A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  On Monday morning Galbraith and I attended the staff meeting at the Kennedy headquarters in Room 8314 of the Hotel Biltmore. About twenty-five people were present, most of whom were assigned to one or another of the state delegations. After a time Robert Kennedy, his coat off, his tie loose, climbed up on a chair to call the meeting to order. He gave detailed instructions about the demonstration to follow his brother’s nomination. Then he discussed the platform, saying crisply: “I want to say a few words about civil rights. We have the best civil rights plank the Democratic party has ever had. I want you fellows to make it clear to your delegations that the Kennedy forces are unequivocally in favor of this plank and that we want it passed in the convention. Those of you who are dealing with southern delegations make it absolutely clear how we stand on civil rights. Don’t fuzz it up. Tell the southern states that we hope they will see other reasons why we are united as Democrats and why they should support Kennedy, but don’t let there be doubt anywhere as to how the Kennedy people stand on this.” It was an impressive performance—in its efficiency, its incisiveness and, in an odd way, in its charm. Afterward Kenneth O’Donnell, Kennedy’s appointments secretary, asked me whether I would speak in delegation caucuses. I said that I would be glad to talk privately to delegates for Kennedy but that, in view of my past, relations with Stevenson, I did not wish to take part in an anti-Stevenson campaign. O’Donnell did not press me.

  In the afternoon, Ken Galbraith and I called on Stevenson, who received us with entire friendliness. His law partners, W. Willard Wirtz, William Blair and Newton Minow, had set up an informal command post in his suite. He still disclaimed interest in the nomination, but Stevenson enthusiasm was rising on every hand. Mike Monroney, the persuasive Senator from Oklahoma, was a whirlwind of activity, doing his best to convince both Stevenson and the delegates that Stevenson had a chance to win. Adlai himself, I think, had few illusions; but he did not wish to let his friends down, and with every passing hour they were becoming more importunate and optimistic. The prospect of his candidacy, moreover, was generating an extraordinary popular response, especially in Los Angeles, his birthplace and long a Stevenson citadel. The makeshift headquarters in the shabby Paramount Building from which James Doyle, George Ball, Thomas Finletter and John Sharon were talking to delegates was soon inundated with telegrams and volunteers. Already Stevenson pickets were gathering around the Sports Arena. In the inner circle only Blair and Minow continued to argue that Kennedy had the nomination and that Stevenson should take no irrevocable steps.

  1. CHOOSING A PRESIDENT

  One cannot speak with certitude about the motives and actions of politicians in that week of strain and clamor and heat, of vast distances and interminable taxi rides. My own impression is that the Johnson strategy was based on building up Stevenson against Kennedy. Nearly every vote cast for Stevenson, the Johnson people reasoned, would be a vote taken away from Kennedy. If Stevenson denied enough votes to Kennedy to prevent nomination on the first ballot, then the Kennedy strength, held together so precariously by momentum and muscle, might begin to crumble. This was, of course, the reason why the Kennedy people, who knew better than anyone the fragility of the combination they had so laboriously put together, were so determined to win on the first round. If the Kennedy combination began to fall apart, who would be the beneficiary? Stevenson would have needed almost all of Kennedy’s first-ballot votes to win, while Johnson needed only about 350, or half. Moreover, if Stevenson became the man who stopped Kennedy, he could not realistically expect to inherit all the Kennedy delegates. With Kennedy fading, the northern pros, as Phil Graham had predicted the previous December, might well have switched to Johnson and put him over. The Johnson strategy was grimly plausible, and the Stevenson people were working enthusiastically to carry it out.

  So from Johnson’s viewpoint, as from Kennedy’s, Stevenson was the key. The Kennedy people continued to hope that Stevenson might be persuaded to place Kennedy’s name in nomination. Stevenson’s reply was that he might if it were the only way to unify the party, but that, because of his commitments to Johnson and Symington, he could not nominate Kennedy without their concurrence. As late as Tuesday afternoon Robert Kennedy discussed the possibility of Stevenson as nominator with Bill Wirtz and Bill Blair. Their talk was courteous and correct; and a number of emissaries appeared in the Stevenson suite to press the point. But the idea perished as the popular clamor for Stevenson grew.

  At this point the Johnson people evidently decided to give the Stevenson bandwagon a further push. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, as Humphrey told James Wechsler of the New York Post and me on Monday, had come to Los Angeles for Johnson. This was logical because, if Johnson were to get the nomination, it would be sensible for him to seek a running mate who, like McCarthy, was both a northern liberal and an Irish Catholic. As for Humphrey himself, the evidence suggests that he had about decided before Los Angeles to back Johnson against Kennedy. He had told Theodore H. White in West Virginia that, if he could not make it himself, Johnson was the best man to run the country. He thereafter resisted the pressure of his liberal supporters to come out for Kennedy as the most libera] of the candidates remaining after his own withdrawal. Soon after he arrived in Los Angeles, he met Johnson in circumstances carefully concealed from his pro-Kennedy friends and apparently agreed to delay a Kennedy endorsement as long as he could. Though under great pressure to declare for Kennedy from some of his warmest supporters, like Walter Reuther and Joseph Rauh, and though he gave the Kennedys the impression that he was waiting for the right moment to announce, he remained ominously silent on Monday and then on Tuesday.

  Minnesota, a center of the liberal Democracy, was a key state. I noted Tuesday morning: “Minnesota is teetering on the edge of a Kennedy endorsement. Apparently Humphrey and [Governor Orville] Freeman were set to go for Kennedy this morning, but overnight a strong Stevenson movement developed within the delegation; and Max Kampelman [an astute Washington lawyer, who has been Humphrey’s administrative assistant] told me before the caucus that it had been decided that Freeman should endorse Kennedy immediately, with Humphrey trying to get the dissidents in line and endorsing later in the day.” At the request of Geri Josephs, the national committeewoman, I agreed to talk privately to a group of Minnesota delegates. I found them resentful over the intense pressure of the Kennedy people and particularly mistrustful of Bobby Kennedy.

  This informal session preceded the meeting of the Minnesota caucus, which Humphrey called to order at ten-thirty. Kennedy and the other candidates had addressed it the day before. This morning Stevenson had agreed to come—an indication of how far he was being moved into active candidacy. Before Stevenson arrived, Mike Monroney made a powerful statement of the case for Stevenson, including a series of well-calculated sideswipes at the Kennedy movement and its tactics (“If they called a meeting of all the people to whom they’ve promised the Vice-Presidency, they couldn’t find a room in Los Angeles large enough to hold it in”). His remarks were brilliantly effective, and the tension grew. Monroney finished with an eloquent appeal to choose the best man and, as Stevenson entered the room, the crowd went wild.

  Then Stevenson spoke. It was a painful moment. I stood on the side with William Rivkin of Chicago, who had worked his heart out for Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 and who was now the Kennedy liaison with the Minnesota delegation; and we both found ourselves in tears. Stevenson’s talk was polished, graceful, courtly, charming, rather non-committal; in its substantive passages, it rehearsed the litany of Dulles-Eisenhower foreign policy errors, beginning with the pledge of 1953 to unleash Chiang Kai-shek. Something was holding him back, that old pride which prevented him from giving the audience what it was waiting for. I think the delegates were a bit let down; there was less applause at the end than at the start.

  In the afternoon I took part with Mrs. Roosevelt in a panel discussion before the Young Democrats. No one was working harder for Stevenson than Mrs. Roosevelt. But she was an old pro, who ha
d seen nearly forty years of Democratic conventions, and did not take politics personally. She explained to me pleasantly that our liberal statement of June for Kennedy had provoked her into open activity for Stevenson. While these skirmishes were taking place in the thickets, in another part of the forest Johnson and Kennedy were having their duel before the Texas delegation—Johnson laying about with heavy saber strokes, Kennedy mastering him with an urbane and deadly rapier.

  Late Tuesday afternoon Stevenson arrived in the convention hall to take his seat as a member of the Illinois delegation. He passed through a crowd of wildly cheering supporters marching around the Sports Arena (and was delighted by the sight of an enormously pregnant woman carrying a large placard inscribed STEVENSON IS THE MAN). The appearance of a candidate on the floor is always risky; it had got Estes Kefauver into trouble when he tried it in 1952. Even if Stevenson were not a declared candidate, it was still a risk. But it produced the first massive outburst of honest emotion in the convention. The galleries went mad, and even on the floor there was pandemonium. Eventually Stevenson was invited to the rostrum. Again he seemed to recoil from the occasion. Instead of speaking two or three sober sentences which might have rallied the convention, he tried a pleasantry (“after going back and forth through the Biltmore today, I know who’s going to be the nominee of this convention—the last man to survive”). The demonstration quieted down almost instantly. Leonard Lyons said afterward, “He let out all the air with one bad joke.”

  On Tuesday evening, the California delegation, in which the Kennedys had invested much energy and hope, split almost evenly. Later that evening, Stevenson met with a group of friendly delegates from New York; the emotions of the day were plunging him, against his intention, into the maelstrom. The next morning Hubert Humphrey declared for him. At eight-thirty that morning Robert Kennedy convened his meeting at the Biltmore. He ran through the states, one by one, to get the rock-bottom Kennedy tally. He was crisp and detached. “I don’t want generalities or guesses,” he said. “There’s no point in fooling ourselves. I want the cold facts. I want to hear only the votes we are guaranteed on the first ballot.” He cross-examined his people as they reported, practically insisting on the name, address and telephone number of every half-vote. The result showed 740 delegates—21 short of a majority. Bobby said that if Jack had 720 votes by the time the roll call reached Washington, enough votes would shift for victory. But the outcome was far from certain. California was falling apart. North Dakota was held by half a vote under the unit rule. Idaho might fall away if the governor felt that anyone else was going to become the candidate for Vice-President. At one point Carmine De Sapio had proposed to Bobby that thirty New York votes go to Johnson on the first ballot; they would be definite for Kennedy on the second. Bobby said to hell with that. He concluded his exhortation to the troops: “We can’t miss a trick in the next twelve hours. If we don’t win tonight, we’re dead.”

  Then on to the Sports Arena, surrounded by lines of men and women chanting for Stevenson. The nominations began: Sam Rayburn for Johnson; Orville Freeman for Kennedy, gallantly improvising when the teleprompter went dead; then Eugene McCarthy, in much the best speech of the convention so far, for Stevenson. The Stevenson demonstration was sustained and riotous. After it had gone on for a long time, Governor Collins of Florida, the permanent chairman, ordered the lights turned off in the auditorium in an effort to bring the clamor to an end. There were a few moments of singular beauty—everything black except for spotlights stabbing into the vast darkness, flashing across the delegates and demonstrators on the floor. This was the last burst of defiance. The balloting began. By Washington, Kennedy had 710 votes; and, as Bobby had forecast, the rush began. In a moment Wyoming made him the nominee.

  The hall cheered its choice with enthusiasm. But pools of bitterness remained. Many Stevensonians were unreconciled. The hope of the nation and the labor of a decade, as they saw it, had been crushed by a steamroller operated by tough and ruthless young men. The next morning I started to urge on Robert Kennedy the importance of doing something to conciliate the Stevenson people and to bring them into the campaign. He listened patiently for a moment, then put his hand on my knee and said, “Arthur, human nature requires that you allow us forty-eight hours. Adlai has given us a rough time over the last three days. In forty-eight hours, I will do anything you want, but right now I don’t want to hear anything about the Stevensonians. You must allow for human nature.”

  2. CHOOSING A VICE-PRESIDENT

  The next question was the Vice-Presidency. This obviously was not a choice Kennedy could sensibly make before the convention, if only for the reason that he might have to use the second place on the ticket, in the manner of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, as a counter in his own fight for the presidential nomination. He had nevertheless set forth certain general specifications. On June 9 he had told Joseph Rauh that his preference would be Hubert Humphrey or “another midwestern liberal”—presumably Orville Freeman of Minnesota or Stuart Symington of Missouri. He amplified this publicly on Meet the Press a month later, saying that he wanted a running mate from another section of the country with particular background in the farm problem “which I think to be the major domestic problem the United States is facing at the present time. So that I would say it would be somebody from the Middle West or Far West.”

  In the meantime, he had held an exploratory talk with Clark Clifford, formerly special counsel at the White House for Truman and now a leading Symington strategist. Kennedy told Clifford that he was going to win in Los Angeles, that in no event was Symington likely to win, but that he was still a few votes short and wished that Symington would throw in with him. “Stuart has run a clean campaign,” Kennedy said, “and I’d like to talk with you about having him on the ticket.” But Symington, who had considerable secondary strength among the delegates, was playing for a deadlock; and Clifford reported back to Kennedy, first in Washington and again in Los Angeles, that his principal preferred to take his chances and try for the distance.

  As the delegates assembled, there was inevitable speculation about the vice-presidential choice. On the weekend before the convention a group of party professionals—men like Governor David Lawrence of Pennsylvania, John Bailey, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, Colonel Jacob Arvey of Illinois, Matthew McCloskey of Philadelphia, Carmine De Sapio—agreed that, if Kennedy won the nomination, Johnson would add most to the ticket. Many of Kennedy’s liberal supporters, myself among them, hoped it would be. Humphrey. By Wednesday of convention week, however, Humphrey’s endorsement of Stevenson made it obvious that, if the nomination went to a Minnesota liberal, it must go to Freeman.

  As for the Kennedys, their drive for a strong civil rights plank suggested a continuing commitment to the strategy of no-compromise-with-southem-conservatism. Robert Kennedy and Ken O’Donnell repeated to liberal and labor leaders the candidate’s assurance that the vice-presidential probability remained a “midwestern liberal”—a description implying Symington or Freeman and, by broad geographic construction, Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, and also loose enough to keep up the hopes of other governors and Senators west of the Mississippi whose support might be needed for the nomination.

  Now that the presidential balloting was over, the vice-presidential speculation engulfed the town. Through Thursday morning and early afternoon we lived in a great swirl of rumors, many of them mentioning Symington. But Kennedy’s intention remained impenetrable. In search of clues, I stopped by at Stevenson’s hotel suite shortly after three o’clock. Bill Blair told me that Stevenson was taking a phone call in another room. In a few moments Adlai emerged, visibly startled. Philip Graham had just told him, he said, that Kennedy had chosen Lyndon Johnson.

  Later Graham wrote a memorandum setting forth his knowledge of the circumstances leading to Johnson’s selection. In trying to put the story together, I have drawn on this as well as on talks with a number of the participants. It is first necessary to say a word about Graham him
self. He was one of the brilliant and tragic figures of my generation. He had come to Washington in 1939 as a member of what might be called the third wave of New Dealers—after the First New Deal of Moley, Tugwell and Berle, and the Second New Deal of Cohen, Corcoran and Henderson. A graduate of the Harvard Law School, he became law clerk to Justice Stanley Reed and then to Justice Frankfurter. After Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Air Force, served in the Far East and ended the war as a major. Returning from the war, he abandoned the law forever and became publisher of the Washington Post, owned by his father-in-law Eugene Meyer. In the next years he made the Post the keystone in a steadily expanding newspaper-magazine-television empire.

  Phil Graham was a man of quite extraordinary vitality, audacity and charm, who charged everything he said or did with an electric excitement. He joined an exceptional gift for intimacy with a restless desire to provoke and challenge his intimates. He knew everybody and was intimidated by nobody. He was fascinated by power and by other men who were fascinated by power. Yet power for its own sake gave him only fleeting satisfaction. He wanted to do things. His sense of the general welfare was strong and usually sound; and he was a forceful manager of people and situations in what he conceived as the public interest.

  In this mood he had thrust himself into the Little Rock crisis of 1957, talking to everyone from Governor Faubus of Arkansas to Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and playing an indispensable role in helping avert what might have been a disastrous defiance by the state government of federal authority. It was at this time that he first became close to Lyndon Johnson. They worked together in the fight for the Civil Rights Act of 1957; and Graham came away from this experience intensely admiring of Johnson’s shrewdness and sophistication, his incomparable skills in manipulation and his hard instinct for power. In 1958 and 1959 he favored Johnson for 1960. But Graham also saw Kennedy as another man of power; and he was captivated by Kennedy’s candor, detachment and intellectual force. He had come, in addition, to know Adlai Stevenson well in the years since 1952. His mother-in-law was an important backer of the Stevenson campaign in 1960.