Clash of the Near-Titans

...Johnson restrained himself from counterattack with heroic self-discipline, making himself almost ill in the process...

...I think he was seriously considering what steps to take.'" To the normal lashings of survivor's guilt, Johnson added his own skittishness regarding Bobby—as a bereaved brother, deserving of sympathy, as well as a political rival—and his private doubts about himself...

...For Robert Kennedy, devastated by the death of the brother he worshiped, the emotional truth was that his brother had been "killed" by LBJ...

...While John Kennedy treated him with understanding and courtesy—"You are dealing with a very insecure, sensitive man, with a huge ego," he told one assistant—his underlings and aides did not...

...he finally purged from government circles anyone who had so much as talked to a Kennedy...

...Visceral Bobby could not...

...Bobby's plans involved small-scale projects, finely tailored to the needs of local areas, that focused on economic opportunity, involved the private sector, and tried to empower the poor...

...Johnson himself told Walter Cronkite that Kennedy's people "undermined the administration, and bored from within" to destroy him...

...The scales seemed to have tilted forever in the favor of the younger rival, who behaved as if nothing would ever be different...

...That would have to wait for 1969, and Richard Nixon, who had his own mixed feelings about Kennedys...

...Eisenhower and John Kennedy were rational people given to courtesy in their everyday dealings, who remained in close touch with objective reality...

...Worse, they were programmed to attach a human face to their fears and frustrations...

...So were block grants...

...Robert Kennedy haunted the whole Johnson tenure...

...Johnson thought Bobby had schemed (without Jack's knowledge) to have him removed...

...Johnson jokes and Johnson stories were as inexhaustible as they were merciless," Shesol writes, "with a real bitterness, a mean-spirit-edness, that was hard to explain...

...Or so it seemed...

...Then he shut himself off from ideas altogether...

...It is also a drama, about human beings, whose feelings can trump all the rest...

...It would have been the bridge too far...

...Without this, Shesol thinks, the Johnson years would have been different and better...

...Blaming Bobby for inciting the riots, that in 1965 put the first blot on his record, Johnson began purging the government of "Kennedy people," among them some of the best in his party...

...Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were not merely men...

...That I was a coward...

...In a public one, it was serious, too...

...Usually, Johnson remained nameless, referred to by a simple 'he' or 'him'—as in, 'Can you believe what he just did?'" As time passed, the trendies resumed Johnson-bashing, their malice increased by their impotence...

...The situation in which these two men had found themselves after John Kennedy's murder was indeed dicey...

...Though Shesol is at pains to show Bobby's challenge as driven by policy, the evidence says something different: The emotional impetus went out of Bobby when Johnson withdrew from the field...

...He was having trouble simply calling Johnson 'the president,' a term Bobby reserved for his late brother...

...In this he created a bunker mentality and lost the ability to respond to the people, and to the ever-changing nature of events...

...That I had let a democracy fall into the hands of the Communists...

...Not a sparrow fell from a tree but what he was convinced that it was the intervention of a Kennedy," said a Johnson aide who had fed his obsession...

...No president before had died leaving a viable political-cum-dynastic heir for his successor to deal with...

...John Kennedy was not the first president to die in office, or even to be killed in it, but he was surely the first whose succession was compromised in emotional, if not legal, terms...

...He also ties him, correctly, to modern conservative activists...

...But this was all for which he was valued...

...He distrusted big, remote, and centralized government, and thought that dependence killed character...

...In the beginning, Johnson shut himself off from ideas coming from Bobby...

...Ike and JFK had frequent outbursts of profane irritation, but seldom held grudges...

...As the flaws in the Great Society began to mount, Kennedy became the first Democrat of real prominence to acknowledge the limits of government action—the first to argue that traditional, centralized solutions were not working," Shesol says...

...Unfortunately, the face that each chose was that of the other...

...The dead president had been charming, young, eloquent—all his successor was not...

...He endorsed direct, non-categorical federal aid to state and local governments—an early notion of 'block grants' borrowed from House Republicans...

...Clearly, Bobby was on the right track and Johnson the wrong one, something the president might have recognized readily had the words not come from the mouth of a Kennedy...

...As Shesol relates, Arthur Schlesinger urged that this prologue be axed, writing, "Some critics may write that the unconscious argument . . . is that Johnson killed Kennedy (. . . as an expression of the forces of violence and irrationality which ran rampant through his native state...

...Respect for Johnson did not come easily," Shesol says, with understatement...

...Kennedy was subdued, obviously deflated . . . there had been a cause in running against Johnson . . . a real challenge, a real adversary, emotion, and even 'fun.'" When Robert Kennedy himself was shot, Johnson's horror and anguish were evident...

...What this book tells us is that common sense is not all that common, and that sense itself gives way to other things...

...Whoever the future was, it was not Lyndon Johnson...

...Read it, and weep...

...But he still could not stop himself from trying to keep Bobby from being buried near his brother in Arlington National Cemetery, or refusing to allocate federal money to maintain the grave and its grounds...

...But by the time Bobby developed his program, the feud between them had become so intractable that his urgings pushed Johnson in the other direction...

...Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson loathed each other, and their party was splintered...

...Contrary to Johnson's fears, there was no conspiracy to ease him off the 1964 ticket: He was loyal, he was a southerner, and he was politically useful...

...We had learned enough about bureaucracies to make us profoundly distrustful of the notion that the government could do more than set a direction or create a set of incentives and opportunities," Shesol quotes one of his aides...

...Now and then, a brave aide would dare to suggest this was counterproductive: "An obsession with Bobby and with the relationship of your best people to him may . . . distort policy and offend the very men you need to attract," Harry McPherson warned him...

...They Noemie Emery is a writer living in Fairfax, Va...

...Their antagonisms spawned political turf battles . . . divided constituencies . . . and weakened their party by forcing its members to choose...

...Their mutual contempt was so acute, their bitterness was so intense . . . they could barely speak in each other's presence...

...Nothing was done without thinking of Bobby: what Bobby would say, what Bobby would do, how something done would give Bobby an issue and opening, how something else would frustrate and checkmate his purpose...

...As Johnson hit his stride in 1964, Bobby begrudged him the plaudits of others, as if each word buried his dead brother deeper...

...Clash of the Near-Titans RFK and LBJ, in Enmity Forever By Noemie Emery -w- yndon Johnson and I Robert Kennedy loathed 1 /each other," goes the very first line of Mutual Contempt, Jeff Shesol's splendid new book about a great public trainwreck...

...Quickly, he went from being the second most powerful man in the American government to being the odd man out in the administration, and beyond that, to being its butt...

...In retrospect, the direct confrontation that finally took place in 1968 appears to have been inevitable, as Johnson had all along realized...

...While he still believed that he deserved the presidency more than John Kennedy—a younger man, and an indifferent senator—he also saw himself as an "illegal usurper," "illegitimate," inadequate and wanting as a presidential successor, "a naked man, with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne...

...For five sullen years, from late 1963 to 1968, the distrust and aversion between these two people functioned as a prime mover in national politics...

...the easy knowledge of foreign countries, foreign capitals, and foreign leaders that had been his since child-hood—that made him the epitome of the establishment that intimidated Johnson...

...Now he would have, from a weakened position, to wholly rebuild his career...

...Had he tried, Johnson thought, "the dovish Bobby would have turned hawk, 'telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy's commitment...

...Magazines talked of a Kennedy dynasty, passing from John Kennedy's brothers to his son, then still an infant...

...This was the one thing Johnson could not consent to...

...his literary sense and his grounding in history...

...Later, the confusion surrounding the vice-presidential nod to Johnson and his acceptance of it caused more bad blood between them...

...Bobby resented Johnson for having (he thought) forced his way onto the ticket...

...Johnson in turn raged against the "Georgetown press," seeing as plots all critiques of his doings...

...In 1967 the left-wing Ramparts compared him to Ronald Reagan...

...Johnson and Kennedy belonged to the same party, had common concerns, and, by common sense, should have been allies...

...Thus is politics not merely political science...

...but had it concerned other people—Kennedy himself, say, and Dwight Eisenhower—it would have ended quite differently...

...Bobby and Johnson cherished their slights, which they replayed in their heads like old movies, and which grew in size and importance with every retelling...

...Already himself a Shakespearean figure, Bobby now saw Johnson as Hamlet had regarded Claudius, and Malcolm and Donalbain had seen Macbeth...

...It picked up steam in 1960, when Johnson for a short time fought John Kennedy for the presidential nomination, and made some charges, most of them true, about Joseph Kennedy's complicity in the pre-war appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain and the poor state of John Kennedy's health...

...Kennedy admitted that he 'sounded like a Republican' in appealing to the private sector, but its involvement was crucial...

...He's mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways...

...Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy loathed each other, and their movement was splintered...

...it is also biography and about human weakness...

...Bobby was one of the first to warn his own party that its devotion to the nanny state was wrong...

...Alone or with friends . . . each man ranted and obsessed, sulked and brooded...

...Shesol agrees with Johnson intimate Doris Kearns Goodwin that "Kennedy's mere existence intensified Johnson's terror" of seeking an exit from his Asian war...

...It was not John Kennedy's looks alone, but many other things about him—his Ivy League and prep-school background...

...His fear of Bobby and of his plots against him (some of them real, but most highly exaggerated) made him view all critiques as attacks on his person, and all dissension as part of a plot...

...Rational Jack dismissed this, as part of the great game of politics...

...For his part, Johnson was actively paranoid from the start: "Johnson said later, 'I think he [Bobby] seriously considered whether he would let me be President, whether he should really take the position [that] the vice president doesn't automatically move in...

...It was an offer Johnson must have later regretted accepting: If he thought his majority leader's status would follow him, he was soon proved wrong...

...An unmanly man.'" Fear of Bobby also shaped the Great Society, planned as the jewel in the crown of the Johnson agenda and now best remembered as a testament to the law of unintended consequences and the good intentions with which roads to hell are paved...

...For Johnson, the emotional truth of the assassination and after was that Robert Kennedy was leading a dynastic war to unseat him, and really could do it...

...That indictment was best expressed in the original beginning of William Manchester's Death of a President, in which a reluctant John Kennedy is forced by LBJ to shoot a deer...

...Shesol, who knows this, has written a wonderful book, a great tragic read about two driven people, who were their own worst enemies because they were each other's worst enemy...

...Bobby was nothing but misery multiplied: his grief at the loss of his adored older brother coupled with an utter loss of power for himself...

...Johnson's pleasures were compromised, but at least he held power...

...Giving Robert Kennedy his own place in Arlington could elevate him to a national standing, on par with his brother, the president...

...On the principle that the best time to kick a man is when he is powerless, the Camelot groupies laid on with a vengeance, wearing disdain like a fashion accessory, as if mockery proved their own merit and elegance...

...they were the two polar heads of the country's majority party, and nothing they did lacked political impact...

...And many opportunities were lost...

...And none had left such an irrational heir...

...Meanwhile Bobby, his longtime bete noire, had become, at 36, the second most powerful man in the country, less by the power of his cabinet office than the nepotistic position that gave him entree into every office, every department, every arm of the government...

...Our president was a gentleman and a human being," he said, in a remarkable paraphrase of the Prince of Denmark...

...For this he blamed not Jack, whom he always was fond of, but Bobby, custodian of the New Frontier and its ethos...

...Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were intuitive people, emotional to the point of being irrational, people to whom the truth was a subjective matter and reality was what they sensed or felt...

...This man is not...

...I thought that was on his mind every time I saw him in the first few days...

...In a private setting, this would all have been painful...

...The circumstantial emotional "evidence"— Johnson had profited by John Kennedy's death, the murder took place in Texas and stemmed from its gun culture—seemed to add up to a bill of indictment...

...The feud, Shesol says, began without reason, stemming to first encounters in the 1950s when Johnson was Senate majority leader, Jack a senator, and Bobby a counsel to Senate committees...

...November 22 changed everything...

...did...

...Politics is a great clash of interests and theories, and therefore, in some ways, a science...

...Running on issues was somehow less urgent...