An engaging, witty speaker with an encyclopedic knowledge of the
state’s history, Branigin had initially agreed to run as a stand-in for
President Lyndon Johnson in the primary. With Johnson’s announcement that he
would not seek or accept his party’s nomination for president, a stunned
Branigin nevertheless decided to remain in the race as a favorite-son
candidate. He hoped to win some influence for Indiana’s sixty-three delegates
at the Democratic convention in Chicago, slated to be held in August 1968. Time
and time again during the campaign he repeated that national issues were not at
stake in Indiana. “What is at stake here,” he told his supporters, “is who is
going to represent the state of Indiana in Chicago.”
Branigin enjoyed several advantages over his opponents in the primary.
With his tight control over patronage in the state, the governor could count on
the expertise of Democratic Party regulars in each of Indiana’s ninety-two
counties. To fund his campaign, Branigin could draw upon the funds raised by
having several thousand patronage employees “voluntarily” kicking back to the
party 2 of their salaries. Democratic officials throughout the state also
feared that if Kennedy were nominated for president, his candidacy would hurt
local candidates in the November election. With these factors in mind,
Democratic Party chairmen in all but one of Indiana’s counties threw their
support to the governor.
In addition to the support of
elected officials, Branigin enjoyed the unwavering editorial assistance of Pulliam,
the powerful owner and publisher of the Indianapolis
Star and Indianapolis News, as
well as newspapers in Muncie and Vincennes. Pulliam did all he could in his
newspaper to aid Branigin and defeat Kennedy, whom the newspaper labeled as a
carpetbagger ready to buy the election with unlimited cash. The newspaper gave
the governor’s effort page-one coverage and even peddled him as a possible
candidate for vice president. Referring to his time delivering copies of the Star as a young man, Branigin joked: “I
used to carry Pulliam, and he has been carrying me ever since."
The governor noted in his
daily journal that Pulliam agreed with his position to “hold the line for the
Indiana delegation so as to be more effective in Chicago—and press my candidacy
as far as prudence and good judgment permits.” The Democratic governor had been
amazed that Pulliam, a strong supporter of Republican causes, had promoted his
candidacy day after day in his newspaper, “sometimes when there was no news—or
reason. You can’t purchase such support.” Although he did not know what the
long-term effect might be for the primary contest, Branigin noted Democrats
should remember that “Republicans can elect you!”
Born in Ulysses, Kansas,
Pulliam had attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, before leaving after
his junior year to work in newspapers. He quickly rose in the industry, working
for the Kansas City Star and serving
as editor of the Atchison Champion
before buying a number of newspapers in Indiana, including the Lebanon Reporter, Franklin Evening Star, and the Indianapolis
Star. According to his grandson, Pulliam was at heart “an old fashioned
editor who went into political battles with both fists swinging.”
During the 1968 Indiana
primary, Pulliam used his power as publisher to bolster Branigin’s efforts in
Indiana, and hamper the Kennedy campaign at all costs. During John Kennedy’s
administration, Pulliam, who also owned newspapers in Phoenix, Arizona, had
developed a liking for the president’s wit, but never developed any such warm
feelings for Robert Kennedy. In Pulliam’s mind, the younger Kennedy possessed
an unattractive personality that sorted people into two distinct
categories—those who were with him, and those who were against him. “You could
never relax and just be with him, like you could with Jack,” Pulliam said.
Although warned by his
assistant publisher, his son, Gene, and the Star’s
managing editor, William Dyer, that his efforts against Kennedy might harm the
newspaper’s reputation, the publisher refused to pull any punches. Longtime Star city editor Lawrence “Bo” Connor
remembered receiving a memo from Pulliam that read: “I think whenever Senator
[Eugene] McCarthy comes to Indiana that we should give him as full coverage as
possible—but this does not apply to a man named Kennedy.”
The
Star treated Kennedy and McCarthy as
unwelcome outsiders. Editorial cartoons blasting Kennedy for using his fortune
to buy Indiana votes appeared on news pages. One infamous cartoon on the front
page of the Star’s April 24 issue
under the title “Guests in the House!” had McCarthy and Kennedy wooing a
worried woman labeled “Mrs. Indiana” as Branigin looked balefully down at them
behind his glasses. In the drawing, McCarthy tickles the woman under the chin
while Kennedy’s hand appears to be fondling her breast.
The
Star also gave continued coverage to
charges from St. Angelo and Branigin that Kennedy was out to buy the election
with his family fortune. The newspaper ran on its front page an editorial from
the New York Times titled “Is Indiana
For Sale?” The editorial noted that the Kennedy campaign estimated they would
spend $500,000 in the state, but nobody would be “surprised at an expenditure
by them twice or three times as great.” Because Indiana had no effective law
requiring reports on campaign expenditures, the Times editorial said no one would ever know the real amount. In
reprinting the editorial, however, the Star
edited out a mention that the Branigin campaign could draw upon for
financial support what the Times called
“the ancient and disreputable practice” of levying 2 percent from patronage
employee’s paychecks.
By
the end of the campaign, Kennedy campaign aides had called on the American
Society of Newspaper Editors’s Freedom of Information Committee to investigate
the Pulliam newspapers for what he called “outrageous and callous disregard for
fairness.” Pulliam fired back at Kennedy, comparing him to a spoiled child.
“When he doesn’t get what he wants, he bellyaches about it,” Pulliam said in a
statement. “The facts are Kennedy and his entourage received more space in the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News than any other
candidate, largely for the reason he brought his whole family, including his
mother, to Indianapolis and they made news and we printed the news and the
pictures.”
The
Kennedy campaign attempted to counter the reach of the Pulliam newspapers by
going over their heads and concentrating on television and radio advertising.
In general, however, noted press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, there was not much
Kennedy could do about what he saw as biased political coverage. One new
technique employed by the campaign to circumvent the Indianapolis newspapers
came from Jim Dunn, who had worked on Democrat Pat Brown’s gubernatorial
contests in California. Dunn set up a recording machine in Kennedy campaign headquarters
in Indianapolis with a phone line and notified every radio station in the state
that they could call twice a day to obtain a live feed of Kennedy’s speeches to
use in their news reports and programs. Dunn went to every Kennedy speech,
recorded them, edited them, and also provided commentary on the size of the
crowd and the location of the speech. “It was a good device,” Mankiewicz
recalled. “We got a lot of good radio publicity that way.”
Kennedy
attempted to joke about the rough coverage he received in the Star. During a visit to Indianapolis on
May 1, Kennedy made brief remarks to an enormous crowd of approximately three
thousand people that pressed around his car as it traveled on Monument Circle.
Lacking the proper permit to make a speech, the senator said he did not want to
say too much and risk spending the last few days of the campaign reading the Indianapolis Star while
incarcerated.
In
a talk at the Christian Theological Seminary later in the day, Kennedy turned
serious, noting he had always considered the Manchester Union-Leader, run by arch-conservative New Hampshire
publisher William Loeb, as the country’s nastiest newspaper. “I think, really,
the Indianapolis Star must run it
neck and neck,” he said. “I’ve been here two weeks, and I’ve never seen a worse
newspaper. . . . It’s certainly the most distorted, I think, one of the most
warped.” He went on to say, in a dig at Pulliam, that it must be a great thing
to “have a toy like that.” The Indianapolis
Star reporter who covered the event at the seminary failed to include
Kennedy’s remarks about the newspaper, noting only that the candidate made
digressed from his remarks to indicate “his displeasure with some of the news
coverage he encounters in Indiana.”
As
the campaign neared its home stretch, Pulliam’s son had convinced his father to
give equal space to all campaigns by running news briefs about their efforts
along the bottom of the front page. Branigin, however, continued to be the
newspaper’s main focus. The front page of the Star on primary election day, May 7, had a large headline above the
fold reading: “Branigin Predicts Victory.” Later that fall, in a meeting with
Indianapolis executives, Pulliam did admit: “Well, I guess we did go a little too
far.”
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