Kennedy: The Classic Biography (22 page)

Back in Washington, we kept in touch with new and old political contacts through letters, Christmas cards, invitations and occasional telephone calls—sent out autographed copies of
Profiles in Courage
and later
The Strategy of Peace
—-and built up a comprehensive state-by-state file of information on some seventy thousand party leaders, officeholders, labor leaders, fund-raisers, delegates, “key Kennedy contacts” and “grass-roots supporters.”

The hectic schedule of appearances, and the other demands on our time, often diminished the quality of his speeches and often increased the number of generalities. With most college and many after-dinner audiences, he would call for questions from the floor and overcome the impression of a heavy speech with a sparkling command of all topics raised. In his speeches, moreover, he did not pull his punches or talk down to his audiences, but continued to spell out his high-minded views on controversial subjects. He chastised the United States Chamber of Commerce for its opposition to foreign aid, criticized several audiences of lawyers for the profession’s indifference to racketeering members, and engaged in verbal battles with many local unions who were unaware of their stake in labor reform legislation. He spoke in factual and scholarly fashion, without “corn” or oversimplification, about the swift revolutions of our age—in weapons, nationalism, automation and life expectancy.

He would not, however, engage in any direct attacks on President Eisenhower. Upon his return to the Senate after his 1955 convalescence, he had replied to a question on Eisenhower’s popularity: “He seems to be standing up pretty well in Palm Beach.” In these pre-1960 years he felt Eisenhower was standing up pretty well everywhere, and inasmuch as Ike would not be the candidate in 1960, Kennedy saw no reason to take him on except by indirection. Whatever his differences with the President, moreover, he retained a basic respect for the office. When his mention of Eisenhower was hissed at a Dartmouth speech, he quickly interjected, “You mustn’t hiss the President of the United States.” And when a Democratic meeting in Tucson asked him about Mrs. Eisenhower’s trip to a “beauty ranch,” allegedly at the taxpayers’ expense, he replied softly, “I wouldn’t criticize anything she does—she is a very fine woman.”

Whether his speeches were controversial or commonplace, it was clear that we were shorthanded in the speech-writing department. Final drafts with all his changes were often completed and retyped only hours before delivery. In Los Angeles in 1956 his reading copy was handed to him as he sat calmly but without manuscript listening to the toast-master introduce him. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1959, my briefcase, containing his only speech copy, was delayed with me en route to a Rotary luncheon. It was with horror that I heard him introduced on the car radio, and with relief that I heard him give the essence of his text extemporaneously.

We made political mistakes as well. Some state party leaders on whose support we were counting deserted us when the showdown approached. Some gubernatorial candidates we were advised to support in their primary fights were defeated, and their victors not surprisingly had little regard for John Kennedy. One friendly Governor, Oklahoma’s Howard Edmondson, lost control of his state’s delegation. Local Kennedy leaders in some states proved unable to make good on their predictions. At least two of the experienced “professionals” we recruited for their political contacts produced a net loss. One antagonized more delegates than he won, and the other turned up as a chief organizer for Stevenson. One National Committeeman asked Kennedy to be the star attraction at a barbecue he was giving at his home for that state’s leading Democratic donors—and then billed Kennedy for the cost. Letters and telegrams of invitation sent to unknown names in our massive files sometimes garnered eccentrics, children and Republicans.

On trips with several stops, the Senator, after an intensive visit of one state, would sometimes sigh at the prospect of “starting all over again” in another, meeting new faces and seeking new friends. Yet at the close of each visit he often expressed amazement at the number of men and women willing to devote time away from their jobs and families to help his candidacy, often with no thought and certainly with no assurance of any reward or recognition. He despaired in private at his inability to remember faces and names, but in time excelled all other candidates in this attribute. He also deprecated in private his knowledge of areas other than his own, but his zeal for learning and his ability to absorb information served him well.

In short, the primary purpose of these speech-making trips was not to talk but to listen and learn. He learned to tell the difference between volunteer workers who could talk and those who could also work, between a friendly comment (“Well do all we can for you”) and a firm commitment. (One governor, I noted in a 1959 memorandum to Abe Ribicoff before the National Governors’ Conference, “has succeeded, at various times, in convincing the Kennedy, Stevenson and Johnson camps that he is really for their man.”)

He learned also to tell the difference between those who were party leaders in name and those who actually spoke for delegates. In New York, for example, Congressman Charles Buckley had considerably less national fame but considerably more delegation influence than former National Chairman James Farley. In Illinois at that time, National Committeeman Jake Arvey had the national publicity, but Chicago’s Mayor Dick Daley had the votes. In Puerto Rico Governor Munoz Marin had more wisdom and stature, but State Chairman Jose Benitez had more Democratic delegates. Buckley, Daley and Benitez were for Kennedy.

Most of his fellow Senators, Kennedy found, had comparatively little political power in state and national conventions. Neither the veteran Carl Hayden of Arizona nor the freshman Tom Dodd of Connecticut, for example, could translate their endorsements of Johnson into a single vote in their pro-Kennedy unit-rule convention delegations.

He found factionalism and rivalries, based more on competing personalities than on ideologies, dividing the Democrats in nearly every state, and he learned to pick his way carefully through these contending forces. He did not confine his search for help to the possessors of high office. John Reynolds (later Governor of Wisconsin), Joseph Tydings (later Senator from Maryland), Robert McDonough (later State Chairman in West Virginia) and Teno Roncalio (later Congressman at Large from Wyoming), to name but four examples, were enlisted in the Kennedy cause long before their talents were equally recognized throughout their home states.

Just as John Kennedy represented a new era in Massachusetts Democratic politics, he gradually built up a corps of new Kennedy Democrats throughout the fifty states. Some were old friends from college or Navy days (it must have been a very large PT boat to have contained all the shipmates we met). Some were delegates who had supported him at the 1956 Convention and enjoyed the special bond that created. Some were friends from the Congress or candidates he had helped. Some were Catholics who felt a strong affinity for his hopes for a political breakthrough—although we took pains not to have Catholics as the most prominent Kennedy leaders in any state. But most of these recruits were simply Democratic workers and voters whose response to our various mailings and meetings indicated their attraction to the unique Kennedy brand of energetic idealism and common sense. Few promises of future patronage were asked and none was given, although it was made clear that, if Kennedy were elected, he would be looking for talented people whom he knew, trusted and could work with.

In many of the smaller states the Kennedy nucleus was started by a series of meetings I held in 1959 and 1960. I also represented the Senator at conferences of the Western and Midwestern Democratic organizations (telling one protesting Michiganer that I still voted in Nebraska and resided in a state—Virginia—-which extended further west than Detroit). While attending the Midwest Conference in Milwaukee, I asked—at the suggestion of Pat Lucey and John Reynolds—Mayor Ivan Nestingen of Madison, liberal, Lutheran and Scandinavian, to be our leader in Wisconsin. While attending the Western States Conference in Denver, I asked—at the suggestion of our key contact, Joe Dolan—an old Kennedy friend, Byron “Whizzer” White, to be our leader in Colorado. Both White and Nestingen were superb, as were others similarly recruited. In one state our Protestant-Scandinavian chairman not only had great ability and loyalty but so looked, talked and acted the part of the rustic, raw-boned corn-husker from what Eastern city dwellers called “the sticks” that the Senator accused me of finding him through some Hollywood type-casting studio.

But I knew full well that a national campaign required many more hands and far more experienced hands than my own. In a memorandum discussed with the Senator in December, 1958, in New York, I attempted to put his prior efforts into perspective and proposed the addition of several campaign aides. The most urgent need was for an administrative assistant to take over our lists of key Democrats, scheduling arrangements and political mail, and we agreed that his brother-in-law Steve Smith, who had smoothly overseen the administrative side of his 1958 Senatorial campaign, was the logical choice.

Steve did an outstanding job, quietly opening a political headquarters in the Esso Building located at the foot of Capitol Hill, and taking with him my card files, memoranda and assistant Jean Lewis. In time he was joined by two long-time Kennedy friends and hardheaded political aides from his Massachusetts Senate races, Larry O’Brien and Kenny O’Donnell; by Bob Wallace, formerly with Senator Douglas; by Pierre Salinger, a former newsman who left his post as investigator for the Senate Rackets Committee to become a superb campaign press secretary; and, finally, by Robert Kennedy, whose organizational and administrative skills, as well as his political judgment and ferocious dedication, made him the Senator’s first and only choice for campaign manager, though neither he nor anyone else had a formal title and there was no organization chart. Bob’s work with the Rackets Committee had made him controversial as well as famous, but the Senator shrewdly observed, “I’ll take all his enemies if I can have all his friends, too.”

In addition to these full-time campaigners, John Bailey of Connecticut and Hy Raskin of Chicago lent a part-time professional touch; Massachusetts Congressmen Macdonald and Boland helped out increasingly, as did Governors Ribicoff and Roberts; the Senator’s brother Teddy and brother-in-law Sargent Shriver focused on the West and Midwest; his father talked to friends in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Nevada and elsewhere; and Dave Powers of Boston, with his invaluable and indefatigable smile, began serving as the Senator’s personal aide on most of the major trips. He also used Jacques Lowe of New York as a semiofficial campaign photographer (although Jacques’s single-minded pursuit of his art at times annoyed the Senator, and it was with genuine delight one day in a remote corner of Oregon that he ordered the
Caroline
not to wait for him).

While expanding his political organization, the Senator also acted to beef up the intellectual side of his staff. We tried out nearly a dozen potential speech-writers, making commitments to none, giving an opportunity to all. To one experienced author I wrote: “In fairness, I must repeat my warning that our past experience would indicate that the chances of satisfying the Senator’s standards are slim.” One full-time writer, Richard Goodwin, was finally hired, with occasional assistance from many other sources.

At the same time, with the help of Professor Earl Latham of Amherst College and a graduate student in Cambridge, I initiated at the Senator’s request and in his name an informal committee to tap the ideas and information of scholars and thinkers in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Drawn primarily from the Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculties, with a smattering of names from other schools and professions, the members of our “Academic Advisory Committee” held their first organizational meeting with me at the Hotel Commander in Cambridge on December 3, 1958. Thereafter they met infrequently with the Senator or myself, answered written or telephoned inquiries, and produced a great number of well-documented position papers and recommendations on current problems and programs. Among the members of this group who would later occupy posts in the Kennedy administration or task forces were Professors Cox, Wiesner, Schlesinger, Galbraith, Rostow, Millikan, Keppel, Chayes, Nitze, Harris, Kaysen, Samuelson, Cohen, Hilsman and Tobin, as well as General James Gavin and numerous others.

Not all of their material was usable and even less was actually used. But it provided a fresh and reassuring reservoir of expert intellect at a time when the Senator’s speech schedule was exhausting both our intellectual and physical resources. Those able to talk personally with him were deeply impressed. Some of them who had similarly briefed Stevenson in 1956 were amazed at Kennedy’s familiarity with an even greater range of current issues.

No announcement was made at the time about the committee’s formation, but its very existence, when known, helped recruit Kennedy supporters in the liberal intellectual “community” who had leaned to Stevenson or Humphrey. This was in part its purpose, for the liberal intellectuals, with few delegates but many prestigious and articulate voices, could be a formidable foe, as Barkley and Kefauver had learned. Suspicious of Kennedy’s father, religion and supposed McCarthy history, they were in these pre-1960 days held in the Stevenson camp by Eleanor Roosevelt and others. Kennedy’s “academic advisers” formed an important beachhead on this front.

An effort was also made, with limited success, to set up similar groups in some of the difficult Presidential primary states. In addition, many of the original committee members joined in Written appeals to fellow professors and intellectuals in these states. Our largest single effort to woo the intellectuals was the mass mailing in the spring of 1960 of Kennedy’s
The Strategy of Peace
, a collection of his speeches, with particular emphasis on foreign policy, which we had prepared for campaign purposes. Editors, scientists, columnists, educators, reporters, authors, publishers, labor leaders, clergymen, public opinion leaders and liberal politicians in great number received copies of the book “personally” from the Senator. One previously pro-Humphrey professor responded: