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

  Eventually, after failing to convince the Republican vice president he was off-base, O’Neill acceded, producing the names of a number of young GOP comers, including that of Sen. Leverett Saltonstall’s gung-ho top staffer: Charles Colson

  * * *

  As he began campaigning cross-country for the Democratic nomination, Sen. John F. Kennedy had a standard icebreaker he used to establish common ground with the local partisans, most of whom had fought the two bitter, losing campaigns against the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket. To set up the punch, he would say that the reason for his visit to the area was to taste some culinary exotica unique to the locale and that he had brought Richard Nixon along to join him in the food tasting. “If we both pass away, I feel I shall have performed a great public service by taking the vice president with me.” This cornball quip was meant to perk up the fervor of those pro-Stevenson Democrats in the audience who were by definition Nixon haters as well. In private, the candidate’s feelings toward Nixon were still hard to figure. A Washington Post editorial cartoon of August 1959 showed the two of them peeking out their office doors at one another across the corridor. “Currently they are on a ‘Hi! Dick’ and ‘How are you, Jack?’ basis, but they no longer stop for a chat when they meet in the hall,” explained an accompanying article by Scripps Howard reporter Andrew Tully. After Kennedy obtained the original, he got Nixon to inscribe it. “To my friend & neighbor Jack Kennedy with best wishes for almost everything!” Nixon wrote.

  “Before the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates, JFK didn’t dislike Nixon, to the annoyance of many of his card-carrying anti-Nixon friends,” Ben Bradlee recalls. Longtime journalist-friend Charles Bartlett and wife, Martha, spent New Year’s Eve 1959 with Jack and Jackie Kennedy. Something Kennedy said that night caused Bartlett to write a note to himself the following morning. “Had dinner with Jack and Jackie—talked about presidential campaign a lot—Jack says if the Democrats don’t nominate him he’s going to vote for Nixon.” Bartlett recalls his reaction to his friend’s surprising remark. “After that I figured that’s the kind of thing memoirs are made of.” Out of loyalty to his politician-pal, he decided not to keep one.

  * * *

  JOHN F. Kennedy knew from the 1956 experience that in order to win the nomination he had to beat the party bosses at their own game. He must force them to take him. After all, he was neither a leader in Congress nor a member of the party’s liberal establishment. Of necessity, his strategy was to gain delegates by winning primaries, convincing the backroom boys by proving to them that his nomination was inevitable. “You think I’m out here to get votes?” he said, sitting in a Wisconsin diner one morning early in the campaign. “Well, I am, but not just for their vote. I’m trying to get the votes of a lot of people who are sitting right now in warm, comfortable homes all over the country, having a big breakfast of bacon and eggs, hoping that young Jack will fall right on his face in the snow. Bastards.”

  Instinctively, he understood how it was possible to end-run the bosses. One route was to exploit his glamour with the print media. “You could go to the A & P store. You could go to any grocery store,” primary opponent Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota observed with a touch of envy. “You’d pick up a women’s magazine—there would be a wonderful article: good pictures. Nice things, always, everything . . . from the Foreign Affairs Quarterly to the family magazine. It didn’t make any difference what it was, it was a good, solid piece.” With his publicity machine humming along, Kennedy also enjoyed a secret edge as he entered each state primary: He had commissioned private polling data on local attitudes and concerns peculiar to local voters. He knew what people had on their minds, what arguments would win their interest. It was a breakthrough technique. “I believe to this day that certain issues fit certain candidates,” Lou Harris would observe. In 1960 the pollster and his candidate made sure they matched the issues to the primary voters, a practice that became part of modern campaigning.

  As before, Kennedy also had the money—unlimited amounts of it—and the willingness to play rough. An example was the campaign’s use of a forty-six-year-old, gravelly voiced hatchet man, Paul Corbin. A onetime Communist who had become a fan of Joe McCarthy’s, Corbin was the complete political acolyte, reputedly capable of doing anything for a Kennedy victory, whether that meant replicating the “teas” that had so charmed the voters during the 1952 Senate effort in Massachusetts or distributing spurious anti-Catholic literature where it would do the most good—in the mailboxes of Roman Catholic voters. What better way to get out the vote of Kennedy’s coreligionists than to convince them that the 1960 Democratic presidential contest was a tribal war and that their tribe was playing defense?

  Despite a surprise attack from liberals for the $1,000 contribution he had delivered to Nixon in 1950—an episode his aides were under instructions to deny—Kennedy scored a big victory in Wisconsin’s April primary, winning 478,901 votes to Humphrey’s 372,034. Yet the press preferred to put a religious spin on the results: Kennedy had won in six of the state’s ten congressional districts, it was decreed, because Wisconsin’s Republican Catholics had crossed over to vote for him on the Democratic ballot. The Catholics had simply rallied to their own. Wisconsin, so went the media line, proved nothing.

  The Kennedys were furious at the dismissal of their hard-fought victory. When CBS’s Walter Cronkite asked Kennedy that primary night about the Catholic vote, the candidate showed his cold fury. His campaign manager was more vocal. “I’m going to see you never get another interview,” Robert Kennedy told Cronkite. After all the trudging through the snow, the hand shaking, and the speech making, the victory in Wisconsin was being denied him. He would now have to win in heavily Protestant West Virginia.

  It didn’t look good. The focus on Kennedy’s religion had hurt. Lou Harris’s numbers, which had been giving Kennedy the lead, 70-30 in West Virginia, now showed Humphrey ahead 60-40. An anti-Kennedy landslide loomed. In Washington, the odds-makers, including Nixon, were betting that he couldn’t pull it off. The nomination would have to be brokered, after all, at the convention in Los Angeles, a scenario that tallied with Lyndon Johnson’s own game plan. The Senate leader could get together with the delegates and woo them in the same tried-and-true manner he used on senators before a key vote. He’d work the states one at a time, using his allies from the Hill as local kingmakers. When the time came to pick a presidential nominee, the convention would choose a candidate who could actually win in November—not a Catholic, not a young backbencher who had never done much of anything where it counted: on Capitol Hill.

  Around this time, Lyndon Johnson called on Tip O’Neill in his office. The Senate leader said that he understood O’Neill’s first loyalty was to his colleague from Massachusetts but that “the boy” would falter after not getting it on the first ballot. He lobbied O’Neill for his commitment on the second ballot. But there never was one.

  * * *

  IN West Virginia, Kennedy rewrote the game plan for Johnson and all future presidential campaigns. Henceforth, the battle of strength and tactic would be in the primaries, not in Capitol offices. Having influenced Catholics in Wisconsin to back Kennedy out of religious solidarity, the new Kennedy spin was designed to convince West Virginia’s Protestants that bigotry was the only reason a person could have for opposing him. Another was to exploit Hubert Humphrey’s major weakness, his lack of military service during World War II. To guarantee that no voter remained unaware of who had served and who had not, the Kennedys undertook a comprehensive education program. Souvenir PT-109 insignia emblems of Jack Kennedy’s wartime heroism were put on sale at the affordable price of a dollar. Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., son of the man who led the country in World War II, now condemned the senator from Minnesota for ducking it. A letter back from FDR, Jr., was conspicuously postmarked Hyde Park to give the impression that FDR himself was endorsing the young candidate from beyond the grave.

  Finally, there arrived the U.S. cavalry of every campaign: greenbacks. West Virginia was a state
, after all, where county chairmen expected pay for service. The decisive swing to the handsome young senator from Massachusetts came on election eve, when the largest amounts yet of Kennedy cash started falling into outstretched hands. Humphrey could do little but complain. “I’m being ganged up on by wealth. I can’t afford to run around this state with a little black bag and a checkbook.” Nixon aide Charles McWhorter, a native of the state, got a taste of things to come in the general election. “They went through West Virginia like a tornado, putting money—big bucks!—into sheriffs’ races. You were either for Kennedy or you weren’t. The Kennedy people just wanted the gold ring. They were ruthless in that objective. That scared the shit out of me.”

  William Rogers, U.S. attorney general and close Nixon friend from the Hiss days, began quietly looking into the Kennedys’ West Virginia operation.

  To diminish the impact of a possible defeat in West Virginia and also to escape the pressure, Kennedy went searching on primary night with Ben Bradlee for a downtown Washington movie. After trying another theater, they ended up at a porno film showing around the corner from the White House. The diversion didn’t work. “Kennedy’s concentration was absolutely zero,” Bradlee recalled. “He left every twenty minutes to call Bobby in West Virginia.” Finally, word came that Kennedy had won. After watching the returns from the safety of Washington and thereby hedging his bets, Kennedy flew in his private plane to the scene of his big victory. Nothing stood between him and the Democratic presidential nomination.

  Nixon staffers remember the abrupt change in the relations between the two Capitol Hill offices that occurred after West Virginia. While it didn’t faze Kennedy a bit to now confront the Republican vice president, the same could not be said for his new rival. “It bothered Nixon plenty,” their mutual friend George Smathers recalled. Dick Nixon and Jack Kennedy were now set against each other in a zero-sum game. For one to win, the other had to lose. For one man’s dream to become reality, the other’s had to become a nightmare.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  Kennedy Versus Nixon

  RICHARD Nixon had reason to believe that, had Kennedy failed in the primaries, his wealthy father would quietly support the GOP ticket in the November election. The pugnacious Joe Kennedy had told him as much. Pat Hillings, traveling with Nixon those early months of 1960, overheard a revealing conversation while aboard a commercial airliner headed for Los Angeles. Seated on the aisle next to Nixon, Hillings saw Joseph Kennedy, Sr., heading toward them. “I want to talk to you, Dick,” the elder Kennedy said as he came within speaking distance. Giving up his seat, Hillings heard what Kennedy had to tell the vice president. “I just wanted you to know how much I admire you and what you’ve done in the Hiss case and in all the anti-Communist activity of yours.” Then, after a few minutes more of conversational pleasantries, the ambassador laid out his fallback position for 1960. “Dick, if my boy can’t make it, I’m for you.”

  His boy could. “It was the goddamndest thing,” Lyndon Johnson complained about the 1960 Democratic front-runner. “Here was this young whippersnapper . . . malaria-ridden, yallah . . . sickly, sickly.” Johnson knew full well that the young man rolling up delegate totals at the Los Angeles convention was suffering from health problems far worse than malaria, and the majority leader had no desire to keep that knowledge to himself. Hoping to shake some of Kennedy’s delegate strength, a Johnson ally, John Connally, called a press conference to let reporters know that Jack Kennedy had been diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a dysfunction of the adrenal glands that, absent regular doses of cortisone, would eventually kill him. The Kennedys were enraged by the Connally gambit. Press secretary Pierre Salinger indignantly called the statement “despicable.” Worse than that, it was true.

  But the Kennedy juggernaut that had piled up a 7-0 primary sweep was not to be stopped either by the machinations of Lyndon Baines Johnson or by those of the old liberal crowd that now packed the convention galleries for Adlai Stevenson. Eleanor Roosevelt could ardently beseech the delegates to “let it go to a second ballot” all she wanted. Kennedy had it clinched on the first. Their “operation was slick, well financed, and ruthless in its treatment of Lyndon Johnson’s southerners and the uncredentialed mob that was trying to stampede the convention for Stevenson,” reported John Ehrlichman, then a young Nixon campaign worker who had sneaked into the Kennedy nerve center. He came away with enormous respect for the organization he was spying on.

  Richard Nixon himself couldn’t help but be impressed by the cold cunning his opponent displayed, especially in selecting a running mate. The Democratic nominee had seen what he needed most—the South—and set about recruiting the strongest possible vice-presidential candidate to win it. If Lyndon B. Johnson was a politician nasty enough to raise the harsh specter of Addison’s disease, he was also the best man for the job Kennedy so desperately needed done: shore up Dixie while the presidential candidate himself energized the liberal, Catholic, ethnic, black, and other voting blocs up North. Instead of getting angry or getting even, the candidate understood how to use his defeated foe to get ahead.

  If there was a weakness in the Kennedy performance in Los Angeles, it lay with his acceptance speech. Except for its catchy reference to a “New Frontier,” it was not viewed as a statesmanlike performance. Watching the closing-night ceremonies at the Los Angeles Coliseum, Richard Nixon decided that Jack Kennedy could be bested. He would now make the single most momentous calculation of the campaign. He would forgo the protection of high office and greater name recognition and meet his lesser-known rival in open combat. He would accept the broadcast networks’ offer to host a series of four face-to-face debates between the two presidential candidates.

  When the Republicans convened in Chicago in late July, Nixon won the nomination handily. To add a needed measure of drama, Tom Dewey, Nixon’s old mentor, roused the delegates with a contemptuous keynote appraisal of the Democratic candidate. “Senator Kennedy has already disappointed his followers. In his first formal address he made regrettable, smart-aleck attacks upon the president and the vice president of the United States. Now, while age alone is not an issue, this irresponsible behavior makes people wonder whether the senator really is grown-up enough to be president,” Dewey bellowed to loud applause. With the delegates cheering his every assault, Dewey, the failed 1944 and 1948 Republican nominee, went after Kennedy with the very weapon that Franklin Roosevelt had once used on him with such devastating effectiveness: ridicule. He scathingly recounted the forty-three-year-old Democrat’s reaction to the suggestion that he might be too young for the presidency. “Kennedy, of course, disagreed. He modestly announced that, like Abraham Lincoln, he was ready. With further modesty, he then proposed to associate himself with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Christopher Columbus, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon. The only ones he left out were Julius Caesar and Hannibal.”

  Had the Republican candidate himself chosen to adopt a similar tone, had Nixon decided to run against Jack Kennedy as he had against Voorhis, Douglas, and Stevenson, the 1960 campaign might have taken a different course. Due to strategy or the lack of it, Nixon played it positive. He chose as his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge, the former senator who had been Ike’s highly respected ambassador to the United Nations. The Republicans would emphasize “experience,” especially in foreign policy. It was a risky but necessary choice for a man whose startling victories of the past had resulted from gambles. But in saluting Lodge’s stolid defense of U.S. interests at the United Nations, Nixon could hardly have forgotten his weak defense of himself against Jack Kennedy in the 1952 Senate race. Though generous in his public remarks about the rival nominees, Kennedy delighted in the bizarre pairing of middle-class hero and New England aristocrat. “That’s the last Nixon will see of Lodge. If Nixon ever tries to visit Lodge at Beverly,” a reference to the family’s North Shore estate, “they won’t let him in the door.”

  Yet Nixon had little choice but t
o play the foreign policy card. The Kennedy advantages—which included a running mate with roots in Texas and a regional appeal to the rest of the Democratic South plus a partisan edge with Jewish, Catholic, and other big-city voters in New York, Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania—made it essential that Nixon run the election on global concerns. After three recessions in eight years, a battle centering on domestic issues would give a decisive edge to the challenger. With a strong plurality of Americans preferring the Democratic party to the Republican party—the Gallup poll had it 47 percent to 30 percent—a Nixon decision to run on a party label would have been foolhardy. As the choice of Lodge displayed, Nixon understood that the most useful strategy available to him was to prove that he, not John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was the best possible steward of foreign policy, that he and Lodge, not Kennedy and Johnson, were the most seasoned men to confront the Soviets. He would need to make the 1960 presidential election into a national referendum on the Cold War.

  “Our next president must tell the American people not what they want to hear but what they need to hear,” Nixon said in his acceptance speech. “Why, for example, it may be just as essential to the national interest to build a dam in India as in California.” When read with historical hindsight, his best line dealt with the cold war. “Mr. Khrushchev says our grandchildren will live under communism. Let us say his grandchildren will live in freedom.” Nixon would later call his words that evening “the single most effective political address” he ever made. Ted Sorensen, architect of Kennedy’s acceptance speech, later called the Nixon acceptance speech “brilliant.”

  * * *

  OUT from under Ike’s shadow, for the first time Nixon set a solid pace for the general election, moving slightly ahead in the polls. A Gallup poll showed him leading Kennedy 53 percent to 47 percent. Then disaster. A reporter asked President Eisenhower what he thought of the Nixon backers who were claiming that Ike’s vice president “had a great deal of practice at being president?” Could he give an example of a “major idea” of Nixon’s that had been adopted? Eisenhower’s reply was lethal: “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” One staff member describes the blow as virtually an emotional concussion for the vice president.