Nixon was quick to react. He informed Republican congressional leaders that the only way to proceed in Algeria was to work “quietly, behind the scenes, to get the French to take a reasonable position and to work to prepare the Algerians for independence.” A quick pullout, he warned, would mean a bloodbath between the Algerians and the million French nationals in the country. Pushing for it now, as Jack Kennedy had rashly proposed, would “only harden the French determination.”
Continuing his efforts to bolster the respectability of his foreign policy views, Kennedy began to assemble a brain trust that included Harvard professor Henry Kissinger and a defense planner named Daniel Ellsberg. He also assembled a Labor Advisory Committee, naming as its chairman Harvard law professor Archibald Cox. For economic wisdom he drew on Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Walt Whitman Rostow; for history, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. A Roper poll taken in 1957 favored Kennedy far ahead of Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson as the most admired member of the U.S. Senate. “He never said a word of importance in the Senate,” Johnson would admit in dismay, “but somehow, with his books and his Pulitzer Prize, he managed to create the image of himself as a shining intellectual.”
For those observing the rise of John Kennedy, it was hard not to resent the ease with which he achieved his new eminence. At a 1958 luncheon honoring Eisenhower envoy Max Raab, the Lodge aide who had won a key position in the Eisenhower White House, Kennedy offered a light yet eloquent tribute sprinkled with several Latin phrases. Nixon, speaking next, felt compelled to administer a tweak. “I might have used a Latin phrase but I didn’t go to Harvard.” For some, memories of this revelatory moment would linger. “I recognized that day his resentment against the whole Kennedy-Harvard monied establishment,” a young aide to Massachusetts senator Leverett Saltonstall, Charles Colson, said of Nixon’s performance. “It came out as a joke, but in the humor was the truth.” The charming fellow across the hall had become a threat to Dick Nixon’s career plans.
One important Democratic figure was still carefully keeping her distance from the popular Kennedy. Eleanor Roosevelt, along with many of her devotees, continued to dislike him, if for no other reason than the undeniable fact that he was not one of them. The feeling was mutual. “I always had a feeling that he always regarded them as something apart from his philosophy,” Charles Bartlett recalled. “I think he regarded the liberals as the sort of people who ran like a pack.” Benjamin Bradlee, at the time the Newsweek bureau chief in Washington, whom Kennedy had met through Bartlett, agrees with the assessment. “He hated the liberals.”
Kennedy was being cagey. Whereas he seduced the Democratic left with urbane commentary on colonialism, he protected the southern strength he had shown in his failed vice-presidential bid. Whatever maneuvers he slyly executed in order to win over the liberals, he kept himself positioned as the best hope of moderate and conservative Democrats, which included those southerners still holding fast to segregation. In the same year he gave the Algeria speech, Kennedy broke with his fellow northern Democrats to support an amendment to the 1957 Civil Rights Act requiring jury trials for local officials charged with contempt of court. The segregationists, whom Kennedy joined on the measure, believed no southern, presumably all-white, jury would ever vote to convict a defendant in such tinderbox cases. Kennedy’s deft positioning on the jury-trial question earned him a rebuke from the NAACP but also the warm regard of his colleagues below the Mason-Dixon line. There was even talk of pairing Kennedy with a southerner on a Dixiecrat ticket.
Meanwhile, Dick Nixon was assuming a quite different posture on the civil rights bill. In Ghana for that African state’s independence ceremonies, Nixon met another American guest, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When they returned home, the quiet NAACP member became allies with King on civil rights legislation. When the jury-trial amendment passed the Senate 51–42, with Kennedy among the majority, the Republican vice president denounced the decision as “a vote against the right to vote.” Their contrary positions on civil rights in 1957 would add one more odd twist to the presidential campaign to come.
* * *
IN October 1957, the country became suddenly uneasy about the grandfather-like leadership of Dwight Eisenhower. The launching of the Soviet space satellite Sputnik sent an ugly shiver down the spines of complacent citizens long convinced of their country’s enduring edge against the Soviet menace. “Artificial satellites will pave the way for space travel,” the Soviet news agency Tass explained to the humiliated West. Moscow was justified in its self-assurance. Sputnik was, after all, nine times the weight of the satellites the United States had been trying, with a discouraging lack of success, to launch. If Communists could beat us in the technology of the future, they might also defeat us ideologically as well. The emerging “third world” might decide to look to Moscow rather than Washington for aid and guidance in their struggle for economic development.
As the national mood shifted uneasily from the “Peace and Prosperity” boosterism of the 1950s, the two politicians on the third floor of the Old Senate Office Building continued their minuet of ambition. While the country at large perceived them as operating in wholly different spheres, they were, in Kennedy secretary Evelyn Lincoln’s phrase, “two men on third,” each continuing to eye home plate while keeping a wary eye on the other. “Their doors were opposite each other,” remembers veteran Hearst reporter Bob Thompson, who spent a year working for Kennedy in the late 1950s. “Every so often Nixon would come out of his door, and Kennedy would come out of his.” The vice president’s reaction was visceral, Thompson recalls, his body tensing each time. “Nixon was always a little bit in awe,” Thompson says.
To his more glamorous colleague, however, Nixon continued to show goodwill in matters political and personal. When John “Black Jack” Bouvier died in August 1957, Nixon composed a gracious note to Jacqueline. “Parents are always special people,” he wrote, “it’s hard to let them go no matter when.” Jacqueline Kennedy replied warmly. “With all you have to do, I have to tell you it was appreciated more than I can say.” When Caroline Bouvier Kennedy was born in November of that year, Nixon wired an exuberant telegram to Jack at the Kennedys’ Park Avenue apartment:
Welcome to the Father-Daughter club. Pat joins me in sending our best to you, Jackie and Caroline Bouvier.
Again, Jackie responded with care to the gesture. “That was so thoughtful of you, with all that must weigh on your mind at this trying time. Jack greatly appreciated your invitation to join you in the Father-Daughter Club and is already acting slightly ridiculous about belonging to it! Just think how thrilled this baby will be when she can read—and I show her your telegram—which I will always save.”
The thing weighing most heavily on the vice president’s mind that month was the stroke President Eisenhower had just suffered, which again put Nixon in the same uneasy position he had found himself in two years earlier at the time of Ike’s heart attack.
Making allowances for the occasional partisan shot, relations between the two base runners remained cordial. Using Smathers as a go-between, Nixon let Kennedy and a handful of other moderate-to-conservative Democrats up for reelection in 1958 understand that “under no circumstances” would he campaign for their Republican rivals. Just as Kennedy had crossed partisan lines to help Nixon in 1950, Nixon now refused to attack Kennedy. He would concentrate his fire on the Democratic left. Despite a growing possibility that he and the senator might soon be locked in struggle, the vice president was also the only outsider invited to Kennedy’s office birthday parties. Dave Powers, forever the loyalist, remembers Nixon once standing in the back of the room during the festivities “as if wondering why no one would ever have a party like this for him.”
But the confident Kennedy staff, still retaining cordial ties with the Nixon people across the hall, fully expected that the long cease-fire between the two politicians was about to end. Their man would take the Democratic nomination; Nixon would almost certainly win the Republican. Though th
e two men still greeted one another warmly, Evelyn Lincoln observed, “that didn’t mean that each side wasn’t watching with an eagle eye for points to be used if they were both nominated.”
Behind the scenes, the effect one had on the other was less predictable. Several times, on social occasions, Kennedy refused to join in the fashionable ridicule of the vice president. One fall day, Jacqueline Kennedy invited McLean neighbors Joan and Arthur Gardner to dinner the next night. The guests would include the two couples plus Rose Kennedy, who was stopping by on her way south to Palm Beach for the winter. Over dinner, Mrs. Gardner made a crack about the “dreadful” Richard Nixon, fully expecting the Democratic senator from Massachusetts to chime in his agreement. He didn’t. “You have no idea what he’s been through,” Kennedy shot back. “Dick Nixon is the victim of the worst press that ever hit a politician in this country. What they did to him in the Helen Gahagan Douglas race was disgusting.” But if he was staying on good terms personally with the inhabitant of room 362, he was publicly separating himself. Kennedy told the author of a New York Times Magazine profile that he hardly knew Richard Nixon. As a gauge of his candor, Kennedy claimed in the same interview to have the same political outlook as liberal icon Adlai Stevenson. His new identification with the party left and his eschewing of any comfort with Nixon was a useful posture to compensate for the residual embarrassment of his tribal tie to liberal archvillain Joe McCarthy. In an October 1958 speech to the Richmond Junior Chamber of Commerce, Kennedy took a direct shot at the presumed GOP nominee. “When Mr. Eisenhower talks about the party of the future, he is talking about the party of Richard Nixon. And I cannot believe that the majority of American voters would want to entrust the future to Mr. Nixon.”
Clearly, Kennedy did not wish to be caught by certain people in Nixon’s company. Arriving at a 1959 social event at which Nixon had reason to expect him, Kennedy decided it would be impolitic to enter. Later, he stopped by the vice president’s office with an apologetic message that he “did make it out there but at the last minute a crisis arose.” He explained that he had to avoid someone leaving just as he was coming. Kennedy summed up his view of the man he now had to beat for the presidency: “Nixon is a nice fellow in private, and a very able man. I worked with him on the Hill for a long time, but it seems he has a split personality and he is very bad in public, and nobody likes him.”
* * *
CUBA was viewed by most Americans as a Caribbean playground, a haven for prostitution and gambling and the home of I Love Lucy costar Desi Arnaz. The party came to an end on New Year’s Eve in 1958 when dictator Fulgencio Batista fled, leaving the country to the rebel forces of Jesuit-trained radical Fidel Castro. The United States greeted the new leader as a hero, only to watch in dismay as he gave orders throwing more than five hundred people before firing squads. During an eleven-day U.S. tour in April 1959, however, Castro told American newspaper editors that he supported a free press and promised the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he would not expropriate U.S. property in Cuba. On Meet the Press, he declared his opposition to communism and his backing of democracy, and he piously laid wreaths at the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.
Not everyone believed it. On a warm, rainy Sunday, Vice President Nixon received the fatigue-clad Castro in his Capitol office. As always, he loved the chance to spar. Why don’t you hold free elections? he asked. “The people of Cuba don’t want free elections; they produce bad government,” Nixon would report his guest as replying. Why not trials for your political enemies? “The people of Cuba don’t want them to have fair trials. They want them shot as quickly as possible,” Castro answered calmly.
After the three-and-a-half-hour meeting ended, Nixon quickly sent a memo to President Eisenhower, Secretary of State Christian Herter, and CIA director Allen Dulles with his assessment. Castro, he wrote, had “that indefinable quality that, for good or evil, makes a man a leader. Whatever we may think . . . he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin affairs generally. He is either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline—my guess is the former . . . because he has the power to lead . . . we have no choice but at least to orient him in the right direction.”
For whatever reason, Nixon was being cautious in front of Eisenhower and the others. With his staff, he was more bluntly suspicious, telling press secretary Herb Klein afterward that the Cuban leader was an “outright Communist and he’s going to be a real danger.” For his part, Castro was offended by the vice president’s coolness. “That son of a bitch Nixon, he treated me badly,” the smarting dictator told a Havana magazine. Decades later, Castro would confide to an American visitor, in one of his famed all-night conversations, his wonder that Nixon alone had guessed at his Communist loyalties. “How did he know?”
* * *
NIXON had a much more celebrated encounter with a Communist that year: his “Kitchen Debate” with Soviet party chairman Nikita Khrushchev. The face-off came at an American trade exhibition in Moscow, where the pair argued the relative merits of the two countries’ latest technological breakthroughs. “There may be some instances where you may be ahead of us,” Nixon said, parrying Khrushchev’s bluster, “in the thrust of your rockets. There may be instances where we are ahead of you—in color television.” More vivid than any words spoken between the two, however, was the news photograph of the American vice president poking his finger hard into the fat Ukrainian’s chest. The show of strength was actually a publicity trick. What the wirephoto didn’t show was that at the moment of his finger-pointing, Nixon was actually giving Khrushchev the banal information that the speech the Soviet leader was about to make would be carried on American television. Anyone reading the next day’s newspapers might have guessed that Vice President Nixon was getting the better of the tough Soviet leader on a more consequential point. Prior to the Kitchen Debate, Nixon trailed Kennedy 61 percent to 39 percent in the Gallup poll. A poll taken afterward would show him leading the popular Democrat 53 percent to 47 percent.
* * *
As the months passed, Dick Nixon still didn’t believe the junior senator from Massachusetts had what it took to be nominated and thus continued to underestimate him. Like others who had spent their lives in the Capitol’s corridors, he let his vision be distorted by the daunting presence of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Right up until the West Virginia primary, Nixon firmly believed Kennedy would be stopped, that Johnson would be anointed the candidate by Speaker Sam Rayburn and other party kingmakers, as Kefauver had been in the 1956 nomination fight for vice president.
Pat Hillings observed from up close Nixon’s attitude toward Kennedy’s bid. “I never heard Nixon say, ‘Well, he’s no good,’ or, ‘He’s a pushover.’ Nothing like that. But we just didn’t think he was a heavyweight. Also, we just didn’t think he would work that hard. We never thought of him as the effective guy he turned out to be on the campaign trail, because, you see, I had served with him in the House. We kept thinking Hubert or somebody would stop him. In the House, for instance, he really didn’t do much. He really wasn’t much on legislation, and then he was gone for long periods of time, illness and other things. He was sick . . . [there were] disclosures that Addison’s disease might have killed him.”
Nixon was not alone in underestimating Kennedy. In June 1959, the Congressional Quarterly polled senators and members of Congress on who would be the “strongest possible” Democratic presidential candidate in 1960. Fifty-four percent named Lyndon Johnson; 20 percent, John F. Kennedy; and 14 percent, Adlai Stevenson. Capitol Hill insiders simply accepted the conventional wisdom that Kennedy’s bid, no matter how rousing, would eventually be stymied by voter concerns, especially in the Bible Belt, about his religion. That same month, the Methodist Christian Advocate, the denomination’s official publication in Alabama, criticized Gov. John Patterson for backing the Massachusetts senator. “It is cause for regret that Governor Patterson is willing to ignore harsh lessons of history to give support to
a Roman Catholic for the highest office in the United States.” While calling Kennedy “an admirable man, undoubtedly brilliant, successful and courageous,” the Methodist newspaper warned Patterson that he would discover “to his sorrow that the people of Alabama, whose attitudes are basically Protestant, do not intend to jeopardize their democratic liberties by opening the doors of the White House to the political machinations of a determined, power-hungry Romanist hierarchy.”
It was just this kind of talk that made Nixon think Kennedy would be stopped, just as he had in 1956. Tip O’Neill would recall the Wednesday nights he played cards with a “gregarious and talkative” vice president during this period. Before one such evening, Nixon sent word to O’Neill that he hoped the Democratic congressman could come early so that the two might have a private conversation. Nixon wanted to talk about Massachusetts, a state Ike had carried twice. “They tell me you know Massachusetts politics,” he began. “I don’t want to go with the old guys who’ve been around a long time. Give me the names of some young fellas I ought to take into my organization.”
O’Neill resisted. “Well, you’re wasting your time. Kennedy’s going to be the Democratic nominee in 1960, and you won’t have a chance of carrying Massachusetts.”
“Kennedy’s got no chance,” Nixon retorted. “I’m running against Johnson. You’re not going to be able to stop him.”
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 122