The Patriarch (95 page)

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O
n the evening of July 13, 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as his father had predicted, was nominated on the first ballot. Bobby, Ted, Jack’s sisters and their husbands, Rose, and the grandchildren watched the proceedings or worked the floor. We don’t know where Joe was. Rose said he stayed at home; Ted recalled that he watched the vote, then “slipped out of the convention hall with no fanfare.”
³¹

That evening, the candidate, his brother, and his senior advisers gathered to discuss the vice-presidential nomination. Kennedy had already made clear that his preference was Lyndon Johnson. When Jack offered the nomination to Johnson and Johnson accepted, the fallout from the liberal wing of the party was considerable. Kennedy remained upbeat. Charles Bartlett, visiting at Marion Davies’s mansion, recalled “Mr. Kennedy . . . standing in the doorway . . . with his smoking jacket on and slippers. And the whole scene was rather downcast, considering this was the day after a great Kennedy triumph. And I remember old Mr. Kennedy saying, ‘Don’t worry, Jack, in two weeks, they’ll be saying it’s the smartest thing you ever did.’”
³²

On Friday, the day that his son was to accept the nomination for president of the United States, Kennedy was nowhere to be found. Chuck Spalding, Jack’s friend, later remembered having found Kennedy packing the night before. “I said, ‘Where are you going?’ He said, ‘I have to get on a plane tonight and get back to New York and get working on this thing. We’ve got to keep moving.’”
³³

Kennedy had telephoned Henry Luce in New York and, Luce later recalled, “asked whether he could come to see me, I think he mentioned around five o’clock in my apartment at the Waldorf.” In the long run up to the convention, the Luce magazines not only had provided Jack with plenty of coverage, but had been exceedingly fair on the religious issue. Kennedy expected that Luce, a lifelong Republican, would endorse Nixon, but he was not going to leave the country for France (which he planned to do on Monday, July 18) without trying to change his mind.

When Kennedy’s morning flight was delayed, he called to ask if he could see Luce for dinner instead. Luce asked what he wanted to eat. “Well, he wanted lobster, so by the time he got there we had the dinner about ready and, as I remember, two lobsters. He ate a very hearty meal and he was in great form. . . . [Dinner] was over about nine o’clock and, as I remember it, the television [and Jack’s acceptance speech] wasn’t going on till ten. I thought that Joe hadn’t come to see me just for chitchat about the convention, so I thought I better get down to cases. I said to him when we were in the living room: ‘Well, now, Joe, I suppose you are interested in the attitudes
Time
and
Life,
and I, might take about Jack’s candidacy. And I think I can put it quite simply.’ I divided the matter into domestic and foreign affairs, and I said, ‘As to domestic affairs, of course Jack will have to be left of center.’ Whereupon Joe burst out with, ‘How can you say that? How can you think that any son of mine would ever be a so-and-so liberal?’ . . . It’s well known that Joe Kennedy’s colorful manner of speech is not always suitable for the tape recording. . . . I think the conversation may have gone on about that for a while, but not very much. Then pretty soon the moment came, the television was on and the nominee, Jack Kennedy, got up to make his speech while the three of us [Luce’s son was with them] were watching the television screen.” Luce thought the speech was acceptable, but not great, and he objected to something in the opening, to which Joe had replied, “Oh, well, now, don’t mind that.” When the speech was finished, “Joe left and at the door he said, ‘I want to thank you for all that you’ve done for Jack.’ I think this was said with great sincerity and, if I recall, he repeated it.”
³⁴

Kennedy’s preemptive strike was not enough. The Luce publications would endorse Nixon, but tepidly.

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O
n Monday morning, July 18, three days after his son accepted the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States, Kennedy flew to France. In early August,
Newsweek
dispatched a reporter to Cap d’Antibes to interview him. The reporter, having discovered that Kennedy swam in the hotel pool every day “‘regular as a clock’ from noon to 1 and 5 to 6 . . . followed him into the water.” While the two treaded water, he asked why Kennedy “hadn’t appeared with his son at the Democratic convention.

“‘I wasn’t on the stand with Jack because I wasn’t in Los Angeles at the time,’ he answered. ‘I cannot think of a better reason than that. I was in New York on business and had left Los Angeles Friday morning.’

“‘Can you explain why you’ve been staying in the background?’ I asked.

“‘I’ve been in this for 25 years now and never denied newsmen’s questions,’ Kennedy said, ‘but I’m keeping out of it now because it’s better that way. There’ll be no questions about whether Jack is doing things himself if nobody else is around. Jack has already proved he is doing a fantastically good job.’

“‘Isn’t it a fact that you’re something of a controversial figure?’ I asked.

“Kennedy started a slow breast stroke toward shore while he thought about the question.

“‘They’ve been saying those things about me for years,’ he finally said. ‘I’m used to it. . . . There is such a thing as staying in politics too long. . . . It’s time for young men to step in. It’s going to be their world.’

“Then, turning to climb up the concrete path to his cabin, Kennedy grinned. ‘But Jack, Bobby, Ted, they’re the ones to interview. They’re the ones making the copy.’”
³⁵

The
Newsweek
reporter was followed by one from
U.S. News & World Report.
“I stood up and took them and batted them out for 25 years,” Kennedy told him. “Now it’s somebody else’s turn. I called them as I saw them at the time, even when it got me in trouble, which is more than some people did.” The only person who would talk to the reporter was Kennedy’s caddy, “an attractive French girl named Françoise, about 21 years old. . . . The blonde Françoise says [Kennedy’s] fairway shots are ‘short’ but very straight. . . . Mr. Kennedy speaks no French, but has been teaching Françoise English during the golf rounds.”
³⁶

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K
ennedy hid out, an ocean away from the campaign, because he feared becoming a campaign issue. It was too late. He already was.

On July 11, the day the Democratic convention had been gaveled to order, Drew Pearson reported that “Republican researchers have been doing a job on the prospective Democratic candidates, especially on Jack Kennedy [and] have dug up some ammunition which they think will make the young Massachusetts Senator a sitting duck next November.” The first two pieces of “ammunition”—namely, that the Kennedys had bought votes in West Virginia and were pals and admirers of Joe McCarthy—were old and stale. But the third, “Joe Kennedy on Hitlerism,” was not. According to Pearson, Republican researchers had “dug up . . . the correspondence between the Nazi ambassador in London and the German foreign office shortly before Pearl Harbor [which] show Jack’s father, then ambassador to London, having intimate talks with the German ambassador in order to keep the United States out of war. Young Kennedy, who had a great war record, is in no way involved. Nevertheless, because of the closeness between father and son, Republican strategists believe the Nazi letters will be effective.”
³⁷

The letters Pearson was referring to were the memorandums Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen had sent to the German Foreign Office after his conversations with Kennedy in 1938. They had been among the thousands of documents discovered by units of the United States First Army in the Harz mountain range and Thuringia in April 1945 and published in the summer of 1949. Kennedy had dismissed the reports as “poppycock” when they were released, and the public at large appeared to have agreed with him. When Jack ran against Lodge for the Senate in 1952, he polled remarkably well in the Jewish districts of Boston. Now, twenty-two years after the conversations took place and eleven years after they had been placed into the public record, Republican operatives planned to use them again.

On September 1, as the campaign heated up after the summer recess, the
New York Times,
in a front-page story,
PARTIES WORRIED BY “JEWISH VOTE,
” reported on what it characterized as Jewish voters’ “active dislike of . . . Joseph P. Kennedy. . . . A Democratic worker in a heavily Jewish Brooklyn district called the elder Kennedy ‘the number one bogy’ of the campaign. . . . Asked why they felt so strongly about Mr. Kennedy’s father, some Jewish voters said they had heard of the existence of a letter in which Joseph P. Kennedy had indicated approval of the Hitler regime.” Democratic leaders in the state were agreed that “something had to be done to neutralize the whispering campaign.”
³⁸

Kennedy asked James Landis to review the documents. Landis did so, then declared to the press that they proved nothing other than that Dirksen was trying to make a good impression on officials in Berlin by reporting what they wanted to hear.

As the campaign wound into higher gear after Labor Day, the Republicans doubled their efforts to smear the father to get at the son. “The Dirksen dispatches,”
Newsweek
reported on September 12, “have been circulated among Jewish voters and they have been given wide credence.” Flyers distributed by the New York Young Republicans for Nixon and Lodge and by ad hoc groups like the Committee for Human Dignity, with a Fort Washington Avenue address, flooded the city.
³⁹

There would be no public defense of Kennedy by his son or his family or anyone on the campaign team. Well aware that the easiest way to keep allegations alive in an endless news loop was to defend against them, the campaign and the Kennedys held their silence. “As I told you over the phone,” Justin Feldman, Landis’s law partner, wrote him on October 11, “we all agree it would be a mistake to try to counter it publicly.” Instead, Feldman prepared a memorandum, with instructions that it should be “put in the hands of the five county leaders of New York City and . . . given to about a dozen of their district leaders with strict instructions not to distribute it or to reproduce it but to use it for their own information and to furnish answers to their workers.”
⁴⁰

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I
came home,” Kennedy wrote Lord Beaverbrook on September 9, “to find the campaign not between a Democrat and a Republican, but between a Catholic and a Protestant. How effectively we can work against it, I do not know. Jack gave it a bad licking in West Virginia and we are confident that we can lick it now. But with the Baptist ministers working in the pulpit every Sunday, it is going to be tough. All I can say is that they have a hell of a nerve to be talking about freedom for the world when we have this kind of a condition right here in our own country. It seems to me that it is more important than ever to fight this thing with everything we have. And that is what we are going to do.”
⁴¹

On September 7, Norman Vincent Peale, whom the
New York Times
identified as “an avowed supporter of Vice President Nixon,” announced the organization of the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, comprising 150 leading clergymen “more or less representative of the evangelical, conservative Protestants,” including the Reverend Dr. Billy Graham. They were united in their belief that Protestants had “legitimate grounds for concern about having a Catholic in the White House.”
⁴²

Senator Kennedy was forced to confront head-on the subject he had hoped, after his win in the Democratic primaries, might be laid to rest. He did so by accepting an invitation to speak to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a gathering of Protestant leaders, many of them evangelicals. He began his address by declaring that while he was going to speak on the “so-called religious issue,” he believed that there were “far more critical issues in the 1960 election.” Still, “because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues . . . have been obscured—perhaps deliberately.” He proceeded to say what he had been saying for almost two years: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. . . . I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish . . . and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.” He reminded his audience that no one had asked him or his brother whether they “might have a ‘divided loyalty’” when they fought—and his brother died—in the Second World War and that at the Battle of the Alamo, “side by side with Bowie and Crockett died Fuentes and McCafferty and Bailey and Bedillio and Carey—but no one knows whether they were Catholic or not. For there was no religious test there.” Knowing that this might be his best and perhaps last chance to put to rest the religious issue, he arranged to have the speech—and question period—broadcast nationwide.
⁴³

Though Jack did brilliantly in Houston, it was almost taken for granted now that he was going to lose Protestant votes that usually went Democratic and would have to compensate by polling a larger than usual big-city Catholic vote. Unfortunately, it appeared as late as six weeks before the election that Catholic voters might not be solidly behind the Democratic candidate.
CITY’S CATHOLICS SPLIT ON ELECTION,
the
New York Times
reported in a page-one headline on September 20, confirming Joseph Kennedy’s worst nightmares. “If Jack Kennedy thinks he has the Catholic vote in his back pocket, he’s wrong,” an Irish Catholic party official was quoted as telling the
Times
reporter. Neither of the two major Catholic papers—the
Catholic News,
the New York diocesan newspaper, and
The Tablet,
the Brooklyn diocesan paper—“has ever been suspected of favoring either the Democrats or Senator Kennedy.” The
Catholic News
had put a photograph of Nixon visiting with a group of nuns on its cover but had never so honored Senator Kennedy.
The Tablet
had denounced the Democratic Party platform in an editorial in July and had had nothing positive of any sort to say about Jack Kennedy. When both candidates appeared at the Al Smith dinner at the Waldorf on October 19, 1960, an event organized and presided over by Cardinal Spellman, Nixon received far greater applause. It was becoming abundantly clear that he was the cardinal’s favored candidate.