Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [103]
Ted Sorensen, now a veteran well acquainted with Jack’s thinking and his wishes, briefed the others in Palm Beach on the campaign to date. O’Donnell recalled, “Sorensen dominated much of this meeting—with the exception of the senator, of course. He’d done a great deal of research on each primary and the pros/cons for and against, so he talked and we listened. Then Senator Kennedy and his father would respond accordingly. Bobby, Larry, and I had little to contribute. We listened carefully.
“The main thrust of the first conversation was that the senator planned to set up some sort of organization in Washington, D.C., reasonably rapidly,” O’Donnell continued. “This was the first and critical step towards putting together professional organizations. Steve Smith, husband of Jack’s sister Jean, was going to come down from New York, open and run the office in Washington, to begin organizing the campaign. Sorensen had been the record-keeper on where the candidate stood with regional party leaders. As Steve took over and became more and more familiar, he increasingly took over that role from Sorensen. He oversaw the filing system that recorded how Jack stood with the delegates and politicians across the country.
“If the senator met a delegate and the delegate said that he’d support Kennedy if he ran for president . . . then either Dave Powers or Ted would make such a notation on the card and give it a number. The numbering system began with a ten. If a delegate was a ten, that meant he was a totally committed Kennedy man.” The card was then “returned to the main file in the Washington campaign office and then the senator would write the person a thank-you letter.”
According to O’Donnell, “There was still an element of hush-hush: Steve Smith’s headquarters bore no mention of the Kennedy campaign. They couldn’t have asked for a more anonymous office without lying: the sign read simply, ‘Stephen E. Smith.’ “ The Kennedy campaign was still, at this point, purposely under the radar.
In addition, the Kennedy team at Palm Beach had moved on to the wider issues facing the candidate throughout the country. Sorensen took notes of the questions posed. It came down to what had been learned in 1956: Who calls the shots when picking delegates, and how do we influence them? This inevitably led to the question of which state primaries the candidate would have to enter.
It was not clear if winning primaries, even a great many of them, would be enough to secure the nomination. As recently as 1952, Kefauver had won practically all of them; still, the convention had “drafted” Stevenson. The goal now was to win as many primaries as possible, meanwhile convincing the big-state governors to climb aboard the bandwagon. It was still a common practice for governors to run in their own state primaries, then arrive at the convention to broker their delegates in backroom deals.
To win, Kennedy would have to do it the hard way, dominating enough primaries that as the convention approached, those governors would go to him. Only that way could he gain the momentum he needed. Jack, after all, wasn’t a party favorite with either the liberal or Washington establishments. If the old Roosevelt crowd prevailed, it could well be Adlai Stevenson again. If Lyndon Johnson proved able to leverage his sizable Capitol Hill clout, the nomination might be his.
“By taking the case directly to the people, as he intended, he felt he’d be able to pick up a great many delegates,” O’Donnell said. “I think, very early, he took the position that the leaders and professionals will, in the end, follow their delegations. He believed he could succeed in building a fire under these leaders by appealing directly to the voters and to the delegates.”
The governors most on his mind were a trio composed of David Lawrence of Pennsylvania, Pat Brown of California, and Mike DiSalle of Ohio. These men, so the idea went, “would begin to get nervous and, though their inclination might—or not—be for John Kennedy, in the end they would follow their