Princeton University Archives: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University: 5
The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation: 6, 10, 11
Author’s collection: 8, 9
Courtesy Sutton Family: 13
Dave Powers/JFK Presidential Library and Museum: 15
McKeesport Heritage Center: 16
Courtesy Richard Nixon Foundation: 17
Getty Images: 18
Tony Frissell, Library of Congress: 19
The Lowenherz Collection of Kennedy Photographs, Friedheim Library, Archives and Special Collections, Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, Orlando Suero, photographer: 20
Courtesy Reardon Family: 22
Newsweek: 26
Courtesy Sorensen Family: 27
Associated Press/Bill Allen: 33
Peace Corps: 35
Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
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Copyright © 2011 by Christopher J. Matthews
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Cover design by Jackie Seow
Cover photograph by Mark Shaw/MPTV
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Matthews, Christopher.
Jack Kennedy : elusive hero / Chris Matthews. — 1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963. 2. United States — Politics and government—1961-1963. 3. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title.
E842.M346. 2011b
973.922092—dc23
[B}
2011044650
ISBN 978–1–4516–3508–9
ISBN 978-1-4516-3509-6 (pbk)
ISBN 978–1–4516–3510–2 (ebook)
Photo credits can be found on p. 479.
Praise for Chris Matthews and Hardball
“The best in the business!”
—Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr.
“Brilliant! God may take care of fools, drunks and the United States, but Chris Matthews has the goods on how Washington politicians take care of the rest of us.”
—Sam Donaldson
“Chris Matthews hits a political homer with Hardball. For political sagacity and humor, this ranks with the work of George Washington Plunkitt.”
—William Safire
“In Washington, everyone says they ‘practice’ politics, and ‘develop’ policy. But to succeed they know they must ‘play hardball.’ This book smartly captures that central truth!”
—Tim Russert
Contents
EPIGRAPH
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I ALLIANCES
1 It’s Not Who You Know; It’s Who You Get to Know
2 “All Politics Is Local”
3 It’s Better to Receive Than to Give
4 “Dance with the One That Brung Ya”
PART II ENEMIES
5 Keep Your Enemies in Front of You
6 Don’t Get Mad; Don’t Get Even; Get Ahead
7 Leave No Shot Unanswered
PART III DEALS
8 “Only Talk When It Improves the Silence”
9 Always Concede on Principle
PART IV REPUTATIONS
10 Hang a Lantern on Your Problem
11 Spin!
12 “The Press Is the Enemy”
13 The Reputation of Power
14 Positioning
PERSPECTIVE
INDEX
To Kathleen
In all my wardrobe, I could not find anything more precious than the knowledge of the conduct and achievements of great men, which I learned by long conversation in modern affairs and a continual investigation of old.
A wise man ought always to set before him for his example the actions of great men who have excelled in the achievement of some great exploit.
—Niccolò Machiavelli,
The Prince, 1532
Acknowledgments
Like the great Machiavelli, I owe much of the wisdom in this book to “long conversation in modern affairs.” Here are some of those who deserve to be acknowledged:
Martin Agronsky, Donn Anderson, Lee Atwater, Ross Baker, Michael Barone, David Broder, Patrick Butler, Joseph Canzeri, Margaret Carlson, David Cohen, Charles Cook, Kenneth Duberstein, Peter Emerson, Thomas Foxwell, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jeff Greenfield, Peter Hart, Robert Healy, Sven Holmes, Congressman William Hughes, Albert Hunt, Edward Jesser, Mark Johnson, Michael Johnson, Larry L. King, Michael Kinsley, Paul Kirk, Jack Lew, Frank Mankiewicz, David Maraniss, Congressman Edward Markey, Harry McPherson, Charles Mellody, Congressman Robert Mrazek, Martin Nolan, Robert Novak, Scott Pastrick, Congressman Claude Pepper, Michael Pertschuk, Jody Powell, Gerald Rafshoon, Steve Roberts, Tim Russert, Jeffrey Sachs, William Safire, Robert Schiffer, Jeff Shesol, Mark Shields, David Shribman, Roger Simon, Michele Slung, Richard Sorensen, Theodore Sorensen, Robert Squier, George Stephanopoulos, Terrance Straub, Paul Taylor, Sander Vanocur and James Wooten.
My thanks to Barbu Alim, Marcel Monfort and James Bethea of the Library of Congress for their tremendous and timely research assistance; Ellen Boyle, Lee Pendergast, Judy Bartee, Annette Nielsen and Jill Eynon for supporting me in that most political of all terrains, “the office.”
For making Hardball a TV show I owe CNBC President Bill Bolster, Bruno Cohen, David Corvo, Bob Reichblum, NBC News President Andy Lack, NBC President Robert Wright and, for his daily brilliance, Hardball’s executive producer, Rob Yarin.
For their long-standing support and friendship I thank Phil Bronstein, James Finefrock, Paul Wilner, Gail Bensinger, Cindy Myers, and my other colleagues at the San Francisco Examiner as well as Charles Lewis, chief of the Hearst Washington Bureau.
I want to express my particular gratitude to those who opened the doors of Washington to me: Congressman Wayne Owens, Senator Frank Moss, Mary Jane Due, Senator Edmund S. Muskie, President Jimmy Carter, Richard Pettigrew, Congressman Tony Coehlo, Martin Franks, and the Honorable Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. For representing me in the television world better than I can say, I thank Richard Leibner.
Finally, I am grateful to Barbara Daniel, my masterful executive assistant of the past decade; Hendrik Hertzberg, who made me not only a presidential speechwriter but a journalist as well; Kirk O’Donnell, who taught me the use of political rules; Bob Woodward, who coaxed me over a tape recorder at a critical time; Brian Richardson for his inspired research efforts; Dorothy Wickenden, who gave style and shape to my manuscripts; Timothy Dickenson, who expanded my vision even as he sharpened my prose; my dynamic agent Raphael Sagalyn; James Silberman, the editor who triggered and directed this explosion of words and battle-hardened wisdom; and both Dominick Anfuso and Airié Dekidjiev of Simon & Schuster, who recognized the enduring nature of these truths.
Introduction
Be warned. This is not a civics book. It is not about pristine procedures, but about imperfect people. It is not an aerial judgment of how leaders of this or any country ought rightly to behave, but an insider’s view of the sometimes outrageous way they actually do. Its subject is not the gran
d sweep of history, but the round-the-clock scramble for position, power and survival in the city of Washington.
Let me define terms: hardball is clean, aggressive Machiavellian politics. It is the discipline of gaining and holding power, useful to any profession or undertaking, but practiced most openly and unashamedly in the world of public affairs.
When the preceding words first appeared, I had no idea this book would become a classic, that many hard-nosed politicians would employ it as their bible, that CEOs would be caught carrying it in their briefcases, that young people set on bright careers would cherish their tattered copies as if they were treasure maps, that political science professors would assign it as required reading, that the word “hardball” itself would so penetrate the country’s vocabulary.
More important to you, the reader, is how the basic rules of Hardball have proven true. The wisdom I gleaned from the gamesmanship of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, then witnessed first-hand from Ronald Reagan and rival Tip O’Neill sparkles with even greater clarity today. Bill Clinton has given us frequent lessons in spin. South Africa’s Nelson Mandela has shown the advantage of getting ahead over getting even. Less fortunate leaders like Newt Gingrich have been taught to only talk when it improves the silence.
As I wrote in 1988, this book is also meant to entertain. Lived to the hilt, a political career is a grand and exuberant experience. In the following pages you will enjoy some candid glimpses of how well-known figures achieved their ambitions. You will meet some very unlikely success stories, people who learned the game, played hard and won.
Those who watch me on TV and read my newspaper column know my relish for this great life’s game. George F. Will called me “half Huck Finn and half Machiavelli.” Indeed, I have learned as much from adventure as from observation. You only truly believe, let’s agree, what you discover yourself.
For me the grand journey began a quarter century ago when I came to Washington thinking I knew something about politics. I had been an addict of the electoral game, a true political junkie, since high school days. Even then I was rooting for and against candidates, cheering their victories, grieving with them on election night. When I went away to the Peace Corps in my early twenties, I maintained the romance from afar. With my late-arriving copy of The New York Times “Week in Review” and a few scattered magazines, I would strain to make my picks in the year’s congressional elections, even though the results reached my little town in Swaziland days after Americans had gone to the polls. So I should have been prepared for my immersion in the political world. For years I had stood in awed attention at the grand debate, the daunting personalities, the big-picture spectacle of national politics.
But in terms of political hardball, I came to Washington as a neophyte. I entered a world that was as anthropologically exotic as the one I had just left in southern Africa. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the “very rich” are different from you and me. So, I came to learn, are the very political.
Behind those vaunted closed doors lies not only the paraphernalia of power but a distinctive language, which I myself have learned to speak. It is a world of tough old alliances, Gothic revenge and crafty deal-making, but also of marvelous state-of-the-art tactics such as spin and positioning.
Old or new, the machinations of the hardened, dedicated pol would strike most people as offbeat. Indeed, by the layman’s standard, there is little in this book that would be categorized strictly as on the level.
In the following pages you will read of raw ambition, of brutal rivalry and exquisite seduction. If the tone is tongue-in-cheek, if some portraits and situations appear too comical for such important affairs, you have caught my attitude precisely: with all its nuclear-age centrality, politics is the only game for grown people to play.
“Politics makes strange bedfellows,” wrote the nineteenth-century humorist Charles Dudley Warner. That, we will see, is only the beginning of the strangeness. I have learned firsthand that the notions we harbor of political men—and women—are a poor guide to reality. Not even the cynic is prepared to understand the wheeling and dealing of the true pol:
Expect a raging egotist, entranced by his own affairs, and you are seized with the unfamiliar pleasure of having someone probe with quick interest at your own most intimate longings, plotting your course even before you have done so yourself. Expect to be wooed with favors, and he captures you instead with a breathtaking request. His real knack, as Machiavelli taught him five hundred years ago, lies in getting you to do things for him. Eerily and against your will, you discover that the more you do for him, the more loyal you become, the more you want to invest in his career.
Expect a figure of dark passions, fired by revenge, and you meet someone with cold-blooded shrewdness, an uncanny bent to bring the most hated enemy into the tent with him. Expect an argument, and you are blinded by the quick concession; yes, you are right on the larger “principle”—it is the smaller, more tangible points that seem to interest him.
Expect a swell, born to well-placed connections, and you meet someone heir to another sort of legacy: the inner drive to meet those he needs to meet. Expect a narcissist, and you meet a person who not only exposes his faults but has learned, adroitly, to brandish and exploit them.
Such curious, even quirky behavior sets the political animal apart from the pack. And it’s what gives certain men and women decisive power over others.
How many times have you heard a colleague complain that he failed to get a promotion because of “office politics”? Or someone say that she turned her back on an opportunity because she “couldn’t hack all the favoritism”? What about the “backstabbing” and the “sharks” who haunt the corridors of business and professional power? But we all know people who have succeeded swiftly and magnificently while others plod along one yard and a cloud of dust at a time. The fact is, there’s a great deal of politics in everyday life.
For twenty-eight years I have worked in an environment where politics is the name of the game. As a U.S. Senate aide, presidential speechwriter and top assistant to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, I have seen men as different as Ronald Reagan and Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill play the game with gusto and win. I have gained something even more valuable than a healthy Rolodex of connections: the knowledge that success is only rarely based on the luck of looks, money or charisma. There is energy, of course. All great pols have that. But what drives this energy is the willingness to learn and do whatever is necessary to reach the top. The more they succeed at their trade, the zestier they become. John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were rivals for office, but they had one great love in common: the contest itself.
Like others before me, I have been fascinated with the towering legends: Lyndon B. Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln. I have heard the tales of how these great politicians learned to forge alliances, make deals, manipulate enemies and bolster their reputations, all the while building strong networks of alliances.
Yes, there are rules to the game of power, part of the political lore passed from one generation of leaders to the next. This unwritten code accumulates year by year, like the morning-after cigar smoke in Capitol Hill cloakrooms. You hear it invoked behind the scenes, when someone does it right and pulls off a victory or does it all wrong and pays the price. One of the old-time guys, the fellows who have won for decades, offers the quiet verdict: “Just goes to show that . . .” Then comes the sacramental intonation of the rule itself, dredged from the archives of those whose lives depend on winning every time.
I was standing one day in the Democratic cloakroom, that narrow hideaway just off the floor of the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol. The room is equipped with a snack bar, banks of telephone booths and two rows of worn leather couches with pillows so that members can take afternoon naps. It was lunchtime and the smell of steaming hot dogs filled the air. A small crowd of congressmen, escaping the Capitol’s chandeliered formality, were lined up munching sandwiches at the
stainless-steel lunch counter. The talk, as always, was of politics. Quietly, I confided to one of the members that I was writing a book about the rules of politics, including all the tricks I had overheard in off-the-record hideaways like this. He looked at me, a crease of pain crossing his forehead, and said with dead seriousness, “Why do you want to go and give them away?”
My answer is that such trade secrets are valuable not just to the aspiring pol. There are enduring human truths in the rules that politicians play by.
In every field of endeavor there are people who could easily be successful but who spend their entire lives making one political mistake after another. They become so absorbed in themselves that they ignore the very people they would most like to influence. Rather than recruit allies, they limit their horizons to missions they can accomplish alone. Instead of confronting or seducing their adversaries, they avoid them. In making important deals, they become obsessed with intangibles and give away the store. They become crippled by handicaps when they could be exploiting them.
Some might say these tendencies are only human. But such tendencies that pass for human nature, our hesitancy to ask for things, our unease in the face of opposition, are instincts for accommodation rather than leadership, the reflexes of fear. By following them, we trap ourselves. We teach ourselves to stay in line, keep our heads down: the age-old prescription for serfdom.
The premise of this book is straightforward: To get ahead in life, you can learn a great deal from those who get ahead for a living. Climb aboard Air Force One and you will find a world not all that different from your own workplace. People are jockeying for position, all the while keeping an eye on the competition across the aisle. Spend some time in the Oval Office, and you will find it much like any other office, much as the Congress is like other large, complex organizations. There are friends and enemies, deals and reputations being made. And there are gladiators, people who keep score by the body count around them. Once you learn the rules, you will have the street smarts not only to survive the world of everyday politics, but to thrive in it.
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 Page 87
