Six Crises (59 page)

Finally, the hour came to an end. Kennedy and I shook hands. The press asked us who had won. I replied that we would learn the answer to that question on Election Day. We then left the studio and I returned to the hotel.

As we rode back, I tried to analyze the debate objectively. I felt that Kennedy had done extremely well. He had been on the offensive throughout, just as I had expected him to be. I thought that as far as the arguments were concerned, point-by-point, I might have had a little the better of it. But also, from a great deal of experience with television, I knew that appearance may at times count more than substance, and I was anxious to make a check as soon as possible on the key question: how did each of us come through on the TV screen?

When I got to my hotel suite, I asked Don Hughes to get Len Hall, Fred Seaton, Bob Finch, Jack Drown, Jim Shepley, and any others who were available to come by and give me an appraisal. Before they arrived, however, Rose Mary Woods, my personal secretary and also one of my most honest critics, came in with some disturbing information. Her parents had called—from their home in Sebring, Ohio—and asked if I were feeling up to par. They said that on their TV set I had looked pale and tired. I asked Rose what she thought. She said she tended to agree with their reaction, despite the fact that she thought I had had the better of the argument on substance.

This proved to be the unanimous reaction of my campaign advisers. At the conclusion of our post-mortem, I recognized the basic mistake I had made. I had concentrated too much on substance and not enough on appearance. I should have remembered that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” I would be the first to recognize that I have many weaknesses as a political candidate, but one of my strengths is that I try to be my own severest critic. In this instance, I realized that the lesson was plain: next three times out we must not make the same mistake. If the picture was bad, it could not be blamed on the technicians.
If we felt the technicians were not competent, then it was our responsibility to find better ones.

My growing conviction about how bad I must have looked was further confirmed when my mother called from California, after the program was carried there, to ask Rose if I were “feeling all right.”

It would be a most convenient excuse for me to blame my poor physical appearance on the fact that I really wasn't feeling up to par. But this simply is not the truth. I had never felt better mentally before any important appearance than I did before the first debate. My knee still bothered me a bit, but when I am keyed up, as I was on this occasion, I do not notice physical pain at all. What then was the trouble? Some of it was technical, over which I had no control. But in all honesty, I must admit in retrospect that some of it was avoidable. The TV camera is like a microscope: it shows not how one feels but what his physical condition actually is.

Dr. Malcolm Todd, who had joined us by this time, talked to me like a Dutch uncle after the program. He asked me how much I weighed because he had noticed that my shirt—collar-size 16, standard with me since college days—fit loosely. I had to admit that I had not been on the scales since leaving the hospital over two weeks before. I stepped on the scales in the bathroom at the Pick-Congress and realized for the first time how much had been taken out of me, physically, by two weeks in a hospital bed followed immediately by two weeks of intensive campaigning. I weighed 160—ten pounds below normal and five pounds less than I could remember having weighed at any time in the last thirty years. Dr. Todd said, “You looked weak and pale and tired tonight on TV because, in fact, you
are
weak and pale and tired—even though you don't feel that way at all, in your own mind. We have to lighten up the schedule, get more food into you, and get you up to par before the next debate.” His prescription, incidentally, was a pleasant one. There happens to be nothing I like better than a rich milkshake but because of trying to keep my weight in check, I had not had one for years. The doctor ordered me to have one with each meal—plus another in mid-afternoon—for the next two weeks. The prescription worked. For the second debate, I had put on five pounds.

During the next few days, as we resumed the campaign, I tried to put the probable effect of the first debate into reasonable perspective. I concluded that it had been a setback—but not a disaster. As far as the television audience was concerned, Claude Robinson and the other pollsters recorded a clear edge for Kennedy. But at the same time,
they noted that the debate had in itself had but slight effect on the way people said they were going to vote: rather than changing voters' intentions, in other words, it intensified previous decisions and preferences.

The press, almost without exception, called it a “draw.” Typical reactions were: the Philadelphia
Inquirer
—“inconclusive, won by neither.” William S. White: “It is impossible to say who won. It is not even easy to say who came out ahead on points.” Robert Albright of the Washington
Post:
“A dead heat.” The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch:
“We should not say that anybody won.” Richard Starnes in the New York
World-Telegram and Sun:
“Neither made a mistake or scored a point.” The Denver
Post:
“A draw.” But while the press was calling it a draw, I knew that they were basing their conclusions primarily on what had been said, not on how the candidates had looked. I knew, too, that how the candidates looked, to many viewers, was going to be a great deal more important than what they said.

Radio reaction was just the opposite from that on television. All the polls gave me a clear advantage. Ralph McGill of the Atlanta
Constitution,
a Kennedy supporter, had run an actual test. This is what he concluded: “Kennedy looked better . . . But I had a number of persons listen on the radio . . . They unanimously thought Mr. Nixon had the better of it.” This information was of very little comfort to me, however. The TV audience ran five-to-six times bigger than the radio audience and it was concentrated in the big industrial states which would be decisive in determining the election outcome. It was, then, essential that we make a comeback, and the time and place to start was October 7 in Washington when we were to have the second debate.

But before then there was campaigning to do. On Tuesday we went from Chicago down to Memphis, Tennessee, and then to West Memphis, Arkansas, and finished out the day in Charleston, West Virginia. Significantly, the crowds were bigger than ever. Regardless of who “won” the first debate, public interest in the election and in the candidates had been tremendously stimulated and this was to hold true for the balance of the campaign.

For the next ten days—the interval between the first two debates—we continued to crisscross the country, and we continued to draw big and enthusiastic crowds. The list of states included New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine, then back to New York, Ohio and Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina, New
Jersey and New York again, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and—for a second swing—Ohio. At every stop I hit the same basic themes: the accomplishments of eight Eisenhower years, the promise of the future, and the fakery of Kennedy's pie-in-the-sky all-purpose panaceas. I hit him on immaturity, on lack of judgment, and on lack of candor with the American people.

One of the most stimulating meetings of this whole swing was my reception at New York's Fordham University where I addressed a student convocation. Attendance was strictly optional and yet the armory was packed and there was an overflow crowd as well. This was typical of the whole campaign: our ticket received strong support from colleges and universities throughout the nation—as the Young Democrats of Texas discovered to their considerable embarrassment when they polled the student body of the University of Texas at Austin. Straw polls among faculty groups generally favored the Democrats, but the students reversed the situation—from Tuskegee to Texas, and even Harvard. This would seem to indicate that America's college youth is more interested in opportunity than in handouts.

•  •  •

The second television debate was coming up on Friday, October 7, in Washington, and it had quite naturally been much on my mind. I was fortunate to have a chat with Louis Seltzer of the Cleveland
Press,
a long-time personal friend and one of the nation's outstanding independent editors, the evening before. I had always found Seltzer's advice especially helpful because he never failed to lay it on the line. He told me, first of all, that he thought my speech that evening in Cleveland had been one of the best of the campaign so far. He said he liked the fighting spirit I had shown, and he urged me to continue in the same spirit right down to the wire. “Don't pay any attention to the critics who talk about a New Nixon and an Old Nixon,” he said. “These men are not your friends anyway. The reason they are criticizing you is that they are trying to blunt your attack because they know you are most effective when you are on the attack. Tomorrow night with Kennedy on TV, take him on. Take the offensive from the first, with the gloves off.”

We arrived back in Washington at midnight, and early Friday morning I began my intensive boning up for the second debate.

The tension before the first round had been very great, but now it was greater. I knew that Kennedy had made a better impression first time out. While the immediate press reaction had been to call it a draw
or to give a very slight edge to Kennedy, as the days had gone by it was more and more being referred to as a “decisive” Kennedy victory. I was thus increasingly in the position of having to make a decided comeback, or of being placed at an almost hopeless disadvantage for the balance of the campaign.

I followed my usual practice of reading as widely as possible and of listening to as much advice as I could cram into my crowded schedule. But in the final analysis, I knew that what was most important was that I must be myself. I have seen so-called public relations experts ruin many a candidate by trying to make him over into an “image” of something he can never be. I went into the second debate determined to do my best to convey three basic impressions to the television audience—knowledge in depth of the subjects discussed, sincerity, and confidence. If I succeeded in this, I felt my “image” would take care of itself.

I arrived at the NBC studios in Washington shortly after six and, following the usual preliminaries, Kennedy and I took our places on the set. A few minutes later, the red light over the camera flashed on and the second great debate was under way. This time, with no opening or closing statements, we went right to the questions put alternately to each of us by the four-man press, radio and TV panel. It was a hard-hitting, sharp contest from beginning to end. When it was over, I knew I had done better than in the first debate as far as substance was concerned—but the verdict was not yet in on the most important question of all: What kind of a picture had come through on the home screens?

I did not have long to wait for the answer. Calls and wires were pouring in when I reached my home thirty minutes later. The consensus was—as different from the first debate as night from day. By the next morning, the messages I had received from my friends and supporters were fully corroborated by more objective critics. A New York
Times
spot-survey in 23 cities showed Nixon over Kennedy, 82 to 65. A poll of the 26 newsmen who had been at the TV studio showed Nixon over Kennedy, 11 to 4, with 11 rating the match even. Lucey and Steele of Scripps-Howard said: “Nixon is back in the ballgame with a sharply improved national impact.” Joe Alsop: “The Nixon candidacy got a real lift.” The New York
Herald Tribune
editorial: “The Vice President clearly won the second round.” The Washington
Star:
“The Vice President this time had a clear-cut edge.” James Reston in the New York
Times:
“Nixon clearly made a comeback, came out
ahead.” And Roscoe Drummond had this to say: “Nixon is now back on even terms. An indispensable lift to his campaign.”

What, then, were the major reasons for the difference in impact between the two debates?

First, there was a simple but important physical factor—the milkshake prescription had done its work. I was back up to my normal weight and collar-size. Second, this time we gave the technical factors the attention they deserved but had not received first time out. The lighting was better. The set was less bleak. I had yielded to Carroll Newton's and Ted Rogers' advice that I use makeup to cover my five o'clock shadow, instead of the powder which had made me appear pale during the first debate.

But most important, this time I had the advantage on substance. The first debate had been fought pretty much on grounds favorable to Kennedy—domestic issues where he was consistently on the attack and I had to defend. In this debate, the questioners moved into the field of foreign policy where I was particularly strong and he had some glaring weaknesses. I was able to hit him hard on his off-the-cuff and, I thought, very foolish suggestion that Eisenhower should have “apologized” to Khrushchev for the U
-2
flights and that if he had done so, the Paris Conference would have taken place on schedule. I said that “when the President of the United States is doing something that's right, something that is for the purpose of defending the security of this country against surprise attack, he can never express regrets or apologize to anybody, including Mr. Khrushchev.”

At the very end of the debate, I had again been able to attack very sharply, this time on Kennedy's contention that the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu be surrendered to the Red Chinese, presumably in order to get a cease-fire in the Formosa Straits. He said they “are not strategically defensible” or “essential to the defense of Formosa” and that therefore we should “work out a plan by which the line is drawn at the island of Formosa” itself. I had only to point up the analogy here to Korea, where another “line” had been drawn and aggression had almost immediately followed. And then I stated the principle involved, and the clear lesson: