TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/60elect/60elect.009

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                2/                ₧<                            =            ╚October 31, 1960

REPUBLICANS

Candidate in Crisis



     Into the battleship-grey conference room of the drab Bond
Hotel in Hartford, Conn. last week walked Presidential Candidate
Richard Nixon, Running Mate Henry Cabot Lodge, and such top
campaign lieutenants as Labor Secretary James Mitchell, Attorney
General William Rogers and Interior Secretary Fred Seaton. The men
took their places around a long table, posed for press
photographers. Then aides shooed the newsmen out, the doors
closed, the smiles faded, and the Republican campaign team got
down to the serious business before it: settling on strategy,
tactics and schedules for the last, decisive weeks of the
campaign.

     Nixon lieutenants read off hopeful reports based on a survey
of Republican leaders around the country, but a grimness hovered
over the meeting. Only three weeks before the showdown, Richard
Nixon's campaign was in trouble. His basic campaign theme --
maturity and experience to cope with Khrushchev and keep the peace
-- had failed to stir any surge among the voters. The whiff of
recession in the autumn air was weakening the second half of the
G.O.P. "peace and prosperity" claim. Most worrisome of all was the
mounting evidence of a wide Roman Catholic swing to Democrat Jack
Kennedy in the big industrial states. The Kennedy camp, groaned a
Nixon aide after the huddle in Hartford, "Has cohesed the Catholic
vote in  a bloc more successfully than we had supposed was
possible."

     Early Rounds. At the start of the campaign, Nixon men would
have dismissed as preposterous a prediction that three weeks
before the end Nixon would be slipping behind, with omens of
defeat swirling about him. The strange 1960 campaign has gone
through three distinct phases. After the confused wrestling at the
Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, with the idealistic
Stevensonian liberals outraged by what they considered the Kennedy
steamroller tactics, the Republican Convention in Chicago conveyed
an impression of unity, earnestness and respectability. Nixon's
acceptance speech went over with the TV audience a lot better than
Kennedy's, with its ill-advised rewriting of Lincoln, his "malice
for all" gibe at Nixon. Kennedy's choice of Texas Lyndon Johnson
as his running mate seemed clever power politics at the time, but
failed to stir any enthusiasm in the South, or anywhere else.
Cabot Lodge, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was Nixon's
second choice -- when Rockefeller would not take the job -- but
proved a first rate asset, strengthening the ticket's appeal,
reinforcing its claim to superiority in foreign policy experience.

     Round 2 was the August rump session of Congress. Kennedy and
Johnson were outmaneuvered by Eisenhower's veto threats and
outvoted by a coalition of Northern Republicans and conservative
Southern Democrats. When the session ended, Candidate Kennedy had
a look of failure and ineptness upon him.

     Positive Thinking. Then, in mid-September, the luck of the
campaign changed and dealt Nixon's prospects two jolting blows.
First came the flare-up of the religion issue. Mindful that a
massive Roman Catholic shift to Kennedy in the big-electoral-vote
Northern states could swing the election, Nixon gave orders down
through the ranks that the religion issue was not to be mentioned.
But a group of 150 Protestant clergymen and laymen, headed by New
York's Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking)
met in Washington to toss a headline-making anti-Catholic
manifesto into the campaign. The manifesto led to Kennedy's
dramatic confrontation with the Houston ministers, and gave the
Kennedy forces a golden opportunity to exploit the religion issue
in Catholic (as well as Protestant) sections of the U.S. by
running and rerunning the film. From the Peale manifesto on,
conservative Catholics, who leaned toward Nixon, began to move
into the Kennedy camp -- carrying with them many a vote-heavy
urban center out of the 1956 Republican column.

     The second heavy blow was Nixon's poor showing in the first
TV debate with Kennedy. A combination of fatigue, inept makeup,
and a me-too approach (abandoned soon afterward), plus the
resourcefulness in argument and forcefulness of character that
Kennedy showed, made Kennedy the winner on the TV screens (many
radio listeners, hearing the voices only, thought that Nixon won).

     Republican party chieftains were staggered by the effect of
the first debate. Knowing that Nixon had been a champion debater
in high school and college, recalling his easy platform conquests
in his California campaigns for House and Senate, Nixon men had
confidently expected their man to give Kennedy a decisive
trouncing. Nixon himself was less cocky. He had debated with
Kennedy on a public platform back in 1947, when they were both
freshman Congressmen, and recalled him as a tough antagonist.
"Everyone expects me to wipe up the floor with this guy," Nixon
said before the first debate. "But it's not going to be easy to
do."

     If Norman Vincent Peale's bomb was Nixon's worst piece of
inherited bad luck in the campaign so far, the agreement to debate
with Kennedy on TV was his own worst tactical mistake. Though
Nixon drew even with Kennedy in the later rounds, the four
encounters together helped Kennedy enormously -- not so much by
weakening Nixon's public image as by strengthening Kennedy's.
Before the debates, after 7 1/2 years as Vice President, Nixon was
far better known, and though he had many detractors, seemed a man
of much greater maturity and experience -- though their age
difference is only four years (Nixon is 47, Kennedy 43). About
Kennedy most voters knew little more than that he was boyish
looking, rich, and an efficient operator. If Nixon had never
agreed to the debates, Kennedy would not have had the opportunity
to prove, before a nationwide audience, that he is Nixon's match
in quickness of mind, decisiveness, and resources of combat.

     Plenty of Advice. The grim effects of this change of fortune
became more apparent to Nixon as he moved into New York City for
three days of conferences and huddles in his Waldorf-Astoria suite
prior to his TV debate. Not only was Kennedy surging in the
big-vote eastern states and winning adulation in the streets, but
the Nixon camp itself was showing its first signs of gloom and
discouragement. Gone was the confident prediction that Nixon would
win or lose in one big sweep -- the win to be based, hopefully, on
his clear superiority in leadership of the cold war battle.
Instead, the Nixon forces were regrouping for a dogged state-by-
state battle for votes, prepared to stick to Nixon's experience
theme for all it was worth but equally ready (along with the
Democrats) to work such local issues as farm support in the
Midwest, oil depletion in Texas, aid for depressed areas in states
of rising unemployment.

     In huddles with such Republican leaders as New York's
Governor Rockefeller, Tom Dewey, Herbert Hoover and Publisher Roy
Howard, Nixon aired his problems. One sign of Republican worry was
the barrage of advice, some of it flatly contradictory, that
poured in on him. Among other things, advice givers urged him to:

     -- Hit harder, in direct, personal attacks on Kennedy.

     -- Halt direct, personal attacks on Kennedy and stick to a
high-toned foreign-policy-is-the-issue approach.

     -- Take a firm G.O.P. line and stop trying to sound both
liberal and conservative.

     -- Bring Ike more directly into the campaign, perhaps by
staging joint Ike-Dick parades in New York and Chicago.

     -- Break away from Ike -- to create an independent image of
strength instead of hanging onto Ike's coattails.

     Plunge into Bathos. Nixon is something of a fatalist and no
stranger to tight spots. No spot could be tighter than the tense
moment in the 1952 campaign when he was caught in the uproar over
a Nixon trust fund and found not only Democrats but Dwight
Eisenhower's lieutenants ready to throw him off the ticket.
Completely on his own, he delivered his well-remembered nationwide
TV speech in which he laid bare his personal finances and
mentioned, in a plunge into bathos, that the only gift he ever had
accepted was the little dog Checkers. The Checkers speech became
a monument to political corn, but the oft-forgotten fact was that
it brought Dick Nixon such a landslide of popular support that Ike
promptly welcomed him back to the team as "my boy."

     For all the well-known high points of his campaign biography
-- son of a hard-pressed Quaker family in Whittier, Calif. who
worked as a youngster in his father's grocery store -- Dick Nixon
as a young man never seemed minted for the kind of pulling,
hauling and mauling that have marked his political career. After
graduating from Quaker-run Whittier College in Depression-haunted
1934, Nixon studied law at North Carolina's Duke University for
three poverty-pinched years. Though he got elected president of
the Duke Bar Association in his last year, none of his fellow
students expected him to go into politics. Recalls Basil Lee
Whitener, a member of Nixon's graduating class (1937) and now a
Democratic Congressman from North Carolina: "He was no smiler
then, quite the contrary. Like most others, I figured he would
wind up doing a wonderful job in a big law firm, handling
securities or other matters that need the attention of a scholar,
not a politician."

     Nixon's fondest hope after graduation (third in his class)
was to land a place in New York's famed Sullivan & Cromwell, where
John Foster Dulles, later Secretary of State under Dwight
Eisenhower, was the top active partner, but Sullivan & Cromwell
was not taking on any fledgling lawyers from unprestigious law
schools that year. Nixon headed back to California, joined a law
firm in his home town of Whittier. The woman who was the firm's
secretary back then recalls that Nixon often stayed at his desk
right through lunch hours: "He was always sending me out for
pineapple malts and hamburgers. He just about lived on them."
Then, as the campaign biographies have never failed to relate,
while trying out for a part in an amateur play, Lawyer Nixon met
Nevada-born Thelma Catherine ("Pat") Ryan, teacher of shorthand
and typing at a Whittier high school. On their first date, to her
astonishment, he told her that he was going to marry her. And two
years later, he did.

     South Pacific Poker. For a while, in 1942, Nixon worked in
the Office of Price Administration in Washington, a period that
helped shape his wariness toward Big Government. "I came out of
college more liberal than I am today," he said not long ago, "more
liberal in the sense that I thought it was possible for government
to do more than I later found it was practical to do."

     Nixon wrestled down his Quaker scruples about military
service, spent a year and a half in the Pacific as an officer in
the Navy's Air Transport Command, constructing airstrips on jungle
islands. Overcoming another Quaker scruple, he learned poker. He
played a careful game, kept one of the stoniest poker faces in the
South Pacific, and "seemed always to end up a game somewhere
between $30 and $60 ahead," a wartime friend recalls.

     Dogged Pursuit. Well-known is the story of his being invited
by Whittier friends, shortly after V-J day, to run for Congress
against New Deal Democrat Jerry Voorhis. His big victory over
Voorhis (won partly because he induced Voorhis to engage in a
series of public debates and thus elevate Nixon to prominence)
landed him in Congress with another freshman, one John Fitzgerald
Kennedy of Massachusetts. Kennedy loped along in anonymity;
Congressman Nixon hit the nation's front pages during his very
first term. As a member of the House Un-American Activities
Committee, he was present when ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers
testified that Alger Hiss, sometime high State Department
official, had been a Communist spy during the 1930s. Hiss's
denials convinced the other committee members -- but his
legalistic evasions caught the alert ear of law-trained Richard
Nixon. Nixon doggedly pursued the investigation as virtually a
one-man committee. Many an ardent Nixon admirer firmly believes
that the Democratic liberals' real hatred of Nixon stems not from
his insinuating style of debate but from the fact that the Hiss
case shattered so many of their postwar illusions about the
Communist "wave of the future."

     Sprung to fame as the nemesis of Alger HIss, Nixon ran for
the Senate in 1950 against liberal-wing Democratic Congresswoman
Helen Gahagan Douglas (wife of Cinemactor Melvyn Douglas),
defeated her in what he called a "rocking, socking campaign." It
featured Nixon's documented allegation that her voting record
resembled that of New York's Communist-lining Congressman Vito
Marcantonio -- a charge originally hurled at Candidate Douglas not
by Nixon but by an opponent in the Democratic primary.

     Conservative Radical. Tied to Richard Nixon in the 1950
battle was an epithet that he has not quite managed to shake
loose: "Tricky Dick." The Nixon that his friends know is not the
stab-fingered persecutor with the five o'clock shadow that the
cartoonists draw. To counter this impression, Nixon, who is
essentially a reserved and private man, has made a "Dick and Pat"
campaign that is quite unlike his unextroverted personal life. The
Tricky Dick legend obscures Nixon's private scrupulousness, which
leads him to turn over to charitable organizations every cent of
the thousands of dollars he has earned for paid speaking
engagements during his years as Vice President. The Tricky Dick
haze has also obscured Nixon's public philosophy. A persistent
liberal accusation against him is that he is "innocent of
doctrine," that he has "no ideas, only methods." But over the
years Nixon has built up a consistent record on public issues.

     During his first term in Congress, Nixon showed himself to
be, in the positions he took, a sort of pre-Eisenhower Eisenhower
Republican: conservative on the central domestic question of the
role of Government in national life, liberal on civil rights,
internationalist in foreign relations. As a Congressman, he took
several stands that the Eisenhower Administration later adopted
and translated into law: civil rights legislation, statehood for
Alaska and Hawaii, construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway,
relinquishment of federal claims to control of the tidelands. As a
freshman Congressman, Nixon supported Harry Truman's program of
aid to Communist-menaced Greece and Turkey, and he has remained a
steadfast backer of foreign aid.

     On domestic questions, Nixon held as a Congressman basically
the same Republican view he holds today: that the role of the
Federal Government "should be a supporting role, supplementing and
stimulating rather than supplanting private enterprise." Nixon
sometimes speaks of himself as a "radical" in the goals he wants
the U.S. to reach in standards of living, in health, in education,
in opportunity for the young and security for the old. Where he
parts company with the Democratic Party is in insisting that
achievement of these goals is not the primary task of the Federal
Government.

     "Hunk of Iron." It was largely Nixon's unmistakable
Republicanness that led Republican chieftains at the Chicago
convention in 1952 to pick him from Dwight Eisenhower's short list
of acceptable vice-presidential prospects. The new President was
reared in the military gospel that a second in command should
always be trained to take over in case of accident, accordingly
decided at the start that his Vice President would sit in the
Councils of the Administration, learn its secrets, share in its
decisions, and so be prepared to take over if the President died
in office. Ike laid down a rule that when he was absent Nixon
would preside at meetings of both the Cabinet and the National
Security Council. Over the years, Nixon has made nine official
trips abroad, covering a total of 159,232 miles, as Ike's
representative. The late Secretary Dulles once said that "Dick is
the best person we have, outside of the President himself, for
overseas good-will missions."

     Vice President Nixon has never had any authority to make
policy decisions: the Constitution vests the entire executive
power in the President. But Nixon nevertheless helped to shape
policies by influence and argument, and many times Ike has had to
call on Nixon to get Republican support for Administration bills
in Congress. The Administration's devotion to foreign aid over the
years is partly traceable to Nixon's influence. In October 1957,
Nixon was the first member of the Administration to say publicly
that the Soviet Sputnik, which the admiral in charge of U.S. Navy
satellite research had dismissed as a "hunk of iron," represented
a serious challenge to the U.S.

     As the highest man in the White House councils with practical
political savvy, he found himself in occasional disagreement with
Administration policy, and his situation was touchy. Sometimes he
openly battled for his viewpoint in the councils of the
Administration. During the 1957-58 recession, for example, he
recruited Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell and Interior Secretary
Fred Seaton in his losing struggle to persuade Ike that, with the
1958 congressional elections looming, the Administration should
take more drastic anti-recession measures, even at the cost of
further unbalancing the budget. On some issues, notably his
disagreement with Agriculture Secretary Benson's farm policies and
his concern over budgetary decisions and defense expenditures,
Nixon decided to let the public in on his dissatisfaction by leaks
to newsmen, which have sometimes reverberated.

     The Kitchen Debate. Nixon did not always have an easy welcome
at the White House. During the Administration's early years, Ike's
peppery chief of staff, Sherman Adams, kept him at arm's length.
But Nixon's standing soared during the months following the
President's heart attack on Sept. 24, 1955. Confronted with a
trying situation, in which even the appearance of undue self-
assertion might have seemed a grabbing for power, Nixon conducted
himself with poise and modesty, presided at Cabinet meetings from
his customary chair instead of from the President's. When he had
to confer with Cabinet officers, he went to their offices instead
of asking them to his.

     Nonetheless, in 1956 Sherman Adams told Nixon that it might
be better if he took a Cabinet post rather than stand again for
the vice-presidency. Later on, Ike himself suggested that it might
help Nixon's political career to serve in a Cabinet post. Nixon
seriously considered quitting Government, but abandoned the idea
and told Ike that he preferred to run for Vice President again.
Adams was toppled into ignominy in 1958 by the Goldfine affair,
and Nixon found firm White House support from Adams' successor,
Wilton B. ("Jerry") Persons, a genial Alabamian, and from ever
influential Jim Hagerty.

     Ike himself was much impressed by Nixon's conduct during the
heart-attack crisis, his courage in the face of Communist-led mobs
in Lima and Caracas in 1958, and his steadiness in the famed
"kitchen debate" with Khrushchev in Moscow last year. Early this
year, Ike made it clear that he wanted Richard Nixon to succeed
him in the presidency.

     Cold Rejection. Ike's endorsement was all Nixon needed to
assure him the Republican nomination: GOPoliticians had made up
their minds for Nixon long before. He won their unshakable loyalty
by campaigning hard for G.O.P. congressional and gubernatorial
candidates in the off-year elections of 1954 and 1958. Over the
years, Republican professionals had come to look upon Richard
Nixon, rather than Dwight Eisenhower, as the leader of the
Republican Party -- and much of the talk of a "new Nixon" evolved
from the fact that Nixon grew in stature as he came to accept this
responsibility. When Nelson Rockefeller, with his impressive
against-the-tide victory in New York State in 1958 and his magic
way with crowds, set out with hopes of winning the G.O.P.
presidential nomination, he met with cold and swift rejection by
Republican politicos -- not because they doubted his vote-getting
abilities, but because they were loyal to Nixon and respected him.

     Once he got the nomination at Chicago, Nixon faced a tough
problem in political arithmetic: in the U.S. in 1960, Democrats
outnumber Republicans by many millions. Despite Ike's vast
personal popularity, a Democratic tide has brought about 2-to-1
Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, a Democratic
edge of 33 to 17 in governorships. Public-opinion polls and voter-
registration tallies indicate a basic Democratic majority of
roughly 7 to 5. "To win," said Richard Nixon at the start of his
campaign, "we have to get most of the Republicans, more than half
of the independents, and 20% or more of the Democrats."

     Nixon was confident that he could do that. He based his hopes
on the fundamental assumption that, with uneasiness about the
Communist menace and the threat of nuclear war widespread across
the land, he could win over enough of the swing voters -- the
independents and wavering Democrats -- by convincing them that he
was better equipped, in maturity and experience, to deal with the
dangerous times ahead. The need to whip up Republican enthusiasm
while appearing to be above party sometimes gets him into
embarrassing contradictions -- as in two conflicting statements in
Arizona last week, when he pledged his backing of all Republican
candidates everywhere and an hour later urged voters to eschew
party labels.

     The Activist. All the whirl of campaigning -- the
speechmaking, the debaters' points on TV, the mimeographing of
position papers -- comes down to one question for the independent-
minded U.S. voter when he goes to the polls Nov. 8: How will the
candidate look in the White House? One of Kennedy's disadvantages
(or advantages) is that the voter, trying to judge future
performance, knows only about Kennedy what he has seen on
television and what he has read about the coolly, capably run
political campaign. The Nixon vision is summoned up far more
easily. Already, Nixon has made it clear that he will rely on a
high-level kind of staff: Vice President Lodge as coordinator of
peacetime cold war, presumably Nelson Rockefeller as an occasional
foreign policy adviser, a new council for economic affairs equal
in stature to the National Security Council, and the active
cooperation of Ike himself.

     But Nixon's staff knows another side of him. Although he
gathers the advice of the best people he can find, Nixon makes up
his own mind and far faster than Eisenhower. Frequently he takes
a completely different tack from what his advisers suggest (he has
been known to change the day's campaign plans and schedules in
mid-air because his ear tells him that it is time to vary the
routine). Nixon acts coolly in crisis, has a good feeling for the
workings of vast government and knows how to short-circuit
bureaucracy. He understands Congress, though he does not have a
warm relationship with congressional leaders of either party. He
has a strong sense of public mood, which might lead him to
postpone some decisions until there is a sufficient public outcry
to back him up (a favorite device of both Franklin Roosevelt and
Dwight Eisenhower). He has, as yet, shown no strong sense of
mission like Kennedy's that might energize his administration into
a flurry of activity in the "first 90 days." But Nixon is by
nature an activist.

     Streak of Fatalism. As he headed into the final phase of the
campaign last week, Nixon had apparently not yet succeeded in
persuading a majority of U.S. voters that he, and not Jack
Kennedy, should cope with the problems, the perils, and the
opportunities of the 1960s. Nixon is convinced that the decisive
lap of the campaign still lies ahead. He argues that only in the
final fortnight of a presidential campaign do the undecided voters
-- still numerous enough to swing the election either way -- make
up their minds, largely on the basis of a "last impression" of the
candidates. This week, in pursuit of those still-undecided voters,
Nixon will take to the rails for the first time in the campaign,
make a six-day whistle-stop tour through Pennsylvania, West
Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois aboard the "Dick Nixon 1960
Campaign Victory Train." Evidently taking the advice of those who
said he had to be rougher and tougher to win, he was already
talking tougher then in his final debate -- calling Kennedy's
ideas "sophomoric," constituting "a pattern of conduct that should
convince many Americans that they could not rest well with a man
with such a total lack of judgment as Commander in Chief of our
Armed Forces." Next week, he will hit stops in New York,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, Washington and his
native California, saving the last two days of the campaign for
emergency expeditions to wherever the campaign needs him most.

     During the final, climactic fortnight of the campaign,
Richard M. Nixon, aware that if he loses this time he will
probably never get another chance to run for President, can gather
some serenity from his streak of fatalism. "Political positions
have always come to me," he once said, "because I was there and it
was the right time and the right place." On the night of Nov. 8,
he will be able to tell whether November 1960 was the right time.