Nixon had reexerted his pull over me. I saw him as the scrappy challenger. I was rooting for the underdog, who was also the one who deserved it. Nixon was tough on fighting the Russians. He’d held his ground in that Kitchen Table debate with Nikita Khrushchev over in Moscow. He and his running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, struck me as the more solid and seasoned candidates to take on the Cold War, to stop the Communist spread around the globe.
On election night, as the returns started to come in, the early ones signaling their defeat, I was overwhelmed—and I cried. By a little after seven, I was drenched in the bad news.
Yet the Matthews house was not as united as I have so far portrayed it. I remember asking my father whom he intended to vote for. When he said Nixon without hesitation, I challenged him. Weren’t we Catholic? Shouldn’t we be for Kennedy? “I’m a Republican” was his simple, all-explaining response. Dad stuck to his party loyalty. He was a Catholic convert and didn’t feel that tribal pull the way the all-Irish side of the family did. It was simple for him, even if he was willing to go so far as to allow how Jack Kennedy had “a touch of Churchill” about him. Interestingly, he also believed that in a fistfight between the two candidates there would be no contest: JFK would easily best Nixon, he declared. I’d raised the issue, and it seemed a matter of no little importance back then.
My mother—born Mary Teresa Shields, Irish to the core—more resembled me in her responses to the political dilemma of our household. But I could tell she was keeping her sympathies to herself, as if to make less trouble in the house. One night, when I was drying the dishes alongside her as she washed them, I offered my opinion that it might be wrong to support Kennedy simply because of religion. It seemed to scrape a wound. She shot back that Grandmom, my father’s mother, from County Antrim, had become a citizen only in order to be able to cast her vote for Eisenhower, a fellow Presbyterian. Mom said it defensively. Don’t single me out, she was arguing, your dad’s side of the family was right out there voting religion, too.
Mom’s dad, Charles Patrick Shields, was a classic Irishman and local Democratic committeeman. He worked the night shift as an inspector at a nearby plant, and left the house every weekday afternoon carrying his lunchbox and thermos. When he had on his peacoat and cap, he could have been heading off to work in County Cork. On Sundays he wore a three-piece suit to church at St. Stephen’s and kept it on all day, even when he’d come up to visit us in Somerton, which he called “God’s country.” He was right out of Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet.
A favorite ritual of mine, when he retired, was accompanying him for long walks through the old neighborhoods, then stopping to buy the bulldog edition of the Inquirer on the way home. Once he’d finished reading it, sitting there under the mantelpiece, he’d fold the paper, look up at me, and say simply, “Christopher John.” I loved him and I always loved that moment, and we would talk politics forever.
This conflict between being Catholic and Republican was a constant bother to me over the years. Yes, a lot of Catholics had voted for Eisenhower, but the old loyalties were deeply Democratic. The vote at LaSalle College High School, where I was going and where I argued the Kennedy-Nixon race at lunchtime, was 24 to 9 for Kennedy in my homeroom.
• • •
Our family divisions along these lines never actually reached the level of a right-out-there dispute, but the business of voting either Republican or Catholic did raise the whole question of what we were. We could be Republican, but we were still mostly Irish. In the end, I never actually knew how Mom voted. Because of how I subsequently came to feel—and how I feel now—I hope it was Kennedy she cast her ballot for in the privacy of that curtained booth. Still, I confess that when the inauguration rolled around, on January 20, 1961, my loyalties remained with the loser.
While my mother was ironing in our basement rec room, we watched the ceremonies as they took place in snowy Washington. She seemed upbeat, quietly happy about the event we were witnessing. I think.
As for me, I moved rightward in the days of the New Frontier. I became a fan of Barry Goldwater, lured by his libertarian case for greater personal freedom. Like Hillary Clinton, herself a Goldwater Girl at the time, I would eventually change course. But even back then, I found John F. Kennedy the most interesting political figure of the day. I wanted to meet him, be in the same room with him, study him.
• • •
A half century of political life later, my fascination with the elusive spirit of John F. Kennedy has remained an abiding one. He is both pathfinder and puzzle, a beacon and a conundrum. Whenever I spot the name in print, I stop to read. Anytime I’ve ever met a person who knew him—someone who was there with JFK in real time—I crave hearing his or her first-person memories.
One significant opportunity to listen to firsthand Jack stories came when I spent a half dozen years in the 1980s working for Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., Speaker of the House of Representatives. His and Kennedy’s mutual history went way back in the arena of Boston politics, that fiercest of partisan battlefields. In 1946, when young Jack Kennedy was making his first political bid, in the primary race for the 11th Congressional District of Massachusetts, Tip actually had been in his opponent’s camp. Later, though, when Jack gained his Senate seat in ’52 after serving three terms in the House, Tip replaced him there, serving with him companionably for the next eight years.
During the time I served as his administrative assistant—enjoying a front-row seat when Tip employed all his liberal conscience and veteran’s craft against that affable ideologue Ronald Reagan—I found I could occasionally get him, when he was in the right mood and time hung over us, to reminisce about the old days. It was like talking to Grandpop under the mantelpiece.
I treasured hearing him tell how Boston mayor James Michael Curley “was corrupt even by the standards of those days” and what Richard Nixon, whom he’d helped bring down over Watergate, was like to play cards with: “talked too much; not a bad guy.” I’d listen eagerly, hardly able to believe my good fortune.
Later, I got to know and became friends with Ben Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor and Kennedy chum. He quickly understood what an appreciative listener I was. And in the early 1990s, when I began to research my book on the surprising history of the Jack Kennedy–Dick Nixon relationship, with its fascinating backstory, I came to know such men as Charles Bartlett, Paul “Red” Fay, and Chuck Spalding, veteran JFK cronies all.
Yet none of those encounters were enough. I wanted to get every possible look at him, see him from any angle that would help explain him. Was he a liberal as he’s been tagged, or was he a pragmatist open to liberal causes? Was he a rich boy pushed by his dad, buying into what his father had sold him on, or was he a self-made leader? Was he a legacy or a Gatsby? The hold JFK had begun to exert on my imagination and on my curiosity when I was a young boy never abated. Instead, it only increased with the passing decades.
Before he came along, politics mostly meant gray men in three-piece suits, indoor types, sexless: Truman, Taft, Dewey, Kefauver, Eisenhower, Nixon. What he did was grip the country, quickening us. From the black-and-white world in which we’d been drifting we suddenly opened our eyes, feeling alive and energized, and saw Technicolor. JFK was wired into our central nervous system and juiced us. He sent us around the planet in the Peace Corps, and then rocketing beyond it to the moon.
Most of all—and, to me, this is what matters above everything else—he saved us from the perilous fate toward which we were headed. All those ICBMs, all those loaded warheads: the Cold War Kennedy inherited was bound for Armageddon. It was just a matter of time—we thought, I thought—until there’d be nuclear war, that “World War III” dreaded in every heart.
If you were a kid you didn’t have to read the newspapers to know this, for, unlike our elders, we were actually living it. Weekly drills sent us crouching under our little varnished wooden desks on command. Then, at one critical moment in the fall of 1962, a lone man, Presiden
t John F. Kennedy, understood the danger clearly, pushed back against his advisors’ counsel of war and got us through. The hard-liners in Moscow and Washington, their backs up, were ready to fight. The word in the air was escalation. JFK found a way to deliver us.
How’d he do it? What personal capability did he have? What had he learned? What combination of nature and training enabled him to see through the noise and emotions of the Cuban Missile Crisis and allowed him to grasp the root of the matter, to understand what he was up against, and what Nikita Khrushchev, his opposite number, was thinking? How did he know to overrule the experts, the angry generals and the professional Cold Warriors, whose every instinct dictated “Bombs away!”?
• • •
It goes without saying that Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy were beautiful. But don’t look at the pictures; they’re a distraction. Jack understood that better than anyone, using them to divert us from his own far more complex reality.
Yet look at them we did. And it’s hard, now, to grasp just how brief that moment was: only seven years from 1956, when we caught the first glimpse, to 1963, when the moment was extinguished.
Whether you’re politically conservative, liberal, or moderate, whatever age you are, you probably have your own responses to and your own questions about Jack Kennedy, still today. And that includes all those questions about his personal life, the ones that linger and disturb.
I began this book wanting to discover how he became that leader who, at a moment of national fear and anger, when emotions were running high, could cut so coldly and clearly to the truth, grasping the nature of the catastrophe to be averted.
Not only has that decisive vision continued to hold me and stir my admiration, it has also fed my fascination with him. So what was it about him? What brought him into the world’s hearts and hopes so vividly, inspiring such fascination, leaving it, mine included, so alive behind him?
Jack himself, also an avid reader of history and the lives of history-makers, once remarked to Ben Bradlee that the chief reason anyone reads biography is to answer the simple question, “What’s he like?”
Having thought about it for so long, I believe I’ve come to recognize, and even unearth, key clues that help explain the greatness and the enigma of Jack Kennedy. They don’t come easily, however. Those glamorous images deflect us from the answers. But if you want to get Jack, you need to look for what they hide.
Among them: He was a dreamer who found his dreams as he read voraciously throughout his boyhood, all alone in one infirmary and hospital bed after another. He was a rebel who showed early the grit that would repeatedly motivate him, launching him against every obstacle in his life, not the least of which was the one presented by his own all-powerful father. He was a dead-serious student of history. In young adulthood, while finishing college, he wrote Why England Slept, and never was able to forget the critical lesson he took away from it—that nations die or thrive on the ability and judgment of their leaders to stir them at perilous times.
Then there was the extraordinary rite of passage made in the waters of the South Pacific during World War II, when he gained the confidence that he, always the frail boy, could meet as a man the twin tests of stamina and courage. At the age of twenty-eight, he determined to master the unforgiving art of politics and did so, with his love of that rough-and-tumble more and more an essential part of him. Finally, there was the deep revulsion he felt at the possibility of nuclear war.
Before Jack Kennedy could make himself president, he first had to make himself Jack Kennedy. We’ve been led to take him as, essentially, a handsome young swell, born to privilege and accepting his father’s purpose along with his wealth.
What I discovered, however, was an inner-directed self-creation, an adult stirred and confected in the dreams and loneliness of his youth. I found a serious man who was teaching himself the hard discipline of politics up until the last minute of his life.
What’s hardest to see clearly, though, is often what hides in plain sight. So much of this man is what he did. His life is marked by events and achievements that speak for themselves. In searching for Jack Kennedy, I found a fighting prince never free from pain, never far from trouble, never accepting the world he found, never wanting to be his father’s son. He was a far greater hero than he ever wished us to know.
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3. Lem Billings
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CHAPTER ONE
SECOND SON
History made him, this lonely, sick boy. His mother never loved him. History made Jack, this little boy reading history.
—Jacqueline Kennedy, November 29, 1963,
from notes scribbled by Theodore H. White
Certain things come with the territory. Jack Kennedy, born in 1917 in the spring of the next-to-last year of World War I, was the second son of nine children. That’s important to know. The first son is expected to be what the parents are looking for. Realizing that notion early, he becomes their ally. They want him to be like them—or, more accurately and better yet, what they long to be.
Joseph Kennedy, a titan of finance, whose murky early connections helped bring him riches and power but never the fullest respect, had married in 1914, after a seven-year courtship, Rose Fitzgerald. The pious daughter of the colorful Boston mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, she launched their substantial family when, nine months later, she presented her husband with his son and heir, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. For the proud couple, he would be their bridge to both joining and mastering the WASP society from which they, as Roman Catholics in early twentieth-century America, were barred.
Such stand-in status meant, for the young Joe, that he had to accept all the terms and rules put forth by those whose ranks he was expected to enter. The idea was to succeed in exactly the well-rounded manner of the New England Brahmin. Above all, that meant grades good enough to keep up at the right Protestant schools, and an ability to shine at sports as well. In this last instance, there was no doubt about the most desirable benchmark of achievement. The football field was not just where reputations were made and popularity earned, it was where campus legends were born.
Joseph Kennedy’s handsome eldest boy would prove himself equal to the task. Entering Choate, the boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he was a student from the age of fourteen to eighteen, he quickly made his mark. A golden youth, he became the headmaster George St. John’s ideal exemplar. Transcending his origins—which meant getting past the prejudices St. John was said to hold for his kind, the social-climbing Irish—Joe Jr., with his perfect body and unquestioning, other-directed mind, seemed to embody the Choate ethos without breaking a sweat.
A second son such as Jack Kennedy, arriving as he did two years later, finds himself faced with that old familiar tough act to follow. And, of course, embedded in the soul of any second male child is this Hobson’s choice: to fail to match what’s gone before guarantees disappointment; to match it guarantees nothing.
You have to be original; it’s the only way to get any attention at all—any good attention, that is.
Jack Kennedy, almost as soon as he got to Choate, quite obviously put himself on notice not to be a carbon copy. He was neither a “junior,” nor would he be a junior edition. He would be nothing like the much-admired Joe, nothing like the Choate ideal. What he brought, instead, was a grace his brother—and Choate itself—lacked. Even as a child of the outrageously wealthy Joseph Kennedy and his lace-curtain wife, Jack soon showed himself well able to see the humor in life. The wit he displayed cut to the heart of situations and added to life an extra dimension. He was fun.
Here, then, is where we begin to catch a glimpse of the young man who would stride decisively up to that convention stage a quarter century later, leaving behind the indelible image. Even though he’s very much still a boy, he’s preternaturally aware of the way life demands roles and resistant to stepping into one preselected for him.
There’s the wonderful irony that comes with those surprises that second s
ons—Jack Kennedy included—are driven, and also inspired, to produce. Unlike his older brother, bound to a more conventional blueprint, Jack wasn’t under the same pressure. There was a lightness to him, a wry Irishness that blended with the WASP manner rather than aspiring to it. With that combination, he could enter where his father, mother, and brother could not.
• • •
What happened to Jack when he got to Choate in the fall of 1931, by then already a victim of persistent ill health, was that, first of all, he had to find himself, and, to a daunting degree, simply survive. His brother Robert—the seventh Kennedy child, younger than JFK by eight years—later said of that period that any mosquito unlucky enough to bite Jack would surely have paid the ultimate price. Jean, his youngest sister, told me it was his bedridden youth that made all the difference. “I remember him being sick. I remember that he read a great deal, and why he was so smart was because during those formative years he was reading when everyone else was playing baseball or football or something like that.”
So it was in the sickbed, it turns out, that he became a passionate reader, thrilling to the bold heroes of Sir Walter Scott and the tales of King Arthur. At Choate, he may have wound up the holder of a title he never trumpeted: the record for most days spent in the school’s Archbold Infirmary.
The appalling reality is that no one—no doctor, nor any of the top-drawer specialists to which his father sent Jack—could tell the Kennedy family or the young patient why he suffered so. He’d had scarlet fever, and his appendix removed, but what continued to plague him was a knot in his stomach that never went away. Frighteningly, too, his blood count was always being tested. Leukemia was one of the grim possibilities that concerned his doctors, and Jack couldn’t avoid hearing the whispers.
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 41