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I tried to make clear what lay at the heart of our differences with the Soviet leadership: not which system was better, but whether one nation should seek to impose its system on other nations. Recalling Khrushchev’s famous prediction that our grandchildren would live under communism, I said: “Let me say that we do not object to his saying this will happen. We only object if he tries to bring it about. . . . We prefer our system. But the very essence of our belief is that we do not and will not try to impose our system on anybody else. We believe that you and all other peoples on this earth should have the right to choose the kind of economic or political system which best fits your particular problems without any foreign intervention.”
After leaving the Soviet Union, we made a brief visit to one of the captive nations—Poland.
The Polish government was extremely sensitive to the fact that Khrushchev had received a noticeably cool reception when he had recently visited Warsaw, and therefore no public announcement had been made of the time of our arrival or the route our motorcade would take. But the people knew, thanks to Radio Free Europe and the underground network that survives even in tightly controlled Communist societies.
It was a Sunday, and many people did not have to be at work. As we left the airport we soon were greeted, first by small clusters, and then by huge throngs of people, waving, clapping, shouting, cheering, many with tears streaming down their faces. Hundreds threw bouquets of flowers into my car, into Pat’s car, even into the press buses that followed behind. The government security forces were totally unprepared. Time and again the motorcade was stopped by the surging crowds pressing forward, shouting “Niech yje Ameryka”—“long live America”—and “Niech yje Eisenhower,” “Niech yje Nixon.” A quarter of a million people turned out that Sunday. Despite the presence of Soviet troops, and the fact that they share a common border with the Soviet Union, on that Sunday the people of Poland demonstrated dramatically not only their friendship for the United States but also their detestation of their Communist rulers and Soviet neighbors.
When we landed in Washington on August 5, we were welcomed by a large and enthusiastic crowd. The Soviet trip had an enormous impact in America. The film clip of my first encounter with Khrushchev at the Exhibition had been shown on U.S. television, and the coverage of our other meetings had presented me as the man who stood up to Khrushchev.
There was a disadvantage to this reputation, however. Some press observers suggested that if I became President I might not be able to get along with Khrushchev, and Khrushchev subsequently did everything he could to lend credence to this theory.
1960 CAMPAIGN
Of the five presidential campaigns in which I was a direct participant, none affected me more personally than the campaign of 1960. It was a campaign of unusual intensity. Jack Kennedy and I were both in the peak years of our political energy, and we were contesting great issues in a watershed period of American life and history.
Our differences were distinct. He preached the orthodox Democratic gospel of government activism, making sweeping promises and issuing rhetorical challenges to leap ahead into an era of new leadership and social welfare. I carried the banner of constructive postwar Republicanism, bred of conservative beliefs that a healthy private sector and individual initiative set the best pace for prosperity and progress. But beyond these differences, the way the Kennedys played politics and the way the media let them get away with it left me angry and frustrated.
Kennedy and I entered the 1960 race fairly evenly matched in terms of our personal campaigning strengths and weaknesses. My most formidable asset was that, since Caracas and my confrontation with Khrushchev, I was probably the best known political figure in the country after Eisenhower. The polls showed that people thought of me as the more experienced candidate, and I intended to stress my experience in the campaign. Perhaps most important of all, I was physically, mentally, and emotionally ready for this campaign, and I was enthusiastically looking forward to it. I knew it would be an uphill battle, but I felt I could win.
On the other side of the ledger, my most serious liability was the weakness of my Republican Party base. In 1960 there were 50 million Americans of voting age who considered themselves Democrats and only 33 million who considered themselves Republicans. In the disastrous 1958 elections, Republican candidates had won only 43 percent of the total votes cast. The Republican Party was at its lowest ebb since 1936, and 1960 boded to be a bad year for anyone who ran with an (R) after his name on the ballot.
I considered Kennedy’s biggest assets to be his wealth and the appeal of his personal style. Some Republican strategists thought that these would weigh against him, but I felt that in the new decade of the sixties, after eight years of Eisenhower’s rather grandfatherly manner, people might be ready for an entirely new style of presidential leadership. He would also be able to count on strong party unity. Unlike Republicans, Democrats are usually able to swallow their differences and unite behind their party’s nominee.
Kennedy had two principal political liabilities. In my judgment one was only apparent—his Catholicism; the other was real—his lack of experience. The religion issue would cut several ways and would probably end up as an advantage for Kennedy. The pockets of fundamentalist anti-Catholic prejudice that still existed were concentrated in states that I stood to win anyway. But many Catholics would vote for Kennedy because he was Catholic, and some non-Catholics would vote for him just to prove they were not bigoted. The experience issue, however, was one on which Kennedy was vulnerable. He had been an active senator for nearly eight years and had established a reputation for the caliber of his mind and the quality of his staff, but he had not carved out any particular areas of expertise.
Just as I was sure that Kennedy would be the Democratic nominee, I was almost as sure that Lyndon Johnson would be his running mate. Both men were superb campaigners and politicians, and a Kennedy–Johnson ticket would be ideally balanced in age, experience, region, and religion. It might be an uneasy and joyless marriage of convenience, but it was a ticket that would unite the party by assuring Southern conservative support even though the ticket was headed by a Northern liberal.
The obvious Republican equivalent of the Kennedy–Johnson ticket would have been a Nixon–Rockefeller ticket. I made the gesture of offering him the position when we met in New York on July 22. As I expected, he declined. I was not altogether sorry, because Rockefeller’s independent temperament would have made him a much more difficult running mate for me to deal with than Johnson would be for Kennedy. But his refusal left me without the option of the kind of finely balanced ticket the Democrats had achieved.
Kennedy made a strong impression and received a great deal of favorable publicity during the Democratic National Convention, which was held in Los Angeles in mid-July. Before the Republicans convened in Chicago on July 25, my pollster, Claude Robinson, placed the Kennedy–Johnson ticket 55 percent to 45 percent ahead of any ticket the Republicans might field.
Just after 11 P.M. on Wednesday, July 27, the state of Arizona moved to make unanimous my nomination as Republican candidate for President of the United States. I immediately called a meeting of thirty-two Republican Party leaders to confer on the selection of the vice presidential nominee.
Before the convention there had been six names on my list of possible running mates: Ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts; Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky; Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota; Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan; Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton of Nebraska; and Secretary of Labor Jim Mitchell of New Jersey.
By the time I met with the leaders in my suite at the Blackstone Hotel, I had narrowed the list to three: Judd, Morton, and Lodge. Both Judd and Morton urged that I select a man with a national reputation who would appeal to wider political constituencies than I might otherwise attract. Morton wanted the position badly, but he magnanimously recommended that I choose Lodge. Eisenhower had also urged me to select him.
My next task was the final preparation of my acceptance speech. I wanted to use the speech to break the stolid and unimaginative stereotype of Eisenhower and his administration that had been presented by Kennedy and the Democrats at their convention. I wanted to challenge people with the rather daring idea that a Republican campaign could be exciting and even inspiring. I asked Rockefeller to introduce me to the convention. He understood that the unity of the party would depend largely on his words, and he came through effectively—as did Goldwater, when he spoke.
I declared my intention to wage a campaign unprecedented in scope: “I announce to you tonight—and I pledge to you—that I personally will carry this campaign into every one of the fifty states of this nation between now and November 8.” In an election between evenly matched contenders, every vote—and thus every state—would be important.
I believed the key issue of the campaign would be experience, and in my acceptance speech I brought home that message.
I asked all Americans to join in meeting what I believed was to be the exciting challenge we faced in the years ahead:
We shall build a better America . . . in which we shall see the realization of the dreams of millions of people not only in America but throughout the world—for a fuller, freer, richer life than men have ever known in the history of mankind.
What we must do is wage the battles for peace and freedom with the same . . . dedication with which we wage battles in war. . . . The only answer to a strategy of victory for the Communist world is a strategy of victory for the free world. Let the victory we seek . . . be the victory of freedom over tyranny, of plenty over hunger, of health over disease, in every country of the world.
The publicity surrounding the Republican convention and my acceptance speech succeeded as I had hoped they would. Gallup reported a decisive switch from the pre-convention results: now Nixon–Lodge led Kennedy–Johnson, 53 percent to 47 percent. But I knew that the immediate impact of the convention and the speech would soon wear off, and the projections about the election itself were that we would be neck and neck until the finish.
An entirely new factor entered American political campaigning in 1960 with the first televised debates between the two presidential candidates.
An incumbent seldom agrees willingly to debate his challenger, and I knew that the debates would benefit Kennedy more than me by giving his views national exposure, which he needed more than I did. Further, he would have the tactical advantage of being on the offensive. As a member of Eisenhower’s administration, I would have to defend the administration’s record while trying to move the discussion to my own plans and programs. But there was no way I could refuse to debate without having Kennedy and the media turn my refusal into a central campaign issue. The question we faced was not whether to debate, but how to arrange the debates so as to give Kennedy the least possible advantage.
We agreed to a series of four appearances. The second and third were to be, in effect, joint press conferences. The first and fourth would more nearly resemble a debate format: each candidate would make opening and closing statements, and a panel of reporters would ask questions. One of these two programs would be devoted exclusively to domestic issues, the other exclusively to foreign policy. Determining our preferred order of these two broadcasts turned out to be one of my most important decisions of the campaign—and one of my biggest mistakes.
Since there was no precedent for this kind of televised debate, we could only guess which program would have the larger audience. Foreign affairs was my strong suit, and I wanted the larger audience for that debate. I thought more people would watch the first one, and that interest would diminish as the novelty of the confrontation wore off. Most of my advisers believed that interest would build as the campaign progressed, and that the last program, nearest Election Day, would be the most important one. I yielded to their judgment and agreed that in the negotiations to set up the debates I would agree to scheduling the domestic policy debate first and the foreign policy debate last.
I began my fifty-state campaign with two trips into the South in mid-August. The first was to North Carolina, my home for three years when I had been at Duke: We received a warm welcome, and the successful visit was marred only by a seemingly small incident: I bumped my knee getting into a car in Greensboro. The immediate pain soon passed, and I thought no more about it. But twelve days later the knee became intensely painful, and tests showed it was badly infected. I required massive doses of penicillin and other antibiotics—and two weeks in bed at Walter Reed Hospital.
All the plans I had made for seizing the initiative by extensive early campaigning were now useless. It was painful when my knee was injected with antibiotics, but it was even more painful to know that each day I was falling behind Kennedy and losing precious time in the campaign.
I was finally able to leave the hospital on Friday, September 9. After only a weekend at home I began an intensive two-week tour covering 15,000 miles and twenty-five states. The first day of that tour was representative of the entire schedule. We took an early morning flight from Baltimore to appear at a rally in Indianapolis, from Indianapolis we flew to Dallas for a motorcade and rally, and from Dallas to San Francisco for a rally at the airport and one downtown in Union Square. I got to bed at 2 A.M. Eastern time.
This pace was bound to tell. Within three days I was running a fever of over 103 degrees, but I continued to keep my schedule. I can now see that I should have accepted the advice of my campaign manager, Bob Finch, my chief scheduler, Jim Bassett, and other members of my staff who urged that my hospital stay was a compelling and legitimate reason to abandon the pledge I had made to carry my campaign to all fifty states of the Union. But having made the pledge, I was stubborn and determined to carry it through. I felt that I had to move decisively to catch up with Kennedy. While I was in the hospital he had regained the lead in the Gallup poll by a slender 51 percent to 49 percent. So instead of lightening my campaign load, I intensified it to make up for lost time.
In the first week after leaving the hospital, I covered fourteen states. In the second week, I covered eleven states. After less than a day at home in Washington, I took a night flight to Chicago, where a crowd of 5,000 was waiting at the airport. After making a short speech and shaking some hands, we moved on to the street rallies that had been planned in each of the five election wards we were to drive through. It was after 1 A.M. before I got to bed. The first debate with Kennedy was set for that evening, September 26.
In the morning I was scheduled to make a speech to the annual convention of the carpenters’ union, so I had only the afternoon for an uninterrupted review of my notes for the debate. When I arrived at the studio I was mentally alert but I was physically worn out, and I looked it. Between illness and schedule, I was ten pounds underweight. My collar was now a full size too large, and it hung loosely around my neck.
Kennedy arrived a few minutes later, looking tanned, rested, and fit. My television adviser, Ted Rogers, recommended that I use television makeup, but unwisely I refused, permitting only a little “beard stick” on my perpetual five o’clock shadow.
During the debate Kennedy was continually on the offensive, attacking Eisenhower’s policies and calling them ineffective. His solution was a more active and interventionist federal government. I did not disagree with many of the goals he outlined, but I sharply attacked the means he advocated to achieve them.
While most of the questions dealt with substantive issues, it was a question of no real substance that hurt me. One of the reporters referred to a response Eisenhower had made a
month earlier at the end of a press conference when asked what major ideas I had contributed as Vice President: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” Eisenhower had meant, “Ask me at next week’s conference”—but he immediately knew that it had come out wrong, and he called me that afternoon to express his regret. The Democrats leaped on Eisenhower’s slip to undercut my emphasis on experience and to imply that Eisenhower was less than enthusiastic about my candidacy.
Most of the editorial writers who based their opinions on substance rather than image, even in the pro-Kennedy Washington Post and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, called the debate a draw, but postdebate polls of the television audience gave the edge to Kennedy. Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, who supported Kennedy, observed that those listening to the debate on radio reported that I had had the better of it. This was small comfort, since the television audience had been five to six times larger than the radio audience.
It is a devastating commentary on the nature of television as a political medium that what hurt me the most in the first debate was not the substance of the encounter between Kennedy and me, but the disadvantageous contrast in our physical appearances. After the program ended, callers, including my mother, wanted to know if anything was wrong, because I did not look well.
The second debate was scheduled for October 7, eleven days later, in Washington. I knew I had to counter the visual impression of the first debate. A four-a-day regimen of rich milkshakes helped me put on weight, and this time I agreed to use makeup.
I immediately took the offensive, hitting at Kennedy’s vulnerabilities.