An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (42 page)

But it was Stevenson’s “sleeping candidacy” that impressed Kennedy as his greatest threat. Jack never trusted his avowed noncandidacy. He accepted that Stevenson disliked the thought of another campaign and would not go after the nomination directly. “But he still has powerful friends—so his name belongs on the list of candidates,” the Kennedys concluded. Joe, however, was less worried about Stevenson than Jack was. “He is not a threat,” Joe told a journalist. “The Democratic party is through in the East if he is nominated. The leaders realize that it would be disastrous. . . . To elect their State ticket they need Jack. . . . The nomination is a cinch. I’m not a bit worried about the nomination.”

Joe’s remarks were a brave show of public confidence, which was a good campaign tactic. But at the start of 1960, Jack knew that nothing was settled. “Look,” he told a reporter, “when someone says to you, ‘You’re doing fine,’ it doesn’t mean a thing, and when someone says, ‘Just call any time you need anything,’ that doesn’t mean a thing, and when someone says, ‘You’ve got a lot of friends out here,’ that doesn’t mean a thing . . . but when they say, ‘I’m for you,’ that is the only thing that means something.”

Most discouraging to Jack was the persistence of the country’s irrational anti-Catholicism. Fourteen years had passed since he entered politics, and still Jack was being asked the same offensive questions. Antagonism to the Church and fear of its influence over him were discussed openly. Katie Louchheim’s friends and relatives, for example, who were “definitely and categorically anti,” told her, “After all, this is still a Protestant country.” One of them said, “How would you like it if the country were run the way the Catholics run Conn[ecticut] and Mass[achusetts]?” When Schlesinger saw Jack on the evening of January 2, Kennedy “conveyed an intangible feeling of depression. I had the sense that he feels himself increasingly hemmed in as a result of a circumstance over which he has no control—his religion; and he inevitably tends toward gloom and irritation when he considers how the circumstance may deny him what he thinks his talent and efforts have earned.”

THE FIRST PRIMARY
contest in New Hampshire on March 6 would be a chance to show that Kennedy could attract a decisive number of Protestant votes, but New Hampshire was not seen as a significant test of Jack’s national appeal, since as a New England native son with no other serious contender, he seemed certain to win. To assure as big a margin as possible, however, the campaign sent Rose and Jack to speak across the state, which both did with great effectiveness. The outcome—85 percent of the vote against a smattering of write-ins for Stevenson and Symington—was all the Kennedys could have hoped for.

Kennedy’s unopposed candidacy in Indiana and Nebraska would give him those states’ delegates. Polls in California had showed that Jack could beat Governor Pat Brown in a primary, and as a trade-off for not running, Jack got a promise from Brown that if he won primaries in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, ran second behind Senator Wayne Morse in Oregon, and was leading for the nomination in the Gallup polls, Brown would support him at the convention.

Ohio required some especially tough negotiations with Governor Mike DiSalle, who wanted to run as a favorite son and then barter his state’s delegates at the convention. But the Kennedys, threatening to back Cleveland Democratic leader Ray Miller, DiSalle’s chief rival, as the head of the Ohio delegation, forced Disalle into a public endorsement of Kennedy in January. At a meeting between Jack and DiSalle in an airport motel in Pittsburgh, Jack told him, “Mike, it’s time to shit or get off the pot. . . . You’re either going to come out for me or we are going to run a delegation against you in Ohio and we’ll beat you.” When Jack’s threat did not settle matters, Bobby Kennedy, accompanied by party chairman John Bailey, went to Ohio to force the issue. Bailey, “a veteran politician who does not shock easily,” told Ken O’Donnell later that “he was startled by the going-over that Bobby had given DiSalle.” The conversation added to Bobby’s growing reputation as Jack’s hatchet man, but it forced DiSalle into a commitment like Brown’s that gave Jack valuable momentum.

Deals and promises were not enough, though. Jack had to win a truly contested primary to show that it wasn’t all back-room dealings that qualified him for the nomination. (He thought that Johnson and Symington were making a serious mistake by staying out of all the primaries. Indeed, the day after announcing his candidacy, Kennedy had said that any aspiring nominee who avoided these contests did not deserve to have his candidacy taken seriously.) To meet the challenge, he reluctantly decided to run against Humphrey in Wisconsin. It meant risking the nomination. Wisconsin had a large Protestant population, so a defeat by Humphrey would increase doubts about a Catholic nominee. Joe Kennedy wrote a friend in Italy, “If we do not do very well there . . . we should get out of the fight.” He believed Wisconsin was “the crisis of the campaign.”

In addition to the possible religious split, Humphrey had the advantage of being a next-door neighbor—the “third senator from Wisconsin,” as supporters called him. His rapport with Wisconsin farmers and liberals clustered in the university community in Madison made him a formidable opponent. Moreover, because Wisconsin was essential to his hopes of a nomination, Hubert seemed certain to make an all-out fight for a majority of the popular vote and the state’s thirty-one delegates.

Yet Jack had some reason for optimism. Between May 1958 and November 1959, he had laid the groundwork for a possible statewide campaign. He had spent sixteen days in Wisconsin giving speeches and meeting Democrats in cities and towns he had never heard of before—Appleton, Ashland, Darlington, La Crosse, Lancaster, Platteville, Rhinelander, Rice Lake, Sparta, and Viroqua joined Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Sheboygan as vital to his political future. Leaving nothing to chance, he also chose a “full-time advance man and organizer of Kennedy clubs,” and enlisted the support of Pat Lucey, the state’s party chairman, and Ivan Nestingen, the mayor of Madison, both of whom were now convinced of Kennedy’s liberal credentials. Private polls in January 1960 showing Kennedy ahead of Humphrey helped ease the difficult but, in Jack’s mind, unavoidable decision to make the race.

The six-week Wisconsin campaign running from mid-February to early April tested Jack’s endurance and commitment to winning the presidency. O’Donnell and Powers remembered it as a “winter of cold winds, cold towns and many cold people. Campaigning in rural areas of the state where nobody seemed to care about the presidential election was a strange and frustrating experience.” In a tavern, where Jack introduced himself to a couple of beer drinkers, saying, “I’m John Kennedy and I’m running for President,” one of them asked, “President of what?” On a freezing cold morning, as Jack stood for hours in the dark shaking hands with workers arriving at a meat packing plant, Powers whispered to O’Donnell, “God, if I had his money, I’d be down there on the patio at Palm Beach.” Powers might have added, “God, if I had his medical problems and all the physical discomfort campaigning added to them . . .” But Jack was determined to see his commitment through. When an elderly woman stopped him on the street to say, “You’re too soon, my boy, too soon,” Jack replied, “No, this is my time. My time is now.” Despite his youthful and robust appearance, he knew that in eight years—assuming the victor would serve two terms—his deteriorating back and chronic colitis might make running even more of a problem than it was in 1960.

The battle was against more than wind chill and back pain. The abuse leveled at him by Humphrey’s campaign and a hostile press were enough alone to discourage him from competing. Sorensen said later that “vicious falsehoods were whispered about Kennedy’s father, Kennedy’s religion and Kennedy’s personal life.” Humphrey pilloried him as a Democratic Nixon who had recently joined the liberal ranks to win the nomination. Appealing to populist antagonism to Kennedy’s wealth, Humphrey declared, “Thank God, thank God” for his own “disorderly” campaign. “Beware of these orderly campaigns. They are ordered, bought and paid for. We are not selling corn flakes or some Hollywood production.” Voters had to make their choice, the balding Humphrey said, “on more than . . . how we cut our hair or how we look.” He complained of a Republican-inspired press buildup for Kennedy as a way to run Nixon against a weak opponent. Echoing the charge that Jack had “little emotional commitment to liberalism,” Humphrey said, “You have to learn to have the emotions of a human being when you are charged with the responsibilities of leadership.” Humphrey also attacked Jack as a recent convert to helping farmers, echoed criticism of Kennedy’s cautious response to Joe McCarthy, and before a Milwaukee Jewish audience implicitly compared Kennedy’s “organized campaign” to Nazi Germany, “one of the best-organized societies of our time.”

Humphrey saw his attacks as a response to “an element of ruthlessness and toughness” in Kennedy’s campaign. Though he couldn’t prove it, he believed that Bobby Kennedy had started and helped circulate a rumor that the corrupt Teamsters union was working for Humphrey’s election. Moreover, he thought that the Kennedys were stimulating Catholics to vote for Jack by sending anonymous anti-Catholic materials to Catholic households.

Kennedy largely ignored Humphrey’s assaults. James Reston noted that Jack “remained remarkably self-possessed. . . . He has shown not the slightest trace of anger. He has made no claims of victory. He has made no charges against Humphrey on the local shows or from the stump.” Instead, he ran a largely positive campaign, giving full rein to his charm and intelligence. Riding in a car with Kennedy for an appearance at a shopping center, Peter Lisagor asked, “‘Do you like these crowds and this sort of thing?’ [Kennedy] turned back and said, ‘I hate it.’” But the moment he stepped out of the car, “he lit up and smiled. He signed autographs on the brown shopping bags of these ladies who came pouring to him. . . . He went along as if he’d been doing this all of his life and loved it.”

The Kennedy campaign was, for a very large part, Pat Lucey said, “just an effective presentation of a celebrity. . . . The family was an asset . . . genuinely glamorous as well as glamorized, so the people were anxious to meet them wherever they went.” As a result, Humphrey felt like a “corner grocer running against a chain store.” With Jack, Bobby, Rose, and the Kennedy sisters all campaigning in Wisconsin, Humphrey was outmanned. The Kennedys are “all over the state,” he complained, “and they look alike and sound alike. Teddy or Eunice talks to a crowd, wearing a raccoon coat and a stocking cap, and people think they’re listening to Jack. I get reports that Jack is appearing in three or four different places at the same time.”

On April 5, Kennedy won a substantial victory, taking 56.5 percent of the vote. The 476,024 Kennedy ballots were the most votes ever received by a candidate in the fifty-seven-year history of Wisconsin primaries, and Kennedy’s majorities in six out of ten districts entitled him to 60 percent of the state’s convention delegates. But Jack saw his success as raising more questions about his candidacy than it answered. Because the six districts he won included large numbers of Catholic voters and Humphrey’s districts were principally Protestant enclaves, including Madison, the center of liberal sentiment, Kennedy could not convince party chiefs that he would command broad backing in a national election. When Ted Sorensen heard the first returns showing Humphrey ahead in the western, rural areas of the state, he turned “ashen.” These numbers made him “mighty uneasy.” Dave Powers tried to put a positive face on the result: “A shift of . . . less than 3/10 of 1% of the vote . . . would have given Kennedy 8 districts to 2.” Powers also listed thirteen counties where 70 percent or more of non-Catholic votes were for Jack and six with substantial numbers of Catholics he lost. None of this, however, could change the initial perception of Kennedy as a candidate whose religion made a difference. When Jack heard the returns, he jumped from his seat and paced the room, muttering, “Damn religious thing.”

Noticing the glum expression on Jack’s face as he studied the returns, Eunice Kennedy asked him, “What does it all mean?” He replied, “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.” Only then might the press stop publishing photos of Kennedy shaking hands with nuns and church officials and continually referring to Jack’s Catholicism. Kennedy kept track of how often newspaper accounts mentioned his religion, and he had not missed the fact that two days before the primary, the
Milwaukee Journal
had listed the number of voters in each county under three headings: Democrats, Republicans, and Catholics. “The religious issue became prominent because the newspapers said it was prominent,” Lucey asserted. When CBS newsman Walter Cronkite asked Jack after his Wisconsin victory whether being a Catholic had hurt him, Jack’s annoyance with Cronkite was unmistakable. Afterward, Bobby exploded at Cronkite and his staff, shouting that they had violated an agreement not to ask about religion and that his brother would never give them another interview. Cronkite was unaware of such a promise, and there would be many future interviews with both brothers. But Bobby’s outburst illustrated how angry he and Jack were at the implicit questions being raised about their loyalty to the country.

If Wisconsin left the overall situation unsettled, Jack’s victory did accomplish something real and important. The outcome in Wisconsin essentially ended Humphrey’s bid for the nomination. If he could not win in a neighboring state with so many Protestants, farmers, and liberals, he was unlikely to win anywhere. But, stung by his defeat and confident that he could beat Jack in West Virginia, a state only 4 percent Catholic, Humphrey decided to continue his campaign. A Harris poll showed Jack ahead of Humphrey in West Virginia by 70 to 30 percent, but even if Humphrey closed some of that gap, Harris predicted, Jack would have “a comfortable margin of victory.” Harris saw West Virginia as “a powerful weapon against those who raise the ‘Catholic can’t win’ bit.”