DEMOCRATS Man Out Front (See Cover)
At Daytona Beach, when a National Airlines attendant last week yelled angrily for Massachusetts' Democratic Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy to hustle aboard or get left in Florida, Mayor J. Hart Long said pointedly: "He doesn't have much respect for the future President of the U.S., does he?" To a Young Democrats' convention in Reno a fortnight before, University of Minnesota Coed Geri Storm brought word from her 58 sorority sisters: "Every girl told me to give Senator Kennedy all her love and to tell him they would all vote for him." At the University of Kansas, Kennedy aged perceptibly while barely escaping with his skin from autograph-hunting students who mobbed him backstage after a speech. In Oklahoma City, a grey-haired lady gushed: "I've come to see him because I think he's wonderful." At a Washington dinner party, a tipsy woman flung herself onto Kennedy's lap, locked her arms around his neck, vowed eternal adoration. Kennedy unceremoniously broke the strangle hold, plunked his admirer onto the floor, strode away muttering: "For God's sake, what's she trying to do?"
In his unannounced but unabashed run for the Democratic Party's nomination for President in 1960, Jack Kennedy has left panting politicians and swooning women across a large spread of the U.S. Taking off from the 1956 Democratic Convention, where he lost the nomination for Vice President to Tennessee's Estes Kefauver by a cliff hanging 38½ votes, Kennedy campaigned for the national ticket in 24 states—more than any Democrat except Adlai Stevenson and Kefauver. This year he has had more than 2,500 speaking invitations (they stream into his office, the mailboxes of his family, and even to Boston's Catholic hierarchy at the rate of 10 to 15 a day). He has accepted 144. He appeared before the American GastroEnterological Association in Colorado Springs and the Arkansas Bar Association at Hot Springs. He spoke to the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Philadelphia, the American Jewish Congress in New York, and he campaigned for successful Democratic Senate Candidate William Proxmire in the Polish districts of Milwaukee.
Ahs over Aws. He keened into the heart of the Deep South, spoke at Jackson, Miss, in support of the Supreme Court's school-desegregation decision,* nonetheless won a standing ovation and the presidential blessings of Mississippi's Governor James Plemon Coleman. Kennedy rolled through the Midwest, where his Senate vote against rigid, 90%-of-parity farm supports had cost him the vice-presidential nomination, and came out with the support of Kansas' up-and-coming Democratic Governor George Docking. Says a top Oklahoma party strategist: "I have been moving around the state for the last couple of months, just looking and picking my teeth. Right now, Kennedy's making all the touchdowns." Says a Democratic National Committee official: "Well, if we held a convention next month, it would be Kennedy, period."