by Larry Tye
Candidates prevaricate. Nothing Jack said really counted until he formally won the nomination and made a definitive offer to a running mate. Each previous promise was aimed at giving one more ambitious politician a stake in the Kennedy candidacy. All the vice presidential hopefuls understood that reality, just as they knew that the man among them least mentioned—except to rule him out to nervous liberals—made the most sense. Lyndon Johnson had more backing among the delegates than anyone but JFK, having garnered four hundred nine votes compared to eighty-six for Symington, forty-two for Humphrey, and none for Freeman. Johnson perfectly complemented Kennedy. He was an artful insider who could corral his Senate colleagues while Jack rallied the nation. His fatherly demeanor might comfort voters put off by JFK’s youth and glamor, and his lackluster public presence would never threaten Kennedy’s place in the spotlight. Better still, Johnson came not just from the South, where a northerner like Kennedy was suspect, but from Texas, which had more electoral votes than all but five other states. “Helps with farmers, Southerners and Texas,” the speechwriter Ted Sorensen wrote two weeks before the convention in a memo to Jack and Bobby that put LBJ’s name atop a list of vice presidential possibilities. The party’s left wing might not have liked him, but its only alternative in the general election would be a Republican. LBJ seemed just the man to keep conservative Democrats in the Kennedy frame. Although Sorensen was one of the few Kennedy advisers who wanted Johnson, the ever-pragmatic Joe Kennedy did as well, and had for years.
While Johnson had a family champion in Joe, he had an enemy in Bobby, who had a memory like an elephant when it came to family slights. For years, LBJ had been regaling listeners with the story of how his friend Franklin Roosevelt gleefully sacked Joe Kennedy as ambassador to Great Britain. For years, Joe’s attack dog son Bobby had been seething. The two finally met in 1953 in the Senate cafeteria, where Bobby was sitting with his new boss Joe McCarthy and others when LBJ stopped by to shake hands. Kennedy was the only one at the table not to stand, with his glower speaking for him. “Bobby could really look hating, and that was how he looked then,” said an LBJ aide who was there. “He didn’t want to get up, but Johnson was kind of forcing him to.”
Each new encounter had fueled Bobby’s resentment. In 1955, Joe Kennedy passed word to LBJ that if he would run for president with Jack as his running mate, Joe would finance the campaign. When LBJ quickly declined, Bobby was “infuriated,” thinking it was “unforgivably discourteous to turn down his father’s generous offer,” according to Tommy Corcoran, a Washington insider who was the intermediary between Joe and Johnson. The hunting incident at the ranch four years later convinced Bobby that the Texan was, in addition to his other faults, a brute. LBJ had taken to calling Bobby “Sonny Boy” to his face, while behind his back he was “a snot-nose” and “that little shitass.” Worse was his slurring of Joe early in the convention. “[I] never thought Hitler was right,” Johnson told delegates from Washington State, whereas Joe Kennedy was a “Chamberlain umbrella man.”*4 Just after that, Bobby Baker, an LBJ intimate, ran into Bobby Kennedy at the convention hotel coffee shop. Kennedy “immediately grew so red in the face I thought he might have a stroke,” Baker recalled. “ ‘You’ve got your nerve,’ he snapped. ‘Lyndon Johnson has compared my father to the Nazis and John Connally and India Edwards lied in saying my brother is dying of Addison’s disease.’…He was leaning forward, clenching his fists, thrusting his face into mine. I was shocked.”
That history would form a backdrop to the most acrimonious and consequential relationship in political Washington over the next decade. But for the Kennedys, family overrode everything, and in this case that meant giving Jack the best possible shot at the White House. To that end, Joe, the target of LBJ’s most relentless name-calling, was the most bullish about putting him on the ticket. Jack came to see the logic, if not the poetry, in that choice. Eventually, so did Bobby. He would later say that JFK “really hadn’t thought about it at all” as to who’d be number two on the 1960 Democratic ticket until it was certain he’d be number one. Perhaps, but that seems more like Bobby’s recasting history than the behavior of his candidate brother, who had been running for at least four years and had planned for every contingency. Surely he had thought about this critical one. Equally certainly, Bobby had, too.
Here is what we know. On July 14, less than twelve hours after he accepted the nomination he coveted, JFK took the back stairs from his corner suite on the ninth floor of Los Angeles’s Biltmore Hotel to LBJ’s suite in the same corner two floors down. He did not stop on the eighth floor, where Bobby had a set of rooms, or at those of any vice presidential contender, where clusters of reporters were camped out. JFK got to the point quickly: Would LBJ be “available” for the vice presidency if it were offered? Johnson was interested. The conversation was over in thirty minutes. In the peculiar mating dance of two master politicians, feelers were extended and intentions signaled, but offers were neither made nor answered.
Piecing together what happened during the bewitching half day that followed that first meeting provides an object lesson in subjective memory and historical legend building. Governors and senators, labor bosses, and campaign aides all offered their recollections, shaded by time, festering hatreds, and other reminiscences they had read or heard. If each was to be believed, several people were two places at once, offering contradictory advice to people they had never met but who took it nonetheless. Were there two, three, or four meetings between Bobby and the Johnson team, and was each an octave angrier? Was the kingmaker Washington Post publisher Phil Graham, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, future Texas governor John Connally, or Lady Bird Johnson? Did an LBJ aide really hide in the closet taking notes while Lyndon was meeting with Bobby? Was Johnson shaking and teary-eyed when he thought JFK might be backing out of his offer?
What mattered to JFK was not the theatrics but the raw politics. LBJ had proved in the primaries what a nettlesome if ultimately ineffective adversary he could be. Better to have him as a vice president who could be controlled than a Senate majority leader with the capacity to stymie the president’s legislative program. “Embrace your enemy” had always been at the top of the list of Kennedy commandments. Knowing how wary his aides were of Johnson, JFK offered this fateful assurance: “I’m forty-three years old, and I’m the healthiest candidate for President in the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to know that. I’m not going to die in office. So the Vice-Presidency doesn’t mean anything.”
LBJ was unsure about his own health after his cardiac attack, and he knew of all the other men in his family tree who’d died too young thanks to weak hearts. The vice presidency and the presidency itself would be less stressful than the job of majority leader, Lady Bird told him. Knowing what he did about JFK’s health, Johnson thought it unlikely that Kennedy would survive two full terms. Johnson had actually had his staff pore through history books to determine how many vice presidents had become president (ten) and how many presidents had died in office (seven). He had been angling for the White House even longer than JFK had, and it remained his driving ambition, but the closest he could come for now was the office next door. He wouldn’t have to give up his Senate seat to run with JFK. Even his mentor Sam Rayburn, who started out saying “never” because he thought the vice presidency mattered less than being majority leader, now thought he should, because having LBJ on the ticket seemed like the only way for the Democrats to reclaim the White House.
The morning of his visit to LBJ’s suite, Jack had asked Bobby for an equally sober-minded calculation: If you added the votes of New England to those of the solid South, how many more would be needed to win the election? (The arithmetic was so convincing that Bobby couldn’t find a way around it.) Still, JFK had nagging doubts about LBJ, which grew as the day of decision advanced. So in the middle of the afternoon Bobby trekked to the seventh floor, where he had already been at least once before that day, this time to see if LBJ might want to avoid an angry battle on th
e convention floor by taking his name out of consideration. He offered to make Johnson chairman of the Democratic National Committee, one of the biggest patronage plums in Washington and one that would let him hold his job as majority leader while playing a crucial role in the election. That last pilgrimage to the Johnson suite became the most hotly debated of the day’s muddled events. Jack would say that by then he had resolved to take Johnson, having made up his mind at the same time Bobby was trying to change LBJ’s. Lyndon and his defenders would speculate that Bobby was acting on his own, out of hatred.
Bobby flatly denied that: “Obviously, with the close relationship between my brother and I, [I] wasn’t going down to see if he would withdraw just as a lark on my own.” His denials couldn’t always be taken at face value, as he proved when he lied about Jack’s Addison’s disease. But here it fit a pattern. JFK used Bobby for the toughest assignments, even though he knew that Bobby’s passion might spell trouble. He never sent his brother on a fool’s mission. Testing how much LBJ wanted the job served Jack’s purpose. If he pulled out, Kennedy could still tell conservatives that he had tried, while reassuring liberals that he was on their side. Then he’d pick a vice president he actually liked, such as Missouri senator Symington. If LBJ said yes to the second spot, Jack could save face, which is exactly how it turned out. “I didn’t really offer the nomination to Lyndon Johnson. I just held it out to here,” JFK told reporter Charles Bartlett, stretching his hand several inches from his jacket pocket and suggesting that LBJ had grabbed for it. When the Massachusetts Democrat made his choice official at a press conference late that afternoon, the news was greeted with what The New York Times called “gasps of surprise.” The next day, Kennedy fed his buddy Bartlett this postscript: “I hear your editors are upset because you said that Symington was going to be the vice president. Well, you can tell them if they’re surprised, so am I.”
As for Bobby, he got the short straw. Reporters and historians speculated that he was at best his brother’s errand boy, at worst an enforcer whom Jack had to keep on a leash. JFK was the decider, but Bobby functioned as his alter ego and master tactician. He would never be cut out on a matter this essential. As if to confirm the point, the newly anointed nominee picked his brother as the liaison that day, first with liberals, then with big labor, and finally with LBJ. Yet it served Johnson’s ego to blame the second thoughts not on his good friend Jack, but on snotnosed Bobby. It was, as even he sensed, an unfair judgment, which helps explain why he remained so insecure both as JFK’s vice president and as his successor. It also doomed any chance that LBJ and RFK would get along. Bobby was too loyal to Jack to question his brother’s spin on picking his vice president, but that allegiance is precisely why the younger brother never would have defied the elder once he made that decision. “Even if Jack wanted to give the Vice-Presidency to Eleanor Roosevelt,” said family friend Dave Powers, “Bobby probably would have said all right.”
Only Joe Kennedy, the unsentimental patriarch, managed to maintain perspective. Not long after the vice presidential pick was finalized, Jack and Bobby drove to the Spanish mansion in Beverly Hills that their father had borrowed from the film star Marion Davies, far from the media spotlight. The two sons were downcast, but not Joe. He greeted them in the doorway in a velvet smoking jacket and slippers, offering these prophetic words: “Don’t worry, Jack. In two weeks they’ll be saying it’s the smartest thing you ever did.”
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FOR THE THREE-AND-A-HALF-MONTH general election campaign, Bobby relied on the playbook he had been fine-tuning since Jack’s first run for Congress, now applied in fifty states and four hundred thirty-five congressional districts. As the race geared up, Bobby dropped in at headquarters, which was housed in three large buildings in Washington. He was shocked that so many staffers were isolated in offices, removed from voters and the grassroots campaign, and he ordered everyone to “stop what they’re doing and get out on the road,” recalled Milton Gwirtzman, a young lawyer who was meeting him for the first time and would become an aide to all three Kennedy brothers. “No one told them where to go, they just were told that they all had to go on the road. Of course, very few did.” Outbursts like those made their way back to the press, leading one national magazine to conclude that Bobby ran Jack’s campaign “the way Captain Ahab ran the Pequod.”
Time was the enemy now, with so much to do. “We can rest in November,” he told anyone he thought wasn’t working at his hurricane speed. He wanted everything done now. He was especially intolerant of the lazy political pros that Boston called Dearos and whose counterparts he was finding in every city he visited. After three days of powwows with fragmented Democrats in New York, he ran out of patience. “Gentlemen, I don’t give a damn if the state and county organizations survive after November, and I don’t give a damn if you survive. I want to elect John F. Kennedy,” he told the reformers. He had an equally unequivocal message for the bosses: “The only thing I’m interested in is electing Senator Kennedy for president.” He loved to deliver speeches like that standing on a chair. His audiences everywhere reacted with undisguised horror followed by frantic action. In New York, the factions from Tammany Hall joined forces with Eleanor Roosevelt reformers just long enough to help Jack carry the Empire State’s forty-five electoral votes, the most in the nation.
Issues mattered less than they should have in 1960, and less than they had in any presidential campaign in memory. America was on the cusp, not quite ready to say goodbye to the reassuring do-nothingness of the Eisenhower boom nor to welcome the sexual, cultural, and political revolutions that would become the hallmarks of the 1960s. So it had it both ways, embracing The Flintstones and Ben-Hur along with the Twist, the Playboy Club, and the Pill. The Kennedys likewise hedged their bets. Bobby pushed for a strong civil rights platform in Los Angeles, which was either a change of heart or opportunism, since on more than one key civil rights vote, Vice President Nixon had stood up to Southern Democrats while Senator Kennedy stood with them. On foreign policy, the Democrat called for closing an imagined missile gap with the Soviet Union, backing “liberty-loving Cubans who are leading the resistance to Castro,” and otherwise outpacing the Republicans in waging a Cold War against Communism. “Of course I preferred JFK to Nixon, but I was not bowled over,” said Harrison Salisbury, who had headed The New York Times’s Moscow bureau. “I am afraid I took to calling Jack ‘a lace curtain Nixon.’ It was not unfair. Under the skin the politics of the two men did not differ much.”
Bobby cared about solving problems but believed the time to talk about that was after you’d won. He also knew that if the election were decided on experience, Nixon’s eight years as vice president would trump anything either candidate had done in the House or Senate. So he tried to frame the campaign around style and hope, themes that had worked against Lodge, Humphrey, and Johnson, all of whom, like Nixon, presented as weighty, steady, and boring. Leaflets that described Jack as fresher and bolder couldn’t get him far enough fast enough, however, and the country was too big for personal appearances to work the way they had in Massachusetts. Bobby realized almost as early as Jack that they had to get him on television side by side with his unhandsome opponent.
Debates have become so central to American politics that it is easy to forget that 1960 was not just the first time the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees had faced off on television, but the first time major party nominees had debated anywhere. Still, Richard Nixon was no TV neophyte. In 1952 he salvaged his place on Eisenhower’s ticket when sixty million Americans tuned in to hear him try to defend his $18,000 political slush fund and instead were beguiled by his story of a gift he wouldn’t give back: a cocker spaniel named Checkers. But Nixon hadn’t grown up around cameras as Jack and Bobby had, with their dad taking home movies to make his children comfortable around a medium he realized would dominate politics.*5 Nixon couldn’t match Jack’s affable style. And Nixon wasn’t the master of chicanery, not yet, although he would learn from the
Kennedys.
Shortly before the candidates went on the air for their first of four debates, as seventy million viewers were warming up their sets, Jack declined a CBS producer’s offer of theatrical makeup. Nixon heard that and, not wanting to seem less manly, he declined as well. He hadn’t noticed that Kennedy had a deep tan after campaigning in the California sunshine. He couldn’t know that a TV-savvy aide was about to apply makeup in Kennedy’s dressing room. All Nixon managed was a dab of Lazy-Shave powder procured at a nearby drugstore. When a Nixon aide asked how his candidate looked, Bobby carefully appraised the vice president’s beard stubble, his pallid skin, and a haggardness that bore witness to his recent hospitalization for a knee infection. “Terrific! Terrific! I wouldn’t change a thing!” Bobby dissembled. Then he turned to Jack with one last snippet of advice: “Kick him in the balls.”
The debates reversed the relative positions of the contestants, pushing Nixon from the role of presumptive president to that of marginal underdog. Jack not only belonged on the same stage as the vice president, he shone much brighter. The senator spoke to the cameras and to America while the vice president played to a nonexistent panel of judges. Kennedy was relishing the encounter, or made it seem so; the vice president glowered, his shirt hanging loose around his still sickly torso, looking nothing like his trademark combative, confident self. Pollsters agreed that most voters who decided based on the TV duels picked Jack. The Massachusetts Democrat “maintained an expression of gravity suitable for a candidate for the highest office in the land,” the obsessively fair-minded New York Times wrote after the first debate. By contrast, “Mr. Nixon, wearing pancake makeup to cover his dark beard, smiled more frequently as he made his points and dabbed frequently at the perspiration that beaded out on his chin.” But while the rest of Team Kennedy celebrated, Bobby knew that three and a half weeks remained in the campaign and the postdebate bounce was sure to flatten out. He relentlessly prepared for election day, repeating his mantra that the stakes were nothing less than life and death. More quietly, he decided it was time to open his bag of tricks.