Man of the New Frontier

(See Cover)

To dramatize his "New Frontier" theme, Campaigner John Kennedy often drew on a favorite anecdote about Benjamin Franklin. As his fellow delegates to the Constitutional Convention rose one by one to sign the newborn document, Franklin observed that for many days he had been unable to decide whether the rosy sun on the painting behind the president's chair was rising or setting. "But now at length," said Franklin, "I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun."

On election morning this week, the rising orange sun flashed on the Boston steeples and rooftops and glanced through the mist on the old streets as John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his expecting wife drove to the stately West End (Congregational) Church in the Sixth Ward to vote.

It was, symbolically, Jack Kennedy's rising sun, heralding the greatest triumph of all for the Kennedy Clan, which first saw the light of political dawn two generations ago in that very city. It was there, in the turn-of-the-century days of boisterous hurrahs and beer-barrel politics, that his two shanty Irish grandfathers ruled: Saloonkeeper Pat Kennedy, the leader of East Boston's First Ward, and a state representative and state senator to boot; John Francis ("Honey Fitz'') Fitzgerald, twice the mayor of Boston and a U.S. Congressman, the only man in town who could sing Sweet Adeline sober and get away with it. (It was a proud Honey Fitz who at 83 climbed upon a table and danced a merry jig and sang Sweet Adeline when his grandson Jack won his first term in the Congress in 1946.)

Jangles & Bristles. It was a long leap from the days of bliss and blarney to the days of Ike, Nixon and Lodge, and before the moment of victory Jack Kennedy allowed himself to doubt that he might make it. In the final swing of the campaign, the Kennedy troupe was showing the frazzled edges of fatigue, even unaccustomed confusion. The motorcades in Connecticut and New York were dogged with inefficiency and out-of-kilter schedules ; so furious was Kennedy at one point that he stomped about in his Manhattan hotel room, called in his weary aides and chewed them out. "This,'' he stormed at one man, "is the most blankety-blank day of the entire campaign!'' His raw-rubbed nerves jangled all the more with his determination to win, for in his fatigue he had worked up a bitter personal dislike for Richard Nixon. "When I first began this campaign." said he grimly. "I just wanted to beat Nixon. Now I want to save the country from him.''

Slowly, as the Election Day sun rose off the horizon, Jack Kennedy's old cool confidence reasserted itself. Returning to his home at Hyannisport, he posed for photographers with Jacqueline and little Caroline, then changed into slacks and a sports shirt and relaxed. Once, he and his brother Bobby went outside and tossed a soccer ball around for a few minutes, though even this momentary fling lacked the old Kennedy flavor of sibling aggressiveness. The rest of the time Bobby kept close to his own home (a stone's throw away from Jack's), where he had set up a command post bristling with long-distance phone lines and news tickers.

Stocking Feet & Black Cigar. On election night the GHQ swarmed with Kennedys and staffers. All the brothers and sisters--Bobby, Ted, Jean, Eunice and Pat--and their husbands and wives scurried about with news bulletins (Old Joe Kennedy and his wife watched the returns on TV in the "Big House'' near by); Brother-in-Law Peter Lawford manned the five wire-association tickers in his stocking feet. Press Aide Pierre Salinger, Chief Adviser Ted Sorensen, Scheduling Coordinator Kenny O'Donnell, Top Organizer Larry O'Brien and Pollster Lou Harris (working feverishly with past election records and a slipstick) analyzed reports from far-flung observers--90 appointed assistants in key precincts all over the nation--who phoned in their findings direct. Bobby kept in touch with Democratic National Committee Chairman Henry ("Scoop") Jackson in Washington over a direct telephone line. He had another private line to Jack's house, but frequently Jack went over to the command post himself to look at the returns. When the news of the big Connecticut victory came over the wires. Jack uttered his favorite exclamation. "Fantastic!"', jumped for joy and (though he rarely smokes) lit a big black cigar, while his gleeful sister Eunice warbled When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.

As the night wore on, crowds gathered outside the Hyannis National Guard Armory, where carpenters had set up a makeshift platform from which Kennedy would make his nationwide victory speech. Pranksters hoisted a stuffed elephant on a telephone pole; newsmen milled about, waiting. Agents of the U.S. Secret Service, assigned to guard the winning candidate, notified the local police that they would move in when certain victory was assured.

At Bobby's house. Jack Kennedy checked in a few more times to read the reports. His mother came down from the big house to see him. By midnight, the jubilation of local Democratic staffers had subsided somewhat as they realized that the race was still undecided. At a TV set in the early hours of the morning, Kennedy watched Richard Nixon's address to campaign workers in Los Angeles (see below), decided to follow the Vice President's lead by going to bed without delivering any public speech.

The victory was the answer to the call whose theme Jack Kennedy had uttered with such pounding force in the two months of his campaign. It was a call predicated on the proposition that the heirs to the Eisenhower years lacked the courage and vision to lead the nation through the troubled '60s. It was a call that forced Richard Nixon into a defensive posture from which he never fully recovered--even with the last-minute intervention of President Eisenhower.

Action & Challenge. With characteristic self-certainty that projected through the TV debates to a nation that scarcely knew him, Kennedy shook the U.S. hard. To the Republican claim that U.S. leadership had halted the march of Communism, he answered with the charge that too little had been achieved for the U.S. to feel safe, that cold-war initiative had been lost to the Soviets, and that as a result, U.S. prestige had dropped to low ebb. Against Republicans' warnings that a Democratic victory would bring a new wave of inflation and Government control, he preached a doctrine of strong federal action in the fields of education, economy, farm policy, housing, unemployment and welfare--promising price stability as well.

In terms of the popular vote accorded Kennedy, the U.S. electorate withheld the resounding mandate that it gave Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. But because he had stirred sufficient numbers of voters to take him and his New Frontier on trust, Kennedy's challenge had been accepted.

The Risk. He had offered remarkably little in the way of specifics. For a nation grown prosperous and comfortable through the eight Eisenhower years (despite recession signs in a number of places), Kennedy's victory presupposed a new willingness to risk much in the '60s. Kennedy's solution to the multibillion-dollar farm scandal--90% price supports --seemed no better than any answer offered before. His welfare programs, despite his reiterated pledge to retain a sound dollar, carried the threat of unbalanced budgets and more inflation at the same time that they strove to satisfy human needs. His pronouncements on the need for new diplomatic vigor in Western Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America were based on the assumption of a U.S. lag and his ability to recreate the atmosphere of F.D.R.'s Good Neighbor policy. But the specifics of foreign policy--on Cuba as on Quemoy--had raised many hackles and some doubts.

Despite this vagueness of program, Kennedy won his victory with the strength of personality and tactic. The U.S. had little known or cared about the boyish, tousle-haired Massachusetts Senator until he erupted on his primary campaign last year. With detached fascination they watched him lift the nomination out of the hands of seasoned pros, felt the incredible force of his bandwagon organization as it coursed over the U.S. Over the months he etched the image of a driving personality, the peculiar quality of his hasty rhetoric that seemed to magnetize though it lacked warmth. Unsmiling for the most part, awkward in gesture, undramatic in tone, he hammered again and again at basically one theme--that the U.S. was caught on dead center in a dynamic age, and he would "get this country moving again."

That single theme, single-mindedly propelled without change of pace, without subtlety of approach, had apparently plumbed an unsuspected concern in the land. Through the pure force of persuasion, Kennedy had won enough Americans to follow him on his own terms.

The Amalgam. It was this capacity for leadership that had driven Jack Kennedy. First came an amalgam of determination, perseverance and political savvy bred in him from the time of Pat Kennedy and Honey Fitz. To this was added the spirit of family pride and achievement instilled by Joe Kennedy. It was completed, in Jack Kennedy's case, by the realities of war, and by his maturing under the heavy pressures of the campaign.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy would enter office as the youngest President since Teddy Roosevelt and as the first Roman Catholic in the nation's history. All good Democrats--or nearly all--had come to the aid of the party. And who knew but that as the new sun rose on the morning after Election Day in a shabby ward of old Boston, some ancient, misty-eyed Irish pol thought he heard Honey Fitz shuffling a ghostly old-country jig and rasping out the strains of Sweet Adeline.

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