Kennedy believed the enemy meant business. Nixon and others could sound off back home about the need to call the Soviets’ bluff. But Nikita Khrushchev looked nothing like a bluffer.
But Kennedy also knew the political price of softness. “There are limits to the number of defeats I can defend in one twelvemonth period,” he would say later in his presidency. The new president could also hear the calls for a tougher stand from the man he had defeated the previous November. “Vice President Nixon seems to be taking a dim view of your administration. He said in a speech yesterday that never in American history has a man talked so much and acted so little. Do you have anything to say about this?” a reporter asked at a June White House press conference. Kennedy countered with a wicked slap at his rival’s evacuation to Los Angeles. “No. I wouldn’t comment on Mr. Nixon. He has been engaged and busy, and I sympathize with the traveling problems he has been having and other problems. I don’t have any response to make. We’re doing the best we can and will continue to do so until 1964, and then we can see what the situation looks like.” He was daring Nixon to run against him.
Nixon was facing the first long summer away from Washington in fifteen years; his worst problems were tedium and irrelevance. Quietly reading a book one Saturday morning, former congressman Pat Hillings got a telephone call. “Pat, what are you doing?” Nixon asked from his office in downtown Los Angeles. When Hillings said he was relaxing around his pool, Nixon said he needed to talk. Shaved, showered, and dressed, Hillings entered Nixon’s office to find his friend alone and distressed. “Where is everybody? There’s no one here. Look at the street down there. There’s no one down there. Doesn’t anyone do anything around here?” Informed that it was a summer Saturday in a part of the country where people did such things as play tennis, go to the beach, and hang around swimming pools, Nixon was indignant. “Don’t they realize they’ll all become vegetables?”
* * *
IN August the Soviets made their long-threatened move on West Berlin. Fortunately for the world, the Soviets and East Germans had found a solution to stop the tide of refugees to the West—a wall. To Kennedy, the news came as a secret relief. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy asked. “There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he occupied the whole city. This is the way out of this predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
But the calm White House reaction drew criticism. “Mr. Nixon has called the movement of American troops into West Berlin a useless gesture which Mr. Khrushchev might interpret as weakness rather than strength,” a reporter challenged Kennedy at an August press conference. “At the same time, the Republican national chairman has said that your administration’s attitude in general is one of appeasement toward communism throughout the world. Do you have any comment on this criticism by top spokesmen of the opposition party?”
Only his contempt was apparent. “No, I don’t. We are in a situation in Germany which is fraught with peril, and I think that anyone who is aware of the nature of the destructive power that’s available to both sides should, I would think, be careful in attempting to make any political advantage out of our present difficulties.
“It would seem to me, and I think at the time, that the West Berliners would benefit from a reminder of that commitment, and it was for that reason that those troops were added to the garrison of West Berlin. I don’t really see how that weakens our commitment. If troops were withdrawn, would that strengthen it?”
* * *
SETTLED in California, Nixon was anxious to regain some political strength of his own. In September, Ted Sorensen traveled to Los Angeles to be honored among the “Ten Outstanding Young Americans” by the Junior Chamber of Commerce. He would recall a comical backstage moment with the event’s master of ceremonies, Richard Nixon.
As emcee and honorees awaited their cue to enter the hotel ballroom, an elderly waiter walked past carrying a large tray. To the others’ amazement, Nixon made a great fuss over the gentleman, asking after his wife, his family, his health. Knowing that the lively familiarities had caught the group’s interest, Nixon waited for the elderly gentleman to pass before offering a well-timed mock explanation: “He was one of last year’s winners.”
Just as Kennedy had surmised in their April meeting, the vice president was intent on challenging Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown in 1962. While the opportunity looked sound—he was leading Brown in the polls five to three—there was an obvious risk that if Nixon lost, his political career would be over. No one could ever run for president who had been rejected by his own state.
Kennedy thought a Nixon run made no sense. As a former vice president, he enjoyed durable status that would enable him to run for president again without ever having to seek another lower office. “Why is he running?” he asked Ken O’Donnell. “He hasn’t got a chance, and the risk of getting beaten by Brown far outweighs any advantage he could win from being elected.” What Kennedy couldn’t imagine was Nixon’s fear of being trapped into a futile rerun against an incumbent Kennedy in 1964. That would be hopeless. The only president beaten for reelection in the century had been Herbert Hoover, the man blamed for the Great Depression. “The important thing, in terms of Nixon’s career, is that he chose to run for governor of California so that he wouldn’t have to run against Kennedy in ’64,” aide Stephen Hess recalls. “The irony of the whole thing is that he was attacked successfully as using the statehouse as a stepping-stone for the presidency. He actually wanted to use it as a bomb shelter.” Pat Hillings had a similar recollection. “Nixon was still a very young man. Our biggest problem was that the man who beat him was also a very young man. What was Nixon going to do for eight years?”
Nixon would explain his decision years later: “My own political judgment at that point told me that Kennedy would be almost unbeatable in 1964. If I ran for governor, I felt I would have to pledge to spend the full term in Sacramento. That would leave someone else to square off in 1964 against Kennedy, his money and his tactics.” But the real prod to Nixon’s running for governor was that he lacked Kennedy’s confidence in his own political staying power.
In late September, Nixon made his announcement: He would not seek the presidency in 1964 but would run instead for governor of California, committing himself to serve a full four-year term. “Despite all the talk about drafts,” he said of the possibility the party might want him to challenge Kennedy in 1964, “there has never been one in history. The candidate has always worked for it, and I will not.” Nixon made the decision, he told his aides, despite the knowledge he would be facing the all-out opposition of the man who had beaten him a year earlier. Nixon knew that anger over the administration’s civil rights stance in the South would make California vital to Kennedy in 1964. Nixon knew that Kennedy was aware that his rival’s winning control of the state would create a serious obstacle to Kennedy’s prospects. “There would be the all-out opposition of the Kennedy family,” he told Bob Finch. “They would do everything they could to stop me from getting a new political lease on life by winning the governorship.”
For Nixon, the governor’s race started badly, with Governor Brown accusing him of using California’s highest office to advance his national career. “He sees the governorship of this state only as a stepping-stone for his own presidential ambitions.” President Kennedy, visiting Los Angeles for a November Democratic fund-raiser, reminded his audience that Brown knew the state, a reference to the fact that his rival did not. For weeks it appeared that Nixon might have to endure a fight for his party’s nomination with the former governor, Goodwin Knight.
From three thousand miles away, Jack Kennedy relished the prospect. He was sitting at the stern of the Honey Fitz, daiquiri in hand, the sun coming down at the end of a beautiful Newport day. “What do you feel at a moment like this? What is it like to be president?” his pal Charles Bartlett asked.
Kennedy smiled and dropped an ash fro
m his Cuban cigar. “Well, I tell you one thing, this beats the hell out of mucking around in California with Goodie Knight.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Coup de Grâce
HAVING made the leap into the gubernatorial race, Nixon realized the depths of his misjudgment. For one thing, he saw from crowd reactions just how popular his recent rival, Jack Kennedy, had become in his inaugural presidential year. Nor was JFK’s popularity based on any one achievement. After the Bay of Pigs, he was more beloved than ever. People who had voted for Nixon were now telling pollsters they had voted for his opponent. Realizing he could not compete with such star quality, the former vice president tried co-opting it. “I was in the navy in the South Pacific but wasn’t in a PT boat,” he told his California audiences. “That’s why I’m here and not in Washington.” He paid more subtle tributes. When the Nixons’ new house was completed, he arranged for his wife to give a televised tour like the one Jacqueline Kennedy had just given of the White House.
Yet his bitterness was thinly disguised. “My little daughter, Tricia, says she doesn’t blame the people who voted for Kennedy,” he said. “She blames the ones who counted the votes in Chicago.” When his memoirs/ which he entitled Six Crises, were published in the spring of 1962, he quoted his younger daughter Julie on the 1960 election count. “Can’t we still win? Why can’t we have a recount in Chicago?” he recalls her asking him every day from the election until Kennedy’s inauguration. Kennedy got the message. When Ben Bradlee asked Kennedy if he had read the book, he got a testy answer. “Just the 1960 campaign stuff, and that’s all I’m going to read. I can’t stand the way he puts everything in Tricia’s mouth. It makes me sick. He’s a cheap bastard; that’s all there is to it.”
Six Crises also reopened the controversy over the CIA’s 1960 briefing of Kennedy. The White House released a statement denying Nixon’s charge that candidate Kennedy had gotten a heads up on the planned Cuba invasion. When Allen Dulles denied giving Kennedy actual CIA “plans,” the author was furious. Once again, Kennedy was being shielded. When the president and his attorney general, Bobby, paid simultaneous visits to California, Nixon let loose. “We welcome them. In November we’re going to show these carpetbaggers a thing or two.”
Asking Kennedy about Nixon’s rocky race for governor became a favorite sport at televised presidential press conferences. “Mr. President, you once told us you had an opinion as to whether Mr. Nixon should enter the race for the California governorship, but you never did tell us what that was. Could you tell us about it?” a reporter asked Kennedy in March.
“Well, I think I said at the time I’d be glad to confide it to him, and he has not yet spoken to me about it.”
Riding the laughter, a reporter brought up the 1960 debates. “Mr. Nixon in his book has indicated that he feels he won three of the four debates. In view of this, do you think that future debates are advisable?”
For Kennedy it was an easy setup. “Well, I would think that they would be—they’d be part of the ’64 campaign. I’ve already indicated I’ll be glad to debate even if I did, as the vice president suggested, lose three of the four.”
That spring, Kennedy showed how far he had come in the raw use of power. Determined to fight inflation, he jawboned both industry and labor to hold the line on price and wage hikes. Executives of the steel industry and the United Steelworkers agreed at a White House meeting in March to hold off any pay increase that might trigger a new cycle of higher prices. But a month later, Roger Blough, chief executive officer of U.S. Steel, asked to see Kennedy. He began the Oval Office meeting by saying: “Mr. President, I want to ask your permission to raise the steel prices.”
Kennedy was swift in his response. “Mr. Blough, what you are doing is in the best interest of your shareholders. My shareholders are every citizen of the United States. I’m going to do everything in the best interest of the shareholders, the people of this country. As the president of the United States, I have quite a bit of influence.”
Kennedy was about to give Big Steel the Onions Burke treatment. “You find out about these guys in these steel companies, where they have been on vacation, who they have been with on vacation.” The next day, Robert Kennedy announced that he had ordered a grand jury investigation under the antitrust laws of the steel price hike. Subpoenas to produce documents were served on U.S. Steel. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara ordered that the Pentagon buy steel “where possible” from companies that had not raised prices.
By the next night, eight steel companies that had announced price hikes canceled them. Two months later, Kennedy joked over dinner how a steel company president, Jim Patton of Republic Steel, had complained to him that day about the telephones of the steel executives being tapped and their tax returns being checked. “I told him that was totally unfair, that the attorney general wouldn’t do such a thing.” Pause. “And, of course, Patton was right!”
Kennedy suspected Richard Nixon’s hand in the steel crisis. “It looks like a double-cross,” he told Ben Bradlee. “I think steel made a deal with Nixon not to raise prices until after the election. Then came the recession, and they didn’t want to raise prices. Then, when we pulled out of the recession, they said, ‘Let Kennedy squeeze the unions first, before we raise prices.’ They kicked us right in the balls. And we kicked back. Are we supposed to sit there and take a cold, deliberate fucking?” Two years later, Robert Kennedy admitted that he and his brother had used rough tactics to intimidate the steel executives. “We looked over all of them as individuals . . . we were going to go for broke . . . their expense accounts and where they’d been and what they were doing. I picked up all their records. . . . I told the FBI to interview them all, march into their offices the next day! We weren’t going to go slowly. . . . So all of them were hit with meetings the next morning by agents. All of them were subpoenaed for their personal records. I agree it was a tough way to operate, but under the circumstances, we couldn’t afford to lose.”
In May, Kennedy celebrated his forty-fifth birthday in New York’s Madison Square Garden with a gala fund-raising evening featuring Marilyn Monroe. After hearing the actress, wearing a skintight dress, coo “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” Kennedy couldn’t resist a shot at Nixon. It came in a mock tribute to the Kennedy children’s affection for Macaroni, their pet pony. “Actually, there’s another speech, given by a former vice president of the United States, in 1952, which is even more pertinent. It was just a little pony, and you know the kids—like all kids, loved it. And I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it. And I feel about Macaroni the way the vice president did about Checkers.” It was a devastating lampoon of Richard Nixon’s most celebrated performance.
In June, Nixon won the Republican nomination for governor, defeating conservative state assemblyman Joseph Shell by more than 600,000 votes. Two days later, Kennedy ridiculed Nixon’s defeat of a political unknown. “I think he emerged from a tough one,” he told White House reporters.
At a July press conference, the political banter continued. “Mr. President, Governor Brown is coming here to see you this afternoon. I wonder if you have any advice for him in the contest with Mr. Nixon and what your overall view might be of the campaign in California?”
Again, Kennedy was ready. “I would not advise Governor Brown. I think this is a matter for the people of California. He seems to be doing very well. He was running far behind in the beginning. And now he is leading in the polls by substantially more than I led at the end of the election.”
In August, the press and Kennedy were still at the game. “Mr. President, a day after you left California last week, the proposed debate between our governor and Mr. Nixon blew sky-high, and it’s been suggested since, in public speculation, that you advised our governor to avoid this kind of confrontation. As the reigning champion in this field, I wondered if you would like to tell us whether or not you did discuss this with Governor Brown and also if may
be the time has come when you would tell us what you once suggested you would have advised Mr. Nixon?”
Kennedy denied giving Nixon’s California rival any debate strategy. “I understand that Governor Brown is suggesting the format which was used in the ’60 campaign . . . and which I think is very satisfactory. But they have to work out those details. In answer to your last . . . I will be glad to tell you in November.”
* * *
To warm Nixon’s own relations with reporters, Nixon’s aides convinced him to throw a party. Aide Stephen Hess recalls the scene: “Got a ballroom. Lots of good food. The press is gathered around. And Nixon starts telling a story about if you want a fresh salad in a restaurant, ask the waiter to slice the tomato against the grain. He had all these jobs as a kid, and he worked in a kitchen. He was explaining that in the middle of the afternoon you prepare the salads and they have been sitting there for three hours when you order your salad. The reporters are gasping. They’re coming up for air. This is the small talk of this guy!”
Nixon’s ineptitude at chitchat was now the least of his problems. Pat Brown was proving far tougher than expected. Nixon couldn’t find anything to throw at him. There was no “meat” around, no PAC issue, no voting record to compare with Vito Marcantonio’s. And unlike his challenger, Brown was a perfect fit for the governor’s chair. Even Nixon’s close advisers admitted that their candidate could not match the governor’s zeal for the issues of daily interest to California voters. As press secretary Herb Klein confessed, the former vice president was beyond bothering with “peaches or produce.”
Brown also turned out to be a more appealing opponent than expected. One day, Nixon staffers were gathered in front of the television at the candidate’s house, enjoying the governor’s on-air fumbles, when Nixon joined the group. “How did he do, boys?” After everyone had chimed in, slamming the performance, Julie Nixon came into the room. “You’re all wrong. He was terrific.” Nixon’s youngest daughter had intuitively recognized what the professionals didn’t: the decency of the man her father was running against.
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 Page 131
