THE CONVENTION: To the New Frontier

All the while his erstwhile rivals were telling the 70,000 people in the Los Angeles Coliseum what a great guy he was, Jack Kennedy fidgeted in his chair, nervously fingered his lips and ears, chatted with his neighbor, or worked at scraping a wad of gum off his right shoe. When the time came to accept the Democratic presidential nomination, he graciously saluted the vanquished one by one—Running Mate Lyndon Johnson, Adlai Stevenson, Stuart Symington, Hubert Humphrey, also scrappy Paul Butler, retiring chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and the absent Harry Truman. Then Jack Kennedy plunged into his...