Candidate in Crisis

(See Cover)

Into the battleship-grey conference room of the drab Bond Hotel in Hartford, Conn, last week walked Presidential Candidate Richard Nixon, Running Mate Henry Cabot Lodge, and such top campaign lieutenants as Labor Secretary James Mitchell, Attorney General William Rogers and Interior Secretary Fred Seaton. The men took their places around a long table, posed for press photographers. Then aides shooed the newsmen out, the doors closed, the smiles faded, and the Republican campaign team got down to the serious business before it: settling on strategy, tactics and schedules for the last, decisive weeks of the campaign.

Nixon lieutenants read off hopeful reports based on a survey of Republican leaders around the country, but a grimness hovered over the meeting. Only three weeks before the showdown, Richard Nixon's campaign was in trouble. His basic campaign theme--maturity and experience to cope with Khrushchev and keep the peace--had failed to stir any surge among the voters. The whiff of recession in the autumn air was weakening the second half of the G.O.P. "peace and prosperity" claim. Most worrisome of all was the mounting evidence of a wide Roman Catholic swing to Democrat Jack Kennedy in the big industrial states. The Kennedy camp, groaned a Nixon aide after the huddle in Hartford, "has cohesed the Catholic vote in a bloc more successfully than we had supposed was possible."

Early Rounds. At the start of the campaign, Nixon men would have dismissed as preposterous a prediction that three weeks before the end Nixon would be slipping behind, with omens of defeat swirling about him. The strange 1960 campaign has gone through three distinct phases. After the confused wrestling at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, with the idealistic Stevensonian liberals outraged by what they considered the Kennedy steamroller tactics, the Republican Convention in Chicago conveyed an impression of unity, earnestness and respectability. Nixon's acceptance speech went over with the TV audience a lot better than Kennedy's, with its ill-advised rewriting of Lincoln, his "malice for all" gibe at Nixon. Kennedy's choice of Texan Lyndon Johnson as his running mate seemed clever power politics at the time, but failed to stir any enthusiasm in the South, or anywhere else. Cabot Lodge, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was Nixon's second choice--when Rockefeller would not take the job--but proved a first-rate one, strengthening the ticket's appeal, reinforcing its claim to superiority in foreign policy experience.

Round 2 was the August rump session of Congress. Kennedy and Johnson were outmaneuvered by Eisenhower's veto threats and outvoted by a coalition of Northern Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. When the session ended, Candidate Kennedy had a look of failure and ineptness upon him.

Positive Thinking. Then, in mid-September, the luck of the campaign changed and dealt Nixon's prospects two jolting blows. First came the flare-up of the religion issue. Mindful that a massive Roman Catholic shift to Kennedy in the big-electoral-vote Northern states could swing the election, Nixon gave orders down through the ranks that the religion issue was not to be mentioned. But a group of 150 Protestant clergymen and laymen, headed by New York's Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking) met in Washington to toss a headline-making anti-Catholic manifesto into the campaign (TIME, Sept. 19). The manifesto led to Kennedy's dramatic confrontation with the Houston ministers, and gave the Kennedy forces a golden opportunity to exploit the religion issue in Catholic (as well as Protestant) sections of the U.S. by running and rerunning the film. From the Peale manifesto on, conservative Catholics, who leaned toward Nixon, began to move into the Kennedy camp--carrying with them many a vote-heavy urban center out of the 1956 Republican column.

The second heavy blow was Nixon's poor showing in the first TV debate with Kennedy. A combination of fatigue, inept makeup, and a me-too approach (abandoned soon afterward), plus the resourcefulness in argument and forcefulness of character that Kennedy showed, made Kennedy the winner on the TV screens (many radio listeners, hearing the voices only, thought that Nixon won).

Republican party chieftains were staggered by the effect of the first debate. Knowing that Nixon had been a champion debater in high school and college, recalling his easy platform conquests in his California campaigns for House and Senate, Nixon men had confidently expected their man to give Kennedy a decisive trouncing. Nixon himself was less cocky. He had debated with Kennedy on a public platform back in 1947, when they were both freshman Congressmen, and recalled him as a tough antagonist. "Everyone expects me to wipe up the floor with this guy," Nixon said before the first debate. "But it's not going to be easy to do."

If Norman Vincent Peale's bomb was Nixon's worst piece of inherited bad luck in the campaign so far, the agreement to debate with Kennedy on TV was his own worst tactical mistake. Though Nixon drew even with Kennedy in the later rounds, the four encounters together helped Kennedy enormously--not so much by weakening Nixon's public image as by strengthening Kennedy's. Before the debates, after 7 1/2 years as Vice President, Nixon was far better known, and though he had many detractors, seemed a man of much greater maturity and experience--though their age difference is only four years (Nixon is 47, Kennedy 43). About Kennedy most voters knew little more than that he was boyish looking, rich, and an efficient operator. If Nixon had never agreed to the debates, Kennedy would not have had the opportunity to prove, before a nationwide audience, that he is Nixon's match in quickness of mind, decisiveness, and resources of combat.

Plenty of Advice. The grim effects of this change of fortune became more apparent to Nixon as he moved into New York City for three days of conferences and huddles in his Waldorf-Astoria suite prior to his TV debate. Not only was Kennedy surging in the big-vote eastern states and winning adulation in the streets, but the Nixon camp itself was showing its first signs of gloom and discouragement. Gone was the confident prediction that Nixon would win or lose in one big sweep--the win to be based, hopefully, on his clear superiority in leadership of the cold war battle. Instead, the Nixon forces were regrouping for a dogged stateby-state battle for votes, prepared to stick to Nixon's experience theme for all it was worth but equally ready (along with the Democrats) to work such local issues as farm support in the Midwest. oil depletion in Texas, aid for depressed areas in states of rising unemployment.

In huddles with such Republican leaders as New York's Governor Rockefeller. Tom Dewey, Herbert Hoover and Publisher Roy Howard, Nixon aired his problems. One sign of Republican worry was the barrage of advice, some of it flatly contradictory, that poured in on him. Among other things, advice givers urged him to:

P: Hit harder, in direct, personal attacks on Kennedy.

P: Halt direct, personal attacks on Kennedy and stick to a high-toned foreign-policy-is-the-issue approach.

P: Take a firm G.O.P. line and stop trying to sound both liberal and conservative.

P: Bring Ike more directly into the campaign, perhaps by staging joint Ike-Dick parades in New York and Chicago.

P: Break away from Ike--to create an independent image of strength instead of hanging onto Ike's coattails.

Plunge into Bathos. Nixon is something of a fatalist and no stranger to tight spots. No spot could be tighter than the tense moment in the 1952 campaign when he was caught in the uproar over a Nixon trust fund and found not only Democrats but Dwight Eisenhower's lieutenants ready to throw him off the ticket. Completely on his own, he delivered his well-remembered nationwide TV speech in which he laid bare his personal finances and mentioned, in a plunge into bathos, that the only gift he ever had accepted was the little dog Checkers. The Checkers speech became a monument to political torn, but the oft-forgotten fact was that it brought Dick Nixon such a landslide of popular support that Ike promptly welcomed him back to the team as "my boy."

For all the well-known high points of his campaign biography--son of a hard-pressed Quaker family in Whittier. Calif, who worked as a youngster in his father's grocery store--Dick Nixon as a young man never seemed minted for the kind of pulling, hauling and mauling that have marked his political career. After graduating from Quaker-run Whittier College in Depression-haunted 1934, Nixon studied law at North Carolina's Duke University for three poverty-pinched years. Though he got elected president of the Duke Bar Association in his last year, none of his fellow students expected him to go into politics. Recalls Basil Lee Whitener, a member of Nixon's graduating class (1937) and now a Democratic Congressman from North Carolina: "He was no smiler then, quite the contrary. Like most others, I figured he would wind up doing a wonderful job in a big law firm, handling securities or other matters that need the attention of a scholar, not a politician."

Nixon's fondest hope after graduation (third in his class) was to land a place in New York's famed Sullivan & Cromwell, where John Foster Dulles, later Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower, was the top active partner, but Sullivan & Cromwell was not taking on any fledgling lawyers from unprestigious law schools that year. Nixon headed back to California, joined a law firm in his home town of Whittier. The woman who was the firm's secretary back then recalls that Nixon often stayed at his desk right through lunch hours: "He was always sending me out for pineapple malts and hamburgers. He just about lived on them." Then, as the campaign biographies have never failed to relate, while trying out for a part in an amateur play, Lawyer Nixon met Nevada-born Thelma Catherine ("Pat") Ryan, teacher of shorthand and typing at a Whittier high school. On their first date, to her astonishment, he told her that he was going to marry her. And two years later, he did.

South Pacific Poker. For a while, in 1942, Nixon worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington, a period that helped shape his wariness toward Big Government. "I came out of college more liberal than I am today," he said not long ago, "more liberal in the sense that I thought it was possible for government to do more than I later found it was practical to do."

Nixon wrestled down his Quaker scruples about military service, spent a year and a half in the Pacific as an officer in the Navy's Air Transport Command, constructing airstrips on jungle islands. Overcoming another Quaker scruple, he learned poker. He played a careful game, kept one of the stoniest poker faces in the South Pacific, and "seemed always to end up a game somewhere between $30 and $60 ahead." a wartime friend recalls.

Dogged Pursuit. Well-known is the story of his being invited by Whittier friends, shortly after V-J day, to run for Congress against New Deal Democrat Jerry Voorhis. His big victory over Voorhis (won partly because he induced Voorhis to engage in a series of public debates and thus elevate Nixon to prominence) landed him in Congress with another freshman, one John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts. Kennedy loped along in anonymity; Congressman Nixon hit the nation's front pages during his very first term. As a member of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, he was present when ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers testified that Alger Hiss, sometime high State Department official, had been a Communist spy during the 1930s. Hiss's denials convinced the other committee members--but his legalistic evasions caught the alert ear of law-trained Richard Nixon. Nixon doggedly pursued the investigation as virtually a one-man committee. Many an ardent Nixon admirer firmly believes that the Democratic liberals' real hatred of Nixon stems not from his insinuating style of debate but from the fact that the Hiss case shattered so many of their postwar illusions about the Communist "wave of the future."

Sprung to fame as the nemesis of Alger Hiss, Nixon ran for the Senate in 1950 against liberal-wing Democratic Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas (wife of Cinemactor Melvyn Douglas), defeated her in what he called a "rocking, socking campaign." It featured Nixon's documented allegation that her voting record resembled that of New York's Commu nist-lining Congressman Vito Marcantonio--a charge originally hurled at Candidate Douglas not by Nixon but by an opponent in the Democratic primary.

Conservative Radical. Tied to Richard Nixon in the 1950 battle was an epithet that he has not quite managed to shake loose: "Tricky Dick." The Nixon that his friends know is not the stab-fingered persecutor with the five o'clock shadow that the cartoonists draw. To counter this impression, Nixon, who is essentially a reserved and private man, has made a "Dick and Pat" campaign that is quite unlike his unextroverted personal life. The Tricky Dick legend obscures Nixon's private scrupulousness, which leads him to turn over to charitable organizations every cent of the thousands of dollars he has earned for paid speaking engagements during his years as Vice President. The Tricky Dick haze has also obscured Nixon's public philosophy. A persistent liberal accusation against him is that he is "innocent of doctrine," that he has "no ideas, only methods." But over the years Nixon has built up a consistent record on public issues.

During his first term in Congress, Nixon showed himself to be, in the positions he took, a sort of pre-Eisenhower Eisenhower Republican: conservative on the central domestic question of the role of Government in national life, liberal on civil rights, internationalist in foreign relations. As a Congressman, he took several stands that the Eisenhower Administration later adopted and translated into law: civil rights legislation, statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, relinquishment of federal claims to control of the tidelands. As a freshman Congressman, Nixon supported Harry Truman's program of aid to Communist-menaced Greece and Turkey, and he has remained a steadfast backer of foreign aid.

On domestic questions, Nixon held as a Congressman basically the same Republican view he holds today: that the role of the Federal Government "should be a supporting role, supplementing and stimulating rather than supplanting private enterprise." Nixon sometimes speaks of himself as a "radical" in the goals he wants the U.S. to reach in standards of living, in health, in education, in opportunity for the young and security for the old. Where he parts company with the Democratic Party is in insisting that achievement of these goals is not the primary task of the Federal Government.

"Hunk of Iron." It was largely Nixon's unmistakable Republicanness that led Republican chieftains at the Chicago convention in 1952 to pick him from Dwight Eisenhower's short list of acceptable vice-presidential prospects. The new President was reared in the military gospel that a second in command should always be trained to take over in case of accident, accordingly decided at the start that his Vice President would sit in the councils of the Administration, learn its secrets, share in its decisions, and so be prepared to take over if the President died in office. Ike laid down a rule that when he was absent Nixon would preside at meetings of both the Cabinet and the National Security Council. Over the years, Nixon has made nine official trips abroad, covering a total of 159,232 miles, as Ike's representative. The late Secretary Dulles once said that "Dick is the best person we have, outside of the President himself, for overseas good-will missions."

Vice President Nixon has never had any authority to make policy decisions: the Constitution vests the entire executive power in the President. But Nixon nevertheless helped to shape policies by influence and argument, and many times Ike has had to call on Nixon to get Republican support for Administration bills in Congress. The Administration's devotion to foreign aid over the years is partly traceable to Nixon's influence. In October 1957, Nixon was the first member of the Administration to say publicly that the Soviet Sputnik, which the admiral in charge of U.S. Navy satellite research had dismissed as a "hunk of iron," represented a serious challenge to the U.S.

As the highest man in the White House councils with practical political savvy, he found himself in occasional disagreement with Administration policy, and his situation was touchy. Sometimes he openly battled for his viewpoint in the councils of the Administration. During the 1957-58 recession, for example, he recruited Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell and Interior Secretary Fred Seaton in his losing struggle to persuade Ike that, with the 1958 congressional elections looming, the Administration should take more dras tic antirecession measures, even at the cost of further unbalancing the budget. On some issues, notably his disagreement with Agriculture Secretary Benson's farm policies and his concern over budgetary decisions and defense expenditures, Nixon decided to let the public in on his dissatisfaction by leaks to newsmen, which have sometimes reverberated.

The Kitchen Debate. Nixon did not always have an easy welcome at the White House. During the Administration's early years, Ike's peppery chief of staff, Sherman Adams, kept him at arm's length. But Nixon's standing soared during the months following the President's heart attack on Sept. 24, 1955. Confronted with a trying situation, in which even the appearance of undue self-assertion might have seemed a grabbing for power, Nixon conducted himself with poise and modesty, presided at Cabinet meetings from his customary chair instead of from the President's. When he had to confer with Cabinet officers, he went to their offices instead of asking them to his.

Nonetheless, in 1956 Sherman Adams told Nixon that it might be better if he took a Cabinet post rather than stand again for the vice-presidency. Later on, Ike himself suggested that it might help Nixon's political career to serve in a Cabinet post. Nixon seriously considered quitting Government, but abandoned the idea and told Ike that he preferred to run for Vice President again. Adams was toppled into ignominy in 1958 by the Goldfine affair, and Nixon found firm White House support from Adams' successor, Wilton B. ("Jerry") Persons, a genial Alabamian, and from ever influential Jim Hagerty.

Ike himself was much impressed by Nixon's conduct during the heart-attack crisis, his courage in the face of Communist-led mobs in Lima and Caracas in 1958, and his steadiness in the famed "kitchen debate" with Khrushchev in Moscow last year. Early this year, Ike made it clear that he wanted Richard Nixon to succeed him in the presidency.

Cold Rejection. Ike's endorsement was all Nixon needed to assure him the Republican nomination: GOPoliticians had made up their minds for Nixon long before. He won their unshakable loyalty by campaigning hard for G.O.P. congressional and gubernatorial candidates in the off-year elections of 1954 and 1958. Over the years, Republican professionals had come to look upon Richard Nixon, rather than Dwight Eisenhower, as the leader of the Republican Party--and much of the talk of a "new Nixon" evolved from the fact that Nixon grew in stature as he came to accept this responsibility. When Nelson Rockefeller, with his impressive against-the-tide victory in New York State in 1958 and his magic way with crowds, set out with hopes of winning the G.O.P. presidential nomination, he met with cold and swift rejection by Republican politicos--not because they doubted his vote-getting abilities, but because they were loyal to Nixon and respected him.

Once he got the nomination at Chicago, Nixon faced a tough problem in political arithmetic: in the U.S. in 1960, Democrats outnumber Republicans by many millions. Despite Ike's vast personal popularity, a Democratic tide has brought about 2-to-1 Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, a Democratic edge of 33 to 17 in governorships. Public-opinion polls and voter-registration tallies indicate a basic Democratic majority of roughly 7 to 5. "To win," said Richard Nixon at the start of his campaign, "we have to get most of the Republicans, more than half of the independents, and 20% or more of the Democrats." Nixon was confident that he could do that. He based his hopes on the fundamental assumption that, with uneasiness about the Communist menace and the threat of nuclear war widespread across the land, he could win over enough of the swing voters--the independents and wavering Democrats--by convincing them that he was better equipped, in maturity and experience, to deal with the dangerous times ahead. The need to whip up Republican enthusiasm while appearing to be above party sometimes gets him into embarrassing contradictions--as in two conflicting statements in Arizona last week, when he pledged his backing of all Republican candidates everywhere and an hour later urged voters to eschew party labels.

The Activist. All the whirl of campaigning--the speechmaking. the debaters' points on TV, the mimeographing of position papers--comes down to one question for the independent-minded U.S. voter when he goes to the polls Nov. 8: How will the candidate look in the White House? One of Kennedy's disadvantages (or advantages) is that the voter, trying to judge future performance, knows only about Kennedy what he has seen on television and what he has read about the coolly, capably run political campaign. The Nixon vision is summoned up far more easily. Already, Nixon has made it clear that he will rely on a high-level kind of staff: Vice President Lodge as coordinator of peacetime cold war, presumably Nelson Rockefeller as an occasional foreign policy adviser, a new council for economic affairs equal in stature to the National Security Council, and the active cooperation of Ike himself.

But Nixon's staff knows another side of him. Although he gathers the advice of the best people he can find, Nixon makes up his own mind and far faster than Eisenhower. Frequently he takes a completely different tack from what his advisers suggest (he has been known to change the day's campaign plans and schedules in mid-air because his ear tells him that it is time to vary the routine). Nixon acts coolly in crisis, has a good feeling for the workings of vast government and knows how to short-circuit bureaucracy. He understands Congress, though he does not have a warm relationship with congressional leaders of either party. He has a strong sense of public mood, which might lead him to postpone some decisions until there is a sufficient public outcry to back him up (a favorite device of both Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower). He has, as yet, shown no strong sense of mission like Kennedy's that might energize his administration into a flurry of activity in the "first go days." But Nixon is by nature an activist.

Streak of Fatalism. As he headed into the final phase of the campaign last week, Nixon had apparently not yet succeeded in persuading a majority of U.S. voters that he, and not Jack Kennedy, should cope with the problems, the perils, and the opportunities of the 19603. Nixon is convinced that the decisive lap of the campaign still lies ahead. He argues that only in the final fortnight of a presidential campaign do the undecided voters-still numerous enough to swing the election either way--make up their minds, largely on the basis of a "last impression" of the candidates. This week, in pursuit of those still-undecided voters, Nixon will take to the rails for the first time in the campaign, make a six-day whistle-stop tour through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois aboard the "Dick Nixon 1960 Campaign Victory Train." Evidently taking the advice of those who said he had to be rougher and tougher to win, he was already talking tougher then in his final debate--calling Kennedy's ideas "sophomoric," constituting "a pattern of conduct that should convince many Americans that they could not rest well with a man with such a total lack of judgment as Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces." Next week, he will hit stops in New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, Washington and his native California, saving the last two days of the campaign for emergency expeditions to wherever the campaign needs him most.

During the final, climactic fortnight of the campaign, Richard M. Nixon, aware that if he loses this time he will probably never get another chance to run for President, can gather some serenity from his streak of fatalism. "Political positions have always come to me," he once said, "because I was there and it was the right time and the right place." On the night of Nov. 8, he will be able to tell whether November 1960 was the right time.

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