If Bobby was the taskmaster, the relentless overseer demanding superhuman efforts from everyone, Jack was the conciliator, the candidate eager to bring everyone to his side in the service of progressive goals. “This was a politician who knew what his duties were and he accepted them not without relish,” Henry Brandon, the Washington correspondent for the London Sunday Times, noted in a memo to himself after a conversation with Jack in June. “He is a child of his times. He instinctively knows how to use all the techniques of the modern mass media to his best advantage. . . . He may lack warmth, he may be cold and calculating, but those eager to work for him suspect or at least hope that he would follow up ideas with action.” By contrast with Bobby, for example, whose visceral dislike of LBJ clouded his political judgment, Jack let practical electoral calculations be his guide.
Similarly, despite his personal antagonism toward Stevenson, Jack met with him at the Cape at the end of July to ask for his help with New York liberals. When Stevenson suggested the creation of a foreign policy task force to prepare for a possible transition to the presidency, Jack immediately agreed and asked him to head it. In early August, Jack went to Independence, Missouri, to seek Harry Truman’s support. Campaign imperatives dissolved his anger toward Truman for having been against his nomination. Truman, who despised Nixon, was receptive to Jack’s appeal. He told Abe Ribicoff, “I never liked Kennedy. I hate his father. Kennedy wasn’t so great as a Senator. . . . However, that no good son-of-a-bitch Dick Nixon called me a Communist and I’ll do anything to beat him.” Asked by reporters how he could see Kennedy as now ready for the presidency after having described him in July as too young and inexperienced, Truman replied with a grin, “When the Democratic convention decided to nominate him, that’s when I decided.”
Kennedy then traveled to Hyde Park, New York, to enlist Eleanor Roosevelt in his cause. Like Truman, the onetime antagonist was now eager to help. Jack gave her “the distinct feeling that he is planning to work closely with Adlai. I also had the feeling,” she wrote a friend, “that here was a man who could learn. I liked him better than I ever had before because he seemed so little cock-sure, and I think he has a mind that is open to new ideas. . . . My final judgement is that here is a man who wants to leave a record (perhaps for ambitious personal reasons, as people say), but I rather think because he really is interested in helping the people of his own country and mankind in general. I will be surer of this as time goes on, but I think I am not mistaken in feeling that he would make a good President if elected.”
Kennedy’s success with Truman, Stevenson, and Eleanor Roosevelt did not translate into grass roots enthusiasm for his candidacy among liberals. Although Kennedy had voiced his support for progressive legislation during a special August congressional session, liberal interest in his campaign remained flat. Part of the reason was a lack of liberal positions on the Kennedy platform. After Stevenson saw Jack at the Cape, he had written Mrs. Roosevelt that Kennedy’s “interest and concentration seemed to be on organization not ideas at this stage.” Schlesinger, who doubted the wisdom of giving highest priority to building a campaign organization, as Jack and Bobby planned, told Jack at the end of August, “Organization has an important role to play, of course; but to suppose that organization per se will win New York or California is nonsense.” Jack needed “to elicit the all-out support of the kind of people who have traditionally provided the spark in Democratic campaigns. . . . The liberals, the reformers, the intellectuals . . . people who have entered politics, not because it is their livelihood, but because they care deeply about issues and principles. . . . Once the issue-minded Democrats catch fire, then the campaign will gather steam.” Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, “who hardly qualifies as a bleeding heart,” Schlesinger wrote a few days later, “. . . said to me, ‘We need someone who will take a big jump—not just improve on existing trends but produce a new frame of mind, a new national atmosphere. If Kennedy debates Nixon on who can best manage the status quo, he is lost. The issue is not one technical program or another. The issue is a new epoch.’”
Kennedy was receptive to Schlesinger’s prodding. “I don’t mind criticism at this point,” he told him. “I would rather have you tell me now than to wait until November.” In the middle of September, Kennedy met the problem head-on with a strong speech before the Liberal party in New York, where he sounded familiar liberal themes, which began to evoke the sort of excitement Schlesinger saw as essential to a winning campaign.
IT WAS APPARENT by September that much more than liberal enthusiasm was essential if Jack was going to beat Nixon. The Republican convention at the end of July—a coronation of sorts for Nixon and running mate Henry Cabot Lodge, featuring effective speeches about the Soviet challenge and the nominees’ superior capacity to enhance national security—boosted Republican poll numbers. Gallup trial heats showed Nixon ahead by 53 to 47 percent in one survey and 50 to 44 percent in another. As troubling, 31 percent of Nixon-Lodge supporters said they were “very strongly” committed to their candidates, while only 22 percent of Kennedy-Johnson backers expressed the same intensity. Happily, from Kennedy’s viewpoint, 60 percent of Americans said that they had paid little or no attention to the presidential race so far.
The Kennedys expected Nixon to fight hard and dirty. During four years together in the House, Kennedy and Nixon had enjoyed a civil relationship. During the fifties, however, Nixon’s campaign tactics and harsh attacks on the Democrats, which echoed some of McCarthy’s excesses, had diminished Kennedy’s regard for him. To be behind in the polls before Nixon unleashed any trademark kidney punches was discouraging.
By the end of August, a new poll showed Nixon and Kennedy locked in a dead heat. Neither man had convinced a majority of voters that he was better qualified to be president. Nixon’s reputation for excessive partisanship and Kennedy’s youth and Catholicism dulled public enthusiasm for seeing one or the other in the White House.
Despite the improvement in Jack’s public standing, the Kennedys were still distressed. While Nixon moved freely about the country in August, emphasizing his fitness for the highest office, the special congressional session kept Jack tied down in Washington. Teddy White saw a firsthand demonstration of the Kennedy frustration during a visit to Jack’s campaign headquarters. While he sat chatting with two Kennedy staffers, Bobby emerged from an inner office and began to shout: “‘What are you doing?! What are we all doing? Let’s get on the road! Let’s get on the road tomorrow! I want us all on the road tomorrow!’ And without waiting for a reply, he clapped the door shut and disappeared.”
Fueling Bobby’s explosion were emerging attacks on Jack’s character and record that put him on the defensive and distracted him from an affirmative appeal to voters. In response, the campaign produced a “Counterattack Sourcebook” for use in answering derogatory assertions about Kennedy’s religion, health, inexperience, profligate campaign spending, voting record on labor, civil liberties, and civil rights, opposition to southern interests, Senate attendance, response to McCarthyism, and opposition to France’s repressive Algerian policy.
Warnings that Kennedy’s Catholicism and youth made him unfit for the White House worried Jack and Bobby the most. “Senator Kennedy is an attractive young man, but he is untrained for the job of President,” Republicans asserted. He had never held an executive position or had any experience in strategic military planning or in dealing with the communists. At the age of forty-three,“he would be the youngest man ever elected to the White House,” and at the age of thirty-one, his “wife is too young to be First Lady.” John Kenneth Galbraith told the brothers that after speaking with more than “a hundred journalists, farm leaders, dirt farmers and Democratic professionals,” he had concluded that “religion in the rural corn belt, Great Plains and down into rural Texas has become an issue greater than either income or peace. . . . In the absence of a clear view of what either candidate stands for or can do about these issues, religion is entering as a deciding factor.” And the
complaints came from both sides: Some prominent Catholics were unhappy with Jack’s opposition to “the Catholic position on many public issues.”
A more muted concern was gossip about Jack’s womanizing. In June 1959, the FBI had received letters and a photograph “containing allegations regarding personal immorality on the part of Jack Kennedy. Apparently,” the FBI’s memo noted, “this data has received widespread distribution—correspondent allegedly sent copies to ‘about thirty-five reporters.’” The memo also noted that “some months ago,” the Bureau “had received from a reliable source information . . . on Senator Kennedy’s sex life. You will also recall that we have detailed substantial information in Bu[reau] files reflecting that Kennedy carried on an illicit relationship with another man’s wife during World War II.” In March 1960, the agent in charge of the New Orleans Bureau office reported that members of the mob, in conjunction with Frank Sinatra, were financially supporting Kennedy’s campaign. The agent also related “a conversation which indicated that Senator Kennedy had been compromised with a woman in Las Vegas, Nevada.” There were also reports that an airline hostess in Miami had been “sent to visit Sen. Kennedy.” In May, the Bureau received a photo published in a right-wing newspaper of Jack “leaving his girlfriend’s house at 1 o’clock in the morning. She is a glamour employee of his.”
Rumors about Kennedy’s philandering were so common that Henry Van Dusen of the Union Theological Seminary in New York asked Adlai Stevenson “to sit down with . . . some . . . friends who would like to silence the stories about Senator Kennedy.” But Stevenson, who knew “nothing himself first hand,” was unwilling to give credence to the gossip. He believed that Kennedy “may have been overactive in that direction prior to 1955,” when acute back problems had put his survival in doubt. But after a series of operations gave him “a normal expectancy he seems to have settled down to preparing himself for his ambition—the Presidency.” Stevenson found confirmation for this conclusion in the fact that “most of the stories about his private life seem to date from 1955 and before. My view, therefore, is that such rumors are out of date and largely unsubstantiated. And I must add even if they were true they would hardly seem to be crucial when the alternative is Nixon! Having been the victim of ugly rumors myself, I find this whole business distasteful in the extreme!”
Stevenson was not the only one who saw public discussion of an elected official’s sex life as out of bounds. William Randolph Hearst, the great press baron who was “a pioneer of slash-and-burn assaults on public figures,” drew the line at probing into private lives, and Hearst—vulnerable himself to charges of being a libertine—was quite representative of media mores in the 1950s and early 1960s. Humphrey, Johnson, Nixon, and even Jimmy Hoffa, who despised the Kennedys and would have done almost anything to beat Jack, said many unflattering things about him, but, in a universe of harsh assaults on political enemies, discussions of sexual escapades crossed the line. The thirty-five reporters mentioned in the FBI memo, for example, never used the information in a story. It may be that they could not find sufficient confirmation of the rumors. Or, in Nixon’s case, like Hearst, he may have feared attacks on himself as a hypocrite. Congressman Richard Bolling had heard stories about Nixon’s having a girlfriend, and Bolling learned that Joe Kennedy was ready to unleash an airing of such if Nixon made an issue of Jack’s philandering. But the standards of the time made such a tit for tat almost impossible to imagine, and Jack did not worry that his womanizing would play any significant part in the campaign, unlike attacks on his religion and youth.
Religion remained an obstacle. On September 7, the New York Times carried a front-page article about the ironically named National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, an organization of 150 Protestant ministers led by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale; they said that the Roman Catholic Church, with its dual role as both a church and a temporal state, made Kennedy’s faith a legitimate issue in the campaign. Like Khrushchev, one member declared, Kennedy was “a captive of a system.” Although the clergymen were all conservative Republicans eager for Nixon’s election (and were guilty of transparent hypocrisy in doing what they said Kennedy’s church would do—interfere in secular politics), their political machinations did not cancel out the effects of their warnings.
Estimates suggested that unless this propaganda was countered and the anti-Catholic bias overcome, Kennedy’s religion might cost him as many as 1.5 million votes. The Kennedy campaign quickly organized a Community Relations division to meet the religious problem head-on. James Wine, a staff member at the National Council of Churches, headed the operation. Wine was as busy as any member of Jack’s campaign team, answering between six hundred and a thousand letters a week and urging lay and clerical Protestants to combat the explicit and implicit anti-Catholicism in so much of the anti-Kennedy rhetoric.
A highly effective and much publicized appearance Kennedy made before a group of Protestant ministers in Houston, Texas, on September 12 helped. Bobby, Jack’s campaign staff, Johnson, and Rayburn all advised against the appearance. “They’re mostly Republicans and they’re out to get you,” Rayburn told Kennedy. But Kennedy believed he had to confront the issue sometime, and he wanted to do it early in the campaign so that he could move on to more constructive matters. “I’m getting tired of these people who think I want to replace the gold at Fort Knox with a supply of holy water,” he told O’Donnell and Powers. In fact, his knowledge of Church doctrine and ties to the Church were so limited that he brought in John Cogley, a Catholic scholar, to coach him in preparation for his appearance.
Although he saw his speech and response to audience questions, which were to follow his remarks, as a crucial moment in the campaign, Kennedy went before the audience of three hundred in Houston’s Rice Hotel Crystal ballroom (and the millions of television viewers around the country) with no hesitation or obvious sign of nervousness. The sincerity of what he had to say armed him against his adversaries and conveyed a degree of inner surety that converted a few opponents and persuaded some undecided voters that he had the maturity and balance to become a fine president.
He began his speech by emphasizing that although the religious question was the one before them tonight, he saw “far more critical issues in the 1960 election . . . for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barrier.” But his religion was the immediate concern, and he stated his views and intentions without equivocation. He declared his belief in “an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. . . . I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed on him by the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office. . . . I am not the Catholic candidate for President,” he declared. “I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters—and the church does not speak for me. . . . If the time should ever come . . . when my office would require me to either violate my conscience, or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office, and I would hope that any other conscientious public servant would do likewise.” He ended with a plea for religious tolerance that would serve the national well-being. “If this election is decided on the basis that 40,000,000 Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our people.”
Although some of the questions that followed showed an indifference to his pledges, he responded with such poise and restraint that the ministers stood and applauded at the close of the meeting, and some came forward to shake his hand and wish him well in the campaign. Rayburn, who watched the speech on television, shouted, “By God, look at him—and listen to him! He’s eating them blood raw. This young feller will be a great President!”
THE HOUSTON APPEARANCE temporarily muted the religious issue and allowed Kennedy to concent
rate on convincing voters that he was not too young or inexperienced to be president. The surest way to counter these assertions was to compete directly with Nixon in a debate. Eisenhower advised Nixon against accepting the unprecedented challenge of a televised confrontation: He was much better known than Kennedy, had eight years of executive experience as vice president, and had established himself as an effective spokesman and defender of the national interest by standing up to a stone-throwing mob in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1958 and to Khrushchev in the Moscow “kitchen debate” in 1959. But Nixon relished confrontations with adversaries and, remembering his successful appearance before the TV cameras in the 1952 campaign (his Checkers speech—a response to allegations of accepting illegal gifts—was the most successful use of television by an American politician to that date), he agreed to four debates. He also believed that saying no to a debate could cost him politically in the new TV age.
Kennedy was as confident, especially after his Houston appearance, that he could establish himself as more worthy of the White House by besting or even just holding his own against Nixon before the press and millions of TV viewers. Either outcome would refute assertions about his being too immature to merit election.
Consequently, on the evening of September 26, in Chicago’s CBS studio, the two candidates joined Howard K. Smith, the moderator, and a four-member panel of television reporters to discuss campaign issues before some seventy million Americans, nearly two thirds of the country’s adult population. Kennedy had spent most of the day preparing responses to possible questions. As campaign historian Theodore White described him, Kennedy lay on his bed in the Ambassador East Hotel dressed in a white, V-neck T-shirt and khaki pants and holding a pack of “fact cards” prepared by aides; he reviewed a variety of topics, tossing each card onto the floor as he finished a subject. Suggestions from his speechwriters for an eight-minute opening statement did not satisfy him, and he dictated his own version to a secretary.