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

  “I would not know if they have any opposition in Russia,” Buse answered.

  “Well, I do not think you are equipped to tell whether a member of your union is a Communist if you do not know any of the answers to any of the things that I have asked you.”

  At a later session, Kennedy went after Buse again. Why, he taunted the Local 248 leader, did the Wisconsin edition of the CIO News oppose “Roosevelt’s War Program” prior to Hitler’s invasion of Russia, then immediately thereafter run a banner headline “All Aid to Britain, Soviet Union”?

  Kennedy had tougher evidence of the two men’s collaboration with Moscow. Louis Budenz, the former Communist who had identified Gerhart Eisler, now testified to the committee that the 1941 strike of the Milwaukee plant was part of a “snowballing” of Communist-rigged strikes aimed at crippling the defense buildup. Budenz said that Buse and Christoffel were lying, that the American party was just a “fifth column” taking orders from Moscow. As Kennedy moved that the committee cite Christoffel for perjury, Kersten compared his young colleague’s attack on the American Communist party to the opening shots of the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord. Christoffel was indicted, convicted, and given a five-year prison sentence. He later won an appeal to the Supreme Court on grounds that a quorum was absent the day of the perjury motion. Kennedy expressed his anger on the House floor. “What a travesty that a Communist witness testifies untruthfully before a recognized committee of the House and then escapes the consequences of perjury by a technical claim that a specified number of congressmen were not present at a particular moment.” Christoffel was later retried, convicted, and imprisoned.

  * * *

  THAT same month, Congress approved President Truman’s call for Greek and Turkish aid, allotting additional money to help China’s Chiang Kai-shek resist the Communist forces of Mao Tse-tung. Nixon and Kennedy both voted with the majority.

  In June, Secretary of State George C. Marshall used the occasion of a Harvard commencement address to unveil an American escalation in the postwar battle between East and West: a massive plan for the economic reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Joseph Kennedy, Sr., thought it a terrible idea. It would be far shrewder, he calculated, to let the Communists grab Europe, creating economic chaos and thus greater opportunities for American business down the road. His son disagreed, having become an enthusiastic supporter of the Marshall Plan.

  To promote the grand U.S. economic scheme, a bipartisan fact-finding delegation was dispatched to Europe. Led by Cong. Christian Herter of Massachusetts, its mission was to verify the need for massive U.S. economic intervention. Nixon was named the committee’s youngest member. He had won his spot with a hard sell in his isolationist district for the earlier Greek and Turkish aid bill. The trip, which was the Californian’s first ever to Europe, would open his eyes to the world stage. “I think his whole life ambition in foreign policy started when he was on the Herter Committee as a young congressman,” recalled Herb Klein, still with the Alhambra Post Advocate, who interviewed Nixon on his return home, where a poll showed three-fourths of Twelfth District voters opposed to the Marshall Plan. An undeterred Nixon launched an ambitious speaking tour on its behalf.

  Jack Kennedy, along with Charles Kersten, had cooked up a European junket of his own that summer. However, on a side trip to his ancestral home in Ireland, Kennedy fell desperately ill. A London doctor diagnosed his condition as Addison’s disease, a failure of the adrenal glands that can prove fatal. On Kennedy’s return to New York aboard the Queen Elizabeth, he was given the last rites of the church. Like so many others, Nixon had no clue as to the seriousness of the affliction that weakened his colleague’s physique and yellowed his skin. That was something the fun-loving Kennedy let no one know.

  As the Republican prepared to embark for Europe on the Queen Mary, the other famed British luxury liner, Nixon learned from secretary Dorothy Cox that his Massachusetts friend, who often stopped by the office for chats, had left a note for him. It contained the addresses of his sister and several other women to look up in Paris. Ms. Cox recounted the episode. “I don’t think Mr. Nixon even took the numbers with him! He was far too embarrassed.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  While Kennedy Slept

  CONG. Richard Nixon led a Dagwood Bumstead existence, a husband and father commuting each evening across the Potomac River to a Virginia subdivision known as Park Fairfax and described by his eldest daughter, Tricia, as “one of a row of identical duplexes teeming with small children and dogs.” Jack Kennedy, ensconced in tony Georgetown, basked in a princely life, attended by a housekeeper, Margaret Ambrose, and a valet, George Thomas, who delivered a home-cooked hot lunch to his Capitol office each day. Press secretary Billy Sutton, with his own room tucked away on the top floor of 1528 Thirty-first Street, was Kennedy’s comic in residence, “the firecracker.” When Kennedy held receptions for his colleagues, including Nixon, his sister Eunice shared the host duties. More often, the comfortable town house was a base for its tenant’s energetic romantic life. Sutton called the Thirty-first Street address a “Hollywood Hotel” for actress Gene Tierney and a regular stream of less famous beauties. “Thinking about girls is what kept Jack alive,” Sutton explained.

  For Jack Kennedy, staying alive was a serious concern. He managed the sweet life of the young bachelor despite his bad back, which often had him on crutches, and Addison’s disease, which cast doubt over his longer-run prospects. “I sometimes wondered,” Sutton recalled, “if he would make it, because I noticed physical changes and chemical changes in him: his complexion, his walk, his legs, his back.” “Emaciated!” is how Miami congressman George Smathers remembers his frail 1946 classmate. “In your wildest dreams you’d never have guessed he would become president.” Smathers, who had gotten to know Jack’s father during the tycoon’s frequent outings to Hialeah racetrack, recounts the hardship the young Kennedy experienced simply getting to the House floor. “Every time there was a roll call, he’d have to come over on his crutches.” Smathers, a hall mate of Kennedy’s, would stop by his colleague’s office to help him on his painful journey across Independence Avenue to the Capitol.

  Kennedy was “deeply preoccupied by death in those days,” talking endlessly to Smathers on a Florida fishing trip about the best ways to die. He decided that drowning would be okay if you lost consciousness. “Quick”—that was the most important thing. “The point is, you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day on earth,” he told him. “That’s what I’m doing.” What he didn’t tell Smathers is that this same carpe diem philosophy explained their social partnership. “I love Smathers,” Kennedy would say. “He doesn’t give a damn!” Kennedy knew life’s fragility. He had already lost his older brother, Joe, in a World War II bombing mission. In the spring of 1948, when he got word that his sister Kathleen had been killed in a plane crash, he just sat silently listening to the phonograph.

  After his own brush with death, Kennedy maintained his easygoing approach to his congressional duties, which included bolting Capitol Hill on a Thursday or Friday for the weekend, dispatching orders over his shoulder as he disappeared in the direction of New York or Palm Beach. “You’ll just have to work a little harder,” he instructed Mary Davis when his secretary complained of the workload.

  Congressman Kennedy’s love of fun was not limited to his off-duty hours. Ted Reardon, who had thrown passes to his older brother, Joe, as a Harvard quarterback, now spent an impressive amount of office time throwing the football back and forth to Jack. Thanks to Billy Sutton, a world-class mimic, the congressman in room 322 of the Old House Office Building was also able to pull off the occasional stunt worthy of his Muckers past. One day, Congressman Smathers was told he had a phone call from Vito Marcantonio. “I’m coming to your district,” the caller said. “I would like to have you . . . I would like to have you introduce me.”

  Smathers, whose political ambitions depended on the archcon-servative voters of segregationist Flori
da, was terrified. “I came up with some excuse,” he said, laughing, decades later, “said I had something to do . . . had to go to a funeral.” It didn’t work. As hard as he tried, Smathers couldn’t shake what he now took as the New Yorker’s pushy determination to be seen with the local congressman in Florida. Growing desperate, Smathers sought out Marcantonio at the next vote. Taking a seat next to the New Yorker, he began making excuses to a colleague who seemed to have no earthly idea what he was talking about. Only after several punishing moments of this did Smathers notice his pal Jack Kennedy, across the House floor, convulsed in laughter. It hadn’t, of course, been Marcantonio on the phone, but Billy Sutton.

  * * *

  CONGRESSMAN Nixon had no time for such amusements. If Jack Kennedy was the class of 1946’s charmer, Dick Nixon was its hardest worker. While Kennedy could use a fellow member of Congress like Vito Marcantonio as the prop in a practical joke, Nixon took everything and everyone on Capitol Hill seriously. “He was the most calculating man I ever knew,” Smathers recalled. Just as the navy officer had scripted his lines for the Committee of 100, the freshman congressman now practiced the rituals of bonhomie to sell himself to colleagues. With Richard Nixon, every relationship was a well-rehearsed business relationship.

  His dealings with the press were a prime example. UPI’s George Reedy credits the freshman Californian with being the only member of HUAC whom reporters could trust for information. “Nixon was always supplying us with the red meat.” Such reliability failed, however, to win Nixon much regard. “No newspaperman had any reason to complain about his relations with Nixon, and yet he was not popular with them. You didn’t have to be around him very long without realizing that he was a formidable but also highly programmed man,” Reedy recalled. “I had the impression he would even practice his inflection when he said, ‘Hello.’ ”

  Reedy remembered vividly his first close exposure to the Republican up-and-comer. It was at a small cocktail reception that Nixon had organized in his cramped “Attic” office in the Old House Office Building’s fifth floor for the quartet of wire-service reporters covering HUAC. The host had made a point to brief himself on each guest beforehand, even to memorize each journalist’s favorite drink. “Hi, George!” he greeted Reedy, whom he had never met, as the UPI reporter entered the suite. Reedy figured Nixon was trying to be one of the boys.

  Bill Arnold, who ran Nixon’s office in those early days, left behind this Dickensian portrait of his employer.

  Mr. Nixon was always a restless soul carrying out his duties. He pushed himself hard, as all who worked for him were supposed to do. He never left his office to get to the airport or railroad station until the last possible moment, for fear of having to sit around and wait at a terminal. It was often my responsibility to drive him to such places and I always cautioned that we were going to miss a plane or train some time. One day this happened as we were attempting to cross the Potomac on the 14th Street drawbridge, which opened while we were en route to the airport to permit a boat to pass beneath. Sure enough, we missed the plane. But did we sit around and wait for the next one? We did not; instead we went back to the office to put in another hour’s work.

  By March 1948, Nixon’s hard work earned him his first national publicity. When HUAC took up a bill to outlaw the Communist party, Nixon was ready with a substitute. Instead of banning Communists, the Nixon bill required party members to register with the government. It was the Nixon version that passed the House. The vote was 319–58. Still a freshman, he had succeeded in passing a measure Jerry Voorhis, the man he had tarred as a Communist dupe, introduced eight years earlier. In a further irony, the Nixon bill became the focus of a heated, misinformed, national radio debate between Minnesota’s Harold Stassen and New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, the top candidates for the 1948 Republican presidential nomination. With 30 million listeners following his argument, Stassen applauded and Dewey opposed Nixon’s bill for outlawing the Communist party, both debaters oblivious to the fact that the measure, a later version of which would be tied up in the courts for years, only required Communist party members to register.

  By the summer of 1948, the national chill toward the Soviet Union had reached deep-freeze levels. First came the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. The same country that had been sacrificed so cowardly to Hitler before the war was now firmly captive to Joseph Stalin. For daring to promote Czech participation in the Marshall Plan, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk was thrown from a window to his death. In June, Communist East Germans cut off Western access to Berlin, requiring a three-month airlift by American planes before Moscow finally backed off. That same month, hard-liner Dick Nixon took advantage of California state law to enter both party primaries. Winning the Democratic nomination as well as that of his own party for a second term, he could ignore the November election and concentrate on matters in Washington. At thirty-five, Nixon was about to become America’s most celebrated Communist-catcher.

  * * *

  ON August 3, 1948, a chubby, shabbily dressed senior editor from Time magazine named Whittaker Chambers made a stunning accusation to HUAC. He described having been a member of the Communist underground in the 1930s, of attending party meetings with figures now prominent in labor and government. He told of reporting these activities to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle in 1939, at a time when Stalin was carving up Poland with Adolf Hitler. One of those Chambers identified was diplomat Alger Hiss, the State Department star who had been with Roosevelt at Yalta and later served as Secretary-General of the founding UN conference in San Francisco. Chambers accused Hiss of being an active Communist agent whose assignment was to infiltrate the U.S. government and carry out espionage for the Soviet Union. Especially angering Nixon was what appeared to be the arrogant decision by the New Deal elite to protect its protégé. The cover-up demanded an investigation.

  Two days later, an eager Alger Hiss testified before HUAC. Tall, slender, and elegantly dressed, the Harvard-trained lawyer stood before less-than-reputable HUAC as a member of the Washington elite. His defense was generously elaborate.

  I am not and never have been a member of the Communist party. I do not and never have adhered to the tenets of the Communist party. I am not and never have been a member of any Communist-front organization. I have never followed the Communist party line, directly or indirectly. To the best of my knowledge, none of my friends is a Communist. To the best of my knowledge I never heard of Whittaker Chambers until 1947, when two representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked me if I knew him. I said I did not know Chambers. So far as I know, I have never laid eyes on him, and I should like to have the opportunity to do so.

  A loud smack of applause rocked the room. Members of the committee suddenly were terrified that they had made a fatal mistake in airing Chambers’s charges. How could anyone have believed such an unkempt fellow’s denunciation of this distinguished man who sat before them? Instinctively, the room sided with the Franklin over the Orthogonian, except for Richard Nixon. He found Hiss’s manner to be “rather insolent.” When Nixon referred in passing to the witness having studied law at Harvard, Hiss took aim: “I understand yours was Whittier,” he replied, sneering at the grocer’s son.

  George Reedy ran into the Californian that evening. “Nixon had a transcript of the Hiss testimony with him and went over it with me point by point.” Nixon discovered that testimony which sounded hard, sharp, and categorical was nothing of the kind. All of Hiss’s denials, including those about not knowing Chambers, had been hedged. It was always “to the best of my knowledge.” Overcoming his colleagues’ nervousness, Nixon took a HUAC subcommittee to New York to hear what Whittaker Chambers had to say now.

  What Chambers had to say was spectacular. In place of the vague testimony of four days earlier, he offered a wealth of convincing detail about his relationship with Alger Hiss. He said that Hiss had contributed a car to the Communist party, had given him use of an apartment. Even more memorably, he recounted a bird-watchi
ng outing along the Potomac River during which Hiss had spotted a rare prothonotary warbler.

  Nixon wanted further convincing. Three times he drove to Chambers’s Maryland farm that week trying to work through his incredulity that the American diplomat who stood next to the president at Yalta had been a Communist agent. What finally convinced him was a small but telling detail. Chambers remembered that Hiss’s wife, Priscilla, a Quaker, like both Nixon and Chambers himself, spoke in the “plain” language when alone with her husband. Nixon, raised in a family that also used “thee” and “thou” at home, recognized that only a close friend of the Hiss family would know such a thing. And if Hiss and Chambers knew each other, Hiss had been lying from the outset. “If the American people understood the real character of Alger Hiss,” Nixon told Chambers one day at the barn, “they would boil him in oil.”

  Nixon wanted very much to expose that character. He showed the transcripts of Chambers’s latest testimony to William Rogers, a Senate aide he had befriended, to Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune, finally to John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, top foreign policy advisers to Republican presidential candidate Dewey. All agreed he should keep up the fight.

  On August 16, HUAC called Hiss to testify a second time. Sensing that the committee was closing in on him, he mentioned the name “George Crosley,” whom he described as a freelance writer he once let stay in his home; he had also lent this “Crosley” a car, a Model A Ford. His denial of knowing Chambers passed within minutes from unconvincing to incredible when he confirmed his sighting of that prothonotary warbler along the Potomac. “Beautiful yellow head, a gorgeous bird!” he exclaimed.

  However, when Nixon brought Hiss face-to-face with Chambers in New York’s Commodore Hotel, Hiss again denied knowing the man. When Hiss challenged Chambers to reconcile his claim to have spent time in Hiss’s apartment with a denial that he had paid rent, the witness confronted him starkly. “Alger, I was a Communist, and you were a Communist.” At this, Hiss abruptly declared that the man before him was “George Crosley.” “If he had lost both eyes and taken his nose off, I would be sure!” After being quizzed about Whittaker Chambers by the FBI since the year before, after having his career jeopardized by allegations of Communist activity, after signing a letter specifically denying any relation with Chambers, even after being confronted with his pictures, Hiss was now saying that, yes, he knew this fellow, but under another name.