(7 of 8)
Wave & the Rock. Johnson's high hope was that the dark horses. Stuart Symington, Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson, with some 200 first-ballot votes among them, could be persuaded to hold on. His other hope was to try to keep state Governors heading up uncommitted or favorite-son delegations from giving way to Kennedy on the first ballot. Johnson had his network of support, mostly congressional friends. He had his handful of devoted admirers. At one point. Colorado's ex-Senator Ed Johnson, who had been kept off the delegation by a Kennedy coup, shuffled up to say: "I'm just Johnson all the way. I'm trying to do all I can even if it does seem like everything I do is wrong."
One key man in the play was California's hapless Governor Pat Brown, who finally, on convention eve, openly endorsed Jack Kennedy. But Johnson had long since conceded that the Kennedys had Pat Brown hog-tied. As it has in many another convention, the real make-or-break power focused on Pennsylvania's 81 votes, presided over by Governor David Leo Lawrence, a tough, old-line boss who could make his influence stick if he wanted to. Dave Lawrence's heart be longed to Adlai Stevenson. Early in the game his mind took him toward Symington because he thought that Jack Kennedy's Catholicism would be a drag on the state ticket in Pennsylvania—where Catholic Dave Lawrence himself had barely squeaked by in 1958. But even hard-rock Pennsylvania was irresistibly being engulfed by the Kennedy wave. Philadelphia's Bill Green, No. 2 boss in the delegation, let it be known that he was for Kennedy. One of Jack Kennedy's first acts on landing in Los Angeles was to dodge through the dim halls of the Biltmore to pay his respects to Lawrence.
While Lyndon Johnson was huddling with delegates at the Biltmore, Jack Kennedy came out of Lawrence's room with a wider-than-usual grin on his face. Whispered a Kennedy man with the same kind of grin: "We have it. That's the ball game."
Even so, Lyndon Johnson's brief campaign had left some lingering echoes behind—a message of responsibility and national unity, and some bracing advice to any Democratic candidate who might want the full support of L.B.J. "The next President," said Johnson, "is not going to be a talking President—or a traveling President. He is going to be, and should be, a working President.
"His job is to convince the world—both our enemies and our allies—that America is strong and freedom is strong. He can't wring his hands that America is second-rate—because America is not second-rate. He can't cry out about moral decay—because this generation is not a generation of decay."
* Mindful that any Southern politician is automatically suspected of race prejudice, Johnson tapped Hawaii's Congressman Daniel Ken Inouye, a Nisei, to make one of the seconding speeches.
* Judged against the pattern of both Democratic and Republican nominating conventions since 1928, Johnson's hope that the suspense would carry beyond the first ballot was pretty dim. In only four of the past 16 conventions did it take more than one ballot to nominate a presidential candidate (Roosevelt in 1932, four ballots; Willkie in 1940, six; Dewey in 1948, three; Stevenson in 1952, three).