Fifties (120 page)

Soon it became clear there would not be time to launch the operation while Eisenhower was still President. And with that perhaps the last chance to kill the operation had died. For it would have been easy for Eisenhower, an experienced military man with solid anti-Communist credentials, to call off his own program; it was not so easy for a young Democratic President, vulnerable to accusations of a lack of experience and of being insufficiently anti-Communist, to stop a program that was so far advanced.

So the plan moved forward and continued to grow. Soon it was six hundred men instead of four hundred; then it was seven hundred fifty, and then over one thousand. Then it became less a covert guerrilla force and more a full-scale landing from the sea, supported by a small hired air force. That was one of the most difficult maneuvers of all in military terms. The more men were needed, the less secrecy there would be and the more the operation would depend on increased airpower. In fact the operation had become something of an open secret by the fall of 1960. Castro had agents everywhere, and even if he had not, the size of the force, the swagger of its members as they boasted of what they would do, had guaranteed that Castro would know many of the details.

That meant that Richard Nixon’s worst nightmare about the 1960 campaign had come true. The Cuban dilemma had not been settled, Castro was sticking his finger in America’s eye from his safe haven ninety miles away, and the formation of an exile expeditionary force lagged well behind schedule. The Democrats, as he had suspected, were about to nominate John Kennedy, who would make a formidable opponent.

Kennedy was young, attractive, contemporary, skilled as few politicians of his generation were at using television. He also represented the resurgence of the Democrats as hard-liners. Accused of being soft on Communism in the past, they were now determined to show that if anything, they were tougher foes of Communism than the Republicans. They did this somewhat deftly: They did not actually accuse the Republicans of being soft on Communism; instead, they claimed that the country had lost its edge during the Eisenhower years. America had become self-satisfied and lazy, and the world was
leaving America behind, particularly in the race for friends in the third world. They spoke of a missile gap (which did not exist) and again and again of Castro’s Cuba.

John Kennedy was a cool and very controlled young man, privileged, well educated, but in some ways very much the son of his Irish-immigrant father. If the passions and rage of Joe Kennedy had been obvious, those of his son were not: He appeared not as an angry immigrant but, thanks to the tailoring of Harvard, as reserved and aristocratic—the first Irish Brahmin. Be more Irish than Harvard, the poet Robert Frost would ask of him at his inauguration a year later. The Kennedy signature was a kind of rugged masculinity, a physical and emotional toughness. Kennedy men did not cry, and they did not make themselves vulnerable on issues of anti-Communism. “Isn’t he marvelous!” an excited Joe Alsop had said to a colleague after watching Kennedy’s announcement for the presidency. “A Stevenson with balls.”

Because he was as good at listening as speaking, he soon recognized that the country’s anxieties over the Cold War now had more to do with Castro than with Khrushchev. All he had to do was mention, as he did frequently, that Cuba was only ninety miles away, eight minutes by jet, and the audience would explode in anger and frustration. Typically, in a speech on October 15, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he said: “Mr. Nixon hasn’t mentioned Cuba very prominently in this campaign. He talks about standing firm in Berlin, standing firm in the Far East, standing up to Khrushchev, but he never mentions standing firm in Cuba—and if you can’t stand up to Castro, how can you be expected to stand up to Khrushchev?” So ironically, Kennedy attacked Nixon for the administration’s softness on Castro, but Nixon, privy to the CIA’s preparation of the clandestine operation, could not respond.

If television played a role in previous presidential elections, this was the first in which it became the dominating force. In past elections, Kennedy might have been denied the nomination because the party bosses (most of them, ironically, Catholic) were against him, fearing an anti-Catholic backlash. But Kennedy used the primaries to prove he could win predominantly Protestant strongholds, and the key to that was his skillful use of television.

Kennedy had been a natural on television—from the start the camera had liked him. He was attractive, he did not posture, and he was cool by instinct: Television was a cool medium—the more overheated a candidate, the less well he did on it. Kennedy’s gestures and his speaking voice seemed natural—perhaps it was a reaction to the
old-fashioned blarney of his Irish-American grandfather, who had campaigned by singing Irish songs. John Kennedy did not like politicians who gave florid speeches; he greatly preferred understatement. His own speeches were full of humor, irony, and self-depreciation, and that helped him in what was to be the defining moment of the 1960 campaign—the first presidential debate.

By contrast, television was a problem for Nixon. Not only were his physical gestures awkward, but his speaking tone was self-conscious and artificial. What often came through was a sense of insincerity. To Eisenhower’s secretary, Anne Whitman, “The Vice-President sometimes seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.” That was a critical distinction, particularly for a man entering the television age, because if there was one thing the piercing eye of the television camera was able to convey to people, it was what was authentic and what was artificial.

The first debate changed the nature of politics in America, and it also crowned the importance of television politically and culturally. From then on, American politics became a world of television and television advisers; the party machinery was soon to be in sharp decline as the big-city political bosses no longer had a monopoly on the ability to assemble large crowds—television offered much larger ones. Until that night in Chicago, Kennedy had been the upstart, a little-known junior senator who had hardly bothered to take the Senate seriously. Nixon, on the other hand, had been Vice-President for eight years; he was experienced, had visited endless foreign countries and met with all the leaders of the world. He also fancied himself a not inconsiderable debater, and he was confident he would do well against Kennedy.

Kennedy, who viewed Nixon with a cool snobbishness, arrived in Chicago early. He had spent much of the previous week in California, and he was tanned and glowing with good health. Knowing that this was the most important moment in the campaign, he had minimized his campaign schedule and spent much of his time in his hotel resting. He also practiced with his staff members, who posed likely questions and likely Nixon answers.

Nixon, by contrast, arrived in terrible shape. He had been ill earlier in the campaign with an infected knee, and he had never entirely recovered. Others on his staff tried to tell him to rest and prepare himself, but no one could tell him anything. Old and once trusted advisers had been cut off. Frustrated by Eisenhower’s treatment of him for the last seven and a half years, Nixon had become megalomaniacal in 1960 as far as his veteran staff was concerned,
determined to be his own campaign manager as well as candidate. Ted Rogers, his top television adviser, found that Nixon would not even talk with him about planning for the coming debates. Rogers kept calling the Nixon campaign plane to see how the candidate was doing and how he looked, and the answer always come back that he was doing well and looked fine.

At one point Rogers flew out to Kansas City to talk with Nixon about the debate but had not been able even to see him. Have you got him drinking milkshakes? Rogers asked the staff on the plane, and was assured that the candidate looked just fine. The first debate was set for Monday, September 26. Nixon, ill and exhausted, flew out late on Sunday night and went on a motorcade through Chicago, stopping for rallies in five wards and getting to bed very late. Then on Monday, even though he was clearly exhausted, he made another major campaign appearance in front of a labor union. His staff prepared possible questions and answers for him, but he was in no mood to look at their work. Late Monday afternoon, Rogers was permitted a brief meeting. He was stunned by how badly Nixon looked. His face was gray and ashen, and his aides had not even bothered to buy him new shirts—so his shirt hung loosely around his neck like that of a dying man. The only thing he wanted to know from Rogers was how long it would take to get from his hotel to the studio.

At the studio, both candidates turned down the makeup offered by the station. It was gamesmanship: Each man feared that if he used any makeup, then the next day there would be newspaper stories about it, or, even worse, a photo. But Kennedy had a good tan and his aide Bill Wilson did a slight touch-up with commercial makeup bought at a drugstore two blocks away. Because of his dark beard, Nixon used something called Shavestick. The CBS professionals were as shocked by Nixon’s appearance as Ted Rogers had been. Don Hewitt, the producer (later to be the executive producer of
60 Minutes
), was sure that a disaster was in the making and that CBS would later be blamed for Nixon’s cosmetic failures (which in fact happened).

Nixon was extremely sensitive to heat, and he sweated profusely when the television lights were on (years later, as President, he gave fireside chats from the White House with the air-conditioning turned up to the maximum so that he would not sweat). He had started out in the debates by looking ghastly, gray and exhausted. Then while some 80 million of his fellow Americans watched, it got worse. He began to sweat. Soon there were rivers of sweat on his gray face, and
the Shavestick washed down his face. In the control room Rogers and Wilson were sitting with Hewitt, who, Rogers decided, was the most powerful man in the country at that moment because he controlled the camera. Earlier, during the negotiations, both sides had agreed on the number of reaction shots that could be used—that is, how many times the camera would focus on one candidate while the other candidate was speaking. At first Wilson had called for more reaction shots of his man, Kennedy, and Rogers had called for more reaction shots of his man. But soon they had switched sides: Watching Nixon in a kind of cosmetic meltdown, Wilson called for more shots of
Nixon
and Rogers called for more
of Kennedy
—anything to get that relentlessly cruel camera off Nixon’s gray face as it dissolved into a river of sweat. “That night,” Russell Baker wrote thirty years later, “image replaced the printed word as the natural language of politics.”

Nixon had been warned by others that he must not attack too harshly, that otherwise he would seem like the Nixon of old; even Eisenhower had told him that he must not be too glib. That had stung, for it was nothing less than a rebuke, the President’s way of saying that he thought Nixon was, in fact, too glib (what stung even more was learning that Ike did not even bother to watch the debate). When it was all over, Nixon thought he had won. Kennedy knew otherwise, particularly when the door to WBBM opened and there was Dick Daley, the boss of the Chicago Democratic machine, who had so far shunned Kennedy in Chicago. Now he was eager to congratulate him, eager to come aboard. The next day Kennedy drew huge crowds wherever he went, and the people seemed to feel a personal relationship with the candidate. For Nixon the news was a great deal worse. The parents of Rose Woods, his longtime secretary, called from Ohio to ask if there was anything wrong with him. Even Hannah Nixon called Rose to inquire about her son’s health.

Later, Ted Rogers mused that eight years of Nixon’s experience as Vice-President had been wiped out in one evening. Rogers wondered how Nixon could have been so careless about so vital a moment in the campaign, and later he decided that it was the sum of everything that had gone before: anger over his treatment by Eisenhower as Vice-President; his subsequent determination to make all the important decisions in this campaign himself and to listen to none of his old advisers; and finally, his belief that because of the Checkers speech, he was an expert on television. Unfortunately, anyone who understood television could have warned him that Kennedy was a formidable foe in front of a television camera.

The debate between these two young men, each born in this century, each young enough to be Dwight Eisenhower’s son, seemed to underscore how quickly the society had changed in so short a time. It showed not only how powerful the electronic medium had become, but also how much it was already speeding the pace of life in America. Not everyone was pleased by the change wrought in American politics by television. Dean Acheson was not moved by either candidate as he watched the debate and it had made him feel older. To him both candidates appeared to be cold, mechanistic figures who had, with the aid of pollsters and advertising executives, figured out, down to the last decimal point, what stand to take on every issue. “Do you get a funny sort of sense that, so far at least, there are no human candidates in this campaign?” he wrote Harry Truman. “They seem improbable, skillful technicians. Both are surrounded by clever people who dash off smart memoranda, but it is not all pulled together on either side, by or into a man. The ideas are too contrived.... These two ... bore the hell out of me.”

It was one of Harry Truman’s memorable moments—holding up the front page of his archenemy,
The Chicago Tribune,
which claimed that Dewey had won. Truman’s victory embittered many in the Republican party and made the decision of many Republican politicians to use the issue of domestic subversion against the Democrats almost inevitable.
BLACK STAR