Richard M. Nixon

Nixon had discussed his upcoming trip at length in his last hospital bedside meetings with Dulles. He received very extensive briefings from the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Soviet specialists in the National Security Council and State Department, and extensive discussions with the president. Eisenhower gave Nixon all the details of Khrushchev’s agitation for a summit meeting, and said that he should stick to the precondition of some progress at Geneva on the status of West Berlin. Nixon departed on July 22 with a very large staff and press party, including James Reston of the New York Times. The visit took place during what Congress and the president had proclaimed, six years before, to be Captive Nations Week, during which the American people were urged to pray for all those under Soviet subjugation. It is not clear if any Americans actually did so, much less the effect of such supplications, other than that the gesture fulfilled its terrestrial purpose of completely aggravating the Soviet leadership.

The American party received a low-key arrival greeting from deputy premier Frol Kozlov, and the Nixons went to Spaso House, the American embassy (the ambassador was now Llewellyn Thompson, whom Nixon had worked with when in Austria in December 1956, trying to help Hungarian refugees). That night, Nixon was too keyed up to sleep well, and got up at 5:30 A.M., called for his chief Secret Service man, Jack Sherwood (who had earned his spurs with Nixon in South America), and went to the Danilovsky Market to compare it with the Los Angeles produce market where he had worked at the same hour of the day as a boy. Nixon mingled with the people quite amiably, and offered a hundred rubles to people who wanted to come to the U.S. exhibition Nixon would open at Sokolniki Park. They declined the money, saying the problem was availability, not cost, of tickets. The next day, Pravda and other Soviet information outlets ran pictures of Sherwood holding out a bank note, and accused Nixon of trying to “bribe and degrade” Soviet citizens.

Following his surprise appearance at the produce market, Nixon went to the Kremlin, a place he would come to know well, and had his first of many meetings with Soviet leaders. While photographs were being taken, Khrushchev was genial and complimented Nixon on his Guildhall speech eight months before about aid to underdeveloped countries and peaceful competition. As soon as Nixon and Khrushchev were alone with their interpreters, the Soviet leader started raving about Captive Nations Week. He lapsed into scatology, and told Nixon: “People shouldn’t shit where they eat,” an assertion whose context in this case Nixon never understood. “This resolution stinks,” Khrushchev yelled at the puzzled Nixon. “It stinks like fresh horse shit, and nothing smells worse than that.” Nixon responded, with unsuspected knowledge of the barnyard (from reading that Khrushchev had once been a pig-herder), that “The chairman is mistaken. . . . Pig shit is fouler than horse shit.” Khrushchev looked pensive for a moment, then conceded that Nixon was correct, and changed the subject.²

The two men drove together to the American exhibition, where a good deal of badinage took place for the cameras. Khrushchev was more self-confident at this sort of thing, embracing a burly Russian laborer and asking rhetorically: “Does this man look like a slave laborer to you?” Nixon unwisely (and inaccurately) conceded that the U.S.S.R. was ahead of the United States in rocketry, but said the United States was ahead in many other areas, such as color television, which was being demonstrated in front of them. They had a further exchange in the model kitchen, and Khrushchev claimed that Soviet houses were better built than American ones and that Nixon had been given a mistaken impression of the U.S.S.R. Nixon criticized the command economy and said that people should have choice and not be told what they liked, in houses or other matters. Khrushchev denounced this as inefficient. Nixon tried to introduce a note of conviviality and said that it was preferable to debate the relative merits of washing machines than of rockets, that both the U.S.S.R. and the United States were great military powers, and that neither should present the other with an ultimatum.

Khrushchev, instead of being placated, pretended that he had been threatened and demanded to know why Nixon was threatening him. Nixon replied forcefully: “We will never engage in threats.” At one point, Nixon was reduced to saying that he had worked hard as a youth and that his father was a shopkeeper. Khrushchev responded with the Marxist orthodoxy that “All shopkeepers are thieves.” Inane though all this was, it was the first public exchange there had ever been between American and Soviet leaders, and only the fifth time, after Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam, and Geneva, that a holder of national office in the United States had met a Soviet Communist Party chairman. As they jabbed fingers at each other in front of the senior American media, and Soviet officials, including Leonid Brezhnev (who would overthrow Khrushchev in five years), the atmosphere lightened, and it became clear that Khrushchev was enjoying the joust. James Reston credited Nixon with keeping the spirit jovial and generally improving the ambiance, which was the purpose of the exhibition and the vice president’s trip. It was clear that Khrushchev was immensely self-conscious about the great wealth and power and international influence of the United States. Nixon could have been a little more relaxed and less earnest, but it was an astonishing spectacle, and he fought his corner reasonably well.

Khrushchev embraced an elderly Russian woman, and then engaged in more repartee with Nixon and William Randolph Hearst Jr., whom Khrushchev already knew, and who was accompanying Nixon. Khrushchev greeted Hearst as “My capitalist, monopolist, journalist friend” and professed to disbelieve Nixon when he said that the United States had a free press. By this time, though the exchange had been absurd and bumptious, the atmosphere was so frivolous, there was no longer anything sinister about it. They returned to the Kremlin and, joined by their wives, had a sumptuous lunch including reciprocal champagne toasts at the end of which they all, following Khrushchev’s lead and urging, threw their glasses into the fireplace.³

That evening Nixon opened the exhibition officially. Khrushchev had promised that Nixon’s remarks would be published unaltered in Pravda and Izvestia. Nixon started with a direct appeal to the bourgeois ambitions of his supposedly communist readers and listeners. He said that 25 million of the 44 million families in the United States had homes as large as or larger than the one in the exhibit; and that 31 million American families had their own homes. He said that in America there were 56 million automobiles, 50 million television sets, and 143 million radios. Nixon declared that his country was the closest in the world to the ideal of a generous distribution of wealth in a class-less society, and denounced the communist propaganda version of America as a “predatory, monopolistic” country. He then emphasized American freedom of speech, religion, information, internal and external travel, and the right to criticize the government, and concluded by extolling the virtues of peaceful competition. It was an effective address, and was run the next day in the Soviet media as Khrushchev had promised.

Nixon was credited with a major success, putting the American case forcefully, but not undiplomatically, for the first time before the Russian masses. Although he allegedly had several stiff nightcaps when he returned to the embassy,⁴ Nixon was again too keyed up to sleep for most of his second night in Moscow, and then had a busy day of meetings and a formal dinner at Spaso House for Khrushchev and the entire Soviet leadership. Khrushchev insisted that the Nixons come with him at midnight to his luxurious forest dacha and spend the night, which they did. It had formerly been occupied by the czar, and was almost as large as the White House, according to Nixon.⁵ The next morning they went for a boat ride on the Moscow River and were greeted by swimmers, who it subsequently was established by Ambassador Thompson were party officials, who assured Khrushchev, when he stopped the boat and asked, that they were not “captives.” Unfortunately, their boat grounded in the river and the leaders had to transfer to another craft. Nixon put in a plea for the pilot, claiming in his memoirs to have feared for his life.

There was then a five-hour lunch, “under a canopy of magnificent birch trees; the scene could have been out of Chekhov.”⁶ When Mikoyan spoke to Pat Nixon in English, Khrushchev accused him of trying to be a Romeo, though too old for the part: “Now look here, you crafty Armenian, Mrs. Nixon belongs to me.” They started with thinly sliced whitefish, which Khrushchev assured his guests was Stalin’s favorite dish.⁷ They got back to the debate of the first day, though without such coarse metaphors. Khrushchev demanded to know why the United States was encouraging South Vietnam not to hold elections as promised at Geneva. Nixon demanded to know why the U.S.S.R. was reneging on its promise to promote genuine democracy in Eastern Europe, and especially East Germany. That evening, Khrushchev and Nixon went for the first of a number of famous Soviet-American walks in the woods. Nixon followed Eisenhower’s request to try to “break the impasse on Berlin,” at Geneva. For once, Khrushchev gave a cautious, equivocal reply.

When Nixon returned to the embassy, he cabled Eisenhower that he had emphasized, as the president had told him to do, the need for progress on Berlin at Geneva and that it was Thompson and his recommendation that “we probe Gromyko at Geneva for a further period before you send reply to Khrushchev on possible visit.” Unfortunately, Eisenhower (claimed to have) discovered that the State Department had not stressed the need for progress on Berlin as it had been ordered to do, and before Nixon returned to Washington, the White House announced that Khrushchev would be making a ten-day visit to the United States, and that Eisenhower would be returning the visit.

The Republican right was outraged, and some blamed Nixon. Senator Goldwater came to his defense, saying that Nixon was “shocked and surprised” ⁸ that the invitation was extended. Nixon did not deny this and the occasional but recurrent friction between him and Eisenhower again came close to the notice of the public. (It is unlikely that Herter and his officials did anything other than what they were instructed to do in these matters, especially as Eisenhower had so meticulously coached Nixon on the point.)

Nixon toured in the interior of the Soviet Union for five days, going to Leningrad, Novosibirsk, and Sverdlovsk (in the Urals). He tried his traditional methods of taking off into the crowds, shaking hands and asking pointed questions. His hosts were ready for this and had hecklers planted who asked him about racism in America, nuclear testing, and the American military bases all around the perimeter of the Soviet Union. But there was no physical threat as there had been in South America, and Nixon handled the exchanges without difficulty.

His speech was very intelligently crafted. He described Russia as a beautiful country inhabited by fine and brave people, remembered the great Soviet war effort, and expressed sympathy for the many millions of Soviet war dead. He dealt with the hecklers’ questions he had encountered. He said that American military bases were entirely defensive, that the U.S.S.R. spent the preposterous sum of 25 percent of its gross domestic product on the military (the real figure was almost twice this; the American figure was then about 7 percent), and that the United States had proposed the internationalization of atomic energy in 1947 and the Open Skies proposal in 1955, and that the U.S.S.R. had rejected both.

He said that the American media faithfully reported Khrushchev’s utterances, but the same courtesy was not granted by the Russians to Eisenhower. Nixon proposed that both countries promise to print the speeches of the leader of the other, that they beam television and radio programs directly to each other, and that there be a free flow of periodicals between them. He referred to the incident at the start of his tour when Pravda falsely claimed he had tried to bribe Soviet citizens. Nixon’s conclusion was that he had seen in all the cities he had visited billboards urging the people to “work for the victory of communism.” He had no problem with exhortations to a better life for all the people of the U.S.S.R. But if what is meant is the victory of communism over the United States, “We have our own ideas as to what system is best for us.” Nixon asserted that if Khrushchev “devotes his immense energies and talents to building a better life for the people of his own country,” he will be one of Russia’s greatest leaders. “But if he devotes the resources and talents of his people to the objective of promoting the communization of countries outside the Soviet Union, he will only assure that both he and his people will continue to live in an era of fear, suspicion, and tension.”¹⁰ This, in the time, was electrifying.

Whatever gloomy thoughts he may have had were dispelled by his stop in Warsaw. Khrushchev had been there two weeks before and the puppet communist occupation regime was unable to generate any enthusiasm for him. Nixon’s visit was publicized in advance only by Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America, and the Roman Catholic Church. Hundreds of thousands of people jammed the entire route of the Nixons’ open car and motorcade, and deluged them with thousands of floral bouquets. It was the exact antithesis of the debacle in Venezuela. The crowds shouted their enthusiasm for America, Eisenhower, and Nixon, and even the honor guard at the airport applauded and cheered Nixon and his wife. He cabled Eisenhower that it was “the most moving experience I have ever had.”¹²

He again returned a hero to the United States. His performance was universally commended, including by the often acidulous James Reston. He appeared on the cover of Life, with the towers of the Kremlin behind him. Among those who sent congratulatory letters were Eisenhower, J. Edgar Hoover, and an effusive film actor, undergoing a gradual career change, Ronald Reagan. Ralph de Toledano, who was at this point his leading cheerleader (but who would eventually break violently with Nixon), claimed in Newsweek that he might have “changed the course of history” in Moscow. It is not clear what possessed de Toledano to engage in such hyperbole, other than hopes of a good position in the event of Nixon’s election as president, but it was a fine domestic political success for the vice president, as well as a competent and important exercise in personal diplomacy. He had been to the lion’s den, where no such prominent American official had preceded him.

One day after his return, Nixon briefed Eisenhower and told him that Khrushchev was undoubtedly intelligent and forceful, and witty, a conversational bully and filibusterer, with a lively if crude sense of humor but an absolutely closed mind. This confirmed Eisenhower’s impression of Khrushchev from Geneva. There was no point arguing the merits of the competing systems with him. Nixon recommended that he be given the maximum exposure possible when he came to the United States, because it would oblige him to do the same for Eisenhower, and because Khrushchev would abuse the access to the Western public and ultimately make a poor impression. It was sage advice.

Eisenhower told his press conference on August 12 that he wanted to take Khrushchev to Camp David by helicopter during a time of congested traffic so the Soviet leader could see the profusion of automobiles and the size and apparent comfort of suburban houses in America. As if this were not banal enough, the president went further and said he wanted to take Khrushchev to Abilene, Kansas, where locals could assure the visitor that Eisenhower had worked hard as a youth. He said he was prompted to wish to do this by Khrushchev’s claim to Nixon that Nixon knew nothing of work: “You never worked,” Khrushchev had said. “Well I can show him the evidence that I did, and I would like him to see it.”

The five-star general and two-term president was apparently even more self-conscious and defensive than Khrushchev had been with Nixon. It is inexplicable that such an able and experienced man as Eisenhower could have imagined that Khrushchev thought that he and Nixon had got to their positions by a life of idleness, and hard to believe that he much cared what Khrushchev thought about either of them personally. It is hard not to think that Eisenhower was feeling slightly upstaged by his vice president and wanted to take back the center of the stage. These were relatively minor abrasions, but they were unfortunate.

Eisenhower went to Bonn, London, and Paris in August and September 1959, before returning to receive Khrushchev. He wanted to square matters with his principal allies before meeting at length with the Soviet leader. He found the West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, very worried about the Algerian War and convinced that it was a communist revolt and that if the French were unsuccessful there, all of North Africa would fall to the communists. Since Germany had had practically no political experience of North Africa, and certainly Adenauer had none, he was presumably inspired to say this by de Gaulle, who was a proponent of a historic settlement of grievances between France and Germany, and was exercising some influence on Adenauer. Eisenhower said that he doubted that the independence of Algeria would be quite such a catastrophe and that the West had to be careful aligning itself with colonial forces. He had the same fear that Roosevelt had had that if the United States seemed to support indefinite European colonization, the communists would be the beneficiaries.

He had a warm reception in London and in Scotland, where he had been given a castle for life because of his war service, and had a very successful joint appearance on television with Macmillan. More than a million people cheered him and General Charles de Gaulle as they rode together in an open car from the airport into Paris. (This was the inaugural trip for the new presidential aircraft, a Boeing 707, which became Air Force One. It was Eisenhower’s first experience of jet travel.) De Gaulle had proposed a triumvirate of the United States, Britain, and France as a sort of executive committee of the Western Alliance, to coordinate Alliance policy. Eisenhower had rejected that, partly out of concern for the sensibilities of other countries, especially the Germans and Italians, and partly because he did not really consider that France had earned such a status.

Now sixty-eight, de Gaulle was the first person in French history to hold high office in three different republics. He left France for Britain in 1940 to continue the war and denounced those who would make peace with the Nazis, having been associate war minister in the last government that swore allegiance to the Third Republic. After four years as head of the government in exile, he returned in the Liberation of 1944, and resigned in 1946 as head of the provisional government rather than accept what he knew to be a doomed regime of political fragmentation and weak government under the Fourth Republic. And after twelve years of domestic exile, he came back again to head the last government of the Fourth Republic and bring in the Fifth Republic, whose president he now was. A veteran of the Battle of Verdun, and of colonial service in Beirut in the twenties, he had seen and participated in almost as much history as Churchill, and was just now reaching the summit of his astounding career.

As had Roosevelt, Eisenhower underestimated the value of France as an ally and, now that it was led by such a formidable and ingenious statesman, its potential danger as a non-ally. De Gaulle had resented the weakness of France during the Second World War, as one violently opposed to any parley with the Nazis, and had tried to gain the esteem of Roosevelt, both by cooperation and then by obstruction. Churchill had recognized the desirability and the need for a revived France to assist Britain in organizing a counterweight to Soviet influence in central Europe, preferably with a revitalized and democratized Germany and a continued American presence in Europe. But Churchill had always favored the American view over the European. Roosevelt came late to the realization of de Gaulle’s qualities, and correctly foresaw that France would not be acting like a Great Power any time soon.

Now the Fourth Republic had come and gone, as de Gaulle had predicted, and the country had a strong presidential system, a strong president, a strong currency, and atomic weapons, and was in all respects an important force, held back only by the Algerian entanglement, which de Gaulle was trying to win militarily at the same time that he liberalized and conciliated the Algerian moderates and conducted secret peace negotiations. Nixon had foreseen the return of de Gaulle when in Europe in 1947. He thought only de Gaulle could restore France, but he noted a legislator’s comment that “In political terms, de Gaulle thinks he has a direct telephone link with God.”¹³ A France fully participating in the Western Alliance would be a great further source of strength. A France giving lip service to the Anglo-American alliance but really trying to stir up Western Europe to be less cooperative, and trying to hold and manipulate the balance between the American and Soviet blocs, could be a terrible nuisance, and was. Eisenhower and his immediate successors did not see the problem or figure out how to deal with de Gaulle (but Nixon did).

As years went by, de Gaulle effectively withdrew from NATO, expelled its headquarters from France, vetoed British entry into the European Common Market, opened relations with China, encouraged Quebec to separate from and fragment Canada (a country to which France owed much, including four divisions in its liberation), and incited Arab hostility to the British and the Americans. Once scorned, as he considered he had been, de Gaulle demonstrated his superhuman powers of harassment and obstruction. When the two major blocs are perceived to be of approximately equal strength, the potential for the third power is very great. De Gaulle’s foreign policy was in large measure an aggregation of confidence tricks, but the times and his prestige and virtuosity enabled him to carry it off with great effect and panache.

De Gaulle personally liked Eisenhower, and although the trip to Paris did not accomplish what had been hoped by either side, as Eisenhower again rejected de Gaulle’s “triumvirate” and de Gaulle again rejected the European Defense Community, de Gaulle did describe Eisenhower publicly and movingly as “forever in the minds of the French, the benign and supreme commander of the armies of our liberation.”

Khrushchev arrived in Washington on September 14. The leaders started with two days of talks. There was no movement on Berlin and Germany, Formosa, the Middle East, or arms control and nuclear testing, so all Eisenhower could aim for was atmospheric improvement. They agreed at the outset that neither of them wanted war. Beyond that, their meetings went smoothly but unproductively. Eisenhower did take Khrushchev on a helicopter ride over Washington, and he did see the heavy traffic and the fine middle-class homes but made no comment and was expressionless. (He had presumably read that this was Eisenhower’s ambition.)

Henry Cabot Lodge then conducted Khrushchev around the country. Some interpreted this as a snub of Nixon, but Nixon had already told Eisenhower that he should not accompany Khrushchev, as he had not accompanied other world leaders on tours of the country. Khrushchev spoke to the United Nations in New York on September 18, and advocated the abolition, over four years, of all weapons, nuclear and conventional, with no inspection or verification system. If this was not acceptable, and he could scarcely have imagined that it would be, he was prepared to revive discussions of a comprehensive test ban.

He returned to Washington and told Eisenhower that he had noted the traffic congestion but, far from being impressed, found it wasteful. On Germany, he pointed out that a reunified Germany was “the last thing” de Gaulle wanted, and Eisenhower allowed that there might be some truth to that. (Macmillan wasn’t very enthused about it either.) The highlight of his trip around the country was the cancellation of his visit to Disneyland for security reasons, and his mockery of the tall fins on the back of the current year’s Cadillac. Khrushchev had a media success, and he and Eisenhower both spoke of the “Spirit of Camp David.” His visit could be counted a modest success for both leaders and a step forward in relations between the superpowers. After almost thirty years of the sinister, enigmatic, though startlingly intelligent and sardonically witty Stalin, who never left Soviet-occupied areas (apart from Teheran, where he had an immense security detail), Khrushchev was at least a lively human face on Soviet communism, and the world media enjoyed him.

On June 9, 1960, Eisenhower had to step out of a meeting with congressional leaders to meet the president of Peru. Nixon immediately warned the others that Rockefeller’s charge that the United States was becoming a “sitting duck” in defense terms had to be contradicted. He said, “We cannot allow this charge of weakness to stand. Not that the president’s judgment is bad, but we just can’t ignore Rocky’s ‘sitting duck’ charge.”¹⁴ In this way, Nixon was effectively enlisting the Republican leaders in the Congress against Rockefeller, but also in favor of a variance to Eisenhower’s political complacency. By this time, John Ehrlichman had been hired to follow Rockefeller and note whom he met with and exactly what he said.¹⁵ The betting from the autumn of 1959 was that Rockefeller would run and take Nixon down to the last primaries, and that Nixon would be the nominee of a divided party. Kennedy was still the Democratic favorite.

In fact, revealing what would prove to be his tactical Achilles’ heel, Rockefeller did not run in the early primaries but attempted an upgraded Harold Stassen campaign of polls. He paid for heavy polling, which was suspect because he had commissioned it, that demonstrated that he would run more strongly against the Democrats than Nixon would. This did not move many delegates, and Rockefeller ran out of time and options. By the spring of 1960, his only hope really to shake Nixon was the possibility of Eisenhower’s endorsement. It is hard to imagine how he thought Eisenhower, at this point having failed to dump Nixon when he could have in the last two presidential elections, would desert him now. He telephoned Eisenhower on June 11, 1960, and sidled up to the question. Eisenhower lectured him that he should not “alarm people unnecessarily” about defense. The president said that if he declared now, he would seem like “off again, on again, gone again Finnegan.” He should go to the convention in Chicago and make his views known, and if others wanted to nominate him they could, but he should support Nixon if he was the nominee.

He also held conversations with Richard Nixon, separately, and wrote: “In his somewhat curious post of vice president, he struck me as one of those frank and steady personalities on whom one feels one could rely in the great affairs of State if ever they were to reach the highest office.” De Gaulle never wavered in his view that Nixon would attain that office, and that he would distinguish himself in it. He had long been a fascinating figure to Nixon, and these meetings began a relationship that flourished for nine years before flowering briefly when they would both be in their countries’ highest offices at the same time.¹⁷ (De Gaulle made his only visit to California, and as his motorcade sped across vast suburbs of Los Angeles, he sat silent for a long time, contemplating what he feared could be the urban future of the West, and then said, to no one in particular: “This will end badly.”)

Eisenhower was going to finish the quest for peace of the latter part of his administration with the summit meeting, his trip to the Soviet Union, and then a trip to Japan and a couple of other Far Eastern countries. Unfortunately, in the bumbling manner of the late-Eisenhower era, a high altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane had developed engine trouble over the U.S.S.R. and the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had bailed out and been captured. He was trotted about before the media of the world like a prize cow. Khrushchev demanded an apology, which Eisenhower declined to give, and the summit meeting in Paris was a fiasco. De Gaulle, as host, visited Eisenhower, Macmillan (whom he had also known well during the war), and Khrushchev, to see if anything could be done to reconstitute the meeting. After Khrushchev’s diatribe in reply, de Gaulle responded, “In that case, Mr. Chairman, do not let me detain you.” The summit meeting broke up in acrimony. (De Gaulle, having held his own with Stalin, gave up on Khrushchev and waited for and did better with Brezhnev.)

Eisenhower went on to the Far East, but was asked by the government of Japan not to come to that country, because of communist-led riots. This was another breach of American prestige, and an inexcusable lapse by the Japanese government. There were not many communists in Japan, and the government should have kept order for the visit of so distinguished and important a visitor. The president returned to Washington shortly before the Democratic nominating convention.

Eisenhower was pretty well resigned to the nomination of Nixon by now, but in May 1960 was still touting Anderson, and suggested to his former Health, Education, and Welfare secretary, Oveta Culp Hobby, that she put Anderson forward as a favorite-son candidate in Texas, or, if necessary, that she put herself forward in that role. Eisenhower was always interested in promoting female, Roman Catholic, and Jewish candidates, in theory, but never did anything about it. Mrs. Hobby wouldn’t touch any of it.

As Rockefeller waited for lightning to strike, Nixon bore down on the Republican organization he had been courting and massaging and building for fourteen years. The Democrats were proposing a lot of mad ideas that Nixon urged his congressional colleagues to force to a vote, in order to get Senators Humphrey, Johnson, Kennedy, and Symington on the record. He was not entirely successful. Nixon by this time saw the Kennedy candidacy coming; he was sure by late 1959 that Kennedy was his opponent and knew that religion would be a big winner for Kennedy. He knew that almost all Roman Catholics, about a quarter of the people, would vote for Kennedy and that many Protestants would feel that to be confident that they were not bigots, they would have to vote for him also.

Humphrey and Kennedy were the early candidates for the Democrats, as Johnson, Symington, and Stevenson held back. Nixon was concerned at what appeared to be Kennedy-financed anti-Catholic mailings into Wisconsin, prior to its April 5 primary, in order to arouse both Roman Catholics and fair-minded Protestants. This level of devious and ruthless primary tactics concerned Nixon, not only as a threat to him, but because even he, rough operator though he was, found it ethically offensive.¹⁸ Kennedy won the primary easily and went on to West Virginia, an overwhelmingly Protestant state, which voted strongly for Kennedy in the primary, as Humphrey ran out of money and was reduced to spending his own grocery money to pay campaign workers. (Kennedy’s campaign was bankrolled by his father, one of America’s wealthiest, if more controversial, industrialists.)

When Roosevelt set up the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934 and astounded everyone by naming Joseph P. Kennedy as the first chairman, he was asked by the press why he would nominate such a shady stock promoter. Roosevelt, with a toss of his leonine head and a debonair wave of his cigarette-holder, replied, “Set a thief to catch a thief.” The press roared with laughter and the appointment was a success, unlike Kennedy’s last venture into public life, as Roosevelt’s ambassador to Great Britain. In West Virginia, where Roosevelt remained an icon, Kennedy imported FDR Jr., who pointedly asked where Humphrey had been during the war. He had been mayor of Minneapolis and was not in the armed forces.¹⁹

After West Virginia, Kennedy soldiered on toward the nomination, almost unchallenged. Nixon had predicted this for many months, and he also foresaw that Kennedy would offer the vice presidential nomination to Lyndon Johnson. What was not so clear was whether Johnson, one of Washington’s mighty powers along with Sam Rayburn and next only to Eisenhower, as majority leader of the Senate, would take it.²⁰

Adlai Stevenson, indecisive to the end, had allegedly been offered the position of secretary of state if he threw in with Kennedy, but was being urged by Eleanor Roosevelt to run outright. At the convention in Los Angeles, Stevenson was the querulous candidate of Mrs. Roosevelt, Symington the unsure candidate of Mr. Truman. Lyndon Johnson was more or less of a southern and congressional favorite son, and Kennedy won on the first ballot, on July 13. He invited the mercurial, vital, and powerful Johnson, the quintessential congressional deal-maker, to be his vice presidential nominee, and Johnson accepted. He did so despite being told by the other great living triumvir of Texas federal politics, with Rayburn and Johnson - former House Speaker and FDR’s first vice president, the ninety-one-year-old John Nance Garner - that the vice presidency wasn’t worth “a pail of warm piss,” which was cleaned up publicly to “warm spit.” Rayburn, as convention chairman, rammed Johnson’s nomination through “unanimously,” despite loud yelps of protest from a liberal minority.

On the closing night, before more than a hundred thousand people in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Symington introduced Johnson, who introduced Stevenson, to introduce the presidential nominee. There were Indians (or people dressed up as American Indians, in full head-dresses) snaking around in the middle of the playing field and a number of helicopters buzzing irritatingly about as Stevenson, an inexhaustible wit, was introduced. He stood for almost a minute at the rostrum, waiting for a respite from the cacophony, and began: “I know the helicopters are Republican, but I’m not so sure about the Indians.”

Nixon was a sure bet for the nomination, and wondered who he should take for vice president, the only remaining matter of suspense to the Republicans. He thought of a Roman Catholic, an idea sponsored by Eisenhower, who suggested his old comrade, General Alfred Gruenther, oblivious of the fact that the country might have had enough of political generals for a while. Nixon wanted Rockefeller, but Rocky was not interested. Nixon even asked Eisenhower to ask Rockefeller, but the president said, “Nelson would go out and tell it to the world.”²² Eisenhower suggested that Nixon promise to Rockefeller (who was five years older than Nixon), that he, Nixon, would not seek reelection. No one would believe Nixon, and Nixon did not believe in self-nominated lame-duck presidents, and did not follow the advice. Rockefeller might have taken secretary of state in exchange for an all-out campaign effort, pursuant to a promise made in Eisenhower’s presence, but Nixon did not pursue it. The president’s proposal of a promise to one term was about as absurd as his idea that he might take his brother Milton as vice president in 1956.

Nixon met with Rockefeller on July 22 at Rockefeller’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York. They had a pleasant dinner alone, in which Nixon said that he would beef up the vice presidency, with particular responsibility in foreign affairs, and stated that if Rockefeller ran with him unsuccessfully, he would be in line for the nomination in four years. Rockefeller said that he had no interest in being vice president. If Nixon were unsuccessful, Rockefeller would be the front-runner in four years anyway, and either way, he would rather spend the intervening time as governor of New York.

From ten o’clock, when they finished dinner, to about four-thirty, they hammered out a joint statement. Nixon had to bring Rockefeller on board without alienating Eisenhower and the Republicans to the right of him. Nixon would not accept Rockefeller’s plan for compulsory medical insurance for the elderly, nor binding arbitration in labor disputes. (These were the notions of someone who had only been in electoral politics for two years.) They agreed a delicate wording on defense: “The United States can afford and must provide . . .” etc. “There must be no price ceiling on America’s security.”

They were bolting from the Eisenhower view that it was all a lot of hype from partisan Democrats, military-industrial self-serving alarmists, and gullible dupes of communist propaganda, but not directly criticizing the administration. When he heard of the “Treaty of Fifth Avenue,” Eisenhower said he found it “somewhat astonishing [from men] who had long been in administration councils and who had never voiced any doubt - at least in my presence - of the adequacy of America’s defenses.”²⁴ Eisenhower was correct in all respects except the domestic partisan implications of the defense issue in an election year.

Rockefeller leaked the deal to the press and spun it as a capitulation by Nixon. Eisenhower telephoned Nixon (from Newport, Rhode Island, where he was on holiday) and told him that “it would be difficult for Nixon to run on the administration record if the platform contained a repudiation of it.” He also implied that it would be difficult for Nixon to serve in the administration for the next six months if he was disaffected. Nixon assured him that he would ensure there was nothing critical of the administration in the platform, failing which he would repudiate the platform. Eisenhower phoned back the next day, after general publicity of Rockefeller’s policy “victory.” Nixon prevailed upon the platform committee and secured Rockefeller’s agreement to a substitute defense wording: “The United States can and must provide whatever is necessary to insure its own security. . . . To provide more would be wasteful, to provide less would be catastrophic.”²⁵ It would have been better for Nixon, Rockefeller, and Eisenhower if they had agreed on this formulation at the first try.

Nixon had carved out ground where he, Rockefeller, and Eisenhower could all stand. Nixon went to the convention in Chicago and found the delegates restive and disturbed. He held a press conference and counter-spun Rockefeller’s version and then, in a mighty blitz, shook hands and was photographed with all of the twenty-six hundred delegates, individually or in small groups, over the next twenty-four hours.

Nixon’s one big decision of the convention, apart from the composition of his acceptance speech, was the choice of a vice presidential nominee. He went through a charade like the one organized by Brownell and Dewey eight years before that had recommended him. He had about twenty party elders together and mulled over candidates, especially Congressmen Gerald Ford of Michigan, Walter Judd of Wisconsin (who had given a fiery, rather far-right, FDR-and-Uncle Joe convention keynote speech), party chairman and Kentucky senator Thruston Morton, and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. It shortly became clear that Lodge was Nixon’s choice, which he confirmed at the end of the session.

This was not a good choice, and was the first serious political error Nixon had made since his excessively violent attacks on some of the Democrats earlier in his career. Lodge had been defeated by Kennedy in 1952, was a patrician Bostonian who had no chance of bringing in his own state or any others, and was not an energetic or compelling campaigner. Nixon thought Lodge would be useful as an easterner acceptable to all sections of the Republican Party, who was familiar to a great many voters by constantly being on television replying to Soviet provocations at the United Nations, where he had been the ambassador throughout the Eisenhower years. This was all right as far as it went. But Kennedy had wrapped up the Roman Catholics, the left, and, with Lyndon Johnson, most of the South, and Nixon needed reinforcements. Lodge proved to be the most lethargic campaigner for national office of modern times.

The voters weren’t concerned about the anti-communist credentials of any of the candidates. What Nixon needed was someone to help pull a big swing state for him, and preferably excite the media a little. Everett Dirksen, senator from Illinois, would have been a flamboyant campaigner and almost certainly would have carried Illinois (which, in a dubious count, went, by nine thousand votes out of five million cast, for Kennedy). Senator Kenneth Keating, a Roman Catholic, probably could not have brought in his home state of New York, but would have added a significant scattering of Irish and eastern votes, and would have made it harder for the Democrats to claim that a Republican vote was an act of bigotry. Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania might have won his state, the third in the country in electoral votes, for Nixon. Keating and Scott were not electrifying on the hustings, though Keating was accomplished and likable, and Scott was unusually intelligent and amusing. Lodge was an impressive-looking man, but he probably did not move a thousand votes one way or another, in an electorate of nearly seventy million.

It is not impossible that Nixon, the common man from Whittier, was making a sociologically balancing move. Facing the wealthy Harvard alumnus Kennedy, veteran of the pre-war debutante parties of London when his father was the ambassador, Nixon reached for the top drawer: first Rockefeller, then the great Boston Brahmin, son of a famous senator and friend of Theodore Roosevelt. This is a wild surmise, but Nixon’s judgment in political matters was usually very clear, and he had seen the Kennedy-Johnson ticket coming for many months.

The party’s biggest vote-winner, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was not present. He had spoken the night before and gave a very combative and effective speech but did not remain to hear his successor. It is not clear whether he was irritated by the Rockefeller compromise or Nixon wanted the limelight for himself. Nelson Rockefeller introduced Nixon, quite enthusiastically, as “Richard A. Nixon,” implying that the candidate had something less than iconic status with the governor, and Nixon gave an outstanding address. Though exhausted, with his mother, wife, and daughters sitting near him, he rose admirably to the occasion. Still somewhat darkly hirsute and complicated, but forceful and dynamic and articulate, he approximately matched Kennedy’s fine oratorical effort in Los Angeles of two weeks before.

Nixon praised the speeches of Herbert Hoover, Walter Judd, Eisenhower (“our beloved, fighting president”), Barry Goldwater, and “my friend Nelson Rockefeller.” The convention was frequently referred to as being on the one hundredth anniversary of the nomination in the same city of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. Eisenhower was praised for peace, prosperity, and the restoration of integrity and dignity to the nation’s highest office. (At least he didn’t accuse Truman of treason.) Nixon claimed for the incumbent the greatest full two-term presidency since the founders of the country. This careful choice of words excluded Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, the two greatest Republican presidents, and Wilson, because of his illness. No one disputed that Eisenhower was a more capable president than Grant; Cleveland’s terms weren’t consecutive, so Nixon was really only exalting Ike over FDR’s first two terms, which was unwarranted but a forgivable partisan excess.

He promised ever greater and wider prosperity through the private sector, and accused Kennedy, in effect, of trying to promote a cult of youth. Nixon was only four years older than Kennedy, but he praised de Gaulle, Macmillan, and Adenauer, as men of “wisdom, experience . . . and courage,” adding that it was not any of them but Kennedy who had suggested that Eisenhower should apologize to Khrushchev for the U-2 overflights. He gave a cogent summary of American domestic and foreign goals, and while there was the usual tedious flag-waving and platitudinous phrases, he attacked racial discrimination, avoided any jingoism, and situated the United States squarely in the world. The communists were referred to unflatteringly, but not demagogically.

Nixon planned a frenetic campaign; he pledged to appear in all fifty states. (Alaska and Hawaii had been admitted as states and Eisenhower took from this the possibility of supranational institutions with Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) Instead of pacing himself, and ensuring that when facing such an elegant and alluring candidate as Kennedy, Nixon would look his best and seem relaxed, he emphasized those practices that tended to make him appear haggard, worn, and afflicted by jowly beardedness and excessive perspiration. This unceasing physical activity was his second serious campaign mistake, after the Lodge nomination. He took no advice, not even from Eisenhower, who gave unsolicited advice from time to time.

The Democrats were attacking the Eisenhower administration’s defense record, which along with their promised fiscal extravagance, redoubled Eisenhower’s partisanship for his vice president. Eisenhower remained a very popular and respected president, although the country felt his government, and he himself, had become rather tired. Eisenhower was so contemptuous of the Democrats, and considered their 1960 nominees to be such an ill-favored pair - Kennedy a debonair and shallow fraud and Johnson a shabby and unscrupulous trickster and con man - that his enthusiasm for Nixon reached unforeseen heights. He was prepared to do almost anything to elect Nixon, but was little used. This underemployment of a magical political weapon in the person of the president was the third principal error of Nixon’s campaign.

Either Kennedy or Nixon would be a startling change, in physical and intellectual energy level. (Kennedy suffered from acute backaches and was addicted to various painkilling medicines, as well as to a prodigious amount of conventional sexual activity with a rather indiscriminate variety of ephemeral or serial mates. But the public never saw this, partly because of the lack of curiosity and widespread partisanship of the national media.) Eisenhower was old enough to be the father of either man (he was only two years younger than Kennedy’s father, and twelve years younger than Nixon’s). This would be one of the rare elections where the age of the president of the country would fall by a whole generation.

Congress had legislated to enable the principal candidates to have free televised political debates. Eisenhower warned Nixon not to get into this. Nixon was better known than Kennedy, and while his grasp of the subject material would probably be at least as strong as Kennedy’s, his appearance and manner were less naturally attractive. Eisenhower thought there was nothing in it for Nixon. He always emphasized his comparative experience, and this would be challenged if Kennedy came through more or less as plausibly.

Eisenhower, who was not especially articulate, thought debates were contests of slickness and glibness and revealed nothing of real importance. Kennedy, for obvious reasons, was instantly in favor of debating Nixon. Nixon did not follow Eisenhower’s advice, and agreeing to debate Kennedy is generally reckoned his fourth important tactical mistake in the 1960 campaign. It need not have been a mistake; Nixon was a convincing and experienced advocate, and if he had declined, he would have appeared afraid of his youthful opponent, and would certainly have been so accused. Nixon also declined Eisenhower’s offer of his television and lighting expert.²⁶

Eisenhower did not assist his protégé by his tepid comments about him at press conferences. Reporters asked Eisenhower to say whether Nixon really was as experienced as he claimed to be at involvement in presidential decision-making. Eisenhower found the persistent questions annoying, perhaps because they implied that he had not entirely maintained his authority, although Nixon never suggested any such thing. Eisenhower, even as he cranked up to help Nixon keep Kennedy out of the White House, was very hesitant to give him the unqualified endorsement he had been seeking for eight years.

Privately, Eisenhower blamed Nixon for not accepting the post of secretary of defense, which, he claimed, would have qualified him much better to be president. This was not only nonsense in itself, but left out the fact that in that case, he would not have been nominated. He could never have retained delegate support from the Pentagon against Rockefeller and Goldwater.²⁷ The ambivalence between the two men would continue for another eight years, but this year would do Nixon great harm.

On one occasion in August 1960, Eisenhower, when asked if Nixon had initiated any important policies or ideas, snapped, “Give me a week. I might think of one.” He immediately realized he had made a mistake, and instead of trying, however awkwardly, to put things right, telephoned Nixon right after the press meeting and apologized. The Democrats and Nixon’s press critics had a good time with this regrettable malapropism. As the campaign got under way, Nixon, for all his suspicious wariness and thoroughness, still hadn’t identified Kennedy as the menace to his career that he was. Nixon had always liked Kennedy. When JFK underwent a perilous spinal fusion operation in November 1954, Nixon visited him at Bethesda Naval Hospital. As Kennedy’s condition worsened, the senator’s family and a priest were summoned. When he returned to his car, Nixon wept and said to his Secret Service escort, Rex Scouten, “That poor young man . . . poor, brave Jack is going to die. Oh, God, don’t let him die.” He returned to see a recovering Kennedy a few weeks later, and Jackie Kennedy wrote: “I can never thank you enough for being so kind and generous and thoughtful. . . . I don’t think there is anyone he thinks more highly of than . . . you.”²⁸ Yet Nixon saw the Kennedys as a sleazy family of a corrupt, quasi-fascist patriarch, and Bobby as a mad McCarthyite monk and Teddy as a friendly Irish lush with a gaggle of toothy, frothy sisters. (Nixon always had a high regard for Jackie). Nixon saw Jack as a whimsical, pleasant, bright, lazy man who had simplistic views, had made no contribution to the Senate, and suffered severe withdrawal symptoms if his appetites of a rutting panther were unfulfilled even for a few hours. He did not see Kennedy as the voters saw him: handsome, fresh, natural, cultivated, very intelligent, with a good sense of humor, and a brave man with a glamorous wife and family.

He recognized that Kennedy had been personally friendly with many of the journalists and would be favored by most of them, but he did not see him as the Robert Logue type of effortlessly attractive and apparently not indecently ambitious man who had defeated him for student body president at Whittier Union in 1929. Nixon could not shake his impression of Kennedy as basically a charlatan and was convinced that the more direct competition there was between them, the more the public would see Nixon’s comparative solidity and Kennedy’s superficiality.

In pursuing this course, he reinforced the public perception that Kennedy was a natural champion and that Nixon was an earnest but hokey striver, or, as the distinguished journalist and historian of modern presidential elections Theodore H. White put it, “one of nature’s losers.” This was an odd description of a man who had risen as quickly as Nixon had, was politically undefeated, and had been almost the acting president, despite underprivileged origins and a very challenging and severely contested career path. This underestimation of Kennedy, aggravated by his lack of Chotiner-quality expert political advice, may be taken as Nixon’s fifth tactical error in the campaign.

While Nixon was in hospital, his friend the Reverend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale signed a public statement expressing concern over whether a Roman Catholic could be trusted to exercise the office of president without being instructed by the pope. With such friends, Nixon had no need of enemies. There was no win for Nixon in this. The rabid anti-papists were going to vote for him anyway. The great majority of the Roman Catholics, despite the efforts of Nixon’s Catholic friends like Clare Booth Luce and Rose Mary Woods, were going to vote for Kennedy, which must have conferred an advantage of approximately two to one on Kennedy among those who were going to vote on the Catholic issue. Nixon had to prevent open-minded Protestants from stampeding to Kennedy to demonstrate to themselves that they weren’t bigots and that they did not subscribe to the sort of nonsense that Peale had just endorsed.

Kennedy played the religious card with tactical genius. A few days after the Peale incident, he addressed a large convention of Protestant ministers in Houston and said that he was “not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president. . . . If this election is decided on the basis that forty million Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser in the eyes of history.”

Kennedy had his foibles, but he was a refined and tasteful man, and he said almost nothing more about the issue. However, his partisans did not leave it alone. Lyndon Johnson and other Democratic spokesmen responded to the anti-Catholic hate literature as if it might have emanated from the Republicans, without ever suggesting that it had, repeating that a quarter of the people could not simply be disqualified in this way; no one had asked Kennedy or his millions of co-religionists in the armed forces what their religion was when they were risking their lives in combat, etc. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem, the leading African-American public officeholder, and the AFL-CIO’s Political Education Committee both called the election a contest between Kennedy and the bigots, as if the Democratic candidate were really running against a lynch-mob in bedsheets, not the two-term vice president. Billy Graham warned Nixon that Kennedy not only was trying to polarize the vote between all Catholics and tolerant Protestants on one side and bigots on the other, but was trying to disguise the real issues behind the false question of sectarian fair-mindedness.³⁰

Nixon handled it as best he could. Utterly devoid of any such prejudice as was being decried from the housetops (and most of the steeples) of America, he left the hospital September 9 and appeared on Meet the Press September 11. He stated his certainty that Kennedy would always put the “Constitution above any other consideration,” said he had ordered his party to say and do nothing on the religious issue, renounced the support of bigots, and disavowed Peale. He made it as difficult as possible for Democrats to represent that they were fighting religious intolerance.

There was nothing more he could do, but this did not stop low-level Democrats from saying that every time Nixon disavowed religious prejudice, he was raising religion as an issue. Kennedy and Nixon handled a touchy issue with distinction, worthy of the great office they sought and achieved. In lower echelons, in a very close and hard-fought campaign, the Republicans performed more creditably than the Democrats. Both candidates recognized that Kennedy’s religion was a political asset to him.

Nixon went over the schedule with Jim Bassett, who urged him to use his hospitalization quietly to cancel his pledge to go into fifty states and avoid those where there was no hope and those that were very safe. It was obviously a close race and the larger swing states would decide it. Nixon, in what became the sixth serious tactical error of the campaign, stuck to his fifty-state campaign plan. The reason for this is obscure. He claimed that having made the pledge, he didn’t feel excused from it just because he had spent two weeks in hospital. Perhaps it brought out another aspect of Nixon’s fierce tenacity and stubbornness. To a degree, he believed that if he simply did not yield, he would win, and his experience had to some extent justified that conviction. He finally hit the trail on September 12, visiting nine states in three days.

He awakened in the early morning of September 15 with a high fever and chills, and told the doctor traveling with him that he had to speak to the International Machinists’ Union five hours later. The doctor, John Lungren, managed to subdue the fever, and Nixon gave the address, to a union that had already committed to endorse Kennedy. In the next day, he went from St. Louis, Missouri, to New Jersey, Virginia, and then back cross-country to Omaha.

The fifty-state commitment was grueling enough, but hop-scotching all across the country like this was just bad scheduling. Ehrlichman had the idea of going by motorcade across Iowa for a day. It was a fiasco, as much time was wasted, the crowds were small, and it was a rather safe state anyway. (Nixon carried nearly 57 percent of the vote in November, and would not have lost a hundred votes if hadn’t gone on Ehrlichman’s slow car trip.) Nixon had a tantrum in the car, kicking the seat in front of him in frustration, until the occupant of the seat, Don Hughes, who had had nothing to do with the decision to travel by car in Iowa, got out of the car, resigned from the campaign, and started walking across Iowa. Haldeman walked after him and brought him back.³¹

Nixon had earned such a reputation as a nasty campaigner from the Democrats that now, running in his own right for the headship of the nation, he astounded Nixon-watchers by his restraint. There were no references to Kennedy’s wealth or the questionable origins of it, the fascist sympathies of his father, his poor attendance record in the Senate, or his peccadilloes. It may seem cynical to claim it, but Nixon made a seventh error running such a soft campaign.

Kennedy’s attacks on the defense performance of the Supreme Allied Commander in Western Europe and founding commander of NATO were outrageous. Kennedy had made a number of ill-considered comments, such as his embrace of the Algerian rebels and his assertion that Eisenhower should apologize for reconnaissance overflights of the U.S.S.R. Nixon did criticize the last, but could have made much more of it. Nixon seemed to have no alternative campaign to “rock’em, sock’em” allegations of communist sympathies or white-gloves gentlemanliness. It was as if he was afraid that his own notoriety would rise up and smite him if he really swung at Kennedy. It almost seemed that he had come full circle from the Voorhis and Douglas and 1952 campaigns, and would rather be admired for his sportsmanship than win. To those too young to remember the Nixon of 1946 to 1952, who first became acquainted with him as a public figure in 1956 or later, he did not at all seem the dreadful ogre conjured by the Democrats but rather, as Theodore White wrote, a man “almost pathetic in his eagerness to be liked.”³²

Cuba loomed as an issue through the campaign. Nixon was an enthusiastic promoter of an incipient plan for the invasion of Cuba by exiles, armed by the United States, and the overthrow of Castro. Kennedy was regularly accusing the Eisenhower administration of being excessively tolerant of the continued irritation of Castro, and implied that he would dispense with him. Nixon was then reduced to accusing Kennedy of being a hip-shooter, and an impetuous and potentially trigger-happy president. Considering what was afoot, and what came to pass seven months later in the Bay of Pigs, this exchange was ironic. Eisenhower had approved, in March 1960, a CIA program for training and equipping Cuban exiles “for future Guerrilla action.” The training took place in Guatemala, and Nixon was constantly urging it forward and asking about its progress. The initial target date for landings to join forces with indigenous anti-Castro forces was September, but Eisenhower delayed it because the exiles could not agree on an alternative to Castro as leader of Cuba. Nixon’s impatience was unwise; given the mortifying failure that befell Kennedy when he implemented the plan developed originally under Eisenhower with Nixon’s prodding, if any such thing had occurred as Nixon agitated for incessantly, in mid-election campaign, the Nixon candidacy would have sunk like the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor (in 1898).

Nixon told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Detroit at the end of August that the United States could “throw [Castro] out of office any day that we would choose” but clarified for the press (to hose down Eisenhower and the State Department) that this was “simply out of the question.”³³ On September 21, Nixon compared moving on Castro to Khrushchev’s invasion of Hungary, an acrobatic stance, given that he was hounding the CIA to get on with injecting the guerrillas into Cuba.³⁴ Kennedy regularly pointed out that the Republicans had been elected in 1952 on a campaign pledge to “roll back” communism, and now it was only ninety miles from Florida. Castro came to New York for the United Nations General Assembly session from September 18 to 28, hamming in front of photographers with Khrushchev, who took off his shoe and pounded it on his desk, in mock rage over the U-2 incident.

The first presidential debate was in Chicago on September 26. Nixon prepared the day before and flew to Chicago, touring the wards in a motorcade when he arrived and speaking to the Carpenters’ Union in the morning. He studied the issues in the afternoon and arrived at the studio in a light suit with a shirt collar too large, which made him appear drawn and fatigued, as his clothes seemed to hang on him like a bat. He had light makeup only. Nixon had bumped his knee again as he got out of his car (perhaps if he had not eschewed Cadillacs for reasons of image, he would have had the legroom to spare his knees the severe battering they suffered). He was standing uncomfortably as a result of the bump he had sustained.

Kennedy had prepared in his own fashion, relaxing on a sun deck and enjoying the pleasures of a professional woman procured for him by the specialists on his staff who supplied him in this regard before, during, and after the campaign. Kennedy found it so refreshing, he insisted on the same preparatory therapy for all the debates.³⁵ As is notorious, Kennedy won the battle of appearances. He wore a dark suit, was tanned and confident, while Nixon seemed haggard and at times a little nervous. Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, jowls, dark eyes, and tendency to perspire under television lights were all in evidence. Both candidates knew the material, and the contrast between the 1960 encounters and future presidential debates, which have been sound-bite exchanges circumscribed to superficial treatment of subjects, is striking. Yet they were not so much debating as answering reporters’ questions that they had addressed many times before.

They had an unprecedented audience of over eighty million people. Kennedy opened with his “get America moving again” theme. “I am not satisfied, as an American, with the progress we’re making.” He wanted faster progress on everything from steel production to civil rights to teachers’ pay. Nixon replied defensively, but argued that the Eisenhower years had shown a good deal more progress than had the Truman years. The fifties were not slow-motion times, he pointed out, but in fact the greatest years of progress and generally improving living standards in the country’s history. Nixon extolled Republican faith in the private sector and unlocking America’s creative energies, and only lightly broke out the violins on the issue of the poor, saying that he had been poor himself, but having the taste to avoid saying that Kennedy had not.

Nixon handled very competently the inevitable questions about whether he had really done anything in the administration or just been an observer, referring to the reports he gave on returning from foreign trips, the setting up of the inter-American lending agency, the admission of Hungarian refugees, his role in various foreign exchange programs, and his work on the Cabinet Committee on Price Stability for Economic Growth. To the follow-up question of Sander Vanocur (the veteran NBC-TV political reporter) about Ike’s inability the month before to think of an initiative of Nixon’s that he had adopted, Nixon said that Ike was “facetious” and that he had suggested a great many things. “Sometimes my advice has been taken. Sometimes it has not. I do not say that I have made the decisions.”³⁶

When Nixon returned to his hotel, feeling fairly good about his performance, he was advised by Rose Mary Woods and others that he had spoken well but looked sick. It quickly became clear that he had lost on appearance but not on content. Those who heard the debate on the radio felt, by a slight margin, that Nixon had won. For television viewers, there was an edge, though not a decisive one, to Kennedy, and this was more a press consensus than a genuine opinion sampling. Republicans who had expected Nixon to eviscerate Kennedy were disappointed, and Democrats were correspondingly happy, but the race was still close and all was still to play for. Henry Cabot Lodge, who was so laid-back that he got into his pajamas after lunch for a nap every day, watched from Texas and said, “That son-of-a-bitch just lost us the election.” In the circumstances, even if it had been true, Lodge was in no position to complain. To improve his appearance Nixon put on five pounds by drinking milk shakes, and for subsequent debates he used more makeup and wore shirts with fitting collars.

Both candidates campaigned energetically. Both drew large and friendly crowds and there was no sense that Kennedy was pulling away, though most polls showed him with a slight lead. Pat Nixon pitched in and gave it her all. Jackie Kennedy was pregnant, and because she had had some difficulty bearing children, she was little seen. (At the outset of the campaign she had been asked if it was true that she spent thirty thousand dollars a year on clothes, and not only defused the question but surely picked up some votes when she responded that she could not do that “unless I wore sable underwear.”)³⁷

The second debate was in Washington on October 7. Nixon did not rest much before the debate, but had the temperature reduced in the studio, arranged for minimal lighting in his face, and wore adequate makeup. His clothes fit properly and he was in sharper form. The whole tenor of the exchange was more aggressive. Kennedy started with the allegation that if the Republicans were going to claim that the Democrats had “lost China,” the Republicans had lost Cuba. Nixon denied that it was lost, reminded Kennedy that there was a non-intervention treaty in the Americas (which the United States frequently violated and which had not received much consideration as Eisenhower and Nixon planned the invasion of Cuba by exiles), and said that the Cubans “who want to be free are going to be supported and . . . they will attain their freedom.” (Forty-six years later, long after Kennedy and Nixon had passed prominently into history, Castro was still the dictator of Cuba.) Nixon could have mentioned that China had one hundred times Cuba’s population, but he didn’t.

There were frequent references to Khrushchev. Nixon said that the United States could not allow Khrushchev to point to the mistreatment of black Americans, and debunked Kennedy’s claim that American prestige had sunk. When Kennedy was asked why he attacked the administration but not Eisenhower, he replied that he had been given to understand that Nixon was a prominent member of the administration. Nixon pointed out that the Democrats had expended a great deal of effort claiming that he had played almost no role in it.

Kennedy attacked the Quemoy-Matsu policy and said the islands, which were only five miles offshore from China, were militarily useless and should be abandoned. Nixon scored well on this point that the United States must not oblige its nationalist allies to give up territory; “This is the same kind of woolly thinking that led to disaster for America in Korea.”³⁸ Nixon a couple of times emphasized that he did not question Kennedy’s sincerity and he hoped that Kennedy would accord him the same courtesy. Kennedy did not respond, and it seemed slightly importunate of Nixon. The press and the polls concurred in Nixon’s own judgment that he had done well and had a slight edge. The audience had declined from eighty million in the first debate to sixty million in the second.

Lodge did Nixon no favors by pledging in Harlem and again on television that there would be an African-American in the cabinet. This was a reasonable idea, but a foolish pledge, as it did not impress the blacks and alienated many southern whites. Nixon had Klein issue a statement saying that he would choose the best people possible, and that “race or religion would not be a factor either for or against.”⁴⁰

The third debate was on October 13, with the candidates on different coasts: Nixon in Los Angeles and Kennedy in New York. The Quemoy-Matsu policy was again a big issue, as both candidates demonstrated the brilliance of the Eisenhower-Dulles Formosa Resolution and Doctrine, which gave the president authority to use any means he wished to defend Formosa and “closely related localities,” a formulation that enabled Eisenhower, a specialist in dissimulation, to play poker with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai.

Kennedy harped on Quemoy and Matsu, saying that Nixon had done nothing about Tibet, Budapest, Laos, Guinea, Ghana, and Cuba. Nixon replied (accurately) that they were hardly comparable. (Kennedy would later claim that Laos was not a communist state.) What the Democratic candidate proposed to do about Tibet, or what he would have done about Budapest, was never clear, and unfortunately, Nixon did not make an issue out of it.

They clashed on domestic issues also, where Kennedy favored health care for the elderly, which he pretended would not be costly. Nixon replied effectively that his opponent was playing a game of “Here it is and here it isn’t,” and pointed out that Social Security taxes were deducted from people’s paychecks and Kennedy was flimflamming the country by pretending that the tax would not increase to pay for higher medical benefits for many millions of people.

Nixon became unctuous when he complained that President Truman had said that southerners who voted for Nixon could “go to hell.” Nixon was at least as coarse in private speech as Truman, and complaining about “bad language” made him seem to many a namby-pamby. Kennedy said, on that subject, with his usual amiable light touch, that he didn’t think there was much he “could say to Mr. Truman that’s going to cause him, at the age of seventy-six,” to change his vocabulary. “Maybe Mrs. Truman can, but I don’t think I can.” (Mrs. Truman, though a formidable battle-axe at times, couldn’t either.)⁴¹ Nixon might have had a slight edge in the third debate, but the candidates essentially were still even going into the last three weeks. It was like a gripping, matched horse race, with two stallions thundering toward the finish line. The campaign now entered the fiercest and most punishing finale at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s great battle for a third term against Wendell Willkie in 1940.

The policy differences between the candidates were relatively subtle, and centered on the role of the public sector. Both candidates favored construction of low-cost housing, extension of medical care, and aid to education, but Nixon thought the private sector could be incentivized to deal with the first two and that money should be given to the states to address educational needs. Kennedy was for direct federal government funding and operation of these programs, including supplements to teachers’ salaries. In foreign policy, Nixon accused Kennedy of being an apologetic appeaser and Kennedy accused Nixon of being a warmonger. Kennedy claimed the country’s defenses were in disarray; both put on an invasion-tease in respect of Castro, and they said virtually the same things about civil rights and stimulative tax cuts.

Kennedy was exploiting Cuba to try to turn the tide on Nixon as a paper tiger, and on October 17, Nixon met with Eisenhower and Undersecretary of State C. Douglas Dillon and urged that something be done about Cuba and that, for political reasons, Nixon be seen to be involved in it. Eisenhower agreed on both counts. While this was being concerted, Kennedy spoke to the American Legion in Miami and accused Nixon of “vicious distortions” over Quemoy and Matsu. Nixon spoke to the same audience the next day and described Castro’s regime as “an intolerable cancer” and promised “the strongest possible economic measures.” (The Legion was composed of veterans of the armed forces and had about fifteen million members; they tended to be fairly hawkish, and liked both candidates because of their tough stances and distinguished war records.)

The following day, October 19, the United States announced the imposition of a complete trade embargo on Cuba except for medicine and food, and the recall of the ambassador from Havana. Kennedy replied that these measures were inadequate and late, and that there should be stronger sanctions (presumably the cut-off of supplies of medicine), aid to the democratic exiles, and a general aid program for Latin America. This was all very frustrating for Nixon, as he had been advocating such an aid program since his first visits to Latin America, and an outright invasion of Cuba by the exiles.

Kennedy claimed that the exiles were being given no support, even though he had had intelligence briefings from Allen Dulles at Eisenhower’s instruction, clearly stating that they were being assisted and prepared. The crowning irony of this exchange came in the fourth and last debate, on October 21, when Nixon gave a brilliant answer to a question about Cuba and excoriated the whole idea of an invasion of Cuba, which he had, in fact, been advocating, and which Kennedy did, in fact, carry out with disastrously humiliating results. Nixon emphasized the problems of violating the 1948 Organization of American States Treaty, which pledged nonintervention in the internal affairs of signatory countries, and predicted that any such course would alienate all of Latin America, open that continent up to the Russians, and probably fail militarily.

As Stephen Ambrose wrote, “In his long political career, Nixon made any number of predictions, some of them amazingly accurate, but never was he more exactly on the mark than in this case. The trouble was, he did not believe a word of what he said.”⁴² Nixon would have done better, since Castro had publicly predicted an American-sponsored invasion, to state that a variety of options were under consideration, that Kennedy had had a full intelligence briefing, and that he knew as a result that what he was alleging against the administration was dishonest. It could have been a knockout blow.

The other main point of contention was Kennedy’s claim that Nixon was suppressing a report showing the decline of American prestige in the world. Nixon said the report referred to was obsolete and that American prestige was in fine fettle, and then tore into Kennedy for “running America down,” citing a speech of nine months before when Kennedy had claimed “seventeen million Americans go to bed hungry every night.” Kennedy replied that he didn’t “need Mr. Nixon to tell me what my responsibilities are as a citizen.” He said that he was running down the country’s leadership, not the country - regarding, for example, Nixon’s statement to Khrushchev that the U.S.S.R. was ahead in rockets and the United States was ahead in color television. “I think that color television is not as important as rocket thrust.”

It was an agile use of Nixon’s unwise and inaccurate admission in Moscow. At this point, at the latest, General Dwight D. Eisenhower should have given Lieutenant Kennedy a massive, public verbal box on the ear. The United States was overwhelmingly stronger in nuclear forces and delivery systems than the U.S.S.R., and not 5 percent of Americans would have believed Kennedy over Eisenhower in a military debate, and it was Eisenhower’s presidency he was attacking.

After the shambles with Martin Luther King, Nixon abandoned his reticence about Eisenhower campaigning for him, as the president was drawing larger crowds than any of the candidates or other prominent campaigners. If in the last days he had been deployed to Chicago instead of New York, and Michigan instead of Ohio, it could have been decisive.⁴³ On October 30, Mamie Eisenhower called Pat Nixon and said that she was concerned that her husband was overstraining himself. Eisenhower’s doctor, General Howard Snyder, also called and expressed concern about his patient’s planned campaign schedule.⁴⁴ Nixon dutifully called on Eisenhower later that day and talked him out of the ambitious schedule that he had, which included barnstorming parts of Illinois and Michigan, states that were very tight. He could have asked Eisenhower to consult his doctor, or scale back his efforts, or just not to overdo it. As so often in delicate personal matters, Nixon bungled the call, which was self-sacrificing and undertaken for the very best of motives. Eisenhower found Nixon mousy and obsequious and almost incoherent, and said that if he had had such an officer in the war he would have “busted” him.

With one week left, Kennedy had the lead, though narrowly. Nixon urged Eisenhower to call for both candidates to make their medical records public, as he had done to counteract morbid Democratic claims in 1956. Eisenhower flatly refused⁴⁵ this as being an unworthy initiative. This was the correct reaction. Nixon should have published his own medical records early in the campaign and said that he expected Kennedy to do the same, and that he believed Eisenhower had started a useful precedent.^m He could have extended it to the vice presidential candidates, as Johnson had had a serious heart attack a few years before. He moved too late, and in the wrong way. If he had done so, Kennedy could have ignored it, or probably have found a doctor, as Roosevelt did in 1944, when he was clearly medically unfit to serve another term, to attest to his good health. It would have been worth a try for Nixon, but probably would not have been decisive. (Roosevelt had retained the enthusiasm of the White House duty doctor who assured the nation of the president’s good health, by promoting him to vice admiral and the position of surgeon general of the U.S. Navy.) If real medical records had been released, it might have been a negative event, as Johnson, whose health held through very stressful years ahead, would possibly have been disqualified, cardiologically.

Coming into the last week, Nixon, trailing narrowly, staged an Homeric effort, supplemented by the greatest television blitz in history. The Republican National Committee was rich, and his media advisers, whose creative ideas had been largely ignored until very late in the campaign, came to life in the last days. Nixon had originally planned the “most imaginative use of television ever displayed in a national campaign.”⁴⁶ He was concerned with being labeled with the opprobrious charge of “Madison Avenue,” and as a result his media group moved one block east to Vanderbilt Avenue. For three months they became impatient and grew disaffected, but finally, after the King blunder and Mamie Eisenhower’s intervention, Nixon reached for all the weapons he had left, and the television group, at five minutes to midnight in the campaign, sprang into action.

There was a national telecast of a Nixon rally in Cincinnati on October 25, an Eisenhower telecast from Pittsburgh on October 29, an Eisenhower-Nixon-Lodge rally from New York City on November 2, a live Nixon television program at seven o’clock every night for the last week of the campaign, and on election eve a four-hour celebrity telecast from Detroit. It is estimated that one in five Americans saw part of the telethon, and it was followed up by fifteen minutes from Thomas E. Dewey (for some inexplicable reason - Nixon cannot have imagined that Dewey would pull any votes for him). At 11 P.M. on the night before the nation voted, Nixon, Eisenhower, and Lodge all appeared together for thirty minutes. Kennedy’s only reply to this television assault was a rather banal election-eve address from Faneuil Hall in Boston.

Despite the overwhelming pressure, there were some things that, as a matter of principle, Nixon would not do. He declined a Billy Graham endorsement in Life, and rejected staff advice to claim that Kennedy was practicing “reverse bigotry,” although he certainly was. Nixon refused to touch the religious issue. He put out papers saying that Kennedy would destroy Social Security, and that the most politically motivated labor leaders would be running the country, neither of which, to say the least, proved to be accurate, or could have been believable to Nixon himself. But these were not unreasonable end-of-campaign gambits by conventional standards. He avoided anything that would revive the allegations of “Tricky Dick” or match some of the most unseemly Democratic attacks on him from past campaigns.

In the last few days, Nixon put on a final burst of mighty personal energy, sleeping only a couple of hours per day as he campaigned through the West. On November 4, Rose Mary Woods called Eisenhower’s analogue, Ann Whitman, and said that Nixon wanted to send Eisenhower on a goodwill trip to Eastern Europe. Eisenhower responded, via Hagerty, that he was “astonished” at this effort at “auctioning off the presidency,” and thought it a “last-ditch, hysterical, action.”⁴⁷ This was being a little harsh, and on November 6, Nixon, ignoring Eisenhower completely for the first time, announced on television that he would send Eisenhower, Hoover, and Truman to Eastern Europe to promote freedom, and said that he had discussed the idea with Eisenhower. Eisenhower was enraged, and told Hagerty to issue a public statement repudiating Nixon, but Hagerty persuaded him to let it go on the day before the election. In the end, Eisenhower, as they were all at the weary end of the battle for his succession, issued a statement congratulating Nixon on his speech, without referring to the three-presidents proposal, which could not have stirred too many votes, and must have flabbergasted Truman. At this point Truman had no more use for Eisenhower than he did for Nixon. (He would only be reconciled with Eisenhower on the grim national occasion of Kennedy’s funeral, and with Nixon in the extreme winter of his days when Nixon was trying to execute a bipartisan policy in Indochina.)

All polls showed Nixon narrowing the lead to a statistical dead heat on the last days. He was alone, except for his wife, with defeatism afflicting his staff.⁴⁸ The Kennedys were rampaging in their irritating, noisy, physical Irish way, like a caricature of boisterous Boston Southies (except for the elegant JFK himself). Nixon oddly liked to be the underdog, and in any case thought it his destiny, and strove mightily to salvage his supreme life’s effort. He flew with his family from Chicago to Los Angeles and had a final campaign rally in the City of Angels at 1 A.M., on election day, and went to the Royal Suite of the Ambassador Hotel, which was tarted up in all the vulgarity L.A. could muster, in gold, purple, violet, pink, and red.⁴⁹ His wife and daughters stayed a floor above, and his mother one floor above that. Nixon slept only two hours, and then drove with Pat to Whittier to vote. He and a couple of aides drove to Tijuana in an open convertible for lunch, and Nixon took the wheel for the return trip, stopping at the mission at San Juan Capistrano.

He returned to the Ambassador Hotel at 5 P.M., as the polls were closing in the East. Kennedy leapt to an early lead, which shrank as the votes moved west. As in all things, Nixon’s tenacity was formidable. The Kennedys and their friends in the media became impatient, but Kennedy’s lead, as the last polls had predicted, dropped to almost nothing. At about midnight in California, Nixon and his wife descended to the ballroom to thank the campaign staff. He said that “If the present trend continues, Senator Kennedy will be the next president of the United States . . . and if he does . . . he will have my whole-hearted support.” Pat, the strongest, most dignified, most admirable of political soul mates, wept silently and motionlessly. But there was no concession, and none was called for. He expected to win California, and did, as the Golden State voted for him for the fourth time in ten years. If he had won Illinois and Michigan or Minnesota or Texas, he would have won the election. (Lodge, an ineffable defeatist, had prepared his concession statement some days before, though he did not release it prematurely.)⁵⁰

It was only after another two hours’ sleep, at 6 A.M. - 9 A.M. in the East - that Nixon learned that he had lost Illinois by 9,000 out of 4.757 million, and Minnesota by 22,000 out of 1.542 million ballots cast. Texas was carried by Kennedy and Johnson by 46,000 out of 2.312 million ballots cast. This appeared on its face to be convincing enough, but the Johnson-Rayburn machine in the state had performed prodigies of electoral mischief. There is little doubt that Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley cheated Nixon out of victory in Illinois, then the country’s fourth state in population. The real winner of the 1960 presidential election has never been clear.

The official popular vote was 34.221 million for Kennedy to 34.106 million for Nixon, the electoral vote 303 to 219. Nixon ran five points ahead of his party, and the Republicans gained twenty-two congressmen and two senators. Kennedy’s popular margin was, in fact, very doubtful, because the Alabama Democratic vote was partly for electors pledged to Kennedy and partly for Dixiecrat Harry Byrd’s electors. A reasonable division of the Democratic Alabama vote would have given Nixon an overall national plurality. The states won with a margin of approximately or less than a one-point swing were: by the Republicans, Alaska, California, Hawaii, and Montana; by the Democrats, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Texas.

If Daley’s almost certain fraud in Chicago were reversed out of the result, and if there were a legitimate 4,500-vote shift in Missouri, or a total in Illinois and Missouri of 9,000 votes out of nearly 6.7 million votes cast in the two states, the election would have gone to the House of Representatives. Here, Johnson (by influencing Senator Byrd) and Rayburn would probably have won it for Kennedy. If another 2,500 votes had shifted in Nevada and New Mexico, out of nearly 420,000 votes in those two states, Nixon would have won. An honest election in Texas could only have helped Nixon, and it was remarkable that he ran as closely as he did in the Johnson-Rayburn fiefdom.

Theodore White, and the Kennedy camp generally, assumed that Nixon was riding into the sunset, and they doffed their hats to a gallant foe. White referred to “the fight that Richard M. Nixon had so valiantly waged, under such personal suffering . . . Nixon’s skills in politics were enormous, his courage unquestioned, his endurance substantial.”⁵¹ “Substantial,” in this case, was to prove one of the great understatements of American political comment.

He had fought a brave struggle, almost alone personally, comparatively undersupported by celebrities, intellectuals, and the media. His frictions with Eisenhower had been in evidence throughout the campaign, from the August 12 presidential request for a week to think of a contribution Nixon made to the administration, through to the small role of Eisenhower in the campaign, and his wife’s plea for her husband’s health at the end. Nixon said to the author: “Eisenhower told me that his friends, by which he invariably meant his rich friends, would pay for a challenge and a recount. I thought it would be irresponsible to leave the country without a government for six months.” Without most of the benefits of incumbency, representing a tired government led by an admired leader with non-transferable popularity, Richard Nixon had run about even against the most naturally attractive Democratic leader, apart from FDR, since Jackson.

The Kennedys, whom British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan compared to a medieval Italian clan taking over a town, and the main, liberal, stream of the national media missed the point. Nixon was only forty-seven. Despite the vast resources of the Kennedys, the immense attractiveness and ability of Jack Kennedy, the larger party membership and greater professionalism of the Democrats, the relative indifference of Eisenhower, the strong biases of the media, the great superiority of Lyndon Johnson over Cabot Lodge, and a series of personal mistakes and unlucky incidents, Nixon had won half the votes, and the election was a draw.

By not campaigning on anti-communist innuendoes, wealth-envy, Kennedy’s sexual indiscretions, the Kennedy intelligence scam on Cuba, any pitch to religious prejudice, Kennedy’s severe health problems and addiction to painkillers, and finally, the theft of votes on such a scale that JFK was moved to exclaim (of Daley and Johnson): “Thank God for a few honest crooks,” Nixon had been so gentlemanly that he shed his image as an insufferable ogre, the Herblock sewer rat. He said to Peter Flanigan, “This campaign has laid to rest forever the issue of a candidate’s religion in presidential politics. Bad for me, perhaps, but good for America.”⁵²

Nixon would be fifty-five eight years later, when Kennedy would have had two terms. The presumptuous Democratic notion that Nixon was finished and would not be heard from again was one of American political history’s colossal underestimations. Nixon had had a toss-up election, and lost the toss. Without his affecting the balance in the Republican Party, or Eisenhower playing a role, the party was approximately half divided between Goldwater conservatives and Rockefeller liberals. His party needed him, and so would his country, and Nixon would be back, much stronger and of surer judgment than in this campaign, and almost certainly against a less attractive opponent.

With John F. Kennedy and his family, a mighty legend was born. Lyndon Johnson, too, would prove an epochal figure. But Richard Nixon, whom The Reporter magazine had not wished to “be bothered with again” in 1952, would prove the most durable American political leader since Jefferson, leading an army of the awkward, the ordinary, the unflamboyant, silent masses of millions of decent, unexceptional people, through important decades of American history.

A few days after the election, the Nixons went to Key Biscayne and the Kennedys went to Palm Beach. The president-elect’s father wanted to arrange a meeting between the candidates and asked Herbert Hoover to call Nixon. “Hello, Chief,” said Nixon as he picked up the pay-telephone receiver in the restaurant where he was having his dinner, when he heard Hoover was calling. Hoover proposed the meeting and, with his usual implacable gloom, said, “We’re in enough trouble in the world today; some indications of national unity are not only desirable but essential.”⁵³ A few minutes later, JFK himself called (further startling the restaurateur, who was not accustomed to incoming calls on his pay phone from such exalted people).

Kennedy came by helicopter the next day to meet Nixon at the Key Biscayne Hotel, though Nixon had offered to come to Palm Beach, “in view of last Tuesday’s results.” Kennedy talked about bringing Republicans into his administration, including Nixon, who declined, saying he would be leading “a constructive opposition.” Kennedy was probably concerned to assure himself that Nixon wasn’t about to launch a full political challenge on the election result, but did not directly ask that question. He did volunteer that “It’s hard to tell who won the election at this point.”⁵⁴ He also asked, “How the hell did you carry Ohio?” (Nixon thought the support of the Ohio State football coach, Woody Hayes, had a lot to do with it.)⁵⁵

Nixon personally signed an astonishing 160,000 letters of thanks to campaign workers, and replied to thousands of personal letters. Eisenhower gently suggested in April that he thank more contributors, from whom he had heard some grumbling, and Nixon did so, taking a year to finish this task.⁵⁶ He wrote General Douglas MacArthur that he was prouder, and more confident of the historical vindication, of his speech “castigating Mr. Truman for his action in recalling you from Korea” than of anything else he had said in the Congress. He wrote to every Republican senator and congressman, and to the party elders, such as Dewey.

On January 6, he and Rayburn presided over the joint session of the Congress at which the electoral votes were officially tabulated, with each state reporting in alphabetical order. Nixon amusingly said, after Senator Byrd had picked up some votes from the first state to report, Alabama: “The gentleman from Virginia is in the lead.” He spoke with high sportsmanship and eloquence when he announced the result: “In our campaigns, no matter how hard fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win. It is in that spirit that I declare that John F. Kennedy has been elected president of the United States.” He wished Kennedy and Johnson well, to great applause and media commendation. Rayburn warmly shook hands, and called him “Dick” for the first time in fourteen years.⁵⁷

Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon handed over to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson on January 20, 1961. It was the only time in the history of the country that such a ceremony involved, as it turned out, four consecutive presidents. It was a measure of America’s public capacity that four such talented leaders were in place to follow the great Roosevelt and capable Truman administrations, when the crises of war and peace had been addressed by such commanding figures as Marshall, MacArthur, Nimitz, Acheson, Stevenson, even the Dulleses, and many other outstanding public servants.

The rending partisanship of the early postwar years tended to draw an unjust division between the Republicans and Democrats in this group. A couple of years into his presidency, Kennedy confidant and respected historian Arthur Schlesinger circulated a form among selected historians inviting them to rate America’s presidents. The recipients chosen assured a selection that would be indulgent of the Democrats, and Franklin D. Roosevelt came in with Lincoln and Washington in the top group, where Wilson and Jefferson also resided, with Truman and Jackson and Polk and Cleveland (all Democrats) just behind, and with Theodore Roosevelt as their only accompanying Republican. Eisenhower was outraged to find himself in twenty-second position, with generally ignored presidents like Benjamin Harrison, Franklin Pierce, and Rutherford B. Hayes. This was a gross injustice to a good president. Eisenhower considered Roosevelt an artful but shifty political trickster (true up to a point but hardly an overall judgment of FDR), and Truman an incompetent (a preposterous opinion), and set down his own administration’s achievements.

He enumerated the achievements of his presidency to his old friend Bill Robinson (who had tried to dump Nixon during the fund crisis): statehood for Alaska and Hawaii; the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the greatest highway program in world history; an honorable and satisfactory end to the Korean War, with no further combat deaths; the biggest tax cut in history and first civil rights bill in eighty years; defeat of communist aggression in Iran, Guatemala, Lebanon, Formosa, South Vietnam (this was stretching it, especially in Vietnam); desegregation in Arkansas and the District of Columbia; beginning of federal medical care for the aged and the Defense Education Act; reorganization of the Defense Department; start of the Polaris submarine and other ballistic missile programs; acceleration of the space program; initiation of the Atoms for Peace program (which led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty); a Latin American aid program that led to the Alliance for Progress; and the setting up of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.⁵⁸

This was a very respectable record, and Eisenhower had been a distinguished president. He could have handled Suez (including Aswan), Hungary, and the French departure from Indochina better, but generally he defended and stabilized the perimeter of communist containment. His became a gray and rather phlegmatic administration that Nixon and to some degree Rogers were trying to energize, but there had been eight years of peace and prosperity under the leadership of an admired and popular man, although one ultimately too much identified with golf, uncertain cardiology, and fiscal humbug. There had been the considerable embarrassments of Sputnik, the U-2 affair, the Caracas riots against Nixon, and the anti-American riots in Tokyo. But America was generally respected in the world.

The “missile gap” was soon exposed as a fraud, which came as no surprise to Kennedy, the author of the canard. Eisenhower had a better knowledge of America’s defense needs than any president since Grant, and by the time Grant was president, the nation hardly had any defense needs. Nixon wrote Eisenhower that history would judge his administration as having achieved the highest “standard for honesty, efficiency and dedication . . . The American people, because of your leadership, have enjoyed the best eight years in their history,” and added, “Never in this nation’s history has one man in public owed so much to another as I owe to you.”⁵⁹ This was a considerable embellishment, but Eisenhower replied very graciously: “I have always felt a complete confidence in your ability and capacity for taking on the Presidency at any instant.” And he added, presciently: “The future can still bring to you a real culmination in your service to the country.” The exchange put a nice cap on their official association.

The position of vice president was so nebulous, or as de Gaulle wrote, so “curious,” that there were no awards from historians for having acquitted it well. But Richard Nixon was undoubtedly the most successful occupant of the post in history, and the first to be nominated to follow the president whom he served in the highest office since John C. Breckinridge in 1860, or, if southern particularism is excluded, since Martin Van Buren in 1836. In general, vice presidents presided over the Senate and that was almost all they did. Apart from this mundane function, and a few strong regional leaders, such as Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun, they were chiefly known for personality foibles - for example, Van Buren’s vice president, Richard Mentor Johnson, was generally reckoned the man who killed the Indian leader Tecumseh, and as vice president cohabited in evident intimacy with a black woman, a rather bold social statement in the slave-trading Washington of the 1830s.

Nixon knew exactly how to use the Senate to pick up scuttlebutt, turn the lobbies and cloakrooms into places of information exchange, and build the momentum of a congressional deal. He was instrumental in all the important legislation for which Eisenhower claimed credit. Stephen Ambrose estimates that at the basic task of assembling coalitions, figuring what could be traded between legislators, and always being on top of gossip and the latest events in the home states, Richard Nixon was at least as astute as that long-acknowledged master Lyndon B. Johnson.⁶⁰ Eisenhower had made good his pledge to ensure that Nixon was the best-informed vice president in history. It is still not clear who was right, as between Eisenhower and Nixon, on the Korean settlement, but Nixon was almost certainly on better ground in 1954 in Indochina in regard to Dien Bien Phu, and in 1955 over Geneva.

Nixon’s inestimable services in bringing the Republican Party out of isolationism and reaction and ending the McCarthy era, and the undoubted value of some of his foreign travel, have been recounted and have no precedent in the prior history of the vice presidency. He conducted most of the administration’s reelection campaign of 1956, and he performed impeccably when Eisenhower’s indispositions required him to be more or less of an acting president. Nixon effectively succeeded Walter Bedell Smith as “Ike’s prat boy,” the designated assistant in charge of the dirty work. Nixon performed these odious and thankless tasks admirably, even when Eisenhower sawed off the limbs he had sent him out on, especially the more spirited attacks on the Democrats. Eisenhower rewarded Nixon’s loyalty, discretion, efficiency, and suppression of his own dissent with an uneven pattern of appreciation and aloofness.

And Nixon, with almost no assistance from Eisenhower, kept the Republican Party lubricated and somewhat coordinated, and left it in 1961 in reasonably good condition, except that with Dewey and Eisenhower retired, Nixon remained the only possible conciliator of the conservative and liberal wings of the party. The schism among the Republicans was almost as profound, and slightly more imminent, than that between the southern Democrats and the liberal Democrats. Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, legendary political operators who had much in common but little rapport, were the indispensable men of their parties, and the vice presidency passed between them at one of American history’s turning points.

Eisenhower’s farewell address, warning of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, was prescient and insightful, and the most important such leave-taking since General George Washington’s admonition to avoid “entangling” alliances in 1797. Eisenhower wrote that the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Apart from being apposite in itself, this was a final post-electoral response to the “missile gap” allegations.

Roosevelt was one of the nation’s and the modern world’s very greatest leaders. Truman was an unusually capable president. Eisenhower was an unambiguously good president. Between them, they led America and much of the world for twenty-eight years, from the terrible depths of the Great Depression and a world afflicted by Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and the Japanese imperialists to the general peace and great prosperity of 1961. And they led America from the depths of isolation to victory in history’s greatest war, to leadership of history’s greatest alliance system, which they devised; and from the futile international diplomatic claptrap of the thirties to the challenges of the great American innovations of the United Nations and the atomic age. The nation and the world watched with great curiosity to see how the next generation would continue the work of the last three presidents.

Kennedy asked Nixon to the White House urgently and poured forth his grievances against the intelligence and military personnel, who had misled him. Nixon said the president felt himself “the innocent victim.”⁶² Kennedy asked what Nixon would do, and he counseled an immediate invasion, invoking protection of American lives and of the base at Guantanamo. (These would have been very thin pretexts.) We should “do whatever is necessary to get Castro and communism out of Cuba.”⁶³ Nixon dismissed Kennedy’s concern that Khrushchev would then move on West Berlin. Nixon also urged action in Laos, where Kennedy had accepted the professedly neutralist government, which was in fact a communist puppet state. This was another domino in Indochina, as there would be no possibility of stopping the flow of North Vietnamese soldiers and military supplies through Laos into South Vietnam. Nixon recommended bombing in Laos, and promised he would not make a political issue out of any forceful policy, in Cuba or Laos, but Kennedy had no stomach for any of it.

Nixon repeated the same point in his speaking tour, including to the Executives’ Club of Chicago, where he pledged his support for a strong policy and said, to great applause: “We should not start things in the world unless we are prepared to finish them.”⁶⁴ In Detroit four days later, Nixon said that “some Americans” were advocating an attack or blockade of Cuba. The principal American among them was himself, but he said that he was opposed to such action without “provocation.” He didn’t say that he had counseled the president to invent the provocation.

At his press conference on April 21, 1961, Kennedy gallantly said, “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan. I am the executive officer of the government.” Despite the fiasco, his popularity jumped and he joked that “like Eisenhower . . . the worse I do the more popular I get.” Eisenhower had not been responsible for a shambles on this scale, but the public liked Kennedy’s frankness in admitting the failure of his policy in Cuba. Kennedy had had an almost unimaginably inauspicious launch as president. It was a poor start for the new generation of American leaders.

The Nixons moved from Washington in June, the former vice president contracting a sore back shuffling cases around. They moved to a rented house in Brentwood while their new home, a large ranch-style house on the Trousdale Estate at the edge of Bel Air, was being built. The Teamsters Union was the vendor of the lot where they built, and the Los Angeles Times alleged that Nixon had received a seven-thousand-dollar discount. Nixon was outraged and pointed out, as his archives confirm, that he had been offered a number of desirable lots for free, and declined them, as he thought that accepting would be inappropriate.

Nixon played golf with Eisenhower at Walter Annenberg’s splendid house in Palm Desert. It was a pleasant reunion. He played a little more golf than he had, and got a hole-in-one while golfing in Bel Air with Bebe Rebozo and Randolph Scott. With his usual hyperbole, in an expression he used too often, he called it “the greatest thrill of my life.”ⁿ He returned to the Bohemian Grove and had a comic triumph with a mock reenactment of his kitchen debate with Khrushchev.

Nixon embarked on a book in the spring of 1961, and called it Six Crises, referring to the Hiss case, the fund controversy, Eisenhower’s heart attack, the South American trip (and especially Caracas), the debate with Khrushchev, and the 1960 election. Some of the actual writing was done by Stephen Hess, with an assist from Alvin Moscow, but all from Nixon’s recollections and files, and so heavily revised by him that he was the chief author.

Adela Rogers St. Johns, an early backer and tough magazine editor, a gravelly career woman before her time, had been the strongest advocate of the book. When Nixon visited Kennedy in April, he had recommended writing a book, for the “mental discipline,” and to acquire a reputation as an intellectual. (Ted Sorensen had written most of Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, which won the Pulitzer Prize after Joseph Kennedy’s intervention with the Pulitzer Committee.) Six Crises was a creditable effort, and got fairly good reviews. It was a best-seller, selling more than a quarter-million copies. The Hiss, fund, Caracas, and election parts were the highlights, and did qualify as crises. Eisenhower recovered very quickly from his heart attack and the debate with Khrushchev was too farcical to be a real crisis. Eleven years later, Mao Tse-tung paid Nixon the compliment that he had read and even liked Six Crises. Nixon’s description of the constructive tension of crisis, followed by the depressive letdown when the crisis is satisfactorily over, was revealing of him and useful. Much of the narrative was graceful and original writing.

Kennedy denied that he had been briefed before the election by Allen Dulles about what became the Bay of Pigs, as Nixon claimed in his book, and Dulles also issued a statement claiming that the briefing he had given Kennedy had been more general and did not cover “our own government’s plans or programs for action overt or covert.” Dulles had been retired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, more or less as a scapegoat, and his successor, John McCone, like Henry Luce, claimed Dulles had told him that he had fully briefed Kennedy on the planned invasion of Cuba by the exiles before the election. It is hardly conceivable that Dulles did not give Kennedy some inkling of what was in contemplation in Cuba, though perhaps not with the precision Nixon claimed.

By mid-1961, Nixon was heavily involved in an excruciating decision-making process about whether to run as Republican candidate for governor of California. He corresponded with an astounding range of prominent and ordinary people, asking their advice. Eisenhower, Dewey, and the inevitable J. Edgar Hoover (the most politicized secret police chief since Beria) thought he should run. Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur thought he should wait for the Senate. Polls indicated he could win against Brown, who was popular and had not made bad mistakes. Nixon didn’t like local issues and was quite out of touch with California issues, though he was such a swift learner, he could put that right quite quickly.

He was afraid of the split in state Republican ranks between the hard right and the John Birch Society, which purported to believe that Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were communists and Nixon wasn’t too much better, and the residue of the liberal Republicans of the Earl Warren school. After Nixon visited Eisenhower at Gettysburg in September 1961, Eisenhower reinforced his recommendation that Nixon run for governor. He was concerned that “mossbacks” would take over the Republican Party in the state, and felt that Nixon should position himself to run for president as soon as possible.

Nixon loved to campaign, and hated to be out of the loop. If he were governor of California, he would be the leading Republican, not Rockefeller or Goldwater. There was a danger of the California Republican Party transmuting itself into a politically primitive organization. There was also a danger of losing, but in the end, Nixon thought that if he could draw, countrywide, with Kennedy, he could surely defeat Brown in their home state. There is little doubt that, despite his agonizing decision-making process, a large part of the reason for his coming back to California was to seek the governorship and get back to the front of national politics as soon as possible.

His wife was opposed, and warned him that she thought it a mistake, but, with her unvarying selflessness, said that if that was what he wanted to do, she would support him as always. Nixon announced his candidacy on September 27, 1961, pledging that if elected, he would serve a full term and not use the statehouse as a trampoline to go for the White House. He claimed, as in 1952, that he would “clean up the mess,” this time in Sacramento, and that Brown was running for president. This was fatuous, as Brown was not running for president and there was no mess in Sacramento. He also said, in an eerie echo of a 1960 error, that he would campaign in every county of the state. This was not such a challenge, as it was just one state and he had over a year to get to them all, but there was a slight air of mustiness and old-hat clichés about his campaign from the start.

Brown immediately said that Nixon was just using California as a “stepping-stone,” and former governor Goodwin Knight also attacked him and confirmed his own candidacy for the Republican nomination, which he shortly withdrew for health reasons. Nixon’s only Republican primary opponent would be Joseph Shell of the John Birch Society. Nixon said he would not begin campaigning until January, and went to Apple Valley to finish his book, which he did just before year-end.

The administration poured in announcements of defense contracts for California, and Kennedy, Johnson, and much of the cabinet came to California and campaigned for Brown. (Nixon expressed private admiration for their professionalism but publicly called them “carpetbaggers.”) Nixon responded as best he could, by bringing in Eisenhower, who told a large hundred-dollar-a-plate live and closed-circuit television audience: “I can personally vouch for his ability, his sense of duty, his sharpness of mind, his wealth in wisdom.” Nixon replied, probably truthfully, after receiving an endorsement he had aspired to for a decade, that all his efforts had been validated by “these words from the greatest living American.”

Nixon could feel his position slipping, with a slightly stale campaign, elusive opponent, and massive federal intervention. He challenged Brown to debate him in any format he chose. Brown resisted for a long time, and finally there was a joint press meeting, at which personal questions were excluded, in San Francisco, on October 1. A question was put, contrary to the agreed ground rules, about a candidate for governor allowing “his family to receive a secret loan from a major defense contractor in the United States.” The moderator told Nixon he did not have to answer, but Nixon declared his eagerness to take the question, about the hoary bugbear of the loan from Howard Hughes, through a lawyer, to Donald Nixon. Nixon’s brother had recently gone bankrupt, and Hannah Nixon had surrendered the deed to Howard Hughes, who did not accept it, but the income from the property went into an escrow fund.

Nixon said that Kennedy had known about this in 1960 but declined to “make a political issue out of my mother’s problems, just as I refused to make an issue out of any of the charges made against the members of his family.” He then tore out after Brown, accusing him, with reason, of circulating and amplifying the rumors about the Hughes loan. “All of the people of California are listening. . . . Governor Brown has a chance to stand up as a man and charge me with misconduct. Do it, sir!” Brown fumbled about and said he had not made an issue out of the loan “other than in casual conversation from time to time.” Nixon said Brown “cringed and went away like a whipped dog.”⁶⁶

Nixon certainly won on the day, and had cowed his opponent. But the national and state press corps took up the loan story. Nixon could labor Brown over it, but the press started demanding answers and did not accept Nixon’s claim to have dealt with the issue completely, at the debate or elsewhere. From this point, the campaign descended into a gutter of unseemly accusations. It became a shabby campaign for the leadership of what had become the nation’s most populous state. Nixon accused Brown of being bankrolled by a giant, Kennedy-financed slush fund; Brown accused Nixon of aspiring to be a dictator and to decide whether individuals were too communistic to speak at California’s universities. Nixon accused Brown of taking free cruises on the yachts of wealthy oilmen. Brown claimed he was “a better American” than Nixon, and one anti-Nixon Los Angeles Times reporter found some Republican candidates who claimed that Nixon had taken campaign funds intended for others. There was a flurry of various pamphlets and lawsuits.

Nixon did present a comprehensive program - anti-communist school curriculum, a restriction on communist public speaking, the death penalty for thrice-convicted drug peddlers, and increased funding for teachers’ salaries, highway construction, and police budgets. It was a respectable effort (though the anti-communist part was pretty dubious legally and philosophically). He also promised an overall budget reduction.

The famous Caryl Chessman case came up in the campaign. Chessman had been sentenced to death in the gas chamber because of the “Little Lindbergh” law on kidnapping, and had resided on death row for twelve years. He had written four books arguing his case, and among those advocating his commutation were Pablo Casals, Robert Frost, Billy Graham, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Dwight MacDonald, Norman Mailer, and Eleanor Roosevelt. He was finally gassed in May 1960. Brown, who opposed the death penalty, said that his “hands were tied,” which was untrue, and Nixon, who favored the death penalty, said with some reason that the episode illustrated the weakness and indecision of Brown.

But the real issue in the campaign was Nixon. Did California want an international figure as governor, or should amiable Pat Brown be allowed to continue and not have his job taken away by a returning interloper with his eye on the White House? As was his custom, Nixon brought his campaign to a final surge in the last two weeks, designed to climax on election eve. Pat came out with him, and even transgressed her normal rule and made speeches for him. Nixon’s great closing effort was narrowing the gap, but he was overtaken by international events.

President Kennedy, after a successful visit to Paris and Versailles at the start of June 1961, had gone on to a summit meeting with Khrushchev at Vienna, the seventh between U.S. and Soviet leaders, going back to Teheran. It was not as evident a failure as the Paris meeting following the U-2 incident, but it was unsuccessful. Kennedy, who had mocked Nixon’s performance in the kitchen debate in Moscow, privately acknowledged that Khrushchev had “savaged” him and “thinks I have no guts.”⁶⁷ Following the Bay of Pigs, this confirmed the Soviet leader in the belief that he could make gains at America’s expense. In the autumn of 1962, American intelligence detected unmistakable signs of Soviet missile deployment in Cuba. Kennedy recognized this as a supreme test of his credibility, as well as a serious national security threat. Plans were developed by the Defense Department for a surgical air strike on the missile launching sites, which were thought to be likely to be operational within a few weeks, as well as plans for broader air strikes, an outright invasion, and a complete naval blockade. On a few days’ reflection, a surgical air strike was thought to be uncertain to eliminate all the missiles, and a blockade would not affect those already in place.

On October 18, Kennedy received the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, for two hours. Gromyko accused the United States of “pestering” Cuba, a little country. Kennedy, playing poker like some of his predecessors, did not mention the United States intelligence about the missiles, but reminded Gromyko of Kennedy’s statement of six weeks before warning against the deployment of offensive weapons to Cuba. On October 20, Adlai Stevenson, whose resolution in a crisis Eisenhower and Nixon had questioned in 1952 and 1956, arrived from New York, where he had succeeded Lodge as Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations, and advocated that a quarantine of Cuba be accompanied by a promise of withdrawal of American missiles in Turkey and abandonment of the U.S. base at Guantanamo in Cuba.

Kennedy acknowledged that at a future date the United States would have to be prepared to withdraw missiles from Turkey and Italy, but not simultaneously with the abandonment of the Soviet deployment in Cuba. On October 21, Kennedy asked former defense secretary Robert Lovett (whom Nixon had briefed on the Hiss case in 1949) if he thought that Stevenson was capable of negotiating terms with the Russians at the UN. Lovett thought not, and it was agreed to bring John J. McCloy, chairman of the Ford Foundation and former assistant secretary of war and U.S. high commissioner for Germany, into the administration’s inner councils to reinforce Stevenson. Kennedy’s judgment in these matters was similar to that of Stevenson’s former Republican opponents.

At 7 P.M. on October 22, 1962, in a seventeen-minute address to the nation, President Kennedy revealed the presence of the Soviet missiles as well as the deployment to Cuba of nuclear-capable bombers, announced “a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment” destined for Cuba as one of his “initial steps,” and said that any nuclear attack from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be regarded by the United States as an attack on the United States by the Soviet Union “requiring a full retaliatory response against the Soviet Union.”

To reinforce his point, he placed all U.S. military forces on a worldwide state of alert, dispatched all missile-firing submarines in port to their preassigned war stations, and deployed constant air force interdiction squadrons to the narrow air space between Cuba and Florida - all activity that would have been detected by Soviet intelligence. David Bruce had already secured the support of the British (though there was some wavering and waffling by Macmillan), and Dean Acheson happily emerged from retirement to brief Charles de Gaulle, who declined to look at aerial photographs, saying he was accustomed to accepting the word of U.S. presidents and needed to hear no more. (The next morning, he summoned the Soviet ambassador in Paris and informed him of France’s solidarity with the United States. When the ambassador said this could well mean nuclear war, de Gaulle replied, “I doubt it, but in that case, we will perish together” and dismissed him.)

The world endured a week of extreme tension. The Soviet ambassador to the UN, Valerian Zorin, flatly denied on October 23 that there were any such missiles in Cuba, and Stevenson, always a formidable orator and debater, easily won that round before the whole world, probably the finest moment of his long career. There were messages back and forth between Kennedy and Khrushchev, as well as back channels, and Kennedy effectively pledged not to invade Cuba and conceded the removal of the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, while denying this was a quid pro quo.

Robert Kennedy, in his memoirs, claimed that he had told the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, that this could not be a straight exchange, but that his brother had wished to remove the missiles from Turkey and Italy for some time. This was a distinction without a difference. This preemptive initiative came from the Kennedys. The Turks made it clear that they wished the missiles retained and their removal was a reciprocal concession, whatever the Kennedys may have called it. This would send the wrong signal to the Europeans about American resolve to defend Europe, and establish a false equivalence between missiles deployed by a defensive alliance in sovereign countries by mutual consent and Soviet deployment of offensive weapons to a satellite state.

The crisis subsided quickly from October 29 on. To the world, Russia appeared to take an initiative and then be forced, rather humiliatingly, to withdraw from it. In the abstract, at the beginning of the problem there were American missiles in Turkey and Italy and no Soviet missiles in Cuba, which the United States had threatened to invade; and at the end, there were no missiles in any of the countries and the Soviets were therefore advantaged. Khrushchev later wrote: “Our aim was to preserve Cuba. Today Cuba exists. So who won? It cost us nothing more than the round-trip expenses for transporting the rockets to Cuba and back.” He denied that there had ever been a moment’s thought of unleashing nuclear war. These were retrospective views from an unreliable source, but they can’t be entirely dismissed.⁶⁸

Kennedy certainly kept calm, marshaled administration and public opinion well, kept a coherent policy throughout, succeeded in his basic objective, redeemed the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Vienna misfortune, and generally exhibited high crisis management skills. Whether it was a long-term, unambiguous strategic success was another matter. De Gaulle, who was preparing to try to pry Western Europe away from the British and the Americans (except when the Europeans vitally needed them), held this incident out as an example of how the United States put its own hemispheric security ahead of solidarity with Europe. Kennedy could easily have got rid of Castro once and for all, and had the provocation to do so. He was concerned at a counter-blow against West Berlin, but he could have replied to that without precipitating the Third World War. After the end of the Cold War, these are academic arguments. At the time, the American people and the world thought, and they were not mistaken, that President Kennedy had handled the crisis very competently.

While the crisis was in progress, it was difficult for Nixon to campaign as he had wished, and when it subsided, there was a great flow of support to the party and followers of the president, in the aftermath of the national security emergency. And Kennedy had just enough time to make a few midterm pre-election campaign speeches, particularly in Indiana, where he sank the incumbent Republican senator, Homer Capehart, by excoriating “those who wish to send other men’s sons to war.”

Nixon had loyally supported the administration throughout, but the final slapstick farce of the California campaign came over the absurd but evanescently topical issue of civil defense. As the Cuban missile crisis was winding down, Kennedy dispensed to Brown the grandstand opportunity of chairing a governors’ conference on civil defense, in a blatant intervention in the California election. On October 24, the civil defense director of Los Angeles, Joseph Quinn, said that in the event of hostilities, Kennedy would probably shut all retail outlets for five days. For a person in Quinn’s position, this was as presumptuous and stupid a statement as it was possible to make. Huge and unmanageable lines arose at every supermarket and convenience store and gasoline station. Nixon urged calm and support of the president.

Nixon, now gasping for electoral air, went for Brown’s jugular, by claiming that he had incited panic, greed, hoarding, and selfishness, and generally was guilty of “gross negligence that potentially endangers the lives of 17 million Californians.” The state was “completely naked” without fallout shelters. Brown scorned Nixon’s (political) deathbed conversion to the cause of civil defense.

Nixon and his wife voted at about 7 A.M. and Nixon went to his office and called supporters all day, holding out little hope of victory. Cuba gave him a plausible reason for losing, but it had been a campaign that, as Pat had said, was misconceived, and where every conceivable part of it had gone wrong. Brown was no star, and he wasn’t a Robert Logue-Jack Kennedy, effortless, athletic, not overly ambitious, campus hero type of the kind that always had Nixon’s number. But he was apparently amiable and unexceptionable, smiling a lot while he kicked hard, and was a perfect underdog to Nixon’s cynical, returning political bully. Nixon the world statesman might still have pulled it out by a whisker, but Kennedy, the real world statesman, in the job Nixon might/should have had, stole the show and threw the California roses to Brown.

Nixon lost by 297,000 votes out of six million cast. If allowance is made for the Cuban missile crisis, he had probably fought to an approximate draw in the popular vote again, in the nation’s premier state, as he had two years earlier in the nation as a whole. Nixon-haters claimed that he had already become a Harold Stassen figure, ludicrous in his quixotic and futile quest for public office that electorates would not give him. But he was not.

On election night, Nixon determined to let Herb Klein deal with the press, and at 10 A.M. the day after the election Klein read a perfectly acceptable press statement and telegram of concession to Brown that Nixon had written. Nixon left his suite as Klein started speaking, and was embraced by weeping secretaries and even media people as he walked down the corridor, and after that the record is unclear. Nixon wrote that he saw, on a monitor, snappish questions from the media. Klein wrote that the friends who had picked Nixon up to drive him home told him he could not seem to be chased out the back door of his hotel.

Haldeman, Finch, and a few others were with Nixon as he rode down in the elevator to meet the press after all, philosophically saying that he had been bitten by a mosquito, having been bitten by a rattlesnake two years before. Earlier, he had said that with Cuba, he now understood how Stevenson had felt when Suez and Budapest occurred. (Kennedy had handled Cuba a great deal better than Eisenhower had handled the earlier problems.)

Instead of sticking to such a sportsmanlike tenor of remarks, Nixon marched into the press conference, interrupted Klein, and with outstretched chin and hands thrust in pockets, said, “Now that all the members of the press are so delighted that I lost . . . I think each of you covered it the way you saw it,” and congratulated Brown and wished him well. And then it all went horribly wrong. “I believe Governor Brown has a heart, even though he believes I do not. I believe he is a good American, even though he feels I am not. . . . For once, gentlemen, I would appreciate it if you would write what I say.”

Nixon claimed he had been outspent two to one (only true if government defense contracts ostentatiously let in California during the election are included), and claimed a Republican victory on the night with Rockefeller’s win, by more than 1.5 million in New York (over Robert Morgenthau, U.S. attorney and son of FDR’s Treasury secretary) and the election as governors of William Scranton in Pennsylvania, John Rhodes in Ohio, and George Romney in Michigan. He expressed cautious concern that Kennedy had brought down an Iron Curtain around Cuba.

“We fought a good fight. We didn’t win. And I take the responsibility for any mistakes.” There were four “One last thing”s, and the last of them ended: “Just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference, and it will be one in which I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you.” This was an odd flourish, as he then waved, smiled, and left, with no test of wits.

This was certainly not a premeditated tactic, claiming what he did not believe - that with this reversal, his political career was over at the age of forty-nine. He gave way to the towering and easily flammable resentment that drove him much of his life, before, during, and throughout his public career. But his intuition, momentarily suppressed, perhaps, by his hatred of losing and of those he judged complicit in his humiliation, came to his assistance. By leaving as he did, slamming the door behind him somewhat ungraciously, he confirmed his enemies in their heartfelt hope that they really had finally seen the back and the last of him. But now the Republican Party would be hopelessly split between Goldwater and Rockefeller, the right and the left. One would win over the other; the other would effectively defect, and the apparent winner would be annihilated by the Democrats, evidently by Kennedy. Goldwater or Rockefeller would become, in national terms, a chronic loser, and the other a disloyal spoiler. Nixon would still be there, still relatively young, narrowly defeated twice, by, as Republican orthodoxy would have it, theft of ballots in 1960, and Castro and Khrushchev in 1962. He would become neither a designated loser nor a mere spoiler.

For now, the striver would become the survivor, and he would depart the center of the stage. John F. Kennedy would be a compelling but tragic leader. And neither Nixon’s millions of admirers - who identified with him in his lack of glamour, dedication to hard work, old virtues, and home truths, as well as his tactical political cunning, and above all his dogged indefatigability - nor the people who worshipped the new icon of JFK would forget him. He would be back, in one of Roosevelt’s famous phrases, “again and again and again.” (Boston, October 30, 1940.⁶⁹) He had involuntarily fallen on his sword in an act of political self-purification in 1960, and then been impaled by unbidden misfortune in 1962. But he was, in part, a magician, who had missed a few tricks in both elections, not having been a solo candidate for ten years. He was also a man of superhuman staying power.

Eleanor Roosevelt, who had disliked both Nixon and Kennedy, died the day after the 1962 elections. All the men who had succeeded her husband as president attended her funeral, and on the presidential aircraft returning from Hyde Park to Washington, President Kennedy and Chief Justice Earl Warren joked about Nixon’s political demise. (Kennedy had acknowledged to Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post and others that he would have lost to Nelson Rockefeller.)⁷⁰

Nixon’s complacent, celebrating opponents were no longer on guard against him. He withdrew and regrouped, but like a hungry, rejected jungle cat, he was prowling not far off and his ambitions had not changed. Now, Republican schism, Democratic errors, and national tragedy would be his allies, and they would be much more reliable allies than most of his professed friends. Warren would live to see Nixon’s revenge; Kennedy would not. Richard Nixon would show his friends and his enemies, the nation and the world, that he was almost imperishable.

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