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

  • • •

  Now Jack Kennedy had survived another brush with death. He was helped through the crisis by the one strong emotional reality of his life: old friendships. One name high on the list was Red Fay. “In January 1955, Bobby called to ask if I could come to Florida. The family was worried about Jack, and didn’t know whether he was going to live. The doctor felt that he was losing interest, and a visit from someone closely associated with happier times might help him regain his usual optimism and enjoyment of life. I flew to Palm Beach and spent ten days with him.”

  It was an opportunity for someone who cared about him to realize what Jack was up against. Fay watched as his recuperating friend gave himself a shot as part of the treatment for his back. “ ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘the way you take that jab, it looks like it doesn’t even hurt.’ Before I had time to dodge, he reached over and jabbed the same needle into my leg. I screamed with the pain.”

  Down in Palm Beach, with time on his hands, surrounded by Jackie and family members, he took up oil painting and spent hours playing Monopoly. His convalescence lasted for almost six months and was interrupted only by a trip back to New York for a second surgery. While in Florida he grew close to his new brother-in-law, the young Hollywood star Peter Lawford, who’d married Patricia Kennedy the year before. “I think we hit it off because he loved my business. He loved anything to do with the arts and motion pictures. It never ceased to amaze me.”

  The British-born Lawford, who’d been in films since he was a young boy, observed Jack with an actor’s keen eye. He got as good a look at him as anybody. “I don’t think anybody ever made up John Kennedy’s mind for him. I don’t think anybody swayed him, including his father. I think he took what he wanted and then sifted it, you know, evaluated it. Then he did what he wanted to do with it.” Lawford was amazed at Kennedy’s self-discipline and his will to make the most of every day, the preciousness of time to him. “He was really ill with that back, but he fought his way through that, and, as you know, wrote the book while he was lying on his back.”

  The book was Profiles in Courage. It was Kennedy’s tribute to eight U.S. senators who during their legislative careers had taken positions highly unpopular with their constituents. Though Kennedy dug up the stories and sketched out his intentions, Ted Sorensen did most of the actual writing. So it’s fair to call the project a collaboration. The bookish child had been father to the man. “He was enormously well read in American history and literature,” Hugh Fraser, the British politician and longtime friend, recalled. “I mean, to me, staggeringly so.” Charlie Bartlett saw the book as an obvious undertaking for Jack. “I think the whole concept of the really gutsy decisions made by men with seats in the Senate fascinated him. So when he had this time, I suppose it was natural for him to turn to it.” Bartlett, like all the others gathered around Jack in Palm Beach, would watch him, still unable to rise from bed, writing upside down on a board suspended above him.

  In his memoirs, Sorensen explained that they worked on the book by letter and telephone. The reason was, he was in Washington helping hold down the fort in Kennedy’s office while his boss was on his back down in Florida. The way Sorensen explained the enterprise, Kennedy played an especially serious role composing the first and last chapters and that he, the aide, wrote the first draft of the rest.

  The theme and the bulk of the content were pure Jack. As smart as Sorensen was, and even given his familiarity with politics—his Republican father had been the attorney general of Nebraska—he was nonetheless a twenty-seven-year-old. He’d arrived in Washington only four years earlier, armed with a law degree but no on-the-ground political experience. He would admit that he was nowhere as well read as Kennedy in American history.

  The voice of John F. Kennedy seems to me to be noticeably audible in Profiles in Courage. For example, in the opening passages, you read, “Where else, in a non-totalitarian society, but in the political profession is the individual expected to sacrifice all—including his own career—for the national good?” It’s a quip that, I think, captures Jack Kennedy’s own ironic style. Another sentence, I believe, derives from his ability to see things from the inside out as well as the outside in: the prospect of forced retirement from “the most exclusive club in the world, the possibilities of giving up the interesting work, the fascinating trappings and the impressive prerogatives of Congressional office, can cause even the most courageous politician a serious loss of sleep.”

  Here’s a story that comes clearly from the insider Jack: “One senator, since retired, said that he voted with the special interests on every issue, hoping that by election time all of them added together would constitute nearly a majority that would remember him favorably, while the other members of the public would never know about—much less remember—his vote against their welfare.” That senator was George Smathers, his pal who’d once said he didn’t “give a damn.” That business about the senator being “retired” was a cover.

  David Ormsby-Gore, now a member of Parliament, stayed in touch with his friend as he recovered. “He must have been getting near the end of the book—but one of the lessons he had drawn from examining these moments in American history was that there were very much two sides to each problem. Now, this didn’t prevent him being capable of taking decisions, and knowing that somebody had to make decisions, but it did always prevent him saying, ‘I know that I have got nothing but right on my side, and the other side is entirely wrong,’ and he never would adopt that attitude.

  “He said that one of the rather sad things about life, particularly if you were a politician, was that you discovered that the other side really had a good case. He was most unpartisan in that way. . . . He wondered whether he was really cut out to be a politician because he was often so impressed by the other side’s arguments when he really examined them in detail. Where he thought that there was a valid case against his position, he was always rather impressed by the arguments advanced.”

  At the end of May, with the help of physical therapy, a corset, and a rocking chair, Jack was set to proceed gingerly with a career that had hung, along with his life, in the balance. Pale and limping, he returned to Capitol Hill more sensitive than usual to imagery. When a Senate page, Martin Dowd, saw the long-absent senator approaching on crutches and opened the Senate chamber door for him, Kennedy tore into him. “Shut that door!” Kennedy yelled to the crushed seventeen-year-old. Unwilling to drop the matter, he confronted Dowd a moment later. “Don’t you touch that door until I tell you to!”

  Sorensen could sense how his boss had grown tougher, not just on others but himself. The political columnist and Kennedy friend Joseph Alsop also recognized the transformation: “Something very important happened inside him, I think, when he had that illness, because he came out of it a very much more serious fellow than he was prior to it. He had gone through the valley of the shadow of death, and he had displayed immense courage, which he’d always had.”

  That June, Kennedy gave a party in Hyannis, inviting to Cape Cod not just his own supporters, but also a sizable group of Democrats who’d never been active for him. Ken O’Donnell helped pull it together. “Larry and I got a call saying he was coming back to Massachusetts and the first thing he wanted to do was have a political reunion of the Kennedy secretaries.” Clearly, the purpose of the event was to prove to the faithful how healthy he was. It was to show others, coming out of morbid curiosity, that he remained formidable.

  “The thing I remember most about the event was that he was physically able to move around. There were no crutches. They had softball games and so forth, and it was an excellent outing. A very successful political event—an all-day affair.” O’Donnell could see Jack’s appeal to the rank-and-file types hadn’t faded. “What struck me the most and to me was critical was that he still held the same old attraction for people. All our people loved him, but you knew there was no question about that. If he’d returned flat on his back or in a wheelchair, our people would have been there. But I w
as watching the others. The reaction from the professional politicians that were there: they loved him. Loved him, despite themselves.”

  If Kennedy was going to go further in politics, he needed to bring all the factions of Massachusetts together. He needed to win over those who practiced politics day in and day out. “It was important for our political futures and for the senator’s that if we were going to take the next step, we had to know them on an intimate personal basis. We realized how important it was that they shouldn’t feel we were snobs, that we didn’t look down on the ‘regulars.’ ”

  It was obvious that Kennedy’s renewed vigor had stirred a healthy fear among the Massachusetts Democratic stalwarts. Abandoning him might well mean abandoning the winning side. No political regular likes being tied to a loser, and while a young senator sidelined for six months with medical problems might have the voters’ sympathy for a time, what good was he? Besides, Jack Kennedy had end-run them over the years, and many had been waiting for him to get his comeuppance. His sunny reappearance at that June picnic was therefore vital to his prospects.

  “Out of that affair,” O’Donnell said, summing up the situation, “I think, at least in our minds, we accepted that, for Senator Kennedy, the bottom point had been reached. Now there was a solid foundation from which to build forward.”

  • • •

  Moving into the future, the Kennedy Party needed to reach out to the wider Democratic organization and win it to the cause. It was no longer enough to woo and charm. To win the big prizes Jack now needed to master the rougher side of politics. To intimidate those he could not seduce, he’d have to play the game harder than his rivals.

  23. Filing petition for senate reelection, 1958

  24. Adlai Stevenson

  CHAPTER NINE

  DEBUT

  Politics is essentially a learning profession.

  —Arthur M. Schlesinger

  When 1956 began, Jack Kennedy was far from a household name. By year’s end, he’d managed to step into the ring as the most exciting Democratic challenger for the American presidency. He’d gotten there by sheer audacity.

  President Eisenhower, having enjoyed a successful first term, was continuing to reap the prestige earned by his wartime victory. Despite the fact he’d suffered a heart attack the previous year, he was still expected to seek and win reelection. Offering himself to the task of opposing him was Governor Adlai Stevenson. The real question was who would be the Illinois Democrat’s running mate.

  That was the brass ring on which Jack Kennedy, now thirty-nine, began to focus. He’d gotten the heads-up from Theodore H. White, then reporting for Collier’s magazine, that he was on Adlai’s shortlist. Though possibly no more than a signal to Catholic voters in Massachusetts that Stevenson understood their importance, the result was to get Kennedy thinking.

  Why not make a move in ’56?

  But if he were to do so, Jack saw how critical it was for him to arrive at the national convention and give the right impression. As an attractive war-hero-turned-thoughtful-politico, he could easily come across as the perfect complement to Adlai: youthful, active, eastern, Catholic, well-rounded. The prospective negatives of his candidacy—his religion and his relative conservatism—could even be regarded as ticket balancers.

  Such boldness is in itself a selling point. But before he could turn his attention to this exciting notion of competing on the national stage, Jack Kennedy first had to face up to serious trouble back home. The problem was a central-Massachusetts farmer whose nickname derived from his cash crop: William “Onions” Burke, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

  Onions was a John McCormack guy, and an especially tribal Irishman. He hated the academic elite, Ivy Leaguers, and liberals. He couldn’t stand Adlai Stevenson. His idea of a Democratic leader was McCormack, a devoutly Catholic congressman from South Boston, who’d come to Washington in 1928 and risen to House majority leader. So Onions was a problem. For Jack to woo Stevenson, he needed to convince him he could deliver New England. Initially, he and Onions agreed to split the Massachusetts delegates going to the national convention. Burke then pulled a double cross, and organized a quiet write-in campaign for McCormack in the April primary that ended up beating Stevenson, whose name was on the ballot. McCormack won big: 26,128 votes to 19,024. It made Kennedy look like a political eunuch, a pretty boy who couldn’t control his people.

  If Jack Kennedy couldn’t deliver his state in the primary, how could he be counted on at the convention? And if he couldn’t deliver votes, why should Stevenson even consider him as a running mate? Onions had put Jack, who now wanted badly to be on the Stevenson ticket, in an embarrassing situation.

  Onions now added insult to the injury. “Anybody who’s for Stevenson,” he declared to the press, “ought to be down at Princeton listening to Alger Hiss.” The accused Soviet agent had just been released from federal prison. Invited to speak at his alma mater, he’d been celebrated as a returning hero. Translation: being for Adlai was the same as being for Alger. Joe McCarthy couldn’t have phrased it better.

  Burke’s slur was unmistakable, intentional, and uttered with impunity, by a guy who figured he could get away with it. He’d put Kennedy in a position where he had no choice but to destroy the man who’d said what he had.

  Kennedy knew he couldn’t let the charge go unchallenged. Until now, he’d been content using the political process simply as a mechanism for winning office. He’d avoided involvement in local politics. That had been his father’s early advice, and it still was. According to Bobby, his father had been telling his children that local Massachusetts politics was an endless morass. “You’re either going to get into the problems of Algeria or you’re going to get into the problems of Worcester.”

  But, for Jack, Onions’s attack made his choice clear. Now he had to get down and dirty. He’d used the Massachusetts Democratic Party to win elections to office, but he’d never actually joined it, much less tried to lead it. He would now either prove himself a leader or be forever at the mercy of the locals. And that would be a problem, because, unlike him, they weren’t big thinkers. Nor did they regard themselves, of course, as national statesmen. Neither were they as liberal as the national party. The reputation that Massachusetts would gain for liberalism, never fully on the mark, was not the case even then. In 1956, it was Joe McCarthy country.

  To get rid of Chairman Burke and the threat he presented, Kennedy needed to switch to a new brand of politics. He had to shift back from the wholesale politics of speeches and position-taking to the retail politics of the clubhouse. And he had to be tough. He needed to beat Burke in the back room, where the television cameras weren’t watching.

  To this end, he ordered his staff to run a personal check on every member of the state Democratic committee. “Find out everything about them. Who do we know who knows them? What time do they get home from work at night? I’m going to ring their doorbells and talk to each one of them personally.” Armed with this intelligence, Kennedy began to travel the state, visiting a sizable percentage of the eighty committeemen.

  The election for state chairman that year was held at the Bradford Hotel in downtown Boston. Larry O’Brien recalled the Kennedy hardball: “We argued that Onions shouldn’t be allowed to attend the meeting since he wasn’t a member of the committee. To back up our ruling, we had two tough Boston cops guarding the door, one of whom had reputedly killed a man in a barroom fight. Burke arrived with some tough guys of his own. Just as the meeting was about to begin, he and his men charged out of the elevator and broke past our guards. One of the leaders was ‘Knocko’ McCormack, the majority leader’s two-fisted three-hundred-pound younger brother. As shouting and shoving spread across the meeting room, I called the Boston police commissioner. He arrived minutes later.

  “ ‘I’m O’Brien,’ I told him. ‘You’ve got to get those troublemakers out of here.’

  “ ‘One more word out of you, O’Brien,’ the commissioner replied, ‘and I’ll l
ock you up.’ I hadn’t known the commissioner was a McCormack man. The whole thing was a scene out of The Last Hurrah. The two candidates for state chairman almost settled matters by a fistfight. There was shouting and confusion, and as the roll call began, one member who’d gotten drunk attempted to vote twice.”

  The guy Kennedy had chosen as his candidate, Pat Lynch, wound up winning two to one. “He and his millions don’t know what honor and decency is,” Burke complained. Kennedy had risen to the occasion, done exactly what was necessary, changing his tactics to suit the situation, ambushing his complacent rival on his home turf. On the afternoon of victory, he made sure the press understood that the day marked a “new era” in Massachusetts politics.

  The fact is, Jack Kennedy had no intention of staying involved in townie politics. He knew it was like quicksand: you got into the fray, picked sides, made enemies, and could never free yourself from it. He now needed to reengage himself in national politics.

  • • •

  As a Roman Catholic, Jack Kennedy would have been, until this moment, an unlikely candidate for national office. World War II had changed things, however, and it was obvious that now there were ways to position oneself favorably as an Irish Catholic, to take advantage of the changes. He needed to make the case that the number of Catholics Stevenson had lost in ’52 could be lured back to the fold with the right running mate. Catholics liked Ike, who’d vanquished Hitler, and were turned off by the divorced Adlai, who couldn’t escape the contemptuous label “egghead,” attached to him not just for his shiny high forehead but also because of his intellectualism.