Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  A moment later, her husband caught the attention of Red Fay, asking over the tumult with a pleased grin: “How would you like to try and follow that?” Yet Jackie wasn’t her husband’s sole secret weapon in Wisconsin. Working for him there was a fellow who stayed under the radar and away from crowds. Paul Corbin was a campaign operative with a flair for dirty tricks. Later to be legendary in some political circles, Corbin began a close and lasting friendship with Bobby Kennedy during that push to win the 1960 Wisconsin primary. Probably his most famous stunt at the time had him distributing anti-Catholic material—ostensibly written by fearful Protestants—throughout largely Roman Catholic neighborhoods. Nothing incites voters to support their own kind like hard evidence they’re under assault from others.

  For their own campaign song, the Humphrey people had chosen the tune of “Davy Crockett,” the jaunty theme of a hit Disney TV show. The problem was that their man was no more “king of the wild frontier” than he could claim to have “killed himself a b’ar when he was only three.” It was Jack Kennedy, who’d proven his grit and courage in his youth, who was plausibly heralding a new frontier.

  While Kennedy believed his hard work would pay off, he also knew he had to win. “You have to keep coming up sevens,” he said, admitting, implicitly at least, that the outcome of the Wisconsin primary remained a crap shoot. However, on April 5, the balloting day, he admitted to Ben Bradlee the confidence he felt. “On the day Wisconsin voters went to the polls, he flew to some town in northern Michigan in the Caroline for a midday political rally before coming back for the returns, and I went with him. During the flight, I asked him for his prediction in each of the ten Wisconsin election districts. He wouldn’t tell me, but agreed to write them down and put them in a sealed envelope, if I’d do the same. We did, and Kennedy put them casually in a drawer on the plane, and switched the subject. Two or three days later, I was back on assignment on the Kennedy family plane and remembered the envelope. He pulled it out and showed me the predictions. I’d put down ‘Kennedy 7, Humphrey 3,’ out of an abundance of caution; I really thought it would be eight to two. Kennedy himself had put down, ‘JFK 9, HHH 1.’ “

  Despite a surprise attack from liberals trying to make last-minute political capital of the thousand-dollar contribution he’d delivered from his father to Nixon in 1950—an episode Kennedy aides were under instructions to deny—the Massachusetts senator had scored a big victory. The final count was 478,901 votes for John F. Kennedy to Hubert Humphrey’s 372,034.

  But the results, the way they were presented, were inconclusive for two reasons. First, the press covered the Wisconsin Democratic vote in terms of congressional districts, of which there were ten: Kennedy took six, Humphrey four. Calling it that way made it appear a far narrower victory than a comparison of total votes for each candidate. This is because three of Humphrey’s four victorious congressional districts lay along his home state’s border and could have been expected to go his way. Kennedy’s friend Lem Billings had run the campaign in one of those districts and would later comment on the outcome there, saying, “In all fairness to myself, Humphrey was a very beloved figure in that district.”

  Another reality helping, spinwise, to offset Humphrey’s loss was his victory in the congressional district that included Madison, the state capital, where the University of Wisconsin campus was also located. It was the single district Humphrey carried that was not on the Minnesota border, and for that reason it was judged to be a clear and unexpected upset of Jack Kennedy. Madison was the center of liberalism in the state, and even though Kennedy lost the district only narrowly, it looked bad. Why couldn’t Jack persuade the liberals he so needed to win the nomination that he should be their candidate?

  The election-night coverage harped on the religion issue. Kennedy had won in six of the state’s ten congressional districts, the commentators decreed, mainly because Wisconsin’s Republican Catholics, rallying to their own, had crossed over to vote for him on the Democratic ballot.

  “Kennedy is, of course, Roman Catholic, Humphrey a Congregationalist, and Nixon a Quaker,” Walter Cronkite reminded listeners. “And some observers think that the election has resolved into a religious struggle.” Sitting on a couch and smoking a small cigar, Kennedy watched Cronkite make this assessment with simmering rage, furious at seeing his victory recast along the very lines that represented a truth about himself that he could never change.

  “One of the most elaborate and intense campaigns in the state’s history will end up achieving nothing,” another broadcaster intoned. After all the trudging through the snow, the hand-shaking, and the speechmaking, Jack was being denied the proper credit for snatching Wisconsin out of Humphrey’s grasp. Now the only choice was heading to heavily Protestant West Virginia, where the Democratic primary was scheduled for one month and five days later.

  Adversity had again presented Jack Kennedy with a truth and a test. Wisconsin reminded the country of the hazard posed by his religion. He had predicted this himself at the April strategy meeting the previous year. Now the press was rehashing the same old story. Kennedy resented it, and to his sister Eunice, he spelled out the consequences of Wisconsin: “It means that we’ve got to go to West Virginia in the morning and do it all over again. And then we’ve got to go on to Maryland and Indiana and Oregon and win all of them.” He had to keep coming up sevens.

  In deciding to throw his hat in the West Virginia primary, Jack Kennedy again had to overrule his father. Ben Bradlee recalled the two of them knocking heads over it. “When the question of West Virginia came up for discussion, Joe Kennedy argued strenuously against JFK’s entering, saying, ‘It’s a nothing state and they’ll kill him over the Catholic thing.’ A few minutes later JFK spoke out. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve heard from the ambassador, and we’re all very grateful, Dad. But I’ve got to run in West Virginia.’ “

  Lem Billings saw it as his old school friend’s drive, his compulsion to rise to the occasion. “He knew that if he dropped West Virginia, particularly for a Catholic reason, it would be interpreted as meaning that a Catholic could never be president of the United States.”

  Upon entering West Virginia, Kennedy must have felt his initial determination had bordered on bravado. The focus on his Catholicism was having an effect. Lou Harris’s numbers, which had been giving Kennedy a 70–30 lead in West Virginia, now showed Humphrey ahead 60–40. Pierre Salinger knew exactly what the turnabout boiled down to. “The reversal was, of course, produced by the addition of a single word to his poll. Harris had neglected to tell the people in West Virginia in his first one that John F. Kennedy was a Catholic. So we were right up against it there. But if we lost in West Virginia, we were gone.”

  It suddenly didn’t look good. The unthinkable—an anti-Kennedy turnaround, a building backlash—might well be looming ahead. In Washington, the oddsmakers—including the self-interested Nixon, whose own future was tied to whomever the Democrats finally nominated—were betting that Jack couldn’t pull it off. Now it appeared that the nomination would have to be brokered, after all, at the convention in Los Angeles, a scenario that squared with Lyndon Johnson’s own game plan. The Senate leader imagined getting together with the delegates and wooing them in the same tried-and-true manner he used on senators before a key vote. He’d work the states one at a time, using his allies from the Hill as local kingmakers. Then, when the time came to pick the party’s nominee, the convention would choose a candidate who could actually win in November—not a Catholic, not a young backbencher who’d yet to do much of anything where it counted: on Capitol Hill.

  Around this time, Lyndon Johnson called on Tip O’Neill in his office. The Senate leader said he understood O’Neill’s first loyalty was to his Massachusetts colleague, but that “the boy” was obviously going to falter after not getting the nomination on the first ballot. He lobbied O’Neill for his commitment on the second.

  In West Virginia, Humphrey pressed the advantage he’d gained in Wisconsin. With the st
rains of “Give Me That Old Time Religion” coming from his campaign bus, he tried to play the faith advantage over Kennedy to the hilt. There was nothing subtle about it. Its verses had featured prominently—and ominously—in the film Inherit the Wind, a stirring drama based on the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.” In the movie, released that year, the song comes to stand for the beliefs of the rural Christian fundamentalists opposed to any teaching of evolution, and in West Virginia its message was clear: Humphrey understood who the voters were, and Roman Catholic wasn’t part of the description.

  Cannily—and what choice did he have?—Kennedy himself began citing his Catholicism at every opportunity, but often in the same context as his navy service. If his critics wanted to make his religion, rather than his political experience, the issue, he was willing to play their game. It was the game of politics at its most masterful. His brother Bobby would call this ploy “hanging a lantern on your problem.” Lem Billings recalled how, of necessity, the strategy had shifted. While in Wisconsin Jack had “pretty well avoided the religious question,” in West Virginia he “jumped into it with both feet. He pounded home day after day about religion.” There it became the issue, out in the open.

  Kennedy showcased his service record in World War II to extinguish voters’ fears about possible conflicted loyalties; his allegiance was to the United States, it always had been and always would be. Why else had he risked his life in the Pacific? “Nobody asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy. Nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber plane to fly his last mission.”

  William Battle, who’d served in the PT boats with Kennedy, introduced him to a much-respected Episcopal bishop, Robert E. Lee Strider, with strong political influence in the Charleston area. “Young man, I should tell you right off the bat the only time I have ever voted Republican was when Al Smith ran for the Democratic nomination,” was the churchman’s opener to Kennedy, as Battle recalled. “And it was because of the Catholic issue. The way he handled it.”

  Battle remembered the look Jack shot him, basically “What the hell did you bring me up here for?” And then Strider smiled. “That’s the way he handled it,” the bishop told his visitor. “Smith would not discuss it. You’ve handled your religion entirely differently. I’m satisfied, and I’d be delighted to work with you.” The next morning local papers throughout the coalfields region ran stories headlined: “Bishop Strider Supports Kennedy!”

  Ken O’Donnell noted the way Kennedy was affected by what he saw in West Virginia. “Here right in our midst was a great mass of people totally ignored, yet they didn’t complain as he talked to them. They didn’t like it; they weren’t lazy, they were just people who’d been in poverty so long they didn’t know a way out.” Pierre Salinger saw the same thing. “I believe West Virginia brought a real transformation of John F. Kennedy as a person. He came into contact, really for the first time, with poverty. He saw what had happened as a result of the technological changes in coal mining. He saw hundreds of people sitting around the city with nothing to do. It affected him very deeply. It really, in my opinion, changed his whole outlook on life.”

  What now made a difference to the campaign’s fortunes in West Virginia was the inherited prestige of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. The president’s son and namesake was brought in to strike at the Minnesotan’s soft underbelly, his failure to fight in World War II. From here on in, the gloves were off. The conclusion of that conflict was just fifteen years in the past, and memories of its horrors and its casualties, along with its many great acts of heroism, hadn’t faded. Ben Bradlee knew how Jack always wanted to know where a fellow of his generation had been in the “wor-ah.” It was a key for him, a key to sizing up other men.

  Humphrey was vulnerable, and the wartime president’s son spread the news. Humphrey twice had attempted to enlist only to be rejected for medical reasons. But to guarantee that no voter remained unaware of who’d served and who hadn’t, the Kennedys undertook a comprehensive education program. Souvenir PT 109 insignia emblems of Jack Kennedy’s wartime heroism were put on sale at the affordable price of a dollar. A letter from FDR Jr. endorsing the young candidate, was mailed to West Virginia voters. It was postmarked Hyde Park, New York, unmistakably signaling its connection to America’s greatest Democrat.

  Out on the campaign trail, Kennedy made it clear to the curious crowds that came to hear him that here was a chance for little West Virginia to choose the country’s top leader. “The basic strategy was a psychological one,” Pierre Salinger recalled. “That is, let West Virginia play a role in selecting the next president of the United States. If Hubert Humphrey wins the West Virginia primary, he will never receive the nomination of the Democratic Party. Therefore, you are throwing your vote away. If John F. Kennedy wins the West Virginia primary, you will have selected the next president of the United States.”

  Salinger confessed the campaign’s subtext. The state had a lot to gain from electing a president. “West Virginia, the fiftieth state in the union in defense contracts, wanted to be with a winner who would remember it. John F. Kennedy sold West Virginia on the fact that if he became president he would never forget West Virginia.”

  Money also played a crucial role. The county political people expected to be paid for their election efforts, and the Kennedys would do what was expected. West Virginia was a state, after all, where the facts of political life weren’t overseen by reformers. The decisive swing came on election eve, when the largest amounts yet of Kennedy cash started falling into outstretched hands. Humphrey could do little but complain. “I’m being ganged up on by wealth. I can’t afford to run around this state with a little black bag and a checkbook.”

  Salinger didn’t argue with the assessment. “We were running the campaign there as if you were running a campaign to elect a ward leader in New York or Chicago. We whipped this campaign down to the sheriffs, the district attorneys, and the councilmen because this is the way you win elections in West Virginia.”

  The Nixon backer Charles McWhorter, a native of the state, saw it as a daunting preview of the general election. “They went through West Virginia like a tornado, putting money—big bucks!—into sheriffs’ races. You were either for Kennedy or you weren’t. The Kennedy people just wanted the gold ring. They were ruthless in that objective. That scared the shit out of me.”

  In the last days, Kennedy was campaigning so hard that he lost his voice. Trying to rest it, he scribbled a note to Charlie Bartlett just as the final showdown at the polls was about to occur. What he wrote said it all: “I’d give my right testicle to win this one.”

  But, as he had told Ben Bradlee, he would not be maneuvered into a corner. He would not let the entire campaign hang on winning one difficult primary. His mind was racing ahead to whatever the West Virginia results might require. He warned his old college friend, and now U.S. congressman, Torby Macdonald, who was running the Kennedy campaign in Maryland, that he might need him more than ever. The primary there was to take place that Friday.

  “If Jack were beaten in West Virginia,” Macdonald said, “then this would be a bail-out operation, in which he’d win so overwhelmingly in Maryland that everyone would forget about West Virginia. It may have been wishful thinking, but that was the point—and that’s why I worked as hard as I did in Maryland.”

  Just as Jack Kennedy had refused to sit on that little island in the Solomons, awaiting a rescuer for him and his men, just as he’d swum again and again out into the water looking for help, just as he’d sent Barney Ross when he couldn’t do it, now he was sending an S.O.S. to his buddy Torby. When it came to survival, he was not a pessimist, but he was seized by the fear that West Virginia had slipped from his hands.

  He made sure to fly back to Washington, D.C., as the actual election was getting under way. He’d look even more a loser should the results go against him and he was there, hanging around in West Virginia, on primary night.

  To
pass the time while the votes came in, the Kennedys, joined by the Bradlees, went out to dinner. Getting away from the action and the teasing hints from the early returns is standard political practice. For his sanity, a candidate needs to remove himself, however momentarily, from the minute-to-minute rumblings and false reports bringing alternating euphoria and gloom. It’s also a pleasure to find yourself alone with good friends after weeks of craziness with strangers.

  Bradlee remembers: “The Kennedys asked us to sweat the vote out with them at dinner, but dinner was over long before any remotely meaningful results were in. After a quick call to brother Bobby at the Kanawha Hotel in Charleston, we all got into their car and drove to the Trans-Lux theater to see Suddenly Last Summer. Bad omen. It was a film with a surprise ending, whose publicity included a warning that no one would be admitted after the show started.”

  They ended up at a film showing around the corner from the White House. To Bradlee it seemed like porn. “Not the hard-core stuff of later years, but a nasty little thing called Private Property, starring Kate Manx as a horny housewife.” Bradlee said he and Kennedy “wondered aloud if the movie was on the Catholic index of forbidden films”—it was—and “whether or not there were any votes in it either way for Kennedy in allegedly anti-Catholic West Virginia if it were known he was in attendance.”

  “Kennedy’s concentration was absolutely zero,” Bradlee recalled. “He left every twenty minutes to call Bobby in West Virginia. Each time he returned, he’d whisper ‘Nothing definite yet,’ slouch back into his seat and flick his teeth with the fingernail of the middle finger on his right hand, until he left to call again.”

  Word suddenly came that Kennedy had won. The foursome headed to National Airport and boarded the Caroline for the short hop to the state that had just defied all the doomsayers, all the experts, all the Democrats backing the wrong horse.