Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [130]
However, what Nixon portrayed as strength, Kennedy saw as brinkmanship. Why would we risk war with the Chinese Communists over such a slight point as this? It made no sense. What it seemed to be about was Nixon wanting to fight the Communists on their own terrain and at significant peril of it going global. “Mr. Nixon is not interested in policies of caution in world affairs,” he told a partisan audience at the Waldorf-Astoria. “He boasts that he is a ‘risk-taker’ abroad and a conservative at home. But I am neither. And the American people had caught a sufficient glimpse of the kind of risks he would take when he said in 1954, ‘We must take the risk now of putting our boys in Indochina on the side of the French if needed to avoid further Communist expansion there.’ That is a foolhardy and reckless decision. How much wiser it would be to follow the president’s original recommendation—to persuade the Chinese Nationalists to evacuate all military personnel and any civilians who wish to go—now, when we would not be seeming to yield under Communist pressure, before real pressure is put on again.”
There were now two hurdles facing Jack Kennedy as he headed into the third debate, on October 13. One was that he continued to be pegged as the squeamish candidate, ready to pull back from Quemoy and Matsu, while Nixon remained the vigilant champion, loudly prepared to hold the line. Helping to prepare him that day, Arthur Schlesinger observed his jitters. “I had the impression that he was a little nervous about the Q-M issue.”
The other problem was the new debate format, which separated the candidates physically, the Democrat in a studio in New York and his Republican opponent 2,500 miles away in Los Angeles. With an entire country between them, Kennedy’s ability to intimidate his rival, so crucial a factor in their first encounter, would be gone.
NBC’s Frank McGee posed the first question, asking Kennedy about his charge that Nixon was being “trigger-happy” in regard to Quemoy and Matsu. If that was so, would Kennedy be willing to take military action to defend Berlin? Ignoring the Asia reference, Kennedy limited his answer only to a commitment regarding Berlin. But when Nixon took his turn, he swiftly moved the issue back to the now notorious offshore Chinese islands. “As a matter of fact, the statement that Senator Kennedy made was, to the effect that there were trigger-happy Republicans, that my stand on Quemoy and Matsu was an indication of trigger-happy Republicans. I resent that comment.”
On the attack now, Nixon challenged Kennedy to come up with the name of a Republican president who’d led the country into war. “I would remind Senator Kennedy of the past fifty years. I would ask him to name one Republican president who led this country into war. There were three Democratic presidents who led us into war.”
Boldly, Nixon cited the pre–World War II legacy of Munich, comparing Kennedy’s position on Quemoy and Matsu to the appeasement policy toward Hitler’s Germany that his father had supported as ambassador to Britain. “This is the story of dealing with dictators. This is something that Senator Kennedy and all Americans must know. We tried this with Hitler. It didn’t work. He wanted, first, we know, Austria, and then he went on to the Sudetenland, and then Danzig, and each time it was that this is all he wanted.” Before a national television audience of millions, Richard Nixon was calling Jack an appeaser. He was reminding him of his father’s disgrace.
“Now what do the Chinese Communists want?” he asked, building dramatically to his climax. “They don’t want just Quemoy and Matsu. They don’t just want Formosa. They want the world.”
With the third debate over, Kennedy took off for Michigan. He was scheduled to spend the night in Ann Arbor and then begin