The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (78 page)

Cushing replied two days later that “the religious issue should be taboo. Those who raise it never change their opinions no matter what answer we give them. This whole thing is very subtle. It will come to the forefront again and again but it may be a political devise
[sic]
to get us off the beam.”

His father and his favorite priest had spoken from the depths of their experience that Jack had better steer as far from the religion issue as he could. But now, in the last weeks of the campaign in the heart of fundamentalist Protestant America, Jack decided to face the religion issue straight on. In doing so, he went not only against his father and Cushing but his West Virginian staff, who supposedly knew these people best, against his own pollster’s studied judgment, and against the advice of most of his sophisticated Washington aides.

A great politician knows that if he stands back far enough from a problem, it may take on a manageable form and become an opportunity. He knows too that the defining of an issue is often the winning of an issue. There were many crucial decisions in Jack’s quest for the White House, but few to compare to this moment. The issue would rise up again and again, but almost always in the form in which Jack had defined it as he campaigned in the hills and hollows of West Virginia. To do what he was doing took the courage that he considered the king of all virtues. But political courage rarely stands alone, and his was welded to an awesomely shrewd sense of human beings and their emotions.

“I refuse to believe that I was denied the right to be president on the day I was baptized,” he told his audiences. “Nobody asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy…. Nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or a Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber plane to fly his last mission.”

How were his listeners to respond when the matter was couched as an act of elemental fairness? Wasn’t there something in their nature that didn’t like bullies and thought that a fight was fair only if either man could win? How brilliantly Jack had finessed the issue so that Catholics could feel comfortable voting for him because he shared their faith, while Protestants who voted against him for the same reason became bigots.

And pity poor Humphrey rattling across the state in his sad little bus, while Jack soared above in the
Caroline.
Could the Minnesota liberal shout
out that all his life he had sung an anthem of tolerance, and that he was nothing but a foil in this whole business? If he said that, he would look like a bigot. Unable to say anything, he could only continue his bumpy ride and speak about everything but what he wanted to discuss.

O
n the weekend before the primary election, Jack appeared on a paid television program broadcast across West Virginia. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. was still of use, and he sat beside Jack, asking him questions that had been prepared by the candidate’s staff. Theodore White, the famed chronicler of this campaign, recalled this half hour as “the finest TV broadcast I have ever heard any politician make.”

Roosevelt gently asked the questions, and Jack ran with them, toying with them in soliloquies daring in their length. Jack was the very image of “cool,” a term that was rising out of the Beat underground and the hip black jazz world. He and this new medium were one. He had all the media-anointed credibility of a television anchor, his words sanctified as truth.

There is nothing like a picture to convince another person, and there were two pictures being broadcast: the pictures on the flickering black-and-white screens in homes and bars from Bluefield to Morgantown, and the pictures created by Jack’s own words.

“So when any man stands on the steps of the Capitol and takes the oath of office of president, he is swearing to support the separation of church and state,” he said as his viewers fixed this image in their minds. “He puts one hand on the Bible and raises the other hand to God as he takes the oath. And if he breaks his oath, he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution, for which the Congress can impeach him—and should impeach him—but he is committing a sin against God.”

Then Jack stopped for a moment. He had raised the ante a final time, placing God’s own name on top of his stack of chips. It was a fierce, just, almighty God these people worshiped. Would Jack dare blaspheme against God before so many witnesses? And if he did, wasn’t God’s wrath worse than any judgment that mortals could mete out? Jack raised his hand from an imaginary Bible as if he had just taken that sacred oath, and then he repeated his words: “A sin against God, for he has sworn on the Bible.”

By then Jack knew that the polls were looking better and better in the West Virginia primary, but victory was not yet complete. “I suppose if I win my poon days are over,” Jack wrote on a notepad, lamenting the fact that his extracurricular sex life might soon be halted. “I suppose they are going to hit me with something before we are finished.” He was almost certainly thinking that some sort of sex scandal would break.

On election day, when almost any other candidate would have prowled the environs of his hotel room, badgering aides for the first hint of results, Jack flew up to Washington. That evening he attended a movie with Ben Bradlee. Jack left the movie every twenty minutes or so to call Bobby at the Kanawha Hotel, each time learning that the results were not yet known. When he slumped back into his theater seat next to Bradlee, he had hardly missed any plot points; the film, a soft-core porn item called
Private Property,
consisted largely of a series of rapes and seductions.

Jack did not learn that he had won a landslide victory, 61 percent to 39 percent, until he returned to his house and received a triumphant call from Bobby at 11:30
P.M.
. The occasion called for a few celebratory toasts and a good night’s sleep. Sleep was not even a possibility. He knew that he would have to fly back to Charleston through the night skies with Jackie to thank in person those who had helped him with the crucial victory. It did not matter that he was tired, that the hour was late, or that the air was turbulent. This was part of the natural risk of a politician’s life, a backstage danger that the audiences never saw.

As Jack flew back to West Virginia for a short-lived celebration, Bobby trudged over to Humphrey’s hotel and walked with the politician back to his headquarters for his public capitulation. Bobby appeared deeply touched by Humphrey’s emotional concession, though his tears were like those of a pyromaniac standing back from the conflagration he has set off as his victims run from the burning building.

Jack stayed in the state capital long enough to shake Humphrey’s hand, thank the voters over television, and hold a short press conference. At her husband’s moment of triumph, Jackie stood alone like a shanghaied but unwanted passenger on a voyage to parts unknown. She turned and walked back to the car and sat there by herself in the darkness waiting for Jack.

As the
Caroline
flew back toward Washington in the predawn hours, the passengers were as giddy and lighthearted as a college football team returning from a victory. Only Jack was different. He sat there in the half-light looking ahead toward the Maryland primary and trying to gauge how his West Virginia victory would affect the uncommitted states. He was on the greatest journey of his life, and he was only partway there.

20
A Patriot’s Song

O
n a Thursday evening in early July at the 1960 Democratic Convention, Wyoming cast its fifteen deciding votes for Jack, and the forty-three-year-old senator became the Democratic nominee. The candidate had secreted himself away from the convention, his whereabouts known only to his intimates. Soon after the vote, he descended on the new Los Angeles Sports Arena out of the cool night, his arrival signaled by a score of lights hurtling through the blackness.

In the cottage outside the gigantic arena stood the most powerful Democrats waiting to greet the man their party had just accorded its greatest honor. Only they had the clout to whisper a few words to Jack before he made his grand entrance to thank the delegates. The party leaders stood back as Jack got out of the sedan and greeted Bobby and Sarge Shriver, his brother-in-law. Part of the pols’ reticence was the natural deference to power. As prominent as they were, and as much as some of them had done to further the younger man’s ambition, there would always be a line now between them and the man who stood before them. Something else, however, kept them at a distance. As much as Jack had pretended that he was one of them, an American politician born and bred, he was different.

Jack did not have the politician’s grayish pallor from a life measured out in planes, auditoriums, public meetings, and too many smoky rooms. He looked like a great star arriving to grace a Hollywood premiere where the klieg lights played across the sky and the urgent masses stretched for a glance or an autograph. Exuding movie star sexuality, he was astoundingly handsome, his perfect white teeth set off against his tanned skin. He was a vibrant, charismatic figure who seemed to radiate healthful vigor.

There was a daring, seductive quality to Jack, as if he would always be
showing up out of a dark, mysterious night. “Yes, this candidate for all his record; his good, sound, conventional liberal record has a patina of that other life,” the novelist Norman Mailer wrote, “the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.”

Jack’s sexuality was real and dangerous, and while all the rest of the politicians nestled down at the Biltmore and other hotels, Jack was staying in a secret hideaway on North Rossmore Avenue, off in the long electric night, a continent away from Jackie, who had stayed on the East Coast. In his apartment, Jack heard not the murmur of jazz but the sweet laughter of young women, and shook not the sweaty palms of pols, but touched the willing young flesh of the likes of the beautiful Judith Exner. The Los Angeles police guarding him did not know what to make of the young women entering the apartment. It was the kind of entourage they had previously thought the exclusive right of movie stars, not of presidential candidates.

T
he next morning, Jack arrived for breakfast at the ten-acre estate in the flats of Beverly Hills where his father was staying. Joe spent much of the day around the pool at the sprawling Beverly Hills mansion of Marion Davies, the former movie star and mistress to the late William Randolph Hearst. He had installed a bank of phones around the pool so that he could talk to one power broker after the next without an interruption while he basked in the California sunshine. Not only had Joe outlived most of the other powerful men of the 1930s, but he was also in the midst of the greatest triumph of his life, helping to propel his son to the presidency of the United States.

Joe would get no closer to the delegates than this. His son’s enemies were whispering that Jack was nothing more than a thespian who mouthed the script his father had given him. Joe could not afford to be seen so close to Jack that he might be giving him his lines. What his detractors scarcely appreciated was the subtlety of Joe’s efforts, how little he sought for himself, and how pointedly his son ignored his father’s conservative thinking on most of the major issues of the day.

Joe’s hands had no fingerprints, or it would have been clear that he had left his mark all over the campaign. His was the hand behind much of the money that had flowed into West Virginia and other states. “These things happened,” reflected Tip O’Neill. “Jack didn’t always know about them. But the old man had made his own arrangements over and above the campaign staff.” Jack had tried to move beyond his father’s ways. In the Maryland primary, the candidate’s old friend Torbyrt Macdonald recalled, Joe wanted to
pass out twelve-dollar-a-day stipends to make sure that poll workers showed up, but he and Jack vetoed the idea.

“All his way through his existence Dad had relationships and contacts none of the rest of us had,” Teddy told his biographer, Burton Hersh. Joe had acquaintances, not only at the highest levels of business and politics but at the lowest levels of American life. “I remember in 1960 my brother saying to Dad, almost jokingly, ‘The states you have are Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York.’ “

With the help of New York City’s Democratic bosses, Joe had helped deliver the largest city in America to his son. He worked with other bosses to whisk away northern New Jersey from under the vigilant eyes of Governor Robert Meyner. He helped to add Illinois by talking to Mayor Richard Daley, whom he had known from the time this boss of bosses was a city council member. Daley turned away from Illinois native son Adlai Stevenson in favor of a man like himself, a Catholic who looked like a winner.

Jack respected all that his father had done. He did not treat Joe as the ultimate arbiter of his political future, however, but as just another source of insight and advice that he assayed and sometimes rejected as fool’s gold. As the two men sat down for breakfast, Jack had a crucial decision to make in choosing his vice presidential running mate, and father and son discussed various possibilities while Timilty and Rose listened in. “What about Lyndon?” Joe asked. That set Timilty off on a tirade against the Texas senator, mouthing words that most of Jack’s supporters would have gladly amplified. The former Boston police commissioner pointed out that earlier in the week Johnson had savaged Jack in a dual presentation before the Texas delegation. The unseemliness of the politician’s display was diminished only by Jack’s cool riposte, which dissipated the Texan’s meanness in laughter and irony.

Johnson had not come into the hot dusty political street to duel with Jack in the primaries but had sought to win the nomination by working his way through the backrooms and dark alleys of politics. As Jack had closed in on the nomination, the Johnson forces had slashed at Jack in attacks that could scar him in the general election. India Edwards, co-chairman of the Citizens for Johnson National Committee, told reporters, “Senator Kennedy, who appears so healthy that it’s almost illegal, is really not a well man…. If it weren’t for cortisone, Senator Kennedy wouldn’t be alive.” It was as ugly a bit of business as FDR Jr.’s attack on Humphrey’s war record, but this was far worse, for the Johnson camp’s allegations had the larger disadvantage of being true.