Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [129]
Nixon’s people, meanwhile, recognized they had other fronts to deal with as well. How their candidate looked mattered as much, obviously, as anything he said. This time Nixon was prepared to wear makeup. There’d be no macho hesitancy as before. He had his own dark suit to wear, and he’d been downing several milk shakes a day to give him the bulk he’d lost in those weeks in the hospital. But none of this would matter, his aides realized, if he showed the same sweaty look he had in that first, disastrous encounter with Kennedy in Chicago.
On the evening of October 7, Bill Wilson arrived with the Kennedy brothers at NBC’s Washington bureau for the second debate. They walked into the studio to realize that someone had set the temperature practically to freezing. It felt like a meat locker. “What the hell is this?” Jack asked. After complaining loudly to no avail, Bobby darted in anger to the control room. Bill Wilson remembers racing down to the basement of the building, looking for the air-conditioning unit. “There was a guy standing there that Ted Rogers had put there, and he said don’t let anybody change this. I said, ‘Get out of my way or I’m going to call the police.’ He immediately left and I changed the air-conditioning back. Ted wanted to keep his job because of the fuck-up in the first debate.”
That night, Nixon showed that he’d been preparing himself not simply to look better than in the first encounter with Kennedy but to fight better as well. There was no more of agreeing in principle. He knew he needed to draw a line. “I should point out here that Senator Kennedy has attacked our foreign policy. He said that it’s a policy that has led to defeat and retreat, and I’d like to know, where have we been defeated and where have we retreated? In the Truman administration, six hundred million people went behind the Iron Curtain, including the satellite countries of Eastern Europe and Communist China. In this administration we’ve stopped them at Quemoy and Matsu. We’ve stopped them in Indochina. We’ve stopped them in Lebanon. We’ve stopped them in other parts of the world.”
Nixon’s reference to Quemoy and Matsu was impossible to ignore. Kennedy’s response was tortured. “We have never said flatly that we will defend Quemoy and Matsu if it’s attacked. We say we will defend it if it’s a part of a general attack on Formosa, but it’s extremely difficult to make that judgment.” Then he started to backpedal. “I would not suggest the withdrawal at the point of the Communist gun; it is a decision finally that the Nationalists should make, and I believe that we should consult with them and attempt to work out a plan by which the line is drawn at the island of Formosa.”
Kennedy was now in Nixon’s Cold Warrior target zone. Fighting Communism, Nixon charged, wasn’t about being wishy-washy. “The question is not these two little pieces of real estate—they are unimportant. It isn’t the few people who live on them—they are not too important. It’s the principle involved. These two islands are in the area of freedom. We should not force our Nationalist allies to get off them and give them to the Communists. If we do that, we start a chain reaction. In my opinion, this is the same kind of woolly thinking that led to disaster for America in Korea. I am against it. I would not tolerate it as president of the United States, and I will hope that Senator Kennedy will change his mind if he should be elected.”
For the first time, Nixon had scored a hit. He’d wounded Kennedy where the Democratic candidate himself knew his own party was vulnerable. The point of contention, after all, was one at which Kennedy himself had taken aim back in the “Who lost China?” period. He knew firsthand the potential firepower of the issue: if the Democrats found themselves positioned again as the party of “appeasement” in Asia, they were finished. In the days ahead, Nixon continued