The Passage of Power (57 page)

And then there were two meetings of the committee itself.

With the battle of
Birmingham still raging and civil rights on everyone’s tongue, Conference Room B at the State Department was filled for both meetings, with Johnson and
Hobart Taylor, his young black supporter from Detroit whom he had made the CEEO’s executive director, sitting at the head of the long conference table: around it high-ranking officials—Cabinet members, agency heads, liberal luminaries like UAW President Reuther and Dean
Francis B. Sayre of the
Washington National Cathedral—and sitting against the wall a full complement of their staffers. And, unfortunately for Johnson, also present at the first of the meetings was Lady Bird’s brother
Antonio Taylor, whom he had invited so that Taylor could get a view of him in action.

When Johnson called this meeting to order, the attorney general’s chair was vacant, but he came in a few minutes later,
Burke Marshall behind him, and, recalls Reuther’s assistant
Jack Conway,
“within
a matter of three or four minutes, the Vice President found himself on the defensive because Bobby just tore in,” demanding precise statistics on Negro employment in federal agencies in Birmingham from Hobart Taylor. When Taylor tried to explain that the statistics were not yet available, because a new form that would show them had just been developed, Kennedy demanded, “Well, where is the form?” Taylor said it was in the final stages of preparation by the
Budget Bureau and that he expected it to be ready shortly—and to have the statistics by the next meeting. Kennedy was not satisfied. “Where in the Budget Bureau is it?” he demanded.
“He
wanted to know where it was right then because he would expedite its completion,” Judge
Marjorie Lawson says. The young man sitting beside Johnson—the man he had brought in to run the committee—“was now getting quite upset.” When an “embarrassed” Johnson tried to intervene, on his face a dark flush and his voice almost inaudible, Kennedy “snapped a few more questions” not at his aide but at him. “At this point Bob turned to someone and wanted to know about the [Negro] apprenticeship program.” But while the official he addressed was still talking, “Bob got up and without a word to excuse himself” walked out of the room.

The second meeting, on July 18, was a repeat performance by Kennedy, except that this time—after again arriving late—he lashed into not only Taylor but also into Johnson’s other man on the committee, NASA director James Webb, firing a barrage of questions at him, as Webb, not knowing the answers, kept turning to an aide named Hartson, behind him—who, it became clear, didn’t
know them either. When Webb tried to defend Hartson, Kennedy interrupted. “Excuse me. This committee and the President of the United States are interested in this program. I don’t see that the job will be done.… This gentleman over here [Hartson] that spent a year and a half on this program … I don’t think he is going to get the job done.… I am trying to ask some questions. I don’t think I am able to get the answers, to tell you the truth.”

“It was,” Conway says, “a pretty brutal business, very sharp. It brought tensions between Johnson and Kennedy right out on the table and very hard. Everybody was sweating under the armpits.… And then, finally, after completely humiliating Webb and making the Vice President look like a fraud and shutting up Hobart Taylor completely,” Kennedy abruptly stood up. Johnson had started trying to explain the situation to him. “For your information, Mr. Attorney General, we of the committee have met with the leading agencies who have the most contracts, namely the Department of Defense.… The Defense Department told us they had some 30 or 40 people working on this.… Mr. Webb doesn’t do that. This man here [Hartson] doesn’t do it anymore than you try to call a case in the Department of Justice. You have got a District Attorney down there that does that.” To Judge Lawson, “It was very obvious that he was angry … but he was clearly more in control, or more dignified in the encounter, than Bob was.” But as he was speaking, Kennedy started walking out of the room. Then, changing his mind, he walked around the table to where Conway was sitting, shook his hand, and stood there chatting with him, in Conway’s words, “about how things were going here, there, and every place,” as casual and relaxed as if nothing else was going on—and then, while Johnson was still talking to him, walked out the door.

As the door closed behind him, “There was a great silence for a while” before the meeting resumed, Judge Lawson says. If Bobby Kennedy was still trying to get revenge for Los Angeles, he got a full measure of it that day.

A
FTER THAT MEETING
, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t wound up anymore.
“In
the late summer of 1963,”
Harry McPherson says, Johnson “looked miserable,” more depressed,
Horace Busby says,
“than
I had ever seen him. Nothing to do—frustrated.” Friends invited to swim and have dinner at The Elms were shocked when they saw him in a bathing suit. His weight had always fluctuated wildly; now he had gone from thin to fat—very fat.
“His
belly … enormous,” McPherson says. “He looked absolutely gross.” His face was flushed and mottled—“maybe he had been drinking a good deal.” Sitting by the pool, he seemed unable to relax for a moment. Grabbing the phone impatiently, he would make a call, his conversation jerking without transition from one topic to another. Then, hanging up abruptly, he would make another call, and another.

The fact that Robert Kennedy had not only harassed him (“humiliated” was the word he used; “he humiliated me”) but had done so in public (and, in fact, in a setting—a meeting packed with government officials—that ensured that the
scene would become known throughout the capital) had, in Johnson’s mind, the most ominous implications: that it was no longer just 1968 that the Kennedys were thinking about but 1964; that they must be planning to drop him from the ticket in the next election because Bobby would never have made him look ineffectual and incompetent if he was still going to be his brother’s running mate. He felt his suspicions were confirmed when Kennedy loyalists began spreading the story of the meeting around Washington.

Washington had had its suspicions even before the confrontation. By the summer of 1963, speculation was rife that he was going to be dumped from the ticket.

Dampening the speculation was the fact that every time the President was asked about the rumors, he denied them.
“There
have been rumors in print and out that Vice President Johnson might be dropped,” a reporter asked him on one occasion.
“I
am sure that the Vice President will be on the ticket if he chooses to run,” Kennedy replied. “We were fortunate to have him before—and would again. I don’t know where such a rumor would start.” “Assuming that you run next year, would you want Lyndon Johnson on the ticket, and do you expect he’ll be on the ticket,” he was asked at another press conference. “Yes, to both of these questions,” Kennedy replied. “That is correct.” Denying the rumors in private, he was equally emphatic. When
Ben Bradlee asked him, after a quiet dinner for the two men and their wives upstairs in the White House in October, if he was considering dumping Johnson, he said,
“That’s
preposterous on the face of it. We’ve got to carry Texas in ’64, and maybe
Georgia.” When
George Smathers, riding with him on
Air Force One in November, said,
“Everybody
on the Hill says Bobby is trying to knock Johnson off the ticket,” he said, “George, you have
some
intelligence, I presume.… Why would we want to knock Lyndon Johnson off the ticket? Can you see me now in a terrible fight with Lyndon Johnson, which means I’ll blow the South? I don’t want to be elected, do you mean? You know, I love this job, I love every second of it.… I don’t want to get licked … and he’s going to be my vice president because he helps me.”

“What
do you mean, am I going to dump Johnson?” he had demanded when his friend Paul B. (Red) Fay visited him in the Oval Office in the spring. “What do you ask a question like that for? Of course I’m not. He’s doing an excellent job in the most thankless position in Washington. He’s my man for the job. He’s going to be my man in ’64, and I don’t know why you’re asking.” No denials could have been more unequivocal. John Kennedy’s assurances, in public and private, that Johnson would be on the ticket were, in fact, as unequivocal as his assurances in 1960 that Johnson would not be on the ticket. No one could have echoed the denials more firmly than Robert Kennedy—
“There
was no plan to dump Lyndon Johnson,” he would say in his oral histories.
“There
was never any discussion about dropping him”—unless it was Lyndon Johnson in his later years. “Reports … that I was going to be dumped from the ticket … were rumors and nothing more,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I had every reason to
believe that he intended for us to go forward together.… What some people did not understand was that our relationship … had always been one of mutual respect, admiration, and cooperation.” The denials made their way into the historical record.
“The
ticket was definitely to be the same,” Arthur Schlesinger would write in 1978; he knew because Kennedy’s brother-in-law and campaign strategist
Stephen Smith had told him so—
“emphatically
.” Indeed it has become an historical axiom, totally accepted, that there was never any serious discussion of dropping Johnson from the ticket; that, as Schlesinger put it in 1980, “There was no discussion. This idea is total fantasy.”
“I
have never encountered anything that corroborates that story” (the story that he would be dropped), journalist
Max Frankel says, adding that in addition to the political considerations there was John Kennedy’s personality: “Whether he would have … been capable of the ultimate, really, destruction of Lyndon Johnson—I would doubt it.” Johnson’s conviction at the time that he would be dumped—and in complete contrast to later statements, his conviction at the time was firm (
“In
the back room they were quoting Bobby, saying I was going to be taken off the ticket”)—is explained away by amateur psychoanalysis;
“obsessed
” is the word Reedy uses to describe this conviction.
“His
complaints against Bobby Kennedy may have bordered on the paranoiac,” is
Bobby Baker’s analysis; “among the other things Bobby was doing to him was to drive him from the national ticket.” The axiom has endured to this day. Yet, in fact, as summer turned to fall in 1963, the question of whether Lyndon Johnson would be on John Kennedy’s ticket again was beginning to be shrouded in ambiguities.

His value to a Kennedy ticket had rested on very solid ground in 1960: Kennedy had needed at least a few southern states, and in particular Texas, to win the presidency—and the best way to win these states was to have Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. By 1963, however, that ground was shifting beneath Kennedy’s feet—and it was shifting fast. In 1960, Kennedy’s civil rights record had been inoffensive enough to minimize the antagonism of southern white voters, and therefore it was possible for him to win some southern states and Texas if he had a southern running mate. But in 1963, there had been his outmaneuvering of Governor Wallace, and on June 13 he had delivered an inspiring televised address in which he said that civil rights was “a moral issue”—“as old as the scriptures and … as clear as the American Constitution.” And not paranoia but only polls were required to explain Lyndon Johnson’s fears.

One, taken in September, 1963, by the
Democratic National Committee, showed that if the election were held then, Kennedy would lose not only Texas but Georgia,
Louisiana,
Arkansas and both Carolinas, the states whose electoral votes were largely responsible for his victory in ’60. Another, by the Gallup Organization, showed that winning the South would not only be much more difficult for him in 1964, but that it might, in fact, be all but impossible if the Republican candidate was one whose stance on civil rights was attractive to that region, and by the fall of 1963, it was becoming increasingly likely that the Republican
candidate would be one with a very attractive stance: Senator
Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Gallup pitted Kennedy against Goldwater head to head in a thirteen-state bloc, the eleven of the Old Confederacy and
Kentucky and
Oklahoma on its borders—the result was Kennedy 41 percent, Goldwater 59 percent.

And Johnson’s own stance on civil rights had changed, of course, and while it had given him a new popularity in liberal precincts of the North, it hadn’t had the same effect in the cotton mills of the South—as conversations in the Senate cloakroom showed.
“I
don’t know what’s got into Lyndon, but he’s outtalking Bobby Kennedy in civil rights,” one southern senator said.
“Lyndon
never had a more devoted admirer than myself,” said another. “Now I wouldn’t give two cents for his winning an election in my state.” And those mills were significant to Kennedy’s re-election plans. Johnson had held the South for Kennedy in 1960; he might not be able to hold it in 1964. Democratic political strategists, interviewed by the
Philadelphia Inquirer
in the summer of 1963,
“said
they doubted whether … Johnson would be able to overcome anti-Kennedy sentiment in the Deep South stirred by civil rights unrest.”
“The
President and his political advisers probably have written off the South for 1964 on the civil rights issue,” the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
said.
“If
they haven’t, they should.”

Polls were showing, as well, that holding the South might no longer be imperative for Kennedy’s re-election, so long as he did better in the North than he had in 1960, and they were showing also that his popularity was holding fairly steady there, at about 60 percent. Strength in the North (holding the big northern states he had won in 1960 and picking up states such as
Ohio that he had lost) and picking up also some electoral votes in the West, most importantly
California’s thirty-two, that he had lost in ’60 might be the key to victory in ’64; it might be more important he have a running mate who added strength to the ticket in those areas rather than in the South. Which led of course to the subject of Lyndon Johnson. “If the solid South is to be written off in 1964, the question is whether Mr. Johnson will be retained on the ticket and if so what his function will be,” the
New York Times
asked. The question was being asked more and more by Democratic strategists, however much the Kennedys denied it—asked so frequently that in October the syndicated columnists
Robert S. Allen and
Paul Scott could write that a
“new
political strategy [is] being hammered out at the party’s secret deliberations,” a strategy which “calls for major Democratic efforts to increase the party’s vote in all the northern industrial areas to offset expected Republican gains in the South.” Specific names were starting to be mentioned:
Pat Brown of California, for example. If the Democrats have
“written
off the South for 1964 … the question becomes whether they should recognize this fact publicly and go west for a vice presidential candidate.… Kennedy strategists are saying that they may have to carry California to win next year. But California is where Barry seems to be running best. Will the President decide that his best chance lies with a Californian or some other westerner as his running mate?”