Instead, Morrow sets a much higher bar for the book. He is determined to demonstrate how the varied geographic and socioeconomic upbringings of the three men led to the development of their outsized, flawed, ultimately dominant characters. Simultaneously, Morrow is determined to link the three distinct character types with alternate visions of the US circa 1948.
The intellectual tour de force arises in a chapter titled "Ellis Island, the Frontier, and the Taft-Hartley Act."
Morrow theorizes how the birthplaces and gravesites of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, scattered as they are across America, "represent an American triangulation."
"The meanings can be approached by looking at basic poles of American experience: Ellis Island and the frontier. ... Americans tend to be attracted, like iron filings, to one or the other of the national narratives, with its attendant attitudes and sympathies. ... But it remains useful to study the interplay between Ellis Island and the frontier, useful to measure the political distance between them, and the frequent hostility between them as organizing metaphors."
The Ellis Island metaphor, Morrow explains, is essentially urban, noisy and ethnic. The frontier metaphor is essentially spacious, silent and homogeneous. The metaphors collided over a piece of legislation called Taft-Hartley, after its congressional sponsors. As the metaphors collided, so did the three future presidents. The proposed legislation carried a pro-business label, as it made organizing and maintaining labor unions more difficult.
US Representative Kennedy opposed passage of the legislation, thus putting himself at odds with the wealthy businessman father who bankrolled the son's political ambitions.
US Representative Nixon, who favored the legislation, "located himself farther to the right, on what might be called the Chamber of Commerce Frontier."
As for Johnson, hoping to win a Senate seat or suffer the near-certain death of his career in politics, he tried to embody both the Ellis Island and Frontier metaphors while misrepresenting his election opponent's stance on Taft-Hartley.
Morrow's book is filled with such original thinking leading to reader epiphanies. It might never become the conventional wisdom for the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon era of American history, but it ought to.
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