CHAPTER 9

New Frontier

ON THE SATURDAY following the 1960 Democratic National Convention, I was off to Nashville to cover Tennessee’s Senate Democratic primary campaign. Senator Estes Kefauver, the nation’s best known Democrat next to John Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, was being challenged by a segregationist named Tip Taylor.

I phoned the state’s junior senator, Albert Gore, to ask him about his senior colleague, with whom he was not friendly. Since I had not been close to Gore during two years of covering the Senate, I was surprised when he insisted that I join him for a family supper at his home in Carthage, not far from Nashville. Gore, his charming wife, Pauline, his two attractive children, and I enjoyed a fried chicken dinner, with the senator and me drinking Budweiser from the can. His polite twelve-year-old son (introduced to me as “Little Al”) took in every word.

Gore was candid with me as he never had been in Washington (nor would be when we returned to the capital). He felt Kefauver was running a poor campaign and was washed up politically in Tennessee, as he was nationally. Nevertheless, Gore predicted accurately, Kefauver would win the Senate primary more easily than expected. Segregationist Democrats like Tip Taylor, he said, were finished. What Gore did not see coming was the Republican tide that would inundate him a decade later.

After dinner, we turned to the coming presidential election. I don’t think Albert Gore was much of a drinker, and two cans of beer may have loosened his tongue. He suddenly stared at me and said in his deep baritone: “Bob, you were at Los Angeles last week. Tell me. Why would the Democratic Party pick Jack Kennedy when they could have had me?” I could not imagine how to answer, but Pauline Gore saved me by intervening. “Albert!” she yelled. “Now, you stop that.”

Prior to that chicken dinner in Carthage, I did not realize how deeply Gore harbored presidential dreams. How much was Little Al pressed into a political career by his father’s disappointment, making the son intent on surpassing the father’s accomplishments? When I related this anecdote to the younger Gore during his first campaign for president in 1988, he smiled weakly and changed the subject.

         

MY NEXT ASSIGNMENT took me to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to cover Kennedy. On my first morning there, the nominee was himself briefing the press. I was wearing khaki shorts that had seen better days and a faded T-shirt with the stigmata of a coffee spill. “Well, Bob, welcome to Cape Cod” said a beaming Jack Kennedy. “But you really haven’t improved the dress code around here, have you?”

The principal news story of my week at Hyannis Port was the arrival Friday, July 29, of Lyndon Johnson. I ran into a sexy LBJ secretary I had been flirting with for a year. But the woman I really wanted to take out was Geraldine Williams, LBJ aide George Reedy’s younger, elegant-looking secretary, who was standing nearby. Al Spivak of UPI, a bachelor in his thirties, was also at hand, and I suggested that all four of us go out that night for dinner and do the nightspots of Hyannis. I hoped to get to know Geraldine better.

But it never happened because of Time correspondent Hugh Sidey. Late in the afternoon, Sidey told me he was going to camp outside JFK’s house in the family compound, where Kennedy, Johnson, and their campaign staffs were meeting that night. Sidey, only a few years older than I, was sure the old guard reporters never would cover this, and we would have the story to ourselves. I could not resist this opportunity, and paid my regrets to the Johnson secretaries. Geraldine would have to wait.

It soon appeared I had bought into a fiasco. Sidey and I stood in the country lane outside JFK’s house for three and one-half hours, as Johnson read from a bag full of memos specially prepared for the meeting, though Hugh and I could make out nothing of what he was saying.

Finally, at one a.m. Saturday, Senator Johnson left the modest clapboard house, accompanied—peculiarly, I thought—by Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger. Sidey whispered to me: “Let’s follow them.”

We did, in Sidey’s rental car, to the Yachtsman Hotel, where Johnson was staying. We stationed ourselves in a stairwell above Johnson’s suite. While we could not hear everything, Sidey and I both were experienced eavesdroppers and picked up a lot.

It soon became apparent why Johnson brought along Salinger. Johnson could never figure out why Kennedy was so much more popular than he was and at this point had concluded it was due to Pierre Salinger. An investigative reporter for Collier’s magazine whose probes of labor corruption gained Bobby Kennedy’s attention and an investigator’s job on the Senate Rackets Committee, Salinger had become Senator Kennedy’s presidential campaign press secretary. Insiders laughed at the notion that Pierre was responsible for Jack Kennedy’s popularity.

At the Yachtsman, amid the sound of ice cubes clinking in highballs, I heard LBJ declare that what he really needed was his own Pierre Salinger. George Reedy was in the room, and I could imagine Johnson’s long-suffering press aide with his sad face, sitting silently as his efforts were disdained.

Johnson was preoccupied by the need to sell himself to the American people. We heard him quote what he said Palmer Hoyt, publisher of the Denver Post, had told him but what sounded more like Lyndon Johnson: “You got a little maturity and all that, but what makes people holler when you walk by is your six-foot-three inches, good looking, broad shouldered Texan. You ought to capitalize on that. Matt Dillon [the town marshal who was the hero in the TV western Gunsmoke] ain’t popular for nothing.”

They drank and talked until nearly three a.m. The next day, I buttonholed enough people to put together a good story for Monday’s paper on what was decided at Senator Kennedy’s house—how they would campaign and what they would do in the postconvention session of Congress. My story included, and was most remembered for, the Matt Dillon quote.

         

MY FIRST CAMPAIGN was 1960, and the last when I would be on the road continuously from before Labor Day to election day, beginning in California to report on the contest for that state’s big bag of electoral votes. I concluded and wrote in the Journal that Nixon had the edge (he did win California narrowly). My most memorable interview during a week’s reporting there, however, contributed nothing to my story. I was told the youngest Kennedy brother, whom I had never met, had been assigned to Los Angeles as western states coordinator for Jack’s campaign. I got an appointment to meet Teddy in a newly rented office on Wilshire Boulevard, furnished with leased metal furniture and free from the clutter of a real working office.

Edward M. Kennedy was then twenty-eight years old, a year younger than I. He was robust, trim, and good-looking. When I asked him about the tense battle for California, he floored me by telling me this state was not included in his domain as western coordinator. That meant he was in charge of thinly populated states with few electoral votes that Nixon was going to win anyway. I wasn’t much interested, but asked about his states to be polite. He replied he was brand-new on the job and didn’t know anything about them. Teddy was neither charming Jack nor ferocious Bobby. He had the reputation of a playboy but also seemed a lightweight.

I next flew to Indianapolis to pick up Richard Nixon on the first day of a whirlwind dash across the country in the first campaign using jet aircraft. Freezing in early September on the Great Plains, I bought my first three-piece suit in Sioux Falls, South Dakota—where Nixon and Johnson appeared at the national plowing contest—and put it on the Wall Street Journal expense account, where it went through without question as everything always did. From there, I picked up Kennedy and traveled with him for a week. For ten weeks, I spent a total of three nights at my Georgetown apartment. Neglecting to pay my utility bills caused telephones, heat, and water to be turned off.

In mid-October, I was traveling with Kennedy when he stopped in Minneapolis one Saturday where I was greeted by Joe Alsop. “My deah boy,” he gushed, in his quasi-English accent. “You must tell me how Kennedy is doing.” Joseph W. Alsop, one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, introduced himself to me one day in 1959 in the Senate Press Gallery. He told me he really liked my editorial page commentaries in the Wall Street Journal and started the first of many conversations (though I cannot remember ever getting to say much as Joe held forth).

We sat together in the press section for the Minnesota rally. Alsop and I had heard Kennedy’s cool presentation many times, but Joe got excited and started cheering at every applause line. When the speech ended, he jumped on the press table and began chanting: “Jack! Jack! Jack!” Alsop was a lifelong registered Republican and a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt’s children.

Joe was more ostentatious than other journalists, but the press corps was solidly for Kennedy. Traveling with Nixon the last week of the campaign, I was having drinks with other reporters in a hotel bar. Somebody mentioned to star reporter William Lawrence of the New York Times that it was tough duty on the Nixon tour. “No,” Bill said, “I think I can do Jack more good when I’m with Nixon.”

Even reporters not committed to Kennedy felt more comfortable with him than with Nixon. Ideology aside, reporters switching from the Nixon plane to the Kennedy plane felt they were leaving a cold orphanage and entering a warm home. The only consistently accessible staffer to me on the Nixon plane was Peter Kaye, a young San Diego Union reporter brought along by Union editor and Nixon press secretary Herb Klein as a press aide. Pete was helpful but not all that knowledgeable. In contrast, all senior Kennedy staffers were eager to talk to me, and I usually could get a few words with the candidate himself.

This was a presidential campaign where both candidates anchored themselves in the middle of the road, minimizing policy disagreements as they underlined personal and character distinctions. The Kennedy campaign was fun, with large, boisterous crowds sometimes waiting hours for the senator to entrance them with a twenty-minute speech. The Nixon campaign was drudgery, with large, orderly crowds rewarded by an on-time vice president who delivered a long, stilted address.

The unique characteristic of the 1960 campaign had nothing to do with issues. That John F. Kennedy was a Roman Catholic had vast meaning for millions of Americans. Driving a rental car on Sunday morning in southern Illinois, I switched from one radio station to another and on nearly every one, I could hear fundamentalist preachers call Kennedy the pawn of Rome.

Roman Catholics, who had been slowly drawing away from traditional attachment to Democrats, were returning to vote for Kennedy. Riding in the Kennedy press bus, I observed something older colleagues had never seen before and I would never see again: Roman Catholic nuns in full habit holding hands and leaping in the air, their faces filled with joy as they gazed on the handsome young defender of their faith.

         

IN LATE OCTOBER, I covered Nelson A. Rockefeller for a couple of days in upstate New York. He knew Nixon would lose New York and was pretty sure he would lose the election. Rockefeller was campaigning so he could make the point in 1964 or future years when he was running for president himself that he had not abandoned the party’s nominee in 1960.

That Saturday night, October 21, flying down to New York City in his private plane from campaign stops in Dutchess County, Rockefeller asked me up front for a drink. This is what he told me (as recorded in my first book, The Agony of the GOP, 1964):

It looks very much as though Nixon is going to lose the election for failing to pick up enough electoral votes in the big industrialized states. He’s losing the big industrialized states, because he’s chasing a will-o’-the wisp trying to capture Southern states. No matter how hard he tries, Nixon can’t win the South. But he can alienate the North, which is attainable—and absolutely necessary.

On the Saturday before the election, I phoned Barry Goldwater at his home in Phoenix (where he had stayed for much of the campaign). He had emerged as Mr. Conservative at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, quelling a right-wing delegate revolt against Nixon. Goldwater now agreed with Rockefeller that Nixon was going to lose, but that was his only agreement with the governor. This is what Goldwater told me (as recorded in my book):

Nixon made his basic mistake by moving to the left to woo an urban Democratic vote and particularly a Negro vote that was irrevocably Democratic…. Nixon’s gestures toward the left…had not only lost Nixon his golden opportunity to become the first Republican in a generation to bring out the full conservative vote but also had botched up the chance to sweep all or most of the segregationist South.

I thought then that Rockefeller was correct and Goldwater wrong. I realize now it was much more complicated. Rockefeller was an exceptional candidate who could have defeated Kennedy by amassing industrialized states, which Nixon—or any mainstream Republican—could not have done. Whether Nixon could have won by following Goldwater’s southern strategy cannot be determined, but there is no doubt that Goldwater was correct in seeing the future of the Republican Party as distinctly southern.

Dick Nixon, who had trouble figuring out who he was, took a little of Rockefeller and a little of Goldwater. Nixon did things that antagonized Goldwater such as bowing to Rockefeller on the party platform and picking the liberal Republican Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate. At the same time, Nixon campaigned in the South as no Republican ever had since the party’s first campaign 104 years earlier.

On the week after Labor Day, Nixon visited Lafayette, Louisiana, and Jackson, Mississippi—becoming his party’s first presidential candidate ever to campaign in those states. It was my first visit to the Deep South. I felt I was in a foreign country, as bands played a campaign ditty especially prepared for the occasion (“Dixie Is No Longer in the Bag”). The heavy black population in the two states was nowhere to be seen.

Nixon ended his campaign by going to Los Angeles for a Saturday night rally three days before the election, determined to carry his home state (which he did). Supporters in pivotal states pleaded with Nixon to visit them Sunday and perhaps push them over the top. Instead, he left Los Angeles late Sunday afternoon to go to Alaska.

Alaska? Why would Nixon take a time-consuming journey to spend an hour speaking at a rally in a Fairbanks high school gym in a state whose three electoral votes were guaranteed for him? Because he had pledged the previous summer to be the first presidential candidate to visit all fifty states. He got Hawaii out of the way early, but never fit in Alaska—until the final weekend.

Nixon next went to Detroit for a Monday afternoon “telethon.” Carefully screened telephone callers from around the country would question him on live television. Pool reporters would represent the daily press inside the television studio, rotating in fifteen-minute shifts. By luck of the draw, I was the daily press pool reporter for the first segment and was permitted in the studio a half hour before the telethon began.

The vice president entered the studio fifteen minutes before airtime, looking like a man who had not slept much. The set had not been arranged the way he wanted, and Nixon erupted. “God damn it!” he yelled. “Can’t you stupid bastards do anything right?” Nixon continued his profanity-laced rant up to airtime, but not a word appeared in print or on the air. The wire service, radio-television, and periodical press pool reporters did not report his conduct. Neither did I as the daily press pool reporter. That’s the way journalism was in those days.

After the telethon, Nixon went to Chicago to tape his election eve message to America from the CBS downtown studios. My father drove up from Joliet to pick me up to spend the night with my parents. I did not get my Illinois absentee ballot in time, and I would vote in Joliet Tuesday morning and then head back to Washington to cover the election.

As he drove the thirty-seven miles from Chicago, my father asked me whom I would vote for. I told him Kennedy. He expressed a little surprise but said he also would vote Democratic for only the second time in his life “because I think Nixon will be a bad president.” When he asked why I was voting for Kennedy, I told him I thought the struggle for survival against the Soviet Union was the only issue that mattered and that I believed Nixon was weak and that Kennedy could be strong.

The events of the next decade showed I was right about Nixon and wrong about Kennedy. I really believed Kennedy at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City when he declared “a struggle for supremacy between two conflicting ideologies: freedom under God versus ruthless, godless tyranny.” His presidency was to suggest that this was mostly posturing.

I sometimes wonder whether I cast my vote based too much on my personal reporter’s contact with candidates, leading me to like Kennedy and dislike Nixon. If I were as committed then as I am today to conservative economic policies, would I have voted for Nixon? Hardly. Nixon’s conservatism was mainly rhetorical. Nobody can claim he was less committed to big government than Kennedy, who had the saving grace of being a tax-cutter—a quality that eluded Nixon.

         

NOBODY GOT MUCH sleep on election night 1960 as we waited to learn that John F. Kennedy would be the next president. Kennedy’s victory was tenuous. The change in the tone and the very nature of our national government that everybody had awaited since I arrived in Washington would be more stylistic than substantive. The New Frontier would have more to do with tone than policy. Nevertheless, it would bring immense change for me, professionally and personally.