Anything for a Vote

by Joseph Cummins

  YOU’RE MAKING ME ILL. Saved for posterity were the notes Adlai Stevenson jotted down to himself one night in 1952 as he tried to figure out whether or not he should accept his party’s nomination for the presidency. They provide a fascinating (and slightly scary) look into the mind of a politician:

  I would not accept the nomination if offered to me.

  I [illegible] that the Presidency is a duty from which no American should shrink in fear … but even if I had the self-confidence to aspire to [crossed out] for that dread office, I could not accept the Democratic nomination.

  I have repeatedly said, my only amb. is to be Gover. of Ill. I have a lot of unfinished business here in Ill.… that is the limit of my ambitions and probably the full measure of my competence too.

  I do not wish to be nominated for the Presidency. I am a candidate for reelection as Gov. of Ill. That is my only ambition.

  Would I accept the nomination of the Dem. Party? Yes, I would. I don’t suppose one can refuse except in the most extenuating of circumstances. And I suppose the friendly people of Ill. would release me from my commitments in that event.

  Republicans warned voters that Adlai Stevenson was a closet homosexual.

  DWIGHT EISENHOWER

  VS. ADLAI E. STEVENSON

  By 1956, tensions in America had simmered down a little. President Eisenhower’s Big Four summit conference in Geneva, in which America, France, England, and Russia made some accords, lessened fears on the Cold War front. On the home front, Joseph McCarthy had been completely discredited (and would die of cirrhosis in 1957).

  But all the work took a toll on the president’s health. In September of 1955, Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. Although he recovered, people began to wonder if he was up to the strains of the office. Less than a year later, Eisenhower went back to the hospital for more surgery—this time, for an intestinal disorder. Nevertheless, the Republicans nominated Ike on the first ballot at their convention. Eisenhower had tried to get rid of Richard Nixon by offering him a cabinet post, but the vice president refused. To avoid an unseemly public battle, Eisenhower agreed to keep him on as a running mate.

  Adlai Stevenson, who had worked diligently for the Democratic Party in the previous four years, wanted another shot at the presidency. Despite a primary challenge from Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Stevenson won—and picked Kefauver as his running mate.

  THE CAMPAIGN Stevenson, gallant as ever, had his work cut out for him. One sign of Eisenhower’s enduring popularity was a 1955 Gallup Poll, in which six out of ten Democrats said that if by some far-fetched chance the Republicans did not nominate Ike in 1956, the Democrats should. It’s hard to fight that kind of deep emotional feeling, and Stevenson’s task was made harder still when his men tried to find an advertising agency to handle the campaign. Twenty major ad agencies in New York said no thanks to the lucrative deal—they were afraid of being dumped by their main clients, a bunch of Republican-supporting businesses.

  Eisenhower, running on his “four more years of prosperity” theme, was almost unassailable. The Democrats hammered away at what they called his part-time presidency (doctors had prescribed plenty of rest and exercise for Ike) but had to be careful not to be seen as attacking a sick man. Their best ad line was “Defeat part-time Eisenhower and full-time Nixon,” which raised the specter of Nixon as the power behind the throne. In fact, 1956 marks the true beginning of that favorite Democratic sport: Nixon bashing. A series of radio and TV ads asked, “Nervous about Nixon? President Nixon?” In one, shopkeepers from Nixon’s hometown claimed that they had to choose between displaying Nixon campaign posters or being evicted.

  The nervous-about-Nixon campaign never ran. Stevenson, ever the gentleman, would not allow the attack ads to air.

  THE WINNER: DWIGHT EISENHOWER Eisenhower beat Stevenson 35,590,472 votes to 26,022,752, thus ending the eloquent Illinoisan’s career as presidential wannabe, although he did go on to become an effective and distinguished ambassador to the United Nations. When Stevenson was a little late conceding on the election night of 1956, Eisenhower’s arrogance showed through: “What in the name of God is the monkey waiting for?” he snapped. “Polishing his prose?”

  But the Democrats—with ambitious senators like Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey currently jockeying for national prominence—would soon have their revenge.

  JOHN F. KENNEDY

  VS.

  RICHARD NIXON

  “Nobody knows to this day who the American people really elected in 1960.”

  —Tom Wicker

  The year 1960 represented a powerful changing of the guard in American politics—oldsters like Eisenhower and Truman were out, youngsters like John F. Kennedy, with his “New Frontier,” and Richard Nixon, running as the “New Nixon,” were in.

  And it was about time. Eisenhower, with his cabinetful of Republican millionaires (eight of them) and his penchant for smoothing things over without really fixing them, had left the country with more than a little hard work to do. The Russians had beaten the Americans to space with Sputnik I, and their belligerent premier, Nikita Khrushchev, was making threatening noises. Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, but this action did nothing to address the roots of the issue of civil rights. And American advisors were gradually becoming a presence in a distant country called Vietnam.

  The most explosive decade in the twentieth century was about to begin with an election that many feel remains, to this day, too close to call.

  THE CANDIDATES

  DEMOCRAT: JOHN F. KENNEDY Scion of the fabled Massachusetts family, forty-three-year-old John F. Kennedy was a war hero who was first a congressman, then a senator, and was now running for president, all in the short span of fourteen years. It was a meteoric rise—helped in good measure by his family’s money, his movie-star good looks, and his lovely wife, Jackie. But Kennedy had a big strike against him—he was Catholic. The last Catholic to run for president, Al Smith, had been practically burned at the stake.

  Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, senate majority leader, was Kennedy’s running mate. Kennedy and Johnson hated each other, but JFK needed the Texan as a Southern ticket-balancer. So why did Johnson take the job? As he told a woman friend at the Democratic Convention, “One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.”

  REPUBLICAN: RICHARD M. NIXON The forty-seven-year-old Nixon’s rise had been just as meteoric as Kennedy’s, in exactly the same span of time, with two terms as Eisenhower’s vice president to boot. His star had risen in the eyes of the American public after his so-called Kitchen Debate with Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev at a trade show in Moscow in 1959. Standing in the mocked-up kitchen of a “typical American home,” Nixon deftly parried Khrushchev’s bullying sallies and came across as a hero for American ideals and democracy.

  This did not necessarily help him with his boss, who had distrusted his vice president ever since the Checkers Speech. When asked if Nixon had participated in any major decisions in his administration, Eisenhower replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

  Nixon’s running mate was Republican UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  The battle of 1960 was hard hitting and fast moving. Instead of traveling by rail, candidates flew in chartered planes all over the country, visiting cities and towns selected by modern statistical analysis.

  To combat his reputation for being devious and underhanded, Nixon created his New Nixon persona: mellow, mild, and reasonable. Democrats weren’t buying it, particularly former president Harry Truman, who once remarked, “If you vote for Nixon, you ought to go to hell!”

  Of course, Kennedy had his own share of image problems. His promise of a New Frontier had little meaning for most people, and his speeches played much better in large urban centers than in the heartland. Most of America’s farmers were not impressed with his rich-bo
y charm. (After talking to an unsympathetic audience at a South Dakota state fair, Kennedy muttered to aides: “Well, that’s over. Fuck the farmers.”)

  And then, of course, there was the problem of his Catholicism. The level of anti-Catholic bias in the country had sunk since the days of Al Smith, and Kennedy was able to skillfully defuse the issue. He went to Houston to address a prominent group of Protestant ministers and convincingly denied that he had any allegiance to the pope. To his credit, Nixon refused to make Kennedy’s religion an issue; the Democratic forces under campaign manager Bobby Kennedy kept bringing it up, however. At one point, Bobby teared up during a speech and said, “Did they ask my brother Joe whether he was a Catholic before he was shot down?” (Joe Kennedy, eldest of the brothers, had been killed by the Nazis during the war.) And Democrat campaign workers continued to make cynical use of the issue, asking voters (in a technique that today would be called push-polling): “Do you think they’re going to keep Kennedy from being president just because he is Catholic?”

  “Tricky Dick” Nixon actually ran a far cleaner campaign than Kennedy. Faced with attack ads, such as the glowering picture of Nixon over the headline “Would You Buy a Used Car from This Man?” Nixon hammered away at his opponent’s “inexperience” in foreign affairs and his lack of a really viable agenda for the country. The election was being rated by pollsters as too close to call by September, when Nixon foolishly agreed to a series of four debates with Kennedy. The first one was broadcast from Chicago on September 26.

  Sixty million Americans watched the debate, and millions more listened to the radio broadcast. Most of those listening to (and not viewing) the debate thought that Nixon had won. But those who tuned into their televisions saw a poised, cool, and confident Kennedy and a strained, tired-looking Nixon whose makeup seemed to be streaking with sweat over his five o’clock shadow. Afterward, Nixon’s mother called to ask if he was ill; in fact, he was fighting off the effect of a debilitating infection that occurred after he had banged his knee on a car door earlier in the campaign.

  Although there were three more debates to go—debates in which Nixon looked much more refreshed and confident—it is the first debate in Chicago that voters, and American history, remembered.

  THE WINNER: JOHN F. KENNEDY

  Going into election night, many commentators were predicting a Kennedy victory, although by no means a landslide. An engaged American public went to the polls—this was one of the last elections to date where more than 60 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots. The final outcome was Kennedy 34,226,731 votes and Nixon 34,108,157 votes, a difference of 119,450 votes, or less than one-tenth of one percent (although Kennedy won in the Electoral College 303 to 219). It was the closest election since the Benjamin Harrison—Grover Cleveland contest in 1888. (By contrast, in 2000, Al Gore would win the popular vote by more than a half-million votes over George Bush, although he lost in the Electoral College.)

  After a nearly sleepless night, Richard Nixon conceded to John F. Kennedy, and Camelot was ready to have its brief, shining moment on stage. But behind the glittering myth remains the question, Who really won in 1960?

  “NO ONE STEALS THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.” Many Republican bigwigs could not understand why Nixon refused to contest the election results of 1960. He certainly had good reason to be suspicious. Immediately after the election, Earl Mazo, an investigative reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, began a series of highly convincing articles detailing voter fraud in two key states, Texas (Lyndon Johnson’s home state) and Illinois (home to the powerful Democratic machine run by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley).

  In Texas, there was widespread evidence of stolen ballot paper, dead men voting, and phony registering. “A minimum of ten thousand votes for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket were simply nonexistent,” Mazo wrote, with certain polling stations reporting thousands more votes than they had registered voters.

  In Chicago, Mayor Daley held back on releasing statewide election returns, probably to see just how many votes Kennedy would need. It would later become apparent that Nixon had actually taken 93 of the state’s 102 counties, yet somehow he managed to lose in Daley-controlled Cook County by 450,000 votes. (Nixon would end up losing the state and its twenty-seven electoral votes by just over eight thousand votes, out of 4.7 million cast.) In the early morning hours, Daley called up John Kennedy and said: “Mr. President, with a bit of luck and a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.” In Illinois, Mazo found evidence of cash payments for votes by precinct captains, dead voters, duplicate voting, and “pre-primed” ballot machines, which would automatically record three votes for every one cast.

  Had the election gone the other way in both of these states, fifty-one electoral votes would have found their way to Nixon’s total, making him the president.

  Mazo had published only four parts of his proposed twelve-part series in the Herald Tribune and was about to examine possible Democratic fraud in other states such as Alabama and California, when Richard Nixon asked him to visit him in the vice president’s office. When Mazo showed up, Nixon implored him to stop writing the series in the interest of national unity. “No one steals the presidency of the United States,” Nixon told him.

  In an age when the press was far more cooperative with politicians than it is now, Mazo agreed to discontinue his articles. But did Nixon really believe that Kennedy had not stolen the presidency? Probably not, but faced with the difficulty of proving these charges, faced with the uproar asking for a recount would have caused, Nixon made the wise choice not to contest.

  The Democrats had out-tricked Tricky Dick. And Nixon would not forget.

  HOW TO PREPARE FOR A NATIONALLY TELEVISED HISTORIC PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE As your teachers in school undoubtedly told you, there is a right way and a wrong way to prepare for the big test.

  The “wrong” way: Richard Nixon shows up in Chicago at midnight on the day before the debate, exhausted from barnstorming through eleven states and plagued by a recurrent fever. The next morning, instead of resting, he gives a major speech and then spends six hours in his hotel room by himself, studying policy reports and refusing to see anyone. Then he heads for the television studio, on the way banging his already infected knee once again. His temperature is over 100 degrees. Instead of wearing regular makeup for television, he insists on smearing on something called Lazy Shave, a kind of talcum powder that casts his face in a ghostly pallor. And he agrees that the debate can take place with both candidates standing—something the Democrats, aware of his hurt knee, insist on.

  The “right” way: Kennedy shows up in Chicago a day and a half before the debate and asks an aide, “Any girls lined up?” On the day of the debate, he gets a suntan on the roof the Palmer House Hotel, has lunch with some friends, and then “studies” in his hotel room by doing Q&A sessions with staff while lying on the bed in his underwear. Ninety minutes before the debate starts, Kennedy slips into a room where a call girl awaits him and emerges fifteen minutes later, according to an aide, “with a big grin on his face.” Then he dashes to the television studio, arriving only moments before the debate begins.

  JUMPERS, RUNNERS, CLUTCHERS, AND SCREAMERS It’s hard to think of a presidential candidate with more sex appeal than John F. Kennedy—and his appearances on national television just underscored the phenomenon. Journalists accompanying Kennedy on his campaign would divide the women into categories—“jumpers,” who would try to leap on his campaign car, “runners,” who would chase after him everywhere, “clutchers” who, given the chance, would grab his arms and not let go, and “screamers,” who would let out loud wails of, “Oh, Jack, I love you! I love you!”

  Kennedy, of course, was never averse to taking advantage of adoring groupies. One day, after his voice gave out from too much campaigning, Kennedy wrote down a few notes on an envelope for a staffer, who preserved them for posterity. “I got into the blonde,” one said. Another plaintively read: “I suppose if I win—my poon days are over?�
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  He would win—but they were far from over.

  The first televised presidential debate ushered in a whole new era of dirty tricks.

  LYNDON JOHNSON

  VS.

  BARRY GOLDWATER

  “We can’t let Goldwater and the Red

  Chinese both get the bomb at the same time.

  Then the shit will really hit the fan!”

  —Lyndon Johnson

  After the tragic events of November 22, 1963, when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot down by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, many thought that his mainly ignored vice president didn’t have the strength or savvy to unite the country. Among these people were plenty of East Coast liberals who—in Lyndon Baines Johnson’s own bitter words—thought he was “corn pone,” an uncouth West Texan hillbilly who lifted up his beagles by the ears. The disdain was mutual. Johnson loved to tell “liberal” jokes along the lines of: “What’s the difference between a liberal and a cannibal? A cannibal doesn’t eat his friends.”

  Johnson was not interested in reform as an intellectual exercise. He was a tried-and-true New Deal Democrat, which meant, as a friend said, that he was an old-fashioned, roll-up-his-sleeves do-gooder. Johnson continued policies begun by Kennedy, declared war on poverty with numerous government-assistance programs, and helped pass a strong Civil Rights Act. The mood of the country was positive. America was more secure than it had been in a decade because of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Johnson was gradually committing more troops to Vietnam, but most Americans, for the time being, were indifferent to this fact. The liberals may not have liked Johnson, but he still had plenty of support from the nation at large.