In 1956, Adlai Stevenson had just won the Democratic nomination for president. He decided to let the delegates at the Democratic Convention pick his running mate.
After the first ballot, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee was in the lead, but young Jack Kennedy, the war hero from Massachusetts, was coming on strong. As the second balloting was underway, it was now neck-and-neck. Several delegations were anxious to shift their votes to Kennedy.
Suddenly, there was confusion on the convention floor.
House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who was chairing the convention, had made his distaste for Kennedy clear from the start. “If we have to have a Catholic,’’ he told Stevenson, “I hope we don’t have to take that little piss-ant Kennedy.’’
Rayburn saw his opportunity and recognized Oklahoma.
That state’s governor also had no time for a Catholic candidate. “He’s not our kind of folks,’’ he said of Kennedy. Oklahoma went for Kefauver and the tide of the convention turned. The people who didn’t want Jack Kennedy on the ticket had stopped the Catholic in his tracks.
Kennedy learned two vital lessons at that convention. One, he could be president. Two, the bosses were not going to let a Catholic get it if they could stop him. For leaders like Rayburn, Kennedy knew he had to beat them before he could woo them. He needed to win it in the primaries; he needed to take it to the people. It’s what he did.
First, he won Wisconsin over Senator Hubert Humphrey. But reporters kept harping on his Catholicism.
“Kennedy is, of course, Roman Catholic,’’ Walter Cronkite reminded his viewers. “And some observers think that the election was resolved into a religious struggle.’’
His success was dismissed as Catholic bloc-voting; the victory got Kennedy nothing. “One of the most elaborate and intense campaigns in the state’s history will end up achieving nothing,’’ another broadcaster decreed that night.
