True Compass (17 page)

It seemed to me that McCracken thought he was agreeing to something that he never believed was going to happen, so he said, "Sure." He got to look expansive in front of me and his delegation, by agreeing to an extremely unlikely scenario. But he didn't have Bobby's knack for counting votes.

When the roll call started, McCracken wasn't paying attention at all. But as it progressed, and the votes for John Kennedy began to pile up, he began to have a look of concern on his face. Could Wyoming
really
be the state that put him over for the nomination? I was standing there with Teno and the rest of the Wyoming delegation as the roll call continued.

I wanted to make sure McCracken held up against his Johnson people. As the roll call got closer and closer, I could see Tracy's jaw begin to clench, and the sweat starting to form. Vermont voted. And then Virginia. Washington. West Virginia. Wisconsin. Now we were within twelve votes of a first-ballot victory.

The Lyndon Johnson delegates were screaming at McCracken, "You can't do this! Lyndon can deliver for us! We're not going for that!" McCracken was between a rock and a hard place, and he had to decide in only a few seconds. He realized that he had given his word, in the presence of the entire delegation.

The chairman's voice boomed through the loudspeakers: "
Wyoming!
"

Back came McCracken: "
Mr. Chairman, the Wyoming vote will make a majority for Senator Kennedy
..."

It wasn't exactly soaring oratory, but it was the sweetest speech I'd ever heard. The arena's instant eruption into bedlam supplied all the drama the announcement itself lacked. It took several minutes before things quieted enough that McCracken could officially state that all fifteen delegate votes would go to my brother. Then we all yelled and cheered again, and I waved the Wyoming standard alongside people who'd been strangers just weeks earlier, but were now dear friends. All but four and a half of them, anyway.

Jack broke tradition and arrived in the convention hall immediately after he had been nominated, to thank the delegates--and to offer a surprised Lyndon Johnson the vice presidential spot, which LBJ immediately accepted. He entered the arena to thunderous cheers and exploding flashbulbs that lit up his famous smile, with Jackie, pregnant with John Jr., and our mother Rose at his side. Dad had already slipped out of the convention hall with no fanfare. He was proud of Jack beyond all measure, but he didn't want to be a distraction. He was on the phone and constantly in touch, but he knew this was Jack's show.

On the following night, to great cheers, Jack strode beneath the blazing Coliseum lights to the podium and formally accepted the nomination. He declared that he would offer the American people challenges, not comforting promises; and he introduced a thrilling new phrase as the descriptive term for his program. "Today our concern must be with the future," he called out. "For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do."

And then:

The problems [of the past] are not all solved and the battles are not all won. And we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier. The frontier of the 1960s. A frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Becoming a Politician

1960-1961

That night of Jack's acceptance speech and the days afterward had the feel of emergence from a six-month trek through the winter wilderness into the Fourth of July. The endless cramped car and bus and small-airplane trips through the primary states were forgotten. The bucking broncos, the daunting ski ramps, the bad food, the fatigue, Jack's laryngitis--it had all been worth it.

We celebrated at Pat and Peter Lawford's house in Hollywood the night after the convention. Sammy Davis Jr. was there, and Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole. Jack goaded my college pal Claude Hooton and me to challenge Sammy and Frank to a songfest. Claude and I belted out "Heart of My Heart," and "Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine," and "Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home." We trotted out "Sweet Adeline" in honor of Honey Fitz. Jack joined in. Frank and Sammy came back with the best they had. Frank must have sung his whole repertoire. I can't recall who won.

Politics intruded when Jack returned to the Senate. During a special session of Congress scheduled by Majority Leader Johnson, Jack bid for a leadership role in trying to push through bills for housing, new minimum wage legislation, aid to education, and medical care. The first two were voted down; the second two passed in watered-down form. These measures probably would have met the same fate no matter who was leading the fight for them--Jack or Johnson himself--but their failure allowed
Time
magazine to comment that the Democratic nominee had encountered "a nightmare series of grim surprises and jolting defeats."

Things smoothed out after that. My family, along with Jack's aides and close friends, managed a couple of sunlit days at the Cape, sailing, swimming, and bantering. It was like old times--except for the throngs of sunglassed, camera-waving tourists who suddenly filled Hyannis Port and strained against lines of policemen and barricades to peer into the grounds for a glimpse of Jack.

As campaign manager, Bobby could not wait to get going. As laughter and footballs floated across the lawn, Bobby worked the telephones, called strategy sessions, and exhorted all hands to gird for battle. He scarcely let up until election night.

Jack launched himself into action. He shored up relations with party leaders who had been skeptics: former president Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, whose early disdain he melted in a visit to Hyde Park. Trailing Nixon and his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge by six points in the Gallup polls at the end of July, Kennedy-Johnson drew even a month later, despite increasing Republican attacks on Jack's character and his Catholicism. Jack blunted the momentum of the latter on September 12. He addressed, on live television, a convention of southern Protestant ministers at the Rice Hotel in Houston, a move that his aides, supporters, and even the normally fearless Bobby had advised against.

Facing these conservative clerics who had regarded him as a likely agent of the Vatican whose loyalties were to the pope rather than the American people, my brother stood at ease behind the podium and delivered one of the pivotal speeches of his career. He was not the Catholic candidate for president, he told the stony faces before him; he was the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happened to be a Catholic. Speaking without a trace of defensiveness, projecting respect for the values of the clergymen in the ballroom but without apology for his own creed, Jack gradually disarmed the ministers. "If the time should ever come," he assured them, "when my office would require me to either violate my conscience, or violate the national interest, I would resign the office." He subtly peeled back the layer of righteousness regarding "the Catholic question" and exposed the bigotry that lay beneath:

If this election is decided on the basis that forty million Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our people.

The ministers sent him offstage with a standing ovation.

Then came the event that might very well have made the difference in the outcome of the campaign: the autumn series of televised debates, or "joint appearances," between him and Richard Nixon.

Robert Sarnoff, the chairman of NBC, initiated the debate discussions on the night that Richard Nixon secured the Republican nomination in Chicago on July 27. He offered both candidates a total of eight hours of free airtime for a series of debates. Jack accepted immediately. Nixon thought it over for four days (with Eisenhower, behind the scenes, urging him not to do it) before he said yes. As negotiations evolved, all three networks agreed to telecast the proceedings. Congress suspended its "equal time" provision, which would have mandated participation even by fringe and special-interest candidates, for the occasion.

Jack's quick decision surprised none of us. He had thought a great deal about the merging of the new medium and the political process. He intuitively comprehended that his own attributes played well on the small screen. And he understood, as few did then, that one ignored the promises and perils of the televised image at one's peril. He had written a prescient article on the subject for
TV Guide
in November 1959. The "revolutionary impact" of television, Jack declared, had "altered drastically the nature of our political campaigns, conventions, constituents, candidates and costs."

The debates commenced on September 26 at the CBS studio in Chicago, with the legendary producer Don Hewitt running the show. Jack prepared, as he would for each debate, by sitting on his bed in his hotel suite, listening to Peggy Lee records, and inviting his staff to pepper him with trial questions related to the night's topic: domestic policy, in the first debate. He had a stack of file cards filled with facts and figures about every issue imaginable. When he felt he'd mastered the material on each card, he'd flip it into the air and watch it flutter to the floor.

As he donned his dark suit and knotted his tie in the hotel that first evening, he told Dave Powers that he felt "like a prizefighter about to enter the ring at Madison Square Garden." Dave shot back, "No, it's more like being the opening-game pitcher in the World Series, because you have to win four of these."

On the car ride to the studio, Jack was lost in thought. The people with him could sense his tension. At CBS, a technician took a look at his starched white shirt and told him it would flare up under the television lights. He sent Powers back to the hotel to retrieve a blue shirt, and changed into it in the greenroom.

Nixon arrived looking a good deal more nervous than Jack. He was wearing a light-colored suit, which seemed to accentuate his persistent five-o'clock shadow. Don Hewitt urged each candidate to submit to a makeup artist. Both stiffened. Jack, who'd needled Hubert Humphrey for wearing TV makeup in Wisconsin, said he would not go into the makeup room unless Nixon went first. Nixon said he would not go in unless Kennedy were seen going in as well.

And so Nixon stayed out of the makeup room, trusting in the tube of sticky film sold over the counter as "Lazy Shave." Jack stayed out, too--more or less. He ducked into his own dressing room instead, and sat still while an aide named Bill Wilson dabbed a little drugstore makeup on his cheeks and forehead to absorb perspiration.

Ted Sorensen and Bobby hung around the dressing room for a little while, then left a few minutes before airtime. Bobby recommended one final bit of advice to Jack: "Kick him in the balls."

Jack refrained; but he was inside Nixon's head long before Howard K. Smith greeted the national audience. He outfeinted Nixon, obliging the vice president to stalk onto the set first and then sit for several minutes perspiring under the hot lights. With little more than sixty seconds before airtime, people began to seriously wonder where my brother was. He was in the men's room. He strolled to his podium with only about fifteen seconds to go, calmly sat down in his chair, and glanced about placidly while Nixon stared helplessly at him. Bill Wilson later said he realized then that JFK had "psyched out" Nixon before the debate even began.

The content of those debates may have passed into insignificance, but scholars continue to study their effect as a transitional moment in broadcasting. My brother treated the camera (and by extension, each of the seventy million viewers) as an intimate friend; he gazed steadily into the lens as he spoke. During Nixon's remarks, he calmly jotted notes. His opponent darted his dark eyes from the camera to Smith to Jack to his own notes, accentuating his aura of tension. When Jack spoke, Nixon frowned at him and sneaked glances at the camera.

Richard J. Daley didn't need anyone to tell him who'd won that opening debate. As the studio lights went down, the Chicago mayor burst from the room where he'd been watching and bounded into the greenroom to congratulate my brother. It was our first sign that we'd won. Ted Sorensen recalled that on the flight back east aboard the
Caroline
, a Convair 240 propeller plane that Jack leased from our father, Jack was exhausted but happy.

My brother relaxed with a bowl of soup and reviewed his replies to questions with almost total recall. "You can always improve afterward," he told Sorensen, "but I would settle for the way it went. I thought it was all right."

Of the remaining three debates, polling showed that audiences thought my brother won the first one, 39 to 23 percent (with the rest undecided), as well as the second, originating in New York, by 44 to 28. For the third round the opponents were on opposite sides of the country: Jack in New York, Nixon in California. This was the only debate that Nixon won in the polling, by 42 to 39. Jack won decisively in the last one, 52 to 27. Roughly 120 million people saw at least one of the debates, according to NBC, forming the largest audience ever to watch and focus on one topic in history.

Now all we had to do was win the election.

The issue of race hung at the edges of the 1960 campaign, seldom acknowledged but on the minds of everyone. On October 19, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Atlanta when he joined a protest at a segregated restaurant. The students involved were soon released, but King, the true target, was sent to a state penitentiary. His wife, Coretta, was understandably terrified for his safety. Many people thought it was politically unwise for Jack to get involved in the incident. The risks of advancing too far ahead of public opinion could drive white voters to the other candidate. Nixon ignored the incident. Jack didn't. He telephoned Mrs. King to express his concern. Then Bobby reached the governor of Georgia by telephone and persuaded him to order King's release.

Through the fall, all of us traveled for Jack. I spent ten days blanketing Washington, Oregon, and California. I mostly visited colleges, four or five a day. I saw lots of enthusiasm. Jack was getting young people involved.

At the outset, Nixon was heavily favored to win the election. The debates closed the gap considerably, but they didn't give Jack a lead. There was little sudden movement in the opinion polls in those days.

On the clear, crisp election day of November 8, 1960, the extended family began to converge on the Cape house. People filtered in throughout the afternoon and evening: the candidate and his wife, Bobby and Ethel, Sarge and Eunice, Pat and Peter, Jean and Steve, Joan and myself. The Gargans were there. Dad had invited some of his eclectic friends: the former president of Notre Dame, Father John Cavanaugh; the New York theatrical producer Arthur Houghton; and Carroll Rosenbloom, owner of the Baltimore Colts. We dined on Maryland crabs and then found comfortable places for viewing the returns, most of us at Bobby's house next door.

The tallies from the eastern states came in the first hour after the polls closed. Jack won Connecticut easily. In the first couple of hours, in fact, it was looking like a blowout. Late in the night, the returns began to shift. The numbers were moving Nixon's way. Jack clung to a narrow lead, but obviously it was going to be close. Not until early morning did the trend shift back his way again. Illinois firmed up, and then Nevada, New Mexico, Hawaii. Illinois was the key state, and it went narrowly for Jack.

Even though the election was close--a cliffhanger in every sense of the word--I had always believed that Jack was going to win, even when the odds were something like nine to five against him. I suppose I believed that Jack could do anything he wanted.

And believe me, I knew the odds. I was so certain of Jack's victory that I placed a Las Vegas bet on it. My winnings would have given me enough money to buy a new car, a really fancy new car. The speedy Aston Martin DB4 had just come out of England a couple years earlier, and I really wanted one. Well, I won that bet, but I never bought the car. I made the mistake of telling Dad about it, and he hit the roof. "This is just--this just makes no sense!" he fulminated. "Foolish! I'm appalled that you'd get into this kind of thing! You're not going to collect that money." He really went after me tooth and nail. I never did collect on my bet, and I've always wondered what happened to the money. Dad was right, of course--as usual.

Bobby and I, exhausted, excused ourselves from most of the gaiety that followed Jack's victory. Along with our wives and Dave Hackett and his family, we headed for a few days of relaxation in Acapulco. (Dave, a childhood friend of Bobby's, was soon to distinguish himself as head of President Kennedy's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime.)

It was under the bright Mexican sunlight that Bobby confided in me a surprising piece of information: he did not plan to seek Jack's vacated Senate seat in 1962. Bobby was never as politically driven as the myth would have you believe. He improvised his life to an astonishing degree.

The seat was being held by a good man named Benjamin Smith, who'd been appointed by Governor Foster Furcolo to fill out Jack's term when Jack resigned shortly after Christmas 1960. I thought the world of Ben Smith. He had been my brother's roommate at Harvard, and I can remember hearing Ben say that if he had to shovel every ton of coal out of West Virginia to make Jack president, he'd do it.