Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America

Christopher Matthews – 1996

Aside from being a regular pundit on political roundtable shows, (where you may like or hate him depending on your affiliations), Chris Matthews is also a decent historian and author.  Kennedy & Nixon is a great read and although it’s not filled with new information, it nicely collects all the pertinent facts about the ways in which John F. Kennedy’s and Richard Nixon’s careers intertwined throughout their lives.  The same age, they were both elected to Congress in 1946, and just six years later, Kennedy was a Senator and Nixon was Vice President.  Their relationship was always cordial during this time, but the 1960 presidential race locked them into permanent roles in the public mind as mortal enemies.  Nixon went to his grave believing that Kennedy had stolen that election.  There are many bizarre coincidences that link the two men.  One concerns Lee Harvey Oswald.  His initial plan was to assassinate Nixon, who was in Dallas the day before Kennedy arrived in November of 1963.  Oswald’s wife managed to prevent him from leaving the house, at which point he turned his attention to Kennedy.  Another has to do with the Mafia.  While still Vice President, Nixon urged the CIA to dispose of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, which he felt would help him win the election.  The CIA turned to known gangsters, including Chicago’s Sam Giancana, to help orchestrate Castro’s death.  Unbeknownst to Nixon or the CIA, however, Giancana was already chummy with the Kennedy family, shared a girlfriend with JFK, and had been persuaded to help guarantee a Kennedy victory in the election.  No one knows what Giancana’s motives were, and to what extent he may have sabotaged the CIA’s increasingly futile anti-Castro efforts.  And it’s really the issue of Cuba and its ramifications on Watergate that turned the Nixon/Kennedy feud into a real case of a surviving rival being cursed from beyond the grave.  Nixon was so paranoid about his involvement in the Bay of Pigs disaster being revealed that he went overboard in trying to silence the Watergate burglars, who – as fate would have it – were all former Bay of Pigs soldiers.  Nixon was traumatized by JFK’s assassination and – though not necessarily believing in a widespread conspiracy – viewed it as payback for the government’s secret war against Cuba.  Matthews is a liberal, but this book is by no means a Kennedy puff piece or a hatchet job on Nixon.  He is even-handed in his treatment of the foibles and virtues of both men.  In fact, if I’d read it with no knowledge of Matthews’ leanings, I would have no conclusion drawn about him being a Democrat or a Republican.  The book would make a very nice introduction for anyone interested in the political history of America in the 50s, 60s and 70s, since so many of the major events of those years involved Kennedy, Nixon or both.