(7 of 9)
Jackie Kennedy almost lost a husband in the first years after the marriage. Jack's wartime injury had required a spinal operation, but the bones were not set properly. In 1954 his back began giving trouble, and by fall he was hobbling about on crutches. In October he entered Manhattan's Hospital for Special Surgery, where a metal plate was set into his spine. Twice in three months, his condition was so grave that his family was called to his bedside. Just before Christmas, he had recovered to the extent of flying, supine on a stretcher, to his father's Palm Beach home—where, to cure black moods of depression, he began writing Profiles in Courage. But in February his back began paining him fiercely again: the wound around his metal plate was not healing. He went back to the hospital for another operation, and missed most of the 1955 session. Kennedy's health has been raised as another liability to his presidential candidacy—but if he holds out at his recent pace until 1960, he should answer all such questions.
"I'll Go for It." By the 1956 convention in Chicago. Jack Kennedy was back in business. He narrated the party film, The Pursuit of Happiness, which was premiered at the convention, and he made a nominating speech for Adlai Stevenson. But Adlai, after winning, threw the vice-presidential nomination wide open (some say as an invitation to Jack Kennedy), and the great Stop Kefauver movement began. Kennedys gathered in a suite at the Hotel Conrad Hilton, trying to decide whether Jack should go after the nomination. Then word came that the Georgia delegation had caucused in favor of Kennedy. Jack jumped up. "By God," cried he, "if Georgia will vote for me, I must have a chance. I'll go for it." Kennedys scurried all over Chicago, but it was of necessity a disorganized effort; e.g., at about 1:30 a.m., someone said a man, name unknown, had been cooling his heels for ten minutes waiting to see Kennedy. It turned out to be New York's Tammany Boss Carmine De Sapio, with more than 90 big delegate votes in his hip pocket.
Despite the jumbled effort, Jack Kennedy came breathtakingly close to the nomination—and lost only because of that Senate vote, earlier in 1956, against 90% farm parity. That fact, more than any other, dramatizes Kennedy's major 1960 problem: he is still in the Senate and he must still vote on highly controversial issues. And if it has been a strength in building him as a public figure, it is also a weakness in his presidential candidacy that Jack Kennedy, ever since he first went to Capitol Hill, has carved himself out perhaps the most independent record of any member of Congress. Items: ¶ In 1947, Massachusetts' Senior Democratic Representative John McCormack handed Kennedy a petition for presidential clemency for Boston's Mayor Curley, who was just then being packed off to jail for mail fraud. Said McCormack: "Sign it." Kennedy refused—the only Democrat in the Massachusetts delegation to do so. McCormack neither forgave nor forgot, especially after Kennedy beat him for control of the state Democratic Committee in a preconvention 1956 fight. At the national convention, it was McCormack who signaled to Sam Rayburn to recognize the Missouri delegation—which cast the decisive votes against Kennedy.