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

  20. Dumbarton Oaks

  21. McCarthy & Cohn

  22. Ted Reardon

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SURVIVAL

  The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  Jack Kennedy had faced death often in his life. He’d spent much of his teenage years with doctors examining him, saying what an “interesting” case he presented. Leukemia, even, was mentioned. He never did manage to escape the knot he felt in his stomach, a chronic reminder of the frequent invalidism he’d lived with in youth and which now followed him into adulthood. When the Japanese destroyer cut through PT 109, barely missing him, the pounding he took said, This is what it feels like to die. Once home, the surgery performed on his back left him with a pain he was forced to live with. In London, there was the diagnosis of Addison’s.

  In 1954, Jack had a choice to make. He could play it one way, living a diminished life that would lead, very likely, to worse. Or he could risk it all—just as he’d done when he left Plum Pudding Island and swam out into that channel in hope of rescue. He was thirty-seven years old and staring at a future that promised a different sort of torture than he might have suffered at the hands of the Japanese. His steadily worsening back promised a return to the sickbed he’d endured as a boy. This time, however, his dreamed-of future would no longer be looming before him, but, rather, drifting forever into the past.

  He would, of course, throw everything he had on the table. Rather than accept a lessened existence, he chose to bet his life on the operating room.

  • • •

  The year began with him executing a masterstroke. As a freshman congressman, he’d shown his independence by withholding his signature from the sleazy Curley petition. Now, in his second year in the Senate, Kennedy made an even bolder move, separating himself from the ranks of his fellow New Englanders. He voted for the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes. This meant backing a public works project that could mean the loss of Boston Harbor’s importance as a major shipping port.

  That 1954 January vote made him an unpopular figure in Massachusetts. It wasn’t hard to understand why. The carving out of a direct route from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes could be seen in New England only in terms of its economic threat to the region. The Northeast was already in decline, and those factories engaged in shoemaking and in textiles, especially, were moving to the non-unionized, cheap-labor South. If ships could find their way to the Midwest without docking at Boston Harbor, huge numbers of jobs would be lost. The men and families who relied on those jobs—the townies of Charlestown and other harbor areas—wondered aloud why their young Irish representative in Washington wasn’t now safeguarding them.

  “The story circulated around the state,” said Ken O’Donnell, who was friendly with many longshoremen, “that the Seaway was being built to take care of his father’s Merchandise Mart . . . that he was caught at last, paying off Joe Kennedy for all the money he spent on the election.”

  In 1945 Joseph P. Kennedy had purchased the Merchandise Mart, the giant Chicago landmark and, at the time, the largest building in the world. Who stood to gain more from the opening of a direct shipping lane to the Atlantic than the man reaping the profits from this giant center for retailers and wholesalers situated there near Lake Michigan?

  Tip O’Neill saw a grander political motive in Kennedy’s vote. He spotted it as the first clear signal that Jack Kennedy’s horizons stretched well beyond the job he now held. “I knew Jack was serious about running for president back in 1954, when he mentioned that he intended to vote for the St. Lawrence Seaway project. The whole Northeast delegation was opposed to that bill, because once you opened the Seaway, you killed the port of Boston, which was the closest port to Europe. The Boston papers were against it, and so were the merchant marines and the longshoremen. But Jack wanted to show that he wasn’t parochial, and that he had a truly national perspective. Although he acknowledged that the Seaway would hurt Boston, he supported it because the project would benefit the country as a whole.”

  The burst of vitriol directed at him spurred his historical curiosity. “After he had been in the Senate for less than a year,” Sorensen would write in his late-in-life memoirs, “JFK called me into his office and said he wanted my help researching and writing a magazine article on the history of senatorial courage.”

  Kennedy had come upon accounts of the heat John Quincy Adams—later the country’s sixth president—had taken not quite a century and a half earlier for a transgression similar to his own. As a Massachusetts senator, Adams had voted against the economic interests of New England when he supported President Jefferson’s embargo on Great Britain because of its attacks on American ships. As a result, he lost his Senate seat. Eighteen years later, though, Adams entered the White House.

  Kennedy was another New Englander with wide ambitions. Still a Cold Warrior, he maintained his belief that the global struggle against Communism must remain his country’s prime concern. “If we do not stand firm amid the conflicting tides of neutralism, resignation, isolation, and indifference, then all will be lost, and one by one the free countries of the earth will fall until finally the direct assault will begin on the great citadel—the United States,” he would declare in a 1956 commencement speech at Boston College. He had only contempt for those men and women—and this included fellow Democrats—who refused to regard the fight against Communism as the essential struggle of the times.

  Yet he worried how the struggle was being waged. A stark example was the desperate French fight in Indochina. Weakened by its humiliation in World War II, France was fighting to regain its international stature, to hold on to its colonial empire. Its conflict with the popular Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, had become a grinding war of attrition. Many on the American right, Vice President Richard Nixon included, wanted to go to the aid of the French. Communism, they felt, must be resisted on every square inch of global real estate.

  When the North Vietnamese forces, the Viet Minh, surrounded the French army at Dien Bien Phu in ’54, Nixon grew more hawkish still, telling news editors he supported sending “American boys” to replace them. He then backed a secret plan, code-named “Operation Vulture,” to drop atom bombs on the Viet Minh. He, other Republicans, and some Democrats like Jack Kennedy had blamed President Truman for “losing” China by not giving sufficient aid to the anti-Communist Chiang Kai-shek. The Eisenhower administration could not afford to lose Indochina.

  Despite his own anti-Communism, Jack Kennedy resisted falling into line. For the first time, he broke with the Eurocentric view of the Cold War. He also challenged the Republicans’ position that the United States could defend itself worldwide on the basis of its nuclear supremacy alone. We could not intimidate an adversary such as Ho Chi Minh with the threat of dropping a hydrogen bomb in the jungles of Indochina. It would not be credible.

  The argument he was using was the same one he’d employed to justify Britain’s failure to confront Hitler at Munich: the capability to fight such a war was not in place. “To pour money, material and men into the jungles of Indo-China without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive. I am, frankly, of the belief that no amount of military assistance in Indo-China can conquer an enemy that is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”

  Equally important to him was the reality he’d seen for himself during his trip to Indochina three years earlier. And that reality was the power of nationalism. On this issue Jack Kennedy found common ground with the newly elected Republican senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, who demanded, as the price for American aid, that the French promise Indochina its independence.

  But it was closer to home that Cold War issues were causing Senator Kennedy the greatest challenges. Since January 1950, Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican junior sen
ator from Wisconsin, had made himself into a force to be reckoned with. His relentless effort to unearth Communists within the government and the American establishment made “McCarthyism” the one-size-fits-all label pinned to the national Red hunt. With bullying zeal, McCarthy and his Senate subcommittee unjustly tarnished and in some cases ruined reputations.

  McCarthy was fueled by the temper of the times. In August 1945, the people of America had looked out upon a world dominated by the United States as by no other country in history. Within a year, the geopolitical shifts were so alarming that Winston Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain being drawn down between free Western Europe and an Eastern Europe falling increasingly under the control of Moscow. Within two years, the victory in Europe had largely been undone. Czechoslovakia and Poland, the countries that had been the casus belli of World War II, were now under Soviet domination.

  Other news from around the globe added to the sense of disillusion and insecurity across America. In 1949, the same year Mao Tse-tung claimed all of mainland China, the Soviets exploded their first atom bomb, an event that occurred shockingly in advance of American predictions—or expectations.

  In 1950 came the conviction of the top American diplomat Alger Hiss, who’d presided at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, which Jack Kennedy covered for Hearst, for his role in a Soviet espionage plot. The fear of Communism on the advance would spike violently with the coming of the Korean War. In July of that year, a thirty-two-year-old New Yorker, Julius Rosenberg, was arrested for helping to pass atomic secrets to Moscow; a month later, his wife, Ethel, was taken into custody.

  This was the national mood when Joseph McCarthy entered stage right. He’d begun his crusade in January of 1950 in a speech to a Republican women’s group in Wheeling, West Virginia. There he borrowed phrases from a speech Richard Nixon had just given on the Hiss conviction. McCarthy upped the ante by declaring that Hiss was only the iceberg’s tip, that the State Department actually, if unknowingly, harbored large numbers of dedicated Communists—and all committed to the sabotage of American interests in favor of those of the Soviet Union. Unchecked, he would ride high on the brazenness of such charges, reaching his zenith of popularity in January 1954. At that juncture, 50 percent of the American people held a favorable opinion of the Wisconsin senator, just 29 percent an unfavorable one.

  But his downhill slide was about to begin, precipitated by CBS’s Edward R. Murrow, a broadcaster who’d made his reputation reporting from London during the Blitz and who was revered for his integrity. In March 1954, Murrow aired a special entitled Point of Order! in which he attacked McCarthy, and dared him to present an on-air rebuttal. McCarthy’s response offers a classic example of how he strung together events to craft his outrageous indictments.

  “My good friends,” he said, “if there were no Communists in our government, would we have consented to and connived to turn over all of our Chinese friends to the Russians? If there were no Communists in our government, why did we delay for eighteen months, delay our research on the hydrogen bomb, even though our intelligence agencies were reporting day after day that the Russians were feverishly pushing their development of the H-Bomb? Our nation may well die because of that eighteen months’ deliberate delay. And I ask you, who caused it? Was it loyal Americans? Or was it traitors in our government?”

  There you have it, an absurd but compelling case against those in high places. It was the old charge of rot at the top. If the Chinese Communists took over China, it was the doing of Commies in our own government. If the Russians had sprinted forward and now had flaunted their H-bomb, it was because we’d slowed down to let them catch us. In short, if anything bad happened, the reason is we were stabbed in the back.

  McCarthy loved charging respected figures with bad faith, thus lending a catchy populism to his accusations of treason. In his view, it was the country’s best and brightest who were selling us out. “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in government we can give.”

  To validate this belief system, he fixed in his sights on such lofty officials as President Truman himself, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and his predecessor, George Marshall, who’d been army chief of staff in World War II. He attacked them all, famously calling Marshall the perpetrator of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”

  Of course, no demagogue ever has a lifetime career, and Joe McCarthy’s own downfall was determined when he decided to focus his crusade on the presence of hidden Communists in the U.S. Army. The target he selected for attack was an army major, Dr. Irving Peress, a dentist who’d been a member of the American Labor Party, believed to be a Communist Party front. When Peress’s commanding officer at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker—a Silver and Bronze Star recipient who’d been a hero of the Battle of the Bulge—appeared before his committee, the senator taunted him, saying he was “not fit to wear that uniform.”

  That encounter showed the extent to which McCarthy was beginning to spiral out of control. His absolute fall from grace came a month later in a moment of television history. The newly launched American Broadcasting Corporation, ABC, covered gavel to gavel the thirty-six days of hearings convened. The April 1954 broadcasts of the Army-McCarthy proceedings gave the audience sitting at home the chance to examine McCarthy’s own conduct as well as the wild charges he brought against army personnel.

  Thus, with the entire country watching—on some days, as many as 20 million people—he self-destructed, with the help of a righteous attorney, Joseph Nye Welch, the army’s chief counsel, who objected to the senator’s innuendo-filled attack on one of his staff lawyers for a past membership in a left-wing legal group. Voicing his distaste, he accused McCarthy of “reckless cruelty” and then asked whether he had “no decency.” It was a stunningly unexpected comeback, and one that marked McCarthy as a pure bully. For the first time, many Americans focused on Joe McCarthy’s tactics and didn’t like the looks of them.

  Not everyone turned on McCarthy. More than a third of the country remained loyal to him after the five weeks of legal spectacle. His fellow Irish-Americans were especially defiant, seeing him as a lonely challenger to the country’s political, diplomatic, and academic elites.

  Within days of the Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, a Republican, introduced a resolution to censure his colleague and remove him from the chairmanship of his committees. It read, in part, “Were the Wisconsin senator in the pay of the Communists, he could not have done a better job for them.” Now that public opinion had turned on him, the Democrats were free to cast Joe McCarthy as their ultimate archvillain.

  • • •

  Jack Kennedy had a McCarthy problem and he knew it. Joining his fellow Democrats, who were now calling for McCarthy’s head on a pike, put him in a serious dilemma. For one thing, up until this moment he’d successfully managed to say nothing on the subject of Joe McCarthy’s harsh tactics. It was a silence he would, in the years to come, always have to answer for. Outside the Senate, moreover, he was actually known to be quite friendly with the man. The pair of them had hung around together during Jack’s early congressional days, and McCarthy, handsome in a Black Irish way, had been out on dates with Jack’s sisters. A close friend of Bobby’s wife, Ethel, McCarthy was a kind of unofficial uncle to their two young children, especially the eldest, Kathleen. Because of his friendship with the Kennedys, McCarthy had refrained from endorsing his fellow Senate Republican Henry Cabot Lodge in the race he lost to Jack. The December before, Jack had been a guest at McCarthy’s wedding, as had many of the Kennedy family.

  Another problem for Jack was Bobby’s closeness to the senator. For half the previous year
, he’d been a McCarthy staffer. Their father, a financial supporter of the Republican senator as well as a friend, had helped pave the way for the job. However, Bobby had quit, smarting under the fact that he was outranked by the senator’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, a fellow whom he despised. But his departure didn’t last long. The next January he switched sides, hired now by the investigating committee’s Democratic minority as its chief counsel.

  When the time came for the Democrats to move against McCarthy, it would fall to the twenty-eight-year-old Bobby, despite his continued personal loyalty, to write the draft of the Democratic members’ report on the senator’s out-of-control conduct. While it targeted Cohn’s behavior, it placed responsibilities on the committee’s chairman. “Senator McCarthy and Mr. Cohn merit severe criticism,” and “the Senator cannot escape responsibility for the misconduct of Cohn. Nor can he excuse the irresponsibility attaching to many of his charges. The Senate should take action to correct this situation.”

  Still, it was one thing to staff the committee report, as Bobby, acting in his official capacity, had done. It would be a very different matter to vote for the historic censure of a colleague—a man who was also a friend—as Jack would now be asked to do.

  There had actually been rumblings against McCarthy in the Senate for several years at this point, including a declaration made by his own party members that denounced smear tactics—in effect, McCarthyism—without mentioning the names of any specific lawmaker. In response, McCarthy contemptuously dubbed Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who originated the declaration, along with the six fellow Republicans who joined her, “Snow White and Her Six Dwarfs.” With the Army-McCarthy hearings having weakened McCarthy and made him at last vulnerable, Senator Flanders’s intention was now to deliver the coup de grâce.