by Ted Sorensen
But Eisenhower’s intervention was hurting. Nixon, effectively taking to the rails, used more savage adjectives than he ever had in the debates. He stepped up his charges that Kennedy was the captive of left-wing labor bosses, would spend this nation into inflation and depression, would raise food prices 25 percent and the domestic budget by $25 billion. “In the last seven days,” remarked Kennedy in the Bronx, “he has called me an ignoramus, a liar, a Pied Piper and all the rest. I just confine myself to calling him a Republican…and he says that is really getting low.” Nixon accused him of telling “a bare-faced lie,” said the Senator in Albuquerque. “Having seen him four times close up…and made up, I would not accuse Mr. Nixon of being bare-faced, but the American people can determine who is telling the truth.”
Nixon also began to unveil a new spectacular proposal each day, mostly a series of conferences and committees on “peace.” He began to go far beyond the Eisenhower position on housing, health, education and natural resources. He founded his housing proposals on the Democrats’ Federal Housing Act of 1949 (Congressman Nixon, pointed out Kennedy, had voted against that Act). Moving to foreign affairs, he proposed sending Lodge to Geneva and Eisenhower, Hoover and Truman to Russia, while he and his wife, Pat, would travel through Eastern Europe. (“If I am elected,” said Kennedy, “I am going to Washington, D.C., and get this country to work.”) The Nixon staff, building the “tide” psychology, released polls showing their candidate carrying Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, California and Texas. A newspaper poll of editors on the results in their respective states predicted an overwhelming Nixon victory.
The administration announced it was releasing an additional $155 million for B-70 development it had previously declined to use in the unemployed aircraft centers of California. By coincidence it chose November 3 to launch, with considerable ballyhoo about our space effort, a new Explorer satellite. (A Mercury capsule launching timed for Election Day, November 8, was a failure.)
Other problems persisted. Democratic politicians and volunteers were still quarreling in California. Not all the hate literature related to religion. The chairman of Texans for Nixon said Kennedy was not a Communist, only a Khrushchev-lover. Anonymous pink cards made their appearance in Miami: “One Mr. K. is enough—vote Republican.”
Ironically, the cruelest blow came from within the Catholic Church. Except for Cardinal Spellman’s public appearances with Eisenhower and Nixon, appearances which convinced Kennedy of the Cardinal’s opposition, the hierarchy kept silent during the fall; the Catholic press reflected growing resentment of unfair attacks; and the Catholic clergy—in contrast with Kennedy’s Protestant critics and contrary to the latter’s belief—abided by their customary rule of neither endorsing nor opposing any candidate from the pulpit, enduring vitriolic and violent harassment of every kind in admirable silence. Catholic voters leaned increasingly though not uniformly to Kennedy, with many still opposed to his “defensive” attitude on religion, his “boast” of attending public schools and the “leftist” advisers around him.8
Then, in the closing weeks of the campaign, the Catholic hierarchy in the American Commonwealth of Puerto Rico directed all Catholics on that island how to vote: against Governor Luis Munoz Marin and his Popular Democratic Party for permitting birth control instruction, tolerating common law marriage and opposing religious education.
Their action aroused a bigger storm in our election than in Puerto Rico’s, where it was only the latest blow in an age-old battle.9 American Protestant leaders saw in the Puerto Rican pastoral letter a confirmation of their worst fears. On this basis, said Denver’s Methodist Bishop, “I shall not mark my ballot for a Roman Catholic candidate for the Presidency.” Another called it an “alarming illustration of the pressure the Roman Catholic hierarchy can exert.” Instantly the incident was featured in publications ranging from hate sheets to denominational newspapers, often under the heading, “They said it couldn’t happen in America.” Senator Kennedy knew he had been hurt. “If enough voters realize that Puerto Rico is American soil,” he remarked to me, “this election is lost.”
Many of his advisers, fearful that it was lost, urged him to make a nationally televised appeal for fairness on the Sunday night before election. They pointed to the increase in hate literature, to evidence that too few Americans still knew his Houston views. The pollsters said more people talked hostilely of Kennedy’s religion than mentioned any other issue or factor in the campaign.
The plan was to announce the subject of religion in advance and ask for written questions. But Kennedy, sensitive to the charge that he was keeping the issue alive even by answering questions, decided against it. Instead, though he was almost superhumanly fighting off fatigue and irritability, he canceled all rest periods for the final two weeks and vowed to campaign right up to Election Eve.
A lack of funds—which long before had curtailed distribution of Kennedy signs and stickers, long-distance phone calls and expense accounts—made it impossible for Democrats to match a last-minute Republican television saturation. Even some of the time which we had earlier reserved was released. Nixon topped off a TV “blitz” with a four-hour, half-million-dollar telethon the day before the election. It seemed insipid to us, but we could not know how many voters would like it.
The Gallup Poll had shown the two candidates seesawing within a few percentage points of each other since the campaign began, and now it concluded that the race was too close for prediction.
Except for a brief Western swing—far too brief in California, he later concluded—Senator Kennedy concentrated those last two weeks on Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, New York and New England. The weather was freezing, particularly in Waterbury, Connecticut, at 3 A.M., on November 6, where one of his largest crowds for a city of that size would simply not let him go to bed.
Finally and suddenly, it was November 7. After six speeches that day in five states, Election Eve began in Manchester, New Hampshire, with his three sisters. They had been to forty states, he said proudly, but “when somebody last week asked my sister Patricia if I was her kid brother, she knew it was time this campaign came to an end.” His own fatigue was evidenced by a rare show of public irritability and incaution in blasting one local publisher for saying once again that Kennedy was a Communist sympathizer:
I would like to have the Union Leader print a headline that we carried New Hampshire. [Applause] I believe there is probably a more irresponsible newspaper in the United States but I can’t think of it. [Applause] I believe that there is a publisher who has less regard for the truth than William Loeb but I can’t think of his name. [Deafening applause]
Still in Manchester, he moved to a TV studio for a nationwide question-and-answer session, with his sisters asking questions we had selected. They covered all the most difficult issues—Communism, Castro, Catholicism, agriculture, education, the budget, small business and peace.
The evening continued with a noisy inspirational rally with his original boosters, back home in the Boston Garden. There he concluded:
I thank you for your past support. I ask you to join us tomorrow. And, most of all, I ask you to join us in all the tomorrows yet to come, in building America, moving America, picking this country of ours up and sending it into the sixties.
Finally, at 11 P.M., he closed out the 1960 Presidential campaign with a televised presentation from Boston’s old Faneuil Hall. It included brief talks by his wife from Hyannis Port and Lyndon Johnson from Austin, taped interviews with various voters and filmed excerpts from his campaign travels. The Senator spoke quietly but movingly. “I come back to this old city,” he said, “with the strongest possible confidence in the future of the United States, in the ability of its people to meet its responsibilities…[and] to strengthen our cause.”
1 After a Senate committee published all the campaign speeches, more than one writer for subsequent candidates told me he borrowed generously from them.
2 When newsmen later asked him the
secret of finding out the sex, he said, “She told me—you would have to ask her.”
3 Nixon replied that they had quality, not quantity. “I don’t know who these geniuses are,” said Kennedy, “but it is a terrible burden for a hundred men.”
4 Hung on the Conference wall was the slogan: “Take Care to be Fair,” and their statement opened with a declaration against “hate-mongering, bigotry [and] unfounded charges.”
6 The Gallup Poll, which showed only 47 percent of the electorate aware of Kennedy’s religion in May, 1959, showed 87 percent aware of it in August, 1960, with the number rising steadily.
7 Refusing to answer questionnaires from the Baptists and others on all the church-state issues he knew Kennedy would have to answer, he did send one telegram saying each state should decide whether to use Federal funds for parochial schools. Had Kennedy so equivocated, he would have been denounced from a thousand pulpits.
8 When a Lou Harris Poll showed Catholic support and particularly Irish Catholic support lagging behind that of the Jews, Ambassador Kennedy, who had been assailed in a barrage of New York newspaper advertisements as an anti-Semite, fumed: “I think I’d better become a Jew. They and the Negroes are the only reliable friends we have.”
9 Ninety percent Catholic Puerto Rico voted overwhelmingly for Munoz Marin.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MARGIN
IT WAS OVER. “We have done everything that could be done,” he said. He and Jacqueline voted in Boston and rested at the Cape. The remaining job was one of organization, for which Bob Kennedy had relentlessly prepared with no allowance for overconfidence. Symbolic of the nationwide network of poll workers and watchers he had built was the network of thirty telephones and four teletypes in his house adjoining the candidate’s. Reports on “indicator” precincts were received, trends were projected and leaders were called throughout the long day and night that followed.
The first news of the day was word of a record turnout—nearly 69 million voters: good news. Then came word of an especially high turnout in the South—among white, Protestant Southerners: bad news. Except for Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, the turnout in the big cities was off: bad news. Finally the Senator, relaxed with a cigar, in sport shirt, sweater and slacks, settled back to watch the returns, sometimes in Bobby’s house, where aides manned the phones, sometimes in his own house, where Jacqueline watched quietly with him.
He made a few calls on his own. Soon after the returns began trickling in, he called John Bailey in Connecticut, one of the first states to report. “Who’s this?” asked Bailey as the questions were fired at him. “Who do you think it is?” said Kennedy. “The candidate.” He joked after a call to his running mate that “Lyndon says, ‘I hear you’re losing Ohio but we’re doing fine in Pennsylvania.’” He did not conclude the race was over on the basis of his early landslide win among his Connecticut neighbors, any more than he did on the basis of Thruston Morton’s premature mature claim of a Nixon victory. He was equally skeptical of those television computers which early in the evening predicted Nixon winning and those later predicting a Kennedy sweep. When Nixon, trailing in the early returns, refused to concede, Kennedy alone was unnettled: “Why should he? I wouldn’t under these circumstances.” He felt that Nixon had only embarrased himself and Mrs. Nixon by a half-concession statement to a group of unruly supporters.
The Senator refused to make any statement, despite pleas from the press, until the outcome was clear—and it was far from clear. Even before 8 P.M. Huntley-Brinkley were using the phrase “cliff-hanger.” After 10 P.M. Kennedy’s early lead shrank steadily through the night. The experts hedged their predictions. The statistics were uncertain. The TV network computers, said one commentator, were producing at best “a definite maybe.” The Senator watched television impassively, for the most part silently. Generally calm, he was briefly upset about not spending more time in California. He could not understand Ohio. For a time it looked like the 1956 Vice Presidential nominating contest all over again, with Kennedy racing to a near majority only to find himself unable to win enough Western and Midwestern votes to clinch it. But he was cool, often jovial, switching his TV set to a new channel each time local returns displaced the national. Shortly before 4 A.M. John Kennedy went to bed, reasonably but not completely confident that he had won, reasonably but not completely content with his effort and, as always, unwilling to worry once there was nothing more he could do.
The minute he awoke around nine the next morning, I mounted the stairs and congratulated him on his election as President. “What happened in California?” were his first words. I told him—mistakenly as it turned out—that he had carried California and that, in any event, he had carried Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois as well as Pennsylvania and Missouri, to guarantee an electoral majority. I also informed him that the Secret Service had surrounded the house. Almost instantly his bedside phone rang, and he picked it up hoping it was the final verdict. It was his mother-in-law—a lifelong Republican who had publicly supported him—and they chatted as though nothing else was on his mind. He dressed once again in sports clothes, uncertain of how long it would be until Nixon bowed out. He knew politics well enough to know that nothing was certain until then.
His popular vote margin continued to dwindle, dropping finally to less than 120,000 out of nearly 69 million votes cast (in contrast with his electoral vote margin of 303-219). When the gracious wires of concession and congratulation finally came shortly after noon from Nixon and Eisenhower (after the Minnesota verdict was final), he was all business, deliberating his replies and his statement of victory. His elation over achieving the long-sought prize of the Presidency was tempered by the fatigue that had finally caught up with him, by the responsibilities that lay ahead of him and by the narrowness of his hard-won victory.
What accounted for Kennedy’s victory after his initial lag in the polls? The margin was so narrow that almost any important aspect of the campaign could probably be said to have provided the final margin. In my view, any list of decisive factors in Kennedy’s favor, excluding his defensive actions on religion, would have to include the following seven, without attempting to ascribe relative weight to any one of them:
1. The Television Debates
Kennedy’s sincerity and vitality, in the most televised campaign in history, and in the televised debates in particular, appealed to millions of voters who would otherwise have dismissed him as too young or known nothing about him but his religion. One survey showed four million voters making up their minds on the basis of the debates, with a three-to-one margin for Kennedy.
Nixon, confident of his superior debating experience, did not avail himself of the many excuses he could have employed to refuse Kennedy’s challenge to debate, and thereby gave the far lesser-known Senator his most highly publicized forum and most highly prized opportunity of the entire election campaign. Handicapped in the vital first debate by a poor television appearance, and hoping to win Democratic votes by erasing the image of the “old” more militant Nixon, he enabled Kennedy to appear more vigorous by seemingly agreeing with many of the Senator’s most pointed thrusts.
2. Campaign Tactics
Kennedy’s campaign style, tested and sharpened in seven spring primaries, was more attractive, more vigorous and more consistently on the offensive. Driving hard from the outset, he appealed to an inner feeling that the soft and easy life was not enough, that our national potential was unfulfilled. He had been well behind at the close of the conventions. He had been behind midway through the campaign both in the big states and in the South. The opinion polls concealed the unusually large number of undecided and wavering voters. Subsequent analysis by the University of Michigan showed that, contrary to our fears of a late Nixon “tide,” Kennedy won two to one among those making up their minds in the last two weeks before election. Indeed, had more time permitted, he might have carried such additional states as Virginia, Florida and California. His incredibly intensive camp
aign had convinced the unconvinced, projected his own convictions, demonstrated his quick intelligence, converted his youth into an asset and showed Democratic anti-Catholics that he was not only a Catholic.
Nixon’s campaign effort, handicapped at the outset by two weeks in the hospital with an infected knee, and further diluted by the fulfillment of his convention pledge to speak in all fifty states, had less substance and style than Kennedy’s. In contrast to the Kennedy theory on timing, Nixon’s strategy called for a careful pacing of campaign efforts, going all out the last two weeks to reach his peak on Election Eve, but his pacing was too slow and his peak fell short.
3. Party Identification
Kennedy’s party, despite Eisenhower’s personal appeal and successive victories, was the majority party in this country in terms of both registration and voting below the Presidential level. The majority of Senators, Congressmen, governors and big-city mayors were Democrats, capable of helping with organization and registration; and Kennedy appealed strongly and frequently to party unity, history and loyalty. To make the most of this majority, a highly skilled well-organized registration drive helped bring out nearly seven million more people than voted four years earlier, over four million of whom it was assumed were Democrats.
Nixon wished to be identified in the campaign with Eisenhower, but not with his party, not with all his policies and not at the expense of his own independence. At the outset, neither Nixon nor Eisenhower seemed certain of their relation or the extent to which the President’s participation in the campaign might overshadow the Vice President. Kennedy meanwhile was placing Nixon on the defensive for all the failings of the preceding years. The full-scale entry of Eisenhower, whose immense popularity more than made up for his lack of political enthusiasm, was thus delayed until it was too late to switch enough states.