An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
On April 12, the fifteenth anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Kennedy reminded an audience that Roosevelt had accomplished more in a hundred days than Eisenhower and Nixon had in eight years. “And now it is time for another ‘New Deal’—a New Deal for West Virginia,” Jack declared. To hammer home the point, Joe Kennedy suggested that they ask FDR Jr., a Kennedy supporter, to join the campaign, which he did with great success, drawing worshipful crowds wherever he went. A West Virginia journalist said it was like “God’s son coming down and saying it was all right to vote for this Catholic, it was permissible, it wasn’t something terrible to do.” Joe also shrewdly convinced FDR Jr. to send letters praising Jack from Hyde Park, New York, the site of FDR’s home and resting place, to West Virginia Democrats.
To undercut Humphrey’s stronger liberal identification, the Kennedys argued that a vote for Humphrey, who could not possibly get the nomination, would destroy prospects for the welfare reforms Jack proposed. Jack also described Humphrey as the tool of a “stop-Kennedy gang-up” backed by Lyndon Johnson and Stuart Symington. Senator Byrd publicly acknowledged the accuracy of Jack’s assertion. “If you are for Adlai Stevenson, Senator Stuart Symington, Senator Johnson or John Doe, this primary may be your last chance to stop Kennedy,” he declared. Seizing on Byrd’s candid statement, Jack responded: “Hubert Humphrey has no chance to win the Democratic nomination for President, and he knows it, so why is he running against me in this primary? To stop me and give the nomination to Johnson or Stevenson or Symington. If Johnson and the other candidates want your vote in the November election, why don’t they have enough respect for you to come here and ask for your vote in the primary?” It was a compelling argument that appealed to the self-interest and sense of fair play of West Virginia Democrats. At the same time Kennedy challenged Johnson publicly, he confronted him privately, complaining that Johnson was using Humphrey as a stalking-horse. According to Johnson, when he denied he was running, Jack pressured him to “get Senator Byrd ‘out of West Virginia.’” Johnson defended himself by telling Kennedy that he could not get Byrd out of his own state and reminded Jack that he had supported his vice presidential bid in 1956 and given him choice committee assignments.
With so much at stake in the election, the contest turned ugly. Humphrey attacked his “rivals” for the nomination as “millionaire ‘money’ candidates backed by political machines.” Specifically, he went after Kennedy’s free spending: “I don’t think elections should be bought. . . . American politics are far too important to belong to the money men. . . . Kennedy is the spoiled candidate and he and that young, emotional, juvenile Bobby are spending with wild abandon. . . . Anyone who gets in the way of papa’s pet is going to be destroyed. . . . I don’t seem to recall anybody giving the Kennedy family—father, mother, sons or daughters—the privilege of deciding who should . . . be our party’s nominee.”
When Kennedy complained about the “personal abuse” and “gutter politics,” Humphrey shot back, “Poor little Jack. That is a shame. And you can quote me on that.” Humphrey also ridiculed his complaint of an anti-Kennedy coalition: “I wish he would grow up and stop acting like a boy. What does he want, all the votes?” Humphrey asserted that Kennedy was “attempting to set up an alibi should he lose.”
Although Humphrey was never proud of his negative attacks, which did more to hurt him than Kennedy, he had reason for complaint. “I would suggest that brother Bobby examine his own conscience about innuendoes and smears,” he said. “If he has trouble knowing what I mean, I can refresh his memory very easily.” An FDR Jr. assertion that Humphrey had been a draft dodger, which Humphrey believed was approved by Bobby, if not Jack, particularly incensed him. In possession of information that Humphrey may have sought military deferments during World War II, Bobby had pressed Roosevelt to use this in retaliation for Humphrey’s harsh words. In fact, having tried and failed to get into the service because of physical disabilities, Humphrey corrected the record with the Kennedys. “They believed me,” he wrote later, “but never shut F.D.R. Jr., up, as they easily could have.” Jack publicly announced, “Any discussion of the war record of Senator Humphrey was done without my knowledge and consent, as I strongly disagree with the injection of this issue into the campaign.” His statement, however, did not challenge the accuracy of what Roosevelt had said. Having addressed issues of food, Franklin, and family in the campaign, the Kennedys were now taking care of the flag.
But it was Kennedy spending that Humphrey knew was his biggest problem. In West Virginia politics, money was king. “As I told you last time you were down here,” a state political veteran wrote FDR Jr. in April, “most of these coal-field counties are for sale. It is a matter of who gets there first with the most money.” Teddy White wrote, “Politics in West Virginia involves money—hot money, under-the-table money, open money.”
The payoffs involved a system of slating, which was a form of legalized bribery. To sort through dense ballots with long lists of names, voters relied on “slates” given to them by county political bosses, usually the county sheriff. Voters would then vote for those candidates on the slate. It was all very simple: The candidate who paid the most to the county Democratic boss (under the conceit of subsidizing “printing” costs) would have his list of backers identified as the “approved slate.” When one county sheriff told a Humphrey campaign organizer what each name on a slate would cost in his county and the man passed the word to Humphrey, the response was, “We would pay it, but we don’t have the money.” Where Humphrey’s total expenditures on the campaign amounted to $25,000, the Kennedys spent $34,000 on TV programming alone. With the Kennedys’ approval, Larry O’Brien independently negotiated the payments for the slates. “Our highest possible contribution was peanuts compared to what they [county leaders] had received from the Kennedy organization,” Humphrey complained. Such payments did not, O’Donnell noted, bother “the earthy and realistic people of West Virginia, who were accustomed to seeing the local candidate for sheriff carrying a little black bag that contained something other than a few bottles of Bourbon whiskey.”
On May 10, Kennedy won a landslide, 60.8 to 39.2 percent. As Joe Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary, said of the 1920 Harding victory, “It wasn’t a landslide, it was an earthquake.” It did not matter that the vote was not binding on the state’s twenty-five convention delegates. Kennedy had proved that he could amass a big majority among Protestants. Kennedy opponents tried to downplay the result with accusations of vote buying. An investigation by Eisenhower’s attorney general William P. Rogers turned up no significant wrongdoing. The editor of the Charleston Gazette “sent two of our best men out. They spent three to four weeks checking. Kennedy did not buy that election,” he concluded. “He sold himself to the voters.” It was a fair assessment. The Kennedy expenditures financing the slates were technically legal. The combination of Jack’s personal appeal, lavish Kennedy campaign spending, an emphasis on economic uplift, assurances about Jack’s commitment to separation of church and state, and Humphrey’s pointless candidacy after Wisconsin gave Jack the decisive victory. When Newsweek quoted Humphrey as believing that the election was stolen from him, he wrote the editor, “I have no complaints about the election—Senator Kennedy won it and I lost it.”
Within ten days after West Virginia, Jack had beaten Wayne Morse in Maryland by 70 to 17 percent and then defeated him in Oregon, his home state, by 51 to 32 percent. It was Kennedy’s seventh straight primary victory and convinced Jack’s advisers that he was on his way to the nomination.
THERE WERE OTHER HURDLES to be cleared, however. Because many liberals still had hopes of nominating Stevenson, the Kennedys tried to weaken him by getting Humphrey to support Jack. After Humphrey conceded defeat in West Virginia, he sent word to Bobby Kennedy that he was dropping out of the race. Bobby immediately went to see him at his hotel in Charleston. He was not a welcome guest. In the words of liberal attorney Joe Rauh, Bobby was “the devil as far as this camp [was] c
It was more important for Stevenson to back Kennedy at the convention; this would make Jack’s nomination a near certainty. Believing he was between eighty and one hundred votes short of the goal, Jack thought “it would be most helpful if Adlai could throw his votes . . . [my] way at the proper moment. If he hangs on to his votes,” Jack told Schlesinger through an intermediary, “it will only mean that either Symington or Johnson will benefit.”
Although Jack had little hope that Stevenson could be persuaded to support him, he was determined to try. Months before, he had sent word to Stevenson through Connecticut governor Abe Ribicoff that if he could not get the nomination, he would publicly announce his wish to run as Stevenson’s VP, “which would nail down the Catholic vote” for Stevenson. “If he comes out for me and I’ve got the nomination and I win,” he had also asked Ribicoff to tell Stevenson, “I’ll make him Secretary of State.” Stevenson would not agree. In May 1960, Jack approached Stevenson again. On his way back from a trip to the West Coast, Jack stopped at his home in Libertyville, Illinois. Stevenson refused to make any promises except not to join a “stop-Kennedy movement” or to encourage any draft of himself. Kennedy was disappointed. “God, why won’t he be satisfied with Secretary of State?” he said to Stevenson’s law firm partner Bill Blair. “I guess there’s nothing I can do,” he added, “except go out and collect as many votes as possible and hope that Stevenson will come along.” As he got on a plane to fly to Boston, Jack added, “Guess who the next person I see will be—the person who will say about Adlai, ‘I told you that son-of-a-bitch has been running for President every moment since 1956’?” Blair replied: “Daddy.”
Jack shared his father’s view and was furious with Stevenson for standing in his way. Jack believed that Stevenson had an overblown reputation as an intellectual. As the author of two books, Kennedy thought that he deserved to be seen as more cerebral than Stevenson, and told friends that he read more books in a week than Stevenson did in a year. He referred to Stevenson as a “switcher,” or bisexual, and wondered what women, who were his strongest supporters, saw in him. When Jack asked Stevenson’s friend Clayton Fritchey to explain the attraction, Fritchey replied, “He likes women, he likes to talk to them, to be around them. Do you like them?” Fritchey asked, twitting Jack for his reputation as a philanderer. “I wouldn’t go that far,” Jack answered. Kennedy preferred columnist Joe Alsop’s description of him as “a Stevenson with balls.”
Kennedy was even more angry at Johnson. After West Virginia, LBJ began saying that Kennedy had bought the election there and that the country would not want to nominate a president based on what four or five or even eight states did in primaries with limited voter participation. Johnson also told columnist Drew Pearson that “none of these big-city leaders in New York, New Jersey, or Illinois want Kennedy. Most of them are Catholics and they don’t want a Catholic heading up the ticket.” Johnson also went to see Stevenson. “Now, listen, Adlai, you just hang loose here,” he said. “Don’t make any commitments. You may still get it. Don’t help that kid, Kennedy. You just stay neutral.”
In May, after the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane and Moscow canceled a summit meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, Kennedy criticized the administration’s failure to suspend such flights before the summit and refusal to acknowledge that it had spied. Johnson, seeing an opportunity to illustrate Jack’s inexperience in foreign affairs, declared, “I am not prepared to apologize to Mr. Khrushchev.” He then excluded Kennedy from a telegram he, Stevenson, Rayburn, and Fulbright sent the Soviet leader asking him to hold the summit conference with the president.
Even Truman joined the anti-Kennedy chorus, calling at a televised press conference for an open convention—not a “prearranged . . . mockery . . . controlled by one . . . candidate”—and declaring that the world crisis required someone “with the greatest possible maturity and experience.” Jack publicly replied that “Mr. Truman regards an open convention as one which studies all the candidates, reviews their records, and then takes his advice.” Jack also said that Truman’s maturity test “would have kept Jefferson from writing the Declaration of Independence, Washington from commanding the Continental Army, [and] Madison from fathering the Constitution.”
Despite Stevenson’s refusal to bow out and Johnson’s belated effort to become the nominee, the smart money was still on Kennedy. At the end of May, Bobby calculated that Jack had 577 delegates and could pick up the additional 184 needed for nomination from seven other states. Joe wrote an English friend, “If we can get a break at all in Pennsylvania and a reasonable break in California, we’re home.” In June, after Jack told his father that the Pennsylvania delegation was now solidly behind him, Joe declared, “Well, that’s it. We’ve got a solid majority.” Johnson conceded privately that “those wanting to bet the favorite had better put their money on Jack.”
Events in the days before the convention opened in Los Angeles on Monday, July 11, however, persuaded the Kennedys to take nothing for granted. Johnson announced his candidacy on July 5, and began publicly attacking Jack. LBJ’s backers reminded journalists and delegates of Kennedy’s response to Joe McCarthy, quoted Eleanor Roosevelt’s criticism of Kennedy, publicized Jack’s absenteeism as a senator (“Where was Jack?” an LBJ flyer asked), and, most troubling to the Kennedys, publicly asked for an evaluation of Jack’s health, explaining that he had Addison’s disease, which raised questions about his capacity to serve as president. Johnson called Dr. Gerald Labiner, an internist in Los Angeles who had been a fellow at the Lahey Clinic and knew Kennedy’s medical history, to ask if Jack had Addison’s disease. Although it was an open secret among Jack’s physicians, Labiner refused to confirm Johnson’s assumption.
In private, Johnson was more scathing, especially about Jack’s age and well-being. “Did you hear the news?” Johnson asked Minnesota congressman Walter Judd. “What news?” Judd replied. “Jack’s pediatricians have just given him a clean bill of health!” Johnson described Kennedy to Lisagor as “a little scrawny fellow with rickets. Have you ever seen his ankles?” Johnson asked. “‘They’re about so round,’ and he traced a minute circle with his finger.” If Johnson had known the full story of Jack’s poor health, he would undoubtedly have leaked it to the press. But the Kennedys had managed largely to keep Jack’s health problems a secret. Johnson also predicted that if Jack became president, Joe would run the country and Bobby would become secretary of labor.
The evening before Johnson and Rayburn flew to Los Angeles, they met with Eisenhower at the White House. Ike later told journalist Earl Mazo that they regarded Kennedy “as a mediocrity in the Senate, as a nobody who had a rich father. . . . And they’d tell some of the God-damndest stories.” They went on for two hours telling Eisenhower, “Ike, for the good of the country, you cannot let that man become elected President. Now, he might get the nomination out there, he probably will, but he’s a dangerous man.” They repeated the phrase several times. They obviously wanted Eisenhower to say something publicly that would help them block Kennedy’s nomination. But Ike did no more than assure them that if Kennedy were the candidate, Dick Nixon would beat him.
Some of Johnson’s remarks got back to Bobby. “I knew he hated Jack. But I didn’t think he hated