Authors: Jim Newton
Hesitation and confusion were hallmarks of Nixon’s 1960 campaign, and they hurt it at a crucial moment. A month before Election Day, Martin Luther King was arrested for participating in a sit-in at an Atlanta department store. While he was in custody, a judge who had months earlier fined King and given him a twelve-month suspended sentence for driving without a proper permit asked authorities to hold him so that he could determine whether King’s new arrest violated the terms of his suspended sentence. Fearful for King’s safety, his supporters urged federal officials to intervene, a call that went from urgent to frantic after the minister was shipped off in the middle of the night to Georgia’s notorious Reidsville prison. Harris Wofford, Kennedy’s earnest and beleaguered civil rights assistant, pleaded with Kennedy’s inner circle to have the senator intervene. Knowing that Bobby Kennedy was wary of any move that would antagonize southern Democrats, Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of both men, caught the candidate when he was alone and suggested he simply call Coretta King.
“What the hell,” Kennedy agreed. “That’s a decent thing to do.”
Coretta was relieved and grateful to hear from the Democratic nominee. Bobby, when he learned of it, was furious. He dressed down Shriver and Wofford, accused them of jeopardizing the campaign.
Responding to King’s arrest was even more complicated in the Nixon camp. Aides urged Nixon to address the incident. But Nixon still imagined that he could win away southern states from his Massachusetts opponent. He declined to issue a statement or even to make a call such as Kennedy had. When questioned by reporters, he refused to comment.
The judge in the King case reversed himself a few days later (Bobby Kennedy, after lambasting his associates for arranging the call to Coretta, called the judge himself to urge that King be granted bail). The minister was freed to the wild relief of his family and supporters. So grateful was his father that he broke with fellow preachers who were backing Nixon to proclaim his support for Kennedy. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” he said. “But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is.” Kennedy marveled. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father,” he remarked. “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”
News of the call and the statement by King’s father spread rapidly through black communities across the country, encouraged by the Kennedy campaign, which skillfully exploited the episode, publishing a pamphlet contrasting Kennedy’s compassion with Nixon’s lack of it and circulating it in the days just before the election. Known as the “blue bomb” for the cheap blue paper on which it was printed, it was passed from hand to hand, pew to pew, in black churches and community gatherings, moving blacks while largely escaping the notice of whites. Both sides knew the election would be close. The blue bomb reflected Kennedy’s guts, while Nixon’s refusal to engage the issue demonstrated his caution and indecision.
Near the end of the campaign, Eisenhower at last took to the hustings to stump for his vice president. On October 28, he addressed a large crowd in Philadelphia. On November 2, he made a round of speeches in New York, culminating in a joint appearance with Nixon at the New York Coliseum that evening. The two appeared together again as Election Day drew near, and on the night before Americans voted, Eisenhower delivered a television address. He described his long association with Nixon, his impressions gleaned from cabinet meetings and private consultations. Nixon, Ike asserted, would provide “the right kind of leadership, steeped in the philosophy of enterprise and of hope, experienced in working for an America, confident in her destiny, secure against the devastation of war, in a world moving toward peace with justice in freedom.” When the morning at last arrived, Ike flew to Gettysburg and trundled over to his polling place with John. “The first four ballots cast … in my precinct were for Nixon and Lodge,” Eisenhower cabled Nixon. “If this marks a trend, you will win in a walk.”
Not quite. The election of 1960 was among the closest in American history (Kennedy received 34,220,984 votes; Nixon received 34,108,157), and its margin may be attributed to any of several factors. Kennedy’s call to Coretta King may have tilted black voters into his column; their votes provided his margin of victory in at least three states—Michigan, Illinois, and South Carolina. Kennedy’s debate performance erased many of the doubts about his youth; his thoughtful address on religion helped suppress anti-Catholic sentiments. And Ike’s careless unwillingness to credit Nixon with any decision of consequence did not help. Finally, consigning Eisenhower to a small role in the campaign may have deprived Nixon of the substantial affection Ike still commanded among moderates of both parties. Those close to Nixon would forever wonder whether he might have edged out Kennedy had he turned earlier and more forcefully to Eisenhower. But Nixon defied Eisenhower and debated; he hesitated rather than call Coretta; he waited until the final weeks to stitch himself close to his president. And he lost.
Eisenhower was gracious—and heartbroken. He wrote consolingly to Dick and Pat Nixon: “I want to express to you both the fervent hope that the two of you will not be too greatly disappointed by yesterday’s election returns. I know that whatever disappointment you do feel will not be for yourselves but for our country and for the jeopardy in which our great hopes and aims for the future have been placed.” But he took Nixon’s defeat personally, called it the worst of his life. To his brother Milton, Ike confided that he felt the work of the past eight years had gone “down the drain.” And to George Murphy, an acquaintance who also had campaigned hard for Nixon, Ike was blunter still. He felt “like I had been hit in the solar plexus with a ball bat.”
Eisenhower rebounded, but Nixon fell into a deep gloom. He sulked through November and December while the country thrilled to its president-elect, his stylish wife, and their adorable children. Near the end of the year, Ike summoned Nixon to discuss the future of the party and Eisenhower’s role in it. The president imagined writing articles, quietly convening Republican leaders, perhaps for annual gatherings at Gettysburg, and fending off what he presumed would be Kennedy’s attempt to co-opt the political center that he had so long defended. The conversation was constructive until the two began to reflect on the campaign. Nixon was bitter. He complained that Lodge had hurt the ticket with his promise to put a black man in the cabinet, a jolting idea that “just killed us in the South.” Eisenhower agreed. The Lodge remark, he believed, cost the Republican ticket South Carolina and Texas. Eisenhower complained that the administration had championed civil rights but received too little credit from blacks. Negroes, Ike growled, “just do not give a damn.”
Nixon was not ready to concede that blacks had ignored him completely. He pointed out that he had tallied slightly more votes from blacks in 1960 than Ike had in 1952. But the black vote, Nixon said acidly, was a “bought vote, and it wasn’t bought by civil rights.” The Kentucky senator Thruston Morton, who headed the Republican National Committee and participated in the meeting as well, echoed that conclusion. Blacks had failed to appreciate the Republican Party’s work on racial equality, the senator said. As far as he was concerned, “the hell with them.”
Up to that point in his career, Nixon had a fairly commendable record on civil rights and had paid some price for it among conservatives. When he resumed his quest for the presidency in 1968, he would pursue it through the so-called southern strategy. The goal was to break the Democratic Party’s hold on the South by allying the Republican Party with the forces of racism. It would prove more effective than Nixon’s more accommodating approach in 1960. The southern strategy might well be said to have been born that December day in Eisenhower’s White House.
Nixon’s funk persisted into the new year. When NBC began shooting a tribute to Eisenhower to air on the last day of his presidency, the network invited Nixon to appear. He refused. Len Hall had to remind Nixon that his absence would surely be noted. Glumly, Nixon relented. He would, Nixon agreed, do anything he was asked.
As the days counted down on Eisenhower’s presidency, Ike turned to the most vexing foreign policy problem left on his agenda. Over the course of 1960, Castro had gone from meddlesome to threatening as he sought and received substantial aid from the Eastern bloc and encouraged other Latin American movements to challenge their governments. The CIA estimated that the Soviets had supplied ten thousand to twelve thousand tons of equipment to Castro’s regime, including six helicopters, many machine guns, and possibly tanks. The CIA further estimated that Castro commanded 32,000 ground forces and a militia said to number 200,000.
None of that made Castro a threat to invade the United States, but it gave him a formidable fighting force and overt Soviet support. Though the United States had long armed Turkey, similarly close to the Soviet Union, neither the American people nor their president was sanguine about a Communist foothold in the Americas. Eisenhower concluded that Castro was determined to place his country on a course inimically at odds with America’s best interests, and he vowed to thwart it. As Ike put it to Harold Macmillan, “We shall seek and use every possible opportunity short of outright intervention which might bring pressure to bear on Castro.”
In late November, Ike convened top members of his diplomatic and covert action staffs in his office. The goal was to bring together the various anti-Castro efforts and to unite them under a single command. State assumed the lead and proposed to contact President Frondizi of Argentina, whom Nixon had visited the previous year, in order to enlist his support in containing Castro. Meanwhile, the first step of the covert operation was authorized. Leaders of the State Department and CIA merged their “overt and covert actions” into a combined effort “completely geared into each other.” Just as with Guatemala in 1954, the United States was prepared to organize the effort and, when the time came, presumably would support it.
Preparations unfolded quickly. Taking advantage of a friendly government in Guatemala, the Cuban fighting force trained there, armed by the United States. But even in the jungles of Guatemala, it is not easy to hide hundreds of armed men, feverishly preparing to invade their homeland—in this case, joined by some three hundred Guatemalans as well. In January, the
New York Times
reported that Cuban forces were training, and Eisenhower again urgently gathered his Cuba group to discuss how to respond. The notes of that meeting leave no doubt about what Ike intended: “He recognized that some day we will want the force to move into Cuba.” If anything, Eisenhower was impatient, suggesting that “perhaps the real point is that we had best get started with our operation.”
Allen Dulles, who had waffled throughout Castro’s accumulation of power, now urged restraint. The operation was not ready, he insisted, and would not be for at least several months. Ike left office without ever approving an invasion.
After so many years of contemplating retirement, Eisenhower loosened his grip on power reluctantly. As a result, his final weeks were nostalgic and slightly sad. Earlier in the year, Ann Whitman had caught him in a White House hallway, musing about where his portrait might someday hang, imagining himself no longer as a president but rather as a relic. Hagerty believed that his boss was relieved to shed the burdens of his office but also regretful not to have accomplished more and worried about becoming bored.
Mamie tried to cheer up her husband. She threw herself into their final White House Christmas, bringing in a towering tree, lavish boughs, decorations, crèches. She marshaled her grandchildren to put on a Nativity play, rehearsing them relentlessly. Each child played multiple roles, switching in and out of costumes painstakingly fashioned by the First Lady herself. “The festivities,” her granddaughter recalled, “were a high point for Mamie. In her last year in the White House, the spirit of Christmas had truly been captured.”
Ike warmed to the holidays. He entertained the grandchildren of friends and aides on December 23, attended Christmas pageants and parties, and kept a light schedule. And as he prepared to shed the sense of duty that had guided him since he was a cadet, Eisenhower began to glimpse a new life ahead. He wrote to friends in good humor and with a special request: the restoration of informality. “During my entire life, until I came back from World War II as something of a VIP, I was known by my contemporaries as ‘Ike,’ ” he reminded them. “Whether or not the deep friendships I enjoy have had their beginnings in the ante or post-war period, I now demand,
as my right
, that you, starting January 21, 1961, address me by that nickname. No longer do I propose to be excluded from the privileges that other friends enjoy.”
19
Farewell
P
resident Eisenhower looked directly into the television camera and thanked the networks for giving him time to speak to the American people. Back straight, owlish glasses fixed firmly across his broad face, notes before him because he still did not quite trust the teleprompters, Eisenhower began his “message of leave-taking and farewell.”
He had considered this moment for many months. Indeed, his whole adult life had built toward it. Ike had served his nation since 1911, when he left his mother crying in Abilene as he departed for West Point and commenced a military career sprung from the unlikely bosom of the River Brethren. In the decades since, he had borne arms for his nation and secured a victory for American liberty unlike any other in history. As president, he had presided over a perilous peace, eight years of continuous threat, of nuclear arsenals and legions of armed men, of rising aspirations and mounting fears, of unrelenting ideological contest, of galloping technological progress and yawing uncertainty about where that progress would lead.
In the years since the end of the Korean War, annihilation still loomed, yet precisely one American died in combat, killed by a sniper in Lebanon. No American president of modern times had brought to the office greater skill as a soldier, yet none had done more to preserve the peace. Eisenhower, America’s warrior-president, had much upon which to reflect, and he looked forward to sharing some final thoughts with his countrymen.