The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [304]
he turned and whispered to Bob Healy of the Boston Globe and Theodore White: “You know, they all think that Kennedy has a trick and if they can learn it they can become president of the United States too.”
Jack’s campaign was supposed to have ended at this triumphant rally at Boston Garden. The Republicans, however, had purchased four hours of national television time on this final evening. At the last moment the Democrats bought their own half hour on ABC directly following the Nixon marathon. So Jack’s quest for the presidency ended at historic Faneuil Hall in a nationally televised speech before a smaller, less raucous gathering than the one he had just addressed at Boston Garden.
Fifteen years before, a young Jack Kennedy had stood not far from here giving his first campaign speech. Now, campaigning for himself for the last time in his life, he was elegant in dress and manner, his wit exquisitely honed, his phrasing eloquent, his speech resonant, his voice firm.
“This is the campaign, and it’s now come to an end,” he began as he looked out on an audience full of Bostonians who had seen him first win election to the House. “I think this old hall reminds us of how far we’ve been as Americans and what we must do in the future.” American history resonated through Boston in ways it did in no other city in America, and that history resonated through Jack as it had through few other presidential contenders.
This was Jack’s last chance to send supporters bursting into the streets ready to rally their forces to the polls. But that was not the kind of speech Jack was giving this evening. This was a solemn, somber speech, as if he realized far better than anyone else the sheer magnitude of what the next president would face. He invoked Lincoln’s election of 1860, though one hundred years later the nation was not on the verge of civil war. He invoked Wilson’s election of 1912, though the world did not face world war. He invoked Roosevelt’s election of 1932, though America was no longer a land in which one-third of the people lived in poverty.
“The campaign is now over,” he said at the end of a long speech, at the end of a long day, at the end of a long campaign. “You must make your judgment between sitting and moving. This is a race not merely between two parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, or between two candidates. It is a race between the comfortable and the concerned. Those who are willing to sit and lie at anchor and those who want to go forward. This country has developed as it is. We are here tonight because in other great periods of crises we have chosen to go forward.”
It is one thing to call a man dispassionate when he seems unaffected by what happens to others. It is something else when he exhibits an impenetrable cool
when it is his own future at stake. As Jack sat in his parents’ home in Hyannis Port watching images on the television set and hearing late returns from various aides who scurried in and out of the living room, there was not a glimmer of anxiety in his voice or a moment’s irritability at the twists and turns of what would prove in the popular vote to be the closest presidential election in American history: in the end fewer than 120,000 ballots, out of 69 million, separated the two candidates. Jack was no more elated at an early computer projection on television that he would win than he was by a later projection that he would lose. He was slightly ahead at close to four in the morning when Nixon appeared before the cameras to say that if the present trends continued, his opponent would win. Jack’s aides poured out their wrath on the television screen, upset that Nixon did not do the honorable thing and concede. “If I were he, I would have done the same thing,” Jack said, effectively silencing those throwing epithets at the screen.
Jack went to sleep while Bobby and the others kept watch. All night