Kennedy: The Classic Biography (29 page)

Senator, are you certain that you are quite ready for the country, or that the country is ready for you in the role of President …? [We need] a man with the greatest possible maturity and experience…. May I urge you to be patient?

I watched Truman’s telecast from our Los Angeles Convention headquarters where advance preparations were already under way. A few hours later I was flying back across the country to Hyannis Port, where the Senator had asked and received television time to reply on July 4. I took with me a file on “youth and age” containing rebuttal material for just such an occasion, and the Senator, looking relaxed and confident, interrupted his vacation to work on the text. He knew his age affected his candidacy, both favorably and unfavorably, but he was unwilling to admit that it also affected his competence. “Sam Rayburn may think I’m young,” he had said earlier, “but then most of the population looks young to a man who’s seventy-eight…. I do not recall that I have demonstrated any lack of judgment under the heat of the past four years. The test is not in the age but in the man himself.”

We flew on July 4 to New York for his own televised press conference. After dismissing Truman’s other contentions,
⁴
he demolished the age argument with such force that his supporters were grateful to Truman for providing such a highly publicized occasion. He mentioned his eighteen years of service and expressed his willingness “to let our party and nation be the judge of my experience and ability.” But, if “fourteen years in major elective office is insufficient experience,” he said, “that rules out all but three of the ten names put forward by Truman, all but a handful of American Presidents, and every President of the twentieth century—including Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman.” And if age, not experience, is the standard, he went on, then a maturity test excluding “from positions of trust and command all those below the age of forty-four would have kept Jefferson from writing the Declaration of Independence, Washington from commanding the Continental Army, Madison from fathering the Constitution…and Christopher Columbus from even discovering America.” (He wisely struck out the one other name I had on this list, that of Jesus of Nazareth.)

In a young country such as ours, he continued, with young men in the Congress and state capitals, the voters are entitled to equal strength and vigor in the White House. He and Nixon were both in their forties and had entered the Congress together, and six previous Presidents (and many nominees) had served in their forties. While it was true that most major world leaders in 1960 had been born in the previous century and educated in a different era, “who is to say how successful they have been in improving the fate of the world?” The newer countries of Asia and Africa were selecting younger men “who can cast off the old slogans and delusions and suspicions.” Then he closed with this summation of his pursuit of the Presidency:

For there is a new world to be won—a world of peace and goodwill, a world of hope and abundance. And I want America to lead the way to that new world.

Mr. Truman asks me if I think I am ready. And I am reminded that one hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln, not yet President and under fire from the veteran politicians, wrote these words: “I see the storm coming and I know His hand is in it. If He has a place and work for me, I believe that I am ready.” Today I say to you that if the people of this nation select me to be their President, I believe that I am ready.

1
Humphrey was also entered in an unofficial balloting sponsored by his friends in the District of Columbia and as a favorite son in his native state of South Dakota, and Kennedy had no intention of entering either.

2
Roper, who we had long heard was unfavorable to Kennedy’s candidacy, had earlier downgraded the importance of a “Catholic vote.” Kennedy was so angry at Roper’s telecast that he wrote a letter of protest to the network.

3
The Oregon legislature in 1959 had changed the law to bind them for one ballot only. But on a Western swing at that time I had talked with the counsel to Oregon’s ambitious Republican Governor, Mark Hatfield, pointing out that in some future year Hatfield could carry the primary for Rockefeller only to have Nixonites switch the delegation after one ballot. The bill, which ultimately proved irrelevant to Kennedy anyway, was vetoed.

4
“Mr. Truman regards an open convention as one which studies all the candidates, reviews their records and then takes his advice.”

CHAPTER VI
THE CONVENTION

J
OHN KENNEDY WAS READY.
He had helped turn his youth from a liability to an asset. And out in Los Angeles his convention organization was ready. As the Senator headed back to the Cape, and I crossed the continent for the third time in five days, Bob Kennedy and team were buttoning down the last details in our headquarters at the Biltmore Hotel. Arrangements for housing, transportation, communications, demonstrations, delegate hospitality, public relations and a host of other details had been under way for months, with deft on-the-spot supervision by Kennedy friends Robert Troutman and David Hackett, who had temporarily moved to Los Angeles.

There would be no repeat of the 1956 failure of communications. From the Kennedy command post on the eighth floor of the Biltmore a vast telephone network linked all offices with all residences, a cottage behind the Sports Arena Convention Hall and the seats of Kennedy leaders on the convention floor. Kennedy floor workers had their own walkie-talkies.

Salinger’s press operation was in high gear with its own daily news sheet. Each day new support was announced to the press: North Carolina’s Governor-elect Sanford, Minnesota’s Freeman, New Jersey delegates. A wide assortment of volunteers—Massachusetts delegates, unoccupied spectators, old Kennedy friends—was assigned to eat, drink and live with each of the fifty-four delegations, to report regularly on their moods, questions and trends, and, above all, to keep track of their votes. The Kennedy “control room” had a file card on every delegate, and the Kennedy “delegate hospitality” room had the biggest crowds and the prettiest girls, dispensing free coffee with campaign pins and showing a movie about the candidate.

“I think we are going to win the nomination,” said Kennedy on
Meet the Press
, after his arrival on Saturday, July 9, had been greeted by two thousand well-wishers. “But I don’t think it is wrapped up…. No convention is.” He knew that both Champ Clark in the Democratic Convention of 1912 and William McAdoo in 1924 arrived with a majority of delegates and lost the nomination. In those days, however, the rules required a nominee to obtain two-thirds of the delegate vote, and had Roosevelt and Farley not permanently liberalized the Democratic Party by repealing this rule in 1936, Kennedy could never have been nominated.

His own majority—which he was careful never to claim with finality, even when he received apparently clinching endorsements from the big Illinois and Pennsylvania delegations on Sunday and Monday respectively—was still too small and too shaky to inspire overconfidence. Pat Brown endorsed him but had lost control of the California delegation. Governors Herschel Loveless of Iowa and George Docking of Kansas said they would withdraw as favorite sons in favor of Kennedy, but it was not clear what they could do on the first ballot. Despite pressures from his own delegation, New Jersey’s Meyner refused to withdraw. He was quoted as saying, “I want my twenty-five minutes on television—I’m entitled to it.” Other Kennedy backers were restless. “Neither one of them is really for me,” the Senator told me in his Los Angeles hotel room, referring to two powerful political supporters, “but each thinks I’m going to win because the other is for me. We’d better get out of here before no one is for me.” He would win by the second ballot, he said, or “never.”

As the convention opened on Monday, July 11, a growing Stevenson drive presented a new problem. Mrs. Roosevelt, echoing an earlier column by the respected Walter Lippmann, expressed the hope that Kennedy’s “unselfishness and courage” would lead him to take the Vice Presidency, where he would have “the opportunity to grow and learn.” Negroes, she said, would not vote for Kennedy. Hubert Humphrey, friendly since West Virginia, but never formally committed, announced he was “switching” from Kennedy to Stevenson out of “concern for my country.” Pat Brown found he had lost to Stevenson many of the California delegates he had hoped to bring with him to Kennedy. A former Humphrey delegate from the District of Columbia told me she had been subjected to bitter and continuous pressures from the same Stevenson backers who complained most about Kennedy’s high-pressure tactics. The convention galleries, both packed and picketed by Stevenson’s Southern California supporters, noisily greeted their hero’s arrival in Convention Hall as a delegate. “I never said he couldn’t be elected Mayor of Los Angeles,” observed Kenny O’Donnell wryly.

Stevenson himself, who had been asked to place Kennedy’s name in nomination, was repeatedly requested by those friendly to both men to halt these efforts, which could only help Symington or Johnson, to gain Kennedy’s esteem by ending his own vacillation, and to return Kennedy’s courtesy in 1956 of placing his name in nomination. It was with some disdain that Kennedy told me Stevenson had replied that he wanted to disengage but “just didn’t know how.”

Meanwhile Johnson supporters were increasingly active. After recessing the Senate until August, the Majority Leader, agreeing to the pleas but not with the views of anti-Kennedy, anti-Catholic Speaker Sam Rayburn, had formally announced as a candidate. His statement warned that “the forces of evil…will have no mercy for innocence, no gallantry for inexperience.” Rayburn assailed Kennedy’s “untested” leadership. John Connally and India Edwards cast doubt on his physical fitness. Other Johnson supporters said Joe Kennedy had been anti-Semitic and soft on Hitlerism. They contrasted Kennedy and Johnson on McCarthy. They sneered at the Kennedy wealth. Harlem leader Adam Clayton Powell endorsed Johnson. A $50,000 full-page advertisement campaign blossomed forth for Johnson. Old-line politicians talked knowingly of a deadlock—with Stevenson taking Kennedy votes, all favorite sons remaining in the race, Kennedy fading after two ballots, and then Johnson or possibly Stevenson emerging as the compromise choice. An attempt was made to amend the convention rules to prevent favorite sons from switching on the first ballot—an obvious stop-Kennedy move that was defeated.

At Los Angeles Johnson saw the opportunity for a break. Responding to a Kennedy form letter which sought meetings with all delegations but which was sent to the Texas delegation inadvertently, he challenged “young Jack” to a “debate” before the Texas group. Kennedy rejected the advice of those urging him to forget it, switched the forum to a joint Texas-Massachusetts delegation meeting, listened politely while Johnson somewhat provocatively contrasted his Senate leadership with the absenteeism of “some people,” and then replied with his customary grace. Johnson, he said, had not identified whose shortcomings he was discussing so

I assume he was talking about some other candidate, not me…. I want to commend him for…a wonderful record answering those quorum calls…. I was not present on all those occasions…. I was not Majority Leader…. So I come here today full of admiration for Senator Johnson, full of affection for him, strongly in support of him—for Majority Leader.

Most of the convention, watching on television, felt that Johnson’s challenge had been neatly deflated by Kennedy. The Massachusetts Senator, despite all the Johnson and Stevenson efforts, remained unperturbed. Only winning candidates, he knew, were accused of driving “steamrollers,” “bandwagons” and “well-oiled machines.” Rumors, chaos and mob emotion are as much a part of convention business as brass bands, balloons, placards and oratory. But the truly important business was securing 761 delegate votes, a majority of the 1,520 total.

The headlines for Stevenson and Johnson were much larger than the number of actual delegate defections. Neither the Stevenson spectators inside, nor the Stevenson pickets outside, nor the organized Stevenson telegrams pouring in represented a cross-section of the American people or more than a handful of delegates. The Johnson and Symington forces could talk of a deadlock, but no Democratic convention had been deadlocked since the two-thirds rule had been repealed. The others had hopes, but Kennedy had delegates—and that was the difference.

They could all talk of making Kennedy their running mate, but he had made unmistakably clear his final rejection of that position. Once again on television he flatly ruled it out—and meant it. To one reporter speculating on a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket, he said, “Look, I’ll make you an offer. If I take the Vice Presidential nomination with anyone, I’ll let you have my next year’s Senate salary.” His father expressed the view we all held: “Not for chalk, money or marbles will we take second place.” At a Los Angeles rally walking in amidst tumultuous applause, the Senator spotted a supporter whom he had not seen since a conversation two years earlier in which the latter urged him to be satisfied with the Vice Presidency. The supporter had long since forgotten the advice, but not Kennedy. “Do you still think I shouldn’t go for it?” he said smiling.

Kennedy concentrated his public remarks, at an NAACP civil rights rally and a preconvention dinner for all candidates, not on personalities but on the issues. The only “health” issue, he said, “is the anemic health of the American economy today.” The only “age” issue is the neglect of our older citizens. He devoted his time to making the rounds of those delegations and leaders who were still uncommitted, a cool, purposeful figure striding swiftly through the jumble.