Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (8 page)

Jack and Bobby went to the convention in Los Angeles in July hopeful but uncertain about gaining the prize. Johnson had emerged as their principal rival. After their encounter with him in 1956 and Bobby’s humiliating visit to his ranch in 1959, the Kennedys were angry at Johnson and privately denounced him as a “chronic liar” whose pronouncements on his noncandidacy were nothing more than a political ploy.

The antagonism intensified when Texas governor John Connally, Johnson’s campaign manager, used a press conference to describe Kennedy as suffering from Addison’s disease and unfit to serve as president. Johnson himself attacked Joe Kennedy as a “Chamberlain umbrella policy man.” Before traveling to Los Angeles, Johnson conferred with Eisenhower at the White House. He urged the president to come out against Kennedy’s nomination, describing him as “a dangerous man” whose lack of foreign policy experience could jeopardize the country’s security. When Bobby learned of Johnson’s attacks on his brother, he exploded at Bobby Baker, Johnson’s Senate aide: “Lyndon Johnson has compared my father to the Nazis, and John Connally . . . lied by saying that my brother was dying of Addison’s disease. You Johnson people are running a stinking damned campaign and you’ll get yours when the time comes.”

It was an empty threat. As soon as Jack won the nomination, he decided to invite Johnson to join the ticket. Of all the several possible running mates, Johnson seemed the most likely to help Jack get elected. Moreover, he was every bit as qualified as Jack or any of the other senators—Humphrey, Stuart Symington of Missouri, or Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington—to step in as president should that unlikely development occur. The South was Jack’s weakest electoral region: His Catholicism and identification with civil rights causes, which he had encouraged to ensure support from the party’s liberal base, made him vulnerable in the old Confederacy. Johnson seemed able to help hold some, if not all, of the southern states, especially Texas with its largest number of southern electoral votes. Finally, as a very seasoned politician with twenty-five years in Washington as a congressional aide and House and Senate member, Johnson had the potential to become a valuable Kennedy adviser.

Bobby was unhappy about the choice. He had been assuring liberals at the convention that Johnson was not in the running for the second spot. It may have been good pre-nomination politics to keep the liberals, who saw Johnson as too conservative, in line. But Bobby’s personal antagonism toward Johnson gave a ring of truth to his assurances. Moreover, Bobby’s later recollections of how Johnson joined the ticket echoed his resistance to the selection. He remembered that Jack offered Johnson the nomination in the belief that he would turn it down. According to Bobby, it was Jack’s way of stroking Johnson’s outsized ego and winning his goodwill for the national campaign.

As word spread at the convention that Jack was offering Johnson the vice presidency, Bobby told liberals that they were shocked when Johnson accepted. But Jack and Bobby may have invented this story to appease Johnson’s opponents, who threatened to fight Johnson’s selection on the floor of the convention. To soften liberal resistance, Jack and Bobby argued that Johnson as vice president would make him easier to control than having him as majority leader, where he could play havoc with a liberal legislative program. The Kennedys also told liberals that once they learned how resistant they were to Johnson’s selection they tried to persuade him to serve as the party’s national chairman instead. But Bobby reported that when he made Johnson the offer, he seemed on the verge of tears and refused. He declared himself ready to fight for the VP nomination if Jack would support him. Bobby said that he then acknowledged Jack’s willingness to stay with his decision to put Johnson on the ticket.

The truth of exactly what happened will never be known. It is plausible that Bobby pressed the case against Johnson with his brother, but in a show of determination to follow his own counsel and set a pattern for how he would function as president, Jack rejected Bobby’s advice. It was no measure of Jack’s continuing regard for Bobby’s importance in his campaign and future influence at the White House.

Once Jack had the nomination, it was a foregone conclusion that Bobby would run the campaign. Bobby’s operation in 1952 had made “every politician in Massachusetts . . . mad at Bobby,” Jack said, “but we had the best organization in history.” Bobby intended to replicate the experience in 1960. His technique was to demand unrelenting effort from everyone without regard for their needs: “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,” he told New York’s feuding Democrats. “I want to elect John F. Kennedy.” He had “all the patience of a vulture,” a journalist said. He sent Paul Corbin, a political aide, to upstate New York to bring the warring factions into line. Like Bobby, he had few scruples about winning: He promised the ambassadorship in Quito, Ecuador, to three people until someone told him: “There were nineteen republics down there, and he could at least spread his offers around.”

Bobby showed no deference to anyone: Governors, mayors, congressmen—they were all subjected to the same insistent pressure for results in advancing Jack’s candidacy. Adlai Stevenson privately called Bobby the “Black Prince.” Eisenhower, who saw Jack as the self-indulgent son of a rich man, called Jack “Little Boy Blue.” He would leave the dirty work of the campaign to his brother, just as Ike, who knew something about relying on a subordinate to sling mud and bring people in line, had left it to Nixon. Eisenhower described Bobby as “that little shit.” Former president Truman told Bobby to moderate his behavior, and that being a “son of a bitch” made people angry and might be doing more to undermine than serve the campaign.

Bobby was not convinced. He continued to be a son of a bitch, mindful that Truman had succeeded by being the same. “I’m not running a popularity contest,” he protested. Getting people mad at him went with the job of being campaign manager. “It doesn’t matter if they like me or not. Jack can be nice to them,” Bobby said. A journalist called it a “sweet-and-sour brother act, Jack uses his charm and waves the carrot and then Bobby wades in with the big stick.”

The contrast between the two brothers was summed up by Eleanor Roosevelt’s evolving view of Jack. He traveled to Hyde Park, New York, the Roosevelt home, to disarm her doubts about his liberalism. His charm campaign worked. She came away from the meeting convinced that he was someone capable of learning. “I liked him better than I ever had before,” she wrote a friend, “because he seemed so little cock-sure, and I think he has a mind that is open to new ideas.” She did not hold Bobby in similar regard. But he stayed away from her, and like Truman, she muted whatever doubts she had about the Kennedys, because the idea of Nixon as president was more than either of them could bear. “I never liked Kennedy,” Truman said. “I hate his father. Kennedy wasn’t so great as a Senator. . . . However, that no-good son-of-a-bitch Dick Nixon called me a Communist and I’ll do anything to beat him.” Mrs. Roosevelt felt the same way.

For all his toughness, Bobby had a deeply ingrained sense of morality that occasionally trumped his ruthless side or eclipsed his political calculations. Segregation offended him. Although he understood that they had to tread lightly in dealing with the white South, he considered its treatment of blacks morally and legally unjust and reprehensible. He insisted on a strong civil rights plank in the party’s platform, and when he visited Georgia during the campaign, he refused to attend a dinner unless blacks were included. Political considerations were not absent from Bobby’s actions. In taking a stand on civil rights, he appreciated that most southerners would find it difficult to vote for a Republican president and that black votes in northern states could make a difference in places like Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Yet political assessments could not trump visceral antagonism to racial abuse. The imprisonment of Martin Luther King in October with a sentence of four months’ hard labor for a minor traffic infraction confronted Jack and Bobby with a moral dilemma. Mrs. Coretta Scott King, who was five months pregnant and terrified that her husband would be killed in prison, asked Harris Wofford, Jack’s civil rights representative, to intervene. When Jack called Mrs. King to sympathize with her and send an indirect message to King’s jailers, Bobby told the campaign aides he thought responsible for Jack’s gesture that three southern governors would now probably support Nixon and that would probably cost them the election. When he learned about the trumped-up charge justifying King’s sentence, however, Bobby called the responsible judge to complain, telling him as a lawyer who knew something about the rights of defendants that it was “disgraceful” to deny King the right to make bond. The judge released King the next day, with the unpredictable result that black voters moved decisively into Jack’s column. More was at work here, however, than Bobby’s indignation. Jack had made the initial contact to the judge through Georgia’s governor, Ernest Vandiver, who was eager to see Kennedy become president. After a mutual friend of the judge and the governor called the judge, he agreed to release King if Jack or Bobby gave him cover with a phone call.

Not everything worked out as the Kennedys had hoped, though, and Jack and Bobby had their differences in the course of the campaign. When a reporter on the campaign trail who provoked Bobby’s wrath complained, “That brother of yours has no manners,” Jack replied, “Ignore him.” Despite the problems, at the end of the day they won, however close the margin. And Jack knew that Bobby, who had given unstintingly to the campaign, was a driving force in their success. “He’s the hardest worker. He’s the greatest organizer,” Jack said later. “Bobby’s easily the best man I’ve ever seen.”

With Jack exhausted after the election and taking a little time to recuperate, Bobby became the principal manager of the transition. “It is Bobby . . . who will be the new man-to-see in Washington,”
Newsweek
reported on November 21, sixteen days after the election. But just what place Bobby would hold in the new administration became a topic of speculation. He seemed a logical choice for chief of staff, but two considerations worked against it: Bobby did not want to work directly under Jack; nor did it appeal to Jack. As Jack was well aware, Bobby could be abrasive, and so close a working relationship seemed bound to produce tensions and arguments that both of them wished to avoid. Second, making Bobby the chief meant bypassing other aides who felt they had a claim on the job. So it seemed best to name no one and let Jack be his own chief and use the people around him on a day-to-day basis as he saw fit.

On November 19, Jack casually mentioned to a
New York Times
reporter the possibility that he might ask Bobby to become attorney general. It was a calculated conversation, an attempt to sound out press and public reaction, or more to the point, to prepare the press and public for Bobby’s elevation to a central place in the administration. The response was swift and uniformly negative: The
Times
dismissed the idea as a politicization of an office that should be above politics. Bobby had been Jack’s “political manager” and “no matter how bright or how young or how personally loyal” he was to his brother, the attorney general’s office “ought to be kept completely out of the political arena.” Others warned that Bobby’s appointment would provoke charges of nepotism and complaints about making someone so young—Bobby was only thirty-five—and inexperienced in the practice of law the chief legal officer of the United States. Of course, every high administration appointment partly rested on rewarding political supporters. But the need for the appearance of impartiality at the Justice Department made Bobby’s selection a serious political liability.

In sounding out opinion, Jack was doing more than testing the waters; he was preparing the ground for Bobby’s appointment. Bobby encouraged speculation that he was interested in getting out of Washington and Jack’s shadow by considering a run for Massachusetts governor or becoming a university president. Or if he remained in government, he thought it would be best to steer clear of the attorney general’s job: He said it “would be a very bad mistake.” As attorney general he would become the administration’s advocate on civil rights, which would enrage southerners and turn them against Jack, who inevitably would be identified with his brother. If he remained in Washington, Bobby thought it should be as an undersecretary of defense or an assistant secretary of state. But his credentials for either of those jobs were even less than those for becoming attorney general.

All this, however, was posturing on Bobby’s part. After his central role in getting Jack to the White House, it was inconceivable that he was going to take his distance from the Oval Office—either by leaving town or by serving in a subcabinet position at Defense or State. As Connecticut governor Abe Ribicoff told Jack, “I have now watched you Kennedy brothers for five solid years and I notice that every time you face a crisis, you automatically turn to Bobby. You’re out of the same womb. There’s empathy. You understand one another. You’re not going to be able to be President without using Bobby all the time.” The talk about Bobby leaving Washington or becoming a subordinate national security official reflected Jack’s sensitivity to making a close relative a key member of the administration. It would be an unwelcome start to his administration.

To disarm criticism of Bobby’s appointment, Jack leaked stories that he had offered the attorney general’s post to Ribicoff and Adlai Stevenson. But it was done with the understanding that neither of them would take it. To further blunt complaints about Bobby’s appointment, Jack and Bobby encouraged the belief that their father forced the decision on them. They even went so far as to ask Clark Clifford to see Joe in New York to persuade him to drop the idea. The request amazed Clifford, who thought it “truly a strange assignment.” Joe, who was in on the ploy, played his part to the hilt, telling Clifford that he would not back down: “I am going to see to it that Bobby gets the same chance that we gave to Jack.”