Stevenson himself was effusive: “I had hoped to see you before you left Chicago, and left, may I say, a much bigger man than you arrived! If there was a hero, it was you, and if there has been a new gallantry on our horizon in recent years, it is yourself. I say with confidence that you couldn’t have been half as disappointed about the Vice Presidency as my children were, and I know that they reflect the view of many.”41

Kennedy would come to accept the view that the outcome in Chicago had served his purposes, but only later; in the initial hours after the tense battle in Chicago, he was morose. He had suffered his first major political reversal, and it stung. Back in his hotel suite, he grumbled to Jackie, Bobby, Eunice, and a few aides and friends about how close he had come and about friends who’d let him down. With cutting sarcasm he dictated an imaginary wire to fellow Catholic David Lawrence, Pittsburgh’s mayor, who had earlier invited him to that city but also had urged Stevenson not to choose a Catholic for the second spot.42

“What impressed me was that Jack really showed more emotion than I’d really seen him display up to that point,” George Smathers recalled of the scene, “and Jackie even shed some tears. I was just shocked that Jackie had taken it so seriously, felt so deeply about it. After all, the whole thing was only a twelve-hour operation.” Yet what Smathers had long considered Kennedy’s even-keeled nature soon reasserted itself: “He stood up on the corner of the bed and I kept wondering if he was going to fall and hurt himself. But he told everybody, ‘Look, it’s all over. We did great considering what time we had. I want to thank everybody.’ And then he made some joke about my speech being cut off. But I knew he was hurt, deeply hurt. The thing is, he came so close. These Kennedys, once they’re in something, they don’t like to lose. But it was great the way he could joke about it.”43

Robert Kennedy, who always felt things more deeply than did his older brother, took longer to cool down. “I sat right next to Bobby Kennedy [on the flight back to Boston],” said one delegate, “and he was bitter. He said they should have won and somebody had pulled something fishy and he wanted to know who did it.”44 Others wondered as well, then and afterwards, about the sudden shift to Kefauver just when Kennedy seemed to have the battle won, and whether shenanigans were involved.^* Bobby also groused that if a large electronic tote board at the back of the hall had not been dismantled the night before, after Stevenson’s nomination (no one thought it would be needed anymore), delegates would have seen how close Jack was to victory on the second ballot and put him over the top.

VI

Exhausted from a mostly sleepless week in Chicago, his back pain unrelenting, Jack Kennedy returned to New England with Jackie. But he didn’t stay: to her intense disappointment, he departed in short order for the South of France. Jackie was herself feeling spent after the hectic convention, and moreover she was eight months pregnant; she thought they should recuperate together, in anticipation of the coming baby. But Jack would not be deterred. Still smarting from his defeat, he reasoned that he could take his long-planned trip and still be back in time for the baby’s birth. Jackie, rather than be by herself in his absence, opted to stay with her mother and stepfather at Hammersmith Farm.

Jack flew first to Paris and thence to the Riviera to see his father. “Jack arrived here very tired but I think very happy because he came out of the convention so much better than anyone could have hoped,” the elder Kennedy wrote singer Morton Downey, a longtime friend and Cape Cod neighbor, on August 24. “As far as I am concerned, you know how I feel—if you’re going to get licked, get licked trying for the best, not the second best. His time is surely coming!”45 Father and son spent several days together, plotting—we can imagine—the next steps in Jack’s political career, after which the son left for a weeklong sailing trip with the ubiquitous—and equally married—Torby Macdonald. Teddy Kennedy, now twenty-four, joined them as well. Details are sketchy, but a subsequent newspaper report suggested several bikini-clad young women were aboard.46

On August 23, a few days after arriving at her mother’s Newport home, Jackie experienced severe cramps. She began to hemorrhage. Rushed to the Newport Hospital, she underwent an emergency cesarean. The baby was stillborn. Upon hearing of the emergency, Robert Kennedy went immediately to be with her, reaching her hospital bedside even before she had come to from her anesthetic. He made arrangements for the funeral of the baby, a girl the couple had intended to call Arabella. Bobby advised his parents not to tell Jack about what had occurred, on the theory that he would fly back immediately and find his wife so upset and angry at his absence that strains between them would become more severe. So Jack was initially told that Jackie felt poorly, with no mention of the stillbirth.47

Just how he responded when he was told this has never been made clear. The evidence is fragmentary. Some accounts claim that he packed his bags and made arrangements to return home as soon as possible; others say he hesitated, thinking he might continue his sail for a few more days.48 According to the latter version, it was only when George Smathers (also in the South of France but not on the boating trip) reached him by phone and stressed the seriousness of the situation that he reconsidered. “If you want to run for president, you’d better get your ass back to your wife’s bedside or every wife in the country will be against you,” Smathers allegedly lectured him.49 Whichever account is correct, the senator flew home, having learned of the stillbirth prior to departure. His anxiety deepened. Upon landing at Boston’s Logan Airport, he snapped at a reporter who dared ask him an election-related question, then immediately boarded a private plane to Newport, where he asked his driver, “Can you get me to Newport Hospital in ten minutes?” Only by violating traffic laws, came the answer. “He was nervous,” the driver said later, “and if the light would be yellow, he’d say, ‘Go through it. I’ll pay for all the tickets.’ ”50

Jack stayed by Jackie’s side for two weeks. She was incensed by his obtuse neglect of her needs in favor of his own, and the strains in the marriage were evident to friends who visited, such as Lem Billings. After the stillbirth, “Jackie worried about whether she’d be able to have a baby,” Billings told author Doris Kearns Goodwin, “and she blamed her problem on the crazy pace of politics and the constant demands to participate in the endless activities of the Kennedy family. The only answer, she decided, was to separate herself even more from the rest of the family, insisting even in the summer months that she and Jack have dinner by themselves instead of gathering at Joe Senior’s house as everyone else in the family did.” Of course, such action would not necessarily do anything to change Jack’s behavior, as Jackie surely understood. She had long since come to the grim realization that, however different his worldview was from his father’s, however different his politics, when it came to marital relations he was Joseph Kennedy’s true heir.51

In September, with Jackie recovering at home, Kennedy took to the road to campaign for Stevenson, hitting twenty-six states and making 140 public appearances. Only the candidate and his running mate campaigned harder. To the Stevenson team’s frustration, Kennedy insisted on setting his own itinerary, one that was national in scope rather than focused on the Northeast, as the campaign wanted. “Jack had his own invitations to speak around the country,” a Stevenson aide remembered. “He pretty much ran his own campaign. There was a lot of mumbling about that.”52 But when Kennedy subsequently offered to cancel a series of engagements in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Cleveland in order to concentrate on getting the vote out in Massachusetts, Stevenson himself demurred, telling aides it was important to have Kennedy speak before the party’s annual fundraising dinner in Philadelphia in late October. (The number of attendees was expected to top four thousand, which would make it the largest dinner ever held in the city.)53

Kennedy’s speeches extolled Stevenson and urged audiences to turn out in force for the Democratic ticket in November. But he also delved into policy issues, sometimes in unexpected ways, as he went beyond simple Cold War shibboleths. In Los Angeles, for example, he suggested that Americans’ fixation on Communism and the East-West struggle had caused them to lose sight of the “Asian-African revolution of nationalism” and the unshakable will of human beings everywhere to control their own destiny, free of colonial control. “In my opinion, the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today—and it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-Communism.”54

Everywhere the response to Kennedy was overwhelming, with often glowing local press coverage. (He drew much bigger crowds than Kefauver.) In Louisville on October 4, Kennedy caused a near riot after a speech at Ursuline College when the coeds surged forward as he tried to make his way to a waiting automobile. “We love you on TV!” the women screamed. “You’re better than Elvis Presley!” In San Francisco, a crowd of six hundred gave him repeated standing ovations. So it went, at stop after stop, Kennedy’s energy never flagging. Even bad weather didn’t faze him. After an event in Idaho, as a terrible storm fast approached, Kennedy learned that an overflow crowd awaited him in Reno. He refused to cancel, and found an intrepid pilot willing to take him and Ted Sorensen in a tiny single-engine aircraft. The trio took off in brutal conditions. The flight proved so harrowing that the pilot had to make five passes before he put the landing wheels on concrete, but the assembled audience got their speaker.55 All the while, hundreds of speaking invitations flooded Kennedy’s Senate office on a weekly basis, along with letters from all over the country—some in response to his Chicago performance, others to the baby’s death. “People wrote of how they cried and how their children cried and how they prayed for him,” Evelyn Lincoln remembered.56

Robert Kennedy, for his part, accepted Stevenson’s invitation to join the campaign. In Stevenson’s eyes, it would show Catholics and conservative Democrats that their views were represented at the upper level, while to Bobby it was a glorious chance to see how a presidential campaign should—or should not—be run. Schlesinger recalled seeing the young Kennedy always scribbling notes, sometimes in the rear of the plane or bus, sometimes sitting on a railroad track while Stevenson spoke from the back of a train. “Occasionally he revealed himself, but in a rather solitary way.”57 Always, he was watching, learning. Bobby was impressed by Stevenson’s sense of humor and his “sparkle” in small groups in which the discussion centered on things that interested him. But overall he thought the candidate and the campaign operation a disaster. Stevenson spent too much time polishing his speeches in private and too little time cultivating politicians. He dithered endlessly over details, taking hours to discuss tactical questions that should have been handled in minutes, while ignoring vital strategic matters—how to win the Midwest, how to secure favorable press coverage, how to maximize voter turnout on Election Day. Too often he failed to connect with his audience, in part because of his habit of reading specially prepared texts instead of speaking extemporaneously—even on brief whistle-stops. This gave the impression of insincerity, Bobby believed, a deadly attribute in a candidate. Most egregious of all, he thought, Stevenson utterly missed the new and game-changing impact of television.

“People around Stevenson lost confidence in him,” Bobby later wrote. “There was no sort of enthusiasm about Stevenson personally. In fact, to the contrary, many of the people around him were openly critical, which amazed me.” In an interview, Bobby recalled, “I came out of our first conversation with a very high opinion of him….Then I spent six weeks with him on the campaign and he destroyed it all.” Others, too, noticed the problems, noticed how the candidate seemed less engaged than the last time around, his speeches less humorous and eloquent, his energy level a notch lower. The crowds still showed up at events, but there was a dutiful quality to their applause and their cheering. The candidate, torn between his need to hit the Republicans hard and his desire to project a more high-minded, noble image, too often landed in the muddled middle, stepping on his applause lines and articulating his strongest lines without conviction.58

Nor was Stevenson helped by developments beyond his control, and beyond America’s shores. In October, tensions flared in Hungary, where a new revolutionary government, urged on by student protesters, announced the nation’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-led military alliance formed with Eastern European countries the year before. Soviet leaders rejected the action and, in early November, sent troops and tanks into Budapest and other locales, where they battled students and workers and ultimately put down the revolution. In Egypt, meanwhile, war erupted on October 29 when Israeli forces invaded the Sinai Peninsula, under a secret plan worked out with Britain and France. The operation was a reaction to Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s move, some months before, to nationalize the Suez Canal. As Israeli forces advanced, drawing closer to the canal, France and Britain, under the pretext of protecting the canal from the two belligerents, dispatched their own troops. American voters, preparing to go to the polls, wondered if their own leaders would feel compelled to join the fray, perhaps sparking a wider conflagration if the Soviets intervened as well.59

For a brief moment, Stevenson thought the twin global crises could play to his advantage. He’d always prided himself on his knowledge of foreign affairs and had been itching to refocus his speeches accordingly. (A few weeks before, the campaign had even made a five-minute film featuring him and Jack Kennedy conversing about the pressing issues of peace and security.60) Here was his eleventh-hour chance. Hardly had he cleared his throat, however, before it became obvious that voters were not inclined to take chances on a new commander in chief in the midst of international turmoil, especially when the incumbent was a military hero and the former supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe. Stevenson’s claim that the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket could not be trusted to maintain America’s alliance relationships or preserve its global credibility moved no one who was not already in the Democrat’s corner.61

On Election Day, Stevenson and Kefauver were trounced by a margin of ten million votes, double Eisenhower’s margin of four years before. The Democrat won only seven states—none in the North and only one (Missouri) outside of the old Confederacy. Among those who quietly cast a ballot for the incumbent: Robert F. Kennedy.62

VII

In later years, much speculation would swirl around the question of when John F. Kennedy made the decision—made his choice to seek the big prize four years later. No precise date can be given. Maybe he was inching toward it already in Chicago, in that electric moment on August 17 when he conceded to Kefauver. (“In this moment of triumphant defeat,” James MacGregor Burns would write, “his campaign for the presidency was born.”63) No doubt he and his father discussed the prospect at length in the South of France later that month. In early September, Sargent Shriver informed Evelyn Lincoln that Senator Kennedy had asked him to compile “a complete list of all the delegates and alternate delegates to the Democratic National Convention together with their home addresses,” the theory being that many of the 1956 delegates would also be delegates the next time around. In late September, Kennedy told aides Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers that he’d “learned that you don’t get far in politics until you become a total politician. That means you’ve got to deal with the party leaders as well as the voters. From now on, I’m going to be a total politician.” Barnstorming the country on Stevenson’s behalf—but not on his itinerary—suggested something as well, as did dispatching Bobby to observe the candidate’s operation up close and take detailed notes on what he found.64

Immediately following the convention, during a long sail off the Cape, Kennedy revealingly contrasted himself with his party’s standard-bearer: “The hell of it is, I love [the campaigning]. Not the fakery, but learning to talk to voters in their own language. Stevenson hates it. He’s dying to be President, but he hates campaigning. That’s the difference between us, and it’s important.”65

Two days after the election, Kennedy offered a further clue to his plans in humor-filled remarks before the Tavern Club, a venerable hangout for Boston Brahmins that had mostly barred Irish Catholics for years but would make him a member the following year. Poking gentle fun at his blue-blooded audience, Kennedy noted, “This is my first major speech in many months that has not begun with those stirring words, ‘Fellow Democrats.’ Those words would not only be inappropriate on this non-partisan occasion, they would also—I gather from looking around me—be as grossly inaccurate as any salutation could possibly be.” Still, the senator went on, despite any partisan differences, he would, “like a tourist returned from a visit to Europe or Yellowstone Park who insists on showing his slides,” offer the room his thoughts on the recent election. For, after all, “some of you may someday have the ill luck to participate in a national political campaign to the same extent that I did in this one. Indeed, there is always the danger that I may participate in another one myself.”66

The climactic moment, one that would live forever in Kennedy family lore, came at Thanksgiving in Hyannis Port, after Jack and Jackie returned from a brief holiday in the Caribbean. On the Cape, the autumn light glittered in the quiet stillness. The Kennedy clan walked along the beach, accompanied only by the gulls circling overhead, then returned home for their traditional holiday feast. Following the clearing of the dishes, the senator and his father moved to the little study off the living room to talk about the future. Jack went first, laying out all the reasons why he shouldn’t run: he was Catholic, he had yet to turn forty, he didn’t have the support of the party leadership, he should bide his time. Joe listened intently, then calmly countered each claim. Back and forth they went as the dusk fell outside, each one respecting the other, each one holding his ground, until finally the younger man began to give way. The father offered his summation: “Just remember, this country is not a private preserve for Protestants. There’s a whole new generation out there and it’s filled with the sons and daughters of immigrants from all over the world and those people are going to be mighty proud that one of their own is running for President. And that pride will be your spur, it will give your campaign an intensity we’ve never seen in public life.”

The son fell quiet, then looked up and smiled. “Well, Dad, I guess there’s only one question left. When do we start?”67