Six Crises (54 page)

Two other developments occurred before the conventions, however, which were to have far more effect on the election outcome than all our carefully considered strategy decisions put together.

Early in March, Dr. Arthur E. Burns, the former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and probably the nation's top authority on the economic cycle, called on me in my office in the Capitol. In January, virtually all the economists in the country had been bullish about the prospects for the economy throughout 1960. But when Burns came to see me in March, he expressed great concern about the way the economy was then acting. Steel, in particular, was in trouble—new orders were lagging after the strike. Production was barely over half of rated capacity. Burns' conclusion was that unless
some decisive governmental action were taken, and taken soon, we were heading for another economic dip which would hit its low point in October, just before the elections. He urged strongly that everything possible be done to avert this development. He urgently recommended that two steps be taken immediately: by loosening up on credit and, where justifiable, by increasing spending for national security. The next time I saw the President, I discussed Burns' proposals with him, and he in turn put the subject on the agenda for the next Cabinet meeting.

The matter was thoroughly discussed by the Cabinet but, for two reasons, Burns' recommendation that immediate action be taken along the lines he had suggested did not prevail. First, several of the Administration's economic experts who attended the meeting did not share his bearish prognosis of the economic prospects. Second, even assuming his predictions might be right, there was strong sentiment against using the spending and credit powers of the Federal Government to affect the economy, unless and until conditions clearly indicated a major recession in prospect.

In supporting Burns' point of view, I must admit that I was more sensitive politically than some of the others around the cabinet table. I knew from bitter experience how, in both 1954 and 1958, slumps which hit bottom early in October contributed to substantial Republican losses in the House and Senate. The power of the “pocketbook” issue was shown more clearly perhaps in 1958 than in any off-year election in history. On the international front, the Administration had had one of its best years. My own experience in Caracas in May had won bipartisan acclaim. That fall, President Eisenhower made what were, in my opinion, two of the most courageous and wise decisions of his entire Administration—the landing in Lebanon, and holding the line on Quemoy-Matsu. In both instances, his firm, decisive leadership avoided war and kept the peace without surrender of principle or territory. Yet, the economic dip in October was obviously uppermost in the people's minds when they went to the polls. They completely rejected the President's appeal for the election of Republicans to the House and Senate.

Unfortunately, Arthur Burns turned out to be a good prophet. The bottom of the 1960 dip did come in October and the economy started to move up again in November—after it was too late to affect the election returns. In October, usually a month of rising employment, the jobless rolls increased by 452,000. All the speeches, television broadcasts,
and precinct work in the world could not counteract that one hard fact.

The second development, which was to have its effect during the election, was the shooting down of the U
-2
reconnaissance plane over the Soviet Union, just before the Summit Conference slated for Paris in early May. Khrushchev used this incident as an excuse for breaking up the Conference. I am confident that it was only an excuse—that he undoubtedly would have found some other reason for torpedoing the Conference had the U
-2
incident never occurred. But great as was the effect of the incident in Paris, it was even greater in the United States. Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy launched an all-out and, in my opinion, irresponsible attack on the President.

In a speech before the Democrats of Cook County, on May 19, Stevenson said:

We handed Khrushchev the crowbar and the sledgehammer to wreck the meeting. Without our series of blunders, Mr. Khrushchev would not have had a pretext for making his impossible demands and wild charges . . .

Kennedy went further at a press conference held May 19 in Portland, Oregon. Because there was some question of exactly what he said on that occasion, Kennedy made the following explanation in the
Congressional Record
on May 23:

I do not think that the timing of the U
-2
incident is defensible. I think it was obviously the wrong time . . . It was a risk you would not want to take at that particular time.

Once the summit had broken up . . . Mr. Khrushchev indicated . . . there were two conditions for continuing. One, that we apologize. I think that that might have been possible to do—and that second, we try those responsible for the flight. We could not do that . . . If he had merely asked that the United States should express regret, then that would have been a reasonable term . . .

The initial reaction of the American people was not one for which either of these critics had bargained. People invariably rally around a President in a period of international crisis. And the dignity with which Eisenhower took Khrushchev's crude insults in Paris gained him support in the United States from members of both parties. But the long-range effect was something else again. The “peace issue” was tarnished.
Democratic orators were to hammer away on this theme throughout the campaign.

A third event prior to the National Conventions which affected the conduct of the campaign and possibly even the result of the election was the special session of Congress. Instead of adjourning Congress
sine die
before the Democratic Convention, Lyndon Johnson asked for a recess and set a date for Congress to reconvene following the Republican Convention. This was one of the shrewdest maneuvers of the 1960 campaign. It meant that while the Senate was in session, I would again be held down in Washington because of the possibility of a tie vote. Kennedy and Johnson, on the other hand, would not be so inhibited. As Senators they could arrange a “live pair” to protect their position in the event that they were away campaigning: their votes would be recorded anyway. The session itself was to turn out to be singularly non-productive. But if one of its purposes was to delay the start of my campaign, it could not have been a more complete success.

As the Democratic National Convention opened in Los Angeles, I was at Camp David already working on the first draft of my acceptance speech. I did not believe there was any question as to Kennedy's winning the nomination. In fact, I did not listen to any of the preliminary convention proceedings except for a portion of Senator Frank Church's inept keynote address.

The only real suspense of the Convention was over the selection of the vice presidential candidate. Bill Rogers had driven up from Washington to spend the night and we were watching television together when the first news came over the air that Lyndon Johnson was to be Kennedy's running mate. We agreed that the Kennedy-Johnson ticket was the strongest the Democrats could possibly put in the field. In spite of Johnson's all-out attack on Kennedy during the primaries, I had anticipated that this might be the ticket. Thruston Morton and I had discussed the situation and, acting on my suggestion, he publicly predicted that a Kennedy-Johnson “deal” was in the making. While Morton's claim was categorically denied by both the Kennedy and the Johnson camps, I was still of the opinion that this was the ticket that would probably come out of the Convention.

The Johnson nomination for Vice President was not a surprise to me as far as Johnson was concerned. He has always been a political pragmatist and has never had too much difficulty accommodating his principles to his politics. But Kennedy's selection of Johnson and the way he was then able to ram this choice down the throats of his liberal
supporters told a lot more about Kennedy than it did about Johnson. Here, indeed, was a tough-minded, capable political operator, and a formidable opponent.

Many Republicans thought that Johnson's selection was a mistake on Kennedy's part. But they were grossly underestimating both men. Kennedy understood that Johnson might cost him some votes in the North—but only if Johnson campaigned extensively in the Northern states, and Kennedy was smart enough to see that no such thing occurred. While Johnson alienated some of his more conservative supporters by going on the ticket, he was the best available bridge for Kennedy between the Northern liberals and the Southern conservatives.

My estimates of the strength of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket were confirmed by Claude Robinson four days after the Democratic Convention. I had asked him to test this combination against Republican tickets of Nixon-Lodge, Nixon-Morton, and other potential vice presidential candidates. He reported that the best showing any one of the various Republican tickets could make against the Kennedy-Johnson combination was 45 to 55, which would have meant a four-million-vote majority for the Democratic ticket. Part of the margin, of course, could be attributed to the fact that the Kennedy-Johnson ticket had just had massive public exposure on television and radio and in the press through the Democratic Convention. But I was under no illusions whatever about the difficulty of the task before us. We had to regain some of the lost ground immediately and the place to begin was at the Republican National Convention.

•  •  •

My most critical problem was to see that our Convention ended with all Republicans united behind the ticket. If this were to be accomplished, I knew I had to take some decisive action with regard to Nelson Rockefeller. Throughout the spring, while he had not entered any of the primaries, he had continued to snipe away at me. I ignored his attacks—except for one occasion when he charged that I had never stated my position on the key issues and that no one, in effect, knew where I stood. At a press conference in Camden, New Jersey, on June 9, I answered his charges in detail and, by fortunate coincidence, that same week a book of my speeches and public statements
³
was published. The detailed statements in the book, combined with the press conference, pretty effectively demolished his argument.

But my goal was to beat Kennedy—not Rockefeller. Rockefeller had a perfect right and, in my view, a responsibility to contest the nomination and to disagree with positions I had taken. On the other hand, I felt it was essential that he be an enthusiastic rather than a reluctant supporter of my candidacy after the Convention. His differences with Administration policies had to be ironed out.

In his inexperience, he had been the victim of almost unbelievably bad advice during the period of his abortive attempt to launch a campaign for the nomination. But I knew that under present circumstances he would not come to me—I had to go to him.

Consequently, I called Herb Brownell in New York. Brownell had always been a close personal and political friend of mine, and I knew that Rockefeller trusted and respected him. I put the problem directly to Brownell and asked for his advice. He suggested that the two of us—Rockefeller and myself—get together and he agreed to talk to Rockefeller about a mutually convenient time for such a meeting. As a result of these negotiations, I flew to New York on Friday afternoon, July 22, with no publicity whatever, and, at Rockefeller's invitation, joined him for dinner at his apartment. During the dinner hour we reminisced cordially about some of our Washington experiences. After dinner I got right down to brass tacks.

I said that I expected to be nominated the next week at Chicago. I noted the fact that there had been a great deal of speculation as to whether he might consider the vice presidential nomination. I told him also that at the Convention, if he should indicate any interest at all, he would probably be the choice of a majority of the delegates. I did not offer him the nomination or urge him to accept it, because I did not want to put the eventual nominee in the position of being second-choice, in the event that Rockefeller refused it. But I told him of the plans I had for expanding the duties of the Vice President in the international field, as I was later to spell them out in my acceptance speech. The challenge would be great and, if he were to run for Vice President, the chances of the ticket's winning would be increased. If we by chance should lose, he—having put personal considerations aside and acceded to the requests of the party leaders—would be in line for the presidential nomination four years hence.

He replied just as candidly. He said he appreciated my speaking as frankly as I had. He realized that pressures for him to run for Vice President would probably mount after he arrived in Chicago, but he said that he simply did not want to be Vice President and therefore
could not put his heart into the campaign if he were to be selected as the candidate. At this point we dropped the subject entirely and I suggested that we discuss the differences we might have on key issues, to see if we could work them out prior to the approval of the platform in Chicago.

Rockefeller said he had been doing some thinking on this score during the afternoon and had in fact prepared a statement of principles which he hoped I would agree to. For the most part, I found the positions he had written down were the same as those I had previously and consistently supported. But there were some major and significant exceptions and, from approximately ten o'clock that evening when we started to discuss his proposed joint-statement, until 4:30 the following morning, we went over the various points of the statement, issue-by-issue, until we finally reached agreement.

This final statement was labeled by some political partisans, as well as by some of the press and the radio-TV commentators, as a “surrender” by Nixon to Rockefeller. Any objective analysis of the statement would lead to exactly the contrary conclusion.

On issue after issue, I found it necessary to refuse to endorse Rockefeller's position because it was not in accord with President Eisenhower's and my own. The most sticky area—one which took us almost three hours to resolve—was the field of national security. I told Rockefeller that I had no objection wherever the statement advocated new or stepped-up programs for the future. But I would not approve any phrase in the statement which even by implication criticized the policies of the Eisenhower Administration. After prolonged discussion, my position prevailed, and all criticism of the Administration was removed from the final statement. Our conclusion on national security—“we can and must provide the necessary increased expenditures for these efforts; there must be no price ceiling on America's security”—far from being a new position on my part, was a reaffirmation of convictions I had stated on many previous occasions.