January 2, 1960—Two hours after dictating his speech while a barber was cutting his thick hair, 42-year-old John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the office that pundits and other politicos had counseled him was beyond his grasp this election.
His ironic sense of humor and belief in international collective security set JFK apart from his plutocratic father, former Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph P. Kennedy. But the two shared an important psychological trait: neither was disposed to wait his turn.
And so father and son agreed there was no reason to delay Jack’s Presidential bid, which was announced in the Senate Caucus Room—a gathering place that, years later, would be renamed in honor of himself and the two younger brothers who launched their own, even more controversial bids for the Oval Office after his assassination, Robert and Edward.
His ironic sense of humor and belief in international collective security set JFK apart from his plutocratic father, former Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph P. Kennedy. But the two shared an important psychological trait: neither was disposed to wait his turn.
And so father and son agreed there was no reason to delay Jack’s Presidential bid, which was announced in the Senate Caucus Room—a gathering place that, years later, would be renamed in honor of himself and the two younger brothers who launched their own, even more controversial bids for the Oval Office after his assassination, Robert and Edward.
The candidate and his paternal eminence grise were out to make history: not only to elect the first Roman Catholic President (a goal that had eluded the father two decades ago, when he saw himself leading the nation), but in the process create a new style of politics that has come to characterize the way we choose Presidents in the years since: one heavily dependent on primaries, TV ads, and polling.
The 1960 bid was truly a family affair. Robert Kennedy would serve as campaign manager, as he had in his older brother’s successful 1952 campaign for the U.S. Senate. Already, he was prodding everyone—including the candidate himself—to get going and leave no stone unturned. In the prior month, sunbathing by a Palm Beach pool, Jack had listened to the intense Robert go on and on about how little had been done to date, then turned to his PT-109 buddy, Paul “Red” Fay, and grinned. “"How would you like looking forward to that high whining voice blasting into your ear for the next six months?"
The 1960 bid was truly a family affair. Robert Kennedy would serve as campaign manager, as he had in his older brother’s successful 1952 campaign for the U.S. Senate. Already, he was prodding everyone—including the candidate himself—to get going and leave no stone unturned. In the prior month, sunbathing by a Palm Beach pool, Jack had listened to the intense Robert go on and on about how little had been done to date, then turned to his PT-109 buddy, Paul “Red” Fay, and grinned. “"How would you like looking forward to that high whining voice blasting into your ear for the next six months?"
Joe would put his great fortune at the service of his son’s bid. That would lead to all kinds of jibes about how he had made his money, as well as one of Jack’s great one-liners, a fake telegram from his dad that read: “DEAR JACK: DON'T BUY ONE MORE VOTE THAN NECESSARY. I'LL BE DAMNED IF I PAY FOR A LANDSLIDE.”
JFK’s announcement illustrates the complex relationship of speechmaking to government. If fine words were enough to remake public affairs, then poets would fulfill Shelley’s grandiose ideal of them as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
But words, if they reveal precious little about how well promises will be kept or how effectively decisions will be made, disclose much of importance about a candidate’s mindset. In particular, campaign speeches can be laboratories for testing which ideas or phrases resonate with listeners, and they are essential weapons in combat against other candidates.
So it proved in Kennedy’s case. As Thurston Clarke points out in Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America, the candidate used his announcement to trot out a phrase that subsequent generations of Americans would come to know in slightly different form. America as the “defender of freedom in a time of maximum peril” would be tweaked, a little over a year later, on a bitterly cold but memorable day in the capital, into “the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.”
But the Senator from Massachusetts had another purpose behind his speech: to redefine, for the elders of the party who would decide the nomination in Los Angeles in July, the issue of electability.
“Electability” was for JFK, as it was for Barack Obama nearly 50 years later, an umbrella term that covered two distinct issues: experience and identity. Kennedy’s rivals for the nomination were men with more years of experience in Washington who carried a greater sense of gravitas than this handsome young scion of a rich father:
* Lyndon Johnson, Senate Majority Leader;
* Hubert H. Humphrey, who 12 years earlier had urged his party to fight for an end to states’ rights and “to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights”;
* Stuart Symington, who had held several defense positions in the Truman administration before winning election to the Senate; and, waiting in the wings,
* Adlai Stevenson, the party’s nominee in the last two elections.
The last time the Democratic Presidential nomination was decided without reference to primaries was 1968, when party bosses, acting at the behest of LBJ, backed his Vice-President, Humphrey, over anti-war forces that had split in the primaries between RFK and Eugene McCarthy. In fact, eight years before JFK’s Presidential campaign, Senator Estes Kefauver came into the convention with the most pledged votes from primaries and still managed to lose to Stevenson.
Additionally, Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism was a serious concern, as race would be for Obama. Grave doubts existed among party bosses as to how much anti-Catholicism would weigh down Kennedy, as it had Alfred E. Smith in 1928.
JFK’s announcement illustrates the complex relationship of speechmaking to government. If fine words were enough to remake public affairs, then poets would fulfill Shelley’s grandiose ideal of them as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
But words, if they reveal precious little about how well promises will be kept or how effectively decisions will be made, disclose much of importance about a candidate’s mindset. In particular, campaign speeches can be laboratories for testing which ideas or phrases resonate with listeners, and they are essential weapons in combat against other candidates.
So it proved in Kennedy’s case. As Thurston Clarke points out in Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America, the candidate used his announcement to trot out a phrase that subsequent generations of Americans would come to know in slightly different form. America as the “defender of freedom in a time of maximum peril” would be tweaked, a little over a year later, on a bitterly cold but memorable day in the capital, into “the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.”
But the Senator from Massachusetts had another purpose behind his speech: to redefine, for the elders of the party who would decide the nomination in Los Angeles in July, the issue of electability.
“Electability” was for JFK, as it was for Barack Obama nearly 50 years later, an umbrella term that covered two distinct issues: experience and identity. Kennedy’s rivals for the nomination were men with more years of experience in Washington who carried a greater sense of gravitas than this handsome young scion of a rich father:
* Lyndon Johnson, Senate Majority Leader;
* Hubert H. Humphrey, who 12 years earlier had urged his party to fight for an end to states’ rights and “to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights”;
* Stuart Symington, who had held several defense positions in the Truman administration before winning election to the Senate; and, waiting in the wings,
* Adlai Stevenson, the party’s nominee in the last two elections.
The last time the Democratic Presidential nomination was decided without reference to primaries was 1968, when party bosses, acting at the behest of LBJ, backed his Vice-President, Humphrey, over anti-war forces that had split in the primaries between RFK and Eugene McCarthy. In fact, eight years before JFK’s Presidential campaign, Senator Estes Kefauver came into the convention with the most pledged votes from primaries and still managed to lose to Stevenson.
Additionally, Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism was a serious concern, as race would be for Obama. Grave doubts existed among party bosses as to how much anti-Catholicism would weigh down Kennedy, as it had Alfred E. Smith in 1928.
Many of these bosses preferred that Kennedy, if he landed on a ticket at all, do so in the number-two spot, as he had come close to doing at the 1956 convention. JFK was having none of that, though, pointedly noting in his announcement that he’d reject a Vice-Presidential bid if it were offered.
More important, he set down a marker and a challenge for the other candidates:
“I believe that any Democratic aspirant to this important nomination should be willing to submit to the voters his views, record and competence in a series of primary contests. I am therefore now announcing my intention of filing in the New Hampshire primary and I shall announce my plans with respect to the other primaries as their filing dates approach.”
At this time, only 16 states even had primaries. The Kennedys intended to stake out ones they deemed important in determining his electability, then pour all their resources into it. The strategy worked to perfection, particularly in victories in Humphrey’s neighboring state of Wisconsin, and West Virginia, where a win in the Protestant-oriented state demonstrated that JFK could indeed overcome reservations about his faith.
More important, he set down a marker and a challenge for the other candidates:
“I believe that any Democratic aspirant to this important nomination should be willing to submit to the voters his views, record and competence in a series of primary contests. I am therefore now announcing my intention of filing in the New Hampshire primary and I shall announce my plans with respect to the other primaries as their filing dates approach.”
At this time, only 16 states even had primaries. The Kennedys intended to stake out ones they deemed important in determining his electability, then pour all their resources into it. The strategy worked to perfection, particularly in victories in Humphrey’s neighboring state of Wisconsin, and West Virginia, where a win in the Protestant-oriented state demonstrated that JFK could indeed overcome reservations about his faith.
I began this post with a multi-tasking JFK because it says something about the restlessness that underlay his ambition. Ever since childhood, he’d been living in extreme ill-health, and particularly since WWII felt he was living on borrowed time. He was tolerant of many things, but not of being bored.
There was no time to waste in JFK’s life, and even at the press conference following his announcement, it would affect how he was perceived: A number of reporters noted that they could not take down his words accurately as he answered questions because he was speaking so rapidly.
The following 10 months would see Kennedy work on such faults as campaigner, as he became, in his early 40s, the most successful of a remarkable generation of politicians, as well as the catalyst for the electioneering style we know today.
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