Driven Apart by Ambition
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
Driven Apart Ambition Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America By Christopher Matthews Simon & Schuster. 377pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Steven V. Roberts Senior writer, U.S. News...
...But who had the last laugh...
...That's no accident, and no criticism...
...Kennedy and Nixon were thrown together partly by accident...
...More accurately, it was shaped bv postwar America...
...The bond between Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon was to some extent rooted in the experiences shared by all politicians: uncertain elections, family stress, media scrutiny...
...Similar chewy nuggets are sprinkled liberally throughout this breezy and buoyant tale that sometimes reads like a treatment for a TV movie...
...The incident is striking because it highlights the contemporary polarization of the two parties along ideological lines...
...It was Ted as well who engineered the appointment of Archibald Cox, an old Kennedy family ally, as the special prosecutor who eventually helped bring Nixon down...
...The Kennedy-Nixon relationship did not shape postwar America...
...Nixon made good on his vow...
...Kennedy and Nixon were alike in another respect, too: They were both modern politicians, pioneers in the use of television...
...He is no historian, however, and his book does not deliver on its overambi-tious subtitle...
...But Washington is also filled with people whose relationships do not follow obvious political lines—then you find out that the friends attend the same church, play tennis or golf together, or have kids on the same soccer team...
...Kennedy, who called himself a "fighting conservative" in the 1946 campaign, is described as a "moderate liberal, but with many conservative leanings...
...It is a tragedy of history that both men were trapped—by their Cold War perspectives and political imperatives—into pursuing a military solution in Indochina that they knew, in their hearts, was doomed to failure...
...Truth in labeling here: I met Chris when he worked for O'Neill and I was covering Congress for the New York Times, and we have remained friends ever since...
...I vowed," he wrote of the Kennedys, "that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them...
...Both came to Congress in 1946 and were assigned to the Education and Labor Committee...
...Christopher Matthews writes of the aides who thought of the stunt: "Even in the Technicolor setting, their boss bore no resemblance to the nautical Jack tacking his sailboat in Nantucket Sound or the barefoot Bobby running his dog along the same strand...
...When Kennedy ran—briefly and unsuccessfully —for the Vice Presidential nomination in 1956, he warned Democrats that the second man on the GOP ticket would take the "low road" in the campaign...
...Just as a whole generation of journalists tried to emulate the exploits of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the young reporters who cracked open Watergate, several generations of politicians have tried to copy the wit and the flair of the Kennedys...
...Nixon wanted to bequeath his political legacy to John B. Connally, the former Democrat who was shot in Dallas riding next to JFK...
...Read carefully, Kennedy's Inaugural Address, remembered today for its soaring rhetoric, was a muscular defense of America's Cold War mission...
...Both men always looked at the world from a bit of an angle, a posture that enabled them to challenge established party leaders and orthodoxy at an early age...
...The Democrat voted for an amendment that weakened the Civil Rights Act of 1957, while Nixon denounced it...
...Later, Nixon became convinced that Kennedy had stolen the election from him, and it was a lesson Nixon never forgot...
...The young President's two worst blunders—military adventures against Fidel Castro in Cuba and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam—were both spurred by the fear, figuratively if not literally, that Nixon would brand him soft on the Red Menace...
...As Matthews carefully documents, the main motive for the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex was a desire to dig up dirt on Larry O'Brien, the old Kennedy confidant who was then party chairman...
...Nevertheless, they were smart enough to realize, after separate journeys to Southeast Asia during the 1950s, that siding with the puppet regimes in Saigon against the nationalist forces of Ho Chi Minh would never succeed...
...That sounds strange, since Kennedy outdueled Nixon so dramatically in the first debate of the 1960 campaign...
...Cameramen were escorted to a bluff overlooking the beach and encouraged to record a pensive President strolling alone along the water's edge...
...The author is an engaging Irish storyteller in the tradition of his great mentor and one-time boss, former House Speaker Tip O'Neill...
...When Caroline was born, Nixon sent Kennedy a telegram welcoming him to the "Father-Daughter Club...
...I can't tell you how many voters I have met over the years who cast their last Democratic ballot for Jack Kennedy (or perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson), and have voted solidly Republican since 1968...
...The two were guests at McCarthy's wedding and Kennedy, whose sister Pat briefly dated the junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, called him a "great American patriot...
...Indeed, the word "Ken-nedyesque" became part of our political vocabulary, and it is still used 33 years after JFK's assassination to describe anyone with vibrant good looks and a full head of hair...
...The Vice President was the only outsider invited to Kennedy's office birthday parties...
...In fact, during the '50s, Nixon was more pro-civil rights than Kennedy...
...Kennedy replied that Nixon was a "very dangerous man...
...It was Ted Kennedy who used his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to launch the first investigation of Watergate...
...The Kennedys won the battle in 1960, and again in 1974...
...Each in his own way was an iconoclast, suspicious of established wealth and social position...
...Both Kennedy and Nixon admired Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and, like him, were unhappy with the established leadership of the State Department...
...At his prep school, Choate, Kennedy formed the "Muckers," a group of hell-raisers named for an ill-fated plan to dump a load of manure on the school's dance floor...
...Matthews has done an excellent job of collecting and collating Kennedy-Nixon lore, though, and many of his observations are fascinating...
...Matthews himself reports how on New Year's Eve of 1959, Kennedy told Bartlett that should he fail to win the Democratic nomination in 1960, he would vote for Nixon...
...The indelible image of a wing-tipped, windblown Nixon symbolizes his lifelong obsession with the Kennedys, which led to the self-immolation of Watergate a few years later...
...What ultimately drove Kennedy and Nixon apart was clashing ambition...
...A single example: Jacqueline Kennedy apparently harbored a real affection for Nixon...
...During the early months of their first term, both testified before the powerful Rules Committee on labor-reform legislation...
...Kennedy and Nixon shared something else: a pragmatic, nonideological makeup that drew them both toward the political center...
...It also neglects the brilliant way Nixon used TV in 1968 to control and manipulate what the voters learned about him...
...Matthews reports that right after that speech Nixon grabbed Kennedy's hand "in exultant tribute for giving the sort of Cold War call to arms that saluted both men's world views...
...Yet that one image neglects the fact that Nixon, eight years earlier, had shrewdly used television to deliver his famous "Checkers" speech and save his place on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's ticket...
...When they finally faced off against each other in 1960, Nixon called Kennedy a "bare-faced liar...
...If Kennedy mesmerized Nixon, Kennedy was driven by Nixon, or at least by the ideas he represented, particularly anti-Communism...
...At his college, Whittier, Nixon organized the "Orthogonians," an association of the "bean boys," the lower-class commoners who were shunned by the "tuxedo boys...
...But in an important sense, Nixon won the war...
...But it was Richard Nixon who made Reagan possible...
...In the end it was another former Democrat, Ronald Reagan, who inherited and expanded the Nixon coalition...
...He's going places...
...The photos printed in the local newspaper the next day, notes Matthews, revealed the "charisma gap" between the tanned, confident Kennedy and the swarthy, shifty-eyed Nixon—a gap that would help decide the Presidential election 13 years later...
...News and World Report DURING RICHARD M.NIXON'S first term in the White House, a photo op was arranged to liven up a vacation trip to San Clemente...
...Although that led directly to Watergate, his obsession with the Kennedys proved to be valid...
...Both were Navy officers in the Pacific during World War II...
...Remember: The Selling of the President was written about the Nixon campaign of 1968, not the Kennedy campaign of 1960...
...Centrists like Kennedy and Nixon, who work easily across party lines, are a dying breed on Capitol Hill...
...In 1947, the two first-termers actually debated each other before a civic group in McKeesport, Pennsylvania...
...Eventually he became a cartoon figure, a target of late-night comedians and a caricature of the bloated liberal that Republicans have been running against for a generation...
...He did this by converting many voters—call them hard-hats, or Reagan Democrats, or members of the Silent Majority—who saw the Democrats as out-of-step with their values and traditions...
...Never," it said, "have I seen such magnanimity and such tenderness...
...The historic forces that molded both men gave them a common view of the world...
...Everybody remembers Nixon's Red-baiting, but it was Kennedy who ran for the Senate in 1952 by accusing the incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge, of backing President Harry S. Truman's "appeasing policy" in Asia...
...A few months before his death, Kennedy told his friend Charles Bartlett: "I can't give a piece of territory to the Communists and then get the American people to re-elect me...
...Matthews unearthed an article in the Winchester (Virginia) Evening Star from 1958 that describes Nixon as a "moderate conservative, though with some liberal tendencies...
...And Ted Kennedy...
...His feeble attempt to mimic the Kennedy style was washed away by a tidal wave of ridicule...
...Despite his disgrace, Nixon helped forge a Republican coalition that has dominated Presidential politics for the last generation...
...But Nixon's was not a solitary obsession...
...Now a newspaper columnist and TV commentator, Matthews has a keen eye for the apt quote, the telling anecdote, the memorable epigram...
...One problem: Nixon was wearing black shoes...
...The single biggest issue that united Kennedy and Nixon, of course, was anti-Communism...
...Mark Dalton, a Kennedy aide at the time, remembers his boss whispering to him as Nixon was speaking: "Listen to this fellow...
...One was written in 1971, after the Nixons invited Mrs...
...she sent him numerous notes over the years that conveyed her warmth and regard...
...In the last election, more than 80 per cent of the self-described liberals voted Democratic, and an equal percentage of the conservatives backed the GOP...
...In 1952, after Nixon was elected Vice President and Kennedy went to the Senate, they were assigned offices directly across the hall from each other, and their friendship blossomed...
...His bid for the Presidency, which Nixon feared in 1972, failed miserably in 1980...
...Kennedy and her children to visit the White House...
...Nixon wrote a letter sponsoring Kennedy for membership in the Burning Tree golf club...
Vol. 79 • August 1996 • No. 5
