Through days that were by turn foggy, snowy, and brilliantly dressed in fall colors, the 16-car Pat and Dick Nixon 1960 Special poked through the countryside of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois, the land that Nixon called "the gut states."
Aboard the train were Vice President Richard Nixon, his wife, his staff, 100 newsmen and a battery of top-level advisers, including three Eisenhower Cabinet members—Attorney General William Rogers, Interior Secretary Fred Seaton, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Arthur Flemming.
In the penultimate week of his campaign, Dick Nixon had turned to a grueling whistle-stop attack aimed at tightening the Republican sinews of those states. "You try to cut your losses where you're weak and build up your margin where you're strong," explained a leading Ohio Republican.
Blood & Yelps. Jack Kennedy's strong lead (see box), and his needling criticism of the last eight Republican years, had put Nixon sharply on the defensive. By touring solid Republican country where the crowds were fairly yelling for blood, Nixon was able to let go the full jolt of the "rocking, socking" battle that he had been saving for the campaign windup.
Despite the fact that the majority of the crowds enjoyed Nixon's blunt attacks, newsmen noted a tenseness in the Vice President, apparently brought on by a combination of fatigue, a cold, and by his awareness of the Kennedy surge. One day he could launch a nearly violent assault on Kennedy; the next day he could be relatively passive. At times, he could touch his listeners with a recital of some poorboy family anecdote (sample: a brother who died without the pony he'd always wanted, because his father had to meet the grocery bills). At other times, some well-tried statement that had produced yelps of approval before ("It's not Jack's money, it's yours") fell flat. More and more, he focused attention on Cabot Lodge; more and more, he leaned on the magic of the Eisenhower name to show that a Nixon vote is a vote for continuity, experience, and a team.
In York, Pa. and Harrisburg, Huntingdon and Pittsburgh; in Marietta, Ohio and Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus and Toledo; in Jackson, Mich., and Battle Creek; in Danville, Ill., Mattoon and Carbondale—in the more than 40 hamlets and cities in the path of his one-week siege, Nixon struck out at Kennedy with ever sharper accusations of naivete and fear-spreading ("It's time to hot things up a bit, don't you think?" he asked one audience). Nearly everywhere churning, cheering crowds smashed to the depots to roar their encouragement as he countered the Kennedy campaign theme ("All of this yakking about America with no sense of purpose, all of this talk about America being second-rate—I'm tired of it and I don't want to hear any more talk about it") and pounded home his own ("We both know Mr. Khrushchev," said Nixon of Running Mate Henry Cabot Lodge and himself. "We have sat across the conference table with him. We have not been fooled by him").