Johnson started in Providence, Rhode Island, which suited his purposes well. It was Kennedy country, its soul divided between the martyr's two most loyal constituencies: a proud Irish-Catholic proletariat and the eggheads at Brown University. Stewart Alsop reported that Oliver Quayle, whose polls the President now carried in his pocket like a lucky rabbit's foot, found that Kennedy's "fading but much-revered memory" was LBJ's "second-greatest asset" in the campaign. (The first was "the nervous and uneasy feeling Senator Goldwater imparts to a great many voters.") Johnson was determined to show that there was so much more to his popularity than that--to show that he was loved. Although he was not exactly sure that he was.
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