Campaigning with Kennedy: John Bartlow Martin and the 1960 Election

In June 1960, as Democrats prepared to gather in Los Angeles, California, to nominate their candidate for president, a respected freelance reporter, John Bartlow Martin, sat down and typed out a ten-page memorandum with suggestions for one of the leading candidates for the nomination, U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, about how a speechwriting group for a presidential campaign should be organized. Martin, whose work often appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, produced his memo after meeting with the candidate’s campaign manager and brother, Robert Kennedy, who had been asking Martin to serve as a speechwriter if John Kennedy captured the nomination.

From the outset, Martin, who had been a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson’s presidential efforts in 1952 and 1956, warned that no matter how carefully advance preparations were made, a campaign was “a fast-developing constantly changing affair, and so most speeches that get delivered are, with a few exceptions . . . written almost immediately before delivery. Therefore, a certain amount of helter-skelter confusion is inevitable.”

In addition to establishing a competent research staff at campaign headquarters, which Martin assumed would be in Washington, D.C., he said that when it came to speechwriters, too many “writers-in-residence are an embarrassment, and they tend to talk, not write.” He advised having no more than six full-time writers on the campaign staff, with two based at headquarters producing major speeches a week in advance of their delivery by the candidate. Another two writers should travel with the candidate, revising speech drafts “in the light of current developments.” These writers, noted Martin, often might have to set aside a prepared speech and produce a new one at a moment’s notice. “It will probably turn out that a great deal of what actually gets delivered will be written by these writers who travel with the candidate, particularly as the pace increases toward the end of the campaign,” he said.

The final two speechwriters, whom he described as “legmen and writers,” would be responsible for the position Martin pioneered while with Stevenson in the 1956 California primary—editorial advance. They would be responsible for talking to local political leaders and other sources to find out what should be discussed in a speech, what local luminaries to mention, what kind of crowd to expect, what the physical surroundings would be, and “what the local pitfalls and beartraps are,” Martin explained.

Although it might not seem so at first, the work of these writers “is extraordinarily important,” he said, as a candidate could not deliver a thoughtful speech on a difficult subject if he had been scheduled to appear at, for example, a boiler factory. If the editorial advance men did not do their jobs well, “the headquarters writer may dump the candidate into this trap.” Martin also counseled Kennedy to be open to accepting speech drafts from writers who were not part of the staff, particularly during the end of the campaign. “At that time everybody is exhausted, running out of ideas, running dry on language; and it is extremely helpful during the last two weeks of October to be able to call on somebody wholly new,” Martin said.

Just a few days after receiving Martin’s memo, Robert Kennedy responded, saying what he had provided was “very helpful and much appreciated. It brought back some vivid memories of the [Stevenson] campaign.” Kennedy also added that his brother was “very enthusiastic” when he told him Martin might work on a draft of an acceptance speech to be given in Los Angeles.

On July 11 the Democratic National Convention began in Los Angeles. Although Kennedy and his supporters were urging the 4,509 delegates and alternates gathered at the Sports Arena that it was “time for a new generation of leadership,” the old guard seemed unwilling to depart the stage. Former President Harry Truman said Kennedy lacked “maturity and experience,” and Johnson had announced six days before the convention opened that he, too, would seek the nomination. Those wishing to stop Kennedy from winning the nomination on the first ballot—Johnson, Symington, and Stevenson—believed that by doing so many delegates would abandon the Kennedy cause and look to one of them as the Democratic Party’s nominee.

There were signs, however, that Kennedy was quite near obtaining the 761 delegates needed to win the nomination, as both the vital Pennsylvania and Illinois delegations had broken in his favor, with Stevenson’s home state pledging him only two delegates to fifty-nine for Kennedy. Those working on Kennedy’s behalf were optimistic that even if he failed on the first ballot, their candidate had enough strength to eventually win the nomination. Although there were wild, clamorous demonstrations on the convention floor and in the galleries on Stevenson’s behalf, the outpourings of emotion for the party’s two-time presidential candidate failed to change the outcome, and Stevenson himself did little to push the issue—a grave disappointment to his devoted supporters. Late on Wednesday evening, July 13, near the end of the roll call vote, Wyoming pledged its fifteen delegates to Kennedy, clinching for him the nomination.

From the beginning of Robert Kennedy’s approach to him about being part of his brother’s speechwriting team, Martin had expressed some uneasiness. It seemed to him that Theodore Sorensen, who had joined John Kennedy’s staff as his chief legislative aide when he started his work in the U.S. Senate in 1953, had already become Kennedy’s main writer through his close contact with the senator as the two of them had traveled around the country wooing local party leaders for the past several years. “Bob said that situation would have to change—Sorensen simply could not, in a presidential campaign, remain the only one [speechwriter], and he intended to persuade Jack of this,” said Martin. At the campaign’s outset there did seem to be a division of labor that followed the speechwriting operation as outlined by Martin in his memo to Robert Kennedy.

Shortly after the convention ended, Archibald Cox, a Harvard University law professor who had headed an academic advisory group for John Kennedy before his nomination, met with the candidate at his home in Georgetown. Kennedy asked him if he “would spend full time heading up a unit which would be sort of an intellectual apparatus, preparing speeches,” Cox recalled. “And he was very candid in talking about Ted Sorensen and Ted Sorensen’s fear that somebody was going to elbow his way in between him and Kennedy, and did I think I could get on with Ted Sorensen. And I didn’t see why not, that I could think of only one person in my life that I hadn’t been able to get on with at all. So why shouldn’t I be able to get on with Sorensen?”

Cox established a speechwriting and research team based in offices at 1737 L Street in Washington, D.C., and he hired a staff that included William Atwood, a former Stevenson speechwriter and editor at Look magazine; Joseph Kraft, a former reporter with the New York Times and Washington Post; James Sundquist, a former Truman speechwriter; and Robert Yoakum, a newspaper columnist. The plan, said Kraft, was to try to set up in advance “certain fixed speeches, and he [Cox] assigned those out as soon as we got there. The idea was that these would be done in August before the Senator went on the road.”

Longtime Kennedy assistant Myer “Mike” Feldman headed of the research team, housed in the same building as Cox’s group, and collected reams of material on their Republican opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon. Sorensen and his chief assistant, Richard N. Goodwin, who had joined the Kennedy staff in the fall of 1959 after working as special counsel for a congressional investigation of improprieties in television quiz shows, handled speechwriting chores for Kennedy while he traveled on his private plane, a Convair 240 series twin-engine propeller aircraft named Caroline in honor of his daughter. The plush, for the times, sixteen-seat aircraft did yeoman work during the 1960 presidential campaign, transporting the candidate, his staff, and selected members of the press on flights totaling 225,000 miles.  

The Kennedy team did not forget Martin’s editorial advance idea. They sent Goodwin to Martin’s home in Highland Park, Illinois, to talk to him about issues and positions for the fall campaign, as well as informing him that John Kennedy wanted to try out his system during a whistle-stop trip down California’s Central Valley in mid-September. Martin spent a week in California doing legwork and writing briefing sheets in advance of Kennedy’s visit.

Once done on the West Coast, he journeyed to Detroit to do the same thing for Kennedy in Michigan. “On Labor Day, I stood in the crowd in Cadillac Square, watching Kennedy speak, as I had watched Stevenson speak,” Martin said, “and I was struck by how much more forceful, even aggressive, Kennedy was. He seemed to assume this labor crowd was with him, and if it wasn’t he would convert it, and he did, to cheers.” Martin accompanied Kennedy aboard the Southern Pacific’s New Frontier Special (named for the theme Kennedy had outlined in his acceptance speech at the convention) as it hauled the fifteen-car campaign train for its two-day trip through the Central Valley, with stops in Redding, Sacramento, Richmond, Roseville, Oakland, Bakersfield, and ending with a Democratic rally jammed with 7,000 supporters and another 2,000 waiting outside the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. At each of the whistle-stops, Kennedy gave a five-minute speech from a platform at the train’s rear, and before each Martin supplied him with the briefing sheet he had prepared for the occasion. Kennedy liked what Martin had done with the briefing sheets he provided and asked him to continue doing so throughout the rest of the campaign.

In the end, Martin spent about half of his time out ahead of Kennedy doing his editorial advance work, and the rest of the time with the candidate on the Caroline. There was plenty of work for the speechwriters, noted Sorensen, as Kennedy spoke eight to ten times a day, sometimes in four or five states. In one week of eighteen- to twenty-hour days, the candidate visited twenty-seven states. On the first full campaign weekend alone Kennedy visited Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, California, Alaska, and Michigan. Looking at the packed schedule for the next few months up to Election Day, Martin realized he could never do all the briefing sheets by himself, and so trained Kraft, whom he described as “very bright, a good writer, a good reporter,” to do the work. Kraft, who got on well with both Sorensen and Goodwin, turned out to be an excellent pupil, and he joined Martin in the editorial advance assignment the second week of the campaign during a tour of Texas.

Kraft had been a Kennedy supporter since seeing him at a meeting of Maryland Democrats in January 1960, so when he received the call from Cox to join his “speech factory,” he was glad to offer his assistance. After doing the editorial advance work in Texas, Kraft returned to Los Angeles with the idea that he would be shuttling back and forth from the Cox group to the speechwriting team (Sorensen, Goodwin, and Martin) with Kennedy on the campaign trail. “I never went back to the Cox factory,” Kraft recalled. “I stayed doing the advances and largely being on the plane all the way through the campaign.” He and Martin played leapfrog, with one of them doing advance work in a state, then accompanying the candidate as he made his campaign appearances there, while the other writer did the same in a different state.

Kraft said both Martin and Sorensen advised him on people to see and reporters in the area also offered suggestions. There were some difficulties in the beginning for Kraft, particularly during his first trip into Texas, where he remembered Kennedy saying to him, after one visit, “You can’t leave me naked here like that.” An appearance in Lubbock, Texas, had turned into a near-disaster because Kraft failed to tell Kennedy how to pronounce the name of the town. “He knew about the German town on the Baltic [Sea] and started out . . . saying, ‘It’s great to be here in Lubeck.’” Kraft, however, soon developed a better feel for his position, and it became easier and more routine for him. “A large part of my job was getting to know Sorensen and Goodwin, getting to relax with them, getting to relax with the Senator,” Kraft noted. “He [Kennedy] really liked a relaxed relationship, and you had to know him a little bit in order to achieve it. I only achieved it with time.” The editorial advance system meshed well with the candidate, said Kraft, as Kennedy proved to be adept “at taking a fast briefing, just very, very good at switching gears and picking up something.”

In addition to finding an editorial advance partner in Kraft, Martin had discovered, by the end of the California trip that he had a candidate for president he truly believed in. He had begun his work with some misgivings about Kennedy, a man younger than he was and who appeared to be “a totally different man from Stevenson, and I had admired Stevenson so long. Transferring political loyalty is not easy.”

Sometimes when he watched Kennedy delivering a speech, Martin felt nostalgic for Stevenson’s “graceful prose.” He soon realized, however, that Kennedy was far more effective than Stevenson had been in rallying the country behind his candidacy and, unlike the man from Illinois, spent less time agonizing about the content of his speeches and more time meeting with local politicians. Kennedy also did not mind repeating the same stump speech over and over again. In working for Stevenson, his speechwriters had placed their emphasis on good writing, Martin observed, while for Kennedy, the emphasis was placed on the speech’s political effect. “His speeches did not soar and capture the imagination as has Stevenson’s 1952 speeches,” Martin said of Kennedy, “but they got his message across—that he was young, vigorous, and could get this country moving again.”

Kennedy, who rarely followed the prepared text word for word, did not seem to mind whether or not people admired him for his oratorical skills, but he did care “a great deal about whether his speeches made people want to follow him, to vote for him,” Martin noted. The candidate also had a keen ear on what language worked in a speech, and what failed to move audiences.” When a line proved successful at one stop,” recalled Sorensen, “whether planned or improvised, he [Kennedy] used it at the next and many times thereafter.” Ironically, Stevenson perfectly captured the difference between Kennedy and himself when, introducing the candidate at a rally, he had pointed out that in classical times when Cicero finished speaking people remembered how well he spoke, but when Demosthenes finished speaking people were moved to take action. “It was so apt it stung,” Martin recalled.

Martin found Kennedy much easier to work with than Stevenson, as Kennedy maintained an even keel during the campaign’s rigors and proved to be far more accessible. “He took advice more readily, made decisions faster,” Martin said. “He wasted no time. He used his staff well.”

Connecting with the candidate was not the only hurdle Martin had to face during the campaign. He also had to forge a relationship with Sorensen, who zealously guarded his closeness with Kennedy and wrote, re-wrote, or reviewed every speech. When he had first gone aboard the candidate’s plane, Martin recalled that Sorensen had taken him aside to remind him, “A Kennedy speech has to have class.” In a memorandum to speechwriters he distributed in late July 1960, Sorensen had established the basic theme for campaign speeches that included “the action, summoning every segment of our society; the result, to restore America’s relative strength as a free nation; and the purpose, in order to regain our security and leadership in a fast-changing world menaced by communism.” He continued that a speech should leave behind with an audience the general impression that a Kennedy administration, unlike a Nixon one, could “be trusted to ‘get things done’ on all the new problems that are coming up on ‘the new frontier’ of the 60’s . . . through specific steps that require effort by all the people as well as vigorous Presidential leadership, characterized by both courage and compassion.”

Sorensen and Kennedy had developed such a symbiotic relationship that they communicated “almost by shorthand,” said Martin. He remembered how, when the Caroline stopped for brief appearances at local airports, Kennedy, who viewed Sorensen as “indispensable,” paused before his speech for a word or two from Sorensen, who would “look up at him [Kennedy] and utter a sentence or two, suggesting a speech theme, and Kennedy would think, nod, remember, and go out and deliver it.” Some of the most eloquent campaign prose in his time came from Kennedy, said Martin, who particularly admired the ending of his speeches, which he compared to parables. And when the candidate spoke about such weighty issues as foreign affairs, he did not seem to be tentative and burdened as Stevenson had been. Instead, Kennedy appeared to know “exactly where we should go and how we should get there,” said Martin.

Sentiment played no role during the campaign. “The Kennedys played with a hard ball,” said Martin. He remembered how Sorensen sat outside the door to the senator’s private cabin on the Caroline, “the keeper of the portal,” personally approving anyone who entered. “It was a no-nonsense campaign, work to be done, no time wasted on people’s feelings,” said Martin. He had received a call from his old friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr., offering his speechwriting assistance on Kennedy’s travels. Martin passed the request along to Sorensen, but he nixed the idea, believing the candidate might be criticized by the Republicans (in his speeches Nixon had denounced the Democrats as “the party of Galbraith and Schlesinger and [Chester] Bowles) and the press as being a captive of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, a group with whom Schlesinger had long been associated. “It was a hardboiled political decision,” said Martin.

Schlesinger said he had offered to do anything the candidate wanted, including joining him on tour, and Sorensen had reacted by telling him he wanted him to do some major speech drafts, but “it was evident that he wished them done at a distance.” Sorensen and Goodwin had “managed to maintain a stranglehold on the speech situation,” Schlesinger said, including blocking for the most part speeches from the Cox group. Cox tried to funnel ideas through Kraft, but it never worked. “A lot of it was spitballing, it had to be spitballed. It would have been impossible really to integrate the Cox operation with the plane operation,” said Kraft. “In a sense it would have been like trying to funnel Niagara into a hose.” It was not, Cox recalled, a “happy time” in his life. Goodwin did note that the material provided by the Cox group made a valuable contribution during the campaign, as it became a sort of traveling library that he carried along on the Caroline in a Sears and Roebuck footlocker and a suitcase. “I don’t know what the hell we would have talked about without it,” Goodwin said.

The pragmatic Martin must have passed muster with Sorensen, as he became, as Kraft noted, the only person closely associated with writing for Stevenson to be a regular part of the Kennedy speechwriting team on the plane. Sorensen had complained that at times the candidate believed the material arriving from the Cox group in Washington, D.C., had not been “responsive to what he wanted.” Still, Kennedy, Sorensen said in his memoirs, had insisted that he find some way to accommodate the speeches Cox and his group produced. “I very much wanted to do so,” said Sorensen. “But Archie was many miles away, out of touch with the every-changing tempo of the campaign.”

The same could not be said of the information provided by the able editorial advance team of Martin and Kraft, collecting, as they were, Sorensen noted, local color, opinion, and commentary, as well as providing “draft introductions, notes, conclusions, and themes for the final speeches to be delivered by the candidate. We almost always made good use of their material.” Pierre Salinger, who handled press relations for the Kennedy campaign, noted that Martin’s local speech inserts were often given more attention by the community’s reporters in their news stories than had the central theme of the candidate’s remarks.

Amidst the endless toil of the campaign trail, there were some lighthearted moments, particularly at the expense of Kennedy’s opponent. On September 26, Kennedy and Nixon faced off in the first-ever televised debate, which was witnessed by an estimated 70 million people; by this time 88 percent of American families owned television sets. “We knew the first televised debate was important,” said Sorensen, “but we had no idea how important it was going to turn out.” Kennedy, tanned from campaigning outdoors, refused makeup, as did Nixon initially. His advisers, however, realizing something needed to be done, used some shave stick to cover up his five o’clock shadow.  It did not work; viewers could see on their television sets a tanned, calm, and confident Kennedy, while Nixon, who had injured his knee during the campaign slamming it on a car door, appeared ill and sweaty under the harsh glare of the television lights. Journalist White, whose book on the campaign, The Making of the President, 1960, became an instant classic, was astounded about the contrast between the two candidate’s faces, with Nixon appearing “tense, almost frightened, at turns glowering and, occasionally haggard-looking to the point of sickness.”

On election night, November 8, Martin and his wife were at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, where they spent a long and tense evening watching and waiting to see if their candidate won. Campaign staff converted Robert Kennedy’s house, next to his father’s mansion and across the back lawn from John Kennedy’s cottage, noted O’Donnell, into a “communications and vote analysis center that included an array of telephones staffed by fourteen operators to keep in touch with party leaders and poll watchers from across the country.”

The operators, all women, were kept quite busy that night. Although the ballot counting went on into December, Kennedy won a narrow 112,803-vote victory over Nixon out of the nearly 69 million votes cast; the Democrat’s margin was greater in the Electoral College, where he had 303 votes to 219 for Nixon. The vice president had captured more states (twenty-six to twenty-three) than Kennedy, but the Democrat’s strategy of focusing attention on the more populous states had paid off, as he won Illinois, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York. Kennedy’s controversial choice of Johnson for vice president proved to be a fortunate one, as the Democrats won back some of the southern states they had lost to Eisenhower in previous elections, with the big prize being Johnson’s home state of Texas. The Kennedy-Johnson ticket also won in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri.

On his third try, Martin had finally been on the winning side of a presidential contest. He spent less time in celebrating Kennedy’s victory, however, than in pondering what his time with the campaign had done to him. In a sense, he said, he had “grown up politically” during his work for Kennedy. Looking back on Stevenson’s 1952 presidential campaign, and even during his time as governor of Illinois, Stevenson had maintained, according to Martin, a particular “amateur attitude toward politics,” an attitude most certainly not shared by the Democratic candidate in 1960. “From him [Kennedy] and his staff and his campaign strategy, I learned hard politics. And this was backed up by what I had learned writing about politics,” Martin noted. For the first time, he began thinking of himself as, while not a professional politician, “at least no longer an amateur.” 

The only regret Martin had after Kennedy had been confirmed as the nation’s thirty-fifth president and he and Fran had been on hand in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration, was that his father had not lived just a few months longer to see another Democrat in the White House. And, as Franklin D. Roosevelt had been the president of his father’s life, Kennedy became the president with whom Martin most identified.