The fight that ensued was to be more about style than issues. Nixon did well in the situations he understood best, the small towns where the locals enjoyed the colorful pageantry, the fluttering parading of the Stars and Stripes, and the “Nixon Girls,” young women in pretty dresses shipped in from stop to stop. Even on friendly turf, though, it hardly worked for Nixon to push the notion that all was well with America as the Eisenhower years ended. James Reston noted that he seemed to be saying, “Buck up, old cheese, everything’s approximately wonderful. . . . The only trouble is that his basic theme adds up to a picture of the world that no well-informed man would seriously consider for a moment.” The nation had been in a major recession for the past two years.
A presidential campaign is a barbaric marathon that drives even fit young men to their physical and mental limits. It quickly became obvious that Nixon had lost weight and looked haggard and exhausted. Kennedy, who had once been a semi-invalid, stayed the course far better.
Press-ganged by Nixon’s team into a starring role, Pat appeared thinner than usual and sapped with fatigue. Jackie Kennedy, rarely on the campaign trail because she was pregnant, smiled from the pages of the nation’s magazines, radiating youth and charm. It did not help Nixon’s cause, Theodore White noted, that the public saw Pat’s “drawn, almost wasted face” as she followed her husband “with stoic weariness.” Observing Nixon, his head sagging with exhaustion, “the mouth half-opened in tired slackness,” White came to feel only “sorrow for the man and his wife.”
The New York Times’s Harrison Salisbury had been impressed by Nixon in Russia but was now more critical. “At home the crowds tensed him up,” he wrote. “I watched him ball his fists, set his jaw, hurl himself stiff-legged to the barriers at the airports and begin shaking hands. He was wound up like a watch spring. . . . No ease.”
“I have been heckled by experts,” Nixon snarled at a rowdy group of pickets in Michigan, “so don’t try something on me, or we’ll take care of you. . . . I didn’t hire you, so stay right out of here, OK?” Later, on no evidence, he ordered press aide Herb Klein to declare that the protesters had been “goons” from the auto workers’ union. Some reporters believed they had in fact been hired by the Nixon camp to undermine Kennedy’s labor support. Luckily for Nixon, his “we’ll take care of you” remark, with its implied threat, failed to appear in the newspapers.
While Kennedy never lost his temper in public, Nixon was by now known for his tantrums. Nixon’s “fiery temper,” wrote Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune, “is an awesome spectacle.” On the road in Minneapolis he began an answer about civil rights calmly. Then, Baltimore Sun correspondent Philip Potter recalled, he suddenly “blew his stack . . . lips trembling and face livid.”3
The Secret Service agent closest to Nixon, Jack Sherwood, said he “would snap when the campaign became too much.” Bob Haldeman recalled a day when Nixon became frustrated over a poor schedule while touring Iowa by car. “Don Hughes, Nixon’s military aide, was in the seat directly in front. Suddenly, incredibly, Nixon began to kick the back of Hughes’s seat with both feet. And he wouldn’t stop. . . . 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. . . .”4
Nixon would sit hunched and alone in the back of the campaign plane, trying to avoid conversation with other politicians and his own staff, scribbling endlessly on his yellow pads, writing and rewriting speeches. While he would recall with pride having worked on the talks himself, his aides thought it a wasteful use of able speechwriters. “He reduced us all to clerks,” one said bitterly.
After appointing a board of seasoned advisers, Nixon ignored them and insisted on making the smallest decisions himself. “He wanted to be horse and jockey,” said Jim Bassett, now planning director. For no good strategic reason, Nixon promised to campaign in every single state of the Union, a commitment that was to leave him rushing off to sparsely populated Alaska just two days before the election. The advisers told him the trip was pointless, worth only three electoral votes, but Nixon would not listen. “Dick has painted himself and all of us into an impossible corner,” Bassett wrote his wife, Wilma.
Bassett also remembered “horrible temper” outbursts after which Nixon would go and “hole himself up in his room.” “I don’t even want to set down on paper all my thoughts about this campaign,” he wrote his wife. “We’ve done so many things wrong, wasted so much time, and blown our lead so. . . . From the top down, it’s agreed that the one guy responsible, perhaps the only guy, is the candidate himself. When loners insist on loneness and shun advice, even reject it out of hand, then, by golly, they must suffer all the penalties. . . . And when his brain tires and his temper shortens, then the aloneness is magnified rather horribly. It’s a little scary, isn’t it?”
The self-inflicted blow that most damaged Nixon was his decision to debate Kennedy on television. One-to-one encounters on the air were possible for the first time in 1960, following a change in the broadcasting law. Kennedy promptly accepted when the networks pressed for debates after the Democratic convention—he saw television as “the one way to break through.” For that very reason, his opponent’s advisers wanted to reject the idea. Nixon agreed with them at first, telling campaign chairman Len Hall, “No damned debates!”5
Then, without a word of notice to his colleagues, he changed his mind and publicly announced that he would debate Kennedy. Press aide Klein “almost fell over” on hearing the news. “The boo-boo,” as Bassett called it, “was handed down to the troops like an edict from the Almighty.” When Len Hall asked Nixon to explain, he “just looked up at the sky and didn’t answer. The rain started coming down . . . he still stood there looking up at the sky.”
Nixon did have a reputation as an effective debater, dating back to his school days. “I can take this man,” he had reportedly remarked after hearing Kennedy’s convention speech. “Kennedy speaks over people’s heads. . . . I did pretty well with Khrushchev. I’ll murder Kennedy.” Nixon’s only hesitation, he told Bassett, was that “he might clobber that kid Kennedy too tough on the first debate, and thus womp up a ‘sympathy factor’ for the guy. . . .”
Too late, Nixon dithered and tried to change course, sending aides to propose to the Kennedy side “conditions they won’t accept.” The tactic did not work; Kennedy had given his negotiator Leonard Reinsch “one directive, and only one directive: ‘Make sure the Republican candidate doesn’t get off the hook.’ ” Weeks of haggling later, Nixon found himself committed to not one but four debates, to begin in late September.
Poor judgment in the negotiations over the debates was followed by bad luck, illness, then more poor judgment. Nixon ignored Secret Service advice on crowd control and one day on the campaign trail found himself in what a senior agent reported as a “mad, mauling melee.” Moving into another crowd, and shoved hard against the door of his limousine, Nixon injured his leg. A few days later, during a television appearance, he visibly flinched when interviewer Jack Paar put his hand on his knee. Soon after, doctors at Walter Reed hospital diagnosed a virulent infection, so serious that Nixon faced amputation if he did not submit to intensive medication and two weeks in bed. To lose even a single day of a presidential campaign is a setback; to be out of the game for two weeks is a candidate’s nightmare.
The president did not help. Asked at a press conference to name a Nixon idea that he had adopted, Eisenhower responded with: “If you give me a week I might think of one. I don’t remember.” It was just a slip, at worst facetious, but it led to terrible press for Nixon.6 The president phoned to apologize but found a “lack of warmth” in his vice president when he visited him in the hospital. Eisenhower did later endorse Nixon’s candidacy but on medical advice campaigned little on his behalf. His heart was pla
ying up again.7
As late as 1991 Nixon was still complaining that Eisenhower had been “a tough son of a bitch. . . . He didn’t endorse me in 1960 until he absolutely had to. That was pretty devastating to my campaign. . . . It wasn’t really the most loyal thing to do.” Eisenhower, for his part, had been scornful of Nixon late in the 1960 campaign, exclaiming afterward: “Goddammit, he looks like a loser to me! . . . When I had an officer like that in World War II, I relieved him.”
Once released from the hospital, Nixon again ignored advice and threw himself into a nonstop travel marathon—only to come down with a raging fever and chills nine cities later. Ehrlichman, who first worked for Nixon that year, said he sometimes “resorted to pills or liquor” to help him sleep. One night he was found slumped in a chair, sleeping so deeply that an aide feared he was in a coma. It was reported that at forty-seven Nixon suffered from high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol levels. His doctor denied it, saying his only ailment was hay fever.
On Sunday, September 25, the Nixon caravan careened into Chicago with the crucial first television debate with Kennedy, one that was to reach seventy million citizens, scheduled for the following evening. Closeted in a suite at the Ambassador East Hotel, Kennedy held a strategy meeting all morning, relaxed over lunch, slipped out to give one untaxing speech, took a nap, then presided over a final planning session from his bed. Shortly before airtime Kennedy reportedly devoted fifteen minutes to a session with a prostitute.
Nixon, by contrast, spent most of the day alone in his room at the Pick-Congress Hotel. While he later claimed to have studied briefing notes for five hours, senior adviser Bob Finch said he “totally refused to prepare. We kept pushing for him to have some give-and-take with somebody from the staff . . . anything. He hadn’t done anything except to tell me he knew how to debate. . . .” Jim Shepley, a future president of Time who prepared the research for Nixon, recalled that “he didn’t even look at the stuff.” Nixon did speak with William Rogers, the attorney general, who suggested he play the “good guy” toward Kennedy in the debates. He brushed off advice from his TV consultant, Ted Rogers, that he should wear makeup. Then, on the way to the studio, he banged his bad knee on the car door again.
CBS producer Don Hewitt, later to achieve distinction as the head of the 60 Minutes team, greeted Kennedy when he arrived for the debate. The Democrat was tanned, fit, and well tailored, the image of “a young Adonis.” Nixon, on the other hand, looked terrible. He had lost ten pounds while hospitalized, and his clothes hung loosely on him. His complexion was as gray as his suit, which turned out to be the wrong color for the backdrop.
On hearing Kennedy refuse makeup, Nixon again declined. Then, when Kennedy accepted talcum powder to tone down his ruddy complexion, Nixon sent out for some Lazy Shave to lighten his five o’clock shadow. It merely accentuated the ghostly pallor of the rest of his face. When he noticed Robert Kennedy staring at him, Nixon asked whether he looked all right. The candidate’s brother replied with a smile “Dick, you look great! Don’t change a thing!”
Nixon’s aversion to makeup, he had recently told a BBC executive, had begun after “some amateur makeup artist dabbed the powder puff in his eye and nearly blinded him.” A military aide had fended off makeup artists thereafter, occasionally administering a little something himself.8 Press aide Klein, meanwhile, has offered a specific explanation for the fateful refusal of September 1960. Kennedy, Nixon had heard, had recently mocked fellow Democrat Hubert Humphrey for wearing heavy makeup on television. “To Nixon,” said Klein, “this made it look like [Humphrey] lacked macho, and Nixon was a very macho man.”
As airtime approached, Kennedy fazed the man who thought of him as a friend, simply by ignoring him. As the pair posed for photographs, producer Hewitt quipped, “I assume you guys know each other.” The rivals shook hands without warmth. While Kennedy retired to another room, Nixon paced nervously about the stage. He barely glanced at his opponent when he returned.
The startled reactions began as soon as the program got under way. “Why, Nixon has lost this thing!” exclaimed columnist Doris Fleeson. “He’s sat there spraddled out almost as if his fly were open.” “Probably no picture in American politics,” Theodore White would reflect later, “tells a better story of crisis and episode than that famous shot of the camera on the Vice President as he half slouched, his Lazy Shave powder faintly streaked with sweat, his eyes exaggerated hollows of blackness, his jaw, jowls and face drooping with strain.”
Nixon’s foes reacted with amazement and glee. Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin saw “a man strangely severed from his own shrewd reasoned discourse. . . . Lips occasionally forced into a smile unrelated to his words, Nixon looked more like a losing football coach summoned before the board of trustees than a leader of the free world.” “My God!” exclaimed Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley, “They’ve embalmed him before he even died.”
Friends were no less shocked. “It almost looked like he was mad or disturbed,” press tycoon Jim Copley wrote Klein the following day. Nixon’s mother telephoned a shocked Rose Woods, her son’s secretary, and asked, “Is Richard ill?” Pat, saying she “couldn’t imagine why he looked that way,” took the next plane to Chicago to join her husband.
An hour later the debate was over, and Nixon drove back to his hotel with Klein. He was exhausted and silent but seemed to believe he had done well. “None of us disillusioned him that evening,” said Klein. Pat did that, later.
In the Democratic camp, as aides rejoiced, Kennedy just smiled. “It was all right,” he said quietly. In private, on the phone to pollster Lou Harris, he exulted: “I know I can take ’im! I know I can take ’im!”
Some who heard the debate on radio, rather than seeing it on television, thought Nixon had been a success or even bettered Kennedy. In a Gallup poll, though, 43 percent of respondents thought Kennedy had come out on top, with only 23 percent for Nixon.9 As Russell Baker later wrote, “That night, image had replaced the printed word as the natural language of politics.”
The tide of the 1960 election had perceptibly turned. Crowds began turning out for Kennedy in unprecedented numbers. In the remaining three debates, with good makeup and fortified by four milk shakes a day—on doctor’s orders, to restore his weight—Nixon performed effectively.10 The damage, however, had been done. “That son of a bitch,” running mate Henry Cabot Lodge had said after watching the initial debate, “has just cost us the election.”
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Nixon flew into Memphis the day after the first confrontation to encounter a seemingly sweet old lady standing near the front of the crowd. Wearing a large NIXON button and a welcoming smile, she stepped forward to embrace him. Then, as the cameras rolled, she said loudly and waspishly, “Don’t worry, son, he beat you last night, but you’ll win next time. . . .”
The scale of the debate disaster had yet to register with Nixon, and this was the last thing he wanted to hear in public and on television. He looked shattered and puzzled until he spotted a familiar face in the crowd, that of Dick Tuck, a Kennedy campaign researcher. Armed with a tape recorder, he openly followed the Republican leader around and fed information back to the Kennedy team. No one objected to that. At the same time, though, Tuck was forever plotting mischief in the form of political pranks designed to embarrass and enrage Nixon. The pranks, he has insisted, were done entirely on his own initiative.*
“What we should have,” Kennedy press aide Salinger had told his Republican counterpart, Herb Klein, “is a very honest campaign and no sleaze on either side.” Klein concurred, talked with Nixon, and as Salinger tells it, both parties agreed to behave fairly.
In fact, both sides pulled dirty tricks, ranging from the droll to the sinister. Before the second debate Republican organizers devised a way to avoid having Nixon appear covered in sweat again. When the Democratic team arrived for the broadcast, Salinger recalled, “You needed a parka, a fur coat, in the goddamn joint . . . the Nixon people had tried to freeze the studio!” Kenn
edy aides rushed to the basement, browbeat a janitor into giving them access to the thermostat, and turned the temperature up as high as possible. By the second half of the debate, Nixon was mopping his face with a handkerchief.
Nixon’s public persona that year gave many the impression that deliberately or not, he never took the gloves off, that this was a “new” Nixon, no longer the political “alley fighter” of old. Kennedy, for his part, came across as a Sir Galahad, the good knight of the New Frontier. The true picture was murkier.
Both sides played the spying game, even against members of their own parties. John Ehrlichman, on the road for the first time, played chauffeur to Nixon’s Republican rival Nelson Rockefeller before the convention, as a cover for gathering intelligence.
“The Kennedy fellows were really much better at the dirty stuff than we were,” Ehrlichman recalled. “The Nixon campaign staff always felt a bit outclassed.” Nixon claimed in his memoirs that he had been faced “by the most ruthless group of political operators ever mobilized for a presidential campaign.”
“The dirtiest trick of all in 1960 was the manner in which the Kennedys manipulated the ‘religious issue’ for their political benefit,” wrote Victor Lasky, a self-described “freelance writer” who was in fact a longtime Nixon friend and front man.11 Kennedy was of course a Catholic, and no one of that faith had ever before been elected president. Nixon, as a Quaker himself and member of a minority faith, was to declare his pride in having resisted all efforts to exploit the religious factor. The Kennedys, he claimed, “repeatedly made religion an issue even as they professed that it should not be one” in order to woo voters who were fellow Catholics.
The allegation of Democratic chicanery was later attached to a flood of anti-Catholic hate mail sent out anonymously to Catholics. Robert Kennedy said the Nixon side spent a million dollars on such anti-Catholic propaganda. Lasky and Nixon countered that the mailings were, rather, organized by “one of Bobby’s hatchet men,” an agent provocateur working to trigger Catholic sympathy for Kennedy.12 From Texas meanwhile came a claim that as in 1946 and 1950, Nixon supporters were making anonymous phone calls. Before hanging up, callers would ask: “Would you vote for a Catholic?” or “Do you want the pope to boss the president?”