* * *
CAMPAIGN manager Bob Finch was there for Richard Nixon’s own hectic hours of September 26, 1960. Instead of resting or prepping, the candidate had spent the night before addressing rallies in five different Chicago wards, then getting up the morning of the debate for a speech to the Carpenters Union. “He was upset, because he had insisted on doing those last-minute car stops. He hadn’t gotten his strength back from being in the hospital.”
Nixon refused to engage in the kind of practice session being held at the Ambassador East, Finch revealed in frustration. “We kept pushing for him to have some give-and-take with either somebody from the staff . . . anything. He hadn’t done anything except to tell me that he knew how to debate. He totally refused to prepare. After all, he was the master debater. Who were any of us to presume to insist?” Going back to that first tussle with Jerry Voorhis and on through the Hiss case, the Checkers speech and the Kitchen Debate, Richard Nixon had proven himself fully capable of pulling off another triumph.
Now came the greatest miscalculation. Already handicapped by his hospital pallor and lack of warm-up, the Republican candidate chose the wrong strategy. Attorney General William Rogers, Nixon’s counselor since the Hiss case, coaxed him to be “the good guy,” to be tolerant of Kennedy’s shortcomings rather than reproachful. Then, minutes before heading to the studio, Nixon received further reinforcement for the soft sell. Henry Cabot Lodge, his vice-presidential running mate, who had already lost one race to Kennedy, cautioned Nixon to avoid being his own Herblock caricature, the swarthy bully of Alger Hiss and Helen Douglas. “Erase the assassin image!” Lodge exhorted. The advice could not have been worse. Had Lodge’s message been as brutal as the one delivered by Governor Dewey the night of the Checkers speech, Nixon’s short fuse of resentment might have been ignited, giving him the angry focus he needed to dominate the night.
Jack Kennedy would have appreciated the ironies of Lodge’s advice. He had told John Kenneth Galbraith that his rival had to decide, in every circumstance, whom to present himself as. According to Galbraith, Kennedy “felt sorry for Nixon because he does not know who he is, and at each stop he had to decide which Nixon he is at the moment, which must be very exhausting.” Had Nixon known how polished and prepared Kennedy would be for the meeting, his predebate decision to go easy on his rival would have been different; as he had understood in the case of Alger Hiss, trying to outgentleman a gentleman is a foolish strategy. The only safe road to victory against young Jack Kennedy lay in a direct, unrelenting attack aimed at piercing the armor of his enemy.
* * *
IN 1950 one in ten American families had a television set. By 1960 that number had increased to nine in ten. Anyone running for president should have realized what these figures meant: The audience, watching the first debate between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, would be the largest yet assembled.
The Republican candidate’s arrival at Channel 2, the CBS affiliate in Chicago, was marked by bad luck. “He was in the right seat, I was in the left seat in the back,” recalled Herb Klein, who was with Nixon in the car. “When he got out of the car, he bumped his knee bad. It was the knee that had been infected.” Others saw Nixon’s face go “chalk white.”
His discomfort didn’t stop Nixon from making an ostentatious display of good fellowship when he met with the phalanx of CBS executives, including CBS president Frank Stanton, who formed a reception committee for the two candidates. Despite the knee, Nixon seemed in lively spirits, taking time to banter with the men snapping pictures. “Have you ever had a picture printed yet?” he cruelly kidded one of the hardworking photographers.
Then it happened, the moment that would forever shake Nixon’s confidence. “He and I were standing there talking when Jack Kennedy arrived,” Hewitt remembers. Tanned, tall, lean, well tailored in a dark suit, the younger candidate gleamed. Photographers, seizing their chance, abandoned Nixon and fluttered about their new prey like hornets. The senator bore no resemblance to the emaciated, wan, crippled, yellow figure he’d once been. “He looked like a young Adonis,” Hewitt would recall.
The psychological battle was on. Kennedy, asked to pose with his rival, appeared barely to notice him. His well-practiced Yankee chill froze the air between the two. “I assume you guys know each other,” Hewitt said. At this, the two shook hands, “not warmly,” Hewitt recalled, “not coldly,” but as prizefighters “about to enter the ring.”
“How’re you doing?” Kennedy asked.
“You had a big crowd in Cleveland,” Nixon rejoined.
They could have been strangers for all the interest Jack Kennedy showed in the colleague he’d known since 1947. Nixon, for his part, seemed intimidated. From the moment Kennedy strode in, hijacking the attention of the photographers, Nixon was not the same man. Visibly deflated by his rival’s matinee-idol aura and seeming nervelessness, Nixon slouched in his chair, his head turned away, a man in retreat.
“Do you want some makeup?” Hewitt asked Kennedy. Hearing the Democrat’s “no,” Richard Nixon also declined, ignoring the fact that his opponent had just spent days campaigning in the California sun while he himself had been hospitalized. On an impulse, he discarded his long reliance not just on television makeup itself but on a particular blend of shades specified for TV makeup. Hewitt, worried about the stark difference in the two men’s video appearances, called CBS president Stanton into the control room. He wanted him to see how bad Nixon looked. Stanton then called Nixon’s television adviser, Ted Rogers. Assured by Rogers that the Nixon aide was “satisfied” with what he saw on the screen, Stanton motioned Hewitt to join him outside the control booth. “If they’re happy, who are we to make any changes?”
Herb Klein had an explanation, years later, for Nixon’s refusal to use the cosmetic help he so desperately needed. His candidate had heard Jack Kennedy’s derision of Hubert Humphrey for wearing heavy makeup in their joint television appearances during the Wisconsin primary campaign. “To Nixon this made it look like he lacked macho, and Nixon was a very macho man.” It was a manhood thing. Intimidated, Nixon relied on the Lazy Shave an aide ran out to buy on Michigan Avenue, the same “beard stick” he had used to cover his five o’clock shadow prior to the famed Kitchen Debate the year before in Moscow. Richard Nixon would learn, to his horror, that it was easier to look good next to Nikita Khrushchev than to Jack Kennedy.
Both candidates now retired to separate rooms. Ten minutes before the broadcast, however, Nixon was back in Studio B, nervously awaiting airtime. Lawrence O’Brien, whose candidate was still in his holding room, watched the vice president pacing up and down the back wall of the set. “He went onto the platform a time or two. He mopped his brow with his handkerchief. Even from across the studio I could see . . . he was in unbelievable shape. The countdown commenced over the loudspeaker. ‘Five minutes to airtime.’ ” Nixon was staring at the studio door. Now there were only three minutes left. “Nixon was still watching the door, as tense a man as I had ever seen. By then, I was sure that no one had summoned Kennedy, and I was about to dash after him, when the door swung open. Kennedy walked in and took his place, barely glancing at Nixon. Kennedy had played the clock perfectly. He had thrown his opponent off stride.” He had set his rival up for the kill.
* * *
“THE candidates need no introduction,” moderator Howard K. Smith announced to 80 million Americans. Richard Nixon, for his part, looked like an ill-at-ease, unshaven, middle-aged fellow recovering from a serious illness. Jack Kennedy, by contrast, was elegant in a dark, well-tailored suit that set off his healthy tan. Kennedy sat poised, his legs crossed, his hands folded on his lap; Nixon had his legs awkwardly side by side, his hands dangling from the chair arms. Their faces presented an even starker contrast. “I couldn’t believe it when the thing came on and he looked so haggard,” Bob Finch recalls. Nixon’s campaign manager also noticed something else. “I saw he didn’t have any makeup on.”
Too late. The debate was under way. By agr
eement, the focus of this first encounter was to be domestic policy. Believing that the audiences for the four debates would grow, the Nixon people had saved foreign policy until last. But in his opening statement, Kennedy made clear he could not only handle a foreign policy debate, he relished it. “Mr. Smith, Mr. Nixon,” he began, slyly equating the status of a two-term vice president and a television newscaster. “In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the question is whether this nation could exist half slave or half free. In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half slave or half free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery.”
Then he dispensed with the rules to extol his global agenda. “We discuss tonight domestic issues, but I would not want . . . any implication to be given that this does not involve directly our struggle with Mr. Khrushchev for survival.” He had cold-cocked his rival by introducing precisely the topic Nixon had agreed to postpone. His reference to the Soviet leader, who Kennedy noted was “in New York” (as if Nikita Khrushchev’s current trip to the United Nations were a symbolic invasion of the country), was that of the classic Cold Warrior. The United States needed to be strong economically, Kennedy declared, not just to maintain the American standard of living but because economic strength buttressed our fight against the Communists. “If we do well here, if we meet our obligations, if we are moving ahead, I think freedom will be secure around the world. If we fail, then freedom fails. Are we doing as much as we can do?” he teased an anxious country. “I do not think we’re doing enough.” Was America to be led by the gutsy GI generation back from the Pacific or by slackers ready to let things slide?
To bolster his indictment of the White House, Kennedy recited a long list of national shortcomings: steel mills operating with unused capacity, West Virginia schoolkids taking their lunches home to hungry families, and the poor prospects facing the “Negro baby.” Then he posed the challenge. “The question now is: Can freedom be maintained under the most severe attack it has ever known? I think it can be, and I think in the final analysis it depends upon what we do here. I think it’s time America started moving again.”
No matter that John F. Kennedy had delivered this selfsame appeal scores of times before. His words now carried a martial cadence in the ears of his largest audience ever. In eight minutes a lean, smartly tailored young gentleman had made a proposal to the American man and woman sitting in the family parlor. In doing so, he had shown himself as infinitely more appealing than the fellow who had been vice president of the United States for eight years. There wasn’t a word of his opening presentation that anyone could have argued with, not a sentiment that his fellow citizens couldn’t share. No, the country was not meeting its potential. No, we were not the same nation of doers who had ended World War II. Yes, the country could do better. And, yes, we needed to “get the country moving again.” Kennedy was playing a hawk on foreign policy, the activist at home, the same strategy he had used in the 1952 Senate race that sent Lodge packing. By going to his rival’s right on foreign policy and to his left on domestic policy, Jack Kennedy would leave Nixon scrambling for turf.
After observing this tour de force, Nixon began to betray the hunted look of a man dragged from a five-dollar-a-night hotel room and thrust before the unforgiving glare of a police lineup, a man being charged with a crime of which he knew himself to be guilty. Afraid to project the “assassin image,” he was stymied. “Mr. Smith, Senator Kennedy, there is no question but that we cannot discuss our internal affairs in the United States without recognizing that they have a tremendous bearing on our international position. There is no question that this nation cannot stand still, because we are in a deadly competition, a competition not only with the men in the Kremlin but the men in Peking.” Finally: “I subscribe completely to the spirit that Senator Kennedy has expressed tonight, the spirit that the United States should move ahead.”
Incredibly, Nixon was agreeing with his challenger. Yes, domestic policies affect the country’s foreign situation. Yes, we cannot afford to “stand still.” Yes, Kennedy has the right “spirit” to lead. His only concern was that Kennedy’s statistics made the situation appear bleaker than it was.
Regarding Kennedy’s call for medical care for the aged: “Here again may I indicate that Senator Kennedy and I are not in disagreement as to the aim. We both want to help old people.” Minutes later: “Let us understand throughout this campaign that his motives and mine are sincere.” And, after a small reminder that he knew “what it means to be poor,” he offered yet another genuflection to Kennedy’s goodwill. “I know Senator Kennedy feels as deeply about these problems as I do, but our disagreement is not about the goals for America but only about the means to reach those goals.”
Only? The race for the presidency is “only” about “means”? With staggering humility, Nixon was telling the largest American political audience ever assembled that his rival was not only a man of unquestioned sincerity but one of unassailable motive. It was merely a matter of method that separated the two applicants for the world’s most exalted position. To avoid the “assassin image,” Dick Nixon was presenting himself as Jack Kennedy’s admiring, if somewhat more prudent, older brother.
He committed a second tactical error. Just as he had at McKeesport thirteen years earlier, Nixon ignored the audience and fixed his attention exclusively on Kennedy. He seemed intent on getting Kennedy himself to agree that when it came to goals, there really wasn’t much difference between them. Worse still, he seemed to crave Kennedy’s approval, even to the point of rebuking his own administration. “Good as a record is,” he averred, “may I emphasize it isn’t enough. A record is never something to stand on. It’s something to build on.”
As the incumbent vice president of the United States dealt with each of his opponent’s points, he tried desperately to elevate himself to an Ike-like pedestal, one from which Kennedy was just as determined to knock him off. Asked about Nixon’s campaign charges that he was “naive and sometimes immature,” Kennedy explained how the two men had come to Congress together in 1946 and how both served on the Education and Labor Committee. “I’ve been there now for fourteen years, the same period of time that he has, so our experience in government is comparable.” Thus, Nixon’s me-too approach seemed to validate the claim of equal seniority. Why wasn’t a man running on the slogan “Experience Counts” talking as if he believed in his own campaign rhetoric?
Yet at least one important listener thought the Nixon approach was working. Lyndon Johnson, following the proceedings on his car radio, gave most of the points to the Republican; so did the millions of others who followed the sound but not the picture.
The wound inflicted by President Eisenhower’s late-August denial of any vice-presidential role in his executive decision making was about to have its scab ripped. Reporter Sander Vanocur noted with brutal force that the “question of executive leadership” had become a major campaign issue. How did Nixon square this with President Eisenhower’s “If you give me a week, I might think of one” reply after being asked to cite a single case of when he’d acted on a Nixon idea? “I am wondering, sir, if you can clarify which version is correct, the one put out by Republican campaign leaders or the one put out by President Eisenhower.”
Summoning all his self-control, Nixon tried for the best plausible set of answers:
Explanation 1: “Well, I would suggest, Mr. Vanocur, that if you know the president, that that was probably a facetious remark.”
Explanation 2: “I think it would be improper for the president of the United States to disclose the instances in which members of his official family had made recommendations.”
Explanation 3: “I do not say that I have made decisions, and I would say that no president should ever allow anybody else to make the major decisions.”
Finally: “I can only say that my experience is there
for the people to consider. Senator Kennedy’s is there for people to consider. As he pointed out, we came to the Congress in the same year; his experience has been different from mine. Mine has been in the executive branch; his has been in the legislative branch. I would say that the people now have the opportunity to evaluate his against mine, and I think both he and I are going to abide by whatever the people decide.”
In a rare reversal, Kennedy’s retort was now oddly defensive, as if he himself recognized the advantage Nixon’s eight years as vice president gave him. “Well, I’ll just say that the question is of experience, and the question also is what our judgment is of the future and what our goals are for the United States and what ability we have to implement those goals.” He then offered the sort of ironic observation that contrasted so well with Nixon’s sad defense. “Abraham Lincoln came to the presidency in 1860 after a rather little known session in the House of Representatives and after being defeated for the Senate in 1858 and was a distinguished president. There is no certain road to the presidency. There are no guarantees that if you take one road or another that you will be a successful president.”
But more than either contestant’s words, it was their images, projected on millions of black-and-white Admiral and General Electric televisions, that affected the American judgment. Each time Kennedy spoke, Nixon’s eyes darted toward him in an uncomfortable mix of fear and curiosity, the same look Kennedy aide Ted Reardon had spotted more than a decade before at a House committee meeting. When Nixon was on, Kennedy sat, sometimes professorially taking notes, at other moments wearing a sardonic expression as he concentrated on his rival’s answers. Sargent Shriver would note that it was his brother-in-law’s facial language, more than anything he said, that decided the results of the Great Debate. By raising an eyebrow at Nixon, he had shown he had the confidence to lead the country.
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 125