Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  Other specialists and campaigners were recruited. Harry Truman had a schedule which took him in particular to his fellow Baptists. Adlai Stevenson was especially helpful in California. Hubert Humphrey helped hold Minnesota and woo liberals elsewhere, as all primary feuds were forgotten:

  HUMPHREY: I want to say…one thing about Senator Kennedy. If he gives you his word and says he is going to do it, he does it. He told me last year that he was going to lick me, and he did it.

  KENNEDY: He made it so tough last winter that this fall is very pleasant…. It is much easier to play Harvard after you have played against Ohio State…. The great advantage I had [in the debates] was that Mr. Nixon had only debated with Khrushchev and I had debated with Hubert Humphrey…. That is much tougher.

  The Kennedy girls—sisters, in-laws and mother—were given extensive speaking assignments, especially in suburban areas. Eunice, Pat and Jean all appeared with the Senator in their husbands’ home states of Illinois, California and New York. “In preparation for this campaign,” said the Senator to those audiences, “I had sisters living in all the key states.”

  A speakers’ bureau was created. Liaison was established with organized labor, whose leaders worked more effectively than they had in any previous campaign. Transportation and television experts were brought in. An advertising agency was retained, not to provide campaign advice or slogans, but to purchase time and space in the commercial media and to help formulate and publish such materials as brochures, bumper stickers, banners and buttons.

  The most successful “button” was a tie clasp in the form of Kennedy’s old PT boat. It became a popular badge for Kennedy supporters and a fast-selling item in the “Dollars for Democrats” drive. It was part of an unprecedented Democratic effort to broaden their financial base and appeal to small donors—an effort based not only on the assumption that such donors are more likely to vote and work for the Democratic ticket following their donation, but also on the knowledge that the Republicans had nearly twice as many contributors giving $10,000 or more.

  Fund-raising was a special problem. Those with large sums to give were primarily for Nixon. Those with small sums to give assumed Kennedy’s wealth made their contributions insignificant. Both parties knew that a defeat is the most expensive campaign of all and that victors will not remain paupers. The Republicans were prepared to incur—and did incur—a level of expenditures exceeding both their 1952 and 1956 outlays for Eisenhower. Kennedy, lacking their sources of revenue but requiring the same resources for campaigning, was prepared to incur—and did incur—the largest campaign deficit in American political history. Both parties spent over ten million dollars at the national level. “They spent it,” Kennedy said of his campaign team later, “like they were sure we were going to win.” By the time the convention was over, the cost of his campaigning had already exceeded contributions by more than $200,000. In taking over the Democratic National Committee after the convention, he inherited an additional debt of some $70,000. By the time he was inaugurated in January, 1961, the party debt had climbed to nearly four million dollars.

  His fall campaign schedule had to make room for frequent fund-raising stops: breakfasts, luncheons, dinners and receptions, at $10, $100 or $1,000 a head, at least one in every state possible. “I am grateful to all of you,” he told one luncheon in Denver. “I could say I am deeply touched, but not as deeply touched as you have been in coming to this luncheon.”

  Both before and after his Presidential contest, Kennedy worried over the rising cost of campaigns, including jet travel and television, and the consequent dependence on powerful interest groups. As both Senator and President, he expressed an interest in either Federal subsidies or tax credits for the small contributor. His only major policy reference to the fund-raising problem during the campaign, outside of fund-raising functions, came in his Wittenberg College speech on ethics in government. “Campaign contributions,” he pledged, “will not be regarded as a substitute for training and experience for diplomatic positions.” (“Ever since I made that statement,” the Senator joked a little later, “I have not received one single cent from my father.” Whether it actually deterred any contributions will never be known, but the pledge was carried out: of twenty-seven noncareer chiefs of mission appointed, twenty had made no known contributions, one had contributed to Nixon, one had served under Eisenhower, and others like Galbraith, Harriman and Akers had all been talented members of the Kennedy campaign organization.)

  The organization was based on the Kennedy-O’Brien maxim that “There is no such thing as too much campaign activity, properly directed.” The object was to involve as many people as possible. On a national, state and local basis, Kennedy supporters created special groups for Kennedy. A nationwide telephone campaign of women “Calling for Kennedy” was kicked off by Jacqueline’s placing a conference call to eleven ladies in eleven states. Each state had its own publicity chairman, announcing each new group’s formation to small as well as large newspapers.

  The Kennedy-O’Brien approach also called for detailed party organization—not merely in the key states but in every state—not merely in the big cities but in every county possible—not merely of the party regulars but of every volunteer. No one who volunteered in or out of Washington was ignored; some assignment was found for all. Volunteers, as pointed out by the “O’Brien Manual,” and particularly women volunteers, are the backbone of any successful Democratic campaign organization.

  At the same time, we were organizing to meet the religious issue. Prior to the convention, this had been primarily my assignment. Having been raised in a Unitarian and civil libertarian atmosphere that looked with some suspicion on Catholic political pressure, I could help the Senator understand the more reasonable fears he encountered. I had some credentials to talk without hostility or embarrassment to the Oxnams, Blanshards and others about the Senator’s stand on these matters. But the Senator also delegated me to talk with his friend Bishop John Wright of Pittsburgh on the position of the Catholic Church (the Senator was pleased to be reminded that, contrary to popular belief, no public act of a President acting under the Constitution could conceivably lead to his excommunication by the Pope; that Confession is for the avowal of personal sins, not the discussion of public policies; and that he, as a Catholic, had not sworn any kind of allegiance to the Pope, least of all in political matters). He asked me to meet with Protestant clergy in Charleston, West Virginia, and elsewhere and seek their help. (In Houston in September, he asked me whether all my associations with Catholic clerics and defenses of Catholic doctrine had “rubbed off” on me a little Catholicism, and I replied that it had not, but that I still had hopes of my Unitarianism rubbing off on him.)

  But once Kennedy was nominated in July, it was clear that his intensive speaking schedule would occupy all my time. The religious issue, we knew, was not dead. “It’s a matter of continuing interest,” said the Senator. “What we prevented in West Virginia was its becoming the only issue…but…it will come on the stage again.”

  Immediately after the convention I suggested to campaign manager Robert Kennedy that our headquarters include a “Community Relations” division to work on neutralizing the religious opposition. He agreed, and to head this operation I secured James Wine, an able, industrious staff member of the National Council of Churches with whom I had worked on the “open letter” at the time of the West Virginia primary. During the remainder of the campaign, with two assistants and two stenographers, Wine answered six hundred to a thousand letters every week on religion, ranging from the most thoughtful to the most scurrilous; helped clarify Kennedy’s position on all church-state matters; encouraged Protestant publications, clergymen and conventions to decry the religious issue; distributed leaflets and films of the Senator’s remarks on this subject; counseled local Democratic leaders on how to handle the religious opposition in their locales; and helped establish a series of denominational, national and state committees designed to attack the problem. In a
ddition, panel discussions were sponsored and high-level interfaith appeals were encouraged.

  Wine’s job was not to exploit the religious issue. He was under strict orders not to raise it or encourage others to do so. His memorandum to his contacts in each state emphasized the Senator’s policy “to meet the issue only when raised by others…to combat an attack…to answer questions.” No office in the Kennedy-Democratic National Committee headquarters worked harder or made a more important contribution to the campaign.

  Finally, we were organizing in those early weeks on the “intellectual” level. Stevenson and Bowles were both named as foreign policy advisers, although Eisenhower denied Kennedy’s request that they be included in the CIA and Pentagon intelligence briefings arranged for both candidates. (The briefings, Kennedy told me, were largely superficial anyway and contained little he had not read in the New York Times.) Although Nixon in the South scornfully referred to “the party of Schlesinger, Galbraith, and Bowles,” Galbraith perhaps spoke for the others when he wrote me from his Vermont vacation retreat about the delights of being credited with so much power in return for so little work.

  At the actual working level, Archibald Cox, who had headed our academic advisers since January, left Harvard to devote full time to coordinating our new writers and the preparation of position papers. These papers—which, unlike Nixon’s, were mostly for internal use—were often invaluable in the writing of major speeches or statements on defense, Latin America, economics and agriculture. Myer Feldman, whom I would call day and night for needed facts, headed a superb staff of researchers whose resources included the “Nixopedia”—a somewhat unwieldy collection of everything Nixon had said and how he had voted on every subject, supplemented daily during the campaign by notations on glaring inconsistencies between his past and present, or North and South, speeches. Feldman and the research staff were important also in providing statements, answers to questionnaires and position papers for both internal and external use.

  Although a group of new speech-drafters was assembled in Washington from various parts of the writing profession, Goodwin and I, traveling with the candidate, found ourselves drafting almost every text. Two of the new writers, however, Joseph Kraft and John Bartlow Martin, worked tirelessly and usefully as speech “advance” men, preparing paring notes and outlines of local lore and issues for use in brief talks at airports, train stations and shopping centers.

  THE CANDIDATE’S SPEECHES

  I do not mean to imply that all the speeches written and delivered on the campaign trail were models of oratorical grace and intellectual depth. “A man’s campaign speeches,” Henry Stimson once said, “are no proper subject for the study of a friendly biographer.” John Kennedy would not want to be measured solely by the speeches we ground out day and night across the country—and neither would I. Nor did he even follow his prepared text on the vast majority of occasions, deviating sometimes slightly with his own interjections and interpretations, more often substantially and sometimes completely. When a line proved successful at one stop, whether planned or improvised, he used it at the next and many times thereafter.

  He was more at ease with speeches that emphasized the positive above the partisan. His spontaneous remarks were consistently more effective than his prepared texts because they were delivered with more conviction and vitality—although both he and the press were sometimes surprised, upon reading the transcript of a particularly successful extemporaneous talk, to find that the passages that sounded so memorable in his impassioned delivery were less impressive in cold print. Some of his speeches reflected disorganization, haste (his and mine) and fatigue (his and mine). In one talk, speaking hurriedly with few notes and little sleep, he repeated the same phrase three times in a single sentence. The crowd laughed, and so did Kennedy. “We are going to put this speech to music,” he told them, “and make a fortune out of it.”

  Many of his off-the-cuff speeches were largely repetitious. Some, particularly near the close, were overly caustic and captious in their criticism of Nixon. Many left his audiences unmoved by his elevated language, flat tone and often strident voice. But not one lacked sincerity. Excepting occasional ones marked by fatigue, not one lacked dignity. Not one offered patronizingly simple solutions to agonizingly difficult problems. Not one varied his views for various audiences or had to be disavowed later.

  They were generally factual, direct and specific.1 They were always brief—usually five minutes at daytime stops, twenty minutes for the day’s major gatherings, and completed long before his audience had had its fill. They were quickly delivered, with few frills and few pauses for applause. They conveyed a sense of concern and conviction, a vast command of information, a disdain for demagoguery and a mood of cool, decisive leadership. They were confident but never arrogant. “I would run a campaign,” he had said to an interviewer in July, “which attempted to show…the responsibilities of the United States in the 1960’s…[and] why I think that the Democratic Party and I…could do a better job than Mr. Nixon…[he is] a formidable candidate…[but] I have no doubt that I can beat Mr. Nixon.”

  Unlike Mr. Nixon, the Senator attempted to tackle a new subject or combination of subjects in almost every speech—ranging from undeveloped nations to America’s unemployed, from our lag in outer space to our lack of urban space, from arms to disarmament, from the problems of youth to the problems of the aged. But these announced subjects, whether mentioned briefly and then discarded, or stressed throughout the speech, often served only as a springboard to the single theme he pressed throughout the fall: the challenges of the sixties to America’s security, America’s prestige, America’s progress. “It is time to get this country moving again,” he proclaimed over and over again, inserting the phrase or a variation of it in his opening speeches until we included it in all his texts.

  He disliked political exploitation of “motherhood,” but, told early in the campaign that housewives would disapprove of Jacqueline’s absence, he reluctantly and self-consciously explained during his two-day train trip through California, “She’s home having a boy.” He never mentioned the subject again.2

  He never referred to himself in the third person or spoke humbly of the receptions he received. He never reminisced about his childhood or told anecdotes about his daughter. Though he often joked with his audiences, his speeches were generally meaty, serious calls to action. “The New Frontier,” he told his Labor Day audience in Cadillac Square, Detroit, in words anticipating his Inaugural, “is not what I promise I am going to do for you; the New Frontier is what I ask you to do for our country.”

  At times his fervent idealism spellbound his listeners, both spectators, who neglected to applaud, and reporters, who neglected to take notes. “It is our obligation and our privilege,” he said over and over, “to be the defenders of the gate in a time of maximum danger. If we fail, freedom fails. Has any people since Athens had a comparable responsibility and opportunity?”

  “I don’t run for the office of the Presidency to tell you what you want to hear,” he said in his Portland, Maine, opener and repeatedly thereafter. “I run for the office of the Presidency because in a dangerous time we need to be told what we must do if we are going to maintain our freedom and the freedom of those who depend upon us…. You cannot be successful abroad unless you are successful at home.”

  By avoiding the tired phrases and promises of the traditional Democratic campaign, he avoided tiring himself. So long as he could be himself—candid, informal, confident, without false pretensions of either humility or grandeur—he could endure and even enjoy the exhausting schedule, the lack of sleep, the endless travel and the raw ugly blisters on his swollen right hand.

  For the campaign, involving as it did the most intensive speaking schedule of all time, was a physical ordeal for everyone, and especially the Senator. In addition to almost daily statements and letters issued by Feldman, Cox or Bob Kennedy in the candidate’s name from Washington, he spoke eight or ten times every day,
sometimes in four or five states. In one week of eighteen-to-twenty-hour days he visited twenty-seven states. His first full weekend took him to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, California, Alaska and Michigan.

  He often spoke at a midnight airport arrival and at an early breakfast the next morning. “Every time I get in in the middle of the day,” he good-naturedly told one audience, “I look down at the schedule and there’s five minutes allotted for the candidate to eat and rest.” At one stop he stressed the urgency of providing medical care for the aged “especially as we are all aging very fast these days.” “I am going to last about five more days,” he said on November 3, “but that is time enough.”

  Actually, he seemed to gain strength and steam with each new audience. Among the staff and press who accompanied him, the unprecedented pace took a heavy toll. I know that the search for a few moments of sleep—on the plane, on the bus, even during the speeches—began to dominate my own thoughts. But not Kennedy. “He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t do anything to keep fit,” observed his wife, “but he thrives on it.”

  At times, to be sure, he was hoarse and weary and dark circles formed under his eyes. “You are not as gay as you used to be,” observed a Mormon leader in Salt Lake. But he never lost his voice as he had in the West Virginia and Oregon primaries; indeed it seemed to grow stronger. His weight fluctuated wildly, as he missed meals and sleep on some days and snacked constantly on milk and soup between airports on others. He found it increasingly hard to rise at dawn, even when Dave Powers would rouse him with a cheery “What do you suppose Nixon’s doing while you’re lying there?” But each day the spirit and enthusiasm of his growing crowds renewed and refreshed his own.