The Patriarch (94 page)

There were several primaries to come, and Jack needed to win them all to demonstrate to the party bosses who controlled the bulk of the delegates—only a minority were selected on the basis of primary voting—that he was a viable candidate. In states with significant Catholic populations, such as Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Maryland, he was going to need the help of those who remained on the sidelines because they did not think he could win and feared the long-term repercussions of his losing. “I can understand why a great many people might not like Jack—some say that he’s too young, some that he’s a Catholic, etc., etc.,” Kennedy wrote Michael Morrissey, the Catholic publisher of a string of Massachusetts newspapers, in early April. “But I really have no patience with the Catholics who want to duck a fight. . . . When you said to me that you hated to see these bigoted ideas arise, I asked you what we were supposed to do, just duck this question for the rest of our lives. If Jack’s heart is broken because he may be beaten on the religious question, then so be it. He has demonstrated that he is the greatest vote getter in the Democratic Party and it is certainly up to him to carry on the battle. A little help from a lot of people might bring him victory.”
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From Wisconsin, the Kennedy and Humphrey campaigns turned their attention to West Virginia. It was here that Jack would have to demonstrate that Protestants were willing to vote for him. “Only about 3 percent of the state is Catholic, probably the smallest percentage in the United States,” Kennedy wrote Lord Beaverbrook on April 20. “And they are passing out religious leaflets up and down the line. The Baptists are the most bigoted group. The Gallup Poll came out today and showed that Jack is pulling farther and farther ahead of all the other candidates; so that he will have a very good call on the nomination. If he is thrown out because he is a Catholic, I doubt very much if a Democrat will win.”
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According to Ben Bradlee of
Newsweek,
who was invited to sit in on one high-level strategy meeting at Palm Beach, Kennedy had “argued strenuously against JFK’s entering [the West Virginia primary]. ‘It’s a nothing state and they’ll kill him over the Catholic thing.’ A few minutes later JFK spoke out: ‘Well, we’ve heard from the ambassador, and we’re all very grateful, Dad, but I’ve got to run in West Virginia.’”
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Once the decision was made, Kennedy backed his son completely. Winning in West Virginia would require bags of money for local candidates who agreed to put Senator Kennedy on the primary election slates they headed and for party professionals, officeholders, poll watchers, election officials, drivers, and, it appeared, everyone else who stuck out a hand. The Kennedy camp was not the only one to throw money around, but it had more of it and did it better. Leo Racine, who worked out of Kennedy’s New York office, had been dispatched to Wisconsin and West Virginia for the campaign. He recalled that money arrived in satchels. “It just kept flowing in. . . . All anyone in the campaign had to say was ‘we need money’ and it was on the way.”
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To help his son win the Protestant vote in West Virginia, Kennedy got in touch with Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., who, like his brother James, had done well neither in politics nor in business and was at the moment selling Fiats in New York and contemplating a return to politics. Kennedy asked Roosevelt Jr. to fly to Palm Beach to meet with Bobby and Jack. After speaking with them, he agreed to join the campaign. His presence—and physical likeness to his father—bolstered Jack’s attempt to define himself as a New Deal liberal who, much like FDR, would employ the power and resources of the federal government to rescue West Virginia’s impoverished miners. Roosevelt called attention as well to the fact that Kennedy had fought overseas in World War II while Humphrey had stayed at home. “‘You know why I’m here in West Virginia today?’ Frank would say. ‘Because Jack Kennedy and I fought side by side in the Pacific. He was on the PT boats and I was on the destroyers.’”
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In the midst of campaigning in West Virginia, Senator Kennedy returned to Washington to deliver a major speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in yet another attempt to counter the anti-Catholic literature, speeches, whispers, and rumors that he feared were pushing every other issue to the side. He was not, he declared as emphatically as he could, “the Catholic candidate for President. I do not speak for the Catholic church on issues of public policy, and no one in that Church speaks for me. My record . . . has displeased some prominent Catholic clergymen and organizations and it has been approved by others. The fact is that the Catholic church is not a monolith—it is committed in this country to the principles of individual liberty.” He was even more emphatic back on the campaign trail in West Virginia. In his final television speech, he repeated again that as president he “would not take orders from any Pope, Cardinal, Bishop or priest, nor would they try to give me orders. . . . If any Pope attempted to influence me as President, I would have to tell him it was completely improper.”
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On May 10, 1960, Jack Kennedy won the West Virginia primary with 61 percent of the vote, which should have, but did not, put to rest the question of whether Protestants would vote for a Catholic. A week later, he won the Maryland primary with 70 percent, his ninth consecutive primary victory. The
New York Times
reported the Maryland primary victory on the front page. Just below, it ran a second front-page story with a Rome dateline:
VATICAN PAPER PROCLAIMS RIGHT OF CHURCH TO ROLE IN POLITICS
. The official Vatican newspaper had declared in an editorial that “the Roman Catholic hierarchy had ‘the right and the duty to intervene’ in the political field to guide its flock. It rejected what it termed ‘the absurd split of conscience between the believer and the citizen.’ . . . The Roman Catholic religion, the editorial asserted, is a force that ‘commits and guides the entire existence of man.’ The Catholic, it went on, ‘may never disregard the teaching and directions of the church but must inspire his private and public conduct in every sphere of his activity by the laws, instructions and teachings of the hierarchy.’”
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The timing, placement, language, and emphasis of the Vatican paper editorial called into question everything Jack Kennedy had been saying about his religion. Pierre Salinger, his press spokesman, responded at once that Senator Kennedy supported “the principle of separation of church and state as provided in the United States Constitution [and] that this support is not subject to change under any condition.” His statement was buried on page thirty-one.

The following day, May 19, lest there be any confusion, the
New York Times
confirmed that the editorial in the Vatican paper had “been given to the newspaper for publication by the Vatican Secretariat of State, the Department of the Church’s Central Government that assists the Pope in political business,” and that earlier reports that the “editorialist . . . did not have in mind the United States Presidential campaign” were inaccurate.

Joseph Kennedy was both distressed and baffled. His fears that the church was out to defeat his son were now fully confirmed. “You must have been aware,” he wrote Galeazzi, “of how terribly shocked we were by that editorial in
L’Osservatore Romano
on the separation of church and state. . . . It was a bad shaking up and it did not do us a bit of good. I cannot understand why my two friends, Tardini [the Vatican secretary of state] and the other man [another papal adviser on foreign affairs] could ever have let anything like that come to America when it could create so much difficulty over something that has already been established as a fact here in the country, namely, the separation of church and state.”
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The Vatican pronouncement, fortunately, did not do the immediate harm that Kennedy had feared it might. Though featured in the
New York Times,
the story was buried elsewhere by the news that Senator Kennedy had won the Maryland primary. For his father, it was an omen of things to come.

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T
he final primary for Kennedy was held in Oregon on May 20. With every possible candidate listed on the ballot, Kennedy took 51 percent of the vote; favorite son Wayne Morse got 31.9 percent; Humphrey, 5.7 percent.

To celebrate the victorious conclusion of the primary season—and Jack’s birthday—the family gathered for a long weekend at Hyannis Port. Frank Falacci of the
Boston Post
was among the throng of reporters who awaited the senator’s arrival at the Barnstable Airport terminal on Cape Cod. “For a long time,” he reported, “no one noticed the man in the blue suit with the yachtsman-type buttons, who carefully checked his watch against the wall clocks. When recognition did come, the reporters made a rush towards him, and Joseph P. Kennedy, tycoon, former ambassador, and father of the presidential candidate, greeted them with a grin.

“His first concern, he said, was for ‘the boys.’

“‘They all look tired in their pictures,’ he said. ‘Bob especially seems to have lost weight.’

“His eyes glowed when he spoke of the work his three sons had done in the primaries across the country. . . . He had special praise for his youngest son, Ted. ‘When Jack’s voice was gone in West Virginia, Ted really took over and kept the ball rolling.’”
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K
ennedy was more and more convinced that his son was going to win the nomination, though there remained obstacles in his path—primarily Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson, each of whom wanted the nomination; and Harry Truman, who had declared that Jack Kennedy was too young and inexperienced to be president. On July 4, a week before the convention was to open, Senator Kennedy held a televised press conference to answer President Truman. If “fourteen years in major elective office is insufficient experience,” he said, “that rules out . . . all but a handful of American Presidents, and every President of the twentieth century—including Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman.” His father, listening on the radio from his cottage at Cal-Neva, told Joe Timilty, who was with him, that he thought it was the best speech his son had ever given. “That evening,” Timilty later recalled, “we went over to the Tahoe Lodge for dinner and were joined by one Wingie Grober, who had the reputation of being quite a character. Mr. Kennedy said to Wingie, ‘Wingie, you go out and beg and borrow as much money as you possibly can and place it on Jack to win on the 1st ballot.’”
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Kennedy, who had absented himself from every stop on the campaign trail, accepted Marion Davies’s invitation to stay at her beach house in Santa Monica during the convention. The house was fully staffed, had a pool, rooms for children and grandchildren, a large television set, and it was outside the reach of the press.
SEN. KENNEDY’S FATHER WATCHES IN HIDEAWAY
, reported the
Los Angeles Times
on July 14. “Joe Kennedy, 71, has refused to grant any interviews. His wife explains that he has always been a rather controversial figure and thinks it is easier for his sons if he does not appear on the scene.”

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O
n July 5, Lyndon Johnson—the man whom Joe Kennedy had always considered the strongest threat to his son’s candidacy—after staying out of the primaries, declared himself a candidate for the nomination. Johnson and his supporters, who had never had much of anything positive to say about Jack Kennedy, now began raising questions about his health and his father. Johnson’s spokesmen told the press that Jack Kennedy had Addison’s disease. Lyndon Johnson attacked the candidate’s father directly. “I wasn’t any Chamberlain umbrella man. I never thought Hitler was right.” With the nomination almost within their grasp, the Kennedys ignored the charges about Joe Kennedy, claimed that Jack didn’t have “classically described Addison’s disease,” and concentrated their attention on securing the last few delegate votes they needed for a first-ballot nomination.
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Joseph Kennedy stayed out of sight, declining every interview request except one from John Seigenthaler of the Nashville
Tennessean,
who had worked with Bobby and whom Bobby suggested his father talk to. “He was wearing swimming trunks and a . . . matching sports shirt, and he had on a straw hat with the brim turned down—a very narrow brim which he had turned down all the way round,” Seigenthaler later recalled. The two men talked outside on Marion Davies’s patio in the blazing Los Angeles sunshine for about two hours. Most of the interview was off the record, as Kennedy insisted that he didn’t want to draw attention from his son’s campaign. “This is Jack’s fight, and this is his effort. He doesn’t need me making wise cracks or making speeches for him. . . . I don’t want my enemies to be my son’s enemies or my wars to be my son’s wars. I lived my life, fought my fights, and I’m not apologizing for them. . . . It’s now time for a younger generation. . . . I don’t want to hang on. . . . They’ll make it on their own. They don’t need me to fight my fight again.” While they talked, the radio was playing in the background. When it was announced that Johnson had invited Jack to debate before the Texas delegation, Kennedy insisted that if he “were Jack, I wouldn’t get within a hundred yards of him. We got this won. Jack’s got the votes. Johnson can’t change them, and he’s desperate. . . . Hell, I wouldn’t touch him. I wouldn’t go near him.” Then, a bit later, came the report that Jack had accepted Johnson’s challenge, and without a moment’s hesitation Kennedy declared that Jack would easily win the debate.

Seigenthaler was astounded at how forthcoming Kennedy was on every issue that he raised. When he asked about Rosemary (whom
Time
magazine had that week reported suffered from “spinal meningitis,” a known cause of mental retardation, and was in a “nursing home in Wisconsin”), Kennedy responded that he didn’t “know what it is that makes eight children shine like a dollar and another one dull. I guess it’s the hand of God. But we just do the best we can and try to help wherever we can. . . . Eunie knows more about helping the mentally retarded than any individual in America.” He had never before spoken publicly about Rosemary.
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