REPUBLICANS: Candidate in Crisis

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Positive Thinking. Then, in mid-September, the luck of the campaign changed and dealt Nixon's prospects two jolting blows. First came the flare-up of the religion issue. Mindful that a massive Roman Catholic shift to Kennedy in the big-electoral-vote Northern states could swing the election, Nixon gave orders down through the ranks that the religion issue was not to be mentioned. But a group of 150 Protestant clergymen and laymen, headed by New York's Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking) met in Washington to toss a headline-making anti-Catholic manifesto into the campaign (TIME, Sept. 19). The manifesto led to Kennedy's dramatic confrontation with the Houston ministers, and gave the Kennedy forces a golden opportunity to exploit the religion issue in Catholic (as well as Protestant) sections of the U.S. by running and rerunning the film. From the Peale manifesto on, conservative Catholics, who leaned toward Nixon, began to move into the Kennedy camp—carrying with them many a vote-heavy urban center out of the 1956 Republican column.

The second heavy blow was Nixon's poor showing in the first TV debate with Kennedy. A combination of fatigue, inept makeup, and a me-too approach (abandoned soon afterward), plus the resourcefulness in argument and forcefulness of character that Kennedy showed, made Kennedy the winner on the TV screens (many radio listeners, hearing the voices only, thought that Nixon won).

Republican party chieftains were staggered by the effect of the first debate. Knowing that Nixon had been a champion debater in high school and college, recalling his easy platform conquests in his California campaigns for House and Senate, Nixon men had confidently expected their man to give Kennedy a decisive trouncing. Nixon himself was less cocky. He had debated with Kennedy on a public platform back in 1947, when they were both freshman Congressmen, and recalled him as a tough antagonist. "Everyone expects me to wipe up the floor with this guy," Nixon said before the first debate. "But it's not going to be easy to do."

If Norman Vincent Peale's bomb was Nixon's worst piece of inherited bad luck in the campaign so far, the agreement to debate with Kennedy on TV was his own worst tactical mistake. Though Nixon drew even with Kennedy in the later rounds, the four encounters together helped Kennedy enormously—not so much by weakening Nixon's public image as by strengthening Kennedy's. Before the debates, after 7½ years as Vice President, Nixon was far better known, and though he had many detractors, seemed a man of much greater maturity and experience—though their age difference is only four years (Nixon is 47, Kennedy 43). About Kennedy most voters knew little more than that he was boyish looking, rich, and an efficient operator. If Nixon had never agreed to the debates, Kennedy would not have had the opportunity to prove, before a nationwide audience, that he is Nixon's match in quickness of mind, decisiveness, and resources of combat.