Silver Linings

For a time last week, Richard Nixon could have been taken for legendary Joe Btfsplk, the creature out of L'il Abner who always walks under a cloud. There was his trouble on the TV debate with Kennedy. Rain dogged him from Illinois to New York to Massachusetts. Chowder fog slowed his chartered Convair while crowds waited restlessly on the ground below. Gremlins bugged up his public-address system in Long Island City and Schenectady, N.Y., and unfortunate twists crept into his off-the-cuff sallies ("It's our responsibility that we . . . get rid of the farmers" instead of "farm surplus'').

But Joe Btfsplk's cloud had its spots of silver lining. Flying from Chicago into Memphis, Nixon got the biggest crowds in the city's history, outdrawing Democrat Kennedy's visit the week before. Down on the Mississippi waterfront, crowds twice as great as Kennedy's clogged the street for a block to hear Nixon. Rain, started falling, umbrellas snapped open, but no one left. Nixon spoke out on civil rights, and when he said "Let's make our country the shining example for all the world to see of equality for all," many whites cheered along with the Negroes.

Biggest Turnout. At the start of his first campaign foray into New York City, crowds were slow. But they picked up as he toured Long Island. So did Nixon's fire. "Remember, when our opponents suggest how much they are going to spend, that isn't Jack's money they are spending but your money,'' said he stop after stop--and the line got a big hand every time.

The week's climax came on Kennedy's own home grounds of Boston. Wet confetti showered on Pat and Dick, cheers echoed through the damp, narrow streets from Bostonians lined six to eight deep, and many broke ranks to chase after his car. Police numbered the throng at an extravagant 250,000, yet it was undoubtedly the biggest street turnout anywhere in the campaign.

"Kennedy's Congress." That night an exuberant Nixon was flailing as though the Nixon-Kennedy TV debate had never happened. "Our opponents have a performance gap as wide as the missile gap that they left us at the beginning of this Administration, and which we've been closing ever since," he told a Boston audience. The summer session of Congress, said Nixon, was "Kennedy's Congress," and it was "a monumental failure." His partisan crowd noisily devoured the scraps of red meat. His visit to Boston, said Nixon, was "one of the greatest days."*

On the stump Nixon was not yet the punching campaigner of yesteryear. But he was beginning to take off his gloves.

*During the week students at the University of Vermont asked Nixon to describe the most exciting day of his life. "It was the day I received a scholarship to law school at Duke," he reminisced. Then he diplomatically corrected himself. "No, that was the second-happiest day. The first was the day I proposed to Pat."

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