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By Root 1216 0

overweening sense of moral superiority and were under the misapprehension that a lecture was the same thing as a dialogue. By the summer of 1956, attacking McCarthy was no longer mortally dangerous to a political career. That Jack did not get in a few blows at the fallen McCarthy was one of the more inexplicable moves in his career. Instead of agreeing with Mrs. Roosevelt, Jack reached into his little bag of legalisms and spoke as if McCarthy had already died. “My point was that … because I had never really been particularly vigorous about McCarthy during his life, that it would really make me out to be a complete political whore, for me to be really chomping and jumping … vigorous[ly] in my denunciation of McCarthy when he was gone.”

Mrs. Roosevelt could not understand why the junior senator from Massachusetts would not denounce the evils that even he could now see. Jack did nothing, and this moral albatross remained tightly wrapped around his neck. McCarthy’s status as a family friend may have had something to do with his reticence. Beyond that, what Jack’s detractors never considered was the possibility that this man, so obsessed with courage, may have realized that he had hidden when he should have stood up, and that he said nothing now was a mark not of dishonor but of its opposite.

Instead of choosing his own running mate, Stevenson took the dramatic step of throwing the choice open to the Democratic delegates. The Kennedy people had been prepared for all eventualities but this one, and they hustled the great floor seeking votes from delegates wavering primarily between Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Jack.

Neither Joe nor Teddy was among the Kennedy people frantically working undecided delegates. Joe was on the Riviera, an ocean away from what he considered a futile effort destructive to Jack’s presidential chances four years later. Teddy was on a trip to Africa, preferring adventure to politics. To give his journey the veneer of seriousness, he had set himself up with press credentials as a stringer covering the French forces in Algeria, but unlike his big brothers, he never managed to file a series of published stories. His father had warned him about spending “too much time” among the more pleasurable fleshpots. It was an admonition that had some muscle; true to the family pattern, Teddy was not traveling alone but had Fred Holborn, a Harvard instructor, for a companion.

Jack had proved to be prescient in wanting Bobby to have delegate credentials so that he could be on the floor. Bobby employed the whole anthology of emotions in promoting Jack. He pled, argued, threatened, and cajoled as he moved from one delegation to the next. He saw that among some of these people even his most salient political arguments did no good. “So many people had come up to me and said they would like to vote for Jack but they were going to vote for Estes Kefauver because he had sent them a card or visited in their home,” he reflected afterward. “I said right there that as well as paying attention to the issues we should send Christmas cards next time.”

Jack came a tantalizing thirty-eight votes short of winning on the second ballot before Kefauver surged ahead. During the voting, Jackie had been surrounded by well-wishers, but as the voting began to go against her husband, the adoring sycophants began sidling away until she was left alone, looking to one observer “a forlorn figure.”

Jack may have lost that evening, but he was the largest victor of the week. He left the 1956 convention brilliantly positioned for a run at the presidential nomination in four years. The Boston papers celebrated their native son’s near-win, but Jack’s name was heard now in areas far distant from Massachusetts. The Clearwater Sun in Florida called him “one of the ablest and most promising young men on the American political scene today … substantial feeling exists among Democrats and other observers that he may have advanced himself a very long stride toward a presidential nomination in the years ahead.”

Jack flew out of Chicago exhausted