TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/60elect/60elect.005

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                                                                                August 8, 1960

THE CONVENTION

The New Boss


     As he landed in Chicago for the big day, Richard Nixon ran
slam-bang into one of the biggest, loudest crowds that ever
greeted a candidate. Perspiring throngs clawed and pushed at
him. Nixon placards rose and spun in the humid air, confetti
cascaded down from hotel rooms, and the traffic din from Lake
Shore Drive fell to a whisper under the tumult in the streets.
Squeezing through the tight throngs, Nixon found safety at last
in his Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel suite. But it was a safety of
sorts. Beneath the clamor and the cheers lay a snorting
Republican rebellion that threatened the future not only of
Nixon himself but of his party.

     Into a Trap? Nixon was in plenty of trouble. His meeting
earlier in New York with Republican Liberal Nelson Rockefeller,
and his 14-point agreement of principles ("The Treaty of Fifth
Avenue"), had rocked Midwestern, Southern and Western
Republicans. Conservatives, led by the vocal and determined
Barry Goldwater, stormed through the city, accusing Nixon of
nothing less than treachery. Behind guarded hotel doors, the
G.O.P. Platform Committee and all its subcommittees foundered in
a ragged dispute among conservatives, liberals and moderates. As
moderates gritted their teeth and dug in, the platform was
shaping up to something close to a conservative manifesto on
defense and civil rights.

     As if this were not enough to raise the hairs on Nixon's
neck, Dwight Eisenhower himself was burning up the wires. The
one man who could destroy Nixon with a word was warning by
phone that the use of words like "bold" and "new" in the defense
plank of the platform would be "falling into a trap." The
statements, Ike said, were the unmistakable handiwork of his own
former speechwriter, Emmet Hughes, who had quit the White House
staff in disillusionment with his role there and now was
Rocky's policy adviser. By using Rocky-Hughes wording, said Ike
to Nixon, "you are saying that you and I haven't done a proper
job."

     Strengthening Grasp. Nixon's first move had the impact of a
grand-slam homer in the last of the ninth. He called a press
conference. A throng of newsmen, TV people and photographers
crushed into a long, narrow room at the Conrad Hilton and fired
shotgun questions. With each answer Nixon deftly assumed his
strengthening grasp of leadership.

     Q. Will you spell out what you want in the civil rights
platform?

     A. The civil rights platform is unsatisfactory as far as
I'm concerned. I believe it is essential that the Republican
Convention adopt a strong civil rights platform, an honest one
which does deal specifically (e.g., mention of sit-in
demonstrations) and not in generalities. (The final draft
omitted the specific.)

     Q. What is your reaction to the charge that your agreement
with Governor Rockefeller was a "Munich?"

     A. The statement represented a summary of his views and
mine, views that he and I have long held.

     Q. Will you base your preference for Vice President chiefly
on foreign or domestic affairs?

     A. Whoever is nominated has to be a man who shares my views
in the issues of foreign policy, human rights and economic
policy. If he is not, he will not be an effective Vice
President.

     Q. Governor Rockefeller says he is not satisfied with the
national defense plank. Are you?

     A. I trust that during the course of the afternoon we will
be able to reach an understanding on that plank.

     Planting the Flag. By the time he was through there was no
mistaking the fact that Nixon had come to Chicago not only to
receive the nomination but to plant his flag at the head of the
party. Now he called in his advisers for a fuller briefing. He
could, they indicated, follow one of three roads: 1) let the
platform fight go to the convention floor, and win it there
publicly and irrevocably; 2) go before the full platform
committee and take charge on the ground that the nominee has
the right to dictate the platform; 3) work behind the scenes,
and get the committee itself to reconsider and give Nixon what
he wanted. It was the third -- and perhaps the toughest -- of
those roads that Nixon chose. It involved nothing less than
getting the already published texts of some of the platform
planks recalled and revised.

     Nixon pressed the action button, and the wheels turned. On
his handshaking and picture-taking rounds with nearly all 2,662
delegates and alternates, he spread confidence and authority
(and paused long enough to get a politically profitable
shoeshine from a photogenic bootblack named Leon Thompson).
Through the afternoon, delegates and leaders trooped in and out
of his second-floor suite. Each of them got the word: the
platform must go Nixon's way or there would be a floor fight.
Committee Chairman Charles Percy, whose inexperienced political
hand had been too weak to stave off the rebellion, relinquished
chairmanship to hard-nosed Wisconsin Congressman Melvin Laird.

     As the civil rights framers returned to work to sweat over
new drafts, the defense plank committee was suffering mightily
-- and so was Nixon, for the shadow of Ike's record and of the
President himself hovered near by like warning clouds. Somehow,
the finished plank would have to recognize the need for further
defense spending (the Rocky-Nixon agreement) without damning the
Eisenhower record. To settle the middle course, Nixon sent for
Massachusetts Congressman and Platform Committee Member Silvio
Conte, urged him to push ahead against the conservatives. To
reopen the defense plank, Conte and his team used as a pretext
Ike's request for a statement praising the progress of the
Polaris program. With that as a wedge, the whole plank got
sprung, and Conte & Co. proceeded to nail down fresh Nixon
lumber. The revolt was under control -- thanks, admitted Chuck
Percy, to the "physical presence of Dick Nixon. That turned it,
and nothing else could have."

     Ike himself was well over his peeve by the time he landed
in Chicago to take his bows. Again, from hotel and office
windows, the confetti poured down in torrents ("It's a
different kind; it really sticks," he gasped. "It sticks and it
chokes," replied Nixon), and Chicagoans as well as the
Republican conventioneers tore loose in a huge, cacophonous
reception that visibly left Ike bubbling. In the quiet of his
suite, Ike and Mamie got together with the Nixons for a photo
fest and a few informal greetings. (Pat Nixon, shaking Mamie's
hand, said, "I shook 3,000 hands of women yesterday." Cracked
Mamie with mock solitude as she withdrew here own hand: "Well,
then, don't bother with mine.") When the preliminaries were
over, Nixon briefed the President on the course of the platform
construction and got Ike's approval.

     The President's speech to the convention brought still
another ovation, another remarkable show of affection that even
he had not expected. The talk itself was a resounding defense of
the Eisenhower years and a challenge to the Democratic affront,
as he saw it, that the U.S. is "second best." He was interrupted
by vigorous applause no less than 72 times. Still glowing over
his reception, Ike turned in another rare performance with an
extemporaneous talk next morning at a breakfast for 600
Republicans. "In the operation of any great human organization,"
he said, "constructive plans and programs must be developed in
the great middle road...Most people instinctively grow to like
the paved highway, and they understand here it is where human
progress is achieved. Those that march in the gutter, in the
extremes of the right and the left, in the long run are always
defeated." He also reminded his fellow Republicans that he was
not yet to be relegated to history's scrap heap. Said he
meaningfully, "I am still President of the United States for six
months." [Discussing his great distaste for socialism, Ike made
a remark that soon had the wires in Scandinavian countries
blazing with fury. He spoke of "the experiment of almost
complete paternalism in a very friendly European country [with]
a tremendous record for socialistic operation...The record shows
that their rate of suicide has gone up almost
unbelievably...they now have more than twice our rate.
Drunkenness has gone up. Lack of ambition is discernible on all
sides." The country, though Ike did not mention it, was Sweden.
Actually, France has the highest rate of alcoholism in the
world; the U.S. is second; Chile, third; Sweden, fourth. Japan
and Austria have the highest suicide rate of all nations (23.9
per 100,000 pop.); Sweden is sixth on the list (19.9), the U.S.
fourteenth (9.8).]

     Yoked. Ike's presence in Chicago, his ebullience and
confidence, was just the right ticket for Dick Nixon. The
President's moderating breakfast speech, his behind-the-door
and over-the-phone talks with leaders, strengthened faint
hearts, calmed hot tempers. The result was that Nixon could pick
his own way past the Administration's record to follow the new
lines he had laid out with Rockefeller. With the further
achievement of a workable platform, the Nixon command was beyond
question, and like good soldiers falling to, Nelson Rockefeller
and then Barry Goldwater stepped into place behind him. The
platform itself, polished and ready in time for Chuck Percy's
delivery (with film clips) before the convention, was one that
Dick Nixon -- as well as the others -- could support with ease;
it sparkled with all the high-minded goals of the Democrats'
platform, yet when in doubt saluted the merits of enterprise and
fiscal conservatism.

     His power thus proved, Nixon had the convention in the palm
of his hand when the delegates assembled to give him the
nomination. In the roaring hall, Nelson Rockefeller presided
genially over the New York delegation beneath Nixon banners,
parked a plastic Nixon skimmer on his head and jubilantly joined
the wild cheering as Nixon was acclaimed by all present and
shouting.

     Less than Complete. From his hotel suite, where he and Pat
watched the spectacle on TV, Nixon took the results without any
show of triumph; the only emotion he displayed came through as
he talked to the TV cameras of his boyhood and the long road he
had traveled. When a telegram came from Eisenhower, he could
not find his reading glasses, borrowed a pair from a
photographer, clamped them on his nose (for the first time in
public) and read: MY ASTONISHMENT AT YOUR NOMINATION ON THE
FIRST BALLOT IS SOMETHING LESS THAN COMPLETE. TO YOUR HANDS I
PRAY THAT I SHALL PASS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE OFFICE OF THE
PRESIDENCY AND WILL BE GLAD TO DO SO. MAY GOD BLESS YOU. AS
EVER, D.E.

     Nixon and the President had discussed vice-presidential
possibilities earlier, and the two had agreed that
Massachusetts' Cabot Lodge was the best choice. But Nixon
realistically kept in reserve the names of a few other
possibilities, notably Kentucky's Thruston Morton, whose able
chairmanship of the National Committee and political spadework
in Chicago had made him invaluable. Even though Lodge was his
favorite, explained Nixon to associates, he might have to
compromise on a Midwesterner to mollify Western and Midwestern
groups who were still seething over the Rockefeller-Nixon
agreement and who said they could not stomach another Easterner.

     Control. By this time Nixon's lines of control were so
certain that he no longer needed to worry about a serious
Midwest revolt. Late that night he gathered with 34 top
Republicans (including Milton Eisenhower and a few members of
Ike's Cabinet), Nixon made no bones about his preference, but
opened the meeting for free discussion. Only Illinois' Governor
William Stratton, who faces an uphill battle for re-election,
argued strongly for choosing a Midwesterner for the ticket -- or
at least for running in some favorite sons. But he and the
others eventually agreed on Nixon's choice. Nixon, Republican
candidate for the presidency, was the party's new boss. From
New York, where he had just finished laying the Soviets low with
his recital of the calculated Russian shooting down of the U.S.
RB-47, U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge flew into Chicago to
accept his new role.

     It was the new boss who rose before the convention to
accept the nomination with a punch-filled speech that he had
been working on for weeks. Without flamboyance, without a grin
of triumph, he tore into the Democrats and their platform
promises, laced Jack Kennedy for "the rash and impulsive
suggestion that President Eisenhower should have apologized and
sent regrets" to Khrushchev for the U-2 flights; then he
delivered his own challenge and promises for the future. [By
way of explanation, Jack Kennedy repeated his now-notable U-2
"apologize" statement for the May 23 Congressional Record: "My
response was: `Mr. Khrushchev...said there were two conditions
for continuing [the summit conference]. 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 U.S. should express
regret, then that would have been a reasonable term...'"] Next
day he followed up his announcement that he would begin
campaigning immediately by nailing down speaking dates in
California, Hawaii and Washington. Then he got together with
farm-state leaders, adroitly disconnected himself for good from
Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson (who had happily --
from Nixon's point of view -- come out for Rockefeller for
President), promised to developed a new farm program that would
finally put a stop to the crisis in the plains.

     So doing, the Republican nominee, having quelled the
disorder in Chicago, flew back to Washington. The forces of the
G.O.P. were now arrayed in new order, ready for command
decisions. And the new commander was Richard Nixon.