Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  That was enough to convince a reluctant George Meany to abandon the idea of neutrality, and endorse Kennedy. More important, labor embarked on a massive campaign to warn their members of “the Wallace threat.” More than fifty million pamphlets were mailed to members out of national headquarters; tens of millions more came from local affiliates all over the country. Twenty-five thousand men and women manned phone banks in the last weeks of the campaign. At Meany’s insistence, most of the messages were aimed less at praising Robert Kennedy than at condemning George Wallace. Politically, it didn’t matter; in the big industrial states, a union member who turned away from Wallace was almost certain to turn to Kennedy, not Nixon.

  There was a third benefit Wallace provided: He spared Kennedy from a debate. From the moment of his nomination, the press began speculating about another series of Kennedy-Nixon confrontations. A hundred columns and television pieces revisited 1960, Nixon’s sallow, drained, undertaker-like appearance in the first debate, John Kennedy’s cool, composed demeanor that played well enough in the medium to neutralize Nixon’s “experience” argument. Debating, however, was one arena where the “Bobby Ain’t Jack” point was well taken. In his TV appearances, Robert Kennedy simply lacked Jack’s smooth affect. He would run his hand up to his head, as if to run it through his hair; he would hesitate, pause, at times grope for a word. More and more, Robert Kennedy had come to see issues in shades of gray; not when it came to people who were suffering, God knows, but he was more comfortable with nuance than with packaged comments for the evening news—“sound bites” was the phrase they were beginning to call them. Last fall, he had appeared with California Governor Ronald Reagan in a satellite “town meeting” with an international group of students, most of whom were militantly Left, who excoriated America’s Vietnam policies. Reagan’s unswerving condemnation of North Vietnam played far better on television than Kennedy’s more complex analysis. (“Never put me in that situation again,” he snapped at an aide.)

  Had 1968 been a simple Nixon-Kennedy clash, the Republican might well have forced the issue, demanding to know why Robert Kennedy was ducking a debate, quoting William F. Buckley on why Bobby wouldn’t appear on his Firing Line TV show (“Why does baloney avoid the meat slicer?”). With Wallace on the ballot, however, the strategic implications were clouded. There had only been one series of Presidential debates—Johnson had refused to face Barry Goldwater in 1964—and the only tentative conclusion from 1960 (apart from the need for a really skilled makeup artist) was that the less experienced candidate had more to gain. Letting George Wallace stand on the same platform as the major-party candidates would elevate him even before a single word was spoken. That posed a direct threat to Nixon’s prospects in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Kentucky. As for the Northern states, late polls suggested that the labor movement’s bombardment of blue-collar voters, and General LeMay’s intemperate remarks about nuclear weapons, had cost Wallace support: His prospective votes now were coming from traditional Democrats most concerned with crime and disorder—exactly the voters Nixon most needed to win the major battleground states.

  Giving George Wallace the bully pulpit of a prime-time, three-network debate, then, was a chance Richard Nixon could not take. Republican allies in the House and Senate blocked the efforts to suspend the equal time provisions of the Federal Communications Act; the Democrats responded with pointed ads asking why “Richard Nixon is afraid to face Robert Kennedy and the American people.”

  By late October, Robert Kennedy had moved into a small lead over Nixon, but the race was clearly too close to call. Either Kennedy or Nixon could win—or, indeed, George Wallace could well succeed in depriving either candidate of victory, propelling the election into something close to Constitutional chaos.

  “Any late-breaking development,” a chorus of analysts proclaimed, “could decide the outcome.”

  And in the last week of the campaign, President Johnson decided it was time . . .

  IT WAS ONE A.M. on November 1, and Clark Clifford lay awake in the master bedroom of his fifty-year-old house in Bethesda, Maryland, profoundly troubled. That would have surprised anyone who had worked with the sixty-one-year-old Secretary of Defense, who had spent a lifetime conveying a sense of serene assurance. It came from his six-foot two-inch, 180-pound frame, topped by a mane of wavy silvery hair. It came from the impeccably tailored double-breasted pin-striped suits, the soothing, cultured voice with the faint echoes of his roots in Kansas and Missouri. From his first days in Washington, something about him had gained him easy entry into the corridors of power. As a young naval aide at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, he had gone to Samuel Rosenman, one of Truman’s top aides, asking for more work to do. Let’s keep that man at the White House, Rosenman had said to Truman. It was Clifford who helped shape Truman’s 1948 upset, urging the civil rights strategy that drove Southerners out of the convention but won critical liberal votes in the North, urging Truman to recognize the state of Israel that year even as Secretary of State George Marshall threatened to quit.

  His calm demeanor—no one ever remembered him raising his voice or losing his temper—won him the confidence of everyone around him. Truman raised the idea of a Supreme Court appointment; admirers urged him to go back to Missouri and run for the Senate, but Clifford had another target in mind. In 1950, he opened a law firm in Washington and quickly became the highest-paid lawyer in the capital. His clients included TWA (Howard Hughes was among his first clients), AT&T, RCA, ABC, GE, DuPont, Standard Oil. He’d greet his clients in his paneled office on Connecticut Avenue, give them all the same speech about how he would not represent them before the President or his staff: “If you want influence,” he would say, “you should consider going elsewhere. What we can offer you is extensive knowledge on how to deal with the government on your problems.” And his clients would nod, Yes, of course, and think to themselves, This man can open every door in this town.

  He was a trusted and discreet advisor to Presidents; he’d helped Jack Kennedy with his transition, “and all that he asked for,” Kennedy said at a pre-election dinner, “was that we advertise his law firm on the back of one-dollar bills.” Kennedy had put him on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board after the Bay of Pigs debacle, and Johnson had made him one of his closest counselors on Vietnam. Clifford had been a consistent voice for escalation, for increased military pressure on the North. Only air and ground power, he argued, would force North Vietnam to abandon its goal of conquering the South. So it was only natural that when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara seemed to be weakening in his resolve, seemed more and more to be doubting whether more bombs and troops could ever prevail, warned that further escalation “would be dangerous, costly in lives, unsatisfactory to the American people,” and worse, seemed to be cracking under the pressure, seemed even to be feeding information to his friend Robert Kennedy, Johnson pulled McNamara out of the Pentagon, sent him to the World Bank (without telling him), and reached for the experienced hand who was unshakably committed to winning the war.

  Except . . . almost as soon as Clifford arrived at the Pentagon at the beginning of 1968, the doubts began. The confident assertions of “progress” grew more ephemeral the harder Clifford pushed for real facts. At the start of February, one day after Clifford’s confirmation, the Tet offensive showed that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese could strike at will just about everywhere in the South, including the grounds of the American Embassy. Yes, they suffered huge losses, but the television footage that demonstrated there were no safe havens in South Vietnam also seemed to prove that the light at the end of the tunnel was an illusion. General Westmoreland and his military commanders were asking for 200,000 more men in arms, on top of the half million already there. By mid-March, Clifford and the other “wise men” around Johnson were telling a stunned, angry President his policy was in ruins. By month’s end, Johnson had reversed course, ordered a partial halt to the bombing, opened the door to negotiations and, to Clifford’s shock, had taken him
self out of the running for renomination.

  In the months that followed, Clifford had begun to see more and more examples of the President’s behavior that was puzzling, even mystifying. First it was a chill in the air between them, almost as if Clifford’s reassessment of the Vietnam approach had been a personal affront to Johnson. It was harder to reach the President, and the invitations to dinner, to a weekend at the ranch, had all but ceased.

  And now . . . there was another, darker cloud. What had happened was that an intense split now divided the highest figures in the Johnson administration. Clifford, along with chief Paris negotiator Averell Harriman, was pushing for the fastest possible end to the conflict. (Clifford was particularly dovish, writing in a private memo, “I do not believe we ought to be in Vietnam . . . I think our being there is a mistake. I’m disgusted with it all.”)

  By contrast, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, White House National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, U.S. Vietnam Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and the military were holding fast to the view that only the use of intense military power would ever bring Hanoi to heel. And more and more, thought Clifford, the President was drifting back to the hawkish side of the argument. (“I think the White House is obsessed with bombing,” he’d told a deputy.) He was appalled when Johnson permitted, maybe even encouraged, Rostow to extract a pro-bombing statement from General Creighton Abrams and pass it along to the chairman of the Democratic Convention Platform Committee. He almost became hoarse this past summer trying to talk Johnson out of that secret summit with the Soviet leaders, followed by the lightning trip to the Democratic convention, before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia snuffed out that idea. Clifford still shuddered at the thought of what that would have done to an already fractious Democratic Party.

  And all of this, Clifford believed, flowed from one source: the specter of a Robert Kennedy Presidency.

  He had never been close to Bobby. Unlike Jack, Bobby was far too hotheaded, far too emotional for someone who held that much power, and who might hold even more. When Bobby and Ted Sorenson had come to the White House in March, proposing a commission to review Vietnam policy as the price of keeping Bobby out of the campaign, Clifford had thought it an unacceptable limit on Presidential power. While he had stayed clear of the fight for the nomination, he had rooted hard for Humphrey. Indeed, he was sufficiently skeptical about Bobby to have wondered just how “spontaneous” that confrontation with the radicals in Chicago had been.

  What overrode those feelings was a far more powerful sentiment: Clark Clifford detested Richard Nixon.

  His contempt stretched back more than two decades, back to Nixon’s willingness, eagerness to assail the patriotism of some of Clifford’s friends and colleagues; his silence when Joe McCarthy in effect called General George Marshall a traitor; his attack on Dean Acheson as “the dean of the cowardly college of Communist containment.” It deepened when Nixon bathetically invoked his wife’s cloth coat and his children’s dog in that Checkers speech, and when he piously praised President Eisenhower’s return to clean language in the White House (everybody knew Ike cursed like the lifelong military man he was). The idea of Richard Nixon in the White House was an affront to everything Clifford believed about the temperament and character of a President.

  And it was because of his disdain, his contempt for Nixon, that Clifford, lying awake in his Bethesda home, was coming to a sickening conclusion: Lyndon Johnson wanted Richard Nixon to win the Presidency.

  He knew as well as anyone how deep the enmity ran between Lyndon and Bobby. He’d heard the stories of Johnson’s darker musings, about Bobby and the TV reporters and the Negroes and the Communists. In the end, Clifford had always thought that Johnson could not stomach the idea of a President Nixon, who’d smeared so many in his own party, who had so little feeling for the very people—black, brown, poor white—whose betterment Johnson saw as his legacy. Even now, Nixon was playing footsie with the Southern segregationists, was drawing on the fear of crime with his attacks on bleeding-heart judges. Now that didn’t seem to matter to Johnson. Nixon is far closer to me on Vietnam than Bobby is, he’d said more than once, even told Charles Murphy, a key Humphrey aide during the nomination fight, that “it’d be better for the country if Nixon won.” In fact, Clifford’s feelings were strong enough that when chief negotiator Averell Harriman came back to the United States for a funeral, Clifford had shared with him his growing conviction that the President wanted Nixon to beat Bobby.

  And Harriman, the seventy-seven-year-old veteran diplomat, the heir to a great railroad fortune who had been at Stalin’s side in World War II, who had sought the Presidency for himself a decade and a half earlier, who had survived and flourished through power struggles at the highest levels of power, shocked Clifford with his response.

  In the days since, Clifford kept replaying what Harriman had said. It was at the front of his mind all through this restless night. Johnson had convened a gathering of his Vietnam advisors later that evening, and Clifford did not know what was on the agenda. But he could not shake the feeling that whatever it was, it was designed to make sure that Robert Kennedy would not win the White House . . . which meant Richard Nixon would . . . which meant that the unflappable, imperturbable Clifford would be facing the toughest decision of his life.

  KENNEDY HAD BEGUN this early November day in Newark, New Jersey, flown to Cleveland and Chicago, then to St. Louis before boarding the chartered 707 for the flight to San Francisco and a twenty-four-hour sprint through California. He was rallying the core in the last days of the campaign, risking a return to the frenzy that had surrounded his first days. It was a calculated, necessary risk. It was all coming down to Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, California. He and Nixon would split New England; he would take the Mid-Atlantic states, with only suburban-heavy New Jersey in doubt; Nixon and Wallace would divide the South and the border states; West of the Mississippi was just about solid Nixon, with a chance for him in Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. So the big Midwestern prizes, Ohio and Illinois, the weathervane state of Missouri, and the 40 electoral votes of California would decide it.

  That meant a massive, hugely expensive effort to find votes in neighborhoods where turnout was historically low. It meant cluster-bombing neighborhoods with “walking-around” money—$100, $200, $300 a pop—to the assemblymen, council members, district leaders, funeral home directors, ministers, who would provide coffee, a sandwich, car fare to lure voters to the polls—or maybe they’d just pocket the money, no one could know for sure. It meant treading through the minefields of tribal wars in Polish, Irish, German, Jewish, black neighborhoods, ministering to the easily bruised feelings of local power brokers, while shielding the candidate from any association with the business at hand. (Kennedy aides still shuddered at a meeting in New York weeks before the primary, when a local leader asked Kennedy bluntly: “What’s in it for me?” and was escorted from the room as Bobby shouted, “Don’t you make any deals with him!”)

  His words were now stripped down; gone were the detailed programs and the crafted rhetoric; now it was the simple skeletal structure of the message: I think we face significant challenges over the period of the next four years, but I believe we can also make significant progress. I believe we can help end the divisions. I ask for your help, I ask you to stand with me, and heal this country. Now, as he sat in the forward cabin of the chartered jet, he seemed to be drawing more and more within himself, waving off briefing papers and speech drafts, staring off at . . . nothing.

  He’s exhausted, the reporters told one another. He’s thinking about Jack. He’s thinking about what he’ll do if he loses. He’s thinking about what he’ll do if he wins.

  Those who knew him best had a different idea. From the time a year ago when he had seriously wrestled with the prospect of challenging Johnson for the nomination, Robert Kennedy had been haunted by one reality, one he knew better than almost anyone else: The President of the United States has enormous power to shape events to his will. And
nowhere was that more obvious than in the arena of war and peace. He had no doubt that, were it not for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Johnson would have flown to the Chicago convention, summit agreement in hand, looking for a renomination. His “friends at court” had sent him notes on the President’s musings about Richard Nixon.

  So as he sat and stared out of the window, Robert Kennedy was not thinking about his brother . . . or about the prospect of victory or defeat . . . or about his plans for a better America.

  He was thinking: I wonder what the son of a bitch is going to do?

  THEY GATHERED in the Cabinet Room on the evening of November 1, the meeting room just off the Oval Office that overlooked the Rose Garden. A portrait of FDR hung over the mantel at one end of the room; a bust of John Kennedy stood in one corner. Now, there’s an irony for the history books, Clark Clifford thought as he took his seat. Across the table, Dean Rusk and Walt Rostow sat side by side. Around the table sat the other members of Johnson’s “Wise Men,” the men who had counseled him on the war: retired General Max Taylor, ex-Vietnam ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, ex-Treasury Secretary Doug Dillon, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, whose elevation to Chief Justice was in serious jeopardy in the Senate. Dean Acheson, Clifford noticed, was not present; the longtime hawk had told the President days earlier that he was done with Vietnam, that it was no longer worth the candle. And UN Ambassador George Ball was gone; he’d resigned out of frustration with the war negotiations, and was out campaigning for Kennedy. Now, as they all stood to acknowledge the President’s entrance, Clifford realized that none of those present shared his conviction that the war had to be stopped, and soon. His anxiety deepened when he saw Johnson take a folded piece of paper out of his breast pocket, slip on his spectacles, and begin to read.