Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [119]
The release of a complete medical workup on the candidate would have handed Kennedy’s rivals, including Richard Nixon, enough to bury him. Given the closeness of the election, his Addison’s disease would undoubtedly have proven decisive. What if the public had learned of his regular intake of steroids, the degeneration in his bones that it caused, the corset he wore for his congenital back problem, his lifetime of stomach illness? What if they knew his constant tanning was to cover up the sickness that gave his skin a yellowish tint? What if the voters knew Kennedy and his people were engaged in a massive cover-up? Would they have responded as well as they did to his great call to arms?
Lyndon Johnson now took unerring aim at another of Kennedy’s vulnerabilities, this one a matter of public record: namely, his father’s backing of appeasement. “I wasn’t any Chamberlain-umbrella policy man . . . I never thought Hitler was right,” the majority leader reminded his listeners.
Kennedy kept his cool—and his cunning. And so, when Johnson challenged him to speak with him before the combined Texas and Massachusetts delegations, he accepted. “We seized on the opportunity to push it into a debate situation,” recalled Pierre Salinger. Kenny and Bobby, however, were worried not just about what theatrics Johnson might pull, but about the possibility of an embarrassing brawl between the two delegations. “There were a few rough Irishmen in the Massachusetts delegation, as well as Kennedy men who wouldn’t mind hitting a few Texans after some of the slurs they’d made against Kennedy, Catholics, and especially the Irish,” said O’Donnell. “So our concern, Bobby’s and mine, was that here we’d be on nationwide television and the potential for the best ruckus show of the year was there. We could be guaranteed that if it were to happen the Republicans would play it over and over again.”
“I was really digging at Johnson pretty hard,” Salinger remembered. He was angry, still, at the attacks on his candidate’s health—accurate as they were. He’d chosen to fight back by accusing Johnson of lacking guts, claiming he was afraid of Kennedy, and so forth. Then he got a phone call. “I heard the voice on the other end of the line say, ‘Young man, this is Phil Graham.’ I’d never met Phil Graham before in my life.” Of course, he knew who the Washington Post publisher was.
“And he said, ‘I just want to say one thing to you. Don’t tear something apart in such a way that you can never put it back together again.’ I said, ‘Okay,’ and hung up the phone. Of course, it immediately dawned on me what he was trying to say to me. It was that there was a chance of a Kennedy-Johnson ticket.” Graham, it turns out, was pushing Johnson to accept the vice presidency if Kennedy offered it, and was pushing the idea of the ticket to LBJ as being for the good of the country.
With Lyndon Johnson’s arrows having failed to hit their mark, the next rival Jack needed to render impotent was Adlai Stevenson. He’d retained scattered loyalists, but his support since ’56 had rusted, even on his home turf, Illinois. Despite some packing of the galleries, there was no demand for Adlai on the convention floor or in the deal-making back rooms.
Still Stevenson’s supporters persisted, keeping up the drumbeat, hoping the scene they were creating on the television screen would stir the delegates. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota gave the convention perhaps its most memorable oratory. “Do not turn away from this man. Do not reject this man. . . . Do not reject this man who has made us proud to be Democrats. Do not leave this prophet without honor in his own party.”
But nothing happened. The Kennedy “operation was slick, well financed, and ruthless in its treatment of Lyndon Johnson’s Southerners and the uncredentialed mob that was trying to stampede the convention for