Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

  Mark Dalton remembered another moment when Kennedy stood out. “I’m going to debate Norman Thomas at the Harvard Law School,” said Jack one day, surprising Dalton, who had arrived at his friend’s Boston apartment to find the congressman hard at work. So now his young friend was going to take on the quadrennial candidate of the Socialist Party. “There was Kennedy sitting on the sofa. There were two or three books open there and six or seven books on the floor opened. Each one had been written by Norman Thomas. The next day I got reports from several people, and everyone was agreed that John Kennedy had won the debate with Thomas.”

  Again, the old dichotomy. His colleagues saw the popular bachelor who lived the good life in Georgetown, the rich kid with such a great sense of humor. Few noticed the other Jack, the occasional Cold Warrior, the autodidact who crammed for off-campus debates, who quietly but steadily was preparing himself for something greater than labor law.

  Like others, his secretary Mary Davis would come to learn that Jack Kennedy was not the fop he played so charmingly. For all the fun she saw him having, she could catch that spark of brilliance. “He didn’t make that many speeches, and we didn’t issue that many position papers when he was here in the House, but when he wanted to write a speech, he did it. I would say ninety-nine percent of that was done by JFK himself.

  “I can remember the first time he ever called me in—I even forget what the speech was going to be on, but it was going to be a major speech, one of his first major speeches. And I thought, ‘Oh, oh, this young, green congressman. What’s he going to do?’ No preparation. He called me in and he says, ‘I think we’d better get to work on the speech.’ And I said, ‘Okay, fine.’ And I thought he was going to stumble around, and he’ll ’er, ah, um.’

  “I was never so startled in my life. He sat back in his chair, and it just flowed right out. He had such a grasp of what he was saying, and was able to put it in such beautiful language. I thought, ‘Wow. This guy has a brain.’ I mean, you didn’t get that impression when you first met him because he looked so young and casual and informal. But he knew what it was all about. He knew about everything.”

  Richard Nixon had a similar epiphany. Ted Reardon recalled the time that Jack became deeply focused on an issue before the Education and Labor Committee, so much so that he went himself to the National Archives to look something up. “At the hearing, the thing I remember is when Jack started to talk, Dicky Boy sort of looked at him . . . with a look between awe and respect and fear.”

  Jack’s greatest secret remained his bad health, the extent of which, until then, was unknown even to him. When Kennedy arrived in Washington that January, his problems had followed. “He was not feeling well,” Mary Davis noticed. “I mean, he still had his jaundice, he still had his back problems.”

  “Emaciated!” is how his fellow congressman George Smathers of Florida remembers his frail classmate. The Florida Democrat, who had been assigned to the same hallway as Kennedy, vividly recalls that “every time there was a roll call, he’d have to come over on his crutches.” Wanting to help, Smathers often would stop by Jack’s office to give him a hand as his new friend made the painful journey across Independence Avenue to the Capitol to vote.

  The various maladies from which he visibly suffered were being blamed on his war traumas, but that explanation, while infinitely useful spinwise, was only part of the story. For Jack the truth lay deeper, and he was about to discover it.

  During the summer recess of 1947, a group of congressmen, Dick Nixon included, headed to Europe to study the impact of the Marshall Plan, which was now being implemented. For a bon voyage gesture—one that was, apparently, ignored—Kennedy had sent his married California colleague the names of a few women he might look up while in Paris. For himself, Kennedy also set off across the Atlantic, first to Ireland with his sister Kick, then to the Continent along with a Republican colleague to look into the Communist influence on European labor unions.

  Arriving in London after falling ill on the first leg of his journey, he was rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a serious disorder of the adrenal glands. Prior to Jack’s release, the attending physician offered this grim prognosis to Jack’s English traveling companion. “That American friend of yours, he hasn’t got a year to live.” Just as the Queen Mary docked in New York, a priest came aboard to administer to him the last rites.

  • • •

  He had lost his older brother in 1944. The husband of his beloved Kick had died the following year. Yet, on the return voyage home from England and near death, he showed himself as politically curious as ever. Much of his time was spent quizzing a fellow passenger on the new British health service created by the Labour Party.

  Jack continued to keep tight the compartments of his life. Like the ship’s captain he still was, he knew he couldn’t sink if he kept each of them strongly secure from the other. In Georgetown, he basked in a princely life, attended by a housekeeper, Margaret Ambrose, and a valet, George Thomas, who delivered a home-cooked hot lunch to his Capitol office each day.

  Meanwhile, Billy Sutton was with him 24/7, since Jack still couldn’t stand to be alone. On those nights he didn’t have a date for the movies, his “firecracker” provided entertainment and company. Mary Davis explained the dynamic between the two men this way: “He was someone he could completely relax with, who would be available, and who would be on call, who could do a thousand and one things for Jack, just being there, knowing that he had a friend close by.”

  Referring to the townhouse they shared on Thirty-first Street NW as akin to a “Hollywood Hotel,” Billy cherished the memories of all the gorgeous women coming and going. “Thinking about girls is what kept Jack alive,” he said.

  Playing the field, rejecting any definite romantic attachments, gave him the freedom he craved. Refusing to give fealty to the Democratic leadership or to the liberal old guard gave him the independence he treasured. Being able to enter each world without the baggage from the other gave him the breezy, debonair life he wanted. Anywhere he went he could simply be Jack Kennedy, the guy he wanted to be, the one he’d made himself.

  “He did have a lot of close associations,” Mary Davis recalled. But not “a lot of close personal friendships.” Charlie Bartlett recalls the detached way his friend regarded political colleagues, no matter their status. “He used to enjoy kidding about the personalities on the scene, and there used to be a lot of jokes about different personalities from Sam Rayburn down, and even some sort of gossiping about the foibles of some of the senior statesmen in Congress.” He liked to watch what they were up to, enjoyed charting their purposes and behavior—but at a distance.

  George Smathers was the rare social friend Jack made in the House of Representatives. A marine in World War II, and son of a federal judge in Florida, he’d gotten to know Jack’s father at the Hialeah Park Race Track in Miami. Smathers, not to put too fine a point on it, was a hack, knew it, and enjoyed it—and this gave him, for Jack, a special aura of honesty. Confiding that he voted whatever way would keep him in office, this made him, in a world of hypocrites, special indeed.

  Kennedy told Charlie Bartlett he liked Smathers “because he doesn’t give a damn.” If he judged Dick Nixon to be the “smartest” guy on the Hill in those days, his pal George was the most fun to hang out with.

  Smathers knew his role: he was Falstaff. Jack was still playing Hal, a prince whose fears, in those days, were not—or not yet—of coming kingship but of mortality. Smathers remembers his pal being “deeply preoccupied by death,” talking endlessly on a Florida fishing trip about the best ways to die. He remembered Kennedy deciding it had to be drowning, “but only if you lost consciousness.”

  “Quick”—that was the key. “The point is, you’ve got to live each day like it’s your last day on earth,” he recalled Jack telling him. “That’s what I’m doing.” Ted Reardon recalled a similar conversation on the way home from Capitol Hill one late afternoon in Jack’s conve
rtible. “It was a bright, shining day. We had the top down. Out of the blue he said, ‘What do you think is the best way of dying?’ ” A new friend, the newspaper columnist and Georgetown mandarin Joseph Alsop, recalled Jack’s bluntness when it came to his short-range outlook. “Unless I’m very mistaken, he said that as a matter of fact, he had a kind of slow-acting—very slow-acting—leukemia and that he did not expect to live more than ten years or so, but there was no use thinking about it and he was going to do the best he could and enjoy himself as much as he could in the time that was given him.”

  Alsop could clearly see there was cause for worry. “He used to turn green at intervals,” he recalled. “He was about the color of pea soup.”

  As he had all his life, Jack found refuge from his health worries in the power of words and ideas. Reading remained his salvation, and not just of the newspapers that are the daily fare of most politicians. Billy Sutton recalls him staying up late at night with Arthur Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson. Mark Dalton, perhaps the most thoughtful of the people around him back then, recalled a visit to Hyannis Port one weekend when Kennedy called him and another friend up to his bedroom.

  He wanted to read them a passage by Churchill, possibly one from his magnificent study of the Duke of Marlborough, a heroic ancestor. “Did you ever read anything like that in all your life?” Kennedy demanded, thrilled again by his hero’s work.

  Dalton, obviously very fond of his friend in those days, believed he saw a side of Jack that rarely showed itself to others. “As I look back, the things that I liked most about John Kennedy were the small flashes of sentiment.” He recalled a particular incident. “One morning I was at mass with him in the early congressional days down at the Cape, at St. Francis there. We were alone. We were about to leave the church, and John said, ‘Will you wait a minute? I want to go in and light a candle for Joe.’ And I was stunned at it. But it showed the deep attachment that he had for his brother Joe, and it also showed his religious nature. You know, there was a strong bond.

  “Another day I can remember riding along with him in the car. He was driving. It was over by the Charles River here in Boston and he was humming a tune to himself, but he was way off. And I said to him, ‘What are you thinking about?’ And he said, ‘I was thinking of Joe.’ ”

  He would soon lose someone closer still. His sister Kathleen, widowed when her husband, Billy Hartington, was killed in 1945, now was being courted by another English aristocrat, Peter Fitzwilliam. In February 1948, Kick took the bold step of telling her mother about this new relationship. It was with yet another Protestant, this one married. Her mother threatened to disown her. But nothing could dissuade Kathleen. She had found true, passionate love and would not let go.

  Now came tragedy. She and Fitzwilliam had left Paris on a chartered flight to Cannes. They had persisted in flying despite the bad weather, and then, in heavy rain, their plane crashed into the side of a mountain. Jack was listening to music on his Victrola when the first, preliminary call came.

  When the next call confirmed the tragedy, he sat quietly listening to a recording of the Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow. He would never make it to the funeral of the person he loved most. Setting out for the flight to Europe, he got only as far as New York. For whatever reason, he couldn’t go on.

  “He was in terrible pain,” Lem Billings recalled of Jack. “He couldn’t get through the days without thinking of her at the most inappropriate times. He’d be sitting at a congressional hearing and he’d find his mind drifting back uncontrollably to all the things he and Kathleen had done together and all the friends they had in common.”

  Chuck Spalding could see the specter the deaths of his friend’s brother and sister had left in their wake. “He always heard the footsteps. Death was there. It had taken Joe and Kick and it was waiting for him.”

  Now he started to take risks. In September 1948 Kennedy decided to make a target of the powerful American Legion, declaring that this mainstream, middle-American organization of veterans hadn’t had “a constructive thought since 1918.” It was one of those marks of independence—his risk-taking again—that helped make him a hero to the young.

  One of those who thrilled to Jack’s taking on the Legion was Kenneth O’Donnell. A Harvard roommate of Bobby Kennedy and captain of the football team, he’d served in the Army Air Corps. When Jack “took on the American Legion,” said O’Donnell, “that was big to the average veteran.” Veterans, O’Donnell believed, were looking for “a fresh face in politics.”

  Jack Kennedy fully intended to be that face. Dave Powers had put a Massachusetts map on the wall of Kennedy’s Boston apartment, with colored pins indicating towns Jack had visited. “When we’ve got the map completely covered with pins,” Jack told his aide, “that’s when I’ll announce that I’m going to run for statewide office.”

  By his second year in Congress, Jack Kennedy had committed to a cause: the Cold War. He’d already triggered a mild stir with his tough grilling of the left-leaning Russ Nixon and his indictment of Harold Christoffel. In 1948, when East Germany cut off West Berlin, Kennedy went there and saw for himself the heroic survival of its people, as well as the pro-American loyalty the situation was instilling.

  As General Lucius Clay, commander of the American zone, put it, “the Russians, by their actions, have given us the political soul of Germany on a platter.” The spirit of the West Berliners stayed with Jack for years to come.

  Back home, the pursuit of the Communist threat continued to stir emotions. Dick Nixon had just led the successful exposure of Alger Hiss, America’s top diplomat at the U.N. Conference in San Francisco. For denying that he had ever been a Communist, the well-connected Hiss now stood indicted for perjury. Jack, who saw Hiss as a “traitor,” shared Nixon’s indignation at the way Hiss had managed to install himself in critical government positions through the patronage of New Deal figures.

  In September 1949 President Truman announced that the Soviets had exploded their first atom bomb, making it clear to the world that the United States no longer held a monopoly on the weapon that had ended World War II. Next came the declaration from China’s Communist rebel leader Mao Tse-tung that he had taken control of the entire Chinese mainland. America’s WWII ally Chiang Kai-shek was trapped on the island of Formosa.

  Kennedy was quick with his rebuke. “The responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State. So concerned were our diplomats with the imperfection of the democratic system of China after twenty years of war and the tales of corruption in high places that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in non-Communist China.” He accused the Truman administration of “vacillation, uncertainty, and confusion.”

  To Kennedy, America’s leaders were repeating the old prewar mistake of failing to confront aggression. Kennedy believed FDR had been as derelict in failing to stop Soviet ambitions in Asia as he had been in Europe. In a Salem, Massachusetts, speech, he described how “a sick Roosevelt with the advice of General Marshall and other chiefs of staff, gave the Kurile Islands as well as control of various strategic Chinese ports, such as Port Arthur and Darien, to the Soviet Union. This is the tragic story of China, whose freedom we once fought to preserve. What our young men have saved, the diplomats and our President have frittered away.”

  In January 1950 came another Cold War milestone. Alger Hiss, the accused Soviet spy, was convicted on two counts of lying under oath and sent to federal prison. That same month, desperate for material to use at a Lincoln Day talk to Republican women in Wheeling, West Virginia, Wisconsin’s Senator Joseph McCarthy jumped on the anti-Communist bandwagon. Cribbing from a speech Nixon had just given on the Hiss conviction, McCarthy said there were 205 Communists in the State Department. His specificity hooded the recklessness of the accusation.

  That June brought a real Communist menace. North Korea attacked American-backed South Korea. President Truman sent troops as part of a United Nations
force. The next month came stunning news at home: Julius Rosenberg was arrested for stealing atomic secrets for the Soviets. Suddenly the country was under assault abroad and at home.

  Kennedy strongly allied himself with the anti-Communist activism. While facing no political contest himself in 1950, he played a small role in helping Nixon win a Senate seat: he walked to Nixon’s office and left a thousand-dollar check from his father. When he got the word, Nixon was overwhelmed that his Democratic colleague had crossed the political aisle like that. “Isn’t this something!” he exclaimed to an aide.

  Jack wanted what Nixon now had. Since they had come to the House together, he, Nixon, and George Smathers had enjoyed running banter on which of them would graduate first to the Senate. Smathers had gotten the jump early that year, beating a fellow Democrat in a Florida campaign notorious for its Red-baiting. Nixon now used similar tactics to beat the liberal New Dealer Helen Gahagan Douglas. Kennedy had to catch up.

  “This rivalry developed and they were all shooting for the future,” said Mark Dalton. Billy Sutton saw it in personal terms: “I think the thing that sent him to the Senate was George Smathers and Richard Nixon.” He was clear about not intending to stay in the House. Jack told his new aide Larry O’Brien, whom he recruited to begin organizing Massachusetts for him politically, “I’m up or out.” And he was ready to play rough. “I’m going to run!” he told Smathers. “I’m going to use the same kind of stuff.”

  18. Jack, Ethel, and Bobby, November 1952

  CHAPTER SIX

  BOBBY

  All this business about Jack and Bobby being blood brothers has been exaggerated. They didn’t really become close until 1952, and it was politics that brought them together.

  —Eunice Kennedy Shriver

  By 1951, Jack Kennedy’s ambition was clear. He wanted very much to reach the Senate. Three times voted in, he’d proved himself an independent Democrat, an ardent anti-Communist, and he had been an efficient, if sometimes detached, steward of constituent services. Based upon his performance and popularity in such a heavily Democratic district, the House seat could have been his for life.