Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House Read Online Free PDF Page B

containment.” Nixon’s underhanded political tactics had also aligned him with Joseph McCarthy, who had been discredited by 1960. Liberals understandably despised Nixon. But his tactics had undermined him with voters more generally by making him appear sinister, untrustworthy, and not deserving of election to the presidency.
    Nonetheless, Nixon also had his share of devoted supporters, who saw him as a leader who could effectively combat ruthless communists. Eight years as vice president under the still popular Dwight Eisenhower gave him impressive credentials as a seasoned foreign policy leader who had famously stood up to Soviet first secretary Nikita Khrushchev in what came to be known as the 1959 Moscow “kitchen debate.” But his identification with the Eisenhower administration also carried liabilities: a so-called missile gap that Kennedy made much of during the campaign. In 1957, Moscow’s launching of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, suggested that the Soviets had eclipsed the United States in capacity to deliver intercontinental ballistic missiles and had put the United States behind in the nuclear arms race. In addition, a series of economic downturns, including the continuing effects of a 1958 recession, gave Kennedy an advantage in emphasizing that he and the Democrats, who enjoyed higher standing as economic managers, would be better able to restore national prosperity.
    The importance of negative images and impressions in defeating Nixon was most apparent in the results of a nationally televised debate, unprecedented in a presidential election, with Kennedy in September 1960. The debate attracted the largest audience ever to have watched two candidates battle each other. As a practiced debater confident of his ability to best any opponent, Nixon was receptive to the prospect of squaring off against his younger, less experienced opponent. Likewise, Kennedy was enthusiastic about the chance to demonstrate that he was as competent as Nixon in discussing the challenges facing the United States. Besides, Kennedy and his aides were confident that his more attractive personal attributes would create an appeals gap with the dour, humorless Nixon.
    In their respective opening and closing statements, Kennedy ignored Nixon and spoke directly to the large viewing audience. Nixon, by contrast, tried to score points against Kennedy, reinforcing impressions of himself as a street fighter trying to win an election rather than demonstrate his qualities as a statesman. Moreover, Nixon, who had spent two weeks in a hospital for treatment of a knee infection suffered in an accident, was thin and pale and appeared scrawny and listless—almost cadaver-like. “My God,” Chicago mayor Richard Daley said, “they’ve embalmed him before he even died.” By contrast, Kennedy, the one with far greater physical problems than the vice president, came across as the picture of robust good health. The minority of the audience who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the great majority who watched it on television gave Kennedy the nod.
    John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal Harvard economist and campaign adviser, thought Kennedy was “simply superb.” When he asked “the proprietor” of “a Negro shoe shine parlor” in San Diego, where he was at a conference on unemployment and Social Security, how he liked Kennedy’s performance, the man replied: “So help me God, ah’m digging up two from the graveyard for that boy.”
    Kennedy won the election, but it was a close victory: a 118,574 popular vote margin, yielding 49.72 percent of the 68,837,000 total cast; it translated into an electoral count of 303 to 219. When Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 A.M. on election night, however, the contest still hung in the balance, with six states—California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Pennsylvania—too close to call. It wasn’t until the next morning at a little after nine that he