Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (29 page)

President Kennedy was, I think, not allowed to fulfill his prospects of being a great president in substance, in terms of legislation accomplished, bills passed, changes implemented on the nation. But in terms of his impact on the nation and his leadership for those brief years, he was a great president—he motivated, inspired, and left an indelible mark in a very short period of time by virtue of personality and presence. That’s a big deal in today’s world or by any standard. Certainly Lyndon Johnson passed far more impactful legislation and had a much greater legislative legacy than John Kennedy was allowed to have. I’ve read many analogies to the first years of other presidents who followed him, who really came into their own in their second term or later in their presidency. We never got to see the full measure of what might have happened legislatively, but we certainly are still living with the legacy of a president who had a profound impact on the world.

Chris Matthews

In November 1963 Chris Matthews was a seventeen-year-old college freshman from Philadelphia. After moving to Washington, DC, and joining the Capitol Police force, he became an aide to four Democratic members of Congress, worked as a speechwriter for President Carter, and served as a top aide to Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. Since 1997 he has hosted
Hardball
with Chris Matthews
on MSNBC.
The Chris Matthews Show
aired on NBC from 2002 to 2013. Among other topics, he has written two books on JFK, Kennedy, and Nixon:
The Rivalry that Shaped Postwar America
and
Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.

Pat Moynihan once came up to me and said, “We’ve never gotten over it.” He looked me in the eye and said, “You’ve never gotten over it,” which was to me almost like an ordination. He was bringing me into the brotherhood because he knew Kennedy. I try to explain to people just in a big-world sense: You don’t know what politics in America was like before Kennedy. It was guys in three-piece suits, the smell of cigars on them, musty characters like Taft—they were boring people.

For the party chairs we used the word “politician,” which meant backroom guys. It didn’t mean candidates. It meant backroom guys with
cigars, Adolphe Menjou types. That’s what politics was. Probably the most interesting guy would be Ike. At least he was happy. He had a nice smile. Everybody else was sort of an indoor type—and along came this guy, Kennedy. Although it wasn’t the colorized version we got after his death, the Camelot thing, it was pretty amazing to watch.

That was the day when people had a million people at a rally in New York, half a million people in downtown Philadelphia on a Wednesday at lunchtime. People had torchlight rallies, like in Connecticut at two o’clock in the morning, or in Michigan when he announced the Peace Corps at two o’clock in the morning at Ann Arbor.

It was a participatory democracy in those days. People had voter hats and buttons, not just lawn signs, and we were all into it. For the American people to vote like they’d never voted before—everybody voted, thirty-three million [votes] apiece—and then to have the guy taken away from us, the guy we picked? The guy who fought for the job and won it narrowly and clean, he wins, and then he’s taken away from us.

I think nobody’s gotten over it. It’s not supposed to happen that way. One minute he’s riding in a car, looking like a million bucks with his beautiful wife, and everybody’s waving at him, and the next minute he’s on a gurney.

Hemingway’s comment about grace under pressure fits [Kennedy during World War II]. It’s in the middle of the night; it’s completely black. There’s no moon or stars. We’re in the South Pacific, and his little balsawood boat gets cut in half. Eleven feet from him, he sees a Japanese destroyer go by—eleven feet from him in the boat—and his back is hurting. He said,
“This is what it feels like to die.” His back was already bad, and he hits the deck, and it gets smashed again. In that split second, he decided basically to roll and dive into the water. They’re in the ocean, the high seas, and he swims to the other part of the boat, which is drifting away, finds Paddy McMahon, who’s badly burned, convinces him to try to come back and save his own life. Then he finds another fellow, who wants to give up too, and says, “You’re putting on a bad demonstration here for our fella from Boston.” Gets him to save his life, gets his thick sweater off, and carries him back to the boat. He gets the guys onto the boat. He decides, “This boat’s already turned over in the middle of the night. It’s not going to make it to the next day. We’ve got to swim.”

Four miles away, there’s an island called Plum Pudding. The key is they have to find an island the Japanese wouldn’t be likely to come by, because the biggest fear of those guys, as we know from the book
Unbroken
, is to be captured by the Japanese. You don’t want to be captured. It’s worse than anything else, worse than drowning, so he has to find an island that is far enough away from them yet reachable. So what does he do? He takes the four guys who couldn’t swim and the five guys who could, and he makes sure they all stick together on an eight-foot plank they found. He gets his EO, his executive officer, to take charge. He puts them together, so he saves everybody—and he’s operating as a commanding officer.

Then he puts Paddy McMahon on his back and carries him for four hours in the water with a bit of the guy’s life jacket strap in his mouth, just pulling him the whole way. Paddy has no idea that Kennedy had a bad back to start with and it has been hurt again. He gets them [onto the island] and pukes on the sand when he arrives there.

Half an hour later, he recovers and says, “I’m going out tonight.” He puts a revolver in his pocket. He’s got a lantern. He swims out into the ocean again, tries to wave down some other boat—he’s scared to stay there another minute because of the Japanese. He gets washed away to some other sandbar. He wakes up on his sandbar, swims back to the island, and then says, “I’m going out again.” He swims to another island. Finally they get to the third island, and he finds water. He finds a Jeep can with some water in it from the Japanese and some candy. He heads back, gets the crew, and keeps them going.

It’s thrilling to think about this courage and leadership from this rich kid. Where’d it come from? He never had a life like this. He never had to be this kind of person. He certainly wasn’t Joe Kennedy’s kid. Joe Kennedy wasn’t much of a patriot, [nor] much of an American really. Jack was the American. It’s an amazing thing. It’s almost like
The Godfather
in a good sense. He was the assimilated son who loved this country and was going to fight and maybe die for it.

Bobby wasn’t happy with the LBJ pick. Bobby, I think, wanted to be vice president, though who knows what he wanted? He couldn’t have been vice president.

I think [John] Kennedy had this feeling about Johnson. He just didn’t feel comfortable in the room with him. He always felt that maybe this guy wanted to be president, and Johnson would admit, later in his life, that he calculated his best chance of becoming president was to become vice president. What did that tell you?

But Kennedy felt this sort of ogre-ish presence around Johnson. He said, “There’s something about the guy.” He told that to people like Ben Bradlee—but he always tried to treat Johnson with respect, and Bobby didn’t.

I think Kennedy respected the rogue quality of Johnson as the guy who may have won an election under questionable counts back in 1948. I think he liked the way he ran the Senate, but they weren’t close, and in the end it was pure calculation not to pick Scoop Jackson or somebody he might have gotten along with. There’s the ruthless calculation: that he knew he had to pick Johnson or he was wasting his time.

Kennedy was the first Catholic [presidential nominee]. He was going to lose a lot of the South because of that. He was going to lose a lot the Midwest because of that. He did hope he’d get California. He did hope he’d get Ohio. He didn’t get either. He needed Texas. He needed states like Texas and Georgia, and even looking ahead to ’64, he said, “I need LBJ on the ticket. I have to pick him because I need Texas and probably Georgia.” Even then, Kennedy thought he needed Johnson.

The Cuban Missile Crisis to me is astounding in terms of how Kennedy got us through it. There were both Churchill and Chamberlain involved in terms of this, Churchill in the heroic stand he took and Chamberlain in the deal he cut. If Kennedy hadn’t found a way to cut the deal for the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and found a way to allow Khrushchev, who came off pretty well in that, to be able to pull back and take on his generals, we wouldn’t have gotten through it. He had to find a way to do something under the table.

June ’63 is Kennedy’s greatest month, when he was able in three great speeches to come out for a nuclear test-ban treaty; the “Ich Bin ein Berliner” speech, the best speech of the Cold War; and the civil rights speech.

Whatever else people say about him, he was the first president in history to go on national television and say, “It’s the Bible. It’s our Constitution. It’s what we believe as Americans,” and to raise [civil rights] as a moral issue, which actually LBJ recommended that he do, to make it a moral issue. Certainly Martin Luther King was out there ahead of him, but I think he was the first president [to do it].

I grew up in a pretty Republican family, and I was [part of the] out-there libertarianism of Goldwater back in the ’60s. By the time Goldwater ran in ’64, I was turned off to him, but I was very much in that libertarian mode, like a lot of people.

I always wanted to meet Kennedy. It was a weird thing; even when I disagreed with him politically, I wanted to meet him. I always found him to be the most interesting politician of our time. Nixon was something; I liked Nixon. Goldwater was interesting; I liked him—he was romantic as a hero. But Kennedy was the one I found the most interesting as a person. I wanted to meet him because I couldn’t quite figure him out. He did things that were so smart and almost brilliant politically; he always hit the mark, and I was just fascinated with that one. When I was conservative, he was too liberal, but he was also a liberal with balls, as we used to say about him, compared to Stevenson.