The Kennedy Half-Century (9 page)

Inside the arena, the real work got under way. After the first ballot, Estes Kefauver led with 483½ votes; Kennedy came in second with 304 votes; Al Gore earned 178 votes, while Robert Wagner and Hubert Humphrey finished with 162½ and 134½ respectively. On the second ballot, the race broke open. Southerners who were anxious to stop Kefauver—an advocate of civil rights—began throwing their support to Kennedy. “Kennedy’s supporters raised a yell as Arkansas switched its 26 votes from Gore to the young New England senator.” Delaware soon followed suit. True to his word, Wagner delivered 96½ of New York’s 98 votes to JFK, which sparked a spontaneous outburst of chanting on the convention floor: “We want Kennedy! We want Kennedy!”
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Kennedy watched the drama unfold from the comfort of his hotel room. Sorensen later recalled the scene: “Our television set showed wild confusion on the convention floor and a climbing Kennedy total. But the Senator was as calm as ever. He bathed, then again reclined on the bed. Finally we moved, through a back exit, to a larger and more isolated room.”
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Though it wasn’t recognized as such at the time, perhaps the most historically evocative moment came when Senator Lyndon Johnson hollered on the convention floor, “Texas proudly casts its vote for the fighting senator who wears the scars of battle, that fearless senator, the next vice president of the United States, John Kennedy of Massachusetts.” Johnson had come to Chicago with his eyes on the top prize. But when Stevenson secured the nomination instead, LBJ decided to play vice presidential kingmaker. He threw Texas’s 56 votes to Clement and then Gore and finally to Kennedy when it looked as if the Massachusetts senator had a decent shot at beating Kefauver, who was not one of Johnson’s Senate favorites.
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Johnson’s announcement triggered a burst of applause and activity; California gave Kennedy 14½ more votes;
North Carolina contributed 17 ½; Kentucky switched its 30 votes from Gore to JFK. He was now leading Kefauver 618 to 551½. He needed 686½ votes to win the nomination. Back at the Stockyards Inn, Sorensen offered his boss a congratulatory handshake. “Not yet,” said Kennedy. Even so, Kennedy was upbeat; he dressed, kept one eye on the TV, and discussed what sort of speech he would deliver if nominated. A cordon of cops arrived, ready to escort the thirty-nine-year-old senator to the convention center.
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And then the momentum suddenly, almost mysteriously, shifted. The young Kennedy had soared too close to the sun.

Al Gore withdrew from the contest and asked his supporters to back Kefauver. Oklahomans, unhappy at the prospect of having to vote for a Catholic from an industrial state, happily complied. Missouri and Michigan also jumped on the Kefauver bandwagon. South Carolina tried to stanch the bleeding, but without success. Pennsylvania added 74 votes to the Tennessee senator’s column, which encouraged the delegations from Iowa, Montana, California, Delaware, West Virginia, and Maine to adjust their votes. At the end of the second ballot, Kefauver secured the nomination with 755½ votes. Kennedy finished with a respectable 589. Knowing that he’d been beaten, he headed to the amphitheater to congratulate Kefauver.
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Kennedy received a warm welcome as he took the stage. “Recognizing that this convention has selected a man who has campaigned in all parts of the country,” he said just after four o’clock, “I hope this convention will now make Estes Kefauver’s nomination unanimous.” As the young senator started to leave the stage, Sam Rayburn called him back and handed him the chairman’s gavel. Kennedy raised it and said, “I move we suspend the rules and nominate Estes Kefauver by acclamation.” The crowd roared its approval. Kennedy’s magnanimous concession endeared him to millions. His “near victory and sudden loss, the impression he gave of a clean-cut boy who had done his best and who was accepting defeat with a smile—all this struck at people’s hearts in living rooms across the nation. In this moment of triumphant defeat, his campaign for the presidency was born.” In private, JFK was hugely disappointed that he had lost. He flew to France for a vacation, leaving behind his pregnant wife, who had already had one miscarriage and would soon suffer another. But as events would show, losing the vice presidential nomination was the best thing that could have happened. If Kennedy had won the contest, he would have been blamed in part for Stevenson’s subsequent defeat. Inevitably, the press would have cited the Catholic issue. Instead, he received extensive, positive media coverage yet was held harmless for Stevenson’s November rout.
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Kennedy spent the next few months crisscrossing the country on Stevenson’s behalf. These trips raised the senator’s public profile and gave him the opportunity to chat up party leaders and build a loyal following. Stevenson
and Kefauver were happy to ride Kennedy’s coattails. J. Howard McGrath, Kefauver’s special assistant, told the press that the Massachusetts senator would “play a leading role in the Democratic presidential campaign, second only to that of the presidential and vice presidential candidates.”
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Kennedy’s help, though, turned out to be the kind politicians often offer—me first, you second. While ostensibly stumping for the party ticket, he frequently promoted his own record. In California, he told a roomful of union workers about his time on the Labor Committee and how hard he had worked to boost the minimum wage. At the World Affairs Council luncheon in Los Angeles he bolstered his foreign policy credentials by lecturing on the security threats posed by “four Middle Eastern-Mediterranean areas—Suez, Cyprus, Israel, and French North Africa.” In Springfield, Massachusetts, the topic turned to energy: “I was gratified when the Congress accepted my amendment to the Atomic Energy Act and gave preference to areas with high power costs in the location of reactors …” Thousands of people turned out to hear Kennedy, whose popularity began to transcend sectional boundaries.
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But endorsements from political celebrities were not enough to save Stevenson’s campaign. Eisenhower trounced the Illinois senator at the polls by an even greater margin than in 1952. Without a discernible pause, JFK geared up for his own 1960 race. Shortly after the Democratic loss, he bluntly offered to a
Chattanooga Times
reporter, “Now, this is the time for me.”
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Kennedy was still savoring the attention he’d received in Chicago. He knew that it meant he had a decent shot at the 1960 nomination. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, he told Dave Powers that he wanted to run for president. “With only about four hours of work and a handful of supporters, I came within thirty-three and a half votes of winning the vice presidential nomination,” he said. “If I work hard for four years, I ought to be able to pick up all the marbles.”
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In January of 1957, the
Los Angeles Times
reported on the “blossoming” of “a bumper crop of [Democratic] presidential hopefuls”—Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, Senator Frank Lausche of Ohio, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and of course Kennedy were among the names mentioned. The following month, the paper published a survey that showed JFK trailing Kefauver among the party faithful, 49 to 38 percent.
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In April, the influential journalist Stewart Alsop opined that one could not swing a cat “on the Democratic side of the Senate aisle” without hitting a presidential candidate. Still, Alsop thought that Kennedy and Johnson had the best chance of securing the nomination. “Kennedy … has great ability, as well as great appeal for the voters (the ladies especially) and unlimited financial backing. His Catholicism is no bar to the nomination, any more than
Johnson’s heart attack—indeed, a good case could be made that his religion is a political asset.”
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During the first half of 1957, Kennedy’s stock climbed as a result of two major triumphs. First, he snagged a spot on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he knew would help him overcome concerns about his youth and inexperience. Second, he received a Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling book,
Profiles in Courage
. JFK’s fellow senators were impressed that one of their own had won such a prestigious award. Congratulations—as well as invitations to speak—poured in from all over the country. The Massachusetts senator “braved bad weather and visited out-of-the-way places in small planes” in order to fulfill his many speaking engagements. Critics accused Kennedy of taking credit for someone else’s work. On December 7, 1957, the journalist Drew Pearson went on ABC’s
Mike Wallace Show
and charged that
Profiles in Courage
had been written by someone other than the senator. Incensed, JFK hired Clark Clifford, a Truman administration alumnus, as his attorney. Clifford sent ABC a sworn affidavit from Ted Sorensen (Pearson’s prime suspect), who denied that he’d ghostwritten the book. On December 14, ABC issued a formal apology: “We deeply regret this error and feel it does a grave injustice to a distinguished public servant and author, to the excellent book he wrote, and to the prize he was awarded.” Kennedy rewarded his lawyer with a Patek Philippe watch—arguably the finest timepiece in the world.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the
Profiles in Courage
controversy appears quaint. After all, few politicians today write their own speeches or books and instead rely on ghostwriters and staff members to come up with memorable lines.
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At the time, though, this was considered a serious charge that might have derailed Kennedy’s presidential ambitions.

On Capitol Hill, Kennedy worked hard to maintain his reputation as a political moderate. He investigated cases of labor racketeering (an issue popular with voters) and tiptoed around the civil rights issue. Many younger Americans today associate the Kennedy name with liberalism, but it was the post-1963 Bobby and Ted who transformed the family name’s ideology. JFK was first and foremost a pragmatic politician: tough on crime and Communism, fiscally conservative, and certainly not at the forefront of the civil rights movement. “I think [JFK’s] legacy in the larger public mind is … one that’s kind to him, probably kinder than he deserves,” says Julian Bond, former chairman of the NAACP. “He had a chance to be a bigger fighter for civil rights than he was and didn’t take that chance.”
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Kennedy also formed lasting friendships with members of the opposition party at a time when bipartisan camaraderie was still possible in Washington. Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, who would later serve on the Warren Commission, was one of Kennedy’s closest Republican pals. “When
Cooper was reelected in 1952, JFK was coming in as a freshman senator,” recalls Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of Cooper’s former interns. “They socially played the same game and lived a block apart in Georgetown. John Sherman Cooper was every Democratic president’s favorite Republican. One of the few private dinners that JFK had during the very busy time between his election and inauguration was with the Coopers in Georgetown. Loraine Cooper and Jackie Kennedy became buddies and since Senator Cooper voted with the Democrats a lot, it was a natural combination of political and social connections that intertwined.”
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Cooper, the Republican, was actually more liberal than Kennedy on the issue of civil rights. When the Civil Rights Bill of 1957 came up for a vote, Kennedy cast his lot with Southern Democrats by sending the bill to the Judiciary Committee, then chaired by James Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi and an unapologetic segregationist. But at the same time he voted for Title III of the bill, a provision supported by liberals who wanted the government to get serious about integration. This back-and-forth on civil rights became the template for Kennedy as president, at least until the summer of 1963. JFK always had his eye on Southern electoral votes.
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Other issues with less political risk engaged Kennedy more. For example, JFK stood up in the Senate on July 2, 1957, and called for an end to the French war in Algeria. He advocated a negotiated settlement, but also American recognition of Algerian independence in the event that negotiations failed. Eager that attention be given to his stand on a top-ranked international concern, the senator made sure that the French embassy and State Department received advance copies of his speech. The
New York Times
called it “perhaps the most comprehensive and outspoken arraignment of Western policy toward Algeria yet presented by an American in public office.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles remained skeptical. He thought that it would be a better idea to simply offer U.S. assistance rather than “openly intervene” in the situation. Dulles added that he would be “very sorry” to see the Algerian war become an American problem. The conservative
Wall Street Journal
worried that Kennedy’s plan might lead to U.S. military intervention and rejected a comparison between the American and Algerian revolutions: “Any resemblance between the politically literate men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the politically primitive Algerian nationalists is coincidental. It is important that we be able to make distinctions between different kinds of independence movements.”
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The French response was understandably harsher. The French minister for Algeria, Robert Lacoste, accused Kennedy of being brainwashed by Arab propaganda and “badly informed” on the situation in North Africa. Lacoste drew cheers from a group of French veterans when he denounced JFK and “the old maids and Quakers of the United States.” In Europe, French patriotic
groups boycotted Fourth of July celebrations. France’s minister of defense, André Morice, accused Kennedy of prolonging the bloodshed.
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