The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (82 page)

At the studio, Jack waited with a small group that included Bobby and Bill Wilson, his television adviser. Wilson had observed the contrast between Jack’s elegant demeanor and Nixon’s stolid frame. Citing the historic Lincoln-Douglas debate, Wilson had convinced the Nixon people that the candidates should stand behind small lecterns that would expose much of their bodies.

As the final minutes approached, the candidate turned to Wilson. “I got to take a leak,” Jack said.

“It’s two minutes before air,” Wilson replied, looking at his watch.

“I got to take a leak.” The two men hurried to the men’s room.

“Kick him in the balls,” Bobby said, when Jack returned. Then Kennedy strode into the studio to face Nixon, sitting there already under the hot lights.

Jack won the right to give his opening remarks before Nixon, only the first of his many victories that evening. As Jack sat there so still, so certain, so straight, Nixon began sweating under the hot lights, first imperceptibly, then looking as if he had stumbled fully clothed into a sauna.

There was something dreadfully unfair in the visual contrast between the two candidates. But it was hardly Jack’s fault that in late August Nixon had hit his kneecap on a car door in Greensboro, North Carolina, and had ended up spending twelve days at Walter Reed Hospital. And now, earlier in the day, Nixon had bumped his troubled knee on a car door on his way into CBS station WBBM and almost passed out from the pain. He then had his face doused in a pancake makeup called “Lazy Shave,” which was inadequate to hide his stubble or mask his sweat.

Nixon should have been able to hold the rhetorical high ground using Eisenhower’s immense popularity as a shield against Jack’s attacks. It was Jack, however, who in his opening statement defined the evening, talking about the great Democratic tradition of Roosevelt and Wilson, making himself appear their logical heir. He took all the glorious truisms by which Americans lived and made them his own, locking them away from his perspiring opponent. He talked about the role of foreign affairs in American life, though that was not supposed to have been broached at all this evening. “In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery.”

Nixon began with the excruciating necessity of agreeing with almost everything Jack had said. “The things that Senator Kennedy has said many of us can agree with,” Nixon said, reverting to a schoolboy debating technique. “And I subscribe completely to the spirit that Senator Kennedy has expressed tonight, the spirit that the United States should move ahead.”

While Jack referred to the vice president as “Mr. Nixon,” his opponent called Jack “Senator Kennedy.” The two candidates stood close together on many of the major issues of the day. They spent most of the hour debating nuances. Jack talked not about changing the direction of America but simply getting the country moving on or moving ahead, tacitly admitting that he agreed with the basic thrust of the past eight years. “This is a great country, but I think it could be a greater country,” he said, “and this is a powerful country, but I think it could be a more powerful country.”

Television and radio stations across America carried the debate, and the largest political audience in history, seventy million Americans, heard the two

men discuss serious, even esoteric issues in a responsible, reflective way. When the hour was over, both sides could reasonably declare a victory. But the fact that Jack still stood in the ring after debating Nixon had elevated the Democratic contender to a new position, proving that he was a challenger who deserved to be in the same heavyweight class as the vice president.

A poll taken the next day showed that television viewers by a slight majority felt that Jack was the winner, while radio listeners overwhelmingly declared Nixon the victor. This was not because Jack was a synthetic creature of a new media age. He had matched Nixon idea for idea and complexity for complexity. On radio, however, Jack at times sounded strident and overwrought, while on television his words wedded to his cool presence took on a different meaning. Those exposed to the debate only by reading the transcript would have had a third verdict, that the debate was a dead heat. These were all truths, but the television sets that in 1960 were already in 87 percent of American homes were the dominant medium of the new age, and from then on a president who had not mastered TV would find it difficult to effectively lead the nation.

Jack was still a person in creation, constantly tinkering with his public persona. He watched his appearance on television as if he were looking at another person. “‘Party,’ not ‘pawty,’” he said one evening, watching his image on the black-and-white screen, like a speech teacher admonishing his pupil.

T
he following three debates for the most part only solidified the verdict of the first. Just before the second debate, J. Leonard Reinsch, Jack’s media adviser, realized that Nixon’s people had turned the thermostat down to a chilling sixty-five degrees at the NBC studios in Washington, D.C., hoping that a cool room would stem Nixon’s embarrassing propensity to perspire. Reinsch hurried through the studio until he found a janitor who, after ample browbeating, turned the hidden thermostat up as high as it could go.

Jack had a subtle, sophisticated understanding of America’s role in the world, but he was elected by people who largely did not have his knowledge or insight and did not necessarily share his views. There had always been a gap between his truths and the realities and limitations of practical politics. In the Senate when he was speaking on Algeria or Vietnam or working on a labor bill that would be fair to both unions and management, he had attempted to bridge that gap. He knew that what he considered political courage was largely the act of making that leap knowing that one might fall into the chasm of defeat. It was a leap that he was not willing to attempt during
the campaign; he preferred standing rooted in the firm and narrow grounds of seemingly practical politics.

In the third debate Jack said that the profoundly anti-Communist Nixon had “never really protested the Communists seizing Cuba, ninety miles off the coast of the United States.” He continued that same assault in the fourth and final debate, blaming the Eisenhower-Nixon administration for losing Cuba to communism.

“In 1957 I was in Havana,” Jack said from the ABC studios in New York while his opponent debated him from the network studio in Los Angeles. “I talked to the American ambassador there. He said that he was the second most powerful man in Cuba.” That was a devastating admission of the true nature of the American role in Cuba. The seeds of Cuban communism had grown during the Eisenhower years in a soil of corruption abetted in part by American businesspeople, the American government, and American mobsters. As Jack had stated previously, the corrupt “dictatorship had killed over twenty thousand Cubans in seven years.” That was in large measure why so many Cubans cried out fervently against the hated
Yanqui,
not because they were the mindless dupes of communism.

Jack criticized Nixon in the debates for traveling to Cuba in 1955 and “prais[ing] the competence and stability of the Batista dictatorship.” Jack, for his part, had treated the Caribbean island as a glorious playground. He had stood beside the dictator kissing babies and frolicked in the mendacious capital with seemingly nary a thought of the American role. And now, instead of trying to explain that government policies would have to change or American foreign policy would become a recruiter for the Communist movement, he played to the most narrowly chauvinistic instincts of the American public. “I have seen Cuba go to the Communists,” he said. “I have seen Communist influence and Castro influence rise in Latin America.”

This was bad enough for him to say without a hint of context, but the day before Jack had told one of his new aides, Richard Goodwin, to prepare “a real blast at Nixon” on the Cuban issue. Sorensen and Feldman were brilliantly attuned to Jack’s thinking. Goodwin was a brash, pugnacious young man with the overweening confidence that can come from having served as an editor of the
Harvard Law Review.
Goodwin wrote a press release in the candidate’s name stating that “we must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista, democratic forces in exile and in Cuba itself who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far, these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.”

One of the reasons Jack was so leery of academics and liberals in politics was that when they attempted to engage in what they thought was realpolitik,
they were playing with weapons that often blew up in their own faces, and those of their friends, rather than hurting their enemies. When Goodwin called Jack at the Carlyle Hotel and learned that he was already asleep, the aide went ahead and issued the press release.

The headline in the
New York Times
(“Kennedy Asks Aid for Cuban Rebels to Defeat Castro, Urges Support of Exiles and Fighters for Freedom”) unsettled American liberals still uncertain about Jack’s bona fides. James Reston, the
New York Times
columnist, a man of studiously judicious opinions, wrote: “Senator Kennedy made what is probably his worst blunder of the campaign.”

In the fourth debate Jack marked Nixon as an impotent bystander looking on hopelessly as Castro took over Cuba. Nixon said later that for the first time he felt personal animosity toward Jack. He knew that Jack’s remarks and his press release were even more unfair than they seemed to Republican loyalists. Since March, the government had been planning a large-scale covert action against Cuba run by Cuban exiles, an operation that he assumed Jack had learned about in his CIA briefings. Nixon was not only a fervent supporter but a prime mover of the action—an understandable position considering that, if the agency had kept to its original schedule, the action would have taken place a few weeks before the presidential election.

The Eisenhower-Nixon administration that Jack was condemning for its weakness in fighting communism was the first peacetime American administration to mandate assassination as official government policy. Eisenhower had done so, or so it appears, at a National Security Council meeting on August 19, 1960, dealing with the left-wing Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Robert H. Johnson, the official note-taker, recalled that the president turned to CIA Director Allen Dulles “in the full hearing of all those in attendance and [said] something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated … there was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued.” Within a few days, Dulles authorized $100,000 to kill the new president of the Congo. Dulles preferred hiding the sting in euphemism. He told Station Chief Lawrence Devlin that “we wish to give you every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility of resuming government position.”

At the same time this action was going on, a CIA agent was meeting with Johnny Rosselli at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills, asking the mobster’s help in assassinating Fidel Castro. In Miami, Rosselli brought in a group of his associates that included Giancana, the Chicago syndicate leader, and Santos Trafficante, a Florida mob boss, who agreed to use their contacts in Havana to attempt to kill the Cuban leader.

As Jack stood next to Nixon in these historic debates, he appreciated one
of the conundrums of democratic government in the modern world. Time and again he had pondered how self-interested democratic man could possibly win against the regimented legions of totalitarian regimes. He knew that in World War II the magnificent qualities of his fellow Americans had come through, but would it happen again in the silent, twilight war against communism?

The Eisenhower who had apparently chosen to authorize murder was a different leader from the greatest general of American’s greatest war, who led 150,000 men into combat at D-Day saying: “The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.” This was a president apparently giving secret orders that allowed the CIA to send assassins to attempt to gar-rote, poison, shoot, or strangle Lumumba and Castro. Did the hopes and prayers of a liberty-loving people go with them as they sidled silently out into darkest night? Was this to be the fate of any mass leader around the world who rose up carrying a Marxist textbook in his hand while waving the flag of nationalism? If that was to be, was not this new statecraft easily learned? If would-be killers could stealthily make their way to the Congo and Cuba, couldn’t other killers rush the throne of power in Washington?

No evidence exists that at this time Jack knew about the assassination attempts, but in this debate Nixon had good reason to condemn Jack for his duplicitous act of pretending to know nothing about the training of Cuban exiles. To do so would have blown the cover on the CIA operation, and that he would not do. Instead, Nixon decided to lie. “I think that Senator Kennedy’s policies and recommendations for the handling of the Castro regime are probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations that he’s made during the course of this campaign,” Nixon said. “Now, I don’t know what Senator Kennedy suggests when he says that we should help those who oppose the Castro regime, both in Cuba and without. But I do know this: that if we were to follow that recommendation, that we would lose all of our friends in Latin America, we would probably be condemned in the United Nations, and we would not accomplish our objective. I know something else. It would be an open invitation for Mr. Khrushchev to come in, to come into Latin America and to engage us in what would be a civil war, and possibly even worse than that.”

In lying, Nixon had spoken the truth. This tragic misadventure whose existence he denied was everything Nixon said it was, though he was one of its major backers. As for Jack, his goading of Nixon was an unseemly business. Although Jack later asserted that he had not been briefed by the CIA about the invasion plans, he had probably learned of them from several other sources. Manuel Artime, the political leader of the brigade of Cuban exiles, met Kennedy in July 1960, when they almost certainly discussed the
prospective invasion. In October, just before the final debate, John Patterson, the governor of Alabama, said that he flew to New York and at the Barclay Hotel secretly briefed the candidate about the members of the Alabama Air National Guard who were training the Cuban exiles in Guatemala for an invasion. “I want you to promise me that you are never going to breathe a word about this to anybody if you do not know about it, because there are a lot of lives at stake,” he recalled telling Jack. A few weeks later, when President-elect Kennedy was formally briefed on the operation for the first time, the CIA’s Richard Bissell realized that Jack was already knowledgeable about the invasion. “I think Kennedy had obviously heard of the project,” Bissell reflected. “Just how, I don’t know, but that wasn’t surprising; a fair number of people knew about it.” The CIA would admit later that “the project had lost its covert nature by November 1960,” and surely the Democratic candidate for president had been one of those to know about it.