The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [279]
And pity poor Humphrey rattling across the state in his sad little bus, while Jack soared above in the Caroline. Could the Minnesota liberal shout out that all his life he had sung an anthem of tolerance, and that he was nothing but a foil in this whole business? If he said that, he would look like a bigot. Unable to say anything, he could only continue his bumpy ride and speak about everything but what he wanted to discuss.
On the weekend before the primary election, Jack appeared on a paid television program broadcast across West Virginia. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. was still of use, and he sat beside Jack, asking him questions that had been prepared by the candidate’s staff. Theodore White, the famed chronicler of this campaign, recalled this half hour as “the finest TV broadcast I have ever heard any politician make.”
Roosevelt gently asked the questions, and Jack ran with them, toying with them in soliloquies daring in their length. Jack was the very image of “cool,” a term that was rising out of the Beat underground and the hip black jazz world. He and this new medium were one. He had all the media-anointed credibility of a television anchor, his words sanctified as truth.
There is nothing like a picture to convince another person, and there were two pictures being broadcast: the pictures on the flickering black-and-white screens in homes and bars from Bluefield to Morgantown, and the pictures created by Jack’s own words.
“So when any man stands on the steps of the Capitol and takes the oath of office of president, he is swearing to support the separation of church and state,” he said as his viewers fixed this image in their minds. “He puts one hand on the Bible and raises the other hand to God as he takes the oath. And if he breaks his oath, he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution, for which the Congress can impeach him—and should impeach him—but he is committing a sin against God.”
Then Jack stopped for a moment. He had raised the ante a final time, placing God’s own name on top of his stack of chips. It was a fierce, just, almighty God these people worshiped. Would Jack dare blaspheme against God before so many witnesses? And if he did, wasn’t God’s wrath worse than any judgment that mortals could mete out? Jack raised his hand from an imaginary Bible as if he had just taken that sacred oath, and then he repeated his words: “A sin against God, for he has sworn on the Bible.”
By then Jack knew that the polls were looking better and better in the West Virginia primary, but victory was not yet complete. “I suppose if I win my poon days are over,” Jack wrote on a notepad, lamenting the fact that his extracurricular sex life might soon be halted. “I suppose they are going to hit me with something before we are finished.” He was almost certainly thinking that some sort of sex scandal would break.
On election day, when almost any other candidate would have prowled the environs of his hotel room, badgering aides for the first hint of results, Jack flew up to Washington. That evening he attended a movie with Ben Bradlee. Jack left the movie every twenty minutes or so to call Bobby at the Kanawha Hotel, each time learning that the results were not yet known. When he slumped back into his theater seat next to Bradlee, he had hardly missed any plot points; the film, a soft-core porn item called Private Property, consisted largely of a series of rapes and seductions.
Jack did not learn that he had won a landslide victory, 61 percent to 39 percent, until he returned to his house and received a triumphant call from Bobby at 11:30 P.M.. The occasion called for a few celebratory toasts and a good night’s sleep. Sleep was not even a possibility. He knew