Kennedy: The Classic Biography (19 page)

He could not change his age. He would not change his religion. And he paid no heed to a suggestion that he seek the governorship of Massachusetts in 1958 as a safer steppingstone to the Presidency. Moreover, the governors of large states—whose offices traditionally supplied both parties with a large share of their Presidential nominees—were less prominently mentioned than Senators in the 1960 Democratic lists. This was partly due to chance. Many of the large states had Republican governors. Many of the Democratic governors were too old or too young, or their talents were not well enough known (or too well known). But it was also due to the elevation of the Senate as a forum for Presidential candidates. The once-touted executive experience of most governors was confined in large part to the problems of providing state and local services; and although rising costs and populations required unpopular tax increases to finance those services, governors, unlike Senators, had comparatively little opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the far different national and particularly international issues with which Presidential campaigns were concerned.

It was not surprising, therefore, that at least four Senators—Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Symington—were regarded as the leading contenders for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1960; and Senators Kefauver, Gore, Lausche and Morse were also frequently mentioned. In 1958, when there were still forty-eight states and ninety-six Senators, Kennedy told the Washington Gridiron Club of a supposed press “survey” of each Senator’s preference for the Presidency, in which, he claimed, “ninety-six Senators each received one vote.”

The one Protestant-big-state governor whom Kennedy regarded as most likely to block him never became governor. Mayor Richardson Dilworth of Philadelphia, a friend of the Senator’s, had none of Kennedy’s liabilities and many of his assets—a photogenic appearance, a heroic war record, a name for idealism and integrity, and a background of wealth and education. The Senator was certain that Dilworth, if elected Governor of Pennsylvania in 1958, would be in 1960 an obvious choice for the Presidency in the same Northern and Eastern states to which Kennedy appealed and would also be more acceptable to Westerners and Southerners. But a candid reply by Dilworth to a Washington luncheon question on the recognition of Communist China gave his opponents within Pennsylvania’s Democratic hierarchy an excuse to discard him; and David Lawrence, who was not a Presidential contender, was elected Governor instead.

In that same crucial election of 1958, in which Kennedy won so overwhelmingly, three other Northern liberals—who, had they been in a position to bid for the Presidency, might well have cut deeply into Kennedy’s strength—all fared poorly: Averell Harriman lost his race for re-election as Governor of New York; Mennen Williams barely won reelection as Governor of Michigan; and Chester Bowles was denied the Senatorial nomination by the Connecticut State Democratic Convention. Bowles’s defeat was unfairly blamed by some on Kennedy, who actually took no part in any of these contests and would have favored all four men.

This assessment of the Presidential campaign scene, I should make clear, did not take place until after 1956. In earlier years the possibility of a Kennedy Presidential candidacy sometime in the future was frequently on my mind but never on his tongue. When I suggested to him on the Senate floor in 1954 that his support of a minor economy move “might look bad in some future national campaign,” he replied emphatically, “I can’t start basing my life on that or I’d be no good in this job or to myself.” Two years later, as he lay on his sickbed in Palm Beach, his worried wife asked me if he would someday be in the White House, and I told her what I had told Evelyn Lincoln after only one month’s work in his office: that someday he should be and could be President, but he would more likely be Vice President first.

The events of 1956 did not infect the Senator with the “Presidential bug,” altering his over-all ambitions and habits. But they did transform him almost instantly into a national leader of his party to whom the Presidency was no longer an impossibility.

He still did not talk in those terms. There was no single time and place at which he decided to try for the Presidency in 1960. As always, he was simply determined, in the new situation in which he found himself, to master the tides of time and events and see how far they could carry him. It was clear to me after the 1956 convention that the Presidency had become his primary goal, in politics and indeed in life. But he deliberately refrained from committing himself to the 1960 race—even privately, even in his own mind—until he was certain his nomination was possible. Volunteers requesting material or permission to form “Kennedy-for-President” clubs were asked to hold up (although their names and addresses were carefully saved in a “grass-roots support” file).

It was in an Evansville, Indiana, hotel room in October, 1959, that he said, as we chatted late one night about the nomination, “I think now I can make it”—a surprising statement to me since I had never thought he thought otherwise. Even then a final public decision was withheld until he felt it was both necessary and appropriate. A questioner in Wichita, Kansas, in November, 1959, asked him at least to name his favorite candidate. “I do have a favorite candidate,” replied the Senator, refusing to be trapped. “But until he has the guts to declare he’s a candidate, I’m not going to announce my support of him.” For “there is,” he told a reporter who pretended to be puzzled over Kennedy’s refusal to announce, “a time and place for everything.”

PRE-1960 TRAVELS

Autumn, 1956, was a time of campaigning for the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket. The Massachusetts Senator emerged from the spectacular Vice Presidential balloting more sought after by party members than any Democrat other than the two nominees. Covering more than thirty thousand miles in twenty-four states, he made over 150 speeches and appearances in the course of six weeks. As we worked one night that summer on his schedule, he suddenly said, “Why don’t you come along?” And on September 18, 1956, we began a series of two-man travels which over the next few years would take us into every state—most of them several times—seeking votes for Stevenson in 1956, seeking votes for Senatorial, state and local candidates in 1957-1958-1959, and seeking friends for Kennedy at every stop.

During these years, with the exception of a few overnight trips by train, we traveled exclusively by plane. The acquisition by the Kennedy family in 1959 of a private plane—later called the
Caroline
after his daughter, born in 1957—made this mode of travel more comfortable and convenient. The
Caroline
was a converted Convair complete with desk, galley and bedroom. But for more than two years, although many of the short hops and a few of the longer trips were by private plane, we relied primarily on the regular commercial carriers. In time we composed our own private rating of all the major airlines. He deplored the fact that one airline assigned its most senior stewardesses to transcontinental flights, that another used three-across seats on first-class flights and that another served invariably tasteless food. We flew from coast to coast in the prejet days when each trip was more than eight hours, the Senator working, napping, talking, reviewing his speeches and schedule, and reading newspapers, magazines and books of all kinds. Franklin’s
Autobiography
, I recall, occupied most of one trip.

We rarely missed a plane and barely caught most of them. He canceled more appearances on the basis of his Senate duties or poor health than as a result of bad flying weather, but I was grateful that no large commercial airline could be induced to risk flying its planes in storms by the most persuasive United States Senator. The pilots of private planes, on the other hand, were often more willing to be daring—although I appreciated one captain who told me with some fervor, “Listen, there’s only one life on this plane that’s important to me—mine—and I’m not risking it for the Senator or anyone else!”

We flew in all kinds of little planes, in all kinds of weather, with all kinds of pilots—experienced and inexperienced, professional and amateur, rested and fatigued. On a flight from Phoenix to Denver, I had to hold the plane door closed. On a flight to Rockport, Maine, the pilot could not find the landing strip, and we circled over the area as he peered out one side and the Senator, sitting in the copilot’s seat, looked out the other. In order to appear on time at a corn-picking contest, we landed in an Iowa cornfield. After a flight over the Green Mountains of Vermont, our pilot confided that his compass was broken. We were tossed for hours in a snowstorm over the Rockies and in a fog over Lake Michigan. In pelting rain we took off in an amphibious plane from a choppy, timber-filled bay in Alaska, with the Senator working the windshield wiper by hand.

The only moment of real danger occurred on a 1956 flight to Reno, Nevada, from Twin Falls, Idaho. Our pilot, an Idaho politician who enjoyed flying his little single-engine plane as a hobby, was confessing openly to fatigue, having picked us up that morning in Salt Lake City. With high mountains and darkness ahead, he decided to land at Elko, Nevada, and find a professional pilot who could take us the rest of the way. Just as we were approaching the Elko landing strip (“We were coming in with the wind instead of against it,” the Senator later insisted), the little plane veered over on one side. The Senator gave me a swift, half-serious, half-humorous glance, and then the plane righted itself for a somewhat bumpy landing. Another pilot in another single-engine plane took us over the mountains by moonlight, all the time assuring us that one engine was really as safe as two. We landed at one end of the Reno Airport and trudged in with our bags, just as the Democratic dignitaries and brass band awaiting us marched out to meet a more dignified twin-engine plane at the other end of the field bearing two surprised industrialists.

We had stormy flights in the
Caroline
as well, but the Senator was always relaxed—working, eating or napping in its comfortable cabin, and demonstrating complete and well-placed confidence in the competence of his pilot, Howard Baer. A rough ride in the
Caroline
bore no resemblance to rough rides of earlier years, and this also made it possible for Jacqueline to join us more often.

The locations in which the Senator spoke varied as widely as the transportation. He addressed crowds on noisy street corners, at airports, on fairgrounds, in theaters, armories, high schools, state capitols, restaurants, gambling casinos, hotels, pool halls, union halls, lodge halls and convention halls of every size and shape. He learned the art of swiftly getting down from the speaker’s stand into a crowd for handshaking instead of being trapped by a few eager voters behind the head table. He learned to pause when trains whistled or airplanes flew over—to laugh when a tray of dishes crashed (or, as in one hall, when the flag fell practically on him)—and to shout when the amplifying system broke down (once bellowing into the microphone just as it became operative again).

In addition to Democratic meetings, he addressed state legislatures, labor conventions, bar associations, civic groups and many colleges and universities. One occasion in 1960 was, he said, “the first time in fourteen years of politics that I have ever heard of a Democratic meeting and the Rotary Club joining together. I don’t know whether it means the Democrats are broad-minded or the Rotary Club is broad-minded, but I am all for it.” An earlier civic group had required him to abide by their tradition of each honored guest’s signing the record in his own blood. He complied without protest—it was not the worst foolishness our Presidential candidates must endure.

On a national level he spoke to farmer, labor, Young Democratic, ethnic, civic and business conventions. His Senate duties enabled him to accept less than 4 percent of the hundreds of invitations that poured into his office, many of them from important Democratic candidates or fund-raising dinner chairmen. But all were carefully screened—or generated—to make certain that no state or major city was neglected. As my Christmas present to him in 1956, I had constructed a map of the United States shaded to show his strength in the Vice Presidential balloting. The almost totally blank areas west of the Mississippi made clear the task confronting him if he was to become a national figure and explained the frequency of his visits to small Western and Midwestern states.

While he approached with great caution the home states of other potential candidates, he undertook to get himself invited to any area not covered by spontaneous invitations. Friends associated with the labor movement, colleges and state leagues of municipalities could usually make the right contact whenever politicians could not.

He also approached Southern states with some caution. He wanted to acknowledge their support for him at the 1956 convention and to demonstrate that his religion would not frighten Southern voters away. But to avoid charges of segregated audiences or auspices, he spoke in the South primarily to universities and nonpolitical organizations. He could not and did not dodge the race issue, however. In Georgia to deliver a 1957 commencement address, he was asked during a state-wide telecast with the two Georgia Senators, contrary to a previous understanding, about his views on the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision. He promptly replied that he had endorsed it as the law of the land.

That fall, shortly after he had upheld President Eisenhower’s use of Federal forces in Little Rock, Arkansas, to quell mob defiance of a school desegregation court order, the Senator refused to default on a commitment to Congressman Frank Smith to address the Mississippi Young Democrats. Both Northerners and Southerners warned him that he could only lose in both areas by speaking in Mississippi, and he arrived to find that Republican State Chairman Yeager had challenged him to repeat his views on the segregation issue. As he relaxed in the bathtub of his hotel room, he dictated to me an insertion in his speech, emphasizing “the same thing I told my own city of Boston.”