Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Nursing his wounds, Nixon sought a weapon with which to make his fighting comeback. He found one in a current Cold War issue, counting on it to be the club with which he might beat his rival. Since the Communist takeover of China in 1949, the two offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu had been occupied by the forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s government on Formosa. The Chinese Communists had been shelling Quemoy and Matsu, demanding their evacuation. In an interview with NBC’s David Brinkley, Kennedy had questioned the U.S. policy of helping Chiang’s forces defend them, saying they weren’t essential to the defense of Formosa.

  If his opponent was willing to back down in the face of Communist aggression, as Nixon saw it, he was going to call him on it. How could any American leader allow the other side to annex even a small chunk of global territory and not see it as an invitation to further aggression? He was ready to attack.

  Nixon’s people, meanwhile, recognized they had other fronts to deal with as well. How their candidate looked mattered as much, obviously, as anything he said. This time Nixon was prepared to wear makeup. There’d be no macho hesitancy as before. He had his own dark suit to wear, and he’d been downing several milk shakes a day to give him the bulk he’d lost in those weeks in the hospital. But none of this would matter, his aides realized, if he showed the same sweaty look he had in that first, disastrous encounter with Kennedy in Chicago.

  On the evening of October 7, Bill Wilson arrived with the Kennedy brothers at NBC’s Washington bureau for the second debate. They walked into the studio to realize that someone had set the temperature practically to freezing. It felt like a meat locker. “What the hell is this?” Jack asked. After complaining loudly to no avail, Bobby darted in anger to the control room. Bill Wilson remembers racing down to the basement of the building, looking for the air-conditioning unit. “There was a guy standing there that Ted Rogers had put there, and he said don’t let anybody change this. I said, ‘Get out of my way or I’m going to call the police.’ He immediately left and I changed the air-conditioning back. Ted wanted to keep his job because of the fuck-up in the first debate.”

  That night, Nixon showed that he’d been preparing himself not simply to look better than in the first encounter with Kennedy but to fight better as well. There was no more of agreeing in principle. He knew he needed to draw a line. “I should point out here that Senator Kennedy has attacked our foreign policy. He said that it’s a policy that has led to defeat and retreat, and I’d like to know, where have we been defeated and where have we retreated? In the Truman administration, six hundred million people went behind the Iron Curtain, including the satellite countries of Eastern Europe and Communist China. In this administration we’ve stopped them at Quemoy and Matsu. We’ve stopped them in Indochina. We’ve stopped them in Lebanon. We’ve stopped them in other parts of the world.”

  Nixon’s reference to Quemoy and Matsu was impossible to ignore. Kennedy’s response was tortured. “We have never said flatly that we will defend Quemoy and Matsu if it’s attacked. We say we will defend it if it’s a part of a general attack on Formosa, but it’s extremely difficult to make that judgment.” Then he started to backpedal. “I would not suggest the withdrawal at the point of the Communist gun; it is a decision finally that the Nationalists should make, and I believe that we should consult with them and attempt to work out a plan by which the line is drawn at the island of Formosa.”

  Kennedy was now in Nixon’s Cold Warrior target zone. Fighting Communism, Nixon charged, wasn’t about being wishy-washy. “The question is not these two little pieces of real estate—they are unimportant. It isn’t the few people who live on them—they are not too important. It’s the principle involved. These two islands are in the area of freedom. We should not force our Nationalist allies to get off them and give them to the Communists. If we do that, we start a chain reaction. In my opinion, this is the same kind of woolly thinking that led to disaster for America in Korea. I am against it. I would not tolerate it as president of the United States, and I will hope that Senator Kennedy will change his mind if he should be elected.”

  For the first time, Nixon had scored a hit. He’d wounded Kennedy where the Democratic candidate himself knew his own party was vulnerable. The point of contention, after all, was one at which Kennedy himself had taken aim back in the “Who lost China?” period. He knew firsthand the potential firepower of the issue: if the Democrats found themselves positioned again as the party of “appeasement” in Asia, they were finished. In the days ahead, Nixon continued to hit Kennedy for a craven willingness to cede territory to the enemy. “I think it is shocking for a candidate for the presidency of the United States,” he said in speech after speech, “to say that he is willing to hand over a part of the Free World to the Communist world.”

  However, what Nixon portrayed as strength, Kennedy saw as brinkmanship. Why would we risk war with the Chinese Communists over such a slight point as this? It made no sense. What it seemed to be about was Nixon wanting to fight the Communists on their own terrain and at significant peril of it going global. “Mr. Nixon is not interested in policies of caution in world affairs,” he told a partisan audience at the Waldorf-Astoria. “He boasts that he is a ‘risk-taker’ abroad and a conservative at home. But I am neither. And the American people had caught a sufficient glimpse of the kind of risks he would take when he said in 1954, ‘We must take the risk now of putting our boys in Indochina on the side of the French if needed to avoid further Communist expansion there.’ That is a foolhardy and reckless decision. How much wiser it would be to follow the president’s original recommendation—to persuade the Chinese Nationalists to evacuate all military personnel and any civilians who wish to go—now, when we would not be seeming to yield under Communist pressure, before real pressure is put on again.”

  There were now two hurdles facing Jack Kennedy as he headed into the third debate, on October 13. One was that he continued to be pegged as the squeamish candidate, ready to pull back from Quemoy and Matsu, while Nixon remained the vigilant champion, loudly prepared to hold the line. Helping to prepare him that day, Arthur Schlesinger observed his jitters. “I had the impression that he was a little nervous about the Q-M issue.”

  The other problem was the new debate format, which separated the candidates physically, the Democrat in a studio in New York and his Republican opponent 2,500 miles away in Los Angeles. With an entire country between them, Kennedy’s ability to intimidate his rival, so crucial a factor in their first encounter, would be gone.

  NBC’s Frank McGee posed the first question, asking Kennedy about his charge that Nixon was being “trigger-happy” in regard to Quemoy and Matsu. If that was so, would Kennedy be willing to take military action to defend Berlin? Ignoring the Asia reference, Kennedy limited his answer only to a commitment regarding Berlin. But when Nixon took his turn, he swiftly moved the issue back to the now notorious offshore Chinese islands. “As a matter of fact, the statement that Senator Kennedy made was, to the effect that there were trigger-happy Republicans, that my stand on Quemoy and Matsu was an indication of trigger-happy Republicans. I resent that comment.”

  On the attack now, Nixon challenged Kennedy to come up with the name of a Republican president who’d led the country into war. “I would remind Senator Kennedy of the past fifty years. I would ask him to name one Republican president who led this country into war. There were three Democratic presidents who led us into war.”

  Boldly, Nixon cited the pre–World War II legacy of Munich, comparing Kennedy’s position on Quemoy and Matsu to the appeasement policy toward Hitler’s Germany that his father had supported as ambassador to Britain. “This is the story of dealing with dictators. This is something that Senator Kennedy and all Americans must know. We tried this with Hitler. It didn’t work. He wanted, first, we know, Austria, and then he went on to the Sudetenland, and then Danzig, and each time it was that this is all he wanted.” Before a national television audience of millions, Richard Nixon was calling Jack an appeas
er. He was reminding him of his father’s disgrace.

  “Now what do the Chinese Communists want?” he asked, building dramatically to his climax. “They don’t want just Quemoy and Matsu. They don’t just want Formosa. They want the world.”

  With the third debate over, Kennedy took off for Michigan. He was scheduled to spend the night in Ann Arbor and then begin a whistle-stop train tour of the state the next day. Arriving late at the University of Michigan campus, he found nearly ten thousand students waiting for him. Speaking in front of the Michigan Union building, he suddenly, out of nowhere, made a proposition. “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians and engineers? How many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that—not merely to serve one year or two years in the service—but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether our society can compete.”

  The speech lasted barely three minutes. He told Dave Powers he’d “hit a winning number” with it. He’d said it all before, pretty much, in that 1951 appearance on Meet the Press after he’d come back from the Far East. He’d talked then about sending off smart and idealistic young Americans to represent their country around the world. This time, however, he was speaking as a candidate for president. This time he was talking about something he would create. He was talking about the Peace Corps.

  There on the steps of the Michigan Union, at two in the morning, he’d imagined out loud the genesis of a phenomenon that would change American lives. An idea that had not before existed in the minds of his countrymen now did: that of non-military service on foreign soil. Harris Wofford, a campaign aide and early civil rights activist, along with other Kennedy staffers, felt he’d been so angered by Nixon’s taunt about the Democratic habit of starting wars that he determined to push in a totally different direction. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Jack began to pair the call for nuclear disarmament that he’d been making with his vision of a “peace corps of talented young men and women, willing and able to serve their country.”

  As for Quemoy and Matsu, Kennedy wanted it dropped, and to this end, he sought out Secretary of State Christian Herter, a former Massachusetts governor, to help broker a deal. The idea was that he, the Democratic candidate, as a point of national solidarity, felt it unwise to give the impression America was divided on the China issue. Kennedy’s people told Herter their candidate was even prepared to change his position in order not to appear out of step with administration policy.

  Hearing this, Nixon, surprisingly, agreed to a moratorium on discussions of the disputed Chinese islands. Whatever the vice president’s posturing, as far as Kennedy himself was concerned, if there was ever to be a Cold War showdown, such an escalation made sense only when the value of the ground being fought over was indisputable.

  And he knew of a hot spot near home, approximately ninety miles off the southern tip of Florida. On the night before the second debate with Nixon, Jack gave a major speech in Cincinnati attacking what he called “the most glaring failure of American foreign policy today . . . a disaster that threatens the security of the whole Western Hemisphere . . . a Communist menace that has been permitted to arise under our very noses.” In short, he blamed the Republicans for losing Cuba, just as he and others had once blamed the Truman administration for the loss of China. He reminded his audience that two recent American ambassadors to Cuba—Arthur Gardner and Earl Smith—had warned about the danger of Fidel Castro and his brother Raul.

  Castro, he said, “with guidance, support, and arms from Moscow and Peiping, has made anti-Americanism a sign of loyalty and anti-Communism a punishable crime, confiscated over a billion dollars’ worth of American property, threatened the existence of our naval base at Guantánamo, and rattled Red rockets at the United States, which can hardly close its eyes to a potential enemy missile or submarine base only ninety miles from our shores.”

  He ended the speech by directly addressing the people of Cuba. “Be of stout heart. Be not dismayed. The road ahead will not be easy. The perils and hardships will be many. But here in America we pledge ourselves to raise high the light of freedom—until it burns brightly from the Arctic to Cape Horn—and one day that light will shine again.”

  Nixon felt the pressure. How could he be sounding alarms about Chinese islands and not defend one just a short boat ride away? He began to push the administration to take action against Castro. His greatest hope was that it would expedite the attack of armed anti-Castro Cubans on the island, a clandestine CIA-backed operation already under way for several months. But the most he could accomplish, to show his muscle, was the Eisenhower administration’s declaration of a trade embargo perfectly timed for the eve of the last debate.

  Quick to respond, Kennedy termed the embargo an “empty gesture . . . which will have so little impact on Castro as to be almost meaningless.” All it would do, he said, was speed up Cuban reliance on trade with the Communist countries. Without clearing it with Kennedy, speechwriter Richard Goodwin put out a statement raising the ante. “We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far, these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.”

  Kennedy was calling for an armed assault on Cuba by anti-Castro forces backed by the United States. It was an extraordinary proposal to make in the middle of a campaign, and it enraged Richard Nixon. That’s because he was aware of top secret American plans to do exactly what Kennedy was proposing. He suspected that Kennedy was as well. Dean Acheson, who’d served as Truman’s secretary of state, later warned that Kennedy had gone too far. “He was likely to get himself hooked into positions which would be difficult afterwards.”

  As he prepared to meet Kennedy for their fourth debate, Nixon continued fuming over that “fighters for freedom” statement. To follow such a recommendation, he declared disingenuously, would cause key Latin American countries to denounce not only the United States, but the U.N., too. What’s more, such aggression would serve as “an open invitation for Mr. Khrushchev to come in, to come into Latin America and to engage us in what would be a civil war and possibly even worse than that.”

  To find new ground during their last televised meeting, Kennedy zeroed in on another area of dissatisfaction with Republican governance. And that was Americans’ growing sense they were falling behind the Soviets in space and strategic weaponry. At the same time, the economy was slowing. From 5.9 percent in August, the nation’s jobless rate rose to 6.4 percent in October. Between the conventions and Election Day, 330,000 people were thrown out of work. Not many of those hundreds of thousands of workers could ignore that their pink slips had been handed to them while Ike sat in the Oval Office, with Dick Nixon as his second in command.

  On October 19, a group of African-Americans politely asked for service at the Magnolia Room in Rich’s, the grand Atlanta department store. The lunch counters at drugstores and other downtown businesses were strictly whites-only. Coretta King described how it was in those days: “There was hardly a place outside our own neighborhoods where a Negro could even get a soda except by going to the side door and having it handed out.” Among those arrested and charged with trespassing at Rich’s that great day was the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. While the other sit-in demonstrators soon were released, a judge denied King bail, sentencing the civil rights leader to six months at hard labor in Reidsville State Prison. The defendant, he said, had violated probation on an earlier charge of driving in Georgia with an Alabama license.

  Coretta, pregnant at the time, was naturally horrified—and very frightened—when she learned her husband had been roughly awakened at night, placed in handcuffs and leg chains, hurried into a car, and driven two hundred miles into rural Georgia. She shared her worry with a longtime friend, Harris Wofford. After discussing the situ
ation with his fellow Kennedy aide Louis Martin, Wofford persuaded Sargent Shriver to take the case for action to the candidate, seizing a moment when Ken O’Donnell and the other political aides were out of the room.

  “Why don’t you telephone Mrs. King and give her your sympathy,” Shriver suggested to Jack. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow no matter who’s elected, but they do want to know whether you care. If you telephone Mrs. King, they’ll know that you understand and will help. You will reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman who is afraid her husband will be killed.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Kennedy said. “Why not? Do you have her number? Get her on the phone.” Mrs. King would later recount to Wofford what Jack had said. “I want to express my concern about your husband. I know this must be very hard on you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call me.”

  Afterward, the press quickly learned from Mrs. King about John Kennedy’s having reached out to her. “It certainly made me feel good that he called me personally and let me know how he felt. I had the feeling that if he was that much concerned, he would do what he could so that Dr. King was let out of jail. I have heard nothing from the vice president or anyone on his staff. Mr. Nixon has been very quiet.”

  Beyond the hearing of any reporters, however, Kennedy worried out loud that even his little gesture had been too much. When asked about the call to Mrs. King, he appeared irritated at the leak. The campaign manager, Robert Kennedy, was downright furious. “Do you know that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon? Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us!” he scolded Wofford and Shriver.