The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [291]
Jack would gladly have given grand, serious addresses, but such speeches no longer held an audience. Even before remote control devices became ubiquitous among television-viewing Americans, the public already had learned to change the channel on whatever was boring, complex, or tedious.
Americans would never again sit still, either in person or in front of their televisions, listening to the kinds of formal speeches that once had defined presidential campaigns. On the campaign trail Jack saw what moved the vast, restless crowds and what made them anxious and nervous. His speeches now had less substance than the talks he had given during the primaries.
Jack did not shirk ideas when they clearly benefited his candidacy. Fritz Hollings, the former governor of South Carolina, called Feldman praising a speech that General James Gavin had given in which he broached the idea of Americans volunteering in the underdeveloped parts of the world. The speech itself was hardly a seminal document. The general had no written speech, only notes that were sent up to Washington. In Michigan, Jack tried the idea out to an enthusiastic reception, and then developed it further into a full-scale speech given in San Francisco.
The Peace Corps, an idea with which Jack’s name would forever be linked, was in a sense the democratization of the ideal that he had expressed at Choate in 1946, that those to whom much had been given should give back in public service. In the affluent America of the 1960s, everyone seemed privileged or at least everyone in the middle class, and it was the children of the middle class who heard this bugle call.
When Jack arrived in Chicago for the first of four unprecedented televised debates on September 26, 1960, he was slightly behind in the polls, and many political handicappers thought that this occasion would worsen his chances. Nixon’s supporters could claim that for eight years he had been groomed in the White House to assume the presidency, while his opponent had been a legislative misfit in the Senate. Although Jack had developed into a fine public speaker, the vice president was a stellar debater who had famously stood up to Khrushchev in Moscow the previous summer in a spontaneous debate. Beyond that, the two candidates’ acceptance speeches provided devastating evidence of Jack’s apparent inferiority.
Jack created his own universe around him, and everyone in his circle served a purpose, from Dave Powers, who woke the candidate each morning and knew when to pump him up with Irish yarns or with a terrifying vision of Nixon already up, shaved and showered, out on the campaign trail; to Janet Des Rosiers, his father’s former mistress, now the stewardess on the Caroline, who gave him everything from coffee to massages; to Pierre Salinger, his ebullient press secretary; to O’Donnell, O’Brien, and his campaign staff.
This weekend, Jack brought Sorensen and Feldman to prepare him for what he knew might be the most important moment of the campaign.
These intense, sharp men spoke the candidate’s idiom perfectly, cutting to the core of any issue. Throughout Sunday evening and the Monday morning of the debate, they peppered Jack with the questions they thought he might be asked, and he answered back in his staccato rhythms, sharpening his arguments.
Jack told his two aides that since the Democrats were the majority party, he would proudly position himself as heir to that tradition. Nixon fancied himself an expert on foreign affairs, but Jack believed that this area was the vice president’s weakness and his own strength. If Jack could lure his opponent onto these dark shoals, he believed that he had a chance to run Nixon’s campaign aground. Unfortunately, the first debate was supposed to be on domestic issues. The second and third would be question-and-answer sessions, and only the fourth debate would focus on foreign policy.