Candidate in Orbit

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In Annapolis, Joe Curnane, a Massachusetts undertaker who looks after Jack Kennedy's political interests in Maryland, hooked his forefingers in his vest and put the heat on 48 Tidewater ward lords for sizable campaign contributions. "It gets better every day," he said. "I'd hate to see Maryland end up in the wrong column the day after the election. Don't miss the boat, gentlemen. Don't miss the boat."

In New Jersey, a Kennedy lieutenant received his instructions to stand by in heavily Democratic Hudson County on election night, grab the predictably heavy pro-Kennedy first returns and flash them to the West Coast, where (because of the time difference) polls would still be open for three hours and there still might be time to exploit a last-minute psychological flurry for Kennedy.

In Manhattan, a dazed girl stood in the torrent of humanity that swirled around a black convertible. "She touched him!" shrieked her companion. "Quick, Mary, let me touch your hand, and then Sally can touch mine, and then . . ."

As he took a breather in Scranton, Pa., Jack Kennedy was grey with fatigue, and his right hand was sore from being grabbed, squeezed, clutched at in some twelve hours of campaigning. It had been a day to remember: all through the mine-scarred countryside of Pennsylvania, from Bethlehem to Allentown to Wilkes-Barre, the people poured out, half a million strong, screaming, tossing food and gifts into Kennedy's open Ford, waving flags.

"These people look to this fellow like a Messiah," muttered old Governor Dave Lawrence. "There's never been anything like this in the history of Pennsylvania--including Roosevelt." What Kennedy said made no difference: he could have recited the Boy Scout oath and brought forth ovations. Everywhere it was the same last week: through Republican heartland from Iowa to Michigan, the throngs eddied around him. Each campaign day topped the previous 24 hours. When he flew into Manhattan for a rally in the garment district, a wall-to-wall carpet of humanity spread out for 12 blocks around him.

"Why doesn't he go back to Hyannisport and do the rest from his front porch?" asked a weary reporter. Instead, Kennedy stepped up the tempo, exhorted his fagged aides to renewed action. "This is no Dewey operation," he said to them in a husky voice. "We're not going to take any time off from now on. Nixon could still win this campaign."

Cool Calculation. Viewed by the warm-eyed crowds who had lined the curbs in 46 states (he missed Mississippi, Louisiana, North Dakota and Nevada) or through the flinty eyes of unforgiving political bosses, the Kennedy campaign two weeks before election seemed almost faultless --even down to the plans for dredging the last votes out of California on election night. With the same cool calculation that had won him the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles, Jack Kennedy had brought dissident party factions into line, stirred up the Northern Democratic organization as it had not been stirred in eight years, met head-on the political problem of his Roman Catholic faith, may even have turned it into a sizable political asset. And by dint of ceaseless campaigning and the television debates with Vice President Richard Nixon, he had made himself a known, familiar and respected figure to millions of U.S. voters, who may very well choose him next week as the 35th President of the U.S. He has come a long way fast.

To the U.S. electorate, John Fitzgerald Kennedy comes through as a somewhat paradoxical figure who radiates confidence while he talks of grave troubles to come. To a nation winding up eight comfortable years under the leadership of one of the most popular Presidents in U.S. history, he brings a message of anxiety and discontent. To a nation strong enough to flex its power from Lebanon on one side of the world to Formosa Strait on the other, he preaches a warning of declining prestige. To a country that has marched down the middle of the road behind Dwight Eisenhower to the highest level of shared prosperity of any nation in history, he campaigns with Depression fervor for welfare-state reform ("I am not satisfied that 17 million Americans go to bed hungry every night . . .").

Relentless Underscoring. Kennedy's panacea for these problems is simple: himself. Elect me, he says, and I will start the U.S. moving forward again. His specific proposals are often vague. In foreign affairs, he promises to make America liked and respected as it was in Roosevelt's day, but thanks to relentless underscoring by Dick Nixon, the major foreign policy discussion of the campaign has been disengagement from Quemoy and Matsu or aid to anti-Castro Cuban revolutionaries, neither of which gives much evidence of how foreign crises would be met (Nixon used the first to accuse Kennedy of retreat; Kennedy used the second to prove that he would be tougher than Nixon). On the domestic front, Kennedy promises most of the programs in the liberal Democratic book; federal aid to education, medical care for the aged, aid to depressed areas, lower interest rates, etc.--overall a sizable increase in federal spending, to be accomplished without unbalancing the budget. He suggests that the extra burdens are to be carried by expanded national growth, but just how this is to be brought about he never makes clear. Even some of his own Harvard economic advisers don't understand what Kennedy's farm program is.

There was, in fact, very little in the Kennedy message to make the crowds bust the barricades, to explain the ecstasy of teenagers or the wild urge of the throngs to touch him. The more he campaigned, the more he seemed endowed with the same charisma that won and held popularity for Dwight Eisenhower. In appearance he is a slender man with a boyish face, an uncontrollable shock of hair, a dazzling smile. In manner he is alert, incisive, speaking in short, terse sentences in a chowderish New England accent that he somehow makes attractive (even when he pronounces Cincinnati as "Since-in-notty" in Cincinnati), reaching with no apparent effort into a first-class mind for historical anecdotes or classical allusions. Like Ike, who is 27 years his senior, he projects a kind of conviction and vigor even when talking of commonplace things in a commonplace way.

His politics are essentially to be for Kennedy, with complete faith that Kennedy will be good for whatever cause he chooses to lead. "The political world is stimulating," he told a TIME correspondent a month before his nomination last July. "It's the most interesting thing you can do. It beats following the dollar. It allows the full use of your powers. First, there is the great chess game--the battle, the competition. There's the strategy and which pieces you move, and all that. And then in government you can do something about what you think."

Or, as he once put it, another way: "In my family we were interested not so much in the ideas of politics as in the mechanics of the whole process."

A Breed Apart. As the son of one of the richest men in the U.S.--and a millionaire in his own right on his 21st birthday--he might well have become a minted conservative. But the Kennedys were a breed apart: Father Joe Kennedy was a Wall Street nabob and a man of many reactionary convictions, yet he swallowed Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal whole. Later, as U.S. Ambassador to Britain on the eve of war, he broke emphatically with Roosevelt on the issue of U.S. involvement in World War II. In the salad days of the New Deal, Jack grew up, absorbing his father's ambiguous politics, listening to the famous men and women who gathered around the Kennedy dinner table, reading prodigiously on his own. Unlike many of his generation (Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, for example), he was untouched by the Depression and unaware, except through reading and conversations, of the traumatic effect it had on the U.S. His Catholic father insisted on a secular education for him, and Jack went to Choate, Harvard and the London School of Economics. Extensive travel in Europe, a wartime hitch as skipper of a Navy FT boat (his brother, Joseph Kennedy Jr., a naval aviator, died in an air explosion over the English Coast), a brief turn as a Hearst correspondent gave him a kaleidoscopic political, international and economic background. By the time he decided to enter public life, Kennedy was a cool and detached young man and a political mugwump.

Mixed Package. His decision was almost capricious. There was the strong undertow of the family's political traditions and connections, to be sure, but no pressures were brought to bear on him, Jack insists. "I was at loose ends at the time," he once explained. "It seemed the logical thing to do."

When he first entered the House of Representatives in 1947, a gangling, 29-year-old youth still wearing his South Pacific suntans and a complexion yellowed by treatment for wartime malaria, there was considerable doubt about what Congressman Kennedy really did think. He seemed like a mixed package, partly conservative, partly liberal and a little bewildered, and Kennedy accepts the early label as accurate: "I'd just come out of my father's house at the time, and these were the things I knew." He meticulously served the parochial interests of his district--Boston's poorest--voting for housing, urban renewal, veterans' pensions, social security, codfish. For the larger issues, Kennedy had little time or interest. Much of his time was spent in pursuit of pretty girls and higher elective office, and his absenteeism was notorious (in six years in the Lower House, he missed more than a quarter of the 604 roll-call votes).

"The Suicide Senator." When a big issue caught his attention, though, Kennedy studied it thoroughly, held it up to the light and voted intelligently and courageously. During his second term in the House, he advocated reducing economic aid to Europe and the Middle East (and incurred the terrible wrath of Harry Truman), not because of any ingrained isolationism--he has always been a committed, Eastern-seaboard internationalist--but out of the conviction that Western Europe and the Arab world should contribute more to their own recovery.

In the Senate in 1954, Kennedy was the first Massachusetts Senator or Representative to vote for the St. Lawrence Seaway. His longshoremen constituents were furious, and the New England press dubbed him "the Suicide Senator" for supporting a scheme that could only damage the port of Boston. But Kennedy reasoned that Canada would undoubtedly build the seaway alone if the U.S. held aloof, decided that the nation might as well share in its ultimate benefits.

In the liberal Democrats' catalogue of sins, Kennedy has one that ranks in liberal legend with Nixon's rough campaign for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas. Jack Kennedy was silent on the condemnation of Joe McCarthy, who was, in fact, a friend of Joe Kennedy's. For months after the Senate voted for condemnation, Kennedy pleaded that he had been critically ill at the time, as he was. But there was time to let his sentiments be known, and no need to have been one of two Senators to go unrecorded. (The other: Wisconsin's Alexander Wiley, McCarthy's colleague.) Finally, taxed by Eleanor Roosevelt for his silence, he announced that he had intended to vote for condemnation--on the technical ground that McCarthy had offended the dignity of the Senate.

Changed Man. In his congressional years, Kennedy matured politically. He also veered more toward the liberal left.

Looking back, most of his associates date his emergence as a bona fide liberal--and probably as a presidential aspirant--to the years 1955-56. His serious 1954 operation to correct a wartime back injury--double fusion of spinal discs, with complications from Addison's disease--brought Kennedy to the brink of death; last rites of the Catholic Church were pronounced. In the long months of convalescence, he had opportunity to contemplate his political fu ture. (Wife Jacqueline Kennedy rejects the theory that this was his moment of political truth: "That way you can sort of tie it up with Campobello and all that. To me, he never wavered on his path. I never knew what it was, but it was obviously toward the presidency.")

Whatever happened, Kennedy was a changed man on his return to the Senate in May 1955. He took his place as a leader among the Northern Democrats; his mind, as sharply honed as a barber's razor, turned to every major project on the agenda, and his eyes fastened on the White House. When Presidential Nominee Adlai Stevenson threw open the 1956 Democratic Convention for vice-presidential nominations, Kennedy plunged into a trial run. To his surprise, he came within a thin 38^ votes of defeating Tennessee's Estes Kefauver--corralling, along the way, a strong voting strength from the South, the Eastern Seaboard and his native New England. Kennedy's case was powerfully helped when Connecticut Democratic Boss John Bailey circulated a memo showing that Kennedy's Roman Catholicism would be a political asset to the ticket in the industrial states.

A few weeks after the convention, Kennedy and his faithful, brainy aide, Ted Sorensen, a Nebraska Unitarian, sat down and plotted the Senator's course toward the White House in 1960.

Small Anchor. Skeptics suggest that Kennedy drew the mantle of New Deal-Fair Deal liberalism around him because he sensed that liberalism offered the only way for a Democrat to win back labor and the minorities from Dwight Eisenhower, and with them the powerful Northern cities. Whether by design or scruple, Kennedy indeed did change his thinking in several areas: his position on farm subsidies switched from Benson's flexible supports to down-the-line 90% of parity. His biographer, James MacGregor Burns, calls him a genuine liberal who "had the helm fixed toward port but . . . was still dragging a small anchor to starboard."

Kennedy was always too much himself to turn into a doctrinaire liberal. He did not take part in the abortive campaigns of such Senate liberals as Wisconsin's William Proxmire and Pennsylvania's Joe Clark against Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. He provoked thunderclouds from labor by helping to write the Landrum-Griffin labor reform bill (Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa still calls it the Kennedy-Landrum-Griffin bill), and his horse-trading skill in a joint Senate-House conference blunted some of the bill's provisions but got it enacted into law.

Polite Blackmail. Kennedy's Senate performance may have written a record for him to run on, but it offered mighty little that interested the political bosses when Kennedy let it be known, in 1959, that he would like the 1960 Democratic nomination. After all, he was only 42. Nonetheless, he and Sorensen carefully laid down the plan: he would run hard in the primaries and arrive at Los Angeles with a basketful of votes and substantial proof that a Catholic could be elected. The Wisconsin primary proved beyond doubt that he could overturn voting patterns by drawing a Catholic-bloc vote. The West Virginia primary proved that he knew how to meet the religion issue head-on in Protestant country and had enough other assets (war record, personality, good looks) to carry him to victory. When such powerful bosses as Pennsylvania's Lawrence (himself a Catholic) were reluctant, the Kennedy forces were not above polite blackmail. Wouldn't the Democrats stand a chance of alienating the big Catholic vote, they suggested, if they should turn down a Catholic candidate who was a proved winner?

As Kennedy marched toward Los Angeles, he had the advantage of something of a double image. He was at once a friend to labor by virtue of his votes on minimum wages, organizational picketing, etc., and a stern monitor of big labor by virtue of his service--and Brother Bobby's--on the McClellan labor-management-rackets investigating committee. He was a far-out liberal on domestic issues, yet carried the conservative aura of his father, Multimillionaire Conservative Joe Kennedy. He sought foreign policy counsel of such men as Adlai Stevenson and Chester Bowles; he did not fear that the right-wing objection to their policies would rub off on him, benefiting from his church's militant line in dealing with the Communists. Those who tried to figure out just what hue of Democrat Jack Kennedy was only wound up in confusion--unless they reached the valid conclusion that he was first and foremost a highly talented, independent political natural.

This, more than anything, came clear at the convention. To get the nomination, he encouraged the vice-presidential hopes of half a dozen Midwestern Governors. With the presidential nomination in hand, he turned his back on the Midwest and selected Texas' Lyndon Johnson, his convention archenemy and the darkest of villains to Northern liberals--with instructions to deliver the Solid South. At the same time, Chester Bowles and others wrote, with his blessing, the most liberal platform in history.

Rule of Reason. Says Jack Kennedy, in a moment of self-analysis: "The policies I advocate are the result of the rule of reason." Then, in his millrace fashion, he pours out the reasons why he is of liberal persuasion in 1960: "It is reasonable to say we've got to do something about low-income housing, we've got to do something about minimum wages, we've got to do something about our schools. Reason tells me we've got to do these things.

"The common definition of a liberal today is an ideological response to every situation, whether it fits reason or not. I don't have an automatic commitment to provide these things. But I don't know how any reasonable man would arrive at any other idea in 1960. If the rule of reason brings you to the position that happens to be the liberal position, it is the one you have to take, but not just because it is liberal. In 1960 that is my position. It was Roosevelt's back in 1932."

Overnight Raise. Since winning the nomination, Kennedy has dispelled the double view of himself. He is running strongly liberal. He has told labor that its goals are his goals, he has told the depressed areas that they have been robbed of their due by an Eisenhower veto, he has told schoolteachers that the Republicans are responsible for run-down school buildings and low teacher salaries. He took hold of an attack on his religion led by the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale and turned it into an asset with his courageous question-and-answer session with the Houston ministers--and his lieutenants saw to it that the film of the session was telecast in key Catholic as well as Protestant areas. In the grueling ordeal of the presidential campaign, his qualities of steadiness served him well.

With all this, Kennedy was still miles behind Vice President Nixon, for the simple reason that Nixon was better known to millions through his two national campaigns and headlines on his spectacular trips to Latin America and Russia. Then came the TV debates, which raised Kennedy overnight to Nixon's stature and showed the nation that he was quite a man under fire. (In Hyannisport last August, a friend asked him how he expected to win the election. Without a moment's hesitation, Kennedy twanged: "In the debates.")

As he has climbed the political heights, ever sure of himself, Jack Kennedy has demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that he is the young political master. In his band of merry men are idealist professors and throat-cutting politicians. They give Kennedy advice, he listens attentively, blots up their words, and then makes his own decision. "Nobody tells Jack what to do," growls Joe Kennedy, "unless he wants to be told." Jack moves swiftly to consolidate his leadership. Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn were as withering in their criticism of Kennedy before the conventions as Dick Nixon has been since the campaign heated up. Yet Kennedy swiftly and diplomatically won their allegiance, and now they march with--but a step behind--Jack Kennedy. He is the absolute boss of the Democratic Party in 1960.

Fresher Faces. If Kennedy next week becomes the youngest President-elect in history, he will move on Washington like an arrow. Already Clark Clifford, an old White House hand from the days of Truman, is at work on a what-to-do program for the transition months between election and inauguration. Plans are under way for a complete overhaul of the executive branch: Clifford has a list of 204 top jobs that would be filled by Dec. i, another 406 to be filled by Jan. 1. Clifford is working closely with the Brookings Institution on a table of organization patterned on Dwight Eisenhower's efficient White House arrangements.

On Capitol Hill Kennedy will, if elected, use Vice President Lyndon Johnson as his chief operative and liaison man. He plans to take a personal hand in congressional affairs as well: "I know more about them, having served in Congress for 14 years." The Cabinet and, in fact, the whole Government would be filled largely with younger men, fresher faces. Jack Kennedy owes very little in the way of political debts--he has been his own best promoter and manipulator--and can choose his team as he pleases. Since he is not a state Governor and has no incumbent Administration in Washington to provide Democratic manpower, he would have to assemble his team from scratch.

Change of Atmosphere. There is no doubt that a Kennedy Administration would start off with a national roller-coaster ride across the New Frontier. Kennedy is well aware of the political grace period--he thinks it is about 90 days--for a new Administration, plans to move fast, with a far-reaching program of social and economic legislation at home and some bold ventures in the field of foreign policy and national defense. His first concern is to beef up and streamline the armed forces. And, sidestepping the nations of Western Europe, he gives his highest foreign policy priority to aid programs for Latin America ("They've been shortchanged"), India and Africa. He would also try for a summit conference, and one last effort at disarmament, by May 1961.

"I will try to get more intellectually vigorous people in Washington," he says. "It's been rather a pale atmosphere." Says a top aide, ignoring the speculation about Adlai Stevenson and Chester Bowles: "Kennedy will be his own Secretary of State. His Secretary of State will be an adviser and an administrator of John Kennedy's foreign policy." Republicans would be invited to participate in the area of national security ("It is not just a Democratic concern"), but, on balance. Kennedy's Washington would be partisan, egghead and dominated by one man: President Kennedy.

The plans were bold, and bolder still was the willingness to discuss them with the election still to be won. But then, if John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shy. retiring and modest, he never would have got to the point where they were worth discussing at all.

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