The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [294]
Jack was still a person in creation, constantly tinkering with his public persona. He watched his appearance on television as if he were looking at another person. “‘Party,’ not ‘pawty,’” he said one evening, watching his image on the black-and-white screen, like a speech teacher admonishing his pupil.
The following three debates for the most part only solidified the verdict of the first. Just before the second debate, J. Leonard Reinsch, Jack’s media adviser, realized that Nixon’s people had turned the thermostat down to a chilling sixty-five degrees at the NBC studios in Washington, D.C., hoping that a cool room would stem Nixon’s embarrassing propensity to perspire. Reinsch hurried through the studio until he found a janitor who, after ample browbeating, turned the hidden thermostat up as high as it could go.
Jack had a subtle, sophisticated understanding of America’s role in the world, but he was elected by people who largely did not have his knowledge or insight and did not necessarily share his views. There had always been a gap between his truths and the realities and limitations of practical politics. In the Senate when he was speaking on Algeria or Vietnam or working on a labor bill that would be fair to both unions and management, he had attempted to bridge that gap. He knew that what he considered political courage was largely the act of making that leap knowing that one might fall into the chasm of defeat. It was a leap that he was not willing to attempt during the campaign; he preferred standing rooted in the firm and narrow grounds of seemingly practical politics.
In the third debate Jack said that the profoundly anti-Communist Nixon had “never really protested the Communists seizing Cuba, ninety miles off the coast of the United States.” He continued that same assault in the fourth and final debate, blaming the Eisenhower-Nixon administration for losing Cuba to communism.
“In 1957 I was in Havana,” Jack said from the ABC studios in New York while his opponent debated him from the network studio in Los Angeles. “I talked to the American ambassador there. He said that he was the second most powerful man in Cuba.” That was a devastating admission of the true nature of the American role in Cuba. The seeds of Cuban communism had grown during the Eisenhower years in a soil of corruption abetted in part by American businesspeople, the American government, and American mobsters. As Jack had stated previously, the corrupt “dictatorship had killed over twenty thousand Cubans in seven years.” That was in large measure why so many Cubans cried out fervently against the hated Yanqui, not because they were the mindless dupes of communism.
Jack criticized Nixon in the debates for traveling to Cuba in 1955 and “prais[ing] the competence and stability of the Batista dictatorship.” Jack, for his part, had treated the Caribbean island as a glorious playground. He had stood beside the dictator kissing babies and frolicked in the mendacious capital with seemingly nary a thought of the American role. And now, instead of trying to explain that government policies would have to change or American foreign policy would become a recruiter for the Communist movement, he played to the most narrowly chauvinistic instincts of the American public. “I have seen Cuba go to the Communists,” he said. “I have seen Communist influence and Castro influence rise in Latin America.”
This was bad enough for him to say without a hint of context, but the day before Jack had told one of his new aides, Richard Goodwin, to