The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “It was Bobby who was cutting him off the list of invitees at the White House.… If he had submerged feelings towards Jack—and they had to be there—then Bobby becomes the target of those feelings. He blamed him for the ill treatment—he couldn’t afford to blame Jack Kennedy—although clearly Bobby wasn’t acting in any way his brother would disapprove of.” Everything was Bobby’s fault. “He couldn’t be rational where Bobby was concerned,” Bobby Baker says. Says Ashton Gonella: “He thought he was sneaky, he thought he lied—I can’t say the rest. He just hated him.”

  There was an additional, ironic, note. In explaining to his angry allies why he had accepted the vice presidential nomination, Johnson had said, in a phrase he used repeatedly, that if he couldn’t be “The Number One Man” in Washington, he would at least be “The Number Two Man.” Now, however, Life magazine’s issue profiling Bobby bore the headline “THE NO. 2 MAN IN WASHINGTON,” and U.S. News & World Report’s said, “ROBERT KENNEDY: NO. 2 MAN IN WASHINGTON,” and Time’s said simply, “NO. 2”—each headline another dash of salt in Lyndon Johnson’s wounds.

  And Johnson had read at least one aspect of Bobby Kennedy well enough to know the feelings were mutual. “When this fellow looks at me, he looks at me like he’s going to look a hole right through me, like I’m a spy or something,” he told John Connally.

  But to a man whose life is based on calculations of power, the crucial factor in any equation is who possesses it, and Lyndon Johnson’s eyes, so keen at these calculations, knew the answer; knew the headlines had ranked Bobby correctly. By the beginning of 1963, all Washington understood that Robert Kennedy had transformed the Justice Department, turning it into a newly aggressive foe of organized crime and juvenile delinquency, and that his role in government had been expanded far beyond his department—that, following the Bay of Pigs debacle, his brother had assigned him foreign policy responsibilities as well, had in fact brought him into the inner circles in which foreign policy is decided. But Johnson saw more than that. He saw the signs that, to the skilled calculator of power, meant more than the assignments: who entered a meeting beside the President, which meant that the President had been consulting with him before the formal deliberations began; who the President quietly asked to stay behind after the meeting; whose views at the meeting were embodied in the presidential decision that followed. “Every time they have a conference, don’t kid anybody about who is the top adviser,” Johnson blurted out one day. “It isn’t McNamara, the chiefs of staff, or anybody else like that. Bobby is first in, last out. And Bobby is the boy he listens to.” Nor was it merely a matter of advice: Bobby was more than an adviser; he was a brother, in a family in which the blood tie meant all. The attorney general was unfailingly formal during meetings, never forgetting that he was addressing “Mr. President,” but sometimes on the way out, in a brief huddle together, the names the attorney general and the President called each other in private slipped out: “Johnny”; “Bobby.” It was the way that they sometimes communicated without words, the reaction of one brother to the other’s statement being conveyed in a shrug of the shoulder or a shake of the head. It was the way that, as Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “They … always talked in the cryptic half sentences that bespoke perfect understanding,” the way they finished each other’s sentences. Watching them at a formal state dinner, where they were sitting far apart, a guest was struck by how each heard, through the chatter, what the other was saying, and chimed in on it. “They hardly had to speak with each other,” the guest said. “They understood each other from a half word. There was a kind of constant, almost telepathic, contact between them.” Asked once to explain, Jack Kennedy said, “It’s by osmosis.” Lyndon Johnson heard and saw it all. He sued for peace.

  The suit was pursued first through a subordinate. John Seigenthaler, the aide perhaps closest to Robert Kennedy, received a telephone call from Walter Jenkins. “We have to work together,” Jenkins said. “We have to keep these two fellows from embarrassing themselves” by publicly feuding. The call, Seigenthaler says, “was basically to say, ‘No hard feelings’ ” about anything in the past—and Jenkins made clear that his principal was willing to go more than halfway to effect a rapprochement. Mentioning some matter that the Vice President wanted to discuss with the attorney general—that was merely an excuse to make the call, it was clear—Jenkins said Johnson would come to the attorney general’s office at any time that was convenient for him. “Well, what time would you prefer?” Seigenthaler asked. “No,” Jenkins said, “what’s convenient for you?” Seigenthaler said he was sure a mutually convenient time could be worked out, but such an arrangement would be contrary to the instructions Jenkins had been given, and he said, this time with agitation in his voice, “No, no, it’s got to be convenient for the Attorney General. Would you check with the Attorney General?” And when, although the appointment was granted, and Johnson made his visit to the Justice Department, the situation did not improve, he pressed the suit in a more informal setting—an upstairs kitchen at the White House, where, after a dinner-dance in January 1963, guests were scrambling eggs for an after-midnight snack. Approaching the attorney general, Johnson said, “I don’t understand you, Bobby. Your father likes me. Your brother likes me. But you don’t like me. Now, why? Why don’t you like me?”

  Bobby, in the recollection of Charles Spalding, one of the other guests in the kitchen, “agreed to the accuracy of all this”—but Johnson wouldn’t let it drop. “Why?” he kept asking. “Why don’t you like me?” He was begging, crowding against Bobby, and Bobby kept retreating—and letting him beg. “It was a role … Bobby was enjoying.… The discussion was completely in his favor and in his hand,” Spalding says. And although Johnson asked the questions “again and again” (it seemed to Spalding that “this went on and on for hours”)—“Why don’t you like me? I don’t understand it. Now, why?”—Bobby wouldn’t answer them.

  Finally, Johnson said, “I know why you don’t like me.” The reason was a misconception, he said: the press had misquoted statements he made at the 1960 convention. “You think I attacked your father,” he said. “But I never said that. Those reports were all false.… I never did attack your father and I wouldn’t, and I always liked you and admired you. But you’re angry with me and you’ve always been upset with me.” That explanation, though, didn’t have the desired effect at all. A day or so later Kennedy repeated Johnson’s explanation to Seigenthaler, who, as a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, had in fact been present in 1960 at Johnson’s speech to the Washington State delegation in which he had called Joseph Kennedy a “Chamberlain umbrella man,” and said, “I never thought Hitler was right.” Kennedy asked Seigenthaler, “Do you remember what he said?”

  “Yes, I do,” Seigenthaler said, and repeated Johnson’s words. When Kennedy told Seigenthaler of Johnson’s claim that his remarks had been misquoted, Seigenthaler said, “Well, he’s not telling the truth.” Looking up microfilms of the articles on Johnson’s attack that had run in the New York Times and other newspapers, he sent reproductions to Kennedy with a note: “There can’t be much doubt … that he was vicious.” Kennedy told him dryly the next time they met, “If the press misquoted him, it’s a general misquoting.”

  Among the aspects of Robert Kennedy’s character most conspicuous to his intimates was what Life magazine called his “genuine contempt for liars.” “He could forgive anything in a staffer except lying,” one aide says. “If you tried to fool him …” The only result of the encounter in the White House kitchen was a reinforcing of his convictions about Lyndon Johnson. “My experience with him since [the convention],” he was to say, “he lies all the time, I’m telling you, he just lies continually about everything.… He lies even when he doesn’t have to lie.”

  NOT THAT HIS CONVICTIONS needed reinforcing.

  Bobby Kennedy’s behavior during the Cuban Missile Crisis had not been the first indication that behind the Torquemada glower, the prosecutor’s jabbing fist, the bullying, the
insistence that all surrenders be unconditional that made the adjective “ruthless” an apt description no matter how deeply he resented it, beneath the idolization of his father, the need to attain his approbation, which seemed to be the constant motivation in his life—that beneath all this, there was something more, something quite different, within Robert Francis Kennedy.

  Hints of it had appeared long before the Cuban crisis—before he had become attorney general; in fact, even before he had been Joe McCarthy’s assistant; before he had even entered government. His father was an anti-Semite—no matter how biographers may try to gloss over that trait, it was there: Jews were the problem with the movie industry, Joe Kennedy had found when he first went out to Hollywood; “a bunch of ignorant Jewish furriers” had taken it over “simply because they had unethically pushed their way into a wide-open virgin field”; Jews were a problem in government, too: “There is a great undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the appointment of so many Jews in high places in Washington,” Joe wrote his friend, the British press czar Lord Beaverbrook, in 1942; behind Joe’s tolerance of Hitler, a biographer notes, was a willingness “to write off … the Jews as well as almost anyone else to achieve peace.” But when Bobby himself, still the religious teenager, the most devoutly Catholic of Rose’s children, encountered anti-Semitism, he could not contain himself, even though the sentiment “came clad in priestly robes.”

  Listening to the fascist diatribes of the anti-Semite Father Feeney on Boston Common, something made Bobby burst out, interrupting the priest to tell him that what he was saying contradicted the Catholic principles he was being taught in school. (“I was horrified,” Rose said. “My own son arguing with a priest. But when the Vatican excommunicated Father Feeney, I knew Bobby had been right.”) After Bobby’s graduation, with C’s and D’s, from Harvard in March, 1948, his father arranged for him to tour the Middle East (and arranged also for him to be accredited as a correspondent for the Boston Post). Crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, he dined, at his father’s insistence, with Beaverbrook, who explained to him that the United States was “a subjugated nation to a Jewish minority.” But when he arrived in the Middle East and saw, with his own eyes, Jews fighting for their existence against overwhelming odds, and was told by a twenty-three-year-old Israeli woman (“I never saw anyone so tired,” he wrote his mother) about her four brothers fighting in the Haganah, the views he expressed in his articles for the Post were not the views of his father. “The Jews in Palestine have become an immensely proud and determined people … a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation,” he wrote. They have “an undying spirit” the Arabs could never have; as for the United States, its failure to come more strongly to Israel’s assistance should be a matter of shame. “We are certainly not the good little saints we imagine ourselves.” And there was another noteworthy aspect to the articles, written as they were by such a mediocre student: they showed, as Arthur Schlesinger writes, “a maturity, cogency and, from time to time, literary finish” quite “creditable for a football player of twenty-two.”

  It wasn’t only his reaction to Jews that gave the hint, it was his reaction to the embattled, to the oppressed—to anyone, it began to become apparent, who was the underdog (as, in that family in which he had had “to struggle to survive,” he had been the underdog).

  At law school at the University of Virginia, where, as usual, “nothing came easy” to him (he graduated fifty-sixth in a class of 124), he became president of the organization that invited outside speakers, and invited his father, his father’s friends like Supreme Court Justice Douglas and Joe McCarthy—and Ralph Bunche, the black United Nations peace negotiator who had won a Nobel Peace Prize. When Bunche replied that he never spoke before a segregated audience, Bobby asked the student council to pass a resolution requesting the university to make an exception to its segregationist policy. The southern students on the council were willing to vote for the resolution but not to sign it individually, since after graduation they would have to practice law in Virginia. Bobby refused to understand their problem. “It [was] his black and white view of things,” an unsympathetic classmate says. His temper was still uncontrollable, and he had none of his brother’s eloquence; after shouting, “You’re all gutless,” he became almost incoherent with rage. Refusing to let the issue drop, he brought it before the law school’s governing body, the Board of Visitors, where, again, he lost his temper, and “the madder he got, the worse he got at talking. Very little came out.” But the audience at Bunche’s speech was integrated.

  The portrait that was Robert Kennedy had always been heavily layered, with the harsh, dark colors—the rudeness, the ruthlessness, the rage; the desire to please and emulate his father—so dominant that it had been hard to see the glimpses of brighter hues. But they were there. They seemed to become more apparent, to be brought out—in this young man who had never been a reader of books—when he saw things with his own eyes. Robert Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree an experiencing nature,” Schlesinger has written; what he actually saw, came into personal contact with, he learned from, and moreover, felt—and felt deeply. And when what he saw were the embattled, the oppressed, when he saw injustice close up so that, reader or not, he understood it, he felt it so deeply that he would argue against it, fight against it, as if even the teachings of his father faded before something deeper within him.

  Then there was the way he acted with children. By 1963, he and his wife, Ethel Skakel (daughter of a wealthy midwestern industrialist), had seven; they would eventually have eleven. When he had been younger, no matter how much work he had, he would leave Capitol Hill at 5:30 each afternoon to be with them; the work would be finished at night, after they went to bed. Now, as attorney general and the President’s principal adviser in every crisis, “Bob was,” Seigenthaler says, “overloaded with work”—there was no more leaving at 5:30—“but he always took time for those children.”

  As he was shaving in the morning—he arose early so he could spend time with them before he went to work—they would come into the bathroom and squirt shaving cream, shouting happily; taking the blade out of a razor, he’d hand the razor to his daughter Kathleen, and she would shave along with him. For half an hour—7 to 7:30—he tossed a football around with them. Over breakfast, he fired questions at them on current events, as his father had tossed questions (not at him so much, but at Joe, Jack, and his sister Kathleen). “Unlike his father,” Bobby “was careful to include all the children, the youngest and smallest, too,” one of his biographers notes. In the evenings, on the rare weekday evenings when he was home, he knelt with them beside their beds as they prayed (ending with, “And please make Uncle Jack the best President ever and please make Daddy the best Attorney General ever”).

  On weekends, there was, from this man who disliked being touched by adults, “a lot of physical affection,” Kathleen says. “All the children would pile into my parents’ bed and tickle each other; it was called ‘tickle-tumble.’ ” On the sweeping lawns of the rambling Civil War mansion in McLean, Virginia, called “Hickory Hill,” a place Bobby and Ethel had filled not only with the seven children but with a donkey, two horses, three ponies, five goats, ten ducks, rabbits (thirty-two one day, forty a few days later), snakes, a burro, a tortoise, hamsters, a cockatoo and a parakeet (and, for a while, a sea lion in the swimming pool)—and seventeen servants—he and the boys would roll on the ground in playful wrestling matches, grunting ferociously, “exchanging,” as a frequent visitor recalls, “terrible threats and mock punches” in a “Donnybrook that left everybody all laughed out and tearfully exhausted.” If one of the children started crying, Bobby would hug him, saying soothingly, “Hush, now, Kennedys don’t cry.”

  When he couldn’t get home enough, he’d bring the children to his office, as if, as one writer puts it, he “cannot bear being away from them for long.” That started when he was working for the McClellan Committee. “My father very much believed that we should know what was go
ing on in the world, and wanted to engage us in what he was doing, so it was interesting and fascinating,” Kathleen says. “Oftentimes when other children were swinging on swings, we went to the Senate Rackets Committee hearings and listened to him cross-examine Jimmy Hoffa. There was always a sense of right and wrong. I didn’t realize until much later that ‘Teamsters’ wasn’t a term for bad guys.” He put up their crayon drawings in the vast, somber, walnut-paneled attorney general’s office. And no matter how busy he was, if they showed up in the office, he would always stop to hug them and talk with them for a few minutes. “There wasn’t a problem that the kids had that he wouldn’t interrupt whatever he was doing to solve,” says a friend.

  As striking as the amount of time spent with them was the tenderness with which he treated them. While he was splashing violently in the pool with the older boys in wild games of water polo, one of the very young girls would come to the pool’s edge to be taught to swim. As her father’s arms came up to get her, they came up slowly, carefully, as gently as he then cradled her in the water.

  His gentleness with children wasn’t only with his own. If he was sometimes still inarticulate with adults, he always knew exactly what to say to them. Particularly with children who were underdogs. “Children in neglect, privation, distress wounded him, like an arrow into the heart,” Schlesinger was to write. Coming across a group of about a hundred black boys and girls from an orphanage being herded through the corridors of the Justice Department by a rather indifferent tour guide, he watched for a moment, and then invited them to come into his office. He showed them pictures of his own children, telling anecdotes about them until the orphans relaxed, and started asking him questions. “Can you all see me?,” he said, and climbed up on his desk before explaining to them what his job entailed. “Children dissolved his reticences, released his humor and his affection, brought him, one felt, more fully out of himself and therefore perhaps more fully into himself,” Schlesinger wrote.