Boston vs. Austin
It started innocently
enough. Bobby Kennedy, gearing up in the fall of 1959 to manage his brother's
upcoming presidential run, visited Lyndon Johnson's Texas ranch to inquire
after the Senate majority leader's presidential ambitions. Johnson assured the
younger man that he had none. Then, as was his wont, Johnson took his guest
hunting. Bobby, a Navy vet who never saw action in World War II, fixed a deer
in his sights, squeezed the trigger--and landed flat on his back from the
recoil. "Son," said Johnson, helping him up with a smirk, "you've got to learn
to handle a gun like a man." He went on to break his word by giving Jack
Kennedy a fight for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination.
Bobby
Kennedy never forgave Johnson the slight, loathing him to the end. Johnson, for
his part, never gave up trying to knock Kennedy on his ass. And while their
feud may not have defined a decade, as Jeff Shesol claims in this wonderfully
entertaining, original, and exceptionally researched book, it certainly makes
for a hell of a gripping yarn.
It is hard to imagine two politicians more opposed in
temperament than Lyndon Baines Johnson and Robert Francis Kennedy. Kennedy was
supremely self-confident and unyielding. Johnson was self-pitying and prone to
the blackest paranoia. (For his paranoia, readers owe the 36 th
president a debt. Johnson recorded just about every telephone call he ever
placed, and Shesol deploys impressive documentary gifts to knock the resulting
transcripts into one of the most intimate portraits of the inner life of a
White House yet committed to print.) The kinds of things Johnson reveled
in--locker-room talk and stiff belts of whiskey, the "muted grays" of the
Senate's well-turned compromises, even his own hard-earned influence and
wealth--were the kinds of things against which the Harvard-educated Kennedy
defined his very identity.
Indeed,
one senses that nothing less than the deepest matters of personal identity
fueled their intense and bitter rivalry. The Bostonian must have sensed that,
compared with the Texan, he came off as snobbish, petulant, and obtusely rich.
Kennedy certainly made Johnson feel like a wheedling country bumpkin who was
unable to pick out the right suit jacket. Kennedy, who cherished his very own
LBJ voodoo doll, called Johnson "mean, bitter, and vicious--an animal in many
ways." Johnson found Kennedy a "little shitass" and a "grandstanding little
runt." It is not surprising that they didn't care to be in the same place at
the same time.
But circumstances forever conspired to place
them in the same place at the same time: namely, in John F. Kennedy's shadow.
Their enmity began in earnest at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los
Angeles, where JFK decisively turned back Johnson's last-minute bid for the
nomination. Not, however, before Johnson's reckless attempt to derail him by
reminding delegates of rumors that Joseph Kennedy Sr., while he was ambassador
to England, had appeased Hitler. Now protocol demanded that JFK offer Johnson
the second spot on the ticket, and honor demanded that Johnson, given that he
had insulted the candidate's father, turn Kennedy down.
Instead,
Johnson accepted. Bobby was given the unenviable job of marching into Johnson's
hotel suite to talk him out of it. To make a long story--it takes up the
greater part of a gripping chapter--short: The dust lifted with Lyndon, the
vice-presidential candidate, loathing Bobby for plotting against him (here was
Lyndon's paranoia, or maybe his ability to spot the hustle); and Bobby, the
campaign manager, loathing Lyndon for having the audacity to take a job for
which he knew he wasn't the first choice (here was Bobby's East Coast
arrogance, or maybe his idealism). Thither to the White House, where Attorney
General Kennedy, whose only previous public service had been as lawyer for two
Senate committees, earned from journalists the label "assistant president" for
his ubiquity at the highest levels of executive influence; while Vice President
Johnson, who practically ran the government from his Senate chamber in the
1950s, found himself so insignificant that he was only informed of Cabinet
meetings five minutes in advance.
JFK's assassination changed everything but the feud, which
only intensified as the martyr's shadow loomed ever larger. In his grief, each
man blamed the other for the tragedy. Bobby had been point man for the
administration's Cuban counterinsurgency program--whose activities, Lyndon
insisted privately, had certainly brought on the assassination as an act of
revenge from Castro. Q.E.D.: Bobby killed Jack. And Lyndon, thought Bobby, was
responsible for his brother's being in Dallas at all--to heal a wound in the
Texas Democratic Party that Lyndon should never have let fester in the first
place. Q.E.D.: Lyndon killed Jack. The executive branch clearly wasn't big
enough for the two of them, and Kennedy wisely decamped for his successful
Senate run. Johnson, for his part, seriously considered dropping out of the
1964 election altogether, foreshadowing his 1968 decision not to seek
re-election.
Up to this
point, Shesol's book is nearly flawless (though Texan readers might be forgiven
for wondering whether Shesol doesn't tip his evidence a little to favor Boston
over Austin). When the chronicle enters the second half of the '60s, however,
it loses a little of its aplomb. This is the period when a single
issue--Vietnam--came to trump all others in establishing the political order of
battle. With President Johnson's Great Society sluicing off up to $2 billion
per month in expenditures on Vietnam, and Sen. Kennedy being elevated, for
better or for worse, to the role of standard-bearer for a generation repulsed
by America's imperial presumptions, the antagonists became symbols for opposing
forces larger than either man could discern. By the time they faced each other
for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, the story had outgrown the
back-room atmospherics Shesol excels in reconstructing.
This is perhaps why the lesson that Shesol
draws from the denouement of the Kennedy-Johnson feud feels so unsatisfying. He
claims that Kennedy is the archetype of today's "New Democrat." This is not a
completely untenable proposition, since, as Shesol demonstrates, toward the end
of his life Kennedy began to experiment with some uncannily Clintonesque
gestures, such as financing urban renewal through market-based public-private
partnerships. It is, however, hard to square Bobby Kennedy, whose
characteristic response to Johnson's poverty proposals was that they didn't go
far enough, with the end of welfare as we know it. And Shesol overlooks a far
more abiding division in contemporary politics than those that divide today's
Democrats. Like so much that polarizes us these days, it is more cultural than
strictly political.
Take a
remarkable statistic that Shesol cites but lets pass relatively unexamined. In
May 1967, Gallup found that the number of people who said they "intensely
disliked" RFK--who was also probably more intensely liked than any other
practicing politician--was twice as high as the number who intensely disliked
Johnson, the architect of the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. Exactly
who reviled the young senator to such a degree is not broken down further. But
it is easy to guess. Consider the results of another poll, this one from 1964,
in which Louis Harris found that RFK's presence on a Democratic ticket would
gravely hurt the party's chances in the South and border states, among
businessmen, and among fence-sitters in both parties.
That is a rough description of what Kevin Phillips later
called the emerging Republican majority: the crowd whose voting habits were
molded by the act of detesting the likes of Bobby Kennedy--politicians who
never worked a day in their lives, who were eager (so the perception went) to
oppress the plain folk with burdensome taxes in order to fatten the undeserving
poor, eager to sell out America's military supremacy out of some guilt-ridden
moralism. Politicians who seemed not to know how to handle rifles like men. By
1968, that annus horribilis when Johnson cracked from the pressure of
mediating an increasingly centripetal Democratic Party and Kennedy fell to an
assassin's bullet, two political ideal-types had solidified: a "silent
majority" who supported Johnson's war on Vietnam and voted in Richard Nixon,
and a "new class" of liberal professionals and youth who supported Johnson's
war on poverty but detested everything Richard Nixon represented.
This is the mutual
contempt, hinted at but not developed in this valuable book, that haunts us
today.
