by Jim Newton
The world does not wait on American politics. The stirrings of liberation, cynically incited by Moscow in its colonial designs, insured that 1960 would produce its share of crises. Even as Kennedy and Nixon girded for their historic encounter, Laotian peasants rose up against their king, and the Congolese rebelled against the colonial rule of Belgium.
In the summer and fall of 1960, tiny, mountainous Laos disintegrated into factions, with North Vietnam and the Soviet Union sniffing at the possibilities. In August, Eisenhower was warned that “the situation remains so confused that anarchy is likely to develop.” It deteriorated from there, and American sources reported on December 11 that howitzers were being unloaded from Soviet aircraft at a Laotian airport. Within a week, fighting was under way, and the U.S. embassy was shelled. The government of Laos, struggling for survival, asked for American help, and Eisenhower, from Walter Reed hospital, where he was for a checkup, authorized the dispatch of Thai and U.S. aircraft to resupply the government. That swift response repelled the Communist forces for the moment but did not secure a victory. As the year ended, Ike pledged to defend Laos even if it meant the United States fighting unilaterally in the region.
In the Congo, meanwhile, Belgium succumbed to the pressure for independence on June 30. Unrest followed. No sooner had the Congo liberated itself than violent bands turned on the white population. Belgium deployed troops in defense of those residents, and the new government complained that the former colonial military was exercising an authority it no longer possessed (Belgium and the new government had drafted a treaty that would bar such intrusions, but it had not been ratified at the time of independence). Complicating matters further, a mineral-rich section of the Congo known as the Katanga Province declared its independence from the new nation on July 11 and invited Belgian troops to protect whites there. The splintering of the Congo was encouraged by Belgium, and Katanga was joined by rebellion in another province, the diamond-mining area of Kasai. With the new nation on the brink of disintegrating, the United States reached out to the Congo’s new prime minister, the handsome, charismatic Patrice Lumumba, to attempt a settlement.
Lumumba arrived in New York on July 24, woefully unprepared to discuss his nation’s future. He had no agenda for the talks; he forgot even to bring money. American officials feigned respect for him but in fact regarded him as an oddity. Ralph Bunche, the great American diplomat and civil rights leader and winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize, considered Lumumba “crazy,” and the Belgians charged that he was a Communist. The CIA and the administration considered him an opportunist, not a Communist, but worried that he might seek refuge under Soviet protection. Communist or not, Ike saw Lumumba as flaky and ill equipped to manage a modern nation. Ike hoped that Lumumba’s government would fall while he was away. To encourage that, he proposed a three-week tour of the United States.
Lumumba’s visit had its ups and downs: the prime minister was flattered by Secretary Herter’s welcome but disappointed not to meet Eisenhower; the Belgian ambassador complained of the ceremony for Lumumba, which he said angered Belgians just as it would annoy the United States if Belgium were to host a state gathering for Castro. Back in the Congo, a UN force invited by the Congolese government enforced a tenuous peace, but the Soviets stoked the unrest, and Eisenhower was perturbed when Lumumba gave an interview to the Soviet news agency. “The communists,” Ike warned Herter on August 1, “are trying to take control of this.” Once again, Ike readied for conflict. If the Soviets tried to enter the Congo by force, he insisted, “we would all be in the fight.”
The Soviets did not send troops, but Lumumba continued to duel with Belgium and the United Nations, demanding a full and immediate withdrawal of Belgian forces and an end to the Katanga Province secession. If he did not get his way, Lumumba hinted that he might turn to the Soviet Union to supply what the West could or would not. Good to his word, when the UN did not respond as quickly as Lumumba wished, he summoned Soviet help. Soon Eastern bloc equipment and advisers were streaming into the Congo. On August 18, a CIA operative there wired his superiors that embassy officials and others believed a “classic communist effort” to overthrow the government was under way. “Decisive period not far off,” the operative cabled in clipped prose. “Whether or not Lumumba actually commie or just playing commie game to assist his solidifying power, anti-West forces rapidly increasing power Congo, and there may be little time left in which take action to avoid another Cuba.”
One Cuba was one too many for Ike. The National Security Council met on August 18, and Eisenhower said he wanted a plan to stabilize the Congo. What he heard was not encouraging. The UN secretary-general regarded Lumumba as “an impossible person” (and possibly under the influence of “dope”), and Allen Dulles reported that Lumumba “was in Soviet pay.” Eisenhower listened to those reports and firmly replied that the United States would not permit Lumumba to expel the UN forces. There was, he insisted, no indication that the Congolese people were opposed to UN peacekeeping efforts; there was only evidence that Lumumba himself was threatened. Ike adamantly refused to stand by while the UN withdrew from the Congo and was replaced by Soviet arms and equipment. That was a prospect, the note taker recorded, “too ghastly to contemplate.”
What Eisenhower said—or did not say—next has been the object of inquiry by historians and investigators ever since. According to Robert Johnson, who kept the minutes of that meeting, Eisenhower indicated with words Johnson could not recall but that “came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba.” Johnson was shocked that the president would issue such an order and retained the memory of that moment for decades. As time went on, however, he came to doubt himself, in part because he recognized how uncharacteristic it would have been for Eisenhower to recommend the dispatch of a foreign leader before a roomful of advisers. Others at the meeting vehemently denied that Ike made any such statement, and the minutes of the meeting that Johnson prepared included no mention of it. Douglas Dillon, the acting secretary of state at that moment, recalled that Eisenhower may well have said that Lumumba was a danger to the world and should be gotten rid of but never ordered him killed. The minutes do, in fact, reflect the suggestion of Maurice Stans, Eisenhower’s budget director, that the United States “throw Lumumba out by peaceful means.”
Whether Ike—who a few weeks later muttered that he wished Lumumba would “fall into a river of crocodiles”—wanted him dead or merely out of the way, Allen Dulles believed he had received presidential authorization to eliminate him. A few days later, the CIA initiated its efforts to depose Lumumba, a mission in which it regarded no methods as off-limits. In September, Dulles cabled the agency’s Léopoldville station chief to urge “every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position.” Clandestine plots were hatched and pursued; CIA cables mused darkly of rifles needed for “hunting season,” while one particularly ingenious plot involved slipping Lumumba a tube of poisoned toothpaste.
Lumumba’s enemies were not confined to the West. The Congo’s new president dumped him from office, but Lumumba continued to agitate and muscle his way back into a position of leadership. After Lumumba was fired, both the president and the now-former prime minister turned to the army chief of staff, Mobutu Sese Seko, and ordered him to arrest the other. Instead, Mobutu seized power for himself, retained the president, and turned on Lumumba, who fled to his home province to escape arrest. Mobutu was himself a curiosity. The first reports described the chaos in his office, with children and dogs milling about as he propounded on the role of “councils of students” in running the government. But he was a curiosity the United States could live with. He expelled the Soviet advisers, and Washington breathed easier. Deposed and on the run, Lumumba no longer posed much of a threat to the United States or Belgium, but neither the CIA nor Belgian intelligence was ready to forget about him.
Richard Nixon had rejected the advice of his betters in deciding to debate John Kennedy. He rejected it
on substance, believing himself the better debater, and on style: Nixon refused to pick a suit that would match the set or to wear makeup that would improve his camera appearance. He paid the price. His performance in the first televised debate, broadcast on September 26, was substantively solid but telegenically disastrous. Still recovering from the injury to his knee, the vice president perspired. Almost from the outset, his upper lip gleamed, making him look ill at ease; he wore a gray suit that blended into the set’s background, and he insisted on turning toward Kennedy, while Kennedy looked steadily into the camera. From the perspective of viewers, he seemed shifty while Kennedy appeared direct. Kennedy reminded viewers that he and Nixon had come to Congress the same year, and he demonstrated by his clear answers and his superior composure that he was every bit Nixon’s equal. Although many observers scored it a tie, television viewers favored Kennedy, and with seventy million Americans watching the debate on TV, that was a powerful victory, evening the race.
Eisenhower writhed as Nixon lost momentum. If Nixon’s future was at stake, so, too, was Ike’s legacy. Kennedy’s campaign promised change—a break from an America that he characterized as spent and sputtering. Kennedy’s success required Americans to join him in rejecting what Eisenhower took pride in having built. Kennedy’s most memorable criticism was at best misleading and at worst deceptive: beginning in 1958 and with increasing fervor as the campaign was engaged, he charged that Eisenhower had allowed the Soviets to take a commanding lead in building the nuclear arsenal. In February 1960, Kennedy asserted that “everyone agrees now” that a “missile gap” existed between the two nations.
But once he secured his party’s nomination, Kennedy was provided with estimates of Soviet and U.S. military strength. He thus knew—or at least had been told—that the United States far exceeded the Soviet Union in nuclear capacity. But ever since Sputnik, he and other Democrats had been lambasting the Eisenhower administration for its supposed indifference to Soviet strength. He was not about to stop now. Kennedy continued to criticize the administration’s attitude toward space, missile, and technological superiority, extracting maximum political advantage from a claim he knew to be at least contested by official estimates, if not outright false.
Even Kennedy’s much-admired speech on his religion and its place in his public and political life opened with a ringing critique of Eisenhower, including a challenge to the administration’s military and technological record. Far more important than Kennedy’s Catholicism, the candidate argued, were:
the spread of communist influence until it now festers only 90 miles from the coast of Florida, the humiliating treatment of our president and vice president by those who no longer respect our power, the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctors’ bills, the families forced to give up their farms, an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space. These are the real issues which should decide this campaign.
Ike rebutted Kennedy’s claims of a missile gap but refused to do so in detail, in part because the estimates of Soviet and U.S. strength were based on the top secret work of the U-2 and other intelligence methods. Even Nixon seemed tacitly to accept some of Kennedy’s critique: Eager to escape criticism of Eisenhower, Nixon embraced the GOP’s commitment to increased defense spending. Ike watched the campaign unfold with gnawing apprehension, torn by his desire to protect his legacy, by his mounting distrust of Kennedy, and by his abiding uncertainty about Nixon’s abilities.
Khrushchev, meanwhile, spent much of October reminding Americans—Eisenhower, in particular—of what an erratic menace the Soviet Union represented with him as its leader. On the first of the month, he delivered a caustic, freewheeling address to the United Nations, berating Eisenhower for the U-2 episode and rambling on about lynching and American support for Spain’s Franco, among other criticisms. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations dismissed the speech as a “spectacle,” but the Soviet premier was not done yet. Eleven days later, during a debate over a Soviet resolution on colonialism, the delegate from the Philippines rose in support of the proposal but suggested broadening it to condemn Soviet domination of Eastern Europe as well. Khrushchev banged his desk in protest and demanded recognition. Receiving it, he thundered at the delegate, calling him a “jerk” and a “stooge of American imperialism.” The assembly then degenerated into chaotic name-calling and demands for attention. It climaxed with Khrushchev waving his shoe in fervid protest and banging it on his desk. The president of the assembly shattered his gavel trying to restore order, then gave up and adjourned the session.
Nixon’s campaign carried a slim advantage into the final weeks, leading in twenty-two states with 161 electoral votes, while Kennedy led in fourteen states with 123 votes. The big states, however, remained too close to call, and Nixon struggled. On October 14, Eisenhower called Nixon’s headquarters but was told Nixon was asleep. Then Nixon called the White House looking for Attorney General Rogers, and the switchboard operator alerted Ike’s secretary, Whitman, that Nixon was on the line. He was transferred to Ike’s office. Once connected, Nixon got a condescending earful. Eisenhower began by admitting that he had missed the previous night’s debate, then proceeded to critique Nixon’s performance anyway. The president recommended slowing down, thinking over questions before blurting out answers, trying to appear more thoughtful, less glib. Nixon considered himself an effective communicator; Ike was the one notorious for garbling his syntax and was, to boot, a stroke victim who occasionally groped for the right word. Who, Nixon must have wondered, was lecturing whom? Whitman filed away the episode under “Things I shall never understand.”
Hesitation and confusion were hallmarks of Nixon’s 1960 campaign, and they hurt it at a crucial moment. A month before Election Day, Martin Luther King was arrested for participating in a sit-in at an Atlanta department store. While he was in custody, a judge who had months earlier fined King and given him a twelve-month suspended sentence for driving without a proper permit asked authorities to hold him so that he could determine whether King’s new arrest violated the terms of his suspended sentence. Fearful for King’s safety, his supporters urged federal officials to intervene, a call that went from urgent to frantic after the minister was shipped off in the middle of the night to Georgia’s notorious Reidsville prison. Harris Wofford, Kennedy’s earnest and beleaguered civil rights assistant, pleaded with Kennedy’s inner circle to have the senator intervene. Knowing that Bobby Kennedy was wary of any move that would antagonize southern Democrats, Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of both men, caught the candidate when he was alone and suggested he simply call Coretta King.
“What the hell,” Kennedy agreed. “That’s a decent thing to do.”
Coretta was relieved and grateful to hear from the Democratic nominee. Bobby, when he learned of it, was furious. He dressed down Shriver and Wofford, accused them of jeopardizing the campaign.
Responding to King’s arrest was even more complicated in the Nixon camp. Aides urged Nixon to address the incident. But Nixon still imagined that he could win away southern states from his Massachusetts opponent. He declined to issue a statement or even to make a call such as Kennedy had. When questioned by reporters, he refused to comment.
The judge in the King case reversed himself a few days later (Bobby Kennedy, after lambasting his associates for arranging the call to Coretta, called the judge himself to urge that King be granted bail). The minister was freed to the wild relief of his family and supporters. So grateful was his father that he broke with fellow preachers who were backing Nixon to proclaim his support for Kennedy. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” he said. “But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is.” Kennedy marveled. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father,” he remarked. “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”
News of the call and the statement by King’s father spread rapidly through black communities a
cross the country, encouraged by the Kennedy campaign, which skillfully exploited the episode, publishing a pamphlet contrasting Kennedy’s compassion with Nixon’s lack of it and circulating it in the days just before the election. Known as the “blue bomb” for the cheap blue paper on which it was printed, it was passed from hand to hand, pew to pew, in black churches and community gatherings, moving blacks while largely escaping the notice of whites. Both sides knew the election would be close. The blue bomb reflected Kennedy’s guts, while Nixon’s refusal to engage the issue demonstrated his caution and indecision.
Near the end of the campaign, Eisenhower at last took to the hustings to stump for his vice president. On October 28, he addressed a large crowd in Philadelphia. On November 2, he made a round of speeches in New York, culminating in a joint appearance with Nixon at the New York Coliseum that evening. The two appeared together again as Election Day drew near, and on the night before Americans voted, Eisenhower delivered a television address. He described his long association with Nixon, his impressions gleaned from cabinet meetings and private consultations. Nixon, Ike asserted, would provide “the right kind of leadership, steeped in the philosophy of enterprise and of hope, experienced in working for an America, confident in her destiny, secure against the devastation of war, in a world moving toward peace with justice in freedom.” When the morning at last arrived, Ike flew to Gettysburg and trundled over to his polling place with John. “The first four ballots cast … in my precinct were for Nixon and Lodge,” Eisenhower cabled Nixon. “If this marks a trend, you will win in a walk.”
Not quite. The election of 1960 was among the closest in American history (Kennedy received 34,220,984 votes; Nixon received 34,108,157), and its margin may be attributed to any of several factors. Kennedy’s call to Coretta King may have tilted black voters into his column; their votes provided his margin of victory in at least three states—Michigan, Illinois, and South Carolina. Kennedy’s debate performance erased many of the doubts about his youth; his thoughtful address on religion helped suppress anti-Catholic sentiments. And Ike’s careless unwillingness to credit Nixon with any decision of consequence did not help. Finally, consigning Eisenhower to a small role in the campaign may have deprived Nixon of the substantial affection Ike still commanded among moderates of both parties. Those close to Nixon would forever wonder whether he might have edged out Kennedy had he turned earlier and more forcefully to Eisenhower. But Nixon defied Eisenhower and debated; he hesitated rather than call Coretta; he waited until the final weeks to stitch himself close to his president. And he lost.