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Kennedy frequently shows the same weariness in his own grueling campaign rounds, but Jack seizes his opportunities to relax and recharge—on a midnight plane seat, between the rounds in a hotel room, during his occasional days off in Washington and Hyannisport. (Before last week's TV debate, he holed up in a Chicago hotel room, slept eleven hours, napped another two.) Bobby never stops. Says Jack: "He's living on nerves." He is also living on the absolute conviction that he and Jack are going to win in November.
Farewell, Cities. With Election Day just five weeks off, few Democrats share Bobby Kennedy's certainty of victory. Although the professionals exude the usual public confidence, many politicians in both parties are privately jittery and uncertain about the outcome. All the current polls show Kennedy and Nixon running neck and neck, with as much as 25% of the electorate still undecided on how to vote. Even in traditionally "safe" states, the margin of safety is uncomfortably close, and neither party can breathe easily. Nixon's claim on California is as shaky as Kennedy's on North Carolina, and while Kennedy seems to be luring the big Northern cities back from Eisenhower, Nixon seems to be luring the up-and-coming Southern cities away from Kennedy. Most of the big, pivotal states where the election will be decided are still no cinches (see box next page). Barring an unforeseen crisis at home or abroad, or a dramatic change in the political weather, the 1960 political campaign should go down to the line as the closest, most hair-raising race since 1916 though in the end the electoral margin may be wide.
Wherever Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon went, they drew record crowds, roaring responses. In Cleveland last week 200,000 swarmed around Kennedy (and Senator Frank Lausche, habitually a loner, hastened to climb on the bandwagon). Roaring through Democratic Dixie, Nixon drew an astounding throng of 70,000 in Memphis. In their first joint television appearance, the two men seemed as evenly matched—though differing in style and pace—as a pair of Tiffany cuff links. Among independents and waverers, however, who had not felt the magic of personal contact, there remain lingering doubts and misgivings about both candidates. The candidates, with much more traveling ahead, and much more television, will do what they can to resolve doubts and arouse enthusiasm. But at least in the eyes of the pros, the main burden of getting out the vote now rests—as Adlai Stevenson learned, to his sorrow, in 1956 —on a fast-moving, hardworking, well-integrated political organization. And in Kennedy terms, that means Jack and Bobby, the most successful brother act in U.S. politics.