The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (77 page)

Jack met with Raymond Chafin, the political boss of Logan County, and tried to convince the man that he cared about West Virginia’s problems; if elected, he would do more than Humphrey for the state. After Jack left, his minions worked on the man some more. Chafin had immense power in the poor county. He controlled all the Democratic election officials—amiable folks always ready to help instruct voters in how to mark their ballots. He got along with the UMW leaders and the bosses at the Island Creek Coal Company. And he was always ready to help get out the vote, whether by putting in a kind word to get someone on the welfare roles, offering a little help paying the electric bill, or supplying a pint of whiskey or a couple of dollars. The Kennedy people asked Chafin how much would be needed to put
Kennedy’s name on the slate cards that he gave voters to take into the voting booth to determine their vote. “Thirty-five,” Chafin said, meaning $3,500. A few days before the election Chafin was asked to come out to Taplan Airport outside Logan and to bring a bodyguard with him. There he received two briefcases. Looking in amazement at the bundles of cash sitting there, he realized that Kennedy’s people had thought he meant $35,000, ten times what he had proposed.

Humphrey’s people had already paid Chafin $2,000 to have the Minnesotan’s name on the slate card, and now Jack had royally trumped him. Humphrey spent $25,000 on his entire West Virginia campaign, $10,000 less than the amount in the two briefcases. Both candidates were playing the only game of politics played in West Virginia, but Humphrey was playing with a few copper pennies and Jack with bars of gold.

Chafin said that he used the money “mostly hiring people, drivers and poll workers, babysitters, people like that.” The Kennedys’ largess was so extravagant, so heedless of true election costs, it was likely that in many instances the money was pocketed.

The 1960 West Virginia primary was the harbinger of the modern political era, not simply in the massive amounts of money the Kennedy campaign spent per voter but in the organization, the use of television, the shrewd meshing of celebrity and politics, and the essentially negative nature of much of both candidates’ campaigns. James McCahey Jr., a Chicago businessman with West Virginia roots, organized teachers and other volunteers to create a grass-roots movement for Jack.

The campaign bought television time to put out documentary-like programming that concluded that Jack was the better candidate. Other Kennedys came to West Virginia, not only to sit in the capital of Charleston for photo ops, but also to go up the rutted country roads and knock on doors and to shake hands in crossroads stores. Jackie did not go out on the hustings, but her mere presence was a revelation. Humphrey’s wife, Muriel, could have been one of these local ladies, but the West Virginians sidled past her to gaze awestruck at the aristocratic beauty who had graced their modest environs. “They had a wondrous look in their eyes when they saw her,” said Charles Peters, then a campaign leader in the state.

If Jackie brought grace and beauty to the campaign, Bobby brought the mailed fist. For him, life was simple. All that mattered was that Jack win, and anyone and anything that did not lead to that goal was rudely shoved aside. When the two candidates staged their television debate, the Minnesota senator was bested in the one field in which he thought he should have been the hands-down winner. Humphrey was not much of a drinker, but at the Charleston Press Club, in his dismayed disbelief, he lifted more
than a few. “Bobby, I made your brother look good tonight.” Humphrey said, coming up to the Kennedy group. “I’ll be the first to admit he won that debate tonight. And who knows? Maybe I made him president of the United States tonight. But I’ve still got to campaign against you in Wheeling tomorrow morning, and I’ve spent so much time, I’ve missed the plane to Wheeling. How about letting me have the
Caroline
to whistle me over to Wheeling?”

Bobby gave Jack’s opponent an answer that was as profane as it was immediate. The other men were all Kennedy partisans too, but they respected Humphrey and were embarrassed by Bobby’s crude invective. “Well, Senator, I flew out here with Bruce Sundlun, and we’re flying back with him, and he’s sitting over there,” said Kenny O’Donnell, who wasn’t afraid of a Bobby who had sat on the bench when Kenny had quarterbacked the Harvard team. “Why don’t you go ask him if he’ll take you over? And if he can, I’m sure we don’t mind … dropping you off.”

I
n the last days of the primary election the Kennedy campaign added a new element, Franklin Roosevelt Jr., who for months had been discussing the campaign with the Kennedys. “When Frank came down to talk to Mr. Kennedy and Jack on the patio, and I was there for dinner, and he had that wonderful smile, that wonderful voice and vocabulary,” Rose recalled. “And he was talking about West Virginia, whether Jack should campaign there and whether he would go with him. And I felt then the marvelous personality he had and the facility for public speaking and his smile and being a Roosevelt, I am certainly glad that he is not a candidate against Jack in the primaries. That thought crossed my mind then … you would think he would have been the one that campaigned and not my son. And that is life.”

Two decades before, Joe had sat with President Roosevelt in the White House. That day he had given up what he thought was his own chance for political immortality to endow his sons with their chances for power. Joe had never traded in his marker, and though for years it had seemed valueless, he would make it pay out now.

Joe was a man who never forgot and rarely forgave. He surely was aware of the exquisite irony of this moment. The son and namesake of the president who had shoved him off the pages of history was helping Joe’s own son to reach the White House. FDR was a great man and a poor father. He had given his son an immortal name, an awesome persona, and natural grace, but little of the strength, will, and ambition that was his own essence. FDR Jr. was a self-indulgent, heavy-drinking namesake. The former congressman had
been a lobbyist for the Trujillo dictatorship and a distributor of Italian cars in Washington, work that Joe’s own sons would have never considered.

Franklin Roosevelt Jr. bore what in West Virginia was the most glorious of names. He was the son of the man whose New Deal had, as many in the state saw it, given shoes to people who had walked barefoot, electric light to those who had sat in darkness, and bread to those who were hungry. By rights, FDR Jr. should have been having this discussion, not with the centrist Jack but with the liberal Humphrey, who was a proud, happy defender of the New Deal legacy. That’s where his mother Eleanor would have placed him, or with her beloved Adlai Stevenson, not with who she considered the opportunistic Jack Kennedy.

FDR Jr. would have served Jack mightily by coming to West Virginia to speak for his candidacy and stand beside him, as if Jack too were an equal stalwart of the New Deal and its legacy. For the Kennedys, that was not enough, and they pushed Roosevelt to speak words that proved to be both untrue and unspeakable. Jack’s staff had come up with documentation that Humphrey had not served in World War II. “I remember discussing it with Ken O’Donnell and with Bobby Kennedy,” Feldman recalled. It was then, in Feldman’s words, “made available to Franklin.”

This was the kind of material that was dropped into the laps of friendly journalists, not shouted from the campaign platform by a man bearing one of the most revered names in American politics. “Bobby had been bringing pressure on me to mention it,” Roosevelt recalled. “He kept calling—five or six calls a day.” Bobby cared nothing about Roosevelt’s reputation, or he would have backed off.

“Is FDR Jr. there tonight?” Jack wrote on his notepad. “The best thing would be some veterans group there. I have to be extremely careful however—as so many people want to stick it to me.”

FDR Jr. began his assault on Humphrey with shrewd insinuations, lauding Jack as “the only wounded veteran” in the race. That was a mite too subtle and on April 27, he told an audience: “There’s another candidate in your primary. He’s a good Democrat, but I don’t know where he was in World War II.” That was so unseemly that the
Washington Star
characterized it as “a new low in dirty politics.”

A good politician learns to keep his distance from the mean and the ugly, to let others dismiss those he would fire and to have surrogates speak the ugly words he wants stated. It may have been Bobby, and behind him Joe, who pushed FDR Jr. to speak as he had, but Jack knew all about it. Humphrey peeled the bark of civility off his attacks and took the desperate expedient of screaming the truth to all within hearing. “I don’t have any daddy who can
pay the bills for me,” Humphrey shouted, his words streaked with self-pity. “I can’t afford to run around this state with a little black bag and a checkbook.”

“And the Star says we are guilty of ‘dirty politics,’” Jack scribbled on a piece of paper. Jack could have asked Roosevelt to back off, but he did not. A week and a half later, Roosevelt had suddenly discovered where Humphrey had been during the war: a “draft dodger” hiding at home. The candidate tried to point out that even though he had been a married man with three children, he had tried to enlist in the navy but was turned down because of a physical disability. The charges had inflicted a heavy wound, however, in proudly patriotic West Virginia.

At that point, right before the election, Jack issued a statement condemning the discussion of Humphrey’s war record. “There was a lot of criticism, and the Kennedys repudiated the statement and cut the ground out from under me,” FDR Jr. recalled. “That was the beginning of the break between Bobby and me.”

While the Kennedys stood back watching, Roosevelt had besmirched Humphrey’s reputation. Although the Minnesota senator would quickly wipe off the dark spots, Roosevelt’s role in West Virginia would stain him for the rest of his life. What angered Roosevelt most was that what he had said was not only unwise and unfair but untrue. “It was based on so-called reliable information which was made available to me,” he later reflected. “It was used in the heat of the closing days of a vital and decisive primary, and … when I found it was unwarranted I went to Mr. Humphrey and not only ate crow but asked for his forgiveness.”

J
ack might have been traipsing across West Virginia wearing the laurels of a war hero, but he remained a Catholic. West Virginia was overwhelmingly Protestant, full of God-fearing, churchgoing folks who had probably never met a Catholic and surely had never voted for one. Most of them had heard tales of an Italian pope and his hold on the American faithful. They had heard whispered yarns of the strange language spoken and strange rituals enacted in the dark recesses of the Catholic churches whose portals they would never enter. Their ministers often told them that a Catholic president would have another master in the Vatican.

In 1960, this Pentecostal vision of Catholics was only an exaggerated version of the dominant Protestant culture’s view on Catholics. Prejudice against Catholics was widespread in America, from the ignorant mouthing of the Ku Klux Klan to the no less pernicious musings of many political liberals,
but the hard center of Jack’s problems lay with Protestant ministers, who feared the gloved hand of Rome reaching into the White House and were ready to tell their congregations as much. Like millions of his co-religionists, Jack was only a nominal Catholic. He attended mass, but he acted as if the rituals of the Church were its essence. He was as much bewildered as irritated when he was constantly confronted with questions about his faith.

Part of the hierarchy of his own church was no more welcoming of Jack’s candidacy than the fire-and-brimstone preachers of the Bible Belt. Some of the bishops and cardinals were so conservative, like New York’s Cardinal Spellman, that they preferred the mock-Quaker Nixon to Kennedy. Others made the calculating and indeed accurate assessment that Kennedy would not be “their” president; he would have to distance himself so far from the Church that he would take positions on aid to parochial education and other matters that were harmful to the Church. In March 1960, Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi, apostolic Vatican delegate in Washington, said off the record to a
New York Times
reporter that though most bishops in America favored Jack “‘simply because he is a Catholic’ … a sophisticated current among Roman Catholics in the U.S., and in the Vatican, feels that a Roman Catholic in the White House at this moment might do more harm than good to the Church.”

Most presidents invoked the name of God to justify the most secular of policies. To assuage the fears and prejudices of Protestants and Jews, Jack took an unprecedented position on the role of religion in public life. He told
Look
magazine in March 1959, that “whatever one’s religion in private life may be, for the officer holder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution in all its parts—including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state.”

In their zeal to protect the presidency from the machinations of Rome, the ministers had essentially induced Jack to promise to drive God out of the White House. This grievously offended the Catholic press, while the most prejudiced of his critics considered it a further example of the duplicities of Rome. Among the many letters of protest Jack received was one from a group of thirty-eight students at a Midwestern parochial school who lamented “the crash of an idol.”

No one was more concerned with this issue than Joe and Cardinal Cushing. The Boston priest worked assiduously to promote Jack’s candidacy in a manner that his Protestant counterparts would have felt proved their every fear about the heavy hand of the Church. “Wherever I go they think I am Jack’s campaign manager,” Cushing wrote Joe in May 1960. The previous March, when Jack’s campaign was just beginning, Joe had written Cushing: “This letter really adds up to saying that if Jack stays in the fight, it will be you who has kept him in. If he wins, it will be you who has made it possible.”

Two months later, Joe wrote the religious leader again, essentially giving him carte blanche as to how Jack would handle the religious issue. “I hope that we won’t have the Catholic question raised again, but it might be a good idea to have some phrases worked out and handed to Jack to be added to the list of matters that he carries in his head. But we will be guided entirely by your thoughts on this.”