* * *
Dr. King’s Sunday sermon at Atlanta’s Ebenezer was called, appropriately enough, “Eight Days Behind Bars.” The words of the sermon have been lost, but were inspired by the lesson that morning from Revelation 2:1–10, which include:
You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as your victor’s crown.
Certain Bible verses were hardly abstract to King; they expressed a terrible reality he would face again, but not this day. After his release, he wrote to L. Harold DeWolf, his Boston University theology professor, “I think I received a new understanding of the meaning of suffering and I came away more convinced than ever before that unearned suffering is redemptive.” Following the service, there was a homecoming dinner in the Fellowship Hall under the sanctuary.
By Sunday evening, Wofford was getting reports of entire Black congregations, Baptist and AME, standing and vowing to vote for Kennedy. When the Harlem operator Silver Fox Jones called Martin, he told him of reports his men were bringing back from the Harlem bars that everything was going to go Kennedy’s way. Martin loved hearing it all. Their excitement was building.
While the election was anticipated to be close almost everywhere, most eyes were on the South, with The New York Times calling it the most influential election for the region since 1860. Could the Democrats keep their party together with papered-over civil rights differences? Would Nixon break the Democrats’ long-standing control of the region? And, whoever won, how would the results affect the prospect of advancing civil rights?
* * *
Nixon made his closing appeal to Americans in a televised event from Chicago, after numbingly long days that included Wisconsin, Michigan, and the day before, astonishingly, Alaska—a final flourish of insane scheduling. During a telethon on the last day before the election from Southfield, Michigan, Nixon took questions from callers. When asked about sit-ins, he said that it was wrong for stores to segregate Black customers and that as president he would work to stop such discrimination.
Meanwhile, in Boston, hundreds of thousands of fellow New Englanders packed the old winding streets to see Kennedy; it took his car an hour and a half to get to the Boston Garden from his hotel and from there to Faneuil Hall. In Kennedy’s final televised statement, he summed up his stirring but vague message, “This is the choice, then, in 1960. Shall we go forward?”
Three major polling companies predicted Kennedy would win, with one other predicting that Nixon would. One polling expert said, “It can go either way. This has been the most volatile campaign since we began taking samplings in 1936. I have never seen the lead change hands so many times.” Gallup had Kennedy up by only one, a drop from the previous poll, suggesting Nixon’s trajectory might overtake that of Kennedy by Election Day.
* * *
After nearly three months in D.C., spending almost all their waking hours side by side, Wofford and Martin parted. Martin said goodbye to drive west, home to Chicago. He passed through the hills of western Pennsylvania and the flatlands of Ohio and Indiana, traveling across a vast heartland preparing to elect a president. He was driving to Illinois to help with the final push, because his state was too close for anyone’s comfort; even Mayor Daley lacked complete confidence in the outcome. When Martin got to Chicago after the long ride, he could have gone home to his family in Hyde Park, but no one ever second-guessed his work ethic. He headed straight to a precinct on the South Side he thought would be crucial the next day. His mission to maximize turnout was not over yet.
“IT WAS A SYMPHONY”
From the moment the sun rose on a brisk, bright day, Atlanta voters flocked to the polls. Fulton County was breaking records, exceeding one hundred thousand voters for the first time. A Daily World reporter thought the King case increased interest in the election. Because Nixon had made Georgia a battleground state, observers predicted the results would reveal an active two-party race there for the first time in their lives. This had been Nixon’s fervent hope back on August 26, when vast crowds of Atlantans came out for him.
Kennedy voted at a quiet library at the base of Beacon Hill. On Election Day, a candidate needs to get out of the way of the staff, party workers, and voters who will determine the outcome. In the cool morning, there was hardly a cloud in the blue sky as Kennedy and Jackie flew to the Cape, home to Hyannis. Shriver arrived later in the day with Eunice, and the family awaited the results together. On the lawn, the brothers broke out a football in the afternoon before Jack took a nap. They were far from getting any real details, but indications were that north of sixty-nine million Americans were voting that day—a record-shattering turnout.
After less than five hours of sleep in the preceding seventy-two hours, Nixon would sleep for two more before rising again to vote in Whittier, California, his hometown. After he voted, an impulse to break free from the confines of the long campaign hit him. Nixon took off down the California coast in a convertible, ostensibly to show the landscape to a military aide who had never seen it. They stopped to see Nixon’s mother, swung by his birthplace, Yorba Linda, and then continued south. Nixon expected to turn back around at San Diego, but when he learned his car mate had never been to Tijuana, the vice president decided to head out of the country, with a Secret Service officer and a policeman in tow. Election Day limbo has made candidates do odd things, but Nixon’s Mexico jaunt remains one of the stranger such episodes.
After asking a border agent for recommendations for Mexican food, they set off to eat and drink margaritas. Back across the border later in the day, they looked at the ruins of the Mission San Juan Capistrano. Nixon relished the solitude of the empty chapel, sitting in the back pew. After getting a pineapple milkshake, the candidate was too exhausted to do any further driving, and he turned the wheel over to the Los Angeles Police Department officer for the rest of the trip back to Los Angeles and the long night ahead.
In D.C., Wofford wondered how to pass the time. Silver Fox Jones called him to say, “Well, just take it easy now. It’s over. We’ve done our part. I want you to know that this thing that you and Louis and others were doing … it was a symphony, man, it was a symphony.” No compliment meant more to Wofford than the approval of an old political ward battler. Wofford would say later that the Kennedy brothers “moved in action and responded in action,” and so had they. Arthur Schlesinger said of the Kennedys, “They were not systematic calculators but brilliant improvisers.”
Wofford had to trust he had done enough. He learned of a late afternoon showing of a favorite movie, Viva Zapata, with Marlon Brando. While working at his old law firm, whenever the film was showing nearby, he brought anyone he could in the office to make sure they saw it. He decided to sit in the darkness, allowing himself to be distracted by the story of a doomed radical speaking for the dispossessed. In the film, a pair of idealistic young brothers help lead a revolution, are tempted by power, and then make a heroic stand before they are killed. The final shot is of a horse without a rider.
In Chicago, Louis Martin’s nine-year-old daughter, Toni, was happy to have her dad home. Toni had two younger sisters and two older ones already out of the house. As the Martins settled before the television in their home on a grassy, tree-lined Hyde Park street of brick houses owned by Black professionals and University of Chicago professors, they were like millions of American families doing the same—experiencing the novelty of watching the tense election results in real time on a flickering black-and-white screen. Toni was aware that her father had been working on this election, but she could not quite decipher the meaning of each state report coming in, how it all added up. She tried to follow her parents’ running commentary on each update. Tonight, Toni would get a civics lesson through their dissection of what each state meant for Kennedy, until she fell aslee
p as the returns crawled in past midnight.
All his life, Kennedy had demanded constant company, but Nixon had a strong desire to be left alone. This was especially true on an election night, when Nixon preferred to hide away, curling up in a chair to keep a running tally on a legal pad. After his Tijuana escape, he had holed up at the Ambassador Hotel (the site where, eight years later, Robert Kennedy would accept victory in the California primary). Aides would gingerly bring in numbers, offering few observations; Nixon knew every inch of the nation’s intricate political landscape, exactly where he was succeeding and where he was showing vulnerabilities.
Early in the evening, Nixon dismissed TV anchors’ talk of Kennedy’s cruising to an assured victory. He knew his totals would go up as the night went on and the tide rolled west toward his home state. Illinois was looking good for JFK, but the downstate vote would even things up, and nothing would be decided until Chicago’s votes were released. Nixon was pleased he was hanging on so well; he had a chance. The race was tight even in the state of Texas; Kennedy’s move to include Johnson on the ticket should have clinched it, but hadn’t so far.
Bobby, a continent away, was surrounded by wired-up phones and teletype machines delivering news. Kennedy would wander through, go to the television to see what was being reported, offering wry commentary as if he were a news anchor and not the candidate. Based on data being delivered to Bobby, the younger brother was apprehensive. “We’re being clobbered,” he said. Then the poll closings in the South brought good news; Georgia and the deep Democratic South were coming home. But Nixon was carrying Florida and was close in North Carolina—good signs for the vice president.
Kennedy’s lead in the popular vote, if not in the crucial Electoral College count, was decreasing as the West started coming in. As the states fell, Kennedy stayed just ahead as he and Nixon each struggled toward 270 Electoral College votes, with many states too close to call. There have been closer elections in American history, but this was the last election that was essentially fought in every section of the country with excruciatingly slim margins throughout. Eighteen states came down to three percentage points or less.
Louis Martin’s family knew he could be a worrier. By midnight in Chicago, he and the country saw that Ohio was among the midwestern states going to Nixon. As he always seemed to, Nixon was clawing his way back.
Nearing midnight in the West, with the math in states like New York and Illinois starting to let him down, Nixon felt compelled to say something, even if there was, at this point, no need to concede. He went to write his remarks on his trademark yellow pad of paper. But Finch stopped him, saying he should let all the votes be counted, because he was closing Kennedy’s popular vote advantage: it was under a million and falling. Kennedy appeared to be only four electoral votes short of winning, but the vice president was close to his rival in enough states that it was possible that Illinois and Texas could give him the narrowest of victories. He went before the cameras around 3:00 a.m. in the East, his wife Pat’s drawn face revealing the pain he would not allow himself to show, and said if present trends continued, he would not be president.
Yet it still was not over, as Nixon learned that his deficit in Illinois was shrinking. He went to sleep in hopes of waking up to a reversal of fortune, as Woodrow Wilson had done in going to bed assuming he had lost, then waking up president-elect with the morning’s victory in California. With Illinois in doubt again, after 4:00 a.m., The New York Times replaced its “Kennedy Elected” headline with “Kennedy Is Apparent Victor.”
In D.C., Wofford was long past his Brando movie and immersed in the numbers on television, which continued to shift deep into the night. He saw with horror that Illinois might well go for Nixon. They had lost Ohio, and Nixon was proving strong all throughout the Midwest; it was not beyond thinking that the vice president would somehow win, stealing Wisconsin. California was too close to call. Nixon had made many questionable strategic moves, but those within the Kennedy circle had always found it difficult to understand the vice president’s appeal; worse, there was the fear that maybe the nation was not ready for Jack. It was easy for Democrats to see Nixon as trite and plodding, but perhaps in his striving, endurance, and guts the people saw themselves.
Bobby was constantly on the phone throughout the night with Mayor Daley, who reassured him that Chicago would overwhelm downstate GOP vote totals. At 4:00 a.m., Kennedy walked the short path back to his house to go to sleep, feeling somewhat confident that he had it; he could not conceive of Daley letting down his father, Joe Kennedy.
Wofford was stubborn, refusing to turn off the television until it looked, at dawn, that by the shakiest of margins they had somehow done it—elected a Roman Catholic candidate, elected the youngest man ever to the presidency, a man who gloried in being smart, alert, alive, not the liberal Wofford might have wanted, but a man capable of listening and of growth. Soon the nation would be waking up in anticipation of Kennedy’s televised appearance in Hyannis.
Wofford sensed that Black voters seemed to have provided, in their surging turnout, the winning margin in state after state. He would soon begin to wonder what those Black vote totals meant. The unexpected events of the last three weeks had led the nation to a racial reckoning. One way or another, the country found itself between a new president and a King.
* * *
Talking to reporters the next morning, an exhausted Bobby credited the debates with being key to getting voters comfortable with electing Kennedy, but added, “I think the Negro vote helped a lot.” Asked if his call to Judge Mitchell helped to make that happen, Bobby smiled and said that it had. He shared his assessment that Nixon should have focused on the Black vote in the North and forgone the temptation of trying to win the white South. Nixon could have come out against bigotry instead of thinking he could win the whole country by staying silent. Then again, left unsaid was how Kennedy moved more deftly in this respect, selecting Johnson to hold white southern voters while the CRS pushed for Black Americans.
The Atlanta Journal wrote, “A good argument can be made for the proposition that Judge Oscar Mitchell of DeKalb County Civil and Criminal Court elected John F. Kennedy as the next president of the United States.” This startling assertion would soon gain traction, but for Atlanta students its truth was already evident. The headline in the Inquirer proclaimed, “Negroes Clinched Kennedy Win: Negro Surge Gave [Democrats] Key States.”
But not everyone in Atlanta felt the same way. Mayor Hartsfield moaned to friends of feeling embarrassed that Atlanta’s Black voters had still given the majority of their votes—56 percent of them—to Nixon. Even as party strategists, reporters, and academics were beginning to pore over the voting data, noting the significant, nationwide shift in Black voting patterns, somehow, after everything the mayor felt he had done for King, his pleas for them to vote Democratic had fallen short. He took it very personally.
But those close to King did not; their middle-class Black community along Sweet Auburn had been voting Republican for a long time, after all. The numbers actually showed a move toward Kennedy that was, for those who had so feared for King’s life, gratifying. For Georgia’s Black voters, generations of persecution by Democrats were felt more keenly than a single gesture made by the idealistic Kennedy, no matter how appreciative they were. It was still hard to vote for a party headed by Vandivers and Mitchells, and there was no disregarding the Republican John Calhoun’s superb organizing skills. Yet many votes had shifted after all the twists and turns of campaigning; that much was also clear. Change had come to Sweet Auburn.
Equally evident was another turn, one that promised to alter Georgia politics for decades: DeKalb County gave the Republicans a surprise victory, one that local politicos attributed to the King affair. Even in a national GOP landslide four years before, Eisenhower put up only 40 percent there; now the Republican candidate received more than 50 percent of votes. A Democratic county official said, “If Kennedy hadn’t made that telephone call, he would have tak
en this county. It isn’t our fault; Kennedy made it himself.”
Nixon might not have won Georgia, but the Constitution proclaimed that he had garnered the highest percentage of votes for a GOP candidate since before the New Deal—nearly 38 percent.
White voters in DeKalb County and Black voters in Fulton County were, in retrospect, harbingers of a massive political realignment that would transform the South. For now, the totals were just a taste of what was to come. All that was needed to cement this tectonic shift was some future, epochal event—say, the signing of a civil rights bill by a Democratic president, with a Martin Luther King standing by to receive the pen. When in fact this happened, President Lyndon Johnson muttered, “We have lost the South for a generation,” but he was too optimistic. It would be far longer than that.
“THEY JUST ALL TURNED”
Nixon slept until noon on Thursday following the election. He decided he needed to return to a Washington schedule, so his chauffeur, John Wardlaw, picked him up. Seeing the man he had known for eight years slink dejectedly into the back seat, Wardlaw, who was Black, confessed to him, “Mr. Vice President, I can’t tell you how sick I am about the way my people voted in the election. You know I had been talking to all of my friends. They were all for you.” He added something that Nixon would hear again, many times, but not as bluntly: “But when Mr. Robert Kennedy called the judge to get Dr. King out of jail—well, they just all turned to him.”
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