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

  But Nixon refused to trust either the course of events or the sentiments of the voter. He called his opponent worse than a bad risk for the task of fighting communism: Far from being the solution to the Communist challenge, she was part of the problem. “During the past six years she has been in Congress, she consistently supported the State Department’s policy of appeasing Communists in Asia, which finally resulted in the Korean War.” Then his attacks took an intimate turn. “She’s pink right down to her underwear.” Responding in kind, Mrs. Douglas threw one nickname after another at her rival—“Pipsqueak,” “Peewee”—finally finding one that stuck: “Tricky Dicky!”

  As he had four years earlier, Nixon made a practice of sending out spies. He wanted to know precisely what his opponent was saying about him. After hearing one Douglas speech in northern California, aide Bill Arnold returned with an account of her remarks he recalled as “somewhat unflattering to Nixon.” “Did she say that?” Nixon erupted. “Why, I’ll castrate her!” Advised as to the impossibility of such a punishment in a woman’s case, Nixon was undeterred. “I don’t care,” he stammered, “I’ll do it anyway!” To sew up his victory, Nixon resorted to the nastiest trick of the campaign, the infamous “Pink Sheet,” which listed more than three hundred times that Mrs. Douglas had voted with the New York pariah Vito Marcantonio. The “Douglas-Marcantonio Axis,” the headline would read. It was a California version of “The Red Record of Claude Pepper.”

  The election, if not decided already by the Korean War, was to move further in Nixon’s direction when Communist Chinese troops attacked U.S. troops in Korea the last week of October. Nixon demanded that Mrs. Douglas state categorically whether she supported letting Red China into the United Nations. When she refused to give a categorical “No,” Nixon went in for the kill. “This is the last straw. I know my opponent was committed to the State Department policy of appeasement towards Communism in the Far East, but I never dreamed she would stick to it even after we were attacked!”

  Just before the election, the Nixon campaign pulled a final coup. It involved the state’s most prominent Republican governor, Earl Warren. Despite his loss as Thomas E. Dewey’s running mate in 1948, Warren retained great prestige, which he was unwilling to dilute by endorsing the man with whom he shared the top of the 1950 GOP ballot, Richard Nixon. Congresswoman Douglas was respecting his neutrality by refusing to back the Democratic candidate for governor, James Roosevelt.

  To smash the Douglas-Warren neutrality pact, the Nixon campaign detailed an operative to query Mrs. Douglas at each of her press conferences whether she backed Roosevelt. Having exhausted her restraint, Douglas let fly with her endorsement: “I hope and pray he will be the next governor, and he will be if the Democrats vote for the Democratic ticket!” Ecstatic, the Nixon camp passed the Douglas remark to a reporter covering Warren. After first remaining aloof, the governor now exposed his position. “In view of her statement, I might ask her how she expects I will vote when I mark my ballot for the United States senator next Tuesday?” Murray Chotiner made it official. “Every voter in California who reads her statement will realize that Earl Warren intends to mark his ballot for Dick Nixon on election day.”

  It worked, but at a high price. Nixon won by 600,000 votes but in the process incurred a brutal reputation and a legion of enduring enemies. Once again, his take-no-prisoners campaign methods made future rivals all that more determined not to be taken alive.

  One Democrat remained in Dick Nixon’s corner. In a postelection meeting with a Harvard graduate seminar, Jack Kennedy told the students how pleased he was that Richard Nixon had won the California Senate race. Helen Douglas was “not the sort of person he’d like working with on committees,” he explained. Kennedy repeated the judgment in a letter to Paul Fay, telling his navy buddy to look up his fellow Californian, whom he described as “an outstanding guy [who] has the opportunity to go all the way.”

  * * *

  To give California’s new senator a jump on his job, Sheridan Downey resigned his seat right after election day. This made Richard Nixon, at thirty-seven the youngest member of the Senate, the first to break the ribbon in his race with Smathers and Kennedy for who would precede the other two in the move up from the House. In a strange twist, one of Nixon’s first exploits as a U.S. senator was protecting a famous newsman from being beaten up by a drunk. The victim was the muckraker Drew Pearson; the soused assailant was that reckless hunter of Communist subversives Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy. “Let a good Quaker stop this fight,” Nixon told the two as he forced himself between McCarthy and the man he was madly punching in the stomach at the checkroom of Washington’s Sulgrave Club. When the referee got McCarthy outside, he realized that his Wisconsin colleague had forgotten where he had parked his car. Dutifully, Nixon spent a half hour searching the Dupont Circle area until he found it.

  Both Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy had been giving wide latitude to McCarthy’s dizzying assault on domestic communism. One reason was that they liked him personally. Another was that they disliked his enemies. Nixon shared McCarthy’s resentment of the New Deal and foreign-service elite. Kennedy enjoyed his contempt for them. The Wisconsin senator “may have something,” Kennedy said in the same off-the-record Harvard seminar during which he had cheered Nixon’s Senate win. He felt a kinship with his loutish fellow Irishman, whom his sister Pat had dated, his father had befriended and defended, and whose soul contained a powerful strain of the Mucker. Nixon, on the other hand, liked McCarthy for the basic reason that the social elite of Georgetown despised him.

  But the sympathy toward McCarthy shared by both men owed as much to ideology as it did to any personal factors. On the most vital issue of post-World War II American politics—communism—they knew which side they were on. Those who pretended neutrality or, worse yet, cast a blind eye to the struggle were worthy of neither power nor respect. Those who, whatever their shortcomings or excesses, fought the enemy were worthy of both. This included Joseph McCarthy. In February 1952, a speaker at an anniversary evening at Kennedy’s Harvard club told the gathered alumni how proud he was that their college had never produced “a Joseph McCarthy or an Alger Hiss.”

  Kennedy jumped to his feet. “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” Angry, he left the dinner early.

  It was hard to find a more committed Cold Warrior in either party than the thirty-four-year-old from Massachusetts. “The political point of the Kennedy speech,” the Haverhill Gazette remarked after hearing his attack on the Democratic administration’s foreign policy in August 1950, “is that the Republicans should try to sign him up for a job with their speaking bureau.” Jack Kennedy advocated aid to Franco’s Spain, attacked Great Britain for its “trade in blood” with Communist China, and criticized Mississippi congressman Jamie Whitten for daring to push pork-barrel spending at a time when the country faced so great a threat from abroad. “I think we ought to spend money this year only when it has defense implications,” Kennedy told his colleagues.

  To inform himself about the global threat, Kennedy left in the fall of 1951 for a seven-week tour of the Far East that would include a stop in Hanoi. Arriving in the colonial capital, he could see the weakness of the French position. Whereas its army was fighting for French imperialism, Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh army were seen as fighting for Vietnamese independence. The issue was not so much ideology as nationalism. Appearing on Meet the Press upon his return, he told moderator Lawrence Spivak that France’s only realistic course was for Paris to abandon its colonialist ambitions and build up a nationalist “native army” to fight the “native armies” on the Communist side, an eerie precursor of the later Nixon attempt to “Vietnamize” the struggle.

  But the big news of that Sunday broadcast centered on the thirty-four-year-old’s own career plans:

  Spivak: When I was in Boston last week, I heard a good deal of talk about you. There were many who thought that you would be the Democratic nominee for the sena
torship against Henry Cabot Lodge. Are you going to run?

  Kennedy: Well, uh, I’d like to go to the Senate. I’m definitely interested in it. I think most of us in the House who came in after the war—some of them have already gone to the Senate, like George Smathers and Nixon and others, and I’m definitely interested in going to the Senate, and I’m seriously considering running.

  “I’m going to run!” he exulted to a skeptical George Smathers, who thought Lodge’s position impregnable. “I’m going to use the same kind of stuff,” pointing to his Florida pal’s assault on Claude Pepper. Though still on crutches most of the time, regular cortisone treatments for his Addison’s disease had improved Kennedy’s overall health. The last thing he wanted now was to be left behind while Nixon and Smathers strode Capitol Hill as U.S. senators. Kennedy had begun to look upon members of the House as “worms.” “I’m not going to stay in the House,” Kennedy told new aide Larry O’Brien, whom he recruited to organize Massachusetts for him town by town. “It’s up or out.” His father sized up the risk-laden appeal of a statewide run with greater color. “For the Kennedys, it’s either the castle or the outhouse! Nothing in between.”

  Many Massachusetts voters were anxious for somebody named Kennedy to finally get the castle. After years of dutiful hat tipping to well-born Protestants, the Irish of Massachusetts were ready to elect an aristocrat of their own. Kennedy gave the Catholic voters the opportunity to elect a senator from among their sons whose polish matched that of the Yankee ruling class. “Kennedy represented a new generation, a new kind of Irish politician,” as O’Brien assessed it. “One who was rich and respectable and could do battle with the Lodges and the other Yankee politicians on their own terms.”

  Like Nixon before him, Kennedy placed great faith in personal appearances. By the end of 1951, the map of Massachusetts on the bedroom wall in the Boston apartment was covered with pins showing the hundreds of towns he had visited. To prepare for the planned bombardment of Lodge, Ted Reardon had begun assembling an inventory of the senator’s voting record. This carefully documented file, entitled “Lodge’s Dodges,” would provide the ammunition for the coming assault on the respected Brahmin rival, a man who had been Jack Kennedy’s schoolboy hero. Reardon’s loose-leaf book, each page covered in sheer plastic, offered ammunition for a two-front assault on the confident incumbent. It would appeal to the regular Democratic voter by showing Lodge as overly conservative on domestic issues and to anti-Communist conservatives in both parties by painting Lodge as a shirker in the global struggle against Russia and Red China. The approach would prove masterful enough for Kennedy again to use it against another centrist Republican eight years later.

  * * *

  HENRY Cabot Lodge was preoccupied in these latter months of 1951 by a grander enterprise than his own reelection. On a July tour of NATO headquarters in Paris, the senator, who had suspended his political career to fight with Eisenhower’s forces in Europe, now urged the man commanding the postwar military alliance to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1952. The general refused. Lodge ignored the rebuff. On returning home, he took his plea public, telling a Meet the Press audience that Ike would make a great president. In October, the New York Herald Tribune, for whom Lodge once wrote editorials, declared Eisenhower the perfect man to lead the nation. A month later, an Ike-for-President group led by New York governor Thomas Dewey named Lodge to manage the campaign. In January, acting on his own authority, Lodge wrote New Hampshire governor Sherman Adams asking that Eisenhower’s name be entered in the March Republican presidential primary. Behind the scenes, he won Ike’s commitment not to debunk the fledgling effort. Eisenhower didn’t and won, defeating the conservative favorite, Ohio’s senator Robert Taft, who had been the front-runner for the nomination. The victory in New Hampshire, followed by a huge write-in vote in the Minnesota primary, brought a wave of excitement to the Eisenhower effort. Lodge, who had engineered the drive from the start, told fellow senator Richard Nixon that if he helped bring the California delegation aboard at the national convention in Chicago, the vice presidency could be the prize.

  Nixon had ties to both Republican camps, that of the war hero Eisenhower and Taft, favorite of the party’s old guard. The California senator’s backing of the Greek and Turkish aid bill, and later of the Marshall Plan, marked him as an internationalist in the Eisenhower-Lodge mold. His harsh criticisms of Truman’s Far East policies and his success with the Hiss case had made him a hero among Taft conservatives. His problem was Earl Warren. Defeated along with Dewey as the Republican’s vice presidential candidate in 1948, the proud California governor was holding to his favorite-son candidacy and, with it, his dreams of a Taft-Ike deadlock that would deliver the nomination to him.

  Nixon had other plans. Having not forgotten Warren’s aloofness toward his 1946 House and 1950 Senate races, he used his free Senate mailing privilege to survey the state’s thousands of Republican precinct workers on who they thought would be “the strongest candidate the Republicans could nominate for president.” Ike won. The man called “Nick” in all those wartime poker games saw his chance to raise the stakes. Boarding the California delegation’s train to Denver, he spent the rail time to Chicago nudging passengers toward the candidate his poll had shown to be the best man. By the time the train reached Chicago, the California delegates emerged from the station to see buses awaiting them decked out with “Eisenhower for President” banners. Murray Chotiner, as outrageous as ever, had worked his magic.

  With Ike headed for victory, only the nomination for vice president remained a mystery. Nixon, meeting New York Times photographer George Tames at the Blackstone Hotel, said he thought Lodge himself would get it. What he didn’t say is how ready he was to grab the offer should it come. Pat Hillings, the Nixon campaign worker who replaced him in Congress, was in Nixon’s suite when the call came. Herbert Brownell, the campaign strategist who would be Eisenhower’s attorney general, was on the line. “It’s Nixon!” Hillings heard Brownell tell someone at the other end. “Wake up, Dick! It’s you!” Hillings yelled to his friend. Seven years after Nixon had received the note from Herman Perry in his Baltimore apartment, the men around Eisenhower had found their man. Dick Nixon was to be the vice-presidential running mate of the most grandly popular figure in America. “The general asked if you could come see him right away in his suite,” Brownell told him when he got on the line. Dwight Eisenhower, the five-star victor of World War II, wanted Dick Nixon to be his running mate.

  Back in Washington, Senator Nixon found a two-page handwritten letter.

  Dear Dick:

  I was tremendously pleased that the convention selected you for V.P. I was always convinced that you would move ahead to the top—but I never thought it would come this quickly. You were an ideal selection and will bring to the ticket a great deal of strength.

  Please give my best to your wife and all kinds of good luck to you.

  Cordially,

  Jack Kennedy

  That same month, the Massachusetts congressman won a prize of a different sort. Three hundred Capitol Hill news correspondents voted him the “handsomest” member of the House. He first heard the news while in the midst of taking a special CBS course in how to use television. It was the opinion of the course’s director that Kennedy’s “natural approach” came over especially well on the new medium. Nixon had shown his ability to play politics at the highest levels; Kennedy, his gift for the decisive new medium. Salieri had learned the powers of craft; Mozart had begun to discover his talent.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Cloth Coats and Lace Curtains

  THE Democrats, who nominated Adlai Stevenson, the eloquent governor of Illinois, to run against Eisenhower, got their first break in September. Following an appearance on Meet the Press, Richard Nixon was asked by a journalist about a “fund” that a group of California businessmen had raised for him. Nixon explained that the money was strictly for campaign purposes and that the columnist sho
uld contact his treasurer, Dana Smith. When Nixon’s train stopped in Bakersfield four days later, an unconcerned vice-presidential nominee pounded away at the ticket’s number-one selling point: “Who can clean up the mess in Washington?” he led the crowd. “Ike can!” Across the continent, the headlines of the archliberal New York Post screamed “Secret Nixon Fund” from its front page: “Millionaire’s Club Allows Candidate to Live Good Life.” The Republican vice-presidential nominee, it told readers, was getting money for his private use from fat cats back home wanting influence in Washington; the crusader was a crook like the rest of them.

  Richard Nixon was being taken to public account for the patronage of California businessmen like those who had set him up politically in late 1945. Suddenly, he found himself facing the first scandal of his career, one that could cost Dwight Eisenhower the presidency. Without warning, he had come under assault from the kind of sneak attack he had himself executed against Voorhis and Douglas. “When it hit us, coming out of nowhere, we couldn’t believe it,” recalled Pat Hillings, the Californian who had won Nixon’s old congressional seat and was traveling with the vice-presidential candidate. Not even a Nixon-ordered audit showing that none of the contributed money had gone to his private use could appease Eisenhower. “What was the use of campaigning against the business of what has been going on in Washington,” he added with lethal candor, “if we ourselves aren’t as clean as a hound’s tooth?”

  Other Republicans were less conditional in their backing of the beleaguered nominee. “I am in your corner 100 percent. Fight to the finish just as you did the smears by the Communists when you were proving charges against Alger Hiss. I will personally welcome you in Grand Rapids or any other part of Michigan.” Cong. Gerald Ford’s loyalty would one day be grandly repaid.