Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry that Shaped America. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1996 by Richard Reeves

The title of this book, Kennedy & Nixon, promises a great deal and delivers a good deal: the fascinating coincidences and conflicts in the lives of the 35th and 37th presidents of the United States, the two young Navy lieutenants who came to Washington as congressmen in the 1946 elections and were assigned offices across the hall from each other.

Christopher Matthews, once a congressional staffer and now an all-purpose pundit, has a fme political eye and loves to tell a good story. This is a wonderful telling. He mixes some golden oldies with original material gathered in 50 or so new interviews with politicians who knew destiny's tots as their relationship progressed from a casual friendship to confrontation at the highest level.

The story of their different styles, hopes, and fears can be seen in the photographs each of them used in their 1946 campaigns. Lieutenant (senior grade) Nixon showed himself standing at attention in his dress blues. Lieutenant (junior grade) Kennedy is in the cockpit of his boat, PT-109, grinning, shirtless, wearing sunglasses and a fatigue cap. Which one would you want to spend time with?

As Matthews describes them: John R Kennedy was handsome, debonair, witty, wealthy ... He was by any measure the most beloved president of modem times ... He possessed an innate ability to be liked, to have people want him as a friend, lover, son, brother, leader... He had the gift.

"Richard Nixon won four national elections and might have won a fifth [Matthews seems to believe that the 1960 Presidential election was stolen Richard Reeves, author of President Kennedy: Profile of Power, is working on a book about the Presidency of Richard Nixon. from Nixon].... Yet he could not best John F. Kennedy.... Bereft of spontaneity, he drafted and rehearsed his speeches for hours. Ill at ease, he briefed himself before even the most casual of meetings." In marvelous but overstated shorthand, Matthews is too kind to Kennedy and too cruel to Nixon, characterizing them as "a Mozart against a Salieri."

But whatever the charms or lack thereof of Kennedy and Nixon, the author cannot deliver on the book's subtitle: "The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America."

The thesis of the book, widely accepted these days, is that Nixon was obsessed with Kennedy and his ease of acquisition and ascent, and that Nixon destroyed himself by trying to be what he was not--crashing first in pursuit of Kennedy's dazzling company, and then of his many secrets. That may be roughly true, though I think this claim and reports of the men's friendship are both exaggerated. But neither the rivalry nor the pursuit made America what it was in those days or these.

In fact, the rivalry was political. It involved ambition and image. Substantively, in terms of governing as opposed to speechmaking and wisecracks, there was not a great difference between the two young men in competition, as Matthews puts it, "to be the great young leader of post-world War Ill America."

Each did extraordinary things, but neither shaped America--America and the concerns of the day shaped them. Matthews, who has a gift for recognizing the telling political moment, telegraphs the ironic and eventually limited nature of the rivalry between two ambitious and calculating moderates when he describes their 1946 campaigns for the House of Representatives. Kennedy of Massachusetts called himself "a fighting conservative." Nixon of California advertised his "progressive liberalism." In the end, these fascinating political rivals both governed within the liberal anti-communist consensus of their time. Remember, JFK defeated RN by saying he would be tougher than the Republicans in dealing with communists in Cuba and in China. Domestic issues? There seemed to be none, except for some odd restlessness among the "Negroes." And Kennedy's Inaugural Address was devoted entirely to foreign affairs.

That said, Kennedy & Nixon was a hell of an idea for a book. Matthews, who toiled for the late Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill Jr., has made good use of his experience and congressional contacts to bring the House of the 1940s to life in this setting. Kennedy and Nixon were both more friendly and more likable before the stakes of their game got higher and higher.

But this "friendship" goes mostly one-way. Nixon is the one pursuing Kennedy. He wants to be his friend. Kennedy, as careless as Daisy Buchanan, is not looking for friendship. He lives to be pursued and to accept or reject the suitor as it serves his interests or amuses him. Poor Dick Nixon.

I enjoyed this book, particularly the new anecdotes that Matthews has engagingly extracted from people I would have thought interviewed-out or who have been ignored for all these years. The most amazing of them, at least to me, came from an interview with Evan Thomas Jr., the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek, about his father, who edited Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage.

There have always been stories speculating on the intrigue and the process use: April, 20, 1961, that led to Kennedy's winning the Pulitzer Prize for history m 1955, a prize of incalculable political value for a young Senator of no great distinction. Thomas tells Matthews that Kennedy called his father, Evan Sr., before the prize juries met and even before the book was published, and said: "We've got the Pulitzer!"