A Treasury of Great American Scandals (15 page)

Lyndon Johnson was president, but Robert Kennedy was the brother of a martyr and, in the eyes of some, his natural successor. This made him a threat, especially when people started discussing the possibility of RFK serving as LBJ's running mate in the upcoming election of 1964. “I don't want to go down in history as the guy to have the dog wagged by the tail, and have the Vice President elect me,” Johnson said about the possibility of Kennedy running with him, “because that's what they're going to write. With Bobby on the ticket, I'd never know if I could be elected on my own.” For his own part, RFK appeared delighted by all the trouble he was causing the president. “I think he's hysterical about how he's going to try to avoid having me or having to ask me. And that's what he spends most of his time on, from what I understand: figuring out how he's going to avoid me.” And avoiding Bobby, the “little shit-ass,” wasn't easy.

“Every day,” Johnson later said, “as soon as I opened the papers or turned on the television, there was something about Bobby Kennedy; . . . 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. . . . And then Kennedy was killed and I became the custodian of his will. . . . 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 the Kennedy people wanted it now.”

Johnson eventually derailed any momentum to place RFK on the ticket by announcing to the press that he had “reached the conclusion that it would be inadvisable for me to recommend to the Convention any member of the Cabinet” for vice president. This, of course, included Bobby. “Now that damn albatross is off my neck,” the president said privately, though he wasn't any more subtle about his feelings in public. Calling a select group of prominent reporters to the White House, Johnson gleefully recounted for them Kennedy's reaction to the news that he wouldn't be in the running: “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 President-nominee, his face changed, and he started to swallow. He looked sick. His Adam's apple bounded up and down like a yo-yo.” With that, the president audibly gulped in imitation of his nemesis, while mimicking his “funny voice.”

Kennedy was not amused when he heard about the president's performance, accusing him of violating the trust of their private meeting. Johnson feigned innocence in the face of the attorney general's wrath, which infuriated Bobby even more. “He tells so many lies,” Kennedy said in a familiar refrain, “that he convinces himself after a while he's telling the truth.” Johnson was too pleased with having this “grandstanding little runt” out of the running to care much what RFK thought, but his relish at the turn of events was short-lived. Though he would no longer have to face the prospect of Bobby as his vice president, he would soon have to deal with him as a vocal foe in the U.S. Senate.

Kennedy had decided that working for LBJ again would be intolerable. He resigned his position as attorney general in 1964 and entered the New York Senate race. In a strange twist, RFK and LBJ became temporary allies in this endeavor. Johnson was wildly popular in New York and was expected to take the state in a landslide in the upcoming presidential election. Kennedy, however, was not so well received and desperately needed to be on the president's band-wagon. Johnson, no doubt enjoying having Bobby so beholden to him, gladly let him on. The pair traveled all over New York, looking “as close as twins,” the
New York Times
reported. “You don't often find a man who has the understanding, the heart and the compassion that Bobby Kennedy has,” the president gushed at one rally, while at another, RFK declared Johnson “already one of the great presidents of the United States. . . . I think of President Johnson with affection and appreciation.” It was all a load of political bull, but it worked.

Bobby Kennedy won his seat, but he didn't bother to thank Lyndon Johnson, the man many considered crucial to his victory. “Bobby thanked the postmasters, he thanked the precinct captains, he thanked every two-bit person who helped in the campaign,” recalled Johnson press aide Liz Carpenter. “But he didn't thank the President of the United States. He just couldn't choke it out of himself.” The brief detente, orchestrated for the New York voters, was now over. Almost as soon as Bobby Kennedy settled into his new Senate seat, he launched his campaign against the administration of Lyndon Johnson.

Most of the president's policies were under siege, from the war on poverty to urban renewal. But it was Vietnam that most sharply divided RFK and LBJ, much as it did the rest of the nation. While Kennedy had supported a military presence during his brother's administration and beyond, he was becoming increasingly convinced that there would be no military solution. To Johnson, Vietnam, though a “little piss-ant country,” was vital in the larger war against Communist expansion. “Knowing what I did of the policies of Moscow and Peking,” he later said, “I was sure as a man could be that if we did not live up to our commitments in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, they would move to exploit the disarray in the United States and in the allies of the Free World.”

Then there was what he imagined Bobby would be doing if Vietnam was lost, “out in front leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy's commitment to South Vietnam. That I had let a democracy fall into the hands of the Communists. That I was a coward. A man without a spine. Oh, I could see it coming, all right.”

As the war in Vietnam escalated, so did the differences between Johnson and Kennedy, each man creating separate orbits around themselves. “It was a galaxy with two suns,” writes Jeff Shesol, “and as one shone more brilliantly the other dimmed.” It was Johnson who was being eclipsed, his administration under increasing attack in the turmoil of the late 1960s, and he blamed it all on Bobby. His hatred and paranoia increased to such levels as to prompt occasional outbursts that were utterly irrational, such as when he claimed that RFK put Martin Luther King on the Kennedy payroll “to rile up the Negroes. That is why we had the riots. After all I've done for the Negroes. They never would have
attacked me
if they hadn't been put up to it.”

Kennedy, meanwhile, continued to speak out more forcefully against the war. “We have misconceived the nature of the war . . . ,” he said in a speech after the Tet offensive in early 1968. “We have sought to resolve by military might a conflict whose issue depends upon the will and conviction of the South Vietnamese people. It is like sending a lion to halt an epidemic of jungle rot.” It was time, he said, for the administration to “face the reality that a military victory is not in sight and that it will probably never come.”

Kennedy's differences with Johnson became irreconcilable when he decided to run against him for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. It was a drastic step on RFK's part, one that effectively split the party, but that he felt was necessary. “My decision reflects no personal animosity or disrespect toward President Johnson,” he said as he announced his candidacy. “I have often commended his efforts in health, in education, and in many areas, and I have the deepest sympathy for the burden that he carries today. But the issue is not personal. It is our profound differences over where we are heading and what we want to accomplish. . . . At stake is not simply the leadership of our party or even our country—it is our right to moral leadership on this planet.”

Bobby was a little less lofty when it came to the actual campaign, taking swipes at the president that made it seem as if he were fighting in a barroom brawl rather than for the opportunity to provide “moral leadership.” At one point, for example, he accused Johnson of “calling on the darker impulses of the American spirit. . . . Integrity, truth, honor, and all the rest seem like words to fill out speeches, rather than guiding principles.”

The contest never got too nasty, though, mainly because it was over almost as soon as it started when Johnson announced to the stunned nation that he would not be seeking his party's nomination. Bobby, he said later, was no small factor in his decision: “The thing I feared from the first day of my presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets. The whole situation was unbearable for me.”

Hail to the Chaff

 

Not all presidents can be great, nor can their scandals. History has relegated some chief executives to obscurity, their malfeasances remembered now as mere oddities. Ten of our less appreciated first citizens, as well as their eccentricities, are celebrated here. But not a word will be said about Millard Fillmore, who has become so famous for his obscurity that, strictly speaking, he no longer qualifies as obscure.

Zachary Taylor (1849-1850)

 

 

 

 

The great statesman is the person who can balance principle and pragmatism, wrestle with great moral issues, and do what's right. Then there was Zachary Taylor. A slovenly soldier from Kentucky with sad eyes and a weary mien, the hero of the Mexican Wars arrived in the White House in 1849 to face the issue that would in twelve years rend the nation: slavery. It was increasingly apparent to an enlightened civilization that the forced bondage of a race of people was morally indefensible. Most other countries had outlawed the practice. Taylor understood that. He wanted the slave trade stopped. Unfortunately, he also owned slaves. Had paid a pretty penny for them, too. Taylor realized it would not look good for the president of the United States to keep slaves. The issue was simply too incendiary. So he came to a difficult, but firm, decision. He hid them in the White House attic.

Franklin Pierce (1853-1857)

 

 

 

 

Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire may have been the first president elected because he had a great flack. Pierce was a close friend of the poet and novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. As the 1852 campaign approached, Hawthorne wrote for his friend a riveting, lyrical biography that made him out to be a cross between St. Francis of Assisi and Alexander the Great, as opposed to what he was—a rather nice-looking loser. “Pierce was the best looking president the White House ever had,” Harry Truman said of his distant predecessor, “but as president he ranks with Buchanan
¹⁵
and Calvin Coolidge.”

Pierce was a small, weak man accused, perhaps unfairly, of battlefield cowardice in the war with Mexico. He was married to a complete loony-bird. Jane Pierce was a reclusive melancholic and a religious fanatic who dressed in black and spent all her time writing letters to her dead son. Not surprisingly, Franklin began to drink a little. Then he began to drink a lot. This became something of a problem. One day a Washington policeman reportedly arrested some babbling, slobbering sot for going amok on horseback on a public street and running over a woman. He turned out to be the president of the United States. The charge was quickly dropped.

Pierce would ultimately die of cirrhosis of the liver. But mere dipsomania does not itself qualify him for enshrinement here. What best survives his undistinguished presidency are ten words, his legacy. National campaigns have made for some fabulously vicious political sloganry,
¹⁶
but none was as fabulous as the slogan the Whigs bestowed on the fourteenth president: “Franklin Pierce, the Hero of Many a Well-Fought Bottle.”

James Buchanan (1857-1861)

 

 

 

 

Historians have often dismissed James Buchanan as a do-nothing president who stood by idly as the nation careered toward civil war. Yet despite the utter failure of his administration, Buchanan may have distinguished himself after all—by being the country's first gay chief executive.

In an era before the concept of a different sexual orientation existed, let alone a public discussion (or even a scientific word for it), the behind-the-scenes snickering of Buchanan's contemporaries provides compelling but by no means complete evidence. It wasn't necessarily Buchanan's failure to marry (the only president not to do so) that got people talking. It was his relationship with Senator Rufus King of Alabama. The two were inseparable, living together for many years before King's death and Buchanan's elevation to the presidency. Andrew Jackson called Senator King “Miss Nancy,” a common term of the era for effeminate though not necessarily gay men. Representative Aaron Brown of Tennessee referred to King as Buchanan's “better half ” and “wife” in a letter to Mrs. James K. Polk. Brown mentioned possible rough sailing in the relationship, noting that King, whom he calls “Aunt Fancy” in the letter, “may now be seen every day, triged out in her best clothes & smirking about in hopes of securing better terms than with her former companion [Buchanan].”