The Passage of Power (30 page)

“Come back and see the Speaker of the House when you are,” Sam Rayburn said.

A
ND THAT WAS NOT THE END
of the confusion, because that was not the last of Bobby Kennedy’s trips downstairs.

During the next hour, there was one—the consensus among the accounts makes this the third meeting—at which he met John Connally. Rayburn refused to see him again, so Connally saw him alone.
“It’s
getting worse. You’ve just got to convince Lyndon not to take it.” Connally reiterated Rayburn’s stance, saying that Jack had made the offer, and if the offer was to be withdrawn, it had to be Jack who withdrew it. “I said, ‘This is a very simple matter. All your brother has to do is call Mr. Johnson and say, “I’ve re-evaluated the situation and I want to withdraw the offer.” ’ He said, ‘He can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Why in the hell can’t he? I’ll tell you this: Mr. Johnson’s not going to be persuaded by the conversations that are taking place here.’ ”

Bobby then said—Graham puts the time at
“roughly
, 3:00”—that Jack would phone at once to make the formal offer. No call came, however, and, Graham says, Johnson “was considerably on edge.” Graham telephoned Jack, saying,
“Johnson
hasn’t heard from you, and you’d better call him.” Jack said he had assumed the message—“It’s all set”—he had sent through Graham would suffice, and “He said he’d call at once.” (But he also mentioned again the “opposition to LBJ.” Graham responded that he should
“stop
vacillating,” and, Graham says, Kennedy
“agreed
about the finality of things.”) Rowe went down the hall to Johnson’s suite.
“Just
don’t go wandering,” he told him; Kennedy was about to call. He did, at perhaps 3:30.
“Johnson
took the call sitting on one bed; I was on the other.” Kennedy read Johnson a press release saying he had selected him as the vice presidential nominee.
“Do
you really want me?” Lyndon Johnson said. Rowe says he could hear Kennedy say, “Yes, I do.” “Well, if you really want me, I’ll do it,” Johnson said.

“E
VERYBODY SORT OF RELAXED
, thought it was all settled,” Jim Rowe recalls. A statement accepting the nomination had been typed up, and Johnson was preparing to go out into the corridor, now jammed from wall to wall with reporters, photographers and television lights and cameras, and read it. But, in fact, the worst of the confusion, fueled by hatred, was yet to come. For there was one more trip downstairs by Robert Kennedy, and on this trip he met, alone, with Lyndon Johnson.

Not long, perhaps half an hour, after the phone call from Jack Kennedy to Johnson, Graham and Rowe were sitting in a bedroom down the hall that they
had commandeered, when suddenly, as Rowe recalls it, a young man
“whom
I had never seen before”—it was a young Johnson aide named
Bill Moyers—came running in, yelling,
“Graham,
my God, Bobby is in the room.” Grabbing Graham’s arm, he dragged him out into the crowded corridor, and, pushing through the crowd with Rowe behind them, down the hall to Johnson’s suite, where they learned Bobby Kennedy had just left after being closeted alone with Johnson in the suite’s living room.

The only people who could say what occurred in that room were Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy. In his account of what had happened there, Kennedy let all his hatred and contempt for Johnson spill out.

Therefore, Robert Kennedy said, repeating the offer that Connally and Rayburn say he had made to them earlier, perhaps Johnson would like to become chairman of the
Democratic National Committee.

Going back into the other bedroom, Lyndon Johnson yanked off his jacket and tie. He couldn’t sit still. With the connecting doors between the suite and the adjoining bedrooms open, he paced back and forth in his shirtsleeves through the long line of rooms with awkward, lunging strides, his arms flailing, a towering distraught figure. Trying to find a place in which he could talk with his advisers,
he walked into a room in which his staff had been entertaining some fifteen delegates from Hawaii. Saying, “Thank you, boys, thank you. Thank you for all you did,” he shooed them out.

Then he was alone with Lady Bird, Rayburn, Connally, Graham, Rowe and
Bobby Baker.
“LBJ
seemed about to jump out of his skin,” Graham said. He told them that Robert Kennedy had said, “Kennedy doesn’t want me.” He asked them,
“What
am I going to do?” Jim Rowe, who had been with him in a score of crises over the course of more than twenty years, says,
“I’d
never seen him in such a state of—not panic—confusion.”

Through the “hubbub” that followed, Rayburn’s voice cut through:
“Phil
, call Jack.” Returning to the bedroom, and sitting on a bed, Graham did—and as soon as that call went through, the confusion was over, at least for the day.
“ ‘Oh,’
Jack Kennedy said—as calmly as though we were discussing the weather—‘that’s all right; Bobby’s been out of touch and doesn’t know what’s been happening.’ ” When Graham asked, “Well, what do you want Lyndon to do?” Kennedy replied, “I want him to make a statement right away.” He had, he said, “just finished making mine.” Graham said, “You’d better speak to Lyndon,” and a moment later Johnson, sprawling across the other bed, was agreeing to make his statement. Graham then told Jack Kennedy,
“You’d
better speak to Bobby.” Baker went out to get Robert Kennedy, who came into the room looking exhausted; his face was white and, in Graham’s description, “sullen” and “dead tired.” He took the phone, and as Graham walked out of the room, he heard Robert Kennedy say to his brother,
“Well,
it’s too late now.”

Johnson didn’t look any better. He and Lady Bird, standing amid a cluster of men in the suite’s vestibule, resembled two people who
“had
just survived an airplane crash,” Graham says. Through the double doors to the corridor, they could hear a babble of voices: the press corps. Johnson was still holding the typed statement accepting the nomination. Before Bobby had come down, “I was just going to read this on TV … and now I don’t know what I ought to do,” he told Graham, who relates that “With more ham than I ever suspected myself of, I suddenly blurted: ‘Of course you know what you’re going to do. Throw your shoulders back and your chin out and go out and make that announcement.’ ” Someone shouted approval, and swung open the door, and someone pushed Johnson and Lady Bird “out into the TV lights and the explosion of flashbulbs.” A couple of chairs were brought out and they were helped up to stand on them, “and,” Graham says, “as they rose their faces metamorphosed into enthusiasm and confidence.”

Behind them, in the bedroom of the Johnson suite, only two men were left: Jim Rowe and Robert Kennedy.
“Jim
, don’t you think it is a terrible mistake?” Kennedy asked. He leaned his head against a wall.
“My
God, this wouldn’t have happened except that we were all too tired last night,” he said.

W
HILE
J
ACK
K
ENNEDY HAD BEEN READING
his statement and answering questions at a crowded press conference a few minutes earlier (the announcement was greeted by “gasps of surprise,” the
New York Times
said), he made one or two minor gaffes, very unusual for him, referring to Symington, at one point, as the “Senator from Illinois,” but there was no other sign of fatigue or tension. He seemed, in fact, quite at ease; he looked, as the
Washington Post
put it,
“as
though he had spent the day at the beach.”

In his efforts to “get him off the ticket,” to try to persuade Lyndon Johnson to withdraw, was Robert Kennedy acting without his brother’s knowledge?

Even Philip Graham, the man who raised that possibility in the memorandum he wrote shortly after the convention, found it impossible to resolve that question. (
“I
urged [Jack] Kennedy to offer the Vice Presidency to Johnson. He immediately agreed.… Kennedy was decisive in saying that was his intention.…
‘Bobby’s
been out of touch and doesn’t know what’s been happening.’ … 
I
later learned he [Bobby] had … assured several liberal delegates it would
not
be Johnson. My guess is that he made that assurance on his own and tried to bring it about on his own during his dealings with Johnson and Rayburn.”)

“Did
Jack offer the VP hoping LBJ would turn it down?” Graham wrote. “Did LBJ really want it? Did Bobby try to sabotage the offer? And if so, did he do so on his own or with Jack’s approval? I have no confident answer to any of those questions.”

When the possibility that Bobby had made the effort on his own became a public issue—and it became a very public issue when Graham’s memorandum was published in 1965, and again, as will be seen, in 1967—Bobby indignantly denied it. No one but he and his brother knew what had happened, he told two interviewers, Arthur Schlesinger and the journalist
John Bartlow Martin, who, in a series of oral history interviews, recorded his reminiscences for posterity.
“The
only people who were involved in the discussions were Jack and myself. Nobody else was involved in it.” Graham’s memorandum—the claim that
“I
went down by myself and on my own”—
“flabbergasted
me,” he said.
“Obviously
, with the close relationship between my brother and me, I wasn’t going down to see if he would withdraw just as a lark on my own. ‘My brother’s asleep, so I’ll see if I can get rid of his Vice President.’ ” He had, Robert Kennedy said, “worked out” with Jack that he would tell Johnson that “the liberals … were going to get up [on the convention floor] and fight it,” and that Johnson could have the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairmanship instead. “That was the idea,” he said. “In any case [JFK] wanted to get rid of him.… During that whole three or four hours, we just vacillated back and forth as to whether we wanted him or didn’t want him. And finally we decided not to have him, and we came upon this idea [offering him the DNC chairmanship] of trying to get rid of him. And it didn’t work.”

Descriptions of some telephone conversations tend to support the view that Bobby Kennedy was acting on his own, without Jack’s knowledge: the four conversations reported by Philip Graham, in an account corroborated by Rowe (who says about one conversation, “I could hear [Jack] Kennedy talking,” and about another that Graham had, immediately upon hanging up, told him what Kennedy had said)—the conversations in one of which, Graham wrote, Jack Kennedy told him, “It’s all set”; in next of which Kennedy had said he had thought that first message would suffice to let Johnson know he was his choice; and in the last of which he said, “Bobby’s been out of touch” and that he, Jack, had already made his public statement announcing that Johnson was his choice.

Robert Kennedy explained these conversations by saying that at the time Jack first dispatched him to make the DNC offer, Jack had
not
yet made the public statement and still wanted Johnson off the ticket. Bobby says that Jack’s decision to publicly announce Johnson’s choice was made between the time he, Bobby, left to see Johnson and the time he returned to Jack’s suite, and that Jack had made that decision because, Bobby says, during that interval Jack had received a telephone call from “somebody” saying he had to stop vacillating, and had therefore decided to make the announcement.

Whatever the explanation for what happened during that long afternoon, however, it is difficult to credit Robert Kennedy’s explanation. His initial acceptance of his brother’s decision, conveyed to Ken O’Donnell and
Pierre Salinger from the bathtub early that morning, appears to have faded quickly, perhaps partly because he accompanied O’Donnell when Ken, following Jack Kennedy’s instructions to “Get your tail over and tell your labor friends,” went to UAW President
Walter Reuther’s suite at the nearby Statler Hilton Hotel, where labor and liberal leaders had gathered. The reaction from this group of men whom O’Donnell and Bobby (and perhaps Jack) had unequivocally assured that Johnson would never be Jack Kennedy’s choice was
“violently
angry,” O’Donnell was to relate. Joe Rauh had somehow already heard the news, and as one of the labor leaders, UAW vice president
Leonard Woodcock, was heading up to Reuther’s suite, suddenly in front of him was
“Joe
Rauh, who had tears literally rolling down his cheeks. Have I heard the news?” Woodcock hadn’t heard it, and as Rauh told him that Kennedy had chosen Johnson, “It seemed” to Woodcock “that Kennedy had betrayed us all. Well, I, very frankly, was shocked, because our whole theme had been to unite behind Kennedy to stop Johnson.” Up in the suite, there were shouts of
“Double-cross
” and
“sell-out
” from a group that included
George Meany of the
AFL-CIO;
Jack Conway, Reuther’s top political aide; and
Alex Rose of New York, president of the
Cloth Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers International Union. In O’Donnell’s recollection, Bobby was attacked
“savagely
.” Jabbing a finger at him, Rose shouted that if Johnson’s name was on the ticket, Kennedy would not receive the Liberal Party designation in
New York State. Conway started for O’Donnell as if he were going to hit him.
“I
don’t think that Bobby Kennedy fully realized the predicament that Jack had put us into until we walked into the room at the Statler Hilton,” O’Donnell was to relate. The
labor delegates said that they, in combination with civil rights and other liberal groups, would nominate their own candidate for the vice presidency to oppose Johnson that evening.
“Bobby
was shaken.”