Nixon Hospitalized;\ Left Knee Injured\ During Visit Here\ - Greensboro Daily News headline, Aug. 30, 1960
\ Maybe it wasn't as historically significant as Napoleon at Waterloo or Roosevelt at Yalta, but Richard Nixon at Greensboro was significant in its own right. At least, Nixon thought so.He lost the 1960 presidential election here.
Politically speaking, Nixon's campaign trip to Greensboro was not considered a huge event. The thousands who went to the airport that day and to the coliseum that night described a festive atmosphere with political smiles and handshakes and back slaps befitting a vice presidential visit. His stops later that week in Atlanta and Birmingham drew far more national coverage.
National coverage of the Greensboro trip would come almost a week later, when Nixon ended up in the hospital.
Nixon was said to have bumped his knee here, though no one saw it. Nixon himself said he remembered doing it, but he couldn't remember where it happened. Less than three months later, after losing the election, Nixon would say the bump on the knee was the beginning of his undoing.
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On Aug. 18, 1960, Richard Milhous Nixon, the 47-year-old Republican vice president, came to Greensboro in the final days of his first campaign for the presidency. He was in a tight race with John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a young Democrat who was clearly the candidate of choice in the Democratic stronghold of the South.
``The Republicans just weren't that strong here,' former Greensboro Mayor Carson Bain recalled. ``The party just wasn't that big. I remember Nixon coming here, and I remember going to see him, but I went only because I had to.'
Bain, a Democrat, was part of a small welcoming committee that met the vice president's party at the airport. Nixon was starting the Southern swing of a campaign tour that covered 14 states and more than 9,000 miles. That month also included two weeks in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington and ended with a nationally televised debate with Kennedy.
``I wasn't a big fan of Richard Nixon,' Bain said. ``I greeted him at the airport and sat up there on the stage, but it was just protocol. I felt like I had to. But I don't remember him hurting his knee. I just didn't see it. I heard something about it later.'
The whole nation heard about it later, in part because a very small press corps followed the vice president to Greensboro that day. Tom Wicker, then with The New York Times Washington Bureau, said it was days later before anyone knew about the bump on the knee.
``There weren't that many national writers there,' he said. ``I'm not sure who was there, to be honest with you. It didn't seem like much at the time, but it sure did later. The consequences of that trip were something.'
In his 1990 memoirs, ``In the Arena,' Nixon described it as something else.
He would lose the 1960 election by fewer than 119,000 votes out of more than 69 million cast. He would point to several reasons for the loss in later years, but he would always come back to the bump on the knee.
A lot of other people did, too.
Nixon hit his knee against a car door either at the airport or at the Greensboro Coliseum that evening. Newspaper reports describe a wild scene when he got in and out of the car.
A Greensboro police officer, Sgt. R.E. Medbury, was Nixon's driver that day. He said at the time that he, too, was slightly injured when the crowd surged and pinned him against the car.
Medbury received a slight leg injury, but Nixon apparently slammed his right knee against a door jam, suffering a cut and a bruise.
Conrad Paysour, a reporter with the Greensboro Daily News, remembered the crowds that followed the vice president and the scene at the coliseum that night.
``It was absolutely electric,' Paysour said. ``It was a lot like a basketball game, an ACC Tournament game. It beat anything I ever saw.'
But Paysour said he, too, missed the fateful injury.
``I just don't remember anything about that,' he said.
No one did. Nixon didn't mention it at the time, and only when he began to limp slightly in the days that followed did anyone say anything to him. He had taken to retiring into his plane seat with a hot compress on his knee, which by then had begun to throb and swell.
Less than a week after the Greensboro stop, he was in the hospital.
A routine checkup revealed a staph infection, one that had begun to attack his red blood cells and was causing him to lose sleep and his appetite.
Doctors decided the campaign would have to stop.
``They put him in the hospital for two weeks,' Wicker said. ``He should have stayed longer. When he got out, he wasn't well.'
Nixon, convinced he was losing the election while lying on his back, decided to leave the hospital and step up his campaign. The decision would prove ominous. The frantic effort to catch up before the first presidential debate, only two weeks away, took him to Baltimore, Indianapolis, Dallas and St. Louis in just three days, and then to Portland, Ore.; Vancouver, British Columbia; Boise, Idaho; Grand Forks, N.D.; Peoria, Ill.; and St. Louis.
In St. Louis, an exhausted Nixon developed the flu. He was still sick as he traveled to Atlantic City, N.J.; Roanoke, Va.; Sioux City, Iowa; and Minneapolis-St. Paul. He was left physically and mentally drained.
When he arrived in Chicago for the first of the four debates, he had lost at least 10 pounds, and he had bags under his eyes and a pallor that suggested an illness far beyond a sore knee.
Wicker, in his 1991 book on Nixon, ``One of Us,' wrote of a depleted, shrinking candidate who arrived at the first debate two weeks after Greensboro in a state of physical exhaustion. The largest television audience in history tuned in.
``That huge audience,' Wicker wrote, `` saw a worn-down, thin Nixon not yet recovered from his hospital stay and exhausted by the intensive travel schedule he'd subsequently followed.'
Nixon, by most accounts, did well in the first debate. By his account, he lost because of how he looked.
Watching on television in Texas that night, Nixon's running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, is said to have slammed down his fist and blurted, ``That son of a (expletive) just lost us the election!'
Wicker and many of the reporters covering the campaign thought the same thing. Like many others, they considered the bump on the knee as the turning point.
``The consequences of that were something,' Wicker said. ``It may well have cost him the election. That election was so close. There were more than 60 million votes cast, and the difference was only 118,000 votes. Almost anything could have cost him the election. Including that bump on the knee.
``That was certainly why he looked so gaunt and weak in that first debate. I remember his beard shadow, and he always had that beard shadow, but it seemed worse that night. He looked bad, really bad,' Wicker said. ``And he was wearing a shirt that didn't fit him because he'd lost so much weight. His neck collar was way too big, and his neck looked scrawny inside that collar. It made him look unattractive. It was a real contrast with him standing there looking sick and Kennedy standing there looking so young and strong.
``I was there, and that struck me, but I didn't think he'd lost the debate. I went back and watched it a few years ago, and I still don't think he lost the debate. There just weren't that many issues they differed on. But the general consensus was that Nixon's appearance at that debate really hurt him, and that bump on the knee is what started it all.'
Years later, after winning presidential elections in 1968 and 1972, after Watergate and his resignation in 1974, Nixon said he often thought of the 1960 campaign. He remained convinced that the first of the four debates had more to do with the outcome than all the other issues raised during the election: civil rights, foreign policy, Kennedy's Catholicism, the economy or rumors of vote fraud in several states.
``It is hard not to conclude that my bum knee was one of the factors that could have made the difference,' he wrote in 1990.
Nixon became wistful in the years before his death and would ultimately describe the event in terms far greater than a ``bum knee.' In his final memoirs he compared the wounded knee to Napoleon's hemorrhoids at Waterloo, Woodrow Wilson's stroke during the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and FDR's physical state at Yalta.
``Do great men make history as Carlyle insisted, or does history make great men, which both Tolstoy's novels and Toynbee's massive 'Study of History' suggest?' Nixon wrote. ``While we cannot be sure, I believe a strong case can be made in at least three cases. Illnesses of great men may have changed the course of history.'
In the 1960 election, a bump on the knee in Greensboro might not have changed the course of history, but it at least slowed things down a bit.