Toward the end the election seemed to blur into a montage of sights and sounds: Kennedy reminding audiences in his cool clipped accents that Castro had put Communists “eight jet minutes from Florida,” Nixon saying that America could not afford to use the White House “as a training ground for a man who wants to learn how to be President, at the expense of the United States of America,” Kennedy repeating over and over, almost as an incantation, “This is a great country. But I think it can be greater. I think we can do better. I think we can make this country move again,” Truman’s profanity and Nixon’s response, vowing never to sully the Presidency by using blasphemy while in the White House, Eisenhower reciting Republican accomplishments in the last eight years: a 48 percent increase in personal income, a 45 percent growth in the Gross National Product, the expansion of social security, the St. Lawrence Seaway, 41,000 miles of interstate highways—“My friends, never have Americans achieved so much in so short a time”—the teen-age girl “jumpers” in motorcade crowds, bobbing up for a glimpse of the candidate, the Vice President promising that a Nixon administration would never allow Red China into the U.N., thus giving “respectability to the Communist regime which would immensely increase its power and prestige in Asia, and probably irreparably weaken the non-Communist governments in that area,” the enthusiasm on college campuses when Kennedy spoke of the years ahead, “the challenging, revolutionary Sixties,” Nixon favoring a resumption of atom bomb tests, Kennedy’s callused hand bursting with blood near the end when a Pennsylvania admirer squeezed it too hard, Nixon charging that Kennedy, by declaring that American prestige was at an all-time low, was “running America down and giving us an inferiority complex,” the smiles of the women whenever Kennedy mentioned his pregnant wife, and Nixon urging audiences: “Vote for the man you think America and the world needs in this critical period. Whatever that decision is, it is the one that I know will be best for America. It is one that we will all abide by; one that we will all support.”
Abruptly it was over. Bright weather and the closeness of the contest brought forth the largest turnout in history—68,832,818 votes, 11 percent more than 1956. After voting, Nixon relaxed by driving three friends down the California coast and showing them Tijuana, the Mexican border town; Kennedy spent the day playing touch football in the family compound in Hyannisport. Elaborate electronic gear had been installed on the sun porch of Bob Kennedy’s home there, and it was there that the Democratic candidate watched the results that night and Wednesday morning.
An IBM-CBS computer enlivened the early evening by predicting, on the basis of data available at 7:15 P.M., that Nixon would win—its incredible odds were 100 to 1—with 459 electoral votes to Kennedy’s 68. Then, as hard figures poured in, the country appeared to be going Democratic in a landslide. Kennedy took Connecticut, always the first state with complete returns, by 90,000. He was winning New York City by a huge margin and carrying Philadelphia by 331,000, 68.1 percent of the vote. Cook County, under the watchful eye of Dick Daley, was giving the Democratic ticket a lead that seemed to place it beyond the reach of downstate Republican Illinois. At 10:30 Kennedy’s popular vote plurality was 1,500,000. He was then being projected as the winner by 4,000,000 or 5,000,000. The IBM-CBS machine was giving him 311 electoral votes; NBC’s RCA-501 computer was putting it at 401. Viewers in the eastern United States were switching off their sets and going to bed, believing that it was all over. Jacqueline Kennedy whispered to her husband, “Oh, Bunny, you’re President now!” He replied quietly, “No… no… it’s too early yet.”
It was indeed. Kennedy’s high-water mark came shortly after midnight. His margin then exceeded 2,000,000, and the first returns from Los Angeles County indicated that he might carry California by 8,000,000. It was at precisely that point that the ticket began to run into trouble. Something unexpected was happening on the far side of the Appalachians. In the swing county of Lexington, Kentucky, for example, Kennedy was running behind Stevenson in 1952 and far behind Truman in 1948. Early Kansas returns put Nixon ahead or abreast of Eisenhower in 1956. Over the next two hours the picture cleared. It was not reassuring to the watchers in Hyannisport. The GOP ticket was sweeping: Kansas by 60.4 percent, South Dakota by 58.3, North Dakota by 55.4, Nebraska by 62.1. Wisconsin, conceded to Kennedy in all the polls, was going Republican by over 60,000 votes and the Democratic lead in California was disappearing as returns came in from the Los Angeles suburbs. Nationally, Kennedy’s popular vote margin dwindled to 1,700,000 to 1,600,000 to 1,100,000. Plainly it was going to be less than a million. It might vanish altogether.
By 3 A.M. the country knew that Nixon was going to carry more states than Kennedy. That was small comfort to the Republicans, though; their ticket had virtually no chance of winning the 269, electoral votes needed for a Nixon triumph. The larger question was whether Kennedy would make it. Four big states hung in the balance: Illinois (27 electoral votes), Michigan (20), California (32), and Minnesota (11). Nixon could become President only if he carried all four, at that point a very remote possibility. Any two would cinch the election for Kennedy. But if he took only one of them, he would fall short. His triumph would be thwarted by 14 or 15 Dixiecrat electors, and the winner would be chosen by the House of Representatives.
By dawn everyone in Hyannisport had gone to bed except Bob Kennedy, who kept vigil over the teletypes, the television sets, and the telephone. (The Kennedy phone bill for that night was $10,000.) At 9:30 Michigan’s Republicans threw in the towel, having concluded that Kennedy’s 67,000 vote lead there would hold. The ticket was also carrying Minnesota and Illinois. That was good enough for U. E. Baugham, chief of the U.S. Secret Service. Baugham put through a call from Washington to a team of sixteen of his agents registered at Hyannis’s Holiday Heath Inn, and they moved in on the Kennedy compound. The campaign belonged to history. Kennedy was now President-elect Kennedy.
Official returns in December gave him 34,226,925 to Nixon’s 34,108,662—a margin of 112,881, less than two-thirds of one percent of the popular vote. For Nixon it was a heartbreaker. A change of a half-vote per precinct would have given him the decision. He had run nearly five percentage points ahead of GOP congressional candidates, and of the country’s eight geographic regions—New England, the mid-Atlantic states, the South, the farm states, the Rocky Mountain states, the industrial Midwest, the five Pacific states, and the border states—he had carried all but the first three. Some of his advisers wanted him to challenge the outcome. There was sufficient evidence of fraud in Illinois and Texas, among other states, to suggest the possibility of a turnaround. He was tempted, but decided against it. The barriers were too formidable. In Cook County, for example, a recount would have taken a year and a half, and there was no recount procedure at all in Texas. Meantime the country would have to be governed.
In January the U.S. Constitution played a cruel trick on this intense, driven man. Article II, Section 2, provides that after the presidential electors have cast their ballots, “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” The President of the Senate is the Vice President of the United States. Once before, in 1861, a Vice President, then John C. Breckinridge, had to attest thus to his defeat, then at the hands of Abraham Lincoln. Nixon solemnly announced the result, 303 to 219, with 15 Dixiecrats for Harry Byrd. He took the occasion to deliver a short, graceful speech congratulating Kennedy and Johnson and paying tribute to the stability of the American political process. In response the Congress gave him an ovation.
After he left an inaugural day luncheon at the F Street Club, his chauffeur gently reminded him that this was the last day that he, as Vice President, would have a limousine at his disposal. That evening Nixon rode to Capitol Hill. In the darkness the city seemed briefly deserted. He later wrote, “I got out of the car and looked once again down what I believe is the most magnificent vista in the world—the Mall, now completely snow-covered, with the Wa
shington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in the distance.”
Here, as so often in his life, he found comfort in sententious reflections. “Defeat is a greater test of character than victory” was one. Another was in a handwritten letter from Robert O. Reynolds, the former Stanford Ail-American and Detroit Lions star who went on to become one of the owners of the Los Angeles Rams. “Sometimes one loses a battle to win the war,” Reynolds wrote Nixon. Quoting one of his college professors, he explained:
…defeats are poison to some men. Great men have become mediocre because of inability to accept and abide by a defeat. Many men have become great because they were able to accept and abide by a defeat. If you should achieve any kind of success and develop superior qualities as a man, chances are it will be because of the manner in which you meet the defeats that will come to you just as they come to all men.
Nixon liked that, and he remembered it while packing to go home to California and start all over again.
IV
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
1961–1968
TWENTY-SEVEN
A New Generation of Americans
Bitter cold had set in that week of Richard Nixon’s farewell to Washington, and on Thursday, January 19, the day before Kennedy’s inauguration, new snow began to fall. By late afternoon, when the government offices let out, streets and pavements were covered. Softly through the long blue winter twilight it sifted down in great powdery layers, and by 8 P.M., when the President-elect and his wife attended a concert in Constitution Hall, the District lay frozen under a thick coverlet which dismayed even hardy New Frontiersmen. Still it continued to fall, speckling the pink faces of soldiers using flamethrowers to melt the caked ice around the inauguration stand on the east side of the Capitol, deepening in the Capitol’s many squares and circles, stitching the eaves of the Executive Office Building and the federal triangle complex with the same shimmering thread. Open fires were lit along the Mall in an attempt to keep it clear for traffic, but the flames had to be kept too low to help much, for the snow was accompanied by a wind that howled in from the Potomac and the Tidal Basin, sending the hard white silt scudding before its raw gusts. Shortly after 3:45 A.M., when the President-elect returned to his Georgetown home, the snow died away, but the cold continued to hold the city in its frigid grip. Drifts hung in the alleys of the Negro ghetto in northeast Washington, and there was an epidemic of broken oil burners in Cleveland Park.
At noon Friday the temperature was twenty degrees above zero; the winds were still punishing. Twenty minutes later the shivering crowd saw the new President appear on the stand and cheered, hoping to hear his speech soon. It didn’t for a while. Instead it shivered some more while Richard Cardinal Cushing honked his way through an invocation that seemed endless. Like so many other chapters in John Kennedy’s life, the inaugural was beginning in disarray. As the cardinal finished, smoke began to curl up from a short circuit in the wires under the lectern. Momentarily the horrified chief of the Secret Service envisaged the whole stand going up in flames. Three times he started to order it cleared and checked himself. Then the smoke stopped, only to be succeeded by another setback. Rising to read a poem, Robert Frost was blinded by the sun glaring on the snow; he had to put it away and recite a poem from memory. At last Chief Justice Warren administered the oath at 12:51. And with that, everything changed. Hatless and coatless, his voice frosting in the air, and his starchy vowels redolent of Boston, the vigorous young President set the tone of the new administration:
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans… tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.”
“That speech he made out there,” Sam Rayburn said afterward, “was better than Lincoln.” It was an occasion for extravagant remarks. After the tranquil, healing years under Eisenhower, the capital was witnessing the commencement of an innovative administration, the first since Franklin Roosevelt’s. Now, as then, the accent was on youth. The new First Lady, who had been born the year of the Crash, was a young woman of stunning beauty. Joining her husband in the Capitol after his speech, she softly touched his face and said in her breathy way, “Oh, Jack, what a day!”
Subsequent days in those first weeks were equally radiant. Writing of Kennedy years afterward in a memoir on the swing generation, Joan Swallow Reiter said, “He was our President, the first born in our century, the youngest man ever elected to the office and, we were sure, certain to be one of the best.” Among New Frontiersmen that faith was absolute: never had men picked up the symbols of command with greater confidence.
***
John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been chosen President by 34,221,463 Americans, or 49.7 percent of those who had voted. After his death in November 1963 a nationwide poll reported that 65 percent recalled casting their ballots for him, which meant that over ten million of his constituents had altered their memories of that election day. But they had been changing them even before he went to Dallas. In June 1963 another poll had found that 59 percent said they had voted Democratic three years earlier.
The phenomenon was not an accident. Kennedy had entered office determined to broaden his support in the country. During the interval between his election and his inauguration he had read Richard E. Neustadt’s scholarly Presidential Power, in which Neustadt wrote that the public’s impression of a chief executive “takes shape for most constituents no later than the time they first perceive him being President (a different thing from seeing him as a candidate).” Kennedy was determined that the first time Americans saw him as President he would be at the post and pulling away.
Noticing that there were no blacks among the Coast Guard cadets in the inaugural parade, he started an official inquiry on the spot. The next morning he was in his bare office early, witnessing the swearing in of his cabinet, pumping Harry Truman’s hand—Truman was in the White House for the first time since his last day as tenant—and firing off Executive Order No. 1, to double the food rations of four million needy Americans. In the weeks which followed the new President continued to vibrate with energy. He would pace corridors while dictating rapidly, read on his feet, dart out for brisk constitutionals, and return in a fast walk that was almost a sprint, restlessly snapping his fingers. “He did everything today except shinny up the Washington Monument,” James Reston wrote of one of those typical early days.
The rest of Washington was expected to keep pace with him. In the Kennedy administration, said Arthur J. Goldberg, the new Secretary of Labor, “the deadline for everything is day before yesterday.” Charles E. Bohlen said, “I never heard of a President who wanted to know so much.” Some members of the government were so hard-pressed by the new chief executive that routine work suffered. A committee chairman from the Hill complained, “He may have two hours to spend, but I don’t,” and Llewellyn Thompson, ambassador to Russia, who had seldom been alone with Eisenhower for more than ten minutes, had four two-hour sessions with Kennedy. The talk wasn’t small talk. “When you see the President,” a senator remarked, “you have to get in your car and drive like blazes back to the Capitol to beat his memo commenting on what you told him.”
One day a hundred people were counted entering his West Wing office. One meeting there produced seventeen separate directives, and two months after taking the oath Kennedy had issued thirty-two official messages and legislative recommendations (Eisenhower had issued five in his first two months) while delivering twelve speeches, promulgating twenty-two executive orders and proclamations, sending twenty-eight communications to foreign chiefs of state, and holding seven press conferences. Reporters were fascinated: more of them came than for the press conferences of any other President before or since. A Washington wit observed that the new President seemed determined to be not only his own Secretary of State but his own Mrs. Roosevelt too. No detail seemed too small for him. At one early press conference he answered in a knowledgeable w
ay a question about a proposal to ship $12,000,000 in Cuban molasses to the United States—information which had appeared four days earlier near the bottom of a departmental report. Noting that Army Special Forces troops had been deprived of their green berets, he ordered that they be returned. Conferring with generals about strategy in Southeast Asia, he tested the carbines being shipped to Vietnam, and as his first presidential spring approached he even detected crabgrass on the greening White House lawn and told the gardeners to get rid of it.
He was out to expand his all-important base. The people he needed were watching him, and he wanted to be sure they liked what they saw. The hatless, coatless vigor helped. Americans approve of self-starters. It was useful for reporters to report that the new President was very much in charge; useful, for example, to let the word get around that Dean Acheson had been given just four days to hammer out a detailed NATO report. The first televised sessions with the White House press corps were, of course, crucial. One of them—the third—was watched by some sixty-five million people in twenty-one and a half million homes. These performances were live. Kennedy had to be not only his own Mrs. Roosevelt but also his own Robert Montgomery. He did it; McLuhan acclaimed him as a virtuoso. And presently the wisdom of the Neustadt approach was reflected in studies by opinion samplers. Kennedy’s racing start had converted an enormous segment of the electorate. These were Nixon voters who had changed their minds and would soon convince themselves that they had been for Kennedy all along. It was something of a political miracle: the new chief executive’s base was as big as Ike’s.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 133
