It was true: Stevenson had not decided on a running mate. Prone to indecision at the best of times, he felt conflicted about the top three contenders. Kefauver, the consensus front-runner, had delegate strength and good organization and arguably deserved the nod, having won primaries in the spring. He had also gained national recognition for his chairmanship of a Senate committee whose hearings on organized crime attracted broad television coverage. But Stevenson disliked Kefauver, who had a reputation for heavy drinking and chronic extramarital dalliances, and he knew that many of Kefauver’s Senate colleagues found him coarse and conniving, and too loquacious by half. Hubert Humphrey, a skilled orator and policy wonk with whom Stevenson had gotten on well in the past, represented the farm vote in the Midwest, which the ticket would need in the fall; he had arrived in Chicago expecting, on the basis of a conversation with Stevenson a few weeks prior, to get the nod.24 But both Kefauver and Humphrey were suspect among southerners for their progressive stances on civil rights. Jack Kennedy, for his part, was a proven vote-getter with a heroic war record and abundant charm, a man who represented an important region of the country and had a reputation for centrism on policy issues. But there were the questions about his health, his youth, and his Catholicism. Trailing behind these three men in Stevenson’s calculation were the other contenders: Johnson, Gore, Harriman, and Wagner.

That evening Ted Sorensen, still waiting for confirmation that Kennedy would give the nominating speech the following day, went over the draft Stevenson’s aides had produced. He thought it terrible—“a wordy, corny, lackluster committee product,” he subsequently said. He ran into Schlesinger, who would only say that the previous draft was worse. At one thirty in the morning, with the platform fight at last over and Kennedy authorized to give the speech, the senator and Sorensen met to discuss how to proceed. Kennedy would take the podium less than twelve hours later, at noon on August 16. He shared his aide’s low opinion of the draft and told him, “We’ll have to start over.” Kennedy dictated the opening sentences and outlined the broad points, and instructed Sorensen to have a draft ready by eight o’clock in the morning. Sorensen worked through the night, then had a secretary type up the new version, jumped in a car, and took the draft over to Kennedy’s hotel room. The senator “looked it over, rewrote some of it, cut out some things and added a few paragraphs, and by then it was so chopped up that we had to have it retyped because the TelePrompTer people were screaming for it. We gave them one copy and sent another copy to be mimeographed for the press.”25

En route to the Amphitheatre, as his taxi sped down Michigan Avenue, Jack saw to his horror that parts of the typescript were illegible. He let loose a string of profanities—he was due on the stage in half an hour. In that instant he spotted a familiar face trying to hail a taxi: Tom Winship, a reporter from the Boston Globe. Kennedy told his driver to stop and pick up the reporter, who promptly agreed to help. After reaching the convention hall, Winship raced to the pressroom and typed two clear pages. The senator got the refreshed copy to the teleprompter with minutes to spare. As it happened, the teleprompter failed and Jack had to read from his notes, but the speech, while faulted by The New York Times for relying on a “cliché dictionary,” was a hit with the delegates, especially a bit that slammed the GOP ticket of Eisenhower and Nixon as having one candidate who took the high road while the other traveled the low road. Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley came away deeply impressed, by both the content and the delivery: the young man from Massachusetts was a must for the ticket, he determined.26

Kennedy’s stirring performance increased the buzz on the convention floor about his chances for the slot. Perhaps it also increased the buzz in Stevenson’s head, for the candidate now shocked the political world by announcing, at 11:00 P.M., that he would throw the vice presidential nomination open to selection by the delegates, with the balloting to occur the following day, barely twelve hours later. Unbeknownst to all but a few insiders, he had in fact been chewing on this idea for some months—an open selection process, he reasoned, would be seen by the party activists and the public as an exciting, democratic move and an effective way to contrast his party’s meeting with the Republican convention, slated for San Francisco the following week and likely to be tightly controlled. But Stevenson also went this route because he was torn, especially about Kefauver versus Kennedy: if he named Kefauver in place of Kennedy, he opened himself up to accusations of being anti-Catholic, a charge he could hardly afford in the coming campaign; but if he selected Kennedy, he risked alienating Kefauver’s sizable number of delegates. Stevenson fully expected Kefauver to prevail in the open contest—his forces were better organized than were Kennedy’s or Humphrey’s—giving him the running mate he probably would have felt compelled to select anyway.

In an instant, the convention became a hive of frantic late-night activity as the contenders and their teams sprang into action. “No delegate could buy his own drink and no elderly lady could cross a Chicago street without help from an eager vice-presidential candidate,” Time pithily reported.27 Humphrey operatives were seen entering lakefront bars at 2:30 A.M. in search of delegates; Kefauver held a press conference at 4 A.M. The Kennedy operation, unprepared for this eventuality (notwithstanding fleeting back-channel rumors over the previous few days), had to decide how—and if—to respond. The senator, still ambivalent about the desirability of being on the ticket in the fall, chose quickly: he was in. His competitive spirit would not let him back away. “Call Dad and tell him I’m going for it,” he instructed his brother Robert, then wisely left the room. The Ambassador, reached in Cap d’Antibes, was livid upon hearing the news, his blue language easily audible to the aides around Bobby. “Jack’s a total fucking idiot, and you’re worse!” he roared. A golden political career was being risked, and for nothing. The connection broke while he was in mid-rant, and Bobby thought the better of trying to call back. “Whew!” he said as he hung up, a wan smile on his face. “Is he mad!”28

Working through the night and the next morning, the Kennedy forces tried by any means available to drum up support for their man. They found a printer who would toil until dawn producing banners, placards, and leaflets. Jack, always his own best campaigner, met with state leaders and visited several state caucuses. His siblings Robert and Eunice paid calls on other delegations, as did John Bailey. Jack also got his brother-in-law Peter Lawford out of bed to try to secure the Nevada delegation. Inevitably, the team’s lack of preparation showed. Powerful New York bosses Carmine DeSapio and Charlie Buckley, who controlled a fat heap of ninety-eight votes, were kept waiting in one of the Kennedy hotel rooms for half an hour without anyone knowing who they were. (When the candidate at last appeared, the two men told him they were pledged to Robert Wagner on the first ballot but might well switch to him on the second.) And when Kenny O’Donnell and Bobby Kennedy buttonholed Senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas to ask if he could help swing his state’s delegation to their man, he gave them a powerful lesson—one they would never forget—in how politics at this level worked. It was not to him but to the governor, Orval Faubus, that they should be speaking, McClellan said, for governors always called the shots and controlled the delegates. Senators mattered far less.

“In the future,” McClellan admonished them, “if one was interested in delegations and their votes, they better find out who has the power in the delegation and stop reading the newspapers. You can’t just arrive at the convention and expect people to switch sides because your fella is so wonderful. You gotta do your homework, talk to the governors, the state reps, the party leaders, these people have been sized up, lined up, and courted for months. Just because you know a few high-profile, important fellas, a few senators or judges is not going to change things. Next time you gotta have this all done before you step off the train.”29

And so it went, hour upon exhausting hour. Associated Press correspondent Jack Bell recalled, “At 5:00 A.M., I came across Kefauver doing a television recording in a corridor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Kennedy, rushing to another meeting, tripped over the power wires and almost fell into his rival.” Sorensen, reflecting on the night, noted the total lack of sleep—and the frenzied confusion: “It was hectic, not very well organized, too many people packed into my bedroom who were just like me—green, completely green. I couldn’t have been greener. I didn’t talk to many people because I didn’t know too many people.” The candidate himself remembered the chaotic scene: “Everybody was running around. My sister Eunice worked on Delaware. I had breakfast with some of the California delegation. I went to a lot of caucuses. I got nothing from Ohio, of course, but I did talk to them. We got Virginia because Governor [John S.] Battle’s son was in the Navy with me. And we got Louisiana because their delegation sat right next to ours and they had a lot of bright young fellows with whom we got real friendly.”30

Bit by bit, Kennedy racked up support. He proved especially effective with southern delegates, many of whom viewed Kefauver as a turncoat on racial matters and liked what they saw as Kennedy’s centrism on civil rights and his stated concern about foreign textile competition. His war experience spoke to them as well, as did his dignified and youthful bearing.

Still, as the nominations closed and the balloting opened, no one knew how things would go. Kennedy had New England as well as Virginia, Louisiana, and Georgia, and on a second ballot he could count on New York and, it was hoped, Illinois. But that left a huge swath of the country still open, and he was weak in the West. Some high-placed Catholic party leaders continued to insist that the country was not yet ready for a Catholic on the ticket, and many northern liberals, suspicious of Kennedy for his failure to cast a censure vote against Joe McCarthy as well as his criticism of Truman for the “loss of China” in 1949, stuck with Humphrey or Kefauver or Wagner. The nominating and seconding speeches for Kennedy were neither a hindrance nor much of a help—Connecticut governor Abraham Ribicoff gave a ringing, largely off-the-cuff nominating speech (privately, he noted the irony of a Jew pushing a Catholic for the ticket), while Florida senator and Kennedy pal George Smathers and House Majority Leader John McCormack (the latter, in Sorensen’s words, “literally propelled toward the platform at the last minute by Bob Kennedy”) delivered hasty seconding speeches that failed to leave much of an impression.31