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 as the rumors of the “fund” spread, the outlook for Nixon grew dark. The New York Herald Tribune, an exuberant backer of Eisenhower, called for Nixon to resign his nomination. New York governor Dewey, Ike’s most influential adviser, then reached Nixon in Portland with firm marching orders from the general himself. He was to go on television and defend himself. Ike, grabbing the phone, confirmed the mission. “Tell them everything there is to tell, everything you can remember since the day you entered public life. Tell them about any money you have ever received.”

  Would there be a thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision on his fate following the broadcast? Ike answered Nixon’s desperate query with one of his own. “I’m having a tough time deciding this; it’s about how people perceive it.” Hearing this five-star waffle, the former junior navy officer could not contain himself: “There comes a time in matters like these when you have to either shit or get off the pot.”

  * * *

  THE goal was now to get the largest possible audience for Nixon’s televised apologia. Initially, the Republican National Committee hoped to get the Monday slot right after I Love Lucy. When CBS would not sell them the time, the Tuesday night slot following Milton Berle was booked on NBC. On a postmidnight flight to Los Angeles, Nixon grabbed some souvenir postcards from the seat pouch in front of him and began jotting down notes. “Pat’s cloth coat . . . . Checkers.” All the next day he wrote and rewrote in his room at the Ambassador Hotel. He knew that an appeal for compassion would not do the job. The hurdle had been set higher than that. Unless the audience response was 90 percent in his favor, he had been warned by the men around Eisenhower, he was a political cadaver. Found unfit for national office by Ike, he could hardly expect the people of California to confirm him as their U.S. senator come the next election.

  Pat Hillings, traveling with Nixon, later painted a stark portrait of the vice-presidential candidate at this low moment. “Dick was sitting in a huge leather chair, his arms stretched out, his hands dangling in that characteristic way of his. His brooding face and his posture reminded me of the statue in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. I knew I was in the presence of total despair.”

  But the final blow was still to come. Ike now demanded license to dump Nixon without soiling his own nice-guy reputation. An hour before the live nationwide broadcast, Governor Dewey called from New York with an ultimatum. Not yet president, the great general was engaging in a practice chief executives regularly use for dirty jobs: plausible deniability. He had given an instruction he could later deny. “There has been a meeting of all of Eisenhower’s top advisers,” Dewey told Nixon. “They’ve asked me to tell you that in their opinion at the conclusion of the broadcast you should submit your resignation to Eisenhower.” Nixon said nothing. Dewey plunged the knife deeper, offering Dutch uncle advice that Nixon should resign his Senate seat and run again in a special election, a risky gambit meant to reinforce his electorate mandate back home. Nixon again said nothing.

  Dewey: Hello, can you hear me?

  Nixon: What does Eisenhower want me to do?

  Dewey: What shall I tell them you are going to do?

  Nixon: Just tell them that I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m going to do and if they want to find out they’d better listen to the broadcast! And tell them I know something about politics, too.

  That night he proved it. Nixon’s speech employed all the craft gained since his student days at Whittier organizing the Or-thogonians. He began by listing his modest assets, describing how he and Pat were like other returned-GI couples: a car in the driveway, young kids in school, a mortgage on the house. “I should say this—that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.” The slash was twin-edged, striking at both the well-off New Deal liberal establishment and at a recent scandal involving one of Truman’s White House cronies.

  He now went after the muckrakers. Nixon told his national audience that a supporter had sent his daughters a cocker spaniel, that Tricia had named the dog “Checkers,” and no matter what “they,” alluding to the Pharisees in the media, said about it, the Nixons were going to keep the dog.

  It was the well-honed Nixonian appeal: resentful, emotional, square. If the sophisticates thought it mawkish or corny, it mattered little. He was talking to all the people out in the country who had to struggle, who were tired of being talked down to by the elite New Dealers. And he got to them. The Depression and the war were over. The striving middle class no longer needed to take orders from the privileged few in New York and Washington. “Eisenhower is a great man,” Nixon reminded his audience in farewell, “believe me, he is a great man.” But he told viewers to write or wire the Republican National Committee, not the general. He would abide by the party’s judgment.

  For several minutes, Nixon had no idea how well his broadcast had gone. Jittery, he had insisted that Hillings, Murray Chotiner, and friend William Rogers be out of the studio before the ON-AIR light flashed. Hillings recalled Nixon’s tears when they joined him onstage afterward. He was emotionally distraught at his failure to give himself enough time to tell the huge audience the address of the Republican National Committee. “He broke down a little bit, and he couldn’t get off the set.” Anxious to get the nationwide reaction to what, by his reckoning, was a smashing performance by Nixon, Hillings rushed to check his reaction with the NBC switchboard. “We’re just swamped!” said a woman operator who sounded to Hillings as if she’d been crying.

  The eyes of a more influential woman, those of Mamie Eisenhower, also had moistened during the broadcast. “Tonight I saw an example of courage,” her husband declared to a packed Cleveland auditorium that had just watched Nixon’s speech on a large screen. He had seen “many brave men in tough situations” and compared his running mate to Gen. George Patton, another officer of his who had once “committed an error.” Eisenhower was placing the Nixon fund on the same level of wrongdoing as Patton’s slap of an enlisted man. “I believed the work of that man was too great to sacrifice . . . but . . . certainly George Patton justified my faith.”

  Like “Old Blood and Guts,” Nixon was being found guilty but worthy of Ike’s absolution once he had suffered sufficient mortification. Just as the Supreme Allied Commander had made Patton apologize to his entire command, Nixon had been made to do the same before the voters. Riding back to the hotel, feeling the full weight of the verdict to come, Nixon noticed a large Great Dane running alongside the car. “Well, we made a hit with the dog world, anyway,” he muttered.

  But still there was no clear decision from Ike on Nixon’s status. Despite the wild success of the Checkers broadcast, it did not seem enough to convince the man who had chased the Wehrmacht back to Berlin. Back at the Ambassador, Nixon decided to dictate a telegram to secretary Rose Mary Woods telling Ike he was resigning from the ticket. Murray Chotiner wisely tore it to shreds; Nixon’s performance was playing well in the country. Fifty-eight million Americans, the greatest television audience in history, had seen the gritty young politician defend himself, his generation, his class.

  Eisenhower, in the end, had little choice but to ratify Nixon as his “boy.” But the deficit in trust that required Nixon to give the Checkers defense had poisoned forever his faith in other politicians and the press. Before this humiliating episode, he had counted many reporters his friends, taken for granted the brotherly loyalty of fellow Republicans. That faith was now destroyed. Nixon now knew that people were fully prepared to believe the worst about him. While he now knew television’s power for going over the heads of the press, he had also learned the weakness of political friendship. He would never be the same man. Just as he would later pay for his persecutions of Jerry Voorhis, Helen Gahagan Douglas, and Alger Hiss, so would he also pay for the us-against-them stance exploited in the Checkers speech. Dick Nixon had won, as his friend Jack Kennedy put it, and held his place at the “top,” but at a terrible price.

  * * *

  IN the same weeks that Nixon wa
s personally experiencing the terrors of “attack” politics, Kennedy was showing a new degree of ruthlessness. Mark Dalton, who had held the job of Kennedy campaign manager in 1946, had been given it again for the 1952 Senate race. The ally who had volunteered his services for six years, paying his own expenses, was now on the Kennedy payroll, a change of status that brought certain implications. The first trouble came after candidate and top aide attended a meeting at a Fall River club and were heading past the bar. “Three guys who were feeling no pain,” as Dalton described them, boisterously surrounded Kennedy as Dalton went to get the car. The candidate did not appreciate being left behind. “He got in the car, turned around, and stuck his finger in my belly,” Dalton recalled with anger. “ ‘Don’t you ever let that happen to me again!’ ”

  Dalton, a Harvard law graduate, son of a prominent Irish-Catholic family, was learning that people who worked for the Kennedys worked for the Kennedys. “I was to take care of him with drunks. I was his caretaker, his bodyguard.” He would never get over the slight, recalling it aloud again and again years later: “That son of a bitch! Right in the belly. ‘Don’t you ever!’ ” It was the beginning of the end of their friendship. The final straw came at a strategy meeting where Kennedy’s father humiliated Dalton in front of the assembled campaign team, the candidate included. When Jack refused to stand up for his campaign manager, Dalton had no choice but to quit.

  Certainly it was hard for anyone, least of all his son, to question Joseph Kennedy’s abilities. In addition to unlimited money, the former film producer was a master at the Hollywood buildup. “In all my years of public life, I’ve never seen a congressman get so much press while doing so little work,” Tip O’Neill would say. To win the endorsement of the conservative Boston Post, Kennedy senior now unblinkingly lent its pliable publisher $500,000. His father had to “buy a fuckin’ newspaper” for him to get his Senate seat, Jack later would joke. But there were greater possibilities to exploit than mere cash and Dad’s readiness to spend it. There was also the fury of Republican party conservatives in Massachusetts at Henry Cabot Lodge for hijacking the party’s presidential nomination from the worthy hands of “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft that summer. Joe Kennedy took several calculated steps to exploit the feud. He organized “Independents for Kennedy” and found a pro-Taft Republican banker to chair the front group. Next, he got the pro-Taft publisher of the New Bedford Standard Times to, first, reprint the Reader’s Digest article on his son’s PT-109 exploits, then to endorse the Democratic candidate Kennedy outright. When young Kennedy attacked Lodge’s absenteeism from the Senate, the newspaper dutifully repeated the Democrat’s charges in its editorials. When Lodge charged Kennedy himself with a poor voting record, the Standard Times refused to even publish it. As they had in 1946, the Kennedys showed the will, the smarts, and the clout to bend the media to their purposes.

  To pound home Lodge’s weakness among Taft Republicans, Congressman Kennedy accused him of being a “100 percent” supporter of Truman’s “appeasing administration policy in China and the Far East.” He further ridiculed Lodge for “straddling” on Senator McCarthy’s charge of Communist subversion in the State Department.

  The one man who might have saved Lodge refused to help. When someone from Lodge’s campaign called McCarthy urging that he go to Boston and make a speech on behalf of the incumbent senator, the Wisconsin senator demurred. He told conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., in whose Connecticut home he was staying, that Lodge had always opposed him, while he counted young Jack Kennedy a covert supporter. McCarthy told Buckley that he had made Lodge a counteroffer he would surely refuse. “I told them I’d go up to Boston to speak if Cabot publicly asked me to. And he’ll never do that; he’d lose the Harvard vote!”

  The Kennedy campaign, meanwhile, presented its own man as every inch an anti-Communist crusader as any Republican. When Adlai Stevenson made a campaign stop in Springfield, Sargent Shriver sent word to him that “up there, this anti-Communist business is a good thing to emphasize.” The future Kennedy brother-in-law let it be known in a briefing paper what the Kennedy people wanted the Democratic presidential candidate to say about the local boy: It was Cong. John Kennedy, not his Republican colleague from California, who was the first to expose Communists in organized labor. He “was the man . . . that got Christoffel . . . not Nixon.”

  Such issues as who was the fiercer anti-Communist would not alone decide the Kennedy-Lodge fight. As in the 1946 campaign, Jack Kennedy’s looks and charm were exploited without shame. Thousands of women answered personal invitations to a series of formal “teas” hosted with lace-curtain pomp by “Ambassador and Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy.” Their son’s sex appeal was such a tremendous asset, another aide, Bob Griffin, recalled, that Kennedy would routinely visit the Tremont Street campaign headquarters late each night, thereby causing all the women volunteering to stuff envelopes to stick around and stay busy until closing. But Tip O’Neill recalled a moment when charm was the very opposite of what the Kennedys were dispensing in the rough campaign to unseat Lodge. O’Neill, the Democratic candidate to take Jack Kennedy’s congressional seat, was asked to substitute for him on an election-eve radio broadcast. Though the format called for Lodge to speak first, he let O’Neill go ahead of him. The script from Kennedy headquarters had not arrived. When it did, arriving at the studio seconds before airtime, it “kicked the living hell out of Henry Cabot Lodge,” O’Neill would recall to his chagrin. Lodge, outraged by the ambush, told O’Neill’s wife, Millie, exactly what he thought of it, reminding her, “The Kennedys would never give a speech like that for him. And I would never say the things about Jack Kennedy that he’s saying about me.”

  If Dick Nixon was displeased by Kennedy’s reach for glory or the discomfort his attainment of it caused Republicans generally, it didn’t show. From the steps of a Boston hotel, the campaigning vice-presidential candidate one day saw Jack Kennedy drive by in an open convertible. When he began waving with excitement, his wife, Pat, worried at the pictures the news photographers would snap, told Nixon to cool his public show of affection. “Remember, he’s running against Lodge.” It would not look good for the Republican rising star to be wagging his hand so excitedly at the young Democratic congressman about to beat the man who had engineered Dwight Eisenhower’s run for the presidency.

  The irony is, Kennedy and Nixon were campaigning with the same message. Nixon said that Truman had “covered up the Communist conspiracy.” Kennedy tied Lodge to Truman’s “appeasing” foreign policy.

  On election day, the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket carried the country by 7 million votes, winning a majority in the House of Representatives and a 48-48 tie in the U.S. Senate, which the new vice president could break in the Republicans’ favor. But in Massachusetts, where Adlai Stevenson suffered a crushing defeat, Jack Kennedy won by seventy thousand votes. For the noble Lodge, it was a humiliating defeat. With the ballots in, Lodge could not bring himself to wish the winner well. From the window of his Tremont Street headquarters, Kennedy watched the proud Yankee’s car drive by on its way into the night. Only then, exhausted and suffering from the effects of his Addison’s disease, would Kennedy have himself taken to the hospital. Once again, he had made the political grade set by his father without an ounce of energy or will to spare.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Hall Mates

  JOHN Fitzgerald Kennedy, thirty-five years old, was sworn in as a U.S. senator on January 3, 1953. He was assigned room 362 of the Senate Office Building, across Constitution Avenue from the Capitol. Richard Milhous Nixon was sworn in as vice president, the second youngest in history, on January 20, 1953, and assigned room 361, directly across the hall. “It was a busy corridor between those two offices,” Kennedy secretary Evelyn Lincoln would recall. “The two of them were continuously tripping over cameras. You couldn’t get through. Hardly a day went by, when Nixon was in Washington, that all kinds of cameras and press equipment were not lined up outside his door. Ken
nedy was a new celebrity. He got tremendous publicity. There was a steady stream of people passing his door trying to catch a glimpse of him.”

  A few days before the Inauguration, Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, told Mrs. Lincoln that there might be some standing-room tickets available if any of the Kennedy staff would like them. When the day came, she handed Mrs. Lincoln a pass to sit in a prize location, on the platform supporting the recording machines and amplifiers, directly in front of the stand where General Eisenhower and Woods’s boss were to take their oaths. “We had a very nice relationship,” Mrs. Lincoln said of her ties with Nixon’s personal secretary. “Rose Mary Woods and I were very friendly.”

  So, apparently, were their bosses. When Kennedy applied for membership in the all-male Burning Tree golf club that year, Nixon wrote a letter sponsoring him. “I have known Senator Kennedy for a number of years as a personal friend and I feel he would make an excellent addition to the membership,” he vouched in a note sent to the club’s admissions chairman.

  Just as the two freshman congressmen were thrown together in the same committee back in 1947, they now faced each other across the same hallway. For the next eight years, the two men would work and plot their ambitions within a few feet of each other.

  One reason for the across-the-hall cordiality was that while Kennedy and his staff assumed even back then that the 1960 Republican presidential nomination was Nixon’s to lose, the vice president had little reason to suspect Kennedy as a rival. Just turned forty, Nixon was now the dynamic national figure of his generation. Thanks to the Hiss case and the Checkers melodrama, he was one of the few public figures known by every voter in the country. More than that, he had become the gritty symbol of a postwar middle class nervous about Communist aggression abroad and uneasy, closer to home, about big labor and the entrenched liberal governmental elite. Kennedy, on the other hand, was a bachelor navy hero enjoying what seemed to be an indefinite shore leave, a man whose tenuous health had taken him to death’s door; a Roman Catholic in a Protestant country that had been electing Protestant presidents since the first peal of the Liberty Bell. Add to that Kennedy’s health: the strange losses of weight, the stark changes in his coloring, the absences. If these reasons were not sufficient to bar a Kennedy presidential shot, there was Kennedy’s youth. At thirty-five, he barely met the minimum constitutional age for the office. By all outward appearances, he seemed a genial dilettante destined for a long, no-heavy-lifting career in the Senate, something in the well-trod Yankee footsteps of Henry Cabot Lodge.