Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [135]
O’Donnell said that he, along with the rest of the staff, now feared that the “silent bigot” would emerge as the decider, the voter who’d never voice his anti-Catholicism but would cast his or her ballot accordingly.
New York on the final weekend proved disastrous. Kennedy was increasingly convinced that he had blown his chance at the presidency by not going back to California. His time would be split between pleasing the city’s powerful bosses and its equally important liberal groups. To get where he was, he’d needed both. Now, facing Election Day, he especially needed the bosses. It was like a comedy in which the hero’s on a date with two different people, simultaneously zipping back and forth to keep both appeased. Jack was forced to move from one hotel, the Carlyle, to another, the Biltmore, for breakfast, then back to the Carlyle for still another breakfast.
The exhausted candidate’s simmering frustration finally rose to a dangerous boil when he was expected to ride in a New York City parade organized by the local Democratic strongman Carmine DeSapio. It was pouring rain, and as he was driven back to Manhattan from an appearance on Long Island, Jack finally had had enough. His breaking point reached, he kicked everyone out of the car, insisting that his driver abandon the motorcade and return to his Upper East Side hotel. En route, however, the driver took some wrong turns. “I was beginning to panic now,” O’Donnell recalled. “I was soaking wet, angry. Our motorcade had also gotten lost—and I’d lost the senator.”
When he reached the Carlyle, the drenched Kennedy was forced to wait for his suitcase, which had been mistakenly taken to the Biltmore. Disgusted, he commandeered O’Donnell’s bedroom and once again threw everyone out. Lyndon Johnson, unaware of the meltdown, wanted to greet his running mate. Said O’Donnell, “Well, the next thing I see is Lyndon being literally thrown out of the room by a rather irate young Irishman from Massachusetts.” The shock was enough to make Johnson worry about the political bed he’d made.
Next, Kennedy demanded that O’Donnell set about canceling the parade DeSapio had planned. “I don’t give a shit if they have five million people out there. Cancel it. Either you tell them, or I will. If you don’t have the balls to tell them, I’ll tell them. Send them in,” he instructed O’Donnell.
“Look, Senator, this is my fault. I’ll tell them. But you’re not going to lose.” O’Donnell couldn’t change his boss’s mood. Jack’s reply: “Just cancel the fucking thing.”
On November 8, as Americans went to the polls to vote for their thirty-fourth president, early returns showed a big Kennedy victory. Connecticut’s results came in quickly and strongly. Philadelphia gave Jack a plurality of 330,000 votes. Then, the news began to shift. “It started out like gangbusters,” Pierre Salinger recalled. “It started out like we were going to win by a landslide. In fact, the computer said we were. Then, everything started to go bad all over the place. By midnight it was a real dog race.” The religious issue was doing its damage.
The news from Ohio was devastating. Kennedy, watching TV at Bobby’s Hyannis Port house with the others, rolled up his sleeve to show how much his hand had swollen. “Ohio did that to me. They did it there.” But as upsetting as it was, it was also unexpected. “All those people now say they knew we would lose Ohio,” said O’Donnell. “Well, if they did, they kept it to themselves until election night, when returns showed we lost it. Ohio was one that came as a shock to all of us.”
Nixon was picking up Midwestern states in landslide fashion: Iowa, Indiana, even Wisconsin, where Kennedy had campaigned so hard that recent winter. As election night turned to morning, Jack saw the heartland turning against his candidacy. They were rejecting him. “I’m angry,” the author Teddy White heard him say.
Though Kennedy would later insist the words he’d spoken were “I’m hungry,” the situation suggests that the word White recorded might be taken