Jaunty Candidate

Ticker tape drifted over Broadway in vast, swirling clots. All the way to City Hall it sifted onto the block-deep mob that surged past police barricades, shoved between cars of the motorcade, slowed the parade to a hesitant crawl. Atop the back seat of an open convertible rode Jack Kennedy, grinning, waving, reaching out to touch one after another of the forest of hands; Wife Jackie sat beside him in white coat, hat. gloves and wide-eyed wonder at the crush ("It felt like the sides of the car were bending"). Even Mayor Robert Wagner, whose good Democratic organization had helped get out the crowds, recoiled like the sorcerer's apprentice at the milling million. Said Jackie, tugging at Jack's sleeve as he grabbed a microphone to make a speech: "Make it fast, Jack, make it fast--they're having a difficult time with the crowds."

"I Love Him." It was the kind of difficulty that Jack Kennedy was learning to enjoy. Earlier in the week, in such Republican precincts as London, Ohio (pop. 6,000; registered Democrats: 380), he drew a surprising curbside turnout. One man held his young son high overhead for a clear view and shouted to the boy: "There he is, the next President of the U.S. I love him. I love him." Kennedy, relaxing with evident self-assurance, joshed the Londoners with effect: "There's a terrible rumor that this is a Republican community. I'm sure it's not true." They liked it.

Kennedy's toughest chore of the week was to address the annual American Legion convention in Miami. Most Legionnaires remembered that in speaking against a Legion-sponsored veterans' pension bill in 1949, Kennedy said on the floor of the House: "The leadership of the American Legion has not had a constructive thought since 1918." Noting wryly in passing that he had "learned a good deal about the Legion, especially since 1949," Legionnaire Kennedy then delivered a call for stronger defenses--suggested an airborne SAC alert, called for a crash program for Polaris and Minuteman missiles, a jet airlift for the country's conventional armed forces. Judging by applause, the Legion rated Jack Kennedy as its third choice--behind J. Edgar Hoover and Dick Nixon, who made headlines with a speech proposing a U.S. veto of any future admission of Red China to the United Nations and an economic "quarantine" of Castro's Cuba (next day, as if by prearrangement, the State Department ordered a U.S. embargo on shipments to Cuba--see THE HEMISPHERE).

Like Casey. In Manhattan, Kennedy had another audience which, somewhat surprisingly, was not on his side. When he turned up for the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner at the Waldorf (a politician's command performance) in black tie and found Nixon in white tie and tails, he seemed so comfortable that Nixon was moved to comment that whichever man won the election would outlaw the agony of full dress. In his speech, Kennedy produced some spirited quips. Only the host, Francis Cardinal Spellman, he said, could have brought together at the same banquet table two political leaders "who have long eyed each other suspiciously and who have disagreed so strongly, both publicly and privately--Vice President Nixon and Governor Rockefeller." He went on to crack to this knowledgeable audience that Casey Stengel's firing was proof that "perhaps experience doesn't count."

The $100-a-plate diners had already made it plain in their welcoming ovations that they were enthusiastically pro-Nixon. And on any applause meter, Nixon, who gracefully shelved partisan politics for the evening, came out ahead. But the pattern remained the same. Kennedy looked and talked like a man who knew he was in the 'lead and was willing to take a few irreverent chances.

While Nixon dropped out of the public eye for three days, Kennedy stayed on the move, savoring the loud encouragement of enthusiastic crowds around New York whenever he stepped outside. New York's police commissioner wisely refused to play the usual numbers game about the Broadway ticker-tape parade, but agreed it might be the biggest since Lindbergh's in 1927. On other days, thousands waited through heavy rain to see Kennedy in suburban Yonkers, thronged against his 15-mile motorcade through Brooklyn. At first, opponents had put the enthusiasm in the Kennedy camp down to the Kennedyites' characteristically aggressive confidence, then rated the enthusiasm as just bandwagon psychology, finally conceded that the spirit was based on a clear expectation of victory. Kennedy workers cautioned one another against overconfidence. Kennedy himself, observed New York Post Columnist Murray Kempton, acted "as though the campaign were over and there remained only the thanking of the troops."

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