The Passage of Power (23 page)

And, liberal leaders said Sunday, of
civil rights as well. All the candidates had been invited to a rally organized by the NAACP that evening to support a civil rights fight in the convention’s platform committee, and Johnson had accepted. Now he said he wasn’t coming, sending former Interior Secretary
Chapman in his place. The audience, about six thousand persons, mostly African-American, was tough on all the candidates except for Humphrey, who was cheered when he rose to speak. When Kennedy was introduced, some boos mingled with the applause; he spoke in generalities, making no specific pledges on Negro rights, but apparently convinced the audience of his sincerity; at the end of his talk, the applause was no more than polite, but there were no boos. Then Chapman spoke. As soon as he mentioned Johnson’s name, the jeering and angry shouts were so loud, and went on so long, that for a time it seemed he would not be allowed to continue. When, finally, he was, he said, “If I did not think Senator Johnson would support the Supreme Court decision [on school desegregation] wholeheartedly, I would not support him.” The skeptical reaction drowned him out again.

One by one, all that weekend, delegations came down for Kennedy. Calling on Johnson in his suite—7333—in the Biltmore Hotel on Saturday morning,
De Sapio and Prendergast delivered in private the news that Mayor Wagner, who hadn’t come, would announce publicly that afternoon: that Kennedy would receive 104 or 105 of New York’s 114 votes. On Saturday also, Governors Docking and Loveless announced that they would release the
Kansas and
Iowa delegations from their favorite-son candidacies; although Kennedy had only a bare majority of Kansas’ 21 votes, under the unit rule if the delegation was released, Kennedy would get all 21. The big headlines in the Sunday newspapers said:
MOVE
TO KENNEDY NEARS STAMPEDE
;
JOHNSON
SEEMS HEADED FOR POLITICAL ALAMO
. And later on Sunday, Dick Daley let it be known that Kennedy would get all but a handful of Illinois’ 69 votes.

T
HERE REMAINED
just one hope: what
Joseph Alsop called
“the
single major herd of delegates that is … genuinely uncommitted. This is the
Pennsylvania delegation, 81 strong, sternly commanded by the Sphinx of Harrisburg, Gov. David Lawrence.”

Slim though the chance might be, it was definitely a chance. Despite the headlines, if Kennedy didn’t take almost all of Pennsylvania’s votes, he might still be well short of the 761 he needed. Pennsylvania would not caucus until Monday morning, and, as Alsop wrote on Friday, the result of that caucus would be “decisive” for Kennedy’s chances.
“Everything
depends on Pennsylvania,” Lyndon Johnson said that weekend.
“If
we could have held Pennsylvania,”
John Connally was to recall years later,
“we
would have stopped him.” And that weekend Lawrence was doing—as he had been doing for more than a year—everything he could to keep his state out of Kennedy’s column.

The son of an Irish teamster, David (“Don’t Call Me ‘Boss’ ”) Lawrence had dropped out of high school at fourteen to run errands for a Pittsburgh alderman, and thereafter his education had been as a politician, and a formative moment had come in 1928. Idolizing another poor and uneducated Irishman up from the slums,
Alfred E. Smith, for the social reforms Smith had enacted as governor of New York, Lawrence had thrown himself and his Pittsburgh machine into Smith’s presidential campaign. The storm of anti-Catholic prejudice that sent the “Happy Warrior” to overwhelming defeat—fiery crosses had blazed on midwestern hills as Smith’s campaign train passed—had burned into Lawrence the belief that Roman Catholicism was an insurmountable handicap in American politics; in 1932, despite his admiration for Smith, he took his machine into
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s camp, “solely,” Lawrence’s biographer wrote, “on the religious issue.” Then, in 1958, after four terms as Pittsburgh’s mayor, he ran for the governorship. Until the end of his life, he never stopped talking about what had happened to him in that race: about the hate-filled letters that poured into his home, some of them worded so violently that he feared for his family’s safety; about the ministers in Pennsylvania’s rural Dutch districts who warned their congregants not to vote for a Roman Catholic; about how, although he had come out of Pittsburgh
and Philadelphia, and the hard coal counties, with a huge plurality, he had almost lost anyway, when the vote from the non-Catholic areas came in. On the morning after a Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in 1959, Lawrence had attended a Sunday Mass together with
Richard Daley, Robert Wagner,
Carmine De Sapio,
Mike DiSalle and
Pat Brown—a communion of the bosses—and during breakfast after church Lawrence delivered his sermon: that Kennedy
“just
can’t win. Districts that have always gone Democratic I lost because I was a Catholic.” Now, on the eve of the 1960 convention, the stocky, grizzled ruler of the Pennsylvania Democrats was convinced that, despite West Virginia, nothing had changed; Kennedy’s victory there might have eased the fears of some of those other leaders about anti-Catholic prejudice; it had done little to ease Lawrence’s.
“I
figured … he’ll lose Pennsylvania sure,” he was to recall. And he was afraid that Kennedy’s name at the top of the ticket would, by arousing anti-Catholic sentiment in those “Dutch Democratic districts,” drag other Pennsylvania Democrats down with him. Says an old friend who talked to Lawrence shortly after West Virginia:
“What
he wanted was to win. He was convinced that the whole ticket was going to go down the drain because you couldn’t elect a Roman Catholic.” An ambitious program he wanted to pass as governor depended on his narrow margin in the legislature. If Kennedy was the nominee, Lawrence recalls,
“I
could see losing … the Legislature.”

And there were, besides, his feelings about Adlai Stevenson, feelings which one reporter called
“an
almost youthful adoration,” the admiration, almost awe, of the tough old boss, with little formal education, for Stevenson’s learning, wit and brilliance. He had played a crucial role in getting Adlai the nomination in 1952 and 1956, and, Lawrence’s son was to say, in 1960
“though
I don’t think his political sense was with Stevenson … his heart was with Stevenson.” Lawrence himself would say,
“I
was very enamored of Stevenson, because I think of him as one of the ablest men in the world and the ablest man I ever met.”

The Kennedys had been working on Dave Lawrence not for months but for years; Joseph Kennedy had made a substantial contribution to his 1958 gubernatorial campaign. (
“Why
would you want to contribute in Pennsylvania?” Lawrence’s protégé,
Joe Barr, had asked the patriarch at the time.) In Pennsylvania’s own, non-binding 1960 primary, more than 175,000 Democrats, an astonishingly high number, had written in Kennedy’s name, and more than half the state’s eighty-one delegates were for him. But Lawrence wouldn’t budge.
“We
were all furious” at him,
Rose Kennedy would recall. “Joe has worked with Lawrence all winter, but he still can’t believe a Catholic can be elected. He has been one of the most exasperating and tantalizing forces.”

That didn’t mean that Lawrence was for Johnson. If he felt a Catholic couldn’t win, he had the same feeling about a southerner, even after Johnson’s speech at the Zembo Mosque. On a visit to the Taj Mahal near the end of May, he was “given the ‘full treatment.’ ” Emerging “in a daze,” he “sought refuge” in the
office of Pennsylvania Senator
Joseph Clark, and told him, “in wondering tones,” that “the man has sold himself on the idea that he is going to be our nominee and the next President. Now how can I ask Pennsylvania Democrats to vote for Lyndon Johnson?”

Over that weekend in Los Angeles, Johnson was working furiously to hold the Pennsylvania delegates. His partner in the effort was a key player in the Pennsylvania game,
John L. Lewis, president of the
United Mine Workers, who had been his ally—a secret ally, since labor union support was not a political
desideratum
in Texas—for years; the UMW’s chief counsel,
Welly Hopkins, a onetime Hill Country legislator for whom Johnson, as a young man, had campaigned in Texas, had carried cash back to that state for both of Johnson’s Senate campaigns.

In any state with as much coal as Pennsylvania, of course, the mine workers would be a potent political force; Lewis had already dispatched UMW Secretary-Treasurer
Tom Kennedy to Los Angeles, and, on Lewis’ instructions, Hopkins had been discussing with Johnson ways in which Johnson might hold at least a substantial bloc of the Pennsylvania delegation.

The last chance melted away due to Stevenson’s indecisiveness. Arriving in Los Angeles, Lawrence found that more of his Pennsylvania delegates than ever were for Kennedy, and Chicago’s Daley let him see with his own eyes that Stevenson had little support even from his own state, inviting Lawrence to attend the Illinois caucus on Sunday, in which Stevenson received only a handful of votes. Nevertheless, meeting Sunday night
“with
the man he had championed for almost a decade,” Lawrence pleaded with him to announce that he was a candidate.
“You’ll
have eighty-five percent of the Pennsylvania delegation,” he said. “I can hold it. They’re going to kill me, but I can hold it. They’re all on the [state] payroll.” And if he held Pennsylvania, Lawrence said, Kennedy couldn’t win on the first ballot, “and this guy is dead if it goes to a second ballot. He’s dead!” But Pennsylvania was going to caucus the next morning. “You’ve got to tell me right now.”

Adlai was Adlai.
“If
the party wants me …”

“No, no, Governor,” Lawrence said. “Right now. I have to know
right now
!”

Finally, Stevenson said cavalierly,
“Do
what you have to, Dave.” Adlai’s aide
Willard Wirtz said in despair,
“Governor
, are you sure that’s the message you want to give Governor Lawrence?” but Stevenson said it was.
“Adlai
could have said anything but that and he [Lawrence] would’ve stopped Pennsylvania from going to Kennedy,” said another Stevenson aide. Lawrence had given Stevenson a last chance—and Stevenson had refused it. Lawrence told Stevenson that Pennsylvania would go for Kennedy at the caucus. All during that weekend, Welly Hopkins says, the UMW’s Tom Kennedy had been working the Pennsylvania delegates, and
“there
was some reason to believe that there might be a last-minute gambit … through Lawrence that they be put in Lyndon’s column,” but “he wasn’t able to put it over although he tried.”

Late Sunday night Johnson learned what Pennsylvania was going to do when it caucused Monday morning. Nonetheless, that morning, before the actual vote he had to attend a breakfast meeting of the Pennsylvania delegation, where he, Kennedy, Symington and, speaking for Stevenson,
Mike Monroney would give brief talks to the delegates before they voted; he had to sit beside Kennedy all through that breakfast, keeping a smile on his face. At one point, Lawrence opened the doors and let photographers in. Leaping to his feet, Johnson stood between Kennedy and Symington, who had remained seated, and put a hand on each of their shoulders so that in the photographs he would be the dominant figure. But after the photographers were ushered out, the doors were closed again, and Lawrence introduced the speakers. Johnson received polite applause. Then Lawrence introduced Kennedy. With a spontaneous roar, the delegates stood and cheered him. After the talks, the speakers left, and the doors were closed again. Back in his suite at the Biltmore an hour later, Johnson got the exact count: he had received 4 of Pennsylvania’s 81 votes, Stevenson 7?, Kennedy 64 (1? had gone for “others”). Later that day he had to keep a commitment to speak to New York.
“I
am not a naïve person,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I know that a preponderance of the cards are stacked against me here.” Of the 114 delegates in the audience facing him, 4? would vote for him. That night, he sat watching the opening of the convention in his suite at the Biltmore, alone except for Jim Rowe. Rowe was staring at the screen when he heard a voice beside him say softly,
“I
don’t see how we can stop this fellow.”

T
UESDAY BROUGHT TWO EPISODES
of note. One was the wild demonstration touched off by Senator
Eugene McCarthy’s emotional speech placing Stevenson’s name in nomination, a riotous parade around the convention floor that moved television commentators to speculate that the convention might be stampeded for Adlai. The political pros in the hall, however, noticed that very few of the paraders were delegates; in terms of changing votes, the demonstration had little significance.

In those terms, the other episode didn’t have much significance, either—but it may have given Lyndon Johnson a new appreciation of
John F. Kennedy.

Trying to give as many delegates as possible a chance to meet Kennedy, his campaign headquarters had sent a telegram, signed by him, to the chairman of each delegation, asking for permission to address it “to explain my views and to answer their questions.” The chairman of the Texas delegation was Lyndon Johnson, and no one had thought to omit him from the list.

It was only a form telegram, but when Johnson received it, he seized upon it as the opening he had been waiting for: the opening that could, even at this late moment, change everything—a chance to trap Kennedy into a debate.

“I
want to get on the same podium with Jack,” he told Irv Hoff. “I’ll destroy him.”

Connally, Reedy and
Busby, when they were called in, were unanimously enthusiastic;
“One
major error” by Kennedy, Connally felt, and the Kennedy bandwagon, which he believed was not yet on completely firm ground anyway, would be overturned. A reply from Johnson was drafted, ostensibly “in response to your request” but in terms that would elevate the event to a more significant level: a debate between the two leading contenders for the nomination. It challenged Kennedy to “appear together” with him at three o’clock that afternoon before a joint caucus of the Texas and Massachusetts delegations “and debate the major issues,” and on Tuesday morning, even before it was sent to Kennedy, Johnson called a press conference and read it to reporters. “It would be in the interest of our party that this session be open to” television coverage, it said.
“If
it went well, enough delegates would be watching to tip the balance,” Reedy said.