Kennedy kept up the pressure. On the eve of the second debate, in a speech in Cincinnati, he called Eisenhower’s Cuba policy a “glaring failure.” America had backed the dictator Batista, he said, prompting such despair among the Cuban people that they fell for the seduction of a communist revolutionary. Now Castro “threatens the security of the whole Western Hemisphere.” When the second debate opened on October 7, Kennedy beat the drum of American decline, alleging that the United States had been standing still while the communists surged. Nixon, more poised, better prepared, and less sickly-looking than in his debut, replied sharply. He scolded Kennedy for such “defeatist” talk and for running down the great republic. He pointed to the advances the communist bloc made under Truman, when “600 million people went behind the Iron Curtain,” and asserted that Eisenhower had turned back the Red tide. “We have stopped them at Quemoy and Matsu, we have stopped them in Indochina, we have stopped them in Lebanon,” Nixon crowed.
Nixon’s boasts about the defense of Quemoy during the second debate drew Kennedy into an attack on Eisenhower’s handling of the defense of Taiwan. Kennedy alleged that American policy there was fuzzy and confused and had therefore invited Chinese provocation. He preferred to draw a line, stating clearly that America would not risk war over Quemoy and Matsu. “I think it is unwise,” he said in a memorable blunder, “to take the chance of being dragged into a war which may lead to a world war over two islands which are not strategically defensible” or essential to the defense of Taiwan. This sounded like Kennedy was advocating retreat under communist pressure, and Nixon pounced. In the third debate, on October 13, Nixon painted Kennedy as an advocate of appeasement toward communist China.31
Sensing that he had been hurt by Nixon’s attacks on the Quemoy issue, Kennedy tried to change the subject. On October 18 he gave a blistering speech at the American Legion convention in Miami Beach on the “steady erosion of American power.” In an address filled with factual inaccuracies and distortions, Kennedy damned the Eisenhower administration for cutting back on missile development, slowing the modernization of the armed forces, failing to develop jet airlift capacity, failing to prepare for conflict abroad. “We have been slipping, and we are moving into a period of danger.” The United States needed to show the world that it had the guts “for a long, long hard fight” against the “Communist advance in the 1960s.” The day before the final debate Kennedy struck again, this time on Cuba. He issued a statement that denounced the administration for “doing nothing for six years” and called for the arming of “non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro.” He asserted, “Thus far, these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.”32
Did Kennedy know that the United States was in the midst of planning just such a covert operation to overthrow Castro? And if so, did he use this highly secret knowledge to score a debating point and make himself look stronger than Nixon in his desire to oust Castro? Nixon certainly thought so, and wrote with bitterness about the episode in his memoirs. Kennedy had indeed been briefed by Allen Dulles on July 23 and September 19 on a wide range of intelligence matters, as part of the normal routine of giving major presidential candidates a review of ongoing policies. Nixon assumed that Dulles had filled Kennedy in on the Cuba plans, and that JFK then used this sensitive information to embarrass the administration. It has never been clear, nor is it fully demonstrable, that Dulles gave Kennedy a detailed brief on the Cuba operation, which was still evolving. The two Dulles-Kennedy meetings covered many issues, Cuba being only one. Even so, given Kennedy’s excellent contacts on Capitol Hill, in the Defense Department, and in the CIA itself, it seems likely that he had a general idea that the CIA was plotting Castro’s ouster by using Cuban exiles. Yet he recklessly attacked the administration for doing nothing to help anti-Castro forces, knowing that Nixon could not affirm the existence of the covert operation. At the very least it was a cynical move.33
The issue took a bizarre twist in the fourth debate, on October 21, when Nixon denounced Kennedy for his “dangerously irresponsible” proposal of arming Cuban exiles and promoting the overthrow of Castro—the very plan that his own administration was pursuing! Nixon believed he had to differentiate himself from Kennedy, so he argued against the policies he himself had long favored. Ironically, his case against a covert operation to overthrow Castro was so skillful and well-delivered he seemed actually to have carried the point. Intervention in Cuba would alienate world opinion completely, he said, and it would be “an open invitation to Khrushchev to come into Latin America.” Nixon did as well as he could to develop a sensible, reasoned argument for “quarantining” Cuba rather than invading it. Yet every word he spoke undermined Eisenhower’s own secret plans to disable Castro.34
As the debates were coming to a close, Nixon suffered yet another blow, this one self-inflicted. On October 19 Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested while conducting a peaceful sit-in at a segregated restaurant in Atlanta. A local judge, eager to settle the score with the civil rights leader, sentenced King to four months of hard labor in the state penitentiary. Numerous African American leaders sought Nixon’s help, and White House aide Fred Morrow rushed to write a statement for Nixon to use, calling for King’s immediate release. Inexplicably Nixon stalled and his press spokesman issued a “no comment” to the media. By contrast, Kennedy moved quickly. He telephoned Coretta Scott King and expressed his sympathies. His campaign manager and brother, Robert Kennedy, interceded with the judge and got King sprung from jail. It was a stunning sequence of events, one Nixon badly fumbled. In the following days hundreds of thousands of black voters deserted the GOP, and they never went back.35
As the campaign reached its final week, Nixon, who had struggled to overtake Kennedy in the polls, at last deployed his most powerful weapon, one he had been deeply reluctant to unleash: Dwight Eisenhower. The two men had done a curious dance on the question of Ike’s role in the campaign. Just a few days after the Republican Convention in July, they had met in Newport to discuss strategy, and Ike said he’d do whatever Nixon asked of him during the campaign. But throughout the fall of 1960 Nixon didn’t ask. He wished to win on his own terms and to campaign in his own voice. Eisenhower watched from the sidelines, increasingly frustrated over Nixon’s inability to rebut effectively Kennedy’s charges of drift and decline. He told one Oval Office visitor, “Listen, dammit, I’m going to do everything possible to keep that Jack Kennedy from sitting in this chair.” He wrote to Nixon after the first debate that his campaign needed more “zip” and “should be more hard-hitting.” But Nixon never found the right way to cut Kennedy down to size. As Ike’s staffer William Ewald explained it, Nixon built his campaign on a negative: “America has not been standing still.” With statistics at the ready, Nixon could prove it—but he was fighting on ground chosen by Kennedy, always counterpunching, always defending, while failing to lay out his own vision for the future. With a week to go, and the polls very close, Nixon finally turned to Eisenhower, a 70-year-old man of unsteady health, to sprint the final mile and bring home victory.36
The reunion began awkwardly. On October 31 Nixon and Eisenhower met at the White House for lunch, along with Len Hall, Nixon’s campaign manager. They planned to discuss an ambitious series of appearances by Eisenhower in the coming days. But according to Nixon, the night before the lunch, Mamie Eisenhower called Pat Nixon to beg that the vice president not ask Eisenhower to do any campaigning. In the previous few weeks he had been showing signs of strain, with high blood pressure and heart palpitations. Mamie feared that a week of strenuous speechifying might trigger another heart attack. With Mamie’s tearful plea in mind, Nixon declined Eisenhower’s offer to undertake a big swing to Illinois, Michigan, and upstate New York. “Mr. President, you’ve done enough,” Nixon responded when Ike asked how he could help. Eisenhower looked “like somebody had thrown cold water over him,” according to Hall. Nixon recalled Ike was
“hurt, and then he was angry.” Eisenhower did not know about Mamie’s personal request, and according to Nixon, he seemed “puzzled and frustrated by my conduct.” So he was. Ike called Hall after the lunch and asked, “What the hell’s the matter with that guy?”37
Eisenhower nonetheless carried out his long-planned appearances in New York City, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the first week of November, and once again demonstrated the effect of his personal magnetism. On November 2 he arrived in New York City for a ticker-tape parade down Broadway with Nixon at his side. Perhaps two million people lined the avenues as the caravan made its way to the New York Coliseum, where Ike spoke to thousands of delirious supporters. He gave the kind of speech Nixon could not: an appeal that drew on his own deep experience, his life of public service, and his sheer mastery of the complex issues that he had faced as president. With his distinctive style of humility mixed with confidence, he pointed to the successes of his administration, which had ended the Korean War, avoided further conflicts, strengthened the armed forces, halted communism’s advance, built up alliances, and expanded the U.S. economy while carefully husbanding the nation’s money. “The past eight years have been the brightest of our history,” he insisted, and he defied anyone to match that record.38
Two days later, in Cleveland, before more adoring crowds, Eisenhower denounced Kennedy’s criticism of America’s achievements and mocked the claims of “this young genius” to know better than the Joint Chiefs of Staff how to run the military establishment. To the crowd of Buckeye faithful, he likened Kennedy to an Ohio State football player who spent the season on the bench running down the team and saying “You are a second-rate bunch of muckers,” but then asked to be made head coach. In Pittsburgh the same day, Eisenhower depicted Kennedy as immature, untested, and unreliable. It was time, he said sternly, for some “woodshed honesty.” Promising more programs and more government would cost too much money and trigger “catastrophic” inflation. “These wizards in fiscal shell games,” Ike declared, “are idolatrous worshippers of bigness—especially of big government.” Furthermore the nation’s security could not be entrusted to a neophyte who needed on-the-job training. In times of crisis the president alone must make the decisions. He cannot turn to a “brains trust” or a “warehouse of trick phrases.”39
To journalist Theodore White, Eisenhower’s speeches seemed “crisp, fresh and dramatic,” especially after Nixon’s corny, saccharine style. According to White, Ike had the most sought-after and yet rarest of qualities in politics: “He makes people happy. No cavalcade I have followed in the entourage of any other political figure in this country has ever left so many smiling, glowing people behind as an Eisenhower tour.” The 70-year-old hero, with his “cherubic pink face,” drew from the crowds “a yearning burst of cheers” of the kind Nixon never received. James Reston noted the same phenomenon: “Pinch-hitting for Mr. Nixon, [Eisenhower] is now the central figure in one of America’s favorite scenes: the old pro coming off the bench and swinging for the fences for the last time.”40
V
But the hero struck out. When the results of the vote on November 8 were finally tallied, Nixon had lost by 112,000 votes, the narrowest loss of the 20th century and still one of the closest elections in American history. On the morning of November 9 Ike and his son sat silently in the Oval Office, the president slumped in his chair staring vacantly out the window. “I rarely saw him so depressed,” John wrote later. “ ‘All I’ve been trying to do for eight years,’ he finally said, ‘has gone down the drain.’ ” John insisted he get out of Washington and down to Augusta as quickly as possible, and “almost physically” shoved him into his car for the ride to the airport.41
Instead of greeting Nixon on his return to Washington from California, Eisenhower left behind a personal note. Explaining his hasty departure, he said he was “feeling a great need to get some sunshine, recreation and rest.” He tried to find a silver lining in the election results by suggesting that Nixon would undoubtedly “have a happier life during these next four years” since he would not have to handle the difficulties of being president—a statement that anyone who knew Nixon could never believe. The letter could not hide the deep pain Ike felt at that moment. As soon as he reached his presidential airplane and sat down in the company of his specially invited golf and bridge pals Cliff Roberts, Bill Robinson, and Ellis Slater, he blurted out his real feelings: “Well, this is the biggest defeat of my life.” Even five years later, as he wrote in his memoirs, Eisenhower called Nixon’s defeat the “principal political disappointment” of his presidency.42
What went wrong? Above all, Kennedy proved a gifted presidential candidate. He won voters with his charisma, his youth, and his style, combined with his intelligence and his central argument: that wise and active government could better serve the needs of the people than the penny-pinching, restrained policies of the Ike age. His choice of Lyndon Johnson as his running mate helped him win across the South (though the margin in Texas was only 46,000 votes). Kennedy also persuaded voters that America under Eisenhower had become stagnant and needed a new cause and clear direction to realize its great potential. His adviser and friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr. believed that Kennedy’s relentless emphasis on the gap between America’s achievements and its promise worked: “He wisely decided to concentrate on a single theme and to hammer that theme home until everyone in America understood it—understood his sense of the decline of our national power and influence and his determination to arrest and reverse this course. He did this with such brilliant success that, even in a time of apparent prosperity and apparent peace, and even as a Catholic, he was able to command a majority (though such a slim majority) of voters.” Kennedy made the election about the future, about dreams and possibilities, and about greatness, and Americans thrilled to his dynamic vision.43
And yet the margin was so close that Nixon would be tormented for years by what Theodore White called “an interminable series of ifs.” If he had worked harder to court African Americans, could he have swung Illinois to his camp? If he had abandoned the black vote altogether and courted the white South (as Goldwater would do in 1964) could he have won South Carolina, Texas, Missouri, or Arkansas? What if he had not done so poorly in the first debate? What if he had used Eisenhower earlier? What if he had done better in framing a vision of the future rather than offering to continue the Age of Eisenhower without Eisenhower? What if he had been a warm, personable man of exuberance and charm instead of a brooding, paranoid introvert? The questions cannot be answered.44
Although the defeat belonged to Nixon, Eisenhower must bear some responsibility. Eisenhower’s principal weakness as president lay in his failure to transfer his personal popularity to his party. His effortless and massive victories in 1952 and 1956 allowed him to believe that the country had ratified his ideas, when in fact they had chiefly welcomed his personal qualities of optimism, decency, and experience. During his time in office, his party imploded. In the elections of 1954, 1956, and 1958, Republicans lost a total of 68 seats in the House and 17 seats in the Senate—a devastating verdict from the electorate. In 1960, with Nixon as the standard-bearer, the Republicans clawed back one Senate seat and 22 House seats, but Democrats still enjoyed huge majorities in both chambers. Eisenhower never found the new young leaders who could rebuild the party on a solid foundation. He mused about forming a Modern Republican Party but never threw himself into the task. In 1960 the Republican cupboard was bare, in part through Ike’s neglect.45
Then too there was Eisenhower’s mistrust of Nixon. The infamous remark in the news conference—“If you give me a week, I might think of one”—may have been a lapse, but it told a deep truth about the relationship. William Ewald explained the problem well: “Eisenhower did not so much wish victory for Nixon [as] he wished defeat for Kennedy.” When he went into battle in the last week of the campaign, Eisenhower fought to defend his own record, not to clear a path for Nixon as his successor. Ike never believed in Nixon and did
not particularly like him, and he was unable to keep his feelings hidden.46
Nixon’s loss stung. For two weeks after election day, Eisenhower played a great deal of golf and bridge and engaged in “lugubrious post-mortem discussions” with his friends at Augusta. Even after this long rest the defeat still felt bitter. “I felt like I had been hit in the solar plexus with a ball bat, especially in the first few days,” he wrote a friend. “But now my normal optimism has taken command.”47
Not quite. He stewed over the election results. On November 30 he called Attorney General William Rogers to say that he was “very much disturbed about continuing allegations of fraud in the election.” According to Ann Whitman’s notes of the call, Ike said “he wanted the Federal government to exercise whatever rights and responsibilities were inherent in the situation. He admitted that the election was a closed issue, but he felt we owed it to the people of the United States to assure them . . . that the Federal government did not shirk its duty.” Rogers, a close confidant of Nixon’s, replied that the FBI “was working” on the matter.48
Rumors and accusations of fraud began on election night and emerged chiefly from Chicago. One local Republican election official announced that 10,000 Republican voters had been wrongfully purged from the voter rolls there. Right after the election, Senator Morton, national chairman of the GOP, called for a recount in 11 states where the vote had been extremely close. Nixon dissociated himself from the effort in a press release on November 11. But two days later the chairman of the Cook County Republican Party, Francis X. O’Connell, asserted that “professional vote thieves” had stuffed ballot boxes and stolen votes, swinging Illinois to Kennedy. Since the official tally gave Kennedy the edge there by only 8,858 votes, the issue looked serious indeed. On November 15 the vote counting in California finally concluded, and Nixon narrowly won the state, making the margin in the Electoral College even closer. If Illinois and Texas had switched columns from Kennedy to Nixon, the vice president would have won the election. On November 19 the Justice Department announced that it had ordered the FBI to investigate complaints of voter fraud. Attorney General Rogers seemed willing to use his authority to launch grand jury probes and hold up the voting in the Electoral College, scheduled for December 19.49
The Age of Eisenhower Page 66