Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [38]
Years later, when he was headed to the Senate, Jack Kennedy would advise his successor in Congress, Tip O’Neill, to “marry John McCormack.” Such different behavior from his own, he said, was the better path for a man who by then had been Speaker of the Massachusetts legislature and who, he correctly assumed, would one day want to join the House leadership ladder.
The world Jack Kennedy found in Washington that winter of 1947 was a jamboree of Republican triumphalism. On both sides of the Capitol, committees were cooking up public hearings on the two hot-stove issues Republicans had championed in the previous election: the evils of Big Labor and the threat of Communism at home and abroad. Republicans had won both houses, the first time since before the Great Depression, with a simple slogan that was more a question than an answer, more a taunt than a promise: “Had Enough?”
Its meaning was clear. It summed up two decades of Democratic rule that had comprised an era of government activism or overreach, depending on the voter’s degree of resentment. And during the ’46 campaign it meant everything voters didn’t like after V-J day, from rationing to the recent rash of labor strikes.
The new Republican majority came with a mission. Harry Truman could sit there in the White House and veto its bills, but he couldn’t stop the new Eightieth Congress from investigating him, and that meant the whole twenty-year Democratic era. They were, in the words of one Republican congressman, going to “open every session with a prayer and end it with a probe.” Almost forty investigative panels were setting up schedules to dig up corruption any way they could find it, with the entire Roosevelt-Truman record as their quarry.
Congress was looking for bad guys, especially those who were seen as soft on the Communist threat. Someone had to pay for the giveaway at Yalta, and FDR, who’d agreed to it, wasn’t around to take the punishment.
Jack Kennedy had brought Billy Sutton to Washington as his press secretary and jack-of-all-trades—housemate included. Being from the Boston neighborhoods, he took a street-corner guy’s view of things. So much was happening so fast that the spectacle on Capitol Hill seemed to him like a “Stop ’n’ Shop, a supermarket of hearings.”
The very day he arrived on Capitol Hill, Jack Kennedy met the fellow member of the House freshman class of 1946 whose destiny would wind up twinned with his own. Richard Nixon had just beaten a much-admired New Dealer and five-term Democratic incumbent in the battle for California’s 12th District. It had been an upset victory tinged by telephoned whispers that Nixon’s opponent was a “Communist.”
Kennedy, however, was impressed by the drama of the triumph itself. “So you’re the guy who beat Jerry Voorhis,” Kennedy exclaimed on meeting Nixon at a National Press Club reception for freshman congressmen who’d fought in the war. “That’s like beating John McCormack up in Massachusetts!”
At Harvard, Jack had gravitated to Torby Macdonald, hotshot of the freshman football team. Now it was the star of the House class of 1946—this thirty-four-year-old Californian, like himself a navy man, who’d just pulled off the biggest political upset of the season.
“How’s it feel?” Jack asked him. Here was the son of one of the richest men in the world showing Dick Nixon, the poor boy, true admiration. “I guess I’m elated,” the Californian answered, plainly taken by the attention. In fact, Nixon’s loyal presidential aide H. R. Haldeman told me decades later and just days before his own death that he’d always found Nixon’s feelings toward Jack Kennedy “strange and inexplicable.” It had been so from the start.
The two ex–naval officers from the South Pacific theater—Nixon had been a supply officer there—were both assigned to the Committee on Education and Labor. Now