The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [293]
As the final minutes approached, the candidate turned to Wilson. “I got to take a leak,” Jack said.
“It’s two minutes before air,” Wilson replied, looking at his watch.
“I got to take a leak.” The two men hurried to the men’s room.
“Kick him in the balls,” Bobby said, when Jack returned. Then Kennedy strode into the studio to face Nixon, sitting there already under the hot lights.
Jack won the right to give his opening remarks before Nixon, only the first of his many victories that evening. As Jack sat there so still, so certain, so straight, Nixon began sweating under the hot lights, first imperceptibly, then looking as if he had stumbled fully clothed into a sauna.
There was something dreadfully unfair in the visual contrast between the two candidates. But it was hardly Jack’s fault that in late August Nixon had hit his kneecap on a car door in Greensboro, North Carolina, and had ended up spending twelve days at Walter Reed Hospital. And now, earlier in the day, Nixon had bumped his troubled knee on a car door on his way into CBS station WBBM and almost passed out from the pain. He then had his face doused in a pancake makeup called “Lazy Shave,” which was inadequate to hide his stubble or mask his sweat.
Nixon should have been able to hold the rhetorical high ground using Eisenhower’s immense popularity as a shield against Jack’s attacks. It was Jack, however, who in his opening statement defined the evening, talking about the great Democratic tradition of Roosevelt and Wilson, making himself appear their logical heir. He took all the glorious truisms by which Americans lived and made them his own, locking them away from his perspiring opponent. He talked about the role of foreign affairs in American life, though that was not supposed to have been broached at all this evening. “In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery.”
Nixon began with the excruciating necessity of agreeing with almost everything Jack had said. “The things that Senator Kennedy has said many of us can agree with,” Nixon said, reverting to a schoolboy debating technique. “And I subscribe completely to the spirit that Senator Kennedy has expressed tonight, the spirit that the United States should move ahead.”
While Jack referred to the vice president as “Mr. Nixon,” his opponent called Jack “Senator Kennedy.” The two candidates stood close together on many of the major issues of the day. They spent most of the hour debating nuances. Jack talked not about changing the direction of America but simply getting the country moving on or moving ahead, tacitly admitting that he agreed with the basic thrust of the past eight years. “This is a great country, but I think it could be a greater country,” he said, “and this is a powerful country, but I think it could be a more powerful country.”
Television and radio stations across America carried the debate, and the largest political audience in history, seventy million Americans, heard the two
men discuss serious, even esoteric issues in a responsible, reflective way. When the hour was over, both sides could reasonably declare a victory. But the fact that Jack still stood in the ring after debating Nixon had elevated the Democratic contender to a new position, proving that he was a challenger who deserved to be in the same heavyweight class as the vice president.
A poll taken the next day showed that television viewers by a slight majority felt that Jack was the winner, while radio listeners overwhelmingly declared Nixon the victor. This was not because Jack was a synthetic creature of a new media age. He had matched Nixon idea for idea and complexity for complexity.