by Garry Wills
The true wound inflicted on Johnson was not that the Kennedys considered him a usurper but that they came, in time, to make him feel like one himself. The Kennedys, he complained, would never let him rule in his own right. The more he deferred to them, the more they made his White House theirs, even before he had left it. This odd personal struggle between two shadow-presidents reached its climax in 1966 when Robert Kennedy returned from a Paris meeting with peace negotiators. A garbled leak had the Senator from New York carrying on negotiations for the United States. When Kennedy visited Johnson, he was attacked for releasing such a story. “I think the leak came from someone in your State Department,” Robert told the President. “It’s not my State Department,” Johnson thundered at him. “It’s your State Department.”
Johnson was President in name only, or President only for taking blame. All the credit for his own initiatives in civil rights or the poverty program seemed to go to the Kennedys. He was President only over things that went wrong. No wonder he confided to Doris Kearns:
It would have been hard on me to watch Bobby march to “Hail to the Chief,” but I almost wish he had become President so the country could finally see a flesh-and-blood Kennedy grappling with the daily work of the Presidency and all the inevitable disappointments, instead of their storybook image of great heroes who, because they were dead, could make anything anyone wanted happen.
From the very moment he took office, Robert Kennedy became an obsession to him. Eric Goldman said he spent more time and energy on “the Bobby threat” than on any other matter in those early days. He relived those days for Kearns:
Every day as I opened the papers or turned on the television, there was something about Bobby Kennedy; there was some person or group talking about what a great Vice President he’d make. Somehow it just didn’t seem fair. I’d given three years of loyal service to Jack Kennedy. During all that time I’d willingly stayed in the background; I knew that it was his Presidency, not mine. If I disagreed with him, I did it in private, not in public. And then Kennedy was killed and I became the custodian of his will, I became the President. But none of this seemed to register with Bobby Kennedy, who acted like he was the custodian of the Kennedy dream, some kind of rightful heir to the throne. It just didn’t seem fair. I’d waited for my turn. Bobby should’ve waited for his. But he and the Kennedy people wanted it now.
Even the Kennedy people who worked energetically for Johnson remained suspect; and if they began to express any doubts about policy, that was taken as a defection to the Kennedy government in exile. Robert McNamara prosecuted the war in Vietnam more vigorously than anyone in Johnson’s administration. But when he began to sense the futility of his own efforts, he could not make a case for withdrawal to Johnson. The President saw this as a Kennedy plot. The Kennedys had got him into this war; now they would tell him to get out; and he would look the fool either way:
McNamara’s problem was that he began to feel a division in his loyalties. He had always loved and admired the Kennedys; he was more their cup of tea, but he also admired and respected the Presidency. Then, when he came to work for me, I believed he developed a deep affection for me as well, not so deep as the one he held for the Kennedys but deep enough, combined with his feelings about the office itself, to keep him completely loyal for three long years. Then he got surrounded by Paul Warnke, Adam Yarmolinsky, and Alain Enthoven; they excited him with their brilliance, all the same cup of tea, all came to the same conclusion after old man Galbraith. Then the Kennedys began pushing him harder and harder. Every day Bobby would call up McNamara, telling him that the war was terrible and immoral and that he had to leave.
The same course of suspicion darkened Johnson’s relations with McGeorge Bundy, and George Ball, and Bill Moyers. His circle of power shrank, by voluntary withdrawal or suspicious expulsion. He became a man exposed, at odds with his own government, sensing enmity everywhere.
The impact of “Camelot” on what followed was profound; but I think it has often been misunderstood, or inadequately stated, because of the trivialization of the word “charisma” during the sixties. It is said that Johnson’s problem was his lack of charisma as mere glamour, mere sophisticated ease of manner; that John Kennedy had created an appetite for such points of style and Johnson could not satisfy that yearning; that the New Frontier had inflated expectations of the presidential office in a way that enabled Johnson to launch ambitious programs without having the flair to bring them off. But if we take charisma in its sociological sense, of a personal rule pitted against traditional and legal procedures, Johnson was forced to take up a charismatic role. He could not rest in the office he held on such tenuous terms, in a government establishment he felt disloyal to him. He tried to use his Senate skills and a few cronies to conduct his own kind of “guerrilla government,” defiant of Georgetown, the press, the bureaucracy. He reverted to Texas hyperbole and a personal war waged from his ranch as much as from the White House—“Son,” as he told a military aide gesturing toward his presidential helicopter at an Army camp, “they are all my helicopters.” His war, waged almost as much against its critics at home—even those in his own government—as against the far-off shadowy enemy. The real impact of Kennedy on his successors was not so much an inflation of the office they succeeded to, but the doomed way they imitated his attempt to rule against the government. Inheriting a delegitimated set of procedures, they were compelled to go outside the procedures too—further delegitimating the very office they held.
This was most apparent in the administration of Richard Nixon. Narrowly defeated by Kennedy in 1960, Nixon was mesmerized by Kennedys. Even during that first race, Nixon’s attacks on Kennedy seemed half-envious, never contemptuous. Murray Kempton observed at the time: “Mr. Nixon is cursed by the illusion that he is playing dirty with his betters.” Like Johnson, Nixon felt compelled to mimic where he could not scorn—the Nixon inaugural address was slavishly imitative of Kennedy’s more successful one. Yet he also felt an urgency to defile what he aspired to. As soon as he was in the White House, Nixon acquired a team of “gumshoes” to smear his foes. Their first assignment, during Nixon’s first summer in office, was Chappaquiddick. Tony Ulascewicz’s team was dispatched to Martha’s Vineyard, not as law enforcement officers, but to dig up further scandal for Nixon’s private use. The same team followed Kennedy, questioned his associates, planned at one point seduction of putative “girl friends” who might be blackmailed to inform against him. It was the sordid beginning to all Nixon’s later “dirty tricks”—the break-ins, the name-blackenings, all that scurrying in back alleys to bring down the shining Kennedy name. Charles Colson, who knew what would please his master, had Howard Hunt forge cables that would link Kennedy directly to the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. (Johnson, too, dwelt at times on the gruesomely satisfying thought that Kennedy might have assassinated another ruler just before his own assassination.) Nixon was at least as obsessed with Kennedys as Johnson had been.
And, like Johnson’s, Nixon’s admiring resentment of the Kennedys combined with earlier grievances against “the establishment” and various aspects of Washington. Nixon’s service under Eisenhower had been a demeaning one. Respectable Republicans treated the Vice-President’s “low road” tactics as a homeopathic medicine against McCarthyism’s deadlier poisons. Washington circles were Nixon’s feared enemies long before he reached the White House. Later, his defenders would say he resorted to private teams of lawbreakers because the official lawbreakers—the FBI, the CIA—had resisted his attempts to use them. But H. R. Haldeman hired private “investigators” just after the inauguration—long before there was a chance for the bureaucracy to oppose his master. Nonetheless, it is fitting that Haldeman—and brighter observers as well, like Nicholas von Hoffmann—should think the CIA, which overthrew foreign governments, overthrew Nixon’s as well. He was governing against the government from the outset.
Nixon’s inability to trust even his own government became a kind of blessing for th
e nation. He was brought down by his own drive to supplement the government’s illegal taps and bugs, break-ins and smear operations. He felt more embattled in office than Johnson had, a counterinsurgent President distrusted by the establishment and under siege from the counterculture. He governed from a mental foxhole, with official enemies at his back as well as hostile “kids” out front. His attitude was expressed in the odd outburst he allowed himself when Charles Manson was on trial for the cult murder of Sharon Tate and others. Speaking extemporaneously in Denver, on the way back from his summer White House, Nixon denounced the press for glamorizing a mass murder, and contrasted this with the values in a John Wayne movie he had seen the night before (Chisum), where Wayne took the law into his own hands and rid the community of undesirables.
To be a hired gun for good, to ride in and rescue where there is no sheriff—that is the outsider’s dream. But Nixon was the appointed sheriff when he reveled in that dream. And he was not talking of a man who “got away with” murder. Manson had been apprehended, and was standing trial as Nixon spoke. (Manson’s lawyers moved for a mistrial when the President called their man guilty before his conviction.) Manson would be legally convicted. But that did not seem enough for Nixon. The hatred of the lawbreakers had not been expressed vigorously or directly enough by the press. The head of lawful government publicly entertained the desire for remedies outside the law, for a press lynching—the very thing sheriffs are supposed to prevent. (Earlier that summer, Nixon had spoken well of Lieutenant Calley, another mass murderer, because he was a lyncher of sorts, not a potential lynchee.)
Nixon fascinated the press and others by his ability to reveal his fantasy life so directly. At the time he launched the Cambodian invasion, he watched the movie Patton several times, but not to indulge vicarious bloodthirstiness. Patton was not about male aggression satisfied, but about the baffling of a good man’s energies—and by Eisenhower! Nixon was not bracing himself with vicarious aggression, but with shared rejection. He was stiffening his spine with the surest medicines for it—resentment of his critics, and self-pity. Even as he wheeled vast forces of destruction to their work half a world away, he was the outsider, the despised one. The loyalty of his followers, their protectiveness, came from this vulnerability of the man hastening to hurt because he had been so deeply hurt himself. Nixon’s was called an Imperial Presidency; but it was a backstairs presidency. He plotted against his own throne, and brought it down. Hating John Kennedy even more than Lyndon Johnson had, he felt even less worthy of that man’s oval office, and carried on a personal guerrilla campaign against the traditional and legal governments of Washington.
Gerald Ford, it is true, did not seem obsessed with the golden family. But the acting president for foreign affairs during Ford’s administration, Henry Kissinger, had been rejected by his Harvard peers of Camelot, and adopted many of Nixon’s devices of secret government—tapping his own underlings, leaking, manipulating the press, governing against the State Department from the White House and by a purely personal reign when he went over to State. He believed in “back channels,” and resented the bureaucracy.
Jimmy Carter ran more openly “against Washington” than any candidate before Ronald Reagan. The Hamilton Jordan memorandum of 1972, which planned the campaign of 1976, established Carter’s basic theme: “Perhaps the strongest feeling in this country today is the general distrust of government and politicians at all levels.” By riding that feeling into power, Carter confirmed and amplified it, denigrating the very power he had won. Arrived at the summit, he could not let himself be contaminated by close relations with the rest of his administration. Hoping to bestow decency on the presidential office from his own store of personal integrity, he forswore the trappings of office, and asked to be thought of as President Carter not President Carter. He was insistent on his personal concern, outrunning mere obligations of place. He encouraged people to think that one could be a good man only by keeping his personal characteristics daintily aloof from the dirtied center of power.
In fashioning a charismatic countergovernment, Carter—the student of James David Barber—absorbed the State Department not only into the White House but into his own person. Anwar Sadat and Menachim Begin were invited to Camp David, where the President shuttled back and forth between them, praying with each, assuring them he loved them. The Camp David Accords were hatched in his very own nest, under his warming breast. When Carter could not go to others in person, he sent surrogates, friends who would express his esteem—Andrew Young to African nations, Rosalynn Carter to speak Spanish to Latinos, Hamilton Jordan to meet with Omar Torrijos over the Panama Canal treaties or with Sadegh Ghobtzadeh over the Iranian hostages. Like other critics of the bureaucracy, Carter tended to add special envoys or experts to the “useless” machinery—a new office for Alfred Kahn to cope with inflation, a special Mideast mission for Sol Linowitz. And, all the while, distrust of official Washington led to disproportionate reliance on a “Georgia Mafia”—Charles Kirbo, Bertram Lance, Hamilton Jordan, Jody Powell—whose only credentials were their proximity to Carter and their total dedication to him.
Like other charismatic leaders, Carter found crisis necessary to enhance “emergency” powers. When he sank to a record low in public opinion polls during the summer of 1979, he withdrew into a ten-day retreat at Camp David, canceling speeches and summoning spiritual as well as political leaders to meetings shrouded in mystery. When he came down from the mountain, it was to proclaim a national affliction with “malaise,” a moral and spiritual “crisis of confidence,” for which the solution was announced: “We simply must have faith in each other.” This meant: Have faith in me to lead you out of this newly discovered darkness. Carter reached for the emphases of the “active-positive” Roosevelt type in his speech of July 15: “And above all I will act … I will listen and I will act.”
It didn’t work. The machinery for cranking up the artificial crisis was too visible. Carter’s real problem was too obviously his own slippage. The polls continued unfavorable, and Kennedy entered the race. But then national trouble became a political blessing. The capture of diplomats in Iran gave Carter a real crisis, one he nurtured for months, exploiting it all through the primary season, fashioning a “Rose Garden strategy” which kept him off the campaign trail tending a crisis too dangerous to be left alone for a single minute. If this mood could have been sustained for a whole year, Carter might have been reelected on the strength of it. But as urgency was dissipated, month after month, so were Carter’s powers.
Like other successors to John Kennedy, Carter fashioned his charismatic presidency as a fearful attack on the former President’s family. His most significant departure from the Jordan memo of 1972 was his failure to cultivate Edward Kennedy. On the contrary, he took the occasion of a 1974 Law Day address in Georgia to upstage and alienate Kennedy. When the family heir removed himself from the 1976 race, Carter wrote to let him know this was no relief to him: “Let me say quite frankly that as one who has considered becoming a candidate myself, I’ve always viewed you as a formidable opponent … and I certainly take no pleasure from your withdrawal.” During the campaign he boasted that he did not have to “kiss Kennedy’s ass” in order to win. Once in office, Carter showed no favor toward one of the most powerful Senators of his own party. On the contrary, he failed to consult him, gratuitously insulted him by omission (e.g., from the first invitations to a party at the Kennedy Center for representatives of the People’s Republic of China), treated with suspicion such friends of his as Joseph Califano, and made sure that the newspapers carried his boast, on the day after Kennedy announced his own health plan, that he would “whip his ass” if Kennedy ran in 1980. It would have been easy for Carter to forestall any Kennedy race that year, simply by recruiting him to his own administration’s efforts early on. But he sought an opportunity for defeating Kennedy. Later Presidents have not considered themselves fully legitimate until they prove they can deal with the heir presumptive.
; Perhaps Ronald Reagan has broken the Kennedy spell over the White House—he awarded the medal Congress had struck in Robert Kennedy’s honor and President Carter had “sat on.” Of course, Reagan won in a year when Edward Kennedy finally did run. And he was not awed by the fake-Hollywood glamour of the Kennedys—he is (as they say) “real tinsel.” Also, as the last of the Roosevelt-era politicians to win the presidency, he had a very different view of Neustadt’s and Schlesinger’s hero. His views were formed before “Camelot” occurred. Though he has been hailed as introducing a new politics to the White House, he is still fighting our century’s oldest electoral battle, the fight over the New Deal.
Time plays tricks on us all. Reagan as the oldest President to be elected, and Kennedy as the youngest, will be frozen in their images, ages apart. Yet they were born only six years from each other. If Kennedy had lived, he would have been sixty-three when the sixty-nine-year-old Reagan was sworn into office. It is odd to remember now, but Kennedy was also speaking for Army Lieutenant Ronald Reagan when, at his inauguration, he said that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and abroad.” In one sense, Reagan just came to fulfill that messianic view of America’s place in the world.
