Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [87]
For the rest of the morning, Kennedy would personally do much of the hour-to-hour campaigning. He discovered he had surprising strength in the South. Part of this was the result of antipathy toward Kefauver due to his record of civil rights support. But there was also clearly goodwill toward Kennedy himself, as a result of his war heroism and his reputation as a moderate. Many Southern delegates saw him as standing apart from the liberal pack.
Of course, he also had to face prejudice. “If we have to have a Catholic,” Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn told Stevenson, “I hope we don’t have to take that little pissant Kennedy.” But some Catholics were themselves a problem. James Farley, the old New Deal warhorse who’d helped make FDR and then broken with him when he ran for his unprecedented third term in 1940, gave Stevenson his opinion: “America is not ready for a Catholic yet.”
Kennedy also took a hit from the party’s liberal wing, who knew he wasn’t really one of them, who’d never forgotten, let alone forgiven, his failure to cast a censure vote against Joe McCarthy. To woo the keepers of the New Deal flame whom he’d spent his early congressional years bashing over Yalta and the loss of China—those same liberals with whom he said he did “not feel comfortable”—he now needed to do some genuflecting.
When he managed to set up a meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt in Chicago, the former first lady and Democratic grande dame didn’t make it easy. She’d let it be known how “troubled” she was by “Senator K’s evasive attitude on McCarthy.” Her opinion wasn’t changed by their get-together. Elaborately orchestrated, it turned out to be a disaster, with the rapport between them nonexistent. When Mrs. Roosevelt raised the McCarthy issue, Jack replied that it was “so long ago” it didn’t help. He also quibbled that the time to censure the Wisconsin senator had been when he returned to the Senate for his second term in 1953.
FDR’s widow was having none of it. In full dudgeon, she berated Jack in front of everyone present, including other politicians who came and went throughout the discussion. Mrs. Roosevelt correctly saw herself as not just Franklin Roosevelt’s partner within the Democratic Party but his political heir. She regarded Kennedy’s approach to her as less than sincere, which it was.
Balancing his failure to win over Mrs. Roosevelt, there now came good news. They began to get promises of support from delegates far and wide. Two or three in Nevada, one in Wyoming, one in Utah, and so forth, people who were for Jack Kennedy personally, but represented no large group of votes or delegates. They’d knock on the door of the hotel suite and say, “My name is Mary Jones. I’ve seen the senator on television and I think he is wonderful.” Or, “I’m from Oregon, and I want to vote for him.”
Winning the support of big-state delegations was a more serious challenge. Charlie Bartlett described the process of Jack going to the Democratic bosses of the country—all complete strangers to him—and asking for their backing. It was an intimidating group that included the major honchos of the New York machine. But he was breaking new ground.
“After Stevenson had thrown down the challenge, it was all beginning to accelerate, and he was obviously quite excited. I said, ‘Look, there’s Carmine DeSapio. You ought to go and see what you can do about him. He might be able to help you.’ I wish I had a movie of that scene. There he was—this rather slight figure, and DeSapio was a rather big fellow—and the reporters were all around DeSapio, completely ignoring Kennedy. But he went up and shyly said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. DeSapio, but my name is John Kennedy from Massachusetts, and I wondered if I could have a few words with you?’ That was the beginning. As I remember, he got a pretty good chunk of the New York vote.