REPUBLICANS: Candidate in Crisis

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Into the battleship-grey conference room of the drab Bond Hotel in Hartford, Conn, last week walked Presidential Candidate Richard Nixon, Running Mate Henry Cabot Lodge, and such top campaign lieutenants as Labor Secretary James Mitchell, Attorney General William Rogers and Interior Secretary Fred Seaton. The men took their places around a long table, posed for press photographers. Then aides shooed the newsmen out, the doors closed, the smiles faded, and the Republican campaign team got down to the serious business before it: settling on strategy, tactics and schedules for the last, decisive weeks of the campaign.

Nixon lieutenants read off hopeful reports based on a survey of Republican leaders around the country, but a grimness hovered over the meeting. Only three weeks before the showdown, Richard Nixon's campaign was in trouble. His basic campaign theme—maturity and experience to cope with Khrushchev and keep the peace—had failed to stir any surge among the voters. The whiff of recession in the autumn air was weakening the second half of the G.O.P. "peace and prosperity" claim. Most worrisome of all was the mounting evidence of a wide Roman Catholic swing to Democrat Jack Kennedy in the big industrial states. The Kennedy camp, groaned a Nixon aide after the huddle in Hartford, "has cohesed the Catholic vote in a bloc more successfully than we had supposed was possible."

Early Rounds. At the start of the campaign, Nixon men would have dismissed as preposterous a prediction that three weeks before the end Nixon would be slipping behind, with omens of defeat swirling about him. The strange 1960 campaign has gone through three distinct phases. After the confused wrestling at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, with the idealistic Stevensonian liberals outraged by what they considered the Kennedy steamroller tactics, the Republican Convention in Chicago conveyed an impression of unity, earnestness and respectability. Nixon's acceptance speech went over with the TV audience a lot better than Kennedy's, with its ill-advised rewriting of Lincoln, his "malice for all" gibe at Nixon. Kennedy's choice of Texan Lyndon Johnson as his running mate seemed clever power politics at the time, but failed to stir any enthusiasm in the South, or anywhere else. Cabot Lodge, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was Nixon's second choice—when Rockefeller would not take the job—but proved a first-rate one, strengthening the ticket's appeal, reinforcing its claim to superiority in foreign policy experience.

Round 2 was the August rump session of Congress. Kennedy and Johnson were outmaneuvered by Eisenhower's veto threats and outvoted by a coalition of Northern Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. When the session ended, Candidate Kennedy had a look of failure and ineptness upon him.