The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (79 page)

Jack knew that Johnson was a brilliantly astute legislator and the most qualified choice for vice president, but the man was a southerner, and many northern urban Democrats had their own prejudice against those born south
of the Mason-Dixon Line, considering them provincial, uncouth racists, stereotypes hardly dissipated by Johnson’s unsubtle, overweening persona. And yet Joe was not the first person to mention Johnson’s name. Before the convention, Feldman and Sorensen, men who billed themselves as liberals, had given Jack a memo in which they listed Johnson as an “outstanding possibility.” Over the weekend, Jack had seriously discussed that prospect with the
Washington Post’s
publisher, Phil Graham, one of Johnson’s closest advisers.

Joe was a philosopher of power, and he looked straight on at decisions that made his sons wince. “We need Texas,” Joe said, an argument that was impossible to deny. Jack listened while his father ran through the strengths that Johnson would bring to the ticket, piling more and more weight on the scale. Joe presented arguments that Jack had already heard, then added his considered judgment to the mix. In the end Jack called Bobby at the Biltmore and asked him to set up a meeting to talk with Johnson about the vice presidential nomination.

This was in many ways the most unpleasant task Bobby had yet performed for his brother, and he performed it poorly. Bobby could not accept the political charade of enemies donning the garb of friends overnight. His scorn was far more than a sneering disdain for a homespun southern vulgarian who had gone to Southwest State Teachers College in San Marcos, Texas. Bobby had his own firm reasons for loving some people and hating others, and no man ever moved from one category to the other. The Kennedys praised physical courage above all virtues, and it was one of the few qualities that Johnson did not have in excess. While Jack won his Silver Star helping to save the crew of PT-109, Johnson received the same high honor in the naval reserves, flying one combat mission as an observer. Bobby probably did not know Johnson’s war record, but Bobby was a man of brilliant instincts when it came to understanding the primitive drives of his fellow humans.

Bobby sensed that Johnson was not a worthy man, as he defined the term. He knew, moreover, that Johnson bore the Kennedys no goodwill. Indeed, he learned a few months later from journalist Peter Lisagor that just before the Los Angeles convention, Johnson had berated Jack in language streaked with profanity, excoriating his brother as a scrawny, sickly mite so unable to govern that “old Joe Kennedy would run the country.”

“I knew he hated Jack,” Bobby admitted sadly that day, “but I didn’t think he hated him that much.” Even without this confirmation, though, everything Bobby knew and thought and felt told him that Johnson should not stand beside his beloved Jack as his running mate, bonded to him forever as his political brother. But Bobby was his brother’s liege, and he would do what Jack asked him to do.

Those who were there that day had different tales to tell about how Johnson became the vice presidential nominee. “Well, you know, I don’t think anybody will ever know,” Jack told Feldman the following year. Bobby said later that Jack never intended to offer the nomination to Johnson. He was merely dangling it before the Texan’s eyes, thinking the prideful politician would never accept such a cheap cut of meat, and then to his brother’s dismay Johnson had simply gobbled up the offer before Jack could pull it back.

It is unlikely, however, that Jack went to Johnson’s suite at the Biltmore merely to see whether the senator was interested enough to have his name firmly added to the list of candidates. More likely, Jack was surprised that Johnson was willing to accept an offer that he thought the Texan would have disdained, but only after leaving Johnson and learning how profoundly liberals and labor people opposed Johnson’s candidacy did Jack wish he could somehow back off.

Jack waffled back and forth, wondering whether he had made one of the shrewdest judgments of his career or, in the name of expediency, had ripped out the very heart and soul of his party. This was largely the way Salinger and O’Donnell viewed it. “In your first move after the nomination, you go against all the people who supported you,” O’Donnell raged, speaking in the intemperate language in which the newly nominated Democratic candidate was not used to being addressed.

Johnson had humbled himself to accept the nomination, and now suggestions were being made that he was unworthy and unwanted. Bobby came visiting with the unpleasant chore of asking Johnson to back out, but Johnson was not one to regurgitate meat he had swallowed whole. Not only did Bobby fail in his mission, but he did the most dangerous thing a person can do to a powerful politician. He humiliated Johnson. He made him do everything but beg on his knees.

In the end, it seemed better for both men and for the party to go ahead with the nomination, but these wounds would fester. Johnson did not blame Jack. He blamed Bobby, whom his campaign aide, Jim Rowe, told him was “a ruthless son of a bitch,” an appellation that just as easily could have described the Texas senator.

After the decision was finally made, the two tired brothers repaired to the Beverly Hills mansion. Bobby’s children cavorted in the pool, giving no thought to what was going on down at the Biltmore. And the elegant Joe sat there in a velvet smoking jacket and formal slippers with the embroidered initials JPK.

Bobby worked the phones, trying to pull some of the outraged liberals back into the fold. Jack, his face drawn, worried that he might have destroyed his chances at the presidency. “Jack, I don’t want you to worry,” Joe said, his
voice still tinged with a touch of Boston Irish. “In two weeks they’ll be saying it’s the smartest thing you ever did.”

During his acceptance speech on the last evening of the convention, Jack’s face was streaked with fatigue, his deep eyes embedded in darkness. This evening he had a crucial message to convey. The somnolent Eisenhower years were ending, and the nation was heading into what Jack believed would be four of the most difficult, challenging years of its history.

Everywhere Jack looked, he saw omens pointing to the rightness of his predictions, and a range of disquieting, dangerous problems. The Soviets had downed a U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory and captured its American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, alerting the American people to a dangerous, covert action. The papers were full of stories about young black Americans “sitting in” at lunch counters and cafeterias across the South, demanding rights that were clearly theirs and had long been denied. In Cuba, Fidel Castro had overthrown the corrupt Batista and spoke a militant Marxist language, condemning
Yanqui
imperialism. Across Africa and Asia, a new generation was ready to attempt to throw off colonialism. In South Vietnam, Viet Cong revolutionaries were killing village leaders by the hundreds, while in Saigon, President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, hunkered down, sequestered with their armies.

In the most important speech Jack had yet given, he needed to set forth forcefully and eloquently the themes of his campaign. The speech, originally written by Sorensen and then passed around from aide to aide, had some compelling phrases, but they were lost in a compendium of clichés. Jack stood before the delegates and in a hurried voice told those assembled: “We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness…. Today our concern must be with that future. For the world is change. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do.”

Despite the banality of much of the speech, one memorable phrase perfectly defined Jack’s aspirations as president and became the slogan of the campaign. “But I tell you the New Frontier is here whether we seek it or not,” he told the delegates and the millions watching on television. “New Frontier” brilliantly evoked the world that Jack saw ahead for America. New Frontier suggested both the romance of the American past and the dangerous future, opportunities as well as solutions, and passionate alertness, not passive acceptance. It was an irresistible slogan, with no taint of liberal perfectionism, no grand flourishes of rhetorical excess.

All the Kennedys were there that evening in the sports arena to savor Jack’s victory, all except for the pregnant Jackie and Joe, who more than anyone deserved to be sitting behind his son on that great platform high above the delegates. Two nights before, Chuck Spalding had gone over to the Beverly
Hills estate to congratulate Joe. He had wandered around until he found Jack’s father in an upstairs bedroom. “Where are you going?” Jack’s friend asked, startled to see that Joe was packing his bags.

“I have to get on a plane tonight and get back to New York and get working on this thing,” Joe replied. “We’ve got to keep moving.” Spalding knew all the stories about the old man’s cynical grasp on his children, but he thought that Joe’s action was “an example of incredible restraint for somebody who has always been characterized as kind of a Machiavellian figure, moving his children around.”

Even his most vociferous critics would not have begrudged Joe at least this moment with his son, but he clearly wanted no new photos of father and son standing together shoulder to shoulder. And he had important matters on his agenda. In New York City, Joe called Henry Luce, the most powerful publishing magnate in America. Luce felt that Joe was angling for a dinner invitation on the evening of his son’s acceptance speech. Luce proffered what was supposed to be proffered, and Joe arrived at the Manhattan home an hour or so before Jack’s speech.

Clare Boothe Luce had probably been Joe’s lover while he was ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. That was long ago, and what the two men shared now was not a woman but similar views on the world of power. Luce knew that a man like Joe did not sit across the table from him this evening for aimless social chitchat. Luce published
Time,
probably the most powerful magazine in America. Luce was a conservative Republican, and
Time’s
take on Jack could have a crucial impact on the campaign.

Instead of waiting for his guest to raise the only subject that mattered this evening, the publisher spoke directly. “Time Inc. realizes Jack will have to be left of center to get the Democratic nomination, and will content itself with arguing domestic economic matters politely.”

“How can any son of mine be a goddamned liberal?” Joe retorted, as if any fool could see that Jack was moving leftward only to win and after his election would return to his natural conservative home.

“But if Jack turns soft on communism,
Time
will cut his throat,” Luce said, as he remembered later.

“Don’t worry about him being a weak sister,” Joe replied. It was all about toughness and manhood, and his son would not be found wanting.

Luce was one of the greatest power brokers in America, and early in the campaign, Jack met with the publisher. Luce’s immensely popular picture magazine,
Life,
had done more than any other medium to create the image of the Kennedys as a gloriously romantic, handsome, energetic clan, while selling millions of copies.
Time
had not been so kind.

Jack was aware of the subtlest nuances of journalism. “I see Otto Fuerbringer
got well and is back at work,” Jack said. Luce was startled that by reading the publication, Jack knew that the profoundly conservative editor was putting his imprint on the week’s news, inculcating opinion into the columns in such a seamless way that even the cognoscenti could not tell where fact ended and editorializing began. Of course, nothing flattered a journalist more than knowing he was being read, and read closely. Jack’s message went beyond that. Jack was signaling that there would be no subliminal ministering to his opponent without Jack understanding what was being done.

J
ack knew that this would be a close election, but after listening to Vice President Richard Nixon give his acceptance speech on July 28 at the Stockyards Amphitheater in Chicago, he became even more aware of the challenge he faced. Jack realized, as a more narrowly partisan politician might not have, that Nixon’s speech was “a remarkable political demonstration.”

Like Jack, forty-seven-year-old Nixon was a veteran of World War II, a man of the new generation ready to assume power in the America of the 1960s. Both candidates were well versed in international affairs and strong anti-Communists who believed that the major challenge of the new administration would probably lie outside the nation’s borders.

“Our next president must tell the American people not what they want to hear but what they need to hear,” Nixon told the Republicans. Nixon, like Kennedy, realized that the political idiom of his day was full of half-truths, and half-truths were often worse than lies, for one could never parse the truth from the lie. “Why, for example, it may be just as essential to the national interest to build a dam in India as in California,” Nixon asserted, a message that many Americans did not want to hear. A politician who spoke such truths too loudly might not win election, but one who spoke them not at all did not deserve America’s highest office.

“Mr. Khrushchev says our grandchildren will live under communism. Let us say his grandchildren will live in freedom.” That was one of Jack’s themes, and he could have spoken that line and most of Nixon’s speech that day. The two politicians had nearly as many affinities as differences. Underestimated by many of their enemies, patronized by some of their friends, they both had the knowledge and the experience to lead America into a new era. It was the character of each man that had not been tested.

The wildly popular Eisenhower had overseen what most Americans considered a blessedly comfortable era of growing affluence and peace. That was the record that Nixon had the happy duty of defending. Jack had the more difficult task of not overtly criticizing the revered, grandfatherly Eisenhower while talking of a new troubled world full of what
Time
called “anxiety and
discomfort.” For the most part, this was not only a posture shrewdly calculated to elect him president by playing on the natural anxieties of Americans in the age of the cold war; it was Jack’s own deeply felt judgment of what his nation faced in the decade ahead.