Stevenson, who had met with Lyndon Johnson a few days before, then mentioned the importance of Johnson’s cooperation if Kennedy were elected. Kennedy, who knew of the meeting, feared that Stevenson had been, as he later put it, “snowed” by Johnson into thinking that, if he stayed neutral, he would be Johnson’s second choice. (Kennedy’s conjecture was right. Johnson had said that he could not stand to be pushed around by a forty-two-year-old kid, and that he favored Adlai next to himself.) Kennedy told Stevenson, as he later described it to me, that there was only one way to treat Johnson; that was to beat him. “Everyone will come around the day after the convention; and anyone who doesn’t come around will be left out and won’t matter. The support of leaders is much overrated anyway. Leaders aren’t worth a damn: I learned that in the Powers campaign if I hadn’t known it before.” He was referring to a recent mayoralty campaign in Boston when Kennedy, John McCormack, Leverett Saltonstall and all the dignitaries had endorsed John Powers only to see him go down to defeat.
“The meeting [with Kennedy] was entirely satisfactory from my point of view,” Stevenson wrote me later, “and I cannot say he seemed disappointed or surprised about my attitude.” He added, “He seemed very self-confident and assured and much tougher and blunter than I remember him in the past.” Kennedy also thought the talk pleasant but less satisfactory. He said later, “I guess there’s nothing I can do except go out and collect as many votes as possible and hope that Stevenson will decide to come along.”
As Minow and Blair took their guest back to the airport, Minow, who could restrain his curiosity no longer, asked Kennedy, “Well, did you offer him the State Department?” Kennedy answered, somewhat surprised, “No, certainly not. You told me not to bring it up.” (Minow later wondered whether he had given the best advice. The next morning he went a little guiltily to Stevenson and told him what he had done. Stevenson at once assured him that he had been right.) As they drove on, they asked Kennedy whom he favored for the nomination if he did not get it himself. He replied, “Johnson,” saying cryptically, “he’s got talent.” When Kennedy got on the plane that would take him to Boston on his way to Hyannis Port, he said to Blair, “Guess who the next person I see will be—the person who will say about Adlai, ‘I told you that son-of-a-bitch has been running for President every moment since 1956’?” Blair answered correctly, “Daddy.”
6. AFTER WEST VIRGINIA
West Virginia had gone to the polls on May 10. That night, as the returns showed a stunning Kennedy victory, an impassioned debate took place in the Charleston hotel room of Hubert Humphrey.
Humphrey’s organization was dominated by two able Washington lawyers, both graduates of Harvard and the Harvard Law School, one a clerk to Justices Cardozo and Frankfurter, the other to Justice Holmes, both paladins of the New Deal, even similar in their names, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., and James H. Rowe, Jr. From the start of the Humphrey campaign Joe Rauh had made it clear that his interest was in having a liberal nominee and that Jack Kennedy was his second choice. Jim Rowe, on the other hand, was a close friend of Lyndon Johnson’s and had gone for Humphrey because in early 1959 Johnson had assured him that he would not possibly be a candidate. Now, with the defeat in West Virginia, Rauh told Humphrey that he could not get the nomination himself, that if he hung on to his delegates and stayed in the race he would only be serving the purposes of the stop-Kennedy movement and that the course of liberalism as well as personal dignity was to announce his withdrawal. Rowe argued that there was no hurry, that Humphrey should take his time about deciding, and that there might be some point in keeping his delegates together till Los Angeles.
Humphrey himself listened somberly to the debate which swayed around him, inserted an occasional question, telephoned supporters in other parts of the country for advice and kept his counsel. Then James Loeb, Jr., who had founded Americans for Democratic Action and worked in the White House for Harry S. Truman and was now a newspaper publisher in Saranac Lake, New York, sat down at a typewriter and wrote out the draft of a withdrawal statement. Loeb’s draft brought the discussion to a head. Muriel Humphrey strongly backed Rauh and Loeb. Humphrey read the statement, thought for another moment and finally said OK, he agreed, he would get out of the race.
At that point word came from the hotel switchboard that “Mr. Kennedy” was below and was coming up to the Humphrey suite. The room froze; everyone supposed that Jack Kennedy was back from Washington where he had gone earlier in the day. In a minute the door slowly opened. It was Robert Kennedy, slight and youthful in a raincoat. He walked the length of the silent room to Muriel Humphrey, kissed her, almost to her consternation, then shook Hubert’s hand. The two men left the suite together and walked through the gusts of spring rain to Humphrey’s campaign headquarters. There Humphrey read his statement of withdrawal before the television cameras. Soon they went on in the night to greet the victor, at last flying in from Washington.
Joseph Rauh now threw himself into the Kennedy campaign, and James Rowe was soon at work for Johnson. Humphrey himself remained enigmatic about his preference. In the meantime, the U-2 incident was putting the contest in a new and grave setting. The collapse of the summit in Paris suddenly reminded the nation that the next President would have to deal with issues of nuclear war. Was the boyish Kennedy the man for this appalling responsibility? The supporters of Johnson began to talk about the need for a man of maturity and experience—a man “with a touch of gray in his hair.” And, even more important, there ran through the party a convulsive movement toward the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson. On Memorial Day Joe Rauh called me from Washington to express concern over the recent slowdown of the Kennedy campaign. Why had everything stood still for a week? Why had states on which we had been counting not moved faster toward Kennedy? The answer, Rauh said, was the Stevenson movement. He feared that Stevenson might develop enough strength to stop Kennedy without having enough to nominate himself. The beneficiary of Stevenson, he said, would be Johnson.
But Stevenson, when he came to Cambridge a week later, still insisted that he was not a candidate. I urged him once again to consider declaring for Kennedy. He said, “I don’t preclude the possibility of coming out for Kennedy. But how am I going to do this without letting down Johnson and Symington, whom I have assured I would remain neutral, and Monroney, Gore, Joe Clark and a lot of others who have begged me to stay out of this?” Then he observed in a worried way that, if his support became necessary to put a liberal over, this might change things.
By this time, a group of liberals, organized by John L. Saltonstall, Jr., of Massachusetts, were planning an endorsement of Kennedy. The group included Rauh, Galbraith, Arthur J. Goldberg of the AFL-CIO, Gilbert Harrison of the New Republic, the historians Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, the political scientist James MacGregor Burns, Congresswoman Edith Green of Oregon, John Frank of Arizona, myself and half a dozen others. I had wondered whether to mention this to Stevenson during his Cambridge visit; but, since the statement had not been drafted and the release date was some time away, it seemed right to wait until the project was further advanced. Then word leaked in the newspapers forty-eight hours after Stevenson’s visit. Stevenson had obviously been touched by the cries through the country for his nomination; and he could not but have been hurt by the defection of old friends like Galbraith (who, indeed, had come out for Kennedy some weeks before) and myself. But he never spoke a word of reproach, and our relations suffered no permanent damage. He retained in any case the loyalty of my wife Marian who promptly told the newspapers that she was still for Stevenson. (A few days later I received a letter from Robert Kennedy with a scrawled postscript: “Can’t you control your own wife—or are you like me?’’)
Our statement, as drafted and redrafted by Commager and Rauh, finally appeared on June 17. “The purpose of this letter,” it read, “is to urge, now that Senator Humphrey has withdrawn from the race and Mr. Stevenson continues to stand aside, that the liberals of America turn to Senator Kennedy for Presi
dent. . . . We are convinced that Senator Kennedy’s adherence to the progressive principles which we hold is strong and irrevocable. He has demonstrated the kind of firmness of purpose and toughness of mind that will make him a great world leader.” On civil rights, “he has assured us that he favors pledging the Democratic Party to Congressional and Executive action in support of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions and to whatever measures may prove necessary to make voting a reality for all citizens.” As for Stevenson, “all of us supported Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 and hope that he will be a leading foreign affairs figure in any new Democratic Administration. But he insists he is not a candidate in 1960, and Senator Kennedy, a man of whom liberals can be proud, is an active candidate who has proved his appeal to men and women of all ranks and creeds.”
The reaction from several leaders of the Stevenson movement was not unsympathetic. Jim Doyle called immediately to say that he supposed that a lot of Stevensonians would be angry, but that he wanted me to know that he understood and respected the reasons which led me to come out for Kennedy. William Blair and William Attwood expressed similar sentiments; and, though George Ball and Thomas Finletter regretted the statement, they were amiable about it. Other Stevensonians were less tolerant, however, and in the next few days I received a flood of letters and telegrams:
You must indeed be proud this morning. You were among the first to admit that a good man had no chance in this country. You and your historian associates, Henry Steele Commager, etc. were willing to work in the junk heap of defeat, before defeat had happened. Shame to a teacher of the young, who before the fight makes a separate peace with the enemy. I congratulate you—prophets of a bought convention. (Southwest Harbor, Maine)
I’ve admired your work and everything you stand for for a long, long time. So your defection to the Kennedy camp comes as a particularly brutal blow . . . All I think you are doing is climbing on the well-oiled bandwagon at a time when the bandwagon can be stopped. (Evanston, Illinois)
When first I heard of your switch from Adlai Stevenson to Kennedy I was incredulous. Now that the original report has been confirmed I am perplexed. It would appear to me that the only thing these two gentlemen share is membership in the Democratic Party. (San Francisco)
TO OUR ADA CHAPTER YOU AND THE REST OF THE TURNCOAT OPPORTUNISTS YOUR ACTIVITIES ARE THE MOST IGNOBLE ACTS IN HISTORY (Great Neck, New York)
A few days before the statement finally came out, my wife and I drove to the Cape with Galbraith for luncheon at Hyannis Port. It was a hot, overcast day, and we vainly sought cool breezes on the Marlin, the Kennedy power launch. Kennedy kidded Marian mildly about her declaration for Stevenson, though it genuinely puzzled him. He used to ask Jacqueline what magic Stevenson had to account for his devoted female support. (On a later occasion at Hyannis Port, when women at the beach were clustering around his boat, he said to Galbraith, “You see I have my women supporters as well as Adlai.”)
He was looking forward to Los Angeles and the convention with apparent confidence. Johnson now seemed to him his serious opponent. We chatted about the discrepancy between Johnson’s towering stature in Washington and the dim shadow he cast in the rest of the nation. Kennedy compared him to British politicians like Peel who were omnipotent in Parliament but had no popularity in the country. He talked of Johnson with mingled admiration and despair, calling him the “riverboat gambler” and evoking a picture of the tall Texan in ruffles and a long black coat, a pistol by his side and aces up his sleeve, moving menacingly through the saloon of a Mississippi steamer.
On the Vice-Presidency, Kennedy seemed inclined toward Humphrey. He reported Arthur Goldberg as telling him that Humphrey would accept if he were Kennedy’s definite choice. Humphrey would add more to the ticket than anyone else, Kennedy said, but he thought Hubert had campaigned irresponsibly in West Virginia, even though he had been under provocation (he had in mind Franklin Roosevelt Jr.’s attack on Humphrey’s war record). He hoped he wouldn’t have to spend the campaign explaining away extravagant statements Hubert might make about the Republicans.
On Stevenson he said, “One reason I admire him is that he is not a political whore like most of the others. Too many politicians will say anything when they think it will bring them votes or money. I remember in 1956 when Adlai met with Dewey Stone and some other big contributors in Boston after Suez. They wanted him to endorse the Israeli attack on Egypt. If he had said the things they wanted, he could have had a lot of money out of that room; but he refused. I admired that. You have to stick to what you believe.”
Much of the talk concerned organization. Galbraith and I urged him to build his own staff and to avoid people like ourselves who had been identified with Stevenson. The civil rights question was much on his mind, and we discussed that at some length. Galbraith, seeking some way by which Kennedy might dramatize his commitment to the issue, suggested an announcement that, if elected, he would try to prevent Eastland of Mississippi from continuing as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kennedy answered quickly, “It wouldn’t be in character for me to do that. After all, the Senate is a body where you have to get along with people regardless of how much you disagree. I’ve always got along pretty well with old Eastland.”
We talked a bit about Massachusetts politics and the anticipated senatorial contest between Leverett Saltonstall, the Republican incumbent, and Governor Foster Furcolo, whom Kennedy had detested for many years. When Galbraith said that he would probably vote for Furcolo, Kennedy said, “The thing I like about professors is their party regularity.” He then asked me how I planned to vote. When I hesitated a moment, he said, “Say it, say it—of course you’re going to vote for Saltonstall. Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.” (The Democratic voters of Massachusetts evidently agreed, because Furcolo was denied the nomination in the primaries in September.) He spoke gloomily about the Massachusetts Democratic party: “Nothing can be done until it is beaten—badly beaten. Then there will be a chance of rebuilding.” He added, “If I were knocked out of the Presidential thing, I would put Bobby into the Massachusetts picture to run for governor. It takes someone with Bobby’s nerve and his investigative experience to clean up the mess in the Legislature and the Governor’s Council.”
So the Democrats moved on toward Los Angeles. I had a final talk with Kennedy early in July after President Truman had denounced him for being young and others had denounced him for being sick. He said that he was glad that Truman had brought out the youth issue and that India Edwards, who had been vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee in Truman’s day and was now supporting Johnson, had brought out the health issue; this gave him the opportunity to dispose of both matters before the convention. He spoke gratefully of Averell Harriman’s rejoinder to the Truman attack and thought he would ask Harriman to second his nomination. “It will be useful for me to have someone who serves as a link to the Roosevelt and Truman administrations; also an older man. I don’t want the convention to think that we’re just a collection of angry young men.” As for the Vice-Presidency, he still leaned toward Humphrey, though he said he had made no commitments because he wanted to preserve flexibility for the convention. He asked what I heard from Stevenson. I said that our relations, though friendly, had probably been rendered less confidential by my coming out for Kennedy. He said, “Yes, but Marian ought to have pretty good relations. Maybe she can serve as that ‘bridge’ Adlai keeps talking about”—referring to Stevenson’s idea of serving as a bridge between Kennedy and Johnson.
II
Triumph in Los Angeles
AMERICAN POLITICS has an occasion to match every mood: ceremony, circus, farce, melodrama, tragedy. Nothing rolls them together more opulently than a presidential convention; nothing else offers all at once the whirl, the excitement, the gaiety, the intrigue and the anguish. But a convention is far too fluid and hysterical a phenomenon for exact history. Everything happens at once and everywhere, and everything changes too quickly. People talk toa m
uch, smoke too much, rush too much and sleep too little. Fatigue tightens nerves and produces a susceptibility to rumor and panic. No one can see a convention whole. And no one can remember it with precision later, partly because it is so hard to reconstruct the sequence of events and partly because people always say and do things they wish to forget. At the time it is all a confusion; in retrospect it is all a blur.
Though I had attended and enjoyed every Democratic convention since 1948, I headed toward Los Angeles in July 1960 with distinct foreboding. I was vigorously in favor of Kennedy; but I retained strong personal ties to Stevenson who now, in the last days, evidently against his conscious will, was emerging as the candidate of a growing and impassioned movement. I stopped for a day in San Francisco and, in the Edwardian lobby of the Fairmont Hotel, ran into Oscar Chapman, who had been Truman’s Secretary of the Interior and was now working for Johnson. Chapman, a man of vast political experience, shook his head and said, “If Adlai had declared as a candidate, he would be unbeatable now.” His remark forecast the mood in Los Angeles where the Stevenson movement had suddenly become the center of emotion. When I arrived there on July 9, the Saturday before the convention opened, Kenneth Galbraith warned me to be on my guard against old friends from earlier Stevenson campaigns. He said that at a party given by Mrs. Eugene Meyer of the Washington Post one of “the Stevenson women” had hissed at him that, in coming out for Kennedy, he and I had committed ‘‘the worst personal betrayal in American history.”
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