LBJ vs. RFK: A Case of Mutual Contempt
SHESHOL, JEFF
LBJ vs. RFK: A Case of Mutual Contempt How it all began BY JEFF SHESOL THE STORY UNFOLDS LIKE A GREE tragedy played out on a nation’s cen- ter stage. The protagonists are...
...In 1961, after a White House dance, a group of offcials gathered upstairs for a late-night batch of scrambled eggs...
...Lady Bird was in tears...
...JFK was heading to Johnson’s suite at 10 a.m...
...RFK: A Case of Mutual Contempt How it all began BY JEFF SHESOL THE STORY UNFOLDS LIKE A GREE tragedy played out on a nation’s center stage...
...Hale Boggs thought it obvious, despite the political chaos, that JFK considered Johnson essential to victory...
...Bobby spoke for Salinger and O’Donnell and especially for himself, revealing an antipathy that ran deeper, predating the campaign...
...Bobby, you do not like me,” Johnson moaned...
...This account cannot responsibly be dismissed as duplicity...
...In your first move after the nomination, you go against all the people who supported you,” he said...
...Bobby later told Arthur Schlesinger that “the idea that lJFK would] go down and offer him the nomination in hopes that he’d take the nomination is not true...
...I thought of the prornises we had made to the labor leaders and the civil rights groups...
...he had not forgotten the ugliness of the Johnson campaign...
...Joe Alsop believed that Bobby took the initiative to talk Johnson off the ticket and that Jack, seeking to avoid “an exhausting fraternal argument during an already stressful time,” placated Bobby by allowing him to do so...
...If Johnson seemed amenable, Bobby should ease him off the ticket...
...At this news, the two advisers exploded...
...Unless Bobby’s recollections are wholly inaccurate, which seems unlikely, it appears that he knew nothing of House Speaker Sam] Rayburn’s, Washington Post publisher Phil Graham’s, or others’ overtures on Johnson’s behalf...
...Robert Kerr was so livid that upon confirmation of the bad news, he reportedly slapped Bobby Baker in the face...
...The nominee decided a reversal would do him more damage than an anti-Johnson revolt...
...In the wake of Bobby’s last visit, a pall hung over the Johnson suite...
...Johnson had his own fires to quench...
...JFK, after all, had earlier told O’Neill that he would be “embarrassed” if Johnson rejected an offer...
...This became the defining relationship of their political lives...
...He wants it,” the dazed Jack told his brother...
...The reason he went down . . . [is] because there were enough indications from others that he uohnson] wanted to be offered the nomination...
...Your sister-in-law likes me...
...In later years, Bobby Kennedy was incensed, “flabbergasted,” by the Graham memo...
...As historical figures, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy are forever entangled: One cannot fully comprehend either man without considering his relationship with the other...
...Bobby, who sided with labor against him...
...Johnson had a tendency to believe such things even in his calmer moments...
...The Aftermath The accounts of Robert Kennedy’s subsequent visits to the Johnson suite-three in all-are jumbled and contradictory...
...Their antagonism was, from the beginning, very personal, but it was also a complicated blend of politics, ideas, ambitions, and anxieties...
...The normally sanguine Arthur Schlesinger lit into Phil Graham with such ferocity that Graham’s wife, Katharine, had to pull them apart...
...The problem was, if it wasn’t a good idea, how you’d get [Johnson] out of it...
...What can explain Bobby’s puzzling version of events...
...Bobby recoiled...
...Now why...
...Bobby, who ruthlessly tried to humiliate him...
...Well, we couldn’t believe [LBJ] would [want the vice presidency],” Bobby said later, spealung more for himself than for his brother, “but Jack decided that he’d go down and talk to him about it anyway...
...He really hadn’t thought about it at all...
...Who’d want to be vice president for that man...
...At conventions, as George Reedy explained, “people become extremely emotional...
...Salinger was outraged...
...Yes, we are,” Bobby said matter-of-factly...
...In Johnson’s suite, political leaders gathered to voice their support or outrage...
...What remains clear is that each trip generated a wider wake of confusion and disaffection, with Bobby at first going ostensibly simply to test Johnson’s commitment to the ticket then later, as Bobby recalled of his final visit, “to see if I could get him to withdrawl’ In between Bobby’s visits, Johnson and his people were on the phone to JFK, who, even as his brother was attempting to ease Johnson off the ticket, called Graham and announced: “It’s all set...
...two men apart-Vietnam, race, poverty-were at the heart of many personal political cleavages in those years of division...
...the villain, Johnson believed, was Bobby Kennedy-Bobby, who opposed Johnson from the beginning...
...Or would they move with RFK toward “a newer world”-a broader coalition, more decentralized decision making, and “empowerment” of the underprivileged...
...Negro leaders cried “sell-out...
...Although Bobby’s self-justifying claims cannot be verified, they make more sense than LBJ’s conspiratorial account...
...Graham instead imagined that Bobby was fulfilling a promise to liberal delegates to deny Johnson the nomination...
...And in the distorting heat of Los Angeles, and forever afterward, LBJ was absolutely convinced that Robert Kennedy had acted alone, with premeditated spite, to destroy his political future...
...Bobby exclaimed...
...In Baker’s recollection it was Bobby, not Jack, whom Johnson denounced as “that little shitass” and a score of epithets more coarse...
...How many electoral votes are we gonna get if we capture the East, Northeast, and the solid South...
...But you don’t like me...
...Bobby shouted from the bathtub...
...Few Texans had even considered that LBJ might take the vice presidency...
...It is hard to fathom that John Kennedy, after clear signals from Rayburn, Graham, Massachusetts Congressman Tip O’Neill, and New Deal guru Tommy Corcoran, could possibly have been surprised by Johnson’s answer...
...Their initial misgiving were conipounded by a staff which, once informed, stormed on the verge of insurrection...
...O’Donnell was almost hysterical...
...Bobby argued that when he had left the Kennedy suite to meet with Johnson, the two brothers had been in agreement...
...All hell broke loose...
...Your Daddy likes me...
...The protagonists are flawed, very human men, and their conflict illuminates not only their characters but their era...
...on July 14, Pierre Salinger stepped across the hall from his suite into Bobby Kennedy’s suite...
...Over the course of eight conversations, spanning a full year, Bobby’s story was consistent and emphatic: under no circumstances was JFK’s offer either intended or expected to be accepted by LBJ...
...The argument won few converts other than Bobby Kennedy...
...Had Bobby been converted to a Kennedy-Johnson ticket...
...The Offer In the Kennedy suite, it was not altogether clear that an offer was imminent...
...Jake Jacobson demanded...
...Even Graham, who remembered John Kennedy’s last-minute qualms and “mind-changing” more clearly than anyone, could not believe JFK had authorized Bobby’s inept political maneuver...
...It seems highly unlikely, for as Bobby later explained, Johnson had “said some rather nasty things-or his people had-and we hadn’t really gotten over that...
...Would liberals, like LBJ, continue to represent unions, federal paternalism, and globalism...
...Obviously,” Bobby said to Arthur Schlesinger, “with the close relationship between my brother and I, [I] wasn’t going down to see if he would withdraw just as a lark on my own-‘My brother’s asleep so I’ll go see if I can get rid of his vice president...
...Are you tallung about nominating Lyndon Johnson...
...Bobby’s been out of touch and doesn’t know what’s happening...
...According to Graham, Bobby took the phone, listened a moment to JFK, and said, “Well, it’s too late now,” before half slamming down the receiver...
...But Johnson and Kennedy were not, like student demonstrators or civil rights workers, peripheral anonymous figures...
...Oh,” Jack replied serenely, “that’s all right...
...He instructed that LBJ make a statement right away, and then talked for a moment to Johnson, who was sprawled across the bed...
...Taut with anger, John Kennedy whitened and composed himself...
...I just got a call from Clark Clifford...
...He protested stiffly thar his offer had not been accepted...
...Now what do we do...
...My guess,” Graham concluded in his memorandum, “is that he made that assurance on his own and tried to bring it about on his own...
...Turning on Bobby, O’Donnell denounced the choice of Johnson as a “disaster” and told JFK it was “the worst mistake” he ever made...
...I felt that we had been double-crossed...
...Robert Kennedy remembered no such phone call...
...LBJ’s nervous response to the “Bobby problem” speaks volumes about the Johnson presidency...
...They were just up in arms,” Hubert Humphrey said of his fellow liberals...
...Shortly after 1O:OO a.m., John Kennedy traced the two flights back up from Johnson’s suite to his own...
...Johnson and Kennedy personalized, embodied, and crystallized growing rifts among Democrats...
...Sometime after JFK’s final offer to Johnson, Graham phoned the nominee to express confusion that Bobby had again returned to Johnson’s suite and was encouraging Lyndon to withdraw...
...the situation was painfully awkward for everyone, but the vice president was unrelenting...
...Copyright 1997 by Jeff Shesol...
...John Kennedy had changed his mind while Bobby was trying to change Johnson’s...
...The solid South included Texas...
...Politics, too, bore its mark...
...Adapted from Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade by JEFF SHESOL...
...Oh, my God...
...I can’t believe that my three best friends would betray me.’’ Eventually, either Rayburn or Baker converted Kerr, who apologized to the Johnsons for “los[ing] my head...
...Time’s Hugh Sidey recalled Robert Kennedy’s “contempt for Johnson as majority leader...
...Kennedy’s challenge to Johnson says much about his own evolution as a public figure...
...Neither John nor Bobby said a word about LBJ...
...After John Kennedy’s assassination, they were the political titans of the decade...
...they decided to talk Johnson off the ticket, to undo “the terrible mistake...
...Now, mos felt deserted and sick at heart, just as bitter as the Kennedy supporters...
...to make the offer...
...And “particularly after you had offered him the job, then it would have been disastrous to have that affront and withdraw it.’’ As it turned out, it was disastrous just to attempt to withdraw it...
...The Fallout What followed was chaos...
...Johnson’s friends joined in the recriminations...
...Did it occur to you,)’ he pointed out, ‘‘that if Lyndon becomes the vice president, I’ll have Mike Mansfield as the leader in the Senate, somebody I can trust and depend on...
...the D.C...
...Salinger demanded...
...Bobby calmly cited Johnson’s unique strength in the South...
...Yet Bobby’s version emerged in a series of private, sealed oral history interviews with historians and trusted friends Schlesinger and John Bartlow Martin...
...O’Donnell, JFK’s liaison to labor, “was so furious that I could hardly talk...
...But lJFK] never dreamt that there was a chance in the world that he would accept it...
...Overwhelmed by the excitement of victory-on the first ballot, no lessKennedy advisers found it difficult to focus on the thorny and less glamorous matter of the vice presidency...
...You just won’t believe it...
...Tell Lyndon I want him...
...These tensions linger: the long shadow of the Johnson-Kennedy feud looms above today’s clash between “Old” and “New” Democrats...
...Shortly after 1:00 p.m...
...Connally seconded LBJ’s suspicion that Bobby was the mastermind...
...The issues that wrenched these...
...They have a tendency to believe things that they would never believe...
...According to Bobby, it was only after the presidential nomination, the night of July 13, that they learned Johnson was interested in the vice presidency...
...It is more believable that Robert Kennedy, who despised LBJ even in 1960, remembered events as he saw them...
...Their feud was, in large part, an ideological and general struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party and the future of American liberalism...
...Nor can one fully comprehend the 1960s without considering the Johnson-Kennedy feud...
...As word of the spreading liberal revolt reached JFK’s suite, Robert Kennedy in particular saw the choice of Johnson as a grave mistake...
...Secondly, if you did get him out of it, how bitter would he be...
...Meanwhile, the two Kennedy brothers sat alone inside Jack‘s suite in utter indecision...
...In the kitchen, Vice President Lyndon Johnson accosted Attorney General Robert Kennedy...
...Johnson and Kennedy’s struggle for power, a focal point of the Democratic search for identity, is a lens through which to examine these larger divisions...
...We both promised each other that we’d never tell what happened,” Bobby recalled, “but we sp’ent the rest of the day alternating between thinking it was good and thinking it wasn’t good . . . and how he could get out of it...
...Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W.W Norton & Company...
...Tip O’Neill thought JFK “delighted” at the prospect of a Kennedy-Johnson ticket...
...But by the morning of July 14,1960, Bobby knew an overture to Johnson was imminent and seems to have been preparing or warning his like-minded advisers...
...It remains a central question, charged with emotion and invested with significance...
...They not only responded to issues but also shaped them...
...The accounts seem irreconcilable...
...Get me my .38,” Kerr yelled at Baker, LBJ, and Lady Bird...
...Joe Kennedy dropped by and urged Jack to pick Lyndon Johnson, but the candidate appeared irresolute and went to bed at 2:OO a.m., leaving advisers with the impression that only Stuart Symington and Scoop Jackson were being considered...
...Yet he did not blame John Kennedy as the agent of his stinging repudiation...
...Your brother likes me,” Johnson went on...
...JFK was too “practical [a] fellow,” Texas Governor John Connally said, to make an offer without expecting it to be accepted...
...Bobby’s case is not persuasive...
...There was more: As Bobby recalled, JFK had concluded that Johnson “would be so mean as majority leader that it was better having him as vice president, where you could control him...
...Why don’t you like me...
...Bobby, your brother wants to speak to you,” Graham said, thinking himself a character in an increasingly absurd melodrama...
...And yet JFK had been receiving signals for days...
...New Mexico Congressman Stewart Udell ran from delegation to delegation “putting out fires,” promising his liberal friends that a Kennedy-Johnson ticket was the surest route to victory...
...Graham, columnist Joseph Alsop, and O’Neill clearly recall encounters with JFK in which he convincingly sang the praises of a Kennedy-Johnson ticket, impressing others with his “positiveness...
...Thus began, in Bobby’s view, “the most indecisive time we ever had,” a period hopelessly snarled by confusion, miscommunication, and murky, mixed intentions...
...By late morning, word of an impending Johnson nomination had reached the convention floor...
...From the war in Vietnam to the war on poverty, from the “problem of the cities” to the collapse of the Democratic coalition, the major events of the ’60s bear the imprint of this personal rivalry...
...LBJ returned from his press conference sour-faced and seething...
...At 6:30 a.m...
...He arrived, according to Bobby, in a panic of misgivings...
...It is tempting to dismiss it as fabrication...
...Its answer reveals a great deal about two men, their times, and the nature of power...
...He was not going to undercut his brother’s decision...
...Ken O’Donnell stood outside the bathroom, where Kennedy was bathing...
...It is also doubtful that, as Bobby argues, JFK offered the vice presidency only to appease Johnson’s self-importance and without any “hopes” that LBJ would accept...
...Juanita Roberts, Johnson’s secretary, was not the only one to characterize the ticket as upside down...
...You’re not going to do that...
...in their calmer moments...
...It was a difficult pitch...
...delegation, infuriated by rumors of Johnson’s selection, threatened hollowly to tear the Convention apart...
...Baker, meanwhile, tugged an utterly exhausted Bobby Kennedy back into the room...
...I’m gonna kill every damn one of you...
...saying that this [indecision] is disastrous, you’ve got to take him,” Jack explained when Bobby returned from Johnson’s suite...
...jack changed his mind back and forth, as I did . . . at least six times,” Bobby remembered...
...O’Donne11 “violently protested” Johnson’s presence on the ticket...
...Then, rising from the tub, he dried, dressed, and excused himself to conduct a morning meeting...
...Jack “thought how terrible it was that he had only 24 hours to select a vice president...
Vol. 29 • October 1997 • No. 10
