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whatever they needed to promise, if they needed to promise anything. And they were so tremendously aggressive and determined, whereas Stevenson wasn't aggressive and determined; he was waiting really, thinking that the Johnson forces would offset the Kennedy forces. Now, Johnson, whereas he was enormously powerful in the Senate as a legislator, was relatively unknown outside of the Senate, outside of Washington. And in the end the people who come to the convention as delegates are in rather large numbers uncommitted. There are many people who come from their states and who are not terribly well informed when they get there, and it just depends on how many workers, how many persuasive people, how energetically they're found and how energetically they're checked on what they do.

Now, Jack Kennedy had been all over the states speaking for two years energetically before this day, and he really had done the work. Now, Johnson, as you may recall, either on Monday night or Sunday night, or afternoon, made an enormously bitter attack on Kennedy. It was so bitter that I questioned the wisdom of this.

He aimed at Kennedy's absence from the Senate and from all these very important roll calls.

Yes.

Kennedy handled the rebuttal very well indeed, I thought.