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

  Kennedy’s harrowing back surgery would now cost him an eight-month absence from the action on Capitol Hill. “One thing about Nixon, God bless him,” Ted Reardon recalled, “every few days he’d stop in and ask, ‘How’s Jack getting along?’ He really admired Jack.” To take the pressure off Kennedy, Nixon even took Ted Sorensen aside to suggest an unusual offer. He wanted Kennedy to know that he, the constitutional president of the Senate, would refuse to exploit Kennedy’s absence. If the Democrats won a one-seat majority in the Senate that November, the vice president would refuse to “break the tie in favor of the Republicans.” Whether the gesture was valid or not—two Democratic absences would have been required to forfeit a 49–47 majority—Jacqueline Kennedy took the gesture to heart.

  December 5, 1954

  Dear Mr. Vice President,

  I could never describe to you how touched and appreciative Jack was at the message you sent him through Ted Sorensen—that you won’t let his not being there in January affect the reorganization of the Senate—

  If you could only know the load you took off his mind—He has been feeling so much better since then—and I can never thank you enough for being so kind and generous and thoughtful—He was having such a difficult time and I know one of the reasons was he just felt so frustrated and hopeless—cooped up in the hospital and wondering if it would affect everything in Washington.

  I don’t think there is anyone in the world he thinks more highly of than he does you—and this is just another proof of how incredible you are—

  Thank you so very much—that sounds so inadequate—all the thanks in the world wouldn’t be enough—Every good wish from us both to you and Mrs. Nixon—

  Very Sincerely, Jacqueline Kennedy

  Two months later, Nixon found an excuse to write Kennedy.

  February 5, 1955

  Dear Jack:

  Last Saturday Pat and I took our youngsters to the Ice Capades and we were delighted to find that Jackie’s mother was sitting behind us. We didn’t realize it until we were about ready to leave but we did enjoy chatting with her for a few minutes.

  As you know, we are all looking forward to your being back with us in the very near future. I can assure you that they are working hard over there because I have stuck my head in a couple of times when I have gone home at a rather late hour and somebody is usually still there!

  When you return I want you to know that my formal office will be available for you to use anytime you have to stay near the Floor. I do not use it myself except just before the session opens and I think you will find it very convenient to handle your appointments or other business which you have to take care of when you find it necessary to attend a session.

  Pat joins me in sending our very best wishes to you and Jackie.

  Sincerely, Richard Nixon

  “It made Jack feel very good,” Ted Reardon would remember, for another politician to assure him that his staff was working “double hard,” taking care of problems back in the state. Kennedy, who had won narrowly in 1952, knew the reelection hazard of the “absenteeism” issue. It was the charge he had used against Henry Cabot Lodge to win his seat.

  In February, Kennedy went back to the hospital for a second, more successful operation. With the help of physical therapy, a corset, and a rocking chair, the young senator was set to proceed gingerly with a career that had hung, along with his life, in the balance. Pale and limping, he returned to Capitol Hill in late May, more sensitive than ever to the public relations of his condition. When a Senate page, Martin Dowd, saw the long-absent senator approaching on crutches and opened the Senate chamber door for him, Kennedy tore into him. “Shut the door!” Kennedy yelled at the crushed seventeen-year-old. Unwilling to drop the matter, he confronted Dowd a moment later. “Don’t you touch that door until I tell you to!”

  Others were more delicate in recognizing what Kennedy had been through. Greeting the Massachusetts senator on his first day back at the office was a basket of fruit sitting on his desk with a card attached. “Welcome Home!” it read. “Dick Nixon.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Profiles in Ambition

  IN June 1954, Vice President Nixon stood on the tarmac at National Airport as Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill walked right past him to the microphones. The young American vice president had lost the chance to deliver to his hero a welcoming speech he had sweated the entire night to prepare.

  A summer later, Kennedy suffered a similar dose of Churchillian disregard. The occasion was an evening dinner aboard Aristotle Onassis’s opulent yacht, Christina. Excited at the chance to exchange big-picture observations with the great world statesman, Kennedy found himself totally ignored by the guest of honor. Afterward, Jacqueline Kennedy couldn’t resist teasing her husband, who had made a point of wearing a starched white dinner jacket for the occasion. “I think he thought you were the waiter.”

  * * *

  THAT fall, Nixon came closer to the vision of glory shared by both young men than even his ambitious schedule for advancement had allowed. President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. Operating coolly only “a heartbeat away” from the nation’s highest office, Nixon won praise for grace under pressure. Yet one man’s approval would be conspicuously absent. The day after Christmas, Dick Nixon sat in the Oval Office listening in disbelief as Eisenhower suggested to him that he think about another line of work. Ike even asked his vice president if he would like a cabinet post, couching the proposal as a useful career move, a chance to bolster his management credentials. In February, Eisenhower repeated the unwanted advice, again urging Nixon to seek the maturity that could come only from a position of command. Running a government department would leave him far better placed for a presidential run come 1960, Ike told him. “However, if you calculate that I won’t last five years, of course that is different,” he coldly added.

  In March, the people of New Hampshire presented the vice president with a write-in vote in the state’s Republican primary. Eisenhower still refused to commit to a second Nixon term. “The only thing I have asked him to do is to chart his own course and tell me what he would like to do,” he told the press. Privately, he turned the screws tighter, deputizing Republican chairman Leonard Hall to ask Nixon if he would step aside for Frank Lausche, the conservative Democratic senator from Ohio. Unknown to his vice president, Ike was intrigued by Lausche’s religion. “I’d love to run with a Catholic,” he confided to friends, “if only to test it out.” Nixon’s liberalism on civil rights was another factor. Eisenhower had gotten a report from press secretary James Hagerty that his number-two man’s aggressive stance was hurting the ticket in the South.

  Nixon responded to Ike’s message carrier just as he had to Governor Dewey when he had phoned before the Checkers broadcast with the disheartening request that he, Nixon, submit his resignation from the Republican ticket. Taking the same shrewd tack he had used to shuck off the 1952 call, Nixon said absolutely nothing to the party leader’s entreaty, waiting to hear the bad news directly from Ike. In April, more pressure was applied. Asked in a press conference if his vice president had charted his course, Ike again refused to bite. “As far as I’m concerned,” he decreed, “I will never answer another question on this subject until after August.” With that command decision, he ordered any further scuttlebutt about Nixon’s fate off-limits until the Republican convention that August in San Francisco.

  Or so he hoped. Nixon was uniquely alert to the danger behind the former general’s stalling. Given the chance to name a vice president at the eleventh hour, Ike might well choose to stampede the delegates. Understanding this, the vice president made his move. Getting an appointment with Ike, he entered the Oval Office with the upbeat news that he had carried out the assigned orders. The Supreme Commander had told him to “chart his course.” He had charted it: The right thing for him was to run for reelection as vice president. It was a bold move, and it worked. Eisenhower, realizing that he’d been outflanked, sent
Hagerty out to announce how delighted the boss was with his young vice president’s decision.

  * * *

  IN addition to overcoming Ike’s stubborn conviction that his vice president lacked the “maturity” for the top job, Nixon needed to stand tough against the Democrats’ belief that playing the Nixon card was the way to bring about the defeat of the still-popular Ike in 1956. Robert Kennedy, now chief counsel to the Senate Government Operations Committee, opened an investigation of lobbyist-political consultant Murray Chotiner for possible conflict of interest. Called to testify, the combative Chotiner managed to land a so’s your own man! slap at the Kennedys. He suggested that in the course of examining potential influence peddling, Kennedy might “explain whether any influences were used in connection with his own appointment as attorney for a subcommittee of a committee of which his brother is a member.” However, committee chairman John McClellan soon ruled that the Chotiner probe was too overtly partisan for an election year.

  Meanwhile, Jack Kennedy was preparing a more direct challenge to the vice president’s position. He had begun a quiet campaign to snag Nixon’s job for himself. Former House colleague Gerald Ford recalls bumping into him at a Washington black-tie affair. When Ford asked how things were going over in the Senate, Kennedy said he had “bigger plans.”

  His first step was to secure for himself more of an “intellectual” aura within the ranks of a Democratic party that revered Adlai Stevenson’s erudition and wit. While recuperating from his back operation the previous spring, Kennedy had enlisted Ted Sorensen, wife Jacqueline, and what amounted to an entire faculty of historians in a book project about members of the Senate who had taken principled, courageous positions at odds with their constituencies. The book’s publication was intended to identify Kennedy as a politician of stature, moral as well as mental. “Where else, in a non-totalitarian country, but in the political profession is the individual expected to sacrifice all—including his own career—for the national good?” it asked the reader.

  The Kennedys, father and son, had great hopes for Profiles in Courage, regarding it as a tool for transforming a first-term New England senator into a figure of national prominence, a young politician into an emerging statesman, and an “author” at that. Joseph Kennedy was ready to try almost anything to propel Profiles in Courage into bestsellerdom. With Ted Sorensen still polishing the manuscript, Senator Kennedy himself called the book’s editor, Evan Thomas, with a query about the publication date, which he followed by an astounding declaration. “We’ve got the Pulitzer!”

  In January 1956, Jack Kennedy hand-delivered copies of Profiles to every member of the U.S. Senate, including its constitutional president.

  Dear Jack:

  I found a copy of your book, Profiles in Courage, on my desk yesterday morning, and I want to thank you for your thoughtfulness in giving me an autographed copy of your latest success.

  My time for reading has been rather limited recently, but your book is first on my list and I am looking forward to reading it with great pleasure and interest.

  It is mighty nice to know that you are back at your desk again.

  Dick Nixon

  * * *

  JACK Kennedy’s next task on the road to the vice-presidential nomination was to get control of politics back home in Massachusetts. It was just the kind of messy, parochial fight he had sidestepped in his rise to the senate. William “Onions” Burke, a tavern keeper and central Massachusetts farmer, had been elected chairman of the state Democratic committee. He was the kind of clubhouse Democrat for whom Kennedy had contempt—a fat, patronage-loving pol. Worse yet, Onions was fervently opposed to Adlai Stevenson’s winning the 1956 nomination. In the April primary Burke organized a write-in campaign for his ally, House majority leader John McCormack, that outpolled Stevenson 20,969 votes to 13,377, embarrassing the state’s junior senator in his own backyard. If Jack Kennedy couldn’t deliver Massachusetts in the primary, how could he be counted on at the convention in Chicago? And if he couldn’t deliver, why should Stevenson even consider him as a running mate?

  But Onions overreached. Alger Hiss, just released from federal prison, had been invited to speak at Princeton, his alma mater. “Anybody who’s for Stevenson,” Burke said, lumping Kennedy into the far-left crowd, “ought to be down at Princeton listening to Alger Hiss.” Having dared to tie him to a man Kennedy had publicly called a “traitor,” Onions had to go.

  In order to knock Burke out of the chairmanship, Kennedy needed to switch from the wholesale politics of media manipulation—his father’s and his specialty—to the retail politics of the clubhouse. He ordered his staff to run a personal check on every member of the state Democratic committee. “Find out everything about them. Who do we know who knows them? What time do they get home from work at night? I’m going to ring their doorbells and talk to each one of them personally.” Armed with this intelligence, Kennedy traveled the state, visiting every one of the eighty committeemen.

  Two weeks before the state convention in May, the victory assured, Kennedy invited Onions to a Saturday morning breakfast on his own Northampton turf to tell him he was through. Echoing 1946, the loser’s protest that many of the committeemen had been bought went ignored. “He and his millions don’t know what honor and decency is,” Burke complained after members of the state committee, lobbied personally by the charming young senator on the way into their meeting, voted Onions out. Kennedy had risen to the occasion, done exactly what was necessary, changing his tactics to suit the situation, ambushing his complacent rival on his home terrain.

  Kennedy’s next bit of maneuvering in his bid to become Adlai Stevenson’s running mate involved converting his Roman Catholicism from a debit to a credit. Ted Sorensen prepared a memorandum toting up the Electoral College votes of those states with large numbers of Catholic voters. By putting a Catholic on the Democratic ticket, it reasoned, the divorced Stevenson might win back those millions of Catholics who had switched to Eisenhower-Nixon in 1952. To give Sorensen’s memo greater credibility, the Kennedy people circulated it across the country as the work of the Connecticut party chairman, John Bailey. The Kennedy selling document thus gained currency in Democratic circles as the “Bailey Memorandum.”

  Jack Kennedy now undertook the final assault. To win the affection of the Stevensonian liberals among the Democratic convention delegates in Chicago, he struck at the man in the office directly across the hall. On a personal level, Kennedy and Nixon had kept their dealings cordial. When asked on Face the Nation that July if he would “advise the Republicans to replace Mr. Nixon in view of the president’s health problem,” Kennedy resisted the easy shot. He said a dump-Nixon move “might split the Republican party open.”

  But Kennedy now needed the support of Adlai’s followers, not to mention their hero himself. To woo the keepers of the New Deal flame whom he had been bashing over Yalta and China, those liberals he said he did “not feel comfortable with,” he needed to do some genuflecting. After years of deriding the soft-line foreign policy of the old Roosevelt crowd, from Henry Wallace to Alger Hiss to the State Department’s China hands, young Senator Kennedy would now pay court to the New Deal grande dame and Stevenson mentor Eleanor Roosevelt herself.

  She would not make it easy. “I am troubled by Senator K.’s evasive attitude on McCarthy,” Mrs. Roosevelt had written. The Kennedy-Roosevelt meeting in Chicago, elaborately orchestrated, was a disaster. When Mrs. Roosevelt raised the McCarthy issue, Kennedy said it was “so long ago” it didn’t matter, quibbling that the time to censure the Wisconsin senator had been when he was being reseated for a second term in January 1953. FDR’s widow was having none of it. She berated Kennedy before everyone present, including other politicians who kept coming and going throughout the discussion. To win over the liberal crowd, Kennedy would have to do something that would convince them he was one of them, that he shared their sensibilities as well as their party.

  When asked to make the formal nominating speech for
Stevenson, Kennedy and aide Ted Sorensen worked until six o’clock in the morning. That afternoon, he went before the Democratic National Convention a full-fledged loyalist to “the man from Libertyville,” a liberal partisan who shared the Stevenson crowd’s hostility for one Republican in particular. Derided by the New York Times for overreliance on a “cliché dictionary,” Kennedy nonetheless delivered a genuine rouser. He warned that the Democratic ticket would be facing fierce opposition in the fall from “two tough candidates, one who takes the high road and one who takes the low road.” The stab at Nixon was unmistakable. For the first time in a decade of peaceful coexistence, one of the two men was using “attack” politics on the neighbor across the hall.

  Kennedy understood well the intensity with which partisan, liberal Democrats hated Richard Nixon. Ike’s heart attack, combined with his enormous popularity, exaggerated the emotion. If the president were to die during the next four years, Richard Nixon would be president. Since the liberals dreaded this prospect, it was easy to convince themselves that the country’s uncommitted voters did as well.

  Having received his party’s nomination, Stevenson moved to exploit the anxiety about the nation’s number-two slot. At eleven o’clock at night, the Democratic presidential candidate went before the convention to say that he would not pick a running mate. Rather, he wanted the convention to do it. Seven of the country’s thirty-four presidents had risen to the office because of an incumbent’s death. Bluntly implying this could happen again, Stevenson told the assemblage that he wanted the decision made by the party rather than a single man. “The nation’s attention has become focused as never before on the . . . vice presidency,” he explained, making pointed reference to Eisenhower’s medical crisis of the year before. The Democratic candidate for that office should be “fully equipped” to “assume, if need be, the highest responsibility.” He wanted the party to pick its number-two man “through the same free processes” by which it had chosen him. What he didn’t voice was the hope of party strategists that the huge media fuss created by the race for the second spot on the ticket would shift the focus of the fall campaign itself to the vice presidency, from “Ike” to “Dick.” His speech cloaked an even deeper truth: Plagued by indecision, Stevenson was using Richard Nixon, the man Democrats loved to hate, as his excuse for not naming Jack Kennedy his vice-presidential nominee. Instead, he made the young Massachusetts senator enter what would now be a twenty-four-hour campaign for the honor.