This is part of our sin tennuce activities. Im executive director of the john f. Kennedy library foundation. On behalf of all of my colleagues at the library, we are thrilled all of you are here. You are in for a special, special treat tonight. Before i talk about the book, a few other quick things first. First, to thank our sponsors for tonight and for the forum series, the bank of america, the lowell institute, media sponsors, the boston globe, xfinity and ber. In addition to tonight, on your chair is a brochure of different activities. As you know, a week from today is the actual centennial birthday for john f. Kennedy. We have a variety of things. We hope you come back to some or all of these as your schedule permits. We also want to welcome those that are watching this streaming or those on cspan. We appreciate their participation as well. After the presentation tonight, our authors have kindly agreed to sign books. If you dont have them, theyre also available in our gift shop for sale and they will be signing them out to my left, your right afterwards. This is a treasure. This book is really a treasure. I know a little bit about this topic, and when i read this i learned so much and how these two skilled writers put together their deep research and told a fascinating story of the road to camelot inside jfks fiveyear campaign. Before i introduce the two authors i want to welcome back ellen fitzpatrick. Many of you have heard ellen before. She has been here many times, both as a moderator and author and as a scholar in so many ways. For each of these three, again, i could tell so much about their background. I will just give a few sentences on each one so we can get to the meat of this. Ellen is a professor of history at the university of New Hampshire. She has written eight books, including many best sellers, letter to jackie, condolences from a grieving nation, and the highest class, ceiling womens quest for american presidency and so much more. Thomas is Pulitzer Prize journalist. A political reporter for the globe for 40 years. He start when he was four years old he told me. The author of four book goes. He was named one of washingtons 50 most influential journalists by washington magazine. Curtis was a national and Foreign Correspondent for the globe. He now teaches journalism at the university of mississippi. He covered eight president ial campaigns, seven for the globe shall wrrks a globe, and served as a white house correspondent. They have so much experience among them. Please welcome them. Thank you so much. [ applause ]. I feel like a school marm with my two pupils over here. It is a good thing classes are over. They were actually nervous in advance about, you know, the academic historian going for blood here, but really this is such a wonderful book that fills in a story that many of us i suspect think we already know. How many of you remember the 1960 campaign . Quite a few hands going up. Well, i can tell you that you dont know anything about it and you will learn so much from reading this book, as i did. It is an absolutely fascinating study. I have had the advantage of reading the book, and most of you i assume have not. I thought i would instead of grilling these two, i would really ask some openended questions to allow you to get a sense of what the story is that they have to tell about this remarkable campaign. In some sense i think the punch line is given away in the sub title, which is that this was a fiveyear undertaking on the part of the very young john f. Kennedy. So when we think about the 1960 campaign, i think very few people appreciate that it began as early as it did, that kennedy set his sights on the presidency as early as he did, and that it was as methodical as it was, and very instrumental not only in getting him to the white house but it affected his time in the senate and it affected the whole political world that we inhabit today. This was one much those really transformative moments in american political history. Thats my plug for you guys. Not bad, hun . Uhoh, you know whats coming now. No. I want you to begin by telling me something telling all of our wonderful attendees tonight, what i learned when i got to the acknowledgements which is how this came about, your collaboration and how you decided to do the book. Well, i guess i can start with my beginning. I was fascinated by the 1956 Democratic Convention which i watched as a teenager on a very snowy black and White Television set in mississippi. There was such drama in that fight for the Vice President ial nomination. Stevenson, another example of his indecisiveness, instead of picking his own running mate through it to the convention. So there was an enormous fight that went on between some very prominent democrats including hubert humphrey, mayor bob wagner from new york, old senator albert gore from tennessee, and then estet estetez cafarbor who won the nomination and this young unheard of senator from massachusetts, john kennedy. Kennedy nearly won the thing. It was kind of a pier six brawl. It was the last time that a convention had multiple ballots. It is hard to believe, particularly when john davis took 100 and something ballots. So i was fascinated. I wanted to write a book about it. I did some work, i actually came to the Kennedy Library in, id say, 2002 and did some research, interviewed some people who are no longer with us, people like ted sorenson, arthur slassinger, john siegenthal, and i had a proposal. No publisher was interested. I finally got an audience through a mutual friend with a very prominent publisher with simon and schuster named alice mayhugh. I pitched it to her in new york and she looked at me and said, not big enough. I packed up my notes and went home. Fast forward about 12 years later, tom. I was visiting curtis in oxford and started talking also about ted sorenson, who is a major figure yes. In what we did, ellen. I think one of the last people in the game who combined intellectual work on the development of ideas, the formulation of policy on the one hand and their expression in terms of rhetoric on the other. I had been on this stage, oh, more times than he care to recall with ted over the years. Miss him still. He would argue to the both of us that no one had ever taken the time to understand how this improbable event happened and what the ideas, the thinking was that went into it, and how they were adjusted as the event actually unfolded. Out of that came this idea, and Computers Made it possible for one of us to sit in mississippi, one of us to sit in washington, both of us to practically live here and see what the record actually showed. It is interesting because many of you probably read theodore whites the making of a president , at least some book in that series. I think the 1960 book is the best of those, and yet the story that he tells i assign that book now to my students. Now im going to assign your book. I teach a seminar on kennedys presidency, and in that in assigning that book, they dont the students today dont even get it. They dont get how this all this whole process worked, the whole political culture of our country. In some ways theres continuity, but theres an enormous amount of change. Tell em about teddy white and what we learned. Well, teddy white, that book changed the way political reporting went. Tom and i were both influenced by it all of our generation were influenced by the book. But it is a book about essentially 1960. Right. And we became friends with teddy white, admirers of teddy white. I think it is a great book. We went out of our way not to try to emulate in any way. Our book starts essentially in 1955 and really picks up in 1956, and we dont even get to 1960 until halfway through the book. So no question, white was an influence for all of us, but i would like to think he was not an influence to us in writing this book. It is a very different approach that youve taken, and i think an extremely rich one. Before we get into the granular part of this, i wondered about your views of kennedy going into the book versus your views once you researched and put this piece into place. For me, my sense of him changed after reading your book and i wondered if yours did as well . Now that hes 100 if only. To put that in perspective, 100 years ago right now American Kids were being shipped to fight and die in france in world war i. So a little water has come under the dam since then. I didnt have any appreciation for kennedy as a working politician. One of the dangers of Something Like tthe making of a president , it is one way of looking at a president ial campaign, it is a narrative. He went to milwaukee and he said, nixons a nut job or some other epithet that was current then, and then he went to new york and there were all of these people on broadway and the voice boomed in the canyons of the big buildings and everybody applauded and went home and then they voted. The narrative. We took the approach, heavily influenced in my case by sorenson, that a president ial campaign is a series of benchmarks, important decisions about how to face the country, and then they play out. The thing to focus on in that school of thought are these benchmarks. I think thats whats a little unusual about the approach we took and why we viewed the whole five years together. And what about you, curtis . Well, i think one thing as a southerner, that i was surprised i think theres general perception that kennedy was out front on civil rights and, in fact, he was not. He dodged the issue. He courted some of the worst southern politicians imaginable. We found in the files here in this building letters back and forth between jfk and george wallace, and kennedys offering wallace help in his gubernatorial campaigns. He walked a tight rope between the south which he needed, he needed their electoral votes, but by doing that he endangered his standing among africanamerican voters in the Northern Industrial states. So it is a very interesting road that he took on this issue. But he was a real latecomer on civil rights and only at the very end did he throw in, and we thought it was a very dramatic part of the book and the whole story, was the call to coretta king. You know, we ran into this ambivalence, i guess you would say, on several topics, cuba, many of the domestic issues. You cant speculate about other peoples motives. Woe were brought up in journalism, believing thats not something you should do. But with kennedy, what makes him so challenging is that you see him approach an issue, like say french colonialism in Northern Africa or health care among older people in america, and youre trying to separate out the political from the substantive. With kennedy they are so blended that it becomes a challenge. About all you can do is say how he approached the issue, what he did, how he thought, how people advised him. But theres always this mixture in him. Well, from the time, it would seem to me, that the democratic that once upon a time there was a solid democratic south. Remember that . Still is, it is republican now. And from that time forward most president s had to deal with this, if they were at all atentative to the issue of civil rights. When the issue of civil rights was not on the radar screen for american president s and in national politics, one could try to finesse this more easily. But really that became very difficult as the 20th century wore on. So as i was reading that, i was wondering to what extent you felt that was specific to kennedy, that what president was going to get elected that didnt try to straddle that fence . I think it doesnt make it admirable by any means. Yeah, i think the difference is the timing. Because the Movement Really started in 55. Right. With the murder of emmet till and rosa parks refusal to go to the back of the bus, and it gained momentum. And in the very period that were writing about is the period where the civil rights Movement Really emerged on the scene. Right. You know, eisenhower didnt really have to grapple with it. Never. Truman, other than desegregating the military, it wasnt an issue until this time. You know, being an old hack journalist myself, i rely a little bit on oversimplification. I think the trick with kennedy and civil rights, the end would be Martin Luther king jr. , riverside church, the fierce urgency of now. It takes a little more effort to have respect for president kennedys approach, which i would say is the fierce urgency of how. Right. And it is a different challenge. Watching him change and he did change, right . Yes. As time wore on in the campaign, theres a moment in the spring of 1959, politically he realizes hes not going to get much help in the south. Thats going to be all Lyndon Johnson. On the other hand, the movement has been heating up, things have been happening, there have been outrages, and we found a guy who was working for water ruther and the united autoworkers who was reporting about one particular meeting where all of a sudden one day kennedy stood up and said, if ive got the quote right, the negroes are right. From that moment you begin to see a different kennedy approach to the issue. He was still straddling, he was still very frustrating, but on the other hand you can see the evolution. And you see it, you tell the story of how other democratic politicians are trying to and republicans for that matter, too, are trying to navigate these waters after the brown decision, when it really becomes unavoidable after 1954. Eisenhower wasnt a big fan of the brown decision. No. And, you know, in your narrative you show that kennedy and johnson both struggled with how to respond to this burgeoning Civil Rights Movement that was really pulling them along, and you go back early enough so that youre showing that fobbus, littlerock and wallace himself are being changed by both the pressure of the Civil Rights Movement and the massive resistance to desegregation thats occurring. So kennedy in that larger story comes out, i thought, not entirely favorably but trying to find his way. I think ultimately he came out taking the right path, no question that he did, and then as the president it got even better. But you show the courtship very clearly of these powerful southern democrats, which would bedelve him through his own administration. Theres a traditional view of kennedys life in politics that majz that his quest for the presidency was imposed upon him by an overbearing father and that this once his older brother died in the second world war, he was next. It was all a trajectory forward. I think thats pretty much blasted out of the water by your study in which you tell a much more complicated story. But its a story about an indifferent congressman and a not very effective senator. But somehow that changes, and it changes early when he suddenly or so it appears, decides that the presidency is the thing to go for. Can you talk a little bit about what you think were whats the moment there . Well, there isnt an actual moment. The volume opens with what we call the only cardiac doubleheader in the history of american politics. Right. Lyndon johnson followed by the ike heart attacks. And his father comes right into it here because he had the cockamamie notion that eisenhower might not run aagain and that what should happen is despite the heart attack, Lyndon Johnson should run. Hed bank roll it and his son would be the running mate. Well, a propoch rouse idea, of course. Johnson dismissed it out of hand of the but thats the moment when you can see kennedy reacting to all of this and seeing the possibility in the form of the Vice President el nomination and it sort of starts right there. And from that moment in the fall of 1955 every time he was faced with some issue of whether he was going to go forward or backward, it was always forward. One of my favorite moments in the fall of 1955, you know, one thing we used to do all the time ahead of a president ial Election Year is speculate on who the running mate might be. And late in the summer of 1955 there was an item remember the old per scope section of news week where they had a little hard news and a lot of gossip . And there was a list and mentioned on that list as a possible running mate for at lee stephen son was John Kennedys name. And this intrigued the hell out of him and so he called the editor of the section at news week in report, a reporter many of us knew named debs meyer and said who is doing the mentioning . And meyer said well, me. Which is how we used to do it, right . You pull one of these lists out of thin air, and then all of a sudden somebody was being mentioned for Vice President. But as we talked when we did the forum on the book listening in a couple of years ago, ellen, he had this ambition that had nothing to do with ideology, was certain of that. He didnt want to run to double the minimum wage or achieve world peace or whatever. He talked in this off the record conversation, a tape of which was found many years later, about wanting to its the Teddy Roosevelt answer. Wanting to be in the arena, wanting to be in the center of things, dealing with the huge issues of the day. Obviously making a difference in a positive direction, but its being there and being in the highest rung. He said, i think, in the tape recording, its like the harvardyale game every weekend. An oddly parochial reference for him. But i think it sums up what the nature of his ambition was. Nernd, he ran for president because he could. Well, and he was seeking the presidency at a time when it was changing in american political life and becoming a much more Important Institution than it had been certainly in the 19th century. It becomes theres a kind of cult of the presidency by the 1950s and 60s in which its seen as the master institution to american political life. But i wonder to what extent the 1956 experience of getting really being seen as a credible candidate to be that close to the presidency made him think i could actually do this. How important, curtis, do you think that was . No doubt at all particularly the 56 convention, because even though he lost, he came out of it as this attractive young guy that people sat up and noticed for the first time. And that was clearly the beginning because shortly thereafter there was a meeting down at the old mans place in palm beach. No. Im sorry. It was at cape kod. It was thanksgiving. And pap pa joe and jack got tog