Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [120]
Beating Vice President Nixon was not going to be easy. Jack was going to need support in the once-reliable Democratic South. His decision to offer the job of running mate to Lyndon Johnson was a model of cold-blooded politics. The fact was, no one else brought to the table what LBJ did, which was Texas and much of the South. The big surprise was that he might accept the prize if offered. But such was the case. And one person who found himself a go-between, helping to seal the deal, was Tip O’Neill.
Johnson’s mentor was Sam Rayburn—a fellow Texan and the powerful Speaker of the House—who made it his business to contact Tip, saying, “If Kennedy wants Johnson for vice president, then he has nothing else he can do but to be on the ticket.” Instructing O’Neill to find Kennedy and tell him what he’d just said, he even passed on the phone number for Jack to call.
Tip located Jack that night at a legendary Hollywood hangout, Chasen’s. When the two met on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, O’Neill gave Jack the phone number and told him what Rayburn had said: Lyndon would accept if offered. “Of course I want Lyndon,” Kennedy replied. He said to tell Rayburn he’d be making the call that night.
The full story of what lay behind John F. Kennedy’s selection of Lyndon Baines Johnson remains murky to this day. When Salinger asked his boss for “some background” on the making of the decision, Jack was unforthcoming. “He said, ‘Well, I’d just as soon not tell you. I don’t think anybody will ever really know how this all really came about.’ “ Bobby, opposing the choice, had urged him to withdraw Johnson’s name. Jack himself appears to have wavered.
What remains impressive is his ability to absorb the attack he took from Johnson and his people and keep his political bearings. “It was a case of grasping the nettle,” Schlesinger wrote in his journal for July 15, 1960, “and it was another evidence of the impressively cold and tough way Jack is going about his affairs.” Indeed, in putting the Johnson assault in its place, Jack was simply sorting matters into compartments, as he often did. Fending off a last-ditch challenge to his nomination was one matter. Finding someone to help him in November was totally another. Whether Johnson had played tough to try to secure the presidential nomination for himself was no deterrent to his running as Jack’s vice president. Not in Jack’s eyes. Not now. Rather, it was an indicator of how tough Johnson was prepared to fight by his side.
Charlie Bartlett could sense Jack was brooding about the necessity of picking Johnson, just as he’d brooded four years earlier over the need to back the less than fresh Pat Lynch as his Massachusetts party chief in 1956. But he also remembers Joe Kennedy standing there in his smoking jacket and slippers saying, “Don’t worry, Jack, in two weeks, they’ll be saying it’s the smartest thing you ever did.” For once, the father’s political judgment was on the money.
With the issue of his vice-presidential choice resolved, and the waves of history lapping at his feet, now came Kennedy’s speech accepting the nomination.
What most people recall is the debut of his presidential signature. “Today some would say that those struggles are all over—that all the horizons have been explored—that all the battles have been won—that there is no longer an American frontier . . . But I tell you the New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.
“For the harsh facts of the matter are that we stand on this frontier at a turning point in history. We must prove all over again whether this nation—or any nation so conceived—can long endure; whether our society—with its freedom of choice, its breadth of opportunity, its range of alternatives—can compete with the single-minded advance of the