Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [85]
Kennedy gave the job of proving the case for putting him on the ticket to Ted Sorensen. It was the same sort of tricky assignment he’d handed his legislative assistant two years earlier when he’d sent him up to Boston to work on the sly for Saltonstall against Furcolo. Again, Sorensen proved equal to the task, knocking out a seventeen-page memo showing the power of the Catholic vote in fourteen key states. It demonstrated how Catholics’ defection in ’52 had cost the Democrats the election. It showed, too, that they had split their tickets in the election, voting for Democrats for the House and Senate, but Ike for president.
However, Kennedy also understood that such a sales pitch coming from him would be seen exactly for what it was. It might even trigger a backlash. To camouflage the effort, he had the Sorensen memo distributed by Connecticut’s John Bailey, the state Democratic Party chairman, a close Kennedy ally. In any case, the “Bailey Memorandum,” as it was marketed, went out to fifty top Democrats thought to have Stevenson’s ear. A few days later, it showed its power. Stevenson’s campaign manager, Jim Finnegan, asked for a dozen copies of “that survey” that was going around. “You know, about the Catholic vote, “ the Philadelphian said.
Jack went to Chicago prepared for lightning to strike. He phoned Tip O’Neill and asked him to let Bobby take his place as a Massachusetts delegate. He said his brother was the smartest politician he knew and he wanted him there on the convention floor in case the odds broke in his favor.
He, nonetheless, remained cool about his prospects. On the way home from the Hill with Ted Reardon that summer, he sounded easygoing about the whole thing. “After all this, I may actually be disappointed if I don’t get the nomination. Yes, and that disappointment will be deep enough to last from the day they ballot on the vice presidency until I leave for Europe two days later.” He was thinking about his coming end-of-summer cruise along the south coast of France with Torby Macdonald, George Smathers, and his youngest brother, Ted.
It was at this moment that Jack Kennedy got one of those big breaks that made so many other ones possible. After Governor Edmund Muskie of Maine, another rising young Democratic figure, turned down the opportunity, Kennedy won a big role on the first night of the national convention in Chicago. He, a freshman senator, was asked to narrate a documentary film on the Democratic Party.
It would turn out to be the highlight of the convention’s opening. Hearing his distinctive New England accent echoing across the floor of Chicago’s International Amphitheatre and broadcast over the country’s television and radio stations, Americans discovered a new voice. The Pursuit of Happiness, created by Dore Schary, a Hollywood producer who’d made his name at RKO and MGM, was projected onto huge screens in the convention hall. It made Jack Kennedy the Democrats’ star of the night.
The applause in the hall, swelled by his friends, was prolonged when Jack was introduced from the floor. Edmund Reggie, a Catholic delegate from Louisiana, was astonished by this young promising Democrat. “I didn’t even know Senator Kennedy existed. The Louisiana delegates sat across the aisle from the Massachusetts delegation. And the first time I ever remember seeing him is in a film that he narrated.”
Nothing that Jack Kennedy had done before, not the offices he’d won, the books he’d written, even the heroics in WWII, would propel him so mightily as what had just happened. Everything before was now prelude.
The sensation created by Jack’s role in the convention film had an immediate effect. Stevenson picked him to be his chief nominator, Kennedy having gotten the word from Adlai himself