Nixon tried his best to minimize the damage, emphasizing the chain of command, the U.S. Constitution, etc. Appearing on the Jack Paar Show, Nixon reminded viewers that “only the president can make the great decisions.” What he could not say is that Dwight D. Eisenhower had simply made a thoughtless, selfish, rotten statement about his loyal junior partner of eight years.
On the same Paar show, Nixon was queried about his relations with the Democratic presidential nominee. “Are you friendly with Jack Kennedy?” Amid the audience’s laughter, Nixon said that he was. “You two have offices near each other?” the host continued. “Well, we certainly do,” Nixon came back. “We’re members of what we call ‘the Club.’ Anybody who has ever been a member of the Senate is a member of a club.” He then turned to his relations with Kennedy himself. “And while we have very definite differences on great issues and we have very different views on how this election should come out, I would say our relations on a personal basis are friendly. That means we couldn’t disagree more on some great issues, but I don’t believe this campaign will be a personal campaign from the standpoint of personal animosity. I would hope not.” Asked by Paar if he’d seen Kennedy recently, Nixon said he had bumped into him on the Senate floor the day before. “You don’t meet at the water cooler or anything,” Paar prompted him, speculating that such encounters might pose “a problem.” Nixon allowed that, yes, their meetings were, in fact, becoming a bit uncomfortable.
The competition was, in fact, becoming entirely personal. Commentator Eric Sevareid wrote:
The case that there is no real difference in the election begins with the personalities of the candidates themselves. They are both “cool cats,” we are told, men devoid of deep passions or strong convictions, sharp, ambitious, opportunistic, with no commitments except to personal advancement. They are junior executives on the make, political status seekers, end products of the Age of Public Relations. Their genius is not that of the heroic leader but of the astute manager on his way up. They represent the apotheosis of the Organization Man. The “managerial revolution” had come to politics, and Nixon and Kennedy are its first completely packaged products. The Processed Politician has finally arrived.
Like Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, both Nixon and Kennedy had, in fact, made themselves into public figures they could admire—one, the gritty champion of the square; the other, the ageless Mucker, the first truly hip candidate to seek the presidency.
There was artifice in both cases, but Kennedy recoiled at Sevareid’s rough pairing. He especially mocked his rival for aping Ike’s two-handed V sign, as he did watching the exultant Nixon respond to the crowd’s cheers from his hard-won place atop the Republican convention podium. “If I have to stand up before a crowd and wave my arms over my head like that in order to become the president of the United States,” he said of his rival’s clumsy body language, “I’ll never make it.”
Yet Kennedy was not above shaping himself to the task in other ways. Just as he had once spent hours in a Manhattan fashion photographer’s studio trying out his most dashing poses, he had also driven up to Baltimore week after week to study speed-reading. In order to equip himself with the right voice, he had been coached to bark for hours like a seal. One campaign worker, stopping by Kennedy’s home one evening, caught his candidate listening to the booming voice of Winston Churchill on his record player. The pupil was studying the master.
The most important part of Kennedy’s transformation, however, was physiological. More than save his life, the cortisone he had taken during the 1950s had transformed his face, fleshing out his features until they coalesced into the radiant handsomeness, the familiar JFK image, that would linger on in the nation’s fantasy years later. Billy Sutton, who had lived with Kennedy those early years in Washington, would remark that he never looked better than he did in those months of running for president against Richard Nixon.
But having an edge in the attractiveness department didn’t keep Kennedy from running scared. Throughout the fall campaign, Dave Powers, the campaign’s “body man,” would employ a standard method for waking up his exhausted candidate. Each morning he would walk into Jack Kennedy’s hotel or motel room, pull open the curtains, and begin his tuneless serenade: “I wonder where Dick Nixon is this time of day. I wonder how many factories he’s been to, how many events he’s had already.” It was the ideal reveille for a man who had watched his fellow World War II vet and 1946 House classmate win all the early battlefield promotions so far. Nixon’s ambitions had become the sharpest possible prod to Kennedy’s own, for he had shown the country and Kennedy what a person of their generation could achieve.
* * *
IN late August, with the campaign just under way, Kennedy was offered an unexpected advantage when his rival was suddenly forced to limp to the sidelines. In Greensboro, North Carolina, the forty-seven-year-old front-runner injured his left knee so badly that it soon became infected. He was ordered by his doctors to spend three weeks in a hospital. As he lay in bed, Kennedy doggedly kept on the campaign trail. Rejecting newspaper editorial pleas that he cease campaigning until his opponent was back in the race, he sent Nixon a get-well message instead.
Western Union Telegram August 29, 7:50 PM
To: Vice President Richard M Nixon
Walter Reed Army Hospital
I am extremely sorry to hear of the necessity of your being hospitalized for treatment of your knee. I hope your stay in the hospital will be of short duration and that you will make a speedy and effective recovery. I look forward to seeing you on the campaign trail. With every good wish I am sincerely,
John F Kennedy
Nixon responded to the pro-forma greeting:
Western Union Telegram August 31, 3:41PM
To: The Hon John F Kennedy
It was most thoughtful of you to wire me as you did. I hope you have no similar accident. Much against my will, I am trying to do what the doctor orders. I hope to be back on the campaign trail before too long. Sincerely,
Dick Nixon
On the hustings, Kennedy was slyly unpleasant. “Well, I said I would not mention him unless I could praise him,” he announced, “so I have not mentioned him.” When a few hecklers responded by yelling, “We want Nixon!” Kennedy didn’t miss a beat before shooting back, “I don’t think you’re going to get him!”
* * *
ONE great irony is that Jack Kennedy, of all people, should have had his religion become a political issue. Joe Kennedy had not raised his boys to master their theology at Holy Cross or Notre Dame but to cut a swath across Harvard Yard. According to him, the church had but one role to play in the lives of the male Kennedys: to bless their political ambitions and stay out of the way.
By this standard, the church was far from infallible. Lou Harris recalls a December 1, 1959, precampaign strategy session. Just days earlier, on November 25, the Catholic bishops had issued a strong letter attacking “population alarmists” advocating birth control. “They know I’m going to announce in a month,” Jack tersely told the group. “It’s a dagger in my back.” Turning to his father, he made his displeasure even more explicit. “And you tell your friends, the bishops, that if I’m so lucky to get elected in spite of all their obvious opposition to me, it will take a redwood tree to knock down the door of the White House if they try to get into it.”
It had been the Democratic primary in Wisconsin that first exposed Kennedy to the perils of the religion issue. The same sharp, unsentimental vision that had led him to pick Lyndon Johnson and that four years earlier had inspired Ted Sorensen to ghostwrite the Bailey Memorandum arguing the case for a Catholic on the national ticket drove him in the late summer of 1960 to the bold decision to flaunt rather than submerge the matter of his religion, to follow his brother Robert’s all-purpose admonition to “hang a lantern on your problem.” Sorensen’s political math underwrote the decision. But Kennedy also knew the power his religion gave him. While just one voter in four was Catholic, these voters had siz
able leverage in the states with the largest electoral votes. If Kennedy could manage to bring back the Catholics who had voted for Eisenhower, the Democrats might take New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. And if he could woo those who had started to vote Republican during the 1940s, the Democrats could get New Jersey, Minnesota, Michigan, California, Wisconsin, Ohio, Maryland, Montana, and perhaps New Hampshire. Such a scenario would decisively undercut Nixon, a politician whose anticommunism and “cloth coat” antielitism had held a gritty appeal to Catholic voters.
Kennedy thus had twin goals: minimize the anti-Catholic vote by tagging any Protestant vote against Kennedy as a vote based on “bigotry”; meanwhile, maximize his ethnic support by convincing Catholics, Jews, and other religious minorities to circle the wagons. He needed to mobilize the Catholic issue among Catholics while making Protestants uncomfortable with the issue. Nixon had no choice but to go along. In a September appearance on Meet the Press, he assured listeners that he had “no doubt whatever” about Kennedy’s “loyalty to his country and about the fact that . . . he would put the Constitution . . . above all other consideration . . . even, substantially, on religious grounds.”
The Republican candidate hoped, of course, that Catholic voters would not vote their religion. But he could hardly say that directly. “The best way the candidates can keep it out of the campaign is not talking about it,” he admonished. “I’ve issued orders to all the people in my campaign not to discuss religion . . . not to allow anybody to participate in the campaign who does so on that ground. I will decline to discuss religion. I feel that we ought to have a cutoff date on its discussion. I would hope that Senator Kennedy would reach the same conclusion.”
Kennedy, for his part, played the issue masterfully. When Harry Truman told the Republicans in mid-October to “go to hell,” earning him a pious rebuke from Nixon, Kennedy dispatched a whimsical telegram to the crusty ex-president:
Dear Mr. President, I have noted with interest your suggestion as to where those who vote for my opponent should go. While I understand and sympathize with your deep motivation, I think it is important that our side try to refrain from raising the religious issue.
Before dropping the matter, JFK first wanted to shape the battlefield for the coming months. He traveled to Houston for a confrontation with the city’s organization of Protestant ministers. Several calculations figured in the Houston meeting. To impress the clerical participants as well as those voters following the event through the media, Kennedy walked into the meeting room alone, the Christian striding unafraid into the lions’ den. To make sure the television cameras knew who was who, advance man Robert S. Strauss picked the “meanest, nastiest-looking” ministers to put in the front row. By opening his campaign on the religious front, the Democratic candidate showed he had nothing to hide. Assuming the role of the defendant in the argument, he offered respect to serious citizens with doubts about his loyalties. The invited ministers had a perfect right to question him, he was saying. But having satisfied themselves as to his sincerity, they also had a responsibility to move on; other issues needed examination.
Kennedy’s opening statement in Houston was his best of the campaign. “It is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me, but what kind of America I believe in. I believe in an America where the separation of the church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president—should he be a Catholic—how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.” And he concluded with an extraordinary commitment: He would resign the presidency if his conscience, presumably meaning his religious or philosophical principles, ever conflicted with his oath to uphold the Constitution. Up until that time, it must be remembered, no president in history had ever resigned the office; it was, in effect, an unimaginable circumstance.
Not only did Kennedy speak eloquently; he carried himself impressively, displaying a kind of elegant pugnacity. Had Nixon seen this Kennedy in Los Angeles, he might never have agreed to meet him in debate. “He’s eating them blood-raw!” yelled Sam Rayburn, whom the Kennedy camp saw sabotage their man’s vice-presidential run in 1956. The Kennedy team had played the event perfectly. By answering all reasonable questions, the young Democratic candidate had left his opponents with only unreasonable questions. He could henceforth campaign as if the ministers, whom the Kennedy people had cast as judge and jury, had not only heard their case but closed it in their favor.
Even Nixon, who hoped for the issue to be dropped from the headlines, agreed that Kennedy’s self-defense in Houston “should be accepted without questioning.” But as his brother’s rival prayed for the issue to go underground, Robert Kennedy barnstormed through the Catskills telling Jewish voters that an attack on one religion presaged an attack on another. Brazenly, the Kennedys were encouraging such voters to unite against intolerance even as they themselves made a bluntly tribal appeal to those same conservative Irish Americans who had cheered on Joseph McCarthy. The pincer maneuver was as effective as it was outrageous.
CHAPTER
TEN
The Great Debate
DESPITE his early success with the Checkers speech, Richard Nixon didn’t understand the power of TV. “Television is not as effective as it was in 1952,” he told the New York Herald Tribune’s Earl Mazo prior to the 1960 race. “The novelty has worn off.” With that odd mind-set in play, the first presidential debate between Nixon and rival Kennedy was set for September 26 in Chicago, the city of Nixon’s selection as the vice-presidential candidate in 1952 and Jack Kennedy’s melodramatic run for the same office four years later. With the country awaiting the televised confrontation between the two men, their positions in the Gallup poll had frozen. An August 16 poll gave Nixon 47 percent, Kennedy 47 percent; an August 30 poll had it Nixon 47 percent, Kennedy 48 percent. A September 14 survey showed Nixon at 47 percent, Kennedy 46 percent. The electorate was waiting until it saw the two gladiators in the same arena, saw how they handled each other, how each reacted to the sight and power of the other man.
Two weeks before the Great Debate, Nixon was asked a deflating question by CBS’s Walter Cronkite. “I know that you must be aware . . . that there are some . . . who would say, ‘I don’t know what it is, but I just don’t like the man; I can’t put my finger on it; I just don’t like him.’ Would you have any idea what might inspire that kind of feeling on the part of anybody?” Nixon, who did not seem put off by the query, answered that it was hard for “the subject of such a reaction” to be objective. He then chalked it up to politics. “In my public life, I have been involved in many controversial issues. As a matter of fact, that is why I am here today.” Finally, he raised the matter of cosmetics. “Then, of course, another thing might be the fact that when people take pictures of you or when you appear on television, you may not make the impression that they like. Oh, I get letters from women, for example, sometimes—and men—who support me, and they say, ‘Why do you wear that heavy beard when you are on television?’ Actually, I don’t try, but I can shave within thirty seconds before I go on television and still have a beard, unless we put some powder on, as we have done today.”
But if Nixon was also concerned about his notorious five o’clock shadow, a feature long satirized in editorial cartoons, Kennedy was already moving to exploit what he knew to be his own telegenic advantage. “Kennedy took the thing much more seriously than Nixon,” recalled Don Hewitt, the CBS producer assigned to direct their first encounter. The Democrat had asked Hewitt to meet with him a week earlier in a hangar at Chicago’s Midway air terminal. “Where do I stand?” he wanted to know, pressing for details. “Where do I stand?” he repeated, hungry for some idea of the setup in advance.
Kennedy and his team were aware that Nixon had a history of debating successes and that, if cornered, he could turn very nasty. In preparation, they commandeered the two top floors of Chicago’s
Ambassador East Hotel. Lou Harris recalls the candidate lying on his bed, braced by a pair of pillows, his discarded tray beside him. Dressed in a terry-cloth robe, Kennedy had a fistful of cards in his hand, each with a probable question and its staff-prepared answer. Drilling him were the invaluable Ted Sorensen and his other legislative assistant, Mike Feldman. To offer further backup, Kennedy and his briefers had the help of a hefty research and speechwriting operation headed by Prof. Archibald Cox, on leave from Harvard Law School and now working for the campaign full-time. According to Harris, after each card had been dealt with, Kennedy would throw it on the floor. As a backup document for the prep session, Feldman had produced a “Nixopedia” of the vice president’s positions and statements over the years. It was a variant of the Lodge’s Dodges catalog aide Ted Reardon had compiled for the first Senate race eight years earlier.
At noon on the day of the first debate, Robert Kennedy interrupted the cramming. Aware, as were other family members, that the candidate’s talk of “vigah” was just that, he insisted that his brother take a nap. But it was not to be. “I will never forget going in after that so-called nap,” Harris remembers. “I go by his door and he’s obviously up because he’s playing Peggy Lee records. So I asked him if he’d taken a nap. He said ‘no’ and asked where Bobby was. So I went next door and had a hell of a time getting Bobby up. Bobby had taken a nap, which was typical. Bobby was a true believer.”
The candidate understandably was keyed up for this, the biggest test of his career. According to Harris, “he came out and spent the rest of the waiting time in his robe. I’ll never forget; he was out on the terrace, there was sunlight on him. Whenever he was nervous, he would hit his fist. There he was, walking back and forth, hitting his fist.” Kennedy kept asking his pollster how he went about the business of calculating public opinion, much as he had regularly grilled Tip O’Neill on the voting habits of the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Armenians back in his old congressional district.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 124