Although
very different in background, the men, Tony Zale, the boxer, and Richard G.Hatcher, the mayor of Gary , were brought
together by Robert F. Kennedy’s attempt to win the Indiana primary. The two heroes of the
Region joined Kennedy in a motorcade through the streets of Gary the day before Hoosier voters trooped to
the polls on May 7. They represented Kennedy’s attempt to bridge the gaps
between poor whites and African Americans into a coalition that could win
elections for the Democratic Party. “We have to write off the unions and the
South now,” Kennedy confided to a reporter, “and replace them with Negroes,
blue-collar whites, and the kids. If we can do that, we’ve got a chance to do
something.”
The
motorcade in Gary was part of a whirlwind effort by Kennedy to secure his first
primary victory on the way to winning the Democratic Party nomination for
president. Kennedy’s family, including his mother, Rose, and his sister-in-law,
Joan, traveled around the state to promote his candidacy. Prince Stanislaw
Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy’s brother-in-law and an opponent of the Communist
government in Poland , proved
to be a highly effective campaigner with Polish groups in Lake County .
During one Radziwill speech a Polish worker had asked him about problems
between Poles and African Americans. “Better to be in America living next to a thousand blacks,”
Radziwill said, drawing applause, “than in Poland living next to one
commissar.”
For
all the resources at his disposal—his fortune; a large, dedicated staff devoted
to ensuring his success; and the mystique of his family’s name—Kennedy worked
harder than anyone to capture the hearts and minds of Hoosier voters to win the primary against his two opponents, Indiana governor Roger Branigin and U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy. David
Hackett, a friend of Kennedy’s since childhood, noted that whenever he happened
to see him during those days “he was so tired he could hardly move.” John
Douglas observed that probably no national candidate in modern times worked as
hard as Kennedy did. “He came across as authentic, direct, and
straightforward—a person in whom people could have confidence,” Douglas remembered. “And that’s what, I think, brought Indiana around.” John Bartlow Martin noted that Kennedy had aged more than he should have since the
death of John Kennedy and the process continued at a heightened pace during the
hectic campaign. “He was wornout,” said Martin, adding that Ethel Kennedy daily
doled out a score of vitamins to help her husband’s frayed voice.
Crowds
in communities throughout the state pressed close to shake Kennedy’s hand and
in doing so tore at him and his clothes. During a stop in Mishawaka , an eager supporter held on to the
candidate’s hand too long and pulled him out of the car and onto the pavement,
chipping Kennedy’s tooth in the process. “The crowds were savage,” remembered
Martin. “They pulled his cufflinks off, tore his clothes, tore ours. In bigger
towns, with bigger crowds, it was frightening.” At times the campaign could be
a ferocious spectacle, but it could also be exhilarating as well, especially
when victory appeared imminent, Martin remembered. “We were beating the
terrible local press, the suspicious national press, the sanctimonious McCarthy, the dull governor, the skeptical parochial narrow-minded Hoosiers
themselves,” he said. “We were beating them all. Or, rather, Bob Kennedy was.”
Kennedy’s
staff attempted to match the great effort shown by the candidate. They used every
bit of the knowledge honed in countless winning campaigns to secure victory in Indiana . “We’ve got a
hell of a lot at stake here,” a top Kennedy adviser told reporters. “We’ve got
to impress in Indiana .”
Lawrence F. O’Brien, the former postmaster general in President Lyndon
Johnson’s administration, had turned down an offer from Vice President Hubert
Humphrey to manage his campaign to work for Kennedy. O’Brien said he made his
decision based on his roots in Massachusetts ,
the memories of his days working for President John F. Kennedy, and his
longtime affection for the Kennedy family. “It was a personal decision, not a
political one,” he noted in his memoirs. “I had to go with Bob.” Once he had
made his choice, O’Brien joined the Kennedy staff in the Hoosier State
on Good Friday, April 12. He knew Indiana
well, having spent much time in the state on behalf of John Kennedy in 1960
organizing get-out-the-vote drives, a task he performed again eight years
later. “I did the job the best I could,” O’Brien recalled, “but it was a job,
not the adventure it once had been.”
For
assistance in Indiana, O’Brien turned to an old friend, Matt Reese, who he had
known since the 1960 West Virginia primary fight for John Kennedy. Reese had
become an expert in using telephone banks on behalf of political campaigns.
O’Brien organized a get-out-the-vote program whose aim was to assemble several
thousand volunteers around the state for the May 7 primary. These volunteers
were tasked with “ringing doorbells in key areas throughout the state to ensure
maximum voting among potential Kennedy supporters,” O’Brien said. Block
captains recruited by Reese through his telephone bank would make up the bulk
of the operation, joined by student volunteers. Reese managed to organize fifteen
thousand block captains in such major cities as Indianapolis ,
Gary , South Bend ,
Fort Wayne , and Evansville . On the first day of the telephone
canvassing, Reese’s phone effort successfully recruited 1,872 block
captains—904 in Gary, 455 in South Bend, 216 in Fort Wayne, and 297 in
Evansville.
To
test the motivation of the block captains, O’Brien had the Kennedy campaign
mail out invitations seeking their attendance at a thank-you reception. “What
we conceived was if we could get these people in groups, fairly good-sized
groups, prior to the effort, thank them in advance, it brought us face to face
with them,” O’Brien recalled. “It tested whether or not they were truly
motivated.” He wanted to make some effort at organization and not try to rely
only on brief telephone conversations engaged in over a period of time. Ten
receptions were established throughout the state by the central headquarters,
along with others organized by local Kennedy offices. “Then we had to
distribute the family—Bobby, Teddy, their sisters or whoever—so there would be
some presence at every one of these meetings,” O’Brien said. The telephone crew
also called the day before the primary election everyone who had not attended a
reception to ask if the Kennedy campaign could still rely on his or her
assistance. “If you have fifteen thousand people say yes and that means you
have five thousand people combined with the youth volunteers then you’ve got a
fairly good operation going,” O’Brien noted. “It was all emphasis on grass
roots.”
In
addition to the block captains, the Kennedy campaign flooded the state with
thousands of tabloids, bumper stickers, posters, and flyers. Approximately six
hundred thousand tabloids promoting Kennedy’s campaigns were distributed in
such cities as Indianapolis , East
Chicago , Michigan City, South Bend , Fort Wayne , Terre Haute , Evansville , Columbus , and Muncie .
Kennedy staff also organized a variety of citizens organizations to promote his
candidacy among such groups as lawyers, clergy, elementary school teachers,
professors, senior citizens, farmers, and conservationists.
Nearly
a week before the election, Kennedy aide Nick Zumas reported to Ted Kennedy
that mailings had been sent out to fifty thousand teachers and six thousand
farmers seeking support. “Our teacher sources indicated that we could have the
public support of over 10,000 teachers,” wrote Zumas. There were difficulties,
however, as efforts to attract leaders for the senior citizens group had not
been successful. “If nothing else,” he said, “we hope to surface a Senior
Citizens for Kennedy even if it includes only ‘old folks’ by May 3 or 4.” Two
other groups had posed the most problems—doctors and businessmen. Of the 130
doctors in the Indianapolis
area called by the Kennedy campaign, only two would offer to endorse the
candidate. “Whatever impact will be made on the doctors,” Zumas said, “it will
come from his [Kennedy’s] Indiana University Medical school confrontation on
April 24.” As for the businessmen, none of any prominence could be found to
join the Kennedy team.
To
help prepare for Election Day, Gerard Doherty, who ran Kennedy's campaign in Indiana, made plans to produce for African
American precincts “throw-away cards” with Kennedy’s name, photograph, and his
column and line position on the ballot. These cards would be handed out in such
cities as Indianapolis , Gary ,
Evansville , Terre Haute ,
Hammond , and East Chicago . “It appears that McCarthy will
have a great number of poll workers,” Doherty reported to Ted Kennedy, “and for
public relations, we should too. Certainly, in the ghetto areas we should have
them passing the above described cards.” Doherty also recommended that the
first priority to transporting people to the polls should go to African
American areas in the state. He suggested traveling down city streets in
caravans from 4:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Election Day (the polling places in the
4,361 precincts in the state were open in Indiana from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.). “Three
or four cars in a row with four people in each car getting out to knock on
doors,” said Doherty. “The soliciting of people for rids by phones could be
done and should be done in our safe precincts, i.e., Negro, Irish-Catholic,
blue-collar.”
The Kennedy campaign faced
another challenge as the primary hit the homestretch when Governor Branigin,
hoping to find some way to offset Kennedy’s financial advantage, called upon
Hoosier Republican voters to cross party lines and vote for him in the primary.
“I welcome all of you, regardless of party, to support me,” Branigin said to a
crowd of approximately four hundred people on the lawn at the Putnam County
Courthouse in Greencastle. Branigin also told reporters during a stop in Lafayette that such crossover voting was legal in Indiana . The governor
confided in his diary that he and Gordon St. Angelo had discussed his campaign
problems. Although his volunteers had been working hard, his campaign had a
tough fight ahead to entice votes from Hoosier African Americans and Catholics.
“Whether we can prevail, I don’t know—crossovers can help but how many will
occur. No one can say,” Branigin wrote.
Publisher Eugene C. Pulliam’s
newspapers did all they could to promote the idea of Republicans crossing party
lines to cast ballots for the governor. A front-page editorial in the Indianapolis Star on May 5 called upon
members of the GOP to “uphold the honor of Indiana
and prove to the world that Indiana
can’t be bought by crossing over in the primary to vote for Branigin.
Republican poll watchers can’t challenge them; we don’t think Democrats will.”
The attempt by the governor to
attract Republican crossover votes did concern key members of Kennedy’s staff.
In a memo to Ted Kennedy, Doherty noted that there had been a similar effort in
the state during the 1964 presidential primary when Republicans threatened to
cross party lines and vote for insurgent candidate George Wallace in an attempt
to embarrass President Lyndon Johnson. “Actually,” reported Doherty, “this threat of cross over did not
materialize, with the exception of Lake County.”
Doherty noted that for a
Republican to cast a vote in the Democratic primary, he or she would give up
the right to vote in their primary, where Richard Nixon was running unopposed.
Even if some did decide to cross over, they would have to sign an affidavit
stating they would support the majority of Democratic candidates in the
November election. “Any Republican who is hopeful of gaining patronage, party
recognition or the like, is reluctant to do this,” said Doherty. He advised
that the campaign should be ready to have challengers available in some
precincts, but it appeared to Doherty that there would not be a substantial
number of crossover voters from the ranks of the GOP—a prediction that came
true come election day. The issue may even prove to be a boon for the Kennedy
effort, as many Democrats had “indicated their displeasure with Branigin for
seeking crossover voting,” Doherty said.
The danger of GOP crossovers
proved worrisome enough to the Kennedy campaign that it even attempted an
alliance with an old adversary—Richard Nixon, who failed in the 1960
presidential race but stood eight years later as the leading candidate for the
Republican Party’s nomination. Although unopposed in Indiana ,
Nixon wanted to stop Republicans from deserting the GOP primary for the
Democratic side, as he sought to capture as many votes as possible to show his
strength to a potential challenger, New
York governor Nelson Rockefeller. The former vice president
wanted to exceed the 408,000-vote total he had received in the 1960 Indiana primary, when he
also ran unopposed.
The Nixon campaign sponsored
full-page advertisements in both the Indianapolis
Star and Indianapolis News warning
that a “vote for Branigin is a vote for Humphrey,” and also revised spots for
radio and television emphasizing the importance of voting in the Republican
primary. According to reporter Warren Weaver Jr. of the New York Times, the crossover threat (estimated at a possible sixty
thousand voters by the Kennedy campaign and forty thousand by Nixon’s staff)
prompted an unnamed Kennedy aide to approach a Nixon assistant to suggest they
work together to do something to stop such attempts by voters. “The Nixon
agent, on the theory that nothing could make the former Vice President less
popular here than an alliance with Senator Kennedy, declined,” reported Weaver.
Kennedy forces often resorted
to direct action when it came to ensuring the proper counting of votes in areas
key to their candidate’s success, particularly in northwest Indiana . Six Kennedy volunteers, mostly
college students, were sent out on Saturday, May 5, to carefully check voting
machines in Gary ’s
132 polling places, and some were arrested for their effort. William Levy,
chairman of a Students for Kennedy organization at Roosevelt
University in Chicago ,
and a young man accompanying him were arrested by Gary police in a church at Forty-sixth and
Broadway streets at eight o’clock in the evening. The volunteers were later
released, however, when police called Jerome Reppa, the Republican member of
the three-person Lake County Election Board. Reppa noted there was no law on
the books either permitting of barring persons checking polling places before
precinct officials made their formal checks the day before the primary
election. Police had received several calls complaining about the inspection.
Thomas Farrell, the coordinator
of Kennedy’s headquarters in Gary ,
said the volunteers were checking the polling places to both familiarize the
organization with the locations and to check to see if anyone had tampered with
the voting machines. “Our problem was that these machines were delivered four
days before the voting where anyone could have had access to them,” Farrell
told a reporter. “We wanted to record their serial numbers and find out where
they were.” In addition, the volunteers made sure to check the vote counters on
the backs of the machines as long as they “didn’t have to touch the machines to
do so,” Farrell said.
Indiana governor Roger Branigin
attempted to match Kennedy’s sizable array of paid staff and volunteers with
loyal state patronage employees, who did all they could to promote the governor
to Indiana voters. Margo Barnard of the state division of labor campaigned on
Branigin’s behalf at the Marcy Village Apartments located just north of the
Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis .
She knocked on 187 apartment doors, six homes in the area, and also talked to
employees of the Adams Drug Company. Although a large percentage of the apartment
residents identified themselves as Republicans, Barnard reported they had
nothing but kind words for the job the governor had been doing. “Win or lose,”
she wrote to Branigin in a letter, “I know it must be rewarding to you to know
that so many people are proud of you and your record as Governor of our Great State .
I, too, am proud to have served as an employee during your administration.” In
a note on the letter, the governor wrote: “Virginia , Call her. Thanks!”
As Election Day approached, Eugene
McCarthy could once again count on the “children’s crusade” that had been so
effective for him in New Hampshire and Wisconsin; approximately six thousand
student volunteers were expected to blanket the state during the weekend before
the election. His volunteers worked to present McCarthy to Indiana voters as “The kind of man Hoosiers
feel at home with.” The weekend before voting began, for example, more than
four hundred college and high school students—busloads from Loyola University
and Boston University
and colleges in Detroit —descended upon northern Indiana with plans to canvass every house in South Bend and Mishawaka .
Working out of a warehouse on Ewing
Avenue in South
Bend , the students were mainly veterans of McCarthy’s
earlier efforts. Bob Rothman of Toledo ,
Ohio , called the group “the
drop-ins,” as instead of “dropping out of society” they had chosen to drop in
“to do something within the system.”
Jim Lagodeny, a
sixteen-year-old Wisconsin high school student
had spent $20 out of his own pocket for a round-trip bus ticket for the
weekend. “But I can’t think of a better way to spend the money,” Lagodeny said.
Other students found cheaper ways to travel to aid McCarthy in Indiana . According to
McCarthy campaign legend, entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. had promised free tickets
for one of his performances to students who volunteered to canvass for Kennedy
in Indiana .
The busloads of students that traveled to Indianapolis
thanked the Kennedy campaign for the free transportation, and then marched off
to offer their services to McCarthy.
Perhaps buoyed by the
enthusiasm of his student volunteers, McCarthy began to place a new
significance on the results in Indiana .
For the first time, he told reporters that he considered the Hoosier primary to
be critical for his presidential aspirations. Speaking in Vincennes
at the George Rogers Clark Memorial, McCarthy indicated that the results from Indiana might well dictate “the way the Democratic party
will go in Chicago .
And the way that the Democratic party goes in Chicago , is the way the country will go next
November.” He advised voters that if they wished to select the next president
of the United States ,
the best thing they could do would be to vote for him on May 7.
McCarthy later backtracked a
bit on his earlier statement, telling reporters during a campaign stop in Gary that if Kennedy won the Indiana
primary, it did not necessarily mean that the New York senator would win the Democratic
nomination for president. When he observed he had been trying to be “subtle”
with his remarks in Vincennes ,
one reporter responded: “A little too subtle for your own good, maybe?”
McCarthy replied: “Maybe too subtle for the press.”
The loss of the student support
due to his late start in the campaign often gnawed at Kennedy. His aide Richard
Goodwin remembered that late one night in Indianapolis
the two men walked past McCarthy headquarters and saw a group of young
volunteers sitting outside the building. Kennedy stopped and talks to the
students, noting he knew why he was in Indiana —to
run for office—but asked whey they were in the state. Many noted that there
were working for McCarthy to end the war. When Kennedy interrupted to say that
he, too, was against the war, one of the students noted: “I’ve been part of the
peace movement for more than a year. McCarthy gave us a chance. I joined his
campaign in New Hampshire
to fight against the war because he was there. And you weren’t there. And as
long as he continues to fight I’ll be with him.”
Kennedy noted that while some
of the students may have viewed him as a usurper who jumped in to spoil their
victory, he praised their efforts and indicated that they made him “proud to be
an American. You’ve done a wonderful thing. I’m only sorry we couldn’t have
done it together.” As he walked away, Kennedy stopped, turned around, and waved
farewell to the students, who reciprocated. As Kennedy and Goodwin returned to
their hotel, the candidate remained lost in thought for a few minutes before
lamenting the loss of what should have been his constituency. “Well, it can’t
be helped,” Kennedy said. “If I blew it, I blew it.”
Without the dedicated support
of students like the ones loyal to McCarthy, Kennedy had to rely on his own, as
one of his aides described it, “sheer energy and personal drive.” To aid in the
national media perception of the Kennedy campaign being a juggernaut that could
not be stopped in Indiana, Joseph Dolan, who handled the scheduling for the
candidate, had devised a strategy whereby he attempted to save the largest and
most enthusiastic crowds for the final days before the election. “You generally
go out into the weaker areas first and then try to build up so that you give
the impression of building up even though you aren’t,” Dolan noted.
With that in mind, Kennedy
campaigned in key African American precincts in Indianapolis on May 4
accompanied by a group of black athletes that included Lamar Lundy of the Los
Angeles Rams, Roosevelt Grier of the Rams, Timmy Brown of the Philadelphia
Eagles, Herb Adderly of the Green Bay Packers, and Bobbie Mitchell of the
Washington Redskins. White athletes also participated, including Jack Concannon
of the Chicago Bears and Hoosier boxing champion Zale. The crowd’s biggest
cheers were reserved for Indiana basketball great Oscar Robertson, former star
of the state champion Crispus Attucks High School. “I am running as Oscar
Robertson’s vice president,” Kennedy joked with an appreciative crowd during a
stop at Thirty-ninth and Illinois streets. At other events he repeated his
theme that the country could not tolerate lawlessness, but must also fight
intolerance. He also urged African Americans to exercise their right to vote,
telling a crowd at Blake Street and Indiana Avenue that many in the
neighborhood “don’t vote in elections and have not voted in past elections. I
need your help on Tuesday.”
On Monday, May 6, Kennedy and
his traveling press corps participated in what veteran journalist Jules
Witcover called one of the most incredible final days of campaigning he had
ever been a part of in his forty years of political reporting. Kennedy’s long
final day began in Evansville, where he had been the previous evening for a
rally and reception at the Civic Center. Thousands of city residents had lined
his route from Dress Memorial Airport to the center, where one young Kennedy
supporter held up a sign reading: “Who Cares If His Hair IS a Silly Millimeter
Longer.”
The hordes of fans impressed a
reporter from the New York Times, who
told a fellow member of the media that only a week before he had believed
Branigin would win the primary, but now he thought Kennedy would carry the
state. One of those waiting to greet Kennedy at the Civic Center was one of
Indiana’s U.S. senators and former Evansville mayor Vance Hartke, who appeared
to be jumping on the winning bandwagon. “I hope you’ll support me,” Kennedy
told the crowd of more than five hundred people. “I have to go home to those 10
little children of mine, and they’ll ask, ‘Dad, how did you do in Indiana?” The
rally’s success prompted Kennedy to later say he would call Evansville mayor
Frank McDonald to seek his last-minute support (McDonald had committed his
organization to Branigin). Kennedy also admitted that early in the campaign his
friends in Indiana had urged him not to enter the state’s primary, but he could
not win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination “without taking chances
like these.”
From Evansville, Kennedy flew
to Fort Wayne on May 6 for a noontime downtown rally. Arriving at Baer Field,
Kennedy countered charges from Branigin and his supporters that he had been
attempting to buy the election. “If I were trying to buy the state I wouldn’t
be here,” he noted. The candidate called on radio and television executives to
make free airtime available to all candidates as a method that would decrease
expenses by 80 percent, and also favored establishing tax deductions of $25 or
$50 so voters could give money to the candidate of their choice.
As he worked his way through
the crowd waiting to greet him at the airport in balmy, sunny weather, Kennedy
said he had received fair coverage from most of Indiana’s media, but singled
out the Indianapolis Star as “a very
biased and prejudiced newspaper.” Kennedy returned to familiar campaign themes
during his remarks at the Allen County Courthouse, recommending tax credits for
businesses willing to invest in poor rural and urban areas; urging more local
control of decisions being made in Washington, D.C.; and speaking against
violence and rioting but urging changes “so everyone has an equal opportunity
no matter where they live.” He added that the problem was not one of race, as
more whites lived in poverty than African Americans. Refusing to disparage
either of his opponents in the Democratic primary, Kennedy did take the
opportunity to question Republican presidential candidate Nixon’s plans on
achieving peace in Vietnam. “All he said on Vietnam is that everybody should
keep quiet,” Kennedy charged. “That’s a good suggestion by somebody who doesn’t
have anything to suggest.”
Before leaving Fort Wayne for
his next scheduled events in South Bend, Kennedy and the media covering his
campaign stopped for an entertaining lunch at Zoli’s CafĂ© Continental on
Broadway Street, an establishment owned by a former Hungarian freedom fighter
named Zoltan Herman. According to Fort Wayne newspapers, Kennedy enjoyed a
submarine sandwich and a beer, while his wife, Ethel, ate pizza and drank a
Coke. Reporters joined the Kennedys in partaking of the establishment’s fare,
pizza, apple strudel, and especially beer, which caused a delay in the day’s
carefully prepared schedule.
Inspired by Kennedy’s visit,
Herman produced a bottle of wine he had been saving for a special occasion and
the candidate proposed a toast in honor of the Hungarian freedom fighters.
Witcover noted that Herman refilled their glasses and the following scene
ensued: “Now it was the proprietor’s turn. But he said nothing. ‘Who shall we
toast now?’ Kennedy asked hopefully. No answer. ‘Does any particular name come
to mind?’ he asked. None did, although the bartender was drinking with a
candidate for President of the United States.” Breaking up the impromptu party,
Kennedy stood on the seat of an empty booth, raised his wine glass, and said:
“As George Bernard Shaw once said . . .,” prompting the reporters and broadcasters
to clamber back aboard the waiting press bus.
Kennedy remained in high
spirits as he continued to press his case in South Bend and LaPorte. Although
he arrived in LaPorte almost an hour-and-a-half behind schedule, more than two
thousand people were still on hand to cheer at a courthouse rally. Pleased by
the enthusiasm shown by the young people in the crowd, Kennedy, in his
fifteen-minute speech, wondered if people “can vote in Indiana at the age of
seven.” He joked that when he had announced his candidacy for the presidency,
his wife had asked him if he planned on running in the Indiana primary. When he
told her he had not yet decided, she had pointed out: “If you enter the primary
in Indiana, you will be able to visit LaPorte.” Kennedy added: “That convinced
me, and here I am.”
In addition to laying out his
program for America, the candidate made sure to take note of a LaPorte native
son with the traveling press, Dan Blackburn, a 1957 graduate of LaPorte High
School, who worked as a congressional correspondent for Metromedia News. “He
was a friendly and conscientious young man to whom Kennedy took a liking,”
noted Witcover. Kennedy pointed out that the community “obviously has produced
many successful people,” as Blackburn had recently been named as an outstanding
young man by the National Jaycees.
The festive mood was dampened
for a bit as Kennedy prepared for a nine-hour motorcade from LaPorte through
Gary, Hammond, and Whiting. The senator learned that the Indiana Department of
the American Legion had been successful in its attempt to secure a court order
to block the planned showing the evening before the election of a half-hour
paid program from the Kennedy campaign. Judge John L. Niblack of the Marion
County Circuit Court issued the order barring the telecast. The Legion objected
because its emblem could be seen on the caps of Legion members who appeared in
the broadcast asking questions of Kennedy, a Legion member, about his stands on
the issues of the day. Although the Legion members only appeared for
approximately fifty seconds in the film, the Legion noted that its constitution
forbid any unauthorized use of its emblem in such a partisan political
activity.
Donald Wilson, who worked on
media for Kennedy, noted that the Legion was angry because the campaign had
been able to arrange the use of a Legion hall (Post Number 34) for the shoot
and had included Legion members. “Oh, we’d gotten releases from all of them,”
said Wilson. “But on the technicality that the Legion emblem showed and
therefore involved the Legion in politics—which of course, it’s up to the top
of its head in Indiana, and anti-Kennedy—caused them to issue an injunction.”
Late in the evening, the Indiana Supreme Court lifted the injunction, but too
late for any prime-time viewing of the broadcast. Another film had to be
substituted in its place.
The masses of people that
waited to greet Kennedy during his motorcade through northwest Indiana soon had
many on the senator’s staff forgetting the problems with the American Legion. A
reporter for the Hammond Times estimated
that anywhere from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people patiently jammed
together along the route from Hammond to Whiting. “In Lake County,” Witcover
remembered, “there was no telling where one city ended and the next began.
Sometimes there were so many reaching well-wishers that Kennedy simply put his
arm out, letting it run along through the outstretched hands like Tom Sawyer
scraping a stick along a picket fence.”
Scheduled to end his day with a
speech in Hammond at 6:30 p.m., Kennedy instead arrived at 9:40 p.m. Speaking
from the steps of the Whiting City Hall, the candidate blamed his lateness on
his motorcade having to travel over “railroad tracks as 16 different trains
came by.” He promised that his first task if elected president would be to “put
an overpass over all of Lake County!” As the crowd erupted in cheers, Kennedy
added that he had taken about thirty deep breaths of air and his second step as
president “will be to do something about air pollution.” Actually, unscheduled
stops to accept a bouquet of flowers from a young girl, to autograph the cast
on the arm of a young boy, and to chat for ten minutes with Monsignor Stanley
Zjawinski slowed the motorcade’s progress more than any trains. “We’ve had a fair
hearing from everybody all across the state and now it’s in the hands of the
people,” Kennedy said before leaving for Chicago’s Midway Airport and a flight
to Indianapolis to await the next day’s results.
Kennedy arrived in Indianapolis
too late for a scheduled reception, but still exhilarated by the day’s events.
He later told Doherty it had been the best day of campaigning he had ever
experienced. The Kennedy campaign had come a long way from its early days in
Indiana, when Doherty had warned the candidate not to visit Lake County, as the
organization had yet to establish itself there. Kennedy returned aghast at
remarks from a county Democratic official who prophesized the senator stood no
chance against Governor Branigin. When he returned to Indianapolis, he asked to
see Doherty and confronted him about the problem. Just minutes before a
volunteer who had been in northwest Indiana had given Doherty a flyer being
circulated supporting Branigin and signed by the same county official who had
talked about to Kennedy. Doherty gave the circular to Kennedy and said, “If you
want to listen to people on the other side, I guess you’re not as smart as you
think you are.” Weeks later, the tide had turned and the Kennedy organization
had delivered a day to remember.
Exhausted from the marathon day
of campaigning, tired reporters checked into the Airport Holiday Inn to sleep
for a few hours before the polls started opening around the state. Some of the
media adjourned to the hotel’s bar for a nightcap, including Witcover and his
friend Jack Germond. In a rare occurrence, Kennedy walked over to where the two
men were sitting at a small table. Declining their invitation to sit down, the
candidate remained standing as he contemplated what had happened that day.
“Well, I’ve done all I could do,” said Kennedy. “Maybe it’s just not my time.
But I’ve learned something from Indiana. The country is changing.” Witcover
said Kennedy continued to talk about the need for the Democratic Party to look
to new coalitions of voters that included whites and blacks in the North. He
also could not keep from thinking about one of the few negative aspects of the
day, a young man holding a sign denigrating Kennedy and then running beside his
car, grabbing his hand, and squeezing it so hard he thought he was trying to
break it.
Kennedy continued his
reflective mood during an early morning meal he shared with reporters and
friends at about 1:30 a.m. at a restaurant named Sam’s Attic near the Marott
Hotel. Among those in attendance were Jack Newfield of the Village Voice, David Halberstam of Harper’s magazine, Loudon Wainwright of Life magazine, and John Douglas from the senator’s campaign staff.
“He was in a good mood,” Douglas said of Kennedy. “He was satisfied that he’d
done all that he could.” Newfield recalled that Kennedy looked the way boxer
Zale must have looked like following his epic bouts with Rocky Graziano, as the
candidate’s hands were “red and swollen and cut” by the thousands of people
that had grabbed for them during the day, and he looked worn out.
In a
nostalgic mood, Kennedy reflected on his experiences in the state and concluded
that Hoosier voters, for the most part, had treated him with fairness. “They
listened to me. I could see this face, way back in the crowd, and he was listening,
really listening to me,” Kennedy recalled. “The people here are not so neurotic
and hypocritical as in Washington or New York. They’re more direct. I like
rural people, who work hard with their hands. There is something healthy about
them.” He did complain about how he had been treated recently in the New York Times, saying he would rather
be reported on by the Indianapolis Star because
at least he knew, as did its readers, where he stood with that newspaper.
Douglas said Kennedy seemed
pleased by the vast numbers who had come out to see him, but instead talked
about a few episodes that had stuck in his mind. One involved a woman who had
come up to him and asked if he could come over to see her mother, a victim of a
stroke. “The older woman had been wrapped up in a shawl and had been sitting on
her lawn for a long time,” said Douglas. “Bob had gone up and had a nice chat
with her.” He had also enjoyed seeing a young man he had noticed on a previous
visit to Gary who had been carrying a brother or sister on his back as he ran
to meet the Kennedy motorcade. Seeing him again, Kennedy asked him to ride
along in the car with him for awhile.
In addition to reflecting on
the campaign, Kennedy also talked about his love for his family—his brothers,
sisters, and parent. “He talked again about something which he apparently
referred to quite a bit,” said Douglas, “about how the face of many of the
black youngsters in their early years were very animated, and how as the
youngsters got older their faces turned into kind of lifeless masks as a result
of the prejudice and hostility and difficulties which they encountered.” The
contemplative mood was shattered when a man who had been drinking wandered over
and said some harsh things about the candidate. Kennedy refused to respond, and
when the man finally left, the candidate said: “You get so tired sometimes. You
have to restrain yourself.”
On primary election day,
Tuesday, May 7, Kennedy relaxed by playing touch football on the lawn of the
Airport Holiday Inn where he, some of his staff, and reporters would watch the
election returns. Kennedy’s opponents were both sanguine about their chances
with voters. A confident Governor Branigin, who the day before had received an
endorsement from the Indiana Conference of Teamsters, told the Indianapolis Star in a page-one article:
“I think I’ll win. I think the large number of undecided voters shown by the
polls is a good sign.” The Teamsters, the union Kennedy had investigated for
corruption during his days as chief counsel for a U.S. Senate subcommittee,
sent out a sound truck to Indianapolis sponsored by Local Union 135 to blast
out an anti-Kennedy message. “We just feel this primary is serious enough not
only for the people of Indiana but for the nation as a whole that we have to do
all we can to support Governor Branigin and stop Kennedy,” said Loran W.
Robbins, president of Local 135. “Kennedy is a most dangerous man in our
opinion.”
McCarthy, who the day before
had embarked on a three-and-a-half-mile hike through central Indianapolis, said
his polling indicated that it should be “quite close,” as only five percentage
points separated the three contenders. A last-minute surge of optimism had
spread throughout McCarthy’s supporters. Jeremy Larner, who used his experiences in a
political campaign to write an Oscar-winning screenplay for the Robert Redford
film The Candidate, remembered that
on election day one of McCarthy’s aides raced around the hotel exclaiming that
the feeling hit him today—McCarthy would win Indiana. “They touch off a small
swirl of ecstasy,” said Larner. “Lost souls hug and kiss cheeks in the
corridor.”
Because of the importance of
the Indiana primary to Kennedy’s hopes for continued success in capturing the
Democratic nomination, his campaign staff made sure they were ready to pass
along any good news to the waiting media. Press Secretary Frank Mankiewicz
noted that the campaign took a representative sample of twenty-five precincts
in the state and placed staff members in those areas on election night to obtain
early results and phone them into headquarters. “We’d brief the press ahead of
time on what those precincts were,” Mankiewicz noted. “Then we’d get those
results early so that an hour or two after the polls were closed we’d be able
to give them fifteen or twenty of those sample precincts. And those stories
were used by almost everybody.” In fact, the technique proved so successful in
Indiana that the Kennedy campaign used it again in the Nebraska, Oregon, and
California primaries.
For most reporters, however,
the place to be on election night as the results were announced was with
Kennedy in his private suite at the Airport Holiday Inn. Kennedy had invited
two of his favorite reporters, Newfield and Jimmy Breslin, a columnist for Newsday, to his room to watch the
returns come in. At the door to the room, however, the two reporters were
barred for a brief moment by another writer, Theodore H. White, the author of
the highly successful The Making of the
President series. White did not want to lose his exclusive access to the
candidate, but Newfield barged into the room, screaming an expletive at White
as he entered, an effort that impressed Kennedy, who had just finished taking a
shower.
The first returns reported to
Kennedy by O’Brien were almost too good to be true. A Polish precinct in South
Bend had Kennedy garnering 241 votes, McCarthy 86, and Branigin 62. A majority
black district in Indianapolis gave Kennedy 341 votes to only 14 for Branigin
and 11 for McCarthy. In one African American precinct in Gary, Kennedy had
received 697 votes; McCarthy, 52; and Branigin, 16. Hearing the news, an
exultant Ethel Kennedy asked: “Don’t you just wish that everyone was black?”
Kennedy’s slate also appeared to be on its way to capturing a landslide victory
over two slates pledged to Humphrey in the District of Columbia primary.
Before leaving his room for a
victory celebration at the Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel, Kennedy noticed that his
vote total had fallen from 54 percent to 48 percent. “He made a child’s face,
said ‘eecch,’ and left for downtown,” Newfield reported. Later, as he watched a
television correspondent report that Kennedy was not doing as well as expected,
the candidate replied: “Not as well as you
expected.”
The final returns had Kennedy
winning with 42.3 percent of the 776,000 votes cast. Governor Branigin finished
second with 30.7 percent of the vote, and McCarthy trailed the field at 27
percent. In winning nine of eleven of Indiana’s eleven congressional districts
(losing only the fifth and sixth districts to Branigin), Kennedy captured 56 of
the state’s 63 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, with Branigin
winning the remaining seven. Kennedy swept fifty-seven of the state’s
ninety-two counties, and also captured the majority of Indiana’s largest urban
centers, including Indianapolis, Gary, Hammond, South Bend, Kokomo, Muncie,
Fort Wayne, Terre Haute, and East Chicago. In African American precincts,
Kennedy destroyed his opponents, winning them with better than 85 percent of
the vote.
The Hoosier Democratic machine,
however, did its work for Branigin in Evansville, where the governor captured
Vanderburgh County with 11,616 votes to Kennedy’s 10,801, and students from
Indiana University helped McCarthy capture Bloomington. In addition, Kennedy
defeated Branigin in the governor’s home county (Tippecanoe), his home city
(Lafayette), and even his home precinct. Hoping to persuade Democratic Party
leaders of his ability to draw white as well as African American voters, the
Kennedy campaign also pointed out that its candidate carried the seven largest
counties in Indiana where George Wallace had secured his greatest vote in the
1964 primary—Lake, Delaware, Howard, Grant, Madison, Allen, and Marion
counties. “I’ve proved I can really be a leader of a broad spectrum,” Kennedy
observed to O’Brien. “I can be a bridge between blacks and whites without
stepping back from my positions.”
Kennedy’s ability in Indiana to
achieve his goal of attracting white as well as African American voters has
come under close scrutiny in the years following the primary. A column by
political reporters Roland Evans and Robert Novak immediately following the
election titled “Kennedy’s Indiana Victory Proves His Appeal Defused Backlash
Voting” credited Kennedy with winning 90 percent of the vote in Gary’s black
precincts and running nearly two to one ahead in some Polish precincts—figures
touted by the Kennedy camp. In an examination of the voting for a biography of
Kennedy, two of his aides, William Vanden Heuvel and Milton Gwirtzman, found
that in fact Kennedy only achieved such positive results in two Polish
precincts and had lost fifty-nine of the seventy white precincts in Gary. “The
lesson of Lake County, then, was that the more personally involved the white
voters were with the racial struggle, the more they identified Kennedy with the
black side of it, and turned to his opponents as an outlet for their protest,”
Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman concluded.
Approximately sixty miles away
in South Bend, however, Kennedy had been able to amass large pluralities in a
number of Polish precincts “where there had been some threat of a ‘backlash’
vote against him,” noted South Bend
Tribune political writer Jack Colwell. At a polling place at the West Side
Democratic and Civic Club, a spot Kennedy had visited with his brother-in-law,
Prince Radziwill, the New York senator won 201 votes to 84 for Branigin and 78
for McCarthy. Another west side Polish precinct, Saint Adalbert’s Parish Hall,
gave Kennedy 224 votes to just 90 for McCarthy and 83 for Branigin. In the only
precinct in Saint Joseph County carried by Wallace in 1964—a west side
neighborhood with a polling place at Benjamin Harrison School—Kennedy won with
190 votes to 95 for McCarthy and 55 for Branigin.
Before Hoosiers had trooped to
the polls, Kennedy strategists had expected their candidate to attract between
40 and 45 percent of the vote. They had also told the New York Times that if Kennedy garnered 40 percent or more of the
vote and ran ahead of his nearest rival by at least 10 percentage points (a
goal he achieved) they would consider Indiana “a significant victory that
should have an important psychological impact in the remaining primaries and on
the delegates to the Democratic national convention.” Television analysts,
however, interrupted the results in a far-different manner, terming Kennedy’s
victory as inconclusive.
An irate Fred Dutton, a close
aide to Kennedy, complained to one network correspondent that McCarthy had won
42 percent of the vote in New Hampshire against a single write-in opponent
(President Lyndon Johnson) and newsmen had called it an heroic victory.
“Kennedy gets 42 percent here against two active candidates,” Dutton observed,
“one the Governor of the state, and you say it’s really meaningless.” Watching
the campaign coverage on a television at the Sheraton-Hilton, Kennedy watched
as McCarthy appeared and told interviewers it did not matter who finished
first, second, or third. “That’s not what my father told me,” Kennedy
responded. “I always thought it was better to win. I learned that when I was
about two.”
The candidate himself also
battled the press. Before speaking to his cheering supporters gathered in the
Cole Porter Ballroom at the Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel, Kennedy gave interviews to
the various television networks covering the campaign. Asked by one interviewer
if he would accept McCarthy’s challenge to debate him on the issues, Kennedy
expressed willingness to debate, but indicated he would also like to see Vice
President Humphrey participate. “I would also like to see him also participate
for the popular vote,” Kennedy added in a dig at Humphrey’s failure to run in
any of the primaries.
CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite
questioned Kennedy about the large amount of money spent on the campaign.
Kennedy decided to turn the issue against Cronkite and the people he worked
for, pointing out that large supplies of funds would not be needed by
candidates if the networks made free airtime available to all candidates on an
equal basis. “The only thing I wish I had thought to ask Cronkite,” Kennedy
said later, “was what his annual salary was.”
Kennedy appeared at a victory
celebration in the Cole Porter Ballroom at the Sheraton-Lincoln with his wife,
Ethel, and two of the men who had made his victory in Indiana possible—Doherty
and Michael Riley, chairman of Kennedy's Indiana campaign. According to Doherty, Kennedy had come up to him on election
night and expressed his gratitude for what he had done in the Hoosier State and
asked Doherty to accompany him to the ballroom. “I said, ‘What? Hey, you know,
you brought it up. My obligation is to your brother. If he’s happy, I’m
happy,’” Doherty recalled. The two men also agreed that it would be appropriate
to have someone from Indiana with them, and immediately thought of Riley.
The moment was doubly sweet for
Riley, because it gave him an opportunity to settle an old score with U.S.
Senator Vance Hartke. Prior to being elected president of the Marion County
Young Democrats, Riley had participated in a Democratic meeting in French Lick
where Hartke posed for photographs with fellow party regulars. Although
somewhat in awe of the senator, Riley seemed to do something to annoy Hartke,
who chastised him by saying, “You’ve got a long way to go boy.”
When Kennedy
graciously asked Riley to join him, Ethel, and Doherty on stage at the victory
celebration, Hartke had come up and also volunteered to join the party. Kennedy
declined the offer, and Hartke asked Riley to convince Kennedy to let him on
stage. Riley turned to Hartke and said: “You’ve got a long way to go senator. I
guess you just can’t be up there with him.” Riley never thought Hartke would
make the connection between the two conversations, but several years later,
after he had left the Senate, Hartke told Riley that he had given him his
comeuppance that evening.
In his remarks to his
supporters, Kennedy thanked all the volunteers who had come from such states as
Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Illinois to help with the
Indiana campaign. He also gave special thanks to his mother, Rose, who had been
“campaigning since McKinley was President and who has been going about the
state telling people I’m not as bad as the newspapers say I am.”
In Kennedy's opinion, the vote in
Indiana had indicated a mood for change in the country. “I, at the moment,
might be the personification of this change,” said Kennedy. “You, the people,
have decided that we can do better than we have in the past. You have decided
that we cannot just heal the divisions, but face what the divisions mean.” In a
final jab at the Indianapolis newspapers that had bedeviled him throughout the
campaign, Kennedy concluded his remarks by saying: “I want to quote the Greek
poet Aeschylus—I will sleep better tonight knowing Eugene Pulliam won’t.”
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