Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Kennedy’s answer was that he had lacked the credentials to attend the dinner “as a spokesman for the Catholic church.” When pushed further on the question again, he’d finally had enough. “Is this the best that can be done after fourteen years? Is this the only incident that can be charged?” But in the end, he’d been respectful, made all his points, stood his ground, and came away looking like a winner.

  There are many ways of preparing for a life on the political stage. To the usual list—remembering the names of people you meet once, smiling at proven enemies—Jack Kennedy now added making noises like a seal. Given to bouts of self-improvement—his famous speed-reading is an example—he had been concerned about the timbre of his voice, how he sounded to listeners when he spoke in public. His performance at the Los Angeles convention had not been that strong and he knew it. The loud daily barking, then, was an exercise assigned to him by the vocal coach David McClosky, one that Jack chose to practice in the bathtub. Unexpectedly hearing him emit these very peculiar sounds caused even the most loyal of his aides to wonder if there wasn’t, perhaps, a new health problem.

  Jack’s ongoing transformation had other aspects, with one significant physical change being inadvertent, a side effect of the medication he was taking for his Addison’s. More than saving his life, the cortisone he’d been taking had transformed his face, fleshing out his features. Billy Sutton, who’d lived with him during those early years in Washington, would remark that he’d never looked better than he did in those months of running for president against Richard Nixon.

  But cosmetic advantages didn’t guarantee elections. True enough, Dick Nixon had looked old even when he was young—he was, in fact, just four years the senior of his Democratic rival—but he’d also spent two terms as vice president in the shadow of the prize they both were after. He was no one Jack could take for granted.

  Throughout that fall, Dave Powers, Kennedy’s campaign “body man,” used the specter of Nixon to motivate his boss each morning. He once told me that he’d walk into Jack’s room, in whatever town they happened to be in, pull open the curtains, and begin, tunelessly, to serenade the candidate: “I wonder where Dick Nixon is this time of day. I wonder how many factories he’s been to, how many events he’s had already.”

  The coming debates were, of course, of far greater importance than a typical day on the campaign trail, and Jack Kennedy knew it. Hadn’t Nixon won his original seat in Congress by stomping on a first-rate New Dealer, Jerry Voorhis? It had been a no-holds-barred assault when he’d run against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, defeating her in the even nastier 1950 Senate race, in which her lone success was in hanging on him a lasting nickname, “Tricky Dick.”

  But as much as Jack had to be wary of Nixon, there was also the fact that they’d be facing each other in front of a huge audience, bigger than any in history. That year, 1960, wasn’t the first one in which television coverage had to be taken into account by presidential campaigns. It was, however, the first one in which nearly every voter had a television.

  There were to be four debates, the first scheduled for September 26 in Chicago.

  “Kennedy took the thing much more seriously than Nixon,” recalled Don Hewitt, the CBS producer assigned to direct the candidates’ first encounter. The Democrat had asked Hewitt to meet with him a week early in a hangar at Chicago’s Midway Airport. “Where do I stand?” Jack kept asking, eager to get an idea of what the setup would be in the WBBM studio. On the afternoon of the debate, wearing a terry-cloth robe, Kennedy lay in bed in his hotel room, clutching a fistful of cards in his hand, each with a probable question and its staff-prepared answer. Drilling him was Ted Sorensen and his other legislative assistant, Mike Feldman. After each card had been dealt with, Kennedy would throw it on the floor. Additionally, there was the “Nixopedia,” which Feldman had prepared—in a binder like the once-invaluable “Lodge’s Dodges”—to track and detail Nixon’s positions.

  The pollster Lou Harris recalled Kennedy standing on his Ambassador East Hotel balcony with the sun on his face. “He was nervous, and would hit his fist. There he was, walking back and forth, hitting his fist.” To pass the time, Kennedy kept asking his pollster how he went about the business of calculating public opinion.

  Also there with Kennedy was a veteran of the new camera-driven politics. Bill Wilson had been a young television producer when hired by Adlai Stevenson’s campaign in 1956. His role was to help the TV-shy candidate perform as best he could in the new medium, since, for all his eloquence as a platform orator, Stevenson was a primitive as far as TV was concerned. When the set in his hotel room went on the blink, for example, he telephoned Wilson to come fix it. He saw no difference between a television advisor and a TV repairman. Nonetheless, Stevenson had kept Wilson through the primaries and into the general election, although never quite sure what the point was. Such basic resistance was not the case, though, with Wilson’s new employer, who understood very well the importance of the tiny screen that sat there in voters’ homes.

  As the two participants arrived at the studio, there was a moment of mutual appraisal that gave a harbinger of what was to come: Jack looked like a million bucks and Nixon knew it; Nixon looked terrible and Kennedy knew it. In the tapes from their prebroadcast rehearsal, you can see Nixon’s confidence shatter the instant Jack walked onto the set.

  “He and I were standing there talking when Jack Kennedy arrived,” Hewitt recalled. Tanned, tall, lean, in a dark, well-tailored suit, the Democratic candidate positively gleamed. Photographers, seizing their chance, abandoned Nixon and fluttered about their new prey like hornets. The senator bore no resemblance to the emaciated, jaundiced, wounded figure he’d been. “He looked like a young Adonis,” Hewitt said simply.

  Bill Wilson recalled his candidate’s strategy: “The design was that we attack Nixon and everything he was saying. He had to get the floor. He had to be the one that had the control and had the sense of command on the stage, which he did. I told him the things that counted in terms of his body language and when you look at the camera, you’re only talking to one person. When you’re doing a debate or sitting, you’re talking to one person and that’s the lens.”

  Once the two men were on the stage together, going through the rehearsal, the psychological battle was on. Asked to pose with his rival, Kennedy appeared barely to notice him. They could have been total strangers for all the interest Jack Kennedy showed in the colleague with whom he’d enjoyed cordial terms since 1947. Nixon, for his part, seemed intimidated. From the moment Kennedy strode in, hijacking the attention of the photographers, he was not the same man. Visibly deflated by his rival’s matinee-idol aura and seeming nervelessness, Nixon slouched in his chair, his head turned away, as if in retreat.

  Pierre Salinger recalled Nixon’s pale, unhealthy appearance. The vice president had injured his leg in August, with a subsequent knee infection forcing him off the campaign trail and into Walter Reed Hospital. He did not yet seem entirely recovered from the ordeal. “Nixon looked awful off camera. He really did. Kennedy went back to his dressing room and remarked how awful he looked.” It seemed to Salinger that Nixon’s ghastly appearance boosted Kennedy’s confidence. “I think he thought that Nixon was afraid.”

  “Do you want some makeup?” Hewitt asked Kennedy. Hearing the Democrat’s “no,” Richard Nixon also declined it, ignoring the fact that his opponent had just spent days campaigning in the California sun and that he, himself, hadn’t fully regained his health. Kennedy’s people were taking no chances. “I was in the greenroom,” recalled Wilson, “and they were playing with him, asking him all kinds of questions. Bobby was there. Anyway, I said okay, we’ve got to close it down, he needs about ten minutes before he goes on to get quiet and I’ve got to put some makeup on him.

  “Ted Rogers, who was Nixon’s guy, said, ‘When’s your guy going to get makeup on?’ And I said, ‘Well, after your guy’s going to get it.’ Rogers was wary. If the other guy didn’t ask for it, his guy w
asn’t going to. ‘Nixon’s not going to get his makeup,’ he said, ‘until John Kennedy does.’ And I said, ‘Well, it looks like it’s a Mexican standoff.’ “

  Both candidates now retired to their separate rooms. Wilson understood the dangers of going on without makeup, even for the already telegenic Kennedy. “So I went back and I said, ‘You know, we’ve got to do makeup. You’ve got a great tan; you look fine.’ But the lights in 1960 in studios were just broad and heavy, not like anything you see in studios today. They were just hot as hell. And if you put a little bit of makeup all over the face, it closed the pores. They wouldn’t sweat.”

  Finally, Wilson quietly ran out to get makeup, and when he returned, cleared the room of the others. “And the last thing Bob Kennedy said after I said everybody’s got to get out, was ‘Kick him in the balls, Jack.’ It was a beautiful moment, because that was the whole strategy.”

  The Kennedy guys had one more trick up their sleeve. Nixon was nervously waiting for the clock to tick down to the debate’s starting time. The countdown commenced over the loudspeaker. “Five minutes to airtime.” Nixon was staring at the studio door. Now there were only three minutes left. As Wilson described it, “Nixon was still watching the door, as tense a man as I had ever seen. By then, I was sure that no one had summoned Kennedy, and I was about to dash after him, when the door swung open. Kennedy walked in and took his place, barely glancing at Nixon. Kennedy had played the clock perfectly. He had thrown his opponent off stride. He’d set him up for the kill.”

  In fact, Nixon may have arrived already off his stride, for reasons other than his impaired health. His running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge—Jack’s old opponent, who should have known better—had warned him to try to “erase the assassin image.” In other words, Nixon was not to be his hardfisted self, but rather more of a gentleman, a Nixon who’d be unrecognizable, say, to those citizens of California who’d seen him in action against Voorhis and Helen Douglas. “Kick him in the balls” would have been more useful counsel to him as well.

  “The candidates need no introduction,” the moderator, Howard K. Smith, announced to 70 million watching Americans. Richard Nixon, for his part, looked ill at ease, unshaven, middle-aged. Jack Kennedy, by contrast, seemed poised, with his legs crossed and his hands folded on his lap. Nixon sat in his chair awkwardly, his legs side by side, his hands dangling from the chair arms. He was wearing a gray suit that didn’t flatter him in the harsh light, and soon he would be perspiring profusely.

  By agreement, the focus of this first encounter was domestic policy. Believing the size of the audiences would grow with each debate, the Nixon people had insisted on saving foreign policy until last. In his opening statement, Kennedy showed he was intent on playing the game strictly by his rules, but hardly by Nixon’s plan. “Mr. Smith, Mr. Nixon,” he began, slyly equating the status of a two-term vice president and a television newscaster. “In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the question is whether this nation could exist half slave and half free. In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half slave and 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.”

  Kennedy then pushed the detonator. “We discuss tonight domestic issues, but I would not want . . . any implication to be given that this does not involve directly our struggle with Mr. Khrushchev for survival.” What he was doing was introducing precisely the topic Nixon had thought was postponed.

  The United States needed to be strong economically, Kennedy declared, not just to maintain the American standard of living but because economic strength buttressed our fight against the Communists. “If we do well here, if we meet our obligations, if we are moving ahead, I think freedom will be secure around the world. If we fail, then freedom fails. Are we doing so much as we can do?” he asked an anxious country. “I do not think we’re doing enough.”

  Kennedy’s words struck home for his largest audience ever. In eight minutes he’d shown himself as infinitely more appealing than the fellow who’d been vice president of the United States for eight years. There wasn’t a word of his opening presentation anyone could have argued with, not a sentiment his fellow citizens couldn’t share. No, the country was not meeting its potential. No, we were not the same nation of doers who’d, heroically and with such sacrifice, ended World War II. Yes, we could do better. And, yes, with the right leadership, it was in our power to “get the country moving again.”

  After observing this tour de force, Nixon took his turn with the look of a man dragged from a five-dollar-a-night hotel room and thrust before the unforgiving glare of a police lineup, a man charged with a crime of which he knew, if not he himself, his political cohorts were guilty. Afraid to project the “assassin image,” he was stymied. “Mr. Smith, Senator Kennedy, there is no question but that we cannot discuss our internal affairs in the United States without recognizing that they have a tremendous bearing on our international position. There is no question that this nation cannot stand still, because we are in a deadly competition, a competition not only with the men in the Kremlin but the men in Peking.” Then, finally: “I subscribe completely to the spirit that Senator Kennedy has expressed tonight, the spirit that the United States should move ahead.”

  Incredibly, Nixon was agreeing with his challenger. Yes, domestic policies affect the country’s foreign situation. Yes, we cannot afford to “stand still.” Yes, Kennedy has the right “spirit” to lead. His only concern was that Kennedy’s statistics made the situation appear bleaker than it was.

  He gave a similar response on Kennedy’s call for medical care for the aged: “Here again may I indicate that Senator Kennedy and I are not in disagreement as to the aim. We both want to help old people.” Minutes later: “Let us understand throughout this campaign that his motives and mine are sincere.” And, after a small reminder that he knew “what it means to be poor,” he offered yet another genuflection to Kennedy’s goodwill. “I know Senator Kennedy feels as deeply about these problems as I do, but our disagreement is not about the goals for America but only about the means to reach those goals.”

  Only? The race for the presidency is “only” about “means”? With staggering humility, Nixon was telling the largest American political audience ever assembled that his rival was not only a man of unquestioned sincerity but one of unassailable motive. It was merely a matter of method that separated the two applicants for the world’s most towering position. To avoid coming off as his nastier self, Dick Nixon was presenting himself as Jack Kennedy’s admiring, if somewhat more prudent, older brother.

  Throughout, he kept his attention fixed exclusively on Kennedy. Just as he had at McKeesport, Pennsylvania, thirteen years earlier, Nixon was ignoring the audience. He seemed to crave his opponent’s approval, even to the point of rebuking his own administration. “Good as the record is,” he averred, “may I emphasize it isn’t enough. A record is never something to stand on. It’s something to build on.”

  As the sitting vice president of the United States dealt with each of his opponent’s points, he tried desperately to elevate himself to an Ike-like pedestal, one from which Kennedy was just as determined to knock him. Asked about Nixon’s campaign charges that he was “naïve and sometimes immature,” Kennedy explained how the two men had come to Congress together in 1946 and how both served on the Education and Labor Committee. “I’ve been there now for fourteen years, the same period of time that he has, so our experience in government is comparable.” He went on to quote the unassailably noble and beloved sixteenth president: “Abraham Lincoln came to the presidency in 1860 after a rather little-known session in the House of Representatives and after being defeated for the Senate . . . and was a distinguished president. There is no certain road to the presidency. There are no guarantees that if you take one road or another that you will be a successful president.”

  But more than eith
er contestant’s words, it was their images, projected on millions of black-and-white Admiral and General Electric televisions, that affected the American judgment. Each time Kennedy spoke, Nixon’s eyes darted toward him uneasily, the same look that Kennedy’s aide Ted Reardon had spotted more than a decade before at a House committee meeting. When Nixon was on, Kennedy sat, sometimes professorially taking notes, at other moments wearing a sardonic expression as he concentrated on his rival’s answers. Sargent Shriver later noted that it was his brother-in-law’s facial language, more than anything he said, that in the end decided the results. By raising an eyebrow at Nixon, Jack had shown he had the confidence to lead the country.

  In the hours that followed, the challenger was convinced he had won. “Right after the debate, he called me up at the hotel,” Lou Harris recalled. “ ‘I know I can take ’im. I know I can take ’im!’ “ Kennedy had exulted. He was not alone in the assessment. A despondent Henry Cabot Lodge, who had given Nixon the misguided advice to go easy on his rival, watched the last minutes of the debate with dismay. “That son of a bitch just lost the election.” On the other side of the case, those hearing the debate on radio—a much smaller audience—were more favorable to the Republican. Lyndon Johnson, listening in his car, was one of them. He thought Nixon was the winner.

  But it was a debacle for the vice president. After weeks of parity in the polls, one candidate now moved into a clear lead. A Gallup survey taken in the days following the first debate found Nixon with 46 percent approval and Kennedy pulling ahead to 49 percent. Who had “won” the debate? Forty-three percent said Kennedy; 29 percent called it even. Just 23 percent gave it to Nixon. Kennedy’s captivating but also commanding performance in the first debate now made him the country’s number one box office attraction.