The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [230]
When Stan Karson, a Stevenson campaign executive, talked to Jack soon after William Burke Jr. had been deposed, Karson left feeling “that for the first time since I have known him over the past few years, he appears to be in control of a political situation, knows it, and likes it.” Karson presumably believed that Jack’s interest was in masterminding the Stevenson campaign in Massachusetts, not positioning himself for the vice presidency by ingratiating himself with the former Illinois governor.
Jack’s daunting problem was his Catholicism. Ever since Al Smith’s disastrous run for the presidency in 1928, it had become part of political catechism that a Catholic could not be elected to national office. Jack was not about to confront this issue directly. The shrewdest partisanship masks itself in a bland cloak of neutrality. Sorensen prepared a seemingly impartial report on voting records suggesting that a Catholic on the ticket would bring votes to Stevenson, not lose them, and then leaked it to the media. The Kennedy people also did another pseudo-neutral report winnowing down the possible vice presidential choices by criteria that included marital status (“Should be married, and with no previous divorces”). Jack’s picture-book marriage stood in stark conquest to the domestic lives of five other divorced candidates. When the sorting out was finished, Jack turned out to be the perfect candidate.
Jack wanted Bobby beside him at the Chicago convention in July. With Sorensen and the others there was always the niggling doubt that they would put their own interests ahead of his, that they might prefer flattery to truth. With Bobby there was none of that. Bobby saw no greater honor, no higher goal, than to advance Jack. The younger Kennedy cut through all the cant and self-promotion and grasped the nubs of truth, no matter how unpleasant they might be.
Jack called Congressman Tip O’Neill who had taken his old congressional seat, to try to get a delegate seat for Bobby. “Tip,” he said, “I’d like to have you name my brother Bob as a delegate to the convention. My brother Bob is the smartest politician I have ever met in my life. Tip, he is absolutely brilliant. You know you never can tell, lightning may strike at this convention out there, I could wind up as vice president. And I’d like my brother with credentials so he could be on the floor to really work for me.”
O’Neill was a politician with a consummate understanding of politics as a game of endless exchanges. “As long as you feel that way about it, Senator, okay,” O’Neill said, taking his own name off as a delegate and letting Bobby go in his stead.
Delegate credentials were not like ducats to a prizefight that could be sold, exchanged, or traded. One citizen, Robert P. Donovan of East Boston, was outraged that Bobby gave his home address as 122 Bowdoin Street, where he supposedly resided with his pregnant wife and four children along with Jack and his wife in a two-room apartment. Donovan protested to the state ballot law commission, whose commissioners were hardly going to cast out the favorite brother of their favorite son.
At the convention, Jack had Bobby on the floor and Jackie in her seat, but he had one irreconcilable problem—his relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. The late president’s widow was the moral center of American liberalism. Mrs. Roosevelt found Jack’s silence on McCarthy a coward’s lament.
“She had seen me on a program a week or so before, and had not felt that I had been vigorous enough on McCarthy,” Jack recalled three years later. “So I went up [to see her], and my explanation was under the most adverse conditions, because she was in her room, she was hurrying to go downstairs…. It was like eighteen people in a telephone booth, and she was giving it just half attention—not listening really.”
One of the reasons Jack did not like liberals was that many of them had an