Kennedy: The Classic Biography (41 page)

Nevertheless Kennedy’s religion was undoubtedly a help in bringing back to the national Democratic ticket most of the Catholic Democrats who had twice preferred Eisenhower to Stevenson while still considering themselves Democrats and voting Democratic locally. More than three out of five Catholics who voted for Eisenhower in 1956 switched to Kennedy in 1960.
¹
Hardly any of them, however, were regular Republicans. Most analysts agree that their return to the Democratic column in 1960 was likely anyway for any candidate, Protestant or Catholic, with the probable exception of Stevenson. But to what extent these Catholic Democrats were
also
moved by pride in Kennedy’s religion, by resentment of the attacks upon it, or foreign policy, economics or a dozen other reasons, cannot ever be measured. We cannot be certain that all of them would have voted for Kennedy had he been a Protestant, although it is revealing to note that: (1) Kennedy carried Boston and other heavily Catholic areas by little more than a Protestant Democrat had carried them in 1948; (2) he received roughly the same proportion of Catholic support nationally (over three to one) that all Democratic Congressional candidates had received in 1958; and (3) the Protestant Democrat who succeeded Kennedy would also obtain this same proportion in 1964.

What is certain is that had Kennedy not scored large majorities among other types of voters, including Negroes, Jews and union members—had he not convinced almost as many Protestants as Catholics who had voted for Eisenhower to switch to him—he would not have won the election. His increased support from Catholics alone would not have been sufficient to secure him a plurality in Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Nevada or any of the Southern and border states he recaptured. In Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, Pennsylvania and possibly Minnesota, the return of Catholic voters to the Democratic ticket may well have been one of the keys to the electoral votes of those five states returning to the Democratic column, but these electoral gains alone clearly would not have been enough to beat Nixon.

Thus it cannot be said that Kennedy’s religion elected him. Many assumed that Nixon’s inability to draw a higher proportion of the Protestant vote than Eisenhower (nearly two out of three) showed religion was not a factor. But the more detailed surveys showed that this was evidence of the opposite conclusion. Protestants, like every other group in the electorate, switched strongly from Eisenhower in 1956 to Kennedy in 1960, but these Protestant switches were almost exactly offset by Protestant Democrats switching from Stevenson to Nixon.

Analysis of all the switches on both sides provides the answer. Comparatively few long-time Republican Catholics deserted Nixon, but lifelong Democrats who were Protestants deserted Kennedy in droves. Both Protestants and Catholics who had voted for Eisenhower switched in great numbers to Kennedy. Inasmuch as the Protestants did so for reasons other than religion, it cannot be said that religion was the sole motivation of the Catholics. But inasmuch as Protestants comprised nine-tenths of those switching from Stevenson to Nixon, the Republican pull on loyal Democrats for any reason
other
than religion must have been fairly weak.

Kennedy’s over-all loss nationally from Protestant Democrats, reported the University of Michigan survey, was at least 4.5 million votes, far more than any Catholic vote gains could offset. In terms of electoral votes, the five states in which the return of Catholic votes helped supply his winning margin outweighed those states which can be clearly identified as lost because of religion. But the Michigan survey analysts, convinced that most of the Catholics voting for Kennedy would have returned to the Democratic fold anyway, concluded that Kennedy’s religion prevented him from winning by a comfortable popular majority. And Professor V. p. Key, Jr. summed up the results of the later surveys with the judgment “that Kennedy won in spite of rather than because of the fact that he was a Catholic.”

The fact remains that he won, and on the day after election, and every day thereafter, he rejected the argument that the country had given him no mandate. Every election has a winner and a loser, he said in effect.
²
“The margin is narrow, but the responsibility is clear. There may be difficulties with the Congress, but a margin of only one vote would still be a mandate.”

If the Electoral College members from Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina and the rest of Alabama had decided to join their six Alabama and eight Mississippi colleagues in voting for Harry Byrd (and this had been a real threat in each of those states, defeated in Louisiana, for example, by only one vote on the hundred-member state committee)—or if fewer than 7,000 people in Illinois, Nevada, Mexico and Hawaii had voted for Nixon instead of Kennedy—neither one of them would have received a majority of the electoral vote, the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives, and its outcome would have been in doubt. If fewer than 12,000 people strategically located in the above four states plus Missouri had voted for Nixon instead of Kennedy, Nixon would have received an electoral vote majority and become the next President.

But continued reference to these statistics did not faze the Presidentelect. No one pointed out that a shift from Nixon to Kennedy of less than one-tenth of one percent of the popular vote could have given him six more states—California, Alaska, Virginia, Washington, New Hampshire and Montana—for 64 more electoral votes and an overwhelming victory. Nor did anyone point out that every state in the nation, save six Southern and border states, had given Kennedy an increase in his party’s proportion of the two-party vote, even though some states showing the largest increase had too large a deficit of Democratic voters to overcome. Among the latter, for example, were Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, but the other three New England states gave their favorite son whopping majorities.

As he watched the election returns on the night of November 8, and reviewed them in the weeks that followed, he had reason for both satisfaction and disappointment. He had never counted on any support from the rural, Protestant, conservative states of the Midwest and West. Farm labor supported him more strongly than farm owners, but he knew that the much predicted Farm Belt “revolt” would fall far short, that most of its anti-Benson force had been spent in 1956, and that its remaining benefits for Democrats would be felt at the Congressional level but not by an Eastern urban Catholic. He had been hopeful but had not counted on winning Nevada and New Mexico (nor had he counted on Delaware in the East. He won all three). He knew Utah and Idaho were no contest once the head of the Mormon Church (long wooed by Kennedy) endorsed Nixon, even though Kennedy ran well ahead of the 1956 Democratic vote in every county in both states. But he was as surprised at his loss of Alaska as he was by his win in Hawaii (where it was not clear that he had won until a December 28 recount).

He had held some hopes for Montana, and possibly even Colorado, where the Denver Post had given him its first Democratic Presidential endorsement since 1916. He lost both. He was disappointed that National Chairman Jackson had not been able to deliver Washington. He was chagrined at not having spent more time in California, where migrants from the Bible Belt to the central valley had switched to Nixon in sufficient numbers to defeat him in a contest so close it was decided by the Republican absentee voters. That is why, conceding the strongly anti-Catholic Oklahoma, he had sent its Governor to campaign for him in the rural centers of California—but to no avail. Democratic factionalism had undermined him there as well.

The other state where a lack of time and unity defeated him was Virginia. “We could take this state away from Harry Byrd if we only had more time,” he had said to me leaving Roanoke less than a week earlier, but we did not have time and fell short by 42,000 votes out of more than three-quarter million cast.

He had counted on most of the larger, more urbanized and industrial states of the Midwest, but expected to lose (and did lose) Indiana, where his reception seemed the coolest of the entire campaign. He won in Minnesota, with the help of Hubert Humphrey, where his victory was due more to the depressed Mesabi Iron Range than to the big cities. (“I used to think the Democrats were pretty strong in South Boston,” he had said in Hibbing, “but we are going to send them out here for indoctrination.”) He won in Illinois, where he was helped by strong candidates for Governor and Senator, Otto Kerner and his old friend Senator Douglas. He barely won in Missouri and in Michigan. He lost Wisconsin, where he had hoped his spring primary efforts would overcome a built-in Republican edge.

But his biggest disappointment by far was Ohio, where his Harris Poll had showed him ahead. In few states had he spent so much time or had larger or more enthusiastic crowds. Although he increased the Democratic vote in Ohio over 1956 by the same proportion as he did elsewhere, and increased it in 96 percent of its counties, that was not enough. He carried Cleveland by strong proportions, but the total turnout was too low. He carried Akron, Toledo, Youngstown, Warren and other labor centers, but did not do well enough in Cincinnati (which he barely carried), in Dayton or in Columbus to offset the Nixon sweep of Protestant small-town and rural voters, few of whom the Senator had ever seen on his travels. “There is no city in the United States,” Kennedy would later tell a Columbus audience, “in which I get a warmer welcome and less votes.”

With these exceptions—and the exceptions of Ohio, California, Wisconsin and Virginia made all the difference between a massive victory and a narrow squeak—the electoral results were about as he had hoped and expected. (My own expectations, as recorded in an office pool, had been too optimistic. I had predicted 408 electoral votes, lower than some of my colleagues but far above his final total of 303, to which Pierre Salinger came closest in our group. All of us predicted his proportion of the two-party popular vote would be in the 53-57 percent range, not in the 50.1-50.2 percent range it ultimately was.)

Candidate Kennedy had known that he had a tough fight, taking on a powerfully entrenched administration that had brought on no war or depression. He had known, reviewing Eisenhower’s margins in 1956, that it would be no easy task to change enough voters to regain enough states. Both his own polls and the published ones told him it would be close nationally and close in the key states, but he could not have known it would be the closest in seventy-six years. He won twelve states with less than 2 percent of the two-party vote and lost six in the same range.

He had known also that no significant number of Republicans—Catholics or any other kind—would shift to him (and they didn’t), and that to offset the loss of Democratic Protestants he had to pick up even more members of all faiths who had voted for Eisenhower (and he did). He had known that he would have to convert the sizable Republican majorities of 1956 in the major industrial states—an Eisenhower plurality of more than a million and a half in New York alone, for example—into new Democratic majorities (and he did).

He had known he would have to win a tremendous vote from labor, Catholics, Negroes, Jews; young voters and other city dwellers, and break even in the suburbs if he was to offset the rural and small-town Republican vote. He did. He broke even in the total vote cast in thirty-seven major suburban areas, carried twelve of the nineteen most important and increased the Democratic vote in all but one. He carried twenty-six of the forty largest cities, compared to Stevenson’s four years earlier carrying only eleven. Of the fourteen Nixon carried all were in the Midwest, West or South (the one big city most opposed to Kennedy was Dallas, Texas).

Finally, he had gambled that Lyndon Johnson would not hurt him in the North and would help him in the South. That gamble paid off. Nixon, who emphasized states’ rights in the South, had consistently criticized Johnson’s nomination in the North—but with no effect. The Liberal Party in New York, which had threatened at Los Angeles to nominate its own ticket because of Johnson, cast more votes for Kennedy and Johnson than the margin by which they carried the state. In the South, where Johnson had wisely spent nearly half the campaign, the Democratic ticket, despite a growing tide of Republicanism, racism and religious bigotry, regained from the Republican column not only Texas—with the help of a large Negro and Latin-American vote, and resentment of the Johnsons’ mistreatment in Dallas—but also Louisiana, where an independent elector movement split the opposition.

Tennessee, said its Governor, would have been two to one for Kennedy had it not been for his religion. While his ratio may be exaggerated, the Michigan survey estimated that the religious issue alone cost Kennedy an estimated net loss of one out of every six Southern voters, more than enough to account for Nixon’s margin in Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, as well as Tennessee, Oklahoma and possibly other Southern, border and Western states.

Protestant Democrats in the small towns of Ohio and the central valley of California, many of them originally from Oklahoma, Arkansas and the South, overcame Kennedy’s lead in the cities of both states. French Catholics in Louisiana and Mexican Catholics in Texas may have helped overcome the anti-Catholic votes in those states. South Carolina was held despite the opposition of Senator Strom Thurmond and a final Nixon appearance with the Rev. Billy Graham. Mississippi, however, was carried by a slate of unpledged electors who voted for Harry Byrd, as did six of the eleven Democratic electors from Alabama. Nor could the border states of Kentucky and Oklahoma be saved from the anti-Catholic tide which very nearly carried Missouri, Illinois and Texas along with them. But West Virginia, his old friend, had stuck with Kennedy.

The statistics and surveys could be read in such a way as to produce the most sobering effect. Including votes for minor party candidates and unpledged electors, he had been denied a majority of the total popular vote—as had Lincoln one hundred years earlier, and as had every Democratic President, with the exception of Franklin Roosevelt, in the intervening hundred years. Even including only the two-party vote, a majority of the voters outside of Massachusetts had voted against him. A majority of the states (twenty-seven out of fifty) had voted against him. A majority of his own race had voted against him. So had a majority of his fellow college graduates and his fellow high-income earners. Contrary to crowd impressions, so had a majority of women voters. So had a majority of Protestants, farmers, old people, small-town inhabitants and business and professional men (although he made spectacular gains in the latter group, receiving more than twice the proportion of their vote that Truman had received in 1948).