The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [273]
Of course, that was not true, and Teddy surely knew it, but this was another of the endless challenges of a Kennedy man. He later told his friends that he was as terrified as he had ever been, but he knew that he had to jump, watched as he was by a crowd of more than eight thousand. He pushed off and flew into the air, and crashed to the earth seventy-five feet down the runway, as the spectators scattered. Teddy got up, brushed himself off, and gave his speech for his brother.
Teddy was a rousing celebrant of a campaign worker, and as much as he appreciated the women he met along the trail, he had come to love his family life with Joan. “I have never seen Ted so excited as he was on February 27th [1960] when his daughter, Kara, was born,” Joan wrote Lord Beaver-brook. “Ted is away all week traveling around Wisconsin, and now West Virginia, making speeches for Jack. He phones home every night and asks, ‘How is my daughter?’ I love the way he enjoys using those two new words—my daughter!”
The Kennedys fanned out across the state in multitudes. Three of Jack’s sisters, Eunice, Pat, and Jean, dusted off their tea sets and arranged a series of coffee klatches in which the good ladies of Wisconsin met the handsome young candidate and other members of his glamorous family. Wherever Humphrey looked, he saw Kennedys. It was like competing against the mythological nine-headed hydra: every time he thought he had sliced off his opponent’s head, there was yet another smiling, garrulous Kennedy greeting voters.
A few days before the April primary, part of the state was inundated by ugly anti-Catholic literature. The pamphlets were sent primarily to Catholics, many of whom had seemed likely to vote for the Minnesota senator. The recipients were outraged by this slander of their faith. It did not occur to many of them to ask why Humphrey, that most genial and unprejudiced of men, would countenance such a foul assault. The pamphlets were enough to convince all but the illiterate that they had best vote for Jack rather than his bigoted opponent. Humphrey’s people cried foul, and the conservative National Review charged rightly that Bobby’s associate, Paul Corbin, had been behind the campaign. And behind Corbin stood Bobby, who, in the words of Edwin O. Guthman, his press secretary, “was willing to do anything to get Jack elected.”
Jack won the primary by a resounding 56 percent of the vote, but he had done so poorly in the heavily Protestant regions of the state that his victory was not overwhelming enough to scratch Humphrey from the race. The Minnesota senator vowed to continue on to the West Virginia primary, even though he had only a few coins in his coffers. There was no better champion of the working man and the poor than Hubert Humphrey, and the mountainous state was full of working men, unemployed, and forgotten poor, many of them tucked up in Appalachian hollows. West Virginia was 95 percent Protestant, and if the electorate voted their religion as much as they had in Wisconsin, Humphrey had a good chance of winning. For Jack, these same demographics created a very different logic. If he won, the Democratic presidential nomination most likely would be his. If he lost, he would prove what his detractors had argued all along, that a Catholic was simply unelectable.
Jack had an added disadvantage in this vital race. While Humphrey was the most voluble of politicians, Jack was losing his voice. It was so bad that as he flew across the state in the Caroline, the campaign plane that his father had contributed to the campaign at nominal cost, he communicated by writing notes on pieces of paper. “My poll … in W.V. showed me 41%[,] HH … 43–44%—rest undecided—but the rest are Protestants,