John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  But his main reason went deeper—back to the problem of his stature as a presidential candidate. Unlike a governor or Cabinet member, Kennedy had no state or federal agency through which he could establish a reputation for political management. It was not enough to win a state election; he had to show an able President’s capacity for pulling together disparate politicians and groups behind a program in the national interest. He had done this in an even more difficult arena than the President’s—without the presidential power of patronage and pressure. The final scores of 88 to 1 in 1958 and 90 to 1 a year later were impressive tests of political effectiveness in the Senate. And he was given considerable credit for final passage of the bill.

  His fight for moderate labor reform also was an example of Kennedy’s theory that in politics one must keep moving, must try for the breaks, must look for the openings, must not stand still. If you move ahead, he has said, you may get some luck otherwise denied. As it turned out, his setback by McClellan and the conference committee tussle dramatized the battle and the difficulties and made the final result all the sweeter. And by sheer luck the Senate tie forced Nixon to show his hand—in favor of a harsher labor-reform measure—and gave Kennedy a big issue for 1960.

  “Victura”?

  By mid-1959, even while Kennedy was still grappling with the labor-reform bill, his campaign for the presidency was accelerating into high gear. His candidacy was still unannounced but universally expected; the coy pretense about his waiting to make up his mind had all but disappeared. During the summer he acquired an airplane, a forty-passenger Convair, and hired a full-time crew to speed him around the country. The plane was named “Victura” after the sailboat Kennedy had as a child.

  He was still leading the Democratic pack in the polls. George Gallup and Elmo Roper ran Kennedy against every likely rival for the Democratic nomination, and then against possible Republican opponents; Kennedy usually emerged on top, sometimes by a small margin, more often by a large one. Some of the local polls produced even more one-sided results. Joseph Alsop, after polling an area in Queens with Louis Harris, came up with figures so top-heavily for Kennedy that he published them with an almost apologetic air.

  Polls were unreliable; the voters were fickle, many politicians said. And besides, Kennedy needed the votes of hard-boiled delegates to the convention, some Democrats pointed out, not the well-wishes of moon-struck women interviewed by poll-takers while they were hanging out the wash. As Kefauver could testify, popularity polls do not make a man his party’s choice. But even by the delegate test Kennedy was doing surprisingly well. A poll by the Chicago Daily News early in 1959 of delegates to the 1956 Democratic convention expecting to return as delegates four years later gave the Senator 409 votes on the first ballot in 1960, to 259½ for for Symington, 244 for Stevenson, 195½ for Johnson, and 120½ for Humphrey. Later in the year, a Democratic county chairman in New York State informally polled the twenty-two members of his executive committee; Kennedy won more straw votes than all the other candidates combined.

  But was Kennedy fading as the election year neared? Some contended he was meeting this classic fate of those who run too hard too soon, and they felt that their predictions were vindicated when the New York Times in August 1959 published a statement to this effect by New York Democratic leaders, following their endorsement of Catholic Mayor Robert Wagner as vice-presidential favorite son. Here again the polls—though inadequate ways of testing opinion, so far the only ones—told a different story. During the same summer, Kennedy’s campaign lost momentum while he was tied down in Washington by his legislative duties, especially the labor bill, but his popular strength remained high. A Gallup poll of Democratic voters showed him running neck and neck with Stevenson, and when the latter’s votes were reallocated (on the grounds that the former nominee had insisted that he would not be a candidate again), Kennedy had picked up twice as many of them as any other candidate.

  During the fall of 1959, Kennedy stepped up his campaign even further. While Congress was adjourning, he stumped for three days in Ohio, including an appearance before 60,000 at a steer roast, followed by three days in Wisconsin and another in Ohio. His schedule for October and November called for a four-day sortie into Indiana, a weekend in West Virginia and New York, a one-day trip to Nebraska, two days in Louisiana for the Rice Festival, a swing up to Milwaukee for the Pulaski Day banquet, three days on the West Coast—including two in vital Oregon—and then a transcontinental overnight trip to New York for an Al Smith dinner. Then were planned in rapid succession three days in Illinois, four in California, four in Oregon, two in Wisconsin, a day each in Oklahoma, Delaware, and Kansas, two in Iowa, two in Nebraska, three in Colorado and Oklahoma. One- or two-day breathing spaces were scheduled in between these trips, but this time, too, was rapidly yielding to campaign plans.

  By now the trips were falling into a pattern: last minute briefings and checking of names as the plane circled low around the airport; the receiving party standing in little knots, some holding Kennedy signs; a flurry of introductions and handshaking amid grinning travelers from the terminal who had crashed the party; the fast drive into town behind wailing police cars; the confusion of bags, coats, brief cases at the hotel; interviews with local reporters and short TV appearances with the inevitable questions: “Do you think a Catholic can be elected President?” and “What is your present stand on McCarthy?” Then would come the real pay-off work: a speech to a local college assembly, followed by questions; a Democratic luncheon, followed by questions and a receiving line; a quick stop and short talk at a nearby business convention; a long drive through the country trailed by two or three cars full of reporters to a Democratic tea in a neighboring county with a brief talk, questions, and the receiving line; the drive back to the city through the early dusk, chatting with politicians en route; the hour reserved for relaxation before dinner but actually filled with telephone calls, conferences with politicians, a short interview with a reporter who missed the morning press conference, the hunt for evening clothes amid a welter of newspapers, suitcases, books, garment bags, mimeographed copies of speeches; the grand entrance into the grand ballroom below, the crowd rising and applauding; the long dinner interspersed with introductions, snatches of conversation, and scrawling of autographs; the long preliminaries and more introductions; the speech itself, over a statewide hookup and through a faulty ballroom microphone; another endless receiving line of delegates to the National Convention of Something-or-Other; the final conferences back in the room with Stephen Smith and Sorensen and local Kennedy leaders; a look at the next morning’s newspapers, and then to bed—this repeated day after day, month after month, and all amid the tension of keeping on schedule, looking alert and confident, avoiding slips in the question period, giving enough attention and inside news to national reporters covering the swing, dealing tactfully with rival local groups who each wanted to be first on the Kennedy band wagon, appealing to rank-and-file Democratic leaders without alienating the top party men who guard their little satrapies against intruders.

  Mrs. Kennedy often accompanied her husband on campaign trips. At first, she had felt bewildered and lost in the commotion, overwhelmed by the press of people, numbed by the endless make-talk and political chitchat. Politicians talked too long; her feet hurt; and the pace was so hectic that she hardly saw her husband except when he was on exhibit. But gradually she became a seasoned campaigner. Reporters debated how much of an asset she was on the tours. “She is an obvious asset to the eyes and well-being of her husband,” one of them, Fletcher Knebel, decided, “but an old political maxim says that the candidate’s wife should not be too young or too attractive. Women tend to be jealous of both.” In any event, campaigning around the country was giving her some preparation for the White House, which she would enter as First Lady at the age of thirty-one if her husband should be elected President.

  Behind all the campaigning in the field was Kennedy’s usual careful organizing in headquarters. As his operati
ons expanded during 1959, he rented a four-room suite in the Esso Building in Washington near the Capitol and put his brother-in-law Stephen Smith in charge. Four girls, each in charge of a quarter of the nation, handled correspondence from politicians and voters. Names were broken down state by state, then into three political types—political leaders like governors or state Democratic chairmen; rank-and-file leaders such as local committeemen; and grass-roots voters. Coded card files and invitation lists were used to prepare thousands of letters expressing Kennedy’s pleasure at having met people on his trips. New gray filing cabinets were packed with polls and electoral studies, press releases, newspaper clippings, and other political intelligence. In a corner office overlooking the Capitol, Smith and an assistant were in almost continuous telephone talks with politicians across the country and with visitors. As they talked they could study wall maps broken down into congressional, county, and local political jurisdictions.

  Much of the incoming mail was unsolicited. Most of the letters were friendly, ending perhaps with “God be with you.” Some offered advice: “Never, never deny your religion!” or “Don’t do it!—the odds are against you.” Some were hostile: “How does it feel to be a pious four-flusher?” “Dear Saturn,” another letter started. And some were mildly zany: “Just finished Life,” a fifteen-year-old girl wrote. “You must be very proud of Jackie and yall’s beautiful daughter. Please excuse the ‘yalls’ you must think I’m a hick but it slipped.…”

  Behind all this organization and activity was a simple strategy: to campaign early, hard, and long, to win the backing of the men and women so neatly tabbed and ticketed in the gray filing cabinets. This strategy had worked in the Eleventh Congressional District and in the State of Massachusetts. Would it work for the whole nation?

  There are three main routes to presidential nominations: quiet understandings and deals with top state officeholders and party leaders who control blocs of delegates; establishing friendly personal contact with the multitude of county and local party chiefs who themselves may be delegates; and appealing to rank-and-file party members who in turn might influence delegates. Most candidates stress one of these routes; Kennedy was working all three as hard as he could. His actual tactics varied considerably from state to state because of the varying extents of party leadership and centralization. In most states the party organization was weak and hence he had to deal with a multitude of factions and mavericks.

  Sixteen states were quite different from the others, however, and would probably decide Kennedy’s fate in the convention. These were the states with presidential primaries—Wisconsin, Ohio, Oregon, Nebraska, California, for example. And, as election year opened, it was clear that Kennedy was making the most intensive effort ever known to sweep those primaries and arrive at the convention in July with a commanding psychological and numerical lead.

  Many politicians were skeptical of this approach. The Kefauver glad-handing technique would help Kennedy no more than it did the Tennesseean, they said. Many old-time professionals distrusted Kennedy’s party independence and his reliance on political amateurs. One Democrat told a reporter: “Lyndon Johnson had F.D.R. and Sam Rayburn behind him. Stu Symington has Harry Truman. Kennedy has nobody but his father and he does not always listen to him. He stays away from the bosses, and the bosses don’t like him.” A Democrat in Congress told the same reporter: “Jack needs somebody who can sit down with Sam Rayburn over a glass of bourbon and talk with Rayburn in Rayburn’s own language. Jack himself doesn’t talk Rayburn’s language. And Rayburn is the guy who will be banging that gavel at the convention.”

  To these strictures, Kennedy and his aides respond mildly. They emphasize first that they are not ignoring party bosses; they are cultivating every Democratic governor, senator, and state chairman they can reach. Any other course would be suicidal; even in states with presidential primaries, a direct appeal to Democrats voting in the primaries is not enough—many such voters can be reached only through their local or state leaders. But when they are rebuffed by the top leaders, the Kennedy aides ask, what else can they do but put their bets on the local leaders and the rank and file? Primaries, says Kennedy, were “put in for a purpose, to give the people a voice—a far more satisfactory system than picking somebody in a hotel room in Los Angeles.”

  When pressed, some Kennedy lieutenants confess that they are not overly impressed by many party leaders. Their experience in Massachusetts had convinced them that the prowess of the so-called professional is much exaggerated, that bright, competent, and personable young amateurs can bring as much shrewdness and more vigor to politics. As Kennedy wrote in 1957 in an article in Life headlined “A Democrat Says Party Must Lead—Or Get Left”; “With a new breed of respected, dynamic professional politicians coming into prominence, we [Democrats] can no longer afford to continue in official party positions tired or tarnished hold-overs from another era—men whose stature and activities inspire neither the enthusiasm of volunteer workers nor the respect of their communities—men who keep busy by attending meetings, filing gloomy forecasts and complaints, and fighting zealously to hold on to their position.” Asked if he had someone in mind to fill the role that Farley filled for Roosevelt, Kennedy has said, “I don’t know anybody who can handle this thing right now better than I can handle it myself.” And if older, wiser heads are needed, Kennedy people prefer someone like Ribicoff, who is working hard for Kennedy, to the old-fashioned party leader who is expert in intraparty politics but not himself an experienced campaigner. If in the end the Kennedy forces pick a veteran figure of the Farley type, he is likely to be closer to a figurehead than a powerful manager.

  Behind this skepticism of party “pros,” however, is something deeper—skepticism of party organization. In part, this is a tactical matter; Kennedy, if nominated, knows that he would have to run as more than a partisan Democrat in a country where the independents hold the balance of power. In the main, however, this feeling stems from the quality of independence, detachment, and noncommitment that has run through his whole life. He is no more willing to be thrust into the role of organizational “Democrat” than into any other. Kennedy is independent not only of party, but of factions within the party. By no means a conservative, he is not a categorical liberal either. He has considerable support among labor but is not a “labor candidate.” He has strength in all sections of the country but, aside from New England, solid support in none.

  The impact of this organizational independence on the Democratic convention would do much to determine Kennedy’s fate there. The delegates might see it as a demonstration of his middle-of-the-road views and hence might turn to him as a consensus candidate standing between the two extremes, as conventions have so often done in the past. Or the delegates might see his independence not as a reflection of moderation, and party consensus, but as a façade for neutrality and detachment toward the supreme traditions and ideas of a party that was rarely neutral when headed by twentieth-century heroes. In this sense, Kennedy’s noncommitment to party might invite party noncommitment to him. Whether he could escape this fate might depend on his power in 1960 both to invoke the best of the Democratic heritage and to renovate its finest principles for the perilous journey through the decade to come.

  13KENNEDY AND THE CATHOLICS

  Kennedy likes to tell the story of a United States congressman who visited the House of Commons. When an usher told him that he must leave his seat, for he had taken a place in a gallery reserved for peers, an old peer sitting nearby interposed, “Let him stay, let him stay. He is a Peer in his own country.” But the congressman stalked out, saying to the peer, “I am a Sovereign in my own country, Sir, and I shall lose caste if I associate with Peers.”

  By the start of his second term in the Senate, Kennedy himself had become a peer, and much more. A member of the Senate’s “inner club,” holder of a Harvard honorary degree and a Harvard overseer, equally at home in Palm Beach or Newport, the Senator was a long way from the Irish cottage and the
Boston slum where Pat Kennedy had begun his long journey a hundred years before. All barriers had been overcome.

  All but one. The supreme political prize, the highest social position in America, had never been held by a Catholic; only one Catholic had been seriously considered for the job. The old sign that Boston Catholics had hated so much—“Only Protestants Need Apply”—still seemed to be stuck on the White House door. As Kennedy became the Democratic front runner following his 1958 campaign, speculation turned more and more to the prospect that by 1960 the sign might be taken off.

  That Kennedy should be the Catholic American of this generation to be most directly involved in this historic situation was, in a way, rather ironic. For the religious barrier was something to which he had had little personal exposure. He cannot remember today any unpleasant episodes in his early schools or at Harvard.

  “My roommate at Harvard was a Catholic but I had some close friends who were not,” he says. “I don’t think my experience was comparable to the usual one, such as someone growing up and going to school as an Irish Catholic in Boston, where the social barriers between racial groups—between Irish and Italian, or so-called Yankee and Irish—are extremely sharp. I had gone to private school, I came from New York instead of Boston, my father had some money and was well known. I may have had a little feeling of a barrier but not acute.”

  Now, in 1960, Kennedy was facing the biggest barrier of all amid the blaze of publicity and the din of argument. And he was plunging into one of the historic areas of conflict in America.

  Render unto Caesar?

  By the mid-twentieth century, Protestants throughout the country were facing much the same problem, although in subdued form, that Massachusetts Yankees had encountered generations before. These Yankees, like the fictional Late George Apley, had seen Irish Catholic immigrants flood into Boston, take control of its politics, push on over Beacon Hill and out into the suburbs, and invade business, education, medicine, and the law. Each side had grievances and felt, each in its own way, beleaguered and discriminated against. And now in the present century, vast social changes brought significant Catholic populations into virtually every state outside the South and the border area. The election of a host of Catholic senators and governors, particularly during the years since the end of World War II, reflected these changes. Even the formerly staunch Republican and Protestant state of Maine had elected a Polish Catholic Democrat, first as a governor, then as senator. And just as Boston Yankees had once looked at the immigrants and their churches and asked, “What will become of our Protestant land?” so the question was now asked by a nation that was still dominantly Protestant in church membership, social heritage, and ideology.