Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek Page A

standards, they were bitter rivals.
    And for Bobby Kennedy, with Jack’s tacit approval, so was anyone who stood in the way of his brother’s White House campaign. The first demonstration of their hardball approach to winning the nomination came in Wisconsin, where they competed with Minnesota senator Hubert H. Humphrey in the Democratic primary. Primaries in 1960 were no surefire route to the party’s nomination. There were too few of the state contests to ensure anyone the prize. But for Jack, they were an essential demonstration to party bosses and convention delegates that he could win sufficient Protestant votes to become a viable national candidate.
    Understanding the importance of the primary in Wisconsin—a state with a large number of Protestant as well as Catholic voters—Bobby spared no effort to win. He gave a demonstration of what was ahead in Wisconsin when at the end of 1959 he pressed Governor Michael DiSalle of Ohio to be the first governor to come out for Kennedy. When DiSalle resisted, Bobby gave him what John Bailey, the Democratic National chairman, who attended a meeting between them, called “a going-over,” the likes of which shocked Bailey. It consisted of bare-knuckle threats to DiSalle’s political future. But it worked, and DiSalle endorsed Jack’s candidacy in January 1960 as the campaign for Wisconsin began.
    Bobby’s successful hard-nosed tactics encouraged him to remain aggressive. As campaign manager, he blitzed the state with Kennedy operatives; family members and hired guns seemed to be everywhere, talking up Jack to anyone who would listen. Humphrey said he felt like “an independent merchant competing against a chain store.” Bobby brought Paul Corbin into the campaign—a slick political Houdini whose mantra was winning, regardless of how it was done. Humphrey complained about Bobby’s “ruthlessness and toughness”—specifically, what Bobby encouraged Corbin to do: anti-Catholic tracts sent to Catholic households that were calculated to anger Catholics and stimulate them to vote for Kennedy. Corbin also spread rumors that the corrupt Teamsters union was campaigning for Humphrey.
    Although Jack would carry the state, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Jack’s margin was too small to be considered decisive, and commentators immediately described his success as the result of Republican Catholics coming to Jack’s rescue. Jack muttered: “Damn religious thing.” One of his sisters asked: “What does it all mean?” Jack replied: “We’ve got to go to West Virginia and do it all over again.”
    West Virginia, only 3 percent Catholic, became an acid test of whether Jack could win Protestant votes. The primary would make or break Jack’s candidacy. The Kennedys spared neither money nor scruples to win: West Virginia was notorious for vote-buying, and relying on Joe’s advice and money, Jack’s campaign paid top dollar to the party’s county bosses to ensure strong majorities for him. Humphrey didn’t blink at the local requirement for vote-buying, either. But “our highest possible contribution was peanuts compared to what they [the county chairmen] received from the Kennedy organization,” he said. He was right. Where Humphrey spent a total of about $25,000 on his campaign, Jack’s TV ads alone came to $34,000.
    Because they couldn’t be sure that the local party operatives could be relied on to produce promised votes, the Kennedy campaign also assumed that it had to motivate voters to go to the polls for Jack. Joe, Bobby, and West Virginia Democrats more familiar with local attitudes urged the strongest possible identification with Franklin Roosevelt’s memory and the New Deal. Because the state still struggled with pockets of poverty and prided itself on traditional values and patriotism, the campaign declared itself for “food, family and flag.”
    Jack’s campaign between April 5 and May 10, the date of the primary, emphasized his determination to bring West