1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon

The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies

David Pietrusza

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781635764451
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

" 1960 aims to take us deeper into the campaign than Theodore White's famous The Making of the President, 1960. And it does."— Chicago Sun-Times This is award-winning historian David Pietrusza's hard-edged account of the 1960 presidential campaign, the election that ultimately gave America "Camelot" and its tragic aftermath. It is the story of the bare-knuckle politics of the primaries; the party conventions' backroom dealings; the unprecedented television debates; the hot-button issues of race, religion, and foreign policy—and, at the center of it all, three future presidents: Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon. "Terrific." —Robert A. Caro, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award "A stirring, hard-edged political saga… An outstanding reexamination."— Booklist " 1960 provides new insights into that year's hard-fought, pivotal election, but, more than that, 1960 is great storytelling—a fascinating, can't-put-it-down account of how American politics really works."—former United States Attorney General Richard Thornburgh "Essential for understanding the political forces that in many ways shaped the world we live in today." —David Mark, author of Going Dirty: The Art of Negative Campaigning

1

January

The date: Saturday, January 2, 1960, as slow a news day as ever there was.

The time: 12:30 p.m.

The location: the crowded parameters of the U.S. Senate office building’s historic red-carpeted, elaborately chandeliered, Corinthian-pilastered, third-floor Caucus Room, witness to investigations into everything from the sinking of the Titanic to Warren Harding’s Teapot Dome scandal to Senator Joe McCarthy’s televised anti-communist crusades—and, just recently, to equally dramatic probes into the often violent and corrupt world of organized labor.

The speaker: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a veteran (along with his younger brother Bobby) of those most recent investigations, tanned from a recent Jamaica vacation, junior U.S. senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, his voice strong, his mien serious and somber (though a tad too somber and leaden—he had yet to perfect his stride), his tousled forelock fastidiously trimmed to add an air of maturity to his forty-two-year-old countenance, standing before his thirty-year-old wife, Jacqueline, and nearly three hundred friends, supporters, and reporters to formally announce to them and to the world his candidacy for president of the United States of America.

It was all very dramatic, yet all very anticlimactic. For John F. Kennedy had, in fact, been running—whether he announced it or not, knew it or not, or wanted it or not—for fifteen years, four months, and twenty-one days—since August 12, 1944.

The day his older brother Joe was blown to bits.

2

“My son will be
President in 1960”

In 1960, America was ready for someone new, someone glamorous and young and witty and smart—an American Cary Grant, who knew not only how to stir a martini and woo a damsel but how to stir voters and woo delegates. A change was overdue on Pennsylvania Avenue. It had been a very long time since a TR had stormed San Juan Hill and America’s hearts. John F. Kennedy—the Pulitzer Prize–winning former PT-109 commander with his custom-made Brooks Brothers suits, his glamorous bride, his vigorous younger siblings, and more bushy hair and gleaming teeth than any president had enjoyed or employed in a long time—was moving toward his moment in history. And America, or at least enough of it, was moving with him.

It all seems so natural now, so inevitable—John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the United States of America. But Jack Kennedy had not been born to be president, had not originally coveted the office, or any political office at all. Neither Camelot nor even the U.S. Congress had been in his original plans—but, then, legends are not always born from plans.

At least not at first.

He was born at the family home—a comfortable, but hardly opulent, two-story, six-room abode in suburban Brookline, Massachusetts—at around 3 p.m. on Tuesday, May 29, 1917, the second child and, more importantly, the second son, of Joseph Patrick and Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald Kennedy.

What Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. then foresaw for his offspring remains impossible to say. More than likely, Joe Kennedy was still concentrating upon his own ascending destiny—building East Boston’s small Columbia Trust Company bank, of which he was then president (America’s youngest bank president when he took it over from his own father in 1913). In any case, for two decades young Jack Kennedy would be too sickly and too much the family dreamer to pin many—if any—dynastic hopes upon.

Their family was Irish and Catholic—Jack was an altar boy at Brookline’s St. Aidan’s—and highly political. Rose Kennedy’s father, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, had been a boss of Boston’s North End and, ultimately, a spectacularly colorful and corrupt mayor whose career was extinguished when it became a tad too spectacular even for normally forgiving Irish Democratic voters—particularly the part about a twenty-three-year-old lady friend named “Toodles” Ryan (“Great Lovers in History: From Cleopatra to Toodles” was the title of a speech threatened by Fitzgerald’s adversary James Michael Curley). Joe Kennedy’s father, the saloon keeper, banker, liquor importer, and coal dealer Patrick J. Kennedy, had served in the state house and senate, dominated Boston’s Ward Two, and helped rule all of Boston’s dominant Democratic Party.

Joe Kennedy had graduated from both Boston Latin School (though he stayed behind his junior year) and Harvard, where he learned firsthand of anti-Catholic, anti-Irish prejudice, and where, despite all the favors and honors tendered him as an influential politician’s son, he honed the nouveau riche arts of resentment and bitterness to razorlike sharpness.

Jack Kennedy survived childhood illnesses. Joe Kennedy grew richer still. His family just grew: from Joe Jr. and Jack and Rosemary to Kathleen (“Kick”) and Eunice and Patricia to Robert and Jean and Edward (“Teddy”). “The measure of a man’s success in life,” Joe Kennedy would contend, “is not the money he made. It’s the kind of family he has raised.”

In 1927, the family, enriched by Joe’s stock market speculations (and rum-running), shook the dust of Brahmin Boston from its brogans, relocating first to New York and then (for tax purposes) to Palm Beach. All the while, Jack attended the best of private schools, culminating in his entrance into elite Choate School (already graced by brother Joe Jr.), where despite two serious hospitalizations (at one point he weighed only 125 pounds) and mediocre grades (sixty-fourth out of a class of 112), he was still voted “Most likely to become president.”

He intended to study at the London School of Economics (again following in Joe Jr.’s footsteps), traveled to England, was hospitalized once more, and sailed for home. He enrolled in college—not at Harvard, but, several weeks late in the 1935 academic year, at Princeton (Joe Sr. pulled strings), and was hospitalized for two months for possible leukemia. He was, his mother sadly wrote, a boy “whose body could not keep pace with his dreams.”

JFK enrolled at Harvard in September 1936 (following both his father and brother—and at his father’s insistence), but when Joseph P. Kennedy, a key FDR backer in 1932, won appointment as ambassador to Britain in 1938, Jack followed. Assisting in his father’s work, he toured a continent galloping toward war, while compiling his senior honors thesis and cementing his lifelong fascination with England and all things upper-class English: manners, morals, attitudes, and history. For while the Kennedys appealed to the Irish for their votes, little about the lower-class Irish particularly appealed to them. So much about the English, especially their upper classes, did. Of Joe Kennedy’s six progeny who married, not one married Irish.

Kennedy père, long rich and recently famous, harbored presidential ambitions, but thanks to his now-unfashionable isolationist sentiments (and oft-voiced anti-Semitism) he had by 1940 become politically radioactive. His fallback plan: Son Joe Jr., immensely talented, charming, intelligent, and ambitious (although considered arrogant by many), would someday become America’s first Catholic president. It is impossible now, decades later, to properly gauge Joe Jr.’s potential. To us, there is no reason why his promise glistened so strongly, so inevitably. He held no public offices save for delegate to the 1940 Democratic convention, built no industries, wrote no books—yet all around him saw it, and if all around him saw him as brighter, harder, more driven, more eloquent, and more charming than his sickly brother Jack, we must honor their judgment.

Few possessed, recalled Harold Laski of the London School of Economics, “either [Joe Jr.’s] eager zest for life or his gift of winning one’s affection. . . . He has often sat in my study and submitted with that smile that was pure magic to relentless teasing about his determination to be nothing less than President of the United States.”

If Joe Jr. was to be president, what might Jack (graduated cum laude from Harvard in June 1940) become? A businessman perhaps (he briefly audited courses at the Stanford Graduate School of Business)? Perhaps, but not likely. A writer? Yes, Jack Kennedy, fascinated by current events and by history, particularly English history, showed real interest in that. When he completed his senior thesis, “Appeasement in Munich,” his father, masterly intuitive at sensing opportunities, corporate or political, recognized the possibilities inherent in the document’s wider circulation—both to boost his second son’s career track (“You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come”) and, perhaps more so, as an apologia for his own notable failures in opposing Nazi aggression. The result was Why England Slept, published in July 1940 with an introduction by Time’s Henry Luce. Assisted by the author’s father’s considerable connections, it became a national best seller—a remarkable eighty thousand copies.

It was, for all the fortuity of its timing and the charm of its youthful author, an unlikely best seller. The senior thesis it was based upon was frankly not all that good—the faculty awarded it Harvard’s lowest honor grade. Accordingly, Why England Slept required substantial reworking by New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, a longtime Joe Kennedy ally, and originator of the tome’s tide; by Joe’s speechwriter and publicist Harvey Klemmer; and even by JFK’s classmate Blair Clark—although JFK remained forever sensitive to charges of ghostwriting. Years later, when Clark reminded JFK of his help, Kennedy angrily shot back, “What do you mean? You never did a goddamn thing on it. You never saw it!”

When war came, both Joe Jr. and Jack enlisted in the Navy (his father pulling strings to get his sickly son in), Joe piloting PB-4Ys in anti-submarine missions and Jack eventually sent to serve on PT boats in the Solomon Islands. His volunteering for service was all the more remarkable, patriotic, and, yes, heroic, considering his precarious constitution.

In April 1943 the Navy assigned Jack Kennedy to command the eighty-foot, forty-ton PT-109. In the very early morning hours of August 2, 1943, his ship lay in Blackett Strait between Kolombangara and Arundel islands, one of fifteen American PT boats stalking a Japanese convoy. Suddenly, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri smashed into the PT-109, slashing it asunder, leaving two crew members dead and the remainder clinging to shattered wreckage. It was, all in all, an inexcusable disaster. “It was a big strait,” observed one squadron skipper. “Kennedy had the most maneuverable vessel in the world. All that power and yet this knight in white armor managed to have his PT boat rammed by a destroyer. Everybody in the fleet laughed about that.”

There was no laughing about what to do next. Kennedy and ten surviving crewmen made for land, which was infested by armed Japanese. Beyond that, machinist’s mate Patrick “Pappy” McMahon had been badly burned about the face, neck, and arms when the PT-109’s high-octane fuel tanks exploded. The twenty-six-year-old JFK towed the thirty-nine-year-old McMahon three and a half miles to minuscule Plum Island, but Plum Island provided little safety, so Kennedy returned to the water, swimming first to Naru Island, then to Olasana Island, and finally back to Plum Island before leading his men again to Olasana, where they were rescued six days later by a search party of Solomon Islanders.

Kennedy won the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his actions following the PT-109’s sinking. He was lucky not to have been court-martialed for losing it. “The medal,” JFK’s squadron commander officer Lieutenant Alvin Peyton Cluster, a close Kennedy friend, said later, “was for the survival phase. Not the preceding battle.” Even JFK would admit, “It was a question of whether they were going to give [me] a medal or throw [me] out.”

JFK survived. Joe Jr. did not. On August 12, 1944, Joe Jr., perhaps jealously attempting to match his kid brother’s well-publicized exploits, lifted off from Fersfield Airdome in East Anglia on a crucial—a risky, some said foolhardy—volunteer mission to destroy Nazi V-1 launching sites in France. His PB4Y Liberator bomber, overloaded with 22,000 pounds of TNT—an incredible amount of explosives—never made it. It exploded—vaporized—off the coast of France. One witness called it “[t]he biggest explosion I ever saw until the pictures of the atom bomb.” The blast took Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. and the hopes and dreams of the Kennedy family with it.

“Joe’s worldly success was so assured and inevitable,” eulogized JFK in his privately printed volume, As We Remember Joe, “that his death seems to have cut into the natural order of things.”

“You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his,” mourned Joe Sr., devastated by his son’s loss. “And what great things I saw in the future for him.”

Now, with both a period of mourning and a world war ended, Joe Jr.’s future would be transferred to brother Jack. “I can feel Pappy’s eyes on the back of my neck,” JFK confided to his old Solomon Islands Navy buddy Paul “Red” Fay at Christmas 1944. “When the war is over and you are back there in sunny California . . . I’ll be back here [in Massachusetts] with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into political advantage. I tell you, Dad is ready right now and can’t understand why Johnny boy isn’t ‘all engines full ahead.’”

Jack seemed ready to drift into journalism, turning out assignments for the Hearst chain (another position secured through paternal influence), but Joe Kennedy would never tolerate journalistic scribbling as anything more than a temporary avocation. Jack moved back to Massachusetts, with his father’s initial political designs centering upon the lieutenant governorship. But when seventy-one-year-old congressman James Michael Curley, who had recaptured Boston’s City Hall in November 1945, was convicted of federal mail fraud charges in January 1946, his safely Democratic, dirt-poor Eleventh District seat opened up—and JFK’s fate was sealed.

Joe Kennedy and all his minions and relations went to work, but for all their resources and talent and instinct, their task was not necessarily an easy one. Their candidate, so long absent from Massachusetts (save for his four years at Harvard he had not lived there since he was six), was looked upon as the “Miami candidate.” He spoke poorly, was stiff in meeting voters, and faced a host of better known opponents, primarily Cambridge mayor Mike Neville, a one-time speaker of the Massachusetts House. And above all, John Kennedy simply looked like hell, all sickly and scrawny, more a candidate for a VA hospital than for Congress—and far too young and inexperienced for the job.

The answer was hard work—by the candidate, by his staff, and particularly by his numerous relatives who flooded the district, hosting rallies and teas from the North and West Ends to East Boston to Cambridge to Charleston. But the real answer to what was needed came from JFK’s harelipped sixty-six-year-old cousin Joe “Pickles” Kane, a one-termer in the city council: “The first is money and the second is money and the third is money.”

“We’re going to sell Jack,” Jack’s father/campaign chief boasted, “like soap flakes.”

“Joe Kennedy,” recalled Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, who would succeed JFK in that same congressional seat, “spent $300,000 on that race which was six times what I spent in a very tough congressional campaign . . . six years later.” A frustrated Mike Neville pinned a ten-dollar bill to his shirt pocket and dubbed it his Kennedy campaign button.

Nine men and one woman (a thirty-five-year-old former WAC major, campaigning occasionally in her old gleaming dress whites) competed. Because the district, particularly in the North End, East Boston, Somerville, and even Cambridge, had over the years become noticeably Italian, veteran Boston Third Ward councilman Joseph Russo also had to be reckoned with...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise for 1960
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Cast of Characters
• 1. January
• 2. “My son will be President in 1960”
• 3. “Independent as a hog on ice”
• 4. “You’re my boy”
• 5. “Kicked in the head by a horse”
• 6. “When Bobby hates you, you stay hated”
• 7. “I am not a candidate for the vice presidency of anything”
• 8. “An independent merchant competing against a chain store”
• 9. “The rich man’s Harold Stassen”
• 10. “Committing a sin against God”
• 11. “A little black bag and a checkbook”
• 12. “All the eggheads are for Stevenson”
• 13. “They were a dime a dozen”
• 14. “A clean bill of health”
• 15. “First blood for Kennedy”
• 16. “We had to win on the first ballot”
• 17. “Too shallow a puddle”
• 18. “I’m not going to die in office”
• 19. “He is not a big man”
• 20. “A two-fisted, four-square liar”
• 21. “The man who will succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower . . . Richard E. Nixon”
• 22. “Why do you think they did that, Sammy?”
• 23. “Nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution”
• 24. “Matt Dillon ain’t popular for nothing”
• 25. “Nixon did everything but sweep out the plane”
• 26. “I seen him, I seen him”
• 27. “You bombthrowers probably lost the election”
• 28. “The most dangerous man in America”
• 29. “No one could tell him anything”
• 30. “He felt cool, calm, and very alert”
• 31. “They’ve embalmed him before he even died”
• 32. “The bones of a single American soldier”
• 33. “Senator Kennedy is in clear violation of the spirit of the law”
• 34. “They know not what they do”
• 35. “I’m just out for a little ride”
• 36. “The help of a few close friends”
• 37. “Dies irae”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author