Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [3]
This conflict between being Catholic and Republican was a constant bother to me over the years. Yes, a lot of Catholics had voted for Eisenhower, but the old loyalties were deeply Democratic. The vote at LaSalle College High School, where I was going and where I argued the Kennedy-Nixon race at lunchtime, was 24 to 9 for Kennedy in my homeroom.
Our family divisions along these lines never actually reached the level of a right-out-there dispute, but the business of voting either Republican or Catholic did raise the whole question of what we were. We could be Republican, but we were still mostly Irish. In the end, I never actually knew how Mom voted. Because of how I subsequently came to feel—and how I feel now—I hope it was Kennedy she cast her ballot for in the privacy of that curtained booth. Still, I confess that when the inauguration rolled around, on January 20, 1961, my loyalties remained with the loser.
While my mother was ironing in our basement rec room, we watched the ceremonies as they took place in snowy Washington. She seemed upbeat, quietly happy about the event we were witnessing. I think.
As for me, I moved rightward in the days of the New Frontier. I became a fan of Barry Goldwater, lured by his libertarian case for greater personal freedom. Like Hillary Clinton, herself a Goldwater Girl at the time, I would eventually change course. But even back then, I found John F. Kennedy the most interesting political figure of the day. I wanted to meet him, be in the same room with him, study him.
A half century of political life later, my fascination with the elusive spirit of John F. Kennedy has remained an abiding one. He is both pathfinder and puzzle, a beacon and a conundrum. Whenever I spot the name in print, I stop to read. Anytime I’ve ever met a person who knew him—someone who was there with JFK in real time—I crave hearing his or her first-person memories.
One significant opportunity to listen to firsthand Jack stories came when I spent a half dozen years in the 1980s working for Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., Speaker of the House of Representatives. His and Kennedy’s mutual history went way back in the arena of Boston politics, that fiercest of partisan battlefields. In 1946, when young Jack Kennedy was making his first political bid, in the primary race for the 11th Congressional District of Massachusetts, Tip actually had been in his opponent’s camp. Later, though, when Jack gained his Senate seat in ’52 after serving three terms in the House, Tip replaced him there, serving with him companionably for the next eight years.
During the time I served as his administrative assistant—enjoying a front-row seat when Tip employed all his liberal conscience and veteran’s craft against that affable ideologue Ronald Reagan—I found I could occasionally get him, when he was in the right mood and time hung over us, to reminisce about the old days. It was like talking to Grandpop under the mantelpiece.
I treasured hearing him tell how Boston mayor James Michael Curley “was corrupt even by the standards of those days” and what Richard Nixon, whom he’d helped bring down over Watergate, was like to play cards with: “talked too much; not a bad guy.” I’d listen eagerly, hardly able to believe my good fortune.
Later, I got to know and became friends with Ben Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor and Kennedy chum. He quickly understood what an appreciative listener I was. And in the early 1990s, when I began to research my book on the surprising history of the Jack Kennedy–Dick Nixon relationship, with its fascinating backstory, I came to know such men as Charles Bartlett, Paul “Red” Fay, and Chuck Spalding, veteran JFK cronies all.
Yet none of those encounters were enough. I wanted to get every possible look at him, see him from any angle that would help explain him. Was he a liberal as he’s been tagged, or was he a pragmatist open to liberal