But Jack was determined to push ahead. Jack instructed Bobby to call their father on the Riviera to tell him about Stevenson’s maneuver, to say that Jack was running, and to ask Joe to press Jack’s case over the telephone with as many influential Democrats as he could reach. Joe Kennedy thought his son was making a terrible mistake. According to Rose Kennedy and Kenny O’Donnell, Joe exploded in anger. He “denounced Jack as an idiot who was ruining his political career.” “Whew! Is he mad!” Bobby said after the phone connection was lost. Anticipating Joe’s reaction, Jack had left the room; deciding to run was an act of defiance against his father, and it was easier to let Bobby take the heat. (Lem Billings recalled that Jack had initially experienced “a sudden warmth” after deciding to ignore Joe’s advice—as if he had drunk “an entire bottle of wine.” But Jack suffered a “momentary paralysis” after hearing Joe’s reaction.) True, once Jack had made up his mind to run, Joe did everything in his power to help. But it was no small act of personal courage for Jack to make so big a political decision without his father’s initial approval.
Kennedy’s backers entered the fight with a “realistic sense of futility.” Led by Jack and Bobby, they spent the night after Stevenson announced the open VP contest arranging for the banners, buttons, leaflets, placards, and noisemakers needed for a winning effort. They also ran from one convention hotel to another, asking, begging, cajoling, flattering, and pressuring delegates to join the swelling ranks of a man they described as a likely future president who would remember their support in his hour of need.
Kefauver retained a significant lead. His unsuccessful competition with Stevenson for the presidential nomination had nevertheless left him with a large number of delegates—4831/2—who were ready to back his vice presidential candidacy, despite having no mandated obligation to do so. This was, however, 203 short of selection, and Jack’s first ballot total of 304 turned the nomination into a real contest. Because Kefauver was unpopular in the South, where his support of civil rights had made him a renegade and because Stevenson had broken precedent by allowing the convention to choose his running mate, the nomination was genuinely up for grabs. With support from anti-Kefauver southerners led by the Texas delegation—“Texas proudly casts its fifty-six votes for the fighting sailor who wears the scars of battle,” LBJ announced—Jack surged ahead of Kefauver on the second ballot by 648 to 5511/2, just 38 short of nomination. But Kefauver’s backers promptly persuaded several state delegations, led by Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Missouri, to switch and shift the momentum back to him. A vote of 7551/2 to Jack’s 589 gave Kefauver the victory and the nomination.
Bobby Kennedy would later remember that “we lost because we weren’t properly organized. If the delegates had known when Tennessee had switched that we were only thirty-eight votes from a majority, there wouldn’t have been all those switches to get on the Kefauver bandwagon. They didn’t realize we were that close.” But other things worked against Jack as well. Liberals, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, who had resisted Jack’s request for her support by complaining that he had not actively opposed McCarthy, were generally unenthusiastic about putting Kennedy on the ticket. In addition, a lot of Democrats, including many Catholics, believed that a Catholic running mate would undermine chances of beating Eisenhower and of holding the Congress. Ike’s illness had forcefully reminded voters that a VP was “only a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.” Kefauver’s runner-up status for the presidential nomination, however circumscribed by the limited number of primaries (he had won 39 percent of Democratic primary votes to Stevenson’s 52 percent), had also made it difficult for the party to deny him second place.
Although the defeat stung Jack, most commentators agreed that his candidacy had been a net gain. An appearance before the convention to ask unanimous backing for Kefauver was a triumph of public relations, as was the impression he made throughout the proceedings. Despite his defeat, Jack “probably rates as the one real victor of the entire convention,” a Boston journalist wrote. “He was the one new face that actually shone. His charisma, his dignity, his intellectuality, and, in the end, his gracious sportsmanship . . . are undoubtedly what those delegates will remember. So will those who watched it and heard it via TV and radio.” Joe agreed: He thought that Jack had come “out of the convention so much better than anyone could have hoped. . . . His time is surely coming!” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote Jack that “you clearly emerged as the man who gained most during the Convention. . . . Your general demeanor and effectiveness made you in a single week a national political figure. . . . The campaign provides a further opportunity to consolidate this impression.”
Jack’s upward trajectory continued into the fall as he campaigned for Stevenson. Though Stevenson’s aides wanted him to concentrate on Massachusetts and a few other swing states with a big Catholic vote, Kennedy organized an itinerary that gave him much wider exposure and promised to do more for his political future than for Stevenson’s candidacy. Whatever discomfort he might have felt at putting his interests ahead of the candidate was eased by the realistic assessment that Stevenson’s campaign was a losing effort from the start. Running against a popular incumbent, whose four-year term included an end to the Korean War; economic expansion; and a deft handling of difficulties with Communist China over the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, the Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule (which the administration used to blacken Moscow’s international reputation in the Third World), and the Suez crisis, Stevenson never had a chance.
Whatever hope Stevenson may have had evaporated in a campaign Bobby Kennedy described as “the most disastrous operation” he had ever seen. Bobby, who traveled with Stevenson at the candidate’s request, thought he did almost everything wrong. He read speeches where he should have spoken them to create some sense of spontaneity; he focused on arcane matters that resonated little with voters; he wasted time on organizational questions he should have delegated to aides; and he showed indecision on all manner of things. “Stevenson was just not a man of action at all,” Bobby concluded at the time.
Meanwhile, Jack seemed to be everywhere, exuding charm, offering sensible pronouncements, and muting his competitiveness and ambition for greater national recognition with self-deprecating humor. He crisscrossed twenty-four states, giving more than 150 speeches that endeared him to audiences. The lesson of running a national political campaign, he told a Boston group, is to “be prepared. Be prepared to travel day and night, east and west, in an overheated limousine in ninety-three-degree weather in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and in an open-car motorcade in raw thirty-degree temperature in Bellows Falls, Vermont, and Twin Falls, Idaho.” (Twin Falls was “one of the most important metropolises I visited in my search for Democratic voters,” he declared to the amusement of his audience. “Despite the ill effects of that freezing ride on my health and morale, there was at least no danger to my person in that Republican stronghold, for there were more of us in the motorcade than there were on the streets to greet us.”) He reminded his listeners that for “one brief moment of glory” he had been a candidate for VP. “Socrates once said that it was the duty of a man of real principle to avoid high national office, and evidently the delegates at Chicago recognized my principles even before I did.”
Kennedy balanced his public effectiveness by shrewd private judgments. He said to Rose that if brother Joe had lived, he would have entered politics and been elected to the House and the Senate. “And, like me, he would have gone for the vice-presidential nomination at the 1956 Convention, but unlike me, he wouldn’t have been beaten. Joe would have won the nomination. And then he and Stevenson would have been beaten by Eisenhower, and today Joe’s political career would have been in shambles.”
JACK UNDERSTOOD that his defeat in Chicago had been a stroke of luck. And a Pulitzer Prize, which was awarded him in April 1957 for Profiles in Courage, was another piece of good fortune. Though the Pulitzer jurors had put five distinguished works of biography ahead of his, the board had decided to
give his book the prize as “a distinguished American biography . . . teaching patriotic and unselfish service to the people.” Recognizing that Jack’s prize was an extraordinary event, Torby Macdonald sent him a telegram jesting that he had probably also won the Irish Sweepstakes and received land grant deeds naming him the rightful owner of Texas and California.
Indeed, the Pulitzer seemed more than a bit unlikely, and there is some evidence that Arthur Krock may have personally lobbied the board for Jack. On Christmas Eve 1955, Jack called Evan Thomas Sr., his editor at Harper & Brothers, to ask that publication be moved up from January to December. “Why is that?” Thomas asked. “Well,” he said, “I’ve just been talking to Arthur Krock and I understand it would win the Pulitzer Prize this year.” Thomas refused Jack’s request, but the book won anyway.
The Pulitzer was largely a case of good timing: In a period of national challenge and peril, when self-indulgence was a national watchword, Jack’s book was seen as a rallying cry to put public needs above private concerns. But Jack understood how useful the prize was to his ambition. At the age of thirty-nine, he feared being seen as too young and untested for heavy responsibilities better suited to older, more experienced men such as Eisenhower. The Pulitzer gave him the stamp of seriousness and even wisdom that Americans saw as invaluable in meeting difficulties abroad and at home. It also carried perils. The Pulitzer sparked predictable envy: New rumors circulated that he had not written the book. It was also alleged that sales figures were doctored to get and keep the book on the bestseller list. If the rumors proved to be true, an FBI report stated, “then the charge of fraud will be made on the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize.” But since no one could prove the accusations, they came to nothing.
EVEN WITHOUT UGLY CHARGES about the book, Jack believed that his youth, Catholicism, limited support from party leaders, and questionable health made him far from a sure bet for president in 1960. He was right. In fact, it was an act of unprecedented political nerve for Kennedy to think that he could win a presidential nomination that year. Although a handful of candidates had won the White House when they were in their late forties, no forty-three-year-old had ever made it to the presidency. Theodore Roosevelt was forty-two when McKinley’s assassination put him in the office, but when he ran in 1904, he was forty-six. More important, only one Catholic had run for president, Al Smith in 1928, and Herbert Hoover had decisively defeated him.
In a conversation with his father on Thanksgiving Day 1956, Jack discussed the conditions working against his candidacy. But Joe, with his extraordinary feel for the direction of national events, asked Jack to remember that “this country is not a private preserve for Protestants. There’s a whole new generation out there and it’s filled with the sons and daughters of immigrants from all over the world and those people are going to be mighty proud that one of their own was running for President. And that pride will be your spur.”
Jack did not need much persuading. His own ambition for the highest office, his self-confidence that he could win, and his understanding that he already enjoyed the support of millions of Americans (including, of course, his father, who would help finance the campaign) made him hopeful of success. “Well, Dad,” he replied, “I guess there’s only one question left. When do we start?”
Jack muted any doubts about whether he was healthy enough to bear the rigors of a campaign and the burdens of office. The daily use of cortisone gave him confidence that his Addison’s disease would not deter him from being president. Moreover, he did not think that his other ailments would be an impediment to serving in the office. In 1960, he told Kenny O’Donnell, “I’m forty-three years old, and I’m the healthiest candidate for President in the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to know that. I’m not going to die in office.”
Yet however confident Kennedy was about taking on the job, he understood that public knowledge of his many chronic health problems would likely sink his candidacy. Consequently, the state of his health was a closely guarded secret. Apparently, only Jackie, Bobby, Joe, and Jack’s several doctors knew the full extent of his difficulties. Evelyn Lincoln was responsible for ensuring that Jack took his medications on schedule, but it is doubtful that she had a substantial knowledge of why he needed them. The medical records collected by his physician Janet Travell show that Kennedy’s health was even more problematic than previously understood. Between May 1955 and October 1957, while he was launching his vice presidential and presidential bids, he was secretly hospitalized nine times for a total of forty-four days, including two weeklong stays and one nineteen-day stretch.
All these confinements were at New York Hospital except for one day in July 1955 at New England Baptist. Terrible back pain triggered a weeklong hospitalization beginning May 26, 1955. A general workup noted continuing back miseries with a chronic abscess at the site of his 1954-55 surgeries; repeated bouts of colitis with abdominal pain, diarrhea, and dehydration; and prostatitis marked by pain when urinating and ejaculating as well as urinary tract infections. On July 3, he spent one day at New England Baptist being treated for severe diarrhea caused by colitis. Eleven days later, he entered New York Hospital for a week to relieve his back pain and treat another attack of diarrhea. After six relatively healthy months, on January 11, he returned for three days to New York Hospital, where he received large doses of antibiotics to counter respiratory and urinary tract infections. To learn more about his prostate troubles, his doctors performed a cystoscopy under anesthesia. When nausea, vomiting, dehydration, and continuing urinary discomfort occurred at the end of the month, he spent two more days in the hospital. Another six-month respite ended on July 18, when he spent forty-eight hours at New York Hospital for abdominal cramps. Fevers of unknown origin, severe abdominal discomfort, weight loss, throat and urinary infections, a recurrence of his back abscess (which was surgically drained), and his all-too-familiar acute back pain and spasms resulted in three hospitalizations for a total of twenty-two miserable days in September and October.
During 1955, Kennedy had consulted Travell, a neurologist, about the muscle spasms in his lower left back that radiated to his left leg and made him unable to “put weight on it without intense pain.” He asked her repeatedly about the origins of his back troubles, but she found it impossible “to reconstruct by hindsight what might have happened to him over the years.” It was clear to her, however, that Kennedy “resented” the back surgeries, which had given him no relief and “seemed to only make him worse.” He might have done better, of course, to blame the physicians who had prescribed the steroids that weakened his bones, but he had no idea that this was the root of his back problems.
The medical records from this time describe Kennedy as having zero flexion and extension of his back, with difficulty reaching his left foot to pull up a sock, turn over in bed, or sit in a low chair. He also had problems bending his right knee and could raise his left leg to only 25 percent of what was considered normal. There was “exquisite tenderness” in his back, and he was suffering from arthritis.
The treatments for his various ailments included oral and implanted cortisone for the Addison’s and massive doses of penicillin and other antibiotics to combat the prostatitis and abscess. He also received anesthetic injections of procaine at trigger points to relieve back pain, antispasmodics—principally, Lomotil and trasentine—to control the colitis, testosterone to bulk him up or keep up his weight (which fell with each bout of colitis and diarrhea), and Nembutal to help him sleep. He had terribly elevated cholesterol—410, in one testing—apparently caused by the testosterone, which also may have heightened his libido and added to his stomach and prostate problems.
Kennedy’s collective health problems were not enough to deter him from running. Though they were an inconvenience, none of them was life-threatening. Nor did he believe that the many medications he took would reduce his ability to work effectively; on the contrary, he saw them as ensuring his competence to deal with the day-to-day rigors of public respons
ibility. And apparently none of his many doctors—the endocrinologists, neurologists, surgeons, gastroenterologists, or urologists—told him that were he elevated to the presidency, his health problems (or the treatments for them) could pose a danger to the country.
Seeing no compelling reason to stand aside, by the end of 1956 Kennedy had begun campaigning for the Democratic nomination. After the defeat in Chicago, Jack told Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, “I’ve learned that you don’t get far in politics until you become a total politician. That means you’ve got to deal with the party leaders as well as the voters. From now on, I’m going to be a total politician.” This meant courting all possible factions. After the 1956 convention, where Democratic members of Congress publicly complained that Kennedy’s voting record or erratic support of party positions made him a liability in a national campaign, Jack privately wrote Democratic leaders to “set the record straight.” He had “actively opposed” Taft-Hartley, he claimed, and had supported Truman’s veto. He had opposed legislation giving the Atomic Energy Commission the authority to make contracts with private companies to replace public power generated by the TVA. True, on farm legislation he had opposed guaranteed government payments providing a kind of welfare for all farm families. However, he pointed out, he was “the only New England Senator to support the [Senator Hubert] Humphrey amendment, which would have provided ‘payments’ for small family farmers, flexible support for medium-sized farmers and no aid to wealthy farmers. . . . In view of the very vigorous opposition of New England farmers to the entire farm program,” he told Missouri representative Leonor Sullivan, “I believe I have gone more than halfway in recognizing the needs in other sections of the country.” And in the fall of 1956, when some Mississippi newspapers reported that an “‘anti-Southern’ attitude and legislative record” had made southern support of Jack’s vice presidential candidacy unwise, he wrote the state’s governor to convince him otherwise; he had “never been ‘anti-Southern’ in any sense of the word,” he told James Coleman. Although he acknowledged that his support of Massachusetts’ interests sometimes clashed with those of Mississippi, he had principally devoted himself to the national interest and looked forward to serving the needs of both their regions in the future.