An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
Calling Johnson’s tactics “despicable,” the Kennedys released statements denying that Jack had “an ailment classically described as Addison’s Disease” and describing Jack’s health as “excellent.” The statements more than shaded the truth: While Jack might not have had classical or primary Addison’s, at a minimum, he had a secondary form of the ailment. The Kennedys had never allowed Eugene Cohen, Jack’s endocrinologist, “the opportunity to carry out the necessary tests that would have been required to establish the diagnosis,” Cohen told Dr. Seymour Reichlin, another endocrinologist. “Thus, [Cohen] could never say definitively that Kennedy had the disease.” If it were known, however, that he also suffered from colitis, compression fractures of his spine, which forced him to take a variety of pain medications, and chronic prostatitis, it could have raised substantial doubts about his fitness for the presidency. Kennedy’s friend Bill Walton said later that during the campaign an aide followed Jack everywhere with a special little bag containing the medical support needed all the time. When the medical bag was misplaced during a campaign trip to Connecticut, Kennedy called up Abe Ribicoff and said, “There’s a medical bag floating around and it can’t get in anybody’s hands. . . . You have to find that bag. It would be murder” if the wrong people got hold of it and revealed its contents, which would have shown Jack’s reliance on so many drugs. (The bag was recovered.)
All the political churning in the run-up to the convention made the Kennedys apprehensive. They expected to win. But history had demonstrated that conventions were volatile and could produce unpredictable results. Two Democratic front-runners earlier in the century—Champ Clark in 1912 and William G. McAdoo in 1924—had found themselves upended by events beyond their control. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. counseled against assuming anything. He described a convention as “far too fluid and hysterical a phenomenon for exact history. Everything happens at once and everywhere, and everything changes too quickly. People talk too much, smoke too much, rush too much and sleep too little. Fatigue tightens nerves and produces susceptibility to rumor and panic. No one can see a convention whole. . . . At the time it is all a confusion; in retrospect it is all a blur.”
During a July 10 interview on Meet the Press, Jack was asked if he thought the convention was “wrapped up.” “No, I don’t,” he replied. “No convention is.” While he predicted a victory, he would not say on which ballot. Nor would he acknowledge his concern that a failure to win on the first ballot could lead to disaster. When Bobby was asked later why they had not given much initial thought to who would be vice president, he answered: “We wanted to just try to get the nomination. . . . We were counting votes. We had to win on the first ballot. We only won by fifteen votes. . . . I think in North Dakota and South Dakota we won it by half a vote. California was falling apart. . . . [New York’s] Carmine De Sapio came to me and said what we’d like to do is make a deal—30 votes will go to Lyndon Johnson and then you’ll get them all back on the second ballot. I said to hell with that; we’re going to win it on the first ballot. So you know, it was all that kind of business. There wasn’t any place that was stable.” They were worried that support in a number of states, especially Minnesota, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, might erode on second and third ballots and open the way for LBJ to win the nomination. Jack told Sorensen that if they did not win by the second ballot, it would be “never.” Joe Kennedy stopped in Las Vegas on his way to Los Angeles to place a substantial bet on Jack’s nomination. He was less interested in winning money than in encouraging a bandwagon psychology by reducing the odds on Jack’s success.
Although Stevenson had too few delegates to be nominated, his backers were so vocal, so intense, that they sustained illusions of a possible victory. When Harris Wofford arrived at the convention, he “found thousands of supporters marching and chanting, ‘We want Stevenson.’ Inside, other thousands in the galleries were continuing the cry at each opportunity. The next afternoon, when Stevenson himself entered to sit in the Illinois delegation, he received a huge ovation and was almost carried to the platform in a sea of enthusiasm.” “This was more than a demonstration,” Teddy White wrote later, “it was an explosion.”
Stevenson, swept up in the outpouring of emotion, lost perspective and tried to engineer a last-minute coup on his own behalf. He asked Richard Daley, who had announced the Illinois delegation for Kennedy, to switch on the first ballot. According to Bobby Kennedy, Stevenson told Daley, “‘We’ve got to have a favorite son and I come from Illinois, and you’ve got to be with me because it would be embarrassing if I don’t have Illinois.’ And Dick Daley almost threw him out of the office. He said Illinois had met their responsibilities to Adlai Stevenson and that they had pledged to Jack Kennedy and that’s the way they were going. . . . It seemed to us to be the actions of an old woman.” Daley recalled telling Stevenson that he had no support in the delegation and was lucky to have the two votes he got out of sixty-eight.
Nothing was left to chance. When Johnson took a fresh swipe at Kennedy on foreign affairs, declaring that “the forces of evil . . . will have no mercy for innocence, no gallantry for inexperience,” they prepared a fact sheet on Lyndon Johnson’s limited understanding of foreign affairs compared to Kennedy’s travels, knowledge, and experience. Kennedy volunteers took up a vigil over each of the fifty-four delegations. They ate, drank, and all but lived with them, reporting on their “moods, questions, and trends, and, above all . . . their votes.” Bobby insisted on practically having the name, address, and telephone number of every half vote. “I don’t want generalities or guesses,” he said. “There’s no point in our fooling ourselves. I want the cold facts.” When one volunteer complained at being asked to appear at 8:00 A.M. the next morning after three nights with almost no sleep, Bobby sharply responded, “Look, nobody asked you here. . . . If this is too tough for you, let us know and we’ll get somebody else.”
The Kennedy organization orchestrated Jack’s every move. Dave Powers found Jack a three-bedroom “hideaway” penthouse apartment on North Rossmore Avenue, a fifteen-minute drive from the downtown Biltmore Hotel, where Bobby set up campaign headquarters in an eighth-floor triple suite from which he exercised “precise, taut, disciplined” control. A floor above, Jack had a private suite adjacent to a press room from which Salinger turned out a daily four-page paper, the “Kennedy Convention News,” that was delivered to every delegate’s room. A band playing “High Hopes” and dancing girls dressed in “colorful candy-striped outfits” were part of a crowd of five thousand people meeting Jack at L.A.’s airport on Saturday, July 9. Another well-planned demonstration greeted Jack’s arrival at the Biltmore, where he worked his way through crowds of well-wishers at a Kennedy hospitality suite. In his ninth-floor sitting room, he studied the latest delegate counts and conferred with former New York governor Averell Harriman, George Meany, Jim Farley, and Mike Prendergast. After an NBC-TV interview, he joined Pennsylvania governor Dave Lawrence, who briefed him on conversations with several other big-city and state party leaders.
Jack spent Sunday, July 10, seeing several governors, attending a brunch for the California delegation, greeting twenty-five hundred convention delegates at a reception in the Biltmore ballroom, speaking to an NAACP conference at the Shrine Auditorium, attending a black-tie Democratic National Committee dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and appearing on TV network news programs. The pace picked up on Monday and Tuesday, when Jack, in a white air-conditioned Cadillac equipped with a telephone (a rarity in 1960), sped from one state caucus to another, shaking hands, making brief remarks, and answering questions. Inviting media coverage and arranging a Kennedy press conference with 750 journalists, the campaign added to the picture of an energetic, healthy, smiling candidate moving confidently toward an inevitable victory.
Despite all the outward signs of optimism, developments on Tuesday increased apprehensions among Kennedy supporters. In response to the passionate demonstrations for Stevenson, the California delegation shifted from Kenned
Simultaneously, Johnson kept up his attacks. Before the Washington state delegation he pilloried Joe Kennedy as a Nazi appeaser: “I wasn’t any Chamberlain—umbrella policy man,” he declared. “I never thought Hitler was right.” Privately, Johnson’s supporters asked whether a Catholic could put the interests of the country ahead of those of his church. On Tuesday afternoon, Johnson challenged Jack to a debate before the Massachusetts and Texas delegations. When Kennedy accepted, Johnson assailed his voting record on farm legislation and civil rights, and his absenteeism. Jack deftly turned aside the criticism by saying he saw no need for a debate with Johnson “because I don’t think that Senator Johnson and I disagree on the great issues that face us.” Jack then praised LBJ’s record as majority leader and drew laughter by promising to support him for another term.
The excitement at the convention increased on Wednesday with the formal nominations of Johnson, Kennedy, and Stevenson. (Recognizing the hopelessness of his candidacy, Symington had dropped out.) The explosion of enthusiasm for Stevenson exceeded anything seen at a Democratic convention since William Jennings Bryan had gained the nomination on an emotional tide of protest in 1896. A brilliantly cadenced speech by Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy ignited the demonstration. “Do not reject this man,” McCarthy pleaded. “Do not reject this man who has made us all proud to be Democrats. Do not leave this prophet without honor in his own party.” Having filled the floor and packed the galleries with their supporters, Stevenson’s backers cheered, shouted, sang, chanted, marched, and snake-danced their way around the hall, shouting, “We want Stevenson.” Only after party officials had turned out the lights could they restore order. Watching the spectacle on television at his father’s rented Beverly Hills estate, Jack said, “Don’t worry, Dad. Stevenson has everything but delegates.” Joe was not so sure. The night before at a dinner party, he had been scathing about Stevenson’s refusal to step aside: “Your man must be out of his mind,” Joe said to Bill Blair. When Blair replied that he was for Jack, Joe “shook his fist at me and said, ‘You’ve got 24 hours.’”
Jack was right about Stevenson’s delegate support. But Bobby refused to take the nomination for granted. Earlier in the day, he had told organizers, “We can’t miss a trick in the next twelve hours. If we don’t win tonight, we’re dead.” Although they gained twice as many delegates as Johnson on the first ballot, they did not clinch the victory until the end of the roll call, when Wyoming’s fifteen votes gave them 763 delegates, two more than the required majority. At the convention hall, where Jack and Bobby had a private moment together after the nomination, Jack could be seen smiling and Bobby, with his customary intensity and head bowed, repeatedly hitting the open palm of his left hand with the fist of his right hand. The next day, when Dick Daley tried to sell Jack on a vice presidential candidate with a reminder of how much he had done to help him get the nomination, Kennedy responded, “Not you nor anybody else nominated us. We did it ourselves.”
CHAPTER 8
Election
I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American national election.
— Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas”
BECAUSE VICE PRESIDENTS traditionally counted for little after assuming office, presidential nominees thought almost exclusively about how their choice would affect the coming election. Indifference to qualifications had been so pronounced that in 1908, William Jennings Bryan had chosen an unknown wealthy eighty-four-year-old who would help finance his campaign. Woodrow Wilson had commented on the office, “In saying how little there is to be said about it, one has evidently said all there is to say.” Despite seven presidential deaths elevating vice presidents, presidential candidates’ thinking about possible successors remained largely the same. As recently as 1945, after making Truman his VP, Roosevelt had failed to inform him about the atomic bomb. The onset of the Cold War and Nixon’s rise to political prominence, however, had made the vice presidency a more important office. And though Kennedy at age forty-three saw no reason to worry about dying, at least not since he had begun using replacement cortisone in 1947, he wanted someone who could help in a close election and have indisputable competence as a possible successor.
A rich field of candidates to choose from complicated Kennedy’s decision. Humphrey, Johnson, and Symington were obvious front-runners, because of their rival candidacies and their standing as experienced congressional leaders. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, an expert on defense issues, and even Stevenson were other possibilities.
Why and how Kennedy made his decision seems beyond precise recounting. We know that he had been thinking about the question for some time before the convention. On June 29, Sorensen had given him a list of twenty-one possibilities. According to Sorensen, Kennedy consulted other party leaders, who put Humphrey, Stevenson, Johnson, Symington, Minnesota liberal Orville Freeman, and Jackson at the top of their lists. Believing that it was an effective means to discourage bitter-end opposition from rivals for the presidency who were also interested in the second spot, Kennedy gave no clear indication of whom he would choose.
Liberal opposition to Kennedy before and during the convention reduced the likelihood that he would select someone from that camp. Stevenson’s refusal to step aside and Humphrey’s continuing resistance to Jack’s nomination pushed them outside the circle. On July 14, the day after Jack’s selection, when news commentator Edward Morgan privately asked him if he would give the vice presidency to Humphrey, Kennedy replied, “No, absolutely not. The credibility of that camp has been destroyed.” As Stevenson, Humphrey, and Freeman urged party unity at the convention before Jack gave his acceptance speech, Joe, watching the proceedings at Time-Life publisher Henry Luce’s house, made snide remarks about each of them. “There was no respect for any of these liberals,” Luce said. “He just thought they were all fools on whom he had played this giant trick.”
To be sure, in a race against Nixon, liberal support of the party’s nominee was a given, but Kennedy’s past problems with liberals and an aftermath of anger at him over Stevenson’s defeat gave him reason to worry that some of them might stay away from the polls. He had tried to accommodate them by backing the strongest possible civil rights plank in the party’s platform and telling Martin Luther King Jr. privately and the NAACP publicly that he wanted “no compromise of basic principles—no evasion of basic controversies—and no second-class citizenship for any American anywhere in this country.” In his speech to the NAACP a few days before his nomination, he said it was not enough to fight segregation only in the South; he intended to combat “the more subtle but equally vicious forms of discrimination that are found in the clubs and churches and neighborhoods of the rest of the country.” He also planned to use the “immense moral authority of the White House . . . to offer leadership and inspiration. . . . And the immense legal authority of the White House” to protect voting rights, end school segregation, and assure equal opportunity in federally funded jobs and housing.
Kennedy himself, at the end of June and again at the convention, had told Clark Clifford that he favored Symington. Labor leaders were partial to him, and his candidacy might help in the Midwest, where Jack did not think he would do well. The journalist John Seigenthaler of the Nashville Tennessean cited Robert Kennedy as also saying that Symington was Kennedy’s choice. But, in fact, Symington was no more than a stalking-horse. Truman’s backing for Symington was more a minus than a plus: Richard Daley’s assertion that Symington’s appeal downstate could make the difference in Illinois and Sorensen’s prediction that he could help with farmers were insufficient to counter his youth. He was “too much like JFK (We don’t want the ticket referred to as ‘the w
The logical choice seemed to be Lyndon Johnson. At a personal level, the Kennedys were not well-disposed toward him. He had said harsh things about Jack and Joe and antagonized Bobby by rejecting his father’s suggestion of an LBJ-JFK ticket in 1956. In November 1959, when Jack had sent Bobby to see Johnson at his Texas ranch to ask if he was running, Johnson, in some peculiar test of manhood or as a way of one-upping the Kennedys, insisted that he and Bobby hunt deer. When Bobby was knocked to the ground and cut above the eye by the recoil of a shotgun Johnson had lent him, Johnson exclaimed, “Son, you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.” It was an indication of his low regard for the whole Kennedy clan.
But with so much at stake, Jack put aside personal feelings about Johnson. Annoyance at Johnson for his attacks on Joe and Jack did not diminish the belief that he was well qualified to be president, if it ever came to that. In 1958, Kennedy had told MIT economist Walt W. Rostow that “the Democratic party owes Johnson the nomination. He’s earned it. He wants the same things for the country that I do. But it’s too close to Appomattox for Johnson to be nominated and elected. So, therefore, I feel free to run.”
Politically, Johnson seemed the most likely of all to help win crucial states. The traditionally solid Democratic South promised to be a sharply contested battleground. An overtly liberal running mate wouldn’t net any additional Kennedy votes in that region. In addition, reluctance among southern Protestants to vote for a Catholic worried Jack and encouraged him to seek an advantage in Texas and across the South by taking Johnson.
On Monday, July 11, when columnist Joe Alsop and Washington Post publisher Phil Graham urged Kennedy to pick Johnson, he “immediately agreed, so immediately as to leave me doubting the easy triumph,” Graham recalled, “and I therefore restated the matter, urging him not to count on Johnson’s turning it down but to offer the Vpship so persuasively as to win Johnson over. Kennedy was decisive in saying that was his intention, pointing out that Johnson would help the ticket not only in the South but in important segments of the Party all over the country.” Johnson responded skeptically to the news, saying “he supposed the same message was going out to all the candidates.”