In Search of Impact

"Impact" was the word for campaigning last week. In order to get it, the two presidential candidates and their running mates, all on separate courses, spent as much time in the air as they did on the ground, pushed themselves and their staffs into 18-hour days and hollow-eyed fatigue. The idea was to chop the day into valuable hours and many states,* to dart in and out of as many towns and cities as possible, to make the same basic speech sound hopefully fresh to each new audience, to capture local television and newspaper headlines, and whisk off again for the next town while the crowds were still applauding and calling for more. The big TV spectaculars, with the whole country watching at once, could come later. Now the object was to be seen in person by as many people as possible.

Nixon's Take-Off. While nursing his infected knee at Walter Reed General Hospital, Richard Nixon had spent long hours working out his in-and-out schedule. On the opening day of his campaigning, President Eisenhower and Vice Presidential Nominee Henry Cabot Lodge saw him off in a storm at Baltimore's Friendship International Airport (it reminded Ike that he had launched his own 1952 campaign in a storm in Abilene). The chartered Boeing 707 landed in sunny Indianapolis at lunchtime, in Dallas by mid-afternoon and in San Francisco at sunset--with time for parades, speeches and interviews at each stop. So it went through the week as the Nixons put the jigsaw puzzle of the U.S. together in their own way--hitting Portland, Boise, Grand Forks, Peoria. St. Louis, Atlantic City, Roanoke, Omaha and winding up in Minneapolis with a turnout of 100,000.

At most stops, Nixon had one simple all-purpose speech: he pleaded with voters to pick the candidate who could keep the peace with honor, who could maintain the Eisenhower record; critics, he said pointedly, are far too interested in what's wrong with America, too prone to overlook what is right, and he almost always got in the "impact line" about "never apologizing to Khrushchev." It was a well-tested speech, and though newsmen and other camp followers wilted at hearing it over and over. Nixon delivered it each time with the appearance of freshness and splashes of local color--as if he had thought it all up just the moment before. He made a strenuous week of it, climaxing in Iowa when he spelled out the first half of his far-reaching farm program (see below).

Kennedy's Landing, Both Kennedy and Nixon assumed that people wanted to get a look at, and form an impression of the candidates, rather than listen to long oratory. Kennedy in particular found listeners' attention wandering in his prepared speeches, eventually cut to his own kind of all-purpose hearing. The crucial hour of Kennedy's week was his confrontation of a group of critical Protestant ministers in Houston. That over, he raced back to fight on other fronts, turning the Southwest over to his running mate Lyndon Johnson, whose assignment was to reassure the folks in towns and villages that Jack Kennedy was their man.

Kennedy himself flew back to Manhattan to accept the Liberal Party nomination, to join forces with Adlai Stevenson, and to promise leadership toward "the new and better world beyond the New Frontier." On across the city and into New Jersey he carried his own basic, oft-repeated theme: the decline of the U.S. at home and abroad. In heavily Democratic centers he added a clarion call for party loyalty.

Well aware that he might find Nikita Khrushchev elbowing into the declining-prestige-of-the-U.S. argument this week. Kennedy devoted an entire speech in Pikesville. Md. to setting the Russians straight. Said he to Khrushchev: "It has been suggested that your objective is to divide our country in the midst of our election. Let me say as emphatically as I can: 'Those tactics will not work.' You may hear us inquiring into our lost prestige, our shaky defenses, our lack of leadership. But do not be deceived. The Democratic Party wants to win this election . . . to achieve peace and regain our security and rebuild America's strength."

* Nixon visited 21 in one week, Kennedy 27.

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