The religion issue cut both ways, however, and many seasoned observers urged Stevenson to be wary. Three-term Pittsburgh mayor David Lawrence, a power within the party and a Catholic, warned Stevenson that having a Catholic running mate would spell inevitable defeat in November. Speaker Sam Rayburn was similarly negative, as was, reportedly, Harry Truman. Small wonder that when Ted Sorensen’s memorandum from earlier in the year began making the rounds among party insiders, Stevenson’s people asked for copies. They wanted hard data. Sorensen, after feigning ignorance, made sure to comply with the request, though circumspectly, as the memo was no longer officially his own product—Kennedy, leery of having his aide perceived as promoting the issue, arranged for the party chairman of Connecticut, John Bailey, a strong backer, to assume responsibility for the document. The camouflage effort worked: thenceforth it would be known as the Bailey Memorandum.5

Did Jack Kennedy really want the vice presidential nomination? Early in the year he had disavowed the idea to Sorensen, calling it a nothing job that gave no role on policy, or on anything else of substance.6 But the idea was growing on him, less out of a pining for the office than out of a sense of competition. All of the buzz that spring and summer was about the presidential ticket, and he wanted in on the action. Accordingly, at regular intervals he and Sorensen supplied Stevenson’s office with updates on how the presidential nomination fight looked in Massachusetts and New England, and offered ideas on how best to turn back the Kefauver challenge nationally. On March 30, Sorensen called Minow at Kennedy’s request to suggest that Stevenson use Kefauver’s absentee record in “a vigorous way” in his speeches. On April 16, Kennedy wrote Minow to warn that Wyoming was in danger of slipping out of Stevenson’s grasp. In May, as we’ve seen, after his successful battle to oust Onions Burke and gain control of the state party, Kennedy wasted no time in informing Stevenson of the fact. And in early June, after Stevenson thumped Kefauver in the California primary and effectively sewed up the nomination, Kennedy fired off a congratulatory telegram: “You have proven what many of us knew from the beginning and pointed the way to victory in August and November.”7

Even the heartfelt opposition of his wife and his father did not deter Jack. Jackie wanted her husband to continue his convalescence in a less stressful mode, while Joseph Kennedy felt certain that a Stevenson-led ticket was doomed to lopsided defeat. Eisenhower was simply too strong. Polls showed him with a healthy lead over Stevenson, and moreover he had already defeated Stevenson once before. Thus, even if Jack won the vice presidential nomination (itself no sure thing), it would be no real victory; on the contrary, Joe believed, any Democratic rout would be blamed on Jack’s Catholicism, which might scuttle his prospects for the presidency four or eight years down the road. “If you are chosen,” he wrote his son, quoting Clare Boothe Luce approvingly, “it will be because you are a Catholic and not because you are big enough to do a good job. She feels that a defeat would be a devastating blow to your prestige.”8

Jack was undaunted. Or at least he saw the merits in, as he put it to his father in a letter in late June, having “all of this churning up.”9 The vice presidential speculation kept his name before the national electorate, and that was all to the good. Plus he always relished a fight. A few weeks thereafter, Eunice, whose husband, Sargent Shriver, had just urged Jack’s candidacy on Stevenson directly while flying with him from Cape Cod to Chicago, wrote her father that, absent the vice presidential nod and the name recognition it would generate, Jack didn’t believe the Democrats would “select him as a presidential candidate any…time in the future.” The Ambassador, ensconced in the South of France, had begun to soften in his opposition, especially after reports emerged that Dwight Eisenhower was experiencing new health problems. (In June the president had contracted ileitis and gone in for surgery, then remained in Walter Reed Army Medical Center for three full weeks.) If Ike couldn’t run for reelection, that changed the equation dramatically, Joe believed, and he told friends he might have to return to America for the Democratic convention.10

The president’s health was key. Joe continued to believe Eisenhower would coast to victory against Stevenson, and perhaps against any Democratic ticket. “I think Eisenhower is the most popular man that we have seen in our time and to make attacks on him in the coming campaign is to me a sure way to commit suicide,” Joe wrote to Sargent Shriver from Èze-sur-Mer. “Oddly enough, as in Jack’s case, when a man is ill and is putting up a good fight, it is almost impossible to generate a feeling against him….Remember, Sarge, that you are going into an atmosphere where over 65 million persons are working and getting better pay than ever before….So you have an economic condition that is excellent; you can’t offer anything to anybody from laborer to capitalist that can persuade him that he can do better by [a Democrat].” In sum, the elder Kennedy told his son-in-law, “I believe that while Stevenson and Jack would certainly do better than last time, they will not win.”11

To his son the Ambassador was more elliptical but still left his feelings clear. “I came to a couple of conclusions,” he wrote to Jack in July:

1) Stevenson is going to nominate his own Vice President when he gets the nomination. 2) He’s definitely worried about your health, and…that will be his excuse, if he wants it. 3) When you see what he wants the Vice President to do, you can decide how attractive it is….If you make up your mind that you either don’t want it or that you are not going to get it, before either of these things happen, you should get out a statement to the effect that representing Mass. is one of the greatest jobs in the world, and there is lots to be done for your state and her people, and while you are most grateful for the national support offered you for the Vice Presidency, your heart belongs to Massachusetts.12

By the start of August, Eisenhower’s condition had stabilized and he seemed set for the campaign. To Joe Kennedy that settled the matter, and the old man was perhaps fortunate that, on account of being overseas, he didn’t have to read the new issue of Time, which put Jack at the top of the list of Democratic vice presidential candidates. “Trademarked by his boyishly unruly shock of brown hair, slim Jack Kennedy, 39, has looks, brains, personality, an attractive wife (who is expecting her first baby in October),” the magazine enthused. Kennedy’s war record, as well as his “vote-getting ability in a pivotal state” and his “reputation as an able, independent-thinking, middle-of-the-road member of both the House…and the Senate,” made him a top contender. On the debit side were Kennedy’s Catholicism and his decision earlier in the year to side with the Eisenhower administration over his party in voting against full subsidization of American farmers by the federal government. Overall, the article said, Kennedy looked better positioned than ostensible front-runner Kefauver, who, with his overbearing approach, had “made too many enemies along the campaign trail.”13

Not least, Kennedy seemed well positioned on a matter that threatened to cleave the party in two: civil rights. Over the prior two years, the insurgency against segregation had grown in intensity as activists demanded that African Americans have full access to the nation’s institutions and prosperity. In 1954, a series of landmark cases testing segregation had culminated in the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which outlawed segregation in public schools. The following year, the court demanded that local school boards move “with all deliberate speed” to implement the decision. In August 1955, the gruesome killing in Mississippi of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till (for the alleged “crime” of whistling at a white woman) further galvanized the movement. And in December, black seamstress and NAACP activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks’s act of defiance prompted a yearlong bus boycott in Montgomery organized by a new Baptist minister in town, the twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.14

In his first nine years on Capitol Hill, Jack Kennedy had been a steadfast advocate on civil rights, with a blemish-free voting record. Now, however, in his tenth year, he subtly repositioned himself, hoping thereby to strengthen his vice presidential prospects. The Democrats were badly split between southern segregationists—who controlled key committees in both houses—and a group of liberal crusaders, centered in the Senate, who were determined to bring meaningful reform.15 Stevenson, philosophically and intellectually in accord with the reformers but fearful of the electoral consequences of aligning with them, tried to finesse the issue, saying as little as he could about the Brown decision while hoping the party’s platform committee could conjure up some kind of artful compromise. He also saw the need for a running mate who could appeal to both wings of the party, who would be tolerable to segregationists as well as to northern liberals.

Kennedy aimed to be that man. In the space of a few short weeks in the late spring and early summer, he attempted a delicate remolding of his political image, shifting to the right to make himself more palatable to the South while at the same time keeping on good terms with northerners, whose views on racial equality he shared. He cast himself as a civil rights gradualist who fully supported black betterment but thought that desegregation should occur step by step and with the voluntary acquiescence of southern municipalities. In effect, Kennedy followed the vague position of the Supreme Court in its “all deliberate speed” formulation—desegregation must occur, but the pace was open to discussion and compromise. This straddling didn’t exactly endear him to many southern Democrats, but it nonetheless left him better positioned than the Tennessean Kefauver to win their support. Kefauver, in their eyes, had committed an act of betrayal by refusing to sign the “Southern Manifesto,” a condemnation of the Brown decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power,” signed by one hundred U.S. senators and representatives (ninety-six of them Democrats).16

On CBS’s Face the Nation in early July, panelists grilled Kennedy on his stance and pushed him to indicate what Congress’s role in desegregating schools ought to be. He bobbed and weaved, avoiding unambiguous statements, but left little doubt that it should be up to the courts, not lawmakers, to determine the pace of desegregation. Asked near the end of the program if the Democratic Party platform should endorse Brown, Kennedy constructed an adroit way of saying no: “Now it may be politically desirable, some people may feel, to reemphasize it. In my opinion, it is unnecessary because I accept it.”17