September 19, 1960
New York City
Finally, after weeks of speeches, handshakes, and baby kissing, something had happened that might end the Kennedy-Nixon deadlock.
The communists had landed in New York City, and suddenly, both candidates had a new brick to throw.
It wasn’t exactly an invasion. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had arrived on the Baltika, a Soviet ocean liner, to address the United Nations.
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was also in town for the meeting. He and Khrushchev had greeted each other on the UN assembly floor with a giant bear hug.
The United Nations treaty gave Khrushchev and Castro freedom to move on American soil while on business for the global peace organization.
Perhaps the American people didn’t feel the impact of the UN meeting, but Richard Nixon saw an opportunity to contrast his years of foreign policy experience with JFK’s relative beginner status.
Both candidates had finished up the summer crisscrossing America, speaking in big cities and small towns. The polls said they were in a dead heat. Every day mattered.
Their campaigns tried everything to sway the news cycle. At every stop, they appealed to local newspapers, television stations, and news radio outfits to show up and focus on their candidate. The newspapers and airwaves were full of bombast, but for weeks, nothing had moved the needle in one direction or the other. Both campaigns looked forward to the first of four televised debates. Then, if a candidate stumbled, the media could leap on it and maybe create a bump in the polls.
The campaigns were breaking new ground. This was the first time the nominees of the two major parties in a presidential election would square off on live television. It was the most high-profile series of American debates in a century.
The last time a political face-off drew so much attention was in 1858, when Democratic senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois took on Republican Abraham Lincoln. They debated seven times in a Senate campaign that focused on expanding slavery into new U.S. territories.
Douglas was reelected, but the national exposure catapulted Lincoln to prominence. Two years later, Lincoln landed the GOP presidential nomination and the White House.
No one knew how many people would tune in to the Nixon-Kennedy debates. Pundits predicted tens of millions of Americans would, and that could make the difference in a tight race.
The first debate was scheduled for September 26, in a Chicago television studio. Until then, both candidates had to keep grinding it out on the campaign trail.
Nixon, looking for a fresh angle of attack, used Khrushchev’s visit to put a new edge on his basic critique of Kennedy, who had suggested in May that Eisenhower apologize to Khrushchev for the U-2 spy plane debacle.
Kennedy was “naïve,” Nixon said.
“We have responsibility in avoiding resort to statements which tend to divide America, which tend to disparage America, and which in any way would encourage Chairman Khrushchev and his fellow dictators to believe that this nation, the leader of the Free World—is weak at will, is indecisive, is unsure of and hesitant to use her vast power; is poorly defended, is held at bay by imperialistic communism, is divided in opinion on world affairs, believing that the majority of mankind hold her in disdain,” Nixon said at a campaign stop in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
It was a maneuver meant to put Kennedy on the political hot spot, now that a Soviet ship was docked in New York Harbor, and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was wrangling with his hotel in Harlem over the bill.
Eisenhower and Khrushchev had been scheduled for an important summit meeting in Paris on May 16, but when the spy plane was shot down on May 1, all hopes of mutual goodwill crashed along with it. Khrushchev lashed out at Eisenhower for refusing to condemn the spying and halt further reconnaissance. It was the end of the hopes of many in both countries who’d thought a period of “peaceful coexistence” might be on the horizon.
After another broadside attack on Kennedy in Fort Wayne, Nixon flew to Louisville and picked up the same theme, hoping that it would stick.
“When you’re dealing with a dictator, you must never make concessions without getting something in return because that is not the road to peace. It is the road to surrender or even to war,” he said.
When asked if he was suggesting that Kennedy was surrendering to the Soviet Union, Nixon backed off, still managing to get in the point about experience. “Absolutely not,” he said at a press conference in Springfield, Missouri. “Mr. Kennedy didn’t know what he was espousing.”
Time and again, Nixon said the U.S. military and economy was first in the world. He appealed for supporting the president.
“We know the regimented communists will march, lockstep, through the United Nations, hanging desperately together to avoid hanging one another separately. There will be, on their part, no deviation,” Nixon said the next day at a stop in Michigan.
Kennedy didn’t keep silent. He fired back, saying that “personal attacks and insults” would not halt communism, or win the November election.
The danger to the nation lay in denying its shortcomings and perils rather than “continuing to speak up for a stronger America,” Kennedy said.
“It’s not naïve to call for increased strength. It is naïve to think that freedom can prevail without it,” he said.
He said those who “held back the growth of America for the past eight years will be rejected this November.”
And so ended another day on the campaign trail. Back and forth they went, but neither gained any ground.
The debates were only a week away. And that would make all the difference.