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

  Nixon would quote Hoover in his memoirs: “Hello, Chief!” Nixon said to his old mentor, then listened as Hoover did precisely what his wealthy crony had requested. “The ambassador has just called me and suggested that it would be a good idea for you and the president-elect to get together for a visit. If you approve of the idea, the president-elect, who is now in Palm Beach, would like to phone you to make the necessary arrangements. I think we are in enough trouble in the world today that some indications of national unity are not only desirable but essential.”

  What Nixon would not record was how thrilled he was with the Kennedy call. In a fit of despair just moments before, the defeated vice president was now euphoric. “It was the difference between night and day,” Klein remembers. Back at the table, Nixon, Finch, and he resolved that a meeting with Kennedy “would be a good thing” but that first Nixon should telephone President Eisenhower, who told his number-two man not to sign off on any Republican serving in the Kennedy cabinet. He didn’t want the new administration painting itself with the “color of coalition.” Young Kennedy had been ambitious to have the daunting duty of the presidency. Now he had it.

  Jack Kennedy was too anxious to wait. As Nixon talked to Ike on the public pay phone, the maitre d’s phone rang for the vice president. “He was very, very chatty,” recalled Klein, who had gotten to know the senator during those many years spent working across the hall. He said how well Nixon’s press secretary had presented himself on television the morning after the election, saying he wished that his own spokesman, Pierre Salinger, dressed as well. Hnally, Kennedy got to the point. He wanted a meeting.

  When Nixon called back, using the number the president-elect had left him, Kennedy said he would be more than glad to come down to Key Biscayne that Monday, “if it won’t interfere with your vacation.” Kennedy was worried, figuring that a single wrong word could trigger Nixon into demanding recounts. But his supplicatory tone wasn’t necessary.

  “I would be glad to come up to Palm Beach to call on you,” Nixon assured him. “After all, that’s the proper thing to do in view of last Tuesday’s results.”

  Kennedy laughed. “No, I have a helicopter at my disposal, and it would be easier for me to come to you.” About to succeed Dwight Eisenhower as the country’s commander in chief, he already held a token of the arsenal.

  * * *

  WHEN the appointed time for the Kennedy-Nixon meeting arrived, the defeated man, surrounded by reporters and photographers, was forced to stand a long, humiliating watch outside the Key Biscayne Hotel. Kennedy, once again, was late, just as he had been arriving to the Great Debate. Nixon would recall the scene decades later. “First the Dade County police escort came heading up the hotel drive. Behind them was the Secret Service car. In the next car, a convertible, was Kennedy sitting in the backseat looking almost lonely.”

  Greeting him, Nixon suggested that the two ex-junior officers observe navy protocol, with the president-elect walking on the right, befitting his higher rank, the vice president on the left. Then, after making Kennedy comfortable on the porch of one of the hotel’s villas, he went inside to get him and his guest some Cokes.

  “Well, it’s hard to tell who won the election at this point,” Kennedy began. When Nixon refused to take the bait, Kennedy told his defeated colleague that he would welcome his advice on putting together the administration. Nixon responded with two suggestions. First, he noted that the CIA might successfully be split in two, with one entity responsible for gathering intelligence, the other for covert action. The second area of Nixon counsel dealt with the status of China. He had heard from Smathers just the day before that some of Kennedy’s liberal advisers were pushing him to admit the Communist Chinese to the United Nations. This, Nixon told Kennedy, he would oppose vigorously.

  Kennedy also mentioned that he was thinking of Henry Cabot Lodge, among other Republicans, for a foreign policy post. Kennedy wondered if Nixon himself might like some sort of “temporary” overseas assignment. Sensing that the offer was actually more ritual than real, Nixon declined.

  Kennedy never raised Nixon’s apparent decision not to contest the election results. He didn’t have to. The meeting had created just the picture of victor meeting victim that his impresario father had hoped to stage. Just as Nixon had tricked Kennedy during the photo opportunity at the Great Debate, making him appear subservient, so Kennedy was now having his way with his rival, listening obligingly to Nixon’s advice for the sole purpose of getting Nixon’s television picture paying court to him as the president-elect.

  The intent was made clear in a later meeting with reporters. “Ladies and gentlemen, I just wanted to say that the vice president and I had a very cordial meeting. I was delighted to have a chance to see him again. We came to the Congress the same day fourteen years ago, and both served on the Labor Committee of the House of Representatives. So I was anxious to come here today and resume our relationship, which had been somewhat interrupted by the campaign.” Asked whether he had offered Nixon an appointment, Kennedy was curt. “We did not discuss that.” Had the two discussed the campaign during their hour-long meeting? “I asked him how he took Ohio, but he did not tell me,” Kennedy joked. “He is saving it for 1964.”

  Back in Washington, the lame-duck vice president soon was busy personally signing an enormous batch of thank-you letters to campaign workers. “My only regret,” he wrote to a California supporter, “is that I could not have done that extra bit which would have assured victory nationally for all of you who worked so hard for our cause.” But he never did call for a recount. If Jack Kennedy felt gratitude for the vice president’s graceful acceptance of defeat, he never voiced it to Nixon or anyone else.

  In late November, Kennedy was briefed by the CIA’s Allen Dulles on plans for the upcoming invasion of Cuba, plans Nixon had been pushing for months. The president-elect showed neither surprise nor a wish to change course. His mind was on picking a cabinet. Hearing his son grouse one day in Palm Beach about his problems matching cabinet slots with the powerful egos who sought to fill them, Joe Kennedy reminded his son of the thin line separating victory from defeat. “Jack, if you don’t want the job, you don’t have to take it. They’re still counting votes in Cook County.”

  * * *

  THE narrowness of the verdict—Kennedy 49.7 percent, Nixon 49.5 percent—was as profound as the decision. Half of those entering the voting booths had responded to the younger man’s call to “get the country moving again.” As Time observed: “Kennedy had done it all not with any specific program, or even any specific catalogue of faults. He had done it by driving home the simple message of unease, of things left undone in the world where a slip could be disastrous. But most of all, he had done it by the force of his own youthful and confident personality, which seemed to promise freshness and vigor. The U.S. had literally taken Jack Kennedy at face value.”

  Half the United States, that is. Despite all the mythmaking to come later, roughly the same number of Americans chose Nixon as his far more appealing rival. They’d done so with little encouragement from Nixon’s party, whose congressional candidates ran four points behind him. “Nixon was more popular than his party,” Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen wrote later, “and more able and likeable than his enemies portrayed him.” Colleague Dick Goodwin went further: “As a result of our hostility, we underestimated Nixon. Admittedly, he was clever, certainly he understood politics, the art of acquiring votes and power. But we thought he did not know, thus could not reach, the country he aspired to govern. We were wrong. He knew a lot about America. He could reach, with uncanny intuition, the buried doubts, the secret dreads, the nightmare panic of the threatened soul.”

  The close call affected both men. Nixon, feeling himself the victim of an ambush, would spend the rest of his career trying to avoid another. Kennedy, stunned by the close split, would remain embittered toward his rival, who had convinced half the country he was Jack Kennedy’s better. “I can remember him telling me, ‘If I’ve done no
thing for this country, I’ve saved them from Dick Nixon,’ ” pal Red Fay recalled of those Palm Beach days after the election. It marked, as his old PT boat pal logged it, a “180-degree reversal” in Kennedy’s attitude toward his Republican colleague. He had joined the Nixon haters.

  * * *

  ON December 22, three days before Christmas, Nixon received an ironic communication in his capacity as president of the U.S. Senate. Addressed to “Richard N. Nixon,” it was a copy of Kennedy’s letter to the governor of Massachusetts resigning his position. And in a more dramatic twist, Nixon was next forced to preside over Kennedy’s ascension to the nation’s highest position. On January 6, 1961, a blustery, snowy day in Washington, Nixon stood at the rostrum of the House of Representatives for the quadrennial balloting of the Electoral College. He was to officiate at his own political requiem.

  The first state to be counted, Alabama, showcased the narrow division in the popular vote two months earlier. Five Alabama electoral votes were cast for John F. Kennedy. Six, those of the unpledged electors, went to the segregationist Sen. Harry F. Byrd of Virginia. “The gentleman from Virginia is now in the lead,” Nixon remarked to a roar of laughter, exhibiting the wry humor that would forever be associated with his rival.

  The roll call of the fifty states completed, the count stood Kennedy, 303; Nixon, 219; Byrd, 15. Without notes, the candidate with the 219 electoral votes spoke to the assembled senators and members of the House.

  This is the first time in one hundred years that a candidate for the presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated. I do not think we could have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system and of the proud tradition of the American people of developing, respecting and honoring institutions of self-government. In our campaigns, no matter how hard fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win. It is in that spirit that I now declare that John F. Kennedy has been elected President of the United States.

  Democratic and Republican members gave Nixon a standing ovation.

  * * *

  ON January 19, the day before the inauguration, Jack Kennedy went to the White House for one last meeting with the great World War II general he would succeed. Clark Clifford, who had piloted him through the controversy over authorship of Profiles in Courage and was now advising him on the transition, accompanied the president-elect and took notes. The two critical topics were Cuba and the Communist threat in Southeast Asia. The Eisenhower policy toward Fidel Castro, Ike told Kennedy, was to seek his overthrow. While “no specific plans for an invasion have yet been made,” he said, “they should be as soon as a government-in-exile is formed.” Eisenhower regarded Laos as the most serious potential problem facing the United States, according to Clifford. The old soldier was uncharacteristically passionate about the inland country, which was under more immediate threat than neighboring South Vietnam. “If we permit Laos to fall, then we will have to write off the entire area.” Promising support of Kennedy on foreign policy, he made a single exception. It was the same point on which Nixon had taken a stand at Key Biscayne. Ike put his successor on notice that he would rally public opinion against any recognition of Communist China.

  * * *

  As he had in January 1947, Jack Kennedy arrived in frigid Washington with a Palm Beach tan. For drama, he endured the inaugural ceremonies without a topcoat, warming himself instead with long underwear. But if he and wife Jacqueline’s glamour offered a stark contrast to the gray face of the preceding administration, his address from the east front of the Capitol underlined their similarities. Except for his admonition to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” a hard Republican-sounding slap at the welfare state, Kennedy devoted the entire address to the subject his rival had emphasized in the campaign: foreign policy.

  The new president’s martial cadences were more synchronized with his rival’s career than his own. Gone was the cautious stance of the Quemoy and Matsu debate, the unorthodox nature of his Algeria speech. “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” He was giving the other candidate’s speech. “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered in war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

  With this stirring call to arms concluded, Nixon, who loved the brazen Cold War rhetoric, jumped from his chair, paused patiently as the new president accepted the congratulations of others, then gingerly tapped his old colleague, now the president of the United States, on the back. He then clutched Kennedy’s hand in exultant tribute for giving the sort of Cold War call to arms that saluted both men’s worldviews. But Kennedy’s stiff body language suggested little relish for the eager tribute. His use for his adversary at an end, the new leader met Nixon not as a hearty club member he had just taken in golf but as a social discard, a gentleman finessing a gate-crasher. The last thing Kennedy needed was a prominent news photo of a sportsmanlike Richard Nixon graciously congratulating the winner while validating his own new role as leader of the loyal opposition.

  * * *

  HOURS later, as John F. Kennedy basked in the glow of the inaugural balls, Nixon made a sentimental journey. Forced to surrender his car and driver at midnight, he went for one last ride through the nation’s capital.

  “No one noticed as we drove past the White House and headed through the streets toward Capitol Hill,” where his rival had just become president.

  I got out and walked up the broad stone stairs. A surprised guard let me in, and I walked past the entrance to the Senate chamber and down the long corridor to the Rotunda, the dome of the Capitol rising above it. The only sound was the echo of my heels on the bare stone floor. I opened a door and went out onto the balcony that looks out across the west: grounds of the Capitol. I had stood there many times before. It is one of the most magnificent vistas in the world and it never seemed more beautiful than at this moment. The mall was covered with fresh snow. The Washington Monument stood out stark and clear against the luminous gray sky, and in the distance I could see the Lincoln Memorial. I stood looking at the scene for at least five minutes. I thought about the great experiences of the past fourteen years. Now all that was over, and I would be leaving Washington, which had been my home since I arrived as a young congressman in 1947. As I turned to go inside, I suddenly stopped short, struck by the thought that this was not the end, that someday I would be back here. I walked as fast as I could back to the car.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Bay of Pigs

  FROM the moment they arrived at the White House, the Kennedys fashioned a mystique of seemingly effortless elegance and sophistication about the new presidency. They invited cultural icons like cellist Pablo Casals to give White House concerts for small groups. Though he joked to a pal about not knowing exactly what instrument the Spaniard played, Jack Kennedy instinctively understood that such guests added an air of style and assurance to the New Frontier. “It’s not what you are,” his father had taught, “it’s what people think you are that counts.”

  Backstage from the black-tie cello concerts and other trappings of entitlement, Kennedy could not forget the bitter political score. “Don’t get mad; get even” was still the Kennedy credo. His irritation at Nixon’s campaign tactics was palpable. New York Times photographer George Tames recalled going to the White House to shoot a photo of Kennedy with his sparring partner from the previous year’s Democratic primaries, Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey.

 
“Wait till I’m ready, George,” Kennedy said, moving uncomfortably close to Humphrey and poking him hard in the stomach.

  “For chrissake, Jack. What are you doing?” his guest demanded, backing away.

  “Just a little trick I picked up from Nixon,” Kennedy said, chuckling at the distasteful memory of Nixon’s stage gimmick. “Not only do you keep him off balance, but you upstage him.”

  Keeping Richard Nixon off balance remained high on the Kennedy agenda. Within months of taking office, the new attorney general, Robert Kennedy, ordered a Justice Department investigation of the Nixon family’s loan from Howard Hughes. He dropped the matter only when he could not find any evidence with which to prosecute.

  Beneath the New Frontier’s confident exterior there lay, of course, the inescapable narrowness of its electoral mandate. No matter what Kennedy said, felt, or thought about his defeated rival, Richard Nixon had fought the Kennedys practically to an even draw. One thing Kennedy particularly dared not do was feed the impression Nixon had created of a young Democrat unprepared and perhaps even unwilling to stop the Communists in Asia. Though he told Ben Bradlee he saw no problem letting Communist China into the United Nations, he also insisted that this particular flash of New Frontier vision be kept out of print. He intended to go to great lengths to honor the sober warning he had gotten from both Nixon and Ike. At one point he got several African countries to support keeping Communist China out of the United Nations if America and Taiwan voted to let Mauritania and Outer Mongolia in. Having watched his party burned alive by the “Who lost China?” issue since 1949, having been scorched himself by Quemoy and Matsu in the campaign, the young candidate who had questioned a rigid, hold-the-line stand in Asia was becoming, as president, its strongest advocate. Within days of taking office, he signed a national security directive stating U.S. policy toward South Vietnam in the starkest possible language: “Defeat Communist insurgency.” Meanwhile, outside the White House, Richard Nixon could be heard beating the drum for an even harder Asian line: “Some commentators say Kennedy is afraid to start a war.”