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  ALSO BY CHRIS MATTHEWS

  Kennedy & Nixon

  Hardball

  Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think American

  Life’s a Campaign

  Simon & Schuster

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  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2011 by Christopher J. Matthews

  Photo Editor: Vincent Virga

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition October 2011

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978–1–4516–3508–9

  ISBN 978–1–4516–3510–2 (ebook)

  Photo credits can be found on p. 479.

  To Kathleen

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER ONE: SECOND SON

  CHAPTER TWO: THE TWO JACKS

  CHAPTER THREE: SKIPPER

  CHAPTER FOUR: WAR HERO

  CHAPTER FIVE: COLD WARRIOR

  CHAPTER SIX: BOBBY

  CHAPTER SEVEN: MAGIC

  CHAPTER EIGHT: SURVIVAL

  CHAPTER NINE: DEBUT

  CHAPTER TEN: CHARM

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: HARDBALL

  CHAPTER TWELVE: CHARISMA

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: LANDING

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: ZENITH

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: GOALS

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: LEGACY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  JACK KENNEDY

  At the peak of the Cold War, an American president saved his country and the world from a nuclear war. How did Jack Kennedy gain the cold detachment to navigate this perilous moment in history? What prepared him to be the hero we needed?

  This is my attempt to explain the leader Jacqueline Kennedy called “that unforgettable, elusive man.”

  1

  PREFACE

  I grew up in a Republican family. My own political awakening began in 1952, when I was six. I remember riding the school bus to Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. One of my classmates was a boy whose father was a Democratic committeeman in Somerton, our remote Philadelphia hamlet bordering Bucks County. I felt sorry for him because he was the only kid for Stevenson. It seemed everybody I knew was for Ike.

  Back then, even though we kids were small, our souls were large. We had a sense of things we weren’t supposed to understand. I knew that Adlai Stevenson was an “egghead.” My father said he “talked over the heads of people.” There was distance between us and those like Stevenson. We were regular people.

  My older brother, Bert, and I spent our days fighting World War II and the Korean War in our backyard. I knew General Eisenhower had fought in what Mom and Dad always called “the war.” It made him a hero. Once I was sitting with Dad at a movie theater when a newsreel came on showing Eisenhower making his return from NATO in Europe, boarding an airplane and waving. I wondered whether he was president and turned to my right to ask my father this. “No,” came the answer, “but he will be.”

  One outcome of World War II was to offer Catholics their opening to join the American mainstream. My mother once told us how the big milk company in Philadelphia used to ask for religion on its job application. The correct answer, she explained, was any one of the Protestant denominations. “Catholic” meant you didn’t get the job. What I know for sure is that in the early 1950s we were still making an effort to fit in.

  Looking back, I can’t count how many times we first and second graders found ourselves marching up and down Bustleton Avenue in front of Maternity carrying little flags. I don’t even know which holidays we were celebrating; maybe none. But there we were, mini–George M. Cohans offering up some endless display of our American regularness. All this actually happened, this postwar assimilation of Catholics, and it’s a key part of the story I’m telling.

  Those were the early boomer years. And a boom it was. We had a hundred kids in our first grade, more than would fit in a classroom, so they had to put us in the auditorium.

  I remember an afternoon in 1956 that’s hard to believe now. What’s strange about it to me is the way it marks a before-and-after moment in time. History changed. It was July, and we were listening to the radio in our two-tone ’54 Chevy Bel Air.

  It was broadcasting the balloting from the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The fight to become the party’s vice-presidential candidate was on between Kefauver—a name I knew from listening to the news, just as I knew the name Nixon—and now, out of nowhere, this candidate named Kennedy. We’d never heard of him. It was an Irish name.

  So, because he was a known quantity—Kefauver, a brand name—I was happy when the Tennessee senator won, finally, on the second ballot. The name I knew had beaten the other name. Isn’t that how most voting seems to be, voting for the name you recognize, rooting for its victory, and all the time having no real idea who the person is?

  Yet, looking back on this event, that Democratic National Convention of over a half-century ago, an image from it remains frozen in my mind’s eye. The truth is, it’s a picture that entered my consciousness and stayed there. What I still see, as clearly as if it were yesterday, is that giant hall with its thousands of cheering delegates, its chaos then suddenly punctuated by the appearance onstage of a young stranger. It was John F. Kennedy, who had just lost the nomination to Estes Kefauver; swiftly he came through the crowd and up to the podium in order to ask that his opponent’s victory be made by acclamation. He was releasing his delegates and requesting unity, and, in making this important gesture, he seemed both confident and gracious. It was the first look the country at large had had of him, a figure we would come to know so well, one who would soon mean so much to us, to me.

  I was ten at the time.

  I was becoming increasingly obsessed with politics. Two years later, on the midterm election night in 1958, I was backing the GOP candidates, among them Hugh Scott, who won his fight that night to be junior senator from Pennsylvania in an upset. In New York, the Republican candidate, Nelson Rockefeller, defeated the Democrat Averell Harriman, the incumbent governor. My father, a court reporter working for the city of Philadelphia, offered a kind remark about the patrician Harriman, saying he looked sad. It was one of those rare, memorable times when Dad would step out of his workaday world to make such a comment, or to quote from a poem he’d learned in school.

  By 1960, I was a paperboy for the Philadelphia Bulletin, and suddenly, as I started reading the daily afternoon paper I was throwing onto people’s lawns, my loyalties were challenged. Now I was following Jack Kennedy in that year’s primaries and enthusiastically rooting for him. He was Catholic, after all, and I felt the pull. Yet all the while I followed his trail through New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, I knew that, in the end, I’d
wind up supporting Nixon, his opponent.

  That’s because, by this time, I’d become not merely a member of a Republican family but a Republican myself. Yet here I found myself entranced by the spectacle of the glamorous JFK winning his party’s nomination.

  And not only was I cheering the idea of Jack occupying the White House for the next eight years, by the time of the Los Angeles convention I was dreaming of the “happily ever after”—the succession of his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, elected to follow JFK with his own two terms; then, after that, Bobby and Teddy. Momentarily dazzled, I was caught up by the romance of dynasty.

  I’d lived my boyhood reading the biographies of great men. From a young age I’d gone from one to the next and been taken with the notion of leaders’ destinies. For every birthday and Christmas, Grandmom had made it her regular practice to buy me a book on the life of a famous historic figure. First it was the Young American series, then the Landmark books. I remember ones on Davy Crockett and Abe Lincoln, while others told stories of iconic events such as the Civil War sea battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack.

  The first book I got from the little public library next to Maternity was an illustrated biography of Alexander the Great. And so that’s who I was in 1960—a kid who had this gut interest in history and liked reading biographies of heroes.

  The Democratic Convention of 1960 was in Los Angeles. Now it was the Republicans’ turn in Chicago. I followed the events gavel to gavel, either watching on television or going to bed listening to the radio. I remember the jaunty, optimistic strains of “California, Here I Come!” repeatedly erupting whenever Nixon’s name was mentioned. Caught up in the Republican spirit, I once again shifted my allegiance.

  Nixon had reexerted his pull over me. I saw him as the scrappy challenger. I was rooting for the underdog, who was also the one who deserved it. Nixon was tough on fighting the Russians. He’d held his ground in that Kitchen Table debate with Nikita Khrushchev over in Moscow. He and his running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, struck me as the more solid and seasoned candidates to take on the Cold War, to stop the Communist spread around the globe.

  On election night, as the returns started to come in, the early ones signaling their defeat, I was overwhelmed—and I cried. By a little after seven, I was drenched in the bad news.

  Yet the Matthews house was not as united as I have so far portrayed it. I remember asking my father whom he intended to vote for. When he said Nixon without hesitation, I challenged him. Weren’t we Catholic? Shouldn’t we be for Kennedy? “I’m a Republican” was his simple, all-explaining response. Dad stuck to his party loyalty. He was a Catholic convert and didn’t feel that tribal pull the way the all-Irish side of the family did. It was simple for him, even if he was willing to go so far as to allow how Jack Kennedy had “a touch of Churchill” about him. Interestingly, he also believed that in a fistfight between the two candidates there would be no contest: JFK would easily best Nixon, he declared. I’d raised the issue, and it seemed a matter of no little importance back then.

  My mother—born Mary Teresa Shields, Irish to the core—more resembled me in her responses to the political dilemma of our household. But I could tell she was keeping her sympathies to herself, as if to make less trouble in the house. One night, when I was drying the dishes alongside her as she washed them, I offered my opinion that it might be wrong to support Kennedy simply because of religion. It seemed to scrape a wound. She shot back that Grandmom, my father’s mother, from County Antrim, had become a citizen only in order to be able to cast her vote for Eisenhower, a fellow Presbyterian. Mom said it defensively. Don’t single me out, she was arguing, your dad’s side of the family was right out there voting religion, too.

  Mom’s dad, Charles Patrick Shields, was a classic Irishman and local Democratic committeeman. He worked the night shift as an inspector at a nearby plant, and left the house every week-day afternoon carrying his lunchbox and thermos. When he had on his peacoat and cap, he could have been heading off to work in County Cork. On Sundays he wore a three-piece suit to church at St. Stephen’s and kept it on all day, even when he’d come up to visit us in Somerton, which he called “God’s country.” He was right out of Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet.

  A favorite ritual of mine, when he retired, was accompanying him for long walks through the old neighborhoods, then stopping to buy the bulldog edition of the Inquirer on the way home. Once he’d finished reading it, sitting there under the mantelpiece, he’d fold the paper, look up at me, and say simply, “Christopher John.” I loved him and I always loved that moment, and we would talk politics forever.

  This conflict between being Catholic and Republican was a constant bother to me over the years. Yes, a lot of Catholics had voted for Eisenhower, but the old loyalties were deeply Democratic. The vote at LaSalle College High School, where I was going and where I argued the Kennedy-Nixon race at lunchtime, was 24 to 9 for Kennedy in my homeroom.

  Our family divisions along these lines never actually reached the level of a right-out-there dispute, but the business of voting either Republican or Catholic did raise the whole question of what we were. We could be Republican, but we were still mostly Irish. In the end, I never actually knew how Mom voted. Because of how I subsequently came to feel—and how I feel now—I hope it was Kennedy she cast her ballot for in the privacy of that curtained booth. Still, I confess that when the inauguration rolled around, on January 20, 1961, my loyalties remained with the loser.

  While my mother was ironing in our basement rec room, we watched the ceremonies as they took place in snowy Washington. She seemed upbeat, quietly happy about the event we were witnessing. I think.

  As for me, I moved rightward in the days of the New Frontier. I became a fan of Barry Goldwater, lured by his libertarian case for greater personal freedom. Like Hillary Clinton, herself a Goldwater Girl at the time, I would eventually change course. But even back then, I found John F. Kennedy the most interesting political figure of the day. I wanted to meet him, be in the same room with him, study him.

  A half century of political life later, my fascination with the elusive spirit of John F. Kennedy has remained an abiding one. He is both pathfinder and puzzle, a beacon and a conundrum. Whenever I spot the name in print, I stop to read. Anytime I’ve ever met a person who knew him—someone who was there with JFK in real time—I crave hearing his or her first-person memories.

  One significant opportunity to listen to firsthand Jack stories came when I spent a half dozen years in the 1980s working for Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., Speaker of the House of Representatives. His and Kennedy’s mutual history went way back in the arena of Boston politics, that fiercest of partisan battlefields. In 1946, when young Jack Kennedy was making his first political bid, in the primary race for the 11th Congressional District of Massachusetts, Tip actually had been in his opponent’s camp. Later, though, when Jack gained his Senate seat in ’52 after serving three terms in the House, Tip replaced him there, serving with him companionably for the next eight years.

  During the time I served as his administrative assistant—enjoying a front-row seat when Tip employed all his liberal conscience and veteran’s craft against that affable ideologue Ronald Reagan—I found I could occasionally get him, when he was in the right mood and time hung over us, to reminisce about the old days. It was like talking to Grandpop under the mantelpiece.

  I treasured hearing him tell how Boston mayor James Michael Curley “was corrupt even by the standards of those days” and what Richard Nixon, whom he’d helped bring down over Watergate, was like to play cards with: “talked too much; not a bad guy.” I’d listen eagerly, hardly able to believe my good fortune.

  Later, I got to know and became friends with Ben Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor and Kennedy chum. He quickly understood what an appreciative listener I was. And in the early 1990s, when I began to research my book on the surprising history of the Jack Kennedy–Dick Nixon relationship, with its fascin
ating backstory, I came to know such men as Charles Bartlett, Paul “Red” Fay, and Chuck Spalding, veteran JFK cronies all.

  Yet none of those encounters were enough. I wanted to get every possible look at him, see him from any angle that would help explain him. Was he a liberal as he’s been tagged, or was he a pragmatist open to liberal causes? Was he a rich boy pushed by his dad, buying into what his father had sold him on, or was he a self-made leader? Was he a legacy or a Gatsby? The hold JFK had begun to exert on my imagination and on my curiosity when I was a young boy never abated. Instead, it only increased with the passing decades.

  Before he came along, politics mostly meant gray men in three-piece suits, indoor types, sexless: Truman, Taft, Dewey, Kefauver, Eisenhower, Nixon. What he did was grip the country, quickening us. From the black-and-white world in which we’d been drifting we suddenly opened our eyes, feeling alive and energized, and saw Technicolor. JFK was wired into our central nervous system and juiced us. He sent us around the planet in the Peace Corps, and then rocketing beyond it to the moon.

  Most of all—and, to me, this is what matters above everything else—he saved us from the perilous fate toward which we were headed. All those ICBMs, all those loaded warheads: the Cold War Kennedy inherited was bound for Armageddon. It was just a matter of time—we thought, I thought—until there’d be nuclear war, that “World War III” dreaded in every heart.

  If you were a kid you didn’t have to read the newspapers to know this, for, unlike our elders, we were actually living it. Weekly drills sent us crouching under our little varnished wooden desks on command. Then, at one critical moment in the fall of 1962, a lone man, President John F. Kennedy, understood the danger clearly, pushed back against his advisors’ counsel of war and got us through. The hard-liners in Moscow and Washington, their backs up, were ready to fight. The word in the air was escalation. JFK found a way to deliver us.