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

The meeting’s organizer, Norman Vincent Peale, the longtime pastor of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church and author of the best-selling The Power of Positive Thinking, also hosted his own radio program, The Art of Living. Thus, he was a popular and influential figure, now committed to using his clout against Jack Kennedy. “Our freedom, our religious freedom,” he proclaimed, “is at stake if we elect a member of the Roman Catholic order as president of the United States.” He worried that the pope was poised to assert his authority over any Catholic aspirant to the White House. His mission was convincing his fellow Americans of that risk.

  As the waiting reporters clamored for a statement, Kennedy’s initial response was curt: “I wouldn’t attempt to reply to Dr. Peale or to anyone who questions my loyalty to the United States.” Later, though, he’d remark to Ted Sorensen—after hearing Peale had claimed “the election of a Catholic president would change America”—“I would like to think he was complimenting me, but I’m not sure he was.”

  Yet, as he traveled on, it was becoming increasingly apparent that his responses to date still weren’t enough to put the issue to rest. He decided to accept an invitation to speak to the Protestant ministers of Houston. When he stood there in front of them, he intended to address thoughtfully what he’d actually come to view as legitimate questions about his loyalty. The effect of it, he hoped, would be enough to arouse the loyalty of all Americans, not only Catholics, who’d felt the sting of prejudice. Though it’s true he was sending mixed signals, telling Protestants not to vote their religion at the same time he was courting the Catholic vote, still, the eloquence he brought to bear upon bigotry cut deep and created a watershed moment in American politics.

  The math, in fact, was straightforward enough. Kennedy understood the electoral power his religion actually gave him. While just one voter in four was Catholic, these citizens had sizable leverage in the states with the most electoral votes. So he needed, first off, to minimize the anti-Catholic vote by hanging the “bias” tag on any Protestant vote against him. Jews and other minorities would then get the picture, he hoped, and rally to the cause.

  He also had to keep it light; he couldn’t allow himself, ever, to get publicly defensive. When Harry Truman, campaigning for Kennedy and sounding only like himself, let loose at Nixon-loving Southerners, telling them they could “go to hell,” the profanity earned him a pious rebuke from the Republican candidate himself. Kennedy, though, dispatched a clever telegram to the highly partisan, and also Nixon-hating, former chief executive. “Dear Mr. President,” he wrote, “I have noted with interest your suggestion as to where those who vote for my opponent should go. While I understand and sympathize with your deep motivation, I think it is important that our side try to refrain from raising the religious issue.”

  En route to address the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, he made a stop in El Paso. Look magazine’s Bill Attwood, who was friendly with Jack, saw him there and has recounted a telling exchange. “It was night and we were late, and a crowd of 7,000 people had been waiting at the airport for hours. They wanted to yell and cheer, and they wanted him to wave his arms and smile and say something about the Texas sky and stars. But he just strode out of the plane and jabbed his forefinger at them and talked about getting America moving again. And then he turned and climbed into a car and drove away.

  “A few days later . . . I told him the crowd had felt let down and suggested that the next time he should at least wave his arms the way other politicians did and give people a chance to get the cheers out of their throats. Kennedy shook his head and borrowed my notebook and pencil—he was saving his voice for the day’s speeches—and wrote, ‘I always swore one thing I’d never do is’ and he drew a picture of a man with his arms in the air.” There were limits to what he would do to win votes.

  But someone else was impressed—and extremely so—that night at the El Paso airport. According to Ken O’Donnell, Sam Rayburn, the legendary “Mr. Democrat,” told him “ten times after we got to the hotel he had never seen such a crowd in El Paso and certainly not at that hour of the night. He didn’t quite understand it, saying ‘This young fellow has something special. I just didn’t realize until now.’ ”

  While the Kennedy advisors all agreed that a speech on his religion was necessary, they were equally against their candidate’s accepting the Houston invitation. Jack Kennedy himself was the sole voice in favor. “In the end, he alone made the decision to go,” O’Donnell recalled. “It came about casually; he was in shaving . . . and came out of the bathroom and said, ‘Notify them we’re going to do it. I’ll give the speech. This is as good a time as any. We might as well get it on the record early; they’re going to be asking this throughout the rest of the campaign. So, I’m going to do it.’ ”

  In the hours leading up to the speech, Kennedy continued to wonder aloud if he’d made the right decision. Then, just before leaving his hotel room in his black pinstriped suit, a nonpolitical issue arose. “Look!” he told the ever-present Ken O’Donnell, pointing at his shoes. “They’re brown!”

  Finally, Dave Powers, the staff guy in charge of wardrobe, was located. His response brought common sense to bear: “I think, Senator, you’ll be behind a podium and nobody will notice it on television. . . . I think this once you’ll be okay.”

  “Really, Dave,” Kennedy replied, “so you don’t think anyone will notice that I have brown shoes with a crisp black suit?”

  “Nah, nobody will notice. I mean, come on, Senator, most people in America only have one set of shoes—and, Senator, those shoes! Those shoes are brown! You know what you did tonight, Senator! You know what you did! You sewed up the brown shoe vote.” At this, even Jack began to see the humor.

  Kennedy walked into the meeting room alone. To make sure the audience viewing clips at home got the message, the advance man, Robert S. Strauss, had picked the “meanest, nastiest-looking” ministers to put in the front row. Assuming the role of defendant in the argument, Jack offered respect to these serious citizens with doubts about his loyalties. The invited ministers had a perfect right to question him, he said. But once having satisfied themselves as to his sincerity, they also had a responsibility to move on to other issues.

  Kennedy’s opening presentation in Houston was, perhaps, the finest of the campaign. “So, it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me, but what kind of America I believe in. I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president—should he be a Catholic—how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.”

  O’Donnell described Senator Kennedy’s performance there as “dancing on a needle.” On the one hand, he had “to satisfy this audience with regard to a Catholic in the presidency; and yet at the same time he had to be careful not to jeopardize his position with the Catholics across the country, the Catholic Church, or the Catholic priests.” If he “came across as too conciliatory to these people, some of whom were outright bigots, it would destroy his candidacy and his position.”

  Not only did Kennedy speak eloquently; he presented himself with careful dignity, at the same time displaying an elegant pugnacity when roused. This was especially true in the long question-and-answer period that followed his speech. One focus of attention was Kennedy’s rejection of a 1947 invitation to address a dinner in Philadelphia to raise funds for a Chapel of the Chaplains. It had been intended as an interfaith house of worship honoring the four chaplains who went down with the Dorchester in World War II. Kennedy had, at first, accepted the invitation, only to later turn it down. He’d done so at the request of the local archbishop, Dennis Cardinal Dougherty.

  Kennedy’s answer was that he had lacked the credentials to attend the dinner “as a spokesman for the Catholic church.” When pushed further on the question again, he’d finally had enough. “Is this the best that can be done after fourteen years?
Is this the only incident that can be charged?” But in the end, he’d been respectful, made all his points, stood his ground, and came away looking like a winner.

  • • •

  There are many ways of preparing for a life on the political stage. To the usual list—remembering the names of people you meet once, smiling at proven enemies—Jack Kennedy now added making noises like a seal. Given to bouts of self-improvement—his famous speed-reading is an example—he had been concerned about the timbre of his voice, how he sounded to listeners when he spoke in public. His performance at the Los Angeles convention had not been that strong and he knew it. The loud daily barking, then, was an exercise assigned to him by the vocal coach David McClosky, one that Jack chose to practice in the bathtub. Unexpectedly hearing him emit these very peculiar sounds caused even the most loyal of his aides to wonder if there wasn’t, perhaps, a new health problem.

  Jack’s ongoing transformation had other aspects, with one significant physical change being inadvertent, a side effect of the medication he was taking for his Addison’s. More than saving his life, the cortisone he’d been taking had transformed his face, fleshing out his features. Billy Sutton, who’d lived with him during those early years in Washington, would remark that he’d never looked better than he did in those months of running for president against Richard Nixon.

  But cosmetic advantages didn’t guarantee elections. True enough, Dick Nixon had looked old even when he was young—he was, in fact, just four years the senior of his Democratic rival—but he’d also spent two terms as vice president in the shadow of the prize they both were after. He was no one Jack could take for granted.

  Throughout that fall, Dave Powers, Kennedy’s campaign “body man,” used the specter of Nixon to motivate his boss each morning. He once told me that he’d walk into Jack’s room, in whatever town they happened to be in, pull open the curtains, and begin, tunelessly, to serenade the candidate: “I wonder where Dick Nixon is this time of day. I wonder how many factories he’s been to, how many events he’s had already.”

  The coming debates were, of course, of far greater importance than a typical day on the campaign trail, and Jack Kennedy knew it. Hadn’t Nixon won his original seat in Congress by stomping on a first-rate New Dealer, Jerry Voorhis? It had been a no-holds-barred assault when he’d run against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, defeating her in the even nastier 1950 Senate race, in which her lone success was in hanging on him a lasting nickname, “Tricky Dick.”

  But as much as Jack had to be wary of Nixon, there was also the fact that they’d be facing each other in front of a huge audience, bigger than any in history. That year, 1960, wasn’t the first one in which television coverage had to be taken into account by presidential campaigns. It was, however, the first one in which nearly every voter had a television.

  There were to be four debates, the first scheduled for September 26 in Chicago.

  “Kennedy took the thing much more seriously than Nixon,” recalled Don Hewitt, the CBS producer assigned to direct the candidates’ first encounter. The Democrat had asked Hewitt to meet with him a week early in a hangar at Chicago’s Midway Airport. “Where do I stand?” Jack kept asking, eager to get an idea of what the setup would be in the WBBM studio. On the afternoon of the debate, wearing a terry-cloth robe, Kennedy lay in bed in his hotel room, clutching a fistful of cards in his hand, each with a probable question and its staff-prepared answer. Drilling him was Ted Sorensen and his other legislative assistant, Mike Feldman. After each card had been dealt with, Kennedy would throw it on the floor. Additionally, there was the “Nixopedia,” which Feldman had prepared—in a binder like the once-invaluable “Lodge’s Dodges”—to track and detail Nixon’s positions.

  The pollster Lou Harris recalled Kennedy standing on his Ambassador East Hotel balcony with the sun on his face. “He was nervous, and would hit his fist. There he was, walking back and forth, hitting his fist.” To pass the time, Kennedy kept asking his pollster how he went about the business of calculating public opinion.

  Also there with Kennedy was a veteran of the new camera-driven politics. Bill Wilson had been a young television producer when hired by Adlai Stevenson’s campaign in 1956. His role was to help the TV-shy candidate perform as best he could in the new medium, since, for all his eloquence as a platform orator, Stevenson was a primitive as far as TV was concerned. When the set in his hotel room went on the blink, for example, he telephoned Wilson to come fix it. He saw no difference between a television advisor and a TV repairman. Nonetheless, Stevenson had kept Wilson through the primaries and into the general election, although never quite sure what the point was. Such basic resistance was not the case, though, with Wilson’s new employer, who understood very well the importance of the tiny screen that sat there in voters’ homes.

  As the two participants arrived at the studio, there was a moment of mutual appraisal that gave a harbinger of what was to come: Jack looked like a million bucks and Nixon knew it; Nixon looked terrible and Kennedy knew it. In the tapes from their prebroadcast rehearsal, you can see Nixon’s confidence shatter the instant Jack walked onto the set.

  “He and I were standing there talking when Jack Kennedy arrived,” Hewitt recalled. Tanned, tall, lean, in a dark, well-tailored suit, the Democratic candidate positively gleamed. Photographers, seizing their chance, abandoned Nixon and fluttered about their new prey like hornets. The senator bore no resemblance to the emaciated, jaundiced, wounded figure he’d been. “He looked like a young Adonis,” Hewitt said simply.

  Bill Wilson recalled his candidate’s strategy: “The design was that we attack Nixon and everything he was saying. He had to get the floor. He had to be the one that had the control and had the sense of command on the stage, which he did. I told him the things that counted in terms of his body language and when you look at the camera, you’re only talking to one person. When you’re doing a debate or sitting, you’re talking to one person and that’s the lens.”

  Once the two men were on the stage together, going through the rehearsal, the psychological battle was on. Asked to pose with his rival, Kennedy appeared barely to notice him. They could have been total strangers for all the interest Jack Kennedy showed in the colleague with whom he’d enjoyed cordial terms since 1947. Nixon, for his part, seemed intimidated. From the moment Kennedy strode in, hijacking the attention of the photographers, he was not the same man. Visibly deflated by his rival’s matinee-idol aura and seeming nervelessness, Nixon slouched in his chair, his head turned away, as if in retreat.

  Pierre Salinger recalled Nixon’s pale, unhealthy appearance. The vice president had injured his leg in August, with a subsequent knee infection forcing him off the campaign trail and into Walter Reed Hospital. He did not yet seem entirely recovered from the ordeal. “Nixon looked awful off camera. He really did. Kennedy went back to his dressing room and remarked how awful he looked.” It seemed to Salinger that Nixon’s ghastly appearance boosted Kennedy’s confidence. “I think he thought that Nixon was afraid.”

  “Do you want some makeup?” Hewitt asked Kennedy. Hearing the Democrat’s “no,” Richard Nixon also declined it, ignoring the fact that his opponent had just spent days campaigning in the California sun and that he, himself, hadn’t fully regained his health. Kennedy’s people were taking no chances. “I was in the greenroom,” recalled Wilson, “and they were playing with him, asking him all kinds of questions. Bobby was there. Anyway, I said okay, we’ve got to close it down, he needs about ten minutes before he goes on to get quiet and I’ve got to put some makeup on him.

  “Ted Rogers, who was Nixon’s guy, said, ‘When’s your guy going to get makeup on?’ And I said, ‘Well, after your guy’s going to get it.’ Rogers was wary. If the other guy didn’t ask for it, his guy wasn’t going to. ‘Nixon’s not going to get his makeup,’ he said, ‘until John Kennedy does.’ And I said, ‘Well, it looks like it’s a Mexican standoff.’ ”

  Both candidates now retired to their separate rooms
. Wilson understood the dangers of going on without makeup, even for the already telegenic Kennedy. “So I went back and I said, ‘You know, we’ve got to do makeup. You’ve got a great tan; you look fine.’ But the lights in 1960 in studios were just broad and heavy, not like anything you see in studios today. They were just hot as hell. And if you put a little bit of makeup all over the face, it closed the pores. They wouldn’t sweat.”

  Finally, Wilson quietly ran out to get makeup, and when he returned, cleared the room of the others. “And the last thing Bob Kennedy said after I said everybody’s got to get out, was ‘Kick him in the balls, Jack.’ It was a beautiful moment, because that was the whole strategy.”

  The Kennedy guys had one more trick up their sleeve. Nixon was nervously waiting for the clock to tick down to the debate’s starting time. The countdown commenced over the loudspeaker. “Five minutes to airtime.” Nixon was staring at the studio door. Now there were only three minutes left. As Wilson described it, “Nixon was still watching the door, as tense a man as I had ever seen. By then, I was sure that no one had summoned Kennedy, and I was about to dash after him, when the door swung open. Kennedy walked in and took his place, barely glancing at Nixon. Kennedy had played the clock perfectly. He had thrown his opponent off stride. He’d set him up for the kill.”

  In fact, Nixon may have arrived already off his stride, for reasons other than his impaired health. His running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge—Jack’s old opponent, who should have known better—had warned him to try to “erase the assassin image.” In other words, Nixon was not to be his hardfisted self, but rather more of a gentleman, a Nixon who’d be unrecognizable, say, to those citizens of California who’d seen him in action against Voorhis and Helen Douglas. “Kick him in the balls” would have been more useful counsel to him as well.

  “The candidates need no introduction,” the moderator, Howard K. Smith, announced to 70 million watching Americans. Richard Nixon, for his part, looked ill at ease, unshaven, middle-aged. Jack Kennedy, by contrast, seemed poised, with his legs crossed and his hands folded on his lap. Nixon sat in his chair awkwardly, his legs side by side, his hands dangling from the chair arms. He was wearing a gray suit that didn’t flatter him in the harsh light, and soon he would be perspiring profusely.