Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [118]
Jack Kennedy had demonstrated over the years two vital capabilities that would now come into play. First, he was, generally, able to view situations without having his vision distorted by anger or any other emotion. Second, he could see through to the essence of a problem. Like Harry Hopkins, the FDR advisor Churchill once dubbed “Lord Root of the Matter,” Jack Kennedy was focused, shrewd, and incisive when it came to his basic interests.
And what he now knew, perfectly clearly, about Lyndon Johnson was that he’d beaten him. He understood that when Johnson went over his list of supporters at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, the proud man would have only senators, and that was if they were lucky enough to be there themselves. Jack, on the other hand, had delegates. After four years crossing and recrossing the country, he not only had them but knew a good number personally.
Johnson’s only hope lay in lassoing together a large enough herd of western delegates to add to his base in the South. Ted Kennedy, working for his brother in the mountain states, was able to shatter that strategy. And, with the help of Stewart Udall, a Tucson lawyer, he got half the Arizona delegation to declare early for his brother. It was a shocker right there in LBJ’s southwestern backyard, and the press play it got contributed significantly to the waning of the Texan’s chances.
Nonetheless, Kennedy flew to the Los Angeles convention still concerned with LBJ’s plans as well as Adlai’s. Tony Bradlee was on the same plane and had been given a list of questions by her husband to ask him. “He was having throat problems, and to save his voice, he took the list and wrote in his answers. The first question was ‘What about Lyndon Johnson for vice president?’ His tantalizing answer was ‘He’ll never take it.’ “
Jack Kennedy arrived in California far better prepared than he’d been four years earlier in Chicago. This time around he had the organization ready and backing him up as he entered the convention hall, and all the technology he’d been missing before, such as the walkie-talkies that would keep his operatives in continual contact. The country had been divided into “six regions, and every region was manned and they had a telephone and they were in touch with the Kennedy Shack which served as the command post. Pierre Salinger published a daily convention journal designed to look like an impartial newspaper.” All their efforts to build a “Kennedy Party,” starting back in early ’46 for that first congressional race, were now paying off. This time Bobby was masterminding its tactics, while, above him, Jack, the consummate political professional, was in command.
In the beginning, Kennedy looked a shoo-in. But then, Lyndon Johnson threw down the wild card of Kennedy’s health. “It was the goddamndest thing,” he said with mournful relish, “here was this young whippersnapper . . . malaria-ridden, yallah . . . sickly, sickly.” The wily Texan was well aware that the young front-runner rolling up his delegate total in the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena was suffering from health problems far worse than malaria, and, riverboat gambler that he was, he had no desire to keep that knowledge to himself.
For Jack Kennedy, who’d come so far, truth posed the greatest threat to him. By hook or crook, LBJ had learned the name of Jack’s most dreaded weakness. His staff, led by John Connally, were now ready to deploy what they knew: namely that, living as he did with Addison’s disease, the Massachusetts senator was perpetually at risk for new infections while also dependent on cortisone injections to keep him functioning. When Connally daringly called a press conference to lob this grenade, the Kennedys were enraged. Pierre Salinger had only one word for the maneuver: despicable.
As it had been in the past—in the Wisconsin primary, for example, when the issue was the thousand-dollar check hand-carried by Jack to