Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [105]
Currently looming was the decision whether to run in Ohio or Wisconsin. Since both primaries were held at the same time, a choice had to be made. If Kennedy tried to campaign in both, he’d be spreading himself too thin. It was decided that a win in Wisconsin, where a poll by Lou Harris showed him ahead, made the most sense. It would prove he could win in a Midwestern farm state against a regional rival, Senator Hubert Humphrey of neighboring Minnesota.
Here, the great potential advantage was identical to the disadvantage: his rival’s geographic edge. Humphrey had for years been a popular figure in Wisconsin. Beating him in his own territory would send a very definite signal. Here’s how O’Donnell recapped Kennedy’s thinking: “He said, ‘I’d be running against Hubert, who practically lives in Wisconsin. Minnesota and Wisconsin have about the same economic problems, Hubert obviously being on the right side. While I—a city boy from Boston—am not going to be on the right side of some Wisconsin problems.’ “
Thus, with Wisconsin obviously such a challenge, it made victory there all the more significant. “He felt it would be a great gamble and, if he lost, it would knock him out of the ballpark, totally.” There was just one real danger the candidates saw to the enterprise: a battle with the Protestant Humphrey could draw unfavorable attention to Kennedy’s Catholicism and thus hurt him in primaries coming after.
But if Kennedy forfeited Wisconsin to Humphrey, focusing instead on Ohio, it would be a mistake, imagewise. Forgoing Wisconsin, with its largely rural population, would leave Kennedy seeming too much the candidate destined to take only the ethnic, big-city states.
Once the decision was made to campaign in Wisconsin, then the task was to figure out how to claim Ohio through other means. What happened next is an example of just how tough a politician Jack Kennedy had become. He and Bobby were about to give Governor Mike DiSalle of Ohio a variation on the Onions Burke routine.
DiSalle was presumed to favor Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, who was Harry Truman’s candidate to head the Democratic ticket. With DiSalle still owing a debt to Truman—he’d given him a sizable job in his administration, director of the Office of Price Stabilization, during the Korean War—the Kennedy people figured he was spoken for. That is, if the Ohio governor ran as a “favorite son” in the state’s primary, he’d then be expected to hand over his delegates to Symington at the convention.
But what if the Kennedy people didn’t intend to leave that option open to him? Soon, Kennedy warned DiSalle, “Mike, it’s time to shit or get off the pot. You’re either going to come out for me or we are going to run a delegation against you in Ohio and we’ll beat you.” And the truth was, Jack Kennedy was popular enough in Ohio to pull it off.
So, even if he wasn’t actively campaigning there, Ohio was still hugely critical for him, especially now that he’d been acting tough and holding a club over the head of the governor. At a press event organized by Ben Bradlee, one Newsweek reporter challenged Kennedy by asking him what his plans were for showing the skeptics he wasn’t “just another pretty boy from Boston and Harvard.” According to Bradlee, Jack didn’t hesitate before replying: “Well, for openers, I’m going to fucking well take Ohio.”
Before getting rough with DiSalle, the Kennedys needed to mend fences with labor. Kennedy declared that the United Auto Workers convention in Atlantic City would be his next destination to, as O’Donnell put it, “stop some of this drift” toward Humphrey and Stevenson, both reliable cultivators of organized labor.
At the UAW event, Kennedy further closed the distance between himself and Humphrey.