Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [110]
Bartlett also put effort into trying to convince him to wear a hat. “It was as cold as the devil up in Wisconsin. I bought him one of those fur hats with the flaps on it and tried to get him to wear that. But he wouldn’t.” In Bartlett’s phrase, as time went on, it was his old friend who “killed the hat.”
With loudspeakers throughout the state blaring the Oscar-winning song “High Hopes,” sung by Frank Sinatra—its lyrics now specially tailored for Kennedy’s candidacy—the presidential hopeful put on a dazzling show in Wisconsin, especially in its ethnic communities. He made a lasting impression when he appeared at a Polish event in Milwaukee, mainly because Jackie took the stage briefly and addressed the gathering in their native language. “I have great respect for the Polish people. Besides, my sister is married to a Pole,” she told them. Then she said, pronouncing the words carefully and correctly, “Poland will live forever.” Her listeners went wild.
A moment later, her husband caught the attention of Red Fay, asking over the tumult with a pleased grin: “How would you like to try and follow that?” Yet Jackie wasn’t her husband’s sole secret weapon in Wisconsin. Working for him there was a fellow who stayed under the radar and away from crowds. Paul Corbin was a campaign operative with a flair for dirty tricks. Later to be legendary in some political circles, Corbin began a close and lasting friendship with Bobby Kennedy during that push to win the 1960 Wisconsin primary. Probably his most famous stunt at the time had him distributing anti-Catholic material—ostensibly written by fearful Protestants—throughout largely Roman Catholic neighborhoods. Nothing incites voters to support their own kind like hard evidence they’re under assault from others.
For their own campaign song, the Humphrey people had chosen the tune of “Davy Crockett,” the jaunty theme of a hit Disney TV show. The problem was that their man was no more “king of the wild frontier” than he could claim to have “killed himself a b’ar when he was only three.” It was Jack Kennedy, who’d proven his grit and courage in his youth, who was plausibly heralding a new frontier.
While Kennedy believed his hard work would pay off, he also knew he had to win. “You have to keep coming up sevens,” he said, admitting, implicitly at least, that the outcome of the Wisconsin primary remained a crap shoot. However, on April 5, the balloting day, he admitted to Ben Bradlee the confidence he felt. “On the day Wisconsin voters went to the polls, he flew to some town in northern Michigan in the Caroline for a midday political rally before coming back for the returns, and I went with him. During the flight, I asked him for his prediction in each of the ten Wisconsin election districts. He wouldn’t tell me, but agreed to write them down and put them in a sealed envelope, if I’d do the same. We did, and Kennedy put them casually in a drawer on the plane, and switched the subject. Two or three days later, I was back on assignment on the Kennedy family plane and remembered the envelope. He pulled it out and showed me the predictions. I’d put down ‘Kennedy 7, Humphrey 3,’ out of an abundance of caution; I really thought it would be eight to two. Kennedy himself had put down, ‘JFK 9, HHH 1.’ “
Despite a surprise attack from liberals trying to make last-minute political capital of the thousand-dollar contribution he’d delivered from his father to Nixon in 1950—an episode Kennedy aides were under instructions to deny—the Massachusetts senator had scored a big victory. The final count was 478,901 votes for John F. Kennedy to Hubert Humphrey’s 372,034.
But the results, the way they were presented, were inconclusive for two reasons. First, the press covered the Wisconsin Democratic vote in terms of congressional districts, of which there were ten: Kennedy took six, Humphrey four. Calling it that way made it appear a far narrower victory than a comparison of total votes for each candidate. This is because three of Humphrey