Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [125]
“Kennedy took the thing much more seriously than Nixon,” recalled Don Hewitt, the CBS producer assigned to direct the candidates’ first encounter. The Democrat had asked Hewitt to meet with him a week early in a hangar at Chicago’s Midway Airport. “Where do I stand?” Jack kept asking, eager to get an idea of what the setup would be in the WBBM studio. On the afternoon of the debate, wearing a terry-cloth robe, Kennedy lay in bed in his hotel room, clutching a fistful of cards in his hand, each with a probable question and its staff-prepared answer. Drilling him was Ted Sorensen and his other legislative assistant, Mike Feldman. After each card had been dealt with, Kennedy would throw it on the floor. Additionally, there was the “Nixopedia,” which Feldman had prepared—in a binder like the once-invaluable “Lodge’s Dodges”—to track and detail Nixon’s positions.
The pollster Lou Harris recalled Kennedy standing on his Ambassador East Hotel balcony with the sun on his face. “He was nervous, and would hit his fist. There he was, walking back and forth, hitting his fist.” To pass the time, Kennedy kept asking his pollster how he went about the business of calculating public opinion.
Also there with Kennedy was a veteran of the new camera-driven politics. Bill Wilson had been a young television producer when hired by Adlai Stevenson’s campaign in 1956. His role was to help the TV-shy candidate perform as best he could in the new medium, since, for all his eloquence as a platform orator, Stevenson was a primitive as far as TV was concerned. When the set in his hotel room went on the blink, for example, he telephoned Wilson to come fix it. He saw no difference between a television advisor and a TV repairman. Nonetheless, Stevenson had kept Wilson through the primaries and into the general election, although never quite sure what the point was. Such basic resistance was not the case, though, with Wilson’s new employer, who understood very well the importance of the tiny screen that sat there in voters’ homes.
As the two participants arrived at the studio, there was a moment of mutual appraisal that gave a harbinger of what was to come: Jack looked like a million bucks and Nixon knew it; Nixon looked terrible and Kennedy knew it. In the tapes from their prebroadcast rehearsal, you can see Nixon’s confidence shatter the instant Jack walked onto the set.
“He and I were standing there talking when Jack Kennedy arrived,” Hewitt recalled. Tanned, tall, lean, in a dark, well-tailored suit, the Democratic candidate positively gleamed. Photographers, seizing their chance, abandoned Nixon and fluttered about their new prey like hornets. The senator bore no resemblance to the emaciated, jaundiced, wounded figure he’d been. “He looked like a young Adonis,” Hewitt said simply.
Bill Wilson recalled his candidate’s strategy: “The design was that we attack Nixon and everything he was saying. He had to get the floor. He had to be the one that had the control and had the sense of command on the stage, which he did. I told him the things that counted in terms of his body language and when you look at the camera, you’re only talking to one person. When you’re doing a debate or sitting, you’re talking to one person and that’s the lens.”
Once the two men were on the stage together, going through the rehearsal, the psychological battle was on. Asked to pose with his rival, Kennedy appeared barely to notice him. They could have been total strangers for all the interest Jack Kennedy showed in the colleague with whom he’d enjoyed cordial terms since 1947. Nixon, for his part, seemed intimidated. From the moment Kennedy strode in, hijacking the attention of the photographers, he was not the same man. Visibly deflated by his rival’s matinee-idol aura and seeming nervelessness, Nixon slouched in his chair, his head turned away, as if in retreat.
Pierre Salinger recalled Nixon’s pale, unhealthy appearance. The vice president had injured his leg in August, with a subsequent knee infection forcing him off the