Report of the County Chairman (18 page)

I exploded. For two weeks I’d been searching vainly for just a little helping of the paraphernalia of electioneering. Telegrams to Washington and phoned pleas to Philadelphia had availed me nothing. But here Sam Thompson
was with a carload. “I have another station wagon full down the road,” he added.

“Where in hell did you get this stuff?” I stormed.

“Remember last week when I was gone for two days?” he asked.

“Where were you?” I asked suspiciously.

“Philadelphia,” he replied evenly, “and Washington. I marched into headquarters and told them I was your personal assistant and that you would be damned if you could run a campaign with no posters.”

“You mean you conned them into giving you …”

“They didn’t exactly give it to me,” Sam explained. “They were impressed that you felt the lack of material so urgently …”

Again I was struck by this wild-eyed politician’s use of words, but he continued, “…  and in each case they wrote out an order for me to take to the warehouse. They were willing to let us have a few things.”

“What did you do, forge the figures after you left the main offices?”

“Every warehouse in the world,” Sam explained, “has a watchman who is underpaid. With your permission, I gave each of the watchmen five bucks, and if you could later on see your way clear …”

In the car and the station wagon Sam must have had four hundred dollars’ worth of electioneering devices. I stood looking at them for some time, and while I was standing there he was whispering, “So if you would let me use your name in some creative way in the northern end of the county, we might do miracles with that empty Quakertown store.”

“I want to see it first,” I replied cautiously. So we rode together through some of the most glorious parts of Bucks County, through the German lands where autumn was rich on the farms and deer were to be seen sifting across the brown fields. How often during that long and perfect autumn was I to think, “This is one of the great counties.” How extraordinarily lovely it was in the fall of 1960.

Sam, driving the car, was saying, “In that farm over there, all good Democrats, and I’ll bet everyone votes for Nixon.” He spotted the various places he knew and it seemed to me that nine tenths of them were Democrats who were determined to vote for the other side. “What are we opening an office up here for?” I asked.

“To give the troops encouragement,” Sam explained. “Wait till you see what I have in mind.”

When we got to the site, I found that Sam had understated the case. It must have been the biggest single building available in Quakertown, and Minnesota could have held football practice in it. It had, as I recall, some dozen enormous windows, any one of which would have been invaluable as a billboard. It stood at the main corner of the new shopping center, had never yet been occupied, and probably commanded a rent that my committee could not possibly meet.

“Sam,” I said, “this is magnificent. This is the kind of headquarters a chairman dreams about. We’d have thousands of people passing here every day, and you can see it from four major highways.”

“Wait till you see what I have outlined for the roof!” Sam cried, sensing that he had me on the hook. He took me to an area where he had blocked out two stupendous
signs, each of which ran almost half a block. They said simply:

I looked at the staggering signs and their inappropriate wording and said sadly, “Sam, it won’t do.”

“Why not?” he pleaded. “For God’s sake, why not?”

“It looks like a theatrical sign. What’s this
presents?
”

Sam took me by the arm and said firmly, “Jim, for years guys like me have worked in this northern end of the county with nothing. We’ve had no money, no candidates, no help. Now you come along, a Bucks County boy, and everybody knows you, and everybody’s wondering what you’re doing backing Kennedy. This is our big chance, Jim, and I’m determined to make a dent this year. Of a thousand people who pass that store, nine hundred and ninety will be Republicans, and I’m going to convert some of them.”

“It won’t do,” I said with finality, but I was to find that speaking to Sam Thompson with finality and making it final were two far different things.

Still holding onto my arm he whispered, “If we took out the
presents
, could you possibly go for it then?”

“Sam,” I explained wearily, “we don’t have money for this store.”

“I was coming to that,” he said easily. “Now if I could arrange to get this store … at absolutely no cost to you … and if I could arrange to have those signs painted, again at no cost …”

“How would you arrange all these things, Sam?” I asked.

“You might prefer not to know,” Sam said. “Please, this is our one big chance to make a splash.”

On one of my subsequent trips, when Quakertown had the single most dazzling political headquarters in eastern Pennsylvania, with signs that stretched for blocks, dozens of windows flashily displayed, and a bevy of eager people spreading the gospel, I did overhear a man who apparently had something to do with the place asking Sam Thompson if Sam thought the last legal permission that was needed before the premises could open as a store was going to come through on time.

“I have a feeling it’ll be here,” Sam assured him, and that’s all I know about the fifth headquarters we opened. It did the best business of all.

Just as we got things organized in Bucks County, trouble began. It was Friday night, October 7, and my wife had invited a group of neighbors in to hear the second debate. We were preparing to gloat over a second victory when I heard Senator Kennedy state, almost unnecessarily it seemed to me, that he would be willing to surrender Quemoy and Matsu to the Chinese communists. “Oh, I wish he hadn’t said that!” I gasped, and I do believe that in the first moment of hearing the statement I recognized how important it was going to become. Certainly Mr. Nixon must have felt the same way, because he jumped in with his disclaimer, and went far beyond the acknowledged administration position, stating that he would engage in war to prevent the loss of Quemoy and Matsu. In the ensuing days we Democrats were pressed
very diligently by Republican hecklers, and I lived in constant fear that President Eisenhower would make some simple statement to the effect that Senator Kennedy had imperiled the American position. The President’s statement never came, and we were able slowly to repair the damage that had apparently been done.

Because of a trick of history, I was called upon to speak widely on the Quemoy and Matsu incident and did so in many different states, for I happened to be one of a handful of private American citizens who had visited both Quemoy and Matsu. Many had seen Quemoy, but few indeed had ever been to Matsu, and even fewer to both groups. My visit to the Matsus had occurred under unusual and privileged conditions during the height of military tension over the islands, and I had spent a wintry day traversing the tiny and insignificant heap of rocks where the Chinese troops were stationed.

Matsu, as I knew it, was about as indefensible militarily as a pile of rocks could be. It lay under the shadow of land-based batteries and could be neutralized at will. All the natives occupying it could have been evacuated in a couple of old liberty ships. It had no airfield, no substantial batteries of its own, no usable harbor, no worthy installations. Its only use, in time of military crisis, might be as a radar station providing help for American planes bombing the mainland, and it was even doubtful if it could be held for that purpose. The only conceivable way in which it could be held, if the Red Chinese wanted it badly enough, would be for the United States to use atomic bombs delivered from either the Seventh Fleet or from our great bases in Okinawa and Guam, and to do
that implied the start of World War III. No one that I knew was ready to launch a nuclear war to save Matsu, which was patently not worth saving … so far as military considerations alone were concerned.

Yet when I returned from Matsu to the mainland of Asia I wrote a series of two widely published articles in which I advocated precisely the policy that was later to be supported by Vice President Nixon in the second television debate. I argued that Matsu, inconsequential though it might be from a purely military point of view, represented psychological factors which made it important both to the Formosan Chinese and to the United States. I argued that because of those factors it must be kept from communist hands, even at the cost of war, and even if that war involved nuclear weapons. When it was discovered that I had been on the islands, I was invited to address a segment of the war college on the subject of Matsu, since none of the military then discussing the problem had seen Matsu.

But no sooner had my articles appeared than I was subjected to a barrage of criticism by foreign correspondents working in the area and by most of the military men as well. They pointed out three grave fallacies in my argument: first, there was no conceivable advantage to be gained militarily from holding onto the islands, not even if they were to serve as a radar listening post, because other locations already in American hands were better qualified to perform that function; second, there was no psychological advantage in holding onto these rocks, and no question of face involved for either the Formosan Chinese or for the Americans, because only a few weeks before,
our side had voluntarily evacuated the Tachens to the north, which did possess a few military advantages, and they stressed that President Eisenhower himself had approved the Tachen evacuation; third, they told me what I had not known before, namely, that every military leader both in the area and at home had advised against the military defense of the Matsu group. They further believed that two distinct American military and civil missions had already approached Generalissimo Chiang with advice that he get out of the Matsus as swiftly as possible. Later President Eisenhower himself agreed publicly that from a military point of view the islands were indefensible and their occupation inadvisable.

Thus I had already, personally, been completely through the line of reasoning adopted by Mr. Nixon. I had advocated it, argued in defense of it, and found it totally insupportable. Therefore when I gasped at Senator Kennedy’s introduction of the subject it was not because I disagreed with his reasoning, for he was correct in his attitude and I better than most knew it, but it was because I knew that this subject ought not to be discussed in public. I therefore knew there would be trouble for the Democrats, because the Nixon-Michener thesis was a popular one to defend, and an easy one on which to excite patriotic responses, even though it was one hundred percent wrong. How many times during the campaign did I have to answer the heckling question: “How can you be in favor of a man who wants to give away our territory to the communists?” I am quite convinced that in my answer I had truth on my side, but I am also sure that we lost a lot of votes on this Quemoy-Matsu business.

Therefore, imagine my dismay on the third debate when Senator Kennedy suggested that we support anti-Castro rebel forces in Cuba! I had just come from Mexico and Guatemala, where ninety-nine percent of the intellectuals I had met favored Castro as an abstract concept of revolutionary zeal, even though the wiser ones rejected many of the specific actions of Castro the man. One of the reasons why Latin American professors, writers and students liked Castro was that he had defended Cuba against what they called “the intrusions by Norteamericanos,” and now Senator Kennedy was suggesting further intrusions. Again Mr. Nixon was quick to challenge him on this, and again the Vice President had a popular and an easy cause to defend. As for myself, again I waited with real fear for President Eisenhower to state briefly and bluntly that Mr. Kennedy had spoken intemperately, for such an accusation by the President would have hurt the Democratic campaign most seriously. But again the President remained silent.

In my public meetings I could now count on two surefire embarrassments, and I found myself speaking more and more about Cuba, and it was interesting that again I had started out years ago defending Mr. Nixon’s precise position and had been educated away from it both by the truth and by the force of international politics. In short, on the Cuba matter Senator Kennedy was again one hundred percent right and Mr. Nixon completely wrong, although the greater error lay in introducing the subject at all.

I knew that Mr. Nixon was wrong because on one of my long stays in Asia I had lived in Bangkok, the capital
of Thailand, when John Peurifoy was our ambassador. Mr. Peurifoy was a close friend of Leonard Lyons, the New York columnist whom I had known for many years, and through Mr. Lyons I met Peurifoy shortly before his tragic death in a Siamese highway accident. Ambassador Peurifoy was not altogether popular with the formal State Department, because he had risen rather rapidly and his feeling that he was not wholly accepted made him more prone to talk about diplomatic matters than the typical career ambassador. What he liked to discuss was the wholly illegal steps whereby the United States joined forces with Guatemalan patriots to throw out of power the communist dictator Jacob Arbenz, who had usurped control of Guatemala. Mr. Peurifoy had been the American agent in this dramatic operation, and it is a pity that he died before committing to paper his memoirs on the subject; from what he intimated to me the action in Guatemala constituted a classic example of how beleaguered democracies can defend themselves against the kind of communist putsch that destroyed Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In other words, in Guatemala the United States had done exactly what Vice President Nixon mistakenly decried as irresponsible, and the free world had subsequently applauded the act. Ambassador Peurifoy, on the other hand, had held that we had intervened quickly, effectively and with the best interests of Guatemala at heart. In so doing we saved a sovereign nation and perhaps a hemisphere.

I was forced to admit that Mr. Nixon was correct in charging that Mr. Kennedy had been imprudent in discussing Cuba’s parallel situation in public, but for Mr.
Nixon to have implied that what the senator had mentioned was beyond the pale of discussion was downright misleading. Yet at the time, the charge seemed to gain votes for Mr. Nixon; I can testify that I was unsuccessful in arguing with people who accepted Mr. Nixon’s charge that Senator Kennedy had been hasty and immature. But as we shall see, I later came to the conclusion that Senator Kennedy’s forthright stands on Matsu and Cuba were responsible for his winning critical support in the crucial days of the election.