Nixon Comes To Boston

September 29, 1960 — Park Square, downtown Boston, Massachusetts. Evening, after rain.

The eye is meant to go to the motorcade, and it does. But the honest object in this photograph sits off on the lower-left sidewalk, minding its own business: a ten-foot illuminated baseball with the word JIMMY painted across the leather, and behind it a billboard urging Boston to help children's cancer research, because THIS IS JIMMY FUND TIME. The Jimmy Fund had begun in 1948 as a radio appeal tied to the Boston Braves; when the Braves decamped for Milwaukee in 1953 and left the city a baseball team short, the Red Sox and Ted Williams adopted the charity as their own, and it has funded the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ever since. The seasonal fundraising drives ran through late summer into autumn, which is the surest clock in the frame — more reliable, certainly, than the men in the convertibles, who were selling something with a shorter shelf life. Of everything glowing on this street tonight, the baseball is the only thing doing measurable good.

The convertibles were doing the other thing. The dark car at center-right carries the banner NIXON LODGE, and the second name is the whole reason this caravan was crawling through Park Square in the first place. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was Massachusetts aristocracy of the purest vintage — grandson of a senator, himself a United States senator until 1952, when a young congressman named John F. Kennedy took the seat away from him. Richard Nixon put Lodge on the ticket to reclaim New England and to needle Kennedy on his own ground, the reasoning being that a Boston Brahmin with a UN ambassadorship could carry the region Kennedy assumed was his birthright. Staging a Republican rally in Kennedy's home city was therefore not an accident of the schedule but the entire point: a demonstration, mounted in enemy territory, that the enemy could be inconvenienced at home. Whether inconveniencing a man in his home city translates into votes is a question the ballot would answer later, and unkindly.

The day that produced this image was a small masterpiece of exhaustion. Nixon had already held rallies that same day in New York City, in Burlington, Vermont, and in Manchester, New Hampshire before his plane came down toward Boston, and he arrived around half past five into a steady downpour, roughly an hour behind a schedule that had been optimistic to begin with. The rain did not thin the crowd. An estimated quarter of a million people lined the route from Logan through downtown and into Park Square — the largest crowd Nixon had drawn anywhere in the campaign to that point — to watch a motorcade pass on its way to a fundraising dinner at the Commonwealth Armory. That dinner was itself a piece of period ambition: a nationwide closed-circuit television hookup stitched dozens of Republican banquets together across the country, President Eisenhower addressed the whole network by feed, and Nixon then spoke live to the nation from the armory floor. There is a quiet cruelty in the timing. Three nights earlier, on September 26, Nixon had faced Kennedy in the first televised presidential debate and lost it not on argument but on appearance — pale and underweight after an August hospitalization, sweating under lights that flattered his opponent — and here he was seventy-two hours later staking the evening on television as a marvel of reach and modernity. The medium giveth. Behind all of it sat the Cold War: Nikita Khrushchev was in New York berating the United Nations General Assembly that very stretch of September, and Nixon spent much of his speech promising to keep America ahead of the Soviets, which was the reliable applause line of a decade that had a great deal to be nervous about.

The street itself is a catalogue of a moment about to end. The cars parked along the top are late-1950s American iron at its most confident — tailfins, acreage of chrome, and the pastel two-tone paint schemes that Detroit had spent the decade insisting Americans wanted and was, by 1960, already quietly abandoning. A police cruiser sits parked at a deliberate diagonal on the left, blocking the roadway to hold the crowd back from the motorcade, which is the kind of arrangement that looks like protection and functions as choreography. The crowd wears overcoats and hats almost to a person, partly for the cool damp of a Boston autumn and partly because this was the last decade in American life in which a crowd dressed itself formally by default simply to stand outdoors and look at something. Neon does the rest of the work: a gift shop and a restaurant burn along the upper right, a lit sign reads DOORS above the parked cars, and Park Square hums as the transit and hotel hub it then was, the Statler nearby, the bus terminals close at hand, a natural place for a caravan to pause and be admired. The photograph was taken from a high window looking straight down, which is fitting — this is precisely the vantage the campaign's own planners would have chosen, enthusiasm rendered as a diagram, a crowd converted into evidence.

And the evidence was worthless. Six weeks later Massachusetts handed Kennedy roughly three of every five votes it cast, one of the largest margins any state gave him, and Nixon lost the presidency by a sliver nationally while losing Kennedy's home turf in a landslide. Lodge, the ticket's New England insurance policy, delivered New England to the other side. The quarter-million umbrellas in the rain amounted to a spectacular attendance figure and nothing whatever on the tally sheet, which is the oldest lesson in electoral politics and the one every campaign is certain does not apply to its own crowds. Of the Republicans smiling from these cars, the single winner that November was John Volpe, running for governor, who is not the man the banners were advertising.

The baseball, by contrast, raised money for sick children and asked no one for their vote. It remains, on the whole, the most successful campaign visible in the frame.