The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [283]
It is unlikely, however, that Jack went to Johnson’s suite at the Biltmore merely to see whether the senator was interested enough to have his name firmly added to the list of candidates. More likely, Jack was surprised that Johnson was willing to accept an offer that he thought the Texan would have disdained, but only after leaving Johnson and learning how profoundly liberals and labor people opposed Johnson’s candidacy did Jack wish he could somehow back off.
Jack waffled back and forth, wondering whether he had made one of the shrewdest judgments of his career or, in the name of expediency, had ripped out the very heart and soul of his party. This was largely the way Salinger and O’Donnell viewed it. “In your first move after the nomination, you go against all the people who supported you,” O’Donnell raged, speaking in the intemperate language in which the newly nominated Democratic candidate was not used to being addressed.
Johnson had humbled himself to accept the nomination, and now suggestions were being made that he was unworthy and unwanted. Bobby came visiting with the unpleasant chore of asking Johnson to back out, but Johnson was not one to regurgitate meat he had swallowed whole. Not only did Bobby fail in his mission, but he did the most dangerous thing a person can do to a powerful politician. He humiliated Johnson. He made him do everything but beg on his knees.
In the end, it seemed better for both men and for the party to go ahead with the nomination, but these wounds would fester. Johnson did not blame Jack. He blamed Bobby, whom his campaign aide, Jim Rowe, told him was “a ruthless son of a bitch,” an appellation that just as easily could have described the Texas senator.
After the decision was finally made, the two tired brothers repaired to the Beverly Hills mansion. Bobby’s children cavorted in the pool, giving no thought to what was going on down at the Biltmore. And the elegant Joe sat there in a velvet smoking jacket and formal slippers with the embroidered initials JPK.
Bobby worked the phones, trying to pull some of the outraged liberals back into the fold. Jack, his face drawn, worried that he might have destroyed his chances at the presidency. “Jack, I don’t want you to worry,” Joe said, his voice still tinged with a touch of Boston Irish. “In two weeks they’ll be saying it’s the smartest thing you ever did.”
During his acceptance speech on the last evening of the convention, Jack’s face was streaked with fatigue, his deep eyes embedded in darkness. This evening he had a crucial message to convey. The somnolent Eisenhower years were ending, and the nation was heading into what Jack believed would be four of the most difficult, challenging years of its history.
Everywhere Jack looked, he saw omens pointing to the rightness of his predictions, and a range of disquieting, dangerous problems. The Soviets had downed a U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory and captured its American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, alerting the American people to a dangerous, covert action. The papers were full of stories about young black Americans “sitting in” at lunch counters and cafeterias across the South, demanding rights that were clearly theirs and had long been denied. In Cuba, Fidel Castro had overthrown the corrupt Batista and spoke a militant Marxist language, condemning Yanqui imperialism. Across Africa and Asia, a new generation was ready to attempt to throw off colonialism. In South Vietnam, Viet Cong revolutionaries were killing village leaders by the hundreds, while in Saigon, President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, hunkered down, sequestered with their armies.
In the most important speech Jack had yet given, he needed to set forth forcefully and eloquently the themes of his campaign. The speech, originally written by Sorensen and then passed around from aide to aide, had some compelling phrases, but they were lost in a compendium