“How long would you say Mr. McCormack has been here?” Kennedy asked.
“Twenty-six years,” the detail-minded Sutton answered after an instant’s calculation.
“Well,” the veteran Mucker answered, still eating his eggs, “don’t you think Mr. McCormack wouldn’t mind waiting another ten minutes?”
Just off the plane, Kennedy was exhibiting the same politics of contempt he had displayed at Choate and in his campaign. His inherited disdain for the John McCormacks of the world would free him from the entangling alliances that brought down men like Jerry Voorhis. This young politician had no use for badges of party loyalty like those Tip O’Neill’s father passed out in Cambridge. Jack Kennedy didn’t need a snow button. He was born with one.
After the noon swearing-in ceremony, the first and only session the tradition-bound House would allow to be televised until the late 1970s, Kennedy and his two aides headed back downtown to the National Press Club, where a reception was being held for new congressmen who had served in the war. Walking into the crowded press club’s ballroom, Sutton noticed that “there was this fellow over in the corner, a young fellow, very dapper-dressed, who seemed to be the star of the show.” When Sutton introduced him to his boss, Kennedy, “who had been sort of taking things easy,” suddenly perked up.
“So you’re the guy who beat Jerry Voorhis!” he said, moving toward his new classmate. “That’s like beating McCormack up in Massachusetts! How’s it feel?”
“I suppose I’m elated!” said the man born absent a gift for small talk.
Like the wealthy Harvard freshman he had once been, Kennedy was checking out the young scholarship kid everyone was touting for quarterback, the gawky freshman with the haircut Billy Sutton said “he must have gotten in North Carolina somewhere!” In a matter of seconds, Jack Kennedy was also doing what he knew how to do almost better than anything else: convince someone he liked him.
The two ex–naval officers from the South Pacific theater would soon be sharing the same Capitol Hill billet. Like Kennedy, Nixon had been put on the pivotal Education and Labor panel, which was about to take on the unions. Years later, he would muse on the paradox of his drawing the shortest straw among freshman Republicans named to the committee, with Kennedy doing the same on the Democratic side. “By one of those curious coincidences of history,” Nixon recalled, “another freshman assigned to that committee was a good-looking, good-humored young Democrat from Massachusetts named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He and I shared the dubious distinction of sitting at the opposite ends of the committee table like a pair of unmatched bookends.”
Thanks to the “Had Enough!” elections of the previous November, the Eightieth Congress was the first controlled by the Republican party since the 1920s. Its new majority was primed to ferret out the misdeeds of two decades of Democratic rule; or, as one congressman put it, to “open each session with a prayer and close it with a probe.” Thirty-nine investigative committees and subcommittees were poised to unearth suspected corruption in the Roosevelt-Truman era. Communism was another target. In recent months, the country’s V-E Day euphoria had flattened. So had the wartime goodwill toward Soviet Russia. With each new headline from abroad the popularity of America’s wartime ally plummeted. So had the man on the street’s estimate of those who had dealt away the country’s winnings at Yalta. Congress was looking for the culprits. During the early weeks of 1947 a staffer like Billy Sutton could peek into any hearing on Capitol Hill and watch the hunt for “Reds” in progress. The Hill was, in Sutton’s later phrase, a “Stop ’n’ Shop” of hearings on Communist subversion in the film industry, in the labor unions, and in government itself.
* * *
RICHARD Nixon won a second, more dubious posting on the anti-Communist front: the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Speaker Joe Martin of Massachusetts wanted the thirty-three-year-old Californian on HUAC for what he was, a lawyer, but also for what he was not, a crackpot. Such credentials were in short supply on a committee notorious for ignoring civil liberties and tilting at windmills. Nixon brought another talent to the committee table: an insatiable appetite for opposition research. That appetite had been whetted, not sated, by the digging done on Jerry Voorhis, which produced the lethal NC PAC memo.
The Honorable Richard M. Nixon, member of Congress, was now hunting bigger game than Jerry Voorhis. He was out to catch real Communists. Within days of joining the Education and Labor Committee, he asked Wisconsin classmate Charles Kersten to find him someone who could teach him about communism, something that would take him beyond the bumper-sticker sloganeering of his first campaign. Kersten mentioned John F. Cronin, whose research had guided Father Edward Duffy, the Catholic priest who informally tutored candidate Jack Kennedy the summer before on Cape Cod. In love as ever with opposition research, Nixon went to work. Together, Nixon and Kersten began making pilgrimages to Baltimore for long discussions with Father Cronin about Soviet espionage.
Back in Washington, the Californian would now come face-to-face with his first Communist. A Fordham University economics professor and former U.S. Communist party member, Louis Budenz, told HUAC the name of the Soviet agent who was Moscow’s direct line to the party: Gerhart Eisler, an Austrian-born Communist then being held on Ellis Island for illegal entry into the country. When the committee called Eisler to the stand, the witness refused even to take the oath. “I have to do nothing. A political prisoner has to do nothing.” At this, the committee cited Eisler for contempt of Congress.
But the committee’s junior Republican was not content; Dick Nixon smelled blood. How had a known Communist like Gerhart Eisler gotten through the immigration authorities in the first place? To get answers, he took a special subcommittee up to New York to find out. Two weeks later, he gave his maiden House address on the matter. Why, he demanded to know, did an “arrogant, defiant enemy of our government” like Gerhart Eisler, his record replete with criminal acts against the United States, from forgery to perjury to failure to register as an alien, get into the United States of America?
When the contempt motion against Eisler reached the House floor, only one member voted “nay”: Vito Marcantonio, the Harlem congressman Nixon’s allies had used as Jerry Voorhis’s tar baby. Marcantonio relished the combat. Why was an “antiFascist” like Eisler being put on trial, he asked, by a House Un-American Activities Committee loaded with “pro-Fascists”? Cheered perhaps by Marcantonio’s grand defense, his “antiFascist” later jumped bail and escaped to Communist-ruled East Germany.
Thanks to Father Cronin, Nixon had a far bigger target on his scanner. His mentor had written a report, “The Problem of American Communism,” which listed several Communists who had risen to high government positions. One was the young State Department whiz kid Alger Hiss, who had presided at the founding UN conference in San Francisco. For months, Nixon would keep this bit of opposition research to himself, much as he and Murray Chotiner had kept the NC PAC memo till the whites of Jerry Voorhis’s eyes could be seen crossing the stage of the South Pasadena high school gym.
* * *
THE “Communist” issue continued to percolate. In March, President Harry Truman called on Congress to stop the Red advance across Europe by approving U.S. military aid to help governments in Greece and Turkey resist left-wing insurgencies. Speaking to a joint session, Truman called the move crucial to American security. To those on the political left, this new “Truman Doctrine” was an unwelcome 180-degree reversal from the pro-Russian policies of FDR. But for many of the young officers back from the war, the president was speaking just the right language.
Jack Kennedy thought stopping the Soviet advance in Europe was the only way to avoid repeating the mistake of not stopping the Nazi advance at the Munich Conference of 1938. Had Hitler been confronted before his deadly attack on Poland the following year, he might have retreated. Instead, it was the Allies who were thrown on the defensive. Having lived through prewar appeasement and its consequences, the World War II gen
eration had come home from the South Pacific and Europe determined to prevent a sequel to the tragedy that had interrupted and harrowed their lives and erased so many others. This time, the dictator must be stopped in his tracks. To young men like Kennedy and Nixon, the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which divided up postwar Europe, had the stench of another Munich, another buckling under to an aggressor more subversive in his methods, more pervasive in his ambitions, than the one who died in his Berlin bunker.
To stop Stalin, Kennedy accepted the mission to seek out and destroy his allies here in the country. The day after Truman spoke to Congress, Russ Nixon (no relation to Richard) of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, a union known for its sizable Communist contingent, told the Education and Labor Committee that labor unions had as much right to be led by Communists as by Democrats or Republicans. When it came his turn to quiz the witness, Jack Kennedy said he was “impressed by the dexterity” the witness, a Harvard Ph.D. in economics who was Kennedy’s instructor before joining the labor movement, had shown in fielding the earlier questions. Now he had some of his own. With a Mucker’s relish, the student was about to grade the professor.
Was communism, he asked Nixon, “a threat to the economic and political system of the United States?” No, the labor official replied, the real threat to the country was its failure to meet the “basic economic problems of the people in a democratic way” as well as its failure to expand civil rights and meet “the problems of the Negro people.”
Accepting those points, Kennedy cited what he called the Communist party’s willingness to “resort to all sorts of artifices, evasion, subterfuges, only so as to get into the trade unions and remain in them and to carry on Communist work in them, at all costs.”
Russ Nixon: I didn’t teach you that at Harvard, did I?
Kennedy: No, you did not. I am reading from Lenin, in which is described the procedure which should be adopted to get into trade unions and how they conduct themselves once they are in.
His well-laid trap won Kennedy an instant salute from the press gallery. “A freshman House member with the coral dust of Pacific Islands still clinging to his heels,” UPI’s George Reedy reported in a radio broadcast, “stole the show from his older colleagues yesterday.” With this one exchange, the young Irish-American lawmaker had cast himself as the veteran of one war ready, if necessary, to fight another.
Dick Nixon and Jack Kennedy were now positioned to go at each other for the first time. The question before Congress was how to cleanse the country’s giant labor unions of both corruption and communism. As would become the case in other areas, their differences of view were not so wide as either chose to pretend. Publicly, Nixon spoke with the same cant he had used to woo the Committee of 100 prior to his 1946 congressional run. “I was elected to smash the labor bosses,” he told a reporter on swearing-in day. “My only principle is to accept no dictation from the CIO PAC!” Privately, his position was more skeptical, closer to the center. He thought the massive Republican bill to be known as “Taft-Hartley” went too far.
Jack Kennedy also saw things differently than his party. The man who had run as a “fighting conservative” agreed with the Republicans that the power of big labor had to be tamed. Like most Americans, not just Republicans, Kennedy saw the excesses of a movement that had put 5 million men out on strike, but he could not flout the interests of Boston longshoremen and other working stiffs back home by backing the Republican bill. Instead, he decided to stake out a position apart from both parties.
Mark Dalton, called down from Massachusetts to help, was impressed that after just three months in office his freshman friend was offering a “dissenting opinion” not just to the landmark Republican measure but to the alternative put forth by his own party.
“John wanted to know what we—Billy Sutton was in the room—thought of the Hartley proposal and what he should do about it. We sat there and developed a position,” recalled Dalton, who was the one at the typewriter. “People have always said to me, ‘Was John Kennedy running for the presidency from the start?’ The new congressman from Massachusetts, in his first months, filing a dissenting report and you asked, ‘Was he thinking of the future?’ ”
He was also sizing up the competition. Dalton accompanied Kennedy when he testified before the Rules Committee about his labor-reform alternative. As they entered the cramped hearing room in the Capitol’s top floor that morning, Christian Herter, the Massachusetts Republican, was in the chair. A young member Dalton hadn’t met was speaking to the committee on the merits of the Republican bill. “Listen to this fellow,” Kennedy whispered to his counsel. “He’s going places.” A few minutes later, the congressman who had spoken returned to take the seat next to Kennedy. “I’d like you to meet Richard Nixon of California,” he told Dalton as they rose to greet him. Despite his personal belief that the Republican labor bill went “too far,” the freshman from California had become its most eloquent advocate.
Within the week, Nixon and Kennedy went head-to-head in their first debate. A western Pennsylvania congressman, Frank Buchanan, had been asked by a civic group in McKeesport, a booming steel town, to pick the two hottest political prospects, one Republican, the other Democrat, to duke it out on the Taft-Hartley bill. Nixon had just turned thirty-four. Kennedy was about to have his thirtieth birthday.
The Washington travelers were greeted on their arrival at the Baltimore & Ohio railroad station and escorted to a local hotel, the Penn McKeesport. There, in a chandeliered ballroom, they offered a stark contrast in style. Nixon, a prize-winning debater at Whittier, drove a wedge through the audience. Ignoring catcalls from the blue-collar crowd, he warned that big labor’s power was growing “by leaps and bounds.” “The public was satisfied with labor laws on V-J Day. But in the year since then we have begun to see a shift in public opinion. We have had unprecedented labor strife—the automobile strike, the steel strike, the coal strike, and even the railroad strike, in which the president was forced to intervene.” By evening’s end, the jeers from the labor seats grew so bellicose that a local business leader felt called upon to apologize to the Republican congressman in writing.
Kennedy’s impact on the room was markedly different. Looking more like a college kid than a U.S. congressman, the boyish Democrat from Massachusetts took a more conciliatory line. He said there was a lot of good in the Taft-Hartley bill, especially the provision outlawing “wildcat” strikes. He worried, however, that the bill would lead to a “war” between management and labor. “The way some of those provisions read, the unions can’t even protect themselves from the competition of the sweatshop.”
More telling than their argument, however, was the difference in manner. The Californian maintained a fighter’s edge, challenging his more genteel seeming opponent on every point. The slender lawmaker with the slight limp focused on the audience, seducing the steel-town folk with his smooth delivery and youthful charm. While Nixon debated, Kennedy simply ignored his opponent, carefully making sure that the businessmen in the room understood his justified concern that the Republican’s get-tough approach to labor might create more trouble, not less.
The battle between grit and charm scored points for both men with the audience. “Kennedy was smooth and genteel,” said a lawyer who confessed to being “fascinated” by his quaint New England accent. The debate’s moderator, a stockbroker, told his wife after the evening’s matchup that Nixon was “going to go places.” He had kind words for both debaters. “It was hard to tell who had come from the wealthy family and which had worked his way up. Neither could be called a stuffed shirt.” But it was Kennedy who won the media battle. The next morning’s editions of the McKeesport Daily News displayed a photo of a tanned, smiling Kennedy who could have been the captain of the local college football team. The picture of Nixon caught his eyes darting sideways with a hunted look, his defiant chin displaying a beard that had passed well beyond its five o’clock shadow. Even in the black-and-white photo,
the charisma gap was stark.
But it was the way the two men hit it off personally, avidly discussing the new baseball season at the Star Diner afterward, that stuck most with the evening’s organizers. A local Democratic party figure would remember Nixon and Kennedy as two “young fellows whom you could like” who showed what he took to be a “genuine friendliness.”
Boarding the Capital Limited for home at midnight, the two ex–navy officers, the one who had gone to Harvard, the other who would have loved to, drew straws for the lower berth. Nixon won. Then, as the train rolled on toward Washington, the two spent the early-morning hours talking about their true interest, foreign policy, especially the rising standoff with the Soviets in Europe, which Bernard Baruch had just christened the “cold war.”
* * *
ON the first day of May, Jack Kennedy went Red hunting. Education and Labor panelist Charles Kersten, who had helped Nixon get a grip on the issue of Communist subversion, was probing a suspicious 1941 strike against a huge defense plant in his Milwaukee district. The shutdown had occurred during the months prior to Hitler’s invasion of Russia, when Joseph Stalin still enjoyed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. Evidence tied the strike, which interrupted the flow of supplies to the U.S. Navy, to the plant’s union leadership, which was believed to be taking orders from Moscow.
The witnesses before the Education and Labor Committee were Harold Christoffel and Robert Buse, both Communist party members, both leaders of the union that struck the Milwaukee defense plant in 1941 at a time when Soviet Russia was allied with Hitler.
“Would you call Russia a democracy?” Kennedy asked Buse, one of the suspect union’s Communist leaders.
“I would not know. I do not think so.”
Kennedy pressed. “I think I would like to inform you on what I believe to be the main difference between socialism in England and socialism in Russia: They have a freedom of opposition which they do not have in Russia,” Kennedy zeroed in. “Do you think that is important?”
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 114
