Report of the County Chairman by James A. Michener
At one-thirty that Sunday afternoon, 25,000 people were jammed into the plaza to hear Senator Kennedy, but he was late. Senator Clark and I were offered to the crowd without conspicuous success. The sound system didn’t work, and we raised the devil. During the campaign I must have used upwards of a hundred and fifty sound systems, and fully half of them didn’t work. I often used to wonder, as urgent men in dark suits ran back and forth fixing wires, how we were doing in the space race if we couldn’t get a simple sound system to work. Now the typical worried man in a black suit hurried up to assure us that by the time the senator appeared, the system would be working, but Sam Thompson followed with the discouraging news that “this system is owned by a Republican, and he’s given orders to sabotage it.”
At two-thirty the crowd was at least 30,000, twice what Nixon had been able to draw in the same spot. Senator Kennedy was now an hour overdue and we began to wonder if we could hold the crowd. Senator Clark and I were again offered to the audience with even less success than before, partly because the sound system still didn’t work.
At three-thirty the crowd was 35,000 and most of them had been standing for at least two hours. Senator Kennedy was still late, and other speakers were proposed, but the sound system didn’t work, so we asked the exhausted bands if they would march again. I don’t know what Johnny Welsh paid those musicians, but no instrumentalists ever earned their money more arduously than these. One band with three beautiful drum majorettes must have marched ten miles, and always to the same amount of applause.
At this point Sam Thompson and I counted the crowd. We walked slowly along the front line and counted every person individually. I forget what our figure was, but it must have been about 400. We then walked back through the crowd and counted individually the rows that pushed in behind those in front, and they numbered about 70. In the central plaza there were therefore 28,000 people. On the roads leading into the shopping center there were many others, and on the distant highway, for at least two miles, every spot along the shoulders was jammed. When I say that in Republican Bucks County at least 35,000 came out to see the Democratic candidate I am cautious in my estimate.
At quarter of four that afternoon a helicopter flew over announcing like a voice from heaven, “Senator Kennedy is coming!” Excitement grew and I thought to test the public address system. It still wasn’t working but the men assured me that soon it would be. Then, from a distance down the main highway, moved three huge buses carrying the press corps. They were about a mile away and struggling through massed crowds, but they were by far the most impressive aspect of the afternoon, three huge beetles crawling through a maze of ants.
Once we caught sight of the distant touring car in the back of which stood a man waving to enormous crowds. Overhead the helicopter assured us in its ghostly voice, “Senator Kennedy is now leaving the highway. He will soon be with us.”
On the plaza the crowd surged forward, but the police kept firm control and Sam Thompson assured me, “Wonderful! They have twenty more motorcycles than they needed for Nixon.”
The three big buses turned off the highway and moved purposefully toward the plaza. A way mysteriously opened up and a touring car burst into view. There was the candidate, surrounded by a fantastic mob of squealing, screaming, pushing admirers. He waved mechanically, smiled mechanically, waved again. When policemen tried to control the mob, he warned, “Don’t push them.” On his own initiative he got out of the car, left the protection of the police, and shook hands with members of the crowd.
A path was made for him to the speakers’ stand and he climbed the steps. He recognized no one. Men who had served in the Senate with him he was unable to see. A kind of dumb glaze was over his eyes, his face and possibly his brain. Then he looked at the crowd and quickly whipped off his overcoat, standing forth as a handsome, dedicated man. The crowd screamed. He took the microphone and asked impatiently, without seeing me, “Does this work?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“They never do,” he said and put back into his pocket an important typed statement he had planned to make.
“Does this work?” he asked the crowd.
“We can hear,” somebody shouted.
He spoke about six sentences, during which I dropped down among the press. Nobody was listening, for nobody could hear. I met Maggie Higgins, tired and worn like Kennedy. “Will Kennedy carry Bucks County?” she asked.
“We’re going to cut the margin way down, Maggie,” I assured her.
“That’s not news,” she snapped, and soon all the reporters were piling back into the press buses.
With his speech, such as it had to be, delivered, the senator suddenly came to life. Now he recognized Senator Clark and stopped to chat with the senator’s pretty daughter, who was attending Bryn Mawr. He recognized other politicians and shook their hands, but soon the police had formed about him and he was hustled back to his touring car. The cavalcade re-formed and the three huge buses began inching once more through the crowd. Overhead the helicopter announced to the jammed highway, “Senator Kennedy is about to appear.” For his next engagement he would be three hours late.
Sam Thompson, watching him go, said, “He’ll make a great President. At least he was smart enough not to come to Bucks County on the first day of hunting.”
The mind is tantalized by several speculations. In Senator Kennedy’s tortuous procession from the center of Philadelphia to Levittown and back he was seen by not less than half a million people. He carried Pennsylvania by only 116,326 votes, and if he had not carried the state, he could have been in trouble. Some overt thing, some specific event in this intense campaign meant the difference between defeat and victory. Could it be that Sam Thompson had been right, and that if Jack Kennedy had made his last great pitch for Pennsylvania’s votes on the first day of hunting season only half as many people, or less, would have seen him? Don’t forget that both candidates together failed to make an impression during the World Series, and both were edged off the front pages by Nikita Khrushchev’s taking off his shoe in the United Nations. Some trivial event possibly made the ultimate difference when the vote was close as it was, and I am at least willing to consider the fact that it might have been Jack Kennedy’s sense of timing in coming to Philadelphia and Bucks County. Or, you could say, “Sam Thompson did it.”
It should be obvious from what I have so far said that in the natural course of the campaign I developed no antagonism whatever for the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. In fact, my wife kept heckling me on the long rides home with the persistent question: “Why do you continue to speak well of the enemy?” And each time I replied that I wasn’t trying to convince Democrats; I was arguing with Republicans. “Besides,” I snapped one night, “I happen to think that Richard Nixon is a pretty good candidate, and if he wins on November 8 I’m not going to cut my throat. The nation will be in fairly good hands.”
This bland attitude terminated on the night of October 13, when during the third debate one of the interrogators, Mr. Charles Von Fremd of C.B.S., asked what seemed to me a perfunctory question: “The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Senator Thruston Morton, declared earlier this week that you owed Vice President Nixon and the Republican party a public apology for some rather strong charges made by former President Harry Truman, who bluntly suggested where the Vice President and the Republican party could go. Do you feel that you owe the Vice President an apology?”
Mr. Kennedy’s answer was by no stretch of standards brilliant, but it was noteworthy for providing the only flash of humor during the campaign, and even it had modest candlepower. He said: “Well, I must say that Mr. Truman has his method of expressing things. He’s been in politics for fifty years. He’s been President of the United States. They are not in my style. But I really don’t think there’s anything I could say to Mr. Truman that’s going to cause him, at the age of seventy-six, to change his particular speaking manner. Perhaps Mrs. Truman can but I don’t think I can
The cameras then turned routinely to Vice President Nixon for what I expected to be a routine additional comment. To my astonishment I heard the Republican candidate for the Presidency actually state: “We all have tempers. I have one. I’m sure Senator Kennedy has one. But when a man’s President of the United States he has an obligation not to lose his temper in public.
“One thing I’ve noted as I’ve traveled about the country are the tremendous number of children who come out to see the Presidential candidates. I see mothers holding their babies up so they can see a man who might be President of the United States. It makes you realize that whoever is President is going to be a man that all the children of America will either look up to or will look down to.
“And I can only say that I’m very proud that President Eisenhower has restored dignity and decency and, frankly, good language to the conduct of the President of the United States.
“And I can only hope that, should I win this election, that I could approach President Eisenhower in maintaining the dignity of the office, in seeing to it that whenever any mother or father talks to his child, he can look at the man in the White House and, whatever he may think of his policies, he will say, ‘There’s a man who maintains the kind of standards personally that I would want my child to follow.’ ”
When this little sermon ended I jumped from my chair and was mad for the second time in the campaign, the first having been when my party was accused of being pro-communist. It seemed to me then, as it does now, incredible that a grown man running for the Presidency in the crucial year of 1960 should seriously put forth as one of his major qualifications the fact that he wanted to be an image toward which children could look with reverence while their mothers beamed. Suddenly the whole shabby performance of the last eight years hit me in the face: the postures in place of the performance; the father image in place of a political leader; the bland reassurances instead of the hard dichotomies; the proliferating clichés in place of the truth. From that moment on I was totally dedicated to the defeat of Richard Nixon as well as to the election of John Kennedy.
I did not dislike Nixon the man, nor did I ever inveigh against him. I even felt that the worst charges brought against him by the Democrats—his campaigning against Jerry Voorhees and Helen Gahagan Douglas—were in a sense irrelevant in that the essence of his charges lay within the bounds of conventional political procedure. But for a serious candidate to keep on offering such patent nonsense to the American people as the claim that President Eisenhower never swore in the White House, whereas it was widely known that both he and Nixon had normal, strong vocabularies, which Nixon exercised with sharp profanity after the third debate had ended, that was too much. It exemplified, I thought, the transparent weakness of Mr. Nixon insofar as intellectual capacity was concerned. For him to say what he did was ridiculous, but for him to think of offering it as a reason for voting Republican was horrifying.
I was so agitated by this extraordinary performance that I said, before he finished his sentimental oration, “Five million people right now are going to say, ‘That nonsense reminds me of Checkers.’ ” In the days that followed I met dozens of people who had been on the fence who said, “I was for Nixon up to the time he gave that little sermon on profanity. When he was speaking his sanctimonious little essay, all I could think of was Checkers. And that did it.”
But whenever my intellect is outraged by something I go in to see Miss Omwake and Mrs. Dale, and this time as usual they set me straight.
MRS. DALE: I thought what Mr. Nixon said about swearing was very fine. After all, James, we don’t want another man like Mr. Truman defiling our White House.
MISS OMWAKE: I feel reassured after hearing the debate that if Mr. Nixon is elected he’ll set a very fine standard for our young people.
MRS. DALE: He’s a fine figure of a man and he will make a very imposing President. After all, passing the laws is somebody else’s job. What we need is a man who will lend dignity to the White House.
MISS OMWAKE: Frankly, James, I thought your candidate came very close to defending the awful language of Mr. Truman, and I didn’t think it was becoming. Not at all.
ME: Didn’t you laugh at the little joke he made. About not being able to do anything with Mr. Truman but maybe Mrs. Truman could?
MISS OMWAKE: I don’t think Presidents should joke. After all, one of the reasons why President Eisenhower has been so successful is that he always takes things seriously. I feel sure Mr. Nixon would take things the same way.
ME: Don’t you ever feel maybe a President ought to be forceful, too?
MISS OMWAKE: That’s for Mr. Dulles and for J. Edgar Hoover to take care of. In a President what you want is stability of character, and frankly I don’t think Mr. Kennedy has that. His attitude toward swearing shows that.
ME: You think then that Mr. Nixon will make the better President.
MISS OMWAKE: He’ll be just like Mr. Eisenhower.
ME: If President Eisenhower could run again, would you vote for him?
MRS. DALE: Everybody on this street would, James. We’re all just sick he can’t run again. He seems to be the only man of the bunch who has any ideas about the real role of the President.
ME: You feel he would be reëlected if he did run?
MRS. DALE: By a bigger majority than before. He’s the kind of President we want.
ME: And you feel that Mr. Nixon’s statement about swearing makes him a lot more like Mr. Eisenhower?
MISS OMWAKE: Oh, yes.
ME: What did you think about his statement on Cuba?
MRS. DALE: Things like that are for men like Mr. Dulles to worry about. The President should occupy himself with other things
ME: Do you agree with Mrs. Dale that if Mr. Eisenhower ran again he’d be reëlected?
MISS OMWAKE: What a silly question!
ME: Do you think Nixon will win?
MRS. DALE: After his promise not to swear in the White House, I’m sure he’ll win. Women will appreciate that kind of gentleman.
In the campaigning that our group did, everyone followed our one inviolable rule: no one was allowed even by implication to cast any aspersion on Dwight Eisenhower, because we knew that the American electorate hungered for him as in the past. Since Senator Kennedy had apparently set for himself the same rule, we witnessed the strange spectacle of an election in which the Democrats damned almost all aspects of the last eight years, in which they paraded the dreadful inefficiencies of an incumbency, in which they pinpointed the errors, the oversights, the lack of resolution and the downright frumpiness of an administration without ever identifying the man who was largely to blame. I think that historians will have a great deal to say about this phenomenon.
I cannot speak for the others, but for myself I followed this course because I knew that if I did otherwise I would alienate a good eighty percent of my listeners and I would lose votes instead of gain them. I could persuade people that our posture overseas was in perilous condition—and I did so persuade them, for many Republicans told me so—but no oratory that I or Cicero possessed could have convinced my listeners that General Eisenhower ought to bear any of the blame for this deterioration.
It is already obvious that the historians of which I just spoke will deal harshly with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s incumbency, for both the concept of the Presidency and the stature of the nation were depreciated in his hands; yet when the last word is written there will remain that incontrovertible spectacle of an engaging man whom the people loved, and whom they were willing to forgive for anything. Even when groups of hard-shell Democrats who knew the facts gathered in the secrecy of their homes, no one dared discuss the overriding fact of the election: if President Eisenhower wanted to, and if he were willing to do the necessary hard work, he could still stampede the voters to Nixon. This was the sword of Damocles that hung over our heads throughout the campaign.
In mid-October I f
When he finally did speak, he was enormously impressive and I grew apprehensive that perhaps it was not too late after all and that he might still stampede the voters. I wondered how Kennedy would combat the Presidential attack and watched with admiration when the senator ignored everything Mr. Eisenhower had said and directed attention to the ridiculous figure of the little boy Richard Nixon calling in panic for help from his father. To a large extent, the potential force of the Eisenhower thrust was thus neatly diverted. When the strongest gun of the Republican campaign was finally allowed to fire, the shot that should have reverberated around the nation was turned into an anticlimactic pop. What should have been a master stroke was interpreted by the public as panic. And where there should have been the overwhelming force of Presidential dignity there was a gnawing suspicion of insincerity.
Before our Bucks County audiences we praised the Eisenhower speech but lamented the fact that he had been dragged unwillingly into the fight because of Nixon’s last-minute panic over what looked like certain Republican defeat. When Republicans asked, “But didn’t you think Ike made a good speech?” I answered, “It was a great speech, but it should have come three weeks earlier when it could have done some good, not as a last-minute improvisation.” Many agreed.
In these last vital weeks I got little sleep, for although I was generally optimistic about our chances, the gnawing fears that characterize the last days of any campaign were beginning to eat at me. On Sunday evening, following the senator’s tumultuous appearance in Levittown, I conducted three large parties in the area and at each I said, “If the election were to be held next Tuesday, November first, instead of on the eighth, I’m sure Senator Kennedy would win handsomely. But in the next nine days anything can happen, and I’m scared stiff it will. I was in Korea just before Ike won in 1952 with his dramatic promise of ‘I will go to Korea,’ and I know how phony that whole deal was. I was in North Africa in 1956 when Hungary and the Suez imbroglio helped him win again, and I know how unjust that was. I don’t know what’s going to happen this year, but something will. And there goes the election to Mr. Nixon.”