Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [108]
“I asked him what he considered the main sources of his own appeal. He said obviously there were no great differences between himself and Humphrey on issues, that it came down to a question of personality and image. ‘Hubert is too hot for the present mood of the people. He gets people too excited, too worked up. What they want today is a more boring, monotonous personality, like me.’ Jack plainly has no doubt about his capacity to beat Nixon and can hardly wait to take him on.”
When it came to pulling out ahead of the Democratic pack, Kennedy wanted to take as many big states as he could in his fight for the nomination. He also needed to decide where to put the biggest effort, where to devote the better part of what he had: his polling, his time, his money, his family, his father. Mike DiSalle, the Ohio governor, was still holding out on him. Privately supportive, he was still withholding his public endorsement. Though he had promised to come out for Kennedy, when Christmas 1959 came and went he was still wiggling. He now explained to Kennedy that, as a Catholic, his backing would not be as beneficial to him and recommended he find some non-Catholics in Ohio to back him. Kennedy got the message: DiSalle was trying to welsh on the deal.
At a Christmas meeting among Jack, Bobby, Joe Sr., and Ken O’Donnell, the decision was made to send Bobby out to Columbus to get Mike DiSalle on board once and for all. O’Donnell remembers Jack’s teasing his brother: “You’re mean and tough, and can say miserable things to Mike that I cannot. And if you get too obnoxious, then I’ll disown and disavow what you said and just tell DiSalle, ‘He’s a young kid and doesn’t know any better.’ “ Bobby, not amused, replied, “Thanks a lot.”
Early that January, Bobby Kennedy, accompanied by John Bailey, met with DiSalle. Afterward, the indignant governor called O’Donnell and Senator Kennedy to complain. “He was furious,” said O’Donnell. “He told me that Bobby was the ‘most obnoxious kid he’d ever met,’ that Bobby practically had called him a liar and said ‘We can’t trust you. You will do what you’re told.’
“In essence, Bobby’d done exactly what he’d been told to, of course. And then Bailey called me privately, saying he’d been horrified at the conversation. Bobby was awfully tough, completely unreasonable, rude and obnoxious, and totally demanded that DiSalle come out for his brother immediately. And if he did not, well . . . he threatened him.” To Bailey, it had sounded just like the kind of pressure mobsters applied.
According to a Newsweek feature, the taking of Ohio made for “a pretty dramatic story,” one that pitted DiSalle’s desires against the Kennedy Party’s own, as well as its “six months of careful effort.” Bobby had secured the endorsement and more. Jack, making good on his determination to claim Ohio’s delegates at the convention, had fashioned for himself a reputation.
Not only were such rivals as Lyndon Johnson, himself no slouch at brutal manipulation, put on notice by the Kennedy brothers’ maneuver, but so were the country’s political bosses, such as Carmine DeSapio of New York and Richard Daley of Chicago. They saw how Mike DiSalle was now running, committed to delivering his state’s delegates to John F. Kennedy at the national convention, and they were impressed.
In March, Kennedy won the New Hampshire primary with 85 percent of the vote. It was a big, if expected, victory. The Wisconsin primary, held the first week in April, was a contest between Jack’s national celebrity and Hubert Humphrey, the boy next door. Democratic voters in both his own state and the one to their east were looking to him to represent their own brand of Midwestern liberalism on the national scene. He was also enormously strong on farm issues, an area where his eastern rival was something of a city slicker.
Stumping around this alien landscape brought the fighter in Jack