An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (40 page)

As important, between 1958 and 1960, Joe became the campaign’s principal behind-the-scenes operator in the nomination fight. “You do what you think is right,” Joe told Jack after he was elected to the Senate, “and we’ll take care of the politicians.” And anything else that needs to be done, he might have added. When Jack wanted prominent civil rights advocate Harris Wofford to join his campaign, Joe pressed Father John Cavanaugh, Notre Dame University’s former president, to get sitting president Father Theodore Hesburgh to release Wofford from teaching duties at the law school. When Wofford told Sargent Shriver about Joe’s intervention, Shriver replied, “‘Don’t ever underestimate Mr. Kennedy.’ This was the only time I personally saw the long hand of Joe Kennedy,” Wofford wrote, “but if he would intervene so vigorously on such a small matter, I could imagine what he was like when he dealt with Mayor Daley for delegates. ‘And that is exactly who did deal with Daley most of the time,’ said Shriver.” Although Jack would pay ceremonial visits to Daley, “the long, tough talks were between the mayor and Joe Kennedy. Shriver said this was true of the negotiations with the Philadelphia leader, Congressman William Green, and with other Irish-Americans of the old school who were in key positions in a number of city and state Democratic organizations, including California and New York.”

“[Joe] knew instinctively who the important people were, who the bosses behind the scenes were,” New York congressman Eugene Keogh said. “From 1958 on he was in contact with them constantly by phone, presenting Jack’s case, explaining and interpreting his son, working these bosses.” Tip O’Neill remembered that when Joe learned that Joe Clark, a Pennsylvania state official, was the power behind Congressman Bill Green, he flew Clark to New York for a meeting in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. Joe also went to see Pennsylvania governor David Lawrence. During a secret meeting at a Harrisburg hotel, Joe was, as Lawrence remembers, “very vigorous.” When Lawrence asserted that a Catholic could not win the White House, Joe recounted a story about a New York bank president who said the same thing. “I was so goddamn mad at that fella,” Joe added. “I had nine million dollars in that bank and I felt like I’d pull out of that bank that day.”

New York party leader Mike Prendergast recalled how Joe “sent a lot of people in to donate money to the state organization, which we used for Jack’s election.” In July 1959, syndicated columnist Marquis Childs asserted that Joe had already spent one million dollars on Jack’s campaign and was the brains behind the whole operation. Jack’s acquisition of a plane leased to him by a Kennedy family corporation belied Kennedy denials that Joe had anything to do with the campaign. Harry Truman echoed the concerns about Joe when he told friends, “It’s not the Pope I’m afraid of, it’s the pop.” Jack knew this was the perception, but there seemed no other route to the presidency but along this tightrope.

THE 1958 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS
had given the Democratic party a decidedly liberal tilt. A recession producing higher unemployment nationwide and farm failures in the Midwest, Republican support of integration in the South and anti-union right-to-work laws in industrial states, and the “missile gap”—fears that America was losing the arms race to Russia—had translated into nearly two-to-one Democratic margins in both houses; their twenty-eight-seat gain in the Upper House was the most one-sided party victory in Senate history. Of the fifteen new Democratic senators, five were liberals and ten were moderates.

Because liberals would thus have a major say in who became the Democratic nominee, Jack had attempted to win Adlai Stevenson’s support. But Stevenson was uncooperative. After 1956, he had consistently denied any interest in another campaign, but when one of his law partners privately confided his own intention to back Kennedy, Stevenson predicted that “the Catholic issue is going to be badly against him, and, after all, Nixon must be beaten.” The partner took this to mean: “I want to be urged to run, and I want to be nominated.” Stevenson also told Newton Minow that Kennedy was too young and inexperienced to handle the job. Stevenson confided his doubts to
Time
reporter John Steele as well, setting Jack down as too ambitious and maybe even a little foolish, a young man reaching too quickly for the coveted prize. He was even more blunt with the British economist Barbara Ward Jackson. “I don’t think he’d be a good president,” Stevenson said. “I do not feel that he’s the right man for the job; I think he’s too young; I don’t think he fully understands the dimensions of the foreign affairs dilemmas that are coming up.”

With Stevenson refusing to help, Jack explored other means of bringing liberals to his side. In March 1958, when a TV interviewer asked him, “Do you think that the candidate in the Democratic party would have to be definitely associated with the liberal wing of the party in 1960?” Jack replied, “I do.” “Do you believe that you are in that wing?” the reporter continued. “I do,” Jack answered. “Do you count yourself as a liberal?” the reporter persisted. “I do,” Jack responded unequivocally.

His answers were part of a larger campaign to convince party liberals that he was one of them, or at the very least would be responsive to their concerns. But he also felt that liberals were uninformed about his record on civil liberties, civil rights, and labor. Consequently, between 1957 and 1960, he publicly emphasized that he had established his “independence from the Democratic party,” but that this was “essentially an independence from party organization rather than from its credo.” He believed that his votes on progressive issues compared favorably with those cast by congressional liberals. His speeches from this period are replete with references to his support of advanced progressive ideas. Liberals nevertheless remained reluctant to embrace him as a reasonable alternative to Stevenson, and this frustrated and angered him, partially because he believed it unrealistic of liberals to hope that Stevenson could be an effective candidate. In 1960, during a conversation with Peter Lisagor, who predicted that Stevenson would be the nominee, Kennedy “leaned forward—I remember this so vividly,” Lisagor said. It was “almost the only time I ever saw him angry . . . and he said, ‘Why, that’s impossible. Adlai Stevenson is a bitter man. He’s a bitter, deeply disillusioned, deeply hurt man.’” As Jack told another journalist regarding Stevenson, “People who want to be deluded are going to be deluded no matter what they are told.” In September, after economist John Kenneth Galbraith publicly supported Kennedy’s candidacy, Jack wrote him, “I rather imagine your voice will be drowned out by the antiphonal choruses of support for [California governor] Pat Brown, [Michigan governor] Soapy Williams and [New York mayor] Bob Wagner!”—all more acceptable liberals.

The gulf between Kennedy and party liberals came partly from an unbridgeable difference in perspective. New Deal-Fair Deal Democrats thought in terms of traditional welfare state concerns—economic security, social programs, racial equality. But as Jack told Harris Wofford, “The key thing for the country is a new foreign policy that will break out of the confines of the cold war. Then we can build a decent relationship with developing nations and begin to respond to their needs. We can stop the vicious circle of the arms race and promote diversity and peaceful change within the Soviet bloc. We can get this country moving again on its domestic problems.” He conceded that “Stevenson may see this, but he’s a two-time loser and has no real chance; nor has [Chester] Bowles or Humphrey, with whom I agree even more. The most likely alternatives are Johnson or Symington, but if either of them is nominated we might as well elect Dulles or Acheson; it would be the same cold-war foreign policy all over again.” (This was certainly prophetic about the Johnson presidency.)

Kennedy also gave voice to his thinking through James MacGregor Burns, who was writing Kennedy’s campaign biography, chiefly from interviews. Kennedy’s “mixed voting record” and resistance to being labeled as a New Dealer or a Fair Dealer made people question his liberal credentials, Burns wrote in his book. But Kennedy was a new kind of liberal, Burns asserted. Because the New Deal and the Fair Deal had “become properly entrenched in our way of life, and hence [were] no longer a disputed political issue,” Kennedy believed that “liberalism must be rethought and renewed.” As for foreign policy, a series of questions Burns posed to him made it clear that Kennedy was trying to craft fresh ways of thinking about the Cold War. In particular, Jack cautioned against overblown hopes: “It takes two to make peace,” he said. “I think it would be misleading to suggest that there are some magic formulas hitherto untried which would ease the relations between the free world and the communistic world, or which would shift the balance of power in our favor.”

He hoped nevertheless that “paramount” military power might “encourage the Russians and the Chinese to say a farewell to arms,” which could produce a competitive shift “to nonmilitary spheres.” Kennedy then foresaw “a struggle between the two systems . . . a test as to which system travels better, which system of political, economic, and social organization can more effectively transform the lives of the people in the newly emerging countries.”

Schlesinger signed on to Kennedy’s campaign principally because he saw him as a more realistic liberal than Stevenson, and it was Schlesinger who helped Jack find a distinctive liberal outlook. Eager to give “his campaign identity—to distinguish his appeal from that of his rivals and suggest that he could bring the country something no one else could,” Kennedy seized upon a memorandum Schlesinger wrote arguing that “the Eisenhower epoch, the period of passivity and acquiescence in our national life, was drawing to its natural end, and that a new time—a time of affirmation, progressivism and forward movement—impended.”

Schlesinger noted in his journal at the time: “This, I suppose, is the real irony. I have come, I think, to the private conclusion that I would rather have K as President than S. S is a much richer, more thoughtful, more creative person; but he has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality. . . . In contrast K gives a sense of cool, measured, intelligent concern with action and power. I feel that his administration would be less encumbered than S’s with commitments to past ideas or sentimentalities; that he would be more radical; and, though he is less creative personally, he might be more so politically.”

A lack of clear definition, however, made Kennedy’s “new” liberalism suspect. Indeed, the details of his domestic program sounded much like the old liberalism or little different from what progressive Democrats were advocating in 1960: “comprehensive housing legislation . . . a ten-point ‘bill of rights’ for improved living standards for older people . . . [a] bill to outlaw the bombing of homes, churches, schools, and community centers”; antilynching and anti- poll tax bills; a higher minimum wage; and an end to loyalty oaths. On foreign and defense policies as well, Kennedy seemed to be treading on familiar ground. True, he called for fresh thinking about Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, emphasizing economic assistance, but a focus on military strength and the “‘magic power’ on our side [of] the desire of every person to be free, of every nation to be independent” gave little indication of just how he might turn the Cold War in a new direction.

BECAUSE THERE WERE
only sixteen state primaries, the road to the nomination in 1960 principally involved winning over state party leaders. Direct contacts between Jack and prominent Democrats across the country seemed essential. Beyond wooing local party leaders, however, no one around Kennedy at the end of 1958 had a clear conception of how to proceed. O’Donnell and Powers thought the nomination fight would be a larger version of Kennedy’s 1952 and 1958 Senate races. As in Massachusetts, where they had largely shunned party chiefs, they initially thought in terms of a 1960 grass roots campaign. Bobby Kennedy agreed, telling a reporter that they could not rely on “the politicians” who controlled the big state delegations to the convention. “We have to get organized in those states,” he said, “and have secretaries in every major city.” The secretaries were to set up Kennedy clubs, or “citizen organizations,” mounting a “grass roots appeal over the party regulars.” The Republican nominations of Wendell Willkie in 1940, Tom Dewey in 1944, and Eisenhower in 1952 were models of how to wrest the nomination from the “bosses.”

By the beginning of 1959, however, as Jack, Bobby, and the rest of the Kennedy team thought about the challenge before them, they concluded that shunning party leaders was a prescription for defeat; with only sixteen primaries, they would need the backing of party “bosses” as well as rank-and-file Democrats to have any realistic hope of being nominated. Implementing this strategy meant creating more formal organization than had existed so far. To this end, they installed Steve Smith, who was married to Jack’s sister Jean, in a nine-room office in the Washington, D.C., Esso building on Constitution Avenue near the Capitol. Because they were eager to keep the operation quiet, the building directory and office door listed only “Stephen E. Smith.” The thirty-two-year-old Smith, the son of a wealthy New York shipping family with some business experience, was asked to manage four secretaries corresponding with Democratic governors and state chairmen and local and grass root supporters around the country. Smith and his staff set up a card file of backers and potential allies and rated their loyalty on a one-to-ten scale. Detailed wall maps identifying areas of strength and weakness across the country gave the operation, which took the form of letters and telephone calls to any and all likely convention delegates, the feel of a military campaign.

But even with the Smith office in place, more questions than answers remained about winning the nomination. On April 1, Jack, Joe, and Bobby met at Joe’s house in Palm Beach with Smith, pollster Lou Harris, and Jack’s Senate staff: O’Brien, O’Donnell, and Sorensen. They reviewed each state in detail, asking: “Where do we stand?” Who are the “key figures” that will “influence the delegation? . . . Should JFK be scheduled there this fall or earlier? Should Bobby be scheduled to speak there this spring or summer? Should a poll be taken—and when?” Which state primaries should they enter? “What kind of organization do we need within the state? Should we be lining up our own delegate slate?”