The only people who could say what occurred in that room were Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy. In his account of what had happened there, Kennedy let all his hatred and contempt for Johnson spill out.
There were just the two of us. He was seated on the couch, and I was seated on his right. I remember the whole conversation.… I said, “There’s going to be a lot of opposition.” … It was going to be unpleasant, that we were going to have trouble with the liberals. They were going to get up and fight it, and the President [Jack Kennedy] didn’t think that he [Johnson] wanted to go through that kind of an unpleasant fight.
Therefore, Robert Kennedy said, repeating the offer that Connally and Rayburn say he had made to them earlier, perhaps Johnson would like to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
The President [Jack Kennedy] wanted to have him play an important role, and he could run the party—the idea being that to run the party he could get a lot of his own people in; and then if he wanted to be President after eight years or something, he could have the machinery where he could run for President or do whatever he wanted. That was the idea at the time. We didn’t really know whether he’d want to go through it [a floor fight], and, in any case, the President wanted to get rid of him.
He [Johnson] is one of the greatest looking sad 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 the President will have me, I’ll join with him in making a fight for it.” It was that kind of a conversation. I said, “Well, then, that’s fine. He wants you to be Vice President if you want to be Vice President.”
Going back into the other bedroom, Lyndon Johnson yanked off his jacket and tie. He couldn’t sit still. With the connecting doors between the suite and the adjoining bedrooms open, he paced back and forth in his shirtsleeves through the long line of rooms with awkward, lunging strides, his arms flailing, a towering distraught figure. Trying to find a place in which he could talk with his advisers, he walked into a room in which his staff had been entertaining some fifteen delegates from Hawaii. Saying, “Thank you, boys, thank you. Thank you for all you did,” he shooed them out.
Then he was alone with Lady Bird, Rayburn, Connally, Graham, Rowe and Bobby Baker. “LBJ seemed about to jump out of his skin,” Graham said. He told them that Robert Kennedy had said, “Kennedy doesn’t want me.” He asked them, “What am I going to do?” Jim Rowe, who had been with him in a score of crises over the course of more than twenty years, says, “I’d never seen him in such a state of—not panic—confusion.”
Through the “hubbub” that followed, Rayburn’s voice cut through: “Phil, call Jack.” Returning to the bedroom, and sitting on a bed, Graham did—and as soon as that call went through, the confusion was over, at least for the day. “ ‘Oh,’ Jack Kennedy said—as calmly as though we were discussing the weather—‘that’s all right; Bobby’s been out of touch and doesn’t know what’s been happening.’ ” When Graham asked, “Well, what do you want Lyndon to do?” Kennedy replied, “I want him to make a statement right away.” He had, he said, “just finished making mine.” Graham said, “You’d better speak to Lyndon,” and a moment later Johnson, sprawling across the other bed, was agreeing to make his statement. Graham then told Jack Kennedy, “You’d better speak to Bobby.” Baker went out to get Robert Kennedy, who came into the room looking exhausted; his face was white and, in Graham’s description, “sullen” and “dead tired.” He took the phone, and as Graham walked out of the room, he heard Robert Kennedy say to his brother, “Well, it’s too late now.”
Johnson didn’t look any better. He and Lady Bird, standing amid a cluster of men in the suite’s vestibule, resembled two people who “had just survived an airplane crash,” Graham says. Through the double doors to the corridor, they could hear a babble of voices: the press corps. Johnson was still holding the typed statement accepting the nomination. Before Bobby had come down, “I was just going to read this on TV … and now I don’t know what I ought to do,” he told Graham, who relates that “With more ham than I ever suspected myself of, I suddenly blurted: ‘Of course you know what you’re going to do. Throw your shoulders back and your chin out and go out and make that announcement.’ ” Someone shouted approval, and swung open the door, and someone pushed Johnson and Lady Bird “out into the TV lights and the explosion of flashbulbs.” A couple of chairs were brought out and they were helped up to stand on them, “and,” Graham says, “as they rose their faces metamorphosed into enthusiasm and confidence.”
Behind them, in the bedroom of the Johnson suite, only two men were left: Jim Rowe and Robert Kennedy. “Jim, don’t you think it is a terrible mistake?” Kennedy asked. He leaned his head against a wall. “My God, this wouldn’t have happened except that we were all too tired last night,” he said.
WHILE JACK KENNEDY HAD BEEN READING his statement and answering questions at a crowded press conference a few minutes earlier (the announcement was greeted by “gasps of surprise,” the New York Times said), he made one or two minor gaffes, very unusual for him, referring to Symington, at one point, as the “Senator from Illinois,” but there was no other sign of fatigue or tension. He seemed, in fact, quite at ease; he looked, as the Washington Post put it, “as though he had spent the day at the beach.”
In his efforts to “get him off the ticket,” to try to persuade Lyndon Johnson to withdraw, was Robert Kennedy acting without his brother’s knowledge?
Even Philip Graham, the man who raised that possibility in the memorandum he wrote shortly after the convention, found it impossible to resolve that question. (“I urged [Jack] Kennedy to offer the Vice Presidency to Johnson. He immediately agreed.… Kennedy was decisive in saying that was his intention.… ‘Bobby’s been out of touch and doesn’t know what’s been happening.’ … I later learned he [Bobby] had … assured several liberal delegates it would not be Johnson. My guess is that he made that assurance on his own and tried to bring it about on his own during his dealings with Johnson and Rayburn.”)
“Did Jack offer the VP hoping LBJ would turn it down?” Graham wrote. “Did LBJ really want it? Did Bobby try to sabotage the offer? And if so, did he do so on his own or with Jack’s approval? I have no confident answer to any of those questions.”
When the possibility that Bobby had made the effort on his own became a public issue—and it became a very public issue when Graham’s memorandum was published in 1965, and again, as will be seen, in 1967—Bobby indignantly denied it. No one but he and his brother knew what had happened, he told two interviewers, Arthur Schlesinger and the journalist John Bartlow Martin, who, in a series of oral history interviews, recorded his reminiscences for posterity. “The only people who were involved in the discussions were Jack and myself. Nobody else was involved in it.” Graham’s memorandum—the claim that “I went down by myself and on my own”—“flabbergasted me,” he said. “Obviously, with the close relationship between my brother and me, I wasn’t going down to see if he would withdraw just as a lark on my own. ‘My brother’s asleep, so I’ll see if I can get rid of his Vice President.’ ” He had, Robert Kennedy said, “worked out” with Jack that he would tell Johnson that “the liberals … were going to get up [on the convention floor] and fight it,” and that Johnson could have the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairmanship instead. “That was the idea,” he said. “In any case [JFK] wanted to get rid of him.… During that whole three or four hours, we just vacillated back and forth as to whether we wanted him or didn’t want him. And finally we decided not to have him, and we came upon this idea [offering him the DNC chairmanship] of trying to get rid of him. And it didn’t work.”
Descriptions of some telephone conversations tend to support the view that Bobby Kennedy was acting on his own, without Jack’s knowledge: the four conversations reported by Philip Graham, in an account corroborated by Rowe (who says about one conversation, “I could hear [Jack] Kenn
edy talking,” and about another that Graham had, immediately upon hanging up, told him what Kennedy had said)—the conversations in one of which, Graham wrote, Jack Kennedy told him, “It’s all set”; in next of which Kennedy had said he had thought that first message would suffice to let Johnson know he was his choice; and in the last of which he said, “Bobby’s been out of touch” and that he, Jack, had already made his public statement announcing that Johnson was his choice.
Robert Kennedy explained these conversations by saying that at the time Jack first dispatched him to make the DNC offer, Jack had not yet made the public statement and still wanted Johnson off the ticket. Bobby says that Jack’s decision to publicly announce Johnson’s choice was made between the time he, Bobby, left to see Johnson and the time he returned to Jack’s suite, and that Jack had made that decision because, Bobby says, during that interval Jack had received a telephone call from “somebody” saying he had to stop vacillating, and had therefore decided to make the announcement.
Whatever the explanation for what happened during that long afternoon, however, it is difficult to credit Robert Kennedy’s explanation. His initial acceptance of his brother’s decision, conveyed to Ken O’Donnell and Pierre Salinger from the bathtub early that morning, appears to have faded quickly, perhaps partly because he accompanied O’Donnell when Ken, following Jack Kennedy’s instructions to “Get your tail over and tell your labor friends,” went to UAW President Walter Reuther’s suite at the nearby Statler Hilton Hotel, where labor and liberal leaders had gathered. The reaction from this group of men whom O’Donnell and Bobby (and perhaps Jack) had unequivocally assured that Johnson would never be Jack Kennedy’s choice was “violently angry,” O’Donnell was to relate. Joe Rauh had somehow already heard the news, and as one of the labor leaders, UAW vice president Leonard Woodcock, was heading up to Reuther’s suite, suddenly in front of him was “Joe Rauh, who had tears literally rolling down his cheeks. Have I heard the news?” Woodcock hadn’t heard it, and as Rauh told him that Kennedy had chosen Johnson, “It seemed” to Woodcock “that Kennedy had betrayed us all. Well, I, very frankly, was shocked, because our whole theme had been to unite behind Kennedy to stop Johnson.” Up in the suite, there were shouts of “Double-cross” and “sellout” from a group that included George Meany of the AFL-CIO; Jack Conway, Reuther’s top political aide; and Alex Rose of New York, president of the Cloth Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers International Union. In O’Donnell’s recollection, Bobby was attacked “savagely.” Jabbing a finger at him, Rose shouted that if Johnson’s name was on the ticket, Kennedy would not receive the Liberal Party designation in New York State. Conway started for O’Donnell as if he were going to hit him. “I don’t think that Bobby Kennedy fully realized the predicament that Jack had put us into until we walked into the room at the Statler Hilton,” O’Donnell was to relate. The labor delegates said that they, in combination with civil rights and other liberal groups, would nominate their own candidate for the vice presidency to oppose Johnson that evening. “Bobby was shaken.”
But while Bobby Kennedy may have changed his mind, Jack appears never to have changed his. And emotional though the scene at the Statler Hilton may have been, it doesn’t explain Bobby’s repeated attempts, attested to not only by Johnson but by Rayburn and Connally, to persuade Johnson to withdraw from the ticket. O’Donnell, who says he was present when Bobby reported back to his brother on his meeting with the angry union and liberal leaders, says that Bobby asked Jack, “Do you want me to tell Lyndon that there’s a possibility of a floor fight?” and that Jack replied, “Maybe you better go downstairs and tell him that. I doubt that it will bother him, but we ought to let him know that there might be a floor fight against him, in case he doesn’t feel up to facing it.” According to O’Donnell, that was all Jack said. He didn’t, according to O’Donnell, tell Bobby to try to persuade Johnson to withdraw. And throughout that afternoon, Jack’s determination to keep Johnson on the ticket appears never to have wavered. As liberal outrage mounted, he treated it with cool indifference. At one point, as Kennedy was meeting in his suite with a group of southern governors exuberant over Johnson’s selection, Soapy Williams unexpectedly walked in. Shocked by what he was hearing—the governor had just been assuring his Michigan delegation that rumors they had been hearing about Johnson’s selection were false—he shouted that he would lead a floor fight against it. Several of the southerners threatened to punch him, and were actually advancing on him when cooler heads pushed them back. All during the scene, Jack Kennedy, “sitting in an armchair with one leg hanging over its arm, watched without saying a word,” O’Donnell says. Asked whether, during the course of the long afternoon, “Jack Kennedy ever seem[ed] to waver on [the choice of Johnson],” Larry O’Brien says, “Not to my recollection.” (Kennedy had asked David Lawrence to nominate Johnson, and all during the time Bobby was making his trips down the stairs to the seventh floor, Lawrence’s speechwriters were drafting the nominating speech.) And of course when Philip Graham telephoned Kennedy while he was in the middle of a meeting with a group of angry liberals, Kennedy asked him to call back in three minutes, and when Graham did, Kennedy’s answer, “utterly calm,” was “It’s all set. Tell Lyndon I want him.” Some minutes later, after Bobby had finished his one-on-one session with Johnson, during which, Johnson said, Bobby had told him, “[Jack] Kennedy doesn’t want me” (Bobby explains that meeting by saying, “The President wanted to get rid of him”), Graham spoke to Jack Kennedy again. Saying, “Oh … Bobby’s been out of touch,” Jack told Lyndon to make his statement accepting the nomination immediately, because he himself had already made his, announcing that Lyndon was his choice. And Jack’s statement to Johnson was accurate. He had made his announcement, some minutes earlier.
Robert Kennedy could of course have been doing what he thought his brother wanted him to do but didn’t want to put into words, even to him, or he could have been hearing—hearing through the haze of his hatred for Johnson—what he wanted to hear. But there is another possible explanation. Close though the two brothers may have been, in their relationship it was only the elder brother who made the decisions. “As the years went on,” O’Brien says, “Jack Kennedy never at any fleeting moment was other than the President of the United States. His brother was the attorney general and his brother was his confidant and adviser, but the decision maker sat in the Oval Office and the decision maker sat in the suite that day.” And it may be that the elder brother had not, before he got the nomination, allowed the younger brother to know what he was planning to do after he got it because if anyone, including his brother, knew, it would make it harder for him to get it. In his biography of Robert Kennedy, Evan Thomas, after summarizing Robert’s account of the long afternoon, says, “That was [Robert] Kennedy’s story, but it wasn’t the whole story or, the evidence suggests, an entirely accurate account.… Robert Kennedy later said the complete story would never be known, but that may be because he hoped it wouldn’t. Jack Kennedy relied on his brother, trusted him, needed him, but he didn’t always tell him everything he was thinking or doing.”3 More than one Kennedy adviser arrives at the same conclusion. Fred Dutton, for one, says, “I always suspected that Jack didn’t tell Bobby everything about LBJ because Jack figured Bobby would try to stop him.”
It may be that Jack Kennedy didn’t always tell anyone everything he was thinking or doing. In attempting to understand why he declared to his journalist friend Charles Bartlett that his offer to Johnson had been merely a gesture (“I just held it out like this, and he grabbed at it”)—a statement at direct variance not only with Johnson’s account of the conversation but with what Kennedy himself told O’Donnell, O’Brien, Governor Lawrence and others immediately after it took place—one possible explanation is that since he had allowed unequivocal “promises … assurances” to be given in his name to liberals and labor leaders that Johnson would not be offered the vice presidency, the easiest way to explain why the offer had been made was to say he hadn’t
really offered it, had only “held it out like this,” and that Johnson had, “to his shock,” “grabbed at it,” and he, Kennedy, then had had no choice but to let the offer stand.4
That explanation raises the possibility that Jack Kennedy may have known all along—for months, perhaps for years—that if he won the presidential nomination he would try to persuade Lyndon Johnson to join him on the ticket, and that he simply hadn’t dropped a hint of that to anyone, even his brother. Such an explanation suggests, of course, cold calculation—very cold; it suggests the existence of a deep reservoir of calculation and reserve beneath Jack Kennedy’s easy charm. But that explanation—that for months he had concealed his true intentions from his brother, his closest adviser—is not definitive, nor is any other. All it is possible to say is that however shrouded the events of that afternoon in Los Angeles may remain for history—however undefinitive, resistant to proof, every explanation subject to contradiction—that is nonetheless one possible explanation for them.
Since rumors and the reports of rumors, confusion and conflicting stories, are a staple of all contested political conventions, the questions surrounding Lyndon Johnson’s acceptance of John F. Kennedy’s offer to be his Vice President, and Kennedy’s decision to make (or not to make) the offer to him, might not warrant as much consideration—so much effort to resolve them—as they have, for decades, been given, except that, because of November 22, 1963, the events of that long afternoon in 1960 were to affect so profoundly the course of American history. As Evans and Novak were to write, the alliance between John Kennedy and Johnson “that opened to Johnson the door of national power set in motion the mutual suspicion between” Johnson and Robert Kennedy “that would grow in importance and depth as the years went by.” After that afternoon, Robert Kennedy wasn’t the only one of the two men who hated the other. Whatever Lyndon Johnson’s feelings toward Robert Kennedy had been before, the events of that afternoon had intensified them. He never blamed Jack Kennedy for the uncertainties and indignities—and the attempt to destroy his hopes, to snatch away from him the opportunity he so much wanted—that were visited upon him that afternoon. He knew who was behind them, he felt. “Bobby was against my being on the ticket in 1960,” he was to say years later. “He came to my room three times to try to get me to say we wouldn’t run on the ticket.” At the end of that long afternoon, after he had stepped down from the chair in the Biltmore corridor on which he had stood to make his acceptance statement, he came back into his suite, and closed the door behind him, and cursed Robert Kennedy. He called him, Bobby Baker was to write, “ ‘that little shitass’ and worse.” Perhaps much worse. John Connally, who during long days of conversation with this author was willing to answer almost any question put to him, no matter how delicate the topic, wouldn’t answer when asked what Johnson said about Robert Kennedy. When the author pressed him, he finally said flatly: “I’m not going to tell you what he said about him.” During the months after the convention, when Johnson was closeted alone back in Texas with an old ally, he would sometimes be asked about Robert Kennedy. He would reply with a gesture. Raising his big right hand, he would draw the side of it across his neck in a slow, slitting movement. Sometimes that gesture would be his only reply; sometimes, as during a meeting with Ed Clark in Austin, he would say, as his hand moved across his neck, “I’ll cut his throat if it’s the last thing I do.”
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