True Compass (15 page)

By this time I was in the middle of the zone, with no possibility of rezoning myself, as it were. For the next twenty minutes, I flew onward hunched over the wheel with visions of every newsreel I'd seen of those hound-dog missiles going after a drone plane and
never missing
. I made it through, and arrived in Yuma. I landed at the wrong airport. On the other hand, I landed.

I was surprised--perhaps I should not have been--that the question of Jack's religion troubled some Democrats' minds in the West. Some people were concerned when I raised the issue; others when I did not. Either way, it served to let me know that my brother would have to deal with the matter of his faith in every corner of the country.

At the University of Wyoming in Laramie in the late fall, I addressed a Young Democrats meeting with my usual talking points. I talked about the upcoming election and the national and international issues facing the candidates, Jack's strengths and relative weaknesses, and so on. I came to the topic of religion and dwelt on it for a few minutes, dismissing it as not a major issue in the election. Then I opened things up to questions from the audience.

As I stood talking to students afterward, an elderly man approached me and said, "Mr. Kennedy, I am a professor of psychology at the university here, and I would like to make just one comment about your discussion. I cannot for the life of me understand why you discuss religion as either a plus or a minus for your brother. It seems to me that from your very raising of this question, you are showing that the Kennedy people are hypersensitive about this issue, and from your discussion here tonight, I fear you are going to make a good many people conscious of that factor who otherwise might not be."

I appreciated this line of thought, and thanked the professor for his candor. I said that since I was just a beginner in giving political speeches, I found his comments especially helpful. I left the campus believing that I'd been given valuable advice on the religion issue, and that I should avoid it from then on unless it surfaced as a direct question.

The following evening I spoke again at an open meeting about the coming election. Again, I covered Jack's prospects, his strengths and liabilities, and steered clear of religion entirely. In the question-and-answer session that followed, another professor of psychology stood up, this one from the University of Colorado. "You've made a great mistake," he admonished me, "in not talking about the role that religion could play in Jack's race. It's a question that everyone is concerned about. By not bringing it up, Mr. Kennedy, you appear hypersensitive about the whole question. It's quite evident from your discussion tonight that you are going to make many people conscious of a factor, which otherwise might not be the case."

I thanked the professor for his candor. And continued on my sojourn through the West.

Looking over my faded notes from that priceless adventure of nearly fifty years ago, rereading the brief, earnest stump speech I delivered at breakfast meetings and auditoriums and college dining halls, I find a capsule glimpse of the vast changes in American politics since Jack's era. I find some constants as well, but it is the changes that interest me, because so many of them sprang from Jack's initiatives.

Twin-engine airplanes of course have long since been replaced by jets, closed-circuit TV, and the Internet. Retail politics still flourishes--putting shoe leather on the ground, pressing flesh, traveling to localities around the country.

My stump speech as written ran a little less than six double-spaced pages. While I didn't actually read it--I spoke off the cuff--I probably stayed fairly close to the general outline, usually speaking for about ten minutes in addition to the opening thanks to my hosts. I always covered three main topics: federal aid to education, medical care for the aged, and foreign policy.

Federal aid to education, in 1959, was mostly about how to pay for school construction, teachers' salaries, and school buses.
Brown v. Board of Education
was just five years old; its enforcement was a matter for the states, and not yet a part of the national dialogue. How the government should address the needs of poor and minority students, students with learning disabilities, the question of evolution versus creationism, school prayer--these were unimaginable topics in a presidential campaign, as were literacy levels, charter schools, the contents of text and library books, and guns in the classroom. Just five years later, the War on Poverty created Head Start, federal aid to low-income students, and other transformative measures. Lyndon Johnson is justly credited with steering this program to reality, but the groundwork was laid by Jack, who had been appalled at the living conditions of the rural poor when he campaigned in West Virginia, and then was galvanized in 1962 by Michael Harrington's landmark study of poverty,
The Other America
.

Medical care for the aged was an issue of some concern back then, but the problem and its solutions were only generally defined. Both candidates acknowledged a need for reform. Richard Nixon was campaigning, rather liberally, on a proposal to pay for it with a direct tax levied on every taxpayer--but disbursed only to those who would sign "a pauper's oath," as my speech argued. Jack envisioned a program to be set up under the Social Security program, covering those working men and women who paid a small fraction of their earnings into it.

This was the root idea of Medicare, which Jack was laying out in his own campaign speeches, and which came to fruition in that same breakout year of 1965, as part of Johnson's Great Society. Then there was the burning issue of World War II and Korea, which were still fresh in the American memory. The fear of communism was all-consuming. Yet the issues I addressed in that stump speech--the Hungarian revolution, the nationalist uprising in Algeria, and those monumentally strategic islands of Quemoy and Matsu--seem almost benign when contrasted to the dangers at large in the world today.

I still treasure those faded notes and the brittle pages of that earnest stump speech of half a century ago.

By early February, the West was behind me. Primary voting was set to begin in March, with New Hampshire, the traditional "first" state, leading off on March 8. Now my services were required back east, which was just fine with me for several reasons. The most important was that Joan was about to have our first baby.

She was with me out west during the earlier days of campaigning, but that became more difficult as her pregnancy advanced. She had been incredibly supportive during my long absences. She was only twenty-three then, not long out of college, and about to become a mother in a family that was busy trying to get one of its own elected president. She went to live with her parents in their Bronxville house, where she was given love and support during the late stages of her pregnancy. She and I were in constant contact by telephone during my western swing, and I'd told her that when the baby was due I would be at her side.

It was during the last of my four visits to New Hampshire that the call came. I left the campaign and arrived at the hospital in time to do the traditional pacing in the waiting room, along with Joan's family and other expectant fathers. Joan gave birth to Kara Ann Kennedy on February 27, 1960. I had never seen a more beautiful baby, nor been happier in my life. Kara's name means "little dear one," and she was then and always has been my precious little dear one. Soon afterward I reluctantly left Joan and Kara and hurried to Wisconsin, where I spent the balance of that state's primary campaign.

Jack took New Hampshire with 85 percent of the vote.

Jack understood that Wisconsin was more important to his chances than its thirty-one-delegate count indicated. Since it lay adjacent to Humphrey's home state of Minnesota, the outcome there had the potential to embarrass Humphrey, "Wisconsin's third senator," and end his bid for the nomination if he lost.

Humphrey knew this, and campaigned accordingly, with an angry, accusatory edge at odds with his usual sunny persona. He tore into Jack's voting record on farm issues in an attempt to shred my brother's "liberal" credentials, and asserted that John Kennedy had "voted with [then senator] Nixon" in the past. Humphrey surrogates painted Jack as "soft on McCarthyism." Hubert even resorted to incendiary language--incendiary for the genial Hubert, at any rate--demanding that Jack drop "the razzle dazzle, fizzle fazzle." These charges and rhetoric drew rebukes from officially neutral Wisconsin Democrats such as Governor Gaylord Nelson and Senator William Proxmire, who worried about the risk of shattering party unity.

Jack's response was brilliant. At his introductory press conference in Madison on February 16, my brother made the following pledge:

This will be a positive, constructive campaign. Let me make it completely clear right now that I do not intend to attack my Democratic opponent, to review his record, or to engage in any arguments or debates with him. I do intend, when his name is mentioned, to speak well of him. I request, moreover, that everyone working on my behalf in this state abide by the same principles.

For this is not a campaign against anyone. This is a campaign for the presidency.

But he didn't hesitate to play some other formidable cards: Kennedys, and lots of them. Mother came to Wisconsin, where she charmed the farm wives and small-town women at teas and talks. Several of my sisters joined her in crisscrossing the state, winning over audiences with their charm. (Humphrey was heard to grumble that when the sisters or I donned raccoon coats and stocking caps, people thought they were listening to Jack.)

Bobby threw himself back and forth over the state's long country roads, gaunt and fatigued by his double role as campaign manager and speechmaker, but crackling with competitive fire. The most eye-catching Kennedy of all, of course, was Jackie. She gamely did her share of stumping for her husband and endeared herself to reporters and crowds alike. Even James Reston of the
New York Times
allowed himself a sidelong glance at her "carelessly beautiful scarlet coat." Jackie's soft empathy and references to Caroline, her two-year-old daughter back home, won her many fans. She filled in for several of Jack's speaking engagements when he had to fly back to Washington for a vote on the civil rights debate, and acquitted herself well, with self-effacing kindness.

As for me, I helped with organizing volunteers and telephone canvassers. And I reprised my role as the campaign's designated stuntman.

It began with a dawn flight, courtesy of my friend Don Lowe, from Green Bay to Madison so that I could witness the famous Blackhawk Ski Club's ski-jump competition. I'd assumed that I was being invited as a spectator, but figured that if by some chance there was a downhill event, I might ski the course, perhaps carrying a kennedy for president banner. But since there were only jumping events, this left me out--or so I thought.

Ivan Nestingen, the mayor of Madison and a strong supporter, picked me up at the airport. On the way in, he suggested casually that as long as I was going, I might as well put on some ski clothes so that I'd look like part of the crowd. I did so, at Ivan's house. When we arrived at the site, a friend of Ivan's asked me--just as casually--whether I wanted to borrow his boots and skis and at least take a run down the slope. That sounded like fun, though I noted that his skis were jumping skis. I climbed up the hill and took the run, and enjoyed it.

When I'd climbed the hill again, Ivan said, "Why don't you go over to the practice jump and take a look at it? But don't bother going off unless you want to."

I told myself there was no chance in hell that I would "go off" on a ski-jump run, having never attempted anything other than quite small ski jumps before, but sure, I'd go up to the top and take a look around. I climbed up with four other fellows, two of whom I learned were scheduled to compete in the "big jump" later on. When we reached the top, I heard the sounds of a brass band below. It was the Marine Band, playing "The Star-Spangled Banner." For the first time, it occurred to me that I was going to have quite a time climbing back down from the ramp without disgracing myself.

The next thing I knew, the announcer introduced the first of the four skiers. The fellow went hurtling down the ramp and off the jump, disappearing over the lip of the hill. Then the second skier went, and the third, and the fourth, and suddenly I was the only one left up there. The announcer bellowed, "Now at the top of the jump--Edward Kennedy, the brother of Senator John F. Kennedy! Edward has never jumped before, but maybe if we give him a big hand, he will try it!" Then I heard the sound of nine thousand people cheering and shouting.

Then I heard the announcer again: "Here he comes, ladies and gentlemen! What a true sport he is! I am sure the senator would be proud of him!"

The die had been cast. I bent down and clamped the skis to my boots as the Marine Band gave me a drum roll, and then I launched myself, doing my darnedest to "snowplow" slowly down the ramp. But snowplow or not, the ramp eventually came to an end. I reached it and shot into the air, 190 feet above the ground.

The next thing I recall is struggling to my feet in the snow at the bottom of the run and being escorted to the broadcast booth, where they let me say a few words. I asked the crowd whether anyone had seen Hubert Humphrey at the top of that jump, and then asked them all to support my brother John. The crowd yelled and cheered. It was the best reception I'd enjoyed since Skyrocket.

I still have a photo of that jump on my wall.

Jack's reward for weeks of long car rides and countless appearances was 55 percent of the Wisconsin vote, despite an overwhelming lead in the early polls. He'd won, but was not especially cheered by the results. He needed a larger margin to score the knockout punch against Humphrey that he had hoped for. Wisconsin voters should have been Jack's natural constituency; the labor-minded Catholic voters in cities such as Madison and Milwaukee were the ones who gave him his margin of victory. But the farmers in the great network of small towns had stuck with Humphrey. Jack had failed to break away from his rival, who was embarrassed by his defeat "next door" but still in the race. Which meant we'd have to start all over again in West Virginia.