Book takes fictionalized look at famous McKeesport Kennedy-Nixon debate

On this day 67 years ago, according to a new book, a McKeesport congressman set in motion a storied political rivalry between two then-U.S. House freshmen.

The book “Capitol Limited” offers a fictionalized version of events begun on March 12, 1947, when Rep. Frank Buchanan, D-McKeesport, invited Reps. Richard M. Nixon, D-Calif., and John F. Kennedy, D-Mass., to go to the old Tube City to debate what became the Taft-Hartley Act.

“It is a story of two future presidents, two young men,” said the Rev. David Stokes, a Virginia pastor who finds the Kennedy-Nixon years “fascinating” and shares that fascination in “Capitol Limited.”

“They were both Navy guys, they were both Cold Warriors,” Stokes said of these World War II veterans elected to Congress in 1946.

The specific inspiration for “Capitol Limited” was offered in the “Strangers on a Train” chapter in the 1997 book “Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry that Shaped Post-War America” by MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews.

“As the train rolled toward Washington, the two spent the early-morning hours talking about their true interest, foreign policy, especially the rising standoff with the Soviets in Europe, which Bernard Baruch had just christened the ‘cold war,'” Matthews wrote.

That train trip followed their digression, so to speak, to tackle what became Taft-Hartley, a pair of bills sponsored by Sen. Robert A. Taft, R-Ohio, and Rep. Fred A. Hartley Jr., R-N.J., who respectively chaired the Senate and House labor committees.

Kennedy and Nixon were among the junior members of the House committee. Nixon later told an interviewer that he and Kennedy talked through the night on that train. Stokes tries to recreate their conversation.

“I believe everything that I put in their mouths is consistent with material that I read and researched,” Stokes said.

Stokes joined the McKeesport Regional History & Heritage Center as part of that research. A bibliography offered as an appendix to “Capitol Limited” includes the April 21 and 22, 1947 editions of The Daily News.

Taft-Hartley reformed the 1935 Wagner Act or National Labor Relations Act. It was favored by business and opposed by labor unions.

Eventually, it would pass both houses, President Harry S. Truman would veto it and Congress would override that veto on June 23, 1947.

In between, on April 21, 1947, Kennedy and Nixon faced off at McKeesport's Penn-McKee Hotel at an annual gathering of the Junto, a group of city businessmen interested in politics and economics.

It was a landmark in the days when McKeesport was among the largest cities in Pennsylvania. As former Daily News librarian Gerry Jurann wrote in a 2005 “Bygone Days” column, “if it happened in McKeesport” from 1926 until 1968, “it probably was at the Penn McKee.”

“Capitol Limited” tries to provide a fly-on-the-wall perspective to that debate, as well as the trip Kennedy and Nixon took back to Washington on a Baltimore & Ohio (now Amtrak) train of the same name that used to stop in McKeesport.

In addition to pastoring Fair Oaks Church in Fairfax, Va., for the past 36 years, Stokes is a commentator, broadcaster and columnist.

An earlier book was published through Random House and had a foreword by Bob Schiefer of CBS.

This time, however, Stokes said, “I'm self-publishing hoping to get noticed both by the public and by publishers. It is sort of a backward way to do it. It is very hard to break into the book business otherwise.”

Stokes said he is working on a screenplay based on “Capitol Limited.”

Kennedy returned to McKeesport 13 months before his assassination, and just days before the Cuban Missile Crisis, to speak at the park along Lysle Boulevard that became one of the first dedicated to his memory.

“We are the beneficiaries of the New Deal,” Kennedy said, in a speech boosting Democrats running in the 1962 election. “I want to be sure in the 1970s that there are the people of this country who are the beneficiaries of what we did on the New Frontiers of 1962.”

Nixon recalled his McKeesport trip often in later years, and the foundation that maintains his presidential library in Yorba Linda, Calif., recalled the site of the debate in a blog on its website — and the recent debate over its preservation.

“Many people believe that a little bit of history will be lost, should the venerable structure ever find itself confronted with a wrecking ball,” said the blog at nixonfoundation.org.

The blog offers a link to the McKeesport Preservation Society, which seeks to include the Penn McKee on the National Register of Historic Places.

Patrick Cloonan is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-664-9161, ext. 1967, or pcloonan@tribweb.com.