by Larry Tye
The third perceived affront occurred that same Saturday, in connection with the issue of when the president should deliver his televised address to a joint session of Congress. LBJ wanted to do it that Tuesday, to reassure a nervous nation of the continuity of its government and to get senators and representatives home in time for Thanksgiving Day. RFK preferred waiting an extra day—“at least one day after the funeral,” as he put it. When Bundy told him the president’s preference he exploded: “The hell with it. Why do you ask me about it? Don’t ask me what you want done. You’ll tell me what it’s going to be anyway. Just go ahead and do it.” When Sargent Shriver relayed Bobby’s reaction, LBJ again backed down and made a mental note. Strike three.
Payback took assorted forms, starting with presidential appointments LBJ knew would rankle Bobby. One was Thomas Mann, the new point man for Latin America and a diplomat who opposed Communists no matter their dogma or context, supported dictators so long as they were friendly to American commerce, and had little use for the Kennedys’ cherished Alliance for Progress. In another passive-aggressive move, Johnson named Shriver supreme commander of the new War on Poverty. Bobby’s brother-in-law had proved himself when he launched the Peace Corps for JFK, and he had demonstrated his loyalty to the new administration in the two months since President Kennedy’s assassination, but LBJ was less interested in his bona fides than in making him a pawn in the relentless chess match with RFK. He knew that Bobby would love to have been offered the job himself, that he would resent its going to a second-tier in-law, and that the public would credit the president for naming a Kennedy. Checkmate.
Bobby understood that his influence would wane with Jack gone, but he hadn’t anticipated how fast or cold-blooded the reversal would be. J. Edgar Hoover, a pro at reading political winds, ordered his direct line to the attorney general moved back to his secretary’s desk, “where it belongs,” and dropped Bobby as a middleman in his dealings with his old friend and neighbor Lyndon. “As far as Hoover was concerned,” said Guthman, “it was like [Bobby] had been transplanted to the moon.” And it wasn’t just the FBI director. “People who had called him every day and whom he would call on the phone and the reply would come back in about twenty seconds [now] never returned the call at all,” remembered Kenny O’Donnell. “I’m more callous than he is. I understood that. The transition of power is the transition of power. It was all over.” The phone from the White House stopped ringing because the new commander in chief wasn’t interested in consulting his attorney general on foreign affairs and other matters outside his brief, and he inquired about issues at Justice only when it was absolutely necessary. We can’t know what the response would have been had Johnson asked, given how forlorn Bobby was, but the one overseas assignment he was sent on suggests that more involvement might at least have been a helpful distraction. The president wasn’t eager to oblige even that once, but his advisers persuaded him to dispatch Bobby to Asia in January 1964 to calm tensions between Indonesia and the newly christened Malaysia. Using a blend of charm and hardheadedness, the attorney general got their leaders to okay a temporary cease-fire. He also stopped at Waseda University in Tokyo, where, instead of the heckling that had greeted him two years before, he drew wild cheers. The world seemed to understand Bobby and his loss, but back home the State Department and LBJ would go only so far. “The President may have been sincere in giving Bob the mission to help him out of the doldrums,” said Guthman, who went along on the expedition. “But Bob concluded otherwise.” Even so, the attorney general said that while “I hadn’t wanted to go on that trip…afterwards I was glad I had.”
Nowhere was Bobby’s diminished status clearer than in politics, LBJ’s favorite sphere. Not long after Kennedy got back from Asia, Johnson summoned him to the Oval Office and told him to fire Paul Corbin, the dirty trickster and Bobby friend who, even as he was on the payroll of Johnson’s Democratic National Committee, had been organizing a campaign in New Hampshire to write in Kennedy’s name for vice president. The president didn’t care who might have been pulling Corbin’s strings: “Get him out of there. Do you understand? I want you to get rid of him.” Bobby: “I don’t want to have this kind of conversation with you…[Corbin] was appointed by President Kennedy, who thought he was good.” That was all the new president needed to hear. In his mind Corbin was a symptom and the Kennedys the syndrome, and he could no longer contain his Texas temper: “Do it. President Kennedy isn’t president anymore. I am.” Bobby: “I know you’re president, and don’t you ever talk to me like that again.” Looking back, Bobby would call the president’s remarks “bitter, mean…the meanest tone that I’ve heard anybody talk.”*4
LBJ got even meaner, although not within earshot of Bobby. When he was growing up in Texas, the president told Pierre Salinger, “I used to know a cross-eyed boy. His eyes were crossed, and so was his character….That was God’s retribution for people who were bad and so you should be careful of cross-eyed people because God put his mark on them….Sometimes I think that, when you remember the assassination of Trujillo and the assassination of Diem, what happened to [President] Kennedy may have been divine retribution.” In telling Bobby’s close friend Salinger, LBJ had to know the story would get back to the attorney general, whom it was likely intended for. Rather than backing off from his retribution theory, Johnson stoked it over the years as he learned more of the Kennedys’ bids to bring down Castro. “Kennedy tried to get Castro,” LBJ would say, “but Castro got Kennedy first.” Later he would charge that Jack and Bobby “had been operating a damn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”
Bobby knew this couldn’t go on. Through the fog of his depression he could see that his allies in the government, a hundred or so of them scattered throughout the senior ranks, would have to make a choice. So would he. LBJ repeatedly said he wanted them to stay, especially JFK’s world-tested White House aides like Salinger, O’Donnell, O’Brien, Schlesinger, and Goodwin. But Bobby realized early on that those invitations, and his, had an expiration date. “Our power will last for just eleven months. It will disappear the day of the election. What we have to do is to use that power in these months to the best permanent advantage,” he cautioned Goodwin and Schlesinger in the aftermath of the assassination. “We must all stay in close touch and not let them pick us off one by one….My brother barely had a chance to get started—and there is so much now to be done—for the Negroes and the unemployed and school kids and everyone else who is not getting a decent break in our society. This is what counts. The new fellow doesn’t get this. He knows all about politics and nothing about human beings.”
It was classic Bobby Kennedy reasoning as well as wording. To him, LBJ would remain “the new fellow,” “Johnson,” “Lyndon,” “Lyndon Johnson,” or “this man.” Bobby wouldn’t call him “LBJ,” which was too embracing, and rarely referred to him as “the president”—that would always be his brother. Equally emblematic was his inability to decide not just whether to stay on as attorney general, but whether to push for the open second spot on the ticket with a man he considered “a very mean, mean figure.” Decisions about his own future had never come easily. He knew that teaming up with LBJ would make for “an unpleasant relationship,” but he wanted to remain a political player—for the sake of voters who’d elected Jack, the White House aides and cabinet men who continued to believe in the New Frontier, and his own outsized if interrupted ambitions, which still included the dream of following his brother to the presidency. He realized he couldn’t go on provoking Johnson if he wanted to run with him, yet he was too transparent and willful to mask his contempt. General Douglas MacArthur knew what it was like to be pulled in just those competing directions, and when he and Bobby met in New York five weeks before the old warhorse died, MacArthur offered this advice on LBJ and the vice presidency: “Take it! Take it. He won’t live. He gambled on your brother and won. You gamble on him and you’ll win!”
Bobby couldn’t take a job that hadn’t been offered, and LBJ had been caref
ul never to do that. Yet he felt trapped by what his staff called “the Bobby problem.” The new president was enough of a pragmatist to know that if his Republican opponent was a moderate like Governors William Scranton of Pennsylvania or Nelson Rockefeller of New York, he could get a huge boost from having as his running mate a Yankee and a Kennedy, especially the one who had looked so tragically heroic during the national mourning for JFK. But he resented Bobby more than he did anyone else in Washington, as he would confide to his biographer: “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….And then Kennedy was killed and I became 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.” Even more consequential, as he acknowledged, “with Bobby on the ticket, I’d never know if I could be elected on my own.” Weighing those pros and cons left him not with an answer but with a sense of being cornered, much the way Bobby and Jack had felt when they reluctantly chose him four years before. Yet thanks to the goodwill generated by the assassination, LBJ was substantially stronger politically than JFK had been in 1960, with polls showing him winning in a landslide against any would-be Republican foe.
The reality was that Lyndon Johnson would never have picked Bobby Kennedy, however much he toyed with the idea. Bobby got it right when he told Newsweek’s Ben Bradlee, “I should think I’d be the last man in the world he would want…because my name is Kennedy, because he wants a Johnson administration with no Kennedys in it, because we travel different paths, because I suppose some businessmen would object, and because I’d cost them a few votes in the South.” But he mused that Johnson might take him anyway, “because most of the major political leaders in the North want me. All of them, really.” LBJ, meanwhile, was telling friends that “if they try to push Bobby Kennedy down my throat for Vice President, I’ll tell them to nominate him for the Presidency and leave me out of it.” Equally certain, however, is that while Bobby might have taken it, he would have been miserable as vice president. LBJ himself had been, and having delivered Texas and much of the South to the Democratic ticket in 1960, he had substantially more clout with JFK than Bobby would with him. “As vice president, I’m not going to have any influence,” conceded the attorney general, who was used to being deputy president. “He’s not going to have to pay any attention to me whatsoever anymore.”
The matter was settled in mid-July when the Republicans picked as their nominee Senator Barry Goldwater. Whatever strength the Arizonan had was in the South, where Bobby would be a liability, and Goldwater had no shot in Northern states where Kennedy could have helped. LBJ broke the news to Bobby soon after in a congenial forty-five-minute one-on-one in the Oval Office. The only disagreement in their versions of the meeting was over what jobs the president had offered Bobby as a consolation prize. Kennedy said they included any open cabinet post, the ambassadorships of Moscow, Paris, or London, or running LBJ’s presidential campaign. Johnson said all he offered was an unspecified role in the campaign or possibly representing the United States at the United Nations. Both agreed that Bobby’s parting words were, “I could have helped you, Mr. President.” What neither saw, then or later, was how much the vice presidential merry-go-round had helped Bobby, taking his mind off the loss of JFK and focusing it, laserlike, on his career and his archenemy.
Things might have ended relatively amicably if either combatant had been willing to let it drop there. But that wasn’t in the nature of their relationship. When Bobby wouldn’t agree to fudge by saying he had voluntarily withdrawn from being considered for vice president, the president came up with what he thought was the ideal cover story—that it had been a matter not of singling out Kennedy, but of ruling out “any member of the Cabinet or any of those who meet regularly with the Cabinet.” Even that wasn’t enough. The next day the president invited in three White House correspondents and, over a four-hour lunch of broiled lobster, watermelon, and sherry, he joyfully recounted how Bobby had taken the news. “When I got him in the Oval Office and told him it would be ‘inadvisable’ for him to be on the ticket as the vice-presidential nominee, his face changed, and he started to swallow. He looked sick. His adam’s apple bounded up and down like a yo-yo.” To make sure his guests got the picture, LBJ demonstrated by letting out a fat gulp.
In the meantime Johnson dangled the vice presidency in front of the one man he knew Bobby couldn’t accept, Sargent Shriver, who found the prospect tantalizing. The attorney general was outraged. First he gave reporters his version of the Oval Office meeting, which was less colorful and more believable. LBJ, he said, had bad-mouthed his own most trusted advisers (“I was shocked to hear him being so critical to me of people who had been so loyal to him”*5) and trashed his protégé Bobby Baker (“he said God must have been watching over him because he did not have financial dealings with Bobby [Baker]”). Then the attorney general let the White House know that “if you are going to take a Kennedy, it’s got to be a real Kennedy”—not “a half a Kennedy.”*6 It was bad enough, Bobby said, that LBJ broke his vow to keep their meeting private, but then he denied the flagrant leaks. Over the course of the following weekend, Bobby’s anger gave way to humor and he shared with Arthur Schlesinger, who was with him in Hyannis Port, possible answers if the press asked about LBJ’s exclusion of his entire cabinet. His favorite: “I swear to the best of my knowledge I am not now and have never been a member of the cabinet on the ground that it might tend to eliminate me.”
That decision made, LBJ and RFK both had reason to look forward to the August nominating convention in Atlantic City. Lyndon knew he would win by acclamation, and Bobby would be introducing a film honoring his brother. But Johnson still was worried to the point of paranoia: Would the Kennedy forces, flush with fondness for their fallen king, railroad the convention into nominating his princely brother as vice president? The president wasn’t taking any chances. The JFK tribute film, scheduled for day two of the convention, was pushed back to the fourth and final night, after the choice of the vice president. The president also got a dozen or so FBI agents dispatched to Atlantic City to provide him with early warning about “any last-minute surprises from the Kennedy camp,” said William C. Sullivan, who ran the agency’s Domestic Intelligence Division. Kennedy boosters might have been capable of mounting an insurrection, but Bobby remained too shell-shocked from the assassination and too ambivalent about the vice presidency to let that happen. In a last and unsubtle sign of their place in the new Johnson order, key JFK and RFK aides including O’Donnell and O’Brien were banished to motels as far away as possible from the convention site.
Bobby was escorted backstage just before his JFK testimonial, to an area so dark and remote that he joked to John Seigenthaler, “I think Lyndon may just have put us back here with orders to forget us. They’ll probably let us out day after tomorrow.” He reviewed his notes, then headed to the runway behind the platform, where the milling politicians treated him like “a bastard at the family reunion.” Finally he was introduced to the delegates, and “it hit,” remembered Seigenthaler. “I mean, it really hit.” Seven times Bobby began, “Mr. Chairman”; seven times the clapping drowned him out. The applause radiated in waves and emanated from Alabama, Wyoming, and states in between. The only ones not standing were the delegates from Texas, who were glad the matter of the vice presidency had already been settled. Even the Texans yielded when their fellow delegates from Massachusetts, seated behind them, chanted “Up in front.” The ovation lasted a record sixteen minutes. It was not the staged cheering that is a trademark of political conventions, but spontaneous and cathartic. Standing on the podium in his black tie and dark suit, tears welling, Bobby looked more boyish than ever. He was embarrassed and he was touched. “Some people in that hall wanted des
perately to let him know that they share his palpable grief,” Mary McGrory wrote. “Some wished passionately to express their regret that he had lost the big prize. And some may have wanted to cheer him on in his political future….A convention totally dominated by Lyndon B. Johnson had been captured by a Kennedy.”
Finally he began to speak, trusting more to memory than to script. He thanked the delegates for all they had done for his brother, saying that “when there were difficulties, you sustained him. When there were period of crisis, you stood beside him. When there were periods of happiness, you laughed with him.” He recounted the New Frontier’s best moments—from its work to “do something for the mentally ill and the mentally retarded” to its efforts on behalf of “our fellow citizens who are not white and who had difficulty living in this society.” Yet it wasn’t his reminiscences that made the audience most nostalgic, but his urging that “we must look forward. When I think of President Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet:
