A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  “I have premised my campaign for the Presidency,” he said, “on the single assumption that the American people are uneasy at the present drift in our national course, that they are disturbed by the relative decline in our vitality and prestige, and that they have the will and the strength to start the United States moving again.” To start moving again it was essential to identify the real problems. “The great trouble with American politics today,” he said, “. . . is that we talk in slogans too often and symbols and we fight old battles. The sixties are going to be entirely different. . . . We are a new generation which science and technology and the change in world forces are going to require to face entirely new problems which will require new solutions.” And this revival at home was the necessary foundation for leadership in the world: Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman were “successful around the world because they were successful here, because they moved this country ahead, because only in this way could America show a watching world”—we sit, he liked to say, quoting Burke, “on a most conspicuous stage”—that communism was not, after all, the wave of the future and “that the future and the United States are one.”

  By mid-September his intelligence and intensity were beginning to command the attention of the electorate—and then the debates began. In retrospect, September 26 was surely the turning point. My wife saw the first debate with Jacqueline at Hyannis Port. I had hoped to join them; but I had to go to New York that afternoon for the publication of Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? By the time I caught the plane back to Boston, the Cape was lying deep in fog, and the Hyannis airport was closed down. Marian told me later that Kennedy, calling Jacqueline after the broadcast, could not suppress his delight. Nixon’s key issue—Kennedy’s supposed youth and inexperience—had been eliminated from the campaign in one stroke.

  When I went to San Francisco again in a few days, the atmosphere had changed. The liberals were now showing enthusiasm and commitment. A few days later Jacqueline called to say that her husband wanted Galbraith and me to come to New York to help in the preparation for the third debate on October 13. She also said he wanted new ideas and speeches.

  Actually he was in no need of assistance. His speech and research operations were in excellent shape. Though Kennedy had no time now to do any writing, he was a confident and skilled improvisor who very often departed from or even abandoned his prepared manuscript—a practice which tried the warm affection of the newspapermen for him, since it required them to listen to every speech and, when he deviated from the text, to file a second story. As for the manuscripts themselves, they came mostly from two members of his senatorial staff, Ted Sorensen and a young Harvard Law School graduate and former Frankfurter law clerk, Richard N. Goodwin. A third member of the senatorial staff, Myer Feldman, helped occasionally in the writing and presided over problems of research and clearance. In addition, two gifted magazine writers, John Bartlow Martin, who had worked in the Stevenson campaigns, and Joseph Kraft, served as literary advance men, checking on the mood and issues in localities where he was to speak, and sending back references, ideas and language to Sorensen and Goodwin. An office in Washington, directed by Professor Archibald Cox of the Harvard Law School, collected research memoranda from experts across the country and turned them into speech drafts.

  All this was working exceedingly well if not without the standard quota of frictions. From his long experience with Kennedy and his superb service for him, Sorenson had come to feel that no one else knew the candidate’s mind so well or reproduced his idiom so accurately. Justifiably proud of his special relationship, he tended to resent interlopers. And a chronic tension existed between the Sorensen-Goodwin-Feldman operation and the Cox office, since the men on the road, sensitive to the ebb and flow, the very vibrations, of the campaign, found little sustenance in the weighty and academic material they received from Washington.

  Kennedy, who was aware of everything, was aware of all this. At luncheon in New York on October 11, he discussed his staff problems at some length. We were in the duplex apartment on the thirty-fourth floor of the Carlyle, the glass of the skyscrapers to the south shimmering in the sun and the East River sparkling in the distance. He said that the senatorial group resisted the idea that things had to be expanded in a presidential campaign and tended to suspect every new face. He regretted the problems between Sorensen and Cox. Then he said, with great emphasis, “Ted is indispensable to me.” As candidate, he would just have to live with the situation.

  I had helped in a speech or two early in the campaign, especially the Liberal party speech in New York on September 14, and Ted had asked me to try my hand some more; but one knew from previous elections how impossible it was to prepare drafts from a distance. Kennedy agreed and remarked that in due course his people might start to grow tired and run out of ideas, in which case he might want to send for Galbraith and me. He noted, though, that there were public reactions to be taken into account—Nixon’s refrain about the Democrats as “the party of Galbraith and Schlesinger and Bowles,” as well as press stories about the Kennedy team collapsing and Stevenson’s writers taking over. He said that, if I had anything I wanted to get to him, I should communicate through Jacqueline—a channel designed, I assume, to simplify his relations with his immediate staff.

  Regarding Nixon, his attitude continued one of amused scorn. During the second debate, the studio, at Nixon’s request, had been cooled to almost sixty degrees. Kennedy, trying out his chair, discovered that four lights were shining in his face as against one shining on Nixon. “When I saw all these lights, I decided that NBC had chosen its candidate.” After the broadcast, he had gone over to shake hands with Nixon, and they had a moment or two of inconsequential chat. Then a photographer began to take a picture. Nixon, without altering the subject of his conversation or the tone of his voice, started waving his finger in Kennedy’s face to give the impression that he was telling off Kennedy as he had told off Khrushchev. Kennedy described this episode with mixed incredulity and contempt.

  The next night Kennedy gave one of the most remarkable and least noted speeches of the campaign—a brilliant discussion of the Quemoy-Matsu problem, which he and Sorensen had composed in an afternoon. I heard it on television that night at the house of Marietta Tree, the most charming and tireless of New York Democrats. A couple of English visitors were present—Ian Gilmour, then publisher of The Spectator, and Roy Jenkins, the historian and Labour M.P. Both had spent the day going around New York with Kennedy and were ecstatic. Gilmour said that Kennedy was his idea of “the young Lord Salisbury.” Jenkins said that a speech he had given in Harlem was the best political address he had heard in ten years. The Kennedy identity was emerging. It was about this time that people began to talk about “the Kennedy style.”

  Galbraith joined me the following morning. We accompanied Kennedy at noon to the launching of the Committee of Arts, Letters and Sciences for Kennedy. A group ranging from Van Wyck Brooks to Bette Davis were at the reception. Kennedy shook hands all around and held an impromptu press conference. (I had tried to get Robert Frost to come to the meeting, but he said that, though he admired Kennedy, he had never in his life signed anything with a lot of other people, and it was too late to begin. “Ganging up” was contrary to the whole point of his poetry and his life. He added, “My father was a rabid Democrat. I regard myself as a Democrat too—a gold-standard, Grover Cleveland Democrat. My first political memory is shouting for Cleveland in 1894. I hope to vote for Kennedy. I have sent for my absentee ballot. But I don’t want to commit myself. I want to listen to every speech in the campaign knowing that it still might change my mind. So I sympathize with you, but I’m sorry, and I can’t do it.”)

  Then we returned to the Carlyle for luncheon, where Sorensen joined us. Kennedy seemed a little nervous about the Quemoy-Matsu issue, and we spent most of our time on that. As we went down in the elevator with him after lunch, he said lightly, “Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person standin
g between Nixon and the White House.”

  3. THE PEOPLE SPEAK

  By now I was embarked on a speaking schedule on behalf of the ticket. This brought me back to New York the next week to talk before university groups and reform clubs. Kennedy had also returned to New York to give his marvelous joshing speech at Cardinal Spellman’s Al Smith dinner. The audience had been strongly pro-Nixon, and Kennedy was ironically entertained by the fact that the wealthy Catholics obviously preferred a conservative Quaker to a liberal of their own faith. “It all goes to show,” he said to me later, “that, when the chips are down, money counts more than religion.”

  He felt—this was October 20—that things were going well; as he put it, he had “everything made” except the religious issue, and this remained the great imponderable. He also expressed concern, however, about Cuba. Nixon, aided by Khrushchev’s shoe-banging performance at the United Nations, was making inroads among suburban Catholics, to whom anti-communism made a strong appeal, denouncing Kennedy as “soft” on Quemoy-Matsu. As we discussed Cuba, Kennedy remarked that any measures against the Castro regime must of course be taken in concert with the other American republics.

  After hearing this reasonable view, I was considerably surprised to read in the afternoon papers a militant Kennedy statement attacking the Republicans for their complacency before communism in Cuba and, while affirming the importance of “collective action,” adding the ambiguous proposal: “We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our Government.”

  In fact, Kennedy had not seen this statement. Richard Goodwin, who had written it the evening before, had shown it to Sorensen and Salinger. They all agreed that this would be an effective riposte to Nixon’s attacks on Kennedy’s ‘softness,’ but, by the time they had finished discussing it, Kennedy himself had gone to bed. No one likes to awaken a sleeping candidate; and, since the staff thought the statement did no more than express compactly the things Kennedy had been saying about Cuba for several days, they decided to put it out without bothering him. (This had not happened before during the campaign; it did not happen again.) In all probability, Kennedy would have approved the text, though he told me later he would have changed the phrase “fighters for freedom” to “forces of freedom.”

  The statement produced an immediate uproar among his liberal and intellectual supporters. James B. Reston described it in the New York Times as Kennedy’s first major blunder, and Walter Lippmann wrote a column of measured dismay. Kennedy himself was a little shaken by the reaction, though he reproached no one, contenting himself with a wry remark to Goodwin and Sorensen: “OK, if I win this election, I will have won it myself, but, if I lose, you fellows will have lost it.” On October 23, as I was leaving the Boston airport for Chicago, Kennedy phoned from Wisconsin to suggest that I call Reston and Lippmann and explain that, by “support from our Government,” he meant only moral and psychological, not military, support, and that he was committed to working within the framework of the Organization of American States. Reston had vanished into the Nixon train and could not be reached. Lippmann, who had given Kennedy powerful support in his columns, said he thought the Kennedy people were trying to play the issue both ways and deserved to be called on it. In any case, Kennedy thereafter dropped Cuba and concentrated for the rest of the campaign on his central themes.

  It was late October, with events rushing toward their climax. A Georgia court sent Martin Luther King to jail on October 24. Harris Wofford of the campaign staff, who had been handling civil rights matters for Kennedy, told Sargent Shriver that Mrs. King was pregnant and in a state of near-hysteria and suggested that it might be good if Kennedy made a phone call of sympathy to her. Shriver went immediately to Kennedy’s hotel in Chicago. Sure that the political experts would oppose a call lest it alienate the South, he waited until, one after another, Sorensen, Salinger and O’Donnell, left the room. Kennedy, responding with instinctive compassion, phoned Mrs. King at once. Later in the day, before arriving in Detroit, he said casually to Salinger, “By the way, I talked to Mrs. King this morning.”

  At first, Robert Kennedy shared the politicians’ doubt. “You bomb throwers better not do anything more in this campaign,” he told Shriver and Wofford. But the more he thought about the jailing of King, the madder he got himself; and soon he put through a call to the Georgia judge asking that King be given bail. Before he did, he alerted Lyndon Johnson. Johnson said, “Tell Jack that we’ll ride it through down here some way, and at least he’s on the side of right.” (After the election, Murray Kempton asked Robert Kennedy whether he was glad he had called the judge. Bobby replied, “Sure I’m glad, but I would hope I’m not glad for the reason you think I’m glad.” Kennedy later told Galbraith that he had not known of Bobby’s call. He added, “The best strategies are always accidental.”) In the meantime, King’s father told newspapermen that he never thought he could vote for a Catholic but that the call to his daughter-in-law had changed his mind. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father,” Kennedy said—then added quizzically, “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”

  The call to Mrs. King was only one of a number of personal gestures revealing the grace and force of feeling which lay beneath the supposedly cool façade. By mid-October one began to feel that the real Kennedy was coming over. No one could mistake him for Nixon any longer. Even the Stevensonians were responding to his wit and resolve. Young people in particular felt, in many cases for the first time, a connection with politics. Wildly cheering crowds surged around him as he crisscrossed the country. One has an unmistakable feeling when a campaign catches fire: it happened to Stevenson for a time in 1952 but not in 1956. It was plainly happening to Kennedy in the third week in October, 1960.

  The surge continued for a number of days. Then, toward the end of the month, as mysteriously as it had begun, it started to wane. It was a strange, impalpable ebbing away. Reporters related it to events: the end of the debates, the intervention of Eisenhower. In retrospect one felt it had deeper roots—that it was almost as if the electorate were having sudden doubts whether it really wanted so intense a leader, so disturbing a challenge to the certitudes of their existence; it was as if the American people commenced to think that the adventure of Kennedy might be too much and that they had better fall back to the safe and familiar Nixon. Some close to Kennedy believed that, if the campaign had gone on three days more, he would have been beaten. The candidate himself knew the tide was shifting. When Nixon at the end went on television for a prolonged question-and-answer session, an aide told Kennedy that his opponent could be seen on a set in the next room. Utterly weary, Kennedy waved him away.

  I spent this last week in an air cavalcade organized by Byron White of the Citizens for Kennedy. We returned to New York City in time for the big Kennedy, rally at the Coliseum the Saturday before the election. On Monday I went along for the last swing through New England. The day was at once beautiful and melancholy. It was clear and cold, the autumn leaves were falling, and intimations of winter were in the air. We whirled from one point to another—Springfield, Hartford, Burlington, Manchester—touching down in four states before we came to rest in Boston long after sunset.

  On election eve Kennedy, exhilarated by the return to home territory, spoke at the Boston Garden. A chapter of American history was spread out in the hall that evening—Kennedy, cool, poised, masterful, a son of Ireland and of Harvard, surrounded by a conventionally seedy Massachusetts state ticket, which he dutifully endorsed with breakneck speed and evident indifference, and confronting an audience of his supporters, from South Boston to Harvard Yard, shouting their hearts out: it was, as one reporter wrote, the young prince come home. He summed up the campaign: “This race is a contest between the comfortable and the concerned, between those who believe that we should rest and lie at anchor and drift, and betwee
n those who want to move this country forward in the 1960s. . . . War and peace, the progress of this country, the security of our people, the education of our children, jobs for men and women who want to work, the development of our resources—the symbolic feeling of a nation, the image the nation presents to the world, its power, prestige and direction—all ultimately will come to rest on the next President of the United States. . . . I do not run for the office of the Presidency after fourteen years in the Congress with any expectation that it is an empty or an easy job. I run for the Presidency of the United States because it is the center of action. . . . The kind of society we build, the kind of power we generate, the kind of enthusiasm that we incite, all this will tell whether, in the long run, darkness or light overtakes the world. . . . I ask you to join us tomorrow, and, most of all, I ask you to join us in all the tomorrows yet to come.”

  What one noticed most was the transformation of Kennedy himself—from the vigorous but still uncertain figure of early September to a supremely assured and powerful leader. His growth in the campaign conquered even the most skeptical. Mrs. Roosevelt said to me a few days after the election, “I don’t think anyone in our politics since Franklin has had the same vital relationship with crowds. Franklin would sometimes begin a campaign weary and apathetic. But in the course of the campaign he would draw strength and vitality from his audiences and would end in better shape than he started. I feel that Senator Kennedy is much the same—that his intelligence and courage elicit emotions from his crowds which flow back to him and sustain and strengthen him.”