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

  The massacre had thrown open the fortress door to Nixon’s enemies. In the House of Representatives, twenty-one resolutions of impeachment were now filed in an anti-Nixon drive no longer limited to a few hotheads. As Nixon could see from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the impeachment team now had a seasoned general manager. “I knew I was in trouble when I saw that Tip O’Neill was calling the shots up there. That man plays hardball. He doesn’t know what a softball is.”

  Nixon had his opponent’s measure. “Until now, I had stayed behind the scenes,” O’Neill recalled of the days after the massacre. But having risen to the leadership through friendships won and kept through endless nights of cardplaying and conversation, he could read the mood on the House floor better than anyone. The man who had coined the phrase “All Politics Is Local” knew, too, that he had bedrock support back home from the street-corner Irishmen as well as the Harvard Yard crowd for any move he might make against the Republican president. A popular Massachusetts bumper sticker recalled the commonwealth’s holdout position in the 1972 election: “Don’t blame us.” Jack Kennedy’s state had never liked or trusted Richard Nixon.

  O’Neill began bullying New Jersey’s Peter Rodino, the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to name a top-flight counsel to marshal the impeachment inquiry. “I had to light a fire under his seat,” said O’Neill, recalling his many hectoring sessions alongside Rodino down in the front Democratic row in the House chamber. “Get the hell off my back!” Rodino finally barked at the persistent majority leader.

  Five days before Christmas 1973, Rodino named John Doar, a registered Republican who had been a respected figure in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, as his impeachment counsel. O’Neill kept up the heat on Nixon. When the beleaguered president began inviting members of Congress down to the White House for fence-mending visits, the Democratic leader accused him of “currying favor with his prospective grand jury.”

  The year 1973 ended with Nixon encircled by age-old adversaries: the special prosecutor’s office, dominated by Bob Kennedy lawyers; the House of Representatives, led by the man who represented the martyred Jack Kennedy’s district; the U.S. Senate, urged on by Ted Kennedy. Through the slits of the bunker, Nixon could see the hated Washington Post, whose editor Ben Bradlee Nixon’s men had demonized as a “Kennedy” man. “Wherever Nixon turned he confronted Kennedy memories, old Kennedy loyalties hardened now into bitter anti-Nixon antagonisms,” speechwriter Ray Price recalled, “old dreams conjured by courtiers and embellished by time, held up as standards against which presidents should be measured.”

  But the most deadly of all the weapons aimed at Richard M. Nixon was the grim tones of the man himself, recorded on June 23, 1972—the “smoking gun” tape—when he tried hiding his misdeeds behind Jack Kennedy’s greatest debacle. Each remaining month of the Nixon presidency would now spin and snap like the loose reel of a tape recorder.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Death of a Presidency

  RICHARD Nixon spent the first two weeks of 1974 alone in California. The Watergate scandal had hit full force. The country’s estimate of him, which had reached Jack Kennedy levels when the American prisoners of war came home from North Vietnam, had fallen thirty-nine points in the Gallup poll. It was the worst plunge in public approval the polling firm had ever recorded. “Opponents are savage destroyers, haters,” Nixon penned in his diary. Impeachment! That quaint constitutional weapon wielded by Radical Republicans against Andrew Johnson after the Civil War suddenly led Congress’s agenda.

  The president, facing his career’s end, was thinking about its beginning. “Don’t assume that the time to run for an office is only when it is a sure thing,” he exhorted a convention of Young Republicans. “Show me a candidate who is not a hungry candidate,” he said, harking back to the night he and Pat had called the happiest of all. “Show me a candidate who isn’t willing to take a risk and risk all, even risk losing, and I will show you a lousy candidate.”

  There followed an eerie coincidence of the kind that had haunted Richard Nixon since he met John Kennedy that first day in Congress. It occurred on a suburban Virginia road just across the Potomac River from Washington. The next day’s Washington Post had the first report:

  A car driven by Murray Chotiner, long-time Nixon adviser, collided with a US government truck Wednesday morning and rolled into another car. It happened on Old Chain Bridge Road in McLean in front of the home of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) who called police.

  The Nixons attended the funeral, paying homage to the man who had once told a young candidate that he needed some “meat” in his campaign, then went out and found it for him. It was Chotiner, too, who had ripped up Nixon’s 1952 telegram quitting the Eisenhower ticket in those purgatorial hours after the Checkers speech but before the great war general declared Nixon his “boy.”

  Even as the president laid to rest the man who had tutored him in the art of attack politics, he found himself staring into his own political grave. In April, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed tapes of forty-three White House conversations. Desperate, Nixon appeared on prime-time television next to a stack of green binders containing the transcripts of the subpoenaed White House recordings. But his attempt to duplicate the success of Checkers was a flop. In his 1952 TV address, he had crushed a scandal by offering a full disclosure of his dealings. Now, twenty-two years later, he was resisting full disclosure, carrying on the cover-up. The transcripts he offered as a concession to his prosecutors only hurt Nixon’s case by letting the public hear how a president, Quaker or not, talks when the network mikes aren’t listening. “Expletive deleted” was now a household phrase.

  The death knell continued. In May, Leon Jaworski sent word that the Watergate grand jury had named the president of the United States an “un-indicted co-conspirator” in the Watergate cover-up. For the first time, Nixon sat in his Executive Office hideaway and listened to the “smoking gun” tape from June 23, the conversation with Bob Haldeman in which he had ordered him to link the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters to the debacle of the Bay of Pigs. Nixon knew that he could not let even his own lawyers hear him tell his chief of staff to have the CIA obstruct the FBI’s probe of the Democratic National Committee break-in.

  For the man in the White House bunker, it was now simply a matter of playing out his hand. In June, Nixon toured Egypt with President Anwar Sadat as millions lined the streets to mark the Arab country’s shift from Soviet to American ally. Next came a meeting with Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. Even in the Soviet capital he could not escape his pursuers. Ted Kennedy, building up his foreign policy credentials for a presidential run in 1976, had beaten him to a private session with the Communist leader. Attempting to make the best of the situation, Nixon told Brezhnev, with locker-room bravado, of the benefit of having both political parties exposed to the new American-Soviet détente. “Let’s get them all a little pregnant.”

  Kennedy was experiencing a family matter of a far different sort. His eldest son, Teddy, Jr., had his right leg amputated due to cancer. The father was still accompanying the son for regular hospital treatments, with the outlook still precarious.

  A man who, like Nixon, had always seemed diminished by his brother’s idealized reputation now experienced his own fallout from Watergate. The revelations about the Nixon henchmen rooting around in the sands of Chappaquiddick had left their mark. So, too, had the national obsession with Nixon’s misdeeds, which forced a new look at Kennedy’s, if only as a counterbalance. In July, the New York Times Magazine published a long article on Chappaquiddick by investigative reporter Robert Sherrill. In a comprehensive review of the episode, which became a news story in itself, the author warned that his assault on Kennedy’s explanation of the incident would not be the last. “If Kennedy, who is now obviously making tentative runs at the Democratic Presidential nomination for 1976, should officially announce his candidacy, then the post-Watergate press would be obl
iged to subject him to the same demands.”

  Out of camera eye, however, the senator from Massachusetts continued to work toward Nixon’s downfall. As the Judiciary Committee prepared to vote on impeachment, Nixon was counting on support from the panel’s diehard southern Democrats. But when he called George Wallace to ask for help with Alabama congressman Walter Flowers, the governor politely but firmly put the president off. He had not examined the evidence sufficiently, Wallace told Nixon. Though he was praying for the president, he just didn’t think it proper to telephone the congressman. Chief of staff Alexander Haig would be convinced that Wallace had been gotten to by none other than Ted Kennedy himself. “That’s the presidency!” Nixon told his staff chief after receiving word that this last bastion had fallen.

  In late July, the Supreme Court ruled, by unanimous vote, that Nixon must turn over the subpoenaed tapes, including the June 23 smoking gun. But without even waiting to hear them, the House Judiciary Committee voted the first article of impeachment. Facing the horrors of a trial in the U.S. Senate, Nixon decided to resign. As drivers honked horns on Pennsylvania Avenue and passersby yelled, “Jail to the Chief,” speechwriter Ray Price chatted with his friend the president on what he wanted to tell the country. “We talked a bit about handling the point about his resignation’s being the equivalent of impeachment. Nixon mentioned his taped instruction to staff chief Haldeman to use the ‘Bay of Pigs’ as a cover for Watergate. ‘That six-minute conversation,’ Nixon called it. ‘It was a stupid damn thing—but wrong.’ That was the heart of the crime.”

  Henry Kissinger tried to comfort Nixon in his last presidential hours. “History will treat you more kindly than your contemporaries,” he prophesied.

  “It depends on who writes the history,” answered the man who feared from the moment he entered the White House that his enemies, those Kennedy-enchanted scholars, were already busy writing him off.

  On the evening of August 8, Richard Nixon, the thirty-seventh president of the United States, went on national television to wrest some hint of grandeur from the ignoble verdict he was now forced to ratify. He quoted from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech to the Sorbonne about the man in the arena “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly . . . and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” Yet even as he celebrated the struggle, the sixty-one-year-old president knew deep in his soul that he had forever squandered the prize.

  * * *

  THE last morning of his presidency, resigned to his fate and to the long, red-carpeted walk to the helicopter, Nixon offered a less guarded farewell. He tried, at first, to say, as JFK had, that life is unfair. He spoke of his father, who sold his lemon ranch not knowing there was oil beneath it. The son, too, was now forfeiting a property before tapping its wealth. “Nobody will ever write a book, probably, about my mother,” he said, referring to the family-produced Rose Kennedy autobiography that had come out that spring. “Yes, she will have no books written about her, but she was a saint.” Then he spoke about himself. “Always remember, others may hate you—but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

  This is what had happened.

  EPILOGUE

  Twilight Struggle

  THE abrupt ending of Richard Nixon’s presidency didn’t stop the campaign he had initiated from reviving public indignation at the part Teddy Kennedy had played in the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Nixon was no longer in the White House, but neither would his enemy be. Barry Goldwater had gotten it right: His foes, after getting Nixon thrown out for his sins, suddenly found their own weighed heavier. “In going over the side, Richard Nixon may have taken Edward Kennedy down with him,” decreed New York Times columnist William V. Shannon.

  Still, for a while, Kennedy refused to acknowledge the fallout. Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor represented a “dual standard of justice,” Teddy said, raising the very charge that so many made about the lenient treatment given him after Chappaquiddick. “Nobody drowned at Watergate,” former congresswoman Clare Booth Luce smugly declared. Two weeks after the pardon, Senator Kennedy, burdened already by family concerns, announced that he would not seek the presidency in 1976. As before, Nixon remained skeptical, convinced that his nemesis was only indulging in subterfuge. From California, where he had gone into exile to recover and write his memoirs, word seeped out that he was predicting that Kennedy would not only run in 1976 but would win.

  Teddy Kennedy’s noncandidacy, however, would now prove more durable than it first appeared. Only forty-two and in good health, Edward M. Kennedy would never again find an open window of presidential opportunity. Though he tried once in 1980, an incumbent Democrat, Jimmy Carter, stood in his way. When veteran CBS correspondent Roger Mudd asked the senator on his family lawn in Hyannis Port why he wanted to be president, the candidate-to-be offered a meandering response that showed how much the Kennedy vision had faded into myth and memory.

  Well . . . I’m . . . were I to make the announcement and to run . . . the reasons that I would run is because I have a great belief in this country that is . . . there’s more . . . more natural resources than any nation of the world; and the greatest political system in the world . . . the energies and resourcefulness of this nation . . . I think . . . should be focused on these problems in a way that brings a sense of restoration.

  It took seventy-one words to reach the secret password, “restoration.” But its power was dissipated. Twenty years after the Great Debate, a decade past the 1960s, six years after Richard Nixon’s banishment from office, the youngest brother’s strongest claim to the nation’s highest office was a fading glimmer of what was. Even against a weakened opponent like Carter, the Kennedy magic could no longer work miracles.

  Though he would become one of history’s most productive senators, his White House run lacked a rationale. Not until the fight was lost did Kennedy find the words to excite the nostalgic legions. “For me a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end,” he told teary-eyed delegates to the Democratic National Convention. “But for all those whose cares are our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

  But if the brother was able to reprise Mozart’s music only briefly, the Salieri of this saga could not get it out of his ears. In The Real War, published in 1981, Nixon struck yet again at the role Jack Kennedy had played in the death of South Vietnam president Diem. “The most charitable interpretation of the Kennedy Administration’s part in this affair is that it greased the skids for Diem’s downfall and did nothing to prevent his murder. It was a sordid episode in American foreign policy.” And five years later, Nixon renewed the attack with In the Arena. America’s role in Diem’s death proved it was “dangerous to be a friend of the United States.” It also made the Vietnam struggle an American war, he said. “When the Kennedy administration destabilized South Vietnam by conspiring in a coup to overthrow the government of South Vietnam, which led to the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem, the resulting political and military chaos forced the Johnson administration to intervene massively to prevent defeat.”

  The Kennedy side also stayed alert to opportunity. When Robert Bork was nominated by Ronald Reagan for the Supreme Court in 1987, the man who had been willing to fire Archibald Cox now had to take the consequences. As hearings opened on the nomination, Edward Kennedy soberly listed his charges against the court nominee to the Senate Judiciary Committee, citing especially the former solicitor general’s bias toward “presidential power.” The allusion to the “Saturday Night Massacre” was unmistakable. With Kennedy fanning the flames, the Judiciary Committee decisively buried the nomination.

  With the end of the cold war, marked by the failure of the 1991 Moscow coup, the former president began a strange rapprochement with the ghost of the rival he had bested only by surviving. In a 1992 speech to a Washington crowd packed with old advisers and foreign policy hands, he recalled the histor
ic votes he and Kennedy both had cast for the Greek-Turkish aid bill back in 1947. “It was a very tough vote for two very young and both, as history later indicated, rather ambitious young congressmen.” He proudly described that initial stand as one that “not only contained communism but bought the time that was essential for communism to fail.”

  Nixon was trying to salve the bitterness of his personal struggle by sharing the victory over the common enemy. One rival had dared an ambivalent world to “come to Berlin” and see the difference between the two systems. The other had retorted to Khrushchev’s boast that America’s “grandchildren will live under communism” with the promise that the Soviet leader’s would live “in freedom.” In paying tribute to the votes Kennedy and he had cast for the Truman Doctrine, Nixon was trying to rekindle the common purpose and nobility of the global struggle those two young congressmen had seen coming on that long-ago midnight train back from that first debate in Pennsylvania.

  In 1992, a young Democratic presidential candidate, Bill Clinton, used as his emblem a 1963 film that showed a moment when he had shaken John F. Kennedy’s hand at a White House ceremony for high school students. Less emblematic but more poignant was advice the new Clinton team received from H. R. Haldeman at the funeral of Pat Nixon in 1993. “Tell them not to make the mistakes that we did,” the Watergate-era staff chief told a close friend of the newly inaugurated president. Clinton would become the first president to welcome Richard Nixon back to the White House as an adviser.

  In one of his last public utterances, Richard Nixon wrote an introduction to a volume of Winston Churchill quotes that he recommended to “aspiring world leaders.” It was meant without irony, as if there really were such young men abroad in the land as he and Jack Kennedy.

  When John Kennedy’s son and namesake passed the New York bar exam, Nixon sent him a message of kind congratulation. “I have endured a few crises in my lifetime,” he noted dryly. “I’m sure your father would be very proud of you.” And when a close Nixon staffer made a derisive crack about a speech John F. Kennedy, Jr., had delivered, it got him a firm rebuke from a seventy-five-year-old Nixon.