Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  His crowds, particularly in the farming areas, were not so openly responsive as the audiences of Irish and Eastern and Southern European ancestry with whom he had learned to gauge his own effectiveness. But they continued to grow; they included young voters, suburbanites and housewives who had not previously shown any interest in politics. “I don’t care why they come out,” said Kennedy to one reporter, “as long as they do. My problem here is to get myself known.”

  By April 5 the intensity of both men’s campaigns had ended that problem. Kennedy was known. His views were known. His charm was known. And his religion was known.

  Kennedy had tried to minimize the religious issue in Wisconsin. He made no direct appeals to tolerance or for Catholic support. (One plain-spoken Kennedy advance man, Paul Corbin, inviting all the Reverend Fathers at a Catholic Seminary to attend a rally in their town that evening, added, “But, fellows, please wear your sport shirts.”)

  The press, however, would not avoid the issue. The people of the nation, and to a lesser extent of Wisconsin, were largely unaware of Kennedy’s talks on other subjects. Pictures of Kennedy greeting groups of nuns were quickly snapped, while other greeters went unnoticed. Frequent questions from student audiences about his religion were reported far more extensively than questions on labor or agriculture. On a TV panel interview one reporter asked the Senator if he would attend a summit meeting even if ordered not to do so by his Bishop. “Of course I would,” bristled the Senator.

  Several sermons were preached in Lutheran and other churches questioning the allegiance of a Catholic President. POAU pamphlets and far more unreasoning statements by anonymous hate sheets were distributed throughout the state. An advertisement in several Wisconsin newspapers said Catholics in both parties were “ganging up” on Kennedy’s opponent and urged Protestants to give a “square deal for Humphrey.” Humphrey promptly repudiated the ad and all other acts of bigotry, though one of his aides suggested it may have been inspired by those seeking to stir up Catholics for Kennedy.

  Voters at Kennedy rallies were accosted by reporters outside the hall and asked their religion—“not their occupation or education or philosophy or income,” remarked the Senator, “only their religion.” One newspaper’s political analysis of the primary, he noted, mentioned the word Catholic twenty times in fifteen paragraphs. And on the Sunday before the primary, the Milwaukee Journal listed the voting strength in each county of three types of voters: Democrats, Republicans and Catholics.

  The primary results confirmed both his hopes and his fears. Kennedy won the state with more votes than any candidate in the history of Wisconsin’s primary. He carried six of the ten districts and thus two-thirds pf the convention delegates. He ran well in many farm areas, carried one farm district and carried labor’s vote despite its leaders. His margin of 56 percent was greater than the press and pollsters had originally, though not finally, predicted, and a shift of less than three-tenths of one percent in the vote could have given him two of the four districts Humphrey carried.

  But the loss of those four districts, after the press had talked of a landslide, encouraged many commentators—particularly pollster Elmo Roper on CBS, hard pressed to explain how Kennedy received more than the 53 percent his poll had predicted—to attribute Kennedy’s win to Catholic Republicans and his losses to farmers and Protestants.2 (Wisconsin Republicans, taking advantage of their state’s open primary laws, had actually crossed over in roughly equal numbers for both men, ignoring Nixon’s unopposed listing on their ballot.)

  Humphrey ran best, it was correctly reported, in the least Catholic areas. But few pointed out that all these areas were near the Minnesota border—that Humphrey also ran well in the Catholic areas near Minnesota—and that Kennedy ran well in the cities and in the eastern part of the state among non-Catholics as well as Catholics. Humphrey did well in the cities near Minnesota; Kennedy did well on the farms further away. Geography was more decisive than religion.

  Obviously Kennedy’s religion did help him—and hurt him—in Wisconsin. Undoubtedly most Catholics did support him. Unquestionably some were motivated by pride in their coreligionist. But it is equally clear that there were many other reasons for union members, Negroes, moderates, women, young people, retired workers, city dwellers, suburbanites and others to prefer Kennedy to Humphrey. Nevertheless, if they lived in a “Catholic community,” their support was attributed solely to religion. “To submit the candidates to a religious test is unfair enough,” said Kennedy. “To apply it to the voters themselves is divisive, degrading and wholly unwarranted.” Attempts to correlate his showing with the location of Wisconsin Catholics were no more valid, he said, than one showing him running well “in the beech tree and basswood counties and not so well among the hemlock and pine.”

  WEST VIRGINIA

  But Wisconsin threatened to make religion the issue, and Humphrey treated this “psychological blow” to Kennedy as a psychological boost for himself. Abandoning his earlier announced intention to withdraw from the race if he could not carry his neighboring state, the Minnesota Senator carried the fight to a new field of battle: West Virginia. “I know we can win here,” he told his aides. Perhaps he recalled that in 1956 the Vice Presidential survey of his friend Louis Bean had flatly listed West Virginia as one of the states where “urban, Boston, Irish Catholic” Kennedy had “no appeal.”

  Kennedy had no choice but to accept Humphrey’s challenge in West Virginia, as he had in Wisconsin, but he had even less reason to run there. He was running the same day—May 10—in Nebraska. He was running in the same area that very month in Maryland. The West Virginia primary had been of no historical importance. Its voters were not typical of the country. Its outcome was not binding on its delegates. The delegation itself was not large. And Senators Johnson and Symington, with no campaign at all, were certain to have many of that delegation’s votes.

  Unlike Wisconsin, not a single leading politician in the entire state was for Kennedy. He had entered West Virginia largely on the strength of a Lou Harris Poll which showed him 70-30 over Humphrey. Now a new Harris Poll, taken after the full impact of Wisconsin, showed a sharply new awareness of the religious issue in this 95 percent Protestant state—and a 60-40 landslide for Humphrey.

  Kennedy was quietly disgusted with his own folly in setting such store by the earlier polls but equally embittered by Humphrey’s refusal to withdraw. If a Minnesotan could not win in Wisconsin, he could not win the nomination, Kennedy reasoned. Humphrey, he was certain, was being urged on, exploited and financed by the backers of the other “stop-Kennedy” candidates. He approached friends they had in common in the liberal and labor movement on the possibility of obtaining a Humphrey withdrawal. He tried to persuade Stevenson backers to stop financing Humphrey to stop Kennedy. But it was all to no avail. (“Thank God,” he would later remark in private, “that Humphrey did win the Second District in Wisconsin and didn’t pull out of West Virginia, and that we did believe that poll of Lou Harris’ and did enter it.”)

  While preparing his public position for a defeat, Kennedy set out doggedly in search of a victory. To neutralize the suspicion attached to his faith, he emphasized his other attributes, especially his family’s war record and patriotism in a state justly proud of its war heroes. To offset the religious issue, he emphasized other issues, especially his efforts for the unemployed, in this most depressed of all states. He also stepped up his year-long cultivation of local county leaders as mapped by his first and shrewdest friend in the state, Bob McDonough (“our man in Havana,” Kennedy had called him, when he was our only agent in a hostile territory).

  Once again the smooth-running Kennedy team, under brother Bob, O’Brien and O’Donnell, assisted by local Kennedy leaders, organized each day and each county. (However, the Senator felt that his sisters were too glamorous to be used as extensively in this poverty-ridden state). A new speaker for Kennedy proved a special attraction, an old friend whose help he had earlier enlisted in his 1952 Senate campai
gn: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., flashing the famous Roosevelt smile which had helped FDR, Sr. to carry West Virginia. Humphrey was campaigning through West Virginia in the Roosevelt image, making what his aides called his “FDR speech,” with a New Deal ring more powerful and practiced than Kennedy’s—but Kennedy had the Roosevelt image in the flesh. Cartons of letters to all West Virginia voters from Franklin, then a Washington automobile dealer, were shipped up to Hyde Park to be postmarked.

  In deserted coal mining camps showing the effects of automation and the rise of competing fuels, to straggling groups of unemployed at the side of the road, to families eking out an existence on welfare checks and surplus food back in the hills and hollows, Jack Kennedy promised help—and asked for theirs. At first the sight of this wealthy Harvard graduate asking for help in their impoverished state astonished the West Virginians, but gradually his warmth and sincerity began to make an impression.

  At the same time West Virginia was making a deep and lasting impression on Jack Kennedy. He was appalled by the pitiful conditions he saw, by the children of poverty, by the families living on surplus lard and corn meal, by the waste of human resources. He more deeply understood, as the distressed areas of Massachusetts had never made him understand, the unemployed worker, the pensioner, the relief recipient and the ghost town, and he more fervently endorsed their plea for more help. He talked of developing West Virginia’s resources, with new highways, clean water and better parks and tourist attractions. He spoke of assisting the coal industry with new research, new by-products and the encouragement of “coal by wire”—shipping coal out of the state as electric energy, instead of by rail, through steam plants at the mouth of the mines (an idea quietly passed on to me by Kennedy’s old Republican friend, Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky). He called for better housing and better schools and better food distribution. And in his most effective use of the Humphrey-can’t-win argument, he reminded his listeners that a Humphrey victory in the primary would only mean that neither of the two candidates familiar with West Virginia’s problems would be the nominee.

  He spoke in every town and hamlet, Jacqueline tirelessly at his side. “I am the only Presidential candidate since 1924, when a West Virginian ran for the Presidency,” he would say later, “who knows where Slab Fork is and has been there.” He shook every hand in sight. He campaigned day and night, and lost his voice in the process. For a few days his brother Teddy and I substituted for him, as he stood by on the platform smiling gamely. (Once, when Teddy made a particularly impassioned speech about the qualities needed in the White House, the Senator stepped close to the microphone to croak that Teddy was not old enough to meet the constitutional age minimum for the Presidency.)

  Then came the television debate. Kennedy had agreed to debate Humphrey in West Virginia—which he never would in Wisconsin, believing Democrats should debate only Republicans—because he knew he was behind and hoped for a breakthrough. As he had predicted, there was no real clash, except for one acrimonious exchange about the “stop-Kennedy gang-up.” Humphrey seemed less tense and more spirited than Kennedy. But Kennedy, speaking in softer tones and shorter answers, without notes, scored with local illustrations and specifics aimed chiefly at West Virginia. He held up a skimpy surplus food package and cited real-life cases of distress. He spoke in simple, straightforward terms. Local newspapers the following few days showed votes switching to Kennedy on the strength of this debate.

  Making the most of his underdog position, Kennedy continued to deride the stop-Kennedy coalition, now aided by West Virginia mine workers and Teamsters angered by the labor reform movement. On the Saturday before primary day, Lyndon Johnson spoke in Clarksburg. The Symington backers were busy circulating their own slogan: “Symington for President, Kennedy for Vice President, Stevenson for Secretary of State and Nixon for Sports Writer” (the latter a reference to one of the many careers Nixon had asserted he once wanted to enter). One of Humphrey’s West Virginia managers admitted he was actually for Stevenson or Symington. West Virginia’s Senator Robert Byrd, an avowed Johnson supporter, openly endorsed Humphrey for the May 10 primary with the warning: “If you are for Adlai Stevenson, Senator Stuart Symington, Senator Johnson or John Doe, this primary may be your last chance to stop Kennedy.” Other Johnson and Symington backers agreed. The people of West Virginia, Kennedy calmly replied, should be more interested in stopping Nixon.

  Humphrey, meanwhile, asserting desperation for funds despite his continued confidence of victory, pushed the poor boy vs. rich boy theme to new heights. He went beyond stressing his own humble origins and Kennedy’s wealthy background and began charging the Kennedys with illegal acts:

  I don’t think elections should be bought. Let that sink in deeply…. I can’t afford to run through this state with a little black bag and a checkbook…. I can’t buy an election…. American politics are far too important to belong to the moneyman…. Bobby said if they had to spend a half a million to win here they would do it…. Kennedy is the spoiled candidate and he and that young, emotional, juvenile Bobby are spending with wild abandon…. Anyone who gets in the way of…papa’s pet is going to be destroyed…. I don’t seem to recall anybody giving the Kennedy family—father, mother, sons or daughters—the privilege of deciding…our party’s nominee.

  Weary, discouraged and angered by Humphrey’s attacks, Kennedy said in an unaccustomed public complaint, “I have never been subject to so much personal abuse.” Kennedy discussed with his campaign team whether to capitalize on his war record. Upon more sober reflection, he decided in the negative. An equally weary Frank Roosevelt, while driving through the state, was not at his thoughtful best when he told an interviewer that Humphrey was “a good Democrat, but I don’t know where he was in World War II.” It was an unfair comment, promptly headlined by the press and immediately regretted by Kennedy. Both he and Roosevelt later apologized to Humphrey; and though his own wounds in West Virginia were deep, he told a questioner even then that he was certain that he and Humphrey could be good friends again—“but it may take a day or two.”

  One issue still plagued him—Catholicism. Repeated newspaper surveys showed well over half of Humphrey’s support was based solely on Kennedy’s religion. It lay heavily on the minds of all Kennedy’s listeners. It cropped up in every poll and press interview. It gave rise to anti-Kennedy sermons in all kinds of pulpits. Even the Humphrey campaign song was sung to the tune of “Give Me That Old Time Religion.” “Protestants have nothing against Kennedy,” said the Democratic leader of Madison, West Virginia. “They think he is intelligent…. But they are going to vote against him. That’s the way they have been reared. It’s like they like women, but won’t vote for them for public office.” “People here aren’t anti-Kennedy,” said the publisher of the Coal Valley News. “They are simply concerned about the domination of the Catholic Church.”

  In a complete switch in tactics, Kennedy decided that it was time to meet the issue head on. If he was to be downed by religious bigotry, he intended to go down fighting. In a series of telephone calls to me in Washington, he outlined three basic approaches: (1) He switched the subject of his address that month to the nation’s editors in Washington from foreign aid to religion. (2) He wanted nationally prominent Protestant clergymen, in an open letter to their colleagues, to call for an end to religious divisions and prejudice. (3) He would make a direct and positive appeal in West Virginia for fair play and a fair chance.

  His address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors was a success. It was his first full exposition of his views on church and state. He reviewed his position on education, birth control and relations to the Vatican and emphasized:

  There is only one legitimate question…. Would you, as President, be responsive in any way to ecclesiastical pressures or obligations of any kind that might in any fashion influence or interfere with your conduct of that office in the national interest?…My answer was—and is—no. I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I do not spea
k for the Catholic Church on issues of public policy, and no one in that Church speaks for me…. Are we to say that a Jew can be elected Mayor of Dublin, a Protestant can be named Foreign Minister of France, a Moslem can sit in the Israeli Parliament but a Catholic cannot be President of the United States?

  He would not, he made clear, accept the advice of those who wished him to withdraw to avoid the issue:

  If there is bigotry in this country, then so be it, there is bigotry. If that bigotry is too great to permit the fair consideration of a Catholic who has made clear his complete independence…then we ought to know it.

  When he concluded, he called for questions, but there were no questions. The Senator was disappointed. Many of the editors in attendance, he told me, had printed stories—and would continue to print stories—about Vatican claims on all Catholics, about Catholic voting blocs and about their use by Kennedy as a candidate. He had answered all those questions and more. He wanted to answer them directly to the editors.

  Meanwhile I was working on the public appeal to and from Protestant clergymen. I made it clear to those ministers whom I approached that the statement would not be released by the Kennedy office and that my role would not be made known to the press. It was to be no more than a nonpartisan appeal for tolerance and for an end to the religious issue.

  Nevertheless I encountered difficulty from the outset. The Senator, encouraged by a conversation he had held with the Chaplain of the Senate, the Rev. Frederick Brown Harris, in which the latter expressed his confidence in Kennedy’s ability to put his country first, suggested I start with him. Rev. Harris told me how much he admired Kennedy, how much he deplored bigotry and how unwilling he, was to take part. Evangelist Billy Graham, encountered by chance by Pierre Salinger, gave it prayerful consideration and decided that his signing would help make religion an issue. (Later in the year he coupled negative comments on the Catholic Church with the declaration that religion would definitely be a legitimate, major issue, “whether we like it or not,” and he proceeded that fall to lead a Nixon rally in prayer.) Other prominent pastors approached through friends in Protestant or political circles refused to sign. One said it might impair his efforts to raise funds for a Baptist hospital in Alabama.