An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (48 page)

Rumors about Kennedy’s philandering were so common that Henry Van Dusen of the Union Theological Seminary in New York asked Adlai Stevenson “to sit down with . . . some . . . friends who would like to silence the stories about Senator Kennedy.” But Stevenson, who knew “nothing himself first hand,” was unwilling to give credence to the gossip. He believed that Kennedy “may have been overactive in that direction prior to 1955,” when acute back problems had put his survival in doubt. But after a series of operations gave him “a normal expectancy he seems to have settled down to preparing himself for his ambition—the Presidency.” Stevenson found confirmation for this conclusion in the fact that “most of the stories about his private life seem to date from 1955 and before. My view, therefore, is that such rumors are out of date and largely unsubstantiated. And I must add even if they were true they would hardly seem to be crucial when the alternative is Nixon! Having been the victim of ugly rumors myself, I find this whole business distasteful in the extreme!”

Stevenson was not the only one who saw public discussion of an elected official’s sex life as out of bounds. William Randolph Hearst, the great press baron who was “a pioneer of slash-and-burn assaults on public figures,” drew the line at probing into private lives, and Hearst—vulnerable himself to charges of being a libertine—was quite representative of media mores in the 1950s and early 1960s. Humphrey, Johnson, Nixon, and even Jimmy Hoffa, who despised the Kennedys and would have done almost anything to beat Jack, said many unflattering things about him, but, in a universe of harsh assaults on political enemies, discussions of sexual escapades crossed the line. The thirty-five reporters mentioned in the FBI memo, for example, never used the information in a story. It may be that they could not find sufficient confirmation of the rumors. Or, in Nixon’s case, like Hearst, he may have feared attacks on himself as a hypocrite. Congressman Richard Bolling had heard stories about Nixon’s having a girlfriend, and Bolling learned that Joe Kennedy was ready to unleash an airing of such if Nixon made an issue of Jack’s philandering. But the standards of the time made such a tit for tat almost impossible to imagine, and Jack did not worry that his womanizing would play any significant part in the campaign, unlike attacks on his religion and youth.

Religion remained an obstacle. On September 7, the
New York Times
carried a front-page article about the ironically named National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, an organization of 150 Protestant ministers led by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale; they said that the Roman Catholic Church, with its dual role as both a church and a temporal state, made Kennedy’s faith a legitimate issue in the campaign. Like Khrushchev, one member declared, Kennedy was “a captive of a system.” Although the clergymen were all conservative Republicans eager for Nixon’s election (and were guilty of transparent hypocrisy in doing what they said Kennedy’s church would do—interfere in secular politics), their political machinations did not cancel out the effects of their warnings.

Estimates suggested that unless this propaganda was countered and the anti-Catholic bias overcome, Kennedy’s religion might cost him as many as 1.5 million votes. The Kennedy campaign quickly organized a Community Relations division to meet the religious problem head-on. James Wine, a staff member at the National Council of Churches, headed the operation. Wine was as busy as any member of Jack’s campaign team, answering between six hundred and a thousand letters a week and urging lay and clerical Protestants to combat the explicit and implicit anti-Catholicism in so much of the anti-Kennedy rhetoric.

A highly effective and much publicized appearance Kennedy made before a group of Protestant ministers in Houston, Texas, on September 12 helped. Bobby, Jack’s campaign staff, Johnson, and Rayburn all advised against the appearance. “They’re mostly Republicans and they’re out to get you,” Rayburn told Kennedy. But Kennedy believed he had to confront the issue sometime, and he wanted to do it early in the campaign so that he could move on to more constructive matters. “I’m getting tired of these people who think I want to replace the gold at Fort Knox with a supply of holy water,” he told O’Donnell and Powers. In fact, his knowledge of Church doctrine and ties to the Church were so limited that he brought in John Cogley, a Catholic scholar, to coach him in preparation for his appearance.

Although he saw his speech and response to audience questions, which were to follow his remarks, as a crucial moment in the campaign, Kennedy went before the audience of three hundred in Houston’s Rice Hotel Crystal ballroom (and the millions of television viewers around the country) with no hesitation or obvious sign of nervousness. The sincerity of what he had to say armed him against his adversaries and conveyed a degree of inner surety that converted a few opponents and persuaded some undecided voters that he had the maturity and balance to become a fine president.

He began his speech by emphasizing that although the religious question was the one before them tonight, he saw “far more critical issues in the 1960 election . . . for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barrier.” But his religion was the immediate concern, and he stated his views and intentions without equivocation. He declared his belief in “an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. . . . I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed on him by the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office. . . . I am not the Catholic candidate for President,” he declared. “I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters—and the church does not speak for me. . . . If the time should ever come . . . when my office would require me to either violate my conscience, or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office, and I would hope that any other conscientious public servant would do likewise.” He ended with a plea for religious tolerance that would serve the national well-being. “If this election is decided on the basis that 40,000,000 Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our people.”

Although some of the questions that followed showed an indifference to his pledges, he responded with such poise and restraint that the ministers stood and applauded at the close of the meeting, and some came forward to shake his hand and wish him well in the campaign. Rayburn, who watched the speech on television, shouted, “By God, look at him—and listen to him! He’s eating them blood raw. This young feller will be a great President!”

THE HOUSTON APPEARANCE
temporarily muted the religious issue and allowed Kennedy to concentrate on convincing voters that he was not too young or inexperienced to be president. The surest way to counter these assertions was to compete directly with Nixon in a debate. Eisenhower advised Nixon against accepting the unprecedented challenge of a televised confrontation: He was much better known than Kennedy, had eight years of executive experience as vice president, and had established himself as an effective spokesman and defender of the national interest by standing up to a stone-throwing mob in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1958 and to Khrushchev in the Moscow “kitchen debate” in 1959. But Nixon relished confrontations with adversaries and, remembering his successful appearance before the TV cameras in the 1952 campaign (his Checkers speech—a response to allegations of accepting illegal gifts—was the most successful use of television by an American politician to that date), he agreed to four debates. He also believed that saying no to a debate could cost him politically in the new TV age.

Kennedy was as confident, especially after his Houston appearance, that he could establish himself as more worthy of the White House by besting or even just holding his own against Nixon before the press and millions of TV viewers. Either outcome would refute assertions about his being too immature to merit election.

Consequently, on the evening of September 26, in Chicago’s CBS studio, the two candidates joined Howard K. Smith, the moderator, and a four-member panel of television reporters to discuss campaign issues before some seventy million Americans, nearly two thirds of the country’s adult population. Kennedy had spent most of the day preparing responses to possible questions. As campaign historian Theodore White described him, Kennedy lay on his bed in the Ambassador East Hotel dressed in a white, V-neck T-shirt and khaki pants and holding a pack of “fact cards” prepared by aides; he reviewed a variety of topics, tossing each card onto the floor as he finished a subject. Suggestions from his speechwriters for an eight-minute opening statement did not satisfy him, and he dictated his own version to a secretary.

Although he and Nixon spent a great part of the contest arguing over specific issues, Kennedy gained an early advantage by addressing his opening statement directly to the American people. He did the same in his closing statement. By contrast, Nixon used his introduction and summary to draw contrasts between himself and Kennedy. The difference was telling: Kennedy came across as a leader who intended to deal with the nation’s greatest problems; Nixon registered on voters as someone trying to gain an advantage over an adversary. Nixon’s language was restrained, but in comparison to Kennedy he came off as unstatesmanlike, confirming the negative impression many had of him from earlier House, Senate, and vice presidential campaigns. Henry Cabot Lodge, his running mate, who had urged Nixon not to be abrasive, said as the debate ended, “That son of a bitch just lost the election.”

Kennedy, as was universally agreed, also got the better of Nixon because he looked more relaxed, more in command of himself, or, as Theodore White wrote, “calm and nerveless. . . . The Vice-President, by contrast, was tense, almost frightened, at turns glowering and, occasionally, haggard-looking to the point of sickness.” The camera showed Nixon “half slouched, his ‘Lazy Shave’ powder faintly streaked with sweat, his eyes exaggerated hollows of blackness, his jaws, jowls, and face drooping with strain.” (“My God!” Mayor Daley said, “They’ve embalmed him before he even died.”) In addition, against the light gray stage backdrop, Nixon, dressed in a light gray suit, “faded into a fuzzed outline, while Kennedy in his dark suit had the crisp picture edge of contrast.” Not yet fully recovered from a recent hospitalization to care for an infected knee injured in an accident, and exhausted by intense campaigning, Nixon appeared scrawny and listless. Ironically, Kennedy, whose medical problems greatly exceeded anything Nixon had, appeared to be the picture of robust good health.* Kennedy further seized the advantage during the debate when he looked bored or amused as Nixon spoke, as if he were thinking, “How silly.”

At the end of the debate, as they stood on stage exchanging pleasantries, Nixon, watching photographers out of the corner of his eye, “put a stern expression on his face and started jabbing his finger into my chest, so he would look as if he were laying down the law to me about foreign policy or Communism,” Kennedy said. Again, the image was not one of command but of a schoolyard bully.

ALTHOUGH POLLS
and larger, more enthusiastic crowds encouragedthe belief that Kennedy had won the first debate, he knew it would be folly to take a lead for granted. And by contrast with TV viewers, the radio audience thought that Nixon had defeated Kennedy, demonstrating how important the contrasting visual images were before the cameras. Kennedy saw the race as still too close to call, and as likely to turn on voter feelings about past and current Republican failings. Attacks on the GOP, however, needed to exclude mention of Eisenhower, who remained popular. Journalist John Bartlow Martin, who had written speeches for Stevenson and was now doing the same for Kennedy, urged Jack to answer complaints that improper makeup had hurt Nixon in the debate by saying, “No matter how many makeup experts they bring into the television studio, it’s still the same old Richard Nixon and it’s still the same old Republican party.” The way to capture “the large body of independents,” a document on “Campaign Reflections” stated, was by highlighting “the
demerits of Mr. Nixon
.” The staff put together “a nearly exhaustive volume of Nixon quotes” containing “an up-to-date analysis of contradictions and inconsistencies in Nixon statements over the years.” Kennedy portrayed Nixon as a conventional reactionary. “I stand today where Woodrow Wilson stood, and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman stood,” Jack said. “Dick Nixon stands where McKinley stood, where Harding and Coolidge and Landon stood, where Dewey stood. Where do they get those candidates?”

Eisenhower helped. Ike had long been sensitive to suggestions that he had “reigned rather than ruled,” and he personally resented suggestions by Nixon that the vice president had been running the government. When a journalist asked the president to name a single major idea of the vice president’s that he had adopted, he replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.”

Yet however assailable Nixon was as a contradictory figure and an abrasive personality—Ike’s secretary described him as someone who was “acting like a nice man rather than being one”—it was his identification with recent economic and foreign policy stumbles that made him most vulnerable to defeat. And those were the issues, under the heading “Let’s Get the Country Moving Again,” on which Kennedy criticized him most effectively in the last weeks of the campaign.

Although Kennedy had no well-developed economic program to put before voters, he was able to point to a number of problems that had bedeviled Eisenhower and Nixon. Between 1953 and 1959, economic growth had averaged only 2.4 percent a year, compared with 5.8 percent since 1939 under the Democrats; the industrialized economies of Western Europe and Japan were expanding faster than America’s, while, according to CIA estimates, recent Soviet increases were more than 7 percent a year. The fifties had also seen two recessions, joblessness and underemployment at 7 percent, rising inflation, and a gold drain produced by an unfavorable balance of payments. Another economic downturn beginning in April 1960 and lasting through the campaign gave resonance to Kennedy’s complaints. When Nixon asserted that unemployment would not be a significant issue unless it exceeded 4.5 million, Kennedy replied, “I . . . think it would become a significant issue to the 4,499,000 . . . unemployed.”