The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  It was conservatives who would, later, first call him a “Torquemada,” but many liberals wouldn’t dispute the comparison. The liberal journalist William Haddad was told by a friend to go down to the hearings if “I wanted to see a fascist at work,” and came back feeling, “He was in the McCarthy mode.”

  The only time Kennedy himself seemed on the defensive—“a little keyed up, a little tense”—was when Joe Kennedy showed up to watch a hearing. He had more respect for his son now. “Bobby hates like me,” he is reported to have said.

  The union leader Bobby focused on was Jimmy Hoffa of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a man in whom, he said, he saw “absolute evilness.” In his dealings with Hoffa, Robert Kennedy demonstrated another trait. He tried to trap Hoffa on a bribery charge, boasting that the case was so airtight that if the Teamster boss wasn’t convicted, he would jump off the Capitol dome. But Hoffa wasn’t convicted. Then he indicted him on an illegal wiretapping charge; when, at a first trial, the jury deadlocked, he brought the union leader to trial again on the same charge, and he was acquitted. “Frustrated to the point of fury,” as one account put it, Kennedy never stopped trying to influence the public against Hoffa, through reports of his committee, a steady stream of inflammatory press releases and the use of “friendly reporters to propagate” the image of Hoffa that he himself saw; one reporter was given a key to the committee offices so that he could obtain information about Hoffa while Kennedy could deny he had leaked it. And when, in 1961, Kennedy would become attorney general, and had at his command, as the journalist Nick Thimmesch writes, “the full arsenal” of the government’s legal powers, he used them. Forming an elite “Get Hoffa” squad in the Justice Department, he launched an all-out campaign against the union leader, in which he also deployed the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. At one time, fourteen separate grand juries were probing the Teamsters. Protests over Kennedy’s tactics came not just from congressmen and senators of both parties who felt that Hoffa’s corruption and brutality did not justify the tactics that Kennedy was using against him, but from the American Civil Liberties Union. Kennedy never changed them, and, finally, in 1964, he got a conviction. It had taken seven years—but he had gotten it. “When Bobby hates you, you stay hated,” Joe Kennedy told a friend. And he hated Lyndon Johnson. Years before, the two men would pass in the halls of the Senate Office Building. “This was the Leader, the Leader,” says a reporter who covered the Senate. “Everybody gave him deference. Bobby could barely look at him.”

  As for Johnson, his feelings were in many respects the same. He took every opportunity to rub in his dislike of Robert Kennedy. Passing Bobby in the Senate corridor, he would greet him as “Sonny Boy.” The difference, at this stage in their careers, was their status. Johnson, whose eye missed nothing in the Senate world, was watching Bobby’s work with the McClellan Committee. “He’s a snot-nose, but he’s bright,” he told Bobby Baker. And once he gave him a compliment. When, after the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by launching Sputnik in October, 1957, proposals were being made for a Senate investigation, Johnson said that an investigation would be successful “if it had someone like young Kennedy handling it.” But these were the compliments of a senator about a staffer. In the Senate world, staffers were employees, and that was all they were—on a decidedly lower level than senators, and so they were regarded. If Johnson had some matter regarding the McClellan Committee to discuss, he discussed it with McClellan, Kennedy’s boss. He disliked Kennedy but didn’t take him seriously.

  Yet Bobby Kennedy understood things about running for the presidency that Lyndon Johnson didn’t. He had learned some of them on the floor of the 1956 convention during the brief, hectic battle with Estes Kefauver. When he had asked his senatorial boss and patron, John McClellan, to give his brother Arkansas’ vote, McClellan had told him, “Just get one thing through your head.… Senators have no votes; I’m lucky to be a delegate; Orval Faubus is the Governor of Arkansas, and that’s it, and where he goes the Arkansas delegation goes.” Bobby Kennedy had learned what Lyndon Johnson hadn’t: the insignificance of senators in the convention equation; Lyndon Johnson didn’t realize that but the young staffer did. And he had learned that he didn’t know who did have significance. At the 1956 convention, “Bobby and I ran around like a couple of nuts” trying to get votes, Ken O’Donnell was to recall. “A joke; we didn’t know two people in the place.” That was not a situation that Bobby let continue. Jack Kennedy had learned that it was the young people who mattered; Bobby Kennedy knew which young people mattered, and how to win to his brother’s cause the ones who mattered, how little courtesies could mean a lot. “It really struck me that it wasn’t the issues which matter. It was the friendships. So many people said to me … they were going to vote for Estes Kefauver because he had sent them a card or gone to their home. I said right there we should … send Christmas cards and go to their homes.”

  And he had learned other lessons after the convention, traveling on the campaign trail with Adlai Stevenson. Adlai’s people didn’t like him—Arthur Schlesinger, a Stevenson man then, remembered that Bobby, “making notes, always making notes … huddled by the window in the rear of the bus or plane, seemed an alien presence, sullen and rather ominous, saying little, looking grim and exuding an atmosphere of bleak disapproval”—but they had little choice other than to accept his presence; they needed the Catholic vote, and they felt the Kennedys could deliver it. If Schlesinger, by accident, got to know him better, and to like him (finding themselves seatmates, “we fell into reluctant conversation.… To my astonishment he was altogether pleasant, reasonable and amusing. We became friends at once”), for most of the rest of Stevenson’s entourage, getting to know him didn’t work the same way; by the end of the campaign he had thoroughly alienated them. Nonetheless, the notes he had taken became a case study of how to run (actually, since it was Stevenson he was observing, how not to run) a campaign. As one journalist put it, “after the Stevenson campaign … Bobby knew every single thing there was to know about a campaign. He just squeezed all that absolutely dry.” During 1957 and 1958 and part of 1959, he spent most of his time on his McClellan Committee job (and in 1959 he wrote a book, The Enemy Within, about his work with the committee), but, in September, 1959, the book completed, the committee post resigned, Bobby Kennedy headed out—full-time—on the campaign trail. Christmas cards were not the only message he was sending now. “Bobby Kennedy holds his head down and looks up through his eyebrows,” one newspaperman wrote. “Throw an arm around those shoulders and the big white teeth might snap at you.… The Kennedys are chill dishes indeed. But you feel they know what to do in a hot fight.” This impression was not exaggerated. Old-time politicians—men familiar with the harsher aspects of politics—would talk for years about Bobby Kennedy on the trail of the votes his brother needed.

  Governor Mike DiSalle controlled Ohio’s delegates, and he wasn’t for Jack Kennedy; he had opposed him in 1956. But DiSalle wanted the honor of running as Ohio’s favorite son candidate in the state’s primary. The Kennedys told him he could run unopposed if he publicly endorsed Jack Kennedy, and committed the delegation to him before the convention. If he didn’t, DiSalle was told, he would find himself in a fight in the primary against an old rival, Ray Miller, Cleveland’s Democratic leader, who had been trying, thus far unsuccessfully, to win control of the state for himself—and Miller would be backed by the Kennedys. Aware that Kennedy backing meant not only Kennedy endorsements but Kennedy money, DiSalle, nonetheless, in a tense meeting with Jack Kennedy, remained evasive, thinking he was in a negotiation. His next meeting was with Jack’s brother. Connecticut’s boss John Bailey, who accompanied Bobby, “does not shock easily,” O’Donnell was to recall, but “he told me later that he was startled by the going-over that Bobby had given DiSalle.” Precisely what he told him has not been recorded—did he warn DiSalle that the Kennedys would, by backing Miller, take the state away from him? DiSalle was to describe the
session as “stormy” and Bobby Kennedy as “fierce”—but at the end the Kennedys had what they wanted. “What could I have done?” DiSalle was to tell friends. “Those Kennedys play real rough.” Out beyond Ohio, in those crucial western states, Bobby worked on the men who held the “pieces of power,” turning into votes the friendships his brother Ted had made with them.

  Newspaper articles were beginning to appear about Bobby Kennedy now. In describing him, many of them used the same adjective: “ruthless.” Bobby hated that adjective. Men who dealt with him, however, did not feel it was inaccurate.

  LYNDON JOHNSON’S SUPPORTERS SAW how much his wavering was hurting his chances. Rayburn told Johnson’s aide Booth Mooney that he had tried “to get Johnson to let it be known quietly, without any public announcement, that he would” eventually become a candidate; “That was the only way, the Speaker said, to prevent … men of power … from lining up behind some other candidate,” but Johnson still wouldn’t allow that. His insistence on secrecy hamstrung Jenkins’ organizing efforts. The Kennedy organization was “extremely effective,” George Reedy was to recall, “and most of us really wanted to get out and counter, and we thought it could be countered … despite the fact that he [Johnson] was a southerner. After all, Kennedy was … testing the old saw that a Catholic could not be President; and we saw no reason why we couldn’t test the old saw that a southerner couldn’t be President …, especially since this was a southerner who actually managed to pass the first civil rights bills through the Congress in eighty-two years.… We wanted to get out, and really fight at it. But he would not permit us to do it.” “We’ve had more trouble between us about this damn campaign than anything within my memory,” Rayburn told Bobby Baker. “Lyndon’s using his friends to raise money and court delegates and he’s making them as well as himself look silly.”

  “SILLY.” ALL THROUGH 1959, he wavered back and forth, until his wavering, his circling about the prize, this vacillation by a man usually so single-minded, tough and decisive, contained elements not of failure alone, but of farce.

  A celebration he staged that year at the LBJ Ranch in honor of the President of Mexico, Adolfo López Mateos, was quite a spectacle: a fleet of eight helicopters, bearing, among others, Rayburn, Truman, Secretary of the Treasury Robert B. Anderson and Texas Governor Price Daniel, circled the ranch. When Mateos’ helicopter touched down on the runway, a red carpet was rolled out to it, and the visitors were greeted by a large mariachi band; at lunch, as the 450 guests ate barbecue on the front lawn, the band played and there was a lasso-twirling exhibition by the gaily costumed Mexican Charro Association of San Antonio, while all during lunch, on the far side of the little river, mounted cowboys herded longhorn cattle back and forth; the Dallas Morning News called the luncheon “one of the most dramatic outdoor shows since they produced Aida with live elephants.” And the most prominent decoration, looming over the guests while they ate, was a large, brightly colored banner that had been hung from a branch of the big live oak tree in the ranch’s front yard. Newsmen who had been assured by the ranch’s owner—assured by him over and over, in the most earnest of tones—that he was not a candidate for President, that he was not running for the job and didn’t want it, arrived at the ranch to find the banner the owner had had hung at his front door: “Lyndon Johnson Será Presidente.”

  Despite his insistence that he wasn’t a candidate, when someone took him at his word his reaction was pique. Convinced by his assurances, six Washington journalists, writing a book of profiles on major candidates, hadn’t included one on him. Although Johnson had accepted an invitation to the book party, when, on the day of the party, he learned of his omission, he let it be known that he took it as a personal insult, and refused to attend. Or the reaction was sulking. Asked by someone at his table at a White House dinner to list the leading Democratic candidates, President Eisenhower treated the matter as a joke, naming Rayburn and a number of Democratic senators who were obviously not candidates. Johnson, reading about this exchange in Drew Pearson’s column, didn’t take it as a joke at all. The next time he was in the White House (at another social gathering), he sat pouting, as the President’s diary was to relate, “in almost complete silence.” When Eisenhower, attempting to draw him out, asked him direct questions, he “answered only in monosyllables.” And when the next day Eisenhower telephoned with an apology (“Just kidding. This was all in the most laughing kind of thing”), it took a while for Johnson to accept it. “I have no ambitions,” he assured the President. “I’m not even going to the Convention. At an appropriate time, I will tell them that. [But] I was distressed that the one whom I had admired and had attempted to cooperate with as much as I have …”

  Farce—unless Lyndon Johnson in 1959 was viewed as a man throwing away his chance at the thing he had wanted all his life, in which case there were elements in the performance that might more aptly be fitted into a different theatrical genre: tragedy.

  On the evening of December 7, 1959, in New York City, the Democratic Party was turning out in force for a lavish dinner in honor of the idolized and influential Eleanor Roosevelt. Johnson, who had refused invitations to every other major Democratic event in this state he was counting on as a keystone in his presidential bid, was invited to give a short speech at this one, as were all the other leading candidates. Kennedy, Humphrey, Symington—even Adlai Stevenson—of course accepted. Johnson declined. And then he accepted two other speaking invitations for the same date: one before a fifteen-dollar-per-plate fundraising dinner sponsored by a Democratic club in a small town in Kansas, the other to a sewing bee in a small town in Iowa.

  “As usual,” James Reston wrote in the New York Times, “these moves by the Democratic majority leader are a mystery to friend and foe alike.… Even his enthusiastic supporters cannot make sense out of these decisions.” (What made them even more senseless, to those rooting for Lyndon Johnson, was another demonstration of what might have been: following his speech in Kansas, a Times reporter asked one of the guests, Would you vote for a southerner? “I didn’t think of him that way when he was speaking,” the man replied.)

  The targets of his fearsome rages had always been men and women at whom they could be directed with impunity: subordinates who had no choice, if they wanted to keep their jobs, but to accept his tongue-lashings; junior senators who, needing his favor, also had no choice. With men he needed, there was not rage but only humility, deference; with Herman Brown of Brown & Root, or the Old Senate Bulls whose support was still essential to him, he had always been as obsequious as he was overbearing with others. Now, so intense was the conflict within him that it exploded as well against men he needed, at least once in a way very damaging to his hopes.

  Trying to decide whom to support, California governor Pat Brown, whose state was very much up for grabs, flew across the country to Washington in 1959 to evaluate the candidates and, accompanied by his aide, Fred Dutton, met with Johnson in the Taj Mahal.

  The meeting went on far longer than Brown had expected, ninety minutes, and, as Brown later related, “Senator Johnson did all the talking,” explaining, among other things—many other things—why he was not electable. “For the first half hour,” Brown was to say, he was “rather impressed”; during the second half hour, “he was not so impressed.” And then, as the meeting entered its third half hour, Brown, perhaps trying merely to get in a word or two, used the wrong one, saying that he agreed that northern hostility made Johnson not “electable.”

  Johnson’s reaction “astonished” Dutton. “Brown was a Governor, and here Johnson was just tongue-lashing him,” he says. “He towered … his desk was higher; it was on a platform. ‘Don’t you ever say I’m not electable! What do you know about national politics?’ ”

  The reaction cost Johnson any chance of Brown’s support. The governor, who was to tell a friend that during the third half hour he became “downright angry,” didn’t respond at the time. “It just wasn’t in Pat Brown’s nature to answer back,” D
utton says. He responded on national television—in a particularly effective way, using an appearance on Face the Nation to spotlight the issues most damaging to Johnson, saying that California “probably would not vote for him because of his associations with the South and the oil interests.”