Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [1]
Those were the early boomer years. And a boom it was. We had a hundred kids in our first grade, more than would fit in a classroom, so they had to put us in the auditorium.
I remember an afternoon in 1956 that’s hard to believe now. What’s strange about it to me is the way it marks a before-and-after moment in time. History changed. It was July, and we were listening to the radio in our two-tone ’54 Chevy Bel Air.
It was broadcasting the balloting from the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The fight to become the party’s vice-presidential candidate was on between Kefauver—a name I knew from listening to the news, just as I knew the name Nixon—and now, out of nowhere, this candidate named Kennedy. We’d never heard of him. It was an Irish name.
So, because he was a known quantity—Kefauver, a brand name—I was happy when the Tennessee senator won, finally, on the second ballot. The name I knew had beaten the other name. Isn’t that how most voting seems to be, voting for the name you recognize, rooting for its victory, and all the time having no real idea who the person is?
Yet, looking back on this event, that Democratic National Convention of over a half-century ago, an image from it remains frozen in my mind’s eye. The truth is, it’s a picture that entered my consciousness and stayed there. What I still see, as clearly as if it were yesterday, is that giant hall with its thousands of cheering delegates, its chaos then suddenly punctuated by the appearance onstage of a young stranger. It was John F. Kennedy, who had just lost the nomination to Estes Kefauver; swiftly he came through the crowd and up to the podium in order to ask that his opponent’s victory be made by acclamation. He was releasing his delegates and requesting unity, and, in making this important gesture, he seemed both confident and gracious. It was the first look the country at large had had of him, a figure we would come to know so well, one who would soon mean so much to us, to me.
I was ten at the time.
I was becoming increasingly obsessed with politics. Two years later, on the midterm election night in 1958, I was backing the GOP candidates, among them Hugh Scott, who won his fight that night to be junior senator from Pennsylvania in an upset. In New York, the Republican candidate, Nelson Rockefeller, defeated the Democrat Averell Harriman, the incumbent governor. My father, a court reporter working for the city of Philadelphia, offered a kind remark about the patrician Harriman, saying he looked sad. It was one of those rare, memorable times when Dad would step out of his workaday world to make such a comment, or to quote from a poem he’d learned in school.
By 1960, I was a paperboy for the Philadelphia Bulletin, and suddenly, as I started reading the daily afternoon paper I was throwing onto people’s lawns, my loyalties were challenged. Now I was following Jack Kennedy in that year’s primaries and enthusiastically rooting for him. He was Catholic, after all, and I felt the pull. Yet all the while I followed his trail through New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, I knew that, in the end, I’d wind up supporting Nixon, his opponent.
That’s because, by this time, I’d become not merely a member of a Republican family but a Republican myself. Yet here I found myself entranced by the spectacle of the glamorous JFK winning his party’s nomination.
And not only was I cheering the idea of Jack occupying the White House for the next eight years, by the time of the Los Angeles convention I was dreaming of the “happily ever after”—the succession of his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, elected to follow JFK with his own two terms; then, after that, Bobby and Teddy. Momentarily dazzled, I was caught up by the romance of dynasty.
I’d lived my