Kennedy: The Classic Biography (35 page)

Ideas for speeches came from a variety of sources, including newsmen, advance men and the Washington research and speech staff. Some thoughts had been brewing for months. The Peace Corps proposal, for example, was based on the Mormon and other voluntary religious service efforts, on an editorial Kennedy had read years earlier, on a speech by General Gavin, on a luncheon I had with a Philadelphia businessman, on the suggestions of his academic advisers, on legislation previously introduced and on the written response to a spontaneous late-night challenge he issued to Michigan students.

In many cases the topic was suggested by the interests or economic conditions of the local community. But he made no effort to appease or comfort each audience. Addressing the Steelworkers Convention after their president had proposed a thirty-two-hour work week, he said the Communist challenge required this nation to meet its unemployment problems by creating abundance rather than rationing scarcity.

The “new” Nixon continually engaged in personalities. (Nixon favorites: “It’s not Jack’s money he’s spending, it’s yours…. He may have more dollars but you have more sense…. I’m sick and tired of his whining.”) When Nixon called him too “naive and inexperienced” to stand up to Khrushchev,” and GOP National Chairman Morton accused him of “giving aid and comfort to the Communists” by deploring America’s pace, Kennedy struck back hard: “It is not naive to call for increased strength. It is naïve to think that freedom can prevail without it…. Personal attacks and insults will not halt the spread of Communism. Nor will they win the November election.”

Kennedy, while constantly deriding Nixon’s record and speeches, refused to touch rumors of a Nixon mortgage scandal, acquitted Nixon of any role in religious bigotry, and stepped over the borders of fair comment only twice that I remember: once when he called Nixon’s original position on risking war for Quemoy and Matsu “trigger-happy” and once when, in answering a question, he referred to Nixon’s support by the Ku Klux Klan (although he quickly went on to emphasize that he knew Nixon had no sympathy with the Klan viewpoint). Some time after Nixon had been hospitalized with a knee infection, Kennedy pointed out to a news conference that he had pledged not to “mention him, unless I could praise him, until he got out of the hospital—and I have not mentioned him.”

But as soon as Nixon was out campaigning again, Kennedy was briefed daily on his opponent’s speeches and tore into them almost daily. The Vice President, he reported on one occasion, had said unemployment “cannot become a significant issue in the minds of a great many people” unless it goes over 4.5 million. “I would think it would become a significant issue to the 4,499,000…unemployed.” And throughout Truman territory he said, “Last Thursday night Mr. Nixon dismissed me as ‘another Truman.’ I regard that as a great compliment, and I have no hesitation in returning the compliment. I consider him another Dewey.”

He could be equally sharp with other attackers. Told at a press conference of the latest in a series of harsh statements by Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, with whom he had tangled in the Senate, he referred to Scott’s membership on the Republican “Truth Squad” and added, “He may well have lost his membership today.”

While campaigning was built around speeches, equally important were the motorcades, handshaking, personal appearances and repeated question-and-answer sessions. In the latter, Kennedy was at his best— fluent, factual and deft, with a natural eloquence. When written questions were used, those selected were usually screened by Goodwin or me—not to avoid controversial issues, such as religion and agriculture, but to make certain they were included in the allotted time. Occasionally we planted a question, usually humorous or homey questions that had spontaneously appeared in earlier audiences. But even these were not told to the candidate in advance, for he preferred not to be forewarned.

Questions on his religion did not need to be planted in his first question-and-answer session. Asked whether a Catholic
could
be elected President, he replied, “With all due respect, it seems to me that question is worded wrongly. Can an American who happens to be a Catholic be elected President?” When he spoke from the rear platform of his train at Modesto, California, a question was shouted from the crowd: “Do you believe all Protestants are heretics?” “No,” the Senator shot back. “And I hope you don’t believe all Catholics are.” At another train stop in Jackson, Michigan, a young student called up: “What shall I tell my parents who don’t want to vote for you because of your religion?” “Ask them to study my statements and record,” said the Senator, “and then…tell them to read the U.S. Constitution, which says there shall be no religious test for office.”

“If 99 percent of the population were Catholic,” he told a nationwide TV panel, referring to a POAU prediction that if the United States ever became 51 percent Catholic, Protestants would be treated as second-class citizens and damned souls, “I would still be opposed to…an official state church. I do not want civil power combined with religious power…. If some other Catholic in another country holds a different view, that’s their right, but I want to make it clear that I am committed, as a matter of deep personal conviction, to this separation. Now what is there left to say?”

Campaigning also meant talking with the press, at first formally in press conferences and then informally on plane and train. Reporters covering Nixon soon memorized the banal sentimentalities he repeated in each speech and found them difficult to report. Their difficulty in reporting Kennedy’s speeches was his tendency to be what they nicknamed a “text deviate,” his rapid-fire interjection of more statistics and statements than they could note. But his unusual accessibility to reporters, his frank and friendly talks with them, his growing confidence, and the excitement generated by his crowds after the first television debate, all contributed to their growing respect for Kennedy and their glowing dispatches back home. There was, moreover, an atmosphere of conviviality in the Kennedy press entourage, encouraged by Salinger’s efficient arrangements for their baggage, transportation, accommodations, instant speech transcripts and inflated crowd estimates from friendly local officials, and heightened by the attitude of enthusiasm and gaiety which spread from the candidate to his staff to the press. (The long weeks of travel together also encouraged the flowering of a certain amount of romance between secretaries, reporters and photographers, thereby adding to the atmosphere of camaraderie.)

For one long October day in Hyannis Port, and briefly in New York, on the plane and elsewhere, campaigning also meant strategy sessions with all the top team from Washington. But these sessions were largely confined to confirming the wisdom of what the candidate was already doing: identifying Nixon with Republicanism, not with Eisenhower.

Finally, campaigning meant seemingly endless travel, on and off planes, trains, buses, cars.

Although forty-five of the fifty states were visited, and no state could be taken for granted, those states with slender electoral totals or slim Democratic chances were visited only once in order to concentrate on more critical areas. Roughly three-quarters of the candidate’s time was spent in the twenty-four most doubtful states and nearly three-fifths of his time in the seven largest. These seven, plus most of New England and the South, were the basis of his campaign strategy. The schedule was adjusted from time to time in accordance with the results of polls and political reports. Time did not permit him to carry out his original plan to open in Hawaii. Nevada, like Hawaii, had too few electoral votes to be squeezed in; and Nebraska was included only for a late-summer briefing at Strategic Air Command Headquarters. Arkansas was included only to the degree that the town of Texarkana is in Arkansas as well as Texas, and Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana were thought better left to local loyalists and Lyndon Johnson.

In fact, the entire South depended considerably on Johnson, and Kennedy was delighted with the reports on his running mate’s progress in that area. Campaigning as the grandson of a Confederate soldier and as a more hard-hitting partisan than previously, the Majority Leader whistle-stopped through Dixie decrying the religious issue, deriding Nixon’s experience, detailing Republican shortcomings, warning of the dangers of divided government, praising Kennedy, mixing in a few homely Texas stories, reminiscing about his kinship with each state and refusing to back down on civil rights. Unlike his opposite number, Ambassador Lodge, Johnson at no time made any statement which caused Kennedy embarrassment or regret. He was aided, as had been the Kennedy girls on an earlier swing, by the remarkable campaign talents of his wife Lady Bird.

Equally as important as Johnson’s platform “pitch” was the persuasive pressure he brought to bear on Southern Senators, governors and local leaders who had theretofore refused to work for a politically unpopular ticket. Many had merely announced their support, denounced the platform and done nothing further. Others had remained wholly mute. But Johnson impressed them with the practical political fact that, win or lose, he and Kennedy would have considerable influence over the passage of legislation and the pipeline to public funds—“and we’re going to win.” In Virginia Harry Byrd would not come to listen. In South Carolina Strom Thurmond was as opposed as always. But elsewhere Johnson’s powerful listeners got the point and climbed aboard not only the campaign train but the campaign team.

While Lyndon Johnson stemmed the tide of Southern white revolt, John Kennedy’s very human call to Negro leader Martin Luther King’s pregnant wife on the occasion of his arrest by a Georgia traffic officer—combined with Bob Kennedy’s indignant protest to the judge who jailed him—may have impressed both Negroes and whites because of the political risk. More on that and other underlying factors later.

THE PERSISTENT RELIGIOUS ISSUE

The roughest issue in the South, as elsewhere, was religion. The issue was quickly brought to a head on September 7 with the founding of a new organization of very prominent Protestant clergymen, the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom. At the close of their daylong meeting behind closed doors, a public statement laid down a barrage of challenges to Senator Kennedy which made clear that, whatever his answers would be, his religion made him unacceptable for the Presidency. Kennedy, they said, had not repudiated all the teachings of his church and could not be free of its hierarchy’s “determined efforts…to breach the wall of separation of church and state.” Like Khrushchev, said the Rev. Harold Ockenga of Boston, Kennedy is “a captive of a system.”
⁴

Presiding over the Conference and serving as its spokesman to the press was a prominent Republican clergyman, author and lecturer, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale of New York. (Peale was also a friend of Nixon’s, and when asked why the group had raised no questions on Nixon’s religion, Peale replied, “I didn’t know that he ever let it bother him.”) No Catholics, Jews or liberal Protestants had been invited, he said, and no details would be given out on who organized the Conference, who financed it or who drafted its declaration. During the Conference Peale had been overheard saying, “Our American culture is at stake. I don’t say it won’t survive [Kennedy’s election], but it won’t be what it was.” (Upon hearing this Kennedy remarked, “I would like to think he was complimenting me, but I’m not sure he was.”)

The “Peale group,” as it was thereafter called, stirred a wave of anger and dismay from coast to coast. Many who had previously assumed that intolerance was confined to “backwoods Bible-thumpers” were shocked by the transparent unfairness of three aspects of the meeting:

1. Men well known to be Republicans had pretended their opposition to Kennedy was for religious reasons.
   

2. Protestant clergymen opposed to the Catholic Church’s intervention in politics showed no compunction about openly intervening themselves.
   

3. The political position of the Catholic Church had not only been inaccurately described but also inaccurately ascribed to Senator Kennedy, whose own views and legislative votes the group largely discounted.
   

There was nothing new about any of these three phenomena. Similar attacks had been made in all parts of the country, in intellectual as well as scurrilous tones, and by prominent preachers as well as hate groups. But the “Peale group” was the best publicized. One result was the withdrawal by several newspapers of Peale’s spiritual advice column and the withdrawal by Dr. Peale from the “Peale group.” He had no disagreement with what was said and done but wanted everyone to know that he had nothing to do with it. “I do not now or never have had any relationship with the group, except attendance upon this one meeting,” he wrote in a form letter which regretted his “distorted publicity” but not his participation in the meeting. “The press has continued to emphasize me personally, without reference to any of the [other] 150 persons present, which I must say seems unfair…perhaps I will be a wiser person in the future—at least, let us hope so.” No more was heard during the campaign from the author of
Confident Living.

The Peale publicity helped set the stage for Kennedy’s major response to his attackers. He agreed, with considerable reluctance, to accept an invitation to appear before the Houston, Texas, Ministerial Association to discuss the religious issue on the evening of Monday, September 12. Nixon had declined a similar invitation from the same group.

We worked on the speech throughout a weekend “rest” in Los Angeles and overnight in El Paso. My chief source of material was Kennedy’s own previous statements on religion to the ASNE, to the convention, to press conferences and to
Look Magazine.
One of the additional facts desired by the Senator, inasmuch as he was speaking at the Alamo in San Antonio on the way to Houston, was how many Catholics had died at that shrine of Texas independence. I telephoned Mike Feldman in Washington at 4
A.M.
Texas time. A few hours later he had a list of possible Irish-American names but added that no religious affiliations were known. Thus was born a line in the speech: “…side by side with Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty and Bailey and Carey, but no one knows whether they were Catholics or not. For there was no religious test at the Alamo.”