Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [106]
In a colorful episode, O’Donnell arranged a discreet meeting between Kennedy and Richard Gosser, “very much the old-school labor union type of fellow and not of the new-breed Reuther type.” Accompanying Gosser were his handlers, who “looked like wrestlers and like they might break a few legs when called upon. The senator shot me a look.”
Gosser confided to Jack that “the rank-and-file members of his locals were all without exception for John Kennedy” and that “all the resources that he could bring to bear in Ohio would be put at Senator Kennedy’s behest.”
O’Donnell recalled that Gosser “got very emotional, and while he was talking, his false teeth kept popping out. So, in between sentences, he’d reach up and shove them back in, with some force. The senator winced the first time, as it looked rather painful. Then, as Gosser kept doing it with every sentence, the senator would look over at me with that quizzical expression that said, ‘What have you gotten me into here?’ “ As comic as it was, it was a politically important meeting. Jack Kennedy was making allies he never could have imagined.
In all his years in politics to date, Jack Kennedy, the opposite of a joiner, had maintained his independence, and cherished it. He took special pride in not being part of the coalition of liberals and labor leaders dominating the Democratic scene of the 1950s. Yet, as he now moved to identify himself with them—he had begun calling himself a liberal—he was determined to preserve his separateness in private. “I always had a feeling that he regarded them as something apart from his philosophy,” Charlie Bartlett said. “I think he saw the liberals as the sort of people who ran like a pack.” Ben Bradlee concurred, with even greater bluntness: “He hated the liberals.”
Despite the fact that Vice President Richard Nixon was heavily favored to be his party’s candidate for the White House this time around—it was his turn—and despite Kennedy’s shots at him on the stump, friends of Jack knew he was anything but a Nixon hater. Whatever he might say out on the campaign trail, when at home he refused to join in when Nixon was being ridiculed. Ben Bradlee recalled how this annoyed Jack’s “card-carrying anti-Nixon friends.”
For example, one evening Jacqueline Kennedy had invited their old neighbors Joan and Arthur Gardner to dinner. There’d be just the two couples and Rose Kennedy, who was stopping by on her way to Palm Beach. Mrs. Gardner made a crack about the “dreadful” Richard Nixon, fully expecting her host to chime in with his agreement. He didn’t. “You have no idea what he’s been through,” Kennedy defended him. “Dick Nixon is the victim of the worst press that ever hit a politician in this country. What they did to him in the Helen Gahagan Douglas race was disgusting.”
Kennedy would take pains, even, to avoid hurting Nixon’s feelings. Arriving at a 1959 social event at which Nixon had reason to expect him, Kennedy changed his mind at the last second and decided it would be impolitic to be seen attending. Later, he stopped by the vice president’s office, with the apologetic explanation that he “did make it out there but at the last minute a crisis arose.” He’d had to avoid someone who was leaving just as he was arriving, he said, a person whom he’d rather didn’t know about his friendship with Dick. “Nixon is a nice fellow in private, and a very able man,” he would tell a British reporter around this time. “I worked with him on the Hill for a long time, but it seems he has a split personality and he is very bad in public, and nobody likes him.”
Charlie Bartlett