Kennedy had a grander adventure in mind. The ex-navy skipper, who saw relationships as an array of tightly sealed compartments—girls, political colleagues, social friends, aides—was filling out the crew. He interviewed and hired as his legislative assistant a young liberal Nebraskan of Protestant and Jewish background named Theodore Sorensen. For the first time he had someone on his payroll whom neither his father nor his late older brother would have picked in a million years—a horn-rimmed intellectual, the kind who hated and were hated in return by tribal Irish types like Joe Kennedy and Joe McCarthy. Sorensen would be Jack Kennedy’s “intellectual blood bank,” imparting to his new boss’s utterances the Churchill-like quality we now associate with him. “I never had anyone who could write for me until Ted came along,” a satisfied Kennedy would later say to Tip O’Neill.
But there was cruelty in this crisp changing of the guard. Before Sorensen arrived, Kennedy’s speeches had been written by his former Harvard tutor Joe Healy, who had remained devoted to him. Such substitutions became a familiar JFK pattern. For years Billy Sutton had filled the sidekick role. Later, Dave Powers assumed the role. Once Mark Dalton had been the trusty campaign manager. In 1952, Larry O’Brien got the job of putting pins on the map. Ted Reardon, who served with Kennedy from beginning to end, recognized the Machiavellian guile at work. “Jack had the ability to have guys around him who personally he didn’t give a damn about. Some . . . he wouldn’t give a dime for as a pal, but he was able to get what he needed from them.” Larry O’Brien also sensed early on the cold utility with which Jack Kennedy manipulated his staff and long resisted joining him for that reason. “If you work for a politician,” he said after the upset victory in 1952, “he tells you what to do, but if you maintain your independence, you can now and then tell him what to do.”
In the spring of 1953, one compartment in John Kennedy’s life remained to be filled. If he was to advance politically, he would have to shed his playboy image and acquire for himself a wife. Fortunately, a pal had already come up with an especially attractive prospect for the empty slot. Two years earlier, columnist Charles Bartlett had asked Kennedy to dinner, hoping to match him with another guest, Jacqueline Bouvier, a twenty-two-year-old George Washington University senior. She had already interviewed both Kennedy and Nixon for her job as “Inquiring Camera Girl” on the Washington Times-Herald. Bartlett’s hunch proved sound. “I leaned across the asparagus,” Kennedy would later joke, “and asked for a date.”
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“I gave everything a good deal of thought, so I am getting married this fall,” he now wrote to Red Fay in San Francisco. “This means the end of a promising political career, as it has been based up to now almost completely on the old sex appeal. Let me know the general reaction to this in the Bay area.” Kennedy was serious about the public relations fallout. He managed to keep secret his engagement to Miss Bouvier until after the Saturday Evening Post had run a long-planned feature: “Jack Kennedy: The Senate’s Gay Young Bachelor.” Later, without telling his fiancée, he invited a Life photographer along on a sailing trip that his bride-to-be had imagined would be a twosome.
The Kennedy-Bouvier wedding, that September in Newport, celebrated by Boston archbishop Richard Cushing and the front page of the New York Times, engendered an even bigger publicity blitzkrieg. Chuck Spalding, Red Fay, George Smathers, and Charlie Bartlett were groomsmen, each told by pal Jack that he was best man. Joe McCarthy was among the Senate guest’s. Richard Nixon, asked to spend a once-in-a-vice-presidency social and golf weekend with President Eisenhower in Denver, had to turn down his invitation.
As Jack Kennedy acquired this last political necessity, an impressive marriage, his eyes were already gazing on the same prize as the man out in Colorado absorbing fairway wisdom from the general. Looking out over Long Island Sound, the groom made an assessment that, coming from any other man of his age, might have seemed either presumptuous or fantastic. “That would be a helluva place to sail in the presidential yacht.”
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IN 1953, the question of Indo-China entered the American political debate. Barry Goldwater, a Republican senator from Arizona, proposed cutting off all U.S. aid to the French forces fighting Communist leader Ho Chi Minh’s insurgency unless Paris agreed to the country’s independence. Jack Kennedy liked Goldwater’s approach. His visit two years earlier had shown him that Communist insurgents enjoyed real popularity in Indo-China because of their nationalist appeal. But he would not let a difference in policy divide the anti-Communist cause. “If we do not stand firm amid the conflicting tides of neutralism, resignation, isolation and indifference,” he declared at Boston College, “then all will be lost, and one by one the free countries of the earth will fall until finally the direct assault will begin on the great citadel—the United States.”
In late 1953, Nixon got his own eyewitness look at Indo-China. Sent on a Far East fact-finding trip by Ike, he deliberately divided his time between the French and native Indo-Chinese, quickly discovering that these were two separate worlds, with the French treating the Vietnamese people with disdain, refusing to integrate them into their elite society. Whereas Jack Kennedy had sensed the nationalism cutting off colonist from colonized, Nixon noticed class resentment. Officers looked down even on those Vietnamese fighting in their regiments. “The French had forfeited their loyalty by not talking to them” was Nixon’s verdict. Ho Chi Minh was “far more appealing as a popular leader,” he discovered, than the figurehead installed by Paris. “The French, if not losing the war, did not know how to win it,” he decided.
Like Kennedy, Nixon kept his doubts to himself. In a December radio broadcast, he clung to the parlance of the global game board, skipping over the inconvenient realities he had seen incountry. “If Indo-China falls, Thailand is put in almost an impossible position. The same is true of Malaya . . . . The same is true of Indonesia. If Indo-China goes under Communist domination, the whole of Southeast Asia will be threatened, and that means that the economic and military security of Japan will inevitably be endangered also. That indicates to you, and to all of us, why it is vitally important that Indo-China not go behind the Iron Curtain.” Caught up in the “who lost China?” syndrome, he and Kennedy continued to speak of Southeast Asia with the same simplicity Ike had employed when he compared its countries to a row of dominoes.
When the Viet Minh surrounded the French army at Dien Bien Phu, Nixon grew more hawkish still, telling news editors he supported sending “American boys” to replace them. He backed a secret plan, “Operation Vulture,” to drop atom bombs on Ho Chi Minh’s forces should the French forces get overrun. “We simply cannot afford further losses in Asia,” he said. The Democrats had lost China. The Republicans could not afford to lose Indo-China. For the first time, however, Kennedy broke with the hard line. “To pour money, material and men into the jungles of Indo-China without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive. I am frankly of the belief that no amount of military assistance in Indo-China can conquer an enemy that is everywhere and at the same time nowhere.”
With France’s final capitulation, which forced a division in Vietnam between a Communist North and pro-Western South, Nixon, too, had second thoughts. In a US News & World Report article written after the decisive French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, he said that no added American aid would have changed the outcome. “What Indo-China proves is that where the will to resist does not exist it is not possible to save the people from coming under Communist domination. In other words, military strength, mutual-defense treaties, military assistance operating together will not do the job alone unless the people are on your side.”
Jack Kennedy now saw the non-Communist South Vietnamese as a people worthy of American help. “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike,” Kennedy said. “It is our offspring. We cannot abandon it, we cannot ignore its needs.” He became a founding member of
the Friends of Vietnam, a personal backer of South Vietnam’s president and fellow Roman Catholic, Ngo Dinh Diem. It would prove to be a dangerous liaison for both men, especially Diem.
Each in his own way, Kennedy and Nixon had seen the soft ground beneath the French position, the hard foundation of Ho’s. Each now failed to see their own country marching inexorably into the same quicksand.
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NIXON and Kennedy each faced a more personal trauma in 1954- For Nixon, the problem was emotional. He talked to Murray Chotiner during 1954 about getting out of politics altogether. It had not been the same. “I resented being constantly vilified as a demagogue or as a liar. As the attacks became more personal, I sometimes wondered where party loyalty left off and masochism began,” he would write years later with rare introspection. “My heart wasn’t really in the battle. For the first time, I realized how much the agony of the fund had stripped the fun and excitement of campaigning from me.” Tormented, he had already made several visits to a New York specialist in psychosomatic illnesses, who later said he had treated the vice president for the “stresses of his office.”
One stress was Joe McCarthy. When the Wisconsin senator first began making his wild accusations of Communist subversion in 1950, Nixon warned that the real beneficiary would be the American Communist party. What he didn’t say was that, with all his bluster, McCarthy appealed to Nixon’s old Orthogonian spirit. Here was an uncouth lout from the heartland raining terror on the “Hiss types.” And doing it with panache, referring to Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, for example, as “the Red dean of fashion.”
But McCarthy knew no loyalty. Republicans hoped he would conclude his charges of Red infiltration after Ike’s victory. Instead, the often intoxicated marauder simply turned his sights on the Eisenhower team. Though Nixon, as well as Kennedy, attended McCarthy’s wedding in the fall of 1953, they could see that McCarthy had not retired his crusade; had escalated it. In a national television address, the groom declared that communism in government was going to be a major issue in the 1954 congressional elections.
At Eisenhower’s request, Nixon invited McCarthy to visit him and his family in Key Biscayne that Christmas. Along with his friend Bill Rogers, now deputy attorney general, the vice president tried talking McCarthy into shifting his fire to a more partisan target. Why not investigate Truman’s use of the Internal Revenue Service to reward allies and punish political enemies? Why not call off this probe of Communist subversion in the U.S. Army, he urged his houseguest? That was Ike’s turf.
When McCarthy took no heed of such appeals, the Democrats saw their opportunity. Adlai Stevenson, still honored as his party’s leader, slyly attacked the Republican administration as “half McCarthy and half Eisenhower.” Ike asked Nixon to give the television response, which he wanted to include a clear whack at McCarthy. Nixon, he said, was one politician immune to the Wisconsin demagogue for the simple reason that no one, not even Joe McCarthy, would appear credible calling Nixon “pink.”
In his national TV address, Nixon’s first target was the previous Democratic administration. “Isn’t it wonderful that finally we have a secretary of state who isn’t taken in by the Communists, who stands up to them? We can be sure that the victories our men win on the battlefields will not be lost in the future by our diplomats at the council table.” Nixon balanced his harsh shot at the State Department set with a squeamish rebuke of McCarthy. “When you go out to shoot rats, you have to shoot straight, because when you shoot wildly . . . you make it easier on the rat.” Unchastened, McCarthy declared he was sick and tired of all the “yack-yacking . . . from that prick Nixon.”
For Jack Kennedy, McCarthy’s crazed attack on the army caused a more personal conflict. The tie between the two Irish Catholics was strong and tribal. When a reporter asked the Massachusetts Democrat how he could be friendly with someone of McCarthy’s politics, Kennedy brushed off the question. If he could get along amiably enough with Vito Marcantonio, he said, there was nothing so surprising about his genial relations with Joe McCarthy. What he didn’t say was that he liked McCarthy personally, that he relished the pyrotechnics of this most outrageous of Muckers, much as Nixon had been warmed by the man’s deep-burning Orthogonian resentment.
As the months of 1954 passed, however, the McCarthy connection became more and more embarrassing. Jack Kennedy had ambitions in a national Democratic party that now perceived McCarthy as the archvillain. The Army-McCarthy hearings, televised day after day from the Senate Caucus Room, had given the country an eyeful of the senator’s boorishness.
The McCarthy crisis coincided with an even more fateful reckoning for Kennedy. “We used to ride home together every night,” Ted Reardon recalls, thinking of one afternoon in particular. “It was a bright, shiny day. We had the top down in the car. Out of the blue, he said, ‘What do you think is the best way of dying?’ ” George Smathers recalled a similar conversation with Kennedy on a fishing trip. “He was always talking about dying, about ways of dying, how drowning would be good. ‘If he gets unconscious,’ Kennedy said, giving the experience of the drowning man some thought, ‘okay.’
Unknown to those outside his well-guarded circle, Jack Kennedy was still a man in poor health. “At least half of the days that he spent on this earth were days of intense physical pain,” Bob Kennedy would say years later of his brother. “He had diphtheria when he was very young and serious back trouble when he was older. In between, he had almost every conceivable ailment. When we were growing up together we used to laugh about the great risk a mosquito took in biting Jack Kennedy—with some of his blood the mosquito was almost sure to die.”
Each health problem was treated as a political problem, to be spun. He had developed, in fact, a reliable smoke screen. When he needed crutches, it was because of the “wartime injury.” When he turned yellow or took sick because of Addison’s disease, it was billed as a recurrence of malaria, another reminder of wartime service.
By May 1954, Kennedy was once again on crutches. “Please call the vice president’s office and tell them that we will not be able to come to the dinner,” he told Evelyn Lincoln on one occasion. “Tell them I am having a little trouble with my back.” By August his condition had grown stark. He had dropped from 180 pounds to 140. So bad was the back pain that he needed to remain on the Senate floor in between votes rather than make the horrendous struggle back and forth from his office. There was scuttlebutt in the Capitol about Kennedy’s impending death and how the appointment of his successor by Massachusetts governor Christian Herter, a Republican, might shift the delicate party balance in the Senate.
In October, Kennedy checked into New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery. “This is the one that kills you or cures,” he told Larry O’Brien. Complications set in. Evelyn Lincoln recalled getting the dreaded call. “The doctors did not expect him to live until morning.” The death watch was even reported on television. For the second time in his life, Kennedy was given the last rites of his church.
The reaction from the vice president across the hall was dramatic. Lincoln recalled Nixon racing into Kennedy’s office, an odd look on his face, wanting to know if the reports were true, that her boss lay mortally ill. “That poor young man is going to die,” Secret Service agent Rex Scouten would recall Nixon saying on the way home one evening, his eyes filling with tears. “Poor brave Jack is going to die. Oh, God, don’t let him die.”
Kennedy pulled through. “The doctors don’t understand where he gets his strength,” Lincoln was told when she called the hospital the following morning. “He rallied during the night.” To cheer him up, friends got Grace Kelly to play a Mucker’s trick. “I’m the new night nurse,” the young movie star whispered into groggy Jack’s ear.
Kennedy rallied, but on December 2, 1954, the Senate closed the curtain on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, voting to condemn him for conduct that brought discredit on the Senate itself. While he would live two and a half years longer, both his anti-Communist crusade and
his political significance had ended. The lone senator who refused to take a public position on the condemnation vote was John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. It was a privilege of the sick that he relished in full. “You know when I get downstairs, I know exactly what’s going to happen,” he told friend Chuck Spalding upon leaving the hospital a few days before Christmas. “Those reporters are going to lean over me with great concern, and every one of those guys is going to say, ‘Now Senator, what about McCarthy?’ Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to reach for my back and I’m just going to yell ‘Oow!’ and then I’m going to pull the sheet over my head and hope we can get out of there.”
Even as he moved to woo the Democratic liberal establishment, Kennedy could never bring himself to side fully with McCarthy’s enemies. “I had never known the sort of people who were called before the McCarthy committee. I agree that many of them were seriously manhandled, but they represented a different world to me. What I mean is, I did not identify with them, and so I did not get as worked up as other liberals did.” It was a telling observation. Kennedy’s contempt toward those Nixon called “Hiss types” was as real as Nixon’s resentment. “They’re not queer at State, but . . .” he told Charlie Bartlett. “They’re sort of like Adlai.” Kennedy hated being grouped with such people in the public mind. “I’d be very happy to tell them I’m not a liberal,” he declared in a Saturday Evening Post interview the year before. “I never joined the Americans for Democratic Action or the American Veterans Committee. I’m not comfortable with those people.”
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 119