Six Crises

by Richard Nixon

  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:

  These two islands are in the area of freedom. We should not force our Nationalist allies to get off of them and give them to the Communists. If we do that we start a chain reaction because the Communists . . . are after Formosa . . . This is the same kind of woolly thinking that led to disaster for America in Korea. I am against it. I would never tolerate it as President of the United States.

  We received only one piece of discouraging news with regard to the second debate, but it was significant. The audience for the first had been estimated at about 80 million. It had fallen to about 60 million for the second, and it was not to rise above that figure for the third and fourth debates. This meant that, regardless of the fact that I had done better in the second debate and might extend my advantage in the third and fourth, there were 20 million people who saw only the first—and who would carry with them to the polls whatever impression they had gained from that one encounter.

  • • •

  Nevertheless, as we moved West on Saturday morning, we could feel from the size and enthusiasm of the crowds that our campaign had received a real lift from the second debate—and number three was only a week off. Again, we managed to keep up with a rugged schedule, with major stops in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, Utah, and New Mexico. Then, from Tuesday through Friday, we moved into California for our first campaigning in depth on my own home grounds.

  On Friday, October 14, I made my first major foreign policy speech of the campaign, before the World Newspaper Forum in Los Angeles. I called for “the total mobilization of all of our national resources and those of the free world” in a crusade for a just and honorable peace. I noted the urgent need for more co-ordination, more unity of purpose and action within the Atlantic Community, and recommended “moving toward confederation.” I pledged that as President I would call together the leaders in each major area of the world—in Asia and Africa and in our own hemisphere—to consider “the over-all political, economic, and military problems most susceptible to further common action” and then to encourage the initiation of long-range programs which would preserve and extend the area of freedom.

  • • •

  The third television debate on October 13, in which I appeared in a studio in Los Angeles while Kennedy was speaking from New York, was one in which each of us alternately answered questions put by members of the press corps, with an opportunity for brief rebuttals. The second debate had given me a needed lift and I went into the third confident that if the questions developed subjects of sufficient interest, particularly in the foreign policy field, I was prepared for my best effort in the series to date.

  When the hour was over, I felt that this confidence had been well placed, and the overwhelming majority of columnists, commentators, and pollsters agreed. Claude Robinson reported that my advantage in the third round was as great as Kennedy’s had been in the first—but again, with this significant difference: 20 million more people had seen the first. Press reaction was pretty well summed up by the Houston Chronicle which observed: “Nixon turned in his best performance to date. The third of the debates was the hardest hitting of the three.”

  But what really was important about the third debate was not so much the superficial aspects—the quality of the picture, the style of delivery, or the fact that Kennedy used notes. It was that the debate developed in some depth a major difference between us on an issue of foreign policy. The issue was whether the Eisenhower policy of not writing off Quemoy and Matsu to the Chinese Reds should, as Kennedy had advocated, be substantially modified. Kennedy, in fact, began to hedge on the issue by attempting to draw an almost invisibly thin line over the use of the word “merely”—in a letter from the President to Senator Theodore Green assuring him that the U. S. did not intend to start a war “merely in the defense of Quemoy and Matsu.” Kennedy thus argued:

  Now that is the issue. I believe we must meet our commitment to Formosa. I support it in the Pescadores Islands. That is the present American position. The treaty does not include these two islands [i.e., Quemoy and Matsu].

  But no one, of course, had ever remotely suggested that an attack on Quemoy and Matsu could represent anything other than the beginning of an attack whose ultimate objective was Formosa itself. Kennedy’s attempt to draw this distinction and to insist that he, not I, really supported the President’s position—this argument was made of the purest straw. I continued to hammer hard on the general theme that in the struggle against World Communism we could make no greater mistake than to submit to blackmail—that surrendering a relatively small and unimportant area under threat of war would never satisfy an aggressor but would only stimulate and encourage him to step up his demands. And the eventual and inevitable result would be that the area demanded would be so important as to make war—or surrender—unavoidable.

  Our polls indicated that voters generally, Democrats as well as Republicans, overwhelmingly supported my position on this issue. Kennedy apparently was receiving similar reports from his own surveys. Shortly after the third debate, at any rate, Fred Seaton received a curious message from Washington. Chester Bowles, who had been chairman of the Platform Committee at the Democratic Convention and who was now one of Kennedy’s top foreign policy advisers, had called on Secretary of State Chris Herter at the latter’s Georgetown home. The purpose of the call was to indicate Kennedy’s concern over the way the Quemoy-Matsu debate was developing. Kennedy, according to Bowles, did not want to give the impression during the campaign that the American people were divided in their support of the Eisenhower Administration’s firm stand against Communist aggression. Kennedy had long disagreed with the Eisenhower-Dulles policy on Quemoy-Matsu—a disagreement that went back at least to the Senate debate of January 1955 over the so-called Formosa Resolution and his support of the Lehman-Morse amendment (fortunately defeated) which would specifically have excluded Quemoy and Matsu from the Formosa Straits defense perimeter. But now, Bowles went on, the issue had been raised in the campaign by questions during the debates and not on Kennedy’s own initiative. He was prepared under the circumstances to modify his position so that there would be no appearance of opposing Eisenhower on this issue and so that we could present a united front to the Communists.

  I asked Seaton what he thought the real purpose of this message might be. His reaction was that Bowles and Kennedy—if Kennedy was aware of what Bowles had done—were using this device for the purpose of getting me to lay off on an issue that was becoming increasingly unpopular for Kennedy. My own reaction was that if Kennedy did modify his position, I would have no choice but to drop the issue—except for continuing to point to the whole “shoot first, think later” approach as indicative of his lack of experience in the foreign policy area. This was the course of action I eventually followed. While I recognized that I had Kennedy over the barrel on an issue which was turning sour for him, I believed that he had a right to change his mind. It was important that the Chinese Communists be given no encouragement to start trouble in the Formosa Straits because of a hassle in the American presidential campaign.

  After the debate we put in a final day of campaigning in the Los Angeles area and then went cross-country, with stops in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Illinois, to Hartford, Connecticut.

  • • •

  Rather than return, as usual, to Washington, we had decided to spend Sunday in Hartford so as to be on the spot for Monday’s swing
through Connecticut. On the schedule, this was to be a day of rest. But in the final month of a campaign there can be no days of rest, as I had learned from previous experience. Cabot Lodge, Len Hall, Bob Finch, and some of our other campaign associates joined the traveling party in Hartford to go over schedules and pin down plans for the last two weeks of the campaign.

  We came to several key decisions at our all-afternoon meeting.

  The most important new development was that Eisenhower had decided this was the time for him to move into action. He had agreed to make speeches at an airport rally in Minneapolis-St. Paul, on October 18—the next Tuesday—and at a Nixon-for-President Committee dinner in Philadelphia, on October 28. The real climax of the campaign was to be reached on Wednesday, November 2, in New York City, when Eisenhower, Lodge, and I would all meet for a ticker-tape, motorcade parade, and for helicopter stops in some of the key, strategic outlying areas. Our chances in New York, according to the Daily News poll, were very slim. At the time we made this decision, the poll indicated we would lose the state by as much as a million votes; but we decided to concentrate our efforts there anyway, for two reasons. First, we could not write off a state as big and as important as New York, or give any appearance of doing so. And second, New York City is the news, TV and radio center of the nation, and we felt we could gain a great deal through the stories and broadcasts which would originate from our visit there. Following the big day in New York, with a climactic rally at the Coliseum, Eisenhower was also slated for a one-day swing on November 4, the Friday before election, to Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

  We decided that Lodge would continue to concentrate his efforts in the industrial cities and states of the North and East where he had been drawing exceptional crowds.

  Another decision, which derived from an idea I had had before the campaign began, was to whistle-stop through the densely populated areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois during the second week before election. I felt that we not only would thus reach a great number of people in smaller towns where air-stops were not feasible, but also it seemed to me that the drama of the traditional campaign train would add zest and color to our efforts during this critical period when the nation’s attention would be riveted on what we were doing.

  There was one knotty problem that I discussed with Lodge privately. We had been receiving a good bit of flak over a statement he had made, October 12, during a talk in New York’s Harlem. This is what he said:

  “ . . . there should be a Negro in the cabinet . . . It is part of our program and it is offered as a pledge.” (The following week, in Albany, he added that he had meant this only as a “personal prediction” and he amended it to read “qualified Negro” but typically, this clarification made few headlines.)

  When I was questioned about this, I of course replied that no pledges had been made for Cabinet appointments and that I would select my Cabinet solely on the basis of personal qualification—without regard to race or creed or color. The background for Lodge’s statement puts it in perspective.

  When he resigned as Ambassador to the UN, at the beginning of the campaign, Lodge felt that one of the best qualified men in the nation to replace him was Ralph Bunche, long-time member of the U.S.-UN delegation and of the Secretariat. Lodge knew that I shared his own high opinion of Bunche, who had lived and taught in my home state of California and whom I knew well. But there were so many current questions under debate at the time of Lodge’s resignation that the decision had been to raise his experienced deputy, Jerry Wadsworth, to serve as Ambassador for the balance of the Eisenhower Administration. When Lodge had arrived in New York the previous week, he was urged by several of the New York Republican leaders to indicate in his Harlem speeches that a Nixon-Lodge Administration would follow a policy of appointing Negroes to any and all positions in government for which they were qualified. Lodge, consequently, made his statement about appointing a Negro to the Cabinet, having particularly in mind that our UN Ambassador sat in as a Cabinet member under Eisenhower and that Bunche might well be named by me to this position.

  He could not have been more surprised when the story got the attention and the rather lurid play that it did. He immediately made it clear that he was expressing only a personal opinion and that the new President, of course, would make all decisions with regard to his Cabinet. But the statement continued to plague us for the balance of the campaign. It hurt us in the South unquestionably. And it did us no good in the North. To Negroes as well as to other voters it appeared to be a crude attempt to woo the support of Negroes without regard to the qualifications an individual might have for high office—something that Lodge had never remotely intended to suggest. Such are the “un-predictables” of any campaign, especially in this day of almost instant mass communication.

  Except for this one problem, the reports we received that Sunday were encouraging and we moved into the third week before Election Day with a confidence that the tide was running our way, an impression confirmed by former National Chairman Meade Alcorn as we campaigned through “Kennedy country” in southern New England on Monday, October 17.

  • • •

  At the American Legion Convention on Tuesday in Miami, I fired the opening gun of what was to turn out to be the major subject for discussion in the fourth and final debate, scheduled for Friday, October 21, in New York. Kennedy had been hammering away for weeks at the Administration’s Cuba policy—although none too consistently. Early in the year—in a book of his speeches published in January—he was still describing Fidel Castro as “part of the legacy of Bolivar” and as simply a “fiery young rebel.” In May, he said in a TV interview that “for the present, I support the Administration” even though “the situation in Cuba . . . continues to deteriorate.” But by mid-September, with his campaign in full-swing, he was taking a very different line: the existence of Communism “eight jet minutes from the coast of Florida” was the fault of the Administration, he said on the fifteenth. On a September 30 TV show, he charged Castro up to us generally (“what they did wrong was not to use . . . our great influence . . . on Batista to have him relax his dictatorship and permit free elections”). Kennedy had much to criticize but little of substance to offer in the way of new policies and proposals.

  This issue is an excellent illustration of the disadvantage that confronts a candidate who also represents an incumbent Administration. I had long been urging a stronger policy, within Administration councils, against Castro. I had had a three-hour conference with Castro when he visited Washington, back in April 1959. After that conference, I wrote a confidential memorandum for distribution to the CIA, State Department, and White House. In it I stated flatly that I was convinced Castro was “either incredibly naïve about Communism or under Communist discipline” and that we would have to treat him and deal with him accordingly—under no further illusions about “fiery rebels” in the “tradition of Bolivar.” My position was a minority one within the Administration and particularly so within the Latin American branch of the State Department. Trying to “get along with” and “understand” Castro continued to be the State Department line despite my own strong recommendation to the contrary—one, incidentally, which was shared by J. Edgar Hoover and by two of our former Ambassadors to Cuba, Arthur Gardner and Earl E. T. Smith, as well as by William Pawley who had held several diplomatic posts in Democratic Administrations and was a widely acknowledged expert on Latin American affairs.

  Early in 1960, the position I had been advocating for nine months finally prevailed, and the CIA was given instructions to provide arms, ammunition, and training for Cubans who had fled the Castro regime and were now in exile in the United States and various Latin American countries. This program had been in operation for six months before the 1960 campaign got under way. It was a program, however, that I could say not one word about. The operation was covert. Under no circumstances could it be disclosed or even alluded to. Consequently, under Kennedy’s attacks and his new demands for “mi
litant” policies, I was in the position of a fighter with one hand tied behind his back. I knew we had a program under way to deal with Castro, but I could not even hint at its existence, much less spell it out.

  Kennedy had spoken up to now only in vague generalities, and so I decided that here was the time and place—the Legion Convention in Miami—to counterattack. I felt that in addition to our secret operations, we could also substantially strengthen our overt and official policy for dealing with Castro. I urged several courses of action in my talks with State Department officials and finally found an ally in Douglas Dillon, the Under Secretary. In a nutshell, what I advocated and what I announced in my Miami speech was a policy of all-out “quarantine”—economically, politically, and diplomatically—of the Castro regime. I said that the time for patience was over, that we must move vigorously—if possible, in full association with our sister American republics—to eradicate this “cancer” in our own hemisphere and “to prevent further Soviet penetration.” Our government was even then, I pointed out, planning “a number of steps” and “will very promptly take the strongest possible economic measures to counter the economic banditry being practiced by this regime against our country and our citizens.”