In addition to the virtually solid support from the 352-delegate Southern Bloc, Johnson was anticipating all the votes of at least two border states, Oklahoma (29 votes) and Kentucky (31), and a scattering of votes from other states—a total of perhaps 430 or 440 delegates out of the 1,521 who would be voting at the convention. If he could add to that number the bulk of the 172 western delegates, he would arrive at the convention with 550 or more. Hubert Humphrey would have 31 from Minnesota, and expected to win the same number in the primary in neighboring Wisconsin—so identified was Humphrey with that state’s battle for milk price supports that he had been called “Wisconsin’s third senator”—and to add more from other Upper Midwest farm states; he had been the region’s leading spokesman for years; it was expected that Humphrey would arrive at the convention with at least 150 delegates. Symington would have perhaps 100, including 39 from his native Missouri. Several favorite sons, including two governors—Robert Meyner of New Jersey (41 votes) and George Docking of Kansas (21)—were adamantly refusing to bow out of the race. Other delegates would hold out to the end for Adlai Stevenson. If Johnson did indeed get the bulk of the western delegates, Kennedy would have little chance of getting the 761 he needed on the first ballot.
And Johnson could have won the West. The Kennedy assigned—in September, 1959—to canvass for western delegates was the youngest brother, twenty-seven-year-old Ted. Amiable, gregarious, open, Ted was nonetheless a natural and keenly observant politician, and on this, his first political foray, he quickly realized, he recalls, that the West “was very sympathetic to” Johnson. “They sweet-talked me about my brother. But they said, ‘The reality is: This is Johnson Country. We know how he stands on minerals, on grazing issues, on … We know he’s been a friend of the West.…’ They felt enormously committed to him on the issues. He [Johnson] could have locked that place up without any difficulty at all.”
Locking it up, however, meant courting the western delegates as individuals. To find out what issues were important to a man or what pragmatic considerations—a federal job, a contract, cash—a man really wanted, it was necessary to talk to him in person. And while in the western states there were no statewide bosses, in many cases four or five delegates might be controlled by, or subject to the persuasion of, some local political leader or businessman. Johnson had to learn the identity of the local leaders who held these “pieces of power,” and bring them, too, to his side.
Lyndon Johnson could have learned all that, could have found out whom he needed in various states. There was nothing in politics that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t learn—couldn’t learn “very fast when he had to,” in Jim Rowe’s words. And nothing did he learn faster than who had the power in any group. But learning would require him to travel to the different states, meet the delegates—he would have to, in short, campaign. Unless he did that, his strategy had no hope of success. But campaigning would have meant admitting that he was trying—and in 1959 he still wouldn’t, still seemingly couldn’t, admit that.
DENYING IN PUBLIC that one was a candidate was, naturally, par for the political course; in Johnson’s case, however, the denials were made, with seeming conviction, even to men who had worked with him a long time.
Though to these men, his maneuvers in Texas were definitive proof (not that they needed proof) that he was a candidate, he kept refusing to admit that to them, refusing even to say that he would eventually, at the proper time, become a candidate. “You can count on it. I am not going to run”—that was still his mantra. On the subject of primaries, he was equally unequivocal. Primaries produce an unambiguous, undeniable result: there is a winner—and there are losers. Johnson was adamant: he wouldn’t enter any primaries.
On every other subject related to a presidential candidacy, equivocation was, in 1959, the order of the year. At one moment, he would be telling an ally or aide, with apparent great sincerity, that his health made running an impossibility; sitting with Bobby Baker in the Senate Chamber after adjournment one evening, he said in a quiet, earnest voice: “Bobby, you’ve never had a heart attack. Every night I go to bed, and I never know if I’m going to wake up alive the next morning. I’m just not physically capable of running for the presidency.” At another moment he would be explaining that his recovery from his attack had been complete (as indeed it had, and the sixteen-and eighteen-hour days he was putting in proved it), pulling out of his breast pocket a laminated copy of his latest cardiogram as documentation. Or he would make the “our home is here” argument, saying that the South’s strength—“our strength”—was on Capitol Hill, and that therefore not only was he not running for the presidency, he didn’t want the job, wouldn’t accept it even if it was offered; if the convention were to draft him, he would say, he would refuse to accept the draft; he would probably not even attend the convention: that would make a draft less likely. The next moment he would be explaining that his “tending the store” stance was the best strategy to get the nomination: at these times, Baker says, “his attitude was, ‘I’m not running, but I’m gonna win.’ ” Out would come another laminated card: this one with a precise state-by-state delegate count, and he would analyze exactly how he was going to win: state-by-state rundowns that would lead to a deadlock on the first ballot, state-by-state switches that would give him additional votes on later ballots. Fresh from a conversation in which Johnson assured him he wasn’t running, Baker would watch Walter Jenkins (who never, as Baker knew, “took the smallest step without his [Johnson’s] consent”) “hand wads of hundred-dollar bills to Johnson loyalists as they fanned out to many states.” Not that Jenkins was any less confused than he. Johnson had indeed told Jenkins—in May—to start setting up state-by-state “Johnson for President” organizations. He had also ordered Jenkins, however, to keep their existence secret. Complying with that order was difficult. One of the putative organizers was to ask Walter a little plaintively if it would be possible for him to speak directly to Johnson, because “I want to ask the Senator just how he wants me to do this [set up a statewide organization] behind the scenes.”
And while Johnson was equivocating in 1959, Jack Kennedy was sending into the field against him a brother a lot less amiable than Ted—one who, in addition, had had Lyndon Johnson fixed in his sights for a long time.
THE FIRST TIME that Lyndon Johnson met Robert Kennedy was an encounter that the two Johnson staffers who were present would never forget.
It occurred early one morning in January, 1953, in the Senate cafeteria on the second floor of the Senate Office Building—there was only one Senate Office Building then—next door to Johnson’s office. Johnson would often have breakfast there, usually with Horace Busby, on this morning also with George Reedy.
Just to the left of the cafeteria entrance was a cash register, and beyond it was a large round table, at which, every morning, Joe McCarthy sat, with three or four staff members from his Senate Investigations Subcommittee, and this morning there was a new staff member at the table: the subcommittee’s newly appointed assistant counsel, twenty-seven-year-old Bobby Kennedy.
As Johnson, Busby and Reedy walked by, McCarthy, as was his custom, jumped up to shake Johnson’s hand, calling him, as senators were already starting to do, “Leader,” and McCarthy’s staffers also rose—except, quite conspicuously, for Bobby, who sat unmoving, with a look on his face that Busby described as “sort of a glower.”
Lyndon Johnson knew how to handle that situation. Moving around the table, he extended his hand to take McCarthy’s and those of the standing staffers, and, when he got to Bobby Kennedy, stood there, with his hand not exactly extended but, in Busby’s words, “sort of half-raised,” looking down at Kennedy. For a long moment Kennedy didn’t move. The glower had deepened into something more. “Bobby could really look hating,” Busby says, “and that was how he looked then. He didn’t want to get up, but Johnson was kind of forcing him to,” and finally, without looking Johnson in the eye, he stood up and shook his hand.
Later, after th
e Johnson group had finished their breakfast and were leaving the cafeteria, Busby asked, “What was that all about in there?” and Johnson replied, “It’s about Roosevelt and his father.” Busby and Reedy knew what that meant. The long relationship between Joseph P. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt had ended in acrimony and bitterness, and Johnson, the young congressman, was a Roosevelt protégé. Moreover, the relationship’s denouement had included one particularly vivid scene—at which Johnson had been present. The President, suspecting that the real purpose of a trip the ambassador made back to the United States from England during the 1940 election campaign was to denounce him for bringing the United States closer to war and to announce his support for Republican nominee Wendell Willkie, lured him down to Washington and tricked him. When a secretary announced that Ambassador Kennedy, who had returned that day, was calling, Johnson reported, the President had turned to him and said, “Oh boy, this is a real problem and I’ve got to handle it.” Johnson related how Roosevelt, in his booming voice, had said, “Joe, how are ya? Been sittin’ here with Lyndon just thinkin’ about you, and I want to talk to you, my son. Can’t wait.… Make it tonight,” and then, hanging up the phone and turning to him, had said, with a smile, “I’m gonna fire the sonofabitch.” The trick had worked; Kennedy made a very effective radio broadcast supporting Roosevelt, and then, the day after the election, his resignation was announced. The story was a dramatic one—and for years Johnson, the great storyteller, had been telling it with drama, using his gift for mimicry to repeat “Joe, how are ya?” in the President’s booming voice, and his “I’m gonna fire the sonofabitch” in FDR’s confidential whisper. And, exaggerated or not—and it may not have been too exaggerated, for Johnson had indeed been in Roosevelt’s office the day Joe Kennedy’s plane arrived from England—Johnson had told the story many times; “For decades,” Hugh Sidey would write, “evenings in the capital were enriched with stories like the one about Franklin Roosevelt coaxing Ambassador Kennedy [down to Washington] and then with great relish firing him,” a story which of course made Joe Kennedy look foolish. Bobby Kennedy’s tribal loyalty to his family—“Bobby’s a tough one. He’ll keep the Kennedys together, you can bet,” Joe Kennedy said—and in particular his adoration for his father were very deep; it took only a hint of a slighting reference to the ambassador to arouse him to fury, and Lyndon Johnson’s story was far more than a hint. But as other breakfast encounters in the cafeteria and repetitions of the first scene took place during 1953, it became apparent to Busby and Reedy that Johnson’s explanation must be only partially correct. “Bobby was there more than once in the morning when we came in, and Johnson always forced him to shake hands,” Busby says. “He enjoyed it.” Aware of “the discomfort he was causing” Bobby, “he’d get out in the hall and he’d laugh about it.” And sometimes the Leader and the young staffer would pass in a Senate Office Building corridor. “Did you ever see two dogs come into a room and all of a sudden there’s a low growl, and the hair rises up on the back of their necks?” George Reedy asks. “It was like that.… Somehow he and Bobby took one look at each other”—the one look, Reedy explains, was in the cafeteria that day in 1953—“and that was it.”
Robert Francis Kennedy was shorter, slighter and much shyer than his two tall older brothers (and, in time, than his younger brother) and with none of their jaunty, glowing air and easy charm. He was all but written off by his family (“Forget Bobby; let’s talk about Joe and Jack,” one of his sisters said), most notably by his father, who once called him the family’s “runt” and who didn’t include him in his discussions of politics with Joe and Jack. Whatever the reasons may have been, many of his biographers have speculated, as one puts it, that he had “no ambition save one”: to please that demanding figure whose insistence on toughness and victory was so uncompromising; “he was willing to do anything to get his father’s respect.” And, in addition, there had, since his boyhood, been visible in Robert Kennedy, born November 20, 1925, a streak often characterized as ruthless, but that could also be called just simply “mean”—or cruel. There was a tenderness in him, too—it would become apparent after he began having children of his own—but the other quality was always there. At Harvard (when he wrote his father, “I wish, Dad, that you would write me a letter as you used to Joe & Jack about what you think about the different political events and the war as I’d like to understand what’s going on better than I do now”), there was raw courage (small and slight, he “didn’t have any great God-given ability,” the freshman football coach recalls, “but he had great determination. You’d have had to kill him to make him quit. He had a temper.… He had a determined and belligerent look. His attitude was always, ‘We’ll settle this thing right now and I’m willing to go all the way to do it’ ”): on the varsity, the 230-pound fullback told the coach, after the 155-pound Kennedy kept hitting him head-on, “For Christ’s sake, stop him before he gets killed”; he once broke his leg but went on playing, tears of pain streaming down his face, but, as one biographer wrote, “Kennedy did not just play furiously. He was furious,” spoiling, off the field as well as on, for a fight—often for senseless fights. One took place in a Cambridge bar where Bobby, celebrating his birthday with a group of friends, including the football captain, Ken O’Donnell, was picking up everyone’s bar tab. Another Harvard student, John Magnuson, happened to be already celebrating his birthday there, and his friends began singing “Happy Birthday” to him. Infuriated over what he apparently regarded as an intrusion into his celebration, Bob walked up behind Magnuson and hit him over the head with a beer bottle, sending him to the hospital for stitches. (A few days later, Ken O’Donnell apologized to Magnuson; Bobby hadn’t come himself, he said, because “it just wasn’t his nature to apologize.”) The journalist Anthony Lewis says that at Harvard, “I didn’t like him and thought he was callow and tough.” In another fight, with a man who, unaware that Joe Jr. was dead, made light of Bobby’s attempts to quote him as an authority on some subject, “Bobby would have killed him if we didn’t pull him off. We had to pry Kennedy’s fingers off his neck. It really scared us.” At law school, at the University of Virginia, “he became more insensitive and selfish … known for his rudeness … a bit of a lout,” with an anger so close to the surface that it showed as clench-fisted rage. He also became known, and regarded warily, for his huge dogs. He would “always have these colossal dogs around him,” at one time a large German police dog “who liked to bite”—and whom he kept unleashed; at another time two fierce Doberman pinschers that, another friend says, “we had a terrible time with.” And he was still spoiling for fights—some, of course, over his father; when the school newspaper criticized Joe Kennedy after he gave a speech at the university urging isolationism, Bobby showed up in the paper’s office “ready to punch someone in the nose.” And there were, during this time, incidents which went beyond rudeness. Once, at Hyannis Port, Bobby took a friend,
who could not sail, out in one of the family sailboats. The wind was fading, and as lunchtime approached, Kennedy realized that they might not make it ashore in time for lunch. Obsessed with his father’s insistence on punctuality, he simply dove overboard and swam for shore, leaving his helpless crewmate to fend for himself. After flailing about, the friend was rescued by a passing boat. Kennedy made no attempt to apologize. Bobby was not a boy at the time. The incident occurred in 1948, when he was twenty-two years old.
In 1953, his father got him the job with McCarthy’s committee. Later his work with this committee would be glossed over, excused by saying he didn’t really believe in McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign. He did. “I felt it was work that needed to be done then,” he was to say. And on another occasion: “At the time, I thought there was a serious internal security threat to the United States … and Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it.” When he resigned in July of that year, it wasn’t because he disapproved of McCarthy’s tactics, but because of a feud with chief counsel Roy Cohn—who
se job he wanted, and didn’t get, and with whom he almost came to blows—and because he didn’t get a promotion on the committee staff. And he remained loyal to McCarthy, in 1955 walking out of a banquet because the speaker, television commentator Edward R. Murrow, was going to attack the senator; in 1957 not only attending McCarthy’s memorial service in Washington but flying to Wisconsin for the demagogue’s funeral. And when he returned to the committee after the Democrats took over the Senate and made him counsel in January, 1955, the belligerence, unabated, was given the armor of governmental authority, and what friends already saw as an extremely moralistic view of the world became even more apparent.
“For him the world is divided into black and white hats,” his wife, Ethel, once said. “Bobby can only distinguish good men and bad.” In a nationally televised series of hearings he brought the black hats—organized crime figures tied in with labor unions such as Momo “Sam” Giancana, “Crazy Joey” Gallo, Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, Joey Glimco—before the Senate Rackets Committee, where they found themselves confronted by a young man with icy blue eyes staring, glaring, at them with an unnerving intensity. As he questioned them, hunching forward over the committee dais as if he wanted to get at them physically, his right arm would jab out with each question in a movement reminiscent of his brother’s when his brother was giving a speech, except that Jack Kennedy’s hand was open for emphasis and entreaty; Robert Kennedy’s hand was balled up; sometimes the thumb stuck up from it, sometimes the forefinger pointed out, but essentially it was a fist. And the questions the chief counsel asked made it clear that to him a witness’s invocation of the constitutional right against self-incrimination was proof of guilt (Giancana: “I decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer may tend to incriminate me.” Kennedy: “Would you tell us anything about any of your operations or will you just giggle every time I ask you a question?” Giancana: “I decline to answer.” Kennedy: “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.” To Glimco: “And you defraud the union?” “I respectfully decline to answer.” “You haven’t got the guts to answer, have you, Mr. Glimco?”). The chief counsel was no less confrontational when the microphone was off—“You’re full of shit,” he kept repeating to one witness during a brief recess—or in private, as in a meeting in his office with Joey Gallo. “I walk into Kennedy’s office and he gets mad at me. He says, ‘So you’re Joey Gallo, the Juke Box King. You don’t look so tough. I’d like to fight you myself.’ I hadda tell him I don’t fight.”
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