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Guns & Eggs. Nixon saved most of his biggest guns for the biggest crowds. In Pittsburgh, where 5,500 people jammed the Syria Mosque and 1,000 more swarmed outside, and in Cincinnati (18,000 partisans), the Vice President got echoing ovations, clenched his fist and raked Kennedy. The rise in the price of gold on the international markets (see BUSINESS) was a result of the world's distrust of Kennedy's avowed economic policies, he said. "He's been up three times," cried Nixon to the baseball-conscious Pittsburghers. "He's struck out three times, and now he wants to be the cleanup hitter!" The campaign, said he, "is beginning to run in a great tide in our direction."
Nixon had saved a few bold foreign-policy promises for the final fortnignt's campaigning. In Toledo Nixon promised, if elected, to ask Ike on Nov. 9 to send Cabot Lodge off to Geneva as U.S. negotiator at the two-year-old Geneva atom-test talks. If the talks succeeded, there would be a summit. If they failed by Feb. 1, "the U.S. will be prepared to detonate atomic devices necessary to advance our peaceful technology." In Muskegon, Mich, next day, Nixon promised, if elected—in a manner reminiscent of Ike's "I will go to Korea"—to tour the Russian satellite capitals in person, to "at least let them see that we haven't forgotten them."
In Grand Rapids, Nixon's appearance was a genuine triumph. So packed were the crowds in downtown Campau Square that weary newsmen could not get through to the rostrum. There, as in Muskegon, anti-Nixon demonstrators pelted the visitors with eggs and tomatoes; one egg hit Nixon in the leg, another struck a Secret Service agent.* ("I have been heckled by experts," Nixon cried, "so don't try anything on me or we'll take care of you!")
Lift for the Hurdles. After touring the Republican strongholds of southern Illinois, Nixon arrived by plane in Davenport, Iowa and got the biggest lift of the week. It was Dwight Eisenhower's pungent political war cry, and Nixon, watching Ike on TV from his hotel room, recovered from a good deal of his gloom. He hurried right out to Davenport's Masonic Auditorium, where a Republican crowd of more than 3,000 had heard the President's speech on big-screen TV. The President, said Nixon, spoke "with great eloquence and conviction tonight. He spoke much too generously about my qualifications." Then Nixon enthusiastically took up the Ike pace and belted out a fight talk of his own.
As he got ready to push on into the final week of the cam paign (New York, South Carolina, Texas, Wyoming, Washington, California), Nixon could figure that the whistle-stop tour and Ike's impressive last-minute intervention had helped to reinforce his margin in areas where Republicans should run strong. Would it also reverse the Kennedy trend so many people were talking about? The hurdles ahead for Richard Nixon were high and hard, and he was tired and anything but cocky.