Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

  But he could have done more than he did. On October 31, Nixon was invited to lunch with the president and his speech-writers. Despite at last having his boss on his side and willing to help, Nixon was behaving a bit oddly. When Eisenhower described enthusiastically his plans for expanding his campaign schedule on behalf of his vice president, the candidate seemed reluctant to share Ike’s ready-for-battle fervor. Infuriated, the president lashed out. “Goddammit, he looks like a loser. When I had an officer like that in World War II”—he demonstrate by hunching his shoulders and bending his head down—“I relieved him.” Only years later did Nixon reveal the serious warning he had received at the time, first from a concerned Mamie Eisenhower and then seconded by the president’s physician, that too vigorous a campaign effort would threaten Ike’s weakened heart.

  Another explanation for his unwillingness to send the general into action may have been that Nixon was again taken in by Kennedy’s taunts. Just as his rival’s refusal of makeup in the first debate had prodded him to do the same, he was now determined again to prove himself the better man, foolishly forfeiting his own greatest advantage. According to Pat Hillings, “he had stood in Ike’s shadow for eight years and suffered a lot of humiliation. Now he wanted to win on his own.”

  Had Nixon been able to judge his situation with clearer eyes, he would have seen Ike as the deal maker between him and the hundreds of thousands of voters who remained uncommitted as the election approached. Abdicating his position as Ike’s partisan successor was like Jack Kennedy deciding to reject some of his father’s money or to minimize his telegenic appearance in order to prove himself the better man. The final Gallup poll, taken October 30 through November 1, showed Nixon with 48 percent and Kennedy with 49 percent. The Republican candidate was taking a needless gamble in rejecting the 100 percent help of the man who, despite having treated him so roughly during the Checkers and “dump Nixon” episodes, was now squarely on his side.

  * * *

  ENTERING the campaign as he did at the most critical moment, like a blue-coated cavalry charge from the hills, Ike was nevertheless an awesome presence. “Now I’ve heard complaints about the country not moving,” the president said, mocking Kennedy’s favorite mantra to a Westchester, New York, airport crowd. “Of course you can move easily. You can move back to inflation. You can move back to deficit spending. You can move back to the military weakness that allowed the Korean War to occur. No trouble at all.” Ike’s impact on the enemy was immediate. “Unlike a lot of Republicans,” Ken O’Donnell noted later, “Kennedy felt that Nixon was right in keeping Eisenhower out of the campaign as long as possible. If Nixon had brought Eisenhower into the campaign earlier, Kennedy would have charged him with hiding behind Ike’s favorable image and being unable to stand on his own record and merits.”

  To counter the impact of the five-star general’s emergence, Kennedy’s team settled on a delicate strategy. They decided to treat Ike with all proper respect, at the same time ridiculing Nixon for being so desperate as to resort to Ike’s intervention on behalf of his sputtering candidacy. “I don’t care how many rescue squads they send,” the Democratic candidate scoffed. “You’ve seen those elephants in the circus. They have a long memory but no vision. When they move around the ring, they have to grab the tail of the elephant in front of them so they’ll know where to go. Dick grabbed the tail of the elephant ahead of him in 1952 and 1956, but now, in 1960, he’s the one who is supposed to be running, not President Eisenhower.”

  But if the pro-JFK crowds lining his own parade routes and the local politicians cheering his every cliché believed this bravado, the candidate himself knew better. Jack Kennedy could feel the old general’s popularity working its magic. “Last week Dick Nixon hit the panic button and started Ike,” Kennedy told San Francisco pal Red Fay as the candidate soaked in his Palace Hotel bathtub. “With every word he utters, I can feel the votes leaving me. It’s like standing on a mound of sand with the tide running out. If the election were held tomorrow, I’d win easily, but six days from now, it’s up for grabs.”

  Eisenhower’s speeches were breathtakingly direct, tearing into the Kennedy complaints about Castro and allusions to a missile gap. “A nation needs leaders who have been immersed in the hard facts of public affairs in a great variety of situations, men of character who are able to take the long-range view and hold long-range goals, leaders who do not mistake minor setbacks for major disasters,” he said to cheering applause, “and we need leaders who by their own records have demonstrated a capacity to get on with the job. This is why I am so wholeheartedly in back of Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge.”

  Ike’s economic policy was not so helpful. While his late entry into the campaign counted as a definite plus, his tight-fisted fiscal policy was a clear minus. From 5.9 percent in August, the nation’s jobless rate rose to 6.4 percent in October, its highest since the previous recession. Between the conventions and election day, 330,000 people were thrown out of work. Not many of those hundreds of thousands of pink-slipped workers were in a mood to cheer Republican “peace and prosperity.”

  Despite the huge presence of Eisenhower in the campaign’s closing week, Kennedy morale stayed high. No longer the newly minted nominee of the late summer, the maturing, more seasoned JFK was suddenly statesmanlike, explaining to audiences how it was the “president’s responsibility to set before the American people the unfinished business of our society, to rally them to a great cause.” Even when things went wrong on the campaign trail, Kennedy kept on enjoying himself. When a microphone went dead at a Los Angeles stop, he didn’t miss a beat. “That never happens in the vice president’s campaign. I understand everything’s in perfect order all the time,” he told the laughing crowd. “They don’t get the votes, but it’s well organized.” When an electrician arrived and began fumbling with the microphone, Kennedy joked that the man was actually the local Republican congressman. “You all know Pat Hillings, don’t you?” he said to loud applause.

  With the end near, Kennedy openly flaunted his contempt for the other side. “I stand tonight where Woodrow Wilson stood and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman stood,” he proclaimed in Buffalo. “Dick Nixon stands where McKinley stood, where Harding and Coolidge and Landon stood, where Dewey stood. Where do they get these candidates?” The Nixon people wanted the press to focus on the far sexier topic of Jack Kennedy’s private life, Pat Nixon was especially frustrated by what seemed a media conspiracy to package their opponent as a devoted husband. She had not counted on this wall of protection around her husband’s rival. “I knew Kennedy too well to think that the country would elect him.”

  Just as Kennedy had now turned his politics of contempt on Nixon, Nixon now targeted his politics of resentment on Kennedy. “You know, it’s not Jack’s money they’re going to be spending!” It was a shot Kennedy would never forget. His references to his rival became withering. “The first living creatures to orbit the earth in space and return were dogs named Strelka and Belka, not Rover or Fido—or Checkers.” Backing up his charge that Dick Nixon, his rival, had been standing still, Kennedy offered himself as an on-the-spot eyewitness. “I know because I’ve been there with him for the past fourteen years.”

  It grew hotter still. To a Nixon accusation that he was a “barefaced liar,” Kennedy retorted: “Having seen him in close-up—and makeup—for our television debates, I would never accuse Mr. Nixon of being barefaced.” Away from the microphones and reporters’ notebooks, he could be nastier still. “He’s a filthy, lying son of a bitch and a very dangerous man,” Richard Goodwin heard him say once. Enraged at his rival’s charge that he was out to “wreck” Social Security, Nixon could only fume: “Now the first time you say something wrong like that, it’s a mistake. The second time you say it, it’s a bad mistake. The third time you say it when you know it’s wrong, it’s a falsehood or lie, and that’s what I call it tonight.”

  Kennedy’s attacks on Nixon’s character were now underscored by a timely bit o
f muckraking. Two weeks before the election, columnist Drew Pearson, whom Nixon had saved from Joe McCarthy’s inebriated assault a decade earlier, reported that the vice president’s brother, Donald, had borrowed $205,000 from billionaire Howard Hughes a few years earlier. Technically lent to Nixon’s mother, the money was to finance an expansion of his parents’ old grocery store in Whittier. Capitalizing on the family name, Donald Nixon had added, among other touches, a drive-in restaurant featuring “Nixonburgers.” Questions about the “Hughes loan,” so reminiscent of the 1952 “fund” episode, would haunt Nixon for the rest of his days.

  Kennedy, too, worried about dirt, waiting for Nixon’s people to hit him with a charge, perhaps even hard evidence, of what JFK privately called his “girling.” But they never did. Voters would never catch so much as a glimpse of that Jack Kennedy. One Nixon aide, watching a news film of Jack and Jackie in the final hours of the campaign, suddenly was struck by the power of the beautiful couple’s allure. Good God, he would recall thinking to himself, how do you run against that!

  For whatever reason, Nixon never once unleashed the kind of scorched-earth raid on the enemy that had made him such a ferocious campaigner in the past. After a weak attempt at getting Ike to force public revelation of his opponent’s Addison’s disease—presidential press secretary James Hagerty thought it indecent for Eisenhower to ask the candidates to do what he himself had done four years earlier, following Ike’s heart attack—Nixon backed off and let the matter rest. The man warned to avoid the “assassin image” never did get all that tough with Jack Kennedy.

  * * *

  ON election day, November 8, Nixon escaped the country, driving with an aide down to Mexico, where he and Pat had driven after that first great victory in 1946. Kennedy awaited the returns at his father’s house at Hyannis Port. Before dinner he placed a call to Chicago mayor Richard Daley. “Mr. President, with a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends,” Kennedy quoted Daley to Newsweek’s Ben Bradlee minutes later, “you’re going to carry Illinois.” The Democrat would carry the pivotal state by a scant 8,858 votes. “Later, when Nixon was being urged to contest the 1960 election,” wrote Bradlee, “I often wondered about that statement.” One Chicago voter totally in the dark about the mayor’s success was Ed Myles, whose ballot was cast in the Fourth Ward, Thirty-first Precinct. The late Mr. Myles was part of Richard Daley’s loyal “cemetery vote.”

  By 11:30 P.M. California time, the results were clear. At the Ambassador, the same Los Angeles hotel where he had prepared for the Checkers speech eight years earlier, Richard Nixon now told his two daughters, Tricia and Julie, he had lost. There remained only a remote chance of victory. He would need to carry his home state of California plus two of the three states—Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois—still undecided. “If the present trend continues,” Richard Nixon told the loyal crowd waiting in the hotel ballroom, his arm around Pat, who was holding back tears, “Senator Kennedy will be the next president of the United States.” As supporters shouted out that he not concede, Nixon doggedly kept on. “Certainly if the trend continues and he does become our next president, he will have my wholehearted support.”

  “Does this mean you’re president, Bunny?” Jackie Kennedy asked her husband back in the Hyannis Port compound.

  “Why don’t you give up?” someone else in the room exhorted the face on the television screen.

  “Why should he?” Kennedy jumped in. “I wouldn’t in his place.”

  * * *

  JOHN F. Kennedy had won the election with 303 votes in the Electoral College to Nixon’s 219. At forty-three, he was the youngest person ever elected president. Nixon’s press secretary, Herb Klein, read the concession statement: “I want to repeat through this wire the congratulations and best wishes I extended to you on television last night. I know that you will have the united support of all Americans as you lead the nation in the cause of peace and freedom during the next four years.”

  “Your sincere good wishes are gratefully accepted,” Kennedy wired back. “You are to be congratulated for a fine race. I know that the nation can continue to count on your unswerving loyalty in whatever new effort you undertake and that you and I can maintain our long-standing cordial relations in the years ahead.” The Kennedy telegram cloaked the winner’s contempt for his rival’s refusal to concede in the venue that had decided the election: television. “He went out the way he came in,” Kennedy remarked. “No class.”

  Adding to Kennedy’s anger was growing scuttlebutt of voter fraud in Illinois and elsewhere. Such talk could undermine the legitimacy of his election. What Kennedy now needed, as rumors spread of voting-booth shenanigans in Chicago and in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas, was certification of his mandate to lead the country. Only one man could give him that.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  If

  Kennedy

  34,226,731

  Nixon

  34,108,157

  RICHARD Nixon would spend the rest of his life examining the many factors that could have reversed the 1960 presidential election results. If Lyndon Johnson had not been on the Democratic ballot and his allies not in unchallenged control of the Texas election machinery, the state wouldn’t have given the Democratic ticket its 46,000 plurality. If the twenty-seven electoral votes of Illinois and the twenty-four of Texas had been switched from Kennedy’s column to Nixon’s, the final tally in the Electoral College would have been 270-252 for Nixon instead of 303-219 for Kennedy.

  Nor did Nixon’s people believe ballot theft was limited to those states. They had enough reports of “irregularities” elsewhere to challenge the outcome even without Texas. They figured a fair count in Arkansas, whose eight electoral votes Kennedy had won by 30,541 votes, or Missouri, whose thirteen electoral votes Kennedy got with less than 9,980 votes, or New Mexico, whose four electoral votes the Democrat had won with a skimpy 2,294 votes, could have combined with Illinois to give the Republicans an outright victory.

  There were still other possibilities. Had Nixon gotten Illinois, Arkansas, and New Mexico but not Missouri, Kennedy would have fallen short of the required 269 electoral votes; the election would then have to be decided by the House of Representatives. There, with each state delegation getting a single vote, Nixon’s victories in the majority of states might have proven decisive.

  Unfortunately, the Chicago ballots, on which all else depended, had been quickly destroyed. Texas presented a different problem, since its law had no provision for a recount. Still, if Nixon had chosen to fight, possibilities remained. “We had enough evidence. We had all kinds of affidavits. It did not all turn on Chicago,” campaign manager Bob Finch would argue. Texas, its government and election apparatus firmly in Democratic hands, remained the stumbling block. Moving the state legislature in Austin to review the balloting, investigate charges of fraud, and review the count would have required a heroic effort. It would have kept the American government and its Cold War leadership on hold for months. Nixon decided to accept the verdict as it was. Without success, he urged the Herald Tribune’s Earl Mazo to kill a series of stories on voting fraud in Chicago and Texas. The country, he said, could not afford to be without a leader.

  Richard Nixon’s sense of being robbed of a deserved victory, which never left him, would one day be joined by a colder, broader political assessment. The loser would come to believe that he had lost a game of political hardball at which his opponent had come better prepared to do precisely what was necessary for victory. The vote stealing evidenced in Chicago, Texas, and other Democratic strongholds was simply due to the other side’s tougher skills. His rival had simply been better at the game than he.

  I had been through some pretty tough campaigns in the past, but compared to the others, going into the 1960 campaign was like moving from the minor to the major leagues. I had an efficient, well-financed and highly motivated organization. But we faced an organization that had equal dedication and unlimited money, that was led by the most r
uthless group of political operatives ever mobilized for a presidential campaign. Kennedy’s organization approached dirty tricks with a roguish relish and carried them off with an insouciance that captivated many politicians and overcame the critical faculties of many reporters. The way the Kennedys played politics and the way the media let them get away with it left me angry and frustrated. From this point on, I had the wisdom and wariness of someone who had been burned by the power of the Kennedys and their money and by the license they were given by the media. I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them—or anyone—on the level of political tactics.

  * * *

  ON the Saturday after the election, the Kennedys were ensconced in Palm Beach, expecting Nixon to demand a recount. Even the vice president’s silence was a problem. There needed to be a formal, public validation of the country’s decision.

  Richard Nixon was in no condition for such rituals. Not yet. As he had after every election since 1950, when George Smathers first suggested the refuge, the exhausted vice president had flown to Key Biscayne for rest and emotional refueling. Never had he needed them more. In the same hours that Jack Kennedy puzzled at the narrowness of his victory, Nixon felt the knife-edge of defeat. Herb Klein recalls both the heavy mood that Saturday and the fascinating development that was to lift it.

  “Nixon was, in my opinion, more unresponsive than at any time I had known him. He was completely depressed and had finally realized, four days later, that he’d lost the election.” The Nixon party, which included the vice president, Pat, Bob Finch, Klein, their wives, Nixon pal Bebe Rebozo, and secretary Rose Mary Woods, had assembled for drinks at the Key Biscayne Hotel. When the group moved to the Jamaica Inn for dinner, the maitre d’ said there was a call for the vice president. As the defeated candidate moved with the others to their reserved table, Klein was delegated to take the call. He found Herbert Hoover on the line waiting to speak to Nixon. The former president had just gotten a call at his Waldorf Towers apartment from Joseph Kennedy, who had asked if he would see if Nixon would be willing to meet with the president-elect “about what to do with the country divided.” Once again, the senior Kennedy was enlisting his vast contacts into his son’s service. He had found the perfect conduit to the defeated Dick Nixon, a former president who had himself recovered from harsh electoral defeat.