Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [112]
It suddenly didn’t look good. The unthinkable—an anti-Kennedy turnaround, a building backlash—might well be looming ahead. In Washington, the oddsmakers—including the self-interested Nixon, whose own future was tied to whomever the Democrats finally nominated—were betting that Jack couldn’t pull it off. Now it appeared that the nomination would have to be brokered, after all, at the convention in Los Angeles, a scenario that squared with Lyndon Johnson’s own game plan. The Senate leader imagined getting together with the delegates and wooing them in the same tried-and-true manner he used on senators before a key vote. He’d work the states one at a time, using his allies from the Hill as local kingmakers. Then, when the time came to pick the party’s nominee, the convention would choose a candidate who could actually win in November—not a Catholic, not a young backbencher who’d yet to do much of anything where it counted: on Capitol Hill.
Around this time, Lyndon Johnson called on Tip O’Neill in his office. The Senate leader said he understood O’Neill’s first loyalty was to his Massachusetts colleague, but that “the boy” was obviously going to falter after not getting the nomination on the first ballot. He lobbied O’Neill for his commitment on the second.
In West Virginia, Humphrey pressed the advantage he’d gained in Wisconsin. With the strains of “Give Me That Old Time Religion” coming from his campaign bus, he tried to play the faith advantage over Kennedy to the hilt. There was nothing subtle about it. Its verses had featured prominently—and ominously—in the film Inherit the Wind, a stirring drama based on the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.” In the movie, released that year, the song comes to stand for the beliefs of the rural Christian fundamentalists opposed to any teaching of evolution, and in West Virginia its message was clear: Humphrey understood who the voters were, and Roman Catholic wasn’t part of the description.
Cannily—and what choice did he have?—Kennedy himself began citing his Catholicism at every opportunity, but often in the same context as his navy service. If his critics wanted to make his religion, rather than his political experience, the issue, he was willing to play their game. It was the game of politics at its most masterful. His brother Bobby would call this ploy “hanging a lantern on your problem.” Lem Billings recalled how, of necessity, the strategy had shifted. While in Wisconsin Jack had “pretty well avoided the religious question,” in West Virginia he “jumped into it with both feet. He pounded home day after day about religion.” There it became the issue, out in the open.
Kennedy showcased his service record in World War II to extinguish voters’ fears about possible conflicted loyalties; his allegiance was to the United States, it always had been and always would be. Why else had he risked his life in the Pacific? “Nobody asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy. Nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber plane to fly his last mission.”
William Battle, who’d served in the PT boats with Kennedy, introduced him to a much-respected Episcopal bishop, Robert E. Lee Strider, with strong political influence in the Charleston area. “Young man, I should tell you right off the bat the only time I have ever voted Republican was when Al Smith ran for the Democratic nomination,” was the churchman’s opener to Kennedy, as Battle recalled. “And it was because of the Catholic issue. The way he handled it.”
Battle remembered the look Jack shot him, basically “What the hell did you bring me up here for?” And then Strider smiled. “That’s the way he handled it,” the bishop told his visitor. “Smith would not discuss it. You’ve handled your religion entirely differently. I’m satisfied, and I’d be delighted to work with you.” The next morning local papers throughout the coalfields region ran stories headlined: “Bishop Strider Supports Kennedy!”
Ken O’Donnell noted the way Kennedy was affected by what he saw in West Virginia.