An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (43 page)

After Wisconsin, however, Jack and his advisers were not so sure. The Wisconsin race had made West Virginia voters more aware of Kennedy’s religion, and his lead over Humphrey disappeared. A poll of Kanawha county, the seat of the state capital, Charleston, showed Humphrey with 60 percent to Kennedy’s 40 percent. A report coming in to Dave Powers in April concluded that “public opinion had shifted and [Kennedy] would be lucky to get 40 per cent of the vote.” On April 6, the day after Wisconsin, Bobby, O’Donnell, and O’Brien went to Charleston, where they met with Kennedy organizers. “Well, what are our problems?” Bobby asked the gathering in a crowded hotel room. “There’s only one problem,” one man shouted. “He’s a Catholic. That’s our God-damned problem!” A Kennedy supporter in the state wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. that “[U.S. Senator] Bob Byrd is getting out his Bible and fiddle to make the rounds of the country churches. These people weren’t thinking much of the religious issue, one way or another. But now every hate-monger, radio preacher and backwoods evangelist is being stirred up for an assault which will make 1928 look pale by comparison.”

The state’s labor unions would also be a problem for Kennedy. A member of the United Steel Workers reported that Kennedy had been relying on “the reactionary element of the Democratic party . . . to head his state organization. He would be weak in . . . the Democratic stronghold in southern W. Va. In a race between Kennedy and Humphrey, we believe that Humphrey would win, even though the Kennedy forces would be better financed.”

Though some of Jack’s advisers suggested that he skip West Virginia and concentrate instead on Indiana, Nebraska, and Maryland, he felt compelled to take up Humphrey’s challenge and show that a Catholic could win in a Protestant state. Robert McDonough, who ran Jack’s West Virginia office, believed that a victory there might allow Kennedy to “bury the religious issue.” At a planning meeting on April 8, Bobby stated their intention “to meet the religious issue head on.” The goal was to give rational answers to questions about Jack’s Catholicism and then move on to “something more important to those people.” Bobby consulted with Frank Fischer, West Virginia’s Junior Chamber of Commerce president, who knew the state as well as anyone. Fischer urged Bobby to talk about the “Four F’s . . . food, Franklin [Roosevelt], family, and the flag.”

Jack set this strategy in motion on the first day of his West Virginia campaign. Before a crowd of three or four hundred people gathered on the steps of the Charleston post office, Jack, microphone in hand, aggressively fielded a question about his religion, “I am a Catholic, but the fact that I was born a Catholic, does that mean that I can’t be the President of the United States? I’m able to serve in Congress, and my brother was able to give his life, but we can’t be president?” McDonough “could just feel the crowd respond to and accept his answer.” With Humphrey making his campaign theme song “Give Me That Old Time Religion” and Baptists warning that a Catholic would owe allegiance to the pope, Jack continuously reminded voters that he had risked his life for the country. “Nobody asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy,” he declared. “Nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber plane to fly his last mission.” The message was clear: How can you doubt my primary loyalty to America?

Kennedy spent two intense weeks in the state between April 5 and May 10. “He was the most attractive candidate imaginable,” Bob McDonough said. “He just went up every valley in the state, down every road, and over every hill, and he shook hands by the thousands.” “I am the only Presidential candidate since 1924, when a West Virginian ran for the presidency,” Kennedy told audiences, “who knows where Slab Fork is and has been there.” He spoke so often and so loudly that he lost his voice and had to have his brother Ted and Sorensen speak for him. “Over and over again,” journalist Theodore White recorded, “there was the handsome, open-faced candidate on the TV screen, showing himself, proving that a Catholic wears no horns.” As important, a skillfully crafted TV documentary, which the campaign put on local stations around the state, displayed his winning manner and his achievements as a war hero, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and the father of a beautiful two-year-old daughter. A compelling sincerity about his devotion to American freedoms dissolved most objections to his Catholicism.

Jackie Kennedy, despite concern among Jack’s advisers that her stylish dress and manners might alienate voters, effectively connected with audiences in West Virginia. Word of her considerateness spread after “a nice old man said he would love to meet Jackie but could not leave his invalid wife.” After Jackie visited their home, the man said, “Now I believe in Santa Claus. She looks like a real queen.” She endeared herself to audiences when introducing Jack. “I have to confess, I was born a Republican,” she said, “but you have to have been a Republican to realize how nice it is to be a Democrat.” Her two-year-old daughter Caroline’s vocabulary was increasing with each primary, she reported. Her “first words were ‘plane,’ ‘goodbye,’ and ‘New Hampshire,’ and just this morning she said ‘Wisconsin’ and ‘West Virginia.’” Already a month pregnant in April, Jackie, at risk of another miscarriage, would largely disappear from the rest of the 1960 campaign, but in West Virginia she worked aggressively on behalf of her husband.

She was not alone. Understanding how crucial the state was to his chances, Kennedy enlisted all his relatives and friends in the campaign. “The Senator is still in West Virginia,” Evelyn Lincoln recorded on April 26. “Things do not look very good for him. . . . The Senator has brought all the people he can think of into the campaign. He has Lem Billings, Chuck Spalding, Ben Smith, Grant Stockdale, Bob Troutman, Sarge Shriver and many others down there working for him. Bobby is going all over making speeches and Teddy is too. Larry O’Brien is in charge of the organization and Kenny O’Donnell arranges his speaking schedule. Ralph Dungan is handling the labor setup. Chuck Roche and Pierre Salinger handle the press releases, TV, etc. Ted Reardon is in Wheeling.”

Winning votes for Jack also meant taking them from Humphrey by neutralizing his advantage as a passionate advocate of liberal programs. If this began as cynical campaign politics, Kennedy’s visits to the state transformed it into a genuine concern. “Kennedy’s shock at the suffering he saw in West Virginia was so fresh,” Teddy White thought, “that it communicated itself with the emotion of original discovery.” Ted Sorensen remembered how appalled Kennedy was “by the pitiful conditions he saw, by the children of poverty, by the families living on surplus lard and cornmeal, by the waste of human resources.” He gained a fuller understanding of the unemployed workers, the pensioners, and the relief recipients demoralized by their poverty but eager for a chance to improve their lives. “I assure you that after five weeks living among you here in West Virginia,” Kennedy declared, “I shall never forget what I have seen. I have seen men, proud men, looking for work who cannot find it. I have seen people over 40 who are told that their services are no longer needed—too old. I have seen young people who want to live in the state, forced to leave the state for opportunities elsewhere. . . . I have seen older people who seek medical care that is too expensive for them to afford. I have seen unemployed miners and their families eating a diet of dry rations.” Attacking the indifference of the Eisenhower administration, Jack laid out a ten-point program to relieve suffering and expand economic opportunity. He promised to increase unemployment benefits, modernize Social Security, expand food distribution, establish a national fuels program, stimulate the coal industry, and increase defense spending in the state. “Much more can and should be done,” he announced in a letter to fellow Democrats. “That is why West Virginia will be on the top of my agenda at the White House.”

On April 12, the fifteenth anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Kennedy reminded an audience that Roosevelt had accomplished more in a hundred days than Eisenhower and Nixon had in eight years. “And now it is time for another ‘New Deal’—a New Deal for West Virginia,” Jack declared. To hammer home the point, Joe Kennedy suggested that they ask FDR Jr., a Kennedy supporter, to join the campaign, which he did with great success, drawing worshipful crowds wherever he went. A West Virginia journalist said it was like “God’s son coming down and saying it was all right to vote for this Catholic, it was permissible, it wasn’t something terrible to do.” Joe also shrewdly convinced FDR Jr. to send letters praising Jack from Hyde Park, New York, the site of FDR’s home and resting place, to West Virginia Democrats.

To undercut Humphrey’s stronger liberal identification, the Kennedys argued that a vote for Humphrey, who could not possibly get the nomination, would destroy prospects for the welfare reforms Jack proposed. Jack also described Humphrey as the tool of a “stop-Kennedy gang-up” backed by Lyndon Johnson and Stuart Symington. Senator Byrd publicly acknowledged the accuracy of Jack’s assertion. “If you are for Adlai Stevenson, Senator Stuart Symington, Senator Johnson or John Doe, this primary may be your last chance to stop Kennedy,” he declared. Seizing on Byrd’s candid statement, Jack responded: “Hubert Humphrey has no chance to win the Democratic nomination for President, and he knows it, so why is he running against me in this primary? To stop me and give the nomination to Johnson or Stevenson or Symington. If Johnson and the other candidates want your vote in the November election, why don’t they have enough respect for you to come here and ask for your vote in the primary?” It was a compelling argument that appealed to the self-interest and sense of fair play of West Virginia Democrats. At the same time Kennedy challenged Johnson publicly, he confronted him privately, complaining that Johnson was using Humphrey as a stalking-horse. According to Johnson, when he denied he was running, Jack pressured him to “get Senator Byrd ‘out of West Virginia.’” Johnson defended himself by telling Kennedy that he could not get Byrd out of his own state and reminded Jack that he had supported his vice presidential bid in 1956 and given him choice committee assignments.

With so much at stake in the election, the contest turned ugly. Humphrey attacked his “rivals” for the nomination as “millionaire ‘money’ candidates backed by political machines.” Specifically, he went after Kennedy’s free spending: “I don’t think elections should be bought. . . . American politics are far too important to belong to the money men. . . . Kennedy is the spoiled candidate and he and that young, emotional, juvenile Bobby are spending with wild abandon. . . . Anyone who gets in the way of papa’s pet is going to be destroyed. . . . I don’t seem to recall anybody giving the Kennedy family—father, mother, sons or daughters—the privilege of deciding who should . . . be our party’s nominee.”

When Kennedy complained about the “personal abuse” and “gutter politics,” Humphrey shot back, “Poor little Jack. That is a shame. And you can quote me on that.” Humphrey also ridiculed his complaint of an anti-Kennedy coalition: “I wish he would grow up and stop acting like a boy. What does he want, all the votes?” Humphrey asserted that Kennedy was “attempting to set up an alibi should he lose.”

Although Humphrey was never proud of his negative attacks, which did more to hurt him than Kennedy, he had reason for complaint. “I would suggest that brother Bobby examine his own conscience about innuendoes and smears,” he said. “If he has trouble knowing what I mean, I can refresh his memory very easily.” An FDR Jr. assertion that Humphrey had been a draft dodger, which Humphrey believed was approved by Bobby, if not Jack, particularly incensed him. In possession of information that Humphrey may have sought military deferments during World War II, Bobby had pressed Roosevelt to use this in retaliation for Humphrey’s harsh words. In fact, having tried and failed to get into the service because of physical disabilities, Humphrey corrected the record with the Kennedys. “They believed me,” he wrote later, “but never shut F.D.R. Jr., up, as they easily could have.” Jack publicly announced, “Any discussion of the war record of Senator Humphrey was done without my knowledge and consent, as I strongly disagree with the injection of this issue into the campaign.” His statement, however, did not challenge the accuracy of what Roosevelt had said. Having addressed issues of food, Franklin, and family in the campaign, the Kennedys were now taking care of the flag.

But it was Kennedy spending that Humphrey knew was his biggest problem. In West Virginia politics, money was king. “As I told you last time you were down here,” a state political veteran wrote FDR Jr. in April, “most of these coal-field counties are for sale. It is a matter of who gets there first with the most money.” Teddy White wrote, “Politics in West Virginia involves money—hot money, under-the-table money, open money.”

The payoffs involved a system of slating, which was a form of legalized bribery. To sort through dense ballots with long lists of names, voters relied on “slates” given to them by county political bosses, usually the county sheriff. Voters would then vote for those candidates on the slate. It was all very simple: The candidate who paid the most to the county Democratic boss (under the conceit of subsidizing “printing” costs) would have his list of backers identified as the “approved slate.” When one county sheriff told a Humphrey campaign organizer what each name on a slate would cost in his county and the man passed the word to Humphrey, the response was, “We would pay it, but we don’t have the money.” Where Humphrey’s total expenditures on the campaign amounted to $25,000, the Kennedys spent $34,000 on TV programming alone. With the Kennedys’ approval, Larry O’Brien independently negotiated the payments for the slates. “Our highest possible contribution was peanuts compared to what they [county leaders] had received from the Kennedy organization,” Humphrey complained. Such payments did not, O’Donnell noted, bother “the earthy and realistic people of West Virginia, who were accustomed to seeing the local candidate for sheriff carrying a little black bag that contained something other than a few bottles of Bourbon whiskey.”