Being Nixon: A Man Divided (14 page)

The so-called Kitchen Debate, widely reported back home, proved a turning point for Nixon. He emerged to many Americans as a stand-up statesman who could handle the Russians.
Time
magazine, the flagship of the Luce Empire, put Nixon on the cover, with the Kremlin towers in the background. Widely distributed photos showed Nixon poking Khrushchev in the chest. Nixon even received grudgingly respectful notices from James Reston, the
New York Times
columnist who functioned as a kind of Voice of the Establishment and who had been scratchy, if not caustic, in his earlier commentary on Nixon.
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The 1960 election was coming.

F
rom their first debate, as freshmen congressmen attending a field hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1947, Nixon and Kennedy seemed bound together in a drama of personal and national destiny. They recognized in each other shyness and profound ambition, a kinship of generational politics, a fascination with America’s global role. They might have remained friendly, if not quite friends, had not fate—and its human instruments, jealousy and pride—pitted them against each other.

One afternoon in the winter of 1950, when Nixon was working in his congressional office on Capitol Hill, preparing for his race for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas, his secretary let him know that that he had a visitor. It was the congressman down the hall, Jack Kennedy. Young Kennedy pulled an envelope out of his breast pocket and handed it to Nixon. “Dick, I know you’re in for a pretty rough campaign,” said Kennedy, “and my father wanted to help out.” Inside the envelope was a check for $1,000 (almost $10,000 in 2015 dollars). Nixon might have seen this offering from the multi-millionaire patriarch as mildly condescending, but he needed the cash, and he was grateful.
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The two saw each other fairly often during their years on the Hill. As senators, their offices were across the hall from each other. In 1953, Kennedy invited Nixon (along with hundreds of political figures)
to his wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier; Nixon had to decline in order to play golf with his boss, President Eisenhower.
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In 1954, when Kennedy was gravely ill after near-fatal back surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Nixon went to see him and emerged in tears, according to his Secret Service escort Rex Scouten. “Oh God, don’t let him die,” Nixon choked. Nixon’s tearful prayer may seem extreme—the two men were not that close—but Kennedy seems to have touched some chord of fellow-feeling in Nixon.
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Dick and Jack.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

In 1960, a month before the Democratic Convention, Nixon ran into Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of the clan, outside the Colony Restaurant in New York City. After a warm handshake, Kennedy said to Nixon, “I just want you to know how much I admire you for what you’ve done in the Hiss case and in all the Communist activity of yours. If Jack doesn’t get it,” said father Joe, “I’ll be for you.” A few days later, Nixon had another chance encounter with Joe Senior, this time in the first-class cabin of a United Airlines flight from New York to Los Angeles. Accompanying the ambassador was a “real raving beauty” less than half his age, recalled Nixon. Kennedy introduced his companion as his “niece” and gave the nonplussed Nixon a wink.
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Decades later, recounting these stories in his 1983 interviews with Frank Gannon, Nixon seemed as much admiring as disapproving. He could scorn the Kennedy philandering and mock the Kennedy privilege, but he envied the Kennedy macho and charisma, and he admired the cold efficiency of the family political machine. “The Kennedys were effective. They got it done,” said Nixon. With mild disdain, Nixon described the Kennedy style: “suave, smooth, debonair, and that appealed, of course, to many in the media, who are more frankly suckers for style than the average people.” On the other hand, Nixon allowed, “People aren’t going to vote for the man next door. They want their leader to be somebody who is different, bigger than life, different from themselves. Not one that is like them.” Nixon knew that to many voters, he seemed “like them.” Jack Kennedy did not.
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The 1960 election
has been portrayed as the ultimate battle of the Franklins against the Orthogonians, the cool guy against the striver.
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But that image, while illuminating, does not fully capture the clash of societal forces, nor the outsize characters of their champions. JFK was not just any Franklin. He was certainly not smug or complacent. He may have been a spoiled rich boy, languid in his charms, but he was also a new-money scion whose father had felt so shunned by the Yankee aristocracy that he literally left town, moving his family from Brahmin Boston to the less class-ridden New York. “When will the nice people of Boston accept Catholics?” his beautiful Irish Catholic mother Rose had bitterly, beseechingly asked one of Jack’s posh Harvard friends.
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To many, the Kennedys represented an American dream of immigrant arrival, the wide-open, G.I. Bill promise of postwar social and economic advancement. In less heart-warming fashion, the family also knew how to do whatever it took.

Richard Nixon, for all his Orthogonian cheerleading, was hardly a regular guy himself. What Average Joe, in the name of democratic debate, takes on a South American mob? Or models himself—as Nixon would later—after Charles de Gaulle? At times Nixon belonged on Olympus, at other times in Hades; either way, he was no mere mortal in the reach of his ambition or the tragedy of his flaws.

A half-century later the issues of the 1960 election seem obscure or hyped. The candidates argued over Cold War hotspots long forgotten, like Quemoy and Matsu (disputed islands on the Red Chinese coast, occupied by the Nationalist Chinese), and vaguely spoke of “getting the country moving again” (Kennedy’s mantra). But the real issues were never really addressed or even recognized by the candidates, the press, or the voters. America in 1960 stood on the verge of a decade of profound change—on matters of sex, gender, and race, on America’s role in the world—and not in a calm or measured way. Half the country wanted to go forward and half wanted to go back, but the path forward—or back—was never clearly defined. Kennedy, very roughly speaking, seemed to represent the future, while Nixon, as Ike’s heir, seemed to represent the status quo, though neither man
came close to articulating what that meant, if they even knew. The country was evenly split between the two candidates in the beginning and evenly divided—almost dead even—at the end. But there was nothing static about the campaign. Between spring and fall, the race twisted and turned in ways that exposed Nixon at his noblest and his most ignoble.

On July 16,
1960, sitting in his Washington office, Nixon closely watched Kennedy’s acceptance speech after the senator from Massachusetts won the Democratic nomination. Nixon was encouraged. Kennedy seemed effete, elitist, and also gaunt and tired. Too much Harvard accent, and a tinge of weakness, even illness, Nixon thought. He could be beaten in a debate—on television.
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Nixon underestimated Kennedy’s public character, but not his family’s dark side. During the primary season, Nixon had seen that the Kennedy operation—well-greased by Ambassador Kennedy’s fortune—could be just as ruthless and underhanded as the roughest Irish pols of Boston. In the Wisconsin primary in April, Senator Hubert Humphrey of neighboring Minnesota seemed to have a clear home-grown edge. But a few days before the vote, anti-Catholic literature, postmarked from Minnesota, began to pour into the Catholic areas around Milwaukee. There was an enormous backlash, and Humphrey was blamed for trying to incite anti-Catholic prejudice against Kennedy. Shortly after Humphrey lost, Nixon learned who had done the mailings: operatives working for JFK’s brother and campaign manager, Robert Kennedy. Nixon put the information in his mental “never forget” file.
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Richard Nixon loved
classical music. He had taken piano lessons as a child and could bang out Broadway tunes and popular songs on the piano, but he was most moved by the great, romantic symphonies of the classical masters. In private, at home or in a hotel suite, he liked to listen to Beethoven and Brahms and Tchaikovsky on a record player, to allow his emotions to be stirred and lifted.

At the Republican National Convention in Chicago in July 1960, Len Hall, the former head of the Republican Party who was advising Nixon, heard loud music late one night coming from the suite reserved for the Republican nominee. He wandered into the suite’s living room and found Nixon in a trance, conducting the trumpets and thundering drums of the
1812 Overture
.
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Nixon usually hid his emotions—but not always well. In the 1960 campaign, he functioned as his own campaign manager, a major mistake. (Murray Chotiner had been sidelined by an influence-peddling scandal.) He was determined to outwork (the soft, spoiled) JFK, which led Nixon to make another mistake. Ignoring the cautions of his advisers, he decided to campaign in all fifty states. He fell behind right away when he banged his knee on a car door and had to spend two weeks in the hospital with a serious staph infection that almost cost him his leg. Emerging from the hospital on September 9, he took off on a twenty-five-state, fifteen-thousand-mile tour. Within three days, he was running a fever over 103 degrees.
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He couldn’t sleep. He kept a Dictaphone by his bed so that he could dictate memos, and he would be up at all hours spitting out orders on campaign minutiae.
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In Iowa in mid-September, a new advance man, John Ehrlichman, had scheduled a full day’s drive through the farm state’s small towns. The hours between stops were long, and Nixon became increasingly frustrated by the wasted time. Nixon may have willed himself to dive into crowds, but the effort cost him. Harrison Salisbury of
The New York Times
observed Nixon’s stiff-legged gait and clenched fists as he approached the rope line—his smile was fixed, but there was nothing easy or natural about his manner.
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In the Indian summer warmth, as Nixon’s open convertible headed down the empty Iowa roads, the candidate “seethed with anger,” recalled the chief advance man, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. One of Nixon’s aides, Air Force Major Don Hughes, was riding in the seat in front of Nixon’s. “Suddenly—incredibly—Nixon began to kick the back of Hughes’s seat with both feet,” recalled Haldeman. “And he wouldn’t stop!”

Thump! Thump! Thump! The seat and the hapless Hughes jolted forward jaggedly as Nixon vented his rage. When the car stopped at a small town in the middle of nowhere, Hughes, white faced, silently got out of the car and started walking straight ahead, down the road and out of town. He wanted to get as far away as he could from the Vice-President. I believe he would have walked clear across the state if I hadn’t set out after him and apologized for Nixon and finally talked him into rejoining us.
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Both Haldeman and Hughes later played down the incident. Nixon had reason to be angry—the endless drive between small farm hamlets to speak to sparse crowds was an immense waste of time, a blunder of scheduling and advance work. Nixon could be petulant, it was true, but he was far more often considerate of his aides, seeing it as his duty to cheer them up when they became worn down and discouraged. Nixon worked at being upbeat. Generally, he succeeded, but—in the course of a grueling campaign—not always.

When, just before midnight on September 25, Nixon arrived in Chicago for the first nationally televised debate, he was exhausted and still sick. He had lost ten pounds, and his shirt hung limply around his neck. He wore himself out some more by giving a speech to a hostile labor audience in the morning and then spent five hours trying to cram facts into his head. On the way to the studio, he once again cracked his knee on the car door. His face turned ashen as he pretended to ignore the pain.
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His rival had spent the day sunning, napping, and listening to Peggy Lee records. When Kennedy sauntered into the studio, tan, crisp, and fashionably late, he ignored his opponent. Nixon couldn’t take his eyes off Kennedy. A producer asked Kennedy if he wanted makeup. “No,” said Kennedy, offhand and cool. Did Nixon want makeup? Nixon declined, too. He told his press secretary, Herb Klein, that he didn’t want to look like a “sissy.”
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But the five o’clock
shadow was a problem. Someone was sent down to Michigan Avenue to buy some Lazy Shave, a kind of cosmetic “shavestick,” at a drugstore. Nixon smeared the white ointment over his beard, adding a ghastly sheen to his pallid complexion (back in his dressing room, Kennedy used Max Factor Creme Puff to keep the shine down).
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In the control booth, a Nixon aide uneasily asked Bobby Kennedy how he thought the vice president looked. “T’rific,” replied Kennedy. “T’rific.”
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Kennedy and Nixon came into the debate, the first of four, essentially tied in the polls. About 80 million people, the biggest political audience since the Checkers Speech, were watching. A few minutes before the camera light went on, Nixon took a phone call from his vice-presidential ticket mate, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. A Boston Brahmin who had lost his Senate seat to Kennedy in 1952, Lodge turned out to be a poor choice as a running mate. He was an unenthusiastic campaigner who liked to take the weekend off and had no common touch. (Kennedy, whose own family knew something about Wasp snobbery, had been bemused when Nixon chose the aristocratic Lodge. “If Nixon ever tries to visit Lodge at Beverly,” JFK said, referring to Lodge’s estate on Boston’s swank North Shore, “they won’t let him in the door.”)
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In his pre-debate pep talk, Lodge urged Nixon to “erase the assassin image,” the Herblock cartoon of the scowling scourge of Hiss, and to be “the nice guy” instead. As the debate began, Nixon made an obvious, almost pained effort to show restraint. The panel of newsmen tried to provoke him. Sander Vanocur of NBC pointedly asked Nixon about President Eisenhower’s apparent, if unintentional, put-down of his vice president. In late August, as he was ending a press conference, Eisenhower had been asked to cite an example of Nixon’s contributions to U.S. foreign policy. “If you give me a week, I might think of something,” Eisenhower had testily responded. Nixon struggled to explain away Eisenhower’s words as “facetious” (what Ike had meant to say, Nixon later argued, was, “I’ll talk about that at next week’s press conference”).
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But the damage done by Ike’s
careless remark was severe. Vanocur’s question particularly rankled Pat Nixon, who (rightly, as events would show) suspected newsmen of doing the Kennedys’ bidding.
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