Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [98]
July 19—Jack Kennedy called up around noon and asked us to come to dinner at Hyannis Port this evening. Marian could not go, so I went alone. The Kennedy place was less grand than I had imagined. I expected miles of ocean frontage with no alien houses in view; but it is a cluster of Kennedy houses, all large and comfortable but not palatial, in the midst of a settled community. Jackie Kennedy was the only other person present, and we all drank and talked about from 8 to 12:30. I only brought two cigars, one of which Jack took, having typically no cigars in the house. Jackie wanted for a moment to go and see A Nun’s Story, which was being screened in a projection room in one of the other houses; but, though somewhat encouraged by Jack to go, finally stayed the evening out with us. She was lovely but seemed excessively flighty on politics, asking with wide-eyed naivete questions like: “Jack, why don’t you just tell them that you won’t go into any of those old primaries?” Jack was in a benign frame of mind and did not blink; but clearly such remarks could, in another context, be irritating. This is all the more so since Jackie, on other subjects, is intelligent and articulate. She was reading Proust when I arrived; she talked very well about Nicolas Nabokov, Joe Alsop, and other personalities, and one feels that out of some perversity she pretends an ignorance about politics larger even than life.
As for Jack, he gave his usual sense of seeming candor. I write “seeming” without meaning to imply doubts; so far as I could tell, he was exceedingly open; and this was, indeed, the freest, as well as the longest, talk I have ever had with him. As usual, he was impersonal in his remarks, quite prepared to see the views and interests of others. He showed more animation and humor than usual and, indeed, was rather funny in some of his assessments of people and situations. He seems fairly optimistic about his presidential chances. He thinks that Humphrey can’t win, that Johnson will take care of Symington, and that he will go into Los Angeles with a large delegate lead. He seems to regard Stevenson as the next most likely person to get the nomination.
Then an uncomfortable subject was broached. “We had considerable talk about McCarthy. Kennedy said he felt that it would be a good idea to admit frankly that he had been wrong in not taking a more forthright position. I said that he was paying the price of having written a book called Profiles in Courage. He replied ruefully, ‘Yes, but I didn’t have a chapter in it about myself.’ “
The conversation that night in July of 1959 is telling in so many ways. The invitation itself was a fine gesture, with the arranging of an intimate evening around one person, a figure Jack saw as powerfully influential. Well aware of the liberal rancor over his failure to oppose McCarthy, he now was working at being convincingly conciliatory. Schlesinger observed his efforts: “I think he genuinely thinks he was wrong about it; but says he was constrained for a long time because Bobby had joined the committee staff—over Jack’s opposition, he says. He also said that his father and Joe were great friends, and that his father would defend Joe as a person to this day.”
During the course of the evening, Jack showed contempt for President Eisenhower, saying he refused to hang around with his old comrades in arms from the war. “All his golfing pals are rich men he has met since 1945.” He also went after Ike’s willingness to drop Nixon from the ticket in ’56. “He won’t stand by anybody. He is terribly cold and terribly vain. In fact, he’s a shit.”
But he was less candid on other matters. When Schlesinger pushed him on his Addison’s disease, he said the problem with his adrenal glands was caused by his wartime malaria, it had cleared up, and he was okay. “No one who has Addison’s disease ought to run for President; but I do not have