Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  The moment of Kennedy’s victory speech, O’Donnell recalled, was both ecstatic and poignant. “He gave the usual speech—about the hard work, and about what wonderful people they all were, and that he would keep his word to them. . . . And if he won the presidency he intended to come back to West Virginia and keep his word. That all the things he’d seen there that disturbed him so much, as president of the United States he’d do something about. That hadn’t just been campaign talk. It was a commitment. And then he moved in and worked the room and shook everyone’s hand.”

  What a night! “The place was jammed and it was around two a.m., and he came over and thanked us,” O’Donnell continued. “He pulled me aside and shook his head and said, ‘What the hell happened? We won!’ I just laughed and shook my head, looked at Bobby, who was exhausted. He nodded.” For his part, Salinger could see a weight had lifted: “He was elated. He knew he’d been nominated.”

  Ben Bradlee, though, was stunned to see how little attention the exhilarated victor showed his wife that night. “Kennedy ignored Jackie, and she seemed miserable at being left out of things. She was then far from the national figure she later became in her own right. She . . . stood on a stairway, totally ignored, as JFK made his victory statement on television. Later, when Kennedy was enjoying his greatest moment of triumph to date, with everyone in the hall shouting and yelling, Jackie quietly disappeared and went out to the car and sat by herself, until he was ready to fly back to Washington.”

  The candidate was alone in his triumph.

  30

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHARISMA

  How does Jack get them girls to squeal that way?

  —Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia

  Jack Kennedy’s singular personal appeal was recognized by Ken O’Donnell for the first time at the Worcester tea in 1952. He noticed how women simply stared at the candidate. The effect Kennedy had on people, most noticeably women, is visible today in films from the Wisconsin primary. You see high-school-age girls racing down the sidewalk merely to capture a glimpse of him. As the campaign entered the general election phase in 1960, and the crowds around Kennedy grew deeper, these young women—“jumpers” they were called—would leap into the air to see over the heads of those in front of them.

  It takes more than sex appeal, however, to win the American presidency. To gain the Democratic nomination, those victories in Wisconsin and West Virginia were necessary, but not sufficient. Jack still needed to conquer the resistance of pivotal governors, many of whom were Catholic like himself. It was not about whom they liked, or with whom they felt comfortable; the decisive question was whether they could be pushed to do what they didn’t want to do: commit, put their own political careers on the line for a guy who might well be stopped short of the nomination, halted for the sin of having the same religion as their own. These men had their own ambitions, too. They wanted the leverage, the clout that comes to a governor who arrives at a national convention with a bevy of delegates under his control.

  But Jack Kennedy wanted those delegates under his control. He wanted the nomination locked up before he reached Los Angeles for the basic, understandable reason that he’d seen what could happen in the middle of a Democratic Convention roll call. People who don’t want you to win can stop you in your tracks, just at the very moment when you and your people think you’ve got it in the bag. Just four years before, he’d seen it unfold like that in Chicago.

  So, to prevent it from happening again, he was taking certain steps, of a sort familiar to the Onions Burkes of this world.

  It had started with Ohio. Bobby’s strong-arm treatment of Mike DiSalle had ensured that the Ohio governor was headed to L.A. on the Kennedy bandwagon. Next had been Maryland, whose primary came the Friday after West Virginia’s. Bobby, now an expert at strong-arm tactics, had taken care of the dirty work there, from the moment the campaign learned that Governor J. Millard Tawes planned on running unopposed on the primary ballot as a “favorite son.” He wanted to arrive in California with the state’s delegates under his personal control. The Kennedy brothers, however, thought otherwise. Just as he had in Ohio with DiSalle, Bobby went to meet with Governor Tawes personally. Here’s Ken O’Donnell’s account:

  “We talked to the governor and suggested that the governor might want to talk to Bobby Kennedy alone, that he’d acquaint him with what our desires and our intentions were, and that he’d relay back to the senator what Governor Tawes’s intentions and desires were. We ushered the governor into a bedroom and Bobby went in and the governor was not happy, looking over his shoulder for some assistance. But there was none forthcoming. We closed the door.”

  Once the door opened again, Tawes had agreed to what the Kennedy forces wanted: an open run for the primary in Maryland.

  The Kennedy treatment of Governor Pat Brown of California was cordial, if only in comparison. Brown, after much prodding from Jack himself, O’Donnell, and O’Brien, worked out a deal. It was simple enough: he’d run on the ballot unopposed in his home state and then hand over his delegates at the convention if Kennedy continued to sweep the primaries and lead in the Gallup poll. Even with this agreement between Brown and Jack, Bobby continued to put pressure on the California governor. Although Senator Kennedy had agreed not to run in the California primary as long as Pat Brown was the only candidate on the ballot, Bobby filed a last-minute delegation. It was an insurance policy against the possibility of Hubert Humphrey attempting a comeback in delegate-rich California, where loyalties to the old liberal crowd ran high. Bobby agreed to withdraw the Kennedy slate of delegates only after Humphrey gave his personal guarantee he wouldn’t try to sneak in at the wire.

  Fred Dutton, who was Pat Brown’s top political guy, thought this final move showed moxie on the Kennedy side. “It was a pretty good example of the sort of hard-boiled game that the Kennedy group was playing. They were just protecting themselves, they said.”

  Even after the California primary, the Kennedy campaign wouldn’t let up. According to Dutton, “The Kennedys, as soon as the primary was over with, ran a very aggressive war of nerves to try to get Brown to come out for them and to pull over as many California delegates as they could. Bobby was in the state a half-dozen times; Larry O’Brien came out and met with me. They had every right to be worried, since a strong pro-Stevenson contingent made it increasingly difficult for Pat Brown to support Kennedy if he was going to protect his own skin in local politics. Liberals loyal to Adlai were beginning to make an eleventh-hour run for their twice-nominated hero. He’d taken on the challenge of Ike, went the argument. Didn’t he deserve the chance to beat the now far more beatable Nixon?”

  Bobby again refused to allow any possibility of this romance with the past taking hold. He was keeping his fingers around Brown’s throat. “He was calling up and was impatient, a little petulant, and not at all understanding of why Brown couldn’t make up his mind.” Dutton figured he either didn’t understand Brown’s political problems or, if he did, he wasn’t going to show he did. Bobby Kennedy was not the sort to see it from the other guy’s point of view. Besides, his job was not to be convinced. “I’m not running a popularity contest,” he told Time’s Hugh Sidey. “It doesn’t matter if they like me or not. If people are not getting off their behinds and working enough, how do you say that nicely? Every time you make a decision in this business, you make somebody mad.”

  Next in line was Pennsylvania. Jack Kennedy knew that Governor David Lawrence feared a backlash if he supported him. Having been the first of his religion to rise to this position there, he was uneasy about endorsing a fellow Catholic. To win Lawrence over, Jack needed an inside man. He found him in U.S. congressman William Green, who chaired the Democratic Party in Philadelphia. Green was a consummate big-city political boss. Two years earlier he had used his clout to get Lawrence the nomination for governor. After West Virginia, he was convinced his fellow Irish-Catholic had proven himself the strongest candidate. He believed no other Democrat would sta
nd a chance of beating Richard Nixon. With the bulk of Pennsylvania’s delegates in his control, he began putting pressure on Lawrence to drop his loyalty to Stevenson and lead the delegation to Kennedy.

  Despite Green’s backing, the governor remained stubborn. Lawrence remained neutral even after Kennedy’s impressive victory in the Pennsylvania primary as a write-in on the ballot. Time was starting to run short, and the deal needed to be closed. Thus, at the invitation of Governor Lawrence, Kennedy spoke at a luncheon in Pittsburgh that included the county leaders in the western part of the state. Lawrence himself introduced Kennedy, but wasn’t very warm. Implying in his remarks that Kennedy’s write-in triumph still wasn’t the last word, the governor seemed to have asked Jack to Pittsburgh to audition for a job he’d already won.

  Understanding that he’d been set up, Kennedy strode to the stage. “I could tell, as Governor Lawrence was speaking, that the senator was very angry,” O’Donnell recalled. “He got up and laid it out cold and hard to them, that these political leaders better think what was going to happen to the Democratic Party if the candidate who’d won all the primaries and amassed all the delegates could be denied the nomination simply for being an Irish Catholic. He told them they’d better think long and hard about what might be left of the Democratic Party should they follow this course.

  “Then he ended with a tough—and I mean tough—attack on Lawrence, kicking him good and hard where it hurts the most. All the color drained from Governor Lawrence’s face. He was stunned. There was a muttering in the room and a nodding of heads in agreement, along with chilly looks directed at Lawrence . . . who got up suddenly, almost knocked his chair over, and rushed out the door, claiming he had a meeting to go to. He didn’t even say good-bye to the senator, just fled the room. The rest of the people at the meeting got up and cheered and swarmed the senator.”

  New York was a different story. There Kennedy had all the Irish bosses working for him. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former aide to Governor Harriman, described the situation: “It was still the last moment in history where Irish political leaders had that much power.” Rip Horton, Kennedy’s Choate classmate and Princeton roommate, was a New York volunteer who saw Kennedy’s religion pay dividends in the cities. “This organization, this Kennedy-for-President movement, encompassed everywhere: Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. So the politicians were responding to the electorate,” seeing he might be a help to local candidates in their elections. His momentum was starting to be infectious.

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.”