Nothing I could say now could add to the splendid tributes which have come from throughout the world.
But I want you to know that the nation will also be forever grateful for your service as First Lady. You brought to the White House charm, beauty and elegance as the official hostess of America, and the mystique of the young in art which was uniquely yours made an indelible impression on the American consciousness.
If in the days ahead we could be helpful in any way we shall be honored to be at your command.
Sincerely,
Dick Nixon
CHAPTERE
EIGHTEEN
Eternal Flame
PRIOR to an interview on the Kennedy assassination, CBS producer Don Hewitt, who had directed the Great Debate three years earlier, asked guest Richard Nixon if he wanted the makeup person, Frances Arvold, to prepare him for the broadcast. Nixon accepted. Hewitt could not resist kidding, “If Frannie had done your makeup three years ago, you’d be president now.” Nixon’s reply was equally macabre.
“I would be dead now, too,” he said.
The New Year would bring a warm reminder of the long and complicated relationship he had shared through so many Capitol corridors, hotels, and campaigns.
Dear Mr. Vice President—
I do thank you for your thoughtful letter—
You two young men—colleagues in Congress—adversaries in 1960—and now look what has happened—Whoever thought such a hideous thing could happen in this country?
I know how you feel—so long on the. path—so closely missing the greatest prize—and now for you, the question comes up again, and you must commit all your and your family’s hopes and efforts again— Just one thing I would say to you—if it does not work out as you have hoped for so long—please be consoled by what you already have—your life and your family.—
We never value life enough when we have it—and I would not have had Jack live his life any other way—though I know his death could have been prevented, and I will never cease to torture myself with that—
But if you do not win—please think of all that you have—With my appreciation—and my regards to your family. I hope that your daughters love Chapin School as much as I did—
Sincerely Jacqueline Kennedy
Included in the envelope was a mass card from St. Matthews cathedral.
* * *
THE young widow’s intuition of another Nixon presidential run was correct, just as her husband’s had been in predicting that his 1960 rival had no need to run for governor in 1962 to remain a live presidential prospect. The first Gallup poll, taken with Lyndon Johnson in the White House, showed Nixon with 29 percent and the previous front-runner, conservative senator Barry Gold-water of Arizona, with 25 percent. Nixon’s former running mate, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, received 16 percent, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller 13 percent.
Jacqueline Kennedy had inherited a part for herself in the political arena. The Sunday after her husband was killed, she began to play it. “And there’s going to be an eternal flame,” she said amid the plans for the funeral arrangements. Sargent Shriver worried about the protocol. “We’ll have to find out if there’s one at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, because if there is, we can’t have one.” The grieving First Lady was adamant. “I don’t care if one is there. We’re going to have it, anyway.” Shriver, whom the Kennedy family had deputized to manage the grand ceremonies, tried to finesse the question. “I think the only places with eternal flames are Paris and the one already out at Arlington. I want to be sure you’re not subjecting yourself to criticism. Some people might think it’s a little ostentatious,” he explained.
“Let them,” the president’s widow replied.
The tragedy in Dallas had transformed the Kennedy personality from a slain president to a clan whose every member had been touched with his glamour. Despite the proud Lyndon Johnson’s feudalistic oath to “continue” the dead president’s legacy, the Kennedys and their loyalists were not ready to yield the scepter of national leadership won in 1960. Henceforth, they would treat all other claimants to the presidency as caretakers or, worse yet, usurpers. “Camelot,” the poignant conceit Jacqueline Kennedy now confected, colorized the career of John F. Kennedy much as film distributors would some years later transform vintage black-and-white movies. People would absorb it so deeply into their memories of the New Frontier period as to make it seem contemporary. “Camelot” came to symbolize a mass longing not limited to partisan Democrats for a return of something beautiful and lost, the honoring of a dynastic claim. What John Kennedy had won through democratic election his family now demanded as hereditary rank.
Jacqueline Kennedy’s instrument for imprinting “Camelot” onto the nation’s psyche was Theodore White, the same author whose Making of the President had celebrated John F. Kennedy’s coming to power. A week after the assassination, she invited White up to Hyannis Port. There was something she wanted to tell him about her husband, something that was not being written in the newspapers.
When the Life correspondent arrived at the Kennedy summer home, his hostess dismissed Chuck Spalding and another guest, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., from the room. She wanted to talk with her selected chronicler alone.
It was raining outside that night. Above her gray pullover sweater, Jackie’s face was drained and pale. “History! History! It’s what those bitter old men write,” she railed when the conversation began at 8:30 P.M. By midnight she got to the reason she had summoned her influential guest. “I’ve got to talk to somebody, I’ve got to see somebody, I want to say this one thing, it’s almost an obsession with me, all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy, it’s been an obsession with me. At night before we’d go to sleep . . . we had an old Victrola. Jack liked to play some records. His back hurt, the floor was so cold. I’d get out of bed at night and play it for him, when it was too cold getting out of bed . . . on a Victrola ten years old—and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last side of Camelot, sad Camelot: . . . ‘Don’t let it be forgot, That once there was a spot, For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.’ Jack loved history so . . . history made Jack what he was . . . this lonely, sick boy . . . this little boy sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history . . . reading the Knights of the Round Table . . . and he just liked that last song. For Jack history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way, if it made him see the heroes, maybe other little boys will see.”
White spent two hours knocking out his story. At 2:00 A.M., he gave Jacqueline Kennedy a carbon copy of what he had written. After she had volunteered her changes, he went to the kitchen phone and began dictating to his editors in New York. When Mrs. Kennedy walked in and heard White fighting his editor’s objection that there was too much “Camelot” in the article, Jacqueline Kennedy shook her head insistently. “She wanted Camelot to top the story,” White wrote years later in his memoirs. He knew that he had let his sentiments be manipulated, knew that the analogy was “a misreading of history.” “The magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed,” he confessed. “Of all the figures of the New Frontier,” he believed John F. Kennedy to be the “toughest, the most intelligent, the most attractive—and inside, the least romantic.” Voices from the Kennedy inner circle shared in the admission. “Camelot is a fraud,” Pierre Salinger would say. Roger Hilsman, who had played his own hard role in the toppling of Ngo Dinh Diem, said: “Camelot was an invention of my good friend Teddy White, using Jackie’s romanticism after the president’s death. If Jack Kennedy had heard this stuff about Camelot he would have vomited.”
* * *
EARLY in 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy acted to shield her husband’s public legacy. She commissioned author William Manchester to write about the assassination, with the proviso that she would review the final manuscript.
Robert Kennedy operative Paul Corbin undertook a more immediate claim on the JFK legacy. He secretly promoted a vice-presidential write-in camp
aign for the attorney general in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. “You always had some of the Kennedy supporters who thought it wasn’t legitimate unless you had a Kennedy in the White House,” said Johnson’s press secretary, George Reedy, summing up the impulse. Ted Sorensen, the man Jack Kennedy christened his “intellectual blood bank,” said that Bobby Kennedy, anxious for the number-two spot on the 1964 Democratic ticket, was not out to serve Lyndon Johnson’s place in history but to recover his brother’s. “He wanted to be there to carry on the legacy of the previous president, not the incumbent president.”
Johnson was furious at the subterfuge, telling Kennedy to get Corbin out of New Hampshire and off the Democratic National Committee payroll. “He was loyal to President Kennedy. He’ll be loyal to you,” Kennedy argued. “I know who he’s loyal to,” Johnson snapped back. “Get him out of here.” Johnson later phoned Bobby to tell him that he had fired Corbin personally. He was not about to share the 1964 ticket with Jack Kennedy’s brother.
* * *
VIETNAM was a far more treacherous piece of the Kennedy legacy.
In taking the presidential oath aboard Air Force One, Lyndon Johnson took custody of a war to which Jack Kennedy had committed sixteen thousand troops. On the morning of November 22, Kennedy had predicted that South Vietnam would fall overnight if the United States lessened its commitment; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, just back from Saigon, now offered an even more troublesome report to the new president. “Current trends, unless reversed in the next two months, will lead to a neutralization at best and more likely to a Communist-controlled state.” Just as critics of the November 1963 coup had feared, the generals Kennedy helped topple Ngo Diem were considerably less impressive leaders than the man they had deposed and killed.
Johnson held Kennedy personally responsible for Diem’s death, believing he had pulled the strings while protecting his own “plausible deniability” in the episode. The conviction that Diem had been eliminated with JFK’s complicity created a fateful reasoning on his successor’s part. “Could the United States engineer the assassination of a nation’s leader,” LBJ aide Joseph Califano explained, “and then walk away from its commitment to that nation on the ground that the legitimate leader of the people was no longer in power?”
* * *
IN January 1964, Nixon called together his veteran strategists, Bob Finch, Bob Haldeman, and Steve Hess, for a meeting at the Waldorf Towers. They agreed that Nixon’s best stance, for the time being, was to lay low. The consensus was that their man was not in a position to run openly for president but that he could turn out to be an acceptable compromise between the party’s left and right should that summer’s convention in San Francisco reach a deadlock. By March, the scenario seemed plausible. Henry Cabot Lodge, Nixon’s former running mate and the American ambassador to South Vietnam, won the New Hampshire Republican primary with 33,000 write-in votes, defeating the two front-runners, Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. Richard Nixon, also not on the ballot, received 15,600 write-ins, a significant portent for a politician whose career had seemed finished.
* * *
THE former vice president now departed for a trip to the Far East to visit some of his firm’s international clients. Saigon was on the itinerary. Before leaving New York’s newly christened John F. Kennedy International Airport, he declared he was on a “holiday from politics.” Would Vietnam be an issue in the year’s presidential election? a reporter asked. “It will only become an issue if the policy has weaknesses worthy of criticism, if it is plagued with inconsistency, improvisation, and uncertainty. That has been the case in the past.” Nixon couldn’t resist a postscript. “There is no substitute for victory.”
Arriving in Asia, the Kennedy legacy in Vietnam remained high on Nixon’s agenda. In Pakistan, President Ayub Khan shared his belief that the United States had been complicit in the killing of President Diem. “I cannot say—perhaps you should never have supported Diem in the first place. But you did support him for a long time, and everyone in Asia knew it. Whether they approved or disapproved, they knew it. And then, suddenly, you didn’t support him anymore—and Diem was dead,” Nixon would later quote his Pakistani host. The global message of the 1963 coup, he concluded, was that it was “dangerous to be a friend of the United States.”
In Saigon, Nixon had dinner with Ambassador Lodge. Nixon recalled the briefing: “I know that a lot of people are impatient with the way things are going here, and I know that the military men don’t like being held back. But there’s a bigger and broader problem that can’t be settled by fighting over it. The problem in South Vietnam is less military than economic. The Viet Cong draw their strength from hungry peasants, and if we want to wean them from Communism we shouldn’t shoot at them—we should distribute food to them.” Lodge argued against pursuing the Vietcong forces into Laos or Cambodia. He said U.S. troops should avoid fighting the Vietcong altogether except to retaliate when Americans were killed. Nixon decided that his former Cold War colleague had grown soft. “I could hardly believe that I was hearing this from one so versed as Henry Cabot Lodge in the tactics of international Communism.”
* * *
THAT June, the Warren Commission, established by Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy, heard Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife, describe her husband’s dangerous behavior in April 1963 after reading in the Dallas Morning News of Richard Nixon’s call for a tougher policy against Castro’s Cuba. When the commission queried Nixon about his later trip to Dallas in 1963, he wrote back that he had been there on November 20 and 21, thereby denying he left the Texas city on the morning of November 22. While most Americans can describe in detail where they were when they heard Kennedy had been shot, Richard Nixon, for whatever reason, would not admit to the commission that he was actually on his way back from the scene of the crime on November 22.
Nixon was still tantalized by the prospect of a presidential “draft” at the Republican convention that July. In San Francisco, however, he endorsed the candidacy of Arizona conservative Barry Goldwater, winning the gratitude of the party’s emerging right wing. By agreeing to present the chosen nominee to the rambunctious convention, Nixon assumed the role of enduring party grandee, a leader standing in reserve for future fights. He clearly sensed the impending catastrophe that Goldwater’s suicidal acceptance speech made inevitable. “Those who don’t care for our cause, we don’t expect to enter our ranks in any case,” the 1964 presidential candidate declared. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” As the candidate’s intemperate words echoed through the Cow Palace, Nixon quietly demonstrated both his wisdom and future ambitions. With aroused Goldwater delegates giving their man’s defiance a standing ovation, the former vice president reached over to keep his wife in her seat.
* * *
IF Richard Nixon was looking toward the future, Lyndon Johnson was worrying hard about the present, especially the theatrics scheduled for the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. “He was afraid that because they had planned a tribute to John F. Kennedy and Bobby was to deliver it,” his adviser Clark Clifford recalled, “it might very well stampede the convention and make Kennedy the vice presidential nominee.” When Johnson tried persuading Kennedy to remove himself as a possible running mate, he refused. Out of desperation, the president issued a statement excluding from vice-presidential consideration all cabinet members and all who meet regularly with the cabinet, the latter phrase meant to include UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson. His prime target tried laughing it off, saying he was sorry that he had to take “so many nice fellows” down with him.
Johnson’s fears were fully justified. A film eulogizing JFK was shown on the convention’s last night. Narrated by Richard Burton, who had starred in the Broadway production of Camelot, it glowed with heartbreaking images of Jack and Jackie and Caroline, making the Kennedy presidency the stuff of myth, the New Frontier
the court of King Arthur.
When the lights of the great convention hall came up, the slender figure of the late president’s brother was there, standing atop the podium, alive! The waves of applause rolled on and on. “ ‘When he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars,’ ” the surviving brother quoted from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. “ ‘And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun.’ ”
Deprived of the chance to continue the dynasty, Bobby Kennedy began a desultory campaign for the U.S. Senate from New York, a state where he did not even have the right to vote. “Don’t you know?” he told an aide, astounded by an emotional crowd in Buffalo. “That was for him, not for me.” As Kennedy stumped around New York State, the gravel-voiced Paul Corbin saw that he was following the same route his brother had taken four years earlier. “Get out of this mysticism,” Corbin growled. “Get out of your daze. Goddamn, Bob, be yourself. Get hold of yourself. You’re real. Your brother’s dead.”
Richard Nixon, also campaigning in upstate New York that fall, darkly alluded to a “cloud of corruption” hanging over the Democratic administration. He predicted that Kennedy would be defeated in his Senate race. He won by 250,000 votes. With a strong new political base in the Empire State, the prospect of a Kennedy “restoration” seemed merely a matter of time. Richard Nixon, too, had kept his own presidential hopes alive, campaigning in thirty-six states for the doomed Republican ticket. A young Kansas congressman named Bob Dole would recall the former vice president peppering him with questions about his future. It would be the only presidential election year between 1952 and 1972 that Nixon would not be his party’s candidate for national office.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
The New Nixon
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 135
