A Treasury of Great American Scandals (14 page)

LBJ vs. RFK

 

 

 

 

President Lyndon B. Johnson was seething. Paul Corbin, a member of the Democratic National Committee and a supporter of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was orchestrating a movement to get his man on the ticket as Johnson's running mate in the upcoming 1964 New Hampshire primary. Johnson despised Kennedy and wanted Corbin's Bobby-for-veep campaign stopped cold. “We either make him desist or get rid of him,” Johnson demanded, adding later through an intermediary that Kennedy himself should fire Corbin.

“Tell him to go to hell,” the attorney general snorted upon hearing the president's order. Since very few would be willing to tell the president of the United States where he could stick his order, Kennedy had to face Johnson himself in a most unpleasant meeting at the Oval Office. “It was a bitter, mean conversation,” Kennedy later recalled. “It was the meanest tone I'd ever heard.” Indeed the president was in no mood for niceties, and bluntly gave notice that he wanted Corbin out of New Hampshire and off the DNC. “He was loyal to President [John F.] Kennedy; he'll be loyal to you,” Johnson barked. “Get him out of there. Do you understand? I want you to get rid of him.”

Johnson's deep animosity toward his attorney general, brother of the late president and inherited from that administration, was certainly mutual. “I don't want to have this kind of conversation with you,” Kennedy said in response to Johnson's tirade. Corbin, he said, was harmless, and not his responsibility anyway. “He was appointed by President Kennedy, who thought he was good.” This was just what Johnson, already self-conscious of the fact that his accidental presidency was due only to JFK's assassination, did
not
want to hear. “Do it,” he demanded. “President Kennedy isn't president anymore. I am.” Johnson's vitriol stunned and wounded Kennedy, who struggled to maintain his composure. “I know you're president,” he said evenly, “and don't you ever talk to me like that again.” With that, the attorney general stormed out of the White House in a white rage.

Unpleasant as it was, the scene between Johnson and Kennedy was just one episode in the epic feud that consumed both men for nearly a decade. To Johnson, Bobby Kennedy was a “snot-nosed little son-of-a-bitch,” who sought to undermine him at every opportunity. Kennedy, on the other hand, felt nothing but contempt for Johnson, whom he viewed as a liar, a bully, and a pretender to the throne. “This man . . . ,” he said, “is mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.” As historian Jeff Shesol writes, the antagonism between the two men “spawned political turf battles across the United States. It divided constituencies [they] once shared and weakened their party by forcing its members to choose between them. It captivated the newly powerful media that portrayed every disagreement . . . as part of a prolonged battle for the presidency or a claim on the legacy of the fallen JFK. It helped propel one to the Senate and drive the other from the White House.” And, Shesol might have added, it was as entertaining a clash of personalities as any in American history.

The tenor of the relationship between LBJ and RFK was established early on, late in 1959, when Kennedy, then acting as campaign manager for his brother Jack's nascent presidential bid, visited Johnson at his Texas ranch to find out if the powerful Senate majority leader had any presidential ambitions of his own. Johnson assured Kennedy that he did not, and took his guest deer hunting. Upon spotting a deer, Kennedy fired his borrowed shotgun at the quarry. The gun's powerful recoil knocked him to the ground, cutting his forehead. Johnson seemed to revel in Kennedy's humiliation. “Son,” he said, “you've got to learn to handle a gun like a man.”

To the scrappy young man once considered the runt of the Kennedy litter, and whose parents feared he would grow up to be a sissy, Johnson's crack must have stung. But any shame Bobby Kennedy might have felt at the time was soon replaced by anger when he found out that Lyndon Johnson had lied to him and entered the presidential race. He was further inflamed when Johnson implied that his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had been a Nazi appeaser while serving as ambassador to Great Britain at the dawn of World War II. “You Johnson people are running a stinking damned campaign and you're gonna get yours when the time comes!” he fumed at Johnson aide Bobby Baker. Kennedy would prove to be true to his word.

Johnson's presidential campaign had fizzled when Jack Kennedy began considering him as a possible running mate, despite the earlier mudslinging. What followed was an awkward dance. Would Kennedy actually offer Johnson the spot, and if so, would LBJ take it? On the morning of July 14, 1960, Jack Kennedy met with Johnson. Accounts vary as to the substance of the conversation, but from Bobby Kennedy's point of view, his brother was merely trying to gauge Johnson's feelings—to dangle the vice presidential prospect before him—and no firm decisions about a running mate had been made. He was horrified, therefore, when JFK returned from the meeting with the grim news that LBJ had interpreted his overtures as an actual offer and had accepted. Bobby later told his biographer Arthur Schlesinger that “the idea that [JFK would] offer him the nomination in hopes that he'd take [it] is not true. The reason he went down [to Johnson's suite at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles] . . . was because there were enough indications from others that [Johnson] wanted to be offered the nomination. But [JFK] never dreamt that there was a chance in the world that he would accept it.” It now fell to Bobby Kennedy to undo what he termed “the terrible mistake.” His efforts at doing so only served to further alienate the two men.

Several meetings between the Kennedy and Johnson camps solved nothing, a situation further aggravated by the fact that Jack Kennedy had decided at one point that it would be unwise to try to remove Johnson once word leaked out to the convention that he would be on the ticket. Bobby Kennedy, apparently unaware of his brother's final decision, which had already been confirmed with Johnson, again visited LBJ's suite hoping to get him to withdraw. Wounded by the contradictions coming from the Kennedys, and believing them to be maliciously orchestrated by Bobby, Johnson refused to budge. LBJ, Bobby Kennedy later said, “is one of the greatest sad-looking people in the world. You know, he can turn that on. I thought he'd burst into tears. . . . He just shook, and tears came into his eyes, and he said, ‘I want to be Vice President, and if [JFK] will have me, I'll join him in making a fight for it.' It was that kind of conversation.” Kennedy wasn't privy to other conversations in which an outraged Johnson called him “that little shit-ass,” among other epithets even more colorful. He was convinced that RFK had deliberately, and of his own initiative, set out to sabotage his political future.

After John F. Kennedy's narrow victory over Richard Nixon in 1960, Lyndon Johnson—like so many before him—was left impotent in the role of vice president. Robert Kennedy was determined to keep him that way. As attorney general and one of his brother's closest advisors, RFK was, in the words of the president, “the second most powerful man in the world.”
U.S. News & World Report
proclaimed him to be “the number two man in Washington . . . second only to the president in power and influence.” The attorney general rarely missed an opportunity to lord his status over the vice president, barging in on Johnson's private meetings with the president to address business he considered more important, or making a mockery of him among the political and media elite who gathered at his Hickory Hill estate.

On one occasion, President Kennedy had to leave a White House meeting with a group of civil rights leaders and asked LBJ to conclude the session for him. Johnson, rarely given much of a role in anything, seemed pleased to do so. Bobby Kennedy, also in attendance and itching to leave as well, instructed a staffer to tell the vice president to cut it short. The staffer was reluctant to perform such a potentially unpleasant task, however, and did nothing. Irate, Kennedy called him over again. “Didn't I tell you to tell the vice president to shut up?” he snapped. With that, the frightened staffer eased his way over to Johnson's chair and whispered to him the attorney general's order to wrap it up. Johnson glared up at him, but kept on talking—and talking, going on for another ten or fifteen minutes while Bobby Kennedy stewed.

On another occasion, the attorney general stormed into a meeting of the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, of which Johnson was chairman, and began bombarding committee members with questions about employment progress and other issues in Birmingham, Alabama. Johnson listened to Kennedy's barrage with growing impatience, finally interjecting the committee's position on many of the issues the attorney general was raising. Unsatisfied, Kennedy began lobbing questions at the vice president. “It was a brutal performance, very sharp,” recalled one person in attendance. “It brought tensions between Johnson and Kennedy right out on the table, and very hard. Everybody was sweating under the armpits.”

LBJ's hatred of RFK grew more intense every day, and he complained about him to anyone who would listen, including the president himself. His rantings about the attorney general's efforts to crush him were, in the words of his aide Bobby Baker, “border[ing] on the paranoiac,” and his jealousy and resentment over RFK's access were nakedly apparent. “Every time they have a conference,” he spouted off to an Associated Press writer, “don't tell me who is the top advisor. It isn't [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara, the chiefs of staff, or anybody else like that. Bobby is first in, last out. And Bobby is the guy he listens to.” As far as Bobby was concerned, though, the vice president was responsible for his own place in the backseat. Johnson, he claimed, “wasn't very helpful at times that he might have been helpful. . . . He never gave any suggestions or ideas on policy.” Even the president, always protective of Johnson's ego, grew “really irritated with him,” Bobby maintained, testing him at times. “ ‘I'm going to give him a chance . . . to go on the record as to how he stands,'” RFK said the president told him before meetings. “And he would never say how he stood on any matter! . . . And then he groused at people afterward.”

The dynamic underlying all Johnson's “grousing” was forever altered on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The once impotent vice president was now in charge. Bobby Kennedy would never forgive him for the boorish way (as he viewed it) he assumed power. “There were four or five matters,” Bobby said later, “that arose during the period of November 22 to November 27 or so . . . which made me bitterer, unhappy at least, with Lyndon Johnson.” One issue that particularly irked him was the way LBJ kept Air Force One—with the suddenly widowed First Lady on board with her dead husband's casket—waiting in Dallas with him until he was sworn in as president. Kennedy, it seems, thought Johnson a bit too eager to grab the reins of power.

Johnson, on the other hand, was very concerned about the proper, Constitutional transfer of the presidency, as well as the negative effect a vacuum of leadership might have on the nation. “What raced through my mind,” he later recalled, “was that if they had shot our president driving down there, who would they shoot next? And what was going on in Washington? And when would the missiles be coming? I thought that it was a conspiracy.”

Johnson, unsure of just what the Constitution required for the assumption of office, and also concerned about how his actions would be perceived by the grieving Kennedy family, called Bobby, as both the nation's top law enforcement official and as the new head of the Kennedy clan, to get his approval for swift action. “A lot of people down here think I should be sworn in right away,” Johnson said in a phone call to the attorney general. “Do you have any objection to that?” Kennedy was silent on the line. “I didn't see what the rush was,” he later said, noting that his brother had been dead only an hour, and that it might have been nice for the family if he could have returned to Washington as President Kennedy—“But I suppose that was all personal.” Neither man appeared to realize that under the Constitution, Johnson automatically became president upon JFK's death.

After hanging up with Johnson, Bobby made some phone calls to answer LBJ's questions about the particulars of the swearing in, and then called him back with the details. He had acquiesced to Johnson's wishes, but what really galled him was later hearing that LBJ had squelched any criticism of the delay on Air Force One by claiming that the attorney general had actually
requested
that he take the oath of office immediately. Johnson, he said, was “simply incapable of telling the truth.” So much for a smooth transition.

President Johnson needed Bobby Kennedy to remain as attorney general, mainly because he wanted to keep JFK's administration intact, and he knew RFK's departure would likely cause a flood of other resignations. But Bobby's willingness to stay put didn't mean that Johnson liked him any better. In fact, things between them only got worse. The new president felt that Bobby treated him as an imposter. And, suspicious and insecure though he was, he was right. Kennedy could barely disguise his contempt.

It was evident from the very first cabinet meeting of the new administration. Bobby was late. When he did sit down, it was “quite clear,” noted Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, “that he could barely countenance Lyndon Johnson sitting in his brother's seat.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk's declaration of loyalty on behalf of the cabinet did not sit well with the attorney general either. He scornfully called it “a nice little statement,” adding that he was informed after the meeting how impressed LBJ was with Rusk because he was the only one who spoke up at the cabinet meeting. “So I thought . . . what he wanted is declarations of loyalty, fidelity from all of us.” But Johnson knew he wasn't going to get this from RFK, in either word or deed, and was soon obsessing over what became known as “the Bobby problem.”