Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [114]
But, as he had told Ben Bradlee, he would not be maneuvered into a corner. He would not let the entire campaign hang on winning one difficult primary. His mind was racing ahead to whatever the West Virginia results might require. He warned his old college friend, and now U.S. congressman, Torby Macdonald, who was running the Kennedy campaign in Maryland, that he might need him more than ever. The primary there was to take place that Friday.
“If Jack were beaten in West Virginia,” Macdonald said, “then this would be a bail-out operation, in which he’d win so overwhelmingly in Maryland that everyone would forget about West Virginia. It may have been wishful thinking, but that was the point—and that’s why I worked as hard as I did in Maryland.”
Just as Jack Kennedy had refused to sit on that little island in the Solomons, awaiting a rescuer for him and his men, just as he’d swum again and again out into the water looking for help, just as he’d sent Barney Ross when he couldn’t do it, now he was sending an S.O.S. to his buddy Torby. When it came to survival, he was not a pessimist, but he was seized by the fear that West Virginia had slipped from his hands.
He made sure to fly back to Washington, D.C., as the actual election was getting under way. He’d look even more a loser should the results go against him and he was there, hanging around in West Virginia, on primary night.
To pass the time while the votes came in, the Kennedys, joined by the Bradlees, went out to dinner. Getting away from the action and the teasing hints from the early returns is standard political practice. For his sanity, a candidate needs to remove himself, however momentarily, from the minute-to-minute rumblings and false reports bringing alternating euphoria and gloom. It’s also a pleasure to find yourself alone with good friends after weeks of craziness with strangers.
Bradlee remembers: “The Kennedys asked us to sweat the vote out with them at dinner, but dinner was over long before any remotely meaningful results were in. After a quick call to brother Bobby at the Kanawha Hotel in Charleston, we all got into their car and drove to the Trans-Lux theater to see Suddenly Last Summer. Bad omen. It was a film with a surprise ending, whose publicity included a warning that no one would be admitted after the show started.”
They ended up at a film showing around the corner from the White House. To Bradlee it seemed like porn. “Not the hard-core stuff of later years, but a nasty little thing called Private Property, starring Kate Manx as a horny housewife.” Bradlee said he and Kennedy “wondered aloud if the movie was on the Catholic index of forbidden films”—it was—and “whether or not there were any votes in it either way for Kennedy in allegedly anti-Catholic West Virginia if it were known he was in attendance.”
“Kennedy’s concentration was absolutely zero,” Bradlee recalled. “He left every twenty minutes to call Bobby in West Virginia. Each time he returned, he’d whisper ‘Nothing definite yet,’ slouch back into his seat and flick his teeth with the fingernail of the middle finger on his right hand, until he left to call again.”
Word suddenly came that Kennedy had won. The foursome headed to National Airport and boarded the Caroline for the short hop to the state that had just defied all the doomsayers, all the experts, all the Democrats backing the wrong horse.
The moment of Kennedy’s victory speech, O’Donnell recalled, was both ecstatic and poignant. “He gave the usual speech—about the hard work, and about what wonderful people they all were, and that he would keep his word to them. . . . And if he won the presidency he intended to come back to West Virginia and keep his word. That all the things he’d seen there that disturbed him so much, as president of the United States he’d do something