An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (47 page)

“Too many Americans have lost their way, their will and their sense of historic purpose,” Kennedy asserted. “It is a time, in short, for a new generation of leadership—new men to cope with new problems and new opportunities. . . . I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier,” Kennedy said with evident passion and conviction. “From the lands that stretch three thousand miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. They were not the captives of their own doubts, the prisoners of their own price tags. Their motto was not ‘every man for himself’—but ‘all for the common cause.’ . . . We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.”

Kennedy had little use for slogans. But he understood that to mobilize Americans, he needed a captivating image, and the New Frontier was Kennedy’s way of communicating the challenge, the country’s fresh rendezvous with greatness. “The New Frontier of which I speak,” he explained, “is not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to
offer
the American people, but what I intend to
ask
of them. . . . Can a nation organized and governed such as ours endure? That is the real question. Have we the nerve and the will? . . . Are we up to the task—are we equal to the challenge? . . . That is the question of the New Frontier. That is the choice our nation must make—a choice . . . between the public interest and the private comfort—between national greatness and national decline. . . . All mankind waits upon our decision. A whole world looks to see what we will do. We cannot fail their trust, we cannot fail to try.”

THE JULY DAYS
after the convention were a heady time for Jack and his whole family. He had gained the second most coveted prize in American politics—a presidential nomination—and now stood only one campaign away from becoming the thirty-fourth American ever to reach the White House. Initial polls following the Democratic convention gave Jack a 17 to 22 percent lead in the five biggest states—California, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

A prominent member of a famous family, Kennedy had long known what it was like to be under public scrutiny. But the attention accorded him and his family after the nomination surpassed anything he or his famous father had ever experienced. To recuperate from the months of traveling and the pressures of the convention, Jack flew from Los Angeles to Hyannis Port to rest, swim, cruise on the family yacht, sun himself with Bobby and others on lawn chairs, and talk about the coming campaign. Jackie, who was five months pregnant, was to take almost no part in the general election.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. remembers a visit to the Kennedy compound on a “shining summer Saturday. . . . The once placid Cape Cod village had lost its wistful tranquillity. It looked more like a town under military occupation, or a place where dangerous criminals or wild beasts were at large. Everywhere were roadblocks, cordons of policemen, photographers with cameras slung over their shoulders . . . tourists in flashy shirts and shorts waiting expectantly as if for a revelation. The atmosphere of a carnival or a hanging prevailed. . . . A stockade now half surrounded the Kennedy compound, and the approach was like crossing a frontier, with documents demanded every ten feet.”

Schlesinger “had never seen Kennedy in better form—more relaxed, funny and free.” The afternoon was spent cruising serenely for several hours off the Cape, with Martha’s Vineyard dimly outlined in the distance. Swimming, cocktails, luncheon, and conversation filled a perfect day. But politics remained near to hand. Jack, Bobby, O’Brien, O’Donnell, Powers, Salinger, Sorensen, and Joe were all churning in anticipation of launching the fight for the greatest prize, and after only two days of rest at the Cape, Jack and Bobby plunged into a series of planning meetings, strategy sessions, and unity discussions with party rivals. Bobby summed up their outlook: “run and fight and scramble for ten weeks all the way.”

Bobby gave new meaning to the term “hardball”: There was nothing subtle about his approach. “Gentlemen,” he told a group of New York reform Democrats, “I don’t give a damn if the state and county organizations survive after November, and I don’t give a damn if
you
survive. I want to elect John F. Kennedy.” The campaign’s Florida coordinator said Bobby was “absolutely strong, steel-willed. . . . He just was blunt and hard and tough and was of course a magnificent campaign manager.” Party workers who displeased him complained, “Little Brother Is Watching You.” Adlai Stevenson dubbed him the “Black Prince,” and Eisenhower, who called Jack “Little Boy Blue,” referred to Bobby as “that little shit.” Bobby was mindful of all the hard feelings but not apologetic: “I’m not running a popularity contest,” he told Hugh Sidey. “It doesn’t matter if they like me or not. . . . If people are not getting off their behinds and working enough, how do you say that nicely? Every time you make a decision in this business you make somebody mad.”

If Bobby was the taskmaster, the relentless overseer demanding superhuman efforts from everyone, Jack was the conciliator, the candidate eager to bring everyone to his side in the service of progressive goals. “This was a politician who knew what his duties were and he accepted them not without relish,” Henry Brandon, the Washington correspondent for the London
Sunday Times,
noted in a memo to himself after a conversation with Jack in June. “He is a child of his times. He instinctively knows how to use all the techniques of the modern mass media to his best advantage. . . . He may lack warmth, he may be cold and calculating, but those eager to work for him suspect or at least hope that he would follow up ideas with action.” By contrast with Bobby, for example, whose visceral dislike of LBJ clouded his political judgment, Jack let practical electoral calculations be his guide.

Similarly, despite his personal antagonism toward Stevenson, Jack met with him at the Cape at the end of July to ask for his help with New York liberals. When Stevenson suggested the creation of a foreign policy task force to prepare for a possible transition to the presidency, Jack immediately agreed and asked him to head it. In early August, Jack went to Independence, Missouri, to seek Harry Truman’s support. Campaign imperatives dissolved his anger toward Truman for having been against his nomination. Truman, who despised Nixon, was receptive to Jack’s appeal. He told Abe Ribicoff, “I never liked Kennedy. I hate his father. Kennedy wasn’t so great as a Senator. . . . However, that no good son-of-a-bitch Dick Nixon called me a Communist and I’ll do anything to beat him.” Asked by reporters how he could see Kennedy as now ready for the presidency after having described him in July as too young and inexperienced, Truman replied with a grin, “When the Democratic convention decided to nominate him, that’s when I decided.”

Kennedy then traveled to Hyde Park, New York, to enlist Eleanor Roosevelt in his cause. Like Truman, the onetime antagonist was now eager to help. Jack gave her “the distinct feeling that he is planning to work closely with Adlai. I also had the feeling,” she wrote a friend, “that here was a man who could learn. I liked him better than I ever had before because he seemed so little cock-sure, and I think he has a mind that is open to new ideas. . . . My final judgement is that here is a man who wants to leave a record (perhaps for ambitious personal reasons, as people say), but I rather think because he really is interested in helping the people of his own country and mankind in general. I will be surer of this as time goes on, but I think I am not mistaken in feeling that he would make a good President if elected.”

Kennedy’s success with Truman, Stevenson, and Eleanor Roosevelt did not translate into grass roots enthusiasm for his candidacy among liberals. Although Kennedy had voiced his support for progressive legislation during a special August congressional session, liberal interest in his campaign remained flat. Part of the reason was a lack of liberal positions on the Kennedy platform. After Stevenson saw Jack at the Cape, he had written Mrs. Roosevelt that Kennedy’s “interest and concentration seemed to be on organization not ideas at this stage.” Schlesinger, who doubted the wisdom of giving highest priority to building a campaign organization, as Jack and Bobby planned, told Jack at the end of August, “Organization has an important role to play, of course; but to suppose that organization
per se
will win New York or California is nonsense.” Jack needed “to elicit the all-out support of the kind of people who have traditionally provided the spark in Democratic campaigns. . . . The liberals, the reformers, the intellectuals . . . people who have entered politics, not because it is their livelihood, but because they care deeply about issues and principles. . . . Once the issue-minded Democrats catch fire, then the campaign will gather steam.” Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, “who hardly qualifies as a bleeding heart,” Schlesinger wrote a few days later, “. . . said to me, ‘We need someone who will take a big jump—not just improve on existing trends but produce a new frame of mind, a new national atmosphere. If Kennedy debates Nixon on who can best manage the status quo, he is lost. The issue is not one technical program or another. The issue is a new epoch.’”

Kennedy was receptive to Schlesinger’s prodding. “I don’t mind criticism at this point,” he told him. “I would rather have you tell me now than to wait until November.” In the middle of September, Kennedy met the problem head-on with a strong speech before the Liberal party in New York, where he sounded familiar liberal themes, which began to evoke the sort of excitement Schlesinger saw as essential to a winning campaign.

IT WAS APPARENT
by September that much more than liberal enthusiasm was essential if Jack was going to beat Nixon. The Republican convention at the end of July—a coronation of sorts for Nixon and running mate Henry Cabot Lodge, featuring effective speeches about the Soviet challenge and the nominees’ superior capacity to enhance national security—boosted Republican poll numbers. Gallup trial heats showed Nixon ahead by 53 to 47 percent in one survey and 50 to 44 percent in another. As troubling, 31 percent of Nixon-Lodge supporters said they were “very strongly” committed to their candidates, while only 22 percent of Kennedy-Johnson backers expressed the same intensity. Happily, from Kennedy’s viewpoint, 60 percent of Americans said that they had paid little or no attention to the presidential race so far.

The Kennedys expected Nixon to fight hard and dirty. During four years together in the House, Kennedy and Nixon had enjoyed a civil relationship. During the fifties, however, Nixon’s campaign tactics and harsh attacks on the Democrats, which echoed some of McCarthy’s excesses, had diminished Kennedy’s regard for him. To be behind in the polls before Nixon unleashed any trademark kidney punches was discouraging.

By the end of August, a new poll showed Nixon and Kennedy locked in a dead heat. Neither man had convinced a majority of voters that he was better qualified to be president. Nixon’s reputation for excessive partisanship and Kennedy’s youth and Catholicism dulled public enthusiasm for seeing one or the other in the White House.

Despite the improvement in Jack’s public standing, the Kennedys were still distressed. While Nixon moved freely about the country in August, emphasizing his fitness for the highest office, the special congressional session kept Jack tied down in Washington. Teddy White saw a firsthand demonstration of the Kennedy frustration during a visit to Jack’s campaign headquarters. While he sat chatting with two Kennedy staffers, Bobby emerged from an inner office and began to shout: “‘What are you doing?! What are we all doing? Let’s get on the road! Let’s get on the road tomorrow! I want us all on the road tomorrow!’ And without waiting for a reply, he clapped the door shut and disappeared.”

Fueling Bobby’s explosion were emerging attacks on Jack’s character and record that put him on the defensive and distracted him from an affirmative appeal to voters. In response, the campaign produced a “Counterattack Sourcebook” for use in answering derogatory assertions about Kennedy’s religion, health, inexperience, profligate campaign spending, voting record on labor, civil liberties, and civil rights, opposition to southern interests, Senate attendance, response to McCarthyism, and opposition to France’s repressive Algerian policy.

Warnings that Kennedy’s Catholicism and youth made him unfit for the White House worried Jack and Bobby the most. “Senator Kennedy is an attractive young man, but he is untrained for the job of President,” Republicans asserted. He had never held an executive position or had any experience in strategic military planning or in dealing with the communists. At the age of forty-three,“he would be the youngest man ever elected to the White House,” and at the age of thirty-one, his “wife is too young to be First Lady.” John Kenneth Galbraith told the brothers that after speaking with more than “a hundred journalists, farm leaders, dirt farmers and Democratic professionals,” he had concluded that “religion in the rural corn belt, Great Plains and down into rural Texas has become an issue greater than either income or peace. . . . In the absence of a clear view of what either candidate stands for or can do about these issues, religion is entering as a deciding factor.” And the complaints came from both sides: Some prominent Catholics were unhappy with Jack’s opposition to “the Catholic position on many public issues.”

A more muted concern was gossip about Jack’s womanizing. In June 1959, the FBI had received letters and a photograph “containing allegations regarding personal immorality on the part of Jack Kennedy. Apparently,” the FBI’s memo noted, “this data has received widespread distribution—correspondent allegedly sent copies to ‘about thirty-five reporters.’” The memo also noted that “some months ago,” the Bureau “had received from a reliable source information . . . on Senator Kennedy’s sex life. You will also recall that we have detailed substantial information in Bu[reau] files reflecting that Kennedy carried on an illicit relationship with another man’s wife during World War II.” In March 1960, the agent in charge of the New Orleans Bureau office reported that members of the mob, in conjunction with Frank Sinatra, were financially supporting Kennedy’s campaign. The agent also related “a conversation which indicated that Senator Kennedy had been compromised with a woman in Las Vegas, Nevada.” There were also reports that an airline hostess in Miami had been “sent to visit Sen. Kennedy.” In May, the Bureau received a photo published in a right-wing newspaper of Jack “leaving his girlfriend’s house at 1 o’clock in the morning. She is a glamour employee of his.”