Lionized by Democrats and Republicans since his death, JFK still remains an enigma in many ways. Matthews uncovers the Kennedy who defied the odds to become president. Excerpt from the program on November 8, 2011.
CHRIS MATTHEWS, Host, “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” MSNBC; Author, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero
DAVID KENNEDY, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus, Stanford University - Moderator
DAVID KENNEDY: You [have] touched on the matter of Kennedy’s chronic and several illnesses. Do you want to say a little more about that?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: You could cry if you understood the guy. He was a far greater hero than he ever let us know. He’s young: he has scarlet fever, he has asthma, he has what for a long time in high school they thought was leukemia. He’s always having his blood count tested, and his mother never visits him; his mother has no time for him, apparently.
[Jacqueline Kennedy] said, a week after he was dead – in the notes I was able to get from her interview with Theodore White that never got published – [that his mother] never loved him. She liked being the mayor’s daughter, the ambassador’s wife, but never loved him. That was Jackie’s view of Rose Kennedy. Jack was much more merciless; he said his mother was a nothing.
[He had] a pretty frightening youth, I’d say; very much an old English kind of youth: sent away to school with no love, and even though he was dying, he thought he’d never have his mother visit him.
He [also] had something wrong with his stomach. Nobody knew what it was. He said it was a “knot” in his stomach, and it never went away. They thought it was leukemia, then they thought it was colitis – I guess it was colitis – and he would always get steroids. The great historian Bob Dallek got the medical records: The steroids that he was taking for years for the colitis really got to his bone structure, and it began to degenerate. That was his real problem; it wasn’t being hit by a Japanese destroyer, so much.
He should never have been approved for service in the PTs [patrol torpedo boat service], but he was able to sneak in basically with the help of his father and the senator from Massachusetts, David I. Walsh. He was able to get PT service. But here’s a guy that had to sleep on either a table or a plywood plank because he couldn’t stand sleeping on a regular bed. He had to wear a sciatic corset. All the time in the Navy, he was dressed like this. He would be running around saying, “Do you have a needle and thread? I’ve got to work on my corset, fix my back.” It got much worse after they were rammed and cut in half by the Japanese destroyer, and he was in the hospital for the whole next year – 1944 – and you can’t find anything about him except that he was in the hospital. He got down to about 125 pounds.
Then he got the Addison’s Disease. It came in in 1947, the first time he had the Last Rights. He was in London; Pamela Harriman got him to the hospital. The doctor said, “This kid doesn’t have a year to live.” He had it strike again in ’51, when he was on a Far Eastern trip with Bobby. Bobby actually first became interesting to Jack at that time because Bobby saved him. He became his protector that trip and got him to a military base in Okinawa. [Jack] had the second episode of Addison’s and he had the Last Rights again. Of course, he had the Last Rights again in ’54 when he had the back operation. There’s a great scene I was able to get for the earlier book I had done on them; Nixon’s Secret Service guy described [Richard] Nixon’s crying in the car for his friend Jack. Of course, Kennedy lived all his life at the edge, you know?
He was a very distant guy – very detached from people – and frighteningly powerful because of it, because he wasn’t moved by the emotions of those around him, which actually saved us in ’62 [during the Cuban Missile Crisis].
KENNEDY: You quote his friend Charlie Bartlett: “I don’t know how to say it, but Jack wasn’t, sort of, in love with humanity. He was cool.” That passage reminded me of a famous remark made 200 years ago about Alexander Hamilton: he loved his country, but not his countrymen.
MATTHEWS: He had a lot of interesting buddies. Lem Billings, whom he met in high school, who became his first real friend when he was sick and lonely, actually substituted for his parents. Joe Kennedy would say that that Lem moved in with his tattered suitcase then and never left. He had a room at the White House.
Now, isn’t that interesting? You’re married to a person, but you have this other person from your gender who lives with you, who’s always there. It’s a fascinating story; everybody just said, “Oh, Lem Billings, he’s sort of here.” If you read all the Kennedy books, like all of us have, you hear this name “Lem Billings” and you ignore it. Well, Lem Billings lived there. He was his really close friend. He couldn’t stand being alone with Jackie for a whole weekend, so he’d always have a pal show up. He always had to have somebody else for dinner, and when he was alone and Jackie wasn’t there, he would have Dave Powers stay ’til 11 o’clock at night and put him into bed, and then he’d say his prayers at the bedside. When Dave told me that years ago, that he said his prayers every night, I said, “Oh, yeah, I can’t put that in the book; nobody’s going to believe it.” Then Jackie put it in her tapes, about how he would say his prayers. She thought it was just superstition. She wasn’t religious, really.
Jack would actually be a real Catholic, and he would go through these devotions of going to confession, right to the end. Nobody noticed he did it, but he would go to confession all the time, even if he had to sneak into line with some other guys with Massachusetts accents so the priest wouldn’t know for sure it was him. One time the priest said, “Mr. President,” and he got really turned off by that. He would light candles when the lost child Patrick died at birth. He was so broken up by that, he would sneak off after the Harvard-Columbia game and go pray at his dead son’s graveside in Brookline, and it was very difficult for him to pray – or to kneel – because it always killed him even to lean over and pick up something. He did the same thing with [his sister] Kathleen.
He was very “old church.” He would always go to church in the Navy – well, when you’re facing death in the Navy, it makes sense that you’d go to church a lot. He’d always go to the other island for mass. One of these guys at Princeton was an Augustinian chaplain; he would go to church when he was at Choate all the time.
But going to confession right to the end and praying every night on his knees, and never wanting to be alone – he is accessible. If you read the book, you’ll say, “I can’t identify with a prince, but I can get to know this guy. He is somebody I think I know, I think I am in a way.” I found it very much like I could figure myself out to be. Without figuring I’m Jack Kennedy, I think some of this stuff is very familiar to me as a Catholic. I told this to the archbishop of one of our major cities. I said, “How do you figure a guy that’s messing around with all these women and yet very devotional?” and he looked at me like I was crazy, like, “What else is new? I think I know these guys by the millions.”
KENNEDY: Let’s talk a little more about his Catholicism. Obviously, he was the first Catholic president.
MATTHEWS: Are you Catholic or Protestant?
KENNEDY: What do you think?
MATTHEWS: I think you’re Catholic.
KENNEDY: You’re right.
It’s a truism, isn’t it, that he was the first Catholic president, but in a sense you could also say that he was the last Catholic president, in the sense that his election kind of just took a lot of the air out of the balloon of anti-Catholicism, and it transformed, I think, the American Catholic community’s sense of itself. That’s something probably you felt as a young person growing up, as I did. What was your family’s reaction to that?
MATTHEWS: Well, we were a Republican family, so I’m not sure how many votes he got. I was Republican as a kid; my dad was definitely Republican. I asked, “Dad, are you voting for Kennedy?” and he said, “No,” and I said, “But he’s Catholic,” and he said, “Yeah, but I’m a Republican.” [In California] it’s not very ethnic, so people don’t think about the neighborhood stuff like back East. The tribalism isn’t so prevalent out here.
It wasn’t just Catholics; it was Jewish people – a lot of people felt that the door had been swung open in ’60, that he opened the door for a lot of people. In fact, that was the great Kennedy strength: the we aspect of it as opposed to he. It wasn’t a solo act. When he came through that door, his whole war generation came through the door. The young officer was back to lead all the Catholics, the Jewish people, the Polish Catholics, the Italians – all the different ethnic groups felt that the door was opening for them. It was a whole difference. Finally, you didn’t have to be a Protestant guy to be running the country. I think it really meant a lot to a lot of people, especially Jewish people. I think they really felt that the monopoly was broken, and it was a very important thing to feel you could be part of a country that wasn’t monopolized by one group.
KENNEDY: Is it fair to make the analogy that Barack Obama is the first black president and the last black president, in the sense, again, that race will not ever again be as big a factor?
MATTHEWS: Well, [Obama’s story is] an immigrant story too. I think Barack Obama benefited from the immigrant narrative as well. He wasn’t just a southern guy with a regular American name like Joe Washington or somebody from the South that moved north. He didn’t have that internal immigration story behind him; he had his own story: Hawaii, and the prep school in Hawaii, and the Ivy League, and the white mother from Kansas and that sort of home-grown, Midwestern background. He had a lot of strains to who he is. He does, and maybe that’s what’s difficult for him. He can do a lot of crossing over, but he doesn’t have a lot of penetration. He’s able to relate to us in a very light way; there’s no deep personal thing there. Kennedy, on the other hand, was still a “Mick.” He was still an Irish guy with a certain attitude about the country and the way it should be run: a tough guy’s attitude. The great line about Bobby was wonderfully unassimilated. He was a kid from a James Cagney movie, you know, the Bowery boys, almost. Tough. So was Reagan; I met him a few times. He had some of that, too, that “Mick” attitude: “You wanna fight? I’m ready.”
KENNEDY: Didn’t Cardinal Cushing tell Kennedy just before his inauguration, “You’ve got some Harvard in you, and you’ve got some Irish, and you’d better be more Irish than Harvard”?
MATTHEWS: Actually, Nixon said that, too. But I think the religion thing: He wasn’t that religious in the sense of his life. His manner of living was hard to figure. The best part of my book is the love stuff with him and Inga Arvad, this Danish movie star he was in love with. Very romantic letters from the South Pacific; the way he related to her is right out of the movies. Of course, Jack Kennedy was right out of the movies, as a war hero, and he had a tremendous personal sense of responsibility that comes through that is so unemotional but so dominant in his life.
Here’s a guy who, when his boat is cut in half, at two o’clock in the morning, with no radar, no moon, no stars, pitch black, he instinctively dives out of the bow of the boat that’s still surfaced, and he goes looking for the guys who were in the stern. He finds one guy who’s badly burned – three quarters of his body, really horribly burned: Patrick McMahon; he was 42 years old, the engineer, who had actually sunk down below into the water, and had looked up and seen the burning gasoline all around him. Jack, through all this hell, grabs this guy and pulls him back, almost against his will, because the guy said, “I’m giving up,” and [Jack] said, “No, you’re not giving up,” and pulls him back by his strength – and he was not a big guy, Jack – to the part of the boat that’s still afloat.
It’s pretty far away by then; it had drifted far, and they’re in the high seas. Then he goes and finds this guy Harris who’s all ready to give up; his leg’s gone, or something – it’s all messed up – and Jack pulls his sweater off and somehow gets him confident again; he wants to live again. The guy says, “Leave me alone; I’m finished, Kipper.” It’s out of the movies, these guys giving up their lives, and he says, “No, you’re not giving up your lives.” He saves these guys by force of will and gets them on this boat.
He says, “Let’s have a vote; we’re going to have to decide what to do. There’s nothing in the book about this. What do we do?” There’s the top of the boat – it’s flipped over, like a turtle – and they’re out in the middle of the seas, and they’re in Japanese waters, and they know the Japanese will torture the hell out of you before they kill you, so they’re thinking, “Oh.” He says, “It’s up to you guys; I don’t have anything to live for.” Then, one of the other guys – McGuire, who’s a Catholic buddy of his – says, “You’ve got a lot to live for.” But he says, “I don’t have any kids; you guys make up the decisions.” So they decide to swim for four miles to the nearest island. They wanted to pick a small island – a plum-pudding island – because they didn’t think the Japanese would be there, and they’d have a few days, maybe, before they’d get picked up, before the Japanese got them. So they found a plank – an eight-foot plank – and Jack said, “The five guys that can’t swim: hang onto this, and don’t separate under waters.” He wanted to make sure the non-swimmers were going to make it. Then he pulled out his knife, and cut the strap of Pappy McMahon’s life jacket, and put it in his teeth. As Pappy said afterwards, “It was like he had done this all his life.” He just puts the strap in his mouth and for four hours he carries this guy on his back, and his back is in terrible shape, and Pappy doesn’t even know how bad off his back is; just through force of will, he saves this guy’s life. He ends up on the beach, and he vomits – he’s exhausted – and the next thing he knows, he’s got a 38 pistol and a flashlight and he’s heading out into the channel again to try to flag down a PT boat that night, and he gets swept away, ends up on another island, swims back the next morning, gets these guys, swims to another island – with Pappy on his back – then swims to another island, finally finds water and brings it back.
It’s an amazing human story of commitment and courage, and word of this kind of behavior gets around. I think it’s the first time in his life he was in true command. Anybody here who’s been in the service knows that’s when you really get confidence, and you can lead men in battle; you can lead them into battle and home safely. He was able to do that. Also, he got to hang around for the first time in his life with the non-elite. They had the weed leaguers, not just the Ivy Leaguers: the guys who went to Ohio State and different big state universities. They called themselves the weed leaguers. He got to know other guys; they were all pretty elite – they were all college guys, which was a big deal in that generation, just to be a college guy – but he got to know a lot of guys, and it made him much more democratic. When he went to run for Congress, he was able to do it. Meet people.
KENNEDY: You don’t do it explicitly in the book, but you’ve done it here this evening, and you certainly did it in your Time magazine piece: you use John F. Kennedy, whom you clearly admire, as a kind of measuring rod to take the measure of the current president and the current state of the country. So a lot of the questions that have come from the audience here go to that comparison. I’ll just give you a sample of one of them. How do you think J.F.K. would have fared in today’s Twitter and YouTube media world and today’s extreme ideology of the Republican Congress?
MATTHEWS: Well, it was a better time back then. I think he would’ve adjusted, you know? So, if you’re talking about his personal life, he would have adjusted. I think he would’ve been very good at it. I think some people are classics. Jack Kennedy would always be great; he could walk on the stage right now, and he’d be Jack Kennedy and blow us away. I think Bill Clinton’s like that. I don’t think he’s exactly as classy, but he is classic. He’s a recognizable figure. But [Jack] was beyond charm. Jackie called him “Magic,” in the second person – like, “OK, Magic” – because he would walk into a room and the room would swoon, men and women both. Of course, Jack called it his Big P., his big personality. He’d put it on when he had to walk into a room. He would adopt this higher level of charm. He would laugh about it, but he knew he had it. I think it would work today, and I think we’d love it.
Obama’s got a bit of the charm; that smile is magic. I don’t think he has the we part. He has the he part, not the we part. Being a leader is not the same as being a star. You can be a star without being a leader, and I guess you can be a leader without being a star. We’ve had generals like that. I think we’ve had generals who are stars, like Patton, but they’re not all stars.
KENNEDY: I think – and I’m sure a lot of people share the opinion – that Nixon and Kennedy are just about totally opposite personalities, but they actually had quite a high regard for each other.
MATTHEWS: They had their first debate in 1947, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. They took the Capital Limited train out there. They were recognized to be pals, sitting around having burgers afterwards and talking sports, and the local people couldn’t believe how friendly they were. They took the train back at midnight to Washington; they flipped a coin for who got the bottom bunk. I would love to see that right now, that picture of those two guys back from the war, junior naval officers talking about the coming Cold War. All through the night, talking, top bunk to lower bunk, about a war that didn’t have a name until two weeks later when Bernard Baruch gave it its name: the Cold War. They were very aware, both of them, of what was coming, and what had to be done to avoid another war.
KENNEDY: So they sized each other up very early on.
MATTHEWS: Yeah, they were the two smart guys in the class.
KENNEDY: We’ve lost that sense of Nixon.
MATTHEWS: Nixon became embittered and broke bad. He was taking to extreme some of the methods of politics that he should never have done. He got very bitter. Last summer I talked to Jean Smith, Kennedy’s last sibling, and she said that Kennedy believed that Nixon was the most brilliant man in the Senate. These are facts. He told Charlie Bartlett, the guy who introduced him to Jackie Kennedy, the New Year’s Eve before the election in 1960, that if he lost the primaries, he’s voting for Nixon. These are facts I came upon; you can connect the dots, and you can be uncomfortable with these facts, [but] he was the guy who walked over with the campaign contribution to Nixon when he ran [his U.S. Senate campaign] against Helen Douglas. [Kennedy] couldn’t stand Helen Douglas.
KENNEDY: Let’s go back to “magic.” Would Kennedy’s magic – after 1964, were he to have been reelected – have been able to be as effective in that second term as Lyndon Johnson was?
MATTHEWS: I think Johnson had the grieving of the country going for him, and the sense of guilt that everybody felt, certainly people on the Right. I was on the Right as a kid; I felt it. Anybody on the other side must’ve felt, “Well, we’d better give them a break.” Remember, there’s only two Republican senators, I believe, who voted against civil rights. The Republican Party of 1964 was a moderate party. It was a northern party, a western party; it wasn’t this southern party that it’s become. It was the southern Democrats who voted against civil rights. It was a totally different environment; it was a better environment.
Johnson was able to exploit that grieving very effectively for civil rights, voting rights, Medicare. But Jack had all that stuff lined up, and he was quite wonderfully impulsive about civil rights. He stood up to [Mississippi Governor] Ross Barnett, and that’s where political toughness comes in: standing up to Ross Barnett with the federal troops, standing up to [Alabama Governor] George Wallace. What he did against a lot of resistance was really admirable, and of course when he got on the phone with Mrs. King in the fall of 1960, when her husband was arrested and hauled off into the countryside – that was the first time a president really reached out and said, “We as a country are for civil rights.” Then he gave the great speech in June of ’63 which just said, “In America, the Constitution is as fundamental as the Bible. We have to be for civil rights.” It had never been said before.
