RICH MAN, POOR MAN

By Richard Stengel

Squares rule the world. This axiom is usually inviolate, but in 1960 a hipster was elected President. Richard Nixon was the very prototype of squareness, yet his rival, John Kennedy, whose amorous adventures infuriated Nixon, defeated him. Warren Beatty once observed--post Gary Hart, pre Bill Clinton--that every American boy could either decide to be President (be square) or have fun (in the Warren Beatty sense of the word). Kennedy managed both, and that puzzled Nixon as much as it enraged him.

One sign of a good idea is that you think it's been done before. But in Kennedy & Nixon (Simon & Schuster; 377 pages; $25), author Christopher Matthews, a newspaper columnist and television pundit, places a frame around these epic 20th century figures for the first time, revealing in this smart, well-researched, readable book that the two cold warriors had more in common than one may suspect. Matthews' thesis is that both Kennedy and Nixon secretly despised the Establishment--Nixon because he felt excluded from it, Kennedy because he felt above it. Most of all they were united by their ambition. For both, success wasn't everything, it was the only thing. They both valued opposition research before it was fashionable and were not at all squeamish about using money or dirty tricks to win votes. Both had a soft spot for Senator Joseph McCarthy. Both were wary of intellectuals and privately looked down on liberals as namby-pamby hypocrites.

Until they faced off in 1960, Nixon and Kennedy were cautiously friendly (though not as chummy as the author would like us to believe). For eight years their offices were across the hall from each other in the Senate Office building. Kennedy invited Nixon to his staff parties, where the Californian was a conspicuous wallflower. What seemed to come so easily to Kennedy--charm, good humor, small talk--were impossible skills for the perennially awkward Nixon. In the 1960 election both men seemed to underestimate each other. Nixon thought Kennedy too green to be President, while Kennedy could not imagine why any American would prefer Nixon to him.

Ultimately, both men were utilitarians who valued ideas and people on the basis of their usefulness. But whereas John Kennedy seemed to be wholly without sentimentality, Nixon seemed plagued by it. When Kennedy nearly died of complications from back surgery in 1954 and was given the last rites of the Catholic Church, Nixon wept in Kennedy's office. Years later, in his condolence letter to Jackie after the assassination, Nixon pointedly (and pathetically) mentioned how grateful he had been to have been invited to their wedding. In later life Nixon appears to have regarded all Kennedys as having been placed on earth to torment him. John Kennedy became the gold standard for the style of presidential leadership, and as President, Nixon, to his eternal chagrin, could never seem to decide whether to emulate it or reject it.

--By Richard Stengel