Being Nixon: A Man Divided (15 page)

Few who saw that debate or read about it later would forget the contrasting images: Kennedy, calm and confident, presidential; Nixon, eyes furtively watching his opponent, sweat streaking the smear of Lazy Shave, shoulders hunched. A British diplomat reported to the Foreign Office: “He seems in the last few weeks to have aged and shriveled, and the way in which his tongue kept darting in and out of his lips was positively reptilian.”
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Columnist Joe Alsop wrote that Nixon “looked like a suspect who was being questioned…in connection with a statutory rape case.”
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Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago tastelessly joked that Nixon had already been embalmed.

In the aftermath, Nixon was in a mild daze, unsure what to think. A supporter tried to console him: “That’s all right. You’ll do better next time.” She spoke loudly so that the microphones could pick up her words. She was in fact not a supporter but a woman hired by Dick Tuck, a campaign prankster. The wily Tuck had first crossed Nixon’s path as a Democratic operative in the 1950 campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas. Posing as a Republican advance man, he had embarrassed Nixon by hiring an empty hall. By the time of the 1960 election, Tuck was on the Kennedy payroll.
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Back at his hotel, Nixon’s secretary, Rose Woods, tried to be gentle with “the Boss,” but she did have to report that Nixon’s own mother had called to ask, “Is Richard ill?” Watching from his hotel room in Texas, Nixon’s running mate Lodge was harsh. “That son of a bitch just lost the election,” he said to his aides.

In political lore, Lodge’s verdict has become conventional wisdom, but in fact Nixon—fattened up by two milkshakes a day and kept cool by frigid air conditioning in the studios—won or held his own in the next three debates. The evidence from polling data suggests that the debates were probably a wash. Even so, there is no question that the first debate established Kennedy, heretofore regarded in many quarters as a playboy and a dilettante, as a mature
leader, while raising questions about Nixon’s stamina and steadiness.
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What really spelled Nixon’s defeat happened offstage.

Nixon’s Quaker mother
raised him to be free of racial prejudice. Ever eager to please and honor her, Nixon went out of his way to show consideration to black people. In college and law school, he stood up against the unthinking racism of the day. In an underappreciated role, Nixon was Eisenhower’s point man on civil rights. Although Lyndon Johnson has been credited with passing the 1957 Civil Rights Act, it was the Eisenhower administration that pushed the bill. Earlier, Nixon had taken the lead by steering government contracts to black businesses. His evident sincerity impressed Ethel Payne, the leading black newspaperwoman, especially when, late in the winter of 1958, the vice president showed up at a party at her D.C. apartment with Pat and a bottle of bourbon. (At the time, Payne wrote off Jack Kennedy, by contrast, as “glassy-eyed” with ambition for 1960 and too pliant to segregationist Southern Democrats.) Nixon became friendly with Martin Luther King Jr. after a trip to Africa in 1957 and was close to Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who broke the color line for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
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On the campaign trail, Nixon practiced what he preached. In Springfield, Missouri, when a hotel refused to rent rooms to some black reporters covering the campaign, Nixon moved his whole entourage out.
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On October 19, 1960, three weeks before election day, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested during a sit-in at a “whites only” restaurant in Atlanta. The civil rights leader was sent in chains to the state pen on an old charge of driving on an expired license. His wife, Coretta, understandably feared that he would be killed there. At the urging of his advisers, JFK called Coretta to express his concern—and to let the press know. Meanwhile, his brother Robert maneuvered to get the judge to release King. Nixon’s press secretary, Herb Klein, was asked to respond. “No comment,” said Klein.
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Nixon had explained to his spokesman, Herb Klein, that calling
Mrs. King would look like “pandering.” He was huffy about Bobby Kennedy calling the judge (“improper!”).
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He may have also worried about alienating white voters, particularly Southern Protestants whom he hoped to peel away from the Democratic “Solid South.” Nixon was already a little suspect in the South for his friendly remarks about the NAACP, and he didn’t want to arouse a backlash. Privately, Nixon did think that King’s constitutional rights had been infringed, and he spoke to his friend Bill Rogers—who had become attorney general in the Eisenhower administration—about announcing a Justice Department investigation. But the White House refused to sign off on the idea.

Nixon’s apparent inaction was galling to blacks. Martin Luther King’s father—“Daddy” King, a prominent Baptist minister in Atlanta—had been a Nixon supporter. But the elder King switched sides. He told his congregation that he never thought he could support a Catholic, but “Kennedy can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is….I’ve got all the votes and I’ve got a suitcase, and I’m going up there and dump them in [Kennedy’s] lap.” The Kennedy machine revved up, though not out in the open: In black churches and bars all over the country, thousands of handbills were distributed. On one side the flyer read, “Jack Kennedy called Mrs. King.” The other side read, “Richard Nixon did not.” In the large black populations of Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York and in the black press, Kennedy operatives reached out, sometimes with cash.
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High black turnout on Election Day may have made the difference for Kennedy, who carried a half-dozen states in the industrial Midwest and Northeast by narrow margins.
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Nixon’s black supporters could not understand what had happened to their candidate. William Safire, who was doing some PR for
the campaign, ran into Jackie Robinson as he was leaving Nixon’s hotel room, where Robinson had gone to plead the case for helping King. Robinson was in tears. “He thinks calling Martin would be grandstanding,” Robinson reported and burst out, “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win.”
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Nixon learned how he had miscalculated only after it was too late. Two days after the election, his black chauffeur, John Wardlow, told him (“with an emotion I had never before seen him show,” Nixon recalled), “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 my friends. They were all for you. 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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Nixon’s surprise and rue at losing a constituency he had consistently courted and supported was genuine. Nixon was not completely free of prejudice, but more than most white politicians—including John F. Kennedy—he identified with the plight of blacks who needed jobs and education to enter the American middle class. Characteristically, Nixon turned his disappointment into anger at the Kennedys for stealing black votes with underhanded tricks.

During the campaign,
the mainstream press missed the story of how Kennedy was winning—and Nixon was losing—the black vote. In Nixon’s view, the press hacks were too busy fawning over Kennedy to pay attention to the Democrats’ more devious maneuvers: the walking-around money and the dirty tricks like hiring hecklers, sending out salacious or prejudiced campaign literature under Nixon’s name, and changing street signs on the way to rallies. (Kennedy’s operatives did not advertise their cultivation of the black press because they did not want white voters to notice.) Once again, Nixon was not being paranoid. Though most publishers, who tended to be Republican, endorsed Nixon on their editorial pages, reporters from the big papers widely favored Kennedy. They regarded Nixon as slippery and insincere, a reputation Nixon exacerbated with his off-putting manner.

Nobody played the press better than John F. Kennedy. He was earthy, clever, confiding; he admitted chosen reporters to his very select club. The most prominent was Theodore H. White, whose
Making of the President, 1960
became the ur-campaign book, at once an exaltation and embarrassment of access journalism. (“Cher Pierre,” White began a letter to Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary, a month before the election, “my chips are so heavily committed to Jack.”)
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In
Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon
, written partly to revise the too-credulous record left by the last of his campaign books,
Making of the President, 1972
, White wrote, with inadvertent hauteur, “When Nixon talks unguardedly on the stump, he talks the hard language of the underprivileged; he can get down to bedrock communication so directly and coarsely as to mystify not only his advisers but his friends.” White described how, when he visited President Kennedy in the Oval Office shortly after the 1960 election, he found the new commander-in-chief “indulging himself by reading verbatim transcripts of Nixon’s stump speeches in the campaign.” Kennedy was “puzzled,” wrote White. “He said, ‘You know Nixon is really smart—how can he talk such shit?’ ”
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Kennedy was cozy with reporters like White (“another Harvard grad,” Nixon would mutter) because he literally lived among them. Jackie and Jack Kennedy had moved into a red brick row house at 3307 N Street in Georgetown, a block away from Joe Alsop’s street, Dumbarton, and just a few doors down from Ben Bradlee, the
Newsweek
reporter who became JFK’s personal friend and, later, Nixon’s nemesis as editor of
The Washington Post
. Joe Alsop was particularly smitten with Kennedy’s combination of machismo and style—“Stevenson with balls,” Alsop called him. Stewart Alsop, Joe’s brother and writing partner, was more balanced—indeed, in 1958, he had written a sympathetic and insightful profile called “The Mystery of Richard Nixon” in the mass-circulation
Saturday Evening Post
. But Joe Alsop was at the center of an elite that embraced JFK and just as firmly rejected Nixon.

On October 11, 1960, Katharine Graham of
The Washington
Post
threw a fiftieth birthday party for Joe at her parents’ home; among the hundred guests were the peers of the Georgetown set, including all the top officials of the CIA and all the leading pundits, most notably Walter Lippmann and James Reston of the
Times
. Surveying the crowd, Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. told former secretary of state Dean Acheson: “They cannot stand the thought of a Nixon victory.” From the campaign trail, the Kennedys sent champagne and a note from Jackie to Joe: “I cannot express—& become tearful when I try—in this supercharged emotional time—how we appreciate your friendship.” On inauguration night, when all the balls were over, JFK would repair to Alsop’s house for more champagne.
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On the campaign plane, reporters joined the Kennedy staff in sing-alongs about the New Frontier.
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Bouncing along on the campaign plane, separated from the traveling reporters by a red curtain (and, in some cases, by a gaping cultural divide), Nixon could not possibly compete with the glamorous Jack. Reporters could be savage to Nixon. They called him “the cardboard man” because he seemed to be hiding behind a cardboard image, even when he tried to have drinks with reporters and chat with them. Bryce Harlow, who counseled Nixon, recalled watching reporters try to trap and provoke Nixon at a press conference in Marvin, Illinois, interrupting him, even insulting him. “I was aghast at the viciousness of it, the malice, the open hatred,” Harlow recalled. That night, on the plane back to Washington, Nixon wearily said to Harlow, “I’ve tried everything anyone can do….I’ve given interviews one on one, lots of them. I’ve had small, intimate interviews. I’ve had parties at my home. I’ve made myself accessible to them. I’ve given them news and information. I’ve played their game. It has never changed a thing. I don’t know what can be done about it.”
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Hounded by reporters, Nixon had to stop holding press conferences on the campaign trail. His last, desperately clumsy attempt to be “one of the boys” backfired. In Billings, Montana, in mid-October, Nixon’s spokesman, Herb Klein, arranged a party for the traveling
press corps and the American Airlines crew of Nixon’s campaign plane. Nixon, who came in “a little late,” tried to mingle. The reporters tried to turn the party into “an informal press conference, violating the rules,” recalled Klein. When Klein stepped in, Nixon awkwardly tried to make a joke by referring to the two American Airlines stewardesses—both favorites with the crew, staff, and press—as “bar girls,” that is, prostitutes. The “girls” gamely laughed, but many of the reporters grumbled about Nixon’s tastelessness. “I could not help but think that the same type of remark made by Kennedy would have brought laughter,” wrote Klein.
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As Election Day
approached, the race appeared to be too close to call. “The hard language of the underprivileged” may have offended Theodore White and the Georgetown set, but Nixon’s “rock ’em, sock ’em” stump speeches played well in many parts of the country, particularly in the Midwest and in rural areas. Nixon needed one last push to take the lead. The obvious man to give it was President Eisenhower, who was still enormously popular.

On October 31, eight days before the polls opened, Len Hall, the former head of the Republican Party, organized a White House lunch with Nixon and Eisenhower. Hall had gotten the president to agree to a series of campaign events in Illinois, New York, and Michigan. Unaccountably, however, Nixon seemed petulant, as if he did not wish to be there. Anxiously, Hall waited for Nixon to ask for the president’s help. He was astonished when Nixon said, “Mr. President, you’ve done enough.” Ike turned an angry shade of red familiar to his subordinates. After the meeting, the former D-Day commander summoned Hall to his office. “Did you see Nixon?” Ike demanded. “Did you see him?” Ike launched into an imitation of Nixon hunched over, shoulders bent, head down. “When I had a front line officer like that in World War II, I wanted to relieve him,” Eisenhower growled. He paused and said, “He doesn’t look like a winner to me.”
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