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Confidence & Souffles. Survival still required action, and by day Jack Kennedy kept moving in on sector after sector, taking hill after hill. Wherever he went, he shook every outstretched hand, autographed every paper in sight, all the while pursued by a straggle of perspiring, panting reporters and photographers who, on one occasion, even swarmed behind him into the men's room. In the evenings, while the convention droned on at the Sports Arena, Jack dodged his chaperons of the press and drove secretly to the Beverly Hills home of former Film Queen Marion Davies to dine and confer with his father, Joe Kennedy, an unseen but eagerly interested witness at the convention. To avoid the mobs. Jack shifted from the Biltmore to a not-so-secret hideaway in the penthouse of a rose-colored apartment building (which is shaped like a ship and named "The Mauritania"). To make his secret nightly journeys to see his father, Jack had to scramble down a fire escape, leap over a wall behind the building. "I'm so tired," he said to his brother-in-law Steve Smith. "I wonder if I'm exuding the basic confidence."
He was. As Wednesday rolled around and the delegates poured into the arena for the nominations and the balloting, the Kennedy steamroller had flattened the last visible rise of significant opposition: Johnson's drive was stalled, Stevenson's exquisite moment in Minnesota expired like a tired souffle. Even Adlai's surprise appearance in the hall on the night before, exploiting the passions of the loving crowds in the galleries, had excited no rush to the Adlaian altar.
"We're In." Yet the Stevenson challenge was not altogether dead. To the rostrum came Minnesota's Gene McCarthy to make the most impassioned speech of the whole convention—in Stevenson's behalf. "Do not turn away from this man," he pleaded. "He spoke to the people.