DAVID McKEAN: Good evening. I'm David McKean, the CEO of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation, and on behalf of all of my Foundation colleagues and the Library's Director, Tom Putnam, I'd like to thank all of you for coming this evening. I'd also like to express particular thanks to the friends and institutions that make these forums possible: Bank of America, the lead sponsor of the Kennedy Library Forum Series, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation, and our media sponsors, The Boston Globe, WBUR, and the New England Cable News Network.
On May 10th, 50 years ago, an elegant young Catholic Senator, who spoke with a little bit of a Boston accent, spoke about a brighter future, and he won a landslide victory in a Presidential primary battle in West Virginia, an economically distressed, overwhelmingly Protestant, hard-to-grapple state in Appalachia. That Senator, of course, was John F. Kennedy, and his victory in that Presidential primary proved that he was a viable candidate in 1960. The election in West Virginia and the role that religion played in the campaign is considered by historians to be one of the most significant state primaries in American political history.
Tonight, we are fortunate to have four panelists who were in West Virginia 50 years ago and who are going to share their memories with us. David Broder covered the West Virginia primary as a junior reporter for The Washington Star. He has since covered every national campaign and convention, traveling up to 100,000 miles a year to interview voters and report on the candidates. He joined The Washington Post as a political reporter in 1966 and now writes a twice-weekly column for The Post on national politics. He has written several books, including Democracy Derailed: Campaigns and the Power of Money; Behind the Front Page: A Candid Look at How the News is Made; and The Party’s Over: The Failure of Politics in America. He's won several awards, including The National Society of Newspaper Columnists Lifetime Achievement and the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary. A regular commentator on CNN's Inside Politics, he also appears regularly on NBC's Meet the Press and Washington Week in Review. In 2001, Washingtonian rated Broder among the four top best and most influential journalists, calling him “the most unpredictable, reliable, intellectually honest columnist working today,” adding that “No one gets a better sense of the pulse of American opinion.”
Dick Donahue is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Boston University Law School. He was a Vice-Chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Committee and a brilliant lawyer from Lowell when he was sent to West Virginia to help with the campaign. He went on to serve as an assistant to President John Kennedy in the White House from 1961 to 1963. Dick was President and Chief Operating Officer at Nike from 1990 until 1994 and served as Vice-Chairman of the Board at Nike from 1994 until 2004. He is a former past President of both the Massachusetts Bar Association and the New England Bar Association. Most importantly, he's been a long-term member of the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.
Charlie Peters was born in Charleston, West Virginia. After graduating from Columbia University, he earned a law degree from University of Virginia and then went home to practice law and to serve in the West Virginia Legislature. Peters managed JFK's campaign in his home county. In 1969, he founded The Washington Monthly, a small but very influential political magazine, and it was the first magazine that I ever subscribed to.
Charlie Peters and The Washington Monthly have spawned the careers of some of the nation's finest journalists, including Jonathan Alter, Taylor Branch, Nick Lemann, James Fallows and Jon Meachum, just to name a few. Historian Michael Beschloss described The Monthly as holding up, “A deadly accurate mirror to the Washington political culture, exposing its hypocrisies, stupidities, and unexpected triumphs.” Charlie Peters is the author of several books, including Five Days in Philadelphia, How Washington Really Works, and Tilting at Windmills. He has a new book, a biography of Lyndon Johnson, coming out this June. In 2001, he retired as editor of The Monthly, and that same year was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame. He is currently President of Understanding Government, a foundation devoted to better government through better reporting.
Ted Sorensen made several trips to West Virginia in 1960 to answer questions and charges about Kennedy's Catholicism, and he helped draft the speech that Senator Kennedy once referred to as his most important speech on religion. He practiced international law for almost four decades as a senior partner and now as counsel to the prominent U.S. law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He has also written several books, including his biography of President Kennedy, entitled Kennedy, in 1965, which became an international best seller, and most recently, his memoir, Counselor: Life at the Edge of History, which came out in 2008.
Our moderator this evening is Tom Oliphant, former columnist for The Boston Globe. Tom is a frequent moderator of Kennedy Library Forums. Most recently, he moderated a conversation with Senator Paul Kirk. Tom was born in Brooklyn, raised in California, and graduated from Harvard College in 1967. He is a student of two of America's favorite pastimes, baseball and politics. He's the author of Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family’s Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, who has covered countless political stories and appears frequently as a television commentator.
And, finally, I just want to encourage all of you to come back to the Museum sometime soon and view our new exhibit, Winning West Virginia, JFK’s Primary Campaign, which tells this extraordinary story through original documents, photographs and artifacts from our collection.
But there's nothing like hearing this story from those who were actually there, so please join me in welcoming David Broder, Dick Donahue, Charlie Peters, Ted Sorensen and Tom Oliphant. Thank you. [Applause]
TOM OLIPHANT: I thought it might be fun, first of all, to tell you what the rules are here. We're going to chat up here for a while -- an hour or so -- and then we're going to invite you to the microphones to ask your questions. We'll try to leave plenty of time for them. And then, I have the unpleasant duty of cutting it all off at the end.
But I thought we'd begin on either end of this distinguished collection of people to try to see if we can put the West Virginia primary from 1960 in its historical context, to understand why we're so interested in it 50 years later. And Dave Broder, help us out.
What has lasted from the West Virginia primary? Why do you think it matters? Why is it worth the kind of study that it still gets?
DAVID BRODER: Well, the thing that‟s hard to fathom today, with the plentitude of primaries that we have every year, is that John Kennedy really ran in very few of them and only two that mattered. The first was Wisconsin where the vote, as my colleagues will recall, very well split almost perfectly along ethnic and religious lines, and, therefore, did not answer the looming question about whether this young man, who was Catholic, could win in a Protestant country. And the second that mattered was West Virginia. After West Virginia, it was all politics from that point on. Kennedy got the rest of the votes that made him the Democratic nominee by strong-arming bosses of one type or another, who were reluctant to give him that honor unless he had already convinced them that the damn voters would support him. That‟s why West Virginia was important.
TOM OLIPHANT: In the month of that campaign, Dave, can you see the seeds of the modern system: television, the rhythm of the campaign. Iis that an early attempt by the modern system to break through?
DAVID BRODER: There were elements that have been carried into the modern system, but the big difference was that they were there for a month, and nobody gets a month anymore unless it happens to be New Hampshire. [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: On my left here, to set the scene some more, Ted, what is the importance of West Virginia, just to the development of then-Senator Kennedy, who would be President within a year of that event?
TED SORENSEN: First, I have to do something I‟ve never done in my entire life. And that is correct Dave Broder, who is a wise man that knows everything. [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: Gingerly.
TED SORENSEN: Gingerly, indeed. There was another primary that mattered in Oregon, where every candidate‟s name, by law, was put on the ballot. One of those candidates was the local favorite son, Wayne Morris, the Senator from Oregon, and Kennedy had to beat him and everybody else in Oregon as well.
TOM OLIPHANT: Oregon? [Laughter]
TED SORENSEN: Thank you. Second, he didn‟t get the rest of those votes by -- what was your term, Dave? Strong-arming? [Laughter]
DAVID BRODER: Yeah.
TED SORENSEN: Persuading would be a better word. [Laughter] Those that agreed with him were no longer bosses; they were distinguished leaders of the Democratic Party. [Laughter] But in any event, you're right, Tom, that everything the day after West Virginia was different from the day before.
There had been a series of surveys: (a) Members of the House, they all predicted and preferred Lyndon Johnson would be the nominee; (b) Members of the National Committee, they all predicted and preferred it was going to be Johnson; (c) I've forgotten -- maybe it was mayors, Democratic mayors across the country, they all predicted it was going to be Stuart Symington, everybody‟s favorite. Of course, the poll of union leaders, liberal organizations, all predicted and preferred that it would be Hubert Humphrey. And the man who had been nominated by the party twice before, Adlai Stevenson, was playing a delicate game of dancing around whether he would run again or whether he might support Kennedy, until Kennedy finally got fed up with the game, which is one reason why Stevenson did not end up as Secretary of State.
But, by the way, Dave, the results in Wisconsin were not strictly along religious lines. They were more along geographic lines with districts bordering Minnesota supporting Humphrey, and the others supporting Kennedy. But your colleagues in the media reported only the religious preferences. They even went around interviewing people, “Are you Republican, Democrat or Catholic?” [Laughter] And I produced a scientific study which showed that districts which had a certain kind of tree -- I don‟t remember the scientific name for it, now -- supported Humphrey, and those which had a certain other kind of tree supported Kennedy. I just couldn‟t get the press to buy it. [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: Dick, you were working with Senator Kennedy well before he ran for President, and I can't think of anybody better equipped to try this question. What was the impact of West Virginia on him? This guy you knew so well was one kind of person before he ran for President. The experience, obviously, changed him. You were watching. You were there in West Virginia. And I should add, Dick has been described, in The Making of the President: 1960, Teddy White‟s still-relevant book, Dick is described as the “coruscatingly brilliant young lawyer.” I have never heard the adjective “coruscatingly” used before or since. But it establishes his stature here.
DICK DONAHUE: No it doesn't. [Laughter] Status is my stature within the Kennedy family … you know, absolutely livid. No one of them had ever been described as “coruscating.” [Laughter] Obviously, you know, this was a majestic victory. It was so intense and it was so great, and it just did give him the total commitment. He could now look at all of these smug people, all those people that Ted talks about who were rejecting him and say, “Look out. I‟m coming. I‟ve got it. It‟s mine.”
And Charlie Peters had started the whole thing.
TOM OLIPHANT: That‟s true. Charlie is not only one of the most important journalists of the last 40 years as both writer and editor, people forget that there was a political side of him before there was a journalistic side. In 1960, he was not just running the Kennedy campaign in Kanawha County, which is Charleston, he was also running for the State Legislature. Did you win that year?
CHARLIE PETERS: Yes, I did.
TOM OLIPHANT: You did?
CHARLIE PETERS: Yes I did.
TOM OLIPHANT: You won big?
CHARLIE PETERS: Thanks to my wife who is here, my wife Elizabeth. Once I got involved in the Kennedy campaign -- I had originally resisted because I was running for office, and then finally I was persuaded to do it -- my wife, Elizabeth, had to do the campaigning for me while I was working for Kennedy. One of my friends in the
Legislature later said, “You know, there are people who are so disappointed. They come up and they look down from the gallery, and there you are and people expected to see this beautiful blonde.” [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: What I wanted to ask you, sir, is do you think the experience of that month in Wisconsin changed Senator Kennedy? Did he learn stuff?
CHARLIE PETERS: Oh, I think it had a marvelous humanizing effect on Kennedy. I think it had a great effect on Robert, too. I think they learned about poverty, and something happened, where something they were talking about in speeches -- a concern that they expressed in speeches -- became a concern they really felt, and you could see that they really felt it.
One of the most memorable things about the campaign was in the last ten days, in particular, when the tide began to go our way, one of the great reasons the tide began to go our way was that Senator Kennedy became so eloquent in his speaking. I had never thought that he was a very good speaker before, frankly, and I thought he laid an egg in a big speech in Charleston the fall before. But he just got red-hot, and part of being red-hot as a speaker was the conviction and so, this was the change I saw in him.
TOM OLIPHANT: Let me ask you to do one other favor for us, and that is, describe your native state as it existed in 1960. Describe the setting for this pivotal battle.
CHARLIE PETERS: Well, a lot of good people, I think. One other nice thing about it, so many of the Kennedy people would tell me, who came down there and spent the month, “You know, there‟re so many nice people down here.” [Laughter] And the truth was there were an awful lot of nice people, and yet they were sublimely uninformed about the Catholic Church., and so the conviction that the Pope would rule the country … The first time I took Senator Kennedy around town we were walking along a sidewalk, and I would go up to people and say, “Would you like to meet Senator Kennedy?” And a depressing number of people simply shunned him. They didn‟t say anything nasty; they just turned away, stone-faced, and walked away.
TOM OLIPHANT: What was the essence of the prejudice?
CHARLIE PETERS: I think, to tell you the truth, it was ignorance. At the very top, to describe West Virginia as having an intellectual elite would be something of an exaggeration at that time. [Laughter] But there were a top number of people who so fancied themselves, and the Nation Magazine had run a series of anti-Catholic articles. It was known that Mrs. Roosevelt, a great hero to that group of people -- and to me, as a matter of fact -- that she was not a friend of Jack Kennedy‟s, and those things turned that level again. But the main thing, the main problem, was simple ignorance and not really knowing Catholics. So that as they got to know the Kennedys, that had so much to do with dispelling the prejudice.
The other two main things were the military experience, being a hero. In West Virginia, that just meant so much. Military service was highly honored. Heroism even more, and so we distributed, in my county alone, 40,000 copies of that Readers Digest article about the Kennedys‟ war experience. Well, that had a big effect. And I think the other big thing was Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. coming down there, and Franklin Roosevelt was God to West Virginians, and so his son was a laying on of hands, as he said, “You can vote for this Catholic.”
TOM OLIPHANT: Ted, if I could jump in, now. You were there in the meetings that planned the Presidential campaign with the Senator, as well as operated it. Could you just give us a little background? There were 16 primaries in 1960. When all this started sometime in 1959, was there a clear commitment to get into West Virginia? Or did that come later? Or how did it evolve?
TED SORENSEN: That‟s a very good question. But first, I want to add a footnote to what Charlie said about Franklin …
TOM OLIPHANT: This is like herding cats. [Laughter]
TED SORENSEN: … about FDR, Jr. Roosevelt -- Franklin Roosevelt was God in West Virginia, a poor coalmining state, and Hubert Humphrey, as the liberal Democrat, talked about Roosevelt and his program and his policies over and over and over again. We had something better than speeches about Franklin Roosevelt. We had Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. in person speaking. And, even better, he sent a personal letter to I don‟t know how many thousands, I believe they went to either every registered Democrat in the state, certainly every local officer holder, etcetera, etcetera.
Now the truth of the matter is -- not something we boast about too often -- at the time, FDR, Jr. was in charge of the Fiat Italian Automobile Company in Washington, D.C. So all of these personal letters addressed to all these West Virginia Democrats were shipped by the tens of thousands in cartons to Hyde Park, New York, where they were mailed and postmarked, “Hyde Park, New York.” And when people in West Virginia got a letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., Hyde Park, New York, they knew it was the real thing. [Laughter]
But to go back to your question, how did Kennedy get in? John F. Kennedy, I should say, was breaking new grounds on the use of polls. Lou Harris had become the Kennedy campaign pollster. He took a poll in West Virginia at a time when Kennedy, but not his religion, was well-known -- his book Profiles in Courage, all the magazine articles about him, all the stories and interviews. And I think you indicated, Charlie, that he had already made a speech in West Virginia. That poll showed Kennedy winning West Virginia 80/20. Of course, he‟s going to go in.
Then came the Wisconsin primary and Dave Broder and his colleagues reporting that it was all about religion. Suddenly, it became not the liberal versus the moderate, it became the Protestant Hubert Humphrey versus the Catholic John F. Kennedy. And Dick and I and a lot of other people discovered we‟d all heard about Roman Catholics. We had certainly heard in Boston about Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics, but in West Virginia, there was always a different adjective. They were all “Damn Catholics.” [Laughter] And the next poll showed 60/40 against us.
TOM OLIPHANT: Dick, could I get you to elaborate a little bit, since you were in Wisconsin as well as in West Virginia, about first of all, what the mood in the campaign was coming out of Wisconsin?
DICK DONAHUE: A little bit smug. You know, there are ten congressional districts in Wisconsin, and you have to win one at a time. And we thought we were doing reasonably well, except that we were a little smug about it, and so instead of coming out there as we did with six of ten wins, congressional districts -- that was a big win, because next door, Hubert was known as the third Senator from Wisconsin. So we get to West Virginia, and then we got hit with this. I personally got hit coming from the airport.
TOM OLIPHANT: Tell the story.
DICK DONAHUE: I said to the cab driver, “Is there an election coming?” “Yes.” “Who are you going to vote for?” He said, “I‟m voting for the guy who‟s running against that damn Catholic.” [Laughter] Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! This isn't what I came out here for, and so we went downhill from there.
It turned, as Charlie says, over time … the only time that we had was the 109, the PT- 109. We used that. The other thing Charlie didn‟t tell you about West Virginia, it leads the country in gold star mothers, and of course he was a gold star brother. It really was the only thing we could do to take the sting out of it.
TOM OLIPHANT: Indeed. Now, we‟ve started to mention religion. So I should tell you all that we have, in our possession here at the Library, a clip of an appearance by Senator Kennedy in which he takes a question and launches into quite a spirited statement on the topic. We‟ll show the clip and then talk about it. [video]
Dave Broder, of all the so-called issues that you have covered down through the years, was this a legitimate issue? Or was this just a confrontation between bigotry and ignorance and tolerance?
DAVID BRODER: It was a legitimate issue, Tom, in the sense that the only other time that a prominent Catholic had run for President, Al Smith, he‟d gone down to very big defeat. There were plenty of people, not only in West Virginia but across America, who really believed that the Presidency was part of a WASP heritage and only a WASP heritage. In that sense, it was a real issue, and John Kennedy understood, probably better than anybody, that he had to deal with that issue.
TOM OLIPHANT: Ted, he seemed to welcome it. Every time I see a clip of him, especially in relatively unstructured settings, there is an enthusiasm about the answer that tells me that he couldn‟t wait to grapple with the question.
TED SORENSEN: Yes and no. [Laughter] He welcomed, once he heard what was happening to him in West Virginia, an opportunity to answer it, particularly after he had addressed the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington and spelled out, for the first time in detail, what his answers were to all the charges against a Catholic candidate for President.
And, by the way, Dave is right. It was true across the country, among many Democrats who thought, “I‟m against Kennedy because he has no chance to win.” And he knew that he had to disprove that in West Virginia of all places.
TOM OLIPHANT: Charlie, as the campaign unfolded during that month, how did the Senator‟s rhetoric on the question of his religion impact people in West Virginia, standing back and looking at it as a historical matter? It almost seems like you're looking at an unbroken line of Kennedy just going up, up, up, up, up. The more people saw of him and heard him, the better he did, the more the Harris seemed to indicate. How was this received as he began to talk about?
CHARLIE PETERS: I think, at the very beginning, he was infected by some depression that set in among his campaign. It was evident to me. There was a meeting the day after the Wisconsin primary, there was a meeting at our headquarters at the hotel in Charleston, where there was actually some fellows that were so nervous they were clearly gone aback. We had Kennedy workers from all over Southern West Virginia, and it was clear that some fellows were going to bail out on us. Bobby saw that, and it was a meeting that was depressing beyond belief, to tell you the truth.
Then there was a meeting at Bobby‟s house at Hickory Hill on that Friday. Ted, you weren't there. I don‟t know why. Oh, I have to tell a story about that meeting because I think it was a critical event. I was trying to talk about the importance of Franklin Roosevelt in West Virginia and how it would be a good idea to get FDR, Jr. down there. But, for some reason, I was putting it in a theoretical way and you could tell Bobby was bored, and when Bobby was bored, it was quite evident that he was bored. [Laughter]
And so Matt Reese spoke up and said, “Bobby, let me try to explain what Charlie is getting at.” Matt said, “Last week I was down in Logan, West Virginia, and I was walking along the street with a friend of mine. My friend suddenly stopped, and he said,
"Mrs. Roosevelt stood right here.” And Matt said, “Well, I didn‟t know Mrs. Roosevelt had been in Logan recently.” And the fellow said, “That was when she was here in 1934.” [Laughter] Bobby immediately got up, went to the phone, called FDR, Jr. Iit was one of those great moments where an anecdote, I think, helped change history.
What I saw, particularly in that town and in the one we saw at the speech downstairs, is that Jack was pretty tense about it. You could tell. The voice was tense. Because the realization had hit everyone that, boy, this is going to be tough. But what you could see over the month, as things got better for us, through the military story getting out, through FDR, Jr.‟s endorsement …
Oh, and there‟s one other thing I keep forgetting to say. We had these volunteers. We had 400 in my county alone that distributed that literature about the war heroism, distributed to each home. These volunteers did it, and the truth was of those 400 volunteers, at least 300 of them represented practically the entire Catholic population of Charleston, West Virginia. [Laughter]
When a reporter would come by, I would always brag we had 400 volunteers. But I prayed he wouldn‟t look at the list of names, because “O‟Brien, McCarthy,” you know. [Laughter] Anyway, as those things gradually took hold and Kennedy became more confident, more assured in the presentation of this argument -- and that increasing assurance and that conviction that came out of the experience with poverty -- just made him better and better and more convincing and more convincing.
TOM OLIPHANT: Dick, as somebody who knew him so well, I‟m sure he had direct experience with bigotry directed at Irish Americans.
DICK DONAHUE: Oh, yeah.
TOM OLIPHANT: Had he ever experienced bigotry directed at Catholics?
DICK DONAHUE: I don‟t know if he had experience directly, but it was certainly a fact. I mean, there were no secrets in West Virginia. Later on they had a Bible Sunday, where they just preached, “No Catholics, no Catholics, no Catholics.” And that was generally accepted. And Charlie says that there was some depression. Some depression? [Laughter] Most people don‟t know that, although he won in a tide, overwhelming tide, the Kanawha Hotel was empty because all of the supposed workers had disappeared to get back to Washington. So there were very few of us there to celebrate this big victory.
TOM OLIPHANT: Really?
DICK DONAHUE: Yeah. They disappeared. One thing I should add, a fact that hasn‟t been mentioned so far -- the truth needs to be told to some extent, at least-- a certain amount of money was invested in West Virginia political organizations by the Kennedy campaign. [Laughter]
TED SORENSEN: And the Humphrey campaign. [Laughter]
CHARLIE PETERS: Well, Ted, to be objective, one has to concede that a great deal more was invested on our side. But the point was that we got most of those commitments early on, and, because of that, you had another core of people in each community throughout the state who had a stake in beginning to turn the tide on this religion question.
And one last thing I keep forgetting about the religion and about the success in the campaign and why we really won without regard to money was because of Kennedy‟s initial appeal to women and young people. He got them excited, and then they began, gradually, to help convert the men. There‟s a wonderful story about a sheriff who had accepted a considerable sum of money from the Kennedy organization, and he said, “Well, they didn‟t need to spend it because my wife and daughter were so enthusiastic about Kennedy, I would have had to support him anyway.” [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: Just for the record, I don‟t have all of Harris‟s stuff from West Virginia, but to illustrate what Charlie was just saying, they had Humphrey ahead roughly 60/40 with about a month to go.
CHARLIE PETERS: That‟s right.
TOM OLIPHANT: With about two weeks to go, the lead is down to 55/45. It is within the statistical margin of error when they met for a very surprisingly boring debate, the only one of the campaign, and then Mr. Harris had Kennedy slightly ahead going into election day in the county.
CHARLIE PETERS: He did not. [Laughter] I was with the President the day before the election, because I had to bring one of our serious leaders, formerly in charge of roads and whatever, Beryl Sawyers, to see the Senator at the Daniel Boone Hotel. We were trying to convince Beryl to come our way, and the President said, “Lou Harris just left.
We‟re flat even. You can make a difference.” So, thank you, Lou, for your great memory. [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: Ted, one last question on religion, because it has so much to do with the way the campaign seems to have been conducted during that month. In reading his words, he has seemed to have framed this as if it‟s not a question of can one vote for a person who happens to be Catholic, but rather, it‟s a question of intolerance versus tolerance. And it posed a rather significant challenge to the people of West Virginia who naturally wanted to have a self-image of tolerance.
CHARLIE PETERS: That‟s part of it. In fact, Peter Salinger quoted the West Virginian who said, “There are two types I can't stand: bigots and those damn Catholics.” That West Virginians have an innate sense of fairness, and it was clear that everybody was ganging up in the “Stop Kennedy Movement,” including everybody who supported Johnson, Symington, Stevenson as well.
And Kennedy, as you say, tied the military record to this issue. “Nobody asked me my religion when they sent me to the South Pacific,” he said. “Nobody asked my brother's religion when he was sent on a fatal bombing mission in Europe.” And West Virginians, in their innate sense of fairness, I think, began to turn around on that issue.
At the same time, as mentioned before, he had the speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The line I best remember from that speech was also a question of fairness. “Are we to say to the world,” he said, “that a Jew can be the Lord Mayor of Dublin; a Protestant can be the foreign minister of France; a Muslim can sit in the Israeli Parliament, but a Catholic can't be chosen President of the United States?” West Virginians understood the innate unfairness of all that.
TOM OLIPHANT: Indeed. I should tell you that if you have questions forming in your minds, you might want to begin ambling toward a microphone. And in a couple of minutes, I‟ll be happy to call on you. But David, I wanted to ask you before we go to questions, if you could talk a little bit about the person who came in second in this primary, Hubert Humphrey.
There are two things that have always confused me, well one thing in particular. And that was why he kept running after Wisconsin when, given conventional arithmetic, it would seem to have been impossible for him to be nominated? Can you give us a sense of Humphrey during that month and what he tried to do, even though he was not successful?
DAVID BRODER: Well, Humphrey was, as everybody else will remember, an irrepressible force. I mean, he just was the original Energizer Bunny. [Laughter] And he ran because he couldn‟t stop running. Muriel Humphrey used to tell the story that at the end of the day, after he had done everything else, he would sweep out the garage because he had that kind of energy. And so I don‟t suppose he ever contemplated quitting after Wisconsin.
But a couple of footnotes on what has been said here already. The sheriffs in West Virginia are the most powerful people in the world because not only are they the law enforcement, they are also the tax collectors for the local community. So there ain't a single bit of local power that is not collected in the sheriff‟s office, and collecting is something that they learn very well.
When Charlie said that they got the money out early, a story that I heard from a man named Ryan Vanderzee --- who was then as young as I was then -- was working for Hubert Humphrey. I happened to be in the Humphrey headquarters in Charleston when Ryan came back from a trip somewhere, and he said, “We are in big trouble.” People in the headquarters said, “Why?” He said, “They told me that they‟d already collected the money, and there was no point in my offering money.” The method in West Virginia -- correct me, Charlie, if I‟m wrong -- was that the people at the top of the ticket were expected to finance the slate cards.
CHARLIE PETERS: Right. This is what was unusual in West Virginia. Ordinarily, the top of the people who put in the money, the finances, the cards, the governor, the sheriff, and the other important county official besides the sheriff, David, was the assessor. Because while the sheriff collected the taxes, the assessor set the amount, so it was very wise to be on the good side of the assessor.
TOM OLIPHANT: And explain what the slate cards were.
CHARLIE PETERS: The slate card you would hand out to the voter, often in the hollows, they would have drivers, and so the campaign money was used partially to pay the driver who drove people to and from the … Because the hollow would be this long thing, like 30 miles long, and then about 200 feet wide, so you‟d go up and down this one road. The driver would hand out a card or a piece of paper with the names of the people that the voter was expected to cast his vote for in return for this transportation. It often was not put in blunt terms, although sometimes it was. [Laughter] So the degree of crookedness varied from county to county.
In Kanawha County, it was not a major element in the vote. In fact, I was always trying to get Cy Hearst … Cy Hearst wrote this article, this book, that we spent, as I said, more money than most Kennedy people want to admit, but not nearly as much money as Cy Hearst said in his book. I would keep telling Cy, “Why don‟t you look at the clean precincts throughout the state? If you could go to each county and you can find out what the clean precincts were …” He would never do that. But we won them. We won them in that primary. The money, there is no question, it played a role, but, in the end, it did not play a decisive role.
TOM OLIPHANT: This is going to lead to a question for the great Donahue, and then we‟ll go to the floor. But this excess of democracy, if you will, in West Virginia, what every position in counties and localities, plus the state was elected, right? Charlie?
CHARLIE PETERS: I forgot one thing I wanted to tell because I just remembered this. Speaking of the assessor, I was in the assessor‟s office in my county one day during the campaign, and a girl who worked in the office came up and whispered to me, “Sam just got $10,000 dollars to use for Humphrey from a man named Jim Rowe from Washington.” [Laughter] Well, I didn‟t know better then. But later, I found out Jim Rowe was a big Johnson man. That money was coming from Lyndon Johnson, and that was a lot of money that did come in for Hubert late. But it came in after Johnson and Stevenson and some of the other candidates and Symington woke up to the fact that Kennedy might win this damn thing.
TOM OLIPHANT: I believe it was the weekend before the voting. The Charleston Gazette, right, attempted to publish, as a public service, to show you how important slating was there, a list of all the candidates in the area for all the offices that people could run for. And it took them three clear pages of the newspaper to print all the names. The last question before the floor, Dick, with hindsight, it almost seems to me that you guys could have paid Humphrey‟s filing fees in West Virginia because, had you not been able to thump him, you would not have had the case to make to all these power brokers who ultimately provided the margin of Senator Kennedy‟s victory. Therefore, it may have been a quixotic exercise on Humphrey‟s part, but it was absolutely essential to the momentum that Senator Kennedy built that night.
DICK DONAHUE: Yeah.
TOM OLIPHANT: Yeah? Did you? Did you pay his filing fee? I mean, there is actually a memo from one of you guys from way back then talking about -- I have the quote here somewhere -- that, “The trap could be baited for Humphrey to enter West Virginia, and that once he was in, you had a chance to make the victory decisive.”
DICK DONAHUE: I don‟t think we had that much confidence. That‟s a little heavy.
TOM OLIPHANT: But didn‟t you, Ted, have to win that primary in order to make that case?
TED SORENSEN: I‟d like to comment on that, and then I‟d like to ask Dick Donahue a question. [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: You see how tough this is?
TED SORENSEN: My comment is that if Hubert had won one more district in Wisconsin, which he came very close to doing, he would not have entered West Virginia, he later said. And we were so glad he won that district after it was all over because, yes, the contest, as painful as it was in West Virginia, is what was comparable to Obama winning in 96% white Iowa in 2008. It just set the stage for the entire race for the nomination.
Now, one of you mentioned the fact that in the closing week of the campaign, there was a debate. My recollection is that it was on television, and they permitted phone-in questions. Of course, Kennedy was a superb debater, and he answered the religious question, possibly planted, who knows. [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: It was.
TED SORENSEN: Yes. But one questioner called. He wanted to direct his question to Humphrey, and Humphrey was trying to satisfy the gentleman, who would not get off the phone. He kept Humphrey on the phone. Humphrey used up his entire allotted time, saying nothing, and I‟ve always wondered whether Dick Donahue was on the other end of that call. [Laughter]
DICK DONAHUE: Do I know who was?
TOM OLIPHANT: It was the early days of a new age in politics, but the old politics were working very well at the same time. Thank you, so much, for your patience, and please proceed.
Q: My name is Ray Mack, and I want to begin by just saying how really terribly honored I am to see history and to hear it. It‟s just wonderful. My mind is going back to when how old I was in 1960. I was a senior in high school. So you‟ve all made me feel what I feel, old. I feel now young tonight, because I was only 18 then. But my mind is going back to think about how exciting the primaries were and how exciting the actual election was, the excitedness of not knowing and being able to be excited at those conventions, which all have changed. I would just like to have you comment about the wisdom of that change, or if we could possibly get back to that excitedness of elections. Thank you.
TOM OLIPHANT: Was it better then?
CHARLIE PETERS: On the convention, I would like to answer one thing. One of the things that first attracted me to Kennedy -- and I think many, many people -- was the 1956 convention, the excitement of that ballot between …
TOM OLIPHANT: The Vice-President.
CHARLIE PETERS: Kennedy had made a good speech nominating Adlai Stevenson, and then he entered the race for Vice-President, in which he and Estes Kefauver emerged as the two leading candidates. In the balloting, it seesawed back and forth. It was the last exciting ballot at a Democratic convention in our lifetime. It used to be that conventions were exciting. But this was the last time, and so this was one of the things in the old days of politics that brought people into the system. They would watch the conventions, which were big events. Now, they're just formalistic, but then they were very … There was often at least one exciting race, so that was a big difference.
TOM OLIPHANT: Yes, thank you.
Q: Hi, my name is Amy Willett. Thank you very much to all of you for transporting me back to a time when I was not even alive, and it was really, really exciting to watch all of you make me feel like I was in these political moments that were so exciting. So my question is in 1960 for JFK, the religious prejudice was a huge obstacle for him in running for President. And I‟m wondering in 2010, if you see national prejudice that the voters may have against a potential candidate that resembles the religious prejudice against Kennedy being a Catholic in 1960, whether it‟s race with Obama or even religion, watching Mitt Romney‟s campaign as a Mormon. Just curious of what today we can see as similar to that past prejudice. Thank you.
TOM OLIPHANT: Okay. Thank you. We‟ll try a one respondent rule and throw that one to Dave Broder as a hanging curve ball.
DAVID BRODER: There is obviously still prejudice, plenty to go around. But I don‟t think it‟s the same as the question about Catholics in 1960. I don‟t think there was much doubt that Kennedy would have been somewhere on the Democratic ticket in 1960 if it were not for his religion being a real issue. He had obviously enormous political skills and would have been on that ticket in either the first or the second place by acclimation, if there were not the question about his Catholicism. And I don‟t think you could say now, after what Obama has achieved, that there is anything like that today.
TOM OLIPHANT: Mitt Romney doesn‟t even come close in your view?
DAVID BRODER: No because there were so many other … He never had the automatic kind of entry that he would have had were he not a Mormon.
TED SORENSEN: I want to just jump in and first, Dave, I want to make it clear -- because John F. Kennedy made it clear -- he would never have accepted second place on the ticket in 1960. Whenever anybody suggested it to him, he would say, “Oh, I get it. Catholics are okay in the back of the bus.” But he also said, “The religious issue has been buried once and for all in West Virginia.” Not true. The hate mail, you wouldn‟t believe the hate mail that poured into our office. The prominent Protestant leaders, who had a conference on the issue at the Waldorf Astoria, even the Reverend Billy Graham and Vincent Peale … that‟s why, when the Houston Protestant Ministers Conference invited both Kennedy and Nixon to come address the religious issue, Nixon wouldn‟t touch it. He knew what was the right moral thing to do. He said, “I am not going to raise the religious issue.”
TOM OLIPHANT: That was how he raised it.
TED SORENSEN: And he said that in every state of the country. [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: Several times a day.
TED SORENSEN: And Kennedy accepted, and it‟s like Daniel walking into the lions‟ den. Dave Powers took one look at the audience and came back and reported to JFK, backstage -- who had wanted Dave to go get his dark black shoes for the audience -- and Dave said, “No, Senator. It‟s a brown shoe audience.” [Laughter] Anyway, he gave a speech built in part on what he said in West Virginia, built in part on what he had said at that American Society of Newspaper Editors Conference, and Teddy White, whom you cited, said he thought that Houston Ministers speech should be required reading for every school child in Boston.
TOM OLIPHANT: Indeed.
TED SORENSEN: So the issue wasn‟t dead.
TOM OLIPHANT: The reference to that meeting of Protestant, non-Catholic theologians at the Waldorf Astoria reminds me of one of Adlai Stevenson‟s great lines about Norman Vincent Peale. He was asked about him once, and he said that in the area of theology, he found Paul appealing and Peale appalling. [Laughter] Thank you for waiting.
Q: Thank you. My name is Jeremy Murphy, and it‟s a great honor to be in the presence of all five of you. I admire you all very deeply, especially Ted Sorensen, who I think is probably the greatest political speechwriter in American history, in my humble opinion. [Applause] But I guess speaking of religion my question is a bit two-fold. I was intrigued by the mention of the visit by Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., and I think I had read that others that were Protestant surrogates like Endicott “Chub” Peabody from up here went down there that year, too. Were there any others, sort of WASP names?
TOM OLIPHANT: Well, Dick knows everything.
DICK DONAHUE: One of the things that we had were lots of visitors from Massachusetts. They came in and Chub was one. I happen to have a picture that he took of some worker in the polls showing what he thought was crime. But Chub wasn‟t too swift. [Laughter] You know, every state rep who thought he could get a little press came. “I‟m going down to West Virginia and help Kennedy.” They did come.
TOM OLIPHANT: And if I could just follow up for a second with Charlie, you're a native West Virginian. You're a young man. You're running for the state legislature. You‟ve signed on with this amazing young person. And, all of a sudden, your native little state is being flooded by these people, many of them from Massachusetts, many of them from outside. How did you decide which ones to hide in the basement and which ones to allow out in the public?
CHARLIE PETERS: Well, it was a combination of if the accent was too extreme … [Laughter]. We had a room across the street from the headquarters, across Kanawha Street, next to the Capitol Theatre, and we intended to put a good many of those people over there. But, you know, to me, the amazing impact of that election and of Kennedy‟s Presidency was coupled with this almost simultaneous reign of Pope John the 23rd, who was the most benign of all Popes. It brought about the most incredible change in American culture that I have known in my lifetime. Anti-Catholicism as a vicious factor in the country just about disappeared in four years, and it‟s just been an amazing, amazing change.
TOM OLIPHANT: Still. Thanks for waiting.
Q: Thank you. My name is Paul Duffy. I‟m from Boston. I‟m struck and impressed by your focus on the impact of rhetoric in this West Virginia primary. There was mention of Mr. Sorensen‟s penning of the speech which President Kennedy gave, or Senator Kennedy gave, which he remarked was his most important speech on religion. I‟m wondering if there was the impact, nationally, by that rhetoric, that we've seen, for example, in the 2008 election with President Obama‟s speech on race, and if that had the kind of ascendency?
TOM OLIPHANT: How would you compare them, Ted?
TED SORENSEN: I think the two speeches are comparable. I thought the Obama speech on race was extremely good and extremely important for him at a difficult time in his campaign. But I‟d like to add one word while I‟ve got the mic, and that is I don‟t know whether everybody up here agrees with me, but I think if Kennedy had lost in West Virginia because of the religious issue, he would not have been nominated. And I believe if any of the other Democrats had been nominated, Nixon would have been President. I don‟t want to turn this into a partisan discussion, but I believe when the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962, and the Joint Chiefs urged bombing those missile sites and invading Cuba and, therefore, starting a nuclear holocaust, that none of us would be here now. Because just take a look at what Nixon did when he ran for governor of California and imploded on election day in the fall of 1962. So I say, thank god John Kennedy was President. Thank god for West Virginia. [applause]
TOM OLIPHANT: They do have consequences. [Applause]
Q: Hi. My name is Shawn Driscoll. I am a junior at Worcester State College, majoring in history and political science. My question is the name Al Smith was mentioned, and I was wondering if his candidacy and his campaigning was sort of a how-not-to/how-to in regards to the Kennedy campaigners, if they looked upon it as sort of the basic litmus test and what they might have taken from it in the 1960 campaign.
TOM OLIPHANT: David, you brought up Al Smith. From what you know of the history -- I will not accuse you of having covered Al Smith‟s campaign -- [laughter] but from what you know of it and from what you saw of John Kennedy‟s campaign, do you think they were different?
DAVID BRODER: They must have been different. I can't tell you how, but one of the dimensions that has not been focused on here is Kennedy had a press corps, because of the religious issue in part, that could not have been more supportive, more in his corner. The story that went around West Virginia -- probably anecdotal, but certainly was believed at the time -- a columnist named Joseph Alsop, then of the Herald Tribune in New York, and hundreds of other papers, supposedly went up to a woman in West Virginia and said, “Madam, are you going to vote for Senator Kennedy? Or are you a bigot?” [Laughter]
TED SORENSEN: That sounds like Joe. What about Al Smith? You will not be surprised to know that in 1956 when the question was will Kennedy be considered for the Vice-Presidency or not because he‟s a Catholic, and I was instructed by John F. Kennedy to study all I could study about the Al Smith campaign, and I concluded that his religion was only one of many, and the least of those reasons why he lost so heavily. He represented Tammany Hall. He represented the forces against prohibition, and above all, he was big city, urban New Yorker, and those overshadowed religion as to why he lost.
CHARLIE PETERS: But there was something else very important about that memo, Ted, that impressed me way back then. I read an account of that memo in a magazine, and it pointed out how religion, the Catholic religion, could help Kennedy. This was a very important factor in the national election, not in West Virginia, but Queens in New York. I had been a student at New York, and Queens had become very Republican, very conservative, and a Catholic candidate was one of the few people who could turn that around.
And Ted pointed that out, turning those Catholics who had become conservative, like a lot of those volunteers I spoke to you about we had in Charleston, were people who a few years ago I had heard praising Senator Joseph McCarthy. In other words, they were far from screaming liberals, but they were supporting John Kennedy. So religion could have a plus factor in the campaign that was seldom acknowledged because in West Virginia, it was a negative in so many ways at the beginning. But nationally, it had a plus factor.
TOM OLIPHANT: Thanks for being so patient.
Q: Hi. My name is Kathy Buckley. I‟m a docent here at the Library, and thanks for a great evening. I am intrigued by the term “Damn Catholics,” [laughter] and wondering what‟s behind it. If it were simply a concern about control by the Pope, the term would be “Damn Catholic,” and it would be applied to this man who is Catholic and who is running for President. But it was not that. There was clearly more behind it, and, as a Catholic, what‟s the attitude towards us in West Virginia today?
TOM OLIPHANT: Did you ever understand it, Dave?
DAVID BRODER: No. It just slaps you in the face is what it does. And I do not know what the attitude is now, but I do know that it obviously, as Charlie says, has moderated. It is not a factor today, but it could be.
TOM OLIPHANT: Really?
DAVID BRODER: Yeah.
CHARLIE PETERS: I don‟t think so. Well, I think, unfortunately, the behavior of some prominent Catholics in recent years has been such that I don‟t think brings praise on the church. But I think for a long time there was a tremendous combined effect of John Kennedy‟s Presidency, and there were many people who admired his Presidency, particularly who admired it after his death. I think the main impact of John Kennedy really became in this country … I agree with Ted about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in domestic issues, it came after his death in helping Lyndon Johnson, providing an emotional basis for Lyndon Johnson being able to pass the legislation that‟s now referred to as the “Great Society Legislation,” because Johnson said he was carrying out John Kennedy‟s program.
TOM OLIPHANT: Indeed. One of the things about this duty I hate is having to watch the clock and call a halt. We‟ve got two patient people here, after which I was going to try to get some trivia out of Sorensen before there‟s one wrap-up question that I‟ve been dying to ask. But thank you for waiting.
Q: Thank you. And thank you for an excellent forum, all of you. In 1960 West Virginia would have had a very powerful Labor unions and labor interests. Did Labor actually support Senator Kennedy? And wouldn‟t that have been a big surprise over Humphrey?
DICK DONAHUE: Well, Ralph Dungan, who was on the President‟s staff and worked with Labor groups, was working with them while we were down there. That was one of the other things that we had going. It wasn‟t just registration and leafleting and all that stuff, so they were helpful for us, and they were powerful, more powerful then than they are now.
TOM OLIPHANT: Charlie, if I could just follow that one up: you know, today in Presidential politics it‟s quite normal for all the elected or prominent figures in a state to take sides as a presidential campaign takes shape, or at least many of them. Not the case 50 years ago. What was it like in West Virginia for that month among the office holders, the state officials and stuff like that?
CHARLIE PETERS: Most of the candidates didn‟t want to touch the issue. They wanted to avoid it. I felt, at the beginning, it hurt me being associated with Kennedy.
TOM OLIPHANT: Really?
CHARLIE PETERS: I think as his stock went up, my stock went up.
TOM OLIPHANT: Because you had two Democratic Senators.
CHARLIE PETERS: Yeah. And Byrd was against us. Jennings Randolph was not as overtly against us as Byrd was. But Byrd was very actively …
TOM OLIPHANT: And that meant pro-Johnson.
CHARLIE PETERS: Yeah, oh he was a Johnson man. But it was a great illustration of what went wrong with Johnson‟s idea of how to win the campaign, because Johnson thought, “Well, the Senators can control the state.” Well, if you could imagine Byrd telling one of those county leaders who could produce a 10,000 vote margin, if Byrd would tell that county leader, “You‟ve got to do this or you‟ve got to do that.” Byrd wasn‟t going to dream of doing that because he needed that man‟s support himself. But Johnson‟s whole theory of how he was going to get the Presidency was all wrong.
TOM OLIPHANT: As it turned out. Thank you.
Q: Thank you. Actually, my question was going to be about Labor also. So the gentleman before me really asked the same question, what was the influence of Labor in the election? Also, just thank you so much for the opportunity to listen to this conversation. It‟s really a piece of history here tonight.
TOM OLIPHANT: Try to elaborate some more. You're one of the key cogs in what would eventually become known as the well-oiled Kennedy machine. [Laughter] You're very used to dealing with constituency organizations. What was the impact of the key wins for the Democratic party in 1960 in West Virginia, above all, Labor?
TED SORENSEN: Well Labor, obviously, was important. It was important. It‟s like with any constituent organization. You first get to know them. You find out how well. You make friends with them. They trust you. You trust them. And when you get that, eventually they become enthusiastic. Kennedy was great about turning crowds around. Once they got to meet him and hear him and all that -- if you see the exhibit downstairs at the coalmines, you can see the sincerity in his face and their admiration for him. That was not something that happened by accident. It happens as a result of exposure over long periods of time and sincerity. But that‟s where we were aiming.
TOM OLIPHANT: Thank you. Okay, well here is my question, which I think is properly directed at the great Sorensen. It‟s primary night, 50 years ago, and we‟re all used to -- David, you know -- hooplas and filled ballrooms and all that kind of stuff.
John Kennedy and his wife went back to Washington on primary night, this pivotal night, and they had two friends over for supper, after which, according to the lore, they went to the movies. He came back from the movies to find a message to call his brother Bob in Charleston. It‟s about 11:30 at night. Who came over to his house for supper? And what movie did they go see? [Laughter]
TED SORENSEN: I wasn‟t there because on that very same day, there was another primary.
TOM OLIPHANT: Your native Nebraska.
TED SORENSEN: Uncontested, Nebraska. Because he had gotten there early and often, Stuart Symington from next door in Missouri never even entered the race. Hubert Humphrey from the Midwest and the farm champion never even entered Nebraska.
Lyndon Johnson, the leader of the Democrats in the country, never entered Nebraska. I was sent out to my native state just to make sure that even in an uncontested primary, nothing went wrong, everybody turned out.
TOM OLIPAHNT: Pierre Salinger went with you?
TED SORENSEN: No he didn‟t. And he wanted to be out there to cover the disaster, the press wouldn‟t find him.
TOM OLIPHANT: Just for the record, the high powered team of Sorensen and Salinger took Nebraska with 88% of the vote that night. It was a real tough one. I just want to know who went over for dinner and what movie they saw. And it shows that the work of history is never done. And thank you all for coming this afternoon. [Applause]
THE END