Free Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek Page A

mate, Joe would finance his campaign.
    But Johnson was reluctant to make a commitment before he was certain that Ike was not running. In addition, he believed it a mistake to get out front and become the object of a stop-Lyndon campaign. No southerner had won the presidency since before the Civil War and Johnson’s identification as a Texas segregationist would make it difficult enough for him to get his party’s nomination and win the White House without the additional burden of having the first Catholic running mate. Memories of Catholic governor Al Smith’s losing 1928 campaign suggested that any Catholic on the ticket could be toxic.
    Johnson’s rejection of Joe’s proposal infuriated Bobby. “He believed it was unforgivably discourteous to turn down his father’s generous offer,” Corcoran recalled. Johnson’s response was perfectly understandable. He saw Joe’s suggestion as more helpful to Jack’s ambitions than his own and he had no interest in being a stalking horse for Joe’s wish to put a son in the White House. Bobby was so focused on the family’s ambitions that he could not see Johnson’s side of the issue. It also did not help that Johnson would acknowledge Bobby when they passed in the corridors of the Senate Office Building with a patronizing “Hi, sonny!” Jack was less frustrated by Johnson’s decision, accepting it as nothing more than self-serving politics.
    By the time Jack decided to get in the race for vice president anyway, it was clear that Ike was running and likely to win a second term and Stevenson was the most likely Democratic nominee. Joe opposed Jack’s decision because he thought that Stevenson would be badly beaten and that the defeat would partly be blamed on Jack’s Catholicism, which would then damage his chances for a future presidential nomination.
    But Jack and Bobby believed that a vice presidential nomination would give Jack the sort of national visibility that would propel him into the presidential nomination in 1960. Stevenson, however, was not sold on Jack as a running mate; he thought he needed a southerner or a border-state senator. To avoid alienating the Kennedys, who could be an important source of campaign financing, Stevenson refused to pick a vice president. Instead, he told the convention to decide for him. It produced a sharp contest in which Jack ran second to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver on the first ballot. Conservative southerners, including Johnson’s Texas delegation, backed Kennedy against Kefauver, who had antagonized them with his support of civil rights. Kennedy took a second ballot lead over Kefauver, 648 to 551½, just 38 short of nomination. Liberals, however, irritated by Jack’s failure to vote for McCarthy’s censure, fearful that Jack’s Catholicism would hurt the ticket, and appreciative of a border-state senator’s backing of civil rights, rallied behind Kefauver, who won the nomination on the third ballot.
    Commentators agreed that Jack had done himself nothing but good as a national political figure by his performance at the convention, where his attributes as a young war hero and attractive personality impressed many of the delegates. The defeat, however, frustrated Jack and Bobby. Jack was depressed, saying, “This morning all of you were telling me to get into this thing. And now you’re telling me I should feel happy because I lost it.” At first Bobby was inconsolable, complaining, “They should have won and somebody had pulled something fishy.” He lamented their ignorance of convention procedures that could have made a difference, but he filed away the lessons for the future. Moreover, he took solace from the belief that Jack was now “better off,” and Stevenson was “not going to win and you’re going to be the candidate next time,” he told Jack.
    Despite his assessment of Stevenson’s chances, Bobby accepted an invitation to travel with the candidate and work in the campaign. For Stevenson, it was a