Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [40]
What surprised those who greeted them and saw them off that night was the way these two partisans got along with each other personally. Before catching the Capitol Limited back to Washington, they grabbed hamburgers at the local Star Diner and talked over the new baseball season. Boarding at midnight, the two junior pols drew straws for the lower berth. Nixon won. Then, as the train rolled on toward Washington, they spent the early-morning hours discussing their true mutual interest, foreign policy, especially the rising standoff with the Soviets in Europe, which Bernard Baruch had just christened the “cold war.”
Kennedy was drawn to those who shared his big-picture view of the world, and Nixon was one who did. Their responses to the threat posed by Communism’s spread were similar, too. For both of them, it was a central issue of their generation.
In the morning-after press, it was Kennedy who scored highest. The next morning’s editions of the McKeesport Daily News ran a front-page photo of the smiling, handsome Kennedy, one that could easily have been of a popular local college grad. The shot of Nixon, on the other hand, caught him with his eyes darting sideways with a hunted look, his defiant chin displaying a beard well beyond the five o’clock mark. Even in black and white, the charisma gap was stark.
That March, President Truman called on Congress to stop the Red advance across Europe by approving U.S. military aid to help governments in Greece and Turkey resist Communist-backed insurgencies. Speaking to a joint session, he called this move crucial to American security. To those on the political left, the new “Truman Doctrine” was an unwelcome reversal from the pro-Russian policies of FDR. But for many of the young officers back from the war, the president was speaking the language they wanted to hear.
The day after Truman had addressed Congress, Russ Nixon—no relation to Richard—of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, a union known for its sizable Communist contingent, told the Education and Labor Committee that labor unions had as much right to be led by Communists as by Democrats or Republicans. That was a far from popular view in the halls of Washington.
When his own turn arrived to quiz the witness, Congressman Jack Kennedy said he’d been “impressed by the dexterity” the witness had shown in fielding the earlier questions. Nixon, a Ph.D. in economics, had been Kennedy’s Harvard instructor before joining the labor movement. Now the student to whom he’d given a B-minus his freshman year got to ask the questions.
Was Soviet Communism, he asked his former instructor, “a threat to the economic and political system of the United States?” No, Russ Nixon replied, the real threat to the country was its failure to meet the “basic economic problems of the people in a democratic way” as well as its failure to expand Americans’ civil rights and in that way meet “the problems of the Negro people.”
Kennedy then asked his instructor to defend what he said was the Communist Party’s willingness to “resort to all sorts of artifices, evasion, subterfuges, only so as to get into the trade unions and remain in them and to carry on Communist work in them, at all costs.”
Russ Nixon:
I didn’t teach you that at Harvard, did I?
Kennedy:
No, you did not. I am reading from Lenin, in which is described the procedure which should be adopted to get into trade unions and how they conduct themselves once they are in.
His clever questioning of the left-leaning witness won Kennedy positive notice from the press gallery. “A freshman House member with the coral dust of Pacific Islands still clinging to his