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

  Hearing this, Nixon, surprisingly, agreed to a moratorium on discussions of the disputed Chinese islands. Whatever the vice president’s posturing, as far as Kennedy himself was concerned, if there was ever to be a Cold War showdown, such an escalation made sense only when the value of the ground being fought over was indisputable.

  And he knew of a hot spot near home, approximately ninety miles off the southern tip of Florida. On the night before the second debate with Nixon, Jack gave a major speech in Cincinnati attacking what he called “the most glaring failure of American foreign policy today . . . a disaster that threatens the security of the whole Western Hemisphere . . . a Communist menace that has been permitted to arise under our very noses.” In short, he blamed the Republicans for losing Cuba, just as he and others had once blamed the Truman administration for the loss of China. He reminded his audience that two recent American ambassadors to Cuba—Arthur Gardner and Earl Smith—had warned about the danger of Fidel Castro and his brother Raul.

  Castro, he said, “with guidance, support, and arms from Moscow and Peiping, has made anti-Americanism a sign of loyalty and anti-Communism a punishable crime, confiscated over a billion dollars’ worth of American property, threatened the existence of our naval base at Guantánamo, and rattled Red rockets at the United States, which can hardly close its eyes to a potential enemy missile or submarine base only ninety miles from our shores.”

  He ended the speech by directly addressing the people of Cuba. “Be of stout heart. Be not dismayed. The road ahead will not be easy. The perils and hardships will be many. But here in America we pledge ourselves to raise high the light of freedom—until it burns brightly from the Arctic to Cape Horn—and one day that light will shine again.”

  Nixon felt the pressure. How could he be sounding alarms about Chinese islands and not defend one just a short boat ride away? He began to push the administration to take action against Castro. His greatest hope was that it would expedite the attack of armed anti-Castro Cubans on the island, a clandestine CIA-backed operation already under way for several months. But the most he could accomplish, to show his muscle, was the Eisenhower administration’s declaration of a trade embargo perfectly timed for the eve of the last debate.

  Quick to respond, Kennedy termed the embargo an “empty gesture . . . which will have so little impact on Castro as to be almost meaningless.” All it would do, he said, was speed up Cuban reliance on trade with the Communist countries. Without clearing it with Kennedy, speechwriter Richard Goodwin put out a statement raising the ante. “We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far, these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government.”

  Kennedy was calling for an armed assault on Cuba by anti-Castro forces backed by the United States. It was an extraordinary proposal to make in the middle of a campaign, and it enraged Richard Nixon. That’s because he was aware of top secret American plans to do exactly what Kennedy was proposing. He suspected that Kennedy was as well. Dean Acheson, who’d served as Truman’s secretary of state, later warned that Kennedy had gone too far. “He was likely to get himself hooked into positions which would be difficult afterwards.”

  As he prepared to meet Kennedy for their fourth debate, Nixon continued fuming over that “fighters for freedom” statement. To follow such a recommendation, he declared disingenuously, would cause key Latin American countries to denounce not only the United States, but the U.N., too. What’s more, such aggression would serve as “an open invitation for Mr. Khrushchev to come in, to come into Latin America and to engage us in what would be a civil war and possibly even worse than that.”

  To find new ground during their last televised meeting, Kennedy zeroed in on another area of dissatisfaction with Republican governance. And that was Americans’ growing sense they were falling behind the Soviets in space and strategic weaponry. At the same time, the economy was slowing. From 5.9 percent in August, the nation’s jobless rate rose to 6.4 percent in October. Between the conventions and Election Day, 330,000 people were thrown out of work. Not many of those hundreds of thousands of workers could ignore that their pink slips had been handed to them while Ike sat in the Oval Office, with Dick Nixon as his second in command.

  • • •

  On October 19, a group of African-Americans politely asked for service at the Magnolia Room in Rich’s, the grand Atlanta department store. The lunch counters at drugstores and other downtown businesses were strictly whites-only. Coretta King described how it was in those days: “There was hardly a place outside our own neighborhoods where a Negro could even get a soda except by going to the side door and having it handed out.” Among those arrested and charged with trespassing at Rich’s that great day was the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. While the other sit-in demonstrators soon were released, a judge denied King bail, sentencing the civil rights leader to six months at hard labor in Reidsville State Prison. The defendant, he said, had violated probation on an earlier charge of driving in Georgia with an Alabama license.

  Coretta, pregnant at the time, was naturally horrified—and very frightened—when she learned her husband had been roughly awakened at night, placed in handcuffs and leg chains, hurried into a car, and driven two hundred miles into rural Georgia. She shared her worry with a longtime friend, Harris Wofford. After discussing the situation with his fellow Kennedy aide Louis Martin, Wofford persuaded Sargent Shriver to take the case for action to the candidate, seizing a moment when Ken O’Donnell and the other political aides were out of the room.

  “Why don’t you telephone Mrs. King and give her your sympathy,” Shriver suggested to Jack. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow no matter who’s elected, but they do want to know whether you care. If you telephone Mrs. King, they’ll know that you understand and will help. You will reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman who is afraid her husband will be killed.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Kennedy said. “Why not? Do you have her number? Get her on the phone.” Mrs. King would later recount to Wofford what Jack had said. “I want to express my concern about your husband. I know this must be very hard on you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call me.”

  Afterward, the press quickly learned from Mrs. King about John Kennedy’s having reached out to her. “It certainly made me feel good that he called me personally and let me know how he felt. I had the feeling that if he was that much concerned, he would do what he could so that Dr. King was let out of jail. I have heard nothing from the vice president or anyone on his staff. Mr. Nixon has been very quiet.”

  Beyond the hearing of any reporters, however, Kennedy worried out loud that even his little gesture had been too much. When asked about the call to Mrs. King, he appeared irritated at the leak. The campaign manager, Robert Kennedy, was downright furious. “Do you know that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon? Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us!” he scolded Wofford and Shriver.

  But Bobby soon transferred his anger to the “son of a bitch” judge who’d thrown the book at King. He called Governor Ernest Vandiver of Georgia, and then, taking his advice, called the judge himself, who ordered King released on bail.

  Louis Martin, an African-American, was elated when his friend Bobby Kennedy phoned in the early-morning hours with news of his successful mission. “You are now an honorary brother,” he said.

  Meanwhile, Kennedy’s opponent had remained silent on King’s predicament. The baseball hero Jackie Robinson tried and failed to get him to say something. “He thinks calling Martin would be grandstanding,” Robinson said mournfully. “Nixon doesn’t understand.”

  Fo
r this he would pay dearly. Martin Luther King, Sr., like his son a prominent Atlanta minister, now decided to endorse Kennedy publicly despite the religious difference between them. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” the elder King somberly told his flock in the Ebenezer Baptist Church during the exultant welcome-home service held for his rescued son. “But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He had a moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got my votes, and I’ve got a suitcase, and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

  Up at Kennedy headquarters in Washington, Wofford and Louis Martin were about to make history. Collecting all the appreciative and admiring comments pouring in from black leaders and others praising the Kennedys’ efforts on behalf of the Kings, they found a pair of Philadelphia ministers willing to sponsor publication of a pamphlet, “The Case of Martin Luther King,” which laid out the story of the Kennedy-King episode in bold language.

  “No-Comment Nixon versus a Candidate with a Heart: Senator Kennedy,” one caption read. “I earnestly and sincerely feel that it is time for all of us to take off our Nixon buttons,” the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a King ally, was quoted in the document. “Since Mr. Nixon has been silent through all this, I am going to return his silence when I go into the voting booth.”

  The pamphlet, two million copies of which were printed on light blue paper and delivered to black churches the Sunday before the election, would be dubbed “the blue bomb.” Though it never stirred even the mildest alarm among conservative white voters, who’d remain loyal to the national Democratic ticket, it moved black America overnight to the Democratic side of the ballot, from the party of Lincoln to that of the Kennedys. Martin Luther King, Jr., summing up the episode’s meaning, was eloquent: “There are moments when the politically expedient can be morally wise.”

  • • •

  On November 2, Kennedy gave a major address at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. He spoke on two topics: the importance of nuclear disarmament and his plans for the Peace Corps. That afternoon, sitting in the bathtub at the Palace Hotel, he talked to Red Fay about how the campaign was going. “Last week, Dick Nixon hit the panic button and started Ike speaking. He spoke in Philadelphia on Friday night and is going to make about four or five speeches between now and the election. With every word he utters, I can feel the votes leaving me. It’s like standing on a mound of sand with the tide running out. I tell you he’s knocking our block off. If the election was tomorrow I’d win easily, but six days from now it’s up for grabs.” Then, suddenly, he changed the subject and began to tell his old friend, who’d been to war with him, what he intended to talk about that night: his great plans for this new corps of Americans working for peace throughout the world.

  But the tide was clearly turning. Ike was out there drawing enormous crowds, and Nixon was playing rough. “You know, it’s not Jack’s money they’re going to be spending!” The debates were yesterday’s news, and voters were fickle.

  To a Nixon accusation that he was a “bare-faced liar,” Kennedy retorted: “Having seen him in close-up—and makeup—for our television debates, I would never accuse Mr. Nixon of being barefaced.” Away from the microphones and reporters’ notebooks, he could be vicious. “He’s a filthy, lying son of a bitch and a dangerous man,” his aide Richard Goodwin heard him say once. To Red Fay, he articulated his dislike: “Nixon wanted the presidency so bad that there were no depths he wouldn’t sink to, to try to achieve his goal. How would you like to have that guy deciding this country’s problems when it became an issue of what was best for the country or what was best for Dick?”

  Fay called it a “180-degree reversal from what it was back in the Congressional years when Jack Kennedy wrote me on November 14, 1950, about how glad he was to see Nixon win big in his Senate race.” Kennedy also was worried about last-minute dirt, waiting for Nixon’s people to hit him with evidence of his “girling,” as he referred to it. He never did. Perhaps the voters would not have believed it if he had. How could they? One Nixon aide, watching news footage of Jack and Jackie in the final hours of the campaign, suddenly was struck by the power of the beautiful couple’s allure. Good God, he remembered thinking to himself, how do you run against that?

  Yet, all the time, the momentum of the 1960 campaign, the reality of the here and now, was shifting about him. He sensed he was losing California and wanted desperately some more days of campaigning, especially in the farm-rich Central Valley. But the schedule had been set. Promises had been made to the bosses of New York. The men who’d helped him win the nomination were now calling in their chits. They wanted him there.

  It’s hard to know how a campaign is going from the stump, Ken O’Donnell knew. Being in the bubble skews your perception. Unlike Jack, Bobby was at headquarters, getting phone calls and detecting very strongly that the question of religion was now back with a vengeance. “They’re much more concerned back at the headquarters because they’re seeing it. We’ve been to the Philadelphias and the Chicagos, Oklahoma—with big crowds across California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. Wild crowds. So we don’t see it.”

  O’Donnell said that he, along with the rest of the staff, now feared that the “silent bigot” would emerge as the decider, the voter who’d never voice his anti-Catholicism but would cast his or her ballot accordingly.

  New York on the final weekend proved disastrous. Kennedy was increasingly convinced that he had blown his chance at the presidency by not going back to California. His time would be split between pleasing the city’s powerful bosses and its equally important liberal groups. To get where he was, he’d needed both. Now, facing Election Day, he especially needed the bosses. It was like a comedy in which the hero’s on a date with two different people, simultaneously zipping back and forth to keep both appeased. Jack was forced to move from one hotel, the Carlyle, to another, the Biltmore, for breakfast, then back to the Carlyle for still another breakfast.

  The exhausted candidate’s simmering frustration finally rose to a dangerous boil when he was expected to ride in a New York City parade organized by the local Democratic strongman Carmine DeSapio. It was pouring rain, and as he was driven back to Manhattan from an appearance on Long Island, Jack finally had had enough. His breaking point reached, he kicked everyone out of the car, insisting that his driver abandon the motorcade and return to his Upper East Side hotel. En route, however, the driver took some wrong turns. “I was beginning to panic now,” O’Donnell recalled. “I was soaking wet, angry. Our motorcade had also gotten lost—and I’d lost the senator.”

  When he reached the Carlyle, the drenched Kennedy was forced to wait for his suitcase, which had been mistakenly taken to the Biltmore. Disgusted, he commandeered O’Donnell’s bedroom and once again threw everyone out. Lyndon Johnson, unaware of the meltdown, wanted to greet his running mate. Said O’Donnell, “Well, the next thing I see is Lyndon being literally thrown out of the room by a rather irate young Irishman from Massachusetts.” The shock was enough to make Johnson worry about the political bed he’d made.

  Next, Kennedy demanded that O’Donnell set about canceling the parade DeSapio had planned. “I don’t give a shit if they have five million people out there. Cancel it. Either you tell them, or I will. If you don’t have the balls to tell them, I’ll tell them. Send them in,” he instructed O’Donnell.

  “Look, Senator, this is my fault. I’ll tell them. But you’re not going to lose.” O’Donnell couldn’t change his boss’s mood. Jack’s reply: “Just cancel the fucking thing.”

  On November 8, as Americans went to the polls to vote for their thirty-fifth president, early returns showed a big Kennedy victory. Connecticut’s results came in quickly and strongly. Philadelphia gave Jack a plurality of 330,000 votes. Then, the news began to shift. “It started out like gangbusters,” Pierre Salinger recalled. “It started out like we were going to win by a landslide.
In fact, the computer said we were. Then, everything started to go bad all over the place. By midnight it was a real dog race.” The religious issue was doing its damage.

  The news from Ohio was devastating. Kennedy, watching TV at Bobby’s Hyannis Port house with the others, rolled up his sleeve to show how much his hand had swollen. “Ohio did that to me. They did it there.” But as upsetting as it was, it was also unexpected. “All those people now say they knew we would lose Ohio,” said O’Donnell. “Well, if they did, they kept it to themselves until election night, when returns showed we lost it. Ohio was one that came as a shock to all of us.”

  Nixon was picking up Midwestern states in landslide fashion: Iowa, Indiana, even Wisconsin, where Kennedy had campaigned so hard that recent winter. As election night turned to morning, Jack saw the heartland turning against his candidacy. They were rejecting him. “I’m angry,” the author Teddy White heard him say.

  Though Kennedy would later insist the words he’d spoken were “I’m hungry,” the situation suggests that the word White recorded might be taken as the more reliable. Nebraska was another wipeout. “Nebraska has the largest Republican majority of all fifty states,” Rip Horton, who’d run the campaign there for his old Choate classmate, recalled. “His religion was definitely a handicap out there. They used to have meetings in churches. They’d advertise these meetings, various denominations, telling people to come to a mass meeting on why they shouldn’t vote for a Catholic for president.”

  Yet even with these losses, Kennedy was managing to stay in front. “If the present trend continues,” Richard Nixon told a loyal crowd waiting in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, “Senator Kennedy will be the next president of the United States.” As supporters shouted out for him not to concede, Nixon doggedly kept on. “Certainly, if the trend continues and he does become our next president, he will have my wholehearted support.”