Kennedy: The Classic Biography (40 page)

The first news of the day was word of a record turnout—nearly 69 million voters: good news. Then came word of an especially high turnout in the South—among white, Protestant Southerners: bad news. Except for Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, the turnout in the big cities was off: bad news. Finally the Senator, relaxed with a cigar, in sport shirt, sweater and slacks, settled back to watch the returns, sometimes in Bobby’s house, where aides manned the phones, sometimes in his own house, where Jacqueline watched quietly with him.

He made a few calls on his own. Soon after the returns began trickling in, he called John Bailey in Connecticut, one of the first states to report. “Who’s this?” asked Bailey as the questions were fired at him. “Who do you think it is?” said Kennedy. “The candidate.” He joked after a call to his running mate that “Lyndon says, ‘I hear
you’re
losing Ohio but
we’re
doing fine in Pennsylvania.’” He did not conclude the race was over on the basis of his early landslide win among his Connecticut neighbors, any more than he did on the basis of Thruston Morton’s premature mature claim of a Nixon victory. He was equally skeptical of those television computers which early in the evening predicted Nixon winning and those later predicting a Kennedy sweep. When Nixon, trailing in the early returns, refused to concede, Kennedy alone was unnettled: “Why should he? I wouldn’t under these circumstances.” He felt that Nixon had only embarrased himself and Mrs. Nixon by a half-concession statement to a group of unruly supporters.

The Senator refused to make any statement, despite pleas from the press, until the outcome was clear—and it was far from clear. Even before 8
P.M.
Huntley-Brinkley were using the phrase “cliff-hanger.” After 10
P.M.
Kennedy’s early lead shrank steadily through the night. The experts hedged their predictions. The statistics were uncertain. The TV network computers, said one commentator, were producing at best “a definite maybe.” The Senator watched television impassively, for the most part silently. Generally calm, he was briefly upset about not spending more time in California. He could not understand Ohio. For a time it looked like the 1956 Vice Presidential nominating contest all over again, with Kennedy racing to a near majority only to find himself unable to win enough Western and Midwestern votes to clinch it. But he was cool, often jovial, switching his TV set to a new channel each time local returns displaced the national. Shortly before 4
A.M.
John Kennedy went to bed, reasonably but not completely confident that he had won, reasonably but not completely content with his effort and, as always, unwilling to worry once there was nothing more he could do.

The minute he awoke around nine the next morning, I mounted the stairs and congratulated him on his election as President. “What happened in California?” were his first words. I told him—mistakenly as it turned out—that he had carried California and that, in any event, he had carried Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois as well as Pennsylvania and Missouri, to guarantee an electoral majority. I also informed him that the Secret Service had surrounded the house. Almost instantly his bedside phone rang, and he picked it up hoping it was the final verdict. It was his mother-in-law—a lifelong Republican who had publicly supported him—and they chatted as though nothing else was on his mind. He dressed once again in sports clothes, uncertain of how long it would be until Nixon bowed out. He knew politics well enough to know that nothing was certain until then.

His popular vote margin continued to dwindle, dropping finally to less than 120,000 out of nearly 69 million votes cast (in contrast with his electoral vote margin of 303-219). When the gracious wires of concession and congratulation finally came shortly after noon from Nixon and Eisenhower (after the Minnesota verdict was final), he was all business, deliberating his replies and his statement of victory. His elation over achieving the long-sought prize of the Presidency was tempered by the fatigue that had finally caught up with him, by the responsibilities that lay ahead of him and by the narrowness of his hard-won victory.

What accounted for Kennedy’s victory after his initial lag in the polls? The margin was so narrow that almost any important aspect of the campaign could probably be said to have provided the final margin. In my view, any list of decisive factors in Kennedy’s favor, excluding his defensive actions on religion, would have to include the following seven, without attempting to ascribe relative weight to any one of them:

1. The Television Debates

Kennedy’s sincerity and vitality, in the most televised campaign in history, and in the televised debates in particular, appealed to millions of voters who would otherwise have dismissed him as too young or known nothing about him but his religion. One survey showed four million voters making up their minds on the basis of the debates, with a three-to-one margin for Kennedy.

Nixon, confident of his superior debating experience, did not avail himself of the many excuses he could have employed to refuse Kennedy’s challenge to debate, and thereby gave the far lesser-known Senator his most highly publicized forum and most highly prized opportunity of the entire election campaign. Handicapped in the vital first debate by a poor television appearance, and hoping to win Democratic votes by erasing the image of the “old” more militant Nixon, he enabled Kennedy to appear more vigorous by seemingly agreeing with many of the Senator’s most pointed thrusts.

2. Campaign Tactics

Kennedy’s campaign style, tested and sharpened in seven spring primaries, was more attractive, more vigorous and more consistently on the offensive. Driving hard from the outset, he appealed to an inner feeling that the soft and easy life was not enough, that our national potential was unfulfilled. He had been well behind at the close of the conventions. He had been behind midway through the campaign both in the big states and in the South. The opinion polls concealed the unusually large number of undecided and wavering voters. Subsequent analysis by the University of Michigan showed that, contrary to our fears of a late Nixon “tide,” Kennedy won two to one among those making up their minds in the last two weeks before election. Indeed, had more time permitted, he might have carried such additional states as Virginia, Florida and California. His incredibly intensive campaign had convinced the unconvinced, projected his own convictions, demonstrated his quick intelligence, converted his youth into an asset and showed Democratic anti-Catholics that he was not only a Catholic.

Nixon’s campaign effort, handicapped at the outset by two weeks in the hospital with an infected knee, and further diluted by the fulfillment of his convention pledge to speak in all fifty states, had less substance and style than Kennedy’s. In contrast to the Kennedy theory on timing, Nixon’s strategy called for a careful pacing of campaign efforts, going all out the last two weeks to reach his peak on Election Eve, but his pacing was too slow and his peak fell short.

3. Party Identification

Kennedy’s party, despite Eisenhower’s personal appeal and successive victories, was the majority party in this country in terms of both registration and voting below the Presidential level. The majority of Senators, Congressmen, governors and big-city mayors were Democrats, capable of helping with organization and registration; and Kennedy appealed strongly and frequently to party unity, history and loyalty. To make the most of this majority, a highly skilled well-organized registration drive helped bring out nearly seven million more people than voted four years earlier, over four million of whom it was assumed were Democrats.

Nixon wished to be identified in the campaign with Eisenhower, but not with his party, not with all his policies and not at the expense of his own independence. At the outset, neither Nixon nor Eisenhower seemed certain of their relation or the extent to which the President’s participation in the campaign might overshadow the Vice President. Kennedy meanwhile was placing Nixon on the defensive for all the failings of the preceding years. The full-scale entry of Eisenhower, whose immense popularity more than made up for his lack of political enthusiasm, was thus delayed until it was too late to switch enough states.

4. Running mate

Kennedy’s running mate, Lyndon Johnson, helped salvage several Southern states the Republicans had counted on capturing, with an intensive campaign mixture of carrots and sticks, and campaigned effectively in some forty states. The maltreatment to which he and his wife were subjected by a shoving, booing crowd of disorderly Republican fanatics in Dallas undoubtedly helped switch more than the 23,000 voters who provided the Democratic margin in Texas; and had it not been for the return of Texas and Louisiana to the Democratic column from their 1956 Republican sojourn, and for the Carolinas’ staying Democratic against a predicted Republican victory, Nixon would have won the election.

Nixon’s running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge—whom the press and pollsters (but never Senator Kennedy) all said would strengthen the Republican ticket more than Johnson would help the Democrats—proved to be the least industrious campaigner on either ticket; and both his blatant pledge of a Negro in the Nixon Cabinet and his subsequent vacillation on the matter offended voters of all areas and races. Lodge was nationally known as “the man from the UN”; and had more political appeal than either Secretary of Labor James Mitchell, whom Nixon might have selected in pursuit of Catholic votes had Kennedy not been nominated, or Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky, whom Nixon might have selected in pursuit of Southern votes had Johnson not been nominated. Kennedy regarded Lodge as an attractive, able addition to Nixon’s team, but he also predicted in August, on the basis of his own race against Lodge in 1952, that sooner or later a Lodge blunder would cause Nixon regret—and he was right.

5. Negro-Southern Choices

Kennedy’s phone call of concern and interest to the bereaved and pregnant wife of Negro leader Martin Luther King, imprisoned in Georgia on a traffic technicality—a call which almost all his advisers initially opposed as a futile “grandstand” gesture which would cost more votes among Southerners than it would gain among Negroes—was hailed throughout the Negro community, which then voted overwhelmingly for Kennedy in numbers exceeding his margin of victory in several Northern and Southern states. Many of those who advised against the call to Mrs. King still argue that, even without it and Bob Kennedy’s subsequent call to the Georgia judge, Kennedy’s popularity among Negroes would have reached this level anyway as the result of economic issues. Although two million copies of a Democratic Committee pamphlet on the episode were distributed outside Negro churches on the Sunday before election, Kennedy was sufficiently uncertain of its impact to make no speech or press release on his call, revealing it with one simple but powerful sentence: “She is a friend of mine and I was concerned about the situation.”

Nixon’s hope of an unprecedented Republican Southern sweep kept him quiet on the Rev. King’s fate, and also caused him during the final week to neglect close states in the North for a flying and futile trip to South Carolina and Texas.

6. Foreign Policy

By chance, an American U-2 “spy” plane had been downed in Russia in the spring of 1960. The subsequent break-up of the Paris Summit Conference, cancellation of Eisenhower’s trips to the Soviet Union and Japan, public fear of a space and missile lag and the increasing realization that the Communists controlled Cuba “only ninety miles from our shore,” all clouded the atmosphere of “peace” which a year earlier had seemed certain to silence any Democratic critic. Nixon, dependent on Eisenhower’s goodwill, and defensive of the Republican record, was required to make rosy assertions about American leadership and prestige abroad which Kennedy continually exploded.

7. Recession

In the last month of the campaign, the nation could clearly feel the effects of a recession which had actually started in April, three months after Eisenhower predicted “the most prosperous year in our history.” It was the third recession in seven years, giving urban voters in the large industrial states good reason to be dissatisfied. Kennedy, on the offensive, was able to emphasize the downturn; Nixon publicly denied its existence and privately failed to persuade his administration to take sufficient action to counteract it. The Federal Reserve Board, as he urged, loosened credit in June but this was not enough. The votes of newly unemployed workers alone in Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and South Carolina were greater than Kennedy’s margin in those states, and their electoral votes were greater than his margin in the Electoral College. Nixon ran worst not, as many believe, in the cities with the highest proportion of Catholics but in the cities with the highest proportion of unemployed.

Each of these seven factors worked in Kennedy’s favor. This was fortunate, for the eighth and by far the largest factor in the campaign worked against him: religion. Obviously there were other reasons for Protestants and others to vote against him—or for him. I cannot agree with Ambassador Kennedy, who, when asked how many states his son would have carried had he been an Episcopalian, snapped without hesitation: “Fifty!” Most of the more superficial analyses completed immediately after the election concluded that Kennedy’s religion had on balance helped him. But subsequent studies in depth concluded that it was, other than Republican Party loyalty, the strongest factor against him.

Catholic voters were not uniformly Kennedy’s strongest supporters. Conservative, well-to-do and suburban Catholics continued to vote Republican, particularly in the West, Midwest and upper New England. Among the states listed in the Bailey Memorandum, Catholic votes for Nixon helped the Republican ticket carry Ohio, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Montana and California.