The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [301]
Jack had brilliantly presented himself in television debates, sound bites, photo ops, and shrewdly calculated advertising. Yet in 1960, there remained an unspoken compact that each voter had the right to shake hands with the candidate, to touch him, to hear his words in person, to hold a banner with his name boldly written on it, to shout his name as he drove by. Tens of millions of Americans voted twice, once with their presence, and once again with their ballot. These were not neatly orchestrated days of media events in which Jack could retreat for afternoon naps and evening sitz baths. It was still the essence of politics to get out to the people and to talk to them, creating the illusion that this moment was as important to the candidate as it was to them.
Jack drove through the depressed coal mining areas of Pennsylvania, where voters were scarce, in an open car and waved to onlookers in tiny Republican towns. Even if at times he was collecting one vote at a time, it was still one vote he had not had before. In a given day, sometimes even an hour, he would encounter enormous, boisterous crowds, and then arrive at a half-empty union hall or a rally notable only for being sparsely attended. And everywhere he went there were what the journalists called “jumpers,” young women who screamed their ardor as they would have for Elvis, creating orgiastic moments that had nothing to do with what was once called politics. In the final days the crowds grew larger and applauded him with greater and greater intensity. The next to the last day of the campaign ended at three in the morning before thirty thousand supporters who had waited half the night to see their candidate in the town square of Waterford, Connecticut.
There was one other Kennedy who had worked as hard and as single-mindedly as Jack since the convention, and that was Bobby. Subtlety and grace were the first casualties of Bobby’s role as campaign manager. Bobby felt that many of those who opposed his brother were not merely misguided men of good intentions but scoundrels and rogues. He had the considerable misjudgment to attack Jackie Robinson for the capital crime of backing the Nixon candidacy, impugning the black leader’s honor more than his judgment. “If the younger Kennedy is going to resort to lies,” the legendary sports star replied, “then I can see what kind of campaign this is going to be.”
Bobby wisely backed off from that particular attack, and for the most part his campaign judgments were acute and judicious. “He gave people their head,” said Wofford, “He kept saying we want to get every horse running on the track.” He nonetheless left the queasy feeling in some of the campaign staff that he was ready to discard them the moment they faltered or misjudged, or that he needed them to take a fall for an error that more rightfully should have had a Kennedy name attached to it.
The brothers were perfectly in tandem on this quest: Jack, the sonorous voice and subtle mind of the campaign, Bobby the fist and the muscle. As the brothers flew around the country, they rarely saw each other in person but talked often on the phone in their own private code. On one occasion, they happened to be passing through the same airport.
“Hi, Johnny,” Bobby said, as nonchalantly as if they were two barnstorming salesmen drumming up their wares. “How are you?”
“Man, I’m tired,” Jack said, looking into a pair of eyes as exhausted as his own.
“What the hell are you tired for?” Bobby exclaimed. “I’m doing all the work.”
As Jack moved through the last days of the campaign, Bobby was on his own frenetic schedule, as if by sheer will he could push up the vote tallies. On the final Saturday of the campaign, he took a trip to make speeches in Ohio, Kentucky, and North Carolina. In the Cincinnati airport, Bobby spied a gigantic six-foot-tall stuffed dog. His children loved animals, and though the gigantic dog was