Kennedy (33 page)

At times his fervent idealism spellbound his listeners, both spectators, who neglected to applaud, and reporters, who neglected to take notes. “It is our obligation and our privilege,” he said over and over, “to be the defenders of the gate in a time of maximum danger. If we fail, freedom fails. Has any people since Athens had a comparable responsibility and opportunity?”

“I don’t run for the office of the Presidency to tell you what you want to hear,” he said in his Portland, Maine, opener and repeatedly thereafter. “I run for the office of the Presidency because in a dangerous
time we need to be told what we must do if we are going to maintain our freedom and the freedom of those who depend upon us…. You cannot be successful abroad unless you are successful at home.”

By avoiding the tired phrases and promises of the traditional Democratic campaign, he avoided tiring himself. So long as he could be himself—candid, informal, confident, without false pretensions of either humility or grandeur—he could endure and even enjoy the exhausting schedule, the lack of sleep, the endless travel and the raw ugly blisters on his swollen right hand.

For the campaign, involving as it did the most intensive speaking schedule of all time, was a physical ordeal for everyone, and especially the Senator. In addition to almost daily statements and letters issued by Feldman, Cox or Bob Kennedy in the candidate’s name from Washington, he spoke eight or ten times every day, sometimes in four or five states. In one week of eighteen-to-twenty-hour days he visited twenty-seven states. His first full
weekend
took him to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, California, Alaska and Michigan.

He often spoke at a midnight airport arrival and at an early breakfast the next morning. “Every time I get in in the middle of the day,” he good-naturedly told one audience, “I look down at the schedule and there’s five minutes allotted for the candidate to eat and rest.” At one stop he stressed the urgency of providing medical care for the aged “especially as we are all aging very fast these days.” “I am going to last about five more days,” he said on November 3, “but that is time enough.”

Actually, he seemed to gain strength and steam with each new audience. Among the staff and press who accompanied him, the unprecedented pace took a heavy toll. I know that the search for a few moments of sleep—on the plane, on the bus, even during the speeches—began to dominate my own thoughts. But not Kennedy. “He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t do anything to keep fit,” observed his wife, “but he thrives on it.”

At times, to be sure, he was hoarse and weary and dark circles formed under his eyes. “You are not as gay as you used to be,” observed a Mormon leader in Salt Lake. But he never lost his voice as he had in the West Virginia and Oregon primaries; indeed it seemed to grow stronger. His weight fluctuated wildly, as he missed meals and sleep on some days and snacked constantly on milk and soup between airports on others. He found it increasingly hard to rise at dawn, even when Dave Powers would rouse him with a cheery “What do you suppose Nixon’s doing while you’re lying there?” But each day the spirit and enthusiasm of his growing crowds renewed and refreshed his own.

Never, however, did he lose his dignity, his self-restraint or himself in the exuberance of the crowd. Never was he to be seen waving both
arms above his head, hugging local politicians or shouting banalities for the sake of applause. He spoke crisply, earnestly, with his chin thrust upward and forward. The chopping right hand with which he emphasized his points was his only gesture. “If I have to hold both hands above my head to be President,” he told one friend, “I’m not going to be President.” His magnetic appeal to youth—the phenomenon of female “jumpers,” “leapers,” “touchers” and “screamers” in the crowds along his route—the recurrent risks they took darting between his moving motorcycle escorts to grasp his hand (including one woman who nearly dislocated his shoulder holding on as though frozen)—the sound of thousands upon thousands of milling, yelling fans—the sea of outstretched hands along airport fences and barricades—all this surprised and amused him without instilling a speck of overconfidence or conceit. It did not detract him from either the issues or the realities of the campaign. Much of the yelling and jumping, he knew, came from children. “If we can lower the voting age to nine, we are going to sweep this state,” he said at one stop.

He could still look and laugh at himself with detachment.
“I
will never know,” he remarked one day as he watched the sidewalk throngs at suppertime, “why anyone would leave his home just to watch a politician go by.” “Do you realize,” he teased one of his liberal supporters, “the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person between Nixon and the White House.”

When a turbulent crowd nearly deafened him with acclaim in the closing weeks of the campaign, he said in feigned solemnity to one reporter, “Do you figure this was how it was for Dewey in…. 1948?” When the crowd in Cincinnati laughed at his pronunciation of the city’s name, he smilingly said that was what the city was called in Boston “and I am from Boston. We will explain to you how to pronounce it.” When the microphone at the St. Paul airport failed to work, he was undisturbed. “I understand that Daniel Webster used to address 100,000 people…without a mike,” he told the crowd. “We are a little softer than they used to be, however.”

No situation ruffled his composure, every situation had its humor. When he was presented with a symbolic key to the city by the Republican Mayor of Niagara Falls, New York, he expressed the hope that the Mayor “will not take my key away if I make a few unkind remarks about his party…. I won’t include him in them at all.” When he had to be told by a Pocatello, Idaho, press conference that the local Burns Creek reclamation project had already come before the Senate, the Senator was embarrassed but not shaken. “It is early in the morning,” he said. “I am sure…Frank Church…will tell me about it for the rest of the morning.” (Kennedy also told his advance men and research men
about it for the rest of the morning, in terms designed to make certain he was never caught napping again.)

When interrupted by an enthusiast in a Brooklyn arena, he calmly replied, “Let me speak first and then you—OK?” When his automobile loudspeaker was insufficient for one crowd, he stopped his speech, climbed to the top of a building and resumed: “As I was saying…” When a fire engine roared up, he said, “Tell the fire department it is just Democrats on fire.” When Republicans at the American Legion Convention circulated copies of his famous 1949 attack, he said smilingly in his introduction, “I have learned a good deal about the Legion—especially since 1949.” He had to cut short an airport stop in North Dakota to enable his plane to leave the unlit field before dark. But it was all right, he said—“The lights are going out for the Republican Party all over the United States.”

Nixon supporters, signs and hecklers frequently appeared at his rallies in Republican areas, but they never fazed him. When a drunken, belligerent woman ran up to his motorcade in Milwaukee and flung a glass of whiskey in his face, he quickly wiped off the whiskey, handed back the tumbler and said in even tones, “Here’s your glass.” When, in the midst of another fatiguing motorcade through a working-class district, he saw among all his fervent well-wishers two well-dressed men in silk suits giving him a contemptuous gesture, he confided to me that he would enjoy nothing more than leaping out and punching them both in the nose—but he only smiled and waved.

“Just listen,” he told a group of Young Republican hecklers at New York University. “You won’t learn anything if you are talking.” Later the same group interrupted his speech with chants of “We want Nixon.” “I don’t think you’re going to get him, though,” said the Senator good-naturedly as the crowd cheered. And he addressed the conclusion of his remarks to “all you young Nixonites-—all eight of you.”

In Owosso, Michigan, describing the pitiful surplus food packages he had seen in West Virginia, he heard boos in the crowd. “You can boo,” he said with some emphasis, “but you can’t eat it…you can’t possibly dispose of [these] problems…by booing. You have to do something about it. That is what this election is all about.” And to a Nixon picket perched on a telephone pole he had called, “If you just stay up there until November 9 we can settle this whole matter.”

The campaign raised no clear-cut, decisive issue, and, except for the Peace Corps, no new proposals. Issues such as Cuba, agriculture, education, minimum wages, the missile gap and Quemoy-Matsu rose and faded throughout the fall. Kennedy did not attempt to create any single specific issue. Instead, he jammed his speeches with a whole series of facts and figures to express his dissatisfaction with standing
still, his contention that America could do better. Fewer than a hundred people scattered throughout government are working on disarmament, he said, one-fifth as many as work for the U.S. Battle Monuments Commission.
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Drawing on the administration’s own figures on malnutrition, he overdramatized them by saying seventeen million Americans go to bed hungry every night (“Most of them on Metrecal,” cracked one Republican).

Often in one speech—and sometimes in one paragraph or even one sentence—he would cite the average wage of female laundry workers in our five largest cities, the average Social Security check, the number of families with less than $1,000 income, the number receiving surplus food packages, the number of workers not protected by minimum wages, the number of families in substandard housing, the proportion of unemployed and their average jobless benefit, the proportion of steel capacity unused, the proportion of high school graduates unable to attend college, the rise in surplus food storage and the decline in home building. He gave precise figures on UN voting, Latin-American broadcasts, loans to Africa and Latin America and the number of Negro judges and Foreign Service officers. He compared our economic growth and our graduation of scientists and engineers with more impressive Soviet gains. He knew how many classrooms and how many jobs this nation would need over the next ten years. He quoted per capita income figures for Libya and India, and the number of college graduates in the Congo. Each torrent of statistics began with “I am not satisfied when…” or “Do you realize that…” or “Our party will be needed so long as…” And each one ended with “I think we can do better—we have to do better…. I do not accept the view that our high noon is past. Our brightest days can be ahead.”

He used apt, sharp illustrations. In a farm speech, for example, he referred to the farmer who said he “hoped to break even this year because he really needed the money”—to the judgment that Khrushchev, if given his choice between fifty American scientists and fifty American farmers, would surely choose the latter—and to the children he saw in the hollows of West Virginia taking their free school lunch home to share with their impoverished parents while surpluses rotted nearby.

“The first living creatures to orbit the earth in space and return,” he pointed out, “were dogs named Strelka and Belka, not Rover or Fido—or Checkers.” Mr. Nixon, he was fond of recalling aloud, shook his finger in Khrushchev’s face in their famous “kitchen debate” and proclaimed, “You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust but we are ahead of you in color television.” “I will take my television in black and white,”
said the Senator. “I want to be ahead in rocket thrust…. Mr. Nixon may be very experienced in kitchen debates, but so are a great many other married men I know.”

He repeatedly pointed to the inadequacies of the number of scholarships we had offered Black Africa, the number of Foreign Service personnel there (less than we had in West Germany alone) and the number of Voice of America broadcasts. The nationalist movements around the world, he said, had traditionally used American slogans and quoted American statesmen, not Russian. But now the United States was neglecting them. “There are children in Africa named Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln,” he said more than once. ‘There are none called Lenin or Trotsky or Stalin—or Nixon.” (In Harlem, where Congressman Powell had given him a rousing introduction, he added: “There may be a couple of them called Adam Clayton Powell”—causing the Rev. Powell to lean forward and say, “Careful, Jack.”)

He had local information at his fingertips as well. He decried the price of corn in Sanborn, Minnesota, the number of layoffs in International Harvester plants in Illinois, the amount of coal mined and food distributed in McDowell County, West Virginia, and the declining number of oil safety shoes sold by Sam Gray in Wichita Falls, Texas.

In Sharon, Pennsylvania, he could deplore Eisenhower’s veto of the Sharpville Dam. In Schenectady he could compare our defenses to the failure of the early settlers of that city to prepare for an Indian massacre. In Rochester he quoted an earlier Republican candidate as having referred to it as Syracuse—proof, he said, that Republicans never did know where they were or where they were going. Repeatedly he said, “I want a world which looks to the United States for leadership, which does not always read what Mr. Khrushchev is doing or what Mr. Castro is doing. I want them to read what the President of the United States is doing.”

He identified Nixon, who understandably preferred to forget party labels, with Republican “stand-pat” slogans and candidates of the last half-century or more—McKinley, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Landon and Dewey. “Where do they get those candidates?” he asked his audiences. But even as he criticized all the deeds and misdeeds of the last eight years, he avoided direct attacks on the popular Eisenhower. The latter, he said, was “a help to Mr. Nixon. I would be glad to have his cooperation, but I think he is already committed.”

He knew that there was probably a greater gap between the views of Eisenhower and Kennedy—on space, defense, social welfare and all the rest—than between those of Nixon and Kennedy. But he also knew, and freely admitted in private, that had the Constitution permitted Eisenhower
to seek a third term, no Democratic candidate including Kennedy could have defeated him. Had the Republicans, he felt, nominated Nelson Rockefeller, who would not need to defend the administration and who often sounded like Kennedy on defense and economic growth, the New York Governor might have been able to outflank the Kennedy position and win the race. (His only comment on Rockefeller’s early 1960 withdrawal, however, had been an expression of sympathy for the fact that Nixon had now lost the chance to present his views in contested, and thus more interesting, primaries.)