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itself before I realized what my party was up against. As in so many other instances, inthis case ignorance was bliss. There was also a final point which impressed me very much when I considered John Kennedy’s candidacy: I was convinced he could win. I thought that he could take the primaries without disrupting the party. I felt sure he could win the nomination and hold the bulk of the candidates with him. And I was very sure that in a general election he could defeat Richard Nixon. On the night that I wrote to Senator Kennedy volunteering my services I went to bed happy.
    And yet the very next night the wisdom of my choice was challenged. By pure chance a neighbor who loved political discussion invited my wife and me to his home, where four other couples were present. That meant that there were twelve of us in the room, and when my wife announced with some asperity that I was not going to support Adlai Stevenson the entire room groaned, for the other ten were strong Stevenson people and in a sense the meeting had been called to see what could be done to further his candidacy.
    “Who you going to support?” one of the men asked.
    “Senator Kennedy,” I said.
    A furious consternation erupted, and except for my wife each of these ten good Democrats, who in the past had proved their loyalty by working openly for the party in a county where Democrats have never been popular, swore, “If the Democrats nominate a Catholic for President, I’ll vote for Nixon.”
    Through five or six hours of heated discussion in which I asked all the questions I was to ask so often in the future months, each of these ten good liberals hardened his determinationand warned me that he spoke not only for himself but for dozens of couples like those present at our informal meeting.
    I need not repeat the arguments. One of the couples was Protestant and had traveled in Spain. Two were Jewish and dreaded the prospect of a repressive Catholic domination. One wife was a Catholic and hated priests who meddled in political matters. All were of the opinion that 1960 was going to be a year in which any likely Democratic candidate for the Presidency could lick Nixon, “unless the party is stupid enough to put up John Kennedy.” As we left, all reiterated their determination to vote for Nixon if that latter dreadful contingency occurred.
    On the long drive home I was an abashed political theorist. I had been quite unprepared for the vehemence of these ten people and I wondered if they did indeed speak for many like themselves. I remember going silently to my room and taking out a sheet of clean paper. On it I made a diagram which made me feel much better:
    Stevenson    Kennedy    Undecided    Nixon    Goldwater
    I called my wife and explained my happy discovery. “On the extreme right you have the Barry Goldwater conservatives. They may not like Nixon, but they have no place else to go. On the extreme left you have the Stevensonian liberals. They may not like Kennedy, but if he’s nominated they won’t have anywhere else to go.”
    “You think those people were fooling tonight?” she asked.
    “No, they weren’t fooling. They’ll be against Kennedyon New Year’s Day. They’ll be rabidly against him in the primaries. They’ll shout against him at the convention. In August, September and October, they’ll be strongly against him, and on November 8 do you know what they’ll do?”
    “Vote for Kennedy?” my wife asked.
    “Right. We mustn’t upset them by arguing against their positions now,” I cautioned, and thereafter I did everything I could to conciliate the Stevenson people; I knew that no matter what they said, they had no place else to go. They might stay home from the election, but they would never vote for Nixon, no matter how strongly they threatened to do so, because for them to vote for Nixon would require that they jump from one side of the spectrum clear to the other and this men refuse to do, for it seems like a