Kennedy: The Classic Biography (16 page)

William H. “Onions” Burke was a rotund former tavern owner and onion fanner from the old Curley school of politics. The Eisenhower victory of 1952 having deprived him of his patronage plum as Collector of the Port of Boston, he had wrested control of the State Democratic Committee and was firmly allied with McCormack against Stevenson.

Publisher John Fox of the Boston Post was an erratic financier who had converted the once-respected Post into a shrill and bitter outlet for his extremist personal views. After giving Kennedy a backhanded endorsement in 1952, in order to justify the Post’s nominal Democratic affiliation at a time when he was endorsing Eisenhower, he turned on the Senator shortly thereafter for not standing by Joseph McCarthy and for not attacking Harvard’s President Pusey. McCarthy and Fox were angry that Pusey had failed to take stronger action against professors suspected of Communist tendencies, and Fox wanted Kennedy to join an alumni boycott of Harvard fund-raising in retaliation. When Kennedy refused, and his Senate votes continued to displease, Fox personally wrote one mean anti-Kennedy front-page editorial after another.

At the Senator’s instructions—the only time he ever requested such a dossier to my knowledge—I quietly began gathering material for a possible speech on Mr. Fox, on the eminent leaders of both parties he had maligned, on his difficulties with the law and on his curious financial arrangements. That file was never used, for the Post in later years went bankrupt under Fox and he largely disappeared from public view. But in 1956, desperate to salvage his paper’s solvency, he was hoping by his support of McCormack and Burke to further not only his dislike of Kennedy and Stevenson but also his ambition to be the most politically powerful publisher in the state of Massachusetts.

Matters came to a head in the early spring of 1956. Burke, increasingly cocky with the support of Fox, castigated all Stevenson supporters in general and the members of the ADA in particular. Senator Kennedy, though he knew his own seat was surely secure, foresaw destruction by Burke and Fox of all his efforts to make the Massachusetts Democratic Party a less shabby, more respected and more cohesive organization. Too many former Democratic followers, having acquired a little affluence and a home in the suburbs, were becoming Republicans in their search for respectability. They would never return to the party of the Burkes and the Curleys.

More importantly, Kennedy had announced for Stevenson. He had no objection to John McCormack as a token “favorite son” and made no effort to obtain write-in votes for Stevenson against McCormack in the state’s nonbinding Presidential primary. But he foresaw his own standing in the state and nation being discredited if his emphatic endorsement of Stevenson was largely ignored at the convention by a Massachusetts delegation looking to Burke, McCormack and Fox for leadership. Although some assumed that talk of his being nominated as Stevenson’s running mate also influenced his decision, he later wrote me in a memorandum with respect to this charge:

I was not fighting for the Massachusetts delegation in order to have “chips” for the Vice Presidential race. I was fighting for it because I had publicly endorsed Stevenson and I wanted to make good on my commitment.

Already many members of Kennedy’s personal campaign organization, as well as other “reformers,” ADA members and Stevenson supporters, had battled with some success in the April, 1956, primary for seats on the State Committee. Now in May, contrary to his own strong preference to steer clear of state politics, and contrary to the counsel of those whose advice he respected, Senator Kennedy plunged into the fray. The election of a new State Committee chairman was the key objective. Winning that election was important only because losing it would be harmful.

The eighty little-known members of the State Committee, an organization Kennedy had previously done well to ignore, suddenly found themselves important for the first time, the object of all kinds of political pressure and press inquiries. The Senator quietly rallied his forces, working principally through two key aides from his 1952 race, Lawrence O’Brien and Kenneth O’Donnell. He visited every uncommitted State Committee member and sought out Burke followers as well. At the same time the Burke forces were equally busy and far more noisy.

Kennedy dispatched me to Boston to help plan the statutory and parliamentary procedures by which control of the committee could be gained from a hostile chairman and secretary who claimed pledges from a majority of the members. The Burke forces called a State Committee meeting in Springfield for May 19 at 2
P.M.
The Kennedy forces then called an official meeting of the committee to be held in the Hotel Bradford in Boston on the same day at 3
P.M.
The Burke forces then rescinded their first call and said
they
were calling a meeting in the Hotel Bradford at 3
P.M.

After two intensive weeks, which concerned the Senator as much as any political fight in his career, the climax was a stormy meeting—complete with booing, shoving, name-calling, contests for the gavel and near fist fights. In the end, the Burke forces were ousted by exactly the vote Kennedy had predicted. The Senator, who had not attended the meeting, called for a new era of unity for Massachusetts Democrats.

THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL RACE

It was not really a new era. But Kennedy, who was shortly thereafter elected chairman of the state’s convention delegation, and delivered four-fifths of its votes for Stevenson on the first ballot, was thus able to honor his pledge.

Earlier that year he had called me into his office with a mixed air of mystery and glee. “I’m considering,” he said, “running as a New England favorite son in the New Hampshire Presidential primary.” It was an appealing idea at first sight. Kefauver was otherwise certain to get a head start on Stevenson by winning in New Hampshire as he had in 1952. As a stalking horse for Stevenson, Kennedy thought he could carry New Hampshire and help unite the six New England states behind the Illinoisan. He had no illusions about himself as a serious Presidential possibility in 1956. He was not even motivated by a serious interest in the Vice Presidential nomination at that time. Nor did he think New Hampshire to be of critical importance. But he was a man of action; and, in a remark which revealed much about his activist nature, he was contemplating running for President in New Hampshire, he said, “because that’s where the action is now.”

In the end, Stevenson campaign manager James Finnegan preferred a Kennedy endorsement of Stevenson immediately before the New Hampshire primary. There Kefauver won, but by the time the Massachusetts State Committee fight was over, Stevenson’s gains elsewhere had caused increased speculation on his choice of a running mate.

Kennedy’s name had often been mentioned as a Vice Presidential possibility. In a letter to the Senator on November 22, 1955, I referred to this talk in suggesting he dispel the rumors about his health. We first heard that Stevenson was considering Kennedy early in 1956 from Theodore H. White, then writing a feature article on the Democratic Party for a national magazine. Stevenson’s camp had told him, he said, that under consideration for the second spot were two Southerners (Gore and Clement, both of Tennessee) and two Catholics (Kennedy of Massachusetts and Wagner of New York). The other three names seemed obviously to have been mentioned as a means of undercutting Presidential candidates Kefauver in Tennessee and Harriman in New York, and we thus suspected that the whole item was a “plant.”

But the seed, once planted, grew steadily in the thinking of Kennedy fans if not in the Senator’s own mind. Governor Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut was the first to endorse him, followed by Governor Dennis Roberts of Rhode Island. Governor Luther Hodges of North Carolina said Kennedy would be acceptable to the South. While the Senator continued to view the whole subject with more curiosity than concern, a surprising flurry of newspaper and magazine stories and editorials pointed up his assets with enthusiasm.

Why was Kennedy mentioned at all? His best-selling book and growing number of speeches had made him more widely known than most Democratic office-holders. His youthful, clean-cut demeanor, his candid, low-key approach and his heroic war record gave him a special appeal to both new and uncommitted voters. His television appearances and Harvard commencement address drew national attention (although a few disgruntled Harvardites were certain that his use of the word “campus” instead of “Yard” proved he had not written his own speech). And his religion, it was said, would help defend the ticket against Republican “soft-on-Communism” charges and help counter the effects of Stevenson’s divorce.

But it became increasingly clear that his religion was not an asset in all eyes. Stevenson himself was said to be expressing some doubts on its effect (along with doubts about Kennedy’s health and devotion to civil liberties). The mail to Stevenson’s office on the Vice Presidency was heavily anti-Catholic anti-Kennedy. Mayor David Lawrence of Pittsburgh told Stevenson that a Catholic on the ticket meant certain defeat. Speaker Sam Rayburn held a similar view, and it was widely reported that, among many others, former President Harry Truman and former National Chairman Frank McKinney (like Lawrence and several other opponents to the idea, a Catholic himself) were equally negative on this ground. A
Look Magazine
poll of thirty-one Democratic officials in thirteen Southern states found eighteen who thought a Catholic on the ticket would be a liability in their states, only three who thought he would be an asset.

Earlier in the year, in connection with a newspaper story, the author of this
Look
article, Fletcher Knebel, had brought a similar report to the Kennedy office. The Senator, wholly willing to be rejected for the Vice Presidency but not on grounds of his religion, asked me to turn over to Knebel some material I had been gathering showing potential “Catholic vote” gains that might help offset any losses. Knebel asked me to develop the material further for his
Look Magazine
piece—and the result some months later was a sixteen-page memorandum of statistics, quotations, analysis and argument summarizing Stevenson’s need to recapture those strategically located Catholic voters who normally voted Democratic.

It was, I wrote in an accompanying letter to Knebel, a “personal” document which I was “extremely reluctant to let out of my hands.” But gradually and inevitably the memorandum and its subsequent refinements were shown on a limited basis to key newsmen and politicians.

Word of its existence spread. Two magazines reprinted it in full and a half-dozen presented summaries. Political leaders sought copies. The Stevenson camp asked for more. The backers of Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota issued a scornful attack on these claims for the “Catholic vote” and put forward a much longer and less documented memorandum of their own making equally broad claims about the “anti-Catholic vote” and the “farm vote.”

No candidates were mentioned in my document. But Senator Kennedy disliked the growing focus on his religion, and disliked even more the danger that his own assistant would be publicized as promoting this issue. We arranged with Connecticut State Chairman John Bailey, a strong supporter, to assert responsibility for the memorandum. I kept Bailey supplied with copies. He kept me entertained with tales of gullible inquiries. Most newspapers at the time accepted Bailey’s statement of sponsorship; but when a more skeptical politician such as Jim Finnegan telephoned me to request six copies for Stevenson headquarters, I successively and unsuccessfully feigned ignorance, surprise, reluctance and the hope that I could “get hold of some” for him.

Like most political-statistical analyses aimed at laymen, the “Bailey Memorandum,” as it became known, oversimplified, overgeneralized and overextended its premises in order to reach an impressive conclusion. That conclusion was both more sweeping than the evidence supported and more valid than its critics alleged. The document did not purport to be original research but applied existing studies and surveys to particular states and elections. It sought to answer Democratic fears of an “anti-Catholic vote” by raising hopes of recapturing a greater share of the “Catholic vote”—and while neither phenomenon can be measured with the precision this memorandum attempted, their existence and importance had long been assumed by most political and public opinion analysts.

The “Bailey Memorandum” made no pretense at being a comprehensive and objective study. It was a political answer to the sweeping assertions made against nominating a Catholic for Vice President. While I acknowledge its limitations as a scientific analysis, its political impact would surely have been somewhat more limited if, instead of discussing the “Catholic vote,” I had followed the advice more recently offered by one professorial critic and referred to “situations in which Catholicism is an independent variable of fluctuating salience with respect to the voting choice.”

The politicians who read the document were more concerned with probabilities than with certainties—and, whatever the memorandum’s faults, the widespread attention accorded its contents at least reopened the previously closed assumption that a Catholic on the ticket spelled defeat. By the summer of 1956, as the result of President Eisenhower’s poor health and Stevenson’s commanding lead for the nomination, the Vice Presidency was being discussed more each day, and Kennedy’s name was no longer automatically dismissed in those discussions.

The Senator’s own interest in the nomination was growing, more out of a sense of competition than of conviction. While his father and wife were willing, as always, to back whatever course he chose, the latter preferred that her husband’s first full year since convalescence be spent in the quiet of his home, and the former (who did not even interrupt his customary summer vacation in the South of France for the convention) saw no merit in second place on a ticket still certain to lose. But with the Senator’s skeptical encouragement, I made a quick trip to New England to seek support from friendly Democrats in Maine, advice from Stevenson speech-writer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and counsel from Ribicoff and Bailey. It was generally agreed that Stevenson would surely consult with his political associates and advisers before selecting his running mates, and our chief task was to make certain that these men were informed of John F. Kennedy’s qualities.