TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT1048> <title> 60 Election: Republicans:The New Boss </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1960 Election </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> August 8, 1960 THE CONVENTION The New Boss </hdr> <body> As he landed in Chicago for the big day, Richard Nixon ran slam-bang into one of the biggest, loudest crowds that ever greeted a candidate. Perspiring throngs clawed and pushed at him. Nixon placards rose and spun in the humid air, confetti cascaded down from hotel rooms, and the traffic din from Lake Shore Drive fell to a whisper under the tumult in the streets. Squeezing through the tight throngs, Nixon found safety at last in his Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel suite. But it was a safety of sorts. Beneath the clamor and the cheers lay a snorting Republican rebellion that threatened the future not only of Nixon himself but of his party. Into a Trap? Nixon was in plenty of trouble. His meeting earlier in New York with Republican Liberal Nelson Rockefeller, and his 14-point agreement of principles ("The Treaty of Fifth Avenue"), had rocked Midwestern, Southern and Western Republicans. Conservatives, led by the vocal and determined Barry Goldwater, stormed through the city, accusing Nixon of nothing less than treachery. Behind guarded hotel doors, the G.O.P. Platform Committee and all its subcommittees foundered in a ragged dispute among conservatives, liberals and moderates. As moderates gritted their teeth and dug in, the platform was shaping up to something close to a conservative manifesto on defense and civil rights. As if this were not enough to raise the hairs on Nixon's neck, Dwight Eisenhower himself was burning up the wires. The one man who could destroy Nixon with a word was warning by phone that the use of words like "bold" and "new" in the defense plank of the platform would be "falling into a trap." The statements, Ike said, were the unmistakable handiwork of his own former speechwriter, Emmet Hughes, who had quit the White House staff in disillusionment with his role there and now was Rocky's policy adviser. By using Rocky-Hughes wording, said Ike to Nixon, "you are saying that you and I haven't done a proper job." Strengthening Grasp. Nixon's first move had the impact of a grand-slam homer in the last of the ninth. He called a press conference. A throng of newsmen, TV people and photographers crushed into a long, narrow room at the Conrad Hilton and fired shotgun questions. With each answer Nixon deftly assumed his strengthening grasp of leadership. Q. Will you spell out what you want in the civil rights platform? A. The civil rights platform is unsatisfactory as far as I'm concerned. I believe it is essential that the Republican Convention adopt a strong civil rights platform, an honest one which does deal specifically (e.g., mention of sit-in demonstrations) and not in generalities. (The final draft omitted the specific.) Q. What is your reaction to the charge that your agreement with Governor Rockefeller was a "Munich?" A. The statement represented a summary of his views and mine, views that he and I have long held. Q. Will you base your preference for Vice President chiefly on foreign or domestic affairs? A. Whoever is nominated has to be a man who shares my views in the issues of foreign policy, human rights and economic policy. If he is not, he will not be an effective Vice President. Q. Governor Rockefeller says he is not satisfied with the national defense plank. Are you? A. I trust that during the course of the afternoon we will be able to reach an understanding on that plank. Planting the Flag. By the time he was through there was no mistaking the fact that Nixon had come to Chicago not only to receive the nomination but to plant his flag at the head of the party. Now he called in his advisers for a fuller briefing. He could, they indicated, follow one of three roads: 1) let the platform fight go to the convention floor, and win it there publicly and irrevocably; 2) go before the full platform committee and take charge on the ground that the nominee has the right to dictate the platform; 3) work behind the scenes, and get the committee itself to reconsider and give Nixon what he wanted. It was the third--and perhaps the toughest--of those roads that Nixon chose. It involved nothing less than getting the already published texts of some of the platform planks recalled and revised. Nixon pressed the action button, and the wheels turned. On his handshaking and picture-taking rounds with nearly all 2,662 delegates and alternates, he spread confidence and authority (and paused long enough to get a politically profitable shoeshine from a photogenic bootblack named Leon Thompson). Through the afternoon, delegates and leaders trooped in and out of his second-floor suite. Each of them got the word: the platform must go Nixon's way or there would be a floor fight. Committee Chairman Charles Percy, whose inexperienced political hand had been too weak to stave off the rebellion, relinquished chairmanship to hard-nosed Wisconsin Congressman Melvin Laird. As the civil rights framers returned to work to sweat over new drafts, the defense plank committee was suffering mightily--and so was Nixon, for the shadow of Ike's record and of the President himself hovered near by like warning clouds. Somehow, the finished plank would have to recognize the need for further defense spending (the Rocky-Nixon agreement) without damning the Eisenhower record. To settle the middle course, Nixon sent for Massachusetts Congressman and Platform Committee Member Silvio Conte, urged him to push ahead against the conservatives. To reopen the defense plank, Conte and his team used as a pretext Ike's request for a statement praising the progress of the Polaris program. With that as a wedge, the whole plank got sprung, and Conte & Co. proceeded to nail down fresh Nixon lumber. The revolt was under control--thanks, admitted Chuck Percy, to the "physical presence of Dick Nixon. That turned it, and nothing else could have." Ike himself was well over his peeve by the time he landed in Chicago to take his bows. Again, from hotel and office windows, the confetti poured down in torrents ("It's a different kind; it really sticks," he gasped. "It sticks and it chokes," replied Nixon), and Chicagoans as well as the Republican conventioneers tore loose in a huge, cacophonous reception that visibly left Ike bubbling. In the quiet of his suite, Ike and Mamie got together with the Nixons for a photo fest and a few informal greetings. (Pat Nixon, shaking Mamie's hand, said, "I shook 3,000 hands of women yesterday." Cracked Mamie with mock solitude as she withdrew here own hand: "Well, then, don't bother with mine.") When the preliminaries were over, Nixon briefed the President on the course of the platform construction and got Ike's approval. The President's speech to the convention brought still another ovation, another remarkable show of affection that even he had not expected. The talk itself was a resounding defense of the Eisenhower years and a challenge to the Democratic affront, as he saw it, that the U.S. is "second best." He was interrupted by vigorous applause no less than 72 times. Still glowing over his reception, Ike turned in another rare performance with an extemporaneous talk next morning at a breakfast for 600 Republicans. "In the operation of any great human organization," he said, "constructive plans and programs must be developed in the great middle road...Most people instinctively grow to like the paved highway, and they understand here it is where human progress is achieved. Those that march in the gutter, in the extremes of the right and the left, in the long run are always defeated." He also reminded his fellow Republicans that he was not yet to be relegated to history's scrap heap. Said he meaningfully, "I am still President of the United States for six months." (Discussing his great distaste for socialism, Ike made a remark that soon had the wires in Scandinavian countries blazing with fury. He spoke of "the experiment of almost complete paternalism in a very friendly European country [with] a tremendous record for socialistic operation...The record shows that their rate of suicide has gone up almost unbelievably...they now have more than twice our rate. Drunkenness has gone up. Lack of ambition is discernible on all sides." The country, though Ike did not mention it, was Sweden. Actually, France has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world; the U.S. is second; Chile, third; Sweden, fourth. Japan and Austria have the highest suicide rate of all nations (23.9 per 100,000 pop.); Sweden is sixth on the list (19.9), the U.S. fourteenth (9.8).) Yoked. Ike's presence in Chicago, his ebullience and confidence, was just the right ticket for Dick Nixon. The President's moderating breakfast speech, his behind-the-door and over-the-phone talks with leaders, strengthened faint hearts, calmed hot tempers. The result was that Nixon could pick his own way past the Administration's record to follow the new lines he had laid out with Rockefeller. With the further achievement of a workable platform, the Nixon command was beyond question, and like good soldiers falling to, Nelson Rockefeller and then Barry Goldwater stepped into place behind him. The platform itself, polished and ready in time for Chuck Percy's delivery (with film clips) before the convention, was one that Dick Nixon--as well as the others--could support with ease; it sparkled with all the high-minded goals of the Democrats' platform, yet when in doubt saluted the merits of enterprise and fiscal conservatism. His power thus proved, Nixon had the convention in the palm of his hand when the delegates assembled to give him the nomination. In the roaring hall, Nelson Rockefeller presided genially over the New York delegation beneath Nixon banners, parked a plastic Nixon skimmer on his head and jubilantly joined the wild cheering as Nixon was acclaimed by all present and shouting. Less than Complete. From his hotel suite, where he and Pat watched the spectacle on TV, Nixon took the results without any show of triumph; the only emotion he displayed came through as he talked to the TV cameras of his boyhood and the long road he had traveled. When a telegram came from Eisenhower, he could not find his reading glasses, borrowed a pair from a photographer, clamped them on his nose (for the first time in public) and read: MY ASTONISHMENT AT YOUR NOMINATION ON THE FIRST BALLOT IS SOMETHING LESS THAN COMPLETE. TO YOUR HANDS I PRAY THAT I SHALL PASS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENCY AND WILL BE GLAD TO DO SO. MAY GOD BLESS YOU. AS EVER, D.E. Nixon and the President had discussed vice-presidential possibilities earlier, and the two had agreed that Massachusetts' Cabot Lodge was the best choice. But Nixon realistically kept in reserve the names of a few other possibilities, notably Kentucky's Thruston Morton, whose able chairmanship of the National Committee and political spadework in Chicago had made him invaluable. Even though Lodge was his favorite, explained Nixon to associates, he might have to compromise on a Midwesterner to mollify Western and Midwestern groups who were still seething over the Rockefeller-Nixon agreement and who said they could not stomach another Easterner. Control. By this time Nixon's lines of control were so certain that he no longer needed to worry about a serious Midwest revolt. Late that night he gathered with 34 top Republicans (including Milton Eisenhower and a few members of Ike's Cabinet), Nixon made no bones about his preference, but opened the meeting for free discussion. Only Illinois' Governor William Stratton, who faces an uphill battle for re-election, argued strongly for choosing a Midwesterner for the ticket--or at least for running in some favorite sons. But he and the others eventually agreed on Nixon's choice. Nixon, Republican candidate for the presidency, was the party's new boss. From New York, where he had just finished laying the Soviets low with his recital of the calculated Russian shooting down of the U.S. RB-47, U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge flew into Chicago to accept his new role. It was the new boss who rose before the convention to accept the nomination with a punch-filled speech that he had been working on for weeks. Without flamboyance, without a grin of triumph, he tore into the Democrats and their platform promises, laced Jack Kennedy for "the rash and impulsive suggestion that President Eisenhower should have apologized and sent regrets" to Khrushchev for the U-2 flights; then he delivered his own challenge and promises for the future. (By way of explanation, Jack Kennedy repeated his now-notable U-2 "apologize" statement for the May 23 Congressional Record: "My response was: `Mr. Khrushchev...said there were two conditions for continuing [the summit conference]. One, that we apologize. I think that that might have been possible to do; and that second, we try those responsible for the flight. We could not do that...If he had merely asked that the U.S. should express regret, then that would have been a reasonable term...'") Next day he followed up his announcement that he would begin campaigning immediately by nailing down speaking dates in California, Hawaii and Washington. Then he got together with farm-state leaders, adroitly disconnected himself for good from Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson (who had happily--from Nixon's point of view--come out for Rockefeller for President), promised to developed a new farm program that would finally put a stop to the crisis in the plains. So doing, the Republican nominee, having quelled the disorder in Chicago, flew back to Washington. The forces of the G.O.P. were now arrayed in new order, ready for command decisions. And the new commander was Richard Nixon. </body> </article> </text>