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

  Appearing, once again, as a guest on the Jack Paar Show, Nixon this time was a hit. As he chatted amicably with the popular host, the former vice president came across as someone with neither politics in mind nor tricks up his sleeve. When Paar inquired about the early friendship between his guest and the president, Nixon allowed, somewhat hesitantly, that this had “certainly” been the case. “When we came to Congress . . . we were low men on the totem pole in the Labor Committee. We stayed low men till we ran for president. Now he’s up, and I’m down.” The studio audience loved it.

  “Can Kennedy be defeated in ‘64?” Paar asked.

  “Which one?” came Nixon’s answer, a snappy reference to a trio of high-profile brothers that included the attorney general and the new junior senator from Massachusetts.

  “Boy, I hate a smart-aleck vice president,” the host responded, underscoring the irreverent mirth of the broadcast.

  So debonair was Nixon’s performance that media guru Marshall McLuhan declared that had he shown this “cool” side of himself in 1960, he would have won. Later that month, Nixon polished his new credibility in a speech at the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He opened with a frontal defense of his “last press conference” of the previous autumn. “I felt like returning for sixteen minutes some of the heat I had been taking for sixteen years,” he said to laughs, then applause. Journalists, he admonished his audience, should be able to take what they dish out. “If you can’t stand the heat,” he quoted Harry Truman, “stay out of the kitchen.”

  Nixon now turned to his main topic: John F. Kennedy. “If the United States had dealt with Castro effectively in the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev would not have miscalculated a year later in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev, like all aggressors, all dictators, interpreted indecision as weakness. The way to avoid miscalculation is never give them a moment when they think you’re weak.” Nixon would not let Kennedy’s success in October 1962 cover up his debacle of April 1961.

  Asked about Nixon’s criticisms at a press conference, Kennedy tried to shove the problem back at him. “I know there is a good deal of concern in the United States because Castro is still there. I think it was unfortunate that he was permitted to assume control in the 1950s, and perhaps it would have been easier to take action then than it was now. But those who were in positions of responsibility did not make that judgment. Now, coming to the question which is rather sidestepped, that is, if the United States should go to war in order to remove Castro. It would seem to me that we have pretty much done all of those things that can be done to demonstrate hostility to the concept of a Soviet satellite in the Caribbean except take these other steps which bring in their wake violence and may bring a good deal of worldwide difficulty.”

  The positions of the two men on Cuba had now shifted 180 degrees. Since 1960, Nixon, an outsider, as Kennedy had once been, could afford to play hawk. Kennedy, having stared Khrushchev in the face, lacked that luxury. He had no choice but to see nuclear war as a deadly, tangible prospect.

  Jack Kennedy was not the only American disturbed by Nixon’s hawkish stance on Cuba. On the morning of April 21, Russian-born Marina Oswald recalled her husband, Lee, a self-styled “Marxist,” heading out to buy the Sunday newspaper, the Dallas Morning News. That day’s edition contained a banner headline: “Nixon Calls for Decision to Force Reds Out of Cuba.” The former vice president was calling on Kennedy to rid the hemisphere of Fidel Castro. Oswald, who had immigrated to the Soviet Union out of sympathy for communism, then returned disillusioned, was a passionate defender of the Cuban leader. Within minutes, his wife would testify before the Warren Commission, he was dressed in gray slacks, white shirt, tie, jacket, and pistol.

  “Where are you going?” his Russian wife asked.

  “Nixon is coming to town. I am going to have a look.”

  Marina Oswald recoiled. “I know what your looks mean!”

  Acting quickly, she lured her husband, a former marine, into the bathroom and slammed the door behind him. “How can you lie to me after you gave me your word? You promised me you’d never shoot anyone else, and here you are starting in all over again.” Two weeks earlier, Oswald had shot at and missed retired general Edwin A. Walker, a leading spokesman for the American right. He had used a secondhand Manlicher-Carcano rifle mounted with a four-power telescope. Refusing to let him out of the bathroom, Marina Oswald convinced her husband to hand over his gun and drop his planned “look” at Richard Nixon. She told him she was tired of his “pranks.” Only later did it become clear that it was the expected arrival in Dallas of Lyndon Johnson, the current vice president, that had combined with the Nixon headline on Cuba to trigger her husband’s confused but deadly conduct.

  * * *

  LIKE all politicians, John F. Kennedy had a Janus quality. A part of him worried about the basic questions of winning elections, gaining and holding power; the other face looked to the larger vision of what he could do to improve the world. As president, Jack Kennedy had to meet the grand concerns of humanity as well as the dictates of politics.

  In one month—June 1963—John F. Kennedy gave three of his greatest speeches. The first, a commencement address at American University, was conciliatory. He used the occasion to call for a limited nuclear-test-ban treaty with the Soviets. Within four months he would sign the historic accord into law. His goal was peaceful relations between the United States and the USSR, between communism and the West. “What kind of peace do I mean?” he asked his audience, including his adversaries in the Kremlin. “Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

  Kennedy was talking about protecting the world he so relished from destruction. He spoke of peace not as a retreat into weakness but as a challenge, like the race into space, a test of man’s ingenuity. “Our problems are man-made; they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.”

  Richard Nixon, touring Europe, expressed his skepticism toward the emerging dialogue between West and East. “We must be under no illusions that this indicates any change in his basic objective, which is to impose communism on the Western world,” he said. But after lunching in Paris with President de Gaulle, one of the few world figures who still believed in Nixon’s political potential, the tough cold warrior called on Republican senators to support Kennedy’s test-ban treaty, which he pointed out was initially proposed by Eisenhower. He continued to question, however, the highly discussed split between the Soviet Union and the world’s other major Communist power, China. “Too many people today are gloating publicly because the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Communists are having an argument. What they fail to realize is that this argument is not about how they can beat each other but how they could beat us.”

  Kennedy’s second memorable address that month concerned civil rights. The day after Kennedy’s American University speech, two black students attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama. Both were blocked by order of Gov. George C. Wallace, who had sworn, during his most recent gubernatorial campaign, to prevent such desegregation. Kennedy was now forced to call out the National Guard in order to force the students’ admission. That night, he went on national television to commit himself and his administration to the right of every citizen to enter public institutions as well as restaurants, hotels, and other places of public accommodation. Calling civil rights “a moral issue . . . as old as the Scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution,” he framed it in the context of the cold war. “Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish t
o be free. And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it.” For the first time, the voice and spirit of the presidency was behind the struggle for civil rights.

  Later that month, Newsweek’s Benjamin Bradlee watched Kennedy struggling to rehearse some German sentences he intended to use in West Berlin. He knew of his friend’s difficulties with languages. But the next day, two-thirds of the people of West Berlin crowded into the street greeting him with chants of Ken-nah-dy; Ken-nah-dy. John Kennedy delivered his triumphant challenge in the plaza of West Berlin’s city hall. “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was ‘civis Ro manus sum,’ he told the massive crowd in front of him. “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’ ” It conveyed all the contempt for the Communists Kennedy and his country had within them. Not only did he embrace the people of the surrounded capital, he said he was one of them! It was the finest speech of the Cold War. “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the Free World and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’ Sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin. Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in. All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ ”

  * * *

  BY autumn of 1963, Nixon had settled in as a commentator on the New Frontier. He was producing articles on a wide range of subjects for Reader’s Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Los Angeles Times syndicate. Stephen Hess, the ghostwriter with whom he was splitting the magazine payments fifty-fifty, recalled Nixon as a “terrific boss,” a generous employer who “really didn’t have that much interest in money.” But if the former vice president didn’t care about the writing fees, Nixon did care that attention be paid to his increasingly hawkish line. By October 1963, his policy stance had shifted markedly to the right, as had that of his party. Stopping communism was not enough; we needed to lift the Iron Curtain. In a Saturday Evening Post article he warned against a “sell-out of the right of ninety-seven million enslaved people in Eastern Europe to be free . . . . Nothing less than to bring freedom to the Communist world” would now satisfy him.

  Too weakened by his California defeat to be a candidate in 1964 himself, Nixon planned to write a book, with Hess’s help, on the race. It would be modeled after The Making of a President, Theodore White’s groundbreaking description of the 1960 race. By the fall of 1963, the Kennedy White House was growing touchy about such political books. When Victor Lasky’s Kennedy: The Man and the Myth mentioned the $1,000 contribution Congressman Kennedy had delivered to Richard Nixon’s office thirteen years earlier, the White House denied the episode altogether. Circumstances had rendered it inconvenient for the Democratic president, headed toward reelection, to admit even so ancient an alliance with the enemy.

  * * *

  IN 1963, there were twelve thousand American military “advisers” in South Vietnam defending the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. A Roman Catholic leader, Diem had enjoyed support from his American coreligionists, including John F. Kennedy, since Vietnam’s partition in 1954- But in addition to the Vietcong, the Communist guerrilla movement Saigon had been fighting since 1959, Diem confronted his country’s hostile Buddhist majority. This placed the United States in conflict with both a Communist insurgency in the countryside and a Buddhist uprising in the cities. It was hard enough standing up to the hardships of the jungle. How could a country that ensured religious liberty support the South Vietnamese government in a civil war against its own religious majority?

  During his first two years as president, Kennedy had played for time in Southeast Asia. He had cut a face-saving deal with the Soviets on Laos and then increased the number of American advisers in Vietnam. But he had drawn a line: He resisted calls by President Diem, beginning in 1962, to introduce American combat troops into Vietnam. He had taken to heart the advice given him by World War II leader Gen. Douglas MacArthur about the folly of committing GIs to a “ground war in Asia.” But there was a sharp limit to such a policy. Kennedy knew that he could not abandon South Vietnam to the Communists and expect to get reelected. He had seen Truman’s Fair Deal destroyed by the cry of “Who lost China?” He didn’t want the New Frontier to suffer the same fate. Jack Kennedy could not afford to “lose” Vietnam.

  His problem, Kennedy decided, was President Diem, a once-impressive leader now believed captive to the influence of a brother, Prince Ngo Dinh Nhu, and sister-in-law, known in the West as “Madame Nhu.” Nhu was failing to prosecute the war vigorously and was suspected of plotting a secret deal with the Communist enemy. Of more immediate concern was his embarrassment of America before the world by his brutal repression of the Buddhists. On a June morning in 1963, the heat from South Vietnam became insufferable. American reporters in Saigon were handed a statement from a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk. “Before closing my eyes to Buddha,” it began, “I have the honor of presenting my words to President Diem, asking him to be kind and tolerant toward his people and to enforce a policy of religious equality.” Sitting in the lotus position, the elderly monk proceeded to burn himself on a bustling street corner, providing a horrified American public thousands of miles away with a news photo more incendiary than the million words printed in the New York Times.

  Kennedy acted. His first step was to name as his personal ambassador to South Vietnam the man he had defeated for the Senate in 1952, then as Richard Nixon’s 1960 running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge. Detecting Lodge’s interest in the post, Kennedy quickly saw the advantages of the unusual appointment. It gave him a man in Saigon who was (a) totally unsentimental toward Diem personally and able to do the dirty work of discarding the longtime U.S. friend; (b) an agent equipped by background and experience to act decisively, unconstrained by bureaucratic control or protocol; (c) someone with a direct line to Kennedy personally; and, finally, (d) a politician with the ego to straighten out the situation in Saigon for the stark, powerful reason he was posted there.

  The Lodge appointment revealed Kennedy’s instinctive com-partmentalization, his aptitude for pursuing his separate ambitions without letting one leak into another. To handle the hellish situation in South Vietnam, he now had a brand-name Republican to make the hell bipartisan. Lodge’s Brahmin disdain was another plus: He was a WASP grandee with no motive whatever to prop up the corrupt regime of the Roman Catholic mystic in Saigon.

  By late summer of 1963, the pictures coming out of South Vietnam had turned more menacing. They showed the Vietnamese Special Forces raiding Buddhist pagodas in Saigon and other South Vietnamese cities, ruthlessly placing the monks and nuns who attended under arrest. The raids were carried out by forces jointly directed by Diem and Prince Nhu. Those within the Kennedy administration who had been lobbying for an anti-Diem coup saw their chance. Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Roger Hilsman drafted a cable from Kennedy to Lodge: “We must . . . tell key military leaders that the U.S. would find it impossible to continue support GVN [government of Vietnam] militarily and economically unless steps are taken immediately, which we recognize requires removal of the Nhus from the scene.”

  Getting rid of Diem’s brother and sister-in-law, those on the scene knew full well, meant eliminating Diem himself. Averell Harriman, Kennedy’s undersecretary of state for political affairs, immediately endorsed the Hilsman draft, as did National Security Council staffer Michael Forrestal, who sent it to Hyannis Port, where Kennedy was spending the late August weekend. The South
Vietnamese generals wanted a signal that Washington would recognize a coup. Hilsman, Harriman, and Forrestal were urging the White House to send it.

  Kennedy gave Lodge the go-ahead. “U.S. government cannot tolerate situation in which power lies in Nhu’s hands,” the August 24 cable read. “Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie and replace them with the best military and political personalities available. If, in spite of your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved. You will understand that we cannot from Washington give you detailed instructions as to how this operation should proceed, but you will also know we will back you to the hilt on action to achieve our objectives.”

  But the administration was divided. Back at the White House that Monday, Kennedy heard Rusk, McNamara, and his military aide Maxwell Taylor accuse Hilsman, Harriman, and Forestal of pulling an end run of sending a cable sure to trigger an anti-Diem coup. “It shocks and saddens me,” McNamara would write three decades later, “to realize that action which eventually led to the overthrow and murder of Diem began while U.S. officials in both Washington and Saigon remained deeply divided over the wisdom of his removal.” Lacking a clear notion of who would rise to replace Diem, Kennedy had signed onto a coup that his team, including his secretary of state and secretary of defense, did not support. “My God!” Kennedy told Charles Bartlett on hearing of the dispute. “My government’s coming apart!”

  Lodge made clear in a cable to Washington five days later that he took the August 24 cable to be a direct presidential order to encourage an anti-Diem coup. “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government. We should make an all-out effort to get generals to move promptly. If generals insist on public statement that all U.S. aid to Vietnam through Diem regime has been stopped, we would agree.”