Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [192]
316 “I want to repeat through this wire”: Telegram courtesy of Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace.
316 “Mr. O’Donnell, the president has”: KOD.
318 “Nixon was, in my opinion”: Author interview with Herb Klein.
318 “I think we are in enough trouble in the world today”: Richard Nixon, Six Crises (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), p. 404.
318 “It was the difference between”: Klein int.
319 “He had done it by driving home”: Time, November 16, 1960.
319 “He wisely decided to concentrate”: Schlesinger, Journals, p. 93.
319 “I know there is a God”: Jack Kennedy quoted these from Abraham Lincoln during a speech in Muncie, Indiana, on October 5, 1960.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: LANDING
321 urgent phone calls were placed: Bradlee, Conversations, pp. 33–34.
322 President-elect Kennedy put a pair of Republicans: Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, pp. 131–36.
322 McNamara, showing no lack of toughness: Ibid., p. 133.
322 Looking to the liberal faction: Reeves, President Kennedy, pp. 26–27.
322 Now, as always, concessions needed to be made: Bartlett OH. “I always had the feeling that the decision on Bobby was not made by the Presidentelect, but I think by his father. I think he took his father’s position on it. I never had the feeling that Bobby had any great burning desire to be attorney general, that this was really almost forced upon him.”
322 “I think I’ll open the front door”: Bradlee, Conversations, p. 38.
323 “I think he hadn’t really thought”: KOD.
323 Kennedy’s “spokes of the wheel”: Ibid. “Roosevelt wanted them competing amongst themselves for what was best for him; at least in reading, this is what I gathered and the president gathered. President Kennedy did not want that; he did not want fighting amongst his staff. He did not want jealousy and infighting; he realized that there would be some competing for presidential favor, that is human nature. But, this was not a goal.”
323 There was little camaraderie: Parmet, p. 47.
323 Ben Bradlee, the Washington sophisticate: Bradlee int.
323 “The president-elect was a complex”: Wofford, pp. 67–68.
324 You’d see him sitting: Clifford quote, KOD.
324 “I remember he told me”: Bartlett OH.
325 “ ‘I’m going to keep the White House white’ “: Sally Bedell Smith, Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 173.
325 Kennedy and Ted Sorensen working on inaugural speech in Palm Beach: Thurston Clarke, Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004), pp. 23–27.
326 To some who’d once been at Choate: Hearing President Kennedy’s historic call to “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” several of his Choate classmates recalled headmaster George St. John’s use of a quite similar phrase. These included some of his Class of ’35 classmates, at least one of whom charged plagiarism in a survey taken by the school in 1985. Putney Westerfield, Choate ’47, volunteered this account to me:
“For five years I attended compulsory chapel five evenings a week after dinner. Usually the headmaster would quote from the Bible, or literature, or political figures, and make a point concerning how a Choate student should think or act. It was in this context that he would say, once every year or two: ‘Ask not what your school can do for you; ask what you can do for your school.’ Sometimes it might be mundane, like, ‘Be well-dressed and don’t smoke cigarettes when on the train to New York or Boston for vacations.’ Or: ‘Pick up a paper carelessly thrown on the grass.’ Or the campaign for a Christmas gift to each member of the school’s support staff. It took many forms.
“Listening to the inaugural address in 1961 I immediately related the two ‘Ask not’s.
“Many years later, when St. John’s ‘quote books’ (three volumes of them) were found, there was a quotation from Harvard dean LeBaron Briggs who wrote: ‘The youth who loves his alma