Nixon's Secret (21 page)

Nixon’s only hesitation, he told an aide, was that “he might clobber that kid Kennedy too tough on the first debate, and thus womp up a ‘sympathy factor’ for the guy . . .”

“I can take this man,” he told aides after watching Kennedy’s convention speech on television.
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He was wrong.

Nixon got to Chicago late, looking tired, haggard, and underweight from recent hospitalization and famously refused make-up. While JFK wore a smart navy blue suit, Nixon would make the error of wearing a light gray suit, which blended in to the backdrop.
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Still ill from his hospital stay, one observer said, “His face was as gray as his suit.” Nixon’s shirt collar hung on him, at least two sizes too big because of his weight loss in the hospital.

Then Nixon bumped his knee on the car door. He winced in pain. He would later tell Speechwriter Richard Whalen, “I was sick as a dog.”
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During the lighting check, Nixon would hear a CBS producer ask JFK if he wanted makeup. The tanned Kennedy declined only to repair to his dressing room where his private makeup man prepared him for broadcast. Hearing this, Nixon also declined makeup, despite the argument of his television advisor Ted Rogers.

However, when John F. Kennedy arrived in Chicago for the first presidential debate, he spent the afternoon not with briefing books and aides but sunbathing on the roof of his Chicago hotel with two buxom young ladies. Kennedy would have a fifteen-minute session with one of the two prostitutes in his hotel suite to relax him.
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When Kennedy entered the NBC studio for the debate, journalist Theodore H. White wrote, “He looked like a bronzed god.” CBS producer Don Hewitt said, “Kennedy arrived tanned, tall, lean, well-tailored in a dark suit . . . he looked like an Adonis.”
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Rogers convinced Nixon to use a product called Beard Stick for Nixon’s dark jowls. This too would be a mistake, as the makeup would begin to run as Nixon began to sweat under the hot TV lights. JFK remained tanned and confident. Nixon melted.

Having looked pale in his first debate with the bronzed JFK, by 1968 Nixon was using a sun lamp at home before major TV appearances. Nixon called it “home cooking” but was careful to avoid sunburns, using just enough of the lamp’s rays to have a healthy glow.

“Fire the make-up man,” a supporter told Klein. “Everybody in this part of the country thinks Nixon is sick. Three doctors agreed he looked as if he had just suffered a coronary.”
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Nixon’s own mother would call Secretary Rose Mary Woods and ask, “Is Richard ill?”
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“My God,” exclaimed Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, “they’ve embalmed him before he even died.”
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To Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Halberstam the only thing that mattered in the debate was “what they looked like. All the insecurities and doubts and inner tensions of Nixon were disclosed in his sweating face by the brutal relentless cameras,” Halberstam wrote in his account of the clash.
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“Those debates changed the conversation entirely,” noted Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia. “Television is all about image, not substance.”
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Watching the debate on television, Nixon’s running mate Lodge would be heard to mutter, “That son of a bitch just lost us the election.”
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Kennedy had another advantage beyond his tan. Kennedy was getting regular shots from Dr. Max Jacobson, also known as Dr. Feelgood. Jacobson was administering methamphetamine shots to Kennedy obstensively so that he could deal with his back pain.
New York Post
reporter Larry Getlen describes the first Nixon-Kennedy clash in the stunning book
Dr. Feelgood
by Richard A. Lertzman and William J. Birnes.

“The night of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, Kennedy met with Jacobson just a few hours before he took the stage. The senator was ‘complaining in a voice barely above a whisper of extreme fatigue and lethargy.’ Jacobson plunged a needle directly into Kennedy’s throat and pumped methamphetamine into his voice box.”

The result was clear within minutes, and an artificially energized Kennedy changed American history that night by upstaging Nixon.
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When presidential brother Robert Kennedy learned about Jacobson and his injections and the fact that JFK had convinced Jacqueline Kennedy to begin a course of treatments, the attorney general would have the ingredients analyzed by an FBI lab and determined that they were a mix of hormones and methamphetamine. When he confronted the president, JFK would famously say, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss, it makes me feel good.”
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Nixon would recover in the last three of the four debates. Many like to point out that people who listened to the first debate on the radio said Nixon won, while those who had watched on TV gave it to JFK. Although Nixon would bounce back in subsequent debates, some historians correctly point out that the audiences for the second and third debate were dwarfed by the first face-off by the two candidates. What historians failed to tell you is that the fourth debate—the one in which many felt Nixon’s victory over Kennedy was the most complete—had a larger audience than debates two and three and would come close to matching the audience size of the first debate. Nixon’s strong performance would fuel a late surge while Kennedy’s poll numbers were flat. Nixon was closing fast, and now, finally outspending the Democrats on television advertising, Nixon drove himself to nervous exhaustion, stumping across the country to make up ground. Now despite the huge Democratic voter registration edge, Eisenhower’s comment denigrating his input in the administration, his disastrous fifty-state campaign pledge, his lost time in the hospital, and his flop in the first debate, it was Nixon who was closing the gap. Despite all his missteps, Nixon came back to an essential tie with Kennedy.

There is substantial evidence that Kennedy’s expensive Madison Avenue campaign peaked too early. Eisenhower’s late campaigning and tough challenge to Kennedy got national coverage. Nixon, having gained back ten pounds with a regimen of milk shakes did an effective coast-to-coast telethon on the Sunday night before the election.

Ironically, Nixon, who was heavily favored, would lose this race when the staunchly anti-Communist Kennedy would run to Nixon’s right on foreign policy and defense issues. Constrained by his loyalty to the Eisenhower administration, Nixon could not call for the massive increases in defense spending that Kennedy favored, nor could he reveal the Eisenhower-Nixon plans against Communist Cuba when JFK urged a stronger line against the island gulag under the control of Fidel Castro. Nixon, who had always been a hard-liner, found JFK to be more hard-line than he was.

Nixon was particularly furious when he learned that CIA Director Allen Dulles had briefed Kennedy on the agency’s plan for the invasion of Cuba. Kennedy had used the information to outflank Nixon in the debates, charging that the Republican administration was lax in their efforts to topple Castro when Kennedy, based on the CIA briefing, knew better. In his memoir
The
Ends of Power
, Haldeman would say that this betrayal by the agency would only intensify Nixon’s distrust of the CIA.
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Thus, as we shall see, the seeds of Watergate were sown.

Until that time, Nixon was on a winning streak that included winning two elections for the House (in 1948 he was the nominee of both the Republican and Democratic parties, having won both party primaries under California’s strange cross-filing system), triumphed in the Senate election, and won two terms as vice president on a ticket with one of the most popular Americans of all time. Nixon had worked hard in Eisenhower’s second term to tone down his partisanship and erase his image as a political hit man. He was the early favorite over the callow JFK and was thought to be the most effective debater and campaigner in his party. The Eisenhower cabinet, and particularly the CIA, expected Nixon to be elected.

Nixon’s frustration in his narrow loss was in fact magnified by the true trajectory of the race; Nixon was closing fast, and the momentum was with him in the closing days of the race. Ironically, this was not the public or private perception of the press or the Kennedy camp. Kennedy’s pollster Louis Harris predicted a Kennedy margin of nine points, and the national media of its day was openly predicting a significant Kennedy-Johnson win. The mood among Democrats was euphoric to optimistic while Republicans despaired their candidate was behind. In fact, Nixon’s pollster Claude Robinson predicted a close race, and there is evidence that Nixon himself understood the race to be closer than the public perception during some of the darkest days of his grueling come from behind campaign.

From the beginning, Nixon expected a close outcome and planned to outwork his opponent. Unlike the Kennedy effort, whose campaign ran at full speed for as long as it could from the beginning, Nixon planned for his campaign to climax in the final days. Nixon had carefully peaked at exactly the right times in his 1946 House and 1950 Senate races.

In Nixon’s view, a campaign had peaks and valleys, with the last few weeks crucial. Nixon traveled nationwide, fulfilling his fifty-state pledge at great cost, but the campaign also husbanded its resources for one last great push in the final weeks. The Kennedy operation burned money at a furious rate from the beginning of the year, with Ambassador Joe Kennedy sparing no expense to put his son in the White House. The Republicans reserved large purchases of television time to dominate the closing days. While Nixon was well financed, he would be massively outspent, and an analysis of polling now showed his late-spending strategy to be sound. Nixon closed in fast on Kennedy in the final days for a photo finish. With the final momentum going to Nixon, both he and his wife would reach Los Angeles on Election Day believing they would win. I believe he did, and there is overwhelming evidence that voter fraud was used to steal the 1960 election.

Did Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley steal Illinois and thus the 1960 presidential election for John F. Kennedy? Kennedy carried Cook County, which includes Chicago, by 318,736 votes—more than double his national margin of 118,574 votes. Indeed, on his deathbed Daley would cry, “Will God forgive me for stealing Illinois from Richard Nixon?”
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Mayor Daley himself gave away the game on election eve when he said, “With the Democratic organization and the help of a few close friends,” the Democrats would prevail on Election Day. There is sufficient evidence that the “few close friends” mentioned included Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana.

The alliance between organized crime and the John Kennedy campaign for president was not an inevitable one, despite, and to a certain extent because of, the Kennedy patriarch’s criminal past during Prohibition. Joe Kennedy Sr. had extensive mob connections dating back to Prohibition; he was still viewed with distrust by many in Cosa Nostra for his competition in the booze-running business of Prohibition.

Joe Kennedy’s competition was perhaps the least burning concern on the heads of the many crime “families” when Joe Sr. summoned them to a lunch meeting to discuss the campaign on February 29, 1950, at Felix Young’s restaurant in Manhattan. The distinction of “enemy-in-chief” at that time went instead to Kennedy’s third son, the relentless moralist Robert Kennedy. Bobby, as he was known, had earned the hatred of much of the organized crime community through his never-ending crusade against them during the 1950s.

“I took the reservation,” said a hostess at Young’s. “And it was as though every gangster chief in the United States was there. I don’t remember all the names now, but there was John Roselli, Carlos Marcello from New Orleans, the two brothers from Dallas, the top men from Buffalo, California, and Colorado. They were all top people, not soldiers. I was amazed Joe Kennedy would take the risk.”
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The meeting started poorly when Kennedy, after insisting that all present leave their bodyguards at the door, arrived fifteen minutes late. While Joe wanted desperately to talk up Jack’s campaign, the conversation inevitably turned to Bobby’s crusade against the Mob.
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In response to Joe’s request for $500,000 for Jack’s campaign, as well as the Mob’s support through the primaries and into the general, a lieutenant of Chicago Mob boss Sam “Momo” Giancana asked Joe bluntly why they should aide the brother of a man who had publicly referred to Giancana as a “sissy” in front of the press.
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Kennedy’s response was that it was Jack running for president, not Bobby, and that his request was “business, not politics.”
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When Joe Kennedy left the meeting shortly thereafter, it had been deemed an unmitigated disaster. However, Roselli, friend of Jack through Italian-American crooner Frank Sinatra, emphasized to his friends in the Chicago family that Joe Kennedy had come to them with the request and in doing so had shown a certain element of modesty and deference. This pitch appears to have been more successful, and a week later, $500,000 was delivered to Joe Kennedy’s Manhattan office.

The ambassador was forced to go to the Chicago mob through a frequent Palm Beach golfing partner, Chicago hood Johnny Roselli. Kennedy also utilized Frank Sinatra to reach out to Chicago mobsters Sam “Momo” Giancana, Joe Accardo, Murray “the Camel” Humphreys, Jack Avery, and Jake “greasy-thumb” Gruzik. They, in turn, enlisted New Orleans Mob kingpin Carlos Marcello and Florida’s Santo Trafficante.

Kennedy collected sizable contributions from all but Humphreys, a Republican who said Joe Kennedy was “full of shit” and pointed out how Bobby Kennedy had harassed the mob as counsel to the Senate’s McClellan, looking into labor racketeering. Humphreys sent $100,000 to Nixon while the midwestern and southwestern families (with some kicked in from the Bonnanos in New York) gave more than a million to Kennedy as well as pledged their army of enforcers to find votes for Jack Kennedy.