The Passage of Power (13 page)

Then, two nights later, came his daylong battle with Kefauver, which for a few minutes he appeared to have won, but which he lost at the wire. Television loves a drama, and that neck-and-neck race was a riveting drama—and so was Kennedy’s appearance on the rostrum to concede.

Biographies of Kennedy almost unanimously say he was smiling as he conceded. He wasn’t. This was Jack Kennedy in defeat: below him, waving in his
face as he came out on the platform, was a sea of signs—“Win with Estes!”—celebrating the man who had beaten him. There was no trace of a smile on his face. For once, his attire wasn’t impeccable; one wing of his shirt collar stuck out of his jacket.
Sam Rayburn had handed him the big gavel as he stepped up to the podium, and as he said the few necessary words (“I want to take this opportunity first to express my appreciation to Democrats from all parts of the country—North and South, East and West—who have been so generous and kind to me. I hope that this convention will make Estes Kefauver’s nomination unanimous”), his hands never stopped turning it restlessly around and around. As his beautiful young wife watched him from a box in the hall, her face, above her black dress and pearls, was sad. Thinking his words had completed his chore, he turned to step down from the podium, but Rayburn took his arm firmly and turned him back, saying he had to make a formal motion that the nomination be made unanimous, and as he stepped back to the microphone, he did so with an air of resignation before walking off again, while the band played Kefauver’s theme song, “The Tennessee Waltz.” This was the first time in his political career that Jack Kennedy had tasted defeat, and it was apparent that he didn’t like the feeling at all. Yet not only his words but his demeanor, if resigned and disappointed, had been gracious—the demeanor of a handsome young man dignified, even gallant, in defeat.
“And
then he was gone, the underdog candidate who had intrigued and captivated the hearts and minds of millions of Americans,” as one historian put it.
“The
dramatic race,” which “had glued millions to their television sets,” was “his great moment—the moment when he passed through a kind of political sound barrier to register on the nation’s memory,” wrote another.

Kennedy realized that. About a year later he ran into Jim Rowe at some airport and the two men sat down for a chat, and Kennedy said,
“Jim
, do you know who’s the most well-known senator in the United States?”

“Kefauver,” Rowe replied, thinking of the Tennessean’s nationally televised organized crime hearings, and, he recalls, Kennedy said, “That’s right. And do you know who the second most well-known senator is?”

“Who?” Rowe asked.

“I am,” Jack Kennedy said. “And do you know why? It was the half hour on national television when I ran against Kefauver for the vice presidency.”

While in hindsight, the transformation that television was to make in American politics seems obvious, at the time few politicians recognized this new reality as Kennedy did. Seizing every opportunity to be on-screen, he appeared not only as a guest on the Sunday interview shows from Washington, but also, for example, as narrator on two programs that the popular show
Omnibus
presented on the Mideast crisis. Moreover, his good looks and relaxed charm made him naturally suited to the new medium that was becoming a fixture in America. Television critic
Jack Gould called him
“the
most telegenic person in public life.” And his popularity on television brought him a flood of invitations to appear before Democratic groups all over the country. To dispel doubts about his health, he played golf and touch football with photographers present, but in reality the constant
traveling was hard on him; his back began giving him trouble again, but as long as he wore both the brace and the elastic bandage, his back held up; by the end of 1957, he had made hundreds of speeches, in forty-seven states.

A
ND THOSE SPEECHES
were increasingly effective.

During his six unproductive years in the House of Representatives, when
Mary Davis, his secretary, had been so annoyed by his “rather lackadaisical” attitude toward work, there had, nonetheless, been
“one
thing” about Jack Kennedy “that really surprised me”—the speeches he dictated to her.

“He wrote his own,” Ms. Davis was to recall. “He appeared to be such a disinterested guy, not involved, couldn’t care less, but then he’d say, ‘Mary, come on in.’ Then he would start dictating off the top of his head. The flow of language, his command of English, was extraordinary. It would come out beautifully—exactly what he wanted to say. And I’d think, ‘This—coming from
you.
’ I surprised myself, but I came to the conclusion that he was brilliant—the brightest person I’ve ever known.”

Brilliant though the content of the speeches that Jack Kennedy dictated during those six years may have been, however, audiences were less than impressed, because of the way he delivered them. Despite magical moments like the one with the
Gold Star Mothers, most of his talks were still delivered much too fast, with his smiles so fleeting and mechanical that their brightness hardly registered, and his physical appearance—the gaunt cheeks, the stiffness with which he moved, the suits hanging too loosely—did not add to their effectiveness. Occasionally, if he got caught up in what he was saying, his right arm would come up, and his hand would be extended to emphasize a point, but the gesture was a tentative one, the arm usually not coming up very far, and quickly coming down again. And during his first three years in the Senate, of course, before Dr. Travell, he was all too often delivering his speeches while he was in pain; several times he was forced to give them while standing on those crutches, with their big, padded crosspieces.

After the cortisone and Dr. Travell, however, his face became fuller (sometimes, in fact, too full for his liking; the drug sometimes caused a slight puffiness around his jaw). His body filled out, too; he seemed healthy, full of energy. The grin was, really, the same grin, but it beamed out now from a face that was very handsome but in a different way from before: confident, strong. The way he delivered his speeches changed, too. His suits now looked casual and debonair, made elegant by his bearing as much as by the fabric; only late in the day, when the press of the suit jacket had wilted and the jacket clung to his frame a little bit, would the outline of the brace be even faintly visible. And the right arm was coming up more and more, higher—to shoulder level, often—and the hand was jabbing forward more and more emphatically as he made his points. And there was something different about the way he was starting to hold his head: sometimes it would tilt a little to the right, and his chin would come up, and out:
strong, self-assured. His voice, with its distinctive New England accent, had always sounded earnest; now it was becoming more emphatic; some
times, in fact—not often but sometimes—it was starting to have quite a ring to it. Lyndon Johnson might still be clinging to the image of a frail, ineffectual Jack Kennedy, but, month by month, as Kennedy crisscrossed the country in 1957 and 1958, speech following speech, that picture was changing: the chin coming up more and more, not just confident but a bit cocky, combative, ready for any challenge; the hand, when he got carried away, often up above his shoulder now, the forefinger jabbing at the sky, the fist punching at the audience, then the hand reaching to the crowd, palm up in entreaty and exhortation. And if, after the speech or during a press conference, he got hostile questions, which were mostly about his Catholicism, the chin would cock up a little more, the gesture would be more emphatic, and he would answer with a mixture of sincerity and self-deprecatory humor that brought audiences over to his side.
“I
have never seen anybody in my
life develop like Jack Kennedy did as a personality, and as a speaker, and as an attractive person, over the last seven, eight years of his life,”
George Smathers was to say. “It was just a miracle transformation.” In addition, during the same time that this was happening, there were, month after month, the feature stories in national magazines—on him, and on his glamorous wife, and, after November, 1957, on his little daughter Caroline, and on his whole glamorous, talented, wealthy family:
“The
Rise of the Brothers Kennedy” in
Look,
“The Amazing Kennedys” in the
Saturday Evening Post
(which called its readers’ attention to “the flowering of another great political family, such as the Adamses, the Lodges, and the La Follettes”)—the cover stories in
Time
,
McCall’s,
Redbook,
one after the other, so that Jack Kennedy’s broad, open, assured grin, under that trademark unruly forelock, seemed to be beaming constantly from newsstands.

Being out on the campaign trail meant he wasn’t in the Senate—during his eight years in the Senate, according to one estimate, Kennedy was away from Washington at least half of the time it was in session—and conventional political observers complained bitterly about the dereliction. “This man seeks the highest elective office in the world not primarily as a politician, but as a celebrity,” one wrote. Said
New York Post
columnist
William V. Shannon: “There is a growing tendency on the part of Americans to ‘consume’ political figures in much the same sense we consume entertainment personalities on television and in the movies. Month after month, from the glossy pages of
Life
to the multicolored cover of
Redbook,
Jack and Jackie Kennedy smile out at millions of readers; he with his tousled hair and winning smile, she with her dark eyes and beautiful face. We hear of her pregnancy, of his wartime heroism, of their fondness for sailing. But what has all this to do with statesmanship?” The answer was: Nothing. While Lyndon Johnson’s assessment of Jack Kennedy as a senator—“He never did a thing”—is an exaggeration, its import is, on the whole, not far wrong.
“His
Senate career,” concludes one of his biographers,
Robert Dallek,
“produced
no major legislation that contributed substantially to the national well-being.” Misgivings about his lack of accomplishments were drowned out by the ubiquity
and attractiveness of his media appearances, however. By May of 1957, the nationally syndicated columnist
Marquis Childs would write, “Seldom in the annals of this political capital has anyone risen as rapidly and as steadily in a presidential sweepstakes as Jack Kennedy.” The effect of his celebrity was evident even in the enclave that was home to many of the capital’s political elite. During the spring of 1958, Kennedy had a drink with the columnist
Joseph Alsop at Alsop’s home on Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown. As he was making his farewells on the high stoop of the house, some of Alsop’s neighbors, looking out their windows, happened to see him. Opening the windows, they began to applaud. Lyndon Johnson had been visiting homes in Georgetown for almost a quarter of a century. No one had ever applauded him. By that spring, Kennedy had reversed his standing against Kefauver in the Gallup Polls; now, instead of trailing him by eleven points, as had been the case the year before, he was ahead by eleven. Kefauver, in fact, was all but out of the race; in 1952 and 1956 he had made himself a threat by his relentless and effective campaigning; there was an equally relentless, and more effective, campaigner in the race now. In March, 1958,
Time
’s Washington bureau chief felt
“by
general agreement,” Kennedy is “the early-season favorite” to win the Democratic nomination; unless he was stopped, he would “win on the first ballot.”

B
UT THERE WAS
also general agreement that he
could
still be stopped.

“Enormously
successful” though Kennedy’s campaigning had been, “it was not enough,” an historian was to write. “And he knew it was not enough.” Popular though he may have been with the public at large, he wasn’t the leader in the polls of Democratic delegates and party officials who would cast the actual votes that would determine the nominee. With them Adlai Stevenson was still ahead. Symington, who had also won a landslide re-election campaign in November, and Humphrey appeared to have substantial blocs of delegates plus the possibility of winning more in primaries, and Johnson had his four hundred or so from the South and border states; favorite sons like Governors
Robert Meyner of New Jersey and G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams of Michigan were still in the running. There appeared to be every chance that Kennedy would not be able to win 761 delegates, and that, after a number of indecisive ballots, the convention would still be deadlocked, and the battle would move into the back rooms—where Johnson wanted it, where the decision would be made by the old bosses who were still put off by Kennedy’s youth, inexperience and religion. Johnson was sure he would win in these rooms, and he was not alone in that feeling.
“If
the convention ever went into the back rooms, we’d never get out of the back rooms,” Sorensen was to say.

Favorite though he might be,
Time
said,
“Jack
Kennedy could turn out to be one of the flowers that bloom in the spring,” and might well do so; “the battle for the 1960 nomination” still “shaped up as one of the grandest, free-swinging, rough and tumble in years.”

I
N HIS
J
ANUARY, 1959
, letter telling Johnson that he had decided to cast his lot with Humphrey, Jim Rowe agreed with
Time
’s assessment.
“I
still think you have a chance for the nomination, despite [the] obvious political handicaps both of us know you carry with you,
if
you would go after it in the way I have urged you should,” Rowe wrote. “You would have had a better chance a year ago than now, but it is still possible, however remote. But, as I said, and as you agreed, you have
no
chance whatsoever if you ‘wait.’ By ‘waiting’ I mean staying always in Washington and doing only a superb job as Leader.… I did not make the rules that must inevitably be followed to win the Presidential nomination.… But I know, as do you, that they must be followed.”