Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (7 page)

Despite his assessment of Stevenson’s chances, Bobby accepted an invitation to travel with the candidate and work in the campaign. For Stevenson, it was a way to mend fences with the Kennedys, who resented Stevenson’s failure to take Jack as his running mate. From the start, Bobby thought the whole operation was a disaster. Arthur Schlesinger remembered him in the campaign as “an alien presence, sullen and rather ominous, saying little, looking grim and exuding an atmosphere of bleak disapproval.” For Bobby, it was a chance to learn how to run a national campaign or, more to the point, how not to run a campaign. Bobby thought Stevenson’s style of speaking was terrible, always reading speeches when he should have been speaking extemporaneously. He came across as insincere or too cerebral, too focused on obscure issues instead of people and more devoted to words than actions.

Meanwhile, Jack had also signed on to the campaign, but less out of an interest in advancing Stevenson’s candidacy than in becoming better known around the country. Instead of confining himself to Massachusetts and a few of the big swing states, as Stevenson’s advisers asked, Jack went into twenty-four states, where he gave more than 150 speeches and charmed everyone with his wit and good looks. He endeared himself to audiences with the observation on his lost fight for the vice presidential nomination: “Socrates once said that it was the duty of a man of real principle to avoid high national office, and evidently the delegates at Chicago recognized my principles even before I did.”

Both brothers were becoming nationally recognized figures. In 1957, mass-market magazines featured them in articles:
Look
published a photographic spread about “The Rise of the Brothers Kennedy,” and the
Saturday Evening Post
led its September issue with “The Amazing Kennedys.” The
Post
saw “the flowering of another great political family” like “the Adamses, the Lodges and the La Follettes.” Amazingly, the article predicted that Jack would become president, Bobby the U.S. attorney general, and the youngest brother, Ted, a senator from Massachusetts.

The 1956 ventures were schooling for Jack’s and Bobby’s 1960 reach for the White House. The campaign began as soon as Stevenson lost to Eisenhower in November 1956, leaving the Democratic nomination for 1960 wide open. Jack broached the subject with Joe on Thanksgiving Day, raising questions about the viability of his candidacy. Joe, ever confident that his son could become president, brushed aside Jack’s doubts with assurances that millions of second-generation Americans were waiting for the chance to put one of their own in the White House. Jack didn’t need much persuading; he was eager to run and said, “Well, Dad, I guess there’s only one question left. When do we start?” He began courting all the party’s leaders and all its factions, while denying that he was a candidate, for fear he would stimulate a “stop-Kennedy” counter-campaign.

With no formal organization operating on Jack’s behalf, Bobby returned to his job as counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In September 1959, after more than two and a half years investigating labor corruption, Bobby resigned as counsel to the subcommittee to write a book on the subject,
The Enemy Within
(1960).

By October 1959, however, he was caught up in Jack’s campaign. Bobby, Ted Sorensen said, was Jack’s first and only choice for campaign manager. He trusted Bobby to “say ‘no’ more emphatically and speak for the candidate more authoritatively than any professional politician.” Bobby at once made clear that he would be a driving force in the operation. He convened a meeting of seventeen principals who were close to Jack and would be at the center of the nominating and national campaigns. At his Cape Cod home, on a beautiful fall day, he pressed everyone to say what was being done to ensure Jack’s success. When no one could provide decisive answers, Bobby chided Jack: “How do you expect to run a successful campaign if you don’t get started. . . . It’s ridiculous that more work hasn’t been done already!” Appreciating Bobby’s tough-minded realism and signaling the group to prepare themselves to be pushed hard by Bobby, Jack joked: “How would you like looking forward to that voice blasting in your ear for the next six months?” To reassure Bobby and the rest of the gathering that he had been busy laying the groundwork for the campaign, Jack spent the next three hours describing in detail the political challenges they faced in every part of the country to his securing the nomination and winning the election.

Bobby’s initial field assignment in November was to sound out Lyndon Johnson on his intentions. Although Johnson denied his interest in running, telling fellow senators that a southerner couldn’t get the nomination or be elected, few Washington insiders believed him. Adlai Stevenson, who was angling for a third nomination and refused to acknowledge his own ambition, assumed Johnson was in the chase and Jack thought he was “running very hard.” Bobby went to Johnson’s ranch in the Texas Hill Country—a show of deference by the thirty-four-year-old Bobby for the fifty-one-year-old majority leader, who saw Jack’s candidacy as a premature attempt to bypass senior, more accomplished, and more deserving members of the Senate and party. Johnson began reminding party bosses that the young man had little to show for his thirteen years in the House and Senate. “That kid,” as Johnson derisively called him, “needs a little gray in his hair.”

During Bobby’s visit to his ranch, Johnson denied that he was running and refused to endorse Jack or anyone else, but he did say he opposed a third Stevenson nomination. Eager to put Bobby and his brother in their place, Johnson insisted that Bobby join him in a deer hunt. Johnson correctly assumed that Bobby would be out of his element and forced to take instruction from him. Bobby was, indeed, a reluctant participant. He was knocked to the ground and suffered a cut above the brow from the recoil of a shotgun Johnson had insisted he use. With thinly disguised disdain, Johnson said, as he helped Bobby to his feet, “Son, you got to learn to handle a gun like a man.” Bobby understandably took Johnson’s remark as a slap in the face—not only to himself but also to his brother, who was daring to oppose what Johnson saw as his greater claim on the presidency. Johnson’s behavior reminded Bobby of his earlier refusal to take up his father’s “generous offer” and gave birth to a feud that would color all future relations between Johnson and the Kennedys, but especially Bobby.

Johnson’s response convinced Bobby and Jack that Johnson was in the hunt and strengthened their determination, as was typical whenever they faced opposition, to pull out all stops in the nomination fight. Bobby, like his father, took any defeat as not only a personal insult but also a demonstration of inadequacy. Any loss was proof of incompetence, of the larger society’s view of Irish Catholic inferiority. In 1960, an Irish Catholic running for president was a challenge to the unacknowledged hierarchy of white Protestant America. Many in the country saw the Irish as only one cut above African Americans, whose inferiority was written into law across the South.

But as Johnson understood, in 1960, southern whites, like Catholics, were also unwelcome participants in the reach for the White House. True, Harry Truman, with his border-state twang and indelible middle American qualities—the bow tie, hair parted in the middle, and blue serge suits—had diminished some of the prejudices about who deserved to hold the highest office. But Johnson’s candidacy, like Kennedy’s, was a call to reshuffle the accepted standards for access to the Oval Office. They were implicit allies in trying to break down old barriers. But until they sorted out who would take the lead in redefining the country’s political standards, they were bitter rivals.

And for Bobby Kennedy, with Jack’s tacit approval, so was anyone who stood in the way of his brother’s White House campaign. The first demonstration of their hardball approach to winning the nomination came in Wisconsin, where they competed with Minnesota senator Hubert H. Humphrey in the Democratic primary. Primaries in 1960 were no surefire route to the party’s nomination. There were too few of the state contests to ensure anyone the prize. But for Jack, they were an essential demonstration to party bosses and convention delegates that he could win sufficient Protestant votes to become a viable national candidate.

Understanding the importance of the primary in Wisconsin—a state with a large number of Protestant as well as Catholic voters—Bobby spared no effort to win. He gave a demonstration of what was ahead in Wisconsin when at the end of 1959 he pressed Governor Michael DiSalle of Ohio to be the first governor to come out for Kennedy. When DiSalle resisted, Bobby gave him what John Bailey, the Democratic National chairman, who attended a meeting between them, called “a going-over,” the likes of which shocked Bailey. It consisted of bare-knuckle threats to DiSalle’s political future. But it worked, and DiSalle endorsed Jack’s candidacy in January 1960 as the campaign for Wisconsin began.

Bobby’s successful hard-nosed tactics encouraged him to remain aggressive. As campaign manager, he blitzed the state with Kennedy operatives; family members and hired guns seemed to be everywhere, talking up Jack to anyone who would listen. Humphrey said he felt like “an independent merchant competing against a chain store.” Bobby brought Paul Corbin into the campaign—a slick political Houdini whose mantra was winning, regardless of how it was done. Humphrey complained about Bobby’s “ruthlessness and toughness”—specifically, what Bobby encouraged Corbin to do: anti-Catholic tracts sent to Catholic households that were calculated to anger Catholics and stimulate them to vote for Kennedy. Corbin also spread rumors that the corrupt Teamsters union was campaigning for Humphrey.

Although Jack would carry the state, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Jack’s margin was too small to be considered decisive, and commentators immediately described his success as the result of Republican Catholics coming to Jack’s rescue. Jack muttered: “Damn religious thing.” One of his sisters asked: “What does it all mean?” Jack replied: “We’ve got to go to West Virginia and do it all over again.”

West Virginia, only 3 percent Catholic, became an acid test of whether Jack could win Protestant votes. The primary would make or break Jack’s candidacy. The Kennedys spared neither money nor scruples to win: West Virginia was notorious for vote-buying, and relying on Joe’s advice and money, Jack’s campaign paid top dollar to the party’s county bosses to ensure strong majorities for him. Humphrey didn’t blink at the local requirement for vote-buying, either. But “our highest possible contribution was peanuts compared to what they [the county chairmen] received from the Kennedy organization,” he said. He was right. Where Humphrey spent a total of about $25,000 on his campaign, Jack’s TV ads alone came to $34,000.

Because they couldn’t be sure that the local party operatives could be relied on to produce promised votes, the Kennedy campaign also assumed that it had to motivate voters to go to the polls for Jack. Joe, Bobby, and West Virginia Democrats more familiar with local attitudes urged the strongest possible identification with Franklin Roosevelt’s memory and the New Deal. Because the state still struggled with pockets of poverty and prided itself on traditional values and patriotism, the campaign declared itself for “food, family and flag.”

Jack’s campaign between April 5 and May 10, the date of the primary, emphasized his determination to bring West Virginia families out of poverty with federal programs, promising to put West Virginia “on the top of my agenda at the White House.” The campaign also made sure that voters would know about Jack’s heroic Navy service and his brother’s sacrifice in a suicide mission. Nor did Jack neglect the religious issue, which posed a serious threat to his election. He implored audiences not to make religion a consideration in their choice of a candidate. After all, he said, no one asked his or his brother Joe’s religion when they risked their lives in combat. A beautifully crafted television documentary about Jack and his family informed voters about his merits as a candidate and heightened his appeal as someone deserving of their support for the presidency. It was an early use of the TV medium as a vehicle for reaching lots of people who normally paid scant attention to politics.

Still, the campaign, led by Bobby, who wished to ensure a landslide, believed it essential not only to broaden and deepen Jack’s appeal, but also to give voters reasons to vote against Humphrey. Bobby saw an opening in allegations about Humphrey’s lack of a military record. Partly responding to reminders to voters of Joe Kennedy’s sympathy for Britain’s prewar appeasement policy and attacks on Jack as a rich man’s son who was buying the election, Bobby pressured Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., who had come into West Virginia to identify Jack with FDR’s New Deal, to alert voters to Humphrey’s absence from the war against the Axis. The Humphrey campaign protested against implicit allegations of draft-dodging. In fact, a 4-F classification had deterred Humphrey from serving. Jack repeatedly decried the use of such tactics, but more to remind voters that Humphrey had not served than to discourage them from taking it into account. Humphrey said later, they “never shut FDR, Jr. up, as they easily could have.”

As far as Bobby was concerned, dirty tricks were a justifiable response to dirty tricks. The Humphrey people were playing the religion card and so Bobby had no problem with Paul Corbin’s recruitment of Catholic priests to knock on doors in Catholic areas to get out the vote. They convinced seminarian volunteers helping in the campaign to dispose of their frocks when visiting Protestant households to solicit Kennedy votes.

Jack decisively won in West Virginia, 60.8 to 39.2 percent, and Humphrey announced his withdrawal from the nomination fight. As a goodwill gesture that could soften Humphrey’s sense of loss and deter him from throwing his support in the convention to Lyndon Johnson or any other potential rival, and a bow toward party liberals, who were Humphrey’s strongest backers, Bobby went to see Humphrey and his wife in their hotel room to praise him and his contributions to the party’s domestic record. It was also a calculated step toward persuading Humphrey delegates to back Jack instead of Adlai Stevenson, the liberal alternative.