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

Virginia families out of poverty with federal programs, promising to put West Virginia “on the top of my agenda at the White House.” The campaign also made sure that voters would know about Jack’s heroic Navy service and his brother’s sacrifice in a suicide mission. Nor did Jack neglect the religious issue, which posed a serious threat to his election. He implored audiences not to make religion a consideration in their choice of a candidate. After all, he said, no one asked his or his brother Joe’s religion when they risked their lives in combat. A beautifully crafted television documentary about Jack and his family informed voters about his merits as a candidate and heightened his appeal as someone deserving of their support for the presidency. It was an early use of the TV medium as a vehicle for reaching lots of people who normally paid scant attention to politics.
    Still, the campaign, led by Bobby, who wished to ensure a landslide, believed it essential not only to broaden and deepen Jack’s appeal, but also to give voters reasons to vote against Humphrey. Bobby saw an opening in allegations about Humphrey’s lack of a military record. Partly responding to reminders to voters of Joe Kennedy’s sympathy for Britain’s prewar appeasement policy and attacks on Jack as a rich man’s son who was buying the election, Bobby pressured Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., who had come into West Virginia to identify Jack with FDR’s New Deal, to alert voters to Humphrey’s absence from the war against the Axis. The Humphrey campaign protested against implicit allegations of draft-dodging. In fact, a 4-F classification had deterred Humphrey from serving. Jack repeatedly decried the use of such tactics, but more to remind voters that Humphrey had not served than to discourage them from taking it into account. Humphrey said later, they “never shut FDR, Jr. up, as they easily could have.”
    As far as Bobby was concerned, dirty tricks were a justifiable response to dirty tricks. The Humphrey people were playing the religion card and so Bobby had no problem with Paul Corbin’s recruitment of Catholic priests to knock on doors in Catholic areas to get out the vote. They convinced seminarian volunteers helping in the campaign to dispose of their frocks when visiting Protestant households to solicit Kennedy votes.
    Jack decisively won in West Virginia, 60.8 to 39.2 percent, and Humphrey announced his withdrawal from the nomination fight. As a goodwill gesture that could soften Humphrey’s sense of loss and deter him from throwing his support in the convention to Lyndon Johnson or any other potential rival, and a bow toward party liberals, who were Humphrey’s strongest backers, Bobby went to see Humphrey and his wife in their hotel room to praise him and his contributions to the party’s domestic record. It was also a calculated step toward persuading Humphrey delegates to back Jack instead of Adlai Stevenson, the liberal alternative.
    Jack and Bobby went to the convention in Los Angeles in July hopeful but uncertain about gaining the prize. Johnson had emerged as their principal rival. After their encounter with him in 1956 and Bobby’s humiliating visit to his ranch in 1959, the Kennedys were angry at Johnson and privately denounced him as a “chronic liar” whose pronouncements on his noncandidacy were nothing more than a political ploy.
    The antagonism intensified when Texas governor John Connally, Johnson’s campaign manager, used a press conference to describe Kennedy as suffering from Addison’s disease and unfit to serve as president. Johnson himself attacked Joe Kennedy as a “Chamberlain umbrella policy man.” Before traveling to Los Angeles, Johnson conferred with Eisenhower at the White House. He urged the president to come out against Kennedy’s nomination, describing him as “a dangerous man” whose lack of foreign policy experience could jeopardize the country’s security. When Bobby learned of