The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  IN SOME WAYS, however, Bobby Kennedy had changed not at all. The old, dark hues—the rudeness, the anger, the belligerence, the “mean streak”—were sometimes still visible under the new, brighter colors.

  Sometimes belligerence was employed as an instrument for his brother, a tool with a very rough edge, even when it was being wielded against grand (or formerly grand) old men of the Democratic Party establishment. The seventy-year-old railroad magnate W. Averell Harriman, former ambassador to Great Britain, ambassador to Moscow, expediter of Lend-Lease, adviser at Yalta, not to mention governor of New York, found himself being ordered about at his own dinner table. Asked by Bobby about a report the President had requested, he said he was still doing research on it. “Well, get on it, Averell,” Bobby snapped at him, in a tone as cold as his eyes. “See that you do it tomorrow.” Said one of Harriman’s other guests, Rowland Evans, Bobby “couldn’t have cared less [who Harriman was] …. Bobby was giving an order, and it happened to be Averell Harriman; it could have been anybody.” Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles, another former governor (of Connecticut) and a revered figure to American liberals, whose backing of Jack Kennedy in 1960 had been a key factor in softening liberal opposition to his candidacy, had not supported the Bay of Pigs invasion, and after its failure, had let that fact be known. Suddenly confronting Bowles after a White House meeting, Bobby had snarled, “You should keep your mouth shut. As of now, you were for the Bay of Pigs”—and, to emphasize the point, had jabbed a finger into Bowles’ chest. Bowles was, in addition, too wordy and slow-moving for the Kennedys, who, following the Bay of Pigs, were looking for a way to remove Castro from power. At a National Security Council meeting with the President in the chair, Bowles delivered a summary of State Department reports that concluded Castro was now firmly in control of the island and could be removed only by the full-scale American invasion that the Kennedys were determined to avoid. Jumping to his feet, Bobby slammed the reports down on the table. “This is worthless,” he shouted. “What can we do about Cuba? This doesn’t tell us anything. You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the President.” He went on shouting for ten minutes. And then he glared directly at Bowles. “We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else,” he said.

  As Bobby’s tirade continued, the President didn’t interrupt, but simply sat silently, tapping the metal rim of the eraser on his pencil against his front teeth. Watching from his seat against a wall, Richard Goodwin “became suddenly aware,” as he was to write, that “there was an inner hardness, often volatile anger beneath the outwardly amiable, thoughtful, carefully controlled demeanor of John Kennedy.” He had no doubt that Robert Kennedy was “communicating exactly what his brother wanted said”—that the President wanted Bowles out of the Administration, but, because of his popularity in liberal circles, didn’t want to fire him, and that Bobby’s tirade was a way to force Bowles to resign (and, in addition, to deter him from leaking information that would undermine the Kennedy image; and to let the other officials watching the scene see what might happen to them if they leaked). Goodwin’s suspicion was confirmed when, not long thereafter, Bowles not having taken the hint, the President began easing him out of his job.

  Sometimes, however, Bobby’s manners had nothing to do with the President, and were a reminder that there had always been that “mean”—cruel—streak in him. As the adulation from the press for the Kennedys, for their graciousness and charm, mounted and mounted, and Bobby’s face, boyish and open and grinning, became a fixture on newsstands, dissenting voices were drowned out, but they were there. If within his “band of brothers” there was a sometimes forced but nonetheless humorous badinage, he had lost none of his brusqueness with other subordinates; “Kennedy’s most obvious fault is rudeness,” wrote a young Justice Department staffer who was not a member of the in-group. “His face, when it lacks that boyish, photogenic grin, is not a pleasant sight. It has a certain bony harshness and those ice-blue eyes are not the smiling ones that Irishmen write songs about. It is with this stern visage that Kennedy confronts most of the world.… His friends call this shyness, but the historians of the 1960 campaign do not record that he was ever shy in pursuit of a stray delegate.” A CIA official giving him a report he didn’t like saw “his eyes get steely and his jaw set, and his voice get low and precise.” An Army general who tried to tell him that a request would be very difficult to meet was asked, “Why would it be difficult, General?” and, wrote a witness to the encounter, “learned that there are few experiences in this world quite like having Robert Kennedy push his unsmiling face towards yours and ask, ‘Why?’ ”

  He had lost none of his insistence on the importance of winning. An autographed picture of heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson hung on the wall of his office—until Patterson lost the title to Sonny Liston. The next day, the photograph was gone. Even while Hickory Hill touch-football games were becoming fixed in American myth as boyishly friendly, visitors who played in one for the first time got a somewhat different view. “Even approaching forty,” wrote a Washington newsman, “Bobby was playing touch football with the callow ferocity of a fraternity boy.” Said another: “I’d like to hit him right in the mouth. Every time I went up for a pass, he gave me elbows, knees, the works. Then our team got within one touchdown of his team, by God he picked up the ball and said the game was over.”

  “Just when you get Bobby typed as the white hope, compassionate, he’ll do something so bad it’ll jar you completely, destroy your faith in him,” a journalist wrote. “And just as you’re ready to accept the excessive condemnations, to accept him as ruthless and diabolical, he’ll do something so classy it stuns you. The inescapable truth about Robert Kennedy is that the paradoxes are real, the conflicts do exist.” Said another, “From one day to the next, you never know which Bobby Kennedy you’re going to meet.”

  And he had lost none of the quality—the capacity for hatred—that had made Joe Kennedy begin to respect him. After his brother’s defeat at the Bay of Pigs, Robert Kennedy’s determination to, in Bowles’ phrase, “get Castro” was so intense that one of his key advisers on Cuba said he seemed to regard the failed invasion as “an insult which needed to be redressed rather quickly.” “It was almost as simple as goddammit, we lost the first round, let’s win the second,” McGeorge Bundy was to say. “We were hysterical about Castro,” Robert McNamara says. Setting up a special CIA operation, later code-named “Mongoose,” Bobby kept pushing the CIA. Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1961, he repeatedly telephoned CIA Director of Operations Richard Bissell at home to tell him to “get off his ass” on Cuba. Following Bissell’s replacement by Richard Helms, Kennedy made it clear to Helms, as he records, that Castro was “the top priority of the United States Government—all else is secondary—no time, effort, money or manpower is to be spared.” That directive was followed, with the CIA ceaselessly trying to set up raids by Cuban exiles, blow up bridges and factories. There were efforts of another type as well. The CIA would carry out eight separate assassination attempts on Castro’s life, continuing into 1965. Did Robert Kennedy authorize them, or know about them? “The Kennedys made clear their desire to ‘get rid’ of Castro,” Evan Thomas wrote. But did they authorize his assassination? “The truth is unknowable,” Thomas concludes.

  Despite his coolheadedness and caution during the Cuban Missile Crisis—and his delicate and successful negotiations beginning a month later to free the Bay of Pigs prisoners—Robert Kennedy’s attitude toward Castro didn’t change; in April, 1963, for example, he was proposing sending a five-hundred-man raiding party into Cuba, a proposal which somehow, luckily, faded away. Over and over during that year he would telephone Helms. “My God, these Kennedys keep the pressure on about Castro,” he recalls.

  He kept the pressure on also in his vendetta against Jimmy Hoffa. When Bobby had left the Senate Rackets Committee in 1959 to run his broth
er’s presidential campaign, he had failed, “despite 1,500 witnesses and 20,000 pages of testimony,” to win a conviction against the Teamsters’ boss. But, he told his aides, “the game isn’t over.” No sooner had he assumed command of the Justice Department than he set up an elite “Get Hoffa” squad that reported directly to him. Were Justice’s resources not adequate? The Internal Revenue Service and the FBI—with “walkie-talkies, electronic recording devices, cameras, informers, pressure, harassment, every conceivable tactic”—were deployed “to pin a criminal charge on Hoffa,” as one of Kennedy’s biographers puts it. At one time, fourteen grand juries had been impaneled in different cities. Not scrupling to employ the press as a weapon as well, while Hoffa was under indictment, he orchestrated a Life article that painted the Teamsters’ boss in unflattering terms. “It would be hard to find a man of the law who would consider it ethical for the Attorney General of the United States to work behind the scenes to discredit a citizen under federal indictment,” wrote Nick Thimmesch, another of Bobby’s biographers. So relentlessly did he pursue the labor leader “that he accomplished the truly stupendous feat of making people feel sorry for Hoffa”; the American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief on his behalf. It would eventually take seven years, but in 1964, Jimmy Hoffa would indeed be convicted. “Bobby hates like me,” Joe Kennedy said. “When I hate some sonofabitch, I hate him until I die.”

  And Bobby Kennedy hated Lyndon Johnson. During oral history interviews he gave to the journalist John Bartlow Martin, on May 14, 1964, he began discussing his brother’s feelings about Johnson—“I’m affected considerably by, I suppose, what … the President thought of him, by, for example, the President’s resentment that he wouldn’t speak at meetings”—and then moved beyond his brother’s feelings to his own, to his feelings about Johnson’s constant lying, for example, and about his treatment of subordinates. “They’re all scared, of course, of Lyndon,” he said. “He yells at his staff. He treats them just terribly. Very mean. He’s a very mean, mean figure.” And then, comparing him with his brother, Robert Kennedy made a more general statement. “Our President was a gentleman and a human being,” he said. “This man is not.… He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.” Robert Kennedy told Bobby Baker, “You’re gonna get yours when the time comes!”—and now he seemed to feel the time had come.

  The reins on the Vice President were tightened by his hand. Johnson’s requests for planes—not for the foreign trips he took on presidential orders but for domestic trips—would be ignored until the last minute, and then the planes he was assigned were generally the small Military Air Transport Service planes with the wording he hated on their sides; it became more and more difficult for him to travel on a plane he considered appropriate for a Vice President. It was made clear now that not only his speeches but his brief introductory remarks—his every public utterance—had to be approved, and not only by the White House but by the attorney general. Working with the Justice Department on Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity matters was necessary almost every day, and Johnson’s secretaries and assistants, telephoning Bobby’s office, felt the contempt. “They went out of their way there to make you know that they were in and you were not,” Gonella says. “We just dreaded having to call over there.” So integral a part of the Hickory Hill gang’s culture was the contempt that at least once it was expressed, without thinking, in Johnson’s presence. Two middle-level Administration officials, Ron Linton and John J. Riley, were chatting at a cocktail party when Linton realized that someone was standing next to them, wanting to be part of the conversation. The listener was Lyndon Johnson. They didn’t stop talking. After a while, Johnson walked away. And when Linton said, “John, I think we just insulted the Vice President of the United States,” Riley blurted out, “Fuck him”—loud enough for Johnson to hear. Whirling around, he stared at the two men for a moment. But what was there to say? Turning again, he walked away.

  IN ATTEMPTING TO UNDERSTAND Robert Kennedy’s treatment of Lyndon Johnson, is there a clue in his treatment of Chester Bowles while his brother was watching, not interrupting because Bobby “was communicating exactly what his brother had wanted”? Was Bobby, with Lyndon Johnson, also serving as a weapon for his brother? Did the President want Johnson kept under tighter rein than ever—and was Bobby his instrument for doing this?

  Whether or not that was one of the reasons, other—political—considerations may have militated such treatment. Robert Kennedy, after all, had been part of the Senate world on days—and there had been many days—when that world marveled at the genius and power of Lyndon Johnson, when word spread through the Senate corridors (and down to the basement office of the Senate Rackets Committee) of how, up on the Chamber floor, the mighty Leader had just done it again: of how, with a vote seemingly sure to go against him, he had somehow once again turned defeat into triumph. Bobby had left the Senate Office Building very late on so many nights, to turn and see the lights still burning in the Leader’s office; he had said on one such night, “No one can outlast Lyndon.”

  Because of the contempt with which Robert Kennedy always treated, and generally spoke of, Lyndon Johnson, many historians have felt that contempt was his basic attitude toward him; the title of the most detailed book on their relationship is, in fact, Mutual Contempt. But when Robert Kennedy was talking to men close to him, very different feelings emerged. “I can’t stand the bastard,” he once said to Richard Goodwin, “but he’s the most formidable human being I’ve ever met.” “He just eats up strong men,” he said on another occasion. “The fact is that he’s able to eat people up, even people who are considered rather strong figures.” “Contempt” was not at all an accurate summation of his feelings about Lyndon Johnson, and powerless though Johnson might be at the moment, as Vice President he was still a threat. The more perceptive members of the staffs of both men understood this. Says Harry McPherson, who had worked for Johnson before the vice presidency, “If your brother is President, and you’ve got this powerhouse accustomed to being in command as Vice President, it would make you as suspicious as anything.” Kennedy’s aide William vanden Heuvel says that Robert Kennedy saw Johnson as “a manipulative force” who could, if he ever got off his leash, be very difficult to rein in again. So the leash had to be kept tight.

  But there was also the aspect that lay beyond the political, and beyond analysis, too, the aspect that led George Reedy to ask, “Did you ever see two dogs come into a room … ?” There was Bobby’s hatred for liars, and his feeling that Lyndon Johnson “lies all the time … lies even when he doesn’t have to lie.” There was his hatred for yes-men—and for those who wanted to be surrounded by yes-men—and Johnson’s insistence on being surrounded by such men, an insistence which, Bobby was to say, “makes it very difficult, unless you want to kiss his behind all the time.” He detested the politician’s false bonhomie, and Johnson embodied that bonhomie. “He [Bobby] recoiled at being touched,” and of course Lyndon Johnson was always touching and hugging. And talking. “It was southwestern exaggeration against Yankee understatement,” Arthur Schlesinger has written. “Robert Kennedy, in the New England manner, liked people to keep their physical distance. Johnson … was all over everybody.” So many of Bobby Kennedy’s pet hates were embodied in Lyndon Johnson.

  “No affection contaminated the relationship between the Vice President and the Attorney General,” Schlesinger writes. “It was a pure case of mutual dislike.” Lyndon Johnson, he writes, “repelled Robert Kennedy.” The two men were, as he portrays them—in the portrayal that has become the model for other historians—opposites, and certainly in many ways, in all the obvious ways, perhaps, they were.

  YET, IN SOME WAYS, “opposite” is not at all an apt adjective to apply to Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, as is shown by their approach to two of the most fundamental elements of politics.

  One was counting votes.

  “Vote-counting”—predicting the count for or against an issue or a candidate in ad
vance of the actual ballot—is, as I have written, “one of the most vital of the political arts, but it is an art that few can master,” subject as it is to the distortions of sentiment or romantic preconceptions. A person convinced of the arguments on one side of a controversial issue feels that arguments so convincing to him must be equally convincing to others, a belief which leads to wishful thinking and to overoptimism in vote predictions. Even as a congressional aide—not even a congressman, yet—Johnson had been known among young Washington insiders as “the greatest vote-counter.”3 In the Senate, leading a party that often had only a one-vote majority, a party with fiercely opposed liberal and conservative blocs so that the Democratic coalition was shifting constantly beneath his feet and he almost always had to cobble Republican votes together with it, he had almost never, during his six years as Majority Leader, lost a vote on a major bill. During the days leading up to the vote, he kept his count on the long, narrow Senate tally sheets, and his thumb, moving down the sheet from name to name, moved very slowly as he reflected, not moving on to the next name until he was certain about this one. To a staff member who, after talking to a senator, said he “thought” he knew which way the senator was going to vote, he would snarl, “What the fuck good is thinking to me? Thinking isn’t good enough. I need to know!”