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Kennedy: Man Out Front On the record of his accomplishment.
Jack Kennedy is the early-season Demo cratic favorite by general agreement. Says an aide to Michigan's hopeful "Soapy" Williams: "If the convention were held today. Kennedy would win on the first ballot, period." Kennedy has New Eng land's loo-plus delegate votes virtually sewed up, stands well in a dozen Mid western and Western states and has sur prising strength in the South. "Kennedy is sober and temperate on civil rights." says Mississippi's Governor J. P. Coleman. "He's no hell raiser or Barnburner." Kennedy came out of nowhere in 1956 with a breathless, near-successful try. with heavy Southern support, at plucking the vice-presidential nomination out of Estes Kefauver's shaken hands. A few months later, after Dwight Eisenhower's election, Kennedy was set to thinking hard when Hubert Humphrey's wife Muriel remarked at a cocktail party: "If Stu Symington is the competition for President, then it's a wide-open race." Kennedy has been campaigning ever since. He has been in every state of the Union except Tennessee, has come to know and be known by some 1,500 professional Democrats who generally go to conventions. During the 1958 campaign alone he traveled 25,000 miles in 19 states. Between times he managed to cover Massachusetts like a quilt, post volunteer "secretaries" in more than 300 of the state's 351 cities and towns, and win a spectacular 870,000-vote plurality over hapless Republican Vincent Celeste (Kennedy lost $10 to a campaign worker by betting that he could not break 700,000).
But Jack Kennedy could turn out to be one of the flowers that bloom in the spring. Even after the successful election of Roman Catholics to major offices in such states as Minnesota, California and Pennsylvania, Kennedy's Catholicism could still be held against him when kingmakers are looking for winners at convention time. Another danger to Kennedy is the idea that his millionaire father, Boston Financier Joe Kennedy, is willing to spend any amount of money to get him elected—an idea forcefully denied by Kennedy and carefully spread by his opponents ("He's a hell of an attractive fellow," says a Meyner man, "but he's trying to buy the convention"). Also, Hum-phreyites will make it clear to farmers that Kennedy has, on occasion, voted against high price supports (although he won the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s 100% approval for his votes on 15 key issues in the 85th Congress).
Kennedy's strategy: to spend the next year paying the strictest attention to his Senate business. He expects to be in the presidential primaries up to his tousled hair; he would like nothing better than to entice that great primary campaigner, Estes Kefauver, into the early-bird New Hampshire primary, and beat him. "It may be a little decadent," says Kennedy wryly, "but popularity's still very important."
Meyner: Regional Entry