When Nixon’s Ace in the Hole Turned Into a Blank

Following last night’s debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, CNN aired what will be the first of a series of shows called Race to the White House looking at past elections, in this case focusing on the 1960 race between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.

I’m currently teaching my course “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics,” and in fact we were just reading about and discussing the 1960 race, including watching lengthy excerpts from the first JFK-RMN debate. I made sure to let my students know about last night’s program, then, for a couple of reasons.

For one, since we had only just gotten through discussing the race I thought they’d find it interesting to compare what we’d learned with what was included in the hour-long show. Secondly, I like reminding them how even though we’re studying people and events from a half-century ago, many are still interested in these things and believe them to be relevant today -- as indicated by CNN giving an hour of prime time to the ’60 race.

The ads for last night’s show made it seem as though the focus would be on the historic first debate (of four) between Kennedy and Nixon that took place on September 26, 1960, a notion furthered by the fact that the show was being paired with the Dems’ debate. In truth, though, the debate only earned a tiny bit of attention during the hour, fleetingly discussed for just a few minutes during the latter half of the show.

The rest of the hour was spent covering the respective candidates’ campaigns via commentary from a few academics and others, the showing of numerous clips from 1960, and some fleeting reenactments employed to enhance the story. Kevin Spacey -- evoking his House of Cards role as U.S. president -- is the narrator for the series, and was heard at the start of the hour suggesting (somewhat misleadingly) that Nixon was hopelessly outmatched by Kennedy as a politician and campaigner.

“You think you know the rules,” he says as we watch an actor portraying Nixon in shadowy profile. “But what happens when you discover you don’t even know how to play the game?”

Following such a line, it isn’t surprising to see a lot of emphasis thereafter on Kennedy’s right moves and Nixon’s wrong ones during the campaign. That said, the show provides some balance as well, illustrating in a necessarily cursory way pros and cons for both candidates. Near the end it is emphasized that JFK was as adept as RMN was when it came to “dirty tricks,” although the show doesn’t really dwell on too many examples (other than alluding to possible voter fraud in Illinois and Texas tilting the election JFK’s way).

Nixon’s eagerness to debate Kennedy is correctly presented as a misstep. During the quick presentation of the first debate, Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow and flop sweat is of course highlighted, and in fact there’s even a quick pre-debate clip of Nixon saying “think I better shave.” The much-repeated line about those listening on radio thinking Nixon “won” the debate while TV viewers favored JFK is uncritically repeated again, something that started as a few anecdotes and got blown up into some sort of ultimate signifier of not just the debate but the entire campaign and election.

Other more meaningful moments from the 1960 campaign are highlighted, including JFK’s address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Martin Luther King’s arrest in Georgia and JFK’s phone call to Coretta, and a couple of Nixon’s “bad luck” moments including being hospitalized for two full weeks at the end of August and beginning of September.

Nixon’s hospitalization resulted from an infection that resulted from his banging his knee on a car door during a stop in Greensboro, NC in mid-August, part of his foolhardy effort to visit all 50 states during the campaign -- something he insisted on doing even after his injury and hospitalization.

In his discussion of the 1960 campaign in Six Crises (written shortly afterwards), Nixon concludes with a list of 16 things he “should have” done, all decisions which in his mind likely contributed to costing him the election. He does not include campaigning in all 50 states among the list of items, though he does lead it off with “I should have refused to debate Kennedy.”

For the second item on the list, and perhaps the second-most important one in retrospect, Nixon says “I should have used Eisenhower more in the campaign.” There is brief reference to Ike having been largely absent from the campaign near the end of the CNN program. With less than a week to go before the election, Spacey’s narration suggests the Nixon campaign had been cleverly waiting to use Eisenhower at the very last to produce a greater effect.

“Nixon has one last card to play,” he says, “his old boss, ex-General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Despite the card-playing metaphor, no indication is made to the fact that both Ike and Nixon were poker players.

We see shots from the ticker tape parade of November 2nd in which Ike finally appeared with Nixon, an event which is said to have given Nixon a late boost as Election Day drew near. I anticipated another turn in the story here -- one explaining how this “one last card” wasn’t nearly as effective as it might have been. But the program moved in a different direction.

This might have been the biggest omission from the show, actually. Not only was Eisenhower mostly absent from the campaign, but in late August 1960 (just a week after Nixon bumped his knee in Greensboro), Eisenhower infamously concluded his weekly press conference with a line that would greatly hurt RMN in the weeks leading up to the debate.

“We understand that the power of decision is entirely yours, Mr. President,” began a reporter, leading up to what would be the last question of the presser. “I just wondered if you could give us an example of a major idea of his [i.e., Nixon's] that you had adopted in that role, as the decider and final, uh....”

About to leave, Eisenhower said “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.”

Afterwards Eisenhower would say he didn’t mean to suggest he actually needed a week to come up with an idea of Nixon’s his administration had found useful. Rather he was just referring to the fact that he’d be giving another press conference a week later and they could continue the discussion then.

But the damage was done. In fact, in that first debate a month later Nixon would be asked early on about Eisenhower’s statement, putting RMN on the defensive right away. And not long after that, the Kennedy campaign built a television ad around Ike’s line -- take a look:

I was a little surprised CNN didn’t touch on this part of the story of the 1960 campaign, the moment when Nixon’s “ace in the hole” suddenly turned into a useless blank. Still, for those unfamiliar with the 1960 race there was enough in the program perhaps to whet your appetite to learn more.

Image: Graphic from CNN advertisement, Race for the White House, 3/6/16 episode.

Early Polling, First Levels

Watched some from those GOP debates last night. I had the early “undercard” on for the last half-hour, kind of passively following. Then I watched more attentively the second one -- the one with 11 candidates all vying with one another for air time -- for an hour-and-a-half or so before growing weary enought to shut down the teevee for the night.

Thanks in large part to this “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics” course I’m currently teaching, I’ve been more aware than usual of parallels between poker and political campaigns. Thus did I sit up for a moment after Scott Walker tossed out that line that he’d “love to play cards with [the president]... because Barack Obama folds on everything with Iran.”

That’s a line the Wisconsin governor’s been using for a while now, and it didn’t necessarily earn him much in the way of “chips” last night, given how several other candidates immediately stepped on it by, pleading “Jake! Jake” to get moderator Jake Tapper to pick them next.

Meanwhile -- thanks again to the class -- I continue to be more focused on the presidential races from 1960, 1968, and 1972 than on the 2016 one.

In 1968 Nixon won the presidency with 301 electoral votes, not a lot more than the 270 needed to be elected. Hubert Humphrey finished with 191 and George Wallace 46; if those two had picked up a couple of states between them, Nixon would have come up short and the decision would have been thrown to the House of Representatives.

The popular vote was also close between RMN and HHH, with Nixon finishing with about 31.78 million to Humphrey’s 31.27 million, while Wallace picked up about 9.9 million votes.

The polls were kind of remarkable during the last few days leading up to the 1968 election, with Nixon leading relatively comfortably until Lyndon B. Johnson’s “October surprise” announcement of a halt on bombing in North Vietnam on the Wednesday before the election.

For a day or two, the prospect of peace seemed imminent, and Humphrey surged. Then all was thrown into doubt when word emanated from South Vietnam that they weren’t necessarily on board with the agreement. “Saigon Opposes Paris Talk Plans, Says It Can’t Attend Next Week” went the headline in The New York Times that Saturday. Voters didn’t know what to think.

(Nixon, of course, is alleged by many to have had a direct role in South Vietnam’s sudden about-face, with Nixon campaign contributor Anna Chennault acting as an agent in what LBJ would describe as a treasonous act by RMN.)

The polls went kind of wacko from day-to-day, with Nixon up, then he and Humphrey even, then Humphrey even up briefly before Tuesday arrived. If the poll numbers were extrapolated to estimate the ultimate number of votes each would receive, the totals would resemble chip stacks at a tournament final table, with each enjoying the edge briefly until the vote finally froze the “stacks” once and for all.

The analogy only works, really, if we think of these final “players” as engaged in a cash game from which they have to leave at a preappointed time, with Nixon having finished up just enough to be declared the game’s winner. It’s hard not to resist thinking of the race in tourney terms, though, with one player effectively finishing with all the chips (even if that player doesn’t even enjoy a majority of the popular vote).

Right now the Republicans have 15 players left. (There are more declared candidates, but it appears only 15 have “chips” at present, with several of those on very short stacks.) Meanwhile Democrats have five candidates who are being recognized as “in the game,” with Biden sounding as though he may be taking a seat after all.

That’s still multiple tables’ worth of players. It’s the early levels, though, and so, like in a tournament, the stack sizes don’t mean very much as yet.

Poker and the Debates

I’ve been pretty immersed in presidential campaigns this summer. I’m not talking about the ones for 2016. Rather, the ones from 1960, 1968, and 1972.

That’s because I’m continuing to prepare for a class I’ll be teaching in the fall, kind of an offshoot from the “Poker in American Film and Culture” one that I taught (and have written about here) for about four years or so in the American Studies program at UNC-Charlotte. Gonna take a break from that for a bit to try a different course this fall, one called “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics.”

The main focus of the new course is obviously Nixon and his three-decade long odyssey of a political career, with much discussion along the way of the Cold War, Vietnam, and Watergate (natch). We’ll use Nixon’s poker-playing background as a starting point for the class, subsequently linking many of the strategies he employed in the context of campaigns, domestic policy, and international diplomacy (and war) with what he had to say about poker.

I’ll share more about the class later on. Today, though, I am thinking about how even though we’re 15 months or so away from the 2016 presidential election, the “race” (as it were) has already begun in earnest, it seems, with the Republicans having the first of what I assume will probably be two dozen or more debates before the G.O.P. finally decides on a candidate.

In fact, there are two debates today -- a kind of “undercard” one involving seven candidates this afternoon, then the prime time one tonight with 10 more. Seems crazily early for it, but four years ago the G.O.P. started up with the debates even earlier, the first one having happened in May 2011 (pictured above).

The 1960 election turned heavily on the debates between Nixon and John F. Kennedy, of course, with the first of the four having the greatest impact and Nixon’s “five o’clock shadow” becoming an iconic image much referenced thereafter. There’s a lot more to the story of the JFK-RMN heads-up battle that year, although I will say I am greatly looking forward to having students watch that first debate and discussing with them some of the moves both players make in it.

Some may not realize there were no debates again until 1976, at least among the presidential candidates. Lyndon B. Johnson was such a prohibitive favorite in 1964, he easily saw how debating Barry Goldwater would be of little value to him -- only a way to lose “chips.” For similar reasons, Nixon opted not to debate George McGovern in 1972, although he’d say he was too busy visiting China and Moscow and running the country to stoop to campaigning (or scrutinizing the criminal activities of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President that would eventually contribute to his downfall).

In 1968 the race was much tighter, and while Hubert Humphrey did challenge Nixon to a debate, the latter opted against doing so, in part because of what had happened in 1960. There was one debate between Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy on June 1 that year, three days before the California primary. RFK won California, and during his victory speech challenged McCarthy to another debate just moments before sadly being gunned down by an assassin and dying early on June 6.

Looking back on those earlier campaigns, while there was certainly maneuvering happening 15 months out, announcements of candidacies and the engagement of campaigns were all still a good ways off -- never mind anyone actually talking about or having debates.

It’s nonetheless curious to consider the scene at present, including the current position of Donald Trump, the celebrity candidate whose current frontrunner status in G.O.P. polls can only be negatively affected by any direct engagement with his opponents, including in the context of a debate. There’s a kind of funny article on Five Thirty Eight this week ticking off “potential threats to Trump” which is, in fact, merely a list of the necessary stages of the campaign between now and the Republican National Convention in July 2016.

In other words, it seems more or less clear this is a game Trump can’t possibly win. Even so, it’s also clear he will probably continue playing it for as long as he’s able to keep rebuying.