THE CAMPAIGN: Little Cold War

For seven weeks Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon have been riding the same campaign issue—foreign policy—in different directions. Kennedy’s main argument in his campaign has been to attack the Republicans for U.S. weaknesses and declining prestige abroad; Nixon has scorned the charge that the U.S. is second best and holds that the nation needs a strong and knowledgeable leader who can deal with Nikita Khrushchev (e.g., Dick Nixon) in the perilous years ahead. With the approach of Baltika to U.S. shores, it became more and more apparent that Khrushchev himself would become a tense campaign issue. And. sure enough. Kennedy and Nixon were soon involved in their own cold war.

Nixon urged a foreign policy truce during Khrushchev’s stay. Kennedy was not having any. But well aware of the risk that he and Khrushchev might be simultaneously criticizing U.S. policy, Kennedy, in his first nationally televised address of the campaign, at a fund-raising dinner in Washington, tried a different technique. He addressed himself directly to Khrushchev. “But how can you talk of peace, Mr. Khrushchev,” he asked, “when you and your Chinese Communist friends are undermining the peace every day, creating disorder and danger wherever you move? How can you talk of colonialism when you are surrounded by your puppet dictators . . . ?” Then he got down to the matter at hand: “This is no time to say that we can outtalk or outshout Mr. Khrushchev. I want to outdo him—outproduce him.” Later, in Nashville, Tenn., Kennedy emphasized a point: “I want to make clear that nothing I am going to say is going to give Mr. Khrushchev the slightest encouragement. He is encouraged enough.”

Who’s Strong? Campaigning in Pennsylvania and Michigan, Nixon struck out instinctively on what he obviously thought (from crowd reaction) was a strong issue. He called Kennedy “naive and inexperienced” and “the spokesman of national disparagement . . . We have responsibility in avoiding resort to statements which tend to divide America, which tend to disparage America, and which, in any way, would encourage Chairman Khrushchev and his fellow dictators to believe that this nation, leader of the free world, is weak of will, indecisive, is unsure and hesitant to use her vast power, is poorly defended.”

Stung to the quick, Kennedy rejected any aspersions on his patriotism, and the campaign began to get more intense at long last. In Bristol, Tenn., Kennedy’s voice was icy. “I support the President.” he said. “I did not need to be reminded of that yesterday.” But the Nixon counterattack continued, and several reporters thought they saw a return of the old Nixon campaigning style. Kennedy, said Nixon in Springfield, Mo., “is just as strong in his opposition to Communism as I am, but because of his lack of knowledge and experience, he urged a course of action [for President Eisenhower to express regrets to Khrushchev for the U-2 incident] that would produce results that he would oppose as strongly as I do.” In Sioux Falls, S. Dak., Jack Kennedy lashed back: “I would not cast aspersions upon any American, and I do not cast them by innuendo or implication upon my opponent.”

Who’s Naive? G.O.P. Chairman Thruston Morton crashed into the fray with a Denver speech reiterating the “naive and inexperienced” charge against Kennedy, and wildly accusing him of “giving aid and comfort to the Communist enemies of the U.S.” by spreading disunity during the U.N. meeting. Kennedy and other Democrats, he said, “were guilty of sheer desertion of American patriotism.” Infuriated, Kennedy warned Nixon and his supporters that “personal attacks and insults will not halt the spread of Communism. Nor will they win the November election. It is not naive to call for increased strength. It is naive to think that freedom can prevail without it.”

By week’s end the insults filled the air like flak, but the pyrotechnics were largely unobserved beyond the local horizons. The nation was engrossed in another, more spectacular performance at the United Nations in New York, starring Nikita Khrushchev—who diplomatically refused to say who he thought could handle him best.