The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  THE FEBRUARY 11 ARGUMENT between the two men had escalated at one point into a discussion of the Indonesian trip, although not of its substance. In Bobby’s recollection, Johnson said, “I did you a favor sending you to the Far East.” and Bobby had replied, “A favor! I don’t want you to do any more favors for me. Ever.” And again, Johnson’s own recollection, as he describes the conversation, in the call to Maguire, does not contradict the gist of that recollection: “I told him [Kennedy] that when the situation arose in Indonesia, that I was anxious to demonstrate my confidence in him, and I showed it by sending him out there.” The President added a bit of description designed to show Bobby in what Johnson seems to have felt was a less than manly light. “Tears got in his eyes, and he said he’s sorry that I sent him to Indonesia only on account of wanting to show confidence in him,” Johnson told Maguire. The adding of that note is of a piece with Johnson saying, “But I’m President, and I don’t want him,” and it bolsters Bobby’s analysis of the conversation’s tone, and of the word Charles Bartlett, reconstructing it later, used: “so … savage.” (And, of course, Johnson was correct. John Kennedy wasn’t President anymore; he was. Corbin was fired.)

  THE TONE WAS to get meaner. “I’m just like a fox,” Lyndon Johnson once boasted. “I can see the jugular in any man and go for it, but I always keep myself in rein. I keep myself on a leash, just like you would an animal.” The first phrase in that boast was accurate. Lyndon Johnson had always had a gift for finding a person’s “jugular,” his most vulnerable spot, the one in which he could most deeply be hurt. The rest of the boast, however, was not. If he kept himself in rein, on a leash, it was a leash that, all through his life, had been frequently unfastened. His ability to hurt had always been combined with a willingness—an eagerness, in fact—to put the ability to use; with a cruelty, a viciousness, a desire to hurt for the sake of hurting.1 Now his unerring eye had located, beneath the pale mask of Robert Kennedy’s grief, the place in which, because of his brother’s assassination, Robert Kennedy was most vulnerable. And the leash came off. Johnson told Pierre Salinger, in a remark he obviously intended to get back to Kennedy, that Jack Kennedy’s death might have been “divine retribution” for his “participation” in assassination plots against other heads of state. “Lyndon Johnson said to Pierre Salinger that he wasn’t sure but that the assassination of President Kennedy didn’t take place in retribution for his participation in the assassinations of Trujillo and President Diem,” Robert Kennedy said during an oral history interview in April, 1964. “Divine retribution. He said that. Then he went on and said that when he was growing up, somebody he knew—who had misbehaved—… ran into a tree, hit his head, and became cross-eyed. He said that was God’s retribution for people who were bad.… God put his mark on them. And that this [President Kennedy’s assassination] might very well be God’s retribution to President Kennedy for his participation in the assassination of these two people.”

  Although neither of the two assassinations to which Johnson referred had been authorized by the late President, Johnson didn’t believe that. Pointing to the picture of President Diem in The Elms the day after Kennedy’s funeral, Johnson had told Hubert Humphrey, “We had a hand in killing him. Now it’s happening here.” In his remark to Salinger, Johnson didn’t include the assassination attempts against a third head of state, Fidel Castro, although he was aware that they had occurred, and believed that the Kennedys had had a hand in them as well. A week after the assassination, he was asking J. Edgar Hoover “whether [Oswald] was connected with the Cuban operation [Mongoose]?” His suspicions were soon to harden. By 1965, he was telling an aide, “President Kennedy tried to get Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first.” During his retirement, he would tell a journalist that the Kennedys “had been operating a damn Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean.” Whether or not his remark to Salinger brought the Castro attempts to Robert Kennedy’s mind, the remark was made, as Evan Thomas says, “cruelly and with an unerring instinct for Kennedy’s hidden vulnerabilities.” And the fact that it struck home is testified to by its target. It was, Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, “the worst thing Johnson has said.” Kennedy was to tell a friend that the new President “does not know how to use people’s talents, to find the very best in them and put the best to work. But more than any other man, he knows how to ferret out and use people’s weaknesses.”

  He had ferreted out one of Kennedy’s.

  In speaking of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy had in the past used adjectives like “formidable,” “flawed,” and “powerful” to describe him. Now a new adjective would be added to the description. Schlesinger, summarizing Kennedy’s feelings, writes that “He saw Johnson more than ever as a formidable but flawed man, powerful but dangerous.”

  *

  1 For one of many examples, see The Path to Power, pp. 191–92.

  25

  Hammer Blows

  WRITING IN 1964, Theodore H. White would say that “the clash of Robert F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson … may continue to agitate the Democratic Party for some years to come.” That prophecy would prove accurate. Writing in 1997, thirty-three years after White, Russell Baker would recall that the story of the two men, “a story that still makes many an old-timer’s blood boil,” had “poisoned the Democratic Party for most of the 1960s.” With each year, in fact, the passions between the two men would blaze only more fiercely. Even the gunshot in Los Angeles in June, 1968, couldn’t extinguish those passions. As Kennedy lay dying the next evening, Johnson, over dinner in the White House, kept asking Joe Califano, “Is he dead? Is he dead yet?” Califano had to make so many calls to the Secret Service or to his assistant Larry Levinson that Levinson finally asked him, “Joe, is this something that he’s wishing to have happen? Why is he asking it that way?” (“I couldn’t tell, because Johnson didn’t know, whether he hoped or feared that the answer would be yes or no,” Califano was to recall.) After the answer was finally yes, Johnson issued the appropriate public statements, praising Kennedy as “a noble and compassionate leader, a good and faithful servant of the people.” “Early the next morning,” however, he also made a private telephone call to the Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, who had jurisdiction over Arlington National Cemetery. The Kennedy family wanted Robert to be buried in Arlington, and Johnson, Clifford was to relate, “wanted to discuss whether or not Bobby Kennedy had the right to be buried in Arlington.” “Stunned” and “dumbfounded” by the call—“one of [my] saddest experiences” in dealing “with [Johnson]”—Clifford told Johnson, he says, that “the regulations were irrelevant, and in any case could be suspended by the Commander in Chief,” and “It seemed obvious that Bobby should be buried near his beloved brother.” “The politician in Lyndon Johnson understood this,” Clifford relates, and Bobby was buried in Arlington, near Jack’s grave.

  The feud between the two men would, during most of the Sixties, have far-reaching influence—surprising, sometimes, in its impact not merely on their party but on the course of American history. The story of the feud would have a dozen twists and turns even before the day in March, 1968, on which what Johnson had “feared from the first day of my presidency” came true, and Robert Kennedy announced that he was running against him for the Democratic nomination, moments in which first one man and then the other could feel for a moment (and usually only for a moment, for the battle would quickly be rejoined) the flush of victory over a longhated foe. But for now, at the end of these first months after Lyndon Johnson became President, the feud had only one victor. If the Tom Mann appointment was indeed the “first round,” there had also been during these months the Indonesia and Corbin rounds, and Johnson had won all three.

  In addition, during these months, Johnson had, in his battle with Robert Kennedy, achieved the overall objective he considered most vital. In order to preserve around his Administration the aura of continuity he considered of overriding importance, it had been necessary to keep Kennedy in it—and, at the end of those months, Kenne
dy was still in it. He left later, of course, but for Johnson’s purposes, he had stayed long enough.

  AFTER JOHNSON’S RETURN from the ranch, several of the Kennedy men began leaving.

  “Schlesinger declared war, I guess, the day that John F. Kennedy went into the ground,” Ralph Dungan was to say. To Johnson, the historian epitomized the intellectual unable to deal with the problems of the real world; once, confronted with a knotty problem in a foreign country, the President, expressing his contempt, asked, “What do you want me to do? Send Arthur Schlesinger to take care of things?” The President, and Jenkins, who echoed his thoughts, expressed “mounting irritation” with him. “There was something about [him] which peculiarly roused the Johnsonian ire.” And, as is clear from the contemporaneous entries Schlesinger made in the journal, the feelings were mutual. Despite admonitions to himself in the journal that “I must guard against … my dislike of the current style and corn,” the guard was sometimes dropped. The new President’s statement to Schlesinger that he didn’t have “the knowledge, the skills, the understanding” of his predecessor was an assessment with which Schlesinger thoroughly agreed, in regard to Johnson’s personality and brainpower alike. Although “the new President is a quick study, … unlike JFK, he does not retain what he has been told,” he wrote on December 30. “His basic trouble, I imagine, is that he has never in his political career had to concentrate on substance.… Policy for Johnson has always been determined by the balance of political pressures. Now he must begin to examine the merits of policy per se, and he is not intellectually or psychologically prepared to do this.” The historian’s enchantment with the former President wasn’t fading. Invited to Jackie Kennedy’s Georgetown townhouse that December for a screening of a film on Jack Kennedy, he “found it almost unbearable to watch that graceful, witty, incandescent personality.” A week later, it snowed in Washington—“almost as deep a snow as the inaugural blizzard.… It all began on a fiercely cold day 35 months ago,” and that was how it was coming to an end. “The White House is lovely, ghostly and alien. My own depression does not abate.” He was soon actively advising Robert Kennedy. “I am … more and more persuaded that I am for him whatever he wants,” Schlesinger wrote, and at dinner parties the barbs of his very sharp tongue were often aimed at Johnson. He signed a contract to write a history of the Kennedy presidency.

  Johnson heard about all this, of course, and “the problem of disengagement” was not, in the event, to prove as “considerable” as Schlesinger had anticipated. By the end of December, the historian was to write, he had been totally “isolated.… I have not had a single communication from the President or his staff for the last month—not a request to do anything, or an invitation to a meeting, or an instruction, or a suggestion.” In fact, by December, Johnson had begun recruiting his successor: a distinguished historian and author from Princeton, not Harvard: Eric F. Goldman. Goldman’s upcoming appointment had been leaked to the press, and Schlesinger was receiving inquiries about it from journalists. On January 27, Schlesinger resubmitted the letter of resignation he had written immediately after the assassination. This time, he was to relate, it was “accepted with alacrity.”1

  WITH SORENSEN, in Johnson’s view the sharpest tool, he tried hardest.

  “Johnson tried to be very nice to me, and he was very nice,” Sorensen was to say. “He was very very nice” not only to him, but “to my sons,” he says. Having brought his three little boys to the White House one day in December, Sorensen left them downstairs in the White House Mess while he was in the Oval Office. When Johnson asked after them, Sorensen mentioned they were downstairs. Johnson said, “Let’s go down and see them,” and “chatted with them very nicely for a while.” Since, in their conversations—on the phone and in person—Sorensen unbent not at all, Johnson did the bending. When, in a telephone call before the November 27 speech to Congress, Johnson said that he “rather liked” Galbraith’s draft and Sorensen said, “Well, to be frank with you, I didn’t,” Johnson backtracked so fast—“Well, I didn’t think it was any ball of fire. I thought it’s something that you could improve on.… I read it in about three minutes.… But I think a much better speech could be written. I’m expecting you to write a better one”—that Sorensen laughed over the phone. The insulting “cannot fill his shoes” line was simply crossed out; during all the discussions between the two men about the speech, it was never mentioned. In the car riding to Capitol Hill to give that speech, Johnson had tried to tell Sorensen that despite the “corning up” by Fortas and Humphrey, the speech was “90 percent Sorensen.” “No sir, that’s not accurate,” Sorensen replied; “not more than 50 percent Sorensen.” “Well, anyway, your 50 percent is the best,” Johnson said. Replying “in a more presumptuous fashion than I had ever used with JFK,” Sorensen said, “On that point, we agree,” and Johnson had simply laughed to break the tension. And when, a few days later, Katharine Graham urged presidential tolerance for the curtness—Sorensen had been “cantankerous” to her, too, she said, but that was what he did “instead of crying.… I think he is going to come around … if you just give him a little love, and overlook …”—Johnson assured her, “I’m going to do it,” although, he added, “I’ve done as much as I can and have any pride and self-respect left.” (A few hours later, Johnson asked Sorensen again to stay. Sorensen didn’t reply, and finally Johnson had to ask: “Are you with me?” Sorensen’s only reply was “I’m still here, Mr. President.”) All that December, the flattery continued; Sorensen became accustomed to hearing the President refer to him as “my trusted counselor,” even “plugging” a book he had published some years previously. “He was wooing me, in a sense, to stay on,” Sorensen knew. At the ranch, as Sorensen was working on his drafts of the State of the Union, Johnson, knowing what he most wanted to hear, found new ways to praise his fallen leader. “Well, your man treated me better than I would have [treated him] if the positions were reversed,” he told Sorensen once. But Sorensen’s devotion to Jack Kennedy hadn’t been ended by the bullets of Dallas. Kennedy “had planned to write … a book with me after the presidency,” he was to say. “Now that he was gone, I felt some obligation to write it.” When he received an offer from the same editor who had published Profiles in Courage, he accepted it and handed Johnson a letter of resignation that would take effect on February 29.

  Protesting violently, Johnson replayed the theme that had worked before. “You and I know that he is up there looking down on us and wants us to work together, carrying out his ideals, and he would not want you to leave here,” he said, and went on, “his speech” growing, in Sorensen’s recollection, “only more saccharine”—until he went too far.

  Once Sorensen got to know him better, Johnson said, Sorensen “would discover that he treated his staff as if they were his own children.”

  “Yes, I know,” Sorensen replied. That was his only reply, and it was made in a quiet tone, but Johnson evidently understood. He accepted the resignation.

  PIERRE SALINGER’S PLUMPNESS, bushy eyebrows, ever-present cigar and good humor (all of which made people forget that he had once been an award-winning crime reporter and a very tough Rackets Committee investigator) had, together with an ability to take a joke, made “Plucky” the butt of a lot of kidding by many of his colleagues in the Kennedy White House. Jack Kennedy’s kidding always stopped at a line that left Salinger his dignity, however. With Lyndon Johnson, there was no such line—as became evident over Christmas at the ranch.

  First, there was the new President’s insistence that Salinger wear that outfit notably unflattering to his portly physique, and then that he mount a horse and trot off on it in front of a battery of photographers despite the fact that he barely knew how to ride, a performance that moved reporters to dub him “Hopalong Salinger.” And there followed an incident at the dinner for Ludwig Erhard in the Stonewall gym.

  Salinger was vulnerable because in his youth he had been a pianist so proficient that, for a brief time, he had considered a
concert career. At Kennedy parties he sometimes played ditties he had composed himself, along with humorous lyrics. Van Cliburn was stepping off the stage after his masterful renditions of Beethoven and Brahms when a startled Salinger heard Johnson say, “Would Mr. Salinger please go to the piano?”

  Turning red, Salinger tried to demur. “Do you think it’s fair to put me on after Van Cliburn?” he asked. But no demurral was accepted. Trying to make the best of the situation—not that any best was really possible—Salinger, trudging up to the stage, said he would play a piece he had written himself, the “Palm Beach Waltz,” so that no one would realize the wrong notes he was hitting. When he finished, there was a reward: a ten-gallon hat, which Johnson presented to him on stage. It was too big; the brim came down over Salinger’s eyes.

  “Reporters felt sorry for Pierre Salinger that day,” one of them was to recall. Those who were his friends felt sorry for him during the entire Texas trip. “For all his striped shirts and big cigars, Salinger is a literate and subtle man, and not disposed toward cornball humor and a folksy approach,” one of them says. “When I saw Lyndon having fun with Salinger and putting ten-gallon hats on him and so on, I just had a feeling Salinger wasn’t going to wear that hat very long.”

  Back in Washington, Johnson pushed him further. Soon there was circulating what Schlesinger calls “a terrible story in which Johnson made Salinger eat a plate of bean soup at a White House luncheon out of pure delight in the exercise of authority.”

  Prior to the ranch trip, during the first month after the assassination, Johnson and Salinger had seemed to have developed a rapport. “Of all the Kennedy people,” the easygoing press secretary “seemed to make the transition most easily,” Schlesinger was to write. And that, as some longtime Johnson observers understood, was the problem. Having “adopted” Salinger, Johnson “now treated him as if he were one of his veteran deputies,” James Wechsler was to write, “and with such men he does not worry about the amenities.” After hearing the bean soup story, Schlesinger wrote in his journal that “There is nothing more dangerous, so far as I can see, than being accepted by Johnson as one of his own. I think he has been meticulously polite to those in the White House whom he regards as Kennedy men. But, when he starts regarding them as Johnson men, their day is over. He begins to treat them like Johnson men, which means like servants. That is what happened to Pierre Salinger.”