The Kennedy Half-Century (15 page)

Of course, the Nixon camp played its own dirty tricks in 1960. Thieves ransacked the offices of Dr. Eugene Cohen, the New York endocrinologist
who was treating Kennedy’s Addison’s disease, and Dr. Janet Travell, JFK’s personal physician.
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Such political skulduggery was not uncommon in this era and was one reason why the public reaction to Watergate surprised Nixon. For the rest of his life, Nixon remained furious that JFK and others had gotten away with various ploys while his reputation had been permanently destroyed by a “third-rate burglary” (his description of the 1972 Watergate break-in).
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This is not to equate prior campaign hijinks with the stunning scope of Watergate’s perfidy; nonetheless, one can understand Nixon’s reaction even while disagreeing with his argument suggesting equivalency.

Meanwhile, the campaign waged in public focused mainly on high-minded matters. Kennedy was on the road making tough statements about Cuba. On October 7, he told a Cincinnati crowd, “We must firmly resist further Communist encroachment in this hemisphere [by] encouraging those liberty-loving Cubans who are leading the resistance to Castro.” Eight days later, he was in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, making a similar statement: “We must broadcast our story to Cuba. We must let those Cubans … who are not fighting for independence and wish to do so [know] that we are on their side.” In New York City, he blasted the administration for mollycoddling Cuba, arguing that the United States “must attempt to strengthen the … democratic anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.”

Richard Nixon was stunned. In his mind, Kennedy had put the security of the country at risk in order to score political points. The vice president ordered an aide to call the White House to find out if Kennedy had been briefed by the CIA on the government’s ongoing invasion planning. “He was told that Kennedy had been briefed.” Today, it is not clear that he ever was, but JFK’s comments did mislead anti-Castro Cubans (and perhaps the Pentagon) into believing that he would support a U.S. attack on Castro once he became president, the opposite of what happened in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. On October 22, Nixon informed TV viewers that Kennedy’s proposals on Cuba represented “the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations that he’s made during the course of this campaign.” U.S. interference in Cuba, warned Nixon, would violate the charters of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations and invite Soviet retaliation in Latin America. Actually, Nixon knew his own administration was planning an eventual invasion of Cuba, but he attacked Kennedy’s statements anyway in order to protect what Nixon considered national security.
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Kennedy ignored the controversy and continued campaigning. Four days before the election, he flew to Norfolk, Virginia, home to one of the largest
naval bases in the world, and rode in a red convertible from the airport to Granby High School. There he delivered a speech to more than twelve thousand rapturous supporters. It was the biggest political event that the city of Norfolk had ever seen. “No citizen can live in this section of Virginia without realizing there is a world of danger and opportunity surrounding us,” he told the cheering multitude. “You must believe that the United States must go forward. You cannot possibly put your confidence in Democratic senators and Democratic congressmen and suddenly put in reverse and elect a Republican president. What sense does that make in the sixties? I come to you in these last four days. I come back where it all began, and I ask Virginia to give me her vote.” Kennedy then flew across the state to Roanoke in the west, where many thousands turned out to greet him. Alvin Hudson, the Roanoke policeman responsible for JFK’s security, made plans to escort the senator from the speaker’s platform to a row of phone booths after the speech was over, but Kennedy refused to cooperate. “Instead of going back with me, he jumped over the wooden handrail that surrounded the speaker stand. He was my responsibility so I had to go with him. On the other side of the rail were about three or four banquet tables that had been arranged for the reporters. He jumped on top of one of these tables and the leg collapsed and we fell. On the way down, he grabbed the chain my whistle was on and ended up standing on it. It was under his foot and I had to ask him to get off my whistle.” Hudson remembered that both candidate and crowd were amused by the incident.
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During the same week, Nixon campaigned in New York City with President Eisenhower. The political duo received a ticker tape parade and “shouts and cheers” from an estimated one to two million onlookers. Nixon had made poor use of Eisenhower, who was still remarkably popular—near 60 percent in the Gallup poll. Partly, the vice president wanted to prove to the country that he was his own man. Yet there was a hidden explanation. Ike’s wife, Mamie, had telephoned Patricia Nixon earlier in the year to express concern over her husband’s often-precarious health. It was clear that the First Lady would not welcome requests for strenuous campaign activities for the president. Nixon deferred to Mamie, not utilizing his best asset for most of the campaign. Meanwhile, President Eisenhower, unaware of his wife’s action, was puzzled and hurt by Nixon’s failure to ask him to do more. This comedy of errors had a fatal effect for Nixon, as Eisenhower might well have made the difference had he been sent to competitive states such as Illinois and Texas. As it was, Ike might have been the reason for the tightening polls at campaign’s end. In mid-October, before Eisenhower’s deployment, Kennedy had led Nixon by 51 to 45 percent, but three days before the election, after photos and
film of Ike and Nixon together had dominated the news, Gallup showed Kennedy’s lead had dwindled to a paper-thin 50.5 to 49.5 percent.
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By November 5, JFK had visited 237 cities in forty-three states; Nixon had toured 168 cities in forty-nine states. The vice president ultimately kept his promise to visit all fifty states by squeezing in a trip to Alaska at the last minute. It was an extraordinarily foolish thing to do. If Nixon had focused his energy on the remaining battlegrounds, as Kennedy did, he might have carried more critical, very close states. By contrast, JFK could look back on a skillfully executed campaign that had transformed him from a little-known senator and presidential underdog into an apparent frontrunner who had united a party suffering from a post-FDR crisis of confidence. In the process, he had brought together the factions of the Democratic Party—to the extent that a young Catholic candidate could. To appease the left, he had openly proclaimed himself to be a liberal. “What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label of ‘liberal’?” he asked listeners at a liberal party dinner in New York.

If by liberal they mean, as they want others to believe, someone who is soft on Communism, against local government, and unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrates that we are not that kind of liberal. But if by liberal they mean someone who looks to the future instead of the past—someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions—someone who cares about the welfare of the people, their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and civil liberties—someone who believes that we can break through the stalemates and suspicions to find the road to peace—if that is what they mean by a liberal, then I am proud to say that I am a liberal.
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To win the confidence of Asian Americans, Kennedy dispatched an aide to address the Chinese National Businessmen’s Organization. Lithuanian Americans were told that JFK would “smother” Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe. African Americans were impressed by his decision to phone Coretta Scott King when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was incarcerated in Georgia. Young people were inspired by his talk of a Peace Corps, old people by his promise of Medicare, white Southerners by his choice of running mate.
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By and large, Kennedy had handled foreign policy issues with skill, despite Nixon’s inherent advantages. His nuanced views on two small islands off the coast of China named Quemoy and Matsu deflected Nixon’s criticism. The
islands lie in the Taiwan Straits and in the 1950s and 1960s were considered strategically important to the defense of Taiwan. In summer 1959, the Chinese Communists held military exercises near the islands that were perceived as threatening. Hoping to convince the public that he would be tougher on Communism than Kennedy, Nixon accused the senator of “woolly thinking” for pointing out that the United States had no international agreement to defend the islands. But Kennedy finessed the dispute, allowing that the Asian islands would pose “a key decision for the next president … whenever the Chinese Communists decide … that they want to put us under pressure.” At the same time, JFK’s rhetoric on Communism and missile defense was as bellicose as Nixon’s, if not more so. In any event, the Quemoy and Matsu issue vanished after the election, as is frequently the case with election controversies.
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On election day, November 8, 1960, Kennedy voted at the West End Branch Library in Boston before flying to Hyannis Port to watch the election returns. He put on a sweater, lit a cigar, and settled in for a long night. Bobby’s house on the Kennedy compound had been “converted into a communications and vote analysis center.” On the ground floor of the house, telephones rang, Teletype machines spat out messages, and campaign workers scurried from one room to another. Upstairs, in one of the children’s bedrooms, the pollster Lou Harris and an army of statisticians were crunching numbers and eyeballing data from previous elections.

The early results looked good. John Bailey, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, reported positive news from Connecticut. Philadelphia looked as if it would go for Kennedy: “The industrial centers of the Northeast, which had been hit hard by unemployment and economic stagnation, were turning in some of the highest pluralities for a Democrat since FDR in 1936.” JFK’s friends and relatives beamed with optimism. But the candidate remained guarded. In 1956 he had watched the vice presidential nomination slip through his fingers at the last minute. He would not relax until the entire country’s vote had been counted. At one point during the evening, CBS-TV’s IBM 7090 computer called the race for Nixon—then the network reversed itself and predicted a victory for Kennedy.
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As the night wore on, it became apparent to everyone that the outcome was extremely close. In the wee hours, Ohio fell into Nixon’s column, and no Democrat in the twentieth century except FDR in 1944 had ever been elected without it. Illinois was a complete toss-up, and Kennedy simply had to win the Land of Lincoln. Pennsylvania, Missouri, Minnesota, Michigan, and California were also on the razor’s edge.
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Somehow, Kennedy grabbed a few hours of sleep once it was apparent that the election would not be decided until the next morning. By dawn’s light on the eastern seaboard, as states still seesawed back and forth, the outline of Kennedy’s Electoral College majority became apparent. At around nine A.M., Ted Sorensen reached JFK and congratulated his boss on becoming presidentelect. “What happened in California?” Kennedy asked. Sorensen assured his boss that he had carried the Golden State. The networks said so, too. Actually, JFK lost California once the final rural votes trickled in. Nor had he won anything approaching a decisive victory. But at midmorning, with Illinois and Texas finally called in his favor by the slimmest of margins, John Kennedy could exhale and contemplate his move into the White House.
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Kennedy eventually learned that he had won the election by a mere 118,574 votes—a margin so tiny he was left without an effective mandate. (To make matters worse, by some calculations, JFK actually lost the popular vote to Nixon.)
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But JFK’s minimal victory was enhanced somewhat by the Electoral College, where he accumulated 303 votes to Nixon’s 219. It may have been Kennedy’s sizable electoral edge that deterred Nixon from seeking a recount in Illinois and Texas, where vote fraud was hardly unknown.
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In Chicago, for example, where Mayor Richard J. Daley, Sr., ruled with an iron hand, JFK won with a massive majority of 319,000 votes. Statewide, Kennedy’s plurality was a mere 8,858 votes out of more than 4.7 million cast. The Democrat also clinched Texas by just 46,257 votes out of more than 2.3 million votes cast. If Nixon had won Texas and Illinois, he would have been the thirty-fifth president of the United States. Nixon and many of his followers firmly believed that the Kennedys, Mayor Daley, and LBJ had stolen the 1960 election.
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In the days following the vote count, Republicans dispatched teams of investigators to ferret out cases of fraud. In Texas, they found some irregularities. In Fannin County, for example, there were 6,138 votes cast even though the county had only 4,895 registered voters. Three quarters of Fannin’s votes had gone to Kennedy. “In one precinct of Angelina County, 86 people voted and the final tally was 147 for Kennedy, 24 for Nixon.” GOP loyalists demanded a recount, but the Texas Election Board, controlled by Democrats, steadfastly refused. Illinois was an equally rich source of questionable votes. Earl Mazo, a reporter for the
New York Herald Tribune
, investigated the returns in Chicago. “There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted,” says Mazo. “I remember a house. It was completely gutted. There was nobody there. But there were 56 votes for Kennedy in that house.” Mazo also found cases of GOP malfeasance in Illinois’s southern counties. “In downstate Illinois, there was definitely fraud. The Republicans were having a good time, too. But they didn’t have the votes to
counterbalance Chicago. There was no purity on either side, except that the Republicans didn’t have Daley in their corner—or Lyndon Johnson.”
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