National Affairs: Parade to Cape Cod

To the other residents of Hyannisport, who prize their leisure and privacy on summer-crowded Cape Cod, the invasion was a horror—gawkers trampling flower beds, teen-agers screeching, out-of-town automobiles cluttering the streets. People begged the town selectmen to set up barricades against the incoming swarms.

John F. Kennedy was beginning his campaign slowly, with his own Cape Cod estate version of Warren Harding’s front-porch campaign of 1920. If he found the process relaxing, practically no one else did. But except for a brisk, one-day foray into Manhattan to patch a ritt among local Democratic leaders, Jack Kennedy spent the entire sunny week by the sea, receiving Democrats from all over the country.

Adlai Stevenson dropped in to chat, urged all Stevensonians to give Jack the “same vigorous support” that they had given him. Chester Bowles came by too. Those who tried to measure by the warmth of Kennedy’s camera smiles whether Stevenson or Bowles was the Senator’s preference for Secretary of State concluded from such flimsy evidence that Bowles was more in favor. Iowa’s Governor Herschel Loveless huddled with Kennedy about farm matters, showed no sign that he was sore at Kennedy for dangling the vice-presidential nomination in front of him at Los Angeles and then snatching it away. Michigan’s Governor G. Mennen Williams herded into Kennedy’s presence a 55-member delegation representing various minority groups, including the American Indians, Jews, Syrians, Lebanese, Ukrainians, Croatians, Bulgarians, Portuguese, Rumanians, Finns, Hungarians, Italians, French, Lithuanians, Poles, Greeks, Russians, Chinese, Belgians. They listened approvingly as Kennedy promised that no administration of his would ever recognize as permanent the Russians’ rule of nations now captive behind the Iron Curtain. Kennedy disapproved of “liberation” promises, but said: “We look forward to the day when captive nations will stand again in freedom and justice.”

Along with politicians and minority-group representatives, labor leaders and eggheads paraded into Hyannisport. The United Auto Workers’ President Walter Reuther swallowed all his past unpleasant remarks about Lyndon Johnson, pointedly said out loud that L.B.J. would make an “excellent” Vice President. A delegation of Kennedy’s professorial brain-trusters, including Harvard’s Economist John Kenneth Galbraith (The Affluent Society) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Economist Paul Samuelson, took a spin out to sea with Jack aboard the family yacht Marlin. Kennedy’s egghead advisers have learned, somewhat ruefully, that he shops among their suggestions with a cold, practical eye, rejecting more than he buys (“The professors give us old cliché instead of new ideas,” complains a Kennedy aide). But Jack likes to have them around anyway to add prestige, a tone of earnestness, and appeal to liberal voters.