Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [39]
Rather than join his fellow Democrats in simply opposing the measure, he decided to put forth his own “dissenting opinion.” He had called Mark Dalton, the friend who’d managed his campaign, and asked him to join him in Washington. “John wanted to know what we—Billy Sutton was in the room—thought of the Hartley proposal and what he should do about it. We sat there and developed a position,” recalled Dalton, who wound up manning the typewriter.
To Dalton, it was a billboard screaming the new congressman’s ambitions. “People have always said to me, was John Kennedy running for the presidency from the start? Was he thinking of the future?” For Dalton, there was never any doubt—and certainly not from that moment forward.
But there was more still to learn about his boss, and it had to do with the way he kept his eye on the future competition. The morning Kennedy was scheduled to present his dissenting position to the Rules Committee, a congressman Dalton didn’t recognize was offering the official Republican support of what would be the Taft-Hartley Act. “Listen to this fellow,” Kennedy whispered as Dalton entered the cramped hearing room. “He’s going places.”
When the Republican member finished speaking and took the seat next to them, Kennedy introduced him. “I’d like you to meet Richard Nixon of California.” In the coming years Jack would be telling his family that Nixon was “brilliant,” the smartest of all his colleagues.
Kennedy, of course, was also trying to establish himself. “There were very few Democrats who would speak as strongly as he did to labor,” Dalton recalled. “The reaction was ‘Kennedy is courageous,’ just what Kennedy wanted it to be.”
Thus, when he rose on the House floor to give what would be his maiden speech in Congress, he was taking on the power of organized labor as well as big business. “I told him that day that he reminded me so much of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Billy Sutton remembered.
Still, not everyone in the chamber was so thrilled. “You can imagine the reaction of the congressmen who had been there for years and had worked on this problem,” said Dalton, “to be told that the new congressman from Massachusetts was filing a separate report.”
A few days later, Kennedy and Dick Nixon got their first chance to match talents in an arena beyond Capitol Hill. A local group had asked a freshman member from western Pennsylvania, Frank Buchanan, to pick the two standouts in his class, one from each party, and invite them home for a debate. The topic would be the new labor reform bill, to be known as Taft-Hartley. The audience would be a mixture of business and labor people.
The pair was greeted at the train station early that evening and taken to the Penn McKeesport hotel. There in the ballroom, they put on vastly dissimilar performances. Nixon was the aggressor, punching away like a hungry middleweight. Playing to the Republicans in the mixed crowd, he pummeled Big Labor. Brutally, he listed all the troubles that had been dominating the postwar headlines: the automobile strike, the steel strike, the coal strike, the railroad strike. He had picked his side in the fight and was quite willing to taunt his enemies on the other.
The younger speaker, the one with the quaint New England accent and the slight limp, offered a more nuanced performance. Watching Nixon antagonize the labor people in the McKeesport crowd, Jack worked to soften the hostility of the business folks. There was much to say for the labor reforms the Republicans were pushing, he allowed, particularly its banning of “wildcat” strikes. His concern was that the legislation might go too far and lead to more trouble between management and labor, not less.
It was Jack’s charm they witnessed that night. Nixon came into the room like a club fighter, eager to win the rivalry point