The Spirit of '56

In the pioneer days of television, a 10-year-old boy named Bill Clinton sat transfixed in front of a black-and-white set in rural Arkansas, watching a frenzied struggle for the vice-presidential nomination at the 1956 Democratic convention. Years later, when first running for president himself, Clinton recalled in an interview that his appetite for politics had been whetted that afternoon. "The Kennedy-Kefauver thing, oh, yeah," he said in a tone of wondrous recollection. "I remember that, and Kennedy's gracious concession speech."

For Clinton and many Americans, the televised battle offered their first glimpse of a youthful senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. And in addition to Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats' nominee for president that year, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hubert H. Humphrey also played roles in the enormous collision of ambitions that ended in a brawling floor fight in Chicago. The networks preempted soap operas for the convention that week and wound up with a perfect marriage of television and politics, demonstrating the power of the new medium to convey a raw, unrehearsed event to a national audience.

It is unlikely that some president in the distant future will recollect drawing inspiration from the Democratic convention in Boston this week. Drama has been drained out of the political conventions. Instead of choosing their nominees in the combustible heat of a summer gathering of delegates, both parties rely on winter and spring primaries to decide. Party rules now ensure that many delegates are elected locally and that delegations reflect proper gender and racial proportions from their states. As a result, colorful party bosses have been defanged and deprived of such tactics as the "favorite son" (a method to mobilize a delegation behind one of their own to maximize bargaining power) and the "unit rule" (which bound states to support unanimously any candidate with a simple majority inside the delegation). Smoke-filled rooms became pass long before antitobacco forces imposed their new form of Prohibition.

Ironically, the dictates of the great god TV have helped rob conventions of the very spontaneity that created such wonderful theater. Democrats were never noted for order or punctuality, but the absence of these characteristics gave their conventions a certain je ne sais quoi. In 1972, as antiwar sentiment roiled the floor, Edward M. Kennedy and George McGovern delivered stirring speeches to their faithful at hours much closer to dawn than nightfall. It was not prime time, but it was memorable.

Over the years party officials grew sympathetic to the desires of television, and at planning sessions the interests of network representatives became more important than those, say, of a party chairman from Blackhawk County, Iowa. Democrats as well as Republicans -- who like to make their politics run on time anyway -- have agreed to tie up their conventions in tidy packages to accommodate TV, vesting control in faceless factotums with clipboards and headsets and pipelines to the networks instead of a gravel-voiced man or woman with a gavel. For these concessions, the Democrats are being rewarded with a grand total of three hours network coverage this week.

In the same way that the traditional networks now demand that World Series games be contested on chilly autumn nights after the bedtime of young fans, the networks have bullied the parties. They have managed to take American politics -- an exciting, existential beast -- and make it look like a slumbering bore.

Consider the networks' lineup this week: one hour of coverage from 10 to 11 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, featuring the speeches by Clinton, John Edwards, and John Kerry, respectively. Compare it with some six hours of live, uninterrupted coverage one afternoon nearly a half-century ago.

With the Democratic presidential nomination in hand in 1956, Adlai Stevenson knew he faced a popular Republican incumbent in the fall, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The situation called for an unconventional gambit.

Stevenson was intrigued by the thought of a Catholic on the ticket. He liked Kennedy, but lacked the nerve to name him outright. House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, who would preside over the convention, told Stevenson, "If we have to have a Catholic, I hope we don't have to take that little pissant Kennedy." So after claiming the formal nomination on Thursday night, Stevenson addressed the delegates and told them he would let "the free processes of this convention" pick his running mate. For the first time since 1896, when William Jennings Bryan was the Democratic nominee, the delegates would make the selection for the second spot on the ticket in open balloting.

It was past midnight on the East Coast when Stevenson made his announcement, but television covered his remarks. And the networks were there all the next day for what Russell Baker described in The New York Times as "a spectacle that might have confounded all Christendom," an epic clash that caused "shrieking pandemonium with 11,000 persons on their feet and howling."

Kennedy and four other men who would become totems of the party ran for the second spot on the ticket: Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, New York Mayor Robert Wagner, and both senators from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr. The candidates had to construct their campaigns overnight, and they operated in an atmosphere rich with subplots.

Kefauver -- an iconoclastic figure who campaigned in a coonskin cap popularized by the 1950s craze over Davy Crockett (another heroic Tennessean) -- had a base of support among the delegates because he had twice run for the presidential nomination, in 1952 and 1956. He had also seized the opportunity to make a name for himself through televised congressional hearings earlier in the decade. But his Senate committee investigating organized crime had scratched at the links between big city Democratic machines and the mob. Former president Truman was a product of the Pendergast machine in Kansas City and continued to wield influence in 1956. He wanted to stop the man he called "Cow-fever."

Humphrey, whose civil rights speech at the 1948 convention drove Southerners into a Dixiecrat movement that year, was still loathed by the Southern delegates. But the Southerners were no more comfortable with the candidates from their own region. Kefauver was an unapologetic liberal, and Gore had been one of the few who refused to sign the Southern Manifesto signaling war against the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision.

Kennedy thought he could appeal to the Democratic intelligentsia. But when he turned to their grand dame, Eleanor Roosevelt, she rebuked him for his failure to stand up against Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt. He was forced to troll among less savory elements of the party. Speaking of these, Wagner represented the last vestiges of Tammany Hall, the Democratic apparatus in New York. The Tammany leader, Carmine DeSapio, looking every part the capo di capi in his tinted glasses, controlled the city's powerful delegation and was ready to cut a deal with Kennedy if Wagner faltered.

The first ballot was inconclusive. Kefauver led with 483 votes, about 200 short of the 687 votes needed to win. Kennedy had 304, Gore 178, and Humphrey 134. Wagner, trailing badly, dropped out and DeSapio arranged to throw New York's votes to Kennedy. The convention session, which had begun at noon, moved into late afternoon amid furious horsetrading on the floor and in backrooms.

The stage was set for the second ballot. It would be the last great roll call of an American political convention, the last time any vote of consequence went to a second ballot. The contest would go on until a candidate achieved a majority of the delegate votes. In the era before TV, conventions had sometimes taken dozens of ballots, extending their meetings for days before choosing nominees. But this battle seemed hurtling to a climax.

As standards identifying the various state delegations bobbed wildly, party leaders clamored for recognition. Votes were mysteriously switched and withheld. Television captured all the chaos, though some of the off-camera bargaining would not be reconstructed until years later by such historians as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and, especially, Ralph G. Martin in his 1964 book "Ballots and Bandwagons."

The two leaders pounced on the wounded Humphrey. Kennedy, following the proceedings on TV in a nearby hotel room, sent his young aide, Ted Sorensen, to the convention to check on Humphrey's disposition. But Sorensen was dismissed with a poet's contempt by Eugene McCarthy, the other Minnesota senator, who was serving as his colleague's campaign manager. There was nothing for Kennedy, said McCarthy, annoyed that he had been approached by a kid. "We've got nothing but Protestants and farmers," said McCarthy. A Catholic himself, McCarthy would become Humphrey's most implacable enemy in the party, challenging Humphrey for the presidential nomination as an antiwar candidate in 1968, a clash that ended in another turbulent Democratic convention in Chicago.

Kefauver had better luck with Humphrey. He caught the distraught senator, weeping over his impending defeat, off the convention floor and begged for his help. He got it. Minnesota gave all 30 of its votes, which had previously been Humphrey's, to Kefauver on the second ballot. But Kefauver's momentum was offset by an unusual stampede to Kennedy among the Southern delegations. Because both Kefauver and Gore were anathema, prominent segregationists such as Birmingham's Bull Connor (who would unleash police dogs on black demonstrators in 1963) Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina (who had led the Dixiecrat revolt in 1948 and would leave the Democratic Party in 1964) and Senator John Stennis of Mississippi joined JFK's ranks on the floor.

When Senator Lyndon Johnson announced that Texas, operating on the unit rule, would cast all 56 of its votes "for the fighting sailor who wears the scars of battle," Kennedy moved to within 35 votes of victory. He began dressing for a triumphant appearance.

But turmoil struck inside the Tennessee delegation, which already had two candidates (Gore and Kefauver) and a governor, Frank Clement, who yearned for the vice-presidential nomination. Seeing Tennessee's chance to place a native son on the ticket imperiled by the Kennedy surge, Silliman Evans Jr., publisher of The (Nashville) Tennessean, took matters into his own hands. Literally. He cornered Gore in a bar set up by the railroad industry off the floor, grabbed the senator by his lapels, reminded him that he had been "made" by Silliman Evans Sr., and would be broken by Silliman Evans Jr. if he didn't get out of the race. "You'll never get The Tennessean's support for anything again, not even dogcatcher," he said to Gore.

Gore decided to drop out. When Clement, who disliked Kefauver intensely, was told the news, he sighed, "Oh, no. Not Kefauver." But it was Clement's duty to announce that his rival had his state's votes. Tennessee switched its 32 votes from Gore to Kefauver and a mighty roar thundered through the hall.

Because there was no official scoreboard operating to show the tally, delegates tried to keep count by scribbling figures on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper. At one point, the Chicago Daily News reported, both Kennedy and Kefauver were tied with 666 votes each, just short of the magic number.

But there was to be one more decisive turn, one which has never been fully explained. Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts, who would succeed Rayburn as House Speaker, was seen whispering with a leader of the Missouri delegation. Though nominally a Kennedy supporter, McCormack was still smarting from a defeat at Kennedy's hands at a state convention earlier in the summer. McCormack shouted at Rayburn, who held the gavel and was trying to decide which state to recognize. "Sam!" McCormack yelled. "Missouri!" Rayburn recognized Missouri, which switched 36 of its 38 votes to Kefauver. The move triggered a rush by other states to push Kefauver's total over the top.

Suddenly, it was over. Kennedy came to the floor and asked for Kefauver to be put on the ticket by acclamation. Stevenson, watching on TV at a downtown hotel, was said to have slumped in disappointment.

The Democratic ticket was doomed that year, but James MacGregor Burns wrote of the convention developments in his 1961 biography, "John Kennedy": "The dramatic race had glued millions to their television sets. Kennedy's near-victory and sudden loss . . . struck at people's hearts in living rooms across the nation. In this moment of triumphant defeat, his campaign for the presidency was born."

It is a measure of how far conventions have fallen that the last suspenseful moment came at the 1980 Republican convention when Ronald Reagan briefly considered making Gerald Ford his running mate. And that the last memorable burst of spontaneous cheering erupted at the 1988 Democratic convention when a grown-up Bill Clinton declared that his interminable keynote address was nearing its conclusion.

Curtis Wilkie covered seven presidential campaigns for the Globe. He now holds the Kelly Cook chair in journalism at the University of Mississippi.