Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [86]
Kennedy and Sorensen then went to work, laboring together on the speech until six o’clock in the morning. Criticized by the New York Times for relying too heavily on a “cliché dictionary,” the speech, nonetheless, was a genuine rouser. In it Kennedy warned that the Democratic ticket would be facing fierce opposition in the fall from “two tough candidates, one who takes the high road and one who takes the low road.”
The knock on Vice President Richard Nixon thrilled its intended audience. The liberals loved it, and continued throughout the campaign to repeat the line. In fact, it became a refrain, resonating throughout the months of the contest. Kennedy had understood exactly what he was saying and precisely whom he wanted to hear him. He was playing to the Nixon haters. It was a theme to which Stevenson, once nominated, would return. He wanted his fellow Democrats to keep in mind that Ike had been the first sitting president to have a heart attack. What would happen, he implied, if he died and Dick Nixon became president?
At eleven o’clock on Thursday, the convention’s fourth night, Adlai Stevenson made a surprise announcement: instead of picking his running mate himself, he would let the delegates do it. Seven of the country’s thirty-four presidents, he reminded them, had risen to office because of an incumbent’s death. Bluntly implying it could happen again—“The nation’s attention has become focused as never before on the . . . vice presidency”—Stevenson told the hundreds of assembled Democrats he wanted the decision made by the party rather than by a single man.
When the convention opened, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had been the front-runner. The field now included Senators Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee, Mayor Robert Wagner of New York, and John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.
Fourteen years older than Jack Kennedy, Kefauver had gained national attention for chairing a 1950 Senate committee investigating organized crime; in the ’52 election he’d sought the Democrats’ nomination for president but lost, in the end, to Stevenson. Trying again, this time he’d won a number of early primaries before falling to Stevenson in later big-state contests. He and the other contenders for vice president, including Kennedy, now entered upon what would be a twenty-four-hour effort to secure the honor of being Adlai’s running mate.
“Call Dad and tell him I’m going for it,” Jack instructed Bobby.
Reached in the South of France with the news, Joseph P. Kennedy was livid. Bellowing what an “idiot” his son was, he could be heard all the way across the room. Jack was ruining his career with this move. “Whew!” Bobby said, after the connection was broken. “Is he mad!”
To place his name in nomination, Jack picked Governor Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut. This choice of a Jewish politician, the son of immigrants who’d begun his political career in the Connecticut state legislature back in the late ’30s, was a shrewd one. Equally savvy was the next phone call he made. At one in the morning, he reached George Smathers, asking him to give the seconding speech. When the Floridian asked what a Southern conservative might say that could help, Kennedy assured him it was a no-sweat assignment. “Just talk about the war stuff,” he said.
Kennedy now had to figure out how to beat the seasoned pros lined up against him. He already had a base of support in the Massachusetts delegation, and in the early days of the convention, he’d realized, during various sessions, that he’d emerged as leader of the New England region. He now had just hours to extend his support beyond it.
As his taxi headed toward the convention hall that Friday dawn, a sleepless Kennedy was clenching his fist, whispering again and again to himself: “Go! Go! Go!” Charlie Bartlett attributed it to his friend’s innate love of competition. “The way Stevenson laid that challenge on the floor was what really challenged