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

  In a September radio address, Nixon spelled out a personal notion of the presidency that echoed the New Frontier. “Let me be very clear about this: The next President must take an activist view of his office. He must articulate the nation’s values, define its goals, and marshal its will.” It was a speech Ted Sorensen himself might have drafted, saluting, as it did, the chief executive’s need to stimulate intellectual debate in the country and to recruit a cabinet of brains and character to help him do it. Officials of a Nixon administration would “not have to check their consciences at the door.”

  One final hazard threatened the Republican march to power: peace. In mid-October, Nixon received a surprise call from Lyndon Johnson, who informed him that talks would soon begin on halting the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. Nixon accused Johnson and the Democrats of being “squishy soft” on communism. But he was worried. Despite his 1960 losses to Jack Kennedy, his humiliating tenure in Lyndon Johnson’s court, and his inveterate gabbiness, Hubert Humphrey was suddenly eating away at Nixon’s lead. A deal that promised peace could put him over the top. The Thursday before the election, Johnson dropped the other shoe. He arranged a conference call to Nixon, Humphrey, and third-party candidate Wallace. He told the three men seeking his job that he had decided to cease bombing North Vietnam as a prelude to peace talks. Then came his veiled warning. “The fate of our country lies in your hands over the next few weeks. There would be serious trouble if anything anyone said were to interrupt or disrupt any progress we are trying to make to bring this war to a halt.”

  Nixon saw easily the electoral calamity the cagey Johnson was preparing for him. He later admitted his sentiments. “Had I done all this work and come all this way only to be undermined by the powers of an incumbent who had decided against seeking reelection?” Fortunately, he had allies of his own. Anna Chennault, widow of Flying Tigers hero Claire Chennault and a staunch Republican, agreed to relay Nixon’s concerns about Johnson’s preelection move to the South Vietnamese government. The “Who lost China?” crowd was back in business to elect Richard Nixon. When President Thieu declared that South Vietnam would boycott any talks involving the rebel Vietcong, Johnson instinctively knew he had been outflanked.

  Nixon’s enemies were desperate. Larry O’Brien, the old Kennedy hand now managing the Humphrey campaign, wanted to air television ads using the infamous “last press conference” that followed the 1962 California governor’s race, to show an out-of-control Richard Nixon. The message would be that the Republican nominee was too unstable to trust with the U.S. military arsenal. Ultimately, the idea was discarded. Showing Nixon tearing into the press might score him some points.

  Yet Nixon’s big lead of the summer was shrinking under Humphrey’s gung-ho assault. Fifty-eight thousand people packed the Houston Astrodome to cheer the fast-closing Democratic nominee. Gov. John Connally, angry at his party’s leftward drift, was not among them.

  But Texas wouldn’t be enough. Saigon’s election-eve rejection of the Johnson peace initiative had, according to Lou Harris’s numbers, stopped the big swing to Humphrey. On election night, the results came in at 43.4 percent for Nixon, 42.7 percent for Humphrey, and 13 percent for Wallace. In the Electoral College, it was Nixon 301, Humphrey 191, and 46 for Wallace.

  The day after achieving the longtime dream, a weary but elated Nixon sat alone in his Upper East Side hideaway listening to the Richard Rodgers score for Victory at Sea, a television documentary on America’s World War II success in the Pacific. “My thoughts meshed with the music,” he would recall a decade later. Yet there was something unsettling in the voters’ judgment even in victory. “I think in his own mind,” Bob Haldeman would one day reflect, “he felt it was very strange that he could get elected.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  Haunting

  FROM the moment Nixon was elected president, major forces were collaborating in his downfall, all sprung from the legacy of John F. Kennedy. They included the capital’s bureaucratic, media, and social establishments, each spurning the Republican arrivistes with the same efficiency with which the human body rejects foreign tissue. Their hero and presidential role model was the slain hero who had graced the White House and the city. Though the New Frontier had ended quietly only six years before, it had managed to leave behind a raft of relics, the most prominent of which was John Kennedy’s notion of a national leader. No man felt this more keenly than the rival who now sat in the Oval Office. “Nixon’s standard as a modern President, conscious or not, was John F. Kennedy,” speechwriter William Safire recalled. “Along with the envy for the way the Kennedys enthralled and bedazzled so much of the press went a genuine admiration for the way the Kennedys played the political game: with zest and calculation, with professionalism, with a high regard for personal loyalty and disregard of traditional obstacles. The Kennedys would come to play and play to win, and when you beat a Kennedy you beat the best. The trouble was, nobody did.” The height of the Kennedy standard, raised still higher by the deftly constructed myth of Camelot, became, in Safire’s estimate, a genuine threat to Nixon’s reelection.

  Another undermining factor was the conflict joined by Jack Kennedy in Vietnam. By the start of Richard Nixon’s presidency, 535,000 American troops were committed. “The war,” with its new and harrowing image of a South Vietnamese officer firing a pistol at the head of a suspected Vietcong in the streets of Saigon, would be the backdrop for the entire Nixon presidency.

  Equally threatening to Nixon were those Kennedy people at whose hands he had suffered in the past. In his darker moments he would recall the harsh tricks he saw worked on him, from the 1960 vote counts in Chicago and Texas to the Kennedy-instigated tax audits. He got a fresh reminder of Democratic hardball right after the election. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told him in his Pierre Hotel transition headquarters how Johnson had tapped not just Madame Chennault’s phone and the South Vietnamese embassy’s but also those on the Nixon and Humphrey campaign planes. Nixon’s knowledge of the LBJ wiretaps would provide a dark standard of what presidents did in difficult circumstances.

  Finally, there was the living, breathing presence of the last surviving brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Nixon regarded his 1960 rival’s brother as the prime danger to his hopes for a two-term presidency. Time called him a “shining champion who had not been bloodied at all in the conflict” of 1968 Democratic politics and the party’s “hope of future victory.” The defeated Hubert Humphrey offered to help Kennedy reclaim the family prize. “Someday you will lead the nation, and I’m going to help you get the chance to do it.”

  By the very force of his face, personality, and voice, Ted Kennedy promised a return to the magic extinguished by the gunfire. Adding to his myth as “Last Brother” was the cloying possibility that with the help of Chicago’s Richard Daley he could have taken the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination just for the asking.

  Bolstering his prestige still further was Kennedy’s surprise election to the Senate’s number-two leadership position. On the eve of the 1969 inauguration, the Washington Star ran a sly Pat Oliphant cartoon of Richard Nixon standing with his suitcases at the North Gate to the White House, pensively eyeing Ted Kennedy, also with luggage, just a few paces behind him. It was a punishing insight. Having lost contests in both 1960 and 1962 and having fumbled a monstrous lead in the final weeks of the 1968 election to win with only 43 percent of the vote, the new president had sufficient excuse to suspect his victory a fluke. If he dared forget the cruel lessons of the past, there stood Jack’s ambitious younger brother to remind him. The month after Nixon’s inauguration, the Gallup poll would show Ted Kennedy leading the Democratic pack for 1972.

  From his Pierre Hotel transition headquarters, Nixon tried from the beginning to co-opt his enemies by bringing some of them into his camp. While he managed to recruit academic Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat with loyalties to the Kennedys, as his chief domestic-policy adviser, other overtures proved fruitless. One example w
as Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a close Kennedy ally and 1960 campaign chairman, whom Nixon invited to be secretary of defense; the recruitment would have sealed the Vietnam War as a bipartisan problem, a parallel to what Jack Kennedy had done in making Henry Cabot Lodge his man in Saigon. Ted Kennedy quietly warned the hawkish Jackson that accepting Nixon’s offer would finish him with the Democratic party.

  Nixon kept trying. He asked Sargent Shriver to join the administration as his ambassador to the United Nations, adding that he was sure the Kennedy brother-in-law would enjoy working with William Rogers, the old Nixon friend about to become secretary of state. Listing the prominent clubs to which Rogers belonged, Nixon suggested that the well-born Shriver and the new chief diplomat, coming from the same social background, would work comfortably together. The Orthogonian was matchmaking among the Franklins.

  Again, the Kennedy family resisted, but not before the former Peace Corps and War on Poverty director sought assurances from Nixon that the social programs created under the Democrats would be retained. Shriver realized too late that he had overstepped the bounds of a job seeker. Nixon, too, had spotted the inevitable conflict of interest. As a consolation, he allowed Shriver to remain in Paris as ambassador to France, a prized post he had been assigned under Lyndon Johnson. Even as Nixon attempted, vainly, to bring Kennedy people aboard, the media hit him for failing to match President-elect Kennedy’s snappy pace of appointments when he formed his administration in the fall of 1960.

  Like John F. Kennedy, Nixon was sworn into office on the Capitol’s east front by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had worsened relations still further with the president-elect by announcing his retirement the previous year, hoping to give Lyndon Johnson, not Richard Nixon, the chance to name his successor. Nixon’s inaugural address paid tribute to a more persistent rivalry. “If every nation cannot be our friend, at least it does not have to be our enemy.” The attempt to mimic the Kennedy speech of eight years earlier was unmistakable. Within two days of the inaugural, Ted Kennedy used a fund-raising dinner to remind Robert Kennedy’s recent supporters that the dream of restoration remained. “The campaign of 1968 never really ended . . . because it remains with all of us. He often said, ‘We have promises to keep’ and these are the promises which will bring all of us together many times in the future.”

  * * *

  THE triumphal parade down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House on January 20, 1969, resembled an obscene pageant as the limousine bearing the Nixon family was pelted with sticks, stones, empty beer cans, and homemade smoke bombs. Lining one side of the avenue was an angry, chanting mob faced off against District of Columbia police and paratroopers from the Eighty-second Airborne Division, their arms linked to form a living barrier. The polarization in the streets of Washington was amply matched by the partisan lines drawn indoors. Speechwriter Patrick Buchanan later captured the sense of menace from those partisans within the inaugural bunker:

  When he left as vice president in 1961, only 600 military advisers were stationed in Vietnam; by 1969, 535,000 troops were there, or on the way. Within months, the war—into which President Lyndon Johnson had for five years plunged the United States—would be called “Nixon’s War.” Liberal Democrats who had cheered on U.S. intervention now demanded to know why Nixon had not brought the boys home. Not only was Congress hostile, so, too, was a vast bureaucracy built in the New Deal and expanded in the Great Society. So, too, was the press, many members of which had never forgiven Nixon for his role in the red-baiting campaigns of the ’50s. So, too, was a liberal establishment that had not only despised Nixon throughout his career but had seen itself repudiated by the great majority of Americans who had voted for Nixon or George Wallace.

  The Washington Post’s Meg Greenfield gasped at the same wide divide from the other side. “There has been no more traumatic clash of cultures than that which marked the confrontation between the arriving Nixon administration and the awaiting resident press since Pizarro first dropped in on the Incas.”

  Nixon’s new national security adviser, Harvard’s Henry Kissinger, asked experts at the Rand Corporation, including Daniel Ellsberg, to write a set of Vietnam policy alternatives. He received back options from “military escalation aimed at negotiated victory” to “unilateral withdrawal of all U.S. forces,” a policy path dismissed out of hand. “We could not simply walk away from an enterprise involving two administrations, five allied countries, and 31,000 dead as if we were switching a television channel,” Kissinger insisted. Like Kennedy and Johnson, Nixon was now caught in a death grip by a war not one of the three politicians would have started had they known its cost. Rejecting both escalation and withdrawal, the new president would decide on a policy of “Vietnamization”—the same approach young Jack Kennedy had advised after his one-day visit to Hanoi eighteen years earlier. Following his dead rival’s prescription, Nixon would raise “native armies” to fight the Communists.

  The new president would offer more flamboyant tributes to the JFK legacy. Seeking the vanished glamour of Camelot, he had White House guards don uniforms more appropriate to a high school production of The Student Prince. The peaked hats, long, gold-braided white coats, and striped pants constituted one of several cloddish attempts to match the pageantry of the earlier presidency. Yet even as the Orthogonian earnestly sought to capture some of the Franklin’s effortless appeal, he began also to strip the presidential mansion of all tangible relics of the Kennedy era itself. In her last day in the White House, Jack Kennedy’s widow had ordered a small plaque placed in her bedroom. “In this room John Fitzgerald Kennedy lived with his wife Jacqueline . . .” Nixon had it removed. As a family gift to the White House the Kennedys had donated a Monet landscape to be hung in Jacqueline’s beloved Green Room. That went, too. A garden named in her honor became the First Lady’s Garden.

  But the most dramatic alteration was Nixon’s decision to do away with Jack Kennedy’s favorite White House locale: the indoor swimming pool. Banished from sight was not just the pool itself but the grand, wall-long mural of sailboats anchored in a Virgin Islands harbor, a gift from Joseph Kennedy to grace his son’s water hideaway. The metamorphosis carried irony. The space where Jack had enjoyed his presidency at eighty degrees water temperature, sometimes with even warmer company, had been transformed into a briefing room and work space for the White House press corps Richard Nixon would come to loathe.

  Yet even as Nixon desecrated Kennedy’s relics, he codified the Kennedy instinct for public relations. Two weeks after taking office, he ordered that a smartly produced copy of his inaugural speech be sent to every American embassy. “Kennedy had his sent by USIA in a classy slick production job with appropriate pictures,” he wrote John Ehrlichman. The Nixon people should obviously do the same. Honoring the same principle, communications director Herb Klein learned how to get his boss to give shorter answers at televised press conferences: by telling him it was a practice “Kennedy” had mastered. And when Nixon saw a note of praise from the Israeli ambassador, he sent yet another memo to Ehrlichman: “You might pass this to some of the press. Why can’t we get some of this kind of reaction out publicly? The Kennedys always did so.” To keep score, Nixon instructed communications director Herb Klein to count the number of times Edward Kennedy was mentioned on the network television news.

  Another homage to Kennedy could be seen in the way Nixon chose to organize his new administration. Like JFK, he centralized power in his White House staff, but with a fatal difference. Whereas Kennedy had adopted a “spokes of the wheel” approach, with himself as the axle, Nixon provided only a single narrow point of access. He allowed one man, Bob Haldeman, to bar his door to many. Old advisers like Herb Klein, who had once had easy access to Nixon, lost it. Cabinet members, presumably recruited for their political acumen, rarely got in to share it. But more than organizational skill was involved. The key to Haldeman’s power, his deputy Jeb Magruder surmised, was that he “hated Nixon’s political enemies as much as Ni
xon hated them.”

  * * *

  A small overseas skirmish that occurred that first spring at the residence of the American ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver, served as a reminder that the Kennedys still topped the list. It happened when John Ehrlichman turned up at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Paris to advance his boss’s first European tour, which was to include, as it had in JFK’s time, a reception for President Charles de Gaulle. Seeing that the entire American residence was festooned with Kennedy family memorabilia—pictures of Jack and Jackie and Bobby and Ethel were everywhere—Ehrlichman flatly told the Shrivers that the mini-museum would have to be shut down before Nixon or de Gaulle stepped foot in the place. There were other ghosts abroad. When Nixon went over his draft arrival statement for London, he scratched out a paragraph referring to his earlier visit, while he was vice president, where he accompanied Queen Elizabeth to the American Chapel in St. Paul’s Cathedral and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was played. “That’s a Kennedy song,” he said, aware that the echoes of Robert Kennedy’s funeral train still rumbled through the American night. But he felt compelled to begin his toast at an Elysée Palace dinner given by de Gaulle with a wordy tribute to John F. Kennedy. “I realize that it was just a few years ago that you entertained another American president, a young man against whom I ran for office and one who came here and sat in the chair I now occupy. We were members of different parties. We disagreed on some issues. But we completely agreed on what was important. We completely agreed, for example, in the importance of the French-American friendship. And we completely agreed in our dedication to the ideals, the ideals which our country stands for, the ideals that we share with you—ideals of freedom, of equality, of peace and justice for all nations.” As Nixon continued his litany of Kennedy-Nixon agreements, Ehrlichman noticed an “emotional” Eunice Shriver, the late president’s sister, pressing her fork hard into her plate.