THE TWO-FRONT WAR: JOHNSON VS. KENNEDY

...In the light of subsequent "leaks" from the White House, this was an understatement...

...But this is not a matter of parlor etiquette...

...In fact, a Stevenson-Humphrey alliance (nurtured by Eleanor Roosevelt) created a momentary illusion that Kennedy could be stopped, and this sustained Johnson's dream of an ultimate victory...

...Seemingly nothing he says or does any longer can close the gap between himself and the President...

...The Administration clearly treated the interval as a time for a major massing of its forces...

...This tale has been often denied...

...But Kennedy seized the major headlines in most places with his plea that we "test" the assertions of U Thant, Kosygin, and others that a bombing halt would lead to the conference table...

...Johnson is beyond dispute...

...But once John Kennedy resolved to embark on his bid for the 1960 nomination, with Robert as his hard-driving manager, the soft pleasantries could not long endure...

...he received emphatic—and in the light of subsequent testimony from others—subjectively truthful denials...

...About two weeks elapsed between the time he confirmed reports that he would do so and the actual delivery...

...Under any circumstances, Presidential awareness of such a rare base of potential rivalry would be a discomfort...

...After that conference any possibility of a Kennedy-Johnson ticket seemed to have vanished, if indeed it had ever been taken seriously by skilled politicos...

...Kennedy had been repeatedly inhibited by the apprehension that his name would be misused...

...The tales of profanities have been exaggerated, but the intensity of the antagonism cannot be doubted...

...He had no large political base of his own and became increasingly dependent on the Communist apparatus, then engaged in its last serious effort to play a strategic role in American politics...

...As members of the Senate, John F. Kennedy and the tall, ambivalent Democratic leader (so much of his personality rooted in the Roosevelt era, and another part still steeped in Texas lore and sentimentality) had a cordial, mutually respectful relationship...

...And almost from that dreadful instant in Dallas the duel began...

...There is no question that he is resisting any vision of leading a party rebellion...

...Any assessment of the origins and meaning of the struggle, offered during the heat of the battle, is necessarily subject to the hazard of a writer's predispositions...

...Johnson likes it or not, opens doors and stirs confidences in places at home and abroad where Johnson evokes no comparable warmth of welcome, and where Dean Rusk is a figure of parody...

...I am proud to belong to that America which has its leader in Lyndon Johnson...

...No matter how often Kennedy disclaims any ambition for office other than his Senate seat, the existence of this sometimes formless Kennedy "underground"—perhaps one of conviction rather than conspiracy—remains a fact of life that no incumbent President could relish...

...that we would be guided by the infinite, incorrigible optimism of the military...

...it was he, after all, who was the older man who had recovered from a massive heart attack...

...In the ensuing weeks, there was some apparent reason for satisfaction among the Johnsonians with the results of the collision...

...Other envoys from the Administration counseled caution and silence...

...In the present it is the boast of the Johnsonians that they have successfully isolated him, and Kennedy sees his own position as an unpopular one on a national scale—at least for the moment...

...If any severe judgment is to be rendered, it is in considering what "might have been" if Johnson had been able to accept Kennedy as a partner in the quest for peace...

...Yet events could alter all his prospects...

...Kennedy, on the other hand, has felt with some justice that it is he who has been entrapped by circumstance...

...For the enduring fact is that the Kennedy name, whether Mr...

...sensitive to the world image of his brother still cherished in so many places, he must have had a deepening apprehension that he was failing to meet the test...

...In part it stems from the era when he was mobilizing' the John F. Kennedy movement...

...but cautious silence had become as unrewarding as it was unconscionable...

...I am convinced that there was nothing spurious or self-serving about Kennedy's dour view of the Administration's Vietnam escalation...

...But the name alone could hardly sustain the mystique...

...In the angry comments of those correspondents most closely identified with the President, one might have assumed that Kennedy had applied a torch to the White House...

...This was part of a larger conclusion that he was being reduced to ineffectuality and irrelevance by his reluctance to force the issue...

...We must retain options...

...We must not allow ourselves to get into a situation where we are prisoners of events...

...it happens to be my own belief, expressed in The Progressive on earlier occasions, that he has acquired a deep fatalism about political planning since that day in Dallas, and that his intuitive rapport with the young is a genuine identification— perhaps intensified by an uneasiness in the presence of some older, mistrustful ideologues to whose exacting diagnoses he has been long subjected...

...It was not a happy union...

...That was back in 1966...

...Much of the rest is public history, exacerbated, of course, by the battle over William Manchester's book, The Death of a President, and climaxed by the reports of Robert Kennedy's encounter with President Johnson aft"We hit three trucks, four barges, and one Kennedy" er his return from Europe in February this year and his Senate speech of dissent in early March...

...Wallace was a well-meaning mystic thrust into a world he never made and beguiled by a small clique of Communist operatives...

...The Kennedy men widely assumed—with some validity—that Hubert Humphrey's entrance into key primaries had the support of Johnson men and money...

...Some crude Johnson loyalists, of course, have increasingly suggested that it is a two-front war—with Kennedy as the deliberate or unwitting agent of the alien enemy...

...From Lyndon Johnson's view, Robert Kennedy looms more and more as an insolent interloper, a reminder of an unhappy time in his own existence, a pugnacious, audacious adversary invading political territory Johnson must hold to win re-election...

...Outside," not because anyone planned it that way but because the nature of his office, so historically ambiguous, was further reduced to triviality by Robert Kennedy's role as roving ambassador for the President...

...His fear, steadily confirmed, was that we would steadily dig ourselves in deeper into a war without end— except calamity...

...in psychological terms, the important fact is that Johnson believed it, and discussed it privately with close friends less than two months before the assassination...

...Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who also preserved his personal friendship with the Senator, has increasingly been obliged to reassert his public fealty to Johnson policies...

...The available evidence still suggests that Kennedy deemed it an implausi-bility that Johnson would respond favorably...

...No political figure of important dimensions has addressed himself so earnestly and sensitively to those many young Americans who are uninspired by the vision of an interminable, dead-end war on a murky battlefield...

...It is perhaps a measure of the President's insecurity rather than his arrogance that he is forever looking over his shoulder and seeing Kennedy men in the shadows...

...In any event that seemed to be the end of the story until the young new nominee changed the script and, after many hours of meditation and maneuver, invited Johnson to be his running mate...

...But such is the extent of the estrangement between the two men that Johnson may well have convinced himself—with the help of some of his advisers—that Kennedy was indeed deliberately offering aid and comfort to the enemy in an effort to prolong the Presidential agony...

...Ascoli's strident outcry reflected the rising mood of self-righteousness among the Johnson intelligentsia...

...It also symbolized the intensity of one of the most dramatic political battles in our history—of which the end is not in sight...

...KENNEDY by JAMES A. WECHSLER TThese have been months when an overnight visitor from another planet might conclude that the Johnson Administration is as deeply involved in its political war with Senator Robert F. Kennedy as with the blood-drenched conflict in Vietnam...

...that, as John F. Kennedy had once suggested, we would let the Joint Chiefs of Staff convert our diplomats into alcoholics —"just one more and everything will be better...

...he said it would be "safe" to report that Kennedy had reached no final decision on a running-mate in the event that he was nominated—that Humphrey, Or-ville Freeman, Stuart Symington, and Henry Jackson were among those being considered—but that "Johnson definitely isn't on the list...

...in almost every Democratic organization there are those who publicly—but more often privately in the present interlude—define themselves as "Kennedy men...

...Until that time it seemed possible to speculate that, by the next convention summer, harsh political adversity would compel the President to make Hubert Humphrey his sacrificial offering and solicit Kennedy as his running-mate...

...He was not looking for a battleground or inventing an issue...

...At one time he put it essentially this way in a private discussion: "The one thing we learned from the Bay of Pigs is that we must know what steps we will take if a given policy fails...

...younger generation of Americans depressed and disaffected by the stodgy stereotypes of political existence...

...Johnson found himself increasingly removed from the seat of power...

...Scrutiny of his motivations is a favorite parlor-game...

...I just wish the President would call in all his top advisers, throw the key away, and make them tell him where they think we will go step by step," he once remarked...

...There are few real secrets in a convention...

...What gives the Kennedy thrust such memorable, explosive dimensions is precisely its contrast with the Wallace adventure, or any previous episode such as Robert M. LaFollette's 1924 insurgence...

...The first fact is that his name is Kennedy, and that he inherited that immense resource of goodwill and sympathy generated by his brother's death, mingled with a widespread reluctance to concede that all the bright promise of the Kennedy era was ended by a savage blow in Dallas...

...Johnson made a vast effort to blanket him...

...but how many Presidents achieve such a relationship with their second man...

...Nothing is certain in life...

...It seems equally clear in retrospect that Johnson clung to the belief that he could capture the nomination even after Humphrey's primary defeats...

...Perhaps the shrillest verbalization of this view came not from any professional pa-trioteer but from Max Ascoli, the proprietor of The Reporter magazine, who wrote after Kennedy's late-winter indictment of the President's escalation in Vietnam: "The speech by Robert Kennedy on the floor of the Senate has made it brutally clear: there are two U.S.A.'s...

...that he has repeatedly withheld words and avoided deeds that Johnson would have deemed provocative...

...no deep ideological discords divided them, and Robert Kennedy was still essentially a peripheral figure...

...Johnson was depicted in some quarters, perhaps extravagantly, as confident that the doves were on the run and that, more specifically, Kennedy had been routed...

...yet few things seem as sure as the proposition that there will be no real reunion between Johnson and Kennedy in any foreseeable future...

...When Johnson unexpectedly began to show interest in the designation, it fell to Robert Kennedy to report the rumblings of an undignified protest on the convention floor and to offer Johnson the alternative of the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee...

...In private conversations his bitterness was largely aimed at Robert Kennedy...

...The final turning point was the White House encounter and the turmoil evoked by Kennedy's subsequent speech on Vietnam...

...but he has abundant trouble with the Joint Chiefs of Staff...

...and that it was only when convinced that he was in fact regarded as an exile that he decided to raise his voice—and even then in terms more modulated than he might otherwise have chosen...

...at a meeting of the Committee on Equal Opportunities which Johnson headed, Robert Kennedy arrived on a tour of inspection and left no doubt that he was dissatisfied with its performance...

...It is hardly a secret in these pages that I basically agree with Senator Kennedy's stand on Vietnam and have become steadily more critical of the President's course...

...since that time the major change in the White House entourage has been the elimination of such men as George Ball, Bill Moyers, and Richard Goodwin, who had managed to maintain communication with Kennedy without being hung for heresy...

...It seems astonishing that a man so endowed with political "realism" could have conceived a different result...

...he was probably more comfortable as the resourceful, tough-minded manager of his brother's political destiny than as the premature heir to his name...

...John Kennedy, in the period preceding the convention, had told liberal spokesmen wavering between him and Stevenson that his Vice Presidential choice would be "Humphrey or some other Midwesterner...

...There are still gaps in that phase of the story, but some incidents are no longer matters of meaningful dispute, regardless of any amenities now employed to blur the truth...

...Instead he exposed himself to at least a measure of public displeasure by espousing a "dove" view in a time when the hawks were thriving in the opinion polls...

...To understand how the situation could have deteriorated so far, one must go back a long way—at least to the weeks preceding the Democratic National Convention of 1960 at which Mr...

...Through many long months, and the changing of many seasons, he had voiced his doubts to close associates...

...More and more he has no real choice except to continue to say what he believes, risking the wrath of the man who succeeded his brother, and living by the maxim, "to thine own self be true...

...It is sometimes alleged that Kennedy's strategy is shrewdly based on the actuarial tables, and that the name, or number, of the game is 1972...

...On the day that Kennedy finally spoke, Mr...

...In Kennedy's behalf it should be reported that he declined, even at that moment, to spell out any details...

...One must begin by observing that professional scholars can offer no authentic precedent in our history for this Johnson-Kennedy drama...

...It is perhaps the most absurd paradox of the Johnson-Kennedy conflict that the only real possibility of the emergence of a Kennedy-for-President movement in 1968 hinges on the dread danger that things will get worse in Vietnam...

...I spoke that evening to Kennedy (and to a White House aide who must remain nameless now...

...It is absurd, for example, to liken Robert Kennedy's insurgence to the Henry Wallace affair of 1948...

...It would be nonsense to intimate that he had any premonition...

...that is one of the reasons why he so long muffled his dismay and discontent...

...he said only that the session had been "jough" and that the President had indicated no desire to see him again in the foreseeable future...

...What finally impelled Kennedy to utter the fateful speech was in part the sense that his bridges to the White House had been destroyed...

...It may well be that his European trip and his audience with Pope Paul strengthened his conviction that he could not forever stand on his remarks of the previous year...

...That it was a rough confrontation between him and Mr...

...He could hardly have envisaged himself as the ordained successor in 1968 if Kennedy presided for two full terms...

...We are not doing that...

...Beyond all the tones of a pragmatic progres-sivism that permeate his messages, there is also an efficient, rugged political operation with roots in many states...

...Who said exactly what to whom is less consequential than the finality of the breach between two men whose conflict may crucially influence the politics of 1968...

...Averell Harri-man undertook a one-man peace mission to Kennedy to implore him to drop the subject...

...By early autumn of 1963, Lyndon Johnson seemed a bruised, beaten, distracted man...

...But it is a fair assumption that in the same town there is a veteran political leader with whom he has maintained personal contact since his managerial days...

...What oc-cured might be called a saturation exercise in suffocation...

...He was "Mr...

...In terms of cold power play, Kennedy would have seemed best-advised to remain aloof from the controversy and quietly watch Johnson dig himself deeper into the morass...

...But the condition is acutely aggravated by the history of the relations between the two men, the nature of their personalities, and, perhaps most of all, by the inscrutable, explosive character of the Vietnam war...

...He watched the Administration continue to absorb "just one more" dosage of escalation...

...It must be assumed that Lyndon Johnson knew he was being written off, perhaps most vehemently by Robert Kennedy...

...There is little value in seeking to ascertain original sin in this clash between two men so disparate in origins and temperament and so enmeshed in accidents of history...

...the President seemed to be everywhere—speaking at Howard University, disclosing (and inflating) an exploratory exchange with Soviet Premier Kosygin on nuclear matters, releasing a letter to Senator Henry Jackson (written several days earlier) explaining why the bombings were vital...

...In this instance, moreover, the situation was complicated from the start of the Kennedy Administration by the presence of Robert Kennedy, who was in fact the President's top lieutenant and confidante...

...In any war in any time those who seek to reason why invite the charge that they are emboldening the enemy...

...Johnson seemed doomed to such endless humiliations...

...he expressed sympathy for the ordeals of the President but left little doubt that he viewed the Attorney General as his real rival for any serious attention at the White House...

...There were at least some around Kennedy who would have urged him to accept such an overture on the primitively realistic assumption that this might be his last chance to become crown prince (and nothing requires a crown prince to revere the monarch whom he is anointed to succeed) . There were intimations that at least some of the belated concern over the Manchester book expressed in the Kennedy camp reflected anxiety that publication of certain anti-Johnson passages would make such a rapprochement a chemical impossibility...

...When Robert Kennedy addresses a succession of high school meetings, he may seem to be leading a children's crusade...

...It was in that atmosphere that Johnson staged a news conference at which he dropped an ugly reference to the isolationist past of papa Joseph Kennedy, with ill-concealed inference of pro-Nazism...

...Johnson's February bid for talks was heralded as proof of the Administration's conscientious peace-mongering (only those who read the smaller type asked why we had renewed the bombing before receipt of Ho Chi Minh's answer and why Secretary Rusk so swiftly proclaimed an unofficial report from Hanoi as total rejection...

...As Vice President he would have, if even in limited terms, a national constituency that would enable him to rise above the smothering demands of a region and prove that his liberalism was that of the old Roosevelt breed...

...he in no way relishes the role of "loner" that some men enjoy...

...Yet it is not only those among the young in age—or heart—whose allegiance Kennedy commands...

...Perhaps above all he sought escape from the sectionalism imposed on a Texas Senator...

...Rauh took these reports to Robert Kennedy...

...indeed, the irony is that he is not by instinct a lost-cause maverick...

...The strategy, of course, was to forestall an early Kennedy victory in the Los Angeles balloting, and Stevenson's adherents were relied upon to prevent the quick breakthrough...

...But Johnson finally chose to run...

...There can be no doubt that Kennedy had genuine regard for Johnson's legislative talents...

...Ho Chi Minh's release of his rejection of Mr...

...He was also becoming convinced that there were plans afoot to drop him from the 1964 ticket—that in fact such a decision had been reached at a secret meeting of the Kennedy family inner circle (with Jacqueline Kennedy dissenting...

...John F. Kennedy won the nomination easily...

...Opinion polls showed a higher percentage (about two-thirds) favoring the resumption and continuance of the bombings of the North...

...Kennedy continues to avow his loyalty to the Johnson-Humphrey ticket of 1968...

...And yet Kennedy finds himself entangled in the most hostile terms with Johnson on the issue of his own effort to press for a negotiated settlement...

...Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., a Humphrey supporter then fighting to line up the District of Columbia delegation behind Kennedy, found his efforts hampered by reports emanating from the late Philip Graham and appearing in his Washington Post (copies of which were flown to the convention) depicting Johnson as very much in the race for the second spot...

...Even Robert Kennedy's detractors concede that he possesses a lively, curious intelligence, a rare gift for communicating with a JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and one of its featured columnists...

...He knew he would be damned if he talked...

...On the day the convention began I talked with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...With the advent of spring and the apparent hardening of positions in both Washington and Hanoi, the Administration's whisperers were saying with increased bitterness that Kennedy's stand had strengthened Communist resistance, heightening the delusion that the United States was swept by a spirit of surrender...

...Against that background of deepening isolation, amid mounting questions from young men and women who had looked to him for forthright speech, Kennedy let it be known that he was preparing a major address on Vietnam...

...Johnson's vision of a stalemate that would result in his nomination collapsed before the first ballot had ended...

...Johnson unexpectedly emerged as John F. Kennedy's running mate...

...Yet I long ago rejected the notion that there are simple heroes and diabolic villains in public life, and what is attempted here is an effort to offer both some personal footnotes and a tentative appraisal of the roots and repercussions of this extraordinary duel...

...that the proposal was made with the expectation that it would be turned down—but that the generosity of the act would diminish the tension created by the convention struggle and avert any hostilities in the relationship between the Executive and the most effective man on Capitol Hill...

...No matter how earnestly Kennedy disavows any desire to stage a coup in 1968, Lyndon Johnson can hardly forget the ovation Kennedy received at Atlantic City in 1964 and the interlude of tension when there were rumors that Kennedy would make an open fight for the Vice Presidency...