A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  One morning in mid-July 1959, as I was sitting in the sun at Wellfleet, Kennedy called from Hyannis Port to invite me for dinner that night. This was my first visit to the Kennedy compound; and, though I had met Jacqueline Kennedy several times since their marriage, it was really the first occasion for a leisurely chat with her. My wife was not able to come, and there were only the three of us. Jacqueline was reading Remembrance of Things Past when I arrived. In the course of the evening I realized that, underneath a veil of lovely inconsequence, she concealed tremendous awareness, an all-seeing eye and a ruthless judgment. As for Kennedy, our relations had hitherto been more political than personal; this was the freest, as well as the longest, talk I had ever had with him. I was struck by the impersonality of his attitudes and his readiness to see the views and interests of others. I was also a little surprised by the animation and humor of his assessment of people and situations. I now began to understand that the easy and casual wit, turned incisively and impartially on himself and his rivals, was one of his most beguiling qualities, as those who had known him longer had understood for years.

  Kennedy was fairly optimistic over his presidential chances. He did not think that Humphrey could win the nomination. He supposed that Lyndon Johnson would edge out Symington, and that Johnson could not win either. Stevenson’s sleeping candidacy he regarded as his greatest threat. He was inclined toward Humphrey or Governor Orville Freeman of Minnesota as his running mate. And he said that he would have to go into the primaries in order to maintain his momentum.

  His greatest need, he thought, was to give his campaign identity—to distinguish his appeal from that of his rivals and suggest that he could bring the country something no one else could. He observed in this connection that he had been stimulated by a memorandum I had written and Finletter had circulated called “The Shape of National Politics To Come.” This memorandum had argued that the Eisenhower epoch, the period of passivity and acquiescence in our national life, was drawing to its natural end.and that a new time—a time of affirmation, progressivism and forward movement—impended. This thesis was an extension of the cyclical account of American politics which my father had set forth twenty years earlier in an essay called “Tides of National Politics.” He had forecast in 1939 that the then dominant liberal impulse would taper off around 1947. The ensuing conservative period, if the rhythm held, could be expected to run its course about 1961–62.

  Invoking this analysis, I had gone on to propose that the approaching liberal epoch would resemble the Progressive period of the turn of the century more than it would the New Deal. The New Deal had taken its special character from the fight against depression; but the Progressive revolt grew out of spiritual rather than economic discontent; and this seemed the situation in 1959. I hazarded the guess that “a revival of a new sense of the public interest will be central to the new period.” Aspects of this argument—the belief that we stood on the threshold of a new political era, and that vigorous public leadership would be the essence of the next phase—evidently corresponded to things which Kennedy had for some time felt himself.

  When I asked about the Republicans, he spoke with enthusiasm of John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky and Jacob Javits of New York. He was caustic about Eisenhower: “I could understand it if he played golf all the time with old Army friends, but no man is less loyal to his old friends than Eisenhower. He is a terribly cold man. All his golfing pals are rich men he has met since 1945.”

  He talked too about his senatorial concern with labor. He was fascinated by Jimmy Hoffa, whom he described as a man of great vitality and intelligence and, in consequence, of great danger to American society. The only man in the labor movement who could deal with Hoffa, he said, was Walter Reuther; but the Republicans on the Senate Labor Committee were anxious to use Hoffa to beat Reuther. He spoke with scorn of Senators Capehart, Curtis and Mundt, who seemed, he thought, to care about labor corruption mostly as a way of compromising the trade union movement; they really detested the incorruptible Reuther far more than they did Hoffa. However, Barry Goldwater, he said, was a man of decency and character.

  Kennedy’s candor provoked candor. I asked him about the rumors that he had Addison’s disease and was taking regular doses of cortisone for adrenal deficiency. He said that after the war fevers associated with malaria had produced a malfunctioning of the adrenal glands, but that this had been brought under control. He pointed out that he had none of the symptoms of Addison’s disease—yellowed skin, black spots in the mouth, unusual vulnerability to infection. “No one who has the real Addison’s disease should run for the Presidency, but I do not have it.”

  4. KENNEDY AND THE PRIMARIES

  In the next weeks, Kennedy’s campaign began to take shape. My Harvard classmate Theodore H. White has described it vividly in The Making of the President: 1960; and I can only add a few notes from the outside. With Humphrey’s candidacy now definite and Symington’s highly probable, there remained the enigmas of Stevenson and Johnson. Stevenson was seizing every opportunity to insist that he was not a candidate, though he was clearly the favorite of some politicians and many voters. As for Johnson, Kennedy told me in July 1959 that he had recently encountered the Majority Leader, who put out his hand, looked him straight in the eye and said, “As you know, John, I am not a candidate.” Kennedy said, “He hasn’t done this for nearly two months.”

  This seemed certain to change. Six months later, Philip L. Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post and a close friend of Johnson’s, outlined the strategy. He predicted that Kennedy and Johnson would be the only candidates to come into the convention wtih sizable blocs of delegates—about 500 for Kennedy, perhaps 300 for Johnson. But Kennedy would not quite make it, and after one or two ballots Stevenson would emerge as the northern candidate. Then the convention would settle down to a struggle between Johnson and Stevenson. In this fight, the northern pros—Truman, Daley, Lawrence, De Sapio—would go for Johnson partly because, Graham said, they disliked Stevenson and partly because they did not think he could be elected.

  This talk took place in December 1959. A few days later a hand-written letter arrived from Kennedy in Palm Beach. He said he was coming to Cambridge on January 2, 1960, to do a television program with Mrs. Roosevelt. (This had been arranged by Galbraith with considerable ingenuity and effort in order to advance the rapprochement with the liberals.) “I shall be finished around 7:30 or 8,” he wrote. “Is there any chance you both might be free that evening for dinner? Perhaps we could get the Galbraiths and any one else you think of and go to Locke Ober’s.”

  This turned out to be the day that he announced his candidacy. The Galbraiths joined us in an upstairs room in the old restaurant. I noted of Kennedy later, “He was, as usual, spirited and charming, but he also conveyed an intangible feeling of depression. I had the sense that he feels himself increasingly hemmed in as a result of a circumstance over which he has no control—his religion; and he inevitably tends toward gloom and irritation when he considers how this circumstance may deny him what he thinks his talent and efforts have earned.” The religious issue, he said, left him no choice but to go into Wisconsin. It would be a gamble, but his only hope of forcing himself on the party leaders was to carry the primaries. A victory over Humphrey in Wisconsin would make his case irresistible. When someone asked what he considered the main source of his appeal, he said that obviously there were no important differences between Humphrey and himself on issues; it came down to a difference in personalities. “Hubert is too intense for the present mood of the people. He gets people too excited, too worked up.” He went on ironically, “What they want today is a more boring, monotonous personality, like me.” He added that he anticipated that Symington would emerge as the safe-and-sane candidate of the party professionals.

  A week later, I chanced to see Johnson in Washington. He too was gloomy about election prospects. He had recently visited a number of states and did not think the Democrats could carry any of them. The Democratic lib
erals in the Senate had put over the picture of a divided party with a militant wing of “wasters, spenders and wild men. . . . The country doesn’t want this. The country wants to be comfortable. It doesn’t want to be stirred up. Have a revolution, all right, but don’t say anything about it until you are entrenched in office. That’s the way Roosevelt did it.” He again defended his strategy as leader. “Congress is not the action arm of the government, and the things we can do are limited. We can’t impose policy on the executive. We sought the best and did the possible.” He brushed off talk about his own candidacy, implying that he had not made up his mind. Then he said, “I would support Stevenson with enthusiasm. I would support Humphrey with enthusiasm.” After a long pause, he added, “I would support Kennedy. I would support Symington.”

  In late March the Democrats of the Middle West held a conference in Detroit at which I had been invited to speak (the title of my talk was “New Frontiers of American Liberalism”). After the Jefferson-Jackson dinner that night, I drove back to the hotel with Sam Rayburn, who reminisced about the House with great charm. He had begun his service in Congress, he noted, before Jack Kennedy was born, and forty-seven of his “boys”—men who had served with him in the House—were now in the Senate. He said that the one of whom he had the lowest opinion was Nixon. When I got back to the hotel, Kennedy and John Bailey, his senior professional adviser, were just coming in. Bailey signaled me to come up to the Kennedy suite.

  Kennedy, though tired, was in excellent spirits. Again one was delighted by the total lack of front. When phones rang, he answered them himself; and when a message was required (he had just received the Democratic nomination at an undergraduate mock convention at Purdue), he sat down and wrote it out. Someone called on behalf of a Knights of Columbus bowling team whose members wanted to shake his hand. Kennedy, who did not answer the phone this time, whispered to Bailey, “Tell them I’ve gone out. If I don’t have their votes, I might as well give up.” He smiled a good deal about Wayne Morse, who had been affable toward him at the banquet. “Half the time,” he said, “Wayne claps me on the shoulder and congratulates me; the other half, he denounces me as a traitor to liberalism and an enemy of the working class. It all reminds me of City Lights and the millionaire who, when he is drunk, loads Charlie Chaplin with gifts and insists that he spend the night, but, when he is sober, can’t recognize him and throws him out of the house.”

  After a few moments Kennedy invited me into his bedroom for a private talk. As usual, he was objective and wryly humorous, candid about himself and impressively dispassionate in his judgment of others. He said that he expected to win in Wisconsin but that he hoped, if possible, to avoid a contest in West Virginia. He did not want to expend the energy or the money. In addition, West Virginia was 97 per cent Protestant, and the religious issue was always a risk, though if Humphrey were determined on West Virginia, Kennedy was confident that he could beat him there. And even if he should lose in West Virginia, this would not bring Humphrey any closer to the nomination. He would knock out Kennedy, but the real victor would be a more conservative candidate, probably Symington. On the other hand, if Humphrey withdrew before West Virginia, he would be the logical man for Vice-President. Kennedy added that, if he himself won in West Virginia under present conditions, he would get the nomination on his own without owing anything to anyone. But if other leaders—Humphrey, for example, and Stevenson—came out for him between Wisconsin and West Virginia, he would of course feel under certain obligations to them. He suggested that I talk to Humphrey and Stevenson and mention some of these considerations.

  When I talked to Humphrey the next day, he simply said that he was committed to going into West Virginia, whether he won or lost in Wisconsin. As for the Vice-Presidency, he said emphatically, “I have no interest at all in the Vice-Presidency. I would not go on the ticket with Jack. I would not go on with Adlai. I would not go on with Lyndon or Stu or any one of them. If I am knocked out of this presidential fight, I am going back to Minnesota and do my damnedest to win re-election as Senator.

  5. KENNEDY AND STEVENSON

  A few days later I talked to Stevenson. He said that he had given his word to all the candidates that he would remain neutral, that he planned to keep his word, and that his great concern was to have a united party. Kennedy did not give up on Stevenson, however, and, as the weeks passed, he became more and more the critical figure in the Kennedy calculations. Though Stevenson continued to maintain that he was not a candidate, his supporters were increasingly active. James Doyle of Wisconsin was now the director of an unofficial Stevenson movement designed to unite the efforts of volunteer groups throughout the country; Mrs. Roosevelt, Tom Finletter and the New York liberals were out for him; and in Washington Stevenson’s old friend George W. Ball, along with Ball’s law associate John Sharon, Senator Mike Monroney and William Attwood of Look, were working on strategy for the convention. A popular demand for Stevenson seemed to be rising steadily.

  Relations between Stevenson and Kennedy, while nominally still friendly, had become uneasy. This was unfortunate because, in spite of differences in temperament and disparities in age, they had affinities in background and taste. A relaxed afternoon at Libertyville or Hyannis Port had very much the same mood and tempo—the same sort of spacious, tranquil country house; the same patrician ease of manners; the same sense of children and dogs in the background; the same kind of irrelevant European visitors; the same gay humor; the same style of gossip; the same free and wide-ranging conversation about a variety of subjects; the same quick transition from the serious to the frivolous. Moreover, the two men were in substantial agreement on the great issues of public policy.

  And, in a sense, Stevenson had made Kennedy’s rise possible. The Democratic party had undergone a transformation in its eight years in the wilderness. In the last days of Truman the party motto had been, “You never had it so good.” The essence of the party appeal was not to demand exertions but to promise benefits. Stevenson changed all that. His lofty conception of politics, his conviction that affluence was not enough for the good life, his impatience with liberal clichés, his contempt for conservative complacency, his summons to the young, his demand for new ideas, his respect for the people who had them, his belief that history afforded no easy answers, his call for strong public leadership—all this set the tone for a new era in Democratic politics. By 1960, the candidates for the Democratic nomination, and Kennedy most of all, were talking in the Stevenson idiom and stressing peril, uncertainty, sacrifice, purpose. More than either of them ever realized or admitted, Kennedy was emerging as the heir and executor of the Stevenson revolution.

  But by 1960 it was too late for them ever really to know one another. Each felt that the other did not understand his problems. Each doubted whether the other appreciated what had been done for him—Stevenson by giving Kennedy his opportunities in the 1956 convention, Kennedy by campaigning in twenty-six states for Stevenson in the election. And rivalry now made the differences in temperament and age emotionally more important than the affinities. Certainly the contrast between Stevenson’s diffidence and Kennedy’s determination in the spring of 1960 heightened for each his misgivings about the other. And Stevenson, like all the political leaders of his generation, thought that Kennedy was a young man pushing too hard who should wait his turn.

  Yet every day made Stevenson more crucial to Kennedy’s hopes; and later in the spring he renewed his efforts to persuade Stevenson, if not to endorse him publicly, at least to assure him private support at some definite point before the convention. He calculated that he lacked about 80 to 100 votes, and that Stevenson could give him what he needed in California and Pennsylvania. “He is the essential ingredient in my combination,” he told me in mid-May. “I don’t want to have to go hat-in-hand to all those southerners, but I’ll have to do that if I can’t get the votes from the north. . . . I want to be nominated by the liberals.”

  When I talked to Stevenson the next day, he said that Bill
Blair had been urging him, “as he has for the past year,” to come out for Kennedy, but to do so would be inconsistent with his pledges and his personality. “It would look as if I were jumping on the bandwagon. Everybody would say, ‘There’s the deal we told you about.’ It would look as if I were angling for a job. I can’t do this sort of thing.” As for helping Kennedy before the convention, he said, “On the basis of present alternatives, I would be quite prepared to do it in terms calculated to preserve as much party harmony as possible. To come out now and kick Lyndon and Stuart in the face and demean my own position of neutrality and aloofness would be an error. . . . Maybe I can help to keep the avenue open to Johnson.”

  A few days later, Kennedy, returning from the Oregon primaries, stopped off to see Stevenson at Libertyville. William Blair and Newton Minow met him at thę airport and drove him out to the North Shore. On the way, Kennedy said, “Do you think I ought to offer him the State Department?” Minow replied, “No. It would be a great mistake. For one thing, he would resent it. For another, you don’t want to tie your own hands.” When they arrived, Stevenson took Kennedy into his study for a private talk. They first discussed foreign policy. This was just after the Soviet Union had shot down the CIA’s U-2 plane engaged in photographic reconnaissance over Russia, and the two men agreed in their assessment of what they regarded as a bungled administration response. Then they turned to the campaign. Kennedy reviewed his situation, state by state, pointing out how much Stevenson, with his strength in the Far West and the East, could help him. Stevenson replied that he wanted to be consistent and therefore could not declare for Kennedy now, but that he would not be a party to any stop-Kennedy movement, nor would he encourage the various draft-Stevenson movements.