Joe was as sensitive as Jack to the detrimental impact he might have on the campaign. Once Joe had taken care of his business in New York City, he flew over to France and his rented villa, Bella Vista. There on the Riviera, Joe gave his only extensive interview of the campaign to U.S. News & World Report. “Americans are wondering why one of the most powerful men in his [Jack’s] camp is sitting out the campaign 3,000 miles from U.S. shores,” the weekly asked. Joe was going to be back in a few weeks and he gave a shrewd, duplicitous answer. “I just think it’s time for 72-year-old men like me to step aside and let the young people take over,” he said. “Since 1952, when Jack went to the Senate, I’ve never campaigned for him, never made any speeches. You know, I’ve never heard Jack make a speech except on television.”
Joe had brilliantly distanced himself from Jack. His only faux pas was to have his beautiful young caddy in residence. Joe was described as “teaching [her] English during the golf rounds,” lessons that presumably continued later when he invited her to visit him in the United States.
While Joe was playing golf and lying in cabana 513 at Hotel du Cap, his new secretary, Bonnie Williams, arrived at Hyannis Port shortly before Labor Day. The Kennedys lived in a village within a village, their homes scattered around their own town square. The children frolicked on a broad plot of grass, and the parents hurried from one house to the next.
Jackie, Ethel, Eunice, and other adult Kennedys flitted in and out of the residences, but when Joe arrived in early September, Williams sensed an electric charge of excitement. Her boss was truly the patriarch, greeted with subtle deference, his smallest want taken care of by the help and the family.
Joe cut a splendid figure as he rode his horse each morning, impeccably attired in riding clothes. And as she sat next to him during the day he talked to some of the most powerful people in America. Jack called too, sometimes several times a day. Williams sensed that Joe wasn’t completely happy with her, and she thought that she knew why. Joe had impeccable manners, and he made no overt advance toward her, but she knew what he wanted and what she would not give.
Joe had been back scarcely two weeks when the chauffeur drove Joe and Williams to Boston for a flight to New York. All through the long ride Joe sat silently. On the plane to New York he said not a word. Finally Williams turned to him and spoke urgently: “You know I came to do one job, and that’s the way I want it. And if it’s going to be some other way, now is the best time to end it.”
Joe shrugged and gave no answer, but from then on Williams had no more difficulties with her seventy-two-year-old boss.
When Jack headed out on the campaign trail, he had an enlarged staff to service his needs. Among the new arrivals was Archibald Cox, an austere, cerebral Harvard Law professor who came down to Washington to oversee a group of academics writing speeches and preparing policy papers. Jack knew Cox as an adviser on labor questions, and it was fitting that Jack opened his campaign on Labor Day, giving a speech that Cox had written, before a vast crowd of sixty thousand in Detroit’s Cadillac Square. About halfway through the turgid lecture studded with facts and figures, the candidate pushed the pages away and ad-libbed his way through the rest of speech.
That was the last time Jack read one of Cox’s speeches. Cox and his colleagues were grievously disappointed at how few of their words Jack ever uttered, though their research and ideas often worked their way into his addresses, compressed into pithy phrases and slogans. For the most part, however, it was the prodigiously industrious Sorensen who wrote almost all of Jack’s speeches on the road, based in large part on Feldman’s research.
Cox began taking each speech that Jack gave in cities across America and comparing them with the talk that Roosevelt had given in 1932 in the same city. “I was just aghast from an intellectual point of view at the lower level of all Kennedy’s speeches,” Cox reflected. The Harvard professor was so appalled with these speeches full of wind and sloganeering that he wrote a futile letter to Sorensen suggesting that Jack give at least two or three truly substantive speeches each week.
Jack would gladly have given grand, serious addresses, but such speeches no longer held an audience. Even before remote control devices became ubiquitous among television-viewing Americans, the public already had learned to change the channel on whatever was boring, complex, or tedious.
Americans would never again sit still, either in person or in front of their televisions, listening to the kinds of formal speeches that once had defined presidential campaigns. On the campaign trail Jack saw what moved the vast, restless crowds and what made them anxious and nervous. His speeches now had less substance than the talks he had given during the primaries.
Jack did not shirk ideas when they clearly benefited his candidacy. Fritz Hollings, the former governor of South Carolina, called Feldman praising a speech that General James Gavin had given in which he broached the idea of Americans volunteering in the underdeveloped parts of the world. The speech itself was hardly a seminal document. The general had no written speech, only notes that were sent up to Washington. In Michigan, Jack tried the idea out to an enthusiastic reception, and then developed it further into a full-scale speech given in San Francisco.
The Peace Corps, an idea with which Jack’s name would forever be linked, was in a sense the democratization of the ideal that he had expressed at Choate in 1946, that those to whom much had been given should give back in public service. In the affluent America of the 1960s, everyone seemed privileged or at least everyone in the middle class, and it was the children of the middle class who heard this bugle call.
When Jack arrived in Chicago for the first of four unprecedented televised debates on September 26, 1960, he was slightly behind in the polls, and many political handicappers thought that this occasion would worsen his chances. Nixon’s supporters could claim that for eight years he had been groomed in the White House to assume the presidency, while his opponent had been a legislative misfit in the Senate. Although Jack had developed into a fine public speaker, the vice president was a stellar debater who had famously stood up to Khrushchev in Moscow the previous summer in a spontaneous debate. Beyond that, the two candidates’ acceptance speeches provided devastating evidence of Jack’s apparent inferiority.
Jack created his own universe around him, and everyone in his circle served a purpose, from Dave Powers, who woke the candidate each morning and knew when to pump him up with Irish yarns or with a terrifying vision of Nixon already up, shaved and showered, out on the campaign trail; to Janet Des Rosiers, his father’s former mistress, now the stewardess on the Caroline, who gave him everything from coffee to massages; to Pierre Salinger, his ebullient press secretary; to O’Donnell, O’Brien, and his campaign staff.
This weekend, Jack brought Sorensen and Feldman to prepare him for what he knew might be the most important moment of the campaign.
These intense, sharp men spoke the candidate’s idiom perfectly, cutting to the core of any issue. Throughout Sunday evening and the Monday morning of the debate, they peppered Jack with the questions they thought he might be asked, and he answered back in his staccato rhythms, sharpening his arguments.
Jack told his two aides that since the Democrats were the majority party, he would proudly position himself as heir to that tradition. Nixon fancied himself an expert on foreign affairs, but Jack believed that this area was the vice president’s weakness and his own strength. If Jack could lure his opponent onto these dark shoals, he believed that he had a chance to run Nixon’s campaign aground. Unfortunately, the first debate was supposed to be on domestic issues. The second and third would be question-and-answer sessions, and only the fourth debate would focus on foreign policy.
Part of the time, Jack’s back was bothering him so badly that he lay on the bed in obvious pain while the two aides continued their questioning. Feldman was amazed that he could even go on. Jack may well have had a secret weapon that afternoon that lifted him high above the deadening fatigue of the campaign. In recent month
s, Jack had noticed that his old friend Spalding, who was stuck in the dread routine of a bad marriage and a nine-to-five job, had a new bounce to his step, a lilt to his voice, and a lowering of his querulous complaints. His friend said that it was all due to Max Jacobson, a wondrous doctor who gave his patients magical vitamin injections that contained, among other things, the blood of young lambs.
The first time Spalding had gone to Jacobson’s New York office, he had been taken aback by the unkempt quality of the place. Jacobson had yellow spots on his smock and to some might have appeared slightly mad. Yet his office was full of patients, some of them famous, all happily waiting for their shots. The moment the doctor injected Spalding, he felt his body fill with life, a pure energy of such magnitude that he stayed up for three days without sleeping. Spalding got his own supply of this liquid life and at home started injecting himself. It was a time when few Americans knew what amphetamines were or the dangers they represented. Spalding had no idea that the magical ingredient was Methedrine, an amphetamine that would in a few years become notorious as “speed.”
Dr. Jacobson worked his chemical miracles as much as one hundred times a day, injecting celebrities, socialites, and politicians with a happy mixture of vitamins and amphetamine. They came sometimes once a month, others once a week, and some every day. Truman Capote might be sitting there in the small outer office, or Eddie Fisher, former Senator Claude Pepper, Alan Jay Lerner, or Cecil B. DeMille. Jacobson filled his syringe with unique mixtures drawn from half a dozen bottles filled with various liquids and injected them almost anywhere in the body.
For Jack’s first visit to Jacobson in September just before the debate, he entered an office suite cleared of other patients. “The demands of his political campaign program were so great that he felt fatigued,” Jacobson wrote in his unpublished autobiography.
His muscles felt weak. It interfered with his concentration and affected his speech…. If not attended to these complaints could not only become more severe but would probably lead to more serious discomforts in the future. I took a short case history, and previous diseases he had, accidents, and treatments he had been given. I asked him about his present condition and what medication he was presently taking. The treatment of stress has been one of my specialties. After his treatment he told me his muscle weakness had disappeared. He felt cool, calm, and very alert. I gave him a bottle of vitamin drops to be taken orally, after which he left.
Jack had a long, laugh-filled luncheon with Bobby and several others. Then he planned to take a nap, but he was so restless that he got up in his bathrobe and walked out on the terrace of his suite. There was a confidence in Jack, not a dumb, blustering arrogance, not a dangerous, willful pride, but a subtle understanding of his own abilities and those of his opponent.
Jack paced back and forth in his bathrobe that long autumn afternoon before the first debate, hitting his fist again and again, like the challenger in his dressing room before the championship fight. As Jack dressed, he told Powers that he felt the tense excitement and nervousness of a prizefighter getting ready to enter the ring in Madison Square Garden. “No, Senator,” Powers replied, with his exquisite sense of what to say to the man he served with such perfect fidelity. “It’s more like the opening-day pitcher in the World Series—because you have to win four of these.”
At the studio, Jack waited with a small group that included Bobby and Bill Wilson, his television adviser. Wilson had observed the contrast between Jack’s elegant demeanor and Nixon’s stolid frame. Citing the historic Lincoln-Douglas debate, Wilson had convinced the Nixon people that the candidates should stand behind small lecterns that would expose much of their bodies.
As the final minutes approached, the candidate turned to Wilson. “I got to take a leak,” Jack said.
“It’s two minutes before air,” Wilson replied, looking at his watch.
“I got to take a leak.” The two men hurried to the men’s room.
“Kick him in the balls,” Bobby said, when Jack returned. Then Kennedy strode into the studio to face Nixon, sitting there already under the hot lights.
Jack won the right to give his opening remarks before Nixon, only the first of his many victories that evening. As Jack sat there so still, so certain, so straight, Nixon began sweating under the hot lights, first imperceptibly, then looking as if he had stumbled fully clothed into a sauna.
There was something dreadfully unfair in the visual contrast between the two candidates. But it was hardly Jack’s fault that in late August Nixon had hit his kneecap on a car door in Greensboro, North Carolina, and had ended up spending twelve days at Walter Reed Hospital. And now, earlier in the day, Nixon had bumped his troubled knee on a car door on his way into CBS station WBBM and almost passed out from the pain. He then had his face doused in a pancake makeup called “Lazy Shave,” which was inadequate to hide his stubble or mask his sweat.
Nixon should have been able to hold the rhetorical high ground using Eisenhower’s immense popularity as a shield against Jack’s attacks. It was Jack, however, who in his opening statement defined the evening, talking about the great Democratic tradition of Roosevelt and Wilson, making himself appear their logical heir. He took all the glorious truisms by which Americans lived and made them his own, locking them away from his perspiring opponent. He talked about the role of foreign affairs in American life, though that was not supposed to have been broached at all this evening. “In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery.”
Nixon began with the excruciating necessity of agreeing with almost everything Jack had said. “The things that Senator Kennedy has said many of us can agree with,” Nixon said, reverting to a schoolboy debating technique. “And I subscribe completely to the spirit that Senator Kennedy has expressed tonight, the spirit that the United States should move ahead.”
While Jack referred to the vice president as “Mr. Nixon,” his opponent called Jack “Senator Kennedy.” The two candidates stood close together on many of the major issues of the day. They spent most of the hour debating nuances. Jack talked not about changing the direction of America but simply getting the country moving on or moving ahead, tacitly admitting that he agreed with the basic thrust of the past eight years. “This is a great country, but I think it could be a greater country,” he said, “and this is a powerful country, but I think it could be a more powerful country.”
Television and radio stations across America carried the debate, and the largest political audience in history, seventy million Americans, heard the two
men discuss serious, even esoteric issues in a responsible, reflective way. When the hour was over, both sides could reasonably declare a victory. But the fact that Jack still stood in the ring after debating Nixon had elevated the Democratic contender to a new position, proving that he was a challenger who deserved to be in the same heavyweight class as the vice president.
A poll taken the next day showed that television viewers by a slight majority felt that Jack was the winner, while radio listeners overwhelmingly declared Nixon the victor. This was not because Jack was a synthetic creature of a new media age. He had matched Nixon idea for idea and complexity for complexity. On radio, however, Jack at times sounded strident and overwrought, while on television his words wedded to his cool presence took on a different meaning. Those exposed to the debate only by reading the transcript would have had a third verdict, that the debate was a dead heat. These were all truths, but the television sets that in 1960 were already in 87 percent of American homes were the dominant medium of the new age, and from then on a president who had not mastered TV would find it difficult to effectively lead the nation.
Jack was still a person in creation, constantly tinkering with his public persona. He watched his appearance on television as if he were looking at a
nother person. “‘Party,’ not ‘pawty,’” he said one evening, watching his image on the black-and-white screen, like a speech teacher admonishing his pupil.
The following three debates for the most part only solidified the verdict of the first. Just before the second debate, J. Leonard Reinsch, Jack’s media adviser, realized that Nixon’s people had turned the thermostat down to a chilling sixty-five degrees at the NBC studios in Washington, D.C., hoping that a cool room would stem Nixon’s embarrassing propensity to perspire. Reinsch hurried through the studio until he found a janitor who, after ample browbeating, turned the hidden thermostat up as high as it could go.
Jack had a subtle, sophisticated understanding of America’s role in the world, but he was elected by people who largely did not have his knowledge or insight and did not necessarily share his views. There had always been a gap between his truths and the realities and limitations of practical politics. In the Senate when he was speaking on Algeria or Vietnam or working on a labor bill that would be fair to both unions and management, he had attempted to bridge that gap. He knew that what he considered political courage was largely the act of making that leap knowing that one might fall into the chasm of defeat. It was a leap that he was not willing to attempt during the campaign; he preferred standing rooted in the firm and narrow grounds of seemingly practical politics.
In the third debate Jack said that the profoundly anti-Communist Nixon had “never really protested the Communists seizing Cuba, ninety miles off the coast of the United States.” He continued that same assault in the fourth and final debate, blaming the Eisenhower-Nixon administration for losing Cuba to communism.
The Kennedy Men Page 63
