But though it could fuel hours of nervous chatter in White House meetings that summer, the politics of backlash was still too hazy to be a real threat. Fear and resentment in the white American mind were still too removed from its rational decision-making regions to change votes. White Americans in the summer of 1964, looking objectively at their situation, could see that their quality of life was just as Johnson’s story had it: quite good, indeed better than it had ever been before. They could stare all they wanted at the horizon, but the black mob was not coming. The looting in the inner cities was happening in black neighborhoods, not white ones. Not yet. “The white backlash itself exists,” Harris wrote that summer in Newsweek, “lurking more or less menacingly in the background, but it is not yet a major force in the land.”
Not major enough to sate Johnson’s hunger for fear. And besides, “backlash” was too abstract a concept to embody the anxiety that Johnson felt. He understood the world in human terms. The greatest prize he could imagine was human: winning the votes and the admiring eyes of as many Americans as possible. So, too, his greatest fear had to take human form. Goldwater, hapless and hopeless, was not terrible enough. Johnson needed a man more worthy of his growing worry. That man, once again, would be the attorney general of the United States.
AFTER THE DEBACLE at the Cow Palace, the press had one final chance at drama in the odd political year of 1964: the mystery of who would fill out the Democratic ticket as Johnson’s running mate. The logical choices were Minnesota’s two senators, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy. But as is often the case, the prospect the press found most exciting was the least likely one. As summer wore on, Washington grew obsessed with the question of whether Johnson’s running mate would be Bobby Kennedy.
The speculation made Johnson frantic. It was the worst thing he could imagine. He devoured intelligence reports from aides that suggested Bobby was trying to enlist power brokers like Chicago mayor Richard Daley to force Bobby’s name on the ticket. In late July, Johnson told Connally he had barely slept the night before, his mind had been so preoccupied by the threat from Bobby. “When this fellow looks at me,” Johnson said, “he looks like he’s going to look a hole through me.”
By then, the tension between the president and his attorney general had long been out in the open. Kennedy’s friends in the press had kept his constant muttering about Johnson out of print for the first months of the new administration. But the split went public in February when Paul Corbin, a freewheeling Kennedy operative in the Democratic National Committee, took the independent initiative to organize a write-in campaign for Bobby on the New Hampshire primary ballot. His goal was to secure the vice presidency for Kennedy, but Johnson, rightly, viewed the effort as a public challenge to his legitimacy. In a tense Oval Office meeting, he demanded that Bobby remove Corbin from New Hampshire and, for that matter, from the DNC. When Bobby protested that Corbin had been a favorite of President Kennedy’s, Johnson lost his patience. “Do it,” he ordered. “President Kennedy isn’t president any more.” Bobby was stunned by the challenge. He jabbed back: “I know you’re president, and don’t you ever talk like that to me again.”
A flurry of mutual pettiness followed. Corbin was let go. Kennedy’s friends wrote columns suggesting that Johnson was freezing out JFK’s staff in favor of his own whoop-hollering Texas posse. Johnson-friendly reporters wrote that the ego and occasionally even insubordination on the part of the Kennedy men was slowing the progress of the Kennedy-Johnson agenda. Kennedy remained Johnson’s attorney general, but the two men mostly kept their distance that spring. Johnson’s periodic attempts at reconciliation were always rebuffed.
The alienation was inevitable, for Johnson and Bobby were living in different worlds. The death of Bobby’s older brother had made him the heir to his family’s political hopes. But unlike Jack, Bobby had not been groomed to be a candidate, and he was constitutionally incapable of the empty flattery and false praise with which politicians like Johnson got others to do their daily bidding. Further on in the decade, Bobby’s raw emotion and reflexive honesty—what political professionals of a later age would call “authenticity”—would become his greatest asset. But in 1964, it mostly made for uncomfortable scenes. At one point that year, Lady Bird Johnson found herself waiting at Union Station alongside the attorney general, where they were scheduled to greet an arriving dignitary. “We waited quite a while and he leaned over to me and said, ‘You’re doing a good job,’ ” Lady Bird would later recall. “Then there was a perceptible pause, and with what seemed like real effort he said, ‘And your husband is too.’ ”
Deeper down, Johnson and Kennedy saw the world through very different eyes. While Johnson was out promoting his wonderful visions of the American future, Bobby was still living in the darkest frontiers of grief. The journalist Murray Kempton, visiting Bobby a few months after the assassination, thought of the epitaph for the three hundred dead at Thermopylae: “Stranger, when you see the Lacedaemonians, tell them we lie here faithful to their orders.” The comparison inverted reality—the living Bobby was being faithful to orders, his brother was the one in the tomb. But that was the inverted world Bobby knew. “I’m sure Jack liked it,” Bobby wrote to Kempton after his piece appeared. As a belated Christmas gift for aides in the Justice Department, he gave gold cuff links inscribed “Robert Kennedy 1961–1964.” It was as though he had died on seeing the first New Year without his brother as president.
Kempton’s piece described an “archaic” Bobby Kennedy, and, indeed, in those first months, all of Bobby’s allegiances were to the ancient world. In his biography of Kennedy, Evan Thomas reveals how Bobby’s attachment to Edith Hamilton’s book The Greek Way sheds light on Kennedy’s thinking in these months. Jackie had given him the book in the weeks after JFK’s death, promising it would provide deep wisdom and consolation. For Bobby, “the book, written thirty years before by a Bryn Mawr classicist, was a revelation,” Thomas writes. “It is easy to imagine Kennedy, desperate for some meaning in senseless tragedy, transfixed by the morals extracted by Hamilton from the historians Herodotus and Thucydides and the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.”
In time, the words of Aeschylus—God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer—would help move him beyond the tragedy and give purpose to his life. But in the early months, the way of the Greeks also offered validation for all of Kennedy’s worst impulses. Reading Hamilton, Kennedy could console himself that the bitterness and pain he felt were noble. In the Greek way, “there is no dignity like the dignity of a soul in agony,” and this dignity belonged only to a privileged few. Pain was human and universal, but tragic suffering was reserved for the rare souls who lived daring lives of passion and gallantry. “Tragedy is enthroned,” writes Hamilton, “and to her realm those alone are admitted who belong to the only true aristocracy, that of all passionate souls.”
Joseph Kennedy had raised his children to believe that the special vigor within them made them superior to all other aristocratic pretenders, be they the Brahmins of Boston or the elected leaders of the land. So now Bobby would claim the special privileges of his spiritual caste. He referred to “the president” when talking about his brother. He withheld even token deference in the presence of President Johnson. He abstained from all the silly rituals of Johnson’s mundane world. All the while he reassured himself that he was not being selfish, but rather dignified and divine. This was the Bobby who, at the Civil Rights Act signing, refused to stoop when Johnson wooed him with his bushel of pens. Hamilton quotes Shakespeare: “Here I and sorrows sit / Here is my throne; bid kings come bow to it.”
The king would bow to the Kennedys, but only so far. Johnson had always hated the idea of Bobby in the vice presidency. In the spring, he told aides that he would accept Kennedy as his running mate but only if it proved absolutely necessary for him to win. By midsummer, with Goldwater’s nomination assured and Johnson’s approval rating above 70 percent, it was clear the necessity wasn’t there. But the
ongoing speculation in the press rattled him. There were reports that Kennedy aides were planning a demonstration in Atlantic City, where they would spontaneously rise up to demand the vice presidency—or maybe something more. He tried to root out accomplices in Bobby’s plots. Richard J. Daley, one of the savviest operators in the history of American politics, played dumb when Johnson called to investigate. “The worst city in the United States for rumor and gossip is Washington,” the mayor told the president. “And frankly, we out in the prairies don’t pay much attention to columnists, the newspapers or anything else.”
By indulging his worst fears about the attorney general, Johnson made them real. On its own, the position of vice president was utterly unappealing to Bobby. The job was full of suffering, but not the noble, tragic kind. He knew that Johnson blamed him for the miserable indignity of his own vice presidency and that, as Johnson’s vice president, he could count on Johnson to return the favor in kind. At first, Bobby expressed little interest in the job. He could see that in all likelihood Johnson would rule Washington for some time to come. He pondered work in a faraway land—maybe he’d write a book in England. Maybe he could even prove himself a gallant adventurer once more by serving as ambassador to Vietnam.
But then he saw just how desperate Johnson was to keep him off the ticket, and suddenly the vice presidency became the thing that Bobby Kennedy wanted most. He launched a defiantly public effort to force himself on the president. In July, he traveled to Poland, where huge crowds came out to see the brother of America’s fallen hero. At the University of Warsaw, he told adoring students that he was “not a candidate for the Vice Presidency” but “if you were in America and could vote for me, I would be.” Minds less studied in American politics than Lyndon Johnson’s could read these words and remember that there were plenty of other Poles, living in and around the cities of the Northeast and industrial Midwest, who could vote for a president and vice president of the United States.
Soon, dark hints of Bobby’s intentions were everywhere. Johnson and his staffers were disturbed by a profile in Newsweek, written by Ben Bradlee, for which the attorney general had provided extensive access. In it, Bobby talked openly of the impossibility of Johnson’s asking him to run on the ticket. “I should think I’d be the last man in the world he would want,” Bobby said in the piece, “because my name is Kennedy, because he wants a Johnson Administration with no Kennedys in it …” But there were other ways to become his party’s vice presidential candidate. “Most major political leaders in the North want me,” he said. “All of them, really.” The threat was subtle but unmistakable: “I have this feeling that I am going to end up in government,” he said. “These things have a way of solving themselves.”
All of this was too much for Johnson to take. The fear that, like so many others in the country that summer, he had kept in the back of his mind, now took hold of his thoughts. In mid-July, he told John McCormack he was hearing consistent grumblings that party bosses were going to force Bobby onto the ticket in Atlantic City. “I don’t want the presidency if they do,” he said. “I don’t want to have to sleep with a woman I don’t trust.”
With a month to go before the convention, the uncertainty became unbearable. On July 29, he invited Bobby for a private meeting in the Oval Office. As the appointed hour drew near, Johnson’s nerves took hold of him. Clark Clifford, who, save for Johnson’s longtime friend Abe Fortas, was Johnson’s closest outside adviser, had offered constant counsel on the Bobby Kennedy threat. Waiting for Bobby, Johnson called Clifford to unload his anxiety. “He’s got [Jackie] thinking about going to the convention,” Johnson said. “He thinks that most of the delegations are for him, and this is the thing he wants more than anything in his life.”
Clifford advised Johnson to take a hard line. “Now I think it appropriate and courteous for you to give some reasons for your decision,” he counseled the president. “But you are not asking him at any time for his reaction.”
Bobby had a good idea what he was walking into when he entered the Oval Office that day. Still, he grew uncomfortable. He glanced at what appeared to be a recording device on Johnson’s desk and wondered if the president was recording the exchange. (In fact, no known recording of the meeting exists, but as John F. Kennedy’s brother, Bobby should not have been surprised by the idea of a president’s recording a meeting with a political foe.) He had the impression that someone—Johnson’s right-hand man Walter Jenkins?—was listening in and taking notes. Later, he would say that an agitated Johnson, gripping prepared remarks, subjected him to a strange exegesis on the vice presidency before making it plain that Bobby would not be his choice. Bobby was pleasant in response, but once again he showed no interest in the politician’s obligatory fakery. “You didn’t ask me,” he said, walking out the door. “But I think I could have done a hell of a job for us.”
After the meeting, a triumphant Johnson rushed to call Clifford. “I was very firm and very positive and very final,” he said. He recounted Bobby’s final words and his own reply: “Well, I think you will do a hell of a job for us … and for yourself too.”
It was clear who was boss.
Clifford had been a force in Washington since the Truman administration. To sustain a career that long in the capital requires a keen sense for where power resides. “Oh, I’m just so gratified,” the lawyer cooed. “Let me say, right away, that this was not an easy task for you. It took courage and forthrightness and it just makes me very proud.” It was indisputably clear who had won the battle between Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy. With Johnson, Clifford spared no flattery: “This is the kind of president I want.”
But, like the plate of sandwiches, even the praise from Harry Truman’s man did not leave Johnson satisfied. He scavenged for more, which only caused him more trouble. The whole point of telling Bobby he wouldn’t get the job, after all, had been to end public speculation. Now he needed to make the news public, but in a way that didn’t seem personally vindictive toward the Kennedys. So Johnson devised a broader rationale to explain his decision. Later that afternoon, he announced that, for the sake of continuity in government, he would not consider any sitting member of his cabinet as his running mate in 1964.
“He had communicated that decision personally,” said the next day’s New York Times, “to Mr. Kennedy and to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman.” This was true, but only barely. “While I’m thinking about naming him,” Johnson joked an hour before the announcement, “I’m gonna try to get ahold of Rusk.”
He couldn’t leave it there. The next day he called in a select group of reporters to brag, off the record, about how he’d crushed Bobby. With heavy embellishment, he walked them through the Oval Office meeting, beat by beat. “When I … told him it would be ‘inadvisable for him to be on the ticket,’ ” Johnson told the stunned newsmen, “his face changed and he started to swallow. He looked sick. His Adam’s apple bounded up and down like a yo-yo.”
Quickly, inevitably, word of this performance spread to Bobby. In the version the attorney general heard, Johnson portrayed Bobby as “a kind of stunned semi-idiot,” journalist Stewart Alsop was later to recall. Bobby was furious. “This,” said Alsop, “was the final break.” Soon Bobby’s friends in the press were lobbing their own bombs back at Johnson. Bobby, they claimed, had never thought about challenging for the vice presidency. “Mr. Johnson may have been seeing goblins where none ever existed,” Evans and Novak wrote. “The vice presidential choice was the president’s own from the beginning without any need for all the political gymnastics.”
Johnson knew that Bobby was angry. He feared further escalation in their conflict. He obsessed over reports that Kennedy lieutenants were meeting to plan some kind of effort at the Democratic convention. “I think we ought to just watch that just like hawks,” he told an aide. He looked at the horizon—August, Atlantic City—and saw disaster coming for him.
ON
THE OTHER side of the world, in the last days of July, the American destroyer Maddox approached the Gulf of Tonkin, the broad inlet enclosed by the Chinese island of Hainan and the mainland coastlines of China and North Vietnam. From the edge of hostile territory, the Maddox would lead an American intelligence operation, gleaning information on the coastal defenses of the Vietcong. The mission would require the Maddox’s chief officer, Captain John Herrick, to dance around the precarious border between international waters and North Vietnam’s sovereign territory. It was a dangerous task. The North Vietnamese had massed protective forces throughout their gulf coastline. The Maddox was huge and easy to spot on radar. In the early morning hours of August 2, ten miles from North Vietnam’s Red River Delta, a feeling of imminent danger came to Herrick. And when his radar interceptors informed him that enemy forces had been ordered to attack the Maddox, he knew that the danger was real.
The Americans fired first as he dashed back to sea. Under pursuit from the North Vietnamese, Herrick requested reinforcements from U.S. bombers in the vicinity. The Communists fired torpedoes at the destroyer in response to the American attack but were unable to reach their target. Soon, the American bombers had downed a Communist ship, the Maddox was safe within international waters, and the frightening incident was over.
But Herrick and the other Americans remained on nervous watch. Under the order of the Pentagon, they were now joined by another destroyer, the Turner Joy, to undertake a new mission in the Gulf. As the historian Stanley Karnow demonstrates, this new charge was designed to provoke North Vietnamese aggression: “The two destroyers would stage direct daylight runs to within eight miles of North Vietnam’s coast and four miles off its islands, as if defying the Communists to ‘play chicken.’ ” The American vessels “were effectively being used to bait the Communists.”
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