Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [2]
The first book I got from the little public library next to Maternity was an illustrated biography of Alexander the Great. And so that’s who I was in 1960—a kid who had this gut interest in history and liked reading biographies of heroes.
The Democratic Convention of 1960 was in Los Angeles. Now it was the Republicans’ turn in Chicago. I followed the events gavel to gavel, either watching on television or going to bed listening to the radio. I remember the jaunty, optimistic strains of “California, Here I Come!” repeatedly erupting whenever Nixon’s name was mentioned. Caught up in the Republican spirit, I once again shifted my allegiance.
Nixon had reexerted his pull over me. I saw him as the scrappy challenger. I was rooting for the underdog, who was also the one who deserved it. Nixon was tough on fighting the Russians. He’d held his ground in that Kitchen Table debate with Nikita Khrushchev over in Moscow. He and his running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, struck me as the more solid and seasoned candidates to take on the Cold War, to stop the Communist spread around the globe.
On election night, as the returns started to come in, the early ones signaling their defeat, I was overwhelmed—and I cried. By a little after seven, I was drenched in the bad news.
Yet the Matthews house was not as united as I have so far portrayed it. I remember asking my father whom he intended to vote for. When he said Nixon without hesitation, I challenged him. Weren’t we Catholic? Shouldn’t we be for Kennedy? “I’m a Republican” was his simple, all-explaining response. Dad stuck to his party loyalty. He was a Catholic convert and didn’t feel that tribal pull the way the all-Irish side of the family did. It was simple for him, even if he was willing to go so far as to allow how Jack Kennedy had “a touch of Churchill” about him. Interestingly, he also believed that in a fistfight between the two candidates there would be no contest: JFK would easily best Nixon, he declared. I’d raised the issue, and it seemed a matter of no little importance back then.
My mother—born Mary Teresa Shields, Irish to the core—more resembled me in her responses to the political dilemma of our household. But I could tell she was keeping her sympathies to herself, as if to make less trouble in the house. One night, when I was drying the dishes alongside her as she washed them, I offered my opinion that it might be wrong to support Kennedy simply because of religion. It seemed to scrape a wound. She shot back that Grandmom, my father’s mother, from County Antrim, had become a citizen only in order to be able to cast her vote for Eisenhower, a fellow Presbyterian. Mom said it defensively. Don’t single me out, she was arguing, your dad’s side of the family was right out there voting religion, too.
Mom’s dad, Charles Patrick Shields, was a classic Irishman and local Democratic committeeman. He worked the night shift as an inspector at a nearby plant, and left the house every week-day afternoon carrying his lunchbox and thermos. When he had on his peacoat and cap, he could have been heading off to work in County Cork. On Sundays he wore a three-piece suit to church at St. Stephen’s and kept it on all day, even when he’d come up to visit us in Somerton, which he called “God’s country.” He was right out of Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet.
A favorite ritual of mine, when he retired, was accompanying him for long walks through the old neighborhoods, then stopping to buy the bulldog edition of the Inquirer on the way home. Once he’d finished reading it, sitting there under