Kennedy: The Classic Biography (24 page)

Most governors of large Democratic states leaned to Stevenson, enough to keep Kennedy away from a convention majority. The spectacular number of potential favorite-son candidates—Governors Brown of California, Williams of Michigan, Meyner of New Jersey, Lawrence of Pennsylvania, Collins (or Senator Smathers) of Florida, Tawes of Maryland, Hodges of North Carolina, DiSalle (or Senator Lausche) of Ohio, McNichols of Colorado, Docking of Kansas, and Loveless of Iowa, plus Senators Hartke in Indiana and Morse in Oregon—seemed certain to deny to Kennedy the early-ballot victory he would need as front-runner.

But the Senator, while not ignoring those at the top, had been building his strength from the bottom up. Relying on new methods and new faces to match this formidable array of obstacles, he had acquired some formidable assets of his own. His power base was not Washington, where the big names were, but out in the states, where the delegates were. There were more voters, more rank-and-file Democrats, for Kennedy than for any other candidate.

Local party leaders—who usually possessed more delegate strength than those more nationally known—were influenced by Kennedy’s popularity with their neighbors and friends and by his repeated visits to their states. He had spoken at their dinners and rallies, raised and given money for their campaigns, sought their advice and assistance, and maintained a genuine interest in them all. He never refused a phone call, ignored a letter or turned away a visitor. Political leaders, labor leaders, Negro leaders, intellectuals, had all been deluged with mail from Kennedy, from Kennedy’s office and from their counterparts in Massachusetts; and all had been deluged as well with articles by and about Kennedy, phone calls from Kennedy, books by and about Kennedy and polls showing Kennedy ahead.

At the root of all other motivations, local political leaders and candidates want a winner, to help the local ticket and to replenish party patronage. To strengthen their future claims for help, they want to be with that winner early. Likely losers may be admired, advised and even quietly assisted, but they are rarely endorsed.

Kennedy did not look much like a politician, but increasingly he looked like a winner. He had a history of political victories which carried lesser candidates in with him. Perhaps more important, he gave the impression that he was playing for keeps. His organization, though inexperienced, was both competent and confident; and his “new pros,” like O’Brien and O’Donnell, worked harder and knew more than the nation’s best-known old “pros.” He had a solid political base, comparable in size to any big state, in a united New England delegation.

Moreover, word was gradually spreading (with the encouragement of Kennedy supporters) that the North and East would block Johnson’s nomination, that the South and East would block Humphrey, that Stevenson would not run and that Symington could not win. The latter two were the most acceptable compromise candidates, but uncommitted party leaders grew nervous waiting for Stevenson to declare and for Symington to get his campaign off the ground. Kennedy had taken pains to be “personally obnoxious” to no one. Many liberals preferred Kennedy to Johnson. Many conservatives preferred Kennedy to Stevenson. Symington was the second or third choice of almost everyone but the first choice of almost no one.

Within this perspective, each Democratic governor had to weigh his own ambitions for a role in the convention or future administration. If Kennedy’s candidacy survived the primaries, he would be consulted about the convention’s keynote speaker and he would need someone to place his own name in nomination. If nominated, he would need a Protestant Vice Presidential running mate from the Midwest or South. If elected, he would need a Cabinet.

The Senator and his staff quietly beamed on all such speculation. No commitments were made, no deals worked out, no falsehoods told. But both hints and frank talk flowed from the Kennedy camp to several governors about the kind of running mate and other talents needed, and all suggestions and applications were gratefully received from their spokesmen, their aides and, in a few cases, their wives. Notations on other Democratic governors in the aforementioned 1959 memorandum to Ribicoff illustrate these considerations (without divulging names):

…strong for Kennedy, partly because he considers himself a Vice Presidential possibility…

…for Stevenson first and Humphrey second…probably cannot be enthusiastic about Kennedy but may face tough fight for re-election and need help in areas where Kennedy is strong…

…irritated by tremendous Kennedy strength in his state…might be interested in Cabinet post if does not run for Senate……enjoys being wooed and is looking for support to be keynoter or nominator…

…reportedly has been reached by the Johnson people though still far from committed…

…probably favors Johnson…also presumed to have Vice Presidential ambitions…

…presumably will have no voice in delegation…

…reportedly made a deal with Symington…can be wooed…

…favors either Kennedy or Johnson…

…a Catholic with Vice Presidential ambitions, he knows they will never be realized with Kennedy…

…committed to Humphrey…would be interested in Vice Presidency if Humphrey did not want it…

THE RELIGIOUS HANDICAP

But casting a shadow over all these bright spots was still the issue of Kennedy’s religion. Democrats wanted a President, not a principle. If a Catholic could not be nominated, or, if nominated, could not be elected, no matter how outrageous the reason, that was sufficient grounds for any Democratic politician to oppose Kennedy’s nomination without being guilty of bigotry. Many did. Nor did Kennedy regard every Democrat who doubted the electability of a Catholic as a bigot. He was not enlisting crusaders in a drive to remove the ban on Catholics from the White House. He had no deep desire to avenge the discrimination his grandparents had encountered in Boston. And he was not, contrary to some reports, interested in whatever glory attached to being the first Catholic President. He simply wanted to be President and happened to be a Catholic. Although his formal position was an expression of confidence in voter tolerance, he replied to one question with a wry smile: “I’ll get my reward in the life hereafter—although I may not get it here.”

He knew that his religion gave him certain political assets, as in the 1956 Vice Presidential speculation, although the thesis advanced by one friend that his religion was his greatest asset he regarded as “exaggerated.” It gave him a link with potential political workers in many of the states he visited. And, if nominated, it gave him at least some hope of recapturing a portion of those Catholic voters who had stopped voting Democratic nationally. But he was never under the illusion that all Catholics, much less the Church hierarchy, would support him. On the contrary, all talk of a Catholic voting bloc—to which the 1956 Bailey Memorandum had contributed—would only encourage Protestant voting blocs. He was not surprised when Republican periodicals resurrected and reprinted the Bailey document, but he instructed his own aides never to talk in terms of Catholic voting strength—1960 was not 1956. Vice Presidential prospects were often judged in terms of their appeal to some particular sector of the electorate—farmers, Southerners or liberals, for example. But Kennedy was no longer a Vice Presidential prospect, answering arguments about the liabilities of his religion with offsetting statistics. In 1960, as he wrote me in a discussion of our approach:

The question is how many people will vote for Kennedy, who, among other things, seems to be a Catholic…. Once we get into the argument…about there being a Catholic vote, we are on very treacherous grounds, indeed.

Thus he repeatedly said that he did not want anyone to vote either for him or against him on grounds of religion, that he did not expect to win because of or in spite of this irrelevant standard. He did not threaten his party, as some charged, with retribution from Catholic voters if the party failed to name him. He had neither the desire nor the power to use the feelings of Catholic voters as a bludgeon—and “I cannot believe,” he said, “our convention will act on such a premise.” But he was aware of the fact that, if he swept the primaries and led the polls and had the most delegates, he could be denied the nomination only by a few party leaders saying, “We won’t take him because he’s a Catholic”—and this, he knew, they would find politically difficult to do.

SELECTING THE PRIMARIES

If he swept the primaries…Only in this way could he demonstrate his electability, prove that a Catholic could win, scatter the favorite-son candidates, pick up a bloc of committed delegates and knock one or more competitors completely out of the race. Only then could he translate his voter strength in such states as New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania into solid delegate strength. Only by thus getting Humphrey and Morse out of the race could he secure his own majority by picking up some of whatever votes they acquired. And only by winning in an early convention ballot could he secure the nomination. “If it ever goes into a back room,” he said, “my name will never emerge.”

Actually he never took Morse’s candidacy seriously and never thought Humphrey, in the absence of a Kennedy withdrawal, could claim more than 200 delegate votes. Nor, in his view, could Humphrey be nominated even if he knocked Kennedy out in the primaries. Campaigning had its supposed joys, he knew, but it also took its physical, emotional, financial and political toll. For Humphrey or anyone else to campaign without hope of success, no matter how loudly the crowds applauded or how hopefully one’s managers talked, seemed to him—as he remarked to one reporter—“just a waste of time…. Why does Hubert do it?”

His real opposition, he knew, would be Symington, Johnson and Stevenson. The latter’s participation in the 1956 primaries entitled him to vow he was not a candidate in 1960, but Kennedy argued that Johnson and particularly Symington should not be seeking nationwide delegate support without proving their voter appeal. At times he exempted Johnson from this charge because of his duties as Majority Leader. But often he referred generally to all his inactive opponents. “If the voters don’t love them in March, April or May,” he told a New Hampshire audience, “they won’t love them in November.”

Privately he thought that Symington, had he organized earlier, might have been able to defeat him among the more conservative Democrats of Indiana or Nebraska; and one defeat would have been enough to deny Kennedy the nomination. But Symington, he felt, preferred the strategy of compromise. Johnson, he was certain, would not enter and could not win any of the 1960 primaries in which Kennedy was running—although he would later speculate that LBJ might have carried West Virginia “if he’d made a fight out of it.” But the Majority Leader’s decision to stick to his Senate duties and enter no primaries at all was a fatal flaw in the Johnson campaign, Kennedy believed, the flaw that prevented Johnson’s nomination.

Johnson had to prove that a Southerner could win in the North, just as I had to prove a Catholic could win in heavily Protestant states. Could you imagine me, having entered no primaries, trying to tell the leaders that being a Catholic was no handicap?…When Lyndon said he could win in the North, but could offer no concrete evidence, his claims couldn’t be taken seriously.

Thus, while privately he had some qualms about the true desirability from his point of view of the inactive candidates getting into the primaries, he was so certain they would not, and so convinced of the unfairness of their staying out, that he continued publicly to challenge and chastise them. History, Kennedy knew from study, was on his side. “Even though my chief competitors in the convention remain safely on the sidelines, hoping to gain the nomination through manipulation,” he said, in language that would grow even stronger as those on the sidelines tried to help the other team,

for fifty years no Republican or Democrat has reached the White House without entering and winning at least one contested primary…. Primaries are the ordinary voter’s chance to speak his own mind, to cast his own vote—regardless of what he may be told to do by some other self-appointed spokesman for his party, city, church, union or other organization.

In short, he was saying, if the bosses, bigots and Hoffas want to beat me with any other candidate, it should be at the polls and not in some back room.

In his opening declaration on January 2, therefore, he stressed that “any Democratic aspirant…should be willing to submit to the voters his views, record and competence in a series of primary contests.” In that statement, and later the same day on New Hampshire television, he announced his entry into the nation’s earliest primary in that state; and, for maximum local impact, a separate announcement was made—usually combined with a flying trip into the state to file his papers in person—for each primary he entered.

Humphrey responded to Kennedy’s challenge by challenging Kennedy to enter Wisconsin and West Virginia.
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Johnson responded by tending to his duties as Majority Leader. Stevenson responded with another declaration that he was not a candidate. Symington, whose strategy required the avoidance of possible defeat before the convention, responded by saying that he was not a candidate although he “certainly would like to be President,” and he announced a nationwide speaking schedule to take his noncandidacy “into the homes, to the street corners…to the farms,” but not to the voters.