Jack Kennedy by Chris Matthews

Author:Chris Matthews
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Autobiography.Politics & Religon
ISBN: 9781451635089
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHARISMA

How does Jack get them girls to squeal that way?

—Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia

Jack Kennedy’s singular personal appeal was recognized by Ken O’Donnell for the first time at the Worcester tea in 1952. He noticed how women simply stared at the candidate. The effect Kennedy had on people, most noticeably women, is visible today in films from the Wisconsin primary. You see high-school-age girls racing down the sidewalk merely to capture a glimpse of him. As the campaign entered the general election phase in 1960, and the crowds around Kennedy grew deeper, these young women—“jumpers” they were called—would leap into the air to see over the heads of those in front of them.

It takes more than sex appeal, however, to win the American presidency. To gain the Democratic nomination, those victories in Wisconsin and West Virginia were necessary, but not sufficient. Jack still needed to conquer the resistance of pivotal governors, many of whom were Catholic like himself. It was not about whom they liked, or with whom they felt comfortable; the decisive question was whether they could be pushed to do what they didn’t want to do: commit, put their own political careers on the line for a guy who might well be stopped short of the nomination, halted for the sin of having the same religion as their own. These men had their own ambitions, too. They wanted the leverage, the clout that comes to a governor who arrives at a national convention with a bevy of delegates under his control.

But Jack Kennedy wanted those delegates under his control. He wanted the nomination locked up before he reached Los Angeles for the basic, understandable reason that he’d seen what could happen in the middle of a Democratic Convention roll call. People who don’t want you to win can stop you in your tracks, just at the very moment when you and your people think you’ve got it in the bag. Just four years before, he’d seen it unfold like that in Chicago.

So, to prevent it from happening again, he was taking certain steps, of a sort familiar to the Onions Burkes of this world.

It had started with Ohio. Bobby’s strong-arm treatment of Mike DiSalle had ensured that the Ohio governor was headed to L.A. on the Kennedy bandwagon. Next had been Maryland, whose primary came the Friday after West Virginia’s. Bobby, now an expert at strong-arm tactics, had taken care of the dirty work there, from the moment the campaign learned that Governor J. Millard Tawes planned on running unopposed on the primary ballot as a “favorite son.” He wanted to arrive in California with the state’s delegates under his personal control. The Kennedy brothers, however, thought otherwise. Just as he had in Ohio with DiSalle, Bobby went to meet with Governor Tawes personally. Here’s Ken O’Donnell’s account:

“We talked to the governor and suggested that the governor might want to talk to Bobby Kennedy alone, that he’d acquaint him with what our desires and our intentions were, and that he’d relay back to the senator what Governor Tawes’s intentions and desires were.

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