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

  New York senator Robert Kennedy now offered a political verdict on the war. The Tet Offensive, he said, had smashed the “illusion” that the Vietnam War could “be settled in our own way and in our own time on our own terms.” It had taught America that a “total military victory is not within sight or around the corner; that, in fact, it is probably beyond our grasp; and that the effort to win such a victory will only result in the further slaughter of thousands of innocent and helpless people.” But he would go no further, refusing the call of antiwar forces that he, too, challenge Johnson for the nomination. One fear drove him to consider such a divisive move. He declared the prospect of Richard Nixon defeating LBJ in the November election, which polls now showed as likely, “unacceptable.”

  On the eve of the March 12 New Hampshire primary, the “unacceptable” suddenly became probable. Michigan governor George Romney, undone by his claim to being “brainwashed” by upbeat Pentagon briefings on the war, quit his run for the Republican presidential nomination. Richard Nixon was now, as Kennedy feared, the voters’ sole alternative to Lyndon Johnson.

  But the primary itself changed everything. On the Democratic ballot, Johnson beat antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy by an embarrassing margin of just 49 percent to 42 percent. Nixon swept the Republican primary. To Robert Kennedy, the results confirmed two realities: the weakness of Lyndon Johnson among Democrats and the acceptability of Richard Nixon among Republicans. Both became persuasive arguments for his own entry into the race. Four days later, in the same Senate caucus room where his brother had launched his candidacy, surrounded by the radiant Kennedy family, the former attorney general made his fateful bid for the long-awaited restoration, using precisely the same words as Jack: “Today I announce my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.”

  Across the country, in Portland, Oregon, Nixon watched the event from his suite in the Hotel Benson. After Kennedy had finished, he sat staring at the blank television screen. “We’ve just seen some terrible forces unleashed,” Nixon said, breaking the silence. “Something bad is going to come of this . . . . God knows where this is going to lead.”

  John Ehrlichman would give voice years later to the mood that now gripped the Nixon camp: “The Kennedys are back!” Julie Nixon got word that many of her father’s people were seized by political déjà vu. “Those who had lived through the election eight years before had memories too vivid to be able to look at the situation rationally.” With one televised announcement, they found themselves back in another Kennedy race.

  Bob Haldeman was less impressed. While Richard Nixon’s “antennas were quivering all the time,” Haldeman believed his man had been hardened by exile. He could see not just the love the Kennedys inspired but the fear. He knew that to millions of Americans the return of the Kennedy family to presidential politics meant not deliverance but trouble.

  Robert Kennedy’s abrupt entry into the 1968 race had an ironic ripple effect in Republican politics. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller had been threatening to make a late entry into the GOP presidential contest. To give Kennedy time to qualify for the Nebraska primary, state officials extended its filing deadline. This forced the hesitant Rockefeller to state his own intentions. Uncertain about the wisdom of challenging Nixon among rural Cornhuskers, the New York plutocrat pulled himself out of contention. The impulsive withdrawal opened an odd opportunity. The man leading the push for a Rockefeller candidacy was Maryland governor Spiro Agnew. Realizing that the New Yorker had pulled out without giving Agnew the courtesy of a heads up, Nixon aide John Sears suggested that his candidate take advantage of the situation. Over lunch with Nixon, Agnew speedily revealed his anger at the harsh treatment by the well-born Rockefeller. Nixon liked what he heard. Here was a new brother in the fraternity of resentment, a genuine Orthogonian. A quiet bond was forged.

  * * *

  ON St. Patrick’s Day, Sen. Robert Kennedy marched exuberantly down Fifth Avenue. From an open window, Jacqueline Kennedy was photographed blowing him a kiss. The next day, he spoke to fourteen thousand students packed into a Kansas State University field house. His topic: Vietnam. “I am willing to bear my share of the responsibility before history and before my fellow citizens. But past error is no excuse for its own perpetuation.” At the White House, President Johnson was getting some startling data from Larry O’Brien, the political strategist he had inherited from Bobby Kennedy’s older brother: He was going to lose the Wisconsin primary. For Johnson, this settled the matter. He would not seek reelection and said so in a Sunday evening broadcast to the nation. One man could not believe what he was hearing, a politician yielding so valuable a prize so easily to such a bitter enemy. “I’d be surprised if President Johnson lets Bobby Kennedy have it on a platter,” Richard Nixon observed. But a Nixon-Kennedy fight was now a live prospect. The Nixon and Kennedy campaign staffs, both headquartered at Portland’s Benson Hotel for the upcoming Oregon primary, were soon bumping into each other in the lobby, just as the Nixon and Kennedy staffs had spent the 1950s bumping into each other on the third floor of the Senate Office Building.

  But Bobby Kennedy was evolving into a very different political personality from his debonair brother in 1964; he was transfiguring into a leader in his own right. Through his championing of the urban poor and rural farmworkers, he had become a one-man bridge between the warring elements of the Democratic party—angry blacks and Latinos on one side, fearful working-class whites on the other. He was part Irish cop, part civil rights advocate. “He was tough on law and order so that liberal programs and politics could work,” aide John Seigenthaler explained. Kennedy’s sympathy for the plight of the African American was learned, not inherited. Paul Corbin, a veteran of the 1960 primary battles, had grown exasperated with his wealthy young boss’s cold professionalism on the civil rights issue. He asked Kennedy what he thought it might feel like to be a man driving through the South and having to go from gas station to gas station asking if his wife could “take a piss.” His growing, impassioned empathy for black America in such human terms expanded the Kennedy appeal even as the Democratic party was coming apart.

  Kennedy, who had voted for Eisenhower-Nixon over Steven-son-Kefauver in 1956, shared one critical sentiment with his older brother. Like Jack, Bobby Kennedy retained a tribal suspicion of the elite liberal establishment.

  I just feel that those New York liberals are sick. They’re not doing any work. They spend their time worrying about not being invited to the important parties, or seeing psychiatrists, or they are bored with all their affluence. I personally prefer many of the poor white people I’ve met here in Indiana. They are tough, and honest, and if you help them, they remember it, like the people who live in the poorer sections of West Virginia. They’re not fickle. I think I just like the Poles in Gary better than those New York reformers, who are so filled up with hate and envy.

  But it was his rapport with black America that brought the forty-two-year-old candidate fully into view, especially his conduct in the evening hours of April 4, the day Martin Luther King, jr., was murdered in Memphis. With a rally planned for an inner-city neighborhood in Indianapolis, Kennedy went ahead with his schedule. It fell to him to tell the excited crowd what had just happened in Memphis. “What am I going to say?” he kept asking an aide as they drove into the Indianapolis ghetto.

  He would find the words. “I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens who love justice all over the world,” he said from atop a flatbed truck, “and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.” The crowd, initially, did not believe him. There was even some applause from those so buoyed by his presence and primed to applaud that they didn’t hear, at first, the tragic call for atonement he was delivering. “We must make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand with compassion and love. I had a member of my family killed, and he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand.” What followed were words that would ne
ver be confused with those of his elegant older brother. “What we need is not division. What we need is not hatred. What we need is not violence but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be black or they be white.” Kennedy brought to the moment not just a shared cause but a shared victimhood. His reference to a “member of my family” being killed was his only public comment on what he would call as long as he lived “the events of late 1963.” Through the ensuing weeks of riot, arson, and racial fury, he alone remained a figure of common hope.

  Yet to millions of his countrymen Bobby Kennedy remained a political apparition of times past, especially when he began campaigning in his brother’s old bomber jacket or when he put his hands in his suit-coat pockets or poked the air with his extended forefinger, declaiming in that same clipped Jack Kennedy cadence. To one of those millions he was both an avenging brother and a haunting flesh-and-blood reminder of his most horrible defeat.

  Richard Nixon stayed up until 2:30 A.M. in his New York apartment the night of the California primary to watch Robert Kennedy claim victory at the Ambassador Hotel, the same Los Angeles landmark where he had received the news of his own defeat eight years before. He believed Kennedy now had the momentum to carry him to the Democratic nomination and the all-out battle in November. “It looks like it’s Bobby,” he said before heading off to bed. Forty-five minutes later, a figure stood over him in the dark. “Mr. Nixon. Excuse me. Mr. Nixon.” It was David Eisenhower, the grandson of the man who had taken him as his vice president, launching him into presidential politics, sixteen years before.

  “What is it?” Nixon asked through his sleep.

  “They’ve shot Kennedy. He’s still alive, but he’s unconscious. He was shot just after his victory speech.”

  Once again the gunfire felt closer than the public could imagine. Political soldiers in the two camps had shared the same hotels and campaign trail for years. “Here I was watching a friend, Frank Mankiewicz, nearly in tears as he courageously briefed the nation on a shooting in a hotel almost as familiar to me as my office,” veteran Nixon press secretary Klein recalled. He remembered Nixon’s practice of escaping crowds through the same kitchen.

  The evocation of Dallas, just five years earlier, was ghastly. Lying on the Ambassador floor, Bobby Kennedy never looked more like his brother. Over the next days, the country would experience an eerie replay of five years before, another odd epoch of gloom in a cheery country’s history. Candidate Nixon’s immediate reaction was to declare a moratorium on campaigning. Underlying the courtesy was a new set of political calculations to be worked out amid the inevitable relief in not having to face Robert Kennedy.

  At St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Ted Kennedy gave a powerful eulogy honoring his slain brother. “He saw suffering and tried to heal it; he saw war and tried to stop it.” Now the spotlight was on him, Teddy, the handsome younger brother, and he never seemed so fine an emblem of his stricken family. Again, the torch had been passed.

  * * *

  NIXON now decided to do nothing that might interfere with what he saw as an inevitable swing toward the Republicans. He would appear on television, but only if no journalists were permitted to interfere with the script. Nor would he agree to any debates. “It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected,” he confided to the young producer Roger Ailes.

  “Television is not a gimmick,” snapped the man who would become Nixon’s television adviser.

  “We’re going to build this whole campaign around television,” Nixon was heard telling his team. “You fellows just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

  Each day, with clockwork precision, a single campaign event would be scheduled early enough and near enough to an airport so that the film could be shipped to New York for inclusion in the evening news. Given no optional pictures to be aired that night, the networks fell into line, showing exactly what the Nixon people had programmed.

  The goal was not just to get across the Nixon message but to protect him from the hapless stumbles of the 1960 race, when he had been driven to fatigue and mistakes and pummeled daily by a hostile press. Yet even as the Nixon operation presented its polished surface and clocklike rhythm, the restless candidate had a habit of breaking free. “I would call for him at his hotel room in a small midwestern city in the morning and find that he was missing,” Bob Haldeman would recall. “Sometime in the early dawn he had gotten out of bed and slipped away, with a nervous Secret Service man tailing him. We’d search all over town until we found the candidate looking haggard and wan in a flea-bitten coffee shop.”

  But the retrofitted Nixon machine was doing the job. Like Kennedy eight years earlier, Nixon had his party’s 1968 presidential nomination locked up long before the convention. Though California governor Ronald Reagan, the new star in the Republican heavens, hoped for a wide-open convention, Nixon had the situation firmly under control. “It’s the fellow without the cards that does the strongest talking,” said the veteran gambler who had won his first campaign grubstake playing poker. “I’ve got the cards.” The nomination official, he appeared in the convention hall grinning and wigwagging the V for victory, the same two-handed gesture that once had made Kennedy cringe. Having named Agnew as his running mate, he accepted the Republican presidential nomination for the second time with a masterful address. With a husky voice, he spoke of a young boy growing up in Depression-hit California. “He hears the train go by at night, and he dreams of faraway places he would like to go. It seems an impossible dream.” Recalling his youthful yearnings in a twenty-by-thirty-five-foot home amid the orange groves of Yorba Linda, his voice broke. “Tonight he stands before you nominated for president of the United States of America. You can see now why I believe so deeply in the American dream.” It was the Orthogonian anthem. In 1960, he had been forced to play defense. Now he would help the squares once again dethrone the Franklins. Back at his hotel room, Nixon called speechwriter Bill Safire’s attention to the moment in the address where he changed his voice, “that ‘impossible dream’ part.”

  Yet as Nixon held the convention enthralled with his Orthogonian anthem, the Muckers were also busy outside. A heavily pregnant woman, recruited by Democratic prankster Dick Tuck, stood with a large sign proclaiming “Nixon’s the One!”

  * * *

  No Democratic prank could offset the nasty pyrotechnics surrounding their own convention that summer of 1968. Meeting in Chicago two weeks later, party officials soon lost control of the riotous situation in the streets beyond. “Chicago” would now evoke the image of angry antiwar students, brutal police, and delegates less than thrilled about nominating Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the man Jack Kennedy had clobbered in the 1960 primaries. Hoping to exploit the nasty situation, Nixon had dispatched to Chicago an eager trio of operatives: Bill Safire, Pat Buchanan, and Bill Timmons, who posted themselves at the Chicago Hilton, where Democrats had set up their headquarters. Their mission was to create a “truth squad,” responding in kind to any shots against the Republican ticket. Watching the pandemonium break loose, however, Nixon hastily switched strategies. He directed his three men to stay clear of the line of fire; the Democrats were doing too good a job of destroying themselves.

  Still, Chicago produced one grace note of danger for Richard Nixon. With the convention about to open, Mayor Richard Daley still held hope of victory in November. He continued urging Ted Kennedy to run despite the reservations many fellow Democrats held about his age and the decency of running the grief-stricken brother of two assassination victims. Humphrey couldn’t beat Nixon, the pugnacious mayor now told Kennedy over the phone. “But you’re a winner. You can carry the convention; you can carry Illinois; you can carry the country,” said the old-style boss whose “few good friends” had given Kennedy’s older brother Illinois that unforgettable election night. Daley’s appeal failed to change the younger man’s mind. The convention would
have to settle for yet another filmed tribute to another slain Kennedy, this one entitled “An Impossible Dream,” narrated by Richard Burton, having performed the same task in 1964, now the official voice of Camelot.

  Ted Kennedy had spent the six weeks after the assassination off Cape Cod in a rented yawl. When he came back to Washington, he could not bring himself to enter the Old Senate Office Building. “I just can’t go in there and face them,” he said. That same July day, John Connally, who had raised Jack Kennedy’s Addison’s disease at a Democratic convention eight years earlier, took a shot at the younger brother’s maturity. He answered a reporter’s questions by saying he wondered if Ted Kennedy even possessed the ability to serve as president of the country.

  Chicago, the site of Nixon’s debut on the national political scene in 1952, now became a source of his second chance. The Democratic convention of 1968, held amid the wildest antiwar demonstrations yet seen, became a symbol of the Zeitgeist. Recognizing the sense of widening chaos, enlarged still further by the independent presidential candidacy of Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace, Nixon refused to let up, injecting his time-worn belief that a campaign can “peak” too early. Like Kennedy in 1960, he ran flat out from the beginning, believing he needed to seize the electoral windfall offered by the chaotic Democratic mayhem in Chicago. Also like Kennedy, he would end the campaign hanging on by his fingertips.

  But if the Nixon presidential campaign of 1960 was fueled with more adrenaline than moxie, the 1968 model was the opposite. Tightly choreographed rallies were geared to begin when the candidate arrived, never more than ten minutes late. The balloons tumbled down with similar synchronicity. “Smooth as a space satellite, precise as a computer, the 1968 Nixon-mobile whirs around the country like a politician’s dream machine.” His rival Hubert Humphrey was, in the same Time report, “as susceptible to programming as the Marx brothers.” Facing hecklers at every stop demanding “Debate! Debate!” Nixon cannily avoided the trap. His allies on Capitol Hill killed a Democratic move suspending “equal time” rules to allow a television debate limited to the two major candidates. This gave Nixon his coveted escape route. When the eager Humphrey offered to pick up the tab for the debates, Nixon debunked such video sparring as “kid stuff.” He would take considerable heat to avert another ambush like that which he suffered at Jack Kennedy’s hands in the Great Debate.