Six Crises

by Richard Nixon

  What was discouraging and even alarming to us was the continued weakness of the Republican Party in general, as reflected in the polls. On September 1, for example, in answer to the question “Which party would you like to see win the congressional elections in your state?” Gallup reported the break at 58 per cent Democratic, 42 per cent Republican. This meant that in order for the national ticket to win, we would have to accomplish two objectives during the course of the next eight weeks. Republican Party strength for Congress and state offices would have to be pulled up substantially—by four or five per cent if possible. And even then we would have to run five or six per cent ahead of the congressional and local candidates.4

  The first week of any campaign is one of the hardest. In this period, the candidate must learn how to pace himself, decide how best to assign functions within his staff, and get the feel of audiences and of the campaign itself. The trips I had taken between the Convention and the end of August had prepared me to a certain extent for this first period of intensive campaigning. But the hospital stay had left me much weaker than I had realized—and, worse still, I found a huge backlog of paperwork on my desk in the plane, all of which had to be handled during the same period that I was preparing and delivering current campaign speeches.

  Much of this backlog, incidentally, consisted of issue-by-issue questionnaires submitted by the Scripps-Howard papers, United Press, and other news syndicates. My staff had done an excellent job of sifting down the material into suggested “positions.” But I felt it was my clear responsibility to review each answer in detail because they had asked for my views, not those of my staff. The result was that during the first week to ten days of an already heavy schedule, I had to work literally night and day to catch up on this backlog and still keep current on the very important speeches that had to be made daily.

  I had told Jim Bassett that we wanted to get off to a fast start—and he had taken me at my word. Cabot Lodge and I were taking off simultaneously on our first tours from Baltimore’s Friendship Airport the morning of Monday, September 12. President Eisenhower drove up from the capital to wish us well as we began the big push for victory. A driving rain forced us to cram the big crowd indoors but failed to dampen its enthusiasm. We flew from Baltimore to Indianapolis for a giant rally at Monument Circle where I had spoken in both 1952 and 1956. Our next stop was Dallas, where we motorcaded through cheering thousands in the downtown area, followed by a speech at the Memorial Auditorium. We then went on to San Francisco for an airport rally and another one downtown in Union Square. It was 11 o’clock Pacific Coast Time (two in the morning Eastern Time, in terms of our take-off) before we finally got to bed.

  The following morning I had to be up at 6:30 for a televised press conference at 7:30. We drove to Hunter’s Point Navy Yard for a non-political speech dedicating the SS Hope—a specially fitted demonstration hospital ship which was about to make its maiden voyage to Southeast Asia. Our next stop was Portland, Oregon, and from there—after a motorcade that took us to Vancouver, Washington—we flew on to Boise, Idaho, for a night rally. The next morning—Wednesday—we again had to be up at 6:30 for a 7:30 take-off and a day that included a noontime stop at Grand Forks, North Dakota, and an evening rally at the Bradley University Field House in Peoria, Illinois. From there, we flew to St. Louis and, while it was past eleven when we arrived, we were greeted by an enthusiastic airport crowd of over 5000. After the long drive into the city from the airport, I still had an hour’s work to do at the hotel on a major speech I was making Thursday morning to the National Convention of the International Association of Machinists—my first campaign appearance before a labor organization.

  I knew that the Machinists were going to endorse Kennedy and that the audience would not be a friendly one. I had accepted the invitation because I wanted every opportunity to talk over the heads of union leaders to the rank-and-file workers.

  As I finished my notes for the Machinists speech and got ready for bed, I looked back over the first three days of the week with considerable satisfaction. The crowds had consistently exceeded our expectations and the campaign was rolling along with good momentum. I felt more tired than usual, but I attributed this to the fact that I had so recently been in the hospital and to the unusually heavy schedule with its early morning departures cutting into my sleep. But when I awoke at about three-thirty in the morning, I knew that there were other causes for my fatigue. I had a raging fever and was shaking with a chill. I woke Don Hughes and asked him to get Dr. John C. Lungren, who was traveling with us and was a veteran of three previous campaigns. When he came to my room, he found that I was running a temperature of over 103, caused probably by a flu virus. I told him that if there was one meeting in the entire campaign at which I had to show up, it was at the Machinists’ convention, scheduled for 8:15 that morning. He shook his head and said, “I don’t see how you can possibly do it, but let’s try to get this fever under control.” He gave me an extra-large dose of aspirin, antibiotics, and other assorted pills. Whatever they were, the fever broke, and while I got very little sleep for the balance of the night, I was able to get up at seven and proceed to the Kiel Auditorium for the scheduled meeting.

  I don’t know when I have ever felt so weak before walking out onto a public platform but I was determined to let no one know my condition. I then proceeded to make what some of the reporters have called my best speech of the campaign.

  I had already decided that this was the right time and place to make another frontal assault on the “tell ’em what they want to hear” school of campaigning—as I had done, for example, in Greensboro with respect to the civil rights issue. Kennedy, in fact, had given me a perfect opening in his own kick-off speech in Detroit on Labor Day, and I carried on from there:

  I have here a report of a speech made by my opponent in Detroit before a labor group, and this is what it says:

  “ . . . what the American labor movement wants for America is what I want for America, and what the American labor movement opposes I oppose.”

  If I were solely concerned about votes, I would tell you that today. I would say that I was 100 per cent for everything that the officers . . . [and] delegates to this convention are for, representing a great number of voters in this country. I would say that I was against, 100 per cent, everything that you are against . . . It might win votes, but . . . it would not be good for the labor movement and for labor union members and it would not be good for America for a President of the United States to make that kind of a statement . . .

  Then, after spelling out the overriding goals of peace and a widely shared prosperity about which all Americans are agreed, and after specifically rejecting the idea of a blanket endorsement of the particular goals of business or labor or farmers or any special group, I summed it up this way:

  It is the obligation of the President of the United States to be President of all the people and not to set one group against another.

  From St. Louis, we flew to Atlantic City, New Jersey, then on to Roanoke, Virginia, and then back crosscountry to Omaha, Nebraska. We motorcaded through the Iowa countryside to Des Moines and on to Sioux City. One of the most memorable stops for me was before the smallest audience of the whole campaign. It was an unscheduled stop on a roadside, on the way to Guthrie Center, where I had noticed a small group of students standing at the roadside with a sign: WELCOME PAT AND DICK NIXON—IOWA SCHOOL FOR THE DEAF. I spoke to the students, standing on the hood of my car, as a teacher interpreted my remarks in sign language. I won no votes, for my listeners were under voting age, but no audience reception moved me more than the looks of delight on their faces when they realized I was going to take the time to speak to them.

  The next day—Saturday—included a morning rally in Sioux City, Iowa, an airport rally in Minneapolis, and then a press conference and evening rally in the field house at Macalester College in St. Paul. We left Minneapolis that night at ten but, because of the time difference, arrived in Washington at 4:30 Sunday
morning. The milk trucks were moving through the streets as we drove home from the airport.

  In that first week of campaigning, we covered fourteen states and more than 9000 air-miles. It had been a successful week from several viewpoints. We had drawn overflow crowds everywhere we went. Most encouraging was our reception throughout the farm belt. The columnists and commentators, as well as many Republican leaders, were predicting that the farm situation would be the most difficult domestic issue confronting us during the campaign. Before the National Convention, every farm state Congressman, Senator, and State Chairman (with only two exceptions) had stated on his own initiative or in response to inquiries made by those working on the farm platform that it was absolutely imperative for me to come up with a new farm program. The Democrats for eight years had done a vicious hatchet-job on Ezra Taft Benson. They had created the impression, not only among Democratic farmers but among many Republicans as well, that Benson had no sympathy for the farmers and their problems and that his attitude was simply that the farmer should “grin and bear it.” The Republican farm bloc leaders respected him as a man of high principle. Scarcely a one of them had any alternative to offer. But almost to a man they told me—“the farmer has not been getting his fair share of America’s increasing prosperity. He is hurting. He will not vote for a presidential candidate who says, in effect, ‘we are doing all we can and things will work out in time.’”

  I personally made it clear to everyone concerned that under no circumstances would I repudiate Benson, either personally or in terms of his long-range goal of less dictation to the farmer from Washington. But I knew we would be in grave danger of losing the farm states unless we were able to offer an affirmative program—going beyond what Benson had previously stood for. I insisted to my staff members working on this issue that the program must be one that was honest and sound. On this and every other issue, the admonition I gave to some of those who had a tendency to let their eagerness to appeal to voters overrule their judgment on the substance of issues went something like this: “We must always assume that we are going to win this election. And I do not want to say anything or do anything during the campaign that I will not be able to live with as President.”

  The farm program we eventually adopted was set forth in the Republican platform, my speech at Guthrie Center, and a second speech delivered during the second week of the campaign at Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It provided for a massive step-up in the program for taking out of production acreage which was yielding surplus crops, and a new five-point program for increased consumption of these surpluses. A basic feature of the program was that there should be more control of farm programs by farmers and their representatives, and less by Washington bureaucrats.

  The reception for this program was generally favorable in the farm belt. But what helped us even more was the very unfavorable reaction to Kennedy’s farm program. He had never had too much interest in the farm problem and very little acquaintance with it. Consequently, he took his program from the panacea-peddlers who were anathema to the average, practical-minded farmer. The Kennedy plan provided for a massive increase in Federal Government control of agriculture and, in effect, would have made virtually every farmer in America beholden to bureaucrats in Washington. Polls taken two weeks after his farm speeches and mine indicated a substantial shift of the farm vote, away from Democratic candidates and back to its traditional Republican mooring.

  My only criticism of the first week’s activities was that we had scheduled too many early morning departures which meant, consequently, too little sleep, not only for me but for members of my staff and our traveling press corps. I did not realize how bone-tired I really was until I opened my eyes about noon on Sunday and found that I could hardly pull myself out of bed to get on with the mass of preparatory work that had to be done before we started out on our second week’s swing.

  • • •

  The second week took us for the first time into some of the big industrial states, which were so important because of the size of their electoral votes. The pace was even heavier than that of the first week. From Monday through Friday we prop-stopped on a split-second schedule through Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Kansas. On Saturday we flew south to Lafayette, Louisiana, and Jackson, Mississippi—which, incidentally, was the first time a Republican nominee for President had ever visited that state. We were back in Washington on Saturday at midnight.

  For every major stop on the schedule, of course, there were usually half a dozen side-trips and motorcades; there were local press conferences, airport rallies, downtown rallies, auditorium and stadium rallies—and if not a speech, at least a few words at each stop.

  During this second week, the size and enthusiasm of our crowds had, if anything, exceeded those of the first. I hammered away, both weeks, at certain basic themes. I pointed with pride to an eight-year record of unparalleled national growth and prosperity in every area of the economy, whether measured by total income or by classrooms and houses and hospitals constructed. But at the same time I warned against smugness or complacency, asserting that this progress must be simply the jumping-off point for still greater future growth, stable and sustained. In any competition with the Soviet Union, I argued, we would win hands down. I also pointed out that, easy as it is to make pie-in-the-sky promises and to offer panaceas for all our remaining problems, the crucial question of how best to move ahead revealed the basic Democratic-Republican split. For every problem, either real or fancied, Kennedy had a ready-made program of Federal action—along with increased Federal outlays, increased bureaucratic control, and increased inflationary pressure. For my part, I contended that the traditional American way has always been to rely on the free choices of millions of individuals and that the role of government must be limited to encouraging and stimulating private initiative and to creating the right climate for the exercise of freedom, with equal opportunity for all. Kennedy had a tremendous advantage here: his approach was simple and easy to understand. It promised something for everyone. And he never had to bother about such details as costs and bureaucratic controls.

  During these first two weeks, Kennedy concentrated on building up what I characterized as a “poor mouth” image of America—just barely limping along in second place behind the dynamic Soviets, with the gap widening day by day. He kept insisting we were “stalled on dead-center” and “frozen in the ice of our own indifference” and were fast becoming “second-raters.” “Last year,” he said, “the Soviet Union exceeded the growth of this country by three times.”5 Kennedy promised, without spelling out the details, to “get America moving again.”

  He seized on every possible shortcoming and inequity in American life and promised immediate cure-alls. I consistently maintained that we must solve our remaining problems, but always in the tradition of freedom and responsibility, while still meeting our tremendous world-wide obligations and the overriding demands of our national security. I knew I was right. But his approach was simpler and more dramatic.

  After two weeks of this intensive campaigning, covering twenty-five states and 15,000 miles, my staff estimated that I had spoken to and been seen in person by crowds exceeding two million. Several millions more had been reached through local radio and television. But I realized that important as these two weeks had been and 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 scheduled for all-network coverage the next evening, Monday, September 26, in Chicago.

  • • •

  All the previous week I had used every spare minute preparing my opening statement and studying the issues that might be raised by the panel of newsmen. I got up early Sunday morning and worked through the day, without interruption, until it was time to go to the airport for a ten o’clock night flight to Chicago. As I pored over my material I wished that I had arranged to have Saturday free
as well as Sunday for this preparation. But it was too late to do anything about the situation now, except to ask Jim Bassett to lighten the schedule somewhat before each of the next three debates so that I could have more time for studying the issues and also for some needed rest after a hard week of campaigning.

  Our flight was scheduled for a 10:30 arrival in Chicago, Central Time, which would make it possible for me to get to bed by midnight for a good night’s sleep. But our plans did not work out exactly as we had expected. Despite the late hour, we were met at the airport by a crowd of some 5000. And the Chicago Republican leaders had planned street rallies in each of the five wards we would be passing through on our way from the airport to the Pick-Congress Hotel. Only a brief 15-minute stop was required in each case, but it was past one o’clock Monday morning before we finally arrived downtown.

  The next morning I made an eleven o’clock appearance before the annual convention of the Carpenters Union, my second campaign speech to a labor organization. While the Carpenters, like the Machinists, were expected to end up in the Kennedy camp, I thought it important to accept their invitation, particularly in view of the fact that Republican strength among the rank-and-file is probably greater in the Carpenters’ membership than in any other union.

  For five solid hours that afternoon I read through and digested material which my staff had prepared, on every issue that might conceivably be raised during the course of the debate. By the time I had completed my boning and was ready to take off for the television station, I felt that I was as thoroughly prepared for this appearance as I had ever been in my political life up to that time. I had crammed my head with facts and figures in answer to more than a hundred questions which my staff suggested might be raised in the field of domestic affairs.