Six Crises (69 page)

Now, it really was all over. Pat, Julie and Tricia, and I walked together down the corridor to the elevator. On the way, we stopped to say good-by to my mother and my brother, Don. Over and over again in the days and weeks ahead I was to find that the hardest thing about losing is not how it affects you personally but to see the terrible disappointment in the eyes of those who have been at your side through this and other battles. It was particularly hard for Don. During the last days of the campaign, the opposition had resurrected the financial troubles which had forced him into bankruptcy two years before and had tried to connect me with a loan he had received from the Hughes Tool Company during that period. They had, of course, conveniently ignored the fact that my mother had satisfied the loan by transferring to the creditor a piece of property which represented over half her life savings and which had been appraised at an amount greater than the loan.

As we left, Don said with his voice breaking: “I hope I haven't been responsible for your losing the election.” I reassured him: “The only place the charge meant anything was here in California, and we are going to carry California anyway.” For a number of reasons, I was especially gratified when the absentee ballots finally did put California in our column ten days later, by a 35,000 vote majority, but one of the major reasons for my satisfaction was that I did not want Don to have any feeling of responsibility for my defeat.

The elevator took us down to the lobby floor, and there a very warm and wonderful thing happened. Eight years before, Pat and I had walked through this same lobby at a time of great victory. The halls had been crowded with our cheering friends and supporters. This time we had expected them to be deserted—but again they were filled.
People cheered, slapped us on the back, shook our hands as if we had won the election rather than lost. Julie put a book over her face to cover the tears which, in her case, come quickly to her eyes at such times. I looked at Tricia and saw the thin, tight smile which I knew covered emotions deeper than tears could express.
¹⁰

After a two-hour delay at the airport because of mechanical difficulties, we boarded our chartered Pan American 707 for the flight to Washington. I had had less than four hours sleep in the last two-and-a-half days but, while I am usually able to cat-nap in airplanes or in automobiles, I found that now I was too tired to sleep. I wandered up and down the aisle talking to members of my staff, many of whom had flown from Washington to Los Angeles to be with me on Election Night. I could not find words to thank them adequately for their devoted service through the years and all during the campaign. Only a candidate for office truly knows how a campaign brings forth almost superhuman efforts from members of a campaign staff, and especially from those who type the letters, run the mimeograph machines, do the research, expect (and get) no coffee-breaks or long lunch hours or overtime pay, and receive no public credit or recognition. Their only reward is victory for their candidate. I could well understand the tears in the eyes of many of my loyal staff members that night.

Finally I returned to my own seat and, for perhaps the first time since the campaign began, looked down at the lights of the cities below. Always before I had had to use every available minute on my flights preparing speeches or statements for the next appearance.

As I saw the lights, I tried to guess the cities over which we were passing. It seemed now almost like a dream that only a few days and weeks before, Pat and I had motorcaded through the streets of these same cities with thousands of our supporters cheering us on. As we went over Chicago my thoughts turned not to the charges of vote fraud which had begun to reach Los Angeles before we had left—they turned, rather, to my acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention just four months before, probably the highwater mark of my whole political career.

As the plane approached Andrews Air Force Base, across the Anacostia River from the District of Columbia, where we had been specially
cleared for landing, Herb Klein brought me a message which some of the reporters who were returning with us had composed. It read:

Dear Friends:

You shook us on the Tijuana trail. (But it wouldn't have happened if you had had a Washington newsman and not a Young Republican at the wheel of our car.)

You made us stand for an hour and a half in the grim fog in Lima, Ohio, while your train rumbled back onto the main line.

You told us in Chicago you never delivered the same speech twice, but some sense we've heard the same phrases once or twice in the course of the campaign.

You took us from St. Louis to Atlantic City to Roanoke to Omaha in one nightmarish day and confined us to Convairs for the last two legs of the journey. And if that weren't enough, you sent Fred Seaton down at 3
A.M.
to explain your farm program to us.

Your entourage in all these travels was a mixed breed. But as this plane wings eastward it was the majority opinion of the regulars in the press corps that we have toured the land with a champ. And we double it in spades for Pat.

[
signed
] Y
OUR
C
AMP
F
OLLOWERS

As I read this I was especially glad that while I had undoubtedly made my share of mistakes during the campaign, I had never complained to a reporter or to his superior about his stories.

We landed in one of those dreary, drizzling rains which plague the Washington area during the late fall. Because of the weather and because our plane was late, we were surprised to see a crowd at the airport. Thruston Morton was first to greet us as he said, “We let you down.” I could reply with all sincerity: “No one could have done more than you did.” John Eisenhower was there representing the President. Chris Herter led a delegation of Cabinet members and their wives-all of those who were in Washington at that time. And, in addition, several hundred friends who had heard of our arrival were standing there, soaked to the skin but cheering and calling out “Speech. Speech.”

The mark of a true politician is that he is never at a loss for words because he is always half-expecting to be asked to make a speech. This was one of those few instances when I was caught so completely by surprise that I spoke without any preparation whatever. I was so tired, in fact, that I literally could not remember ten minutes later
what I had said, but the papers next morning reported it this way:

This is just about the nicest thing that's happened to us in the whole campaign. Because it is in defeat rather than victory that real friendship and loyal support is put to the test—and may I simply say that, in Pat's and my book, you have passed this test with banners flying. And so all we can say, from deep in our hearts, is thank you.

We got into the waiting limousine finally and started for home. The air had been bumpy on our flight's descent and Tricia, who has the same tendency toward air sickness that I had at her age (in my generation, to be sure, it was car sickness), had become quite ill. Several times on the trip from the airport we stopped the car so that she could walk around and get some fresh air. We finally pulled up in front of our house just before midnight. Our long journey—which had, in reality, begun so many years before—was now ended.

Pat put Tricia and Julie to bed at once but, after saying good night, I found I was still unable to sleep. I went down to the library, built a fire, and sat before it to let the tension and fatigue drain away. In the quiet of my own home, I tried to think not of the past but of the future. I knew that the next few days and weeks would probably present me with the greatest test of my life.

In each of the crises of my political career, one lesson stood out: the period of greatest danger is not in preparing to meet a crisis or in fighting the battle itself but rather in that time immediately afterward, when the body, mind, and spirit are totally exhausted and there are still problems to deal with. It had been difficult enough in those past instances, each of which in its way had ended in victory, to avoid making serious errors of judgment once the battle was over. Now, in defeat, I knew the problem would be even greater.

As I sat before the fire, I determined that I would try to conduct myself in such a way that even those who had been most bitterly opposed to me would find nothing to criticize. I knew this would not be easy. We had been through a long, hard-fought campaign. Kennedy's margin of victory was razor-thin. Charges of fraud and demands for recounts had already begun. I realized that what I said and did in the next few days would be observed closely, and not in the United States alone but all over the world.

Apart from considerations involving the nation and my party, it was important now with so many eyes so sharply focused on me that, from a purely personal standpoint, I try to set a proper example of conduct
in defeat. Because defeat is a much more common experience than victory. For everyone who reaches the top—in politics, business, the professions, or any other field—there are many more who seek that goal and fall short. I had had more than my share of victories in my lifetime. But I had known, too, the sting of defeat. I knew that defeat was a greater test of character than victory.

It was not that I believed I should accept defeat with resignation. I have never had much sympathy for the point of view, “it isn't whether you win or lose that counts, but how you play the game.”

How you play the game does count. But one must put top consideration on the will, the desire, and the determination to win. Chief Newman, my football coach in college and a man who was a fine coach but an even more talented molder of character, used to say: “You must never be satisfied with losing. You must get angry, terribly angry, about losing. But the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not on his victorious opponents or on his teammates.”

Bob Reynolds, who had been chairman of my Sports Committee, and who is now one of the owners of the Los Angeles Angels, put much the same thought this way, in a handwritten letter he sent me the day after election:

Sometimes one loses a battle to win a war . . . I leave you this thought which came to me as the best advice I ever had from one of my college professors, after Stanford's stunning defeat by Howell-Hutson of Alabama—“Bob,” he said, “defeats are poison to some men. Great men have become mediocre because of inability to accept and abide by a defeat. Many men have become great because they were able to rise above a defeat. If you should achieve any kind of success and develop superior qualities as a man, chances are it will be because of the manner in which you meet the defeats that will come to you just as they come to all men.”

These were the thoughts running through my mind as, sitting before the library fire, I began to relax in the small hours of the morning. I had arrived at no momentous decisions about what I would do or say when finally I pulled the screen in front of the fire, turned off the light, and went up to bed. But I was at peace with myself. I was confident that, knowing the dangers to watch for, I would be able to handle the problems I would be confronted with, without making serious mistakes.

I did not wake up on Thursday until after noon. John Wardlaw, my
chauffeur for the eight years I had served as Vice President, drove me down to my office at the Capitol. He is not only an excellent driver but one of the finest men I have known. This was one of those exceedingly rare occasions when he spoke to me as he drove. With an emotion I had never before seen him show, he said: “Mr. Vice President, I can't tell you how sick I am about the way my people voted in the election. You know I had been talking to all of my friends. They were all for you. But when Mr. Robert Kennedy called the judge to get Dr. King out of jail—well, they just all turned to him”

I assured him, as I was to assure scores of others who expressed their regrets as to why this or that group of which they were a member had not given me more support, “When an election is this close, John, no one can say for certain what caused us to lose. If there was any fault involved it was not with your people: it was mine, in failing to get my point of view across to them.”

At the office, I found my staff buried in the mass of wires and letters that had poured in from all over the country. Except for the period after my fund telecast in 1952, I was to receive more messages during the next week than in any previous period of my public life—and this was only the beginning. When I saw how much work there was to do, I realized Pat and I would have to put off the vacation that we had planned for right after the campaign. But I felt we should try to get away for a few days at least and—since we had been seeing very little of Tricia and Julie over the past several months—that even a brief holiday with them now would mean more than a longer one later on. So, the next day we flew to Florida for what we hoped would be a complete escape and relief from the tension under which we had been living for so long.

•  •  •

But we were to discover that it was far too early to find even partial escape from what we had been through. The letters and wires and messages followed us and, although Don Hughes and Rose Woods did their best to keep phone calls at a minimum, there had to be exceptions. One round of calls added up to a notable exception.

Two days after our arrival, Pat and I were having dinner at the Jamaica Inn on Key Biscayne. The party included Bob Finch, Herb Klein, Don Hughes, each of them accompanied by his wife, Bebe Rebozo, and Rose Woods. Just as the waitress was taking our order, I received word from the hotel, which was nearby, that former President Hoover was trying to reach me by phone from New York. I knew that
he would not be calling unless it was a matter of vital importance; consequently, I asked Don to return the call on the pay phone in the restaurant lobby. Within a couple of minutes he came back to the table with the word that he had Mr. Hoover's Waldorf Towers apartment on the line. I went to the phone, chatted briefly with his secretary, Bunny Miller, and then Mr. Hoover came on the line.