Kennedy: The Classic Biography (26 page)

But Humphrey had some important allies of his own. Most of Wisconsin’s local labor leaders, farm spokesmen and political liberals endorsed him. His own attractive family seemed more at home in Wisconsin than the sophisticated Kennedy girls. Symington and Stevenson supporters moved behind him. With paid television advertising, Wayne Morse came in to attack Kennedy. All the officialdom of Minnesota poured across the boundary to campaign for Humphrey. So did Teamster boss James Hoffa, the most powerful and dangerous figure of the labor movement to be exposed by the Rackets Committee. Humphrey emphatically repudiated Hoffa’s endorsement, but he stepped up the vehemence of his own attacks on Kennedy’s “Johnny-come-lately” farm record and on his wealth and campaign expenditures. (It should be emphasized that this chapter necessarily confines its discussion of Humphrey and other candidates to their opposition to Kennedy. Needless to say, their greater effort was not in opposing him but in advancing their own virtues, which were numerous.)

There were advantages of wealth, of which the airplane
Caroline
was the most ostentatious example. “But any candidate who attempts to finance his own campaign,” Senator Kennedy pointed out, “will end up in jail because it is against the law.” Kennedy himself had been raising money in Boston, Washington, New York and elsewhere for over a year, and his actual spending within Wisconsin roughly equaled Humphrey’s.

More disturbing to Kennedy were the attacks circulated by many Wisconsin liberals. The President was saddened to see intelligent men, who had reviled Joe McCarthy’s methods, themselves using methods which created an impression of anti-Catholicism. During the course of the primary fight, vicious falsehoods were whispered about Kennedy’s father, Kennedy’s religion and Kennedy’s personal life. Anti-Kennedy letters-to-the-editor were printed in the Madison
Capital Times
over obscure signatures, such as “Confused Catholic.” (“I see,” said Kennedy, referring to political editor Miles McMillan of the
Capital Times
, “a face full of energy and full of hate.”) Although Humphrey’s friend Governor Nelson professed a pro-Stevenson neutralism, in order to offend no one who might make him convention keynoter, it was with his apparent approval that members of his staff—including those who would later ask the Kennedy administration for top jobs—were openly and bitterly anti-Kennedy. All the old stories of Kennedy’s contributing to Nixon, of Kennedy’s deriding foreigners in a Harvard background lecture, of Kennedy’s admiring McCarthy, were resurrected without regard to well-documented past denials.

Humphrey, his speeches and his literature stepped up the attack on the still unruffled Kennedy: “If you can’t cry a little in politics, probably the only thing you can do is hate…. Beware of these orderly campaigns. They are ordered, bought and paid for…. [Kennedy] voted for the Benson farm program…record is like Nixon’s.”

Still Kennedy remained, in the words of James Reston, “remarkably self-possessed. He has shown not the slightest trace of anger. He has made no claims of victory. He has made no charges against Humphrey.” He continued his dawn-to-exhaustion schedule, talking about the pollution of Wisconsin’s rivers, the future of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the development of Wisconsin’s timber, the taxation of farm cooperatives and other topics selected from our file of over a hundred Wisconsin “speech sections.”

His crowds, particularly in the farming areas, were not so openly responsive as the audiences of Irish and Eastern and Southern European ancestry with whom he had learned to gauge his own effectiveness. But they continued to grow; they included young voters, suburbanites and housewives who had not previously shown any interest in politics. “I don’t care why they come out,” said Kennedy to one reporter, “as long as they do. My problem here is to get myself known.”

By April 5 the intensity of both men’s campaigns had ended that problem. Kennedy was known. His views were known. His charm was known. And his religion was known.

Kennedy had tried to minimize the religious issue in Wisconsin. He made no direct appeals to tolerance or for Catholic support. (One plain-spoken Kennedy advance man, Paul Corbin, inviting all the Reverend Fathers at a Catholic Seminary to attend a rally in their town that evening, added, “But, fellows, please wear your sport shirts.”)

The press, however, would not avoid the issue. The people of the nation, and to a lesser extent of Wisconsin, were largely unaware of Kennedy’s talks on other subjects. Pictures of Kennedy greeting groups of nuns were quickly snapped, while other greeters went unnoticed. Frequent questions from student audiences about his religion were reported far more extensively than questions on labor or agriculture. On a TV panel interview one reporter asked the Senator if he would attend a summit meeting even if ordered not to do so by his Bishop. “Of course I would,” bristled the Senator.

Several sermons were preached in Lutheran and other churches questioning the allegiance of a Catholic President. POAU pamphlets and far more unreasoning statements by anonymous hate sheets were distributed throughout the state. An advertisement in several Wisconsin newspapers said Catholics in both parties were “ganging up” on Kennedy’s opponent and urged Protestants to give a “square deal for Humphrey.” Humphrey promptly repudiated the ad and all other acts of bigotry, though one of his aides suggested it may have been inspired by those seeking to stir up Catholics for Kennedy.

Voters at Kennedy rallies were accosted by reporters outside the hall and asked their religion—“not their occupation or education or philosophy or income,” remarked the Senator, “only their religion.” One newspaper’s political analysis of the primary, he noted, mentioned the word Catholic twenty times in fifteen paragraphs. And on the Sunday before the primary, the Milwaukee
Journal
listed the voting strength in each county of three types of voters: Democrats, Republicans and Catholics.

The primary results confirmed both his hopes and his fears. Kennedy won the state with more votes than any candidate in the history of Wisconsin’s primary. He carried six of the ten districts and thus two-thirds pf the convention delegates. He ran well in many farm areas, carried one farm district and carried labor’s vote despite its leaders. His margin of 56 percent was greater than the press and pollsters had originally, though not finally, predicted, and a shift of less than three-tenths of one percent in the vote could have given him two of the four districts Humphrey carried.

But the loss of those four districts, after the press had talked of a landslide, encouraged many commentators—particularly pollster Elmo Roper on CBS, hard pressed to explain how Kennedy received more than the 53 percent his poll had predicted—to attribute Kennedy’s win to Catholic Republicans and his losses to farmers and Protestants.
²
(Wisconsin Republicans, taking advantage of their state’s open primary laws, had actually crossed over in roughly equal numbers for both men, ignoring Nixon’s unopposed listing on their ballot.)

Humphrey ran best, it was correctly reported, in the least Catholic areas. But few pointed out that all these areas were near the Minnesota border—that Humphrey also ran well in the
Catholic
areas near Minnesota—and that Kennedy ran well in the cities and in the eastern part of the state among non-Catholics as well as Catholics. Humphrey did well in the cities near Minnesota; Kennedy did well on the farms further away. Geography was more decisive than religion.

Obviously Kennedy’s religion did help him—and hurt him—in Wisconsin. Undoubtedly most Catholics did support him. Unquestionably some were motivated by pride in their coreligionist. But it is equally clear that there were many other reasons for union members, Negroes, moderates, women, young people, retired workers, city dwellers, suburbanites and others to prefer Kennedy to Humphrey. Nevertheless, if they lived in a “Catholic community,” their support was attributed solely to religion. “To submit the candidates to a religious test is unfair enough,” said Kennedy. “To apply it to the voters themselves is divisive, degrading and wholly unwarranted.” Attempts to correlate his showing with the location of Wisconsin Catholics were no more valid, he said, than one showing him running well “in the beech tree and basswood counties and not so well among the hemlock and pine.”

WEST VIRGINIA

But Wisconsin threatened to make religion
the
issue, and Humphrey treated this “psychological blow” to Kennedy as a psychological boost for himself. Abandoning his earlier announced intention to withdraw from the race if he could not carry his neighboring state, the Minnesota Senator carried the fight to a new field of battle: West Virginia. “I know we can win here,” he told his aides. Perhaps he recalled that in 1956 the Vice Presidential survey of his friend Louis Bean had flatly listed West Virginia as one of the states where “urban, Boston, Irish Catholic” Kennedy had “no appeal.”

Kennedy had no choice but to accept Humphrey’s challenge in West Virginia, as he had in Wisconsin, but he had even less reason to run there. He was running the same day—May 10—in Nebraska. He was running in the same area that very month in Maryland. The West Virginia primary had been of no historical importance. Its voters were not typical of the country. Its outcome was not binding on its delegates. The delegation itself was not large. And Senators Johnson and Symington, with no campaign at all, were certain to have many of that delegation’s votes.

Unlike Wisconsin, not a single leading politician in the entire state was for Kennedy. He had entered West Virginia largely on the strength of a Lou Harris Poll which showed him 70-30 over Humphrey. Now a new Harris Poll, taken after the full impact of Wisconsin, showed a sharply new awareness of the religious issue in this 95 percent Protestant state—and a 60-40 landslide for Humphrey.

Kennedy was quietly disgusted with his own folly in setting such store by the earlier polls but equally embittered by Humphrey’s refusal to withdraw. If a Minnesotan could not win in Wisconsin, he could not win the nomination, Kennedy reasoned. Humphrey, he was certain, was being urged on, exploited and financed by the backers of the other “stop-Kennedy” candidates. He approached friends they had in common in the liberal and labor movement on the possibility of obtaining a Humphrey withdrawal. He tried to persuade Stevenson backers to stop financing Humphrey to stop Kennedy. But it was all to no avail. (“Thank God,” he would later remark in private, “that Humphrey did win the Second District in Wisconsin and didn’t pull out of West Virginia, and that we did believe that poll of Lou Harris’ and did enter it.”)

While preparing his public position for a defeat, Kennedy set out doggedly in search of a victory. To neutralize the suspicion attached to his faith, he emphasized his other attributes, especially his family’s war record and patriotism in a state justly proud of its war heroes. To offset the religious issue, he emphasized other issues, especially his efforts for the unemployed, in this most depressed of all states. He also stepped up his year-long cultivation of local county leaders as mapped by his first and shrewdest friend in the state, Bob McDonough (“our man in Havana,” Kennedy had called him, when he was our only agent in a hostile territory).

Once again the smooth-running Kennedy team, under brother Bob, O’Brien and O’Donnell, assisted by local Kennedy leaders, organized each day and each county. (However, the Senator felt that his sisters were too glamorous to be used as extensively in this poverty-ridden state). A new speaker for Kennedy proved a special attraction, an old friend whose help he had earlier enlisted in his 1952 Senate campaign: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., flashing the famous Roosevelt smile which had helped FDR, Sr. to carry West Virginia. Humphrey was campaigning through West Virginia in the Roosevelt image, making what his aides called his “FDR speech,” with a New Deal ring more powerful and practiced than Kennedy’s—but Kennedy had the Roosevelt image in the flesh. Cartons of letters to all West Virginia voters from Franklin, then a Washington automobile dealer, were shipped up to Hyde Park to be postmarked.

In deserted coal mining camps showing the effects of automation and the rise of competing fuels, to straggling groups of unemployed at the side of the road, to families eking out an existence on welfare checks and surplus food back in the hills and hollows, Jack Kennedy promised help—and asked for theirs. At first the sight of this wealthy Harvard graduate asking for help in their impoverished state astonished the West Virginians, but gradually his warmth and sincerity began to make an impression.

At the same time West Virginia was making a deep and lasting impression on Jack Kennedy. He was appalled by the pitiful conditions he saw, by the children of poverty, by the families living on surplus lard and corn meal, by the waste of human resources. He more deeply understood, as the distressed areas of Massachusetts had never made him understand, the unemployed worker, the pensioner, the relief recipient and the ghost town, and he more fervently endorsed their plea for more help. He talked of developing West Virginia’s resources, with new highways, clean water and better parks and tourist attractions. He spoke of assisting the coal industry with new research, new by-products and the encouragement of “coal by wire”—shipping coal out of the state as electric energy, instead of by rail, through steam plants at the mouth of the mines (an idea quietly passed on to me by Kennedy’s old Republican friend, Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky). He called for better housing and better schools and better food distribution. And in his most effective use of the Humphrey-can’t-win argument, he reminded his listeners that a Humphrey victory in the primary would only mean that neither of the two candidates familiar with West Virginia’s problems would be the nominee.

He spoke in every town and hamlet, Jacqueline tirelessly at his side. “I am the only Presidential candidate since 1924, when a West Virginian ran for the Presidency,” he would say later, “who knows where Slab Fork is and has been there.” He shook every hand in sight. He campaigned day and night, and lost his voice in the process. For a few days his brother Teddy and I substituted for him, as he stood by on the platform smiling gamely. (Once, when Teddy made a particularly impassioned speech about the qualities needed in the White House, the Senator stepped close to the microphone to croak that Teddy was not old enough to meet the constitutional age minimum for the Presidency.)