REPUBLICANS: Whistle Stop

Through days that were by turn foggy, snowy, and brilliantly dressed in fall colors, the 16-car Pat and Dick Nixon 1960 Special poked through the countryside of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois, the land that Nixon called “the gut states.”

Aboard the train were Vice President Richard Nixon, his wife, his staff, 100 newsmen and a battery of top-level advisers, including three Eisenhower Cabinet members—Attorney General William Rogers, Interior Secretary Fred Seaton, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Arthur Flemming.

In the penultimate week of his campaign, Dick Nixon had turned to a grueling whistle-stop attack aimed at tightening the Republican sinews of those states. “You try to cut your losses where you’re weak and build up your margin where you’re strong,” explained a leading Ohio Republican.

Blood & Yelps. Jack Kennedy’s strong lead (see box), and his needling criticism of the last eight Republican years, had put Nixon sharply on the defensive. By touring solid Republican country where the crowds were fairly yelling for blood, Nixon was able to let go the full jolt of the “rocking, socking” battle that he had been saving for the campaign windup.

Despite the fact that the majority of the crowds enjoyed Nixon’s blunt attacks, newsmen noted a tenseness in the Vice President, apparently brought on by a combination of fatigue, a cold, and by his awareness of the Kennedy surge. One day he could launch a nearly violent assault on Kennedy; the next day he could be relatively passive. At times, he could touch his listeners with a recital of some poorboy family anecdote (sample: a brother who died without the pony he’d always wanted, because his father had to meet the grocery bills). At other times, some well-tried statement that had produced yelps of approval before (“It’s not Jack’s money, it’s yours”) fell flat. More and more, he focused attention on Cabot Lodge; more and more, he leaned on the magic of the Eisenhower name to show that a Nixon vote is a vote for continuity, experience, and a team.

In York, Pa. and Harrisburg, Huntingdon and Pittsburgh; in Marietta, Ohio and Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus and Toledo; in Jackson, Mich., and Battle Creek; in Danville, Ill., Mattoon and Carbondale—in the more than 40 hamlets and cities in the path of his one-week siege, Nixon struck out at Kennedy with ever sharper accusations of naivete and fear-spreading (“It’s time to hot things up a bit, don’t you think?” he asked one audience). Nearly everywhere churning, cheering crowds smashed to the depots to roar their encouragement as he countered the Kennedy campaign theme (“All of this yakking about America with no sense of purpose, all of this talk about America being second-rate—I’m tired of it and I don’t want to hear any more talk about it”) and pounded home his own (“We both know Mr. Khrushchev,” said Nixon of Running Mate Henry Cabot Lodge and himself. “We have sat across the conference table with him. We have not been fooled by him”).

Guns & Eggs. Nixon saved most of his biggest guns for the biggest crowds. In Pittsburgh, where 5,500 people jammed the Syria Mosque and 1,000 more swarmed outside, and in Cincinnati (18,000 partisans), the Vice President got echoing ovations, clenched his fist and raked Kennedy. The rise in the price of gold on the international markets (see BUSINESS) was a result of the world’s distrust of Kennedy’s avowed economic policies, he said. “He’s been up three times,” cried Nixon to the baseball-conscious Pittsburghers. “He’s struck out three times, and now he wants to be the cleanup hitter!” The campaign, said he, “is beginning to run in a great tide in our direction.”

Nixon had saved a few bold foreign-policy promises for the final fortnignt’s campaigning. In Toledo Nixon promised, if elected, to ask Ike on Nov. 9 to send Cabot Lodge off to Geneva as U.S. negotiator at the two-year-old Geneva atom-test talks. If the talks succeeded, there would be a summit. If they failed by Feb. 1, “the U.S. will be prepared to detonate atomic devices necessary to advance our peaceful technology.” In Muskegon, Mich, next day, Nixon promised, if elected—in a manner reminiscent of Ike’s “I will go to Korea”—to tour the Russian satellite capitals in person, to “at least let them see that we haven’t forgotten them.”

In Grand Rapids, Nixon’s appearance was a genuine triumph. So packed were the crowds in downtown Campau Square that weary newsmen could not get through to the rostrum. There, as in Muskegon, anti-Nixon demonstrators pelted the visitors with eggs and tomatoes; one egg hit Nixon in the leg, another struck a Secret Service agent.* (“I have been heckled by experts,” Nixon cried, “so don’t try anything on me or we’ll take care of you!”)

Lift for the Hurdles. After touring the Republican strongholds of southern Illinois, Nixon arrived by plane in Davenport, Iowa and got the biggest lift of the week. It was Dwight Eisenhower’s pungent political war cry, and Nixon, watching Ike on TV from his hotel room, recovered from a good deal of his gloom. He hurried right out to Davenport’s Masonic Auditorium, where a Republican crowd of more than 3,000 had heard the President’s speech on big-screen TV. The President, said Nixon, spoke “with great eloquence and conviction tonight. He spoke much too generously about my qualifications.” Then Nixon enthusiastically took up the Ike pace and belted out a fight talk of his own.

As he got ready to push on into the final week of the cam paign (New York, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, Washington, California), Nixon could figure that the whistle-stop tour and Ike’s impressive last-minute intervention had helped to reinforce his margin in areas where Republicans should run strong. Would it also reverse the Kennedy trend so many people were talking about? The hurdles ahead for Richard Nixon were high and hard, and he was tired and anything but cocky.

* A more unsettling incident was the discovery, near Fort Wayne, Ind., that a piece of an old electric transformer had been tied to the railroad tracks on Nixon’s route; had it not been found in time by an advance pilot train, it could have caused a serious derailment. Trainmen reported having found similar objects on the tracks in that area several times in the past, blamed misguided pranksters.