“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications…. In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
It was a remarkable speech, but forces favoring an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union were too strong. Despite their many differences they were, in essence, the world’s two largest industrial nations. By 1966 the size of the American military-industrial complex, and its dependence on congressional appropriations, would become staggering. In that year Boeing and General Dynamics sold 65 percent of their output to the government; Raytheon sold 70 percent, Lockheed sold 81 percent, and Republic Aviation sold 100 percent. As Galbraith admonished readers of The New Industrial State six years later, a company developing a new generation of fighter aircraft, to cite but one example, was “in an admirable position to influence the design and equipment of the plane. It can have something to say on the mission for which it is adapted, the number of planes required, their deployment, and, by implication, on the choice of the enemy toward which it is directed.”
***
The presidential election of 1960 shaped up as a classic duel. Both nominees were from the swing generation and had been young naval officers in World War II, each had entered public life in the months after World War II, and both were now vigorous men in their forties. Richard Nixon believed at the outset, in January 1960, that the coming race would be the closest presidential election in America up to that time. It was; but that was just about the only prediction about it which proved correct.
The United States was not the same country that Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson had stumped in 1952, and it was even less like the country that had gone to war in Korea two years before that. By 1960 the wave of migrants to the new suburbia was at floodtide. The nation was richer. Washington, the new census revealed, had become the first American city with a black majority—54 percent as against 35 percent in 1950. By 1960 40 million American families, or 88 percent of them, owned at least one television set. Fully aware of the hundred million viewers, the two candidates were pondering ways to beguile them. Afterward it was widely believed that the tube helped Kennedy most. Marshall McLuhan thought he knew why. Kennedy, he said, had projected the image of a “shy young sheriff” in a TV western, while Nixon resembled “the railway lawyer who signs leases that are not in the best interests of the folks in the little town.” What McLuhan overlooked was that as Americans became more prosperous they were increasingly conservative; more of them were investing in the railway, and were therefore on the lawyer’s, not the sheriff’s, side.
Each candidate followed a strategic plan. Kennedy appealed to the young, to the blue-collar vote, and to the liberal constituency which Roosevelt had drawn into the Democratic party in the 1930s. The two great Kennedy bases were the Democratic South—holding it was to be the task of his running mate—and the industrial northeast. His campaign would be largely directed at nine big states: Massachusetts, California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. If they could be carried, they would give him 237 of the 269 electoral votes he needed to be elected. His techniques included the mass registration of seven million unregistered voters—seven of every ten new registrants now were Democrats—the articulation of ideas from an Ivy League brain trust—Schlesinger, Galbraith, et cetera—and the brilliant tactics of his young Irish-Americans from Massachusetts, led by Lawrence F. O’Brien and Kenneth O’Donnell.
Kennedy’s built-in advantages were support from organized labor, his father’s great wealth, his Pulitzer Prize, a friendly press corps, his charisma—reporters were beginning to call it the Kennedy “style”—and his membership in the majority party.
His disadvantages were long memories of his father’s support of appeasement twenty years earlier, his youth—forty-three to Nixon’s forty-seven—his inexperience, and the widely held conviction, dating from Al Smith’s candidacy in 1928, that a Roman Catholic could not be elected President.
Kennedy meant to run as hard as he could as far as he could as long as he could. Nixon took a different tack. He believed that a political campaign had high tides and low tides, and that to ignore them was to risk boring, and therefore alienating, the electorate. The object, in his view, was to “peak” a campaign—to bring it to a climax—on election day. Like Kennedy, Nixon planned to zero in on key states, seven of them in his case: New York, California, Michigan, Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. He also promised to campaign in each of the other forty-three states—a pledge he later regretted. He had no brain trust; now, as always, Nixon was a loner, a solitary, brooding introvert. While the theme of Kennedy’s drive was that American prestige was slipping and that Americans must move ahead, the Republican nominee preached the virtues of free enterprise, individual responsibility, hard-nose anti-Communism, and Eisenhower peace with prosperity.
Nixon’s built-in advantages were support from big businessmen, his greater experience (for example, in the steel strike settlement during the President’s illness, and in his kitchen debate with Khrushchev), his strong middle-class roots, and Eisenhower’s occupancy of the White House.
His disadvantages were recollections of Hoover in the White House, still vivid in the minds of older voters; his reputation as a dirty fighter—the “old Nixon”—the bad luck which was to plague him throughout this campaign, and his membership in the minority party.
Each year there were fewer Republicans in the United States. GOP candidates had won 49 percent of the votes cast in the off-year elections of 1950. In 1954 the figure was 47 percent; in 1958, 43 percent. A Gallup poll published in 1960 traced the decline of Republican loyalties in various occupational groups over the past eight years. Asked which party “best served” their interests, 28 percent of the farmers had said the Republicans in 1950. In 1960 only 18 percent said so. Among white-collar workers the drop had been even sharper, from 44 to 29 percent. Everybody liked Ike in the White House, but that affection wasn’t transferable to Republicans playing supporting roles, and the rate of attrition among the party’s lesser figures was alarming.
Eisenhower’s effect on the 1960 race was further blurred by his equivocal feelings about his Vice President. He clearly preferred him to Kennedy, whom he regarded as a young upstart (“that boy,” he called him), but he had told too many people that “Dick just isn’t presidential timber”; the word was out. Eisenhower’s insensitivity in this regard was puzzling. He slighted Nixon again and again. Discussing possible successors in his second term, he came down hard in favor of his last Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Anderson—“Boy, I’d like to fight for him in 1960!” Making a mental list, he added “some good new other fellows,” including Attorney General William Rogers. He loyally included Sherman Adams, “although he’ll be sixty-one in 1960, and that’s pretty old for this job.” Only at the end did he say, “…and Dick Nixon.” On August 24, 1960, Eisenhower dealt Nixon the worst blow in the campaign. He was asked in a press conference, “What major decisions of your administration has the Vice President participated in?” The President’s almost unbelievable reply was, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” Nixon wrote in Six Crises that Eisenhower had telephoned to apologize, saying that he had merely meant to be “facetious.” The justification is odd, and he never offered any public explanation.
In a trial heat taken by Gallup after the 1958 off-year election, the voters chose Kennedy over Nixon, 59 to 41 percent. Just before the Vice President’s visit to Moscow in July 1959, it was Kennedy 61 to Nixon 39—a greater margin than Eisenhower over Stevenson in 1956. After that trip the figures were Kennedy 52 to Nixon 48. In November 1959 Nixon moved ahead for the first time, 53 to 47. O
n the eve of the first presidential primary on March 8 that six-point margin held steady.
Between New Hampshire and the Democratic national convention in Los Angeles four months later, Kennedy captured the Democratic nomination by proving himself unbeatable. Other Democrats who had pursued it were Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Stuart Symington and—his last hurrah—Adlai Stevenson. Humphrey had led the challengers in the primaries. Kennedy bent Humphrey’s lance in Wisconsin on April 5, taking 56 percent of the vote, and then destroyed him in supposedly anti-Catholic West Virginia on May 10, outpolling him three to two. At that point Humphrey quit; he had run out of money. Then the Kennedy bandwagon picked up momentum, winning in Maryland, in Indiana, and Oregon. By June 27, when Kennedy addressed the Montana legislature, in search of support, he had 550 of the 761 delegate votes needed for the nomination.
On the eve of the Democratic convention, Gallup had him leading Nixon 52 percent to 48 percent.
When he moved into his Los Angeles command post, suite 8315 of the Biltmore Hotel, the young Irish-American senator from Massachusetts had 600 delegate votes. Like all Democratic conventions, this one was boisterous, and rich in political talent. Chicago’s retiring boss, Jake Arvey, was there with his successor, Dick Daley, and the most eloquent speech was that of Senator Eugene McCarthy, nominating Stevenson. Eleanor Roosevelt was for Stevenson; so was Marian Schlesinger. (Bob Kennedy scrawled a note to her husband: “Can’t you control your wife—or are you like me?”) The Stevenson people were well organized. They had packed the galleries, and their placard carriers were numerous on the convention floor; included among them was one whose sign delighted her candidate: an enormously pregnant woman, she carried a placard reading, STEVENSON IS THE MAN.
The Stevenson movement was exciting, at times it was even gallant, but it altered nothing. John F. Kennedy was nominated on the first ballot with 806 votes; Wisconsin’s 15 had put him over the top. He chose Lyndon Johnson for the bottom of the ticket—no two men who were there can agree exactly how it was done, but Kennedy knew he needed November support in the South, and Johnson was the man likeliest to give it to him. In his acceptance speech Kennedy spoke of “a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” He warned, “the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges. It sums up, not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.” At the end he said, “Now begins another long journey, taking me into your cities and homes all over America. Give me your help”—the crowds cheered—“give me your hand”—they cheered again—“your voice and your vote”; they gave him a standing ovation, cheering on and on.
Gallup figures after the Democratic convention showed Kennedy leading 55 to 45.
***
After Nixon’s nomination at the Republican national convention the following week, he took the lead in Gallup’s report, 51 to Kennedy’s 49. The week after that he lengthened the lead, 53 to 47. Late in August the two were running neck and neck. In September the number of undecided voters pushed both candidates below the 50 percent mark, but Nixon remained in front, 49 to Kennedy’s 46.
This was the low point in the Democratic campaign. Lyndon Johnson, convinced that he would be the party’s nominee, had scheduled a special session of Congress in which he expected to shine. Kennedy was now trapped in it while Nixon jubilantly opened his first tour in Atlanta on August 26. Six days later the special session ended and Kennedy took off for Maine. Gallup’s new figures were Nixon 50, Kennedy 50.
Luck now intervened. On the third day of his southern trip Nixon struck his right kneecap on an automobile door in Greensboro, North Carolina. The injury did not heal. At Walter Reed Hospital he was told that it had become infected with hemolytic Staphylococcus aureus. Unless he remained at Walter Reed for two weeks of intensive antibiotic treatment, he was told, the cartilage of the joint would be destroyed. Thus he lay on his back from August 29 to September 9 with his leg in traction, wretched at the thought of the lost time. Back in action, he caught cold in St. Louis. His voice grew hoarse. To compound his misery, the religious issue emerged at this time under the worst possible circumstances for him.
Nixon had repeatedly instructed his staff not to discuss Kennedy’s religion with anyone, under any circumstances. Unfortunately he could not control Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the best-known Protestant clergyman in the country and a Nixon friend. Dr. Peale led a group of ministers issuing a statement expressing doubt that a Roman Catholic President could free himself from the influence of the church hierarchy in Rome. Nixon couldn’t attack Dr. Peale, though he came close to it on that Sunday’s Meet the Press program. Kennedy, meanwhile, had seized the chance to deal with this most delicate of issues, one that he had known he must confront sooner or later. The Greater Houston Ministerial Association had just invited him to discuss his faith on September 12 in Houston’s Rice Hotel. He accepted. With dignity and lucidity he told them that he firmly believed in the complete separation of church and state, and that if he could not solve a conflict between his conscience and his office, he would resign. They applauded.
Two weeks later Gallup announced that voter preferences were again narrowing. The figures were Nixon 47 and Kennedy 46, with 7 percent undecided.
The race was approaching the critical period. In two September weeks both candidates stumped the country from coast to coast. Nixon had now traveled fifteen thousand miles in twenty-five states, addressing crowds exceeding two million voters, but he realized, as he later put it, that “no matter how big the crowds or how extensive the local coverage, it was a drop in the bucket: the effect up to September 25 would be infinitesimal compared with the first joint debate for all-network coverage the next evening, Monday, September 26.”
There were to be four debates—the others were on October 7, October 14 and October 21—but the first one was the most important. It drew the largest audience, some seventy million Americans, twenty million more than the others, and it was a Kennedy triumph. That was dismaying for Nixon, and it came as a surprise. He was a skillful debater. Watching Kennedy’s acceptance speech on television—unaware that Kennedy was exhausted—he had thought that his rival spoke too rapidly, that his voice was too high-pitched, and that his concepts were too complicated for the average American. That was why Nixon had accepted the challenge of the debates. Both men had crammed for the first debate as though they were boning up for a bar exam. In words and ideas it was a standoff. But that in itself was a victory for Kennedy. Until that evening Nixon had been the more famous of the two, holding as he did the higher office. But here they stood toe to toe with Howard K. Smith as referee, and Kennedy held his own. More important, he looked better. Those who heard them on radio thought both did well, but the larger television audience saw the senator as tanned and fit. Nixon, on the other hand, had lost five pounds in Walter Reed. He was haggard, and he wore a shirt collar a half size too large for him. He slouched, his expression was grim, and his complexion was pasty, a consequence of ill-advisedly coating his face with Lazy Shave, a pancake make-up meant to hide afternoon beard growth.
Gallup’s new poll showed that Kennedy had moved ahead 49 to 46; 5 percent were undecided.
Drinking four chocolate milk shakes a day on his doctor’s instructions, Nixon regained his lost weight. In subsequent debates he looked as fit as his rival. He scored more debating points, too. It was all to no avail; millions had seen all they wanted, and their minds were made up.
After the last debate, and before Nixon’s last-minute surge, Gallup’s findings were Kennedy 51, Nixon 45; 4 percent were undecided.
Two key incidents affected the Negro vote as the campaign approached the home stretch. Speaking in Harlem on October 12, Lodge, without consulting anyone, said: “…there ought to be a Negro in the Cabinet…. It is part of our program and is offered as a pledge.” Nixon angrily denied that it was part of any program of his—which un
fairly but inevitably offended blacks. A week later, on October 19, a Martin Luther King sit-in once more collided with Georgia law. Arrested in an Atlanta department store for refusing to leave the store restaurant, King was sentenced to four months at hard labor. When reporters asked Nixon for an opinion, he answered that he had none. Privately he thought that King’s constitutional rights had been violated, and he called Attorney General Rogers to ask for a Justice Department inquiry. Rogers agreed, but Eisenhower wanted no part of it and the matter was dropped. The Kennedys had reacted differently. The Democratic candidate put through a person-to-person call to Coretta King telling her of his sympathy and his desire to help in any way he could. Next he conferred with his brother. Bob phoned the Georgia judge who had sentenced King, and on the following day the black clergyman was out on bail. At the time the press was unaware of all this, but Mrs. King told other black leaders about it. They spread the word, which undoubtedly contributed to the tremendous majorities Kennedy rolled up in northern cities on November 8. One of the voters who switched was Martin Luther King’s father. He told reporters that he never thought he could cast his ballot for a Catholic, but a call from his daughter-in-law had won him over. Kennedy murmured, “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father.” Then he added, “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”
In the last days of October Gallup concluded that the race was too close for prediction. The Elmo Roper, Lou Harris, and Claude Robinson polls agreed, and Lawrence O’Brien told Kennedy that it was “a toss-up.” It wasn’t a dead heat all the way, though. Political writers and politicians on both sides agree that two trends counterbalanced in October. A decided shift toward Kennedy two weeks before the election was followed by a last-minute surge to Nixon. Nixon subsequently took this to be confirmation that Kennedy had “peaked” too early, but there is another interpretation. The switch in momentum accompanied President Eisenhower’s entry into the campaign. Neither the U-2 nor the Japanese humiliation had diminished Ike’s tremendous popularity in the country, but Nixon’s relationship with him had continued to be difficult, which explains the Vice President’s failure to ask for his help until Monday, October 21. The President plunged in then and turned the campaign around. Conceivably another week or even a few more days could have reversed the result.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 132