Fidel Castro himself spent much of September 1960 in New York, using the United Nations as his pulpit for spouting anti-American rhetoric. In one memorable episode, the Cuban exuberantly embraced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had recently made his own publicity waves banging his shoe on his country’s Security Council desk to protest further the U-2 espionage plane that had been shot down several months before over Soviet territory.
In early October, Nixon was driven to ask Republican party chairman Leonard Hall to encourage Ike to move ahead more speedily on Cuba. Desperately, he went to the president himself, pleading with him to impose a trade ban on the island. Complaining to his aides that the State Department types were too worried about offending “left-wingers” at the New York Times, he was forced to play Ike’s good soldier. As much as he detested the go-slow policy toward Castro, he had to defend it.
For Richard Nixon, the whole get-Castro effort was moving with lethal slowness. As the election crept closer, Kennedy began to push harder and harder, blaming the Eisenhower administration for the 1959 Communist takeover of Cuba. Like Nixon, he saw the irony of his public position. “Of course, we don’t say how we would have saved Cuba. What the hell, they never told us how they would have saved China!” he told liberal speech-writer Richard Goodwin, conveniently forgetting that he, Jack Kennedy, was one of those who had been yelling at Truman the loudest. But if Kennedy saw the paradox in his position, Nixon felt personally damaged by the administration’s reluctance to act. “Are they falling dead over there?” he complained to his military aide about the CIA invasion plan. “What in the world are they doing that takes months?”
For Nixon, forced to play dove to Kennedy’s hawk, the mutual masquerade grew more and more humiliating. At first, Kennedy merely criticized the Republican administration for failure to compel Castro to hold free elections. Then, in mid-October, after the Cuban leader had raised the ante by nationalizing about four hundred American businesses, Kennedy turned the screw on his rival further by saying that Nixon could talk all he wanted about Quemoy and Matsu; Americans cared much more about events in their own backyard. “The people of the United States would like to hear him discuss his views on an island not four miles off the coast of China but ninety miles off the coast of the United States—Cuba.”
Finally, two weeks before the election, the administration declared an embargo on all trade with Cuba except medicine and food. In a further slap at Castro, Eisenhower recalled his ambassador.
Lou Harris was pushing Kennedy, too, to “do something about Castro.” The written questions the Kennedy entourage solicited at evening campaign stops included more uncertainty about Castro and Cuba than about any other foreign policy matter. This triggered a Kennedy demand for tougher sanctions, propaganda, increased support for exile groups. Yet the Democrat stopped short of calling for a U.S.-backed armed invasion by the anti-Castro forces. Having been briefed by the CIA on its plans, he did not want to be blamed for giving away the operation. “Kennedy felt it imperative that he not reveal, even by indirection, the secret knowledge with which he had been entrusted,” Richard Goodwin recalled.
But he also refused to be outgunned. In response to Eisenhower’s get-tough stance, Kennedy decided to escalate his demands. He told Goodwin to prepare a “real blast at Nixon.” He did just that. “We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista, democratic forces in exile and in Cuba itself who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far, these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.” When he called the Carlyle Hotel, where Kennedy was staying, Goodwin found his candidate asleep. After checking with other staff members, none of whom was willing to wake him, he went ahead and released the statement to the press.
“Kennedy Advocates U.S. Intervention in Cuba, Calls for Aid to Rebel Forces in Cuba” ran the headline the next morning, which was the same day as the two candidates’ final televised debate. Knowing that Kennedy had been briefed by CIA director Allen Dulles, a furious Nixon believed his opponent had betrayed the administration’s trust. The Democrat was attacking Eisenhower for not helping the anti-Castro Cubans with military training and equipment, knowing the CIA was doing just that. He was calling on the administration to do something he well knew Nixon could not admit doing. “I could hardly believe my eyes,” Nixon would write later. “For the first and only time in the campaign, I got mad at Kennedy personally. I thought that Kennedy, with full knowledge of the facts, was jeopardizing the security of a United States foreign policy operation. And my rage was greater because I could do nothing about it.”
Nixon was particularly furious at Allen Dulles. At a meeting of the National Security Council, the vice president exploded when the CIA director told those around the table of his meeting with Kennedy. What neither Nixon nor Dulles knew was that there was a second source of information regarding the CIA’s plans. Gov. John Patterson of Alabama, a Democrat and close Kennedy ally, had been approached by a CIA official seeking recruits from the state’s National Guard to help with a Cuban invasion force. The official told him that President Eisenhower had given his full approval to the operation. Patterson decided to alert his party’s presidential candidate, arranging a secret New York meeting through Kennedy brother-in-law Stephen Smith.
Preparing to meet Kennedy in their fourth debate, Nixon was still fuming over Kennedy’s “fighters for freedom” statement. When the first question of the final debate concerned Cuba, he threw everything he had at the Democrat, calling Kennedy’s recommendations “dangerously irresponsible.” He cited a handful of treaties with Latin America, including the charter of the Organization of American States, in which the United States agreed not to intervene in the internal affairs of any other American country. He also cited the UN charter’s decree that “there be no intervention by one nation in the internal affairs of another.” “Now I don’t know what Senator Kennedy suggests when he says that we should help the exiles and those who oppose the regime in Cuba, but I do know this: that if we were to follow that recommendation, we would lose all of our friends in Latin America, we would probably be condemned in the United Nations, and we would not accomplish our objective. I know something else: It would be an open invitation for Mr. Khrushchev to come in, to come into Latin America and to engage us in what would be a civil war and possibly even worse than that.” Rather than extend this “invitation” to the other nuclear-armed superpower to come to the defense of Cuba, Nixon recommended the moderate course of economic sanctions. Adlai Stevenson could not have expressed the sentiments better.
Now it was Kennedy’s turn to get angry. Knowing of CIA efforts to help the “fighters for freedom,” he watched Nixon deride the very notion of such help, mocking Kennedy’s immaturity for proposing it. The New York Times’s James Reston now added to the insult, calling the senator’s comments “probably his worst blunder of the campaign.” But Kennedy knew, and he knew Nixon knew, that no American administration, whatever it said publicly, could avoid doing everything it could to clear its backyard of Fidel Castro.
* * *
IN their final debate, Kennedy executed a broader line of attack: the growing sense in the country that America was falling behind the Soviets in space and strategic weaponry. Kennedy scoffed at Nixon’s assertion, made in the Kitchen Debate, about the Soviets being ahead in rocket thrust but the United States being ahead in color television. “I think that color television is not as important as rocket thrust.” The notion that the United States suffered from a “missile gap” would become a powerful metaphor for Kennedy’s taunt that America was slipping behind. Many of the nations of Africa, Latin America, and Asia were moving toward the Soviet camp, and according to the Democratic candidate, there was little reason to be confident “that we will be the strongest military power by 1963.”
Here was another case where Nixon felt himself undercut by the “Old Boy” foreign policy establishment. Briefing Kennedy, CIA director Allen Dulles had failed to refute the Democrat’s “missile
gap” charge, thus tacitly endorsing Kennedy’s skepticism about America’s long-presumed military superiority.
Another Kennedy point of attack was a secret government poll showing a decline in American “prestige” around the world. When Walter Cronkite asked Nixon about it in the fourth debate, Nixon broke the ice with a light joke about being, of course, aware of such a document because he paid such close attention “to everything Senator Kennedy says.” The camera caught Kennedy responding with a good-natured laugh. Then, to his rival’s face and in front of the entire country, Nixon suddenly revealed the full extent of his bitterness toward the man he believed had betrayed his country’s trust with his exploitation of the CIA briefing on Cuba. “America’s prestige abroad will be just as high as the spokesmen for America allow it to be,” Nixon declared. “Now, when we have a presidential candidate, for example, Senator Kennedy, stating over and over again that the United States is second in space . . . When he states that we’re second in education, that we’re second in science . . . . When he says . . . we have the worst slums, that we have the most crowded schools, that we have seventeen million people go to bed hungry in this country every night . . .” Millions of voters watching the debate now saw Kennedy reacting angrily in the background.
“When he makes statements like this, what can it do to American prestige?” Nixon continued. “It can only have the effect of reducing it. Let me make one thing very clear. Senator Kennedy has a responsibility to criticize those things that are wrong, but he has also a responsibility to be right in his criticisms. On every one of these items I have mentioned he has been wrong. Dead wrong. And for that reason, he has contributed to any lack of prestige.” Flashing Kennedy a smile, he said American leaders should be adding to the nation’s “dignity,” as Eisenhower was doing, “not running down America the way Senator Kennedy has.”
Kennedy took the shot as it was meant, personally. “I really don’t need Mr. Nixon to tell me about what my responsibilities are as a citizen. I served this country for fourteen years in the Congress and before that in the service. I have just as high a devotion, just as high an opinion . . . What I downgrade is not the country but the leadership the country is getting . . . . Anyone reading the papers and any citizen of the United States must come to the conclusion that the United States no longer commands the same image of a vital society on the move, with its brightest days ahead, as it carried a decade or two decades ago.”
Jack Kennedy, harking back to the wartime energies of the 1940s, was promising to get the country moving again. Having risen high in the 1950s, Dick Nixon was obliged to defend the somnolent decade.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The Verdict
WITH the fourth and final debate with his charismatic rival behind him, Richard Nixon had reason for optimism: He now had two weeks to concentrate his message of superior Cold War experience and thus overcome Kennedy’s 49 percent to 45 percent lead in the Gallup poll. Sadly for the vice president, the nation’s civil rights struggle did not conform to his electoral timetable.
On October 19, a group of seventy-five African Americans had politely asked for service at the Magnolia Room in Rich’s, the grand Atlanta department store. It was a whites-only restaurant. Among those arrested and charged with trespassing was the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. While the other participants in the sit-in were soon released, a judge denied King bail, sentencing the civil rights leader to six months at hard labor. The charge: violating probation on an earlier conviction for driving with an out-of-state driver’s license.
Coretta Scott King feared with good reason that her husband, a black man, might not get out of jail alive. The pregnant wife’s fears grew to horror when she learned that her husband had been awakened at night, placed in handcuffs and leg chains, then driven hundreds of miles into rural Georgia, never knowing whether or not he was about to be lynched. Mrs. King shared her worry with longtime friend and civil rights activist Harris Wofford, then working for the Kennedy campaign.
After discussing the situation with fellow Kennedy aide Louis Martin, Wofford persuaded Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver to take the case for action to the candidate. “Why don’t you telephone Mrs. King and give her your sympathy,” Shriver argued. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow no matter who’s elected, but they do want to know whether you care. If you telephone Mrs. King, they will know that you understand and will help. You will reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman who is afraid her husband will be killed.”
Despite his yearning for the continued confidence of the conservative southern Democrats who had backed his 1956 vicepresidential run, Kennedy made the call. Mrs. King would later recount his words to her friend Wofford. “I want to express my concern about your husband. I know this must be very hard on you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call me.” From Mrs. King, the press quickly learned about John Kennedy’s expressions of sympathy. “It certainly made me feel good that he called me personally and let me know how he felt. I had the feeling that if he was that much concerned, he would do what he could so that Dr. King was let out of jail. I have heard nothing from the vice president or anyone on his staff. Mr. Nixon has been very quiet.”
Beyond the hearing of the press Kennedy worried out loud that even his little gesture had been too much. When a reporter asked him about the call to Mrs. King, he appeared irritated at the leak. Campaign manager Robert Kennedy was downright furious. “Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us!” he scolded Wofford and Shriver. Yet a day later, the younger Kennedy, nimble enough to exploit the political turn of events, called the judge who had sentenced King to ask for his release on bail. Louis Martin, an African American, was elated when his friend Bobby Kennedy phoned in the earlymorning hours with news of his successful mission. “You are now an honorary brother.”
Nixon, meanwhile, was silent. Despite his pro-civil rights record and Quaker’s commitment to the cause of black equality and opportunity—a Whittier friend recalls the vice president being quite passionate on the topic over a beer one afternoon—the King arrest had brought no reaction from the Republican candidate. There were reasons for this, among them Nixon’s hope to make inroads, as Eisenhower had done, among white southerners. “At least we’re going to give the people down there a choice, something that they sometimes have not had in previous times.” Just the week before, Nixon had publicly disavowed a commitment by running mate Henry Cabot Lodge that a black would be named to the cabinet. The flip-flop had its predictable effects, the initial promise disturbing southern whites, the ultimate denial disappointing hopeful blacks. Nixon now feared that his involvement or interference in the King matter would, as he told press secretary Herb Klein, “look like he was pandering.” Baseball hero Jackie Robinson tried and failed to elicit a Nixon statement when he caught up with the Republican vice president on a whistle-stop tour through the Midwest. “He thinks calling Martin would be grandstanding,” Robinson tearfully said after meeting the man who had until that moment been his candidate. “Nixon doesn’t understand.”
For his failure to act, Nixon would pay dearly. Martin Luther King, Sr., like his son a prominent Atlanta minister, now decided to endorse Kennedy publicly despite the religious difference between them. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” the elder King somberly told his flock in the Ebenezer Baptist Church during the exultant welcome-home service held for his rescued son. “But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He had the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got my votes, and I’ve got a suitcase, and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”
Up at Kennedy headquarters in Washington, Harris Wofford and Louis Martin were about to make
history. Collecting all the appreciative and admiring comments pouring in from black leaders and others praising the Kennedys’ efforts on behalf of the Kings, they found a pair of Philadelphia ministers willing to sponsor publication of a pamphlet, “The Case of Martin Luther King,” which laid out the story of the Kennedy-King episode in bold language. “No Comment Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy,” one caption read. “I earnestly and sincerely feel that it is time for all of us to take off our Nixon buttons,” the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a King ally, was quoted in the document. “Since Mr. Nixon has been silent through all this, I am going to return his silence when I go into the voting booth.”
The pamphlet, 2 million copies of which were printed on light blue paper and delivered to black churches the Sunday before election, would be dubbed “the blue bomb.” Yet it never stirred even the mildest alarm among conservative white voters, who would remain loyal to the national Democratic ticket. In a silent coup, black America was being moved overnight to the Democratic side of the ballot, from the party of Lincoln to that of the Kennedys. Martin Luther King, Jr., summing up the episode’s meaning, was eloquent: “There are moments when the politically expedient can be morally wise.” Murray Chotiner himself could not have worked the gambit better.
* * *
DESPITE the King episode, which for many added to Kennedy’s moral stature, and despite the advantages of his newly celebrated glamour, Jack Kennedy was losing momentum by late October and Nixon was gaining, even as the most potent Republican weapon still lay covered in the armory. President Dwight D. Eisenhower—the general who had accepted the Nazi surrender papers—was at last ready to hit the road for Nixon and defeat the Democrat he sarcastically called “that young genius.” “Listen, dammit,” he told an Oval Office guest, “I’m going to do everything possible to keep that Jack Kennedy from sitting in this chair.”
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 127