THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607150183
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BARRETT R. RICHARDSON
LENGTH: 101 lines
KENNEDY & NIXON
The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America
CHRISTOPHER MATTHEWS
Simon & Schuster. 375 pp. $25.
Syndicated columnist Christopher Matthews explores in fascinating detail the complex relationship between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon in his new book, Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America.
A former speech writer for President Jimmy Carter and a top aide to the late House Speaker Thomas P. ``Tip'' O'Neill, Jr., Matthews is the author of Hardball, a primer on politics. In Kennedy & Nixon, he documents numerous instances of hardball employed by the two political heavy hitters and rivals in a game that lasted for years.
``More than either man, it was the rivalry itself that marked and drove the era,'' Matthews observes.
Ironically, before they got on a collision course, Kennedy and Nixon moved congenially along parallel tracks after service in World War II. In many ways the war was the engine that propelled their careers.
Ex-Navy officer Nixon entered politics with a $10,000 nest egg fattened by poker games won in the Pacific. Kennedy, another Navy Pacific Theater veteran, was better bankrolled, with Papa Joe inundating Massachusetts with politically oriented ``philanthropy'' - $600,000 went to the archdiocese of Boston alone - during his son'sfirst run for office.
By a variety of strategies, Joseph Kennedy managed to ``parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into a political advantage,'' as Jack Kennedy recalls.
When the votes were counted on Nov. 5, 1946, two newcomers were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives: Richard Milhous Nixon, then 33, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 29. The next day, a portent surfaced when The Los Angeles Times reported Californian Nixon's victory on Page 2 while displaying on Page 1 the story of a victory 3,000 miles away headlined ``Son of Kennedy Congress Winner.''
Within a week after taking office, Kennedy and Nixon debated head-to-head in McKeesport, Pa., over the Taft-Hartley bill - Nixon being fiercely in favor, Kennedy mildly against. Although both men scored points with the audience, Kennedy won the media battle. A newspaper photograph showed him tanned and smiling, in contrast to his opponent, who displayed a hunted look and a ``beard that had passed well beyond its five-o'clock shadow.''
In their early congressional careers, both men became active Red hunters at home and backed Communist containment policies abroad. But Nixon got more national exposure with his pursuit of State Department official Alger Hiss.
In 1950 Nixon's career train edged ahead when he defeated incumbent Sen. Helen Gahagan Douglass. Two years later Sen. Nixon was elected vice president, while his rival Kennedy beat Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts for a Senate seat. Ironically, the two men were assigned spaces across the hall in the Senate Office Building where, Matthews writes, ``for the next eight years they would work and plot their ambitions within a few feet of each other.''
While the country at large perceived them as operating in wholly different spheres, they were, to quote Kennedy's secretary Evelyn Lincoln, ``two men on third, each continuing to eye home plate while keeping a wary eye on the other.''
As vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nixon was often subjected to his boss' coolness and disdain, Matthews says - once Ike even suggested that Nixon consider another line of work. Eisenhower reluctantly accepted Nixon on his re-election ticket.
Meanwhile, Kennedy rode the publicity tide of success from his 1956 book Profiles in Courage, which later received a Pulitzer Prize, while striving for a spot on the Democratic presidential ticket. When the party chose Sen. Estes Kefauver for the No. 2 spot in 1956, the ambitious young senator had his first political setback. This defeat turned Kennedy from a ``dilettante to professional'' politician, Matthews notes.
Throughout their careers Nixon and Kennedy were conscious of the need for good media images. Nixon was obsessed by what he felt was Kennedy's favorable press, in contrast to his own. Even Kennedy said on one occasion during Nixon's vice presidency, ``Dick Nixon is the victim of the worst press that ever hit a politician in this country.''
Kennedy projected effortless charm in contrast to Nixon's awkward heaviness, and Kennedy had the advantage of a publicity buildup worthy of a matinee idol.
``Thanks to his concession speech at the 1956 convention and his Pulitzer, (Kennedy) had become a figure of glamour around the country,'' Matthews observes. More favorable exposure came from a Time magazine cover story and the chronicle of his PT-109 exploits on the Navy Log television series.
Matthews gives a lively account of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race of 1960 and of Nixon's subsequent failed run for the California governorship against incumbent Edmund G. ``Pat'' Brown. He also highlights events such as Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Vietnam turmoil of both the Kennedy and the Nixon administrations, and Watergate.
Nixon's presidency and the impact of Kennedy's legacy, ironically, were inextricably intertwined.
Matthews's historical facts are not new, but his perspective creates high drama worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. Two intelligent, ambitious men, the one talented, but frustrated by the charismatic genius of the other, lock in eternal struggle. MEMO: Barrett R. Richardson is a retired staff editor who lives in
Portsmouth. ILLUSTRATION: FILE
The two protagonists meet on the 1960 presidential campaign trail. by CNB