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

  Three weeks later, Roy Day, Committee of 100 leader, phoned the Nixon apartment at two o’clock in the morning and shouted the news. “Dick, the nomination’s yours!” The vote had been unanimous. Too excited to go back to sleep, Pat Nixon was to remember, she and her husband talked until dawn.

  That same morning, Nixon launched his campaign, soliciting negative information on Jerry Voorhis, calling up anyone in Washington who might help him get the goods. “His conservative reputation must be blasted,” Nixon wrote enthusiastically to one Committee of 100 leader of the liberal Democrat who had been a socialist in his younger years. “I’m really hopped up over this deal!” Yet one problem remained: the Nixon family finances. His entire personal kitty consisted of the $10,000 he’d brought home from the South Pacific. He was willing to spend it, though, for a seat in Congress.

  His first investment was hiring a $500-a-month Beverly Hills public relations man, Murray Chotiner. The overweight, sallow-faced Chotiner had two working precepts. The first held that voting was a negative act: People don’t vote for someone; they vote against someone. Chotiner’s second rule was that voters possessed the mental capacity for grasping just two or three issues at one sitting. The goal of every campaign was therefore to limit the number of issues to two or three, all of them tied to the opponent, all of them negative. “I say to you in all sincerity that if you do not define the opposition candidate before the campaign gets started,” Chotiner taught his disciples, “you are doomed to defeat.”

  For Nixon, defeat loomed as a real possibility. At the campaign’s outset, Chotiner told him to exploit his veteran’s status to the hilt. “Just stand there in your uniform, keep your mouth shut, and I’ll get you elected to Congress!” Since his candidate had no civilian suits, it seemed an unremarkable set of orders. But within a matter of weeks the Nixons learned the harsh realities of political life. A break-in at party headquarters cost the campaign its entire stock of pamphlets that Pat Nixon had financed with the $3,000 she realized by selling a piece of land. “No one cared when it happened to us!” she was to recall decades later in the aftermath of a more celebrated burglary. A worse calamity concerned the campaign itself. Nixon’s tales of the South Pacific, and his self-portrait of the young returning vet building a family, were not stirring up the voters. He had failed to ignite enough anger toward the well-turned-out Voorhis to wrest his seat from him. By early April, Chotiner was starting to get nervous. “We don’t have enough meat!” he complained to his candidate. If they didn’t turn up something on Jerry Voorhis, the Nixon campaign would go nowhere.

  Thanks to Chotiner, the meat was soon in Nixon’s refrigerator. It arrived on April 23, the same day Jack Kennedy delivered those nocturnal nominating petitions to the Massachusetts secretary of state’s office. Nixon had found his issue: Jerry Voorhis’s backing by the giant Congress of Industrial Relations. Freed from wartime “no strike” pledges, the country’s great labor unions, led by the CIO, were demanding catch-up wages. In January 1946, the electrical, machine, and auto workers had struck. Next to go out were the mine workers, who forced President Truman’s hand. Dick Nixon would now charge Cong. Jerry Voorhis with being in the hip pocket of labor’s political action committee, the CIO PAC.

  The Committee of 100 delivered the anti-Voorhis blow: “Now that the Political Action Committee has endorsed the candidacy of Jerry Voorhis for Congress, one of the real issues of the campaign is out in the open. There can be no mistake. The choice now is: Shall it be the people represented by Nixon or the PAC by Voorhis?”

  There was only one problem with the charge: It was false. The CIO executive board in California had voted on April 1 to endorse every Democratic congressman except Voorhis. He had been passed over for criticizing the many postwar strikes. He had committed the further offense in the eyes of the CIO PAC of condemning the Soviet Union’s grab of Eastern Europe. “I believe the Communists are in substantial control of CIO,” Voorhis had written a friend afterward, “and between you and me I think that is why I didn’t get the endorsement.”

  Nixon found such details unimpressive. A liberal, anti-Communist faction in the Southern California branch of National Citizen (NC) PAC, an auxiliary group organized by CIO PAC leaders, had pushed through a local endorsement of Voorhis. Thanks to an informant, Murray Chotiner had this sugarplum of opposition research in hand a full month before Voorhis even knew of the local NC PAC’s action. The Nixon team had all the evidence it needed.

  Congressman Voorhis had been attacked for his CIO PAC endorsements in the previous election campaigns to little effect. But Nixon’s use of the “PAC” charge in 1946 came amid a sea change in voter attitudes. A Gallup poll in July showed that six out of ten Americans saw Russia’s actions in Eastern Europe as a first step toward world rule. “Foreign policy and relations with Russia” had become the number-one voter concern. The CIO PAC had become a popular target of this concern. In Detroit, rank-and-file workers charged it with being Communist, refusing to contribute to it. “There are no strings attached to me,” Nixon told a Whit-tier audience that August. “I have no support from any special-interest or pressure group. I welcome the opposition of the PAC with its Communist principles and its huge slush fund.”

  But victory still seemed elusive. In the June primary, Nixon and Voorhis took advantage of California law permitting them to cross-file for the other party’s nomination as well as their own. When both Democratic and Republican ballots were counted, Voorhis won a total of seven thousand more votes than Nixon, a dim portent for November. Another obstacle rose up in the form of Republican governor Earl Warren, who refused either to endorse Nixon or to withdraw a letter of commendation Voorhis had received from him and was using as a bragging point in his campaign. It was an impolitic gesture by Warren that Nixon would never forget.

  It was still Jerry Voorhis’s campaign to lose. In mid-September, the congressman met face-to-face with Nixon in a South Pasadena high school gym. The challenger had prepped fanatically, even sneaking in to listen to Voorhis’s speeches, studying him as an aide scribbled down everything the incumbent said. For three days prior to the debate, Nixon skipped everything else to study and rehearse.

  Jerry Voorhis took the platform first that night, speaking for fifteen minutes on postwar planning, full employment, and foreign policy. It was earnest, good-government stuff, and dull. Nixon, arriving late, waited backstage. Storming onto the stage just as Voorhis was winding down, he grabbed his rival’s hand and shook it briskly. Then, after rousing the pro-Republican crowd with his usual anti-New Deal barn burner, Dick Nixon waited patiently for the question-and-answer period.

  It was worth the wait. A Voorhis ringer in the audience demanded that Nixon recant his “false charges” that the Democratic congressman had gotten the endorsement of the CIO PAC. Hearing this, Nixon pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. It was an in-house bulletin from the Los Angeles chapter of NC PAC reporting the local group’s support for Voorhis. Nixon had beer saving this five-month-old product of Murray Chotiner’s opposition research for just this opportunity.

  Exploiting the moment for maximum indignation, Nixon walked toward Voorhis, holding the paper high over his head. He asked that his rival read what was in his hand. Stunned by this unaccustomed theater, the congressman started toward his predator. It was too late. Reading the document Nixon had presented him, the five-term veteran now made a fatal error. Instead of dismissing the document as an internal, local recommendation ignored at the state and national level, Voorhis quibbled. He said the document was not from CIO PAC but from NC PAC, its associate organization. Nixon had him. To the hoots of the crowd, the challenger read aloud the names of board members, then the same names on the board of the CIO PAC. Instead of calling Nixon a liar for claiming erroneously that he had the national labor group’s endorsement, Voorhis had only struggled deeper into the quicksand. “How did it go?” Voorhis asked a fellow congressman afterward.

  “Jerry,” the colleague answered, “he cut you to
pieces.”

  When Voorhis, answering a question at a subsequent debate, called him “Commander Nixon,” the young vet let loose with a stinging riposte. “If Mr. Voorhis had been in the navy, he would know that the correct way of addressing someone of my rank was ‘Mister.’ ” It was a masterful eye gouge at the older man, who had spent the war in Washington while Dick Nixon was in steamy Bougainville.

  In the next weeks, Nixon turned to mockery. “Out of a mass of 132 bills introduced by my opponent in the last four years,” an October newspaper claimed, “only one has become law, and that was one that transferred the activities affecting domestic rabbits from one federal department to another.” You have to be “a rabbit,” he told the audience in the candidates’ last joint appearance, to get any representation from Jerry Voorhis.

  The attacks grew nastier. The Alhambra Post Advocate, edited by Nixon booster Herb Klein, compared Voorhis’s voting record with that of New York congressman Vito Marcantonio, a reflexive leftist and Communist apologist. “How Jerry and Vito Voted” screamed the headlines. “Notorious Fellow Traveller.” The Los Angeles newspapers carried front-page boxes exhorting:

  Vote Against New Deal Communism.

  Vote Republican. Vote American.

  The smearing of Democrats as un-American Communists was hardly a Southern California monopoly. On election eve, House Republican leader Joseph Martin of Massachusetts voiced equally strong language. “The people will vote tomorrow between chaos, confusion, bankruptcy, state socialism or communism, and the preservation of our American life.” To further stoke the Communist issue, unidentified phone calls began arriving in Twelfth District homes. “This is a friend of yours, but I can’t tell you my name,” one of the nine-dollar-a-day hired callers would recite into the receiver. “I just wanted you to know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist.” Many would forever attribute those calls to Nixon personally.

  * * *

  A billboard in Boston aptly defined the nation’s appetite for change that fall of 1946: “Had Enough? Vote Republican!”

  Jack Kennedy, running in a deeply Democratic district, had no reason to fear the national trend. Calling himself a “fighting conservative,” he harbored private contempt for the social and economic policies of the New Deal. “Mr. Roosevelt has contributed to the end of capitalism in our own country,” he wrote in his diary the summer before, “although he would probably argue the point at some length. He has done this, not through the laws which he sponsored or were passed during his presidency, but rather through the emphasis he put on rights rather than responsibilities.”

  Kennedy had formed a close tie that summer in Hyannis Port with a Catholic priest, Edward Duffy, a student of Soviet communism. Having watched events in Europe since the Yalta agreement of February 1945, Kennedy now spoke as someone alarmed by Moscow’s belligerence and scornful of those in America who failed to see it. He told an October radio audience how he had stood down a left-wing meeting of Young Democrats in New York. “I told them that the people of the United States have been far too gullible with respect to the publicity being disseminated throughout the world by the clever and brilliant Moscow propagandists. I told the group that I felt that Soviet Russia today is run by a small clique of ruthless, powerful, and selfish men who have established a government which denies the Russian people personal freedom and economic security. I told them that Soviet Russia is a slave state of the worst sort. I knew that my remarks would alienate the entire group, and I did alienate them.”

  Kennedy now raged at those in the Democratic party, led by Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, who chose to ignore the Soviet Union’s expansionism in Eastern Europe. What angered Kennedy most was Wallace’s words at a Madison Square Garden rally of NC PAC, the organization that Dick Nixon was attacking that fall: “We have no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of the United States,” the man FDR had dropped from his 1944 ticket said. “If we can overcome the imperialistic urge in the Western world, I’m convinced there’ll be no war.” Wallace was blaming America for Soviet belligerence.

  * * *

  BY the end of their campaigns, Kennedy and Nixon were both combatants in a global war that had not yet been given a name. For the next decade, their shared antipathy toward the Soviet Union would make them oddly compatible, their common foe being not just the Communist threat but those in the country who turned a blind eye to that threat. That first campaign sealed another, less attractive bond. Long before election day, each had lost his political virginity. While Kennedy had shown himself a worthy student of his new profession, a master at how this or that group voted, an old friend noticed that he now selected his companions on the same basis: who could help him get ahead. A Whittier classmate told Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose of the disturbing change he noticed in the local political newcomer: He’d become ruthless. “Dick knew that a lot of us who are liberal are not Communists; in fact, we are anti-Communists.”

  On November 5, John F. Kennedy won with 73 percent of the vote. Across the continent, that same night, Richard Nixon pulled a major political upset, defeating a well-known, respected Democrat with 56 percent of the vote. Nixon was euphoric. “Pat and I were happier on November 6, 1946, than we were ever in our political career,” he would recall years later. But as he looked at the morning-after newspaper that victorious day in November 1946, a new challenge had already arisen. The Los Angeles Times carried its account of Nixon’s local victory on page 2, while on the front page was an item reporting a more distant result. From three thousand miles away, across the full breadth of this nation, came the message: “Son of Kennedy Congress Winner.”

  It had begun.

  A week after the election, Time showcased some “new faces” to watch in the next Congress:

  Richard Milhous Nixon, dark, lank Quaker attorney who turned a California grass-roots campaign (dubbed “hopeless” by wheelhorse Republicans) into a triumph over high-powered, high-minded Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis. To beat Voorhis, ex-Navy Lieut. Commander Nixon, 33, passed around 25,000 white plastic thimbles labeled: “Elect Nixon and needle the P.A.C.” He plugged hard for veterans’ housing, end of controls, a bipartisan foreign policy; politely avoided attacks on his opponent.

  John F. Kennedy, 29, boyish, raw-boned, Harvard-bred son of ex-U.S. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. To win the Democratic primary in Massachusetts’ 11th District, which has rarely sent a Republican to Congress, ex-PT boat commander Kennedy made 450 speeches, plumped first for international issues, then switched to such local matters as the restoration of Boston’s port and the encouragement of New England industries. One of his biggest jobs: to convince 37 nationalities in some of Boston’s grimmest slums that he was no Fauntleroy.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Strangers on a Train

  Two freshman congressmen could not have come to Washington in more wildly different style that turbulent January of 1947. Richard Nixon arrived in the nation’s capital resembling more an economic itinerant than a political conqueror. He and Pat drove cross-country with their family possessions strapped to the roof of their new 1946 Ford like an Okie family headed the wrong way. A side trip to Mexico produced an added indignity when a U.S. border guard insisted that the pair unload the entire car for inspection. In Washington, more trouble: The young California family could find no place to live, at least not on the $12,500 that a member of Congress drew a year. He, Pat, and daughter Tricia would spend three months living out of suitcases at the Mayflower Hotel. Nixon would admit to having the “same lost feeling” he had experienced upon entering the navy.

  Jack Kennedy’s entrance into the postwar capital was a study in nonchalance. In late November the Boston Post pictured the new lawmaker looking through the real estate ads. But this was just a human-interest ploy for the voters back in Cambridge and Charlestown. Joe Kennedy’s son was hardly the typical young vet scavenging for housing. Soon a comfortable Georgetown town house was leas
ed, and the congressman-elect was vacationing in Palm Beach.

  Billy Sutton, who had driven down from Massachusetts a few days earlier, greeted Kennedy when the twenty-nine-year-old arrived in the nation’s capital to take the oath of office. Kennedy walked into the Statler Hilton gleaming with his Florida tan, hair tousled, carrying a black cashmere overcoat and wearing a gray suit and a pair of brogues elegantly stretched by shoe trees.

  “Billy, is Ted with you?” Kennedy asked, wondering about the whereabouts of his new congressional secretary.

  “He’s in having some coffee,” Sutton told him, leaning his head in the direction of the Statler’s drugstore. But Kennedy, he warned, would not have time for such amenities. John W. McCormack, the majority leader and unquestioned head of the Massachusetts delegation, had been calling all morning. “You should be in a hurry. You have a caucus meeting!” To soften the admonition, Sutton delivered some good news. “You’ve got two pretty good committees: Education and Labor and District of Columbia.” Kennedy was undeterred. “Well, I’d like a couple of eggs.”

  With that, the young congressman took a seat alongside Ted Reardon at the drugstore counter and ordered two soft-boiled eggs and tea. Sutton continued to hover. “We’ve got to get up there! Mr. McCormack is anxious that you get there!” The most powerful Democrat in Massachusetts and, next to Sam Rayburn, in Washington as well was up there waiting for the freshman!