Timothy “Ted” Reardon, administrative assistant to John F. Kennedy, 1947–61; presidential aide, 1961–63.
George Smathers, U.S. House of Representatives from Florida, 1947–51; U.S. senator, 1951–69.
Theodore “Ted” Sorensen, legislative assistant to Senator Kennedy, 1953–61; special counsel to the president, 1961–63.
Charles “Chuck” Spalding, personal friend of Jack Kennedy’s, 1940–63.
William “Billy” Sutton, staff aide, Kennedy for Congress campaign, 1946; congressional aide, U.S. congressman John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, 1947–50.
Richard “Dick” Tuck, campaign volunteer, Douglas for Senate, 1950; Brown for Governor, 1962; Robert Kennedy campaign aide, 1968.
NIXON
Patrick J. Buchanan, political aide to Richard Nixon, 1966–68; presidential speechwriter, 1969–74.
Murray Chotiner, political adviser to Richard Nixon, 1946–74.
Charles Colson, administrative assistant to U.S. senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts; presidential aide, 1970–73.
Thomas E. Dewey, governor of New York, 1943–55; strategist, Eisenhower for President, 1952.
John Ehrlichman, advance man, Nixon for President, 1960; campaign aide, Nixon for President, 1968; assistant to President Nixon for domestic affairs, 1969–73.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, 1943–45; chief of staff, U.S. Army, 1945–48; president, Columbia University, 1948–52; Supreme Commander, 1950–52; president of the United States, 1953–61.
Robert Finch, administrative assistant to Vice President Nixon, 1958–60; campaign manager, Nixon for President, 1960; lieutenant governor of California, 1967–69; secretary of health, education and welfare, 1969; counselor to the president, 1970–72.
H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, advance man, Nixon for President, 1960; campaign manager, Nixon for Governor, 1962; head of advance, Nixon for President, 1968; chief of staff to President Nixon, 1969–73.
Christian Herter, U.S. congressman from Massachusetts, 1943–52; chaired the Herter Committee to promote the Marshall Plan; governor of Massachusetts, 1953–57; secretary of state, 1959–61.
J. Patrick Hillings, U.S. congressman from California, 1951–59; campaign adviser, Nixon for Vice President, 1952, and Nixon for President, 1960.
Herbert Hoover, president of the United States, 1929–33.
E. Howard Hunt, Central Intelligence Agency; presidential aide, 1971–72.
Herb Klein, Alhambra Post Advocate, 1940–50; press secretary to Vice President Nixon; communications manager, Nixon for President, 1968; director of communications, President Nixon, 1969–73.
Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. senator from Massachusetts, 1937–44, 1947–53; strategist, Eisenhower for President; U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, 1953–60; Republican candidate for vice president, 1960; U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, 1963–64, 1965–67.
INTRODUCTION
This is the story of a rivalry. It’s how two men’s pursuit of the same prize changed them and their country.
When Americans think of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, they recall their close, bitter 1960 fight for the presidency. They picture them in their “Great Debate,” the debonair Kennedy outshining an awkward Nixon. But behind this snapshot lurks a darker, more enduring saga that began with their election to Congress in the months just after World War II, then crept for fourteen years along those old Capitol corridors where politicians, even rivals, share the same small space. It would survive even the assassin’s bullets, climaxing a decade later with a haunted president trying to defend himself against the imagined onslaught of his rival’s brother.
During the early years, Nixon was the man to beat. He was the best politician of his time, articulating more ably than anyone else the nervous mood of post-World War II America. By the age of forty-three, he had been elected to the House, the Senate, and twice to the vice presidency of the United States. Even the respected liberal columnist Murray Kempton called the 1950s the “Nixon decade.” Kennedy was the late bloomer.
The relationship between the two men was complex. As a freshman congressman, Jack Kennedy had pointed out Nixon to friends as someone to watch. Even with the 1960 election looming, Kennedy retained a measure of respect for the Republican vice president. If the Democrats didn’t nominate him, he said wistfully over dinner New Year’s Eve before the 1960 election, he would vote for Nixon. His tycoon father said much the same to Nixon’s face. “Dick, if my boy can’t make it,” a congressman heard him tell the vice president, “I’m for you.”
Dick Nixon, the socially ill at ease Californian who had grown up in his parents’ grocery store, had been flattered from the outset by Kennedy’s early attention. “I have always cherished the fact that Jack and I were friends when we first came to Congress,” he wrote Jacqueline that grim night in 1963.
His rapid, early rise from House to Senate to the vice presidency had made Nixon an electoral role model for Jack Kennedy—but also a rival. No one from the World War II generation had traveled so fast or so far. To succeed the beloved commander in chief, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy would have to defeat him. “From the beginning,” JFK aide Ted Sorensen recalled of Nixon’s chances for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination, “we knew it was his to lose.”
As early as 1952, the Kennedys found Nixon a useful target. Sargent Shriver prompted Adlai Stevenson to say it was brother-in-law Jack, “not Richard Nixon,” who moved the first perjury charge against a Communist. In 1956, Kennedy ran for the Democratic nomination for vice president, Nixon’s job. “One takes the high road, and one takes the low,” he said—a direct shot at Eisenhower’s running mate.
Even Kennedy’s assassination did not end the rivalry waged so fiercely in 1960. As he began his Lazarus-like revival, Nixon was left to face not only Jack’s brothers Bob and Ted but the specter of “Camelot.” But one who knew him well saw the unquenched fire. “I know how you feel—so long on the path—so closely missing the greatest prize,” Kennedy’s widow wrote, responding to Nixon’s letter of condolence, “and now for you, the question comes up again, and you must commit all your and your family’s hopes and efforts again.”
Having won the prize in 1968, Nixon would still feel shadowed by the Kennedys. Despite his dramatic opening to Communist China, he worried that some last-minute maneuver would make Ted Kennedy his 1972 rival and deny him a second term. “It was like we were running against the ghost of Jack Kennedy,” Nixon aide Charles Colson recalled. Ambushed by Jack in 1960, and nearly again by Robert in 1968, Nixon and his men now saw yet another Kennedy approaching. The dread led to Watergate.
It started with a friendship. In April 1947, the two freshman U.S. congressmen briskly debated national politics before a rambunctious crowd in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. The Californian showed a fighter’s edge, challenging his gaunt, genteel opponent at every point. The rival refused to take his bait; instead, he spoke directly to the audience, charming the steel-town crowd with his smooth delivery and quaint Massachusetts accent. Both men were impressive. “It was hard to tell who had come from the wealthy family and which had worked his way up,” the debate’s moderator told his wife later that night. What struck him most was the genuine friendliness of the two young politicians as they chomped hamburgers and talked sports at a local diner before catching the midnight Capital Limited back to Washington.
Both antagonists had won election to the House of Representatives in that first postwar Congress. Kennedy had run as a “fighting conservative,” a phrase he chose himself; Nixon, on a commitment to “practical liberalism.” Both were anxious for higher office. Though one was a Democrat and the other a Republican, the rivalry over who in the class of 1946 would move up first was a cordial one. When Nixon did, running for the Senate in 1950, Democrat Kennedy showed up at the Republican’s office with a large financial contribution from his father. When Dwight Eisenhower picked the Californian as his vice-presidential running mate
two years later, Kennedy cheered. “I was always convinced that you would move ahead to the top,” he wrote in a longhand letter. “But I never thought it would come this quickly.”
Within months, the two were thrown back together. Nixon and Kennedy spent the 1950s across the hall from each other, the vice president in room 362 of the Senate Office Building, the new senator from Massachusetts in 361. When Kennedy went into the hospital for dangerous back surgery in 1954, Nixon regularly stopped by his colleague’s office after-hours to check how “Jack” was doing. When the vice president sent word that, as presiding officer of the Senate, he would not allow the Democrat’s absence to give the Republicans control of the Senate, Kennedy’s twenty-five-year-old wife was touched. “There is no one my husband admires more,” Jacqueline wrote. With reports that Kennedy lay near death, a Secret Service agent riding with Nixon in the car saw him cry. “Poor brave Jack is going to die. Oh, God, don’t let him die.” Back then Nixon was as charmed by his handsome, joke-loving hall mate as anyone. He liked Kennedy, wanted to be like him, and very much wanted Kennedy to like him.
In September 1960, presidential candidate Richard Nixon was readying to leave his Chicago hotel for his nationally televised debate with John F. Kennedy when he received an urgent phone call. “Erase the assassin image,” his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge warned. Nixon needed to go easy on his rival lest he stir the public’s sympathy for the boyish challenger.
Bad advice. In the Great Debate, it was Nixon who would elicit sympathy. The sickly senator who teetered on the edge of death six years before now beamed with vitality. The playboy from across the hall conducted himself like a statesman. The familiar face was suddenly a stranger—the easygoing colleague, a predator; the old friend, the new enemy. Before the evening’s contest had been joined, Richard Nixon was visibly deflated by this cold apparition with whom he now shared the stage. Before the ON-AIR light had flashed, the ambush was complete.
But the Nixon versus Kennedy struggle was not quelled with the 1960 election. Even after Nixon lost a race for governor of California, he had emerged by the following autumn as a live prospect to challenge Kennedy for reelection.
In November 1963, a gleaming President Kennedy campaigned through Texas. Former vice president Nixon, who left Dallas the morning of Kennedy’s arrival, had spread his mischief. “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson,” the Dallas Morning News reported that Friday, November 22.
Riding by cab back to his New York office that day, Nixon saw a man yelling from a Queens curbside. The president had been shot! Stricken by the macabre turn of fate, Nixon brandished his quote in the Dallas newspaper urging “a courteous reception” for the visiting president.
In February 1968, half a decade later, Nixon watched from a Portland hotel as Robert Kennedy announced for the Democratic presidential nomination. After the televised picture of the glamorous Irish-American clan had faded from the screen, the Republican front-runner stared grimly at the black TV screen. “We’ve just seen some terrible forces unleashed,” he said.
When the second Kennedy was assassinated four months later, the hopes of the divided Democrats passed to the youngest brother, Ted, who refused to run. On his second try for the presidency, Richard Nixon succeeded.
In July 1969, the new American leader presided over the successful Apollo 11 moon landing, the mission launched by Jack Kennedy. Amid the national excitement, word came that Ted Kennedy, the reelection rival Nixon now feared most, had been in a car accident that cost the life of a young woman. The president was fascinated by the news. “Strange!” he muttered to an aide.
From early in his presidency, Nixon was haunted by the fear of a Kennedy “restoration.” After the death at Chappaquiddick, Nixon sent detectives to the area in search of evidence that would finish Ted Kennedy’s presidential prospects once and for all. To besmirch the family legacy, aides faked a Washington-to-Saigon cable tying the late president’s own hand to the assassination of South Vietnam leader Ngo Dinh Diem. Unable to shake his fear of a Kennedy restoration, Nixon instigated a covert campaign to gather intelligence on the Democrats, starting with veteran Kennedy strategist Lawrence O’Brien.
June 23, 1972: To cover up the White House role in the break-in of Democratic headquarters by a band composed largely of Cuban exiles, and believing in the party’s plan to nominate Ted Kennedy “at the last minute,” Nixon ordered his aides to say that pursuing the Watergate break-in would expose what he believed to be Kennedy’s secret bungling and betrayal of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. “They play it tough,” he reminded his aides of past tactics used by his political enemies. “We need to play it the same way.” Within minutes, he had fashioned the “smoking gun” of impeachment.
In August 1974, Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign. Surrounded by loyalists within the White House and by his enemies without, he confessed the terrible price of his obsession. “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them back, and then you destroy yourself.”
It was a stark pairing. John F. Kennedy was handsome, debonair, witty, wealthy, and a decorated war hero to boot. He was by any measure the most beloved president of modern times. Three decades after his death he remains the standard by which we measure our country’s leader. What he possessed was an innate ability to be liked, to have people want him as a friend, lover, son, brother, leader. Men and women both wanted to follow him. Millions voted for him with no questions asked, then liked him even more after the Bay of Pigs blunder. Before his dazzling success in the Great Debate, we didn’t know the Greek word charisma. After his early, ghastly departure, the name “Jack Kennedy” evoked it. He had the gift.
Richard Nixon won four national elections and, in 1960, quite nearly a fifth. Between 1952 and 1972, he was a Republican candidate for national office in every election but one. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine fifty-six times and was a central figure in American life from 1948 until his death in 1994—a span of half a century. Yet he could not best John F. Kennedy, not the one time that mattered: their 1960 encounter before a spellbound nation.
Nixon used not only his talents but also his deficiencies to propel himself in the contest. Lacking a distinctive charm, he made a virtue of his regularness, offering himself as champion of the squares. Bereft of spontaneity, he drafted and rehearsed speeches for hours. Ill at ease with strangers, he briefed himself before even the most casual of meetings. Starting with small stakes, he made himself a gambler. Resentful of fortune, he made resentment his fortune. If Americans viewed John F. Kennedy as their shining hero, they also recognized the five o’clock shadow of Richard Nixon in the fluorescent light of their bathroom mirror.
* * *
“THERE was something mysterious and inexplicable” in the Nixon relationship with Jack Kennedy, his aide H. R. Haldeman said the month before he died. Here is the strange saga of what went on between the two: one man favored by fortune, the other relying on craft, a Mozart against a Salieri, two antagonists with the same ambition—to be the great young leader of post-World War II America. More than either man, it was the rivalry itself that marked and drove the era.
STUDENTS
As a seventeen-year-old senior at the exclusive Choate School, John Kennedy organized the “Muckers Club.” Both the idea and the name came from a sermon given at chapel one afternoon by the prep school’s starch-collared headmaster. George St. John had railed that day against those troublemaking students who he said lacked the proper Choate spirit. He called them “Muckers,” slang for the local Irish-American ditchdiggers who were a familiar sight around campus. To show his contempt, young Kennedy recruited a dozen friends to meet every evening just after chapel. They would have a single purpose: concoct pranks aimed at wreaking havoc on the proper Choate order. The chance to plot mischief with young Kennedy’s Muckers proved so popular that admission was limited, by the founder’s decree, to those too rich for the school to expel.
What sealed t
he Kennedy gang’s doom was a bold scheme to disrupt a major social event by dumping cattle manure onto the school’s dance floor, with the Muckers arriving, shovels in hand, to save the day. Tipped off to the escapade, headmaster St. John angrily summoned Joseph Kennedy, Sr., from Washington, where he was chairing Franklin Roosevelt’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Beneath a mien of solemn indignation, the arriving paterfamilias secretly cheered his son’s spit-in-the-eye bravado. When the headmaster left the room, he said that his only qualm was the choice of name. “If that crazy Muckers Club had been mine,” the tycoon conspired with his vastly relieved son, “you can be sure it wouldn’t have started with an M.”
Jack Kennedy went on to defeat the chairman of the student council in a contest for the Choate senior “most likely to succeed.” Even St. John was finally seduced. “His smile was . . . well, in any school he would have gotten away with things just on his smile. He was . . . very lovable.”
From his first run for Congress, Jack Kennedy’s grown-up politics would bear the Muckers imprint. No group or institution was spared: the street-corner factions of Massachusetts politics, the labor unions, the Democratic party’s liberal establishment, big business, or the eminences of Capitol Hill. From the early canvasses of Cambridge’s working-class neighborhoods to that last motorcade in Dallas, his only allegiance was to the “Kennedy party” and its triumph. Driving the enterprise was its ringleader’s delightful gift for getting other men to follow him into battle.
* * *
ARRIVING at California’s Whittier College, the Quaker school not far from his Southern California home, Dick Nixon didn’t like what he found. Unable to accept a scholarship to Harvard because his family lacked the necessary money for travel and board, he now found himself a victim of class distinction in his own backyard. The entire life of the Whittier campus revolved around a social elite known as the Franklins. The rest of the student body seemed resigned to its exclusion, its nerd-dom.
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 111