* Raab, who served with distinction as ambassador to Italy during the Reagan administration, had been used by Senator Kennedy during the 1960 campaign. He left the White House in 1959 and was working as an aide to Senator Kenneth Keating, Republican of New York, when Kennedy, very agitated, sought him out. The two men had known each other since the late 1940s, Raab told me in our interview. "I gotta talk to you," Kennedy said. "Nixon and the Republican National Committee are doing a job on me. They're trying to destroy me and they've got Jackie all upset. It's created havoc in my home. It's got to be stopped." Kennedy asked Raab to approach Nixon and his fellow Republicans and tell them "to stop spreading the word that I'm philandering." "It wasn't rage," Raab said of Kennedy's demeanor, but "the nearest thing." Raab dutifully brought up the matter with Leonard Hall, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and with Nixon. "Nixon said, 'I'm not doing it,' but he"---referring to Hall---"was." Raab, who admits he was very naive about Jack Kennedy at the time, subsequently reported back to the senator, assuring him that "there will be no more talk from the White House or Republican National Committee." Kennedy thanked him.
9
LYNDON
Jack Kennedy came to Los Angeles with more than enough delegates to assure a first-ballot nomination, and enough excess baggage---from the huge cash outlays in West Virginia and the womanizing---to threaten his certain victory. It is only with an understanding of the dark side of the Kennedy legacy---and who was aware of it at the time of the convention---that the surprise selection of Lyndon Johnson as the vice presidential candidate can be understood.
The public story is that for reasons of party unity Kennedy offered the vice presidency to Johnson fully expecting that the Texan, who was Senate majority leader, would turn it down. By this account, once Johnson accepted, Kennedy had no choice but to go along. Bobby Kennedy's profound dismay upon learning of Johnson's nomination was obvious to scores of politicians and journalists at the convention; the two men would remain bitter enemies for the next eight years. The word was put out after the convention that Joe Kennedy had been pushing all along for Johnson, who was seen as a more conservative political figure acceptable to the South, and able to deliver Texas. But the Kennedy brothers and their aides muddled the picture by providing political insiders and favored journalists with widely varying accounts of their thinking before, during, and after the convention, leaving a record of impossible-to-reconcile contradictions.
Hugh Sidey, of Time magazine, who covered Kennedy as a candidate and in the White House, vividly recalled in an interview for this book a conversation on the eve of the convention, as Kennedy was preparing to fly from New York to Los Angeles. Sidey had just spent a day with Johnson, and Kennedy "wanted to know his mood and all that. He told me that night in so many words, 'If I had my choice I would have Lyndon Johnson as my running mate. And I'm going to offer it to him, but he isn't going to take it.' So, right off," Sidey told me, "a lot of these stories about Bobby's anger and not knowing about this were nonsense."
Bobby Kennedy, in a 1965 oral history for the Kennedy Library, flatly contradicted his brother's words to Sidey. He said that any reports that "the president had the thought of Lyndon Johnson as vice president prior to his own nomination---that's not true. The idea that he'd go down and offer him the nomination in hopes that he'd take the nomination is not true." In an earlier interview for the library, Kennedy described the selection of Johnson as "the most indecisive time we ever had.... We changed and rechanged our minds probably seven times. The only people who were involved in the discussions were Jack and myself. Nobody else was involved in it."
Bobby Kennedy remained distraught after the convention. On the day after Jack's nomination, Charles Bartlett, the Chattanooga newspaper reporter and family friend, had been invited to join the family at a hideaway in Santa Monica. "Bobby told me that this was the worst day of his life," Bartlett said in an interview for this book. "He felt really badly about Lyndon Johnson going on the ticket. Jack seemed sort of stunned."
One reason for the dismay became clear in 1978, when Bobby Baker, Johnson's close aide, published his memoir, Wheeling and Dealing. Baker described a brutal breakfast meeting with Bobby Kennedy just as the convention was getting under way. After the usual banter over coffee, Baker complained mildly about Teddy Kennedy's suggestion in a speech in Texas that Johnson had not fully recovered from an earlier heart attack. Bobby Kennedy immediately reddened at the criticism of his younger brother, Baker wrote, and declared, "You've got your nerve. Lyndon Johnson has compared my father to the Nazis and [Johnson supporters] John Connally and India Edwards lied in saying my brother is dying of Addison's disease. You Johnson people are running a stinking damned campaign and you're gonna get yours when the time comes." Kennedy slammed a few dollars down on the table, Baker wrote, and stomped off.
Even Joe Kennedy found it necessary to console his sons. "There's a scene I'll never forget," Bartlett told me, recalling his day with the Kennedys in Santa Monica. "Old Joe was in a dinner jacket and velvet slippers, and he was standing with the setting sun glinting in his eyes. Old Joe said, 'Jack,' in that Boston accent, 'in two weeks they'll be saying this is the smartest thing you ever did.'"
Johnson's nomination pitted brother against brother, and as Kennedy's narrow plurality in the November election would show, did not ensure the success of the Democratic ticket. What made Johnson more attractive than the other candidates?
One account that has not been made public is the late Hyman Raskin's, as recorded in a chapter of his unpublished memoir, provided for this book, and buttressed by interviews with him in 1994 and 1995. In Raskin's account, Stuart Symington was always at the top of Kennedy's short list of running mates. That list was "precipitously and totally discarded," Raskin wrote, when Kennedy met early on the morning after his nomination with Johnson and Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House. At the meeting, Kennedy was "made an offer he could not refuse." In other words, Raskin assumed, Johnson blackmailed his way into the vice presidency. Raskin could not learn which aspect of the Kennedy history was cited by Johnson and Rayburn in making their threats, but he had no doubt that their morning meeting with Johnson disrupted months of careful planning and put the Kennedy campaign staff in an uproar.
Hy Raskin had been a major strategist and trusted campaign aide for more than two years by the time Kennedy won the nomination; he was much more of an insider than was publicly known. "It is a chronic weakness of all the books that have been written about the emergence of John F. Kennedy that the vital role played by Hyman B. Raskin is grossly underplayed or totally ignored," the Chicago television analyst Len O'Connor noted in his 1975 book, Clout: Mayor Daley and His City. "It was Hy Raskin who had dropped in on old Democratic friends everywhere, using the soft sell that it would have to be Jack Kennedy at the convention or they would never make it in November, cashing in the chits he held for past favors, picking up a few delegates here, the promise of a few delegates there."
Once at the convention, Raskin was given the important task of running the campaign's communications center. It was natural for Bobby Kennedy to turn to him for confidential help in resolving the vice presidential issue. Moments after Kennedy's nomination was locked up on Wednesday, July 13, the third night of the convention---and before the decisive meeting---Bobby Kennedy ordered Raskin to make a series of discreet calls to arrange a late meeting with the candidate and a select group of Democratic party leaders. The session was to take place after Kennedy appeared before the convention delegates to make a short thank-you speech. The meeting's purpose, Raskin understood, was cosmetic:
To assuage the feelings of a few ambitious men who were under the impression they were being seriously considered for the vice presidential nomination. In addition, the important leaders of the party who had not been consulted would have an opportunity to make their recommendations and then be the "first to know" the identity of the vice presidential candidate. This was the traditional method for giving comfort to politi
cal prima donnas.
Johnson and Rayburn were not on Bobby Kennedy's list of those who were to be called to the meeting, and Raskin, he later wrote, understood why: "Johnson was not being given the slightest bit of consideration by any of the Kennedys." The front-runner in all previous discussions inside the campaign, Raskin knew, was the attractive Symington, who had served as secretary of the air force during the Truman presidency. "On the stuff I saw," Raskin told me in an interview, "it was always Symington who was going to be the vice president. The Kennedy family had approved Symington." The Missouri senator's popularity in California was his most obvious asset, in Raskin's opinion; a Kennedy victory there would offset the expected losses in the South.
Raskin's recollection was supported by interviews for this book with Clark Clifford, who recalled a secret meeting on the evening of July 13 at which Jack Kennedy told Clifford, "We've talked it out---me, my dad, and Bobby---and we've selected Symington as the vice president." Kennedy asked Clifford to relay that message to Symington "and find out if he'd run." After a conference in Symington's suite, Clifford was authorized to tell Kennedy that Symington would accept the vice presidential nomination. "I and Stuart went to bed believing that we had a solid, unequivocal deal with Jack," Clifford told me.
In Raskin's account, the newly nominated Kennedy was expected to stop by the communications command post that night to shake hands with his loyal staff before proceeding to the convention hall, but he did not show up. It was said that he was running late. "When I was supplied with the facts and circumstances later," Raskin wrote, "it was clear that the reason Jack was 'running late' was a phone call from either Rayburn or Johnson. I know that his brother, Bob, was not with him" when the call came, because the younger Kennedy did not leave the command post until Jack Kennedy arrived to speak to the convention. A few hours later, after JFK's brief speech to the delegates, a distraught Bobby Kennedy telephoned Raskin and told him to cancel the meeting of party leaders. How should he answer the inevitable questions? Raskin asked. "Tell them the truth," Bobby responded. "You don't know." Raskin realized he was not going to learn anything more from Kennedy.
The party leaders, told that the meeting was off, began to gossip. "It was obvious to them that something extraordinary had taken place, as it was to me," Raskin wrote. "During my entire association with the Kennedys, I could not recall any situation where a decision of major significance had been reversed in such a short period of time.... Bob [Kennedy] had always been involved in every major decision; why not this one, I pondered." Raskin went to bed that night worrying that the decision to exclude Johnson and Rayburn from the Wednesday late-night meeting had backfired. "I slept little that night," he wrote. "I could hardly wait for the beginning of the next day."
By the next morning, Thursday, July 14, word was all over the convention that Johnson was to be Kennedy's running mate.
Clark Clifford recalled that he was summoned early the next morning---before his morning shave---to another meeting with a disconsolate Jack Kennedy, who said: "I must do something that I've never done before. I made a serious deal and I've now got to go back on it. I have no alternative." Symington was out and Johnson was in. Clifford recalled observing that Kennedy looked as if he'd been up all night.
Jack Kennedy was scheduled to host a luncheon later in the day for his immediate staff. He entered the dining room, followed by the usual horde of journalists and cameramen, spotted the avuncular, white-haired Raskin, and, as Raskin remembered it, dragged him to a window seat, saying: "Come with me. I have something to tell you." As they walked, Kennedy asked:
"Have you heard the news?"
"Yes."
"What do you think?"
Raskin shrugged, and Kennedy said: "You know we had never considered Lyndon, but I was left with no choice. He and Sam Rayburn made it damn clear to me that Lyndon had to be the candidate. Those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems and I don't need more problems. I'm going to have enough problems with Nixon."
Raskin, as he wrote in his memoirs, remained haunted by the conversation: "The substance of this revelation was so astonishing that if it had been revealed to me by anyone other than Jack or Bob, I would have had trouble accepting it. Why he decided to tell me was still very mysterious, but flattering nonetheless."*
In an interview in 1995, Raskin acknowledged with a laugh that there have been literally dozens of published accounts, all described as authoritative versions, purporting to explain how Lyndon Johnson became the surprise choice. He maintained that Jack Kennedy "never wanted Lyndon on the ticket. The ideal guy was Symington. With Lyndon they lost California, but with Symington they would not have lost it."
Kennedy insiders, ever loyal, responded to Johnson's selection by immediately telling the press and the campaign staff that Kennedy had been as surprised as anyone when Johnson accepted his token offer of the vice presidency. That the story, thin as it was, worked was all the more amazing because Johnson, or someone close to him, wasted little time in telling his side to a favored journalist, John S. Knight, editor and publisher of the Miami Herald. Newspaper readers in Miami on the Friday morning of the convention woke to an eight-column banner headline in the Herald proclaiming: "The Exclusive Inside Story: How Johnson Demanded (and Got) 2nd Spot." Knight wrote that on Thursday morning---the story did not say when in the morning---Bobby Kennedy paid a courtesy call to Johnson to discuss various options for the vice presidency. To Kennedy's "amazement," Knight wrote, "Lyndon Johnson informed him that he and Sam Rayburn had been having a talk and had agreed that Johnson should be named for vice president." Johnson further said that he would put his name in nomination, with or without Kennedy's support, and make a floor fight, if necessary, at the convention. The candidate was informed and immediately visited Johnson, who repeated his threat. Kennedy then convened a meeting of party leaders, Knight wrote, all of whom had previously supported Symington, and eventually all present agreed that "they couldn't risk a fight with Johnson without endangering the party's chances in November. So, the capitulation was made."
The essential threat cited in the dispatch---that Johnson convinced Kennedy to make him his running mate by promising to stage a floor fight for the nomination---is ludicrous. Such a threat would give Johnson little leverage, as even a political novice would know: he would have been vilified for disrupting convention unity on the eve of the campaign, severely damaging his own standing in the party in the process. Nonetheless, the article flatly declared that Johnson had forced Kennedy to make him vice president. Bobby Kennedy ordered Pierre Salinger, the campaign's press secretary, to issue a public denial. Salinger described the events of that day in his 1966 memoir, With Kennedy, and noted that his denial, in turn, prompted an angry response from both Johnson and Rayburn. The two men, who clearly had much to do with getting the story to Knight, were aggressive in denying responsibility. They demanded, Salinger wrote, that Jack Kennedy himself telephone Knight, at his home, and tell him the story was false. Johnson wanted the story "nipped in the bud," Salinger wrote, before it got into wide circulation. Eventually Bobby Kennedy called Knight. Salinger noted, ingenuously, in his memoir: "Through this vigorous action that night, we were able to prevent spread of the story and I spent most of Friday (the 15th) backgrounding newspapermen on the facts of the vice-presidential nomination as they had been outlined by Bob Kennedy." The cover story---that Jack Kennedy had always wanted Johnson as his running mate---held, and Knight's page-one exclusive disappeared into obscurity.
A few days later, Salinger wrote, he asked Jack Kennedy whether he really expected Johnson to accept the vice presidential offer or whether he had been merely making a pro forma gesture. Kennedy began to respond, but suddenly stopped and said: "The whole story will never be known. And it's just as well that it won't be." Salinger added that he could not explain the cryptic remark. Similarly, Joseph Dolan, who was Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant in the Senate in the mid-1960s, recalled in a 1995 interview for th
is book that Kennedy paused as he was leaving a meeting to say, about Lyndon Johnson, "Only two people alive know the whole story about 1960." Kennedy asked Dolan if he wanted to hear it. "I said," Dolan told me, "that it wouldn't be a secret if I knew." He'd been kicking himself since then, Dolan added, for not asking.
The only Kennedy insider to discuss the vice presidential nomination publicly over the next thirty-five years was Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's personal secretary, who told the British journalist Anthony Summers that she was convinced in mid-1960 that J. Edgar Hoover and Johnson had conspired. Hoover was known to be personally close to Johnson---they lived on the same street in northwest Washington---and had for years provided Johnson with information about Kennedy's private life. In Official and Confidential, Summers's biography of Hoover, published in 1993, Lincoln was quoted as saying that Johnson "had been using all the information Hoover could find on Kennedy---during the campaign, even before the Convention. And Hoover was in on the pressure on Kennedy at the Convention ... about womanizing, and things in Joe Kennedy's background, and anything he could dig up. Johnson was using that as clout. Kennedy was angry, because they had boxed him into a corner. He was absolutely boxed in." In a later interview for this book, Lincoln told of finding Bobby and Jack deep in conversation early on the morning of July 15: "I went in and listened. They were very upset and trying to figure out how they could get around it, but they didn't know how they could do it." She did not hear any mention then of a specific threat from Johnson, Lincoln said. But, she added, "Jack knew that Hoover and LBJ would just fill the air with womanizing."
The Dark Side of Camelot Page 15
