Search for a Fulcrum

In his rare moments of privacy last week, fast-running Jack Kennedy was restless and tense. He fidgeted with his tie clasp, rolled and squeezed a magazine or tapped his feet. All surface signs were pointing to a Kennedy victory, but the Democrats had a good dose of down-to- the-wire nervousness over Dwight Eisenhower's all-out support for Nixon, and over the nagging question of the religion vote.

Needle for Coattails. Outwardly, as Kennedy sped swift as the hungry hummingbird through more than a dozen states, he showed no concern over the religion question (though he was prepared, if necessary, to go on TV to outline again his church-state philosophy). But his awareness of Ike's impact was implicit in a series of Kennedy shotgun blasts from rostrums everywhere. To counteract the spread of the President's warnings that a Democratic victory would bring a new wave of inflation, Kennedy issued a formal statement in Philadelphia promising "reasonable price stability" and pledging not to devalue the dollar: "Rather, I shall defend its present value and soundness."

Time and again, Kennedy needled Richard Nixon for clinging to Ike's coattails, challenged the Vice President waspishly to bring Ike along for a fifth TV debate. In California, Arizona and Illinois he gibed at the fact that Nixon, Ike, Vice-Presidential Candidate Henry Cabot Lodge and Governor Nelson Rockefeller had joined in a massive last-minute effort to win New York. "We have all seen these circus elephants, complete with tusks, ivory in their head and thick skins," said Kennedy, "who move around the circus ring and grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them. Dick Nixon grabbed that tail in 1952 and 1956, but this year he faces the American people alone." In none of his sallies did Kennedy ever attack Dwight Eisenhower directly.

Missionaries for Peace. In his own coast-to-coast hopping, Kennedy was content to stick pretty much to his tried-and-true "get America moving" theme, but as Election Day neared he was chancing more and more quips. Only in a San Francisco speech did Kennedy broach a new program. This was a call for a volunteer "Peace Corps" of "talented men and women" who would serve abroad for three years as missionaries of good will for the U.S., as an alternative or supplement to peacetime selective service. "I am convinced," said he, "that the pool of people in this country of ours anxious to respond to the public service is greater than it has ever been in our history . . . Archimedes said, 'Give me a fulcrum and I will move the 'world.' We in the '60s are going to move the world again."

In Manhattan, after a big, noisy torchlight parade from Times Square, Kennedy told a tumultuous crowd at the Coliseum: "I want above all else to be a President known, at the end of four years, as one who not only prevented war but won the peace--as one of whom history might say, 'He not only laid the foundations for peace in his time, but for generations to come as well.' "

Election night he and wife Jackie would hear the returns in Hyannisport. Cape Cod, its summer clamor over, is usually shuttered by now, but all the paraphernalia of TV, news tickers, long-distance phone lines, and all the newsmen, TV celebrities and assorted gripmen were descending on its peace. The candidate, returning home, had certainly left nothing to chance. "We missed a ward in Philadelphia," Kennedy had snapped suddenly to an aide at one point in the week. "Make sure that every registered Democrat in the ward gets a letter before the election." That left it all up to the voters.

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