Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [93]
They also operated with a low enough profile to avoid any backlash. Many of their stops were in remote corners of the west and Midwest where, as Sorensen put it, his man’s “candidacy could make solid gains without alerting the national party and press barons to mount a ‘Stop Kennedy’ movement.” By late in 1959, Kennedy had personally contacted half the delegates who would be headed to the 1960 Democratic Convention.
Larry O’Brien was separately traveling the country for Kennedy. His accounts of that period show what a pioneer effort the mere idea of such canvassing was at the time. “My main job, in those early months, was to go on the road, to travel around America to build a campaign organization, as seven years earlier I’d traveled through Massachusetts in search of Kennedy secretaries. I would pay special attention to the potential primary states, since we knew that Kennedy would have to score well in the Democratic primaries to have any chance for the nomination.”
Indiana was a typical destination, a central state where O’Brien spent days chatting up mayors, sheriffs, state legislators, and union officials. “I introduced myself as a representative of Senator Kennedy, a potential candidate for President in 1960. I soon realized I was a long way from Massachusetts, that most often Jack Kennedy was just a name, an image on a television screen. People were polite, sometimes interested, but there was no great groundswell for him. I found some support, a sheriff here, a mayor there, but more important, I found concern about Kennedy’s religion.”
O’Brien’s account of a trip through California revealed the problem Kennedy would have with fellow Catholics. “I paid a courtesy call on Governor Pat Brown in Sacramento, who was himself considered a dark-horse possibility for the presidential nomination or, more likely, the vice-presidential nomination. He was in a difficult position. Stevenson had a great deal of support in California, and I assumed the Stevenson people were hinting that Brown might be Stevenson’s running mate if he could deliver his state to their man. Brown certainly knew that, as a Catholic, he wasn’t going to be on the ticket with Kennedy. We had a pleasant talk, but we both were playing our own little games.”
After this, he met with Jesse Unruh, the astute Democratic leader of the California State Assembly. Unruh announced his support for Kennedy right away and stuck with him even when it got tough. “Jesse,” O’Brien would tell him, “Senator Kennedy has every politician’s name written in one of three books, and yours is written in Book One, in gold letters.”
In this way, O’Brien worked his way across the country, finding both resistance and acceptance, but also people who were waiting to commit. What he didn’t come across was the enemy doing the same thing that he and his candidate were doing: getting out there and meeting people one on one. “As I moved from state to state making friends, nailing down support, I kept waiting for the opposition to show up, but it never did. . . . It always amazed me how other politicians underestimated Kennedy. Johnson and Symington weren’t taking him any more seriously in 1959 than Henry Cabot Lodge had in 1952. His opponents never discovered how tough, gutty, and ring-wise he was—until it was too late.
“We were lucky in 1959, because if his opponents for the nomination had started earlier and worked harder, they could well have blocked Kennedy’s nomination,” O’Brien recalled. “Instead, they sat