The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  In 1960, the man counting votes against Lyndon Johnson was Robert Kennedy, and Kennedy’s men had learned he didn’t want optimism or wishful thinking. “I don’t want generalities or guesses,” he told them when he gathered them together before the convention. “There’s no point in our fooling ourselves. I want the cold facts. I want to hear only the votes we are guaranteed to get on the first ballot.” He wanted to know, to know beyond doubt; he insisted on knowing: “He insisted practically on the name, address, and telephone number of every half vote,” someone who watched him recalls. And he knew. He couldn’t be wrong: “If we don’t win tonight, we’re dead.” Ben Bradlee was to remember “Bobby, literally sick with fatigue, going over the … first ballot with me at two o’clock in the morning, one last time, delegate by delegate.” Getting the necessary majority was going to be so close. He couldn’t be wrong—and he wasn’t. He had told Ted that the outcome was going to come down to those last five votes from Wyoming, and that was just how it turned out.

  Johnson, who, after his long indecision, was battling in the last days before the 1960 convention for every delegate vote as the count swayed back and forth—Delaware hinging on a single vote, North Dakota on half a vote—was keeping his own tally. A master of an art recognizes another master when he encounters one, and Johnson knew there was a master battling—and counting votes—against him.

  The other element, as important as counting votes, was holding them. When he was Majority Leader, nobody had been better at holding votes than Lyndon Johnson: keeping the vote of a senator who, after he had pledged him his vote, received a better offer—or a more effective threat—from the other side. “Destroy” was a verb he used to men who, having pledged him their support, were thinking about changing their minds: “I’ll destroy you.” “Ruin” was a verb he used. “I’m going to give you a three-minute lesson in integrity,” he told one politician. “And then I’m going to ruin you.” And, as he tried to take votes away from the Kennedys in 1960, there had been someone on the other side holding them fast, someone who, having slipped on “the halter and the bridle,” would not allow them to be slipped off. There were, moreover, other qualities to which the word “opposite” did not apply. Was Lyndon Johnson a smearer of opponents, a destroyer of reputations, without scruple? Watching Franklin Roosevelt Jr. destroy Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia with the “draft dodger” fabrication, Johnson knew who had orchestrated the tactic. “That’s Bobby,” he had told Tommy Corcoran—and he had been right. In some ways, Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were very different—and in some ways they weren’t.

  Lyndon Johnson recognized the caliber of the man he was dealing with. He had recognized it even before the campaign. It had been in 1957, when he was the Majority Leader and Robert Kennedy had been a thirty-two-year-old Senate staffer, that he had said that an investigation of America’s Sputnik disaster might succeed “if it had had someone like young Kennedy handling it.” All during his life, words would, as if despite himself, burst out of him that revealed that he recognized Bobby’s abilities. Back on his ranch in retirement, watching on television the bumbling attempts of Edward Kennedy and a retinue of Kennedy advisers to explain away the Chappaquiddick drowning, he would say, “Never would have happened if Bobby was there.” And, recognizing that caliber, he was, as Richard Goodwin says, “always afraid of Bobby. It was more than hatred. It was fear.”

  And hatred and fear, no matter how deep they went, were not Lyndon Johnson’s only feelings about Bobby Kennedy, for the President’s brother had come to embody to him something deeper than the political.

  Hickory Hill, that most “in” of all Camelot’s social “in” places, was the catalyst for these emotions. He and Lady Bird were almost never invited, of course, and in a town where everyone was talking about the gossip columns’ description of the previous evening’s dinner party, he would invariably be asked if he had been there, and would have to say no. On those occasions when an invitation to the Vice President and his wife was unavoidable, they were seated at Ethel’s “losers’ table.” While at the White House, protocol and the President’s expressed desire that the Vice President be treated with respect maintained a patina of courtesy—he and Lady Bird may have come down the staircase behind the President and the visiting head of state, but at least they came down the staircase, and then stood in the receiving line with them—at Hickory Hill, there was no patina at all. Hugh Sidey was to call the mockery of the Vice President at Ethel’s parties “just awful … inexcusable, really.” At one party, to “overwhelming merriment,” Bobby was presented with a voodoo effigy of Lyndon Johnson for him to stick pins into.

  Hickory Hill hurt especially deeply because of the way it fit into the pattern of his life. It wasn’t the first place from which Lyndon Johnson had been excluded—the Hickory Hill regulars not the first in-group that had rejected him. His youth had, after his father’s failure, been years of rejection. The Johnson City families that didn’t have to work with their hands—the owners of the stores in the little town who were, more or less, its little social hierarchy, the merchants who wrote “Please!” on the Johnsons’ bills, and made clear their feelings that the crucial fact about Lyndon was that he was “a Johnson,” that he was “too much like Sam”—had cut him off from more than credit. His high school girlfriend was his classmate Kitty Clyde Ross, daughter of E. P. Ross, “the richest man in town,” until her parents ordered her to stop dating him, and encouraged a rival suitor by lending him their car so the young couple could drive around Johnson City in the evenings. “I saw how it made Lyndon feel when that big car drove by with Kitty Clyde in it with another man,” says his cousin Ava. “And I cried for him.” At college, there had been an in-group, a social club called the “Black Stars,” which included the athletes and the other big men on campus, and the prettiest girls, the group that “everyone wanted to be part of.” Lyndon tried very hard to become part of it, pressing one Black Star or another to put his name up for membership in meeting after meeting, and every time he was voted down. “He wanted so badly to belong to the ‘in’ crowd,” says a classmate, Ella So Relle. “To be accepted by them. But they wouldn’t let him in. He was just not accepted.”

  As a youth, Lyndon Johnson had been very aware—as how could he not be?—of exactly where his family stood. “We had dropped to the bottom of the heap.” There had been moments during that youth that revealed an insecurity so deep that they raised the question of whether anything could ever convince him that he had respect; of whether anything could make him, deep inside himself, feel secure. Hickory Hill, and its master, seemed to bring back those insecurities, to arouse in him emotions that went deeper than politics—to the very depths of his being.

  Washington social pages and gossip columns were filled with details of life at Hickory Hill, the dinner parties at tables set up around the swimming pool, the brunches filled with pranks and charades, the mixture of gaiety and serious discussion. He would pore over the names of the people who had been in attendance, parsing them for a common denominator that might be an excuse why they had been included and he hadn’t, each story—each name of a couple that had been invited while he and Lady Bird hadn’t—a little dart of pain. At one, Ethel Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger and other guests fell or jumped or were pushed into the pool, and the stories about that party leapt into prominence across the country, and of course he was asked over and over if he had been there, and he had to invent some excuse to explain why he hadn’t been.

  And then there was “Hickory Hill U.,” the seminars that one participant said summed up “the humane and questing spirit of the New Frontier,” while another thought they were “all sorts of fun.” Led by renowned intellectuals like Isaiah Berlin and Schlesinger, they included, in addition to diplomats and Cabinet members, Harvard professors and deans like Mac Bundy and graduates of the university’s colleges and graduate schools such as Dillon and McNamara—and of course sometimes the President. The “Harvards,” Johnson called this group
when he was talking with his own aides. He understood the quality of his education. It wasn’t just that he hadn’t gone to Harvard, he hadn’t even gone to the University of Texas, the school, in Austin on the edge of the Hill Country, where the few young men and women from the Hill Country’s farms and ranches who had the marks—and the tuition—went to college. He had gone to Southwest Texas State Teachers College, and he knew what that was: “the poor boys’ school,” he called it. “Most of the kids were there because they couldn’t afford to go anywhere else,” one of Johnson’s classmates was to say. So low were its standards—its fifty-six faculty members included exactly one holder of a doctorate—that the year Johnson arrived there was the year the college graduated its first fully accredited class. Another classmate, who became a professor at Bryn Mawr, says that when he first came to Bryn Mawr, “I felt so inadequate—that I had so much to catch up.… I could not go to a dinner party, and participate intelligently in the conversation. And this is a terrible feeling. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t experienced this feeling can understand how horrible it is. At San Marcos I got cheated out of an education.”

  Johnson knew they were laughing at him at Hickory Hill. Did something in his life, deep within him, something created by the years of being laughed at in his youth, feel the laughter was justified? “They’re trying to make a hick out of me,” Johnson said. Did he himself feel like a hick—feel that there was a chasm dividing him from the Kennedys, and that the ground on their side of the chasm was higher ground, ground to which, because of the circumstances of his youth, he could never climb? When his assistants are asked to describe his feelings toward the Harvards, they respond with words that have little to do with politics, words like “hurt” and “rage” and “jealousy,” and the last of the three words is one that is heard often. He was caught in a “storm of jealousy about the ‘Kennedy class,’ ” a storm so violent that at times it “threatened to drown him,” Joseph Califano says. And his feelings centered, with a growing concentration that seemed to leave none for other targets, on the slight figure of Bobby Kennedy. “As LBJ saw it, there was a poor kid working around the clock at … San Marcos and there was a rich kid partying through the ivy halls of Harvard with plenty of time to acquire the social graces” he himself lacked, Califano says. He was, Califano says, “possessed by an internal class struggle …, and tortured by an envy he could not exorcise.” Princeton professor Eric Goldman, who would come to work for Lyndon Johnson later in his presidency, learned that “the response that Robert Kennedy evoked in Lyndon Johnson was hugely disproportionate to the political realities. Something beyond politics was at stake.” The disproportion was already visible as 1962 turned into 1963, and Richard Goodwin felt he understood. “Bobby symbolized everything Johnson hated,” he was to say. “He became the symbol of all the things Johnson wasn’t … with these characteristics of wealth and power and ease and Eastern elegance; with Johnson always looking at himself as the guy they thought was illiterate, rude, crude. They laughed at him behind his back. I think he felt all that.” And the intensity of his feelings about Bobby made them something that cause Johnson’s associates, in describing them, to use words that have nothing to do with politics. “Whatever realistic basis there was for dislike or fear, it cannot explain the almost obsessive intensity of Johnson’s feelings towards Robert Kennedy,” Goldman says. His feelings weren’t “totally rational,” Goodwin says. “He just couldn’t be rational where Bobby Kennedy was concerned,” says Bobby Baker.

  AND IN 1963, Bobby Kennedy was becoming not only a symbol or an obsession to Lyndon Johnson, but, in a very concrete way, a threat—to his gaining the prize he had always pursued. He had accepted the vice presidency, and was enduring all the humiliations that went with it, was bearing an all but unbearable burden, because he had felt that doing so was his best chance, quite possibly his only chance, of obtaining the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. But by 1963 Washington was becoming aware that the President’s brother had set his sights on the same prize.

  In the March issue of Esquire, Gore Vidal predicted that Johnson wouldn’t be the nominee in ’68. “Time is no friend to Johnson’s candidacy,” he wrote. “The public … has already forgotten the dynamic Lyndon Johnson who was once master of the Senate. Eight years of vice presidential grayness will have completed his obscurity; nor is there any way for Johnson to gain political attention.… How does the ceremonial presiding officer of the Senate make a new record for himself?”

  Bobby’s situation was the opposite, Vidal wrote. “During the next few years, he will be continually in the headlines and” by 1968 “even his numerous enemies will have a hard time trying to pretend he is not ‘experienced.’ ” He will “have the support of the Kennedy political machine, easily the most effective in the history of the country.… One cannot imagine any Democrat seriously opposing Bobby at the ’68 convention.”

  Vidal was no friend of Bobby’s; his views, however, were echoed by the Washington press corps. LBJ MAY FACE BOBBY IN 1968, said the headline over a Roscoe Drummond prediction in the Herald Tribune. It was true, the columnist said, that Bobby would thus be trying to succeed his brother, but he wouldn’t wait for 1972. “No Kennedy likes to wait too long.” Another columnist, Gould Lincoln, wrote that “a great many have speculated that the [1968] Democratic presidential candidate would be Robert F. Kennedy.” On March 1, Bobby denied such predictions, saying he was “emphatically not” planning to run for the nomination in 1968. “This certainly ought to be a relief to Lyndon Johnson, if it’s true,” Republican Senator Barry Goldwater said. But any relief was short-lived. Addressing the same subject three days later, Bobby added an additional phrase: “I have no plans to run at this time,” he said.

  When these stories first began appearing, Johnson, seeing Bobby’s hand behind everything, thought they had been planted by the attorney general with friendly journalists; he seemed unable to believe that a man so young (Bobby had just turned thirty-seven), whose qualifications even for attorney general had been suspect only two years before, was now a leading candidate for the presidency. After checking in with the columnists, however, Reedy had to report that they were writing what they believed. “The Washington press corps is convinced that there is a well organized move afoot to groom Bobby Kennedy for the Presidency in 1968 and shove you aside,” he told Johnson. And Johnson felt he was helpless to fight the move. “My future is behind me,” he told Busby.

  *

  1 Although, in the week since Johnson had leaked his information, electronic launching systems had been installed at the missile sites. When, now, Kennedy revealed this, Russell said, “they’d be ready to fire now? … My God.”

  2 Earlier that evening, Johnson had appeared to be endorsing the trade, but that had been before he understood the terms Khrushchev was proposing.

  3 See Master of the Senate, p. 389.

  9

  Gestures and Tactics

  ON FEBRUARY 24, 1963, Johnson received a letter from Mrs. Fannie Fullerwood, of St. Augustine, Florida, an African-American cleaning woman who was president of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Because it was George Smathers who had asked him to do so, he had agreed to give two speeches in St. Augustine on March 11, one at a banquet that would kick off a year-long celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of St. Augustine’s founding, the other at one of the area’s most important industries, the Aircraft Division of the Fairchild Stratos Corporation. Pointing out that there had been recent instances of police brutality toward blacks in a city that was a bastion of racial segregation, Mrs. Fullerwood told him that no blacks would be allowed to attend the banquet, nor was there one on the planning committee for the anniversary. “It is impossible for us to see how you can” come “under such conditions,” she wrote. Johnson’s response was immediate—and firm. “I cannot go unless we get this worked out,” he told Smathers, and Smathers assigned his administrative assistant, Scott Peek, to work
it out. Peek tried to assure Johnson that the letter was “nothing to get excited about,” that it represented the views of only one branch of the Florida NAACP, a “very small” branch at that, and said that “if the State NAACP knew anything about this they would raise hell with the local chapter.” Peek added that any interference by Johnson would embarrass Florida Senators Smathers and Holland, who would also be attending the banquet, because they would be caught in the middle of a racial dispute; moreover, the chairman of the four-hundredth-anniversary celebration—and of the banquet—was St. Augustine banker Herbert E. Wolfe, one of Florida’s leading political fund-raisers, and, in fact, treasurer of Smathers’ next senatorial campaign. When Johnson told George Reedy to look into the situation, however, Reedy learned that the local chapter was planning to picket the banquet if blacks were not allowed to attend, and to picket Fairchild as well. A telephone call to Fairchild elicited the information that of the one thousand employees at the plant, exactly sixty-two were black, none of them executives. A Fairchild official explained the situation by telling him that “St. Augustine does not have many colored people and it is difficult to get the few that are there out of grade school.” (The “best solution” to the lack of black executives, the official said, would be “some colored office workers … and he is going to redouble his efforts to find some.”) But, Reedy added in his report to Johnson, Peek had also said that “if necessary, the local people can probably get a Negro table set up at the banquet,” and “if a Negro table could be set up … you could well emerge as a hero.”

  A hero, Johnson knew, was not a role the Kennedys had in mind for him; their attitude toward his involvement in civil rights matters had been demonstrated just five months before when they had completely cut him out of any deliberations on the James Meredith crisis. Not only would any racial dispute be a thicket of complications, he would be stepping into it without any assurance of support from the Administration. Yet almost immediately Johnson began to get excited as he had not been for months. Busby and Reedy understood the reason: they had witnessed themselves, or had heard about from other Johnson aides, the immediacy and passion with which Johnson had reacted in the past when confronted by examples of racial injustice; how, with barely a moment’s pause, in almost the very instant he was told that a Mexican-American war hero had been denied burial in a whites-only cemetery in South Texas, he had blurted out, “By God, we’ll bury him in Arlington!,” how this reaction was “immediate … instinctive.… It had to do with outrage”; how, when Johnson described his longtime African-American cook driving back and forth to Texas across the South without being able to find a gas station or motel that would allow her to go to the bathroom so that she had to “squat in the road to pee,” his words would be underlined by an indignation “that was straight from real feelings,” straight from anger, “sometimes just about to tears.” Johnson told Reedy to get in touch with the St. Augustine NAACP and to see what could be worked out. That proved logistically difficult—Mrs. Fullerwood was constantly having to break off phone calls to get to her housecleaning jobs—but otherwise easier than Reedy expected, because the St. Augustine civic leaders planning the celebration were anxious not to have it marred by a picket line. Peek, through whom Reedy dealt with these leaders, found them amenable to the “Negro table,” and Reedy then persuaded the NAACP leaders to agree not to picket if two conditions were met: first, that there actually be such a table and, second, that the St. Augustine City Commission agree to meet with the NAACP after the banquet to discuss not only the police brutality issue but the desegregation of city-owned facilities. The civic leaders agreed to that: a time for the commission meeting—9:30 a.m. the very day following the banquet—was set, and Wolfe persuaded the hotel to allow the Negro table. But that wasn’t enough for Johnson; he knew about “Negro tables” at southern dinners, he told Reedy; he didn’t want it placed in the rear of the hall or off to one side. And he didn’t want just one table, but at least two. It wasn’t just the banquet that he wanted desegregated, moreover; he didn’t want the races to be separated at his speech at Fairchild Stratos, or at any other event at which he spoke. Reedy insisted on all this, and by March 1, Peek was able to assure Johnson that invitations to all events were being extended to NAACP leaders and that “They will not be stuck off in a faraway corner” at the banquet. “No event in which I will participate in St. Augustine will be segregated,” Johnson wrote Mrs. Fullerwood, dispatching Reedy to Florida to make sure that would be true.