An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (44 page)

On May 10, Kennedy won a landslide, 60.8 to 39.2 percent. As Joe Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary, said of the 1920 Harding victory, “It wasn’t a landslide, it was an earthquake.” It did not matter that the vote was not binding on the state’s twenty-five convention delegates. Kennedy had proved that he could amass a big majority among Protestants. Kennedy opponents tried to downplay the result with accusations of vote buying. An investigation by Eisenhower’s attorney general William P. Rogers turned up no significant wrongdoing. The editor of the
Charleston Gazette
“sent two of our best men out. They spent three to four weeks checking. Kennedy did not buy that election,” he concluded. “He sold himself to the voters.” It was a fair assessment. The Kennedy expenditures financing the slates were technically legal. The combination of Jack’s personal appeal, lavish Kennedy campaign spending, an emphasis on economic uplift, assurances about Jack’s commitment to separation of church and state, and Humphrey’s pointless candidacy after Wisconsin gave Jack the decisive victory. When
Newsweek
quoted Humphrey as believing that the election was stolen from him, he wrote the editor, “I have no complaints about the election—Senator Kennedy won it and I lost it.”

Within ten days after West Virginia, Jack had beaten Wayne Morse in Maryland by 70 to 17 percent and then defeated him in Oregon, his home state, by 51 to 32 percent. It was Kennedy’s seventh straight primary victory and convinced Jack’s advisers that he was on his way to the nomination.

THERE WERE OTHER HURDLES
to be cleared, however. Because many liberals still had hopes of nominating Stevenson, the Kennedys tried to weaken him by getting Humphrey to support Jack. After Humphrey conceded defeat in West Virginia, he sent word to Bobby Kennedy that he was dropping out of the race. Bobby immediately went to see him at his hotel in Charleston. He was not a welcome guest. In the words of liberal attorney Joe Rauh, Bobby was “the devil as far as this camp [was] concerned. . . . He was the one whom all our people were so bitter about.” The defeat had humiliated Humphrey; Rauh remembered his appearance at his campaign headquarters as “the saddest sight I’ve ever seen. . . . Humphrey stood all alone in the middle of this big room . . . and looked at the blackboard, and almost was speechless. The banjo player had started to cry, and Hubert had to comfort him.” Humphrey’s wife, Muriel, was furious. “She did not want to see any Kennedy, much less be touched by one,” Humphrey recalled. “When Bob arrived in our room, he moved quickly to her and kissed her on the cheek. Muriel stiffened, stared, and turned in silent hostility, walking away from him, fighting tears and angry words.” Bobby’s gesture was not enough to bring Humphrey to Jack’s side.

It was more important for Stevenson to back Kennedy at the convention; this would make Jack’s nomination a near certainty. Believing he was between eighty and one hundred votes short of the goal, Jack thought “it would be most helpful if Adlai could throw his votes . . . [my] way at the proper moment. If he hangs on to his votes,” Jack told Schlesinger through an intermediary, “it will only mean that either Symington or Johnson will benefit.”

Although Jack had little hope that Stevenson could be persuaded to support him, he was determined to try. Months before, he had sent word to Stevenson through Connecticut governor Abe Ribicoff that if he could not get the nomination, he would publicly announce his wish to run as Stevenson’s VP, “which would nail down the Catholic vote” for Stevenson. “If he comes out for me and I’ve got the nomination and I win,” he had also asked Ribicoff to tell Stevenson, “I’ll make him Secretary of State.” Stevenson would not agree. In May 1960, Jack approached Stevenson again. On his way back from a trip to the West Coast, Jack stopped at his home in Libertyville, Illinois. Stevenson refused to make any promises except not to join a “stop-Kennedy movement” or to encourage any draft of himself. Kennedy was disappointed. “God, why won’t he be satisfied with Secretary of State?” he said to Stevenson’s law firm partner Bill Blair. “I guess there’s nothing I can do,” he added, “except go out and collect as many votes as possible and hope that Stevenson will come along.” As he got on a plane to fly to Boston, Jack added, “Guess who the next person I see will be—the person who will say about Adlai, ‘I told you that son-of-a-bitch has been running for President every moment since 1956’?” Blair replied: “Daddy.”

Jack shared his father’s view and was furious with Stevenson for standing in his way. Jack believed that Stevenson had an overblown reputation as an intellectual. As the author of two books, Kennedy thought that he deserved to be seen as more cerebral than Stevenson, and told friends that he read more books in a week than Stevenson did in a year. He referred to Stevenson as a “switcher,” or bisexual, and wondered what women, who were his strongest supporters, saw in him. When Jack asked Stevenson’s friend Clayton Fritchey to explain the attraction, Fritchey replied, “He likes women, he likes to talk to them, to be around them. Do you like them?” Fritchey asked, twitting Jack for his reputation as a philanderer. “I wouldn’t go that far,” Jack answered. Kennedy preferred columnist Joe Alsop’s description of him as “a Stevenson with balls.”

Kennedy was even more angry at Johnson. After West Virginia, LBJ began saying that Kennedy had bought the election there and that the country would not want to nominate a president based on what four or five or even eight states did in primaries with limited voter participation. Johnson also told columnist Drew Pearson that “none of these big-city leaders in New York, New Jersey, or Illinois want Kennedy. Most of them are Catholics and they don’t want a Catholic heading up the ticket.” Johnson also went to see Stevenson. “Now, listen, Adlai, you just hang loose here,” he said. “Don’t make any commitments. You may still get it. Don’t help that kid, Kennedy. You just stay neutral.”

In May, after the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane and Moscow canceled a summit meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, Kennedy criticized the administration’s failure to suspend such flights before the summit and refusal to acknowledge that it had spied. Johnson, seeing an opportunity to illustrate Jack’s inexperience in foreign affairs, declared, “I am not prepared to apologize to Mr. Khrushchev.” He then excluded Kennedy from a telegram he, Stevenson, Rayburn, and Fulbright sent the Soviet leader asking him to hold the summit conference with the president.

Even Truman joined the anti-Kennedy chorus, calling at a televised press conference for an open convention—not a “prearranged . . . mockery . . . controlled by one . . . candidate”—and declaring that the world crisis required someone “with the greatest possible maturity and experience.” Jack publicly replied that “Mr. Truman regards an open convention as one which studies all the candidates, reviews their records, and then takes his advice.” Jack also said that Truman’s maturity test “would have kept Jefferson from writing the Declaration of Independence, Washington from commanding the Continental Army, [and] Madison from fathering the Constitution.”

Despite Stevenson’s refusal to bow out and Johnson’s belated effort to become the nominee, the smart money was still on Kennedy. At the end of May, Bobby calculated that Jack had 577 delegates and could pick up the additional 184 needed for nomination from seven other states. Joe wrote an English friend, “If we can get a break at all in Pennsylvania and a reasonable break in California, we’re home.” In June, after Jack told his father that the Pennsylvania delegation was now solidly behind him, Joe declared, “Well, that’s it. We’ve got a solid majority.” Johnson conceded privately that “those wanting to bet the favorite had better put their money on Jack.”

Events in the days before the convention opened in Los Angeles on Monday, July 11, however, persuaded the Kennedys to take nothing for granted. Johnson announced his candidacy on July 5, and began publicly attacking Jack. LBJ’s backers reminded journalists and delegates of Kennedy’s response to Joe McCarthy, quoted Eleanor Roosevelt’s criticism of Kennedy, publicized Jack’s absenteeism as a senator (“Where was Jack?” an LBJ flyer asked), and, most troubling to the Kennedys, publicly asked for an evaluation of Jack’s health, explaining that he had Addison’s disease, which raised questions about his capacity to serve as president. Johnson called Dr. Gerald Labiner, an internist in Los Angeles who had been a fellow at the Lahey Clinic and knew Kennedy’s medical history, to ask if Jack had Addison’s disease. Although it was an open secret among Jack’s physicians, Labiner refused to confirm Johnson’s assumption.

In private, Johnson was more scathing, especially about Jack’s age and well-being. “Did you hear the news?” Johnson asked Minnesota congressman Walter Judd. “What news?” Judd replied. “Jack’s pediatricians have just given him a clean bill of health!” Johnson described Kennedy to Lisagor as “a little scrawny fellow with rickets. Have you ever seen his ankles?” Johnson asked. “‘They’re about so round,’ and he traced a minute circle with his finger.” If Johnson had known the full story of Jack’s poor health, he would undoubtedly have leaked it to the press. But the Kennedys had managed largely to keep Jack’s health problems a secret. Johnson also predicted that if Jack became president, Joe would run the country and Bobby would become secretary of labor.

The evening before Johnson and Rayburn flew to Los Angeles, they met with Eisenhower at the White House. Ike later told journalist Earl Mazo that they regarded Kennedy “as a mediocrity in the Senate, as a nobody who had a rich father. . . . And they’d tell some of the God-damndest stories.” They went on for two hours telling Eisenhower, “Ike, for the good of the country, you cannot let that man become elected President. Now, he might get the nomination out there, he probably will, but he’s a dangerous man.” They repeated the phrase several times. They obviously wanted Eisenhower to say something publicly that would help them block Kennedy’s nomination. But Ike did no more than assure them that if Kennedy were the candidate, Dick Nixon would beat him.

Some of Johnson’s remarks got back to Bobby. “I knew he hated Jack. But I didn’t think he hated him that much,” Bobby said to Lisagor. When Bobby Baker, LBJ’s Senate aide, complained to Bobby Kennedy that brother Ted was putting out stories about Johnson’s heart condition, Bobby angrily replied: “You’ve got your nerve. Lyndon Johnson has compared my father to the Nazis, and [Texas governor] John Connally . . . lied by saying that my brother was dying of Addison’s disease. You Johnson people are running a stinking damned campaign and you’ll get yours when the time comes.”

Calling Johnson’s tactics “despicable,” the Kennedys released statements denying that Jack had “an ailment classically described as Addison’s Disease” and describing Jack’s health as “excellent.” The statements more than shaded the truth: While Jack might not have had classical or primary Addison’s, at a minimum, he had a secondary form of the ailment. The Kennedys had never allowed Eugene Cohen, Jack’s endocrinologist, “the opportunity to carry out the necessary tests that would have been required to establish the diagnosis,” Cohen told Dr. Seymour Reichlin, another endocrinologist. “Thus, [Cohen] could never say definitively that Kennedy had the disease.” If it were known, however, that he also suffered from colitis, compression fractures of his spine, which forced him to take a variety of pain medications, and chronic prostatitis, it could have raised substantial doubts about his fitness for the presidency. Kennedy’s friend Bill Walton said later that during the campaign an aide followed Jack everywhere with a special little bag containing the medical support needed all the time. When the medical bag was misplaced during a campaign trip to Connecticut, Kennedy called up Abe Ribicoff and said, “There’s a medical bag floating around and it can’t get in anybody’s hands. . . . You have to find that bag. It would be murder” if the wrong people got hold of it and revealed its contents, which would have shown Jack’s reliance on so many drugs. (The bag was recovered.)

All the political churning in the run-up to the convention made the Kennedys apprehensive. They expected to win. But history had demonstrated that conventions were volatile and could produce unpredictable results. Two Democratic front-runners earlier in the century—Champ Clark in 1912 and William G. McAdoo in 1924—had found themselves upended by events beyond their control. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. counseled against assuming anything. He described a convention as “far too fluid and hysterical a phenomenon for exact history. Everything happens at once and everywhere, and everything changes too quickly. People talk too much, smoke too much, rush too much and sleep too little. Fatigue tightens nerves and produces susceptibility to rumor and panic. No one can see a convention whole. . . . At the time it is all a confusion; in retrospect it is all a blur.”

During a July 10 interview on
Meet the Press,
Jack was asked if he thought the convention was “wrapped up.” “No, I don’t,” he replied. “No convention is.” While he predicted a victory, he would not say on which ballot. Nor would he acknowledge his concern that a failure to win on the first ballot could lead to disaster. When Bobby was asked later why they had not given much initial thought to who would be vice president, he answered: “We wanted to just try to get the nomination. . . . We were counting votes. We had to win on the first ballot. We only won by fifteen votes. . . . I think in North Dakota and South Dakota we won it by half a vote. California was falling apart. . . . [New York’s] Carmine De Sapio came to me and said what we’d like to do is make a deal—30 votes will go to Lyndon Johnson and then you’ll get them all back on the second ballot. I said to hell with that; we’re going to win it on the first ballot. So you know, it was all that kind of business. There wasn’t any place that was stable.” They were worried that support in a number of states, especially Minnesota, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, might erode on second and third ballots and open the way for LBJ to win the nomination. Jack told Sorensen that if they did not win by the second ballot, it would be “never.” Joe Kennedy stopped in Las Vegas on his way to Los Angeles to place a substantial bet on Jack’s nomination. He was less interested in winning money than in encouraging a bandwagon psychology by reducing the odds on Jack’s success.