Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [62]
O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Bobby remained optimistic. Based on their calculations, the Kennedy vote was doing what it had to even as the candidate kept calling the headquarters and arguing.
“Finally, he got so frustrated he came down around midnight or so,” O’Donnell said, “and began to run the slide rule himself. He went town by town, and we walked him through it. But it became confusing to him, and he just kept telling us that the reports we were getting on the television and those we gave to him simply did not square at all.”
Governor Dever then telephoned and told Kennedy that, on the basis of the returns, they were both defeated and should concede together. O’Donnell recalled the dramatic response. “The congressman, who by now had learned our system—in fact, had made some improvements to it, typically, and knew it better than we did—said to the governor . . . that on the basis of our computations we were not defeated—and that, in fact, on the basis of our figures he was about to win by a narrow margin.”
At this point, there remained a general sense Kennedy had lost. Looking beyond their headquarters, they could see what appeared to be the electoral reality. Outside there were rowdies—“Irish bums,” O’Donnell called them, local fellows with various bones to pick—shouting drunkenly, “Jack Kennedy, you’re a loser and a faker! You’re in the shithouse with your old man!” Mainly, they were giving it to Bobby, who’d been the tough guy in the campaign.
By then, according to O’Donnell, “it was just us sitting around drinking coffee. Even most of the girls had left. It was a very disheartening moment.
“At about three or probably closer to four in the morning, only the major cities were still out . . . Worcester . . . Springfield . . . and I remember Bobby and the congressman began to give me some grief, because I’d dismissed the hand-picked Kennedy secretary the congressman had selected in Worcester—he was a faker and I’d replaced him with someone I knew and trusted. Now Bobby was saying to me, ‘Everything rides on Worcester and your judgment. If we lose, it’s your fault.’
“Well, it was beautiful: he hadn’t completed the sentence, literally not gotten the words out of his mouth, when I got a call from our man in Worcester saying we’d carried it by five thousand votes. And that, we all knew, was the final clincher. The congressman and Bobby looked at me in astonishment. Then the congressman said to me, ‘You’re either the brightest or the luckiest SOB on the planet!’ “
After the votes were tallied in the big cities, with Worcester and Springfield now in the Kennedy column, the candidate continued strongly, surpassing other Democrats. “Even in these little towns, we were running four, five, or six percentage points ahead of any Democrat and ahead of Dever. The margin of victory can really be found in all those small communities where he’d spent all that time and done all that work in for the past six, seven years. It was now paying off. Every weekend he could, he’d been out there meeting people, having coffee with them, handshaking—and it was now paying off as it was intended to.” The Kennedy Party strategy had worked.
The proud incumbent, there in his headquarters across the street, refused to accept defeat. “We could see him sitting there in his suit coat, looking very calm, watching the returns. What’s he waiting for? Why won’t he concede? What does he know that we don’t? The senator-elect kept asking me, ‘Are you sure?’ Yes, we were sure, but we were worried. At one point, he even joked, ‘Is this what victory looks like?’ We were sitting at the card table—the congressman, Dave, Bobby, Larry, myself, and just a few of the girls. The fair-weather types had all gone home.
“Finally, about six or six thirty, Lodge conceded. He walked across, looking dapper, and the congressman, now the senator-elect, said what a bunch of bums we all looked like.