Preparing for a possible power play at the convention, the Kennedy campaign began shuttling through the Midwest attempting to tie down delegates. Adlai Stevenson, presidential nominee of 1952 and 1956, was not ready to accept a changing of the guard in the Democratic Party. Moving into May, Kennedy still had received no support other than neutrality from Stevenson. “God, why won’t he be satisfied with secretary of state?” he demanded of a Stevenson loyalist.
On the eve of the convention, Jack asked Adlai, one last time, to back him. Again, the answer was no. When Kennedy made it clear he had the votes for the nomination, Stevenson still refused. Now came the threat: “If you don’t give me your support, I’ll have to shit all over you. I don’t want to do that, but I can and I will if I have to.” Nothing worked. The old campaigner wasn’t ready to give up his one last chance for glory. Eleanor Roosevelt would arrive in Los Angeles still bearing the torch for Adlai, but it was a flame that burned, just as brightly, against this younger favorite. The year before, Jack had sent a young ally, Lester Hyman, to secretly test her attitude toward him. Asked her opinion of a potential Kennedy presidency, and not knowing Hyman’s loyalties, Mrs. Roosevelt let loose with a broadside. “We wouldn’t want the Pope in the White House, would we?” Hyman, who is Jewish, told me he almost fell off his chair.
To Kennedy, the more formidable presence at the convention would be Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy kept his opinion of the Senate majority leader well guarded. To Ben Bradlee, he would refer to Johnson as a “riverboat gambler,” although leaving the impression that that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Jack Kennedy had demonstrated over the years two vital capabilities that would now come into play. First, he was, generally, able to view situations without having his vision distorted by anger or any other emotion. Second, he could see through to the essence of a problem. Like Harry Hopkins, the FDR advisor Churchill once dubbed “Lord Root of the Matter,” Jack Kennedy was focused, shrewd, and incisive when it came to his basic interests.
And what he now knew, perfectly clearly, about Lyndon Johnson was that he’d beaten him. He understood that when Johnson went over his list of supporters at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, the proud man would have only senators, and that was if they were lucky enough to be there themselves. Jack, on the other hand, had delegates. After four years crossing and recrossing the country, he not only had them but knew a good number personally.
Johnson’s only hope lay in lassoing together a large enough herd of western delegates to add to his base in the South. Ted Kennedy, working for his brother in the mountain states, was able to shatter that strategy. And, with the help of Stewart Udall, a Tucson lawyer, he got half the Arizona delegation to declare early for his brother. It was a shocker right there in LBJ’s southwestern backyard, and the press play it got contributed significantly to the waning of the Texan’s chances.
Nonetheless, Kennedy flew to the Los Angeles convention still concerned with LBJ’s plans as well as Adlai’s. Tony Bradlee was on the same plane and had been given a list of questions by her husband to ask him. “He was having throat problems, and to save his voice, he took the list and wrote in his answers. The first question was ‘What about Lyndon Johnson for vice president?’ His tantalizing answer was ‘He’ll never take it.’ ”
Jack Kennedy arrived in California far better prepared than he’d been four years earlier in Chicago. This time around he had the organization ready and backing him up as he entered the convention hall, and all the technology he’d been missing before, such as the walkie-talkies that would keep his operatives in continual contact. The country had been divided into “six regions, and every region was manned and they had a telephone and they were in touch with the Kennedy Shack which served as the command post. Pierre Salinger published a daily convention journal designed to look like an impartial newspaper.” All their efforts to build a “Kennedy Party,” starting back in early ’46 for that first congressional race, were now paying off. This time Bobby was masterminding its tactics, while, above him, Jack, the consummate political professional, was in command.
In the beginning, Kennedy looked a shoo-in. But then, Lyndon Johnson threw down the wild card of Kennedy’s health. “It was the goddamndest thing,” he said with mournful relish, “here was this young whippersnapper . . . malaria-ridden, yallah . . . sickly, sickly.” The wily Texan was well aware that the young front-runner rolling up his delegate total in the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena was suffering from health problems far worse than malaria, and, riverboat gambler that he was, he had no desire to keep that knowledge to himself.
For Jack Kennedy, who’d come so far, truth posed the greatest threat to him. By hook or crook, LBJ had learned the name of Jack’s most dreaded weakness. His staff, led by John Connally, were now ready to deploy what they knew: namely that, living as he did with Addison’s disease, the Massachusetts senator was perpetually at risk for new infections while also dependent on cortisone injections to keep him functioning. When Connally daringly called a press conference to lob this grenade, the Kennedys were enraged. Pierre Salinger had only one word for the maneuver: despicable.
As it had been in the past—in the Wisconsin primary, for example, when the issue was the thousand-dollar check hand-carried by Jack to Dick Nixon—the response was all-out self-protection. To scotch the accusation of ill health, Kennedy’s physician, Dr. Janet Travell, was thrown into action, on the principle that what they couldn’t defend, they would deny.
The release of a complete medical workup on the candidate would have handed Kennedy’s rivals, including Richard Nixon, enough to bury him. Given the closeness of the election, his Addison’s disease would undoubtedly have proven decisive. What if the public had learned of his regular intake of steroids, the degeneration in his bones that it caused, the corset he wore for his congenital back problem, his lifetime of stomach illness? What if they knew his constant tanning was to cover up the sickness that gave his skin a yellowish tint? What if the voters knew Kennedy and his people were engaged in a massive cover-up? Would they have responded as well as they did to his great call to arms?
Lyndon Johnson now took unerring aim at another of Kennedy’s vulnerabilities, this one a matter of public record: namely, his father’s backing of appeasement. “I wasn’t any Chamberlain-umbrella policy man . . . I never thought Hitler was right,” the majority leader reminded his listeners.
Kennedy kept his cool—and his cunning. And so, when Johnson challenged him to speak with him before the combined Texas and Massachusetts delegations, he accepted. “We seized on the opportunity to push it into a debate situation,” recalled Pierre Salinger. Kenny and Bobby, however, were worried not just about what theatrics Johnson might pull, but about the possibility of an embarrassing brawl between the two delegations. “There were a few rough Irishmen in the Massachusetts delegation, as well as Kennedy men who wouldn’t mind hitting a few Texans after some of the slurs they’d made against Kennedy, Catholics, and especially the Irish,” said O’Donnell. “So our concern, Bobby’s and mine, was that here we’d be on nationwide television and the potential for the best ruckus show of the year was there. We could be guaranteed that if it were to happen the Republicans would play it over and over again.”
“I was really digging at Johnson pretty hard,” Salinger remembered. He was angry, still, at the attacks on his candidate’s health—accurate as they were. He’d chosen to fight back by accusing Johnson of lacking guts, claiming he was afraid of Kennedy, and so forth. Then he got a phone call. “I heard the voice on the other end of the line say, ‘Young man, this is Phil Graham.’ I’d never met Phil Graham before in my life.” Of course, he knew who the Washington Post publisher was.
“And he said, ‘I just want to say one thing to you. Don’t tear something apart in such a way that you can never put it back together again.’ I said, ‘Okay,’ and hung up the phone. Of course, it immediately dawned on me what he was trying to say to me. It was that there was a chance of
a Kennedy-Johnson ticket.” Graham, it turns out, was pushing Johnson to accept the vice presidency if Kennedy offered it, and was pushing the idea of the ticket to LBJ as being for the good of the country.
With Lyndon Johnson’s arrows having failed to hit their mark, the next rival Jack needed to render impotent was Adlai Stevenson. He’d retained scattered loyalists, but his support since ’56 had rusted, even on his home turf, Illinois. Despite some packing of the galleries, there was no demand for Adlai on the convention floor or in the deal-making back rooms.
Still Stevenson’s supporters persisted, keeping up the drumbeat, hoping the scene they were creating on the television screen would stir the delegates. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota gave the convention perhaps its most memorable oratory. “Do not turn away from this man. Do not reject this man. . . . Do not reject this man who has made us proud to be Democrats. Do not leave this prophet without honor in his own party.”
But nothing happened. The Kennedy “operation was slick, well financed, and ruthless in its treatment of Lyndon Johnson’s Southerners and the uncredentialed mob that was trying to stampede the convention for Stevenson,” noted John Ehrlichman, then a young campaign worker for Richard Nixon secretly scouting the opposition.
• • •
Beating Vice President Nixon was not going to be easy. Jack was going to need support in the once-reliable Democratic South. His decision to offer the job of running mate to Lyndon Johnson was a model of cold-blooded politics. The fact was, no one else brought to the table what LBJ did, which was Texas and much of the South. The big surprise was that he might accept the prize if offered. But such was the case. And one person who found himself a go-between, helping to seal the deal, was Tip O’Neill.
Johnson’s mentor was Sam Rayburn—a fellow Texan and the powerful Speaker of the House—who made it his business to contact Tip, saying, “If Kennedy wants Johnson for vice president, then he has nothing else he can do but to be on the ticket.” Instructing O’Neill to find Kennedy and tell him what he’d just said, he even passed on the phone number for Jack to call.
Tip located Jack that night at a legendary Hollywood hangout, Chasen’s. When the two met on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, O’Neill gave Jack the phone number and told him what Rayburn had said: Lyndon would accept if offered. “Of course I want Lyndon,” Kennedy replied. He said to tell Rayburn he’d be making the call that night.
The full story of what lay behind John F. Kennedy’s selection of Lyndon Baines Johnson remains murky to this day. When Salinger asked his boss for “some background” on the making of the decision, Jack was unforthcoming. “He said, ‘Well, I’d just as soon not tell you. I don’t think anybody will ever really know how this all really came about.’ ” Bobby, opposing the choice, had urged him to withdraw Johnson’s name. Jack himself appears to have wavered.
What remains impressive is his ability to absorb the attack he took from Johnson and his people and keep his political bearings. “It was a case of grasping the nettle,” Schlesinger wrote in his journal for July 15, 1960, “and it was another evidence of the impressively cold and tough way Jack is going about his affairs.” Indeed, in putting the Johnson assault in its place, Jack was simply sorting matters into compartments, as he often did. Fending off a last-ditch challenge to his nomination was one matter. Finding someone to help him in November was totally another. Whether Johnson had played tough to try to secure the presidential nomination for himself was no deterrent to his running as Jack’s vice president. Not in Jack’s eyes. Not now. Rather, it was an indicator of how tough Johnson was prepared to fight by his side.
Charlie Bartlett could sense Jack was brooding about the necessity of picking Johnson, just as he’d brooded four years earlier over the need to back the less than fresh Pat Lynch as his Massachusetts party chief in 1956. But he also remembers Joe Kennedy standing there in his smoking jacket and slippers saying, “Don’t worry, Jack, in two weeks, they’ll be saying it’s the smartest thing you ever did.” For once, the father’s political judgment was on the money.
With the issue of his vice-presidential choice resolved, and the waves of history lapping at his feet, now came Kennedy’s speech accepting the nomination.
What most people recall is the debut of his presidential signature. “Today some would say that those struggles are all over—that all the horizons have been explored—that all the battles have been won—that there is no longer an American frontier . . . But I tell you the New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.
“For the harsh facts of the matter are that we stand on this frontier at a turning point in history. We must prove all over again whether this nation—or any nation so conceived—can long endure; whether our society—with its freedom of choice, its breadth of opportunity, its range of alternatives—can compete with the single-minded advance of the Communist system.”
Kennedy was really harking back to the same question that presented itself just before World War II, the one that had gripped him and driven his interest in foreign policy. It had not lost its relevance, for what he was asking was, could the democracies match the dictatorships when it came to responding to a dire threat? While we see the allusion to Lincoln in the wording, the question itself is pure twentieth century—only it was now Khrushchev, not Hitler, in opposition to us.
• • •
But it wasn’t just America’s Democrats who had their attention focused on the convention concluding in Los Angeles. The about-to-be Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, was watching television that night, viewing it carefully with the eye of a professional, and deciding, when all the shouting was over, that he was encouraged by what he’d seen.
Theodore White, then doing the reporting for his landmark book The Making of the President, 1960, described the response of the Republican cohort this way: “They sat rapt, then content, then pleased. The rapid delivery, the literary language, the obvious exhaustion of the Democratic candidate . . . all combined to invite in them a sense of combative good feeling.” Nixon told those with him that he thought Kennedy had turned in a poor performance, his speech above people’s heads and delivered too rapidly. He could take this man, his longtime colleague, now a known quantity, on TV—or so he felt.
So Nixon, made confident by what he’d seen, and trusting his judgment, was in a mood receptive to the idea of televised debate. Kennedy, when the moment came, jumped at the opportunity. “I took the telegram to him,” Pierre Salinger said. The networks were proposing a candidates’ debate, and, in the Kennedy camp, the decision to agree was quickly made. “The feeling was that we had absolutely nothing to lose by a debate with Nixon. If we accepted right away, we’d put Nixon in a position where he had to accept.”
No one, least of all Jack, could have predicted the vice president’s psychology or realized that Jack’s performance at the convention had allayed Dick Nixon’s worries about going head to head with him in front of the cameras. But by saying yes to a debate, what Nixon was handing his opponent was, in fact, a platform of such value that not even the senior Kennedy’s wealth could have purchased it. Here was an opportunity for Jack to face the American people and claim for himself a measure of the recognition already Nixon’s. Eight years in the vice presidency had given his rival a mammoth edge. TV would now hand it to the challenger.
The Kennedy themes, devised to differentiate his candidacy from Nixon’s, all looked to the future. While the one man was so closely associated with both the long-standing positives and the more recent negatives of the Eisenhower era, the other could recast the country’s complacency as a trap. Elect him, Jack Kennedy promised, and he’d arouse citizens to a new urgency, a new determination to face up to the challenges ahead. The United States was slowing down; everyone knew that. But he, John F. Kennedy, would get it moving again. He’d
take on the Soviet threat, close the “missile gap,” and bring the enemy to the bargaining table. He would arm America, not to fight, but to parlay. In short, he’d do what Winston Churchill might have done to prevent World War II, had his own countrymen listened to him back in the 1930s.
Meanwhile, Kennedy had a vibrant domestic agenda as well. He vowed to be a Democratic activist in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, bringing medical care to the elderly, federal aid to education, and strong enforcement of civil rights.
When the two came together face-to-face, the strategy was for Nixon to be squeezed, maneuvered into appearing both weak on defense and inactive on the home front. The tactic had worked against Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952, and, since you repeat what works, Kennedy intended to deny Nixon any chance to benefit as a moderate-sounding Republican. Not hard enough on defense, not soft enough on taking care of people: Kennedy would keep up the punches and send his rival into a defensive crouch, trying to match point for point every charge made against the Eisenhower record.
• • •
However, before he could go head to head with Nixon, Kennedy first needed to deal once again with the religion issue, which, despite his facing it head-on in West Virginia, had never really gone away. The need to do so once again came in early September, as he was whistle-stopping his way down the Pacific coast from Portland to Los Angeles. Suddenly, at one stop, he was peppered with questions about a meeting of 150 ministers just held at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. The purpose of the gathering, called Citizens for Religious Freedom, had been to band Protestant clergymen together to work against the election of a Roman Catholic president.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 66