Kennedy: The Classic Biography (39 page)

As the fourth and final round approached, only the networks were eager for a fifth to be added. But correctly sensing that Nixon was even less eager for a fifth debate than he, the Senator publicly called for such a debate, pressed for negotiations between the staffs (which we carried out to no avail) and, in a barrage of telegrams and public statements, continually chided Nixon’s refusal to meet him once again.

THE WIND-UP

All this was consistent with the continuing atmosphere of Kennedy confidence. The campaign had entered its final phase. The debates were over, the World Series was over, Khrushchev had left the UN and a crucial 11 percent of the voters had still to make a final choice. The crush of Kennedy’s crowds continued to grow, people often waiting several hours, on occasion until 1, 2 and 3
A.M.
His motor tour of economically hard-hit Pennsylvania cities from Bethlehem to Wilkes-Barre was, Governor Lawrence said, “like the coming of a Messiah,” as 500,000 shouting, crowding people hurled confetti at the candidate, gifts into his car, and flags and Kennedy banners into the air. Crowds choked his car engines with paper streamers in Los Angeles, trapped him in a phone booth at Roanoke and paraded one million strong for him in Chicago. “I hope they won’t all be too tired to get to the polls Tuesday,” said the candidate to Mayor Daley. “They’ll be there,” said the Mayor (and they were).

His audience in New York’s garment district covered twelve blocks, and he touched all the hands he could. Jacqueline, who always joined him in New York, despite her doctor’s warning (“If he lost,” she said, “I’d never forgive myself for not being there to help”), felt the sides of the car almost bending. A motorcycle policeman with his sleeve torn off said it was worse than the Battle of Omaha Beach.

Kennedy was, if anything, calmer as the campaign closed around him. He radiated confidence as he preached concern. His speeches were more aggressive, more poised, more humorous and less tense. He was still informal, relaxed and unafraid. He was still himself. He fought off the effects of fatigue and pushed his vocal chords into one final drive. His anger exploded only once, when a series of motorcade errors marred his last visit to New York.

His hand was wrenched, scratched, swollen and infected. His face was creased with lines that had not been there a year before. “This campaign,” he told crowds in New York, “fortunately for us all, is coming physically and financially to an end…. If somebody told me the election is November 16 instead of November 8, I might just fade right out.” “Four more days,” he told a Phoenix airport crowd at 3
A.M.
, November 3. “We can hang on that long. The election is Tuesday…. We have timed it very well.”

Nixon, although his speeches had an increasing ring of desperation, felt
his
timing was right and that Kennedy had “peaked” too soon. Predicting an electoral landslide “if the tide continues,” he stepped up his attack, increased his television and unlimbered his biggest weapon: Ike. Kennedy, while still refraining from attacking the President, needled Nixon for needing Eisenhower, as well as Lodge and Rockefeller, to escort him through New York and to serve as his future peace council. Why not add Goldwater, Dewey, Hoover and Landon? he asked.

But Eisenhower’s intervention was hurting. Nixon, effectively taking to the rails, used more savage adjectives than he ever had in the debates. He stepped up his charges that Kennedy was the captive of left-wing labor bosses, would spend this nation into inflation and depression, would raise food prices 25 percent and the domestic budget by $25 billion. “In the last seven days,” remarked Kennedy in the Bronx, “he has called me an ignoramus, a liar, a Pied Piper and all the rest. I just confine myself to calling him a Republican…and he says that is really getting low.” Nixon accused him of telling “a bare-faced lie,” said the Senator in Albuquerque. “Having seen him four times close up…and made up, I would not accuse Mr. Nixon of being bare-faced, but the American people can determine who is telling the truth.”

Nixon also began to unveil a new spectacular proposal each day, mostly a series of conferences and committees on “peace.” He began to go far beyond the Eisenhower position on housing, health, education and natural resources. He founded his housing proposals on the Democrats’ Federal Housing Act of 1949 (Congressman Nixon, pointed out Kennedy, had voted against that Act). Moving to foreign affairs, he proposed sending Lodge to Geneva and Eisenhower, Hoover and Truman to Russia, while he and his wife, Pat, would travel through Eastern Europe. (“If I am elected,” said Kennedy, “I am going to Washington, D.C., and get this country to work.”) The Nixon staff, building the “tide” psychology, released polls showing their candidate carrying Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, California and Texas. A newspaper poll of editors on the results in their respective states predicted an overwhelming Nixon victory.

The administration announced it was releasing an additional $155 million for B-70 development it had previously declined to use in the unemployed aircraft centers of California. By coincidence it chose November 3 to launch, with considerable ballyhoo about our space effort, a new Explorer satellite. (A Mercury capsule launching timed for Election Day, November 8, was a failure.)

Other problems persisted. Democratic politicians and volunteers were still quarreling in California. Not all the hate literature related to religion. The chairman of Texans for Nixon said Kennedy was not a Communist, only a Khrushchev-lover. Anonymous pink cards made their appearance in Miami: “One Mr. K. is enough—vote Republican.”

Ironically, the cruelest blow came from within the Catholic Church. Except for Cardinal Spellman’s public appearances with Eisenhower and Nixon, appearances which convinced Kennedy of the Cardinal’s opposition, the hierarchy kept silent during the fall; the Catholic press reflected growing resentment of unfair attacks; and the Catholic clergy—in contrast with Kennedy’s Protestant critics and contrary to the latter’s belief—abided by their customary rule of neither endorsing nor opposing any candidate from the pulpit, enduring vitriolic and violent harassment of every kind in admirable silence. Catholic voters leaned increasingly though not uniformly to Kennedy, with many still opposed to his “defensive” attitude on religion, his “boast” of attending public schools and the “leftist” advisers around him.
⁸

Then, in the closing weeks of the campaign, the Catholic hierarchy in the American Commonwealth of Puerto Rico directed all Catholics on that island how to vote: against Governor Luis Munoz Marin and his Popular Democratic Party for permitting birth control instruction, tolerating common law marriage and opposing religious education.

Their action aroused a bigger storm in our election than in Puerto Rico’s, where it was only the latest blow in an age-old battle.
⁹
American Protestant leaders saw in the Puerto Rican pastoral letter a confirmation of their worst fears. On this basis, said Denver’s Methodist Bishop, “I shall not mark my ballot for a Roman Catholic candidate for the Presidency.” Another called it an “alarming illustration of the pressure the Roman Catholic hierarchy can exert.” Instantly the incident was featured in publications ranging from hate sheets to denominational newspapers, often under the heading, “They said it couldn’t happen in America.” Senator Kennedy knew he had been hurt. “If enough voters realize that Puerto Rico is American soil,” he remarked to me, “this election is lost.”

Many of his advisers, fearful that it was lost, urged him to make a nationally televised appeal for fairness on the Sunday night before election. They pointed to the increase in hate literature, to evidence that too few Americans still knew his Houston views. The pollsters said more people talked hostilely of Kennedy’s religion than mentioned any other issue or factor in the campaign.

The plan was to announce the subject of religion in advance and ask for written questions. But Kennedy, sensitive to the charge that he was keeping the issue alive even by answering questions, decided against it. Instead, though he was almost superhumanly fighting off fatigue and irritability, he canceled all rest periods for the final two weeks and vowed to campaign right up to Election Eve.

A lack of funds—which long before had curtailed distribution of Kennedy signs and stickers, long-distance phone calls and expense accounts—made it impossible for Democrats to match a last-minute Republican television saturation. Even some of the time which we had earlier reserved was released. Nixon topped off a TV “blitz” with a four-hour, half-million-dollar telethon the day before the election. It seemed insipid to us, but we could not know how many voters would like it.

The Gallup Poll had shown the two candidates seesawing within a few percentage points of each other since the campaign began, and now it concluded that the race was too close for prediction.

Except for a brief Western swing—far too brief in California, he later concluded—Senator Kennedy concentrated those last two weeks on Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, New York and New England. The weather was freezing, particularly in Waterbury, Connecticut, at 3
A.M.
, on November 6, where one of his largest crowds for a city of that size would simply not let him go to bed.

Finally and suddenly, it was November 7. After six speeches that day in five states, Election Eve began in Manchester, New Hampshire, with his three sisters. They had been to forty states, he said proudly, but “when somebody last week asked my sister Patricia if I was her kid brother, she knew it was time this campaign came to an end.” His own fatigue was evidenced by a rare show of public irritability and incaution in blasting one local publisher for saying once again that Kennedy was a Communist sympathizer:

I would like to have the
Union Leader
print a headline that we carried New Hampshire. [Applause] I believe there is probably a more irresponsible newspaper in the United States but I can’t think of it. [Applause] I believe that there is a publisher who has less regard for the truth than William Loeb but I can’t think of his name. [Deafening applause]

Still in Manchester, he moved to a TV studio for a nationwide question-and-answer session, with his sisters asking questions we had selected. They covered all the most difficult issues—Communism, Castro, Catholicism, agriculture, education, the budget, small business and peace.

The evening continued with a noisy inspirational rally with his original boosters, back home in the Boston Garden. There he concluded:

I thank you for your past support. I ask you to join us tomorrow. And, most of all, I ask you to join us in all the tomorrows yet to come, in building America, moving America, picking this country of ours up and sending it into the sixties.

Finally, at 11
P.M.
, he closed out the 1960 Presidential campaign with a televised presentation from Boston’s old Faneuil Hall. It included brief talks by his wife from Hyannis Port and Lyndon Johnson from Austin, taped interviews with various voters and filmed excerpts from his campaign travels. The Senator spoke quietly but movingly. “I come back to this old city,” he said, “with the strongest possible confidence in the future of the United States, in the ability of its people to meet its responsibilities…[and] to strengthen our cause.”

1
After a Senate committee published all the campaign speeches, more than one writer for subsequent candidates told me he borrowed generously from them.

2
When newsmen later asked him the secret of finding out the sex, he said, “She told me—you would have to ask her.”

3
Nixon replied that they had quality, not quantity. “I don’t know who these geniuses are,” said Kennedy, “but it is a terrible burden for a hundred men.”

4
Hung on the Conference wall was the slogan: “Take Care to be Fair,” and their statement opened with a declaration against “hate-mongering, bigotry [and] unfounded charges.”

6
The Gallup Poll, which showed only 47 percent of the electorate aware of Kennedy’s religion in May, 1959, showed 87 percent aware of it in August, 1960, with the number rising steadily.

7
Refusing to answer questionnaires from the Baptists and others on all the church-state issues he knew Kennedy would have to answer, he did send one telegram saying each state should decide whether to use Federal funds for parochial schools. Had Kennedy so equivocated, he would have been denounced from a thousand pulpits.

8
When a Lou Harris Poll showed Catholic support and particularly Irish Catholic support lagging behind that of the Jews, Ambassador Kennedy, who had been assailed in a barrage of New York newspaper advertisements as an anti-Semite, fumed: “I think I’d better become a Jew. They and the Negroes are the only reliable friends we have.”

9
Ninety percent Catholic Puerto Rico voted overwhelmingly for Munoz Marin.

CHAPTER VIII
THE MARGIN

I
T WAS OVER
. “We have done everything that could be done,” he said. He and Jacqueline voted in Boston and rested at the Cape. The remaining job was one of organization, for which Bob Kennedy had relentlessly prepared with no allowance for overconfidence. Symbolic of the nationwide network of poll workers and watchers he had built was the network of thirty telephones and four teletypes in his house adjoining the candidate’s. Reports on “indicator” precincts were received, trends were projected and leaders were called throughout the long day and night that followed.