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Still boyish-looking at 43, Jack Kennedy has the gemlike qualities—highly polished, but hard and rather cold—sometimes found in men of silver-spoon birth, Ivy League education and high ambition. Once he decided to be a politician, he set for himself the highest possible political goal, the presidency, and he marched toward it with machinelike efficiency. For him, the House and Senate were not so much arenas of action as steppingstones to his goal. In the Senate he was conspicuous not for achievements of legislation or leadership but for youth, good looks, wealth, and the aura he exuded of being bound for higher places still. When he decided to run for President in 1960, he marshaled his advantages—charm, articulateness, money, a sure political instinct, and the handsome Clan Kennedy (TIME, cover, July 11)—and set out, half a year ago, to take the nomination by storm. Publicly challenging his rivals to run against him in primaries, publicly insisting that no presidential hopeful who shunned primaries deserved to be considered for the nomination, Kennedy ran in seven, piled up majorities in all of them (only two of them, Wisconsin and West Virginia, were real contests). His showing proved that his Roman Catholicism was an asset rather than a liability, helped his hardboiled campaign to persuade Democratic politicians to climb aboard his bandwagon lest they get left behind.
Aura of Respect. Only eight years older than Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson seems to belong to a different generation and a different world. He still has an in eradicable touch of Texas backlands about him. When he is trying to persuade or cajole somebody, as he often is, he grabs an arm or shoulder in a bruising grip, and a hint of the carnival snake-oil seller shows in his voice. His fellow Senators joke about the lavish vanity of his tailoring and his baronial Senate office—but they respect him, too. Last June the non-partisan Congressional Quarterly polled Senators and Representatives on who they thought would be the Democratic Party's "strongest possible" presidential candidate; of the 220 members who replied, 54% named Lyndon Johnson, only 20% named Jack Kennedy (Adlai Stevenson came in third with 14%).
During his 5½ years as Senate majority leader, facing a Republican President, Johnson proved himself to be one of U.S. history's ablest masters of the subtle, complex art of legislative leadership. And he exercised that leadership with statesmanlike responsibility. A Southerner, utterly dependent upon Southern support in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, he painstakingly steered through the Senate this year a civil rights bill guaranteeing the voting rights of Southern Negroes. Instead of trying to use the U-2 imbroglio and the summit collapse to embarrass the Administration in an election year, he spoke out for national unity.