Ezra Klein has been reading Chris Matthews' book Kennedy and Nixon and he's been struck by one of the more surprising elements of both Presidents' biographies.
At one time, Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon were friends.
I think it was more on Nixon's part than Kennedy's, but when they were young Congressmen just starting out they were friends. In fact Nixon seems to have had something of a man-crush on JFK, and his later hatred of the Kennedys has the whiff of the spurned-lover's obsessiveness about it.
No, I'm not suggesting that Nixon was a closet case. Straight men can fall in love with each other without crossing the line and they do it almost as often and just as fervently as straight women fall in love with each other. This fact about straights probably confuses the hell out of gays who have found themselves in love with and loved back by people who have no desire to go to bed with them. (This is an idea that will figure in the follow-up to my post on The Merchant of Venice. I'm only mentioning it to commit myself to actually writing that follow-up.) The young man Nixon seems to have loved the young man Kennedy and one of the most moving scenes in political history, which I think I read in Nixon's autobiography, but it may have been Richard Reeves' President Kennedy, has young Dick Nixon leaving the hospital where he's just visited Jack in tears, crying to his wife, the probably already confused-about-her-husband and wondering why she married him, Pat, about the terrible suffering Kennedy was enduring upstairs.
It's one of those many disconcerting moments in the story of Nixon's life when he comes across as almost decent.
By the way, there is no understanding or appreciating Jack Kennedy without keeping in mind just how sick he was. Kennedy was often famously detached, aloof to the point of coldness---admirers called this his "cool"---but it was the aloofness of the chronically ill, he was cut off from most other people around him by pain. This explains his fatalism and his recklessness, the devil may care attitude towards his personal security that got him killed. Kennedy knew he was going to die before his time.
I think it's plausible to imagine that it was pain that made him, not a great President, because he didn't have time, but a President on the path to greatness. (I'm one of those who think he'd have taken a much different approach to Vietnam than LBJ did.) It's possible to imagine that in meetings during the Cuban Missle Crisis, listening to the wild-eyed generals like Curtis LeMay talk blithely, almost longinlgy , of starting World War III, Kennedy was fighting his pain and thinking, Don't you guys have anything real to worry about? And then deciding to himself, this is ridiculous, if we get out of this one alive, I'm going to have a long talk with Khruschev.
Richard Dallek's Kennedy biography, An Unfinished Life, deals admirably with Kennedy's illnesses and the possibile courses of JFK's second term. The Atlantic ran extensive excerpts, in the December 2002 and June 2003 issues, but you have to be a subscriber to the magazine to access their archives.
At any rate, at second glance Ezra finds the friendship between Kennedy and Nixon not as surprising as he did at first.
They had an affinity for each other because they were both, basically, bloodthirsty. Kennedy won Congress using an array of dirty tricks and bribes that make DeLay look like a choirboy. As for Nixon, his red-baiting was legendary and actually provided the template for McCarthy's later perfection of the form (the Wisconsin Senator actually cribbed whole speeches from Nixon). He was a nasty, lying campaigner and an absolute workaholic. The two of them, in the end, were the same sort of folks. It's just that Kennedy's looks, charm and money allowed him to get away with his tactics, even be admired for them while Nixon went down in disgrace. In some ways, that's a much more profound judgment on Americans and how we treat criminals from different classes than it is a verdict on either man.
Ezra leaves out two other points of sympathy between the two. Both were Navy veterans and both were ardent anti-Communists.
But I think Ezra makes too much of their other similarities. They were not the same sort of folks.
Kennedy was no goo-goo and by our lights he ran corrupt campaigns. But they were corrupt in the good old-fashioned American way. Kennedy was the product of Boston machine politics. Both his grandfathers were machine men and he learned his trade from them. At bottom, Kennedy was a big city Irish pol of the old school. He knew what he was too---he joked during the West Virginia primary, in which he beat Hubert Humphrey pretty much by buying up all the available votes, that his father sent him a telegram ordering him to stop spending so freely, "I'm not paying for a landslide!"---and he knew why he was what he was. Candidates didn't run against each other in those days. Machines did. Nixon had his own machine. This is why though his campaigning style looks corrupt to us, Kennedy himself doesn't. Because he wasn't. It didn't touch him. And when he became President he left it behind.
But Nixon was something new. He was from the start a Right Wing idealogogue. His politics and his political style rose up out of his heart and soul. Hatred, and the lying and the dirty tricks that went with it and which the hatred justified, paranoia, and his personal insecurities were what he stood for.
Kennedy was the last Democratic machine candidate for President. (LBJ was a far more corrupt machine-style politician, but in '64, running as Kennedy's heir, Johnson didn't need to do the kinds of things he had always done in the past to win elections.) But Nixon was the first of the kind of Republican who has been running for President ever since.
The phenomenon Ezra describes above, of the rich, charming, and photogenic scoundrel getting away with what someone like Nixon couldn't is a real phenomenon in American politics. But I think it's a better description of the difference between Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.
This fact about straights probably confuses the hell out of gays who have found themselves in loved and loved back by people who have no desire to go to bed with them.
Blink. Blink.
Why would gay people, who do the same thing (My name is Shakespeare's Sister, and I am a fag magnet - and happily so, I might add!) be confused by that?
Posted by: Shakespeare's Sister | Monday, August 01, 2005 at 02:14 PM
What a splendid, complex post!
First, some of my oldest friends are guys I truly love (and feel loved by), but entirely fraternally; if there was ever an erotic component in our attraction to one another, it was by unspoken mutual agreement a taboo, just as impossible as fucking a brother. These men have stood by me through the whole coming-out odyssey and it makes no difference now (except for a bit more frankness!).
Second, the Kennedy Machine experience is the defining difference between him and Nixon, I think. You had to grow up in Daley the 1st's Chicago to see the last gasp of that political tradition (not that it didn't leave ghosts...), but Nixon came out of something entirely different. From my sketchy knowledge of West Coast urban politics, what machines there were were broken a long time ago - I don't think any of the major cities there have strong-mayor systems, and, god, LA has a miniscule City Council for a town that size. What you got instead was oligarchies, and they tended conservative. Nixon comes out of that.
I'm grasping here - help me out, Ezra!
Last, Merchant is giving you juice, Lance! So cool! I'll address that separately at the other post, but - whoa - I hope you get to see Pacino's riff on Richard III - "Looking for Richard" - it's wonderful.
Posted by: grishaxxx | Monday, August 01, 2005 at 09:50 PM
O - and to Shakes's Sis - Fag Mag, eh? Who woulda thunk? :-))
Posted by: grishaxxx | Monday, August 01, 2005 at 09:52 PM
This is why though his campaigning style looks corrupt to us, Kennedy himself doesn't. Because he wasn't. It didn't touch him. And when he became President he left it behind.
Hmm. Sounds suspiciously of the Jesuit in the world, not of it world view, LM. Whether this is possible, I will leave to lawyers and philosophers to determine.
I am uncertain what might be worse: to be divorced from one's circumstances and what brings one success, or to be entirely of a corrupt world without shame. How the followers respond to leaders of either sort is the beginning of myth and the end of tragedy.
Posted by: The Heretik | Monday, August 01, 2005 at 10:31 PM
Besides Daley in Chicago, there was Bill Green and his money man, Matt McCloskey, in Philly. They carried PA for Jack. Walter Annenberg hated them for it. McCloskey ended on his S... list; his photo could not appear in Sir Walter's paper. The story was told that on a July 4th, Kennedy came to Independence Hall to give a speech and as he was shaking hands, Matt popped his head into the popping flashbulbs, reportedly saying, 'now let that SOB keep me out of his paper.' The next day the photos appeared, with a gray blotch of airbrush where the contractor has stood.
We 18-20 year olds could not wait for Ike to go in 1960; he seemed to be doing nothing. We couldn't vote but we wanted John and Jackie, not Dick and Pat. Good god, that man inspired my friend Crazy Frank to walk from suburban Philly to Washington one March weekend in 1963. Vinny and I joined him in Baltimore; the two of us made it to College Park and then took the bus. Maybe Vinny is a Repug now; maybe he's dead. Who knows? Crazy Frank owns a saloon.
What died with Nixon and Kennedy was comity and a certain respect for process. For all his ugliness, Nixon did resign. Can you imagine what would happen if Junior were impeached? We would probably have a coup.
Posted by: Exiled in NJ | Tuesday, August 02, 2005 at 08:06 AM
What makes you write JFK was careless about his security?
Posted by: jonst | Tuesday, August 02, 2005 at 08:22 AM
Jonst,
JFK had the Clintonesque habit of plunging into crowds. Drove the Secret Service nuts. He routinely over-ruled their plans for protecting him in public. And that day in Dallas they wanted to put the bullet-proof bubbletop on the car and he said no way, no how.
He also used to talk about the possibility that he would be assassinated---we now know that he was thinking that Castro would try to take revenge as well as just being the victim of a nutcase. I think he believed it was a real possibility and yet he didn't do anything special to prevent it from happening.
Posted by: Lance | Tuesday, August 02, 2005 at 09:30 AM
I wonder if there will ever be a really good and complete biography of Nixon in less than 500 pages. He's so complex he makes Lyndon Johnson look like Calvin Coolidge by comparison. What a strange strange man.
Posted by: Erik Loomis | Tuesday, August 02, 2005 at 02:24 PM
The other Kennedy/Nixon trope is the ongoing, all-American contest between "the aristocrats" and "the common men". American presidents going back to Adams and Jefferson have swung between these nodes, even when the truths of their personal histories had nothing to do with their presidential bios. Adams was labelled as the classic "I deserve to be president because I'm smarter & better than you voters" aristo, even though he was very much a self-made man. Jefferson was "the Man of the People", even though he came from old money (all of which, and more, he managed to pour down the rathole of his endless intellectual whimsies). Kennedy was a second-generation Irish ward rat running as an old-money intellectual; Nixon was an old-family Quaker running as California's man of the people. They could respect each other, at least in their Congressional days, because they both knew the difference between their complicated individual truths and the one-dimensional circus posters of their virtues as touted to the voters. The current occupant of the Oval Office, on the other hand, actually seems to BELIEVE that he's a horny-handed, hard-working son of the middle class (and not just the perfect example of the old Irish proverb, "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations"). If nothing is more fatal to an actor than believing one's own publicity, you'd think this particular bad actor would have fallen out of favor by now.
Posted by: Anne Laurie | Thursday, August 04, 2005 at 11:10 AM