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By Root 1611 0

long, Bobby worked the phones, helping to run up a long-distance bill of about $10,000. In Illinois, Mayor Daley had proved his fidelity to Chicago’s dubious politics by not tabulating the city’s final votes until the heavily Republican downstate ballots had all been counted and he knew what it would take to win. California came in for Jack finally, and by dawn it was clear that he had won, but no one considered waking Jack. Although it would become part of American political myth that, with Daley’s help, Jack won fraudulently, even without the questionable Illinois votes, Kennedy still had 276 electoral votes to give him a bare majority.

When Sorenson entered Jack’s bedroom at 9:30 A.M., he addressed the man sitting in pajamas in his bed as “Mr. President.” Early in the afternoon, at the Hyannis Armory, the president-elect went before the cameras for the first time. Jack had insisted that his father be there, and Joe had reluctantly agreed. Jack stood there now with his wife, two brothers, three sisters, and his mother. The president-elect spoke with self-confidence and control, and almost no one noticed that out of sight of the cameras and most of the reporters his hands were trembling.

Book Three

21

The Torch Has Been Passed

On the day before the inauguration of the thirty-fifth president of the United States, a fierce storm fell upon Washington, blanketing the capital with eight inches of snow, stranding ten thousand cars across the city, grounding planes, and slowing trains. Crews worked during the night cleaning the main roads, and by noon on January 20, 1961, a crowd of twenty thousand stood on the Capitol grounds in the twenty-two-degree cold, braced against the eighteen-mile-an-hour winds and looking up at the portico where the nation’s leaders sat outside to witness the ritual of passage. One million other Americans began gathering along Pennsylvania Avenue to greet the new president as he traveled in a parade that would carry him to his new home in the White House.

The onlookers had bundled themselves up against the fierce cold wearing an eclectic collection of wool coats, snowsuits, fur hats, ski jackets, hiking boots, galoshes, mufflers, face masks, hoods, and scarves. Up on the podium, seventy-year-old Dwight Eisenhower, then the oldest president in American history, sat wrapped in a heavy topcoat and scarf. The other largely aging politicians and officials were equally protected against the cold, many of them in top hats or homburgs. In the row upon row of largely indistinguishable black and gray coats, hats, and pale faces, there was one tanned, radiantly healthy-looking man.

Forty-three-year-old John F. Kennedy was the youngest elected president in American history, and he stood there the personification of the nation’s energy and ambition. The new president tended to speak quickly, but this noon he spoke with a careful, deliberate pace:

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

The audience listened closely, the words seemingly resonating so deeply that they did not even applaud until Kennedy had spoken nearly five minutes. He appeared to be a strong young leader for a difficult new age. Kennedy had many virtues to bring to his presidency. He had a political mind as sharp as that of any of the politicians who surrounded him, but he understood nuances and subtleties on a deeper level than did most of Washington’s narrow men. This was a brilliant attribute, nurtured by his father’s influence, cultivated at the Court of St. James’s and in his extensive travels, honed in the House of Representatives, where he was as much an observer as a participant, and seasoned in the Senate, where he had to deal with