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A Jack campaigned on those endless cold days, there was an increasingly liberal glaze to his words. His primary speechwriters, Sorensen and Feldman, were far more to the left than the candidate they served, but it was hardly a matter of their promoting ideas that Jack would not have chosen on his own. Jack knew that to win he had to appear liberal, so as to gather in a reluctant labor movement, urban intellectuals, and social activists, despite his disdain for the priests of that particular faith. “He had real contempt … for the members of that group in the Senate,” reflected Joe Alsop, the conservative columnist. “What he disliked … was the sort of posturing, attitude-striking, never-getting-anything-done liberalism.”

Jack did not like being around liberals such as Adlai Stevenson, whose very manhood he doubted. As for professional diplomats, they were little more than eunuchs. “I know how they are at the State Department,” he said. “They’re not queer, but, well, they’re sort of like Adlai.” Jack hated being grouped with liberals like Adlai. “I’d be very happy to tell them I’m not a liberal,” he had declared in the Saturday Evening Post several years earlier in an unfortunate lapse into candor. “I never joined the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) or the American Veterans Committee (AVC). I’m not comfortable with those people.”

Jack felt that there was a high prissiness to the Stevensonian liberalism of his day. As he saw it, these men preferred to profess pure virtue among their peers than to have their ideas sullied in the grimy arena of political life. Jack truly liked the sweaty, profane, cynical, street-savvy politicians whom men like Stevenson would walk across the street to avoid. When they had to, these ADA liberals would put out their right hands to shake hands with such politicians while keeping their left hands clamped over their noses. Among those progressives who accepted at face value Jack’s conversion to their political faith, there was the hope that he was more principled than he appeared but as tough as his legend, and that he might make the term “practical liberal” no longer seem an oxymoron.

Jack made a brilliant move in the way he cultivated the academic community in the Harvard-MIT nexus. The engine of contemporary American liberalism was housed in the elite universities; the candidate thought of their professors not only as a source of ideas but also as a powerful group to be co-opted. Among these intellectuals were many men so outsized in their professorial vanity that they could be had for the cheapest of coinages—a request for their advice. He used their ideas much less than they imagined.

The first time Jack met his Academic Advisory Group at the Harvard Club in January, he told them: “I don’t want any of you to worry about the politics of the situation. You don’t have that skill. Forget it. I’ll do that. You just worry about the substance.” The nineteen academicians left the meeting that afternoon largely converted to Jack’s candidacy. They took his stipulation as a compliment. It could be seen equally as a mark of Jack’s belief that “ideas” were only another category that had to be processed through political realities that he felt the academicians did not truly understand.

Back in Wisconsin, Jack thrust his hand out to factory workers in Milwaukee and stood at the bar in American Legion halls in innumerable towns and cities, and he discussed the farm problem and Social Security. The journalist Stewart Alsop, often a far more perceptive observer than his more celebrated brother Joe, found that in Wisconsin, Jack was “an unexpectedly self-conscious and diffident man.” On one occasion, the journalist watched as a group of bubbly cheerleaders surrounded the candidate to give a cheer that they had spent much time preparing. “Right sock, left sock, rubber-soled shoes; we’ve got the candidate who can’t lose,” they chanted while Jack “wore a rather bemused air, as though he had unexpectedly found himself knee-deep in midgets.” Alsop found Jack at his best as a political pedagogue speaking