To the astonishment of all, Nixon, instead of just passing, chose to exercise his right of rebuttal to comment on the answer, embarking on a flight of sanctimony. For example: “I see mothers holding their babies up so they can see a man who might be president … I can only say that I’m very proud that President Eisenhower restored … good language to the conduct of the presidency. . .” And on and on. So spoke the man we were years later to come to know from the White House transcripts of his tapes as Mr. Expletive Deleted.
According to those monitoring the folks watching the debate in working-class bars, church halls and other gathering places across the country, Nixon’s response provoked a nationwide collective groan and a lot of derisive laughter. It was the first clear incident I remember of the goody-two-shoes political pretension being tried out to disastrous effect. This was very heartening. It demonstrated that there is a limit to the hypocrisy politicians can get away with and that the country has both a sense of proportion and a sense of humor. I think something like all this has been at work in the current campaign. People so far have been awfully good at threading their way through the rhetorical posturing and muck.
Nixon in that moment was presuming a different American from the one who was out there, an American who would be shocked by things that Nixon himself didn’t really find shocking, but only pretended to. Through the years I think Americans have gotten, if anything, better and better at sifting out this stuff. But that development seems to have been recognized by everyone but the politicians who keep dishing it out. Affected shock and horror somehow give themselves away.
This has been more of a problem for Bush than Clinton (or Perot) this time around because shock and horror are the currency of incumbents under siege. In some campaigns it is merely a contest of traded nightmare scenarios. Under Goldwater, we were told by the Democrats in 1964, we would be incinerated by nuclear bombs; the Republicans helpfully countered that under Johnson we would all be murdered in the street by common criminals-you pay your money, you take your choice. Eisenhower, Americans had been warned a few years earlier, would strip them of the whole New Deal social-safety net and return to the perilous time of Herbert Hoover. The Eisenhower campaign was meanwhile warning that the Democrats had brought and would bring even more crooks and commissars to Washington. But this year, as in 1960, 1968 and some others, the situation is different. An incumbent party and/or president having to defend or at least explain and promise to correct what is generally regarded as a huge national mess won’t have much choice. The incumbent will have to say, or at least imply by what he says, that bad as things are, the challenger is scary and must not be allowed to take the helm. So a lot of mock shock and fabricated horror will be expressed. They already have been.
I don’t think any two elections are ringers for each other or that history repeats itself except very broadly in the candidates who come before us. But there are strong resonances between 1960 and now because in many respects the situations are similar. In fact, if you go back over the defensive Nixon arguments of the period, you will find material that is very familiar today. Kennedy was inexperienced in foreign-policy matters, naive about them, Nixon argued; he was also going to tax you to death and give government all sorts of sway over your private business. When Kennedy attacked the administration of which Nixon had been a part and spoke of the low esteem to which it had brought the country in the world or of the sluggish economic conditions it had countenanced at home, Nixon did what Bush does now and what many others in a comparable pickle have done: he claimed that Kennedy had attacked not him and his administration or what they had brought to pass, but rather the country itself. He would thereupon piously point out that he, of course, didn’t think this was a bad country at all. We heard words rather like those only last week. He also set about marginalizing Kennedy, trying to set him apart in people’s minds from mainstream American values. Sound familiar?
In addition to these similarities of political circumstance there is one other. Many forget it now, but it took a very long time for Kennedy actually to gain solid acceptance by the people who were eventually to be his supporters. He left the Los Angeles Democratic convention the nominee that many of the party heroes and elders-including Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman-had not yet fully bought. Liberals thought him too conservative, not one of them. There was a hey-where-did-this-person-come-from feeling about him. He was considered an upstart. And he did not seem a probable president. I recall his traveling up the West Coast to campaign shortly after the convention and his seeming not to be the Democratic nominee, but just some youngish guy giving speeches in a funny accent.
Like Clinton he was vulnerable to the incumbent party’s defense, prime material for being denounced as a risk. He was a plenty rough campaigner, but it was his coming back again and again in a kind of rammish, head-butting way on the administration’s derelictions that got him within winning distance of the election. It was the sight of the two men debating that finally catalyzed choice and hardened loyalties, putting him over the line. There are king-size differences between now and 1960, but despite them on the eve of the first debate we are in many ways exactly where we were then.
