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

  Nixon, just seventeen, rejected the yoke. He organized a rival social club of precisely those rejected by the Franklins: the poor students who had to work their way through school, the football linemen, and others judged too awkward or unattractive for the elite fraternity. To celebrate its resentment, the new club employed parody. The Franklins wore black ties for their yearbook photo; the contrarians wore shirts with open collars. The Franklins held formal dinners; the new crowd got together over beans and hot dogs. As one of Nixon’s club mates put it, the Franklins were the “tuxedo boys . . . the aristocrats on campus.” The Nixon crew constituted “the bourgeois . . . the bean boys.”

  Even Nixon’s name for the new club, the Orthogonians, poked fun at the social caste system the Franklins had imposed. Denied admission to the Franklins for lacking the requisite sophistication, his band took defiant pride in being the “straight shooters.” Within weeks, its ranks outnumbered those of the established club, and Dick Nixon went on to defeat a Franklin to become Whittier’s student-body president. While having no interest in it himself, Nixon based his winning campaign on a promise to have dancing permitted on campus.

  Nixon would employ the same Orthogonian politics in his adult career. From his first run for Congress, he pointed to the elite holding power, then raised an army of the excluded against it. In 1946, he spoke for the small businessmen angry at the liberal New Dealers still clinging to office in Washington. In 1952, he and wife, Pat, embodied the young “cloth coat” Republican couple indignant at the mink-warmed Democratic elite. As president, his constituency became the “silent majority” angry at the longhaired children of privilege who protested their country’s war in Southeast Asia. Each time, the Nixonian rage derived its strength from the same Orthogonian resentment.

  When Kennedy and Nixon took their seats in Congress just after World War II, the Mucker and the Orthogonian could unite against a common enemy: the old New Deal establishment trailing, like a retreating army, behind the funeral cortege of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Toward this crowd, the George St. Johns of Democratic liberalism, Jack Kennedy would feel a Mucker’s contempt; Dick Nixon, an Orthogonian’s resentment. One had watched his wealthy father manipulate this crowd; the other knew the painful sting of being born among those millions excluded by it. The odd bond would for many years make them friends.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  World War II Was Their Greatest Campaign Manager

  IN April 1945, as Adolf Hitler and mistress Eva Braun spent their last days in a Berlin bunker, the celebrating in San Francisco had already begun. From Washington, London, and Moscow, the Allies converged for the first great pageant of victory. Artie Shaw had taught his band every national anthem, even scoring one for Saudi Arabia, whose strict Muslim royalty saw the composition as blasphemy. Pianist Arthur Rubinstein and New York Metropolitan Opera star Ezio Pinza were at the San Francisco Opera House, where Secretary-General Alger Hiss was preparing for the inaugural session of the new United Nations. Hotel lobbies bustled with the arrival of the men World War II had made celebrities. Up on Nob Hill, the American secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, held court at the Fairmont penthouse. Several floors down, aide Adlai Stevenson leaked so much news his room was christened “Operation Titanic.” At the St. Francis, young assistant secretary Nelson Rockefeller hosted an around-the-clock reception for Latin American delegates. Up on the tenth floor, the conference’s most mysterious delegation, the Soviet mission, headed by Vyacheslav M. Molotov, had rifle-toting guards posted from one end of the hall to the other.

  Everyone guessed at Moscow’s intentions. Would America’s “great Russian allies” cooperate in the new postwar order or resort to their pre-1941 truculence? At a Palace Hotel suite, Kremlin expert Charles “Chip” Bohlen gave a briefing one evening on the situation he had just left behind in Moscow. The prestigious group included top British envoy Anthony Eden and U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman. At one point in Bohlen’s talk, Harriman went out on the balcony with a young woman. “I give him about two more minutes, and then he’s going to hang himself,” Jack Kennedy, the twenty-seven-year-old host of the gathering, whispered to his navy pal Paul “Red” Fay. “What do you mean?” Fay asked, thinking that Kennedy was talking about the briefing they were getting from the Soviet expert. “I’m not talking about Bohlen,” Kennedy corrected him. “I’m talking about Harriman.”

  “That’s pretty much the way it was,” agreed Chuck Spalding, another Kennedy pal along for the fun. “Jack’s attitude, as it was in so many other crises, made you feel you were at a fair or something.” Kennedy, a stringer for the Chicago Herald American, was something of a celebrity himself due to his wealthy father’s controversial tenure as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain in the prewar years and his own publicized exploit in the South Pacific, saving his crew after his PT boat was rammed in half by a Japanese destroyer.

  Like other returned servicemen, Kennedy worried that an ailing President Roosevelt, dead just two weeks, had conceded too much to Joseph Stalin during the recent Allied meeting at Yalta. The stone-faced Soviet delegation attending the UN conference only added to the sense of postwar menace. “Americans can now see that we have a long way to go before Russia will entrust her safety to any organization other than the Red Army,” Kennedy wrote after covering a Molotov press conference. “The Russians may have forgiven, but they haven’t forgotten.”

  The Hearst reporter had his own postwar agenda: politics. His older brother, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., had been killed in a bombing mission the year before, leaving the hopes of Joseph Kennedy, Sr., riding on his second oldest. The job covering the UN conference, a plum assignment won through his father’s friendship with William Randolph Hearst himself, was a warm-up for what Jack called his dad’s scheme to “parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into a political advantage.” His weeks covering the UN conference would teach Kennedy the superiority of his father’s plan to his own notion of becoming a full-time journalist. He learned the hard way that the statesmen passing through the hotel lobbies of San Francisco carried far more prestige than those milling around trying to snag interviews. Red Fay, who had convinced his navy superiors to let him accompany his mustered-out pal to San Francisco, recalled a telling incident from those days and nights in San Francisco. “He had this attractive gal, and—I will never forget—somebody came in and ran his hand through Jack’s hair and was very condescending. I’ve never seen Jack so mad.” Kennedy was learning firsthand the lack of respect shown to lowly reporters, even well-connected ones. When word came that his father had persuaded, with the help of a huge financial gift, the legendary James Michael Curley to give up his seat in the U.S. Congress and run again for mayor of Boston, young Kennedy was ready for the leap. “I’ve made up my mind,” Kennedy told Spalding not long after. “I’m going into politics.”

  * * *

  JOSEPH Kennedy prepared the way for his son’s electoral debut in 1946 much as the U.S. Navy had prepared an enemy-held island for an invasion by the marines. To replant his family’s roots in a state deserted years earlier for New York, Kennedy drenched the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in philanthropy. The archdiocese of Boston got a check for $600,000; the Guild of Appolonia, the association of Catholic dentists, got $10,000. With each gift came a sole proviso: Son Jack got his picture in the newspaper handing over the check.

  To make young Kennedy a recognized figure in the area, his father retained a public relations firm to book his son at every local club that needed a free speaker. Lieutenant Kennedy used the occasions to share with his less-traveled audiences his firsthand impressions of postwar Europe. Like most Americans of the day, he missed the drama taking place on the other side of the globe in the Indo-Chinese capital of Hanoi, whose streets and docks were crowded that September with a million people celebrating the Japanese evacuation and what they thought was their nation’s independence. But what young Kennedy lacked in oratorical skill—and knowledge of Indochina—he supplied in charm, es
pecially the winsome smile he flashed after each stumble over the text.

  To offset the resistance of the local political organizations, the Kennedys built one of their own. Sgt. Billy Sutton was the first aboard, hired by the younger Kennedy for seventy-five dollars a week just hours after arriving home from the war. To establish a voting residence, Kennedy used the Bellevue, a hotel and political hangout across from the Boston State House. But while he busied himself trudging through the working-class neighborhoods of the Eleventh Congressional District, Kennedy overlooked an impressive detail: He had missed the deadline for filing his petitions. The papers that should have been presented to the election board by close of business April 23 were instead sitting in a filing cabinet at the candidate’s headquarters. It was 6:30 P.M. The statehouse closed at 5:00 P.M.

  Joseph P. Kennedy’s son refused to accept catastrophe. Some frantic phone calls located a well-placed accomplice. Entering the statehouse that night, Kennedy found his way to the appropriate office and deposited the all-important documents in their proper place. Though unaware of the after-hours entry, his rivals were outraged already by Kennedy’s blatant carpetbagging into an area where he had neither lived nor paid taxes, much less served politically. Boston city councilman Joseph Russo, another candidate for the Eleventh District seat, expressed the street-corner attitude in a newspaper ad:

  Congress Seat for Sale.

  No Experience Necessary.

  Applicant Must Live in New York or Florida.

  Only Millionaires Need Apply.

  Instead of becoming angry at Russo, the Kennedys got even. They got a twenty-eight-year-old custodian named Joseph Russo to agree, for a modest payment, to put his name on the ballot, thereby splitting the Joseph Russo vote in two. Front runner Mike Neville faced even tougher treatment. The Kennedys tried bribing him out of the race. “Joe Kennedy called my dad, who was a lawyer,” his son Robert recalls. “They wanted him to get out of the fight. They offered him a job with the Kennedy Foundation. Twenty-five thousand dollars a year . . . for life.” When the proud Neville refused, Kennedy senior called once again on his friendship with William Randolph Hearst. For the last sixty days before the election, the Hearst-owned Boston American did not run a single Neville ad, print a single Neville photo, or so much as mention the man’s name. “The Kennedy strategy was to buy you out or blast you out,” Neville would ruefully recall of a family that possessed ample clout for either method.

  Assemblyman Tom O’Neill, a Neville backer known on the street corner as “Tip,” was not all that impressed by the Kennedy operation, not at first. To O’Neill, comfortable at the neighborhood clubhouse, the rules were basic. A fellow worked for the party and was rewarded, perhaps with a snow button that meant you would be a regular on the city road crew come winter. If you wanted to run for office, you waited your turn, something young John Kennedy apparently knew nothing about. “I couldn’t believe this skinny, pasty-faced kid was a candidate for anything!” he thought after being introduced to the young interloper one Sunday in front of the Bellevue Hotel.

  Kennedy looked better than he actually was. His war injuries masked more serious health problems. His bad back, aggravated in the PT boat incident, was congenital. His yellowish skin, a condition the Kennedy campaign blamed on malaria, was actually a symptom of Addison’s disease, which produced jaundice, stark changes of appearance, and deathly bouts of illness. “He wasn’t looking healthy then,” Billy Sutton recalled. Another aide, Mark Dalton, remembered his candidate as “a skeleton.”

  But Kennedy’s sickliness seemed only to add to his appeal. As with other young veterans, he had come home to run for office wearing a badge of courage. As Sutton would declare again and again in the years ahead, “World War II was their greatest campaign manager.” And in Jack Kennedy’s case, the power of his father’s money magnified his back-from-the-front appeal. Tip O’Neill soon noticed an extraordinary sight on his North Cambridge street: a caterer’s truck. Even his own block was being infiltrated by the Kennedy campaign. “If you agreed to invite a few friends to your house to meet Jack, they brought in a case of mixed booze, hired a caterer, and gave you a hundred dollars, which was supposed to pay for a cleaning woman to come to your house both before and after the party.” For the ready host, that hundred dollars was money in the bank. In those days, working-class families of North Cambridge didn’t employ cleaning women. They raised them.

  As the election neared, the pace of vote buying escalated. “A few weeks before the primary, the Kennedys approached a number of large families and promised them fifty dollars in cash to help out at the polls,” O’Neill recalled. “They didn’t care if these people showed up to work. They were simply buying votes, a few at a time, and fifty bucks was a lot of money.” Opposition campaign workers took to pinning twenty-dollar bills to their lapels. They called them “Kennedy buttons.”

  To Joe Kennedy, twenty dollars was small change. Thanks to his Hollywood connections, local movie theaters began running newsreel features on young Jack Kennedy’s campaign for Congress. One hundred thousand bootleg reprints of a Reader’s Digest account of Lieutenant Kennedy’s PT-109 exploits were mailed first-class to voters.

  Jack Kennedy lived up to the Hollywood image his father was promoting. He had become a local celebrity, especially among the young women of the area. Despite his gaunt features, the bobby-socks crowd looked upon the rich, young Irish American as the political equivalent of that other skinny star Frank Sinatra. His prospects zooming, Kennedy turned on the charm. After hearing one rival after another use a joint appearance with him to describe his hard-knocks upbringing, the target of these Uriah Heepish performances took the wry road. “I do seem to be the only one here,” he deadpanned to the delight of the working stiffs, “who did not come up the hard way.”

  As the primary approached, Jack would be reminded that his new career in politics was a hand-me-down from a brother lost in war. With Joe Kennedy’s polls showing his second son with a solid lead, members of the family sat around the dinner table in Hyannis Port, each taking a turn to toast the candidate’s twenty-ninth birthday. Finally, the senior Kennedy called on thirteen-year-old Teddy. “I would like to drink a toast to the brother who isn’t here,” he said.

  It took several minutes for the room to recover.

  Try as he did, trudging dutifully up the stairs of one second- and third-story family dwelling after another, Jack Kennedy could not ignore his own mortality. The day before balloting, the front-running candidate marched in the Bunker Hill parade, then fell ill before the finish. Yet in the June 18 primary, tantamount to election in that Democratic stronghold, Jack Kennedy won 22,183 votes, Neville 11,341, Cotter 6,677, the real Russo 5,661, Kennedy’s Russo 799.

  * * *

  GEN. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, accepted the Nazi surrender documents at Rheims on May 7, 1945. Days later, he was driven through the canyons of Wall Street, ticker tape flying down from the highest windows as the general stood in the back of his car, both hands held high with the V sign, a gesture he and the world had learned from Britain’s Winston Churchill. Twenty floors above, a thirty-two-year-old navy lieutenant beheld the sight. It was the closest he had ever come to so great a man.

  For Dick Nixon, World War II was not yet over. As an aviation ground officer in the Solomons, he had earned the nickname “Nick” and learned enough poker to bring home a nest egg of $10,000. He was spending the rest of the war back East, terminating defense contracts. On V-J Day he celebrated with others in New York’s Times Square, only to realize a pickpocket had gotten to his wallet. Weeks later, back in his apartment in Baltimore, where the Californian was still on active service, he experienced a different stroke of luck. It came in a surprise from home.

  October 3, 1945

  Dear Dick,

  I am writing you this short note to ask if you would like to be a candidate for Congress on the Republican ticket in 1946.

  Jerry Voorhis expects to run�
��registration is about 50–50. The Republicans are gaining.

  Please airmail me your reply if you are interested.

  H. L. Perry

  P.S. Are you a registered voter in California?

  Herman Perry, a prominent banker and longtime friend of the Nixon family, had played a role in an early Nixon political success. He was the Whittier College board member who backed the young student leader’s call for legalized dancing on the Quaker campus. Calling Perry in California, Nixon discovered that Perry was head-hunting on behalf of a local business group, the Committee of 100, which hoped to unseat Democrat Voorhis, the ten-year incumbent seeking reelection. Nixon told him he was “honored” and “excited” at the chance being offered to appear before the group. He would run, he promised Perry in a letter sent the next day, “an aggressive, vigorous campaign” on a platform of “practical liberalism.”

  Within the month, Nixon was back in Los Angeles, telling eight wealthy leaders of the Committee of 100 what its members wanted very much to hear. “There were two ways of looking at America’s economic future,” the young man in his navy officer’s uniform said. “One, advocated by the New Deal, is government control in regulating our lives. The other calls for individual freedom and all that initiative can produce. I subscribe to the second view. I believe the returning veterans, and I have talked to many of them in the foxholes, will not be satisfied with a dole or a government handout.”

  The earnest young man was giving voice to the Committee of 100’s implicit credo. Yet one point still concerned him. Nixon asked the Committee of 100’s leaders if they were ready to foot the bill for a serious campaign. Assured there would be adequate financing, he made his position clear. “Well, I’m in your hands. If you say for me to run, I’ll run.” Facing its general membership that night at Whittier’s William Penn Hotel, Nixon found the same seething resentment he had felt so keenly among the squares at Whittier College. Here again he sensed the passion of the angry, striving middle class against the social and cultural elite, represented, in this case, by Jerry Voorhis, well-born, well-spoken graduate of Yale, the ultimate Franklin. Nixon was last to be heard of six candidates, several of them lured by a newspaper advertisement. His well-composed lines did the trick, putting the group’s pro-business ideology in sharp relief from that of the despised New Dealers. Dick Nixon had done his homework.