During his absence, Jackie found herself faced with dangerous complications of the pregnancy, necessitating a Caesarean. But it was too late. On August 23, less than a week after the convention ended, Jackie delivered a stillborn daughter she had wanted to name Arabella. She suffered this tragedy without the presence of her vacationing husband. He wasn’t even close by.
Jack had hurt his wife deeply. While he had always refused to accept his father’s politics, or his selfish view of the world, when it came to his marriage he was Joe Kennedy’s true son. Jackie was able to see the effect her husband had on other women, and it wasn’t easy. Yet she’d given him the nickname “Magic” for his ability to walk into a room and seduce all present. Charlie Bartlett could see the effect on her of his pal’s behavior in those early years of marriage. “She wasn’t the carefree, happy Jackie Bouvier anymore.” But Jack’s behavior now traveled beyond casual infidelity. He wasn’t there when she needed him. He’d shown off his wife at the convention for political gain, then left her to suffer her tragedy alone.
It was Bobby, usually politically astute, who made the decision not to alert his brother about what had happened. His reasoning seemed based on the belief that Jack’s returning from a pleasure trip to console his grieving wife would be the wrong sort of reunion. It was a bad call, and the newspapers got the story. George Smathers made it his business to persuade Kennedy to return home pronto, telling him that his marriage was at stake and, along with it, his ambitions for high office.
That fall Jack Kennedy traveled the country for Adlai Stevenson. He owed him, after all. What Stevenson was giving him now was actually better than the vice-presidential nod; it was the perfect trial run. It set Jack loose on the political circuit as a Stevenson man. To the Democratic Party, still dominated by its liberal faction, this was an incalculable benefit. After August 1956 Jack knew what he possessed, and what he needed to change. He was a smart and engaging outsider, a moderate in a party still run by its liberal establishment.
To win the next prize he sought, he’d have to become part of it. He would do what was necessary.
25. Senate Rackets Committee, 1959
26. Ben Bradlee
27. Ted Sorensen
CHAPTER TEN
CHARM
A little touch of Harry in the night.
—William Shakespeare, Henry V
What we are born with are our gifts. What we learn are our prizes. Jack Kennedy came into the world with good looks and wealth, and the social confidence that accompanies them. He possessed an instinctive trait for getting to the heart of a matter that enabled him to direct himself to the essence of a challenge. He possessed also an ability—rare and somewhat unsettling—to separate himself from the emotions of those around him. He was uncannily astute, moreover, when it came to seeing the motives of those he encountered. That he could know what moved others but not be moved himself brought hurt to those close to him, but it was for Kennedy himself a source of strength and provided for him an almost scary independence.
All these gifts would have been his had he never embarked on a career in professional politics. His prizes were what he picked up along the way. He now understood better than he might have before how the candidate who starts early gives himself the advantage. He saw how much simple personal contact mattered when you wanted something from people. He’d recognized the truth of that during his first race, back in ’46, when he was out at dawn, campaigning at the Charlestown docks, and then staying with it until late in the evening when he sat with constituents in their living rooms. To accomplish his goal, he’d practically killed himself—and it had worked.
He’d learned, too, in that first, winning effort, that the ambitious politician such as himself needs to create his own organization; he cannot expect existing political factions to whisk him forward. And he quickly realized that the key to forging loyalty within his organization was the invitation itself. The mere act of asking someone to become a Kennedy person was the step that mattered. Nothing builds fealty like getting people out there working for you. With time, discipline, experience, and trust, Jack Kennedy had forged a strong team, one that had been blooded in battle and now was ready for a fresh attack on an even greater trophy.
At the 1956 convention, Kennedy had begun to set the course for the next four years. Above all, he had made his presence known. But the strong backing for Kefauver, known as both a heavy drinker and difficult maverick, had been a clear sign that liberals didn’t see Jack as one of their own—which, of course, he wasn’t. The truth is, even Stevenson himself had reservations about the Tennessean who’d been twice his rival before he was his running mate. “Kefauver has never done anything to me,” he told his friend the historian Arthur Schlesinger. “I just instinctively don’t like that fellow.”
The pivotal revelation in Chicago for Kennedy and his budding strategists was the emerging power of the primaries. A big change had occurred in the way Americans choose presidents. Consider the difference in how Adlai Stevenson had won his party’s nomination in 1952 and how he gained it again in ’56. In January of ’52, he’d been summoned to meet with President Truman. In that meeting, Truman had offered him the presidential nomination, as if it were a Kansas City patronage job. Stevenson, to the dismay of his host, turned it down. He said he wanted to run for reelection as governor of Illinois.
In March, Truman met with him a second time and offered the nomination again. Stevenson once more held back. Only at the convention itself, staged in Chicago, did Adlai finally bow to the “Draft Stevenson” pressure and agree to be the party’s candidate against Dwight Eisenhower.
What’s particularly interesting, given what came later, is that, during all those months Truman and the party were urging Stevenson to run, Senator Kefauver was out there doing his own thing, running and winning primaries, including the New Hampshire contest in which he famously upset the incumbent, Truman. So, in 1952, what mattered was not victory in the primaries, but the blessing of the president, along with the excitement Stevenson was able to stir on the convention floor by the rousing speech he gave, which started a stampede for his nomination.
Four years later, the nomination went to the same man—but by a very different route. As he had before, Kefauver again won New Hampshire, this time swamping Stevenson. He went on to secure the primaries in Minnesota and Wisconsin. But then Stevenson turned the tide, winning in Oregon, Florida, and California, where he’d retained his popularity among the Democratic faithful. By the end, he won more primary votes, overall, than Kefauver.
So, if Jack Kennedy was to win the presidential nomination in 1960, there was only one route for him. He needed to go out in the country and build the basis for winning primaries. Here he faced a set of personal challenges. One concern was his health. His Addison’s disease required that he pace himself and, as needed, take time off to rest. In addition, he would have to contend with the perennial twin curses of his bad back and weak stomach. “I know I’ll never be more than eighty to eighty-five percent healthy,” he told Red Fay, “but as long as I know that, I’m all right.”
Beyond that were more basic challenges. How could he possibly run for president of the United States? Charlie Bartlett had challenged him. After all, he didn’t know the country. For all his intellectual curiosity, Jack had spent very little time in the real United States, if by that we mean the way regular Americans know it. Until he entered politics, Jack’s America had been Hyannis Port, Palm Beach, and the Stork Club. The product of elite prep schools and Harvard, he’d spent summers in Europe, touring with his chums and staying with his family in the South of France. During his father’s tenure in London, he was the ambassador’s son, a privileged American youth among the titled.
To win nationally, Kennedy would have to get out there and stay—from now until 1960. The goal would be to build a whole national organization, just as he’d constructed a local one in the 11th Congressional District in 1946, and then across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the
lead-up to the Lodge race in ’52. He’d be required to “retail” himself the way he’d done in both those earlier races. Certainly, the countrywide scale of the enterprise was daunting, and he could hardly piggyback on any existing organization. This meant a whole new Kennedy Party from coast to coast.
Only by getting out there before everyone else could he build the sort of support he’d be able to use to dominate the Democratic big shots, especially the governors, who, he’d learned, control the bulk of the delegates. But before he could give them the Onions Burke treatment, he needed to secure his own clout.
At first, it was just him and Ted Sorensen. The two of them would head out together across the country to introduce Jack to the local political people, the ones who’d likely be chosen as delegates to the next national convention. “For Christmas that year, 1956,” Sorensen recalled, “I gave him a blank map of the United States, with each state shaded or colored . . . according to a code indicating what percentage of that state’s 1956 convention delegation had supported him for vice president. He pored over that little map often in the next few years, and it became a guide to our early strategy and travel priorities in his quest for the presidency.”
The hosts welcoming them out there in America’s cities and towns responded well to the attention of the glamorous Massachusetts senator. “The smaller states,” Sorensen remembered, “were flattered by this attention; the large states were pleased to have him speak at their annual fund-raising dinners.” Wherever he traveled, he was a hit, and for Sorensen, it was the hair-raising adventure of a lifetime: “To reach small towns not served by major airlines, private planes were an unavoidable part of political campaigning. Most politicians can tell stories of scary plane travels. Prior to my journeys with JFK, at least two sitting senators had been killed in small plane crashes.”
He found his boss to be great company. It almost always was just the two of them, with the budding candidate giving the speeches, shaking hands, getting to know people, while his aide took down the names and details. “It was more than a list of names and addresses. I attempted to add to the file notes on which people were most influential in each state, their attitudes toward JFK, and the issues that mattered most to them. I also made certain that they received Christmas cards, personal notes, some even phone calls, from JFK, gradually building a ‘Christmas card list’ of thirty thousand influential Democrats across the country.” With a goal of meeting every potential delegate, it meant dealing with a lot of politicians.
In those days the word politician, used today almost exclusively for candidates and officeholders, applied to those fellows behind the scenes as well. They were the ones calling the shots, picking the future mayors and governors. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, many of those less visible pols—the party chairmen, the big-city bosses, the ward captains—were Irish Catholics. Actually, almost all of them were. “When we said good-bye to almost every Irish-American mayor, party leader, or legislator we met around the country,” Sorensen recalled, “JFK would turn to me and say—depending on whether our host had been warmhearted or cold, compassionate or conservative—‘Now, that’s our type of Irish.’ ”
With some of this crowd, their mission would prove a hard sell. The city bosses from New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago were the people Kennedy most needed to win over. Having them on board would lay the foundation for winning over big-state governors such as David Lawrence of Pennsylvania and Pat Brown of California. Such men were skittish about Kennedy, perhaps even resentful. Why back another Al Smith, the Irish-Catholic New York governor who’d lost to Herbert Hoover in the presidential race of 1928? Based on Smith’s performance, Kennedy could run and wind up bringing scores of other Democrats down with him, embarrassing Catholics like them in the process. Some begrudged the fact of Kennedy’s effort itself. If he could take it on, it undercut their own egos. Why weren’t they themselves running for president?
The key players the traveling duo of Kennedy and Sorensen hooked up with might include a congressman, an influential delegate, a governor, or sometimes just an old friend or relative. It was an education in national politics for both of them. “Those early trips were a way to test the presidential waters for 1960, to make friends and contacts while ascertaining whether a young, inexperienced Catholic senator would have any serious chance as a presidential candidate,” Sorensen said. “We discovered that there was no true national party, only a coalition of forty-eight—later fifty—state parties. JFK set out to win them over, state by state, building grass-roots support, starting in smaller states, and encircling the big cities until we were ready to tackle them.”
They also operated with a low enough profile to avoid any backlash. Many of their stops were in remote corners of the west and Midwest where, as Sorensen put it, his man’s “candidacy could make solid gains without alerting the national party and press barons to mount a ‘Stop Kennedy’ movement.” By late in 1959, Kennedy had personally contacted half the delegates who would be headed to the 1960 Democratic Convention.
Larry O’Brien was separately traveling the country for Kennedy. His accounts of that period show what a pioneer effort the mere idea of such canvassing was at the time. “My main job, in those early months, was to go on the road, to travel around America to build a campaign organization, as seven years earlier I’d traveled through Massachusetts in search of Kennedy secretaries. I would pay special attention to the potential primary states, since we knew that Kennedy would have to score well in the Democratic primaries to have any chance for the nomination.”
Indiana was a typical destination, a central state where O’Brien spent days chatting up mayors, sheriffs, state legislators, and union officials. “I introduced myself as a representative of Senator Kennedy, a potential candidate for President in 1960. I soon realized I was a long way from Massachusetts, that most often Jack Kennedy was just a name, an image on a television screen. People were polite, sometimes interested, but there was no great groundswell for him. I found some support, a sheriff here, a mayor there, but more important, I found concern about Kennedy’s religion.”
O’Brien’s account of a trip through California revealed the problem Kennedy would have with fellow Catholics. “I paid a courtesy call on Governor Pat Brown in Sacramento, who was himself considered a dark-horse possibility for the presidential nomination or, more likely, the vice-presidential nomination. He was in a difficult position. Stevenson had a great deal of support in California, and I assumed the Stevenson people were hinting that Brown might be Stevenson’s running mate if he could deliver his state to their man. Brown certainly knew that, as a Catholic, he wasn’t going to be on the ticket with Kennedy. We had a pleasant talk, but we both were playing our own little games.”
After this, he met with Jesse Unruh, the astute Democratic leader of the California State Assembly. Unruh announced his support for Kennedy right away and stuck with him even when it got tough. “Jesse,” O’Brien would tell him, “Senator Kennedy has every politician’s name written in one of three books, and yours is written in Book One, in gold letters.”
In this way, O’Brien worked his way across the country, finding both resistance and acceptance, but also people who were waiting to commit. What he didn’t come across was the enemy doing the same thing that he and his candidate were doing: getting out there and meeting people one on one. “As I moved from state to state making friends, nailing down support, I kept waiting for the opposition to show up, but it never did. . . . It always amazed me how other politicians underestimated Kennedy. Johnson and Symington weren’t taking him any more seriously in 1959 than Henry Cabot Lodge had in 1952. His opponents never discovered how tough, gutty, and ring-wise he was—until it was too late.
“We were lucky in 1959, because if his opponents for the nomination had started earlier and worked harder, they could well have blocked Kennedy’s nomination,” O’Brien recalled. “Instead, they sat tight, the Washington columnists kept writing about what a political genius L
yndon Johnson was, and we kept locking up delegates.”
Because he had neither the party liberals nor the congressional leaders behind him, Jack was creating his own national political organization. Charlie Bartlett was amazed at his old friend’s commitment. “I don’t think anybody realizes, really, how much of a job that was. I mean, those weeks that he put in . . . and going into these towns where he really didn’t know many people and there was no great Kennedy organization. He was traveling most of the time alone or with Ted Sorensen. It wasn’t very lavish. But he traveled a long road. This was, of course, part of his strength.”
Kennedy’s feeling that his fate lay with a presidential run strengthened his resolve not to take a veep nomination. “He was urged to accept the vice presidential nomination to avoid a dangerous controversy,” Sorensen recalled, “to which he replied, ‘Oh I see, Catholics to the back of the bus.’ ” Kennedy still felt the sting of whatever anti-Catholic attitudes he’d come across over the years, even if they’d never been directed at him personally.
The four-year marathon taxed Kennedy to his limits. “As hard as it is on the speechwriter, a presidential campaign is even tougher on the candidate,” Sorensen said. “It is impossible for him to remember the names of all the people whose hands he shakes, to remember the time of day, the day of the week, and the town in which he is speaking; to remember his own previously stated positions on issues, much less those of his opponent. All day, the press is outside his door and window, the rooms are full of sweat and smoke, his hand is bruised, scratched, full of calluses. In JFK’s case, one callus burst with blood. Everyone you meet wants something from you, your time, your endorsement, your support for some local project or measure; and then you move on to three more stops in three more states before you fall into bed.”
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