The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [229]
When Clement ended his lengthy speech, demonstrators rushed forward carrying the banners boldly emblazoned “Kennedy for President.” In politics there is nothing more calculated than the illusion of spontaneity, and these Massachusetts delegates had been primed for their moment in the television spotlight. Jack was a candidate for the vice presidency, not the presidency, but in this one evening he had become a major presence in national politics. The star of the evening was the man whose cool voice exemplified the future of politics as much as the florid Clement represented the past. “Kennedy came before the convention tonight as a movie star,” wrote the New York Times.
Jack’s fascination with Hollywood was not a dilettantish indulgence, but a formidable weapon in his rise to national power. The millions of Americans watching their television screens bestowed celebrity on those they chose to anoint. Celebrity was becoming the most desired new currency, readily cashed in for money or power, and by the time the convention was over no one in the vast hall had received more freshly minted celebrity than John F. Kennedy.
Jack had another unique element in his panoply of power, and that was his beautiful wife. Seven months pregnant, Jackie was suffering in all the heat and turmoil of the convention. Only once, however, did she confess her discomfort. As she looked out the window of their tenth-floor suite, a reporter asked how she liked the convention. “Not much,” she sighed. But for the most part, she sat dutifully in a box, and during the week the television audience saw a tableau of marital happiness, a star married to a star.
In his three and a half years in the Senate, Jack had been sick and absent so much that he had had no major impact. By all appearances, he had neither the record, the energy, nor the ambition to attempt to win such a prize as the vice presidential nomination. The reality was that the calendar of Jack’s life might have only a few pages that had not yet been turned over. If he aspired to national political office, he could not wait to be noticed. For the first months of 1956, he had coyly refused to proclaim his interest in the nomination while allowing Sorensen and others to work on his behalf.
Jack spent his time promoting Adlai Stevenson, the putative Democratic presidential nominee. Stevenson’s strongest advocate within Jack’s family was his own wife, who for the first time took a strong interest in politics. Jackie was one of a myriad of educated women devoted to the former Illinois governor, applauding what she considered “his intelligence, farsightedness, and reasonableness.” She did not limit her words to whispered asides to her husband but used them in drafting in her own hand the very words spoken by the senator from Massachusetts in announcing his support for Stevenson’s candidacy.
Ambition is often a wondrous tonic, and in advancing his candidacy Jack showed an energy and sheer pleasure in the high deviousness of politics that he had rarely shown before. For instance, in seeking to remove an anti-Stevenson man, William H. Burke Jr., from the chairmanship of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, Jack spread gossip accusing Burke of “spend[ing] the whole day with Carmine DeSapio,” the New York boss and Stevenson foe.
Most politicians would have sought to replace Burke with a new chairman who would do his bidding. Jack realized that doing that would exchange new enemies for the old one. In a letter marked “Personal and Confidential,” Jack told one supporter, attorney Walter T. Burke (no relationship to William H. Burke Jr.) that “if someone who is as close to me as you is named, the feeling will generally be that this whole fight has been one for personal gain rather than a clear-cut attempt to establish an entirely new, impartial, and clean organization.” Instead, Jack proposed former Mayor Pat