The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Regardless of the mantra’s validity, however (and like so many other issues it must remain to be evaluated in the last volume of this work, for it is during the course of the years to be covered in that volume that the extent of its validity will become clear), the passion that lay beneath it—Robert Kennedy’s passion for social justice—was genuine. With every month that passed after the assassination, his indignation at injustice seemed to rise. Even a newsman like Ben Bradlee, whose relations with him had been cool, saw the genuineness, realizing that the scene in the Kansas City home for the aged had been an accurate measure of something significant in Robert Kennedy’s character, hidden and largely unrecognized though it had been. In an article he wrote after Robert’s assassination in 1968, Bradlee said that during the years between the assassinations, “I had been slowly coming to sense this man’s passion, his building rage at the persistent inequalities that plagued America, his readiness to embrace the homeless and enlist in their cause.” During those years, Bradlee would write, “Bobby Kennedy’s [almost] romantic determination to make a difference had deeply impressed me. There was no need to compare him with JFK, they were so different, except for that last name and that father. JFK was more intellectual, urbane, sophisticated, witty. RFK was more passionate, more daring, more radical.”

  ROBERT KENNEDY’S more pragmatic qualities, the ones that had earned him the adjective he so resented, would never disappear. “Anybody who writes that he looks like a choirboy should burn in hell,” says a congressman who opposed one of his initiatives in 1967. His evolution would be a gradual one, and it was, at the time of his death at the age of forty-two, not so complete that the word “ruthless” would no longer apply. More than one of his intimates feel constrained to point out that the portrait was, thanks to another bullet, never finished, that, as one of them says, “Bobby Kennedy was always a work in progress.” Unfinished though the portrait may have been left, however, its dominant tone had changed. Having said he was “tired of chasing people,” Bobby Kennedy had stopped chasing them. Was he tired of something else as well? In addition to “ruthless,” “hate” was a word often applied to him in the past. “Bobby hates like me.” “When Bobby hates you, you stay hated.” But had the hatred for Jimmy Hoffa stayed? Perhaps not. Some people who knew Robert Kennedy well speculate that perhaps the death of his brother, combined with his father’s helplessness, had altered that aspect of his character also. “Before that, perhaps the father and [the] brother had been the controlling forces in his life,” vanden Heuvel says. “Before that, well, you know, the father had said, ‘Bobby’s like me’—and up to that point, he probably was.” After his long talk with him in February, Murray Kempton wrote that “Robert Kennedy knew how to hate; he hated on his father’s behalf; he grew up to hate on his brother’s; but these last weeks that he has endured have now left behind a man we recognize as being unskilled at hating on his own.” Examining Robert Kennedy’s life following the gunshot in Dallas, it is possible to feel that, with one exception, that might be true.

  With the exception of Lyndon Johnson.

  There had been no change in Robert Kennedy’s feelings toward him.

  In conversation with other people, he never called him “the President.” Whenever, for the rest of his life, all four and a half years of it, he used the phrase “the President,” he was referring to John F. Kennedy. He called the new President “Johnson” or “Lyndon Johnson” or “the new fellow” or “this man.” He couldn’t bear to think of him sitting in his brother’s place, a satyr to Hyperion. Some of the remarks he made about him showed a fundamental misunderstanding of his background. “What does he know about people who’ve got no jobs?” he asked Goodwin not long after the assassination. “Or are uneducated. He’s got no feeling for people who are hungry. It’s up to us.” Johnson’s success fed his bitterness. “All those things he’s doing, poverty, civil rights, they’re things we had just begun,” he was to say to Goodwin some years later. “We just didn’t have the time.”

  If, for reasons of politics, he covered up his feelings in public, he could not always contain them, even when he knew they were being recorded for history (or perhaps because they were being recorded for history). During the spring of 1964, he sat for a series of oral interviews being conducted for the John F. Kennedy Library by sympathetic friends like Arthur Schlesinger and John Bartlow Martin, and in these interviews his feelings poured out.

  He tried to justify them. “There were three or four matters that arose during the period of November 22 to November 27 or so which made me bitter—unhappy at least—with Lyndon Johnson. Events involving the treatment of Jackie on the plane trip back and all that kind of business—when he lied again and where he treated Jackie, the whole business, very badly.”

  His brother had seen through Johnson, he said. His brother had “said to Jackie, talking about him, that Lyndon Johnson was incapable of telling the truth.” His brother had “often said how lucky he was to have Lyndon Johnson as Vice President, because otherwise, Lyndon Johnson would be Majority Leader … and Lyndon Johnson would screw him all the time.… Lyndon Johnson never would have been loyal to him. So he was very pleased. He was more pleased about having Lyndon Johnson Vice President because he was out of the Senate than he was having him as Vice President.”

  And his brother’s assessment of his Vice President had been correct. “He was against our policy on Cuba in October of ’62—although I never knew quite what he was for; he was just against it.… He was shaking his head, mad.”

  The interviews reveal Robert Kennedy’s resentment “that an awful lot of things were going on that President Kennedy did that Johnson was getting the credit for—and [that Johnson] wasn’t saying enough that President Kennedy was responsible for”; his resentment that columnists like Reston were comparing the two men and not always favorably to President Kennedy; “I just don’t think that they understand it … in their buildup of Lyndon Johnson, comparing him to the President.”

  He despised the way Johnson treated subordinates—“They’re all scared, of course, of Lyndon.… He yells at his staff. He treats them just terribly. Very mean. He’s a very mean, mean figure”—and resented the success of those methods, his ability “to eat people up, even people who are considered rather strong figures.… Mac Bundy or Bob McNamara: There’s nothing left of them.” He despised his methods: the way, for example, he made men beg. “Ralph Dungan was trying to work out appointments.… And Johnson said he wanted to make sure that everybody who was at all interested called him personally and ask him for the person to be appointed so that they would know they’d be personally indebted to him as President.” But Robert Kennedy’s feelings about Lyndon Johnson went beyond such analysis. It was in one of these interviews that he said, “Our President was a gentleman and a human being.… This man is not.… He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.”

  As there had been no change in Lyndon Johnson’s feelings toward Robert Kennedy.

  President though he was, fear—fear as well as hatred—was still a component in those feelings. The fear would always be there. Years later, in a conversation during his retirement, he would describe Robert Kennedy’s 1968 announcement that he was running for President as “the thing I feared from the first day of my presidency. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets.”

  Even the acclaim that had greeted his own performance after the assassination was soured for him by the “snot-nosed little runt,” Johnson said in that conversation. “Every day as soon as I opened the papers or turned on the television, there was something about Bobby Kennedy.… Somehow or other it just didn’t seem fair. I’d given three years of loyal service to Jack Kennedy. During all that time I’d willingly stayed in the background; I knew that it was his presidency, not mine.… And then Kennedy was killed and … I became the President. But none of this seeme
d to register with Bobby Kennedy, who acted like he was the custodian of the Kennedy dream, some kind of rightful heir to the throne. It just didn’t seem fair … ” He railed about the “game of royal family” that was being played. “If Bobby Kennedy’s name came up even by accident,” Ken O’Donnell says, “he’d launch into a tirade about what a son of a bitch Bobby Kennedy was. Ninety-nine percent of the things were untrue. And it’d get back to Bobby Kennedy, and Bobby’d say something about Lyndon Johnson.… These two men … built up this picture of each other which was just incredible.”

  For a time, these feelings—on both sides—not only were kept out of public view, but were layered over when the two men were dealing with each other. Knowing how much he needed “continuity,” Johnson did what he could to maintain a façade of cordiality with the living personification of the Kennedy legend, the man who had not only been the martyred President’s most trusted counselor but who reminded people of him in the similarity of their accents and gestures. But Lyndon Johnson had the power now. Fortune’s reversal could not have been more complete. Two men hated each other to the depths of their beings. For a time—three years—one had had power over the other, and had used it, used it ruthlessly, used it beyond the bounds of policy, used it to insult and humiliate the other. And then, in an instant, in a gunshot, the world of the two men was turned upside down. Suddenly the other man had the power. “You’re gonna get yours when the time comes,” Bobby Kennedy had vowed—and then the time had come: three years of it. Now that time was over. The other man’s time—the time for vengeance—had not quite arrived. Lyndon Johnson couldn’t afford to alienate the Kennedy faction yet; his strategy must still be one of restraint. Conscious though Johnson was of that consideration, however, his feelings about Bobby Kennedy were too strong always to be concealed. He was, furthermore, becoming more secure in the presidency, more euphoric from the adulation he was receiving, less guarded. Passion started to break through strategy’s bounds. By mid-December, shortly before he left for the ranch, the rein he had kept on himself in his dealings with Bobby was starting to slip.

  He fired a test shot, announcing that he had appointed Thomas C. Mann assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, a position from which President Kennedy had removed him because of a belief among Kennedy’s Latin-American team that Mann was, in Goodwin’s words, “a colonialist by mentality who believes that the ‘natives’—the Latin Americans—need to be shown who is boss” and who had “a basic lack of belief in [Kennedy’s] Alliance for Progress.” Now, Mann would be in effective charge of the Alliance, and Goodwin, who wrote in his diary that the appointment had occasioned “real gloom among the” Kennedy crowd, went to see Bobby in his office at Justice along with Arthur Schlesinger.

  It was at this meeting that Kennedy said that although “Our power will last for just eleven months,” during these months—until Election Day, 1964—the power of the Kennedy faction would still be substantial. But that prediction did not survive its first test. The shot he fired back—a letter to Johnson protesting Mann’s appointment—went all but unheard. The public wasn’t interested in Latin America. While the appointment drew some criticism in the editorial columns of liberal newspapers, it was buried in the wave of adulation for Johnson’s successes.

  “Johnson has won the first round,” Schlesinger wrote Bobby. “He has shown his power to move in a field of special concern to the Kennedys without consulting the Kennedys.… We have underestimated the power of the Presidency. The President has nearly all the cards in this contest.… We are weaker—a good deal weaker—than we had supposed.”

  HAVING WON THE FIRST ROUND, Johnson, after his return from Texas in January, was ready for the second.

  Trying to rouse Bobby from his apathy, Averell Harriman and McGeorge Bundy suggested that he be sent to Southeast Asia as a presidential envoy to informally mediate a territorial dispute between Indonesia’s President Achmed Sukarno and the fledgling Federation of Malaysia. Unenamored of the idea, which, he complained to Bundy, had been proposed by “staff people who weren’t thinking about the Johnson interest,” Johnson was delaying a decision when the proposal was leaked to the Washington Post. Its editorial praising the idea as an indication of the President’s laudable concern for the attorney general left Johnson, still trying to create the illusion of such concern, little choice but to approve. Speaking to Richard Russell, with whom maintenance of the illusion was unnecessary, the President said that at least the mission, seemingly foredoomed to failure, might make Bobby look bad. “I’m going to send Bobby Kennedy to Indonesia and just let him [Sukarno] put it right in his lap … let him go out there and have [a] row … with Sukarno.”

  The trip turned out to be the opposite of failure, although not for any reason Johnson or Kennedy had foreseen. Kennedy’s meeting with Sukarno took place in Tokyo. On a previous visit to that city, in 1962, Bobby, speaking at Waseda University, had been heckled vociferously by both left-wing and right-wing students. Informed now by the American embassy that there was “insistent urging” from students that he speak again, he reluctantly agreed to do so. When he arrived, on a rainy day, the auditorium was jammed with students, and ten thousand more were huddled under umbrellas outside to hear him over loudspeakers. And when the professor introducing him said the name “Kennedy” for the first time, from inside and outside the auditorium there was a cheer that seemed to go on and on.

  He spoke without a text, but since he was speaking about his brother, he didn’t need one. “Tears were in his eyes, and in the eyes of many of the Japanese as he spoke about all the President had hoped to accomplish,” Guthman was to recall, about how “he was not only President of one nation; he was President of young people around the world.”

  “If President Kennedy’s life and death and his relationship to all in our age group mean anything, it means we young people must work harder for a better life for all the people in the world,” Robert Kennedy said, as the cheering started again.

  “It was a moment to remember,” Guthman would recall. And, for “the first time,” he says, Robert Kennedy “began to realize the magnitude of admiration for President Kennedy that existed overseas.” A few days later, at the University of the Philippines, he spoke again. So large was the throng trying to get a glimpse of him that it broke through police lines. “I hadn’t wanted to go on that trip, but afterwards I was glad I had,” he was to tell Kempton. By the time he returned, he had decided—although he had not decided how he would do it—“to remain in public service and carry on his brother’s work,” Guthman says.

  As a presidential envoy, he had expected to meet with the President alone to give his report, but on his arrival at the White House, he found, as Guthman relates, that the meeting would be “less than private,” that Kennedy would be “required to brief him” in front of a roomful of congressmen and Cabinet officials. Afterwards, he and Johnson each spoke briefly before the television cameras—“We are of the unanimous opinion that he carried out his assignment constructively and with real achievement,” the President said—so that Johnson got a picture of him and a Kennedy shaking hands, although Kennedy didn’t look at him as he did so. Thereafter, the President never discussed the Sukarno-Malaysia controversy with him again, and the State Department showed little interest in his report. He told Theodore H. White that he felt he had been “used.” As far as his relationship with Johnson was concerned, Guthman says, the episode left Bobby with “a bitter taste”—as if the taste hadn’t been bitter enough already.

  IN FEBRUARY, the rein slipped further, far enough so that words slipped out of Lyndon Johnson which he had for weeks restrained himself from speaking.

  He said them to Robert Kennedy in the Oval Office. The two men were arguing over Paul Corbin. An eccentric, abrasive loose cannon of a political operative, Corbin had been useful to the Kennedys during the 1960 campaign as what Guthman euphemistically calls “a gutsy political infighter.” Thereafter, however, he had proved troublesome because
“He would do anything [President] Kennedy wanted (or that Corbin thought Kennedy wanted) whether or not Kennedy knew what he was doing,” and he had been shunted into a low-level position at the Democratic National Committee. Early in February, he appeared in New Hampshire, where the first Democratic presidential primary would be held on March 10, organizing a write-in vote for Bobby Kennedy. Whether Corbin was operating on his own or under instructions is unknown—Bobby’s closest aides, to a man, insist it was the former—but Johnson had no doubts. Summoning Kennedy to the Oval Office on February 11, he told him to have Corbin fired.

  Bobby refused. He said he hadn’t even known Corbin was in New Hampshire, and that he was a valuable political asset. Johnson said he knew Corbin was in New Hampshire, and that he wanted him out of that state, and off the DNC payroll. “If he’s such a good fellow, you pay him,” he said. “I know who he’s loyal to. Get him out of there.” Bobby continued to refuse. “I suggested that he find out himself whether” Corbin was actually in New Hampshire. “I’m not going to,” he told Johnson. He said that Johnson should remember that Corbin had worked for President Kennedy, and that the President had thought highly of his work.

  And Lyndon Johnson told Bobby Kennedy that his brother wasn’t President now.

  Bobby was to tell friends that Johnson, demanding Corbin’s firing, had said, “Do it. President Kennedy isn’t President anymore. I am.” Johnson was not to deny expressing that sentiment, recalling it, during a recorded telephone conversation later that day with DNC Treasurer Maguire, in only slightly different words. Johnson told Maguire that “he [Bobby] said … that I must understand that he [Corbin] had worked for the President [Kennedy]” and that “the President liked the work he did. I said, ‘I know it, Bobby, but I’m President, and I don’t like what he’s doing, and … I don’t want him.’ ” “It was a bitter, mean conversation,” Bobby Kennedy was to say. “It was the meanest tone that I’d heard.…”