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A Little Grey. Kennedy was reassured about everything when he read the bandwagon headlines at the family summer home in Hyannisport, Mass., between leisurely strolls along the beach and turns in the family motor cruiser. "Boy, this is for me," he boomed over the phone to a friend. "Let those other guys run around out there." By Friday night it was time for him, too, to head "out there." As he left home, the Irish maids of wealthy Hyannisport neighbors lined up across the street to give him a sendoff. From Hyannis, he and Wife Jackie flew to New York's Idlewild Airport, stayed at a nearby hotel overnight. Then, sternly refusing to kiss Jackie goodbye for the photographers, Jack boarded a jetliner called "Flagship West Virginia" and headed west across the U.S.
Said Kennedy of Lyndon Johnson to the 2,000 who flocked around at Los Angeles' International Airport: "A few days ago another candidate said that we needed a man with a little grey in his hair. We put that grey in his hair and we will continue to do so."
The Real Question. Lyndon Johnson, at this point, was actually feeling at home in the campaign for the first time. He was in his kind of situation—a situation of maneuver. And although the odds were staggeringly against him, he wheeled in relaxed fashion from meeting to luncheon to television show to cocktail party, preaching his doctrine of the right of the best man to win. "Everybody talks about who's going to be nominated" said he, "when the real question should be who ought to be nominated."
In closed-door huddles with delegates, Johnson argued that the air would start hissing out of the Kennedy balloon after the second ballot. Kennedy, he insisted, would be a weak candidate—mistrusted by farmers (Kennedy declared himself opposed to high price supports back in 1955), widely mistrusted by Negroes, vulnerable to Republican charges of absenteeism (he had missed nearly 80% of the Senate roll-call votes since the session began in January). Johnson tried hard to argue down the Northern Democrats' two main objections to his own candidacy: i) he is too conservative to be acceptable to labor and eggheads, and 2) as a Southerner he would alienate the Negro vote.
Kennedy, in fact, had the backing of most A.F.L.-C.I.O. big guns (although they hesitated to say so publicly out of respect for what Johnson and Rayburn might do to such labor favorites as the minimum-wage law when Congress reconvenes). But Johnson could point to some surprising signs of Northern Negro support. New York's Democratic Representative Adam Clayton Powell, political chieftain of Harlem, is a Johnson defender. Philadelphia's No. 1 Negro newspaper, the Tribune, openly endorsed Johnson in an editorial last March: "Please don't think we are crazy, but this newspaper would like to see Lyndon B. Johnson nominated for President."