Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [95]
As a candidate, Kennedy quickly had begun to give off the glow of celebrity. No politician had ever gotten the kind of star treatment he was accorded. It had begun at the Democratic Convention in Chicago: his debut in the public eye there threw the spotlight on him and his wife as well. In April 1957, he’d been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Profiles in Courage, the book he’d dedicated to Jackie. Their first child, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, was born in November 1957.
Whenever Senator Kennedy showed up at a local Democratic dinner in some small city where there were more hands to shake, it was if a Hollywood star had come to town. It was still the age of the glossy magazines, many of them pictorials. Look, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, all weeklies back then, did spreads on Jack and Jackie, as did McCall’s and Redbook.
“Senator Kennedy, do you have an in with Life?” a high school newspaper writer once asked the roving candidate. “No,” he shot back, “I just have a beautiful wife.” There was a professional’s assessment if ever there was one. But the fuss didn’t stop with the romantic-couple angle. The TV series Navy Log did an episode on PT 109. The Knights of Columbus magazine Columbia offered a salute to a brother knight. And at the end of 1957, in the issue of December 2, he was Time magazine’s cover boy, painted looking thoughtful by Henry Koerner, whose unmistakable celebrity portraits were often featured there.
This ongoing stream of media attention continued into the 1960 primaries. “You could go to the A&P store,” his rival Hubert Humphrey would later say, revealing his exasperation, “you could go to any grocery store. You’d pick up a women’s magazine—there would be a wonderful article. He had the publicity. He had the attraction. He had the it.”
The Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy Show had a powerful effect even on people who normally paid little attention to politics but now could not take their eyes away. Eventually, the “it” to which Humphrey referred would achieve a name: charisma, not a word much in popular use until the Kennedys made it so.
While the stillbirth in 1956 and Jack’s absence from the country at the time caused Jackie much pain, she and her husband had made their peace with it. Celebrating their new small family, they moved into a town house in Georgetown. Again, all the public saw were the pictures. Photos of infant Caroline with her splendid-looking parents captivated the American public.
Nonetheless, the audience with which Jack most needed to make inroads wasn’t falling for it. Not yet, anyway. The liberals, given life by Franklin Roosevelt and still in love with Adlai Stevenson, were looking for gravitas. Here, again, Jack Kennedy went to work, with the help of his most trusted and productive lieutenant. For several years now, Ted Sorensen had been turning out all kinds of articles under Kennedy’s name. They appeared in such journals as the General Electric Defense Quarterly, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the National Parent-Teacher. Their purpose, Sorensen conceded, was “to promote Senator John F. Kennedy as a man of intensive progressive thought, balancing the flood of superficial articles about his looks and his romance with Jackie.”
There remained the challenge of winning over the Stevenson people. “I’m not a liberal at all,” the Saturday Evening Post had quoted him just after his election to the senate. “I never joined Americans for Democratic Action or the American Veterans Committee. I’m not comfortable with those people.”
Still, his pursuit of the intellectuals who persisted in carrying a torch for Adlai was soon to begin in full earnest. The winning of the Pulitzer for Profiles, in fact, had been no happy accident. Rather, it was the result of energetic lobbying by Jack’s dad. Through the good offices of Arthur Krock, a New York Times columnist and Kennedy friend, Joe was able to approach the members of the Pulitzer screening