Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry that Shaped America.

• Author: Reeves, Richard

The title of this book, Kennedy & Nixon, promises a great deal and delivers a good deal: the fascinating coincidences and conflicts in the lives of the 35th and 37th presidents of the United States, the two young Navy lieutenants who came to Washington as congressmen in the 1946 elections and were assigned offices across the hall from each other.

Christopher Matthews, once a congressional staffer and now an all-purpose pundit, has a fme political eye and loves to tell a good story. This is a wonderful telling. He mixes some golden oldies with original material gathered in 50 or so new interviews with politicians who knew destiny's tots as their relationship progressed from a casual friendship to confrontation at the highest level.

The story of their different styles, hopes, and fears can be seen in the photographs each of them used in their 1946 campaigns. Lieutenant (senior grade) Nixon showed himself standing at attention in his dress blues. Lieutenant (junior grade) Kennedy is in the cockpit of his boat, PT-109, grinning, shirtless, wearing sunglasses and a fatigue cap. Which one would you want to spend time with?

As Matthews describes them: John R Kennedy was handsome, debonair, witty, wealthy ... He was by any measure the most beloved president of modem times ... He possessed an innate ability to be liked, to have people want him as a friend, lover, son, brother, leader... He had the gift.

"Richard Nixon won four national elections and might have won a fifth [Matthews seems to believe that the 1960 Presidential election was stolen Richard Reeves, author of President Kennedy: Profile of Power, is working on a book about the Presidency of Richard Nixon. from Nixon].... Yet he could not best John F. Kennedy.... Bereft of spontaneity, he drafted and rehearsed his speeches for hours. Ill at ease, he briefed himself before even the most casual of meetings." In marvelous but overstated shorthand, Matthews is too kind to Kennedy and too cruel to Nixon, characterizing them as "a Mozart against a Salieri."

But whatever the charms or lack thereof of Kennedy and Nixon, the author cannot deliver on the book's subtitle: "The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America."

The thesis of the book, widely accepted these days, is that Nixon was obsessed with Kennedy and his ease of acquisition and ascent, and that Nixon destroyed himself by trying to be what he was not--crashing first in pursuit of Kennedy's dazzling company, and then of his many secrets. That...