Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  But Bobby soon transferred his anger to the “son of a bitch” judge who’d thrown the book at King. He called Governor Ernest Vandiver of Georgia, and then, taking his advice, called the judge himself, who ordered King released on bail.

  Louis Martin, an African-American, was elated when his friend Bobby Kennedy phoned in the early-morning hours with news of his successful mission. “You are now an honorary brother,” he said.

  Meanwhile, Kennedy’s opponent had remained silent on King’s predicament. The baseball hero Jackie Robinson tried and failed to get him to say something. “He thinks calling Martin would be grandstanding,” Robinson said mournfully. “Nixon doesn’t understand.”

  For this he would pay dearly. Martin Luther King, Sr., like his son a prominent Atlanta minister, now decided to endorse Kennedy publicly despite the religious difference between them. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” the elder King somberly told his flock in the Ebenezer Baptist Church during the exultant welcome-home service held for his rescued son. “But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He had a moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got my votes, and I’ve got a suitcase, and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

  Up at Kennedy headquarters in Washington, Wofford and Louis Martin were about to make history. Collecting all the appreciative and admiring comments pouring in from black leaders and others praising the Kennedys’ efforts on behalf of the Kings, they found a pair of Philadelphia ministers willing to sponsor publication of a pamphlet, “The Case of Martin Luther King,” which laid out the story of the Kennedy-King episode in bold language.

  “No-Comment Nixon versus a Candidate with a Heart: Senator Kennedy,” one caption read. “I earnestly and sincerely feel that it is time for all of us to take off our Nixon buttons,” the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a King ally, was quoted in the document. “Since Mr. Nixon has been silent through all this, I am going to return his silence when I go into the voting booth.”

  The pamphlet, two million copies of which were printed on light blue paper and delivered to black churches the Sunday before the election, would be dubbed “the blue bomb.” Though it never stirred even the mildest alarm among conservative white voters, who’d remain loyal to the national Democratic ticket, it moved black America overnight to the Democratic side of the ballot, from the party of Lincoln to that of the Kennedys. Martin Luther King, Jr., summing up the episode’s meaning, was eloquent: “There are moments when the politically expedient can be morally wise.”

  On November 2, Kennedy gave a major address at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. He spoke on two topics: the importance of nuclear disarmament and his plans for the Peace Corps. That afternoon, sitting in the bathtub at the Palace Hotel, he talked to Red Fay about how the campaign was going. “Last week, Dick Nixon hit the panic button and started Ike speaking. He spoke in Philadelphia on Friday night and is going to make about four or five speeches between now and the election. With every word he utters, I can feel the votes leaving me. It’s like standing on a mound of sand with the tide running out. I tell you he’s knocking our block off. If the election was tomorrow I’d win easily, but six days from now it’s up for grabs.” Then, suddenly, he changed the subject and began to tell his old friend, who’d been to war with him, what he intended to talk about that night: his great plans for this new corps of Americans working for peace throughout the world.

  But the tide was clearly turning. Ike was out there drawing enormous crowds, and Nixon was playing rough. “You know, it’s not Jack’s money they’re going to be spending!” The debates were yesterday’s news, and voters were fickle.

  To a Nixon accusation that he was a “bare-faced liar,” Kennedy retorted: “Having seen him in close-up—and makeup—for our television debates, I would never accuse Mr. Nixon of being barefaced.” Away from the microphones and reporters’ notebooks, he could be vicious. “He’s a filthy, lying son of a bitch and a dangerous man,” his aide Richard Goodwin heard him say once. To Red Fay, he articulated his dislike: “Nixon wanted the presidency so bad that there were no depths he wouldn’t sink to, to try to achieve his goal. How would you like to have that guy deciding this country’s problems when it became an issue of what was best for the country or what was best for Dick?”

  Fay called it a “180-degree reversal from what it was back in the Congressional years when Jack Kennedy wrote me on November 14, 1950, about how glad he was to see Nixon win big in his Senate race.” Kennedy also was worried about last-minute dirt, waiting for Nixon’s people to hit him with evidence of his “girling,” as he referred to it. He never did. Perhaps the voters would not have believed it if he had. How could they? One Nixon aide, watching news footage of Jack and Jackie in the final hours of the campaign, suddenly was struck by the power of the beautiful couple’s allure. Good God, he remembered thinking to himself, how do you run against that?

  Yet, all the time, the momentum of the 1960 campaign, the reality of the here and now, was shifting about him. He sensed he was losing California and wanted desperately some more days of campaigning, especially in the farm-rich Central Valley. But the schedule had been set. Promises had been made to the bosses of New York. The men who’d helped him win the nomination were now calling in their chits. They wanted him there.

  It’s hard to know how a campaign is going from the stump, Ken O’Donnell knew. Being in the bubble skews your perception. Unlike Jack, Bobby was at headquarters, getting phone calls and detecting very strongly that the question of religion was now back with a vengeance. “They’re much more concerned back at the headquarters because they’re seeing it. We’ve been to the Philadelphias and the Chicagos, Oklahoma—with big crowds across California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. Wild crowds. So we don’t see it.”

  O’Donnell said that he, along with the rest of the staff, now feared that the “silent bigot” would emerge as the decider, the voter who’d never voice his anti-Catholicism but would cast his or her ballot accordingly.

  New York on the final weekend proved disastrous. Kennedy was increasingly convinced that he had blown his chance at the presidency by not going back to California. His time would be split between pleasing the city’s powerful bosses and its equally important liberal groups. To get where he was, he’d needed both. Now, facing Election Day, he especially needed the bosses. It was like a comedy in which the hero’s on a date with two different people, simultaneously zipping back and forth to keep both appeased. Jack was forced to move from one hotel, the Carlyle, to another, the Biltmore, for breakfast, then back to the Carlyle for still another breakfast.

  The exhausted candidate’s simmering frustration finally rose to a dangerous boil when he was expected to ride in a New York City parade organized by the local Democratic strongman Carmine DeSapio. It was pouring rain, and as he was driven back to Manhattan from an appearance on Long Island, Jack finally had had enough. His breaking point reached, he kicked everyone out of the car, insisting that his driver abandon the motorcade and return to his Upper East Side hotel. En route, however, the driver took some wrong turns. “I was beginning to panic now,” O’Donnell recalled. “I was soaking wet, angry. Our motorcade had also gotten lost—and I’d lost the senator.”

  When he reached the Carlyle, the drenched Kennedy was forced to wait for his suitcase, which had been mistakenly taken to the Biltmore. Disgusted, he commandeered O’Donnell’s bedroom and once again threw everyone out. Lyndon Johnson, unaware of the meltdown, wanted to greet his running mate. Said O’Donnell, “Well, the next thing I see is Lyndon being literally thrown out of the room by a rather irate young Irishman from Massachusetts.” The shock was enough to make Johnson worry about the political bed he’d made.

  Next, Kennedy demanded that O’Donnell set about canceling the parade DeSapio had planned. “I don’t give a shit if they have five million people out there. Cancel it. Either
you tell them, or I will. If you don’t have the balls to tell them, I’ll tell them. Send them in,” he instructed O’Donnell.

  “Look, Senator, this is my fault. I’ll tell them. But you’re not going to lose.” O’Donnell couldn’t change his boss’s mood. Jack’s reply: “Just cancel the fucking thing.”

  On November 8, as Americans went to the polls to vote for their thirty-fourth president, early returns showed a big Kennedy victory. Connecticut’s results came in quickly and strongly. Philadelphia gave Jack a plurality of 330,000 votes. Then, the news began to shift. “It started out like gangbusters,” Pierre Salinger recalled. “It started out like we were going to win by a landslide. In fact, the computer said we were. Then, everything started to go bad all over the place. By midnight it was a real dog race.” The religious issue was doing its damage.

  The news from Ohio was devastating. Kennedy, watching TV at Bobby’s Hyannis Port house with the others, rolled up his sleeve to show how much his hand had swollen. “Ohio did that to me. They did it there.” But as upsetting as it was, it was also unexpected. “All those people now say they knew we would lose Ohio,” said O’Donnell. “Well, if they did, they kept it to themselves until election night, when returns showed we lost it. Ohio was one that came as a shock to all of us.”

  Nixon was picking up Midwestern states in landslide fashion: Iowa, Indiana, even Wisconsin, where Kennedy had campaigned so hard that recent winter. As election night turned to morning, Jack saw the heartland turning against his candidacy. They were rejecting him. “I’m angry,” the author Teddy White heard him say.

  Though Kennedy would later insist the words he’d spoken were “I’m hungry,” the situation suggests that the word White recorded might be taken as the more reliable. Nebraska was another wipeout. “Nebraska has the largest Republican majority of all fifty states,” Rip Horton, who’d run the campaign there for his old Choate classmate, recalled. “His religion was definitely a handicap out there. They used to have meetings in churches. They’d advertise these meetings, various denominations, telling people to come to a mass meeting on why they shouldn’t vote for a Catholic for president.”

  Yet even with these losses, Kennedy was managing to stay in front. “If the present trend continues,” Richard Nixon told a loyal crowd waiting in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, “Senator Kennedy will be the next president of the United States.” As supporters shouted out for him not to concede, Nixon doggedly kept on. “Certainly, if the trend continues and he does become our next president, he will have my wholehearted support.”

  “Does this mean you’re president, Bunny?” Jackie Kennedy asked her husband. “Why don’t you give up?” someone else in the room exhorted the face on the television screen. “Why should he?” Kennedy jumped in. “I wouldn’t in his place.”

  Jack was done for the evening. “What am I going to tell the press?” Pierre Salinger asked. “Tell them I went to bed,” came the answer. “Wake me up if anything happens.” With that, he walked out into the Cape Cod night, headed for his own house. When he awoke, he was the next president.

  Ted Sorensen beat Salinger to him with the news. That morning they watched intently as Herb Klein, Nixon’s press secretary, read the telegram Nixon had sent from California, before flying at dawn back to Washington. “I want to repeat through this wire the congratulations and best wishes I extended to you on television last night. I know that you will have the united support of all Americans as you lead the nation in the cause of peace and freedom during the next four years.”

  Nixon wasn’t playing by the rules and Jack resented it. It had been a close election, yet here was his opponent denying him the courtesy of a televised concession. It was part of the ritual, and yet he’d ducked out at the climax, leaving his press secretary to do the job. He, Jack Kennedy, would never have behaved in such an unsportsmanlike manner. Once he’d known he’d lost the vice-presidential race in 1956, he’d raced to the podium.

  As he greeted and thanked his top political aides O’Donnell and O’Brien, he now struck them both as a different man. The battle had been hard fought and won.

  When the Secret Service detail arrived at Hyannis Port at 5:45 a.m., the agents knew the names, faces, and roles of each of Kennedy’s people. Seeing Ken O’Donnell at the Kennedy compound that Wednesday afternoon, the chief of the Secret Service unit approached him as he got out of his car. “Mr. O’Donnell, the president has informed the Secret Service that we will now be reporting to you and that you are now our boss, in charge of the Secret Service for the length of the president’s term of office. What would you like us to do right now?” It was the first indication that Kennedy intended him to come to Washington.

  President-elect Kennedy’s plans did not include appointing a chief of staff. He, Jack Kennedy, was going to be at the center. Everyone else, including O’Donnell, now a special assistant, and Sorensen, special counsel, would be arrayed around him, each spoke of the wheel competing for his attention. Jack would design a White House operation to match his compartmentalized personality. No one would control him. He would, in that fashion he loved, have things under control.

  Still, before he could relax in his triumph and enjoy his cresting euphoria, Kennedy needed to secure the victory against any doubters. The problem was that the historically close tally had left questions about certain state results. Those in dispute were in Illinois—especially Cook County, where Chicago is located—and in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas. It remained unclear in the first days after the election whether Richard Nixon intended to demand recounts or otherwise challenge the results. In order for John Kennedy to be able to move forward as chief executive, an extraordinary measure was required: someone must indicate, clearly and convincingly, that he had, without question, won the election. The person who needed to do so was Dick Nixon.

  It fell to Joseph P. Kennedy, a master at the deal and knowing whom to call, to figure out the way. A longtime friend of Herbert Hoover, he was able to pick up the phone and quickly reach the eighty-six-year-old former president. The message he delivered to Hoover was a straightforward one: it was in the country’s interest for the newly elected president and the defeated Nixon to get together. Hoover listened and understood. He’d once lost a presidential election himself, and survived. Plus, over the years Nixon had come to regard him as a political father figure. For both these reasons, Nixon would listen to him and respect his counsel.

  The Saturday after the election, the excitement and fatigue of the campaign had faded from the fallen candidate. Defeat, both dull and cruel, had taken hold. The loyal Herb Klein could see it plainly. “Nixon was, in my opinion, more unresponsive than at any time I had known him. He was completely depressed and had finally realized, four days later, that he’d lost the election.”

  Nixon and his retreating corps of advisors were assembled that night in Key Biscayne, Florida. It was there he took the call from Hoover and heard the big-picture case for getting together with Kennedy. “I think we are in enough trouble in the world today that some indications of national unity are not only desirable but essential.”

  But, as always in such moments, there were dimensions that existed beyond the easy explanations. After talking to Hoover, Nixon’s glum mood suddenly lifted. “It was the difference between night and day,” Klein said. While Nixon was on another phone calling President Eisenhower for guidance, Klein took a call from Kennedy, who hadn’t wanted to wait for Nixon to ring him. The upshot was the two men agreed to meet the following Monday in Key Biscayne.

  The meeting accomplished just what the Kennedys intended: providing a photo op to showcase the image of loser meeting winner. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Jack Kennedy told the press, “I just wanted to say that the vice president and I had a very cordial meeting. I was delighted to have a chance to see him again. We came to the Congress the same day fourteen years ago, and both served on the Labor Committee of the House of Representatives. So I was anxious to come here today and resume our relationship, which
had been somewhat interrupted by the campaign.” Had the two discussed the campaign during their hour-long meeting? “I asked him how he took Ohio, but he did not tell me,” Kennedy joked. “He is saving it for 1964.”

  The vote count would turn out to be incredibly tight—Kennedy: 34,226,731; Nixon: 34,108,157. But now the results had been validated by the face-to-face meeting on Nixon’s own turf.

  Jack Kennedy’s ultimate trophy had been won by virtue of the truth he’d grasped about his country, one that Richard Nixon had failed to see. “He had done it by driving home the simple message of unease,” Time reported, addressing “the things left undone in the world, where a slip could be disastrous.” The historian Arthur Schlesinger enlarged on the same point in his diary. “He wisely decided to concentrate on a single theme and to hammer that theme home until everyone in America understood it—understood his sense of the decline of our national power and influence and his determination to arrest and reverse this course. He did this with such brilliant success that, even in a time of prosperity and apparent peace, and even as a Catholic, he was able to command a majority of the votes.”

  Victory confirmed, Jack could focus anew on those ideals of peace and heroic leadership that had inspired him since youth. The new president had a favorite quote from Lincoln that he liked to carry with him on a scrap of paper. He’d used it in speeches, but now it spoke to him personally. “I know there is a God, and I know He hates injustice. I see the storm coming and I know His hand is in it. But if He has a place and a part for me, I believe that I am ready.”

  31

  Inauguration

  32

  Meeting with Khrushchev

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LANDING

  He who learns must suffer, and, even in our sleep, pain