MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is really into John F. Kennedy. So much, in fact, that he wrote more than 400 pages on the former president for his newest book “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.” However, back when Kennedy was running for office, the “Hardball” host didn’t actually support him.
As a young Catholic, Matthews had flirted with the idea of Kennedy. “By 1960, I was a paperboy for the Philadelphia Bulletin, and suddenly, as I started reading the daily afternoon paper I was throwing into people’s lawns, my loyalties were challenged,” he writes in the book’s preface. “Now I was following Jack Kennedy in that year’s primaries and enthusiastically rooting for him…I knew that, in the end, I’d wind up supporting Nixon, his opponent.”
And he did. So much, in fact, that when he heard that Richard Nixon would lose, tears appeared. “On election night, as the returns started to come in, the early ones signaling their defeat, I was overwhelmed — and I cried,” Matthews recalls. He went on to support Goldwater before changing political course entirely.
In the biography, Matthews hashes out some interested details about Kennedy’s relationship with Nixon. He discusses their first debate, long before the historic televised one. It was in April of 1947 in Western Pennsylvania, only a few months after both men had entered Congress. Matthews also notes how once Kennedy moved to the senate, his office was across the hallway from Nixon’s.
“Despite the fact that Vice President Richard Nixon was heavily favored to be his party’s candidate in the White House this time around — it was his turn — and despite Kennedy’s shots at him on the stump, friends of Jack knew he was anything but a Nixon hater,” Matthews writes of Kennedy’s views in 1959.
Matthews book comes out next Tuesday and the television host will be feted in Washington Wednesday at the Hay-Adams.
