Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [134]
The pamphlet, two million copies of which were printed on light blue paper and delivered to black churches the Sunday before the election, would be dubbed “the blue bomb.” Though it never stirred even the mildest alarm among conservative white voters, who’d remain loyal to the national Democratic ticket, it moved black America overnight to the Democratic side of the ballot, from the party of Lincoln to that of the Kennedys. Martin Luther King, Jr., summing up the episode’s meaning, was eloquent: “There are moments when the politically expedient can be morally wise.”
On November 2, Kennedy gave a major address at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. He spoke on two topics: the importance of nuclear disarmament and his plans for the Peace Corps. That afternoon, sitting in the bathtub at the Palace Hotel, he talked to Red Fay about how the campaign was going. “Last week, Dick Nixon hit the panic button and started Ike speaking. He spoke in Philadelphia on Friday night and is going to make about four or five speeches between now and the election. With every word he utters, I can feel the votes leaving me. It’s like standing on a mound of sand with the tide running out. I tell you he’s knocking our block off. If the election was tomorrow I’d win easily, but six days from now it’s up for grabs.” Then, suddenly, he changed the subject and began to tell his old friend, who’d been to war with him, what he intended to talk about that night: his great plans for this new corps of Americans working for peace throughout the world.
But the tide was clearly turning. Ike was out there drawing enormous crowds, and Nixon was playing rough. “You know, it’s not Jack’s money they’re going to be spending!” The debates were yesterday’s news, and voters were fickle.
To a Nixon accusation that he was a “bare-faced liar,” Kennedy retorted: “Having seen him in close-up—and makeup—for our television debates, I would never accuse Mr. Nixon of being barefaced.” Away from the microphones and reporters’ notebooks, he could be vicious. “He’s a filthy, lying son of a bitch and a dangerous man,” his aide Richard Goodwin heard him say once. To Red Fay, he articulated his dislike: “Nixon wanted the presidency so bad that there were no depths he wouldn’t sink to, to try to achieve his goal. How would you like to have that guy deciding this country’s problems when it became an issue of what was best for the country or what was best for Dick?”
Fay called it a “180-degree reversal from what it was back in the Congressional years when Jack Kennedy wrote me on November 14, 1950, about how glad he was to see Nixon win big in his Senate race.” Kennedy also was worried about last-minute dirt, waiting for Nixon’s people to hit him with evidence of his “girling,” as he referred to it. He never did. Perhaps the voters would not have believed it if he had. How could they? One Nixon aide, watching news footage of Jack and Jackie in the final hours of the campaign, suddenly was struck by the power of the beautiful couple’s allure. Good God, he remembered thinking to himself, how do you run against that?
Yet, all the time, the momentum of the 1960 campaign, the reality of the here and now, was shifting about him. He sensed he was losing California and wanted desperately some more days of campaigning, especially in the farm-rich Central Valley. But the schedule had been set. Promises had been made to the bosses of New York. The men who’d helped him win the nomination were now calling in their chits. They wanted him there.
It’s hard to know how a campaign is going from the stump, Ken O’Donnell knew. Being in the bubble skews your perception. Unlike Jack, Bobby was at headquarters, getting phone calls and detecting very strongly that the question of religion was now back with a vengeance. “They’re much more concerned back at the headquarters because they’re seeing it. We’ve been to the Philadelphias and the Chicagos, Oklahoma—with big crowds across California,