Listening In (11 page)

BRADLEE:
And luck.

JFK:
… and luck. I mean, the margin is awfully small between, you know, those who succeed and those who don’t. Like it is in life.

CANNON:
Were you disappointed in ’56 when you didn’t make it for vice president?

JFK:
I was for about a day or so.

CANNON:
Is that all, really? What did you do to contain your disappointment?

JFK:
I didn’t really ever think I was going to run when I went there. I didn’t think I had much of a chance ever. When Stevenson asked me to nominate him. I thought I was out, this was a complete surprise to me, I really …

BRADLEE:
Did you nominate Stevenson in ’56?

JFK:
Yes.

TONY BRADLEE:
Maybe he’ll do the same for you now. [laughter]

BRADLEE:
You’d ask nothing less.

CANNON:
But once it was done, were you disappointed?

JFK:
Yeah, I guess we were, the next morning, weren’t we, Jackie? I mean, I was tired.

JACQUELINE KENNEDY:
You were so tired. How could you be anything …

JFK:
It was so damn close, I was disappointed. I was disappointed that night.

CANNON:
Did you think that they were going to win?

JFK:
Kefauver deserved it. I always thought that [unclear], he’d beaten Stevenson in two or three primaries …

BRADLEE:
You didn’t run in any primaries in that, did you?

JFK:
No, but he had, that’s why he deserved it.

CANNON:
Was there any sense of [unclear]?

JFK:
Afterwards? No, it’s past [or passed].

CANNON:
It was past the next morning. You can honestly say, you could go off the next day to home, or to Hyannisport, or wherever, and say, “Well, nice try.”

JFK:
Not quite that easy, because I was damn tired, but I have to say, I thought, you know, we did have a close effort, and I had not thought I was going to win, I did much better than I thought I would, I thought Kefauver deserved to win, and therefore I was not desolate. It’s a lot different from now. Now it’s entirely different. Now I’m [unclear]. It would take me a lot longer to recover.

CANNON:
How does a politician get over this sense of loss? Sense of defeat?

JFK:
I didn’t lose so much. I was still in the Senate, and finally, of course, you know the ticket didn’t win.

CANNON:
Did you think it was going to?

JFK:
Well, in September I thought he might, I thought he had a pretty good chance. At the end of the convention we all got excited. I thought even in September he was doing … turned out to be a [unclear].

CANNON:
Why did you think he was going to win?

JFK:
Well, for a little while there, Stevenson was awfully active and Eisenhower wasn’t. I was just talking to Democrats.

CANNON:
You’re suggesting that you haven’t had many disappointments in politics. Have you ever lost a race?

JFK:
No. I’ve run five times.

CANNON:
The only thing you’ve ever lost was the try for the vice presidency.

JFK:
That’s right.

CANNON:
And it really didn’t hit you very hard.

JFK:
No. At the time. I mean, that day it did.

CANNON:
What do you do, what did you say to yourself, when it happened?

JFK:
I was disappointed that day, and I was damn tired, and we came awfully close, and then we lost. By twenty-eight votes or something. And I was disappointed.

CANNON:
What did you do, go back to the hotel and go to sleep? Or have a drink?

JFK:
No, I think we went to have dinner with Eunice, didn’t we, Jackie? And then we went back afterwards.

JACQUELINE KENNEDY:
You know for five days in Chicago, Jack really hadn’t gone to bed. Nobody had. Except for two hours sleep a night. It just was this incredible … brutal thing. You don’t see how any men are that strong to stay up for five days and talk and talk …

BRADLEE:
Do you remember wanting to go into politics?

CANNON:
Not really, no.

JFK:
And here you are, around these history makers, in Washington. Do you ever think you’d rather be a politician than reporting?

BRADLEE:
Yup. Yup.

CANNON:
I think I can’t afford it. I have two children and …

JFK:
Well, you couldn’t, I mean, at this point. Now, after the war? What are you now, about forty-two or -three? Forty-one. Now let’s say 1945, you might have been able to.

CANNON:
Well, it was not a convenient thing.

JFK:
What was it, in ’45, were you in the service?

CANNON:
Yeah.

JFK:
Well, when you came home, you were pretty much [unclear].

CANNON:
Yeah, but I was … I’m not talking about myself.

JFK:
No, but I’m just trying to say, why wasn’t it possible, really, in ’45?

CANNON:
Well, basically, my problem was financial. I recognize that this was something that if you were going to be honest in, you ought to have an independent source of income.

JFK:
I don’t agree with that. I mean, it may be more difficult for me to talk about it, but I’ve seen a lot of politicians with money, and I don’t find … There’s so many kinds of being dishonest, the money part is just only one of them. I don’t really think you can prove by any test that you have to have money to be successful, politically, or that people with money are more honest than those who aren’t.

BRADLEE:
Or less honest, you mean.

JFK:
I mean more honest. People with money. They may be, not tempted by bribery, but nobody is offering people money in the Senate or the House except on the rarest occasions. There’s no idea that anybody attempts to bribe anybody in the United States Senate, with the exception of maybe, possibly …

BRADLEE:
[unclear]

JFK:
Well, here are maybe the rarest influences, but even Ben, who’s pretty tough, would have to say, maybe campaign contributors, but we all get campaign contributions, some from labor, and some from business, and I suppose that makes them perhaps somewhat responsive, but you’re responsive also to people who vote for you, veterans and other pressure groups. So I don’t think that this idea, you can’t tell me that, I’ll name him, but not for the thing, that Averell Harriman
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and these people are as political whores as anybody in the United States. Because they are desperately anxious to succeed in this profession which has so many attractions to it. So money is not really a sine qua non.

BRADLEE:
There are a thousand objections to running for politics that I … Somebody once told me that I ought to run for politics in New Hamsphire. God forbid! There were whole lots of objections, there was one that I couldn’t possibly have been elected. [laughter] You know, I mean, a Democrat in New Hampshire? For God’s sakes, I mean, I thought very very very seriously about this. Second thing was, there is something in some people’s minds that is uncomfortable at constantly being projected in the public eye, that is not uncomfortable to you and to these guys, who not only love it, but transfer it into a good thing. Whereas with somebody else it sort of snarls them up and gets them to eat their own tail. This is something about politics, who has that and why, I think is an important area of why go into politics.

JFK:
Let me now just finish this thing, though, and I’m not the best one because I do have some financial resources, so it’s rather easier for me, but I do say, looking at it objectively, that money, because you can just go through the House and the Senate, I mean, I know most of my colleagues do not have resources and they have succeeded in politics. The people with money who have succeeded are comparatively few in politics. I mean, it’s just most of them don’t go into politics, if they have money, and if they do go into politics, they’re not any better than their colleagues. I mean, they are just as susceptible to pressure and in many ways more susceptible to pressure because they are desperately anxious, this is their tremendous chance to break through the rather narrow lives they may lead. So they’re just as anxious to succeed. That’s why I say to you, merely getting beaten, the financial problem is an additional one, but not the chief one. The chief one is being cut off from this fascinating life at mid-age, which is what you’re suggesting to me. Now, I can survive, but it’s still being cut off.

BRADLEE:
What about the projection of one’s self? The only comparable field I can think of is a movie star.

JFK:
No, but I think I personally am the antithesis of a politician as I saw my grandfather who was
the
politician. I mean, every reason that I say, that he was ideal. What he loved to do was what politicians are expected to do. Now I just think that today …

CANNON:
Don’t you?

JFK:
No, I don’t. I don’t enjoy. I’d rather read a book on a plane than talk to the fellow next to me, and my grandfather wanted to talk to everybody else. I’d rather not go out to dinner.

TONY BRADLEE:
You look as though you enjoy it. Which helps.

BRADLEE:
But Jack, that whole projection that comes with modern times.

JFK:
I think I just happen to fit now. I mean, I think people don’t like this.

JACQUELINE KENNEDY:
I think that’s a nineteenth-century politician, don’t you, like your grandfather, that you people are suspicious of?

BRADLEE:
Now the politicians have to be constantly on the air.

JFK:
Bill Fullbright—he’s not on the air. He has a particular personality. I have a particular type of personality which, I [don’t?] look like a politician, and all the rest, which helps me. Everybody isn’t an extrovert in politics. I would say that a lot of the Senate certainly are not extroverts.

BRADLEE:
Well, name me one.

JFK:
Who’s not? Mike Mansfield is not an extrovert. John Cooper is not an extrovert. Richard M. Nixon is not an extrovert. Stuart Symington is a tricky extrovert, if he is one. I don’t think he is one. Hubert is. I’m not.
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BRADLEE:
But Jack, I mean, you are! No?

JFK:
No, I don’t think I am, actually.

BRADLEE:
But you like it. And you live on it.

JFK:
All these things may be true. Listen, I’m just saying, what I would be doing, you know I don’t go out to dinner.

BRADLEE:
I know, I’m not trying to provoke you.

JFK:
I understand. I’d be delighted if I had Hubert Humphrey’s disposition. He thrives on this. He loves to go out and campaign for five days. It’s a lot of work. I just don’t think you have to have that type of personality to be successful today in politics. I think you have to be able to communicate a sense of conviction and intelligence and rather, some integrity. That’s what you have to be able to do. This hail-fellow is passé in many ways. Those three qualities are really it. Now, I think that some people can do that. I think I do that well. I mean, I’ve been really successful, politically. I think I can do that. But it isn’t anything to do with being able to go out and just love it. Dancing [unclear], the Fourth of July.

CANNON:
Something you naturally do?

JFK:
In my first campaign somebody said to me that he thought after I spoke that I would be governor of Massachusetts in ten years. I think I did well from the beginning in this particular key.

BRADLEE:
Did that statement create things in you?

JFK:
No, but I didn’t think it was possible, but I was pleased. Because I had not regarded myself as a political type. My father didn’t, he thought I was hopeless.

CANNON:
Go into that.

JFK:
I mean, Joe was made for it, and I certainly wasn’t.

BRADLEE:
Why was Joe? I never knew Joe obviously, but why?

JFK:
He [Joe] was more a type, an extrovert type.

BRADLEE:
Now why did the old boy think you were hopeless?

JFK:
At that time I weighed about 120 pounds. [laughter] Where was that picture we saw with Franklin Roosevelt, in the paper?

JACQUELINE KENNEDY:
Oh yeah. That’s in your old campaign photo?