Nixon's Secret (17 page)

Theodore H. White would both pioneer a new form of journalism and write the official story of the 1960 campaign in
The Making of the President, 1960
. I got to know “Teddy” well in 1979–80, when he wrote his book on the 1980 race. He was infatuated with Kennedy. His narrative focused on Kennedy’s image and style, while Nixon was a middle-class afterthought. White, like many Americans, bought into the Kennedy mystique and seemed oblivious to the well-funded Madison Avenue effort to sell America on John F. Kennedy’s “style.” He was movie-star handsome, with a beautiful wife and adorable children. American’s were interested in his family, and his taste in art and music, and among the intellectual class, the Kennedy style dazzled. To a certain extent, John F. Kennedy was a confection, sold to the American people by what Nixon would call “the most ruthless group of political operators,” and cutting edge advertising techniques, paid for by the multimillionaire Joseph P. Kennedy. “We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes,” Joe Kennedy proclaimed.
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Nixon speechwriter Richard Whalen would analyze the mesmerizing effect of the Kennedy style on America. “In Kennedy-enchanted America, ‘style’ was everything,” Whalen wrote. “Not style in the familiar sense, as mode, manner, or aspect of something, but style as a supreme value in itself, style for it own splendid sake. The line between image and substance disappeared. A thing well said was a thing accomplished.”
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Indeed, after his death, the mythology of Kennedy weaved around the fictional Camelot allowed for imagination to fill in the rest of his incomplete life and presidency: The end to the Vietnam War, and the Cold War or the passing civil rights. None were accomplished under Kennedy, but the mythology allowed that all were possible.

Because of the circumstances of his death, and the incomplete record of his life and presidency, one can project on Kennedy whatever one wants to see. Add to that fifty years of nostalgia, and an accurate assessment of the Kennedy-Nixon race becomes difficult. JFK did not start as the toast of party liberals or organizational Democrats. The tightly organized and relentless campaign run by his brother Robert Kennedy would take first the Democratic nominating process, and then the nation, by storm.

Nixon was without a doubt a polarizing figure, but had managed to soften his image in 1959 and early 1960, launching the first of the “New Nixons.” From the beginning the national polls reflected a skintight race. Professor Edmund Kallina would reflect a more balanced view of Nixon’s “negatives”:

On balance, it is fair to say that Nixon’s reputation as a dirty campaigner was exaggerated and that Helen Douglas and California Democrats were the first to raise questions about Congressman Vito Marcantonio, who Murry Chotiners’ pink flyers would make a household name in the closing days of the 1950 Senate race. The extreme left abhorred Nixon and they constantly drove the narrative of “Tricky Dick,” who they saw as manipulative, deceitful, and underhanded. Polls in 1960 showed that this view was largely limited to liberal Democrats and a more balanced perspective of Nixon was held by Republicans, the vast majority of Independents and some conservative Democrats. There is no doubt that the animus on the hard left emanates from Nixon’s pursuit of Hiss and his defeat of Mrs. Douglas with a bare-fisted campaign would only intensify this hatred.
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The contest was dirtier and more hard-fought than depicted in White’s book. In the intervening years,
Kennedy v. Nixon
by Kallina and
The Real Making of the President
by W. J. Rorabaugh provided a more balanced perspective on the photo-finish election. The contest was fought close and tough with Nixon, the more seasoned politician and famed debater, making a series of unforced errors.

No election for president has matched the overall voter turnout, and yet the 1960 election was remarkable in other ways. It was the dirtiest in American history. The mythologizing of John F. Kennedy after his death has obscured his father’s and brothers’ ruthlessness and commitment to do anything it took to put Kennedy in the White House.

Dirty tricks? Break-ins? Illegal cash? Bugging? Today these tactics are readily identified with the Nixon administration, but could just as easily describe the Kennedy campaign of 1960. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and his campaign manager son Robert would engage in all of them as well as dealings with organized crime to elect John F. Kennedy.

They would employ these tactics first to Senator Hubert Humphrey and then to Richard Nixon. This campaign stratagem, in turn, bred the “everyone does it” attitude of the Nixon men, which allowed the crimes of Watergate to happen twelve years later. The 1960 campaign would include a successful effort by the Kennedy men to bug Nixon’s hotel suite on the eve of Nixon’s second debate, a surreptitious entry into the office of Nixon’s psychiatrist and the bugging of an official at the Republic National Committee as well as a break-in at the accountant’s office of industrialist Howard Hughes in search of incriminating evidence against Richard Nixon. Robert Kennedy was a tough and ruthless political operator who used private detectives and illegal wire taps in the campaign for JFK’s ascendancy to the White House. RFK’s activities included the bugging of an executive in Boston who had evidence that John Kennedy had an affair with a nineteen-year-old college student in the Bay State.
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It is Nixon who bears the reputation as a “dirty campaigner,” but in the context of the era it was just part of the game. “Well, for Christ’s sake, everybody bugs everybody else. We know that,” President Nixon said in private conversation in September 1972.
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One of the great ironies of the 1960 campaign is that Nixon, who had enjoyed robust health and a phenomenal capacity for physical energy and hard work, would be plagued by a series of maladies throughout the 1960 campaign, while Kennedy, who projected an aura of athletic vitality, but had been plagued throughout his life by serious and even life-threatening health issues, would pace himself in a way that allowed him to physically stand up to the rigors of the campaign.

The question of both candidates’ health would play out in more devious and surreptitious ways as the major candidates for president in 1960, Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson, all maneuvered to get the goods on each other. Although Nixon’s 1972 campaign that resulted in the Watergate scandal would become synonymous in the public mind with illegal break-ins, wiretapping, illegal money, and dirty tricks, the 1960 campaign would have these tactics utilized by the Kennedys and Senator Lyndon Johnson. While Kennedy was the picture of hale good health in public, the reality was much more problematic. Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease and required regular injections of cortisone to augment his deadly adrenal insufficiency. When this accurate diagnosis became public, John F. Kennedy would simply lie.

Someone broke into the New York City offices of Dr. Eugene Cohen, an endocrinologist who treated Kennedy. The offices were in shambles with the lock jimmied; filing cabinets rifled and discarded patient files strewn on the floor. On the same day, someone attempted another burglary at the offices of another doctor who was treating Kennedy, Dr. Janet Travell. The perpetrators had not been able to penetrate the lock on her office door. While Dr. Travell was not treating Kennedy for Addison’s disease per se (that care fell to Dr. Cohen), she was treating Kennedy for his chronic back pain and was fully aware of his advanced Addison’s disease.

After the break-in at both doctors’ offices, Kennedy would ask Dr. Travell to contact every hospital where he had ever been treated and secure his records.

In a 2002
Vanity Fair
article JFK biographer Robert Dallek pinned the break-ins on Nixon, but has never provided proof for his assertion. “It appears that Richard Nixon may have tried at one point to gain access to Kennedy’s medical history,” Dallek opined. “Although the thieves remain unidentified, it is reasonable to speculate that they were Nixon operatives.” Nixon’s longtime spokesman and advisor Herb Klein vehemently denied this. “It couldn’t have happened,” said Klein. “Anything that would have been close to [a break-in] would have been discussed with me, and it wasn’t.”

  Dallek ignored the most obvious perp in the break-ins, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and LBJ would use the information only weeks before the Los Angeles convention. It was Lyndon Johnson, not Richard Nixon, who would lay Kennedy’s secret before the American people at the Los Angeles convention. With Kennedy’s medical records secretly in hand, LBJ acolytes Texas Governor John Connally and Vice Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee India Edwards would hold a convention press conference to publicly announce that Kennedy had Addison’s disease and therefore was not healthy enough to be president. Johnson himself would spread the intel through interviews and other publicity, at one point referring to Kennedy as that “little scrawny fellow with rickets.”
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The more probable sponsor for the break-ins at both Kennedy doctors’ offices was Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.

Edwards would quote a “reliable” source when she charged Kennedy with the assertion that he “would not be alive today if it were not for cortisone.”
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This was, of course, true. Following his assassination, it was found that JFK’s adrenal glands had wasted away to almost nothing due to the disease.
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He had been kept alive with cortisone, which gave his face the puffy look notable in his later years.

That the Kennedy forces knew Johnson, not Nixon was behind the illicit seizure of Kennedy’s health records was confirmed when Robert Kennedy sought out Johnson at the Los Angeles Democratic Convention. “You Johnson people are running a stinking damned campaign, and you’re gonna get yours when the time comes,” Bobby fumed.
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The belief that Robert Kennedy thought it was LBJ, not Nixon, who broke into the Kennedy doctor’s offices is bolstered by the timing of both the break-in and the subsequent attack on JFK. We know that the attack on Kennedy from Johnson’s camp followers occurred
before
the Democratic Convention in July.

  Kennedy was forced to release a letter from Dr. Travell and Dr. Cohen, who wrote in a largely false statement saying that Jack’s “adrenal glands do function.” In an action of false bravado the doctors advised Kennedy to bring suit any claim to the contrary, even if they “have had access to old medical records”—a clear reference to the records that Robert Kennedy was worried had been stolen from his brother’s doctor’s office.

The Kennedys understood the need to immediately refute this health claim lest the Kennedy bandwagon would be halted. Both Kennedys denied the accusations. “I do not have it,” Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, “and I never had it.” A press conference was held shortly after to bolster their claims. More than thirty years later in an oral history, Dr. Travell would come clean about JFK’s Addison’s disease.

Perhaps the reason Nixon never overtly raised the question of Kennedy’s Addison’s disease was because he himself had health issues that were less serious than Kennedy’s but enough to sink a presidential candidacy in 1960. Nixon had sought the treatment of a psychiatrist throughout the 1950s. The former US president began seeing Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker in 1952 with a litany of maladies that Nixon suspected were psychosomatic, including back pain and insomnia. The Kennedy forces would use a surreptitious entry to gain proof of Nixon’s visits to the shrink.

Nixon knew that in 1960 the American people were unlikely to elect a man who was “seeing a shrink.” Although the advances in our perceptions about psychiatry and mental health issues have advanced, even in 2014, it is also notable that no man elected president has admitted to psychiatric care.

Kennedy’s father had paid a source in Los Angeles who had made Nixon’s visits to Dr. Hutschnecker known to the Kennedy’s through crooner Frank Sinatra.
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A private detective who sold the records to Kennedy had learned about Dr. Hutschnecker’s treatment of Nixon through Attorney Louis Neustein, who was not only the doctor’s lawyer, but also a close friend. The detective managed to get into Nixon’s psychotherapist’s office under false pretenses in September 1960, where he stole Nixon’s medical file, but he also would be arrested three years later for stealing classified state documents.

No matter who was behind the 1960 break-ins at JFK’s doctors’ offices, Jack Kennedy knew it was an opponent. Jack’s powerful and protective father had every reason to prevent Nixon from using stolen medical files against Jack by getting his hands on Richard Nixon’s own medical files. After LBJ’s attack on Kennedy, Nixon was certainly
aware
of the allegations that Kennedy had Addison’s disease. With his own dark secrets to hide, he never raised the issue, unlike LBJ. Before the start of the Democratic Convention, there was one other politician who might have had a reason to want to steal Kennedy’s medical records—a politician who wanted the Democratic nomination for himself. Like Nixon, this politician had a long history of doing anything it took to win, and on the eve of the Democratic Convention, would have two of his subordinates call a press conference and tell reporters that Kennedy had Addison’s disease.

That politician was Lyndon Baines Johnson, who would later become Jack’s running mate in the 1960 election. Like Nixon, Johnson had the means, motive, and opportunity to stage such a crime.

The tactics that defeated Nixon were more devious than merely the stealing of medical records and votes that Lyndon Johnson specialized in. The Kennedy camp learned that in 1957, Howard Hughes lent Nixon’s brother Donald $205,000 to bail out his “Nixon’s” drive-in restaurant in Whittier, California. Even though the restaurant featured “Nixonburgers,” it went bankrupt less than a year later. Author Mark Feldstein claimed the Hughes funds were diverted to Richard Nixon to purchase a home, but the candidate said he received no portion of the loan and that his mother had posted family property as collateral. “It was all she had,” he said. Strangely, the loan had been extended through third parties, apparently to hide its origins, the terms never called for repayment and the property was never seized after the restaurant failed.