Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [107]
On January 2, 1960, John F. Kennedy stood in the Senate Caucus Room, one floor up from his office, and announced his candidacy. “The presidency is the most powerful office in the Free World,” he declared. “Through its leadership can come a more vital life for our people. In it are centered the hopes of the globe around us for freedom and a more secure life. For it is in the Executive Branch that the most crucial decisions of this century must be made in the next four years—how to end or alter the burdensome arms race, where Soviet gains already threaten our very existence . . .” He was offering himself as a latter-day Churchill, warning his people that the enemy was arming while America was asleep. It was an homage to his hero and, at the same time, a son’s declaration of independence from his father’s support for Neville Chamberlain and appeasement.
It was also a challenge to would-be rivals. He spoke of his relentless cross-country campaigning “the past forty months.” He’d been out with the people since September 1956. Where were they? “I believe that any Democratic aspirant to this important nomination should be willing to submit to the voters his views, record, and competence in a series of primary contests.” He was daring Lyndon Johnson, master of the Senate, to come out and joust in the open fields. Better yet, he was using his weakness—his lack of a power base like Stevenson’s in the loyal Roosevelt cotillion or Johnson’s among the Senate barons—to suggest they do what he had to do: build a national organization from scratch.
But he kept coy about where he intended to make his fight. He would enter the New Hampshire primary, but keep his other options open. “I shall announce my plans with respect to the other primaries as their filing dates approach.” He was keeping other information hooded, too: a biography stapled to the prepared speech lightly wallpapered over significant facts.
The official handout opened with a description of his father having “served under Franklin Roosevelt,” a bland portrait of that terribly bitter relationship. It described the candidate as having been “educated in the public schools of Brookline, Massachusetts,” an obvious effort to democratize his elite upbringing. The document further said he’d attended the London School of Economics “in 35– 36.” This was an obvious effort both to claim distinction and hood the serious illness that sent him back home from the LSE within days of his arrival, not to mention his registration at Princeton that same fall and the subsequent relapse that cost him the academic year. Illness, such a powerful part of Jack Kennedy’s biography, was clearly not something to be admitted in this version. Finally, the sheet highlighted the candidate’s “WAR RECORD,” something his opponents in the upcoming primaries, most particularly Hubert Humphrey, didn’t possess.
The campaign was on! The season had arisen for selling strengths and diverting attention from weaknesses. Jack Kennedy was now running to be the champion of the party that had twice run Adlai Stevenson, a party still liberal at its heart, working-class in its gut. Traveling to Boston that evening, he summoned Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith, two keepers of the liberal keys and Stevenson regulars, to dine with him at the grand old Locke-Ober restaurant.
“At dinner he was, as usual, spirited and charming, but he also conveyed an intangible feeling of depression,” Schlesinger jotted in his journal later that night. “I had the sense that he feels himself increasingly hemmed in as a result of a circumstance over which