Not least, Kennedy seemed well positioned on a matter that threatened to cleave the party in two: civil rights. Over the prior two years, the insurgency against segregation had grown in intensity as activists demanded that African Americans have full access to the nation’s institutions and prosperity. In 1954, a series of landmark cases testing segregation had culminated in the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which outlawed segregation in public schools. The following year, the court demanded that local school boards move “with all deliberate speed” to implement the decision. In August 1955, the gruesome killing in Mississippi of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till (for the alleged “crime” of whistling at a white woman) further galvanized the movement. And in December, black seamstress and NAACP activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks’s act of defiance prompted a yearlong bus boycott in Montgomery organized by a new Baptist minister in town, the twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.14
In his first nine years on Capitol Hill, Jack Kennedy had been a steadfast advocate on civil rights, with a blemish-free voting record. Now, however, in his tenth year, he subtly repositioned himself, hoping thereby to strengthen his vice presidential prospects. The Democrats were badly split between southern segregationists—who controlled key committees in both houses—and a group of liberal crusaders, centered in the Senate, who were determined to bring meaningful reform.15 Stevenson, philosophically and intellectually in accord with the reformers but fearful of the electoral consequences of aligning with them, tried to finesse the issue, saying as little as he could about the Brown decision while hoping the party’s platform committee could conjure up some kind of artful compromise. He also saw the need for a running mate who could appeal to both wings of the party, who would be tolerable to segregationists as well as to northern liberals.
Kennedy aimed to be that man. In the space of a few short weeks in the late spring and early summer, he attempted a delicate remolding of his political image, shifting to the right to make himself more palatable to the South while at the same time keeping on good terms with northerners, whose views on racial equality he shared. He cast himself as a civil rights gradualist who fully supported black betterment but thought that desegregation should occur step by step and with the voluntary acquiescence of southern municipalities. In effect, Kennedy followed the vague position of the Supreme Court in its “all deliberate speed” formulation—desegregation must occur, but the pace was open to discussion and compromise. This straddling didn’t exactly endear him to many southern Democrats, but it nonetheless left him better positioned than the Tennessean Kefauver to win their support. Kefauver, in their eyes, had committed an act of betrayal by refusing to sign the “Southern Manifesto,” a condemnation of the Brown decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power,” signed by one hundred U.S. senators and representatives (ninety-six of them Democrats).16
On CBS’s Face the Nation in early July, panelists grilled Kennedy on his stance and pushed him to indicate what Congress’s role in desegregating schools ought to be. He bobbed and weaved, avoiding unambiguous statements, but left little doubt that it should be up to the courts, not lawmakers, to determine the pace of desegregation. Asked near the end of the program if the Democratic Party platform should endorse Brown, Kennedy constructed an adroit way of saying no: “Now it may be politically desirable, some people may feel, to reemphasize it. In my opinion, it is unnecessary because I accept it.”17
II
When the Democratic convention opened at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre on August 13, analysts in the party and the press identified several leading candidates for the number-two slot: in addition to Kefauver and Kennedy, they included Senators Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, and Lyndon Johnson of Texas, as well as New York City mayor Robert Wagner (also a Catholic) and W. Averell Harriman, governor of New York. Kefauver was the odds-on favorite going in, with Humphrey also attracting a lot of attention. (Johnson, most politicos speculated, preferred to remain majority leader and to set his sights on 1960.)
But now Jack Kennedy got one of those lucky breaks that periodically defined his career. Party chairman Paul Butler had commissioned a film about the history of the Democratic Party, by Hollywood producer and delegate Dore Schary, that would introduce the first evening’s keynote address. Governor Edmund Muskie of Maine, a rising figure in the party, was asked to provide the narration but declined, whereupon Kennedy got the nod. He flew out to California in July to see a screening of the footage-only rough cut at the twenty-room Santa Monica beachfront home of his sister Patricia and her husband, Peter Lawford. (The house had been built in 1936 for film industry titan Louis B. Mayer.) Pleased by what he saw, Kennedy rehearsed the script, adding a few lines of his own, then went into a studio to record his voice-over. Schary was thrilled: “All of us who were in contact with [Kennedy] immediately fell in love with him because he was so quick and so charming and so cooperative, and obviously so bright and so skilled.”18
The film was a smashing success, the high point of the convention’s opening night. As the lights dimmed, the audience of eleven thousand heard Kennedy’s New England voice fill the auditorium. The effect was electric. Schary, seated with the California delegation, recalled that the senator’s personality “just came right out. It jumped at you on the screen. The narration was good, and the film was emotional. He was immediately a candidate. There was simply no doubt about that because he racked up the whole convention.”19 A press report said the film “sent the convention roaring for the first time.” After it ended, Kennedy strode to the platform to take a bow and the roars came anew. Members of the Massachusetts delegation waved “Kennedy for President” placards and staged a brief but noisy favorite-son parade, and The New York Times proclaimed that “Senator Kennedy came before the convention tonight as a photogenic movie star.”20 But it was among the other states’ delegates and, even more, the television viewing audience that the narration really mattered, in an instant raising his profile in a way nothing had ever done before—not his books, not his dramatic 1952 Senate win, not even his Pacific war heroics. He had reached a new level.
A star in Chicago: Jack confers with Jackie and Eunice at the Democratic National Convention.
Stevenson, too, was impressed, but he remained uncertain at day’s end about which way he would go on a running mate. When, during a late-evening cab ride, Newt Minow made an impassioned plea for Kennedy as the best choice, Stevenson launched into a recitation of all the things he disliked about Joe Kennedy. “How can you blame the kid for his father?” Minow exclaimed. Stevenson fell silent for a moment, then murmured, “He’s too young.”21
The following day, Kennedy was the talk of the convention, mobbed wherever he went, on the streets and on the convention floor, an overnight sensation. Behind the scenes, though, all was not smooth. Eleanor Roosevelt, a formidable player in the party, had arrived in Chicago to proclaim her support of Stevenson’s candidacy and extol her late husband’s legacy; the Kennedy team, thinking she could boost Jack’s chances of being tapped for the second slot, arranged for a half-hour meeting between the two at the storied Blackstone Hotel. It didn’t go well. Mrs. Roosevelt was wary of Kennedy for what she saw as his father’s tolerance of Nazis during the war, as well as Jack’s failure to condemn Joseph McCarthy. Accounts of the meeting differ on the particulars, but all agree that the former First Lady placed the senator on the defensive over the McCarthy issue. When she pressed him on the matter, he reportedly said, “That was so long ago,” and offered a meandering comment on Senate procedure. The reply “just wasn’t enough of an answer for me, that’s all,” she reported afterwards, but Kennedy insisted “she must have misunderstood me because what I meant was that the bill of particulars against McCarthy was long before the censure movement. My position was that we couldn’t indict a man for what happened before he was seat
ed [for his new term, in January 1953]. If he was guilty of those things, the time to stop him was before he was seated…it was hardly a place or a basis for judgment.”22
More likely, Roosevelt did not misunderstand Kennedy at all but merely saw his response for what it was: an evasive dodge on a matter he preferred not to confront.
III
On Wednesday, August 15, came more proof that Kennedy was having an outsize role in the convention. In a morning meeting, Adlai Stevenson asked him to deliver the main nominating speech before Thursday’s presidential balloting. The offer came with a caveat: if northerners succeeded in pushing through a stronger civil rights plank in the party platform later that day, Stevenson would instead need a southerner to nominate him. Kennedy felt honored to be asked—this would mean yet more national attention for him, and on a critical day of the convention—but also came away disappointed, in that it probably meant he would not be the running mate. By tradition, one did not invite to give the nominating speech someone also under consideration for the second slot on the ticket. When Stevenson told Kennedy he wanted him to give the speech, Kennedy later reflected, “I asked him if that meant I was thereby being disqualified for the vice-presidential nomination and he said, no, not necessarily. So when Arthur [Schlesinger Jr.] came to see me that day, I told him I felt I should know whether or not I was being eliminated before I made the nominating speech, or at least before it happened. And that’s when Arthur told me that nobody yet had been picked.”23
It was true: Stevenson had not decided on a running mate. Prone to indecision at the best of times, he felt conflicted about the top three contenders. Kefauver, the consensus front-runner, had delegate strength and good organization and arguably deserved the nod, having won primaries in the spring. He had also gained national recognition for his chairmanship of a Senate committee whose hearings on organized crime attracted broad television coverage. But Stevenson disliked Kefauver, who had a reputation for heavy drinking and chronic extramarital dalliances, and he knew that many of Kefauver’s Senate colleagues found him coarse and conniving, and too loquacious by half. Hubert Humphrey, a skilled orator and policy wonk with whom Stevenson had gotten on well in the past, represented the farm vote in the Midwest, which the ticket would need in the fall; he had arrived in Chicago expecting, on the basis of a conversation with Stevenson a few weeks prior, to get the nod.24 But both Kefauver and Humphrey were suspect among southerners for their progressive stances on civil rights. Jack Kennedy, for his part, was a proven vote-getter with a heroic war record and abundant charm, a man who represented an important region of the country and had a reputation for centrism on policy issues. But there were the questions about his health, his youth, and his Catholicism. Trailing behind these three men in Stevenson’s calculation were the other contenders: Johnson, Gore, Harriman, and Wagner.
That evening Ted Sorensen, still waiting for confirmation that Kennedy would give the nominating speech the following day, went over the draft Stevenson’s aides had produced. He thought it terrible—“a wordy, corny, lackluster committee product,” he subsequently said. He ran into Schlesinger, who would only say that the previous draft was worse. At one thirty in the morning, with the platform fight at last over and Kennedy authorized to give the speech, the senator and Sorensen met to discuss how to proceed. Kennedy would take the podium less than twelve hours later, at noon on August 16. He shared his aide’s low opinion of the draft and told him, “We’ll have to start over.” Kennedy dictated the opening sentences and outlined the broad points, and instructed Sorensen to have a draft ready by eight o’clock in the morning. Sorensen worked through the night, then had a secretary type up the new version, jumped in a car, and took the draft over to Kennedy’s hotel room. The senator “looked it over, rewrote some of it, cut out some things and added a few paragraphs, and by then it was so chopped up that we had to have it retyped because the TelePrompTer people were screaming for it. We gave them one copy and sent another copy to be mimeographed for the press.”25
En route to the Amphitheatre, as his taxi sped down Michigan Avenue, Jack saw to his horror that parts of the typescript were illegible. He let loose a string of profanities—he was due on the stage in half an hour. In that instant he spotted a familiar face trying to hail a taxi: Tom Winship, a reporter from the Boston Globe. Kennedy told his driver to stop and pick up the reporter, who promptly agreed to help. After reaching the convention hall, Winship raced to the pressroom and typed two clear pages. The senator got the refreshed copy to the teleprompter with minutes to spare. As it happened, the teleprompter failed and Jack had to read from his notes, but the speech, while faulted by The New York Times for relying on a “cliché dictionary,” was a hit with the delegates, especially a bit that slammed the GOP ticket of Eisenhower and Nixon as having one candidate who took the high road while the other traveled the low road. Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley came away deeply impressed, by both the content and the delivery: the young man from Massachusetts was a must for the ticket, he determined.26
Kennedy’s stirring performance increased the buzz on the convention floor about his chances for the slot. Perhaps it also increased the buzz in Stevenson’s head, for the candidate now shocked the political world by announcing, at 11:00 P.M., that he would throw the vice presidential nomination open to selection by the delegates, with the balloting to occur the following day, barely twelve hours later. Unbeknownst to all but a few insiders, he had in fact been chewing on this idea for some months—an open selection process, he reasoned, would be seen by the party activists and the public as an exciting, democratic move and an effective way to contrast his party’s meeting with the Republican convention, slated for San Francisco the following week and likely to be tightly controlled. But Stevenson also went this route because he was torn, especially about Kefauver versus Kennedy: if he named Kefauver in place of Kennedy, he opened himself up to accusations of being anti-Catholic, a charge he could hardly afford in the coming campaign; but if he selected Kennedy, he risked alienating Kefauver’s sizable number of delegates. Stevenson fully expected Kefauver to prevail in the open contest—his forces were better organized than were Kennedy’s or Humphrey’s—giving him the running mate he probably would have felt compelled to select anyway.
In an instant, the convention became a hive of frantic late-night activity as the contenders and their teams sprang into action. “No delegate could buy his own drink and no elderly lady could cross a Chicago street without help from an eager vice-presidential candidate,” Time pithily reported.27 Humphrey operatives were seen entering lakefront bars at 2:30 A.M. in search of delegates; Kefauver held a press conference at 4 A.M. The Kennedy operation, unprepared for this eventuality (notwithstanding fleeting back-channel rumors over the previous few days), had to decide how—and if—to respond. The senator, still ambivalent about the desirability of being on the ticket in the fall, chose quickly: he was in. His competitive spirit would not let him back away. “Call Dad and tell him I’m going for it,” he instructed his brother Robert, then wisely left the room. The Ambassador, reached in Cap d’Antibes, was livid upon hearing the news, his blue language easily audible to the aides around Bobby. “Jack’s a total fucking idiot, and you’re worse!” he roared. A golden political career was being risked, and for nothing. The connection broke while he was in mid-rant, and Bobby thought the better of trying to call back. “Whew!” he said as he hung up, a wan smile on his face. “Is he mad!”28
Working through the night and the next morning, the Kennedy forces tried by any means available to drum up support for their man. They found a printer who would toil until dawn producing banners, placards, and leaflets. Jack, always his own best campaigner, met with state leaders and visited several state caucuses. His siblings Robert and Eunice paid calls on other delegations, as did John Bailey. Jack also got his brother-in-law Peter Lawford out of bed to try to secure the Nevada delegation. Inevitably, the team’s lack of preparation
showed. Powerful New York bosses Carmine DeSapio and Charlie Buckley, who controlled a fat heap of ninety-eight votes, were kept waiting in one of the Kennedy hotel rooms for half an hour without anyone knowing who they were. (When the candidate at last appeared, the two men told him they were pledged to Robert Wagner on the first ballot but might well switch to him on the second.) And when Kenny O’Donnell and Bobby Kennedy buttonholed Senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas to ask if he could help swing his state’s delegation to their man, he gave them a powerful lesson—one they would never forget—in how politics at this level worked. It was not to him but to the governor, Orval Faubus, that they should be speaking, McClellan said, for governors always called the shots and controlled the delegates. Senators mattered far less.
“In the future,” McClellan admonished them, “if one was interested in delegations and their votes, they better find out who has the power in the delegation and stop reading the newspapers. You can’t just arrive at the convention and expect people to switch sides because your fella is so wonderful. You gotta do your homework, talk to the governors, the state reps, the party leaders, these people have been sized up, lined up, and courted for months. Just because you know a few high-profile, important fellas, a few senators or judges is not going to change things. Next time you gotta have this all done before you step off the train.”29
JFK Page 78