Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [121]
Kennedy was really harking back to the same question that presented itself just before World War II, the one that had gripped him and driven his interest in foreign policy. It had not lost its relevance, for what he was asking was, could the democracies match the dictatorships when it came to responding to a dire threat? While we see the allusion to Lincoln in the wording, the question itself is pure twentieth century—only it was now Khrushchev, not Hitler, in opposition to us.
But it wasn’t just America’s Democrats who had their attention focused on the convention concluding in Los Angeles. The about-to-be Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, was watching television that night, viewing it carefully with the eye of a professional, and deciding, when all the shouting was over, that he was encouraged by what he’d seen.
Theodore White, then doing the reporting for his landmark book The Making of the President, 1960, described the response of the Republican cohort this way: “They sat rapt, then content, then pleased. The rapid delivery, the literary language, the obvious exhaustion of the Democratic candidate . . . all combined to invite in them a sense of combative good feeling.” Nixon told those with him that he thought Kennedy had turned in a poor performance, his speech above people’s heads and delivered too rapidly. He could take this man, his longtime colleague, now a known quantity, on TV—or so he felt.
So Nixon, made confident by what he’d seen, and trusting his judgment, was in a mood receptive to the idea of televised debate. Kennedy, when the moment came, jumped at the opportunity. “I took the telegram to him,” Pierre Salinger said. The networks were proposing a candidates’ debate, and, in the Kennedy camp, the decision to agree was quickly made. “The feeling was that we had absolutely nothing to lose by a debate with Nixon. If we accepted right away, we’d put Nixon in a position where he had to accept.”
No one, least of all Jack, could have predicted the vice president’s psychology or realized that Jack’s performance at the convention had allayed Dick Nixon’s worries about going head to head with him in front of the cameras. But by saying yes to a debate, what Nixon was handing his opponent was, in fact, a platform of such value that not even the senior Kennedy’s wealth could have purchased it. Here was an opportunity for Jack to face the American people and claim for himself a measure of the recognition already Nixon’s. Eight years in the vice presidency had given his rival a mammoth edge. TV would now hand it to the challenger.
The Kennedy themes, devised to differentiate his candidacy from Nixon’s, all looked to the future. While the one man was so closely associated with both the long-standing positives and the more recent negatives of the Eisenhower era, the other could recast the country’s complacency as a trap. Elect him, Jack Kennedy promised, and he’d arouse citizens to a new urgency, a new determination to face up to the challenges ahead. The United States was slowing down; everyone knew that. But he, John F. Kennedy, would get it moving again. He’d take on the Soviet threat, close the “missile gap,” and bring the enemy to the bargaining table. He would arm America, not to fight, but to parlay. In short, he’d do what Winston Churchill might have done to prevent World War II, had his own countrymen listened to him back in the 1930s.
Meanwhile, Kennedy had a vibrant domestic agenda as well. He vowed to be a Democratic activist in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, bringing medical care to the elderly, federal aid to education, and strong enforcement of civil rights.
When the two came together face-to-face, the strategy was for Nixon to be squeezed, maneuvered into appearing both weak on defense and inactive on the home front. The tactic had worked against Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952, and, since you repeat what works, Kennedy intended to deny Nixon any chance to benefit as a moderate-sounding Republican. Not hard enough on defense, not soft enough on taking care of people: Kennedy