The Making of the President 1960

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

WAITING

IT WAS invisible, as always.

They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, as they always do, seven and a half hours before the candidate rose. His men had canvassed Hart’s Location in New Hampshire days before, sending his autographed picture to each of the twelve registered voters in the village. They knew that they had five votes certain there, that Nixon had five votes certain—and that two were still undecided. Yet it was worth the effort, for Hart’s Location’s results would be the first flash of news on the wires to greet millions of voters as they opened their morning papers over coffee. But from there on it was unpredictable—invisible.

By the time the candidate left his Boston hotel at 8:30, several million had already voted across the country—in schools, libraries, churches, stores, post offices. These, too, were invisible, but it was certain that at this hour the vote was overwhelmingly Republican. On election day America is Republican until five or six in the evening. It is in the last few hours of the day that working people and their families vote, on their way home from work or after supper; it is then, at evening, that America goes Democratic if it goes Democratic at all. All of this is invisible, for it is the essence of the act that as it happens it is a mystery in which millions of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together, none of them knowing the shape of the whole.

What results from the fitting together of these secrets is, of course, the most awesome transfer of power in the world—the power to marshal and mobilize, the power to send men to kill or be killed, the power to tax and destroy, the power to create and the responsibility to do so, the power to guide and the responsibility to heal—all committed into the hands of one man. Heroes and philosophers, brave men and vile, have since Rome and Athens tried to make this particular manner of transfer of power work effectively; no people has succeeded at it better, or over a longer period of time, than the Americans. Yet as the transfer of this power takes place, there is nothing to be seen except an occasional line outside a church or school, or a file of people fidgeting in the rain, waiting to enter the booths. No bands play on election day, no troops march, no guns are readied, no conspirators gather in secret headquarters. The noise and the blare, the bands and the screaming, the pageantry and oratory of the long fall campaign, fade on election day. All the planning is over, all effort spent. Now the candidates must wait.

The candidate drove from his hotel at the head of his cavalcade to the old abandoned West End branch of the Boston Public Library. Here in these reading rooms, the countless immigrants and their children of Boston’s West End for two generations had, until a year ago, first set their feet on the ladder that was to take them up and out of the slums. Now, deserted and desolate, the empty library was the balloting place of the Third Precinct, Sixth Ward, and here at 8:43 he voted, signing the register as John F. Kennedy of 122 Bowdoin Street, Boston.

He was tense, it seemed, as he voted, thronged and jostled by the same adhesive train of reporters who had followed him, thronging and jostling, for three months across the country; only now his wife was with him in the press, and he was uncomfortable at how the pushing might affect her, she being eight months pregnant. He let himself be photographed as he came from the booth, and then the last cavalcade began, in familiar campaign order—photographers’ car first, candidate’s car second (the top of the convertible shut, for he did not want his wife to catch cold), security car next, three press buses following. It moved swiftly out of the West End, down through the grimy blight of Scollay Square, under the tunnel to East Boston and the airport. This had been his first political conquest—the Eleventh Congressional District of Massachusetts, immigrants’ land, full of Irish, Italians, Jews, some Negroes, few Yankees.

For a full year of journeys he had bounded up the steps of this same airplane in a grace act that had become familiar to all his trailing entourage—a last handshake to dignitaries, an abrupt turning away and quickstep run up the stairs, a last easy fling of the hand in farewell to the crowd cheering his departure, and then into the cozy homelike Mother Ship and security.

This morning he walked up the stairs slowly, a dark-blue mohair overcoat over his gray suit, bareheaded, slightly stooped. He was very tired. He paused at the top of the stairs and, still stooped, turned away. Then he slowly turned back to the door but made no gesture. Then he disappeared. He was off to Hyannisport: a quick flight of twenty-five minutes; no disturbance; the plane full of messages of congratulation; the welcoming group at the Cape shrunk to a few score—and no more speeches to make.

As he arrived at Hyannisport, accompanied by more than a hundred correspondents and more than eighty staff members from the other planes, the tension broke ridiculously for a moment. Many of this group had followed him now for some 44,000 miles of campaigning since Labor Day, and one of the reporters, strained, caught him, insisting she was being prevented from observing him closely, deprived of her proper rotation in the pool choice of reporters who are closest to him. Gravely, and because he was fond of her and knew her to be devoted to him, and because, moreover, this is a man who never forgets either friend or enemy, he turned and said, You and I will never be apart, Mary. And yet he knew, and everyone knew, that if his hope, which she shared, came true, he would be apart, unreachably, from these people who had been his friends.

A honking cavalcade of local politicians had gathered to lead him through the town. But he could not face one more campaign trip and, turning to a car driven by his cousin, Anne Gargan, he asked her to drive him to his family’s summer cottages, already surrounded and barricaded by police. On the way orders were given to the police escort to separate the huge press train from his own car as he drove home. It was the first time anyone could remember that he had sought such isolation this year.

When he came again to greet the press and people, he would be the next President, close to no one. Or else he would be an also-ran, a footnote in the history books. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

Hyannisport sparkled in the sun that day, as did all New England. Hyannisport is the name of a hundred-odd cottages and summer homes that sprawl along the edges of Nantucket Sound just west and adjacent to the village of Hyannis (population not quite 6,000), which is part of Barnstable Township, county seat of Barnstable County, and summer center of the most fashionable area of Cape Cod’s summer season. The houses are large and roomy, clapboard and shingle, white and brown, separated from one another across well-tended lawns by hedges or New England stone walls. Hyannisport was molded in the best and simplest of the old New England manner, its homes less ostentatious and snugger in style than the summer homes of the Long Island Hamptons that catch the overflow of New York’s wealthy. For generations the good families of Boston had built these homes for solid comfort; the Kennedys, thirty-two years ago, were the first of the Irish to invade its quiet. A large compound encloses a number of homes at the end of Scudder Avenue where it reaches to the water; there Joseph P. Kennedy had bought a seventeen-room house to shelter his amazing brood of children. As the years passed, his son Jack had bought another house within the same compound, a few hundred feet away; and a few years later another son, Bobby, had acquired a third. Together the three houses form a triangle on a smooth green lawn that runs off into the dune grass before plunging to the sands of the beach. (Today the father’s home flew the American flag at full mast.)

The local community had never been too happy about the Kennedys, aliens and intruders, and though some, particularly those who lived close, had become friends, most of the neighbors had been upset during the summer of 1960 when, after the nomination, the horde of newspapermen, staff, and curiosity-driven sight-seers that always surrounds a candidate boiled up in their quiet streets. The Civic Committee had met informally to control this development after the Los Angeles Convention; indeed, they suggested to the police that Hyannisport be totally sealed off from the public; the police had said that was impossible. Some members threatened to hold a protest meeting. To appease their resentment, Jacqueline Kennedy had begun the construction of a wooden palisade on Irving Avenue, where her front door is exactly thirteen feet from the road. But when her husband returned from the nomination, he ordered that the building of the palisade be stopped. He would do anything he could to cooperate with the Committee short of leaving Hyannisport; but this had been his home; he had spent his boyhood summers there; he planned to keep it as his home. So only a half-finished wooden palisade, a white-picket fence and a dozen local policemen separated the three cottages from the cars that carried the gawkers and peerers. The police were polite, efficient and cooperative; Barnstable Township was doing its best—even though that day it was voting Nixon over Kennedy by 4,515 to 2,783.

Now in November, the New England hardwoods—oak, elm and maple—had given up their color with their leaves, and the scrub pine of the Cape were beginning to show branch tips wind-burned and hurricane-scorched to a rust brown. A slight offshore breeze blew off the surfless waters; the dune grass and the feather-gray tufts of beach rushes bent gently to the breeze. A single gull wheeled over the house and the beach most of the morning, dipping toward the water when a glint suggested food. The sky was pure, the weather still a comfortable few degrees above freezing; the scudding white clouds were to break up by evening as the breeze freshened.

The weather was clear all across Massachusetts and New England, perfect for voting as far as the crest of the Alleghenies. But from Michigan through Illinois and the Northern Plains states it was cloudy: rain in Detroit and Chicago, light snow falling in some states on the approaches of the Rockies. The South was enjoying magnificently balmy weather which ran north as far as the Ohio River; so, too, was the entire Pacific Coast. The weather and the year’s efforts were to call out the greatest free vote in the history of this or any other country—68,832,818 in all, 11 per cent more than was called out in 1956.

But there was nothing to do about it now. The people were already voting, their myriad impulses, intuitions, educations, heritages, fears and hopes creating the answer at the moment.

And so the candidate was restless.

He breakfasted at his father’s house (across the lawn from his own), where nine of the Kennedy clan had already gathered at the board: he and his wife; his father and mother; brother Robert and sister-in-law Ethel; brother Edward and sister-in-law Joan; and brother-in-law Peter Lawford. In the next few hours of the morning all the rest were to arrive—sister Eunice Shriver and brother-in-law Sargent Shriver; sister Pat Lawford; sister Jean and brother-in-law Stephen Smith.

The candidate finished quickly, and trying to find a place where he might be alone to unwind, he went back to his own cottage and sat briefly on the porch in the sun, huddled under his overcoat against the chill, exhausted from the months that had passed. An aide approached him and chatted—they talked about D-Day; and the aide remembers his talking about the quality of waiting on that longest day, and Rommel. A newspaper plane flicked down over the house as they talked, slipping within 200 feet of the porch to get his photograph—if he were President-elect tomorrow, no plane would be allowed within thousands of feet of him. Some of his neighbors sent through the guards a horseshoe of red roses ten feet high for luck; it was passed on to him without inspection—no such gift would reach his hands again if he were elected, unless the Secret Service unwired and searched it for explosives. He remembered something he had forgotten, and sent a messenger to the plane to fetch it. It was an enormous sack of toys he was bringing back from his year-long journeyings for Caroline, his three-year-old daughter; the teddy bear, wrapped in a cellophane sack, was almost as big as Caroline herself. The returning messenger remembers the warm aroma of Brown Betty baking in the kitchen when he arrived. Briefly his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, came across the lawn to visit; someone observed the father’s cupping grip on his son’s clenched fist, but no one caught what they said.

At noon a troop of photographers arrived to photograph him ceremonially, and he gave them, as they described it, a taut, tense ten minutes. He emerged minutes later from his cottage, leading Caroline by the hand, and found his younger brothers, Bobby and Teddy, two activists, throwing a football back and forth on the lawn. He beckoned for the football and tossed it back and forth with them for a few minutes, Caroline watching; then he disappeared again into his own house to lunch alone with his wife. He was restless still, and after lunch he came across the lawn, dressed in a heavy sweater over a sports shirt and tan slacks (of his two shoes, one was glossily polished as usual—the other scuffed and dirty), to visit the command post set up in brother Bobby’s cottage where an electronic tangle of thirty telephones, four wire-service teletype machines, and direct wires across the country had been established for the evening’s vigil. Then, at 3:30 in the afternoon, he went back to his own cottage to try to nap.

It was fifteen minutes later by Pacific Coast Time, or 3:45, when Richard Nixon went back to his hotel room in Los Angeles to try to nap, too. The returns were beginning to come in; they were unreadable for both—yet disturbing. Nothing would be clear until early evening, if then.

A mile and a half away, at Hyannis’ National Guard Armory, some 250 men and women of the local, national and international press had assembled—as had a similar group in Los Angeles, at the Ambassador Hotel—to prepare to report the reception of the night’s tidings by the possible next President.

Two advance men of the Kennedy staff had appeared in Hyannis only a week before to convert this summer resort of the Cape, now largely shuttered and closed for the winter, into one of the two election capitals upon which the world would wait for news of the next American President. They had worked not only diligently but brilliantly, for the Democratic National Committee was at this point insolvent, and the total sum that could be allowed for operations in Hyannis was $800.00. If the Democrats lost, even this was too much, adding to a hopeless deficit.

The two advance men had persuaded the Massachusetts National Guard to make available the Armory as press and communications center. A local television dealer was persuaded to contribute a dozen TV sets for use in the Armory and the Kennedy cottages. Western Union and American Telephone and Telegraph Company installed the hundred-odd special long-distance lines and fifty-odd teletypewriters; the news-gathering organizations would pay for those. The two advance men commandeered the ample housing space of the deserted summer resort and arbitrarily assigned the available rooms to the 250 correspondents expected, the eighty-plus staff personnel and their wives. The local lumber company contributed lumber; a local carpenter was persuaded it was an honor to build press-room partitions and platforms free. A local Ford dealer lent a number of new Fords, including ten Thunderbirds, for the use of the candidate’s staff. Seats and benches were contributed by the local Protestant churches (the local Catholic church, for some delicate reason, was unwilling to do so). And then, early on the morning of voting day, the antiaircraft gun on which the National Guard unit of Barnstable County trains was removed from the main Armory hall; the benches were installed; seats were assigned alphabetically to all the 250 correspondents; the monk’s cloth for the platform arrived from New York and was hung; and the news center was ready to report.

There is a traditional profile to the outline of news on election nights in America that is exciting and instructive, although it is also artificial, deceitful and imposed by the mechanics of counting. Voting in America is a simultaneous act of many citizens; by the time counting has begun, the act is over; only the sequence of tally makes it seem like a narrative drama; yet the drama, though false, is illuminating.

Returns usually start in upper New England, as the clean white hamlets of the northern hills, largely Protestant and overwhelmingly Republican, race each other to hit the news wires first and enjoy a fleeting midmorning fame as their names flash in early newspaper editions. By late afternoon returns from rural and mountain counties across the land begin to trickle in. Tennessee’s rural areas close their polls at four in the afternoon; an hour later, eastern (or mountain) Kentucky begins to close its country polls, as does rural Alabama; so do Maine precincts with fewer than 300 voters. By this time substantial returns are in from Kansas (again, heavily Republican) where this year separate tally sheets and separate ballots permitted some Kansas communities to count the vote as it proceeded throughout the day. The early news reports that late afternoon papers show as people come home from work always bear tidings of a Republican lead.

Then, between six and seven, the tide changes. At six the polls close in urban Alabama, rural Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, rural Oklahoma, South Carolina, urban Tennessee and Vermont. At 6:30 Arkansas, North Carolina and Ohio close their polls and begin to check in. And at seven comes the deluge: the Democrats from the big-city states.

A few minutes after seven the political silhouette of the industrial Northeast first becomes apparent—for Connecticut, a state that closes its polls at seven, votes on machines and counts quickly. At 7:15 the returns from Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford—Democratic-industrial bastions all—are pouring in. Fifteen minutes later the slightly slower returns are totaled from the suburban towns of Fairfield County, the bedroom of New York’s Republican executive class. Connecticut is a switch-voting state, and when Fairfield County’s gut-Republicans balance out against the gut-Democrats of the factory towns, the first real clue to the nation’s decision shows. At 7:30 on voting day of 1956, when Bridgeport repudiated Adlai E. Stevenson, it was instantly clear that this repudiation in a factory town meant that Eisenhower was to sweep the country nationwide.

By the time the news systems and the commentators on TV and radio have digested Connecticut, the other big Democratic cities of the East are beginning to flood the wires. First Philadelphia (where polls close at 7:30) then Pittsburgh, then Chicago, then, at nine o’clock, New York City. From nine o’clock, when New York closes its polls, to midnight the Democratic tide reaches its peak as the big cities of Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, swamp the vote-gathering facilities of the news networks.

Between ten and midnight the United States is politically leaderless—there is no center of information anywhere in the nation except in the New York headquarters of the great broadcasting companies and the two great wire services. No candidate and no party can afford the investment on election night to match the news-gathering resources of the mass media; and so, as every citizen sits in his home watching his TV set or listening to his radio, he is the equal of any other in knowledge. There is nothing that can be done in these hours, for no one can any longer direct the great strike for America’s power; the polls have closed. Good or bad, whatever the decision, America will accept the decision—and cut down any man who goes against it, even though for millions the decision runs contrary to their own votes. The general vote is an expression of national will, the only substitute for violence and blood. Its verdict is to be defended as one defends civilization itself.

There is nothing like this American expression of will in England or France, India or Russia or China. Only one other major nation in modern history has ever tried to elect its leader directly by mass, free, popular vote. This was the Weimar Republic of Germany, which modeled its unitary vote for national leader on American practice. Out of its experiment with the system it got Hitler. Americans have had Lincoln, Wilson, two Roosevelts. Nothing can be done when the voting returns are flooding in; the White House and its power will move to one or another of the two candidates, and all will know about it in the morning. But for these hours history stops.

If the Democrats are going to win, they must have a healthy margin of several million votes by midnight. After midnight the tide reverses itself as the farm states, the mountain states, the Pacific Coast, all begin to check in with their traditionally Republican tallies. Thus the profile that repeats itself every four years and creates the arbitrary drama of election night: the afternoon and early-evening trickle of Republican votes, the Democratic tide from the big cities between eight and midnight and then, after midnight, the Republican counterassault.

There is little that can be done by either political leadership about these tides—except for the opportunity of a grace note that television and radio have recently given them. This last grace note of the campaign hinges on Connecticut. Connecticut, which closes its polls by seven and knows its results by 7:30, has a three-hour advantage over California, whose rhythm of the day is measured by Pacific Coast Time. When it is eight in Connecticut, it is only five in the afternoon in California. If, as in 1956, the early returns from Connecticut show a Republican landslide, it makes the efforts of the Democratic poll workers in California seem hopeless, and they fade for their homes and their headquarters to nurse their wounds among friends. If, on the contrary, Connecticut shows a strong Democratic lead, it inspires the Democratic workers in California—or so the theory runs—to redouble their efforts to bring the last registrants, the laggard voters, to the polls before seven o’clock Pacific Time. The psychology of the bandwagon, of being with the victor, may affect ten, twenty or fifty thousand California votes; conversely, the psychology of emergency may, if there seems the slightest hope, rush sluggards out of their homes to vote their convictions. Both parties focus down tightly on Connecticut on election evening to transmit early results in order to influence the California vote. (The results, historically, in 1960 were open to two contradictory interpretations. California went for Nixon by 35,623 votes out of 6,507,000, or one tenth of one per cent. It was won, one may argue, because Eisenhower took to the air waves at eight o’clock Eastern Standard Time—five o’clock Pacific Time—to counteract the Connecticut influence in California; or it was close, one may argue, because the Democrats had so effectively prepared to get the results there that fast.)

This is the profile, known to all.

Thus it had been an easy and leisurely afternoon in the big Armory hall, as it slowly filled with cigarette smoke while John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon took their naps and the nation waited for the Armory in Hyannis and the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles to report what was happening. It was true that early reports showed the New England, Appalachian and Kansas villages going solidly Republican—but that was the normal trickle. On the other hand an early-morning phone call from Sid Holtzman of Chicago’s Board of Elections to a Kennedy staff member reported Holtzman’s estimate that 93 per cent of Chicago’s registered voters would vote that day—an extraordinarily heavy vote, and thus a big-city bonus for Kennedy.

At 6:25 the Kennedy control room in the family compound fed out to the Armory its first shred of hard news. Early returns from Campbell County, Kentucky, which had always voted with the winner since time out of mind, had been telephoned to the control switchboard; with half the returns in, Campbell County counted 56 per cent for Kennedy (5300 votes) to Nixon’s 44 per cent (4100 votes). In 1956, Republicans had carried Campbell County by 64 per cent to the Democrats’ 36 per cent! Did this forecast a national switch?

No one could be certain at the moment, and the news sped over the wires. (Later, when Campbell County brought in its late returns, it was Nixon by 54.2 per cent to Kennedy’s 45.8 per cent, the first time in history that Campbell County voted with the loser.)

Quickly after this news came a second item, at 6:30: the Kennedy control room had received the returns of the first complete precinct from Cleveland: Kennedy, 158; Nixon, 121. (In 1956 the same precinct had read Eisenhower, 186, to Adlai Stevenson’s 86.) Good.

The Armory was gay now. In Hyannis, as in Los Angeles, the correspondents itched to be with the winner. Closeness to power heightens the dignity of all men. The men in the Hyannis Armory felt close now. The gaiety lasted for almost half an hour.

It stumbled over the first summary total of voting figures transmitted by the AP shortly after seven o’clock: 203,628 for Nixon and only 166,963 for Kennedy. The AP could be ignored by the clattering typewriters, for these returns were probably the usual early Republican trickle. What could not be discounted was the 7:15 flash from the Columbia Broadcasting System over TV. CBS had taken as its partner on election night the brains and resources of International Business Machines. IBM, in turn, had engaged social scientists, mathematicians, analysts, to make a computorial model of national voting habits, based on analysis of previous results in 500 key precincts across the nation. Their theory was that politics was an affair of random human particles subject, like other universes of random particles, to statistical analysis and mathematical projection. The IBM-CBS team had made what was, perhaps, the finest survey ever done of a scientifically selected sample of American communities and had coded each of its 500 key precincts on a notched red card to be fed into IBM’s 7090 Computer. Each notch in a card indicated a characteristic of the community: white collar, blue collar, rural, urban, Anglo-Saxon, Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Negro, Scandinavian. All data had been cross-slotted and cross-indexed so that the big computer might scan results in an instant, compare past data with the evening’s new reports, and come up instantly with a national projection for the evening. The computer had been fed all necessary facts and figures—but no emotions. Now, at 7:15, as the big machine digested the first cards and first results, it hummed its first prediction: odds on Nixon to win, 100 to 1! And by a margin of 459 Nixon electoral votes to Kennedy’s 78.

Gloom lasted no more than twenty minutes, for by 7:35 Connecticut had begun to feed into the TV computers the first strength of the big-city industrial tide. From Hartford, Connecticut, where Governor Abraham Ribicoff and State Boss John Bailey directed the most efficient Democratic machine of the Atlantic Coast, the first returns were now coming in from Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven—working-class towns all—and they were overwhelmingly Democratic. TV and wire services began to report Boss Bailey’s prediction that Connecticut would go for Kennedy by a margin of 100,000 votes. In 1956 Eisenhower had carried Connecticut by a margin of 306,000 Republican votes!

For a few minutes more now, the Kennedy control room competed with the national TV flow in defining the Kennedy crest. Indicator precinct from Crittenden County, Vermont—Kennedy running 50 per cent ahead of Stevenson in 1956! Indicator precinct from Ward One, Burlington, Vermont—Kennedy, 20 per cent ahead of Stevenson in 1956; Nixon, 40 per cent behind Ike’s mark there. Indicator from Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania—Kennedy, 61 per cent of the vote (Stevenson had racked up only 25 per cent in 1956); Nixon, 39 per cent (Ike had had 75 per cent).

And then the control room stopped feeding returns, for by now the TV nets and wire services were in full flow—and every report showed a Kennedy sweep. No one in the press room noticed for quite a while that the report of indicator precincts from the Kennedy control room had stopped.

By eight o’clock the IBM console at CBS had switched sides and now predicted Kennedy by 51 per cent of the popular vote. By nine o’clock it had raised this forecast to a 52-to-48 split. A few minutes after nine Chicago’s first precincts came through, staggeringly Democratic—Holtzman had been right, Chicago was going to be good. (As a matter of fact, only Chicago, Philadelphia and New York were really good for Kennedy that evening, getting out the total vote that had been expected of them; most other big cities, except Los Angeles, polled fewer voters in 1960 than in 1956, thus chipping the Democrats’ big-city margin.)

Shortly after eight, struggling to keep up morale on the West Coast against what now seemed a Democratic flood, the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, appeared on the TV screen, exhorting the workers of his party to keep fighting, reminding them of his battle record and career as a soldier, insisting they keep fighting right to the last minute. (Dwight D. Eisenhower was angry that evening, disturbed by what he felt was a certain Nixon loss, upset by Nixon’s behavior throughout the campaign, bitter against Kennedy.)

By now in the Armory the press feeding Kennedy reports to the nation was almost jubilant—they, not the reporters in Los Angeles, were with the winner. The margin for Kennedy was moving from 800,000 on the totalizers up to 1,100,000. Watching the TV sets, then again watching the platform for new announcements, reporters saw a burly man with the sour face, brown fedora and suspicious manner of a detective mount the platform. He jounced heavily to see whether it would bear the weight of the full Presidential party; all eyes observed him; one could see other plain-clothes men examining the curtains, the pennants, the drapes behind the platform, as if they concealed hidden threats. This was a good sign.

It could not be long now. By 10:30 men began arranging seats on the platform. The margin on the TV totalizers showed a 1,500,000 plurality for Kennedy, and projecting this blindly against the total vote, some guessed that Kennedy might win by a margin of 4,000,000 or 5,000,000.

On the teletypes and on the TV screen the totals mounted. Kennedy was now 1,600,000 ahead. The RCA-501 Computer of the National Broadcasting Company was now predicting 401 electoral votes for Kennedy. Simultaneously the IBM Computer of CBS was predicting a Kennedy electoral total of 311. By midnight the Kennedy margin had swept to 2,000,000 popular votes and now, with the first returns from California showing out of Los Angeles County, it seemed obvious that California was going for Kennedy, too. If Kennedy could carry Nixon’s homeland, Los Angeles County, as decisively as he appeared to be doing, then surely in the great Central Valley of California, full of Okies and gut-Democrats, where even Stevenson had outrun Eisenhower in 1956, the margin would grow and be capped by San Francisco’s traditional Democratic plurality. On the TV screen the Governor of California, Pat Brown, was quoted as guessing that California might be carried by a Kennedy margin as high as 800,000. (Unlike John Bailey, Pat Brown was wrong; he did not understand his state.)

It appeared then, in the Hyannis Armory, as the clock hovered at midnight, only a question of when Mr. Nixon would concede. At the buffet in the back of the Armory the Cokes, orange drinks and coffee were replaced by hard liquor; serious celebration was now in order. The hall stank of sweat and stale tobacco; the pecking of typewriters sagged as fingers muttered and minds groped for a new lead on a new President who would soon be here. On the platform photographers were gathering, measuring the light with their photometers, pacing off distances from the place where the new President would soon stand. The advance men of the Kennedy party slipped away to organize the motor cavalcade that would leave the Armory immediately to pick up the candidate at the Kennedy cottages and bring him back as the next President. Correspondents filled their glasses at the bar for the last time and filtered back to their assigned seats to wait for his appearance. He’s coming now, he’s coming now, ran the word. The state cops told me that the motor cavalcade is forming up outside his house already, said a local reporter. But no one came.

At the Kennedy compound the mood read otherwise.

For by midnight the shape of the election as they, who understood, read it was not as they had planned. It was not only badly shaped and perilously thin, the margin shrinking as their private analysis screened the mounting results, but shaped so that no one could tell its meaning or tell whether it reflected the past of America’s prejudices or the impulse of America’s future concerns. All that afternoon and evening the Kennedy control system had been several hours ahead of the press and television in analysis; it was still far ahead in reading the portents. So was the candidate.

The candidate had risen, still restless, from his nap at about five in the afternoon, visited the communications center in the sunroom of his brother Bobby’s home, then telephoned John Bailey in Connecticut to see whether any early clues were available. In Hartford, at the Connecticut State House, Boss Bailey gasped as he answered the phone. Turning to Abe Ribicoff, he said, It’s Himself calling, falling back on the homely Irish phrase in excitement. Himself? said Ribicoff, unfamiliar with Gaelic idiom. Who’s himself? Jack, said Bailey and, turning back to the phone, proceeded to tell the candidate all he could at that early hour of the afternoon: that the high-school straw polls (in which Bailey is a great believer) showed a solid Kennedy margin, that the absentee ballots showed a slimmer margin, but that the first totals from voting machines which had broken down in the afternoon—and thus had been opened for repair and inspection—indicated a sweep.

Kennedy had then gone back to his own home across the lawn; then, once again, impatient, had come back to the communications control center in his brother Bobby’s home a few minutes after seven.

He came at seven, of course, to hear the official Connecticut returns, an expected victory; but when he climbed the stairs he arrived on a scene of gloom. The pink-and-white children’s bedroom on the second floor had been cleared that evening as a data-analysis section, the beds removed, the baby chairs thrust to the side, a long table set up with mounds of voting statistics; there public-opinion analyst Louis Harris was codifying reports received from the communications center downstairs and from the four teletypewriters of the wire agencies installed in the adjacent bedroom.

From four o’clock on Harris had been growing more and more discouraged. At four he had received and analyzed some 15 per cent of Kansas returns; Nixon, he concluded, was abreast or ahead of Eisenhower’s race in 1956; the farmers in this key farm state were, it appeared, not going to vote against Ezra Benson and Republican farm policy, but against the Democrats and the alien culture of the East. By six it was obvious that Kansas was going to give Nixon a margin of 60 to 40—and the other states of the farm belt would probably follow suit. While downstairs in the communications center the happy reports from good indicator precincts were still being fed to the press and public to influence the voters in California, upstairs Harris was reading other indicator reports—not to be released. The first report from the border states had been from Columbia Precinct of Lexington County, Kentucky. And though Kennedy was running slightly ahead of the Stevenson record of 1956, he was running behind Stevenson’s record of 1952 and heavily behind that of Truman in 1948. Early Louisville results came in shortly thereafter; and it was obvious that Kentucky, which Harris had expected to go for Kennedy by 55 to 45, was going to be a hair-thin victory—or a defeat.

We’re being clobbered, said Bobby Kennedy, fresh in from an afternoon of touch football and ready for the long night’s vigil. And thereupon, at 7:15, as if to confirm Bobby’s first reaction, came the report from the downstairs television monitors—IBM had just quoted odds on Nixon’s victory at 100 to 1!

It was at this point that the candidate himself had arrived, to catch the first tide of Connecticut returns. He absorbed the news of IBM’s prediction and declared flatly that the machine was crazy. Harris, almost despairing, fearing that IBM had already fed into its calculations returns not yet available in Hyannisport, somberly agreed that of course the machines were crazy—they were projecting only Kansas and Kentucky returns; the polls in the big industrial states had not even closed yet. The candidate grinned, unflustered as ever, and remarked to his statistician that from now on it was he, Lou, against the machine.

Only minutes later, it is described, Bobby Kennedy came whooping up the stairs to the children’s bedroom to see his brother: Bailey had just telephoned through with the first Connecticut results! They were being counted now, and in Hartford Kennedy was running 18 percentage points ahead of Stevenson in 1956—Kennedy, said Bailey, would sweep Connecticut by 60,000 votes. Within three minutes Bobby dashed upstairs again—a second call from Bailey in Hartford, as the returns piled up: Bailey was now estimating a 100,000 margin. Three minutes later Bailey had called a third time—it was going to be solid now, at 90,000. And with this Connecticut disappeared from center stage.

Now the first returns from Pennsylvania were coming in and they were excellent, topped by spectacular figures out of Philadelphia. The mood in the cottage changed. The candidate lit a small cigar, a Havana Royal panatela. The Kennedy girls, dressed in slacks, pranced about the house as if they were at a party. Peter Lawford, fresh from Hollywood and bemused, ran up and down stairs in his stocking feet, tearing off sheets of news from the teletype as returns came in from the wire services. Singer Morton Downey, a guest of Joseph Kennedy, had wandered over from the father’s house and was serving as waiter, offering sandwiches and pastries to anyone hungry. It was better now; the early rural vote was beginning to be blanketed by the thundering industrial vote; and the candidate decided to leave the elated communications center and stroll back across the lawn to his own house for dinner.

It was very quiet there. Caroline, a scratch on her nose, was waiting to say goodnight to her father, and he bounced her on his knee several times, then sent her upstairs to bed and settled down to his first drink of the day, a Daiquiri, with his wife, Jacqueline, and his friend, William Walton. Walton is a sturdy sun-faced man of charm and toughness, a distinguished artist, a gay warrior. A friend of Kennedy’s over many Washington years, Walton had volunteered early in the spring to serve for the duration of the campaign; for six months, giving up brush and canvas, he had performed through Wisconsin, West Virginia, California and New York as a political coordinator of increasing responsibility. The range of his many moods matched almost any Kennedy mood, and now, as they relaxed in the sitting room (a large white room furnished to Mrs. Kennedy’s taste in antiques), they talked of painting, not politics. Did Walton like the painting of the sailing ship over the mantelpiece, which Jacqueline Kennedy had bought her husband as a welcome-home gift after the Los Angeles Convention? Did Walton like the landscape that the candidate had painted himself? (Like Churchill, Montgomery, Eisenhower and countless other men who live under strain, Kennedy had begun to paint a few years before, and in Hyannisport now he had hung his favorite—a Riviera scene, warm with the honey colors of the sun-bleached Mediterranean coast where Kennedy had vacationed shortly after the 1956 Convention.) Walton thought it a fine primitive, and they chatted idly with no interruption from radio, TV or the communications center until dinner was ready promptly at eight in the dining room—an all-white room with red carpeting, elegantly different from the rooms in the other Kennedy cottages in the compound.

At dinner, while totals rolled up in the communications center across the lawn, the candidate talked of politics again, yet at another level. Perhaps because they had been discussing painting before dinner, he was now remembering visual vignettes of the campaign. It was as if, out of the tumult and storm and noise of the campaign, he was fixing, in the hush now growing around him, scenes for later memory. He remembered arriving in Lewiston, Maine, forty hours before, at two in the morning of Monday, and driving through the cold of the airport, through the empty streets with their lights blue in the dark, until suddenly arriving at the park, he found fifteen thousand people waiting for him in the cold, in a burst of light, their torchlights flaring about him. He remembered out of his triumphal tour in Pennsylvania a month before a family group, dressed in black clothes, on a deserted country road—the father with a clothespin on his nose and the mother, as the candidate’s eye rested on her, suddenly sticking out her tongue at him. The memory carried him to another: how, wherever he had traveled in the big cities and the crowds had lined the sidewalks and overspilled into the roads, he could look up to the windows of the office buildings and there, above the cheering street mobs, see the white-collared executives staring down at him. And in city after city, as if by common instinct, they were all giving him the universal bent-arm, clenched-fist gesture of contempt and occasionally forming on the lips a curse that he could read above the shouting. The others reminisced, too, but dinner was quick and by 8:45 they were back in the living room, watching a small leather-covered portable TV set that his wife manipulated to bring into focus.

Shortly after dinner Ted Sorensen arrived to watch with them, and thereafter, one by one, in and out, there filtered other members of staff and family from the communications center across the lawn. Pierre Salinger, the Kennedy press chief, came to report; Bobby was back and forth several times; occasionally the telephone rang and the candidate would rise to answer it briefly. His sisters came across the lawn once, giggly and happy, and the candidate scolded them for telling the press (for TV had already reported it) that he was smoking a big, black cigar and jumping up and down for joy.

Between visits the group of four was quiet in the living room. Self-possessed, apparently almost emotionless, the candidate watched the TV screen as the returns from the industrial states poured on. At one point, about 10:30, as a landslide seemed inevitable, his wife said quietly, Oh, Bunny, you’re President now! and he said to her, equally quietly, No…no…it’s too early yet.

However possessed he appeared, the candidate felt the tension. Between nine o’clock and midnight he had crossed the lawn to the communications center several times, but always returned to his home to be close to his wife in the sitting room, while concealing his concern at the tidings he read so clearly. At about 11:30, because she was now three weeks from giving birth, she was sent upstairs to bed; and afterward the candidate decided to cross the lawn and wait at the communications center itself. The TV cameras had long since been posted outside his own home, but the cameramen had agreed not to transmit any pictures of him walking back and forth between the cottages until they should get permission. Nevertheless, lights were needed, for this was a mobile TV unit and required forty minutes to warm up. So the lights were left on continuously, and their blinding glare continuously outlined the night—stark white, stark black. In this light the candidate felt his way across the grass at about midnight to his brother’s house and the control center, where he was to remain for the rest of the evening.

There, while the public TV report was one of landslide and victory, the mood of the command staff was deep disturbance and unease. The sunporch of the Robert Kennedy home had been cleared of all its furniture, and a telephone central had been established there. One long table ran down its length, another shorter table crossed it in a T-bar. Fourteen telephones, staffed by fourteen girls, rested on the long table. Ten were for use by the scores of Democratic headquarters and chieftains across the country who had been given the special number of the Hyannisport switchboard; two were for use by the ninety poll watchers at the ninety indicator precincts across the country; two were for overflow and emergency messages. Several telephone directors sat at the crossbar tables, switching the calls as they came to the proper recipient. They faced a large Elgin clock whose red sweep hand traced the minutes and the hours as they passed west across the country; in a corner below the clock a TV set showed them what the nation was seeing. As the phones rang and reports came in, the girls filled out mimeographed blanks with individual precinct returns, which were rushed upstairs to Harris’ data-analysis room where their meaning could be read.

Behind the sunporch, in Ethel Kennedy’s dining room, the Steuben crystal had been cleared away and a huge coffee urn substituted. Two electric typewriters and a tabulating machine rested on the sideboard, and several more direct telephone lines created a tangle of telephone cables over the floor. On the landward side of the house, in Ethel Kennedy’s sitting room, a buffet of sandwiches had been established. Around the room were easy chairs, lounge chairs, several more telephones, several more typewriters, a large TV set.

Now, at midnight, as the candidate entered, it was clear here at the command post that the campaign was tracing a course he had not designed.

Elation had swollen here from shortly after eight until 10:30, an elation that had all but erased the early-evening gloom. Hard on the heels of the Connecticut sweep had come the first news from Philadelphia, promising a margin of 300,000 votes in that city alone. (Too good to be true, said Bobby Kennedy. But it was to be even better than that in the end—a 331,000 margin, a Kennedy victory by 68.1 per cent.) After Philadelphia there came, forty minutes later, the first indicators from Pittsburgh, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton where slack in coal and steel had together created unemployment and discontent. It had been clear very early that nothing the rural or suburban Republican vote might amass would overtake this strength in Pennsylvania. Between nine and ten the first private Texas reports had also come in; and as soon as Laredo had reported, it had been obvious that the Mexican-Americans of South Texas were delivering their vote to Kennedy with such force that the Southern Republican vote of Dallas and Houston could be matched.

As if to confirm Texas, had come the drama of South Carolina, telephoning in at ten-minute intervals. The South Carolina cities had been in first, with their expected Republican pluralities. But as the South Carolina countryside reported, the Republican margin had shrunk from 54 per cent to 53 per cent to 52 per cent to 51 per cent until, with a whoop, the Republican percentage became 49 per cent, and it was certain that South Carolina and the Confederacy would remain basically Democratic. New Jersey was looking good, too, as in suburban Bergen, Mercer and Middlesex counties Kennedy was far outdistancing the Stevenson score in 1956 in these Republican bedrooms; Harris had at this point predicted carrying all of New Jersey by 53 or 54 per cent. As New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland all followed with their heavy pluralities, victory had seemed certain.

It was then, at 10:30, that the tide of voting had moved from the Atlantic seaboard across the Appalachians into the Midwest, and the trouble began. Wayne County in Michigan showed the first break in the parade. Wayne County is the City of Detroit; here the Kennedy campaign had expected a vote of 800,000. Only 745,000 voted in Detroit that day (it rained); the plurality of that big city (311,721), so necessary to carry Michigan, had thus been shaved to the danger point. Cleveland came next. Cleveland had been expected to give 60 to 65 per cent of its vote to Kennedy. It had, indeed, done better than this percentage of its vote (70.9 per cent), but the total of the vote (338,000) was so far below expectation (measuring out to a Kennedy plurality of 141,000 as against an expected 200,000) that Ohio was clearly in danger. And then had followed the rest of the Middle West: Iowa, a landslide for Nixon, as expected; Indiana, another Nixon sweep; but then came Wisconsin, which Kennedy had stumped so furiously in March and now expected with certainty to carry—and Wisconsin was lost. By eleven o’clock, when the electronic indicators read that Kennedy had 241 electoral votes out of the necessary 269 to elect, the Kennedy thrust had amassed almost all that it was going to have with certainty—the industrial Northeast and the Old South. Now from somewhere must come the last thirty electoral votes to make the victory a reality. And though it was close enough to taste, the surge of Republican countervotes from the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain areas denied the victory still.

While such reports had been coming to the center, the candidate had been absorbing them privately in his own home. Only once had he shown emotion. It was Ohio that had caused him bitterness. He had moved through Ohio six times in the course of the campaign. On his last trip on October 17th, campaigning from Middletown through Dayton through Springfield through Columbus, it had been such a day of marvel and splendor as is reserved only for heroes and gods. The Ohioans had lined 113 miles of highway almost solidly, holding their children up to watch him, clutching at him, tearing at him, waving at him, shrieking at him, until his staff had feared for his safety. Yet now along this route, precisely in these cities, from Franklin County through Hamilton County, the Ohioans of the southern tier were showing that their hearts still belonged to Robert A. Taft and Richard M. Nixon. The candidate had listened as the profile of Ohio’s preference traced the biggest disappointment of his campaign, and slowly he rolled back his sleeve. His right hand, by the end of the campaign, had swollen with the handshaking of the months to grossly disproportionate size and he displayed it now—calloused, red, the scratches reaching as far as his elbow. He held up the inflamed hand, bare to the elbow, and said Ohio did that to me—they did it there. Then he had rolled down the sleeve, had shaken his head, not understanding, and had become cool again, as ever.

Now as the candidate arrived at the command post shortly after midnight, a quiet tension had become general in his brother’s house. Earlier, a split mood had unreally divided the Bobby Kennedy cottage. In the living room about the TV set, where sandwiches and light drinks were being offered, the candidate’s sisters and a few family friends had jubilantly and vociferously begun to celebrate. But in the adjacent sunporch, where the communications center had been established, and upstairs in the data analysis center, where reports were being studied, the mood had been, since ten o’clock, one of quiet and growing concern. Upstairs Lou Harris worked his slide rule and attempted to sustain optimism by reading the totals in contrast to the Stevenson race of 1956; but downstairs, where the operational political chieftains—O’Brien, O’Donnell, Donahue and Dungan—received the reports, they contrasted them with the Truman scores of 1948, and worried.

By midnight the tension in the sunporch communication center and the upstairs data-analysis center had communicated itself to everyone in the house and celebration was over. A waitress of the Mayfair Catering Service wandered back and forth asking, Are we doing all right? Are we all right? but no one answered her. Actor Peter Lawford sat on the stairs leading to Harris’ data room, worrying about his baggage, which had disappeared that morning somewhere between Boston and Hyannis. Singer Morton Downey rested quietly in the living room, munching on the sandwiches he had been serving. Author Cornelius Ryan (The Longest Day), serving as advance man for the logistics of the Hyannisport operation had been summoned earlier in the evening by press-chief Salinger to marshal the motorcade that would bring the candidate victoriously to the Armory; now he tiptoed quietly about, measuring the balance of concern and confidence.

No one had to explain to the candidate what was happening as he entered the command post. He was to stay there for three long hours. He had mastered politics on so many different levels that no