The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [270]
The first great contest of 1960 was the Wisconsin primary. This was a special challenge to Jack since it was adjacent to Humphrey’s home state of Minnesota. Jack’s opponent may have been the kind of overwrought, weepy liberal whom Jack usually privately despised, but there was nary a mean bone in Humphrey’s ample frame, and Jack bore the man no personal animus.
A presidential campaign usually begins with as much indifference as enthusiasm. Each moment of elation is paid for in the hard cash of tedium, exhaustion, bad meals, cold coffee, predawn alarms, and late-night flights. A man of Jack’s sensitivity, as much aesthetic as political, was especially vulnerable psychologically to the phlegmatic unconcern that he often encountered.
The coldness of the Wisconsin winter was at times matched by the icy reserve of the Midwestern farmers and townspeople. In one of the nameless small towns Jack had given his speech to yet another undemonstrative crowd and tried afterward to grasp a few hands in the local restaurant. He strode to the back where a group of men sat around a table playing dominoes. No one stood or greeted the senator from Massachusetts, even as Jack paraded around the table shaking hands. “We planned to come to hear you speak,” one of the men said, looking up from the dominoes, “but we didn’t finish our game.” Jack smiled, shook hands, and left the room as if nothing gave him more pleasure than soliciting such taciturn men.
If Jack had sat down with those farmers, losing a quick game of dominoes while talking about next year’s crop, he would probably have walked away with three or four certain votes. But that wasn’t Jack. He wasn’t a politician like Humphrey or Johnson, a toucher who thought that in the physical act of grasping a shoulder or pumping a hand he was making an indelible impression. He was as uncomfortable being touched emotionally as physically, and he still barely tolerated the gaudy sideshows of politics. If he had had his choice, he would have campaigned standing before audiences of intelligent citizens discussing with subtlety and nuance the issues of the day.
On the worst of these days Jack enjoyed no stronger tonic than a call to his father. Joe had endowed his sons with a restless, unquenchable optimism. It was a spirit that they imbibed from their father whenever they talked to him. The more down they felt, the more they faced defeat, the more Joe bolstered them as if he could lift them up with his very hands.
In the winter of the primaries, Joe spent much time in Florida going to the races at Hialeah and talking to influential people and reporters. Again and again he heard worrisome negative stories about Jack’s dubious prospects, and when he talked to Jack, as Rose recalled, he bolstered him with “something positive and enthusiastic, but not necessarily in line with his own experience.”
Jack shared much of his father’s coldhearted political realism. He might stand on a platform mouthing idealistic paeans written by Sorensen, but he knew that the real business of power and politics often took place in private antechambers where no echo of the campaign rhetoric could be heard. On one of his early campaign jaunts, he chatted with an old-time political hand who told him of his father’s role in Roosevelt’s 1932 nomination. Despite Joe’s “very low estimate of Roosevelt’s ability,” he had backed FDR, trying to manipulate him into taking less liberal positions. In a crucial moment, Joe had helped to talk William Randolph Hearst into backing Roosevelt simply because the press magnate hated another contender. Joe’s conduct had been the most cynical of ripostes, and another son might have flared out at a man who would dare slander his father with such a tale. Jack was impressed enough by the story that he sent a copy of the letter to his father with a note stating, “It definitely shows the success you had in securing Hearst for Roosevelt.