Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  After JFK secured the nomination, he offered Johnson the vice presidential slot. Johnson accepted it, and then Bobby—apparently on his own authority, or because of a miscommunication with his brother—attempted to rescind it. The story leaked widely and caused Johnson considerable embarrassment, for which he never forgave RFK.

  As vice president, Johnson stoically and without public complaint weathered almost three years of endless humiliation at the hand of Bobby Kennedy. Though JFK insisted that his staff members accord LBJ all of the consideration and courtesy due to the vice president, Bobby and his loyalists were uniformly dismissive and impolite. They frequently disregarded instructions that LBJ be included in key policy and security conclaves. At cabinet and interagency meetings, Bobby took every opportunity to single out the vice president for a public scolding. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson were rarely granted invitations to parties at Hickory Hill, Bobby’s estate in Northern Virginia and the unofficial social capital of the New Frontier. On those few occasions when they were included, Ethel Kennedy seated them at the “losers’ table.” Hugh Sidey, a leading journalist, recalled their treatment at Hickory Hill as “just awful . . . inexcusable, really.” At one party, staff aides presented Bobby with a cloth effigy of Johnson, with pins sticking out of it. The story inevitably got back to LBJ. On another occasion, Johnson attended a small gathering of Kennedy staff members and appointees. When he attempted to exchange greetings with Ron Linton, a senior Pentagon official, and John Reilly, the president’s nominee to chair the Federal Trade Commission, the two men continued in private conversation as though LBJ were invisible. Observing that Johnson had retreated in search of someone who might deign to speak with him, Linton thought better of their brush-off. “John,” he told Reilly, “I think we just insulted the vice president of the United States.”

  “Fuck ’im,” Reilly replied loudly.

  Johnson stopped dead in his tracks and turned for a moment toward the men, wearing an icy, defiant scowl. He said nothing and walked away. (Just weeks after the encounter, Lyndon Johnson would take the oath of office at Love Field.)

  Dick Goodwin later observed that “Bobby symbolized everything Johnson hated. He became the symbol of all the things Johnson wasn’t . . . with these characteristics of wealth and power and ease and Eastern elegance; with Johnson always looking at himself as the guy they thought was illiterate, rude, crude. They laughed at him behind his back. I think he felt all of that.” Johnson miserably accepted that such disgrace would be his lot in life for eight years—unless the Kennedys dumped him from the ticket in 1964, a fear that haunted him nightly. It was an open secret that Bobby coveted the 1968 nomination for himself. He was, according to all the newsmagazines, the “No. 2” man in Washington. “When this fellow looks at me,” said the actual No. 2 man, “he looks at me like he’s going to look a hole right through me, like I’m a spy or something.”

  In a particular moment of weakness, the vice president cornered Bobby inside the White House residence and pleaded, “I don’t understand you, Bobby. Your father likes me. Your brother likes me. But you don’t like me. Now, why? Why don’t you like me?” According to a bystander, RFK “agreed to the accuracy of all this.” It was the ultimate twist of the knife.

  When, on November 22, 1963, fate reversed their fortunes, Johnson tried at first and of necessity to be gracious to the man who was now his attorney general. He had to serve out John Kennedy’s remaining thirteen months in office before he could lay claim to his own mandate. But the relationship, already bad, grew poisonous from the first instance. Bobby deeply resented that LBJ insisted on flying back from Dallas on Air Force One, rather than on the vice presidential plane, and he believed—though he was not entirely correct—that LBJ had treated Jackie Kennedy shabbily that day. While LBJ consciously avoided the Oval Office until after President Kennedy had been buried, on the morning of November 23 he instructed JFK’s secretary to clear out her office so that his secretaries could move in, a callous gesture that inevitably traveled back to Bobby. That afternoon, RFK observed his brother’s iconic rocking chair stacked upside down in the corridor. Unaware that it had been removed before the assassination so that a new carpet could be installed in the Oval, he assumed incorrectly that Johnson had already begun installing his furniture and belongings. For the next several weeks, he would show up late to cabinet meetings and openly brood or stare with open aggression at the sight of the new president sitting in his brother’s seat. “Our President was a gentleman and a human being,” Bobby told an interviewer in confidence. “This man is not. . . . He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.”

  Despite his hatred for Johnson, Bobby was eager to reclaim the Kennedy family’s power base and made overtures for the vice presidential spot in 1964. When LBJ turned him down, Bobby resigned his post and ran for the Senate in New York. It proved a tougher race than everyone expected. In the closing days, RFK had to swallow his pride and ask the president—who was then riding high and on his way to a landslide victory against Barry Goldwater—to campaign with him in the Empire State. The photographs show a very glum Senate candidate hating every minute of their joint appearance. Yet in 1965, even at the height of his power, LBJ feared that his onetime tormentor would swerve to the left and challenge him for the presidency in 1968. Goodwin thought that the president was “always afraid of Bobby. It was more than hatred. It was fear.”

  Johnson’s concern was not entirely misplaced. Very late to the twin causes of civil rights and the War on Poverty, RFK—who earned a reputation as a relatively conservative anticommunist during his formative years as a Senate aide in the 1950s—now reinvented himself as a liberal. “What does [Johnson] know about people who’ve got no jobs, or are undereducated?” he asked Dick Goodwin in a remarkable display of cognitive dissonance. “He’s got no feeling for people who are hungry. It’s up to us.” In the wake of his brother’s death, and as a freshman senator from New York—a state whose impoverished urban ghettos and rural hamlets stood in stark contrast to prosperous neighborhoods in Manhattan, Westchester, and the suburbs of Long Island—RFK developed genuine concern for the plight of poor people and minorities. But it stung Johnson loyalists when Kennedy denounced Johnson’s urban policies. “It’s too little, it’s nothing,” RFK barked at senior administration officials during an intimate dinner party. “We have to do twenty times as much.” In early 1967, Bobby and two other members of the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty embarked on a widely publicized fact-finding trip to study food insecurity. Though Johnson had vastly expanded food support programs for poor children and families, the press lavished attention on Bobby’s pained expression as he shook hands with starving farmers and city dwellers. The empathy was real. As Marian Wright, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, later observed, he “did things that I wouldn’t do. He went into the dirtiest, filthiest, poorest black homes . . . and he would sit with a baby who had open sores . . . I wouldn’t do that! I didn’t do that!” Johnson, who had become almost “paranoiac” about the prospect that Bobby might challenge him from the left, dug his heels in and resisted Kennedy’s call for an expansion of the administration’s food stamp program. Liberals scorned the president for placing politics above policy—“Why would he respond so coldly when he knows thousands of desperate people are depending on him for relief?” the Nation asked rhetorically. “Because, simply, he is incapable of rising above personal politics. Look at the subcommittee that made the request: one man he hates (Robert F. Kennedy); one man he thoroughly dislikes (Edward M. Kennedy).” Bobby, the editors asserted, “could put aside personal politics for mercy’s sake. . . . President Johnson could not.”

  It was not just intense abhorrence or fear of Bobby Kennedy that drove Lyndon Johnson. On the contrary, as Califano explained in a private memorandum, the secretary of agriculture—whose department administered food stamps—did “not want to upset the entire program by either giving food to these negro
es in the delta or by lowering the amount of money they have to pay for food stamps until he has the food stamp program through Congress.” Typical of senators and congressmen, Kennedy rattled his saber without acknowledging or understanding that the administration faced numerous obstacles in securing funding reauthorization from Congress. A near-cash benefit, food stamps upended traditional patterns of social and economic deference, particularly in the South, and thus engendered opposition from conservative Democrats and Republicans. Equally important, the mounting costs of war—costs that Johnson labored assiduously to hide or obscure—created an imperative to hold the line on domestic spending. The trade-off between Vietnam and the Great Society was one of his own making, but he was not incorrect to hold Bobby Kennedy partially responsible for his bind.

  From 1965 through the end of 1967, Bobby—like many of his Democratic congressional colleagues—attempted to find middle ground on Vietnam. He opposed outright withdrawal, because such “a course would involve a repudiation of commitments undertaken and confirmed by three administrations.” Neither did he advocate an intensification of America’s war effort. “Let us not deceive ourselves: this would be a deep and terrible decision,” he warned. Egged on by his young staff members, who were stridently opposed to the war and vehemently hostile to Johnson, Bobby supported a temporary halt in bombing (“If we regard bombing as the answer in Vietnam, we are headed straight for disaster,” he argued on the Senate floor) and advocated the inclusion of the NLF in negotiations—a position that was sharply at odds with the administration’s position. Permitting the NLF to participate in peace talks “may mean a compromise government.” Newspapers pounced on this line. “Viet Coalition Rule, Including Vietcong Urged by Kennedy,” the New York Times announced. “Ho Chi Kennedy,” the Chicago Tribune offered less charitably. Speaking for the White House, Hubert Humphrey decried Kennedy’s idea as a “dose of arsenic” that would destroy the democratic aspirations of the South Vietnamese people.

  Of LBJ’s aides, Bill Moyers enjoyed the closest relationship with the Kennedys, and by 1966 his seeming dual loyalty was fast becoming a liability. In the wake of Bobby’s call to include the NLF in peace talks and potentially in a coalition government, Moyers strained to close the gap between LBJ and RFK. He telephoned Bobby to assure him (without basis) that the president would ultimately come around to his position and urged the senator to dial back his support for including the NLF in a coalition government—a request with which Kennedy attempted to comply in a series of incoherent follow-up interviews and statements. At the same time, Moyers confided to Johnson that “Kennedy has managed to create the image of division among us, thus escaping the necessity of clarifying his own positions.” To journalists, he offered a tangled assurance that “if Senator Kennedy did not propose a coalition government with Communist participation before elections are held, there is no disagreement.” Moyers was playing a dangerous game, attempting at his own peril to serve two masters at once. It did not escape notice. The Washington Star spoke for a skeptical press corps when it observed that the “Kennedy-Moyers pact did not appear to rest on entirely solid ground.” In fact, Kennedy’s position was tortured. Though in favor of a bombing halt and more favorably inclined to negotiate with the NLF, Bobby was no less willing to lose Vietnam than the president. When college students taunted him with hand-drawn signs that read, KENNEDY: HAWK, DOVE, OR CHICKEN, they mordantly called out his vulnerability. His opposition was rooted more in style (and antagonism to Johnson) than in substance. This point was cold comfort to the president. From his perch in the Senate, Bobby could swerve to LBJ’s left without the burden of offering a substitute plan that would de-escalate the war and free up funding for an expansion of Great Society programs.

  It did not escape LBJ that his press secretary and untitled chief of staff enjoyed a direct line to Bobby and used it liberally. “God . . . he was on the phone every day with Moyers!” marveled Joe Dolan, one of Kennedy’s top aides. “That’s the trouble with all you fellows!” the president once snapped at his press secretary. “You’re in bed with the Kennedys!” Keeping a watchful eye from Bobby’s Senate office, Dolan was every bit as suspicious of the relationship as the president. He wondered how Moyers could possibly “serve two masters” and would later rue that it was not “a proud moment in Robert Kennedy’s life. . . . How does he defend talking to the president’s press secretary when he’s supposed to be at war with the president?” It was especially unhelpful when the New York Times cheerfully observed “interesting parallels between Moyers and Robert Kennedy (the two are, in fact, friendly despite the disaffection between Kennedy and Johnson).”

  On occasion, the president also suspected Harry McPherson of conflicted loyalty. A veteran of his Senate leadership staff, McPherson had begun political life as a Johnson acolyte but glided with ease into the New Frontier, which he served as deputy undersecretary of the army and assistant secretary of state. Sensing early that LBJ looked with disfavor upon his cordial relationship with the Kennedys, he chose an opposite course from Moyers. Rather than try to bridge the personal and political gap between Bobby and the president, he urged Johnson essentially to ignore RFK. He argued that Bobby was an intellectual lightweight and liberal poseur who tacked to the left “to put himself into a position of leadership among liberal Senators, newspapermen, foundation executives, and the like. Most of these people mistrusted him in the past, believing him (rightly) to be a man of narrow sensibilities and totalitarian instincts.” But liberal intellectuals were warming to Bobby and probably would continue to do so, for “as we know the intellectuals are as easy a lay as can be found,” McPherson argued. “The Kennedys are handsome and dashing, they support many good causes. And to some people their rudeness and ruthlessness is exciting. . . . There is an air of tragic loss about them now.” He suggested that there was little use in testing the loyalty of former Kennedy officials who now served in Johnson’s administration, men like McNamara and Katzenbach. “The test of our people should be whether they are smart, imaginative and working to carry out your policies,” he continued. “You have the office, the policies, the personal magnetism, the power to lead and inspire, and above all the power to put good ideas into effect. An obsession with Bobby and of the relationship of your best people to him may, I believe, distort policy and offend the very men you need to attract.”

  McPherson’s advice went unheeded. Throughout 1966 and 1967, the two antagonists alternated between cautious efforts to keep their feud at a low simmer—Johnson was fearful of pushing Bobby into a direct confrontation that might result in a primary challenge in 1968; RFK was wary of appearing too calculating or disloyal to the Democratic Party—and angry flare-ups that made for splashy headlines. Privately, the president’s obsession with Kennedy only intensified. Matters came to a boil in 1967 when William Manchester, a reporter and book editor, published his long-awaited account of JFK’s assassination. In writing The Death of a President, Manchester had exchanged access to Jackie Kennedy for broad editorial rights over his final work. Months before the book’s serial debut in Look magazine, Kennedy aides sounded an alarm. The draft portrayed Lyndon Johnson in a dramatically poor light, so much so that family loyalists feared it would boomerang on Bobby and jeopardize a future presidential bid. An odd sideshow ensued, whereby Jackie sued Manchester in an ill-fated attempt to forestall publication. The author ultimately agreed to modest revisions, but the final work proved no less incendiary. Particularly cruel were chapters that portrayed Johnson and his entourage as boorish interlopers on the flight back from Dallas and in the days leading up to Jack Kennedy’s funeral. Seething with rage, LBJ set his staff about the task of identifying all of the book’s factual errors. But he maintained public silence, preferring to advance his position through targeted, unattributed leaks. “The President, his family and his associates are indignant about this [portrayal],” reported U.S. News, “feeling that he has no recourse, no proper forum, no legitimate way to clear the air and set th
e record straight in connection with derogatory reports that have gained wide credence.” To Moyers, Johnson confided, “I don’t want to debate with them. I don’t think the president of this country, at this time, ought to. It’s just unthinkable that my whole morning would not be spent on Vietnam or anything else but be spent on this kinda stuff.” But this declaration was probably intended for wider dissemination. The president had earlier informed Abe Fortas that he was now convinced that whatever he told Moyers “becomes known to Schlesinger immediately,” and then to William Manchester, and then to liberal columnists and other “agents of the people who want to destroy me.” Johnson was paranoid, but he was not wrong.

  Weeks later, during an official visit to Paris, Bobby accepted an invitation to meet with Étienne Manac’h, a minor official in the French Foreign Office. Accompanied by John Gunther Dean, a State Department official who translated in real time, RFK seemed perplexed as Manac’h relayed word from a source in the North Vietnamese government that were the United States to halt its bombing campaign, Hanoi might agree to peace talks. Bobby thought little of the conversation, which he had trouble following despite simultaneous translation. When he arrived back in the United States, he was stunned to learn that word of the discussion had leaked to Newsweek and the New York Times. While Kennedy was not at fault—Newsweek had learned of the meeting from a low-level State Department official who was in possession of a routine cable that Dean had transmitted—the president and his secretary of state, Dean Rusk, were incensed. As a matter of course, the administration received such “feelers” on a monthly basis. Most were either baseless—the handiwork of amateur legates “eight months pregnant with peace,” as Rusk fumed—or designed to embarrass the government. Rusk’s staff nevertheless pursued each inbound proffer with care. Now Bobby had—seemingly for political glory and gain—presumed to engage in slapdash diplomacy in a stunning violation of the separation of powers. The resulting “diplomatic hubbub,” the New York Times observed, “added another strain to the already taut political relations between President Johnson and Mr. Kennedy.” The Times further informed readers that a subsequent Oval Office meeting between LBJ and RFK “was reported by White House aides to have been serious, even-tempered and constructive, if not precisely fraternal. But it was acknowledged that it had not served to narrow the breach between the two leading figures in the Democratic party.”