Landslide (29 page)

Kempton’s piece described an “archaic” Bobby Kennedy, and, indeed, in those first months, all of Bobby’s allegiances were to the ancient world.
In his biography of Kennedy, Evan Thomas reveals how Bobby’s attachment to Edith Hamilton’s book
The Greek Way
sheds light on Kennedy’s thinking in these months. Jackie had given him the book in the weeks after JFK’s death, promising it would provide deep wisdom and consolation. For Bobby, “the book, written thirty years before by a Bryn Mawr classicist, was a revelation,” Thomas writes. “It is easy to imagine Kennedy, desperate for some meaning in senseless tragedy, transfixed by the morals extracted by Hamilton from the historians Herodotus and Thucydides and the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.”

In time, the words of Aeschylus—
God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer
—would help move him beyond the tragedy and give purpose to his life. But in the early months, the way of the Greeks also offered validation for all of Kennedy’s worst impulses. Reading Hamilton, Kennedy could console himself that the bitterness and pain he felt were noble. In the Greek way, “
there is no dignity like the dignity of a soul in agony,” and this dignity belonged only to a privileged few. Pain was human and universal, but tragic suffering was reserved for the rare souls who lived daring lives of passion and gallantry. “Tragedy is enthroned,” writes Hamilton, “and to her realm those alone are admitted who belong to the only true aristocracy, that of all passionate souls.”

Joseph Kennedy had raised his children to believe that the special vigor within them made them superior to all other aristocratic pretenders,
be they the Brahmins of Boston or the elected leaders of the land. So now Bobby would claim the special privileges of his spiritual caste.
He referred to “the president” when talking about his brother. He withheld even token deference in the presence of President Johnson. He abstained from all the silly rituals of Johnson’s mundane world. All the while he reassured himself that he was not being selfish, but rather dignified and divine. This was the Bobby who, at the Civil Rights Act signing, refused to stoop when Johnson wooed him with his bushel of pens. Hamilton quotes Shakespeare:
“
Here I and sorrows sit / Here is my throne; bid kings come bow to it.”

The king would bow to the Kennedys, but only so far. Johnson had always hated the idea of Bobby in the vice presidency. In the spring, he told aides that he would accept Kennedy as his running mate but only if it proved absolutely necessary for him to win. By midsummer, with Goldwater’s nomination assured and Johnson’s approval rating above 70 percent, it was clear the necessity wasn’t there. But the ongoing speculation in the press rattled him. There were reports that Kennedy aides were planning a demonstration in Atlantic City, where they would spontaneously rise up to demand the vice presidency—or maybe something more. He tried to root out accomplices in Bobby’s plots. Richard J. Daley, one of the savviest operators in the history of American politics, played dumb when Johnson called to investigate. “
The worst city in the United States for rumor and gossip is Washington,” the mayor told the president. “And frankly, we out in the prairies don’t pay much attention to columnists, the newspapers or anything else.”

By indulging his worst fears about the attorney general, Johnson made them real. On its own, the position of vice president was utterly unappealing to Bobby. The job was full of suffering, but not the noble, tragic kind. He knew that Johnson blamed him for the miserable indignity of his own vice presidency and that, as Johnson’s vice president, he could count on Johnson to return the favor in kind. At first, Bobby expressed little interest in the job. He could see that in
all likelihood Johnson would rule Washington for some time to come. He pondered work in a faraway land—
maybe he’d write a book in England. Maybe he could even prove himself a gallant adventurer once more by serving as ambassador to Vietnam.

But then he saw just how desperate Johnson was to keep him off the ticket, and suddenly the vice presidency became the thing that Bobby Kennedy wanted most. He launched a defiantly public effort to force himself on the president. In July, he traveled to Poland, where huge crowds came out to see the brother of America’s fallen hero. At the University of Warsaw, he told adoring students that he was “not a candidate for the Vice Presidency” but “if you were in America and could vote for me, I would be.” Minds less studied in American politics than Lyndon Johnson’s could read these words and remember that there were plenty of other Poles, living in and around the cities of the Northeast and industrial Midwest, who
could
vote for a president and vice president of the United States.

Soon, dark hints of Bobby’s intentions were everywhere. Johnson and his staffers were disturbed by a profile in
Newsweek
, written by Ben Bradlee, for which the attorney general had provided extensive access. In it, Bobby talked openly of the impossibility of Johnson’s asking him to run on the ticket. “
I should think I’d be the last man in the world he would want,” Bobby said in the piece, “because my name is Kennedy, because he wants a Johnson Administration with no Kennedys in it …” But there were other ways to become his party’s vice presidential candidate. “Most major political leaders in the North want me,” he said. “All of them, really.” The threat was subtle but unmistakable: “I have this feeling that I am going to end up in government,” he said. “These things have a way of solving themselves.”

All of this was too much for Johnson to take. The fear that, like so many others in the country that summer, he had kept in the back of his mind, now took hold of his thoughts. In mid-July, he told John McCormack he was hearing consistent grumblings that party
bosses were going to force Bobby onto the ticket in Atlantic City. “
I don’t want the presidency if they do,” he said. “I don’t want to have to sleep with a woman I don’t trust.”

With a month to go before the convention, the uncertainty became unbearable. On July 29, he invited Bobby for a private meeting in the Oval Office. As the appointed hour drew near, Johnson’s nerves took hold of him. Clark Clifford, who, save for Johnson’s longtime friend Abe Fortas, was Johnson’s closest outside adviser, had offered constant counsel on the Bobby Kennedy threat. Waiting for Bobby, Johnson called Clifford to unload his anxiety. “
He’s got [Jackie] thinking about going to the convention,” Johnson said. “He thinks that most of the delegations are for him, and this is the thing he wants more than anything in his life.”

Clifford advised Johnson to take a hard line. “Now I think it appropriate and courteous for you to give some reasons for your decision,” he counseled the president. “But you are not asking him at any time for his reaction.”

Bobby had a good idea what he was walking into when he entered the Oval Office that day. Still, he grew uncomfortable. He glanced at what appeared to be a recording device on Johnson’s desk and
wondered if the president was recording the exchange. (In fact, no known recording of the meeting exists, but as John F. Kennedy’s brother, Bobby should not have been surprised by the idea of a president’s recording a meeting with a political foe.) He had the impression that someone—Johnson’s right-hand man Walter Jenkins?—was listening in and taking notes. Later, he would say that an agitated Johnson, gripping prepared remarks, subjected him to a strange exegesis on the vice presidency before making it plain that Bobby would not be his choice. Bobby was pleasant in response, but once again he showed no interest in the politician’s obligatory fakery. “
You didn’t ask me,” he said, walking out the door. “But I think I could have done a hell of a job for us.”

After the meeting, a triumphant Johnson rushed to call Clifford.
“
I was very firm and very positive and very final,” he said. He recounted Bobby’s final words and his own reply: “Well, I think you
will
do a hell of a job for us … and for yourself too.”

It was clear who was boss.

Clifford had been a force in Washington since the Truman administration. To sustain a career that long in the capital requires a keen sense for where power resides. “
Oh, I’m just so gratified,” the lawyer cooed. “Let me say, right away, that this was not an easy task for you. It took courage and forthrightness and it just makes me very proud.” It was indisputably clear who had won the battle between Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy. With Johnson, Clifford spared no flattery: “This is the kind of president I want.”

But, like the plate of sandwiches, even the praise from Harry Truman’s man did not leave Johnson satisfied. He scavenged for more, which only caused him more trouble. The whole point of telling Bobby he wouldn’t get the job, after all, had been to end public speculation. Now he needed to make the news public, but in a way that didn’t seem personally vindictive toward the Kennedys. So Johnson devised a broader rationale to explain his decision. Later that afternoon, he announced that, for the sake of continuity in government, he would not consider any sitting member of his cabinet as his running mate in 1964.

“
He had communicated that decision personally,” said the next day’s
New York Times
, “to Mr. Kennedy and to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman.” This was true, but only barely. “
While I’m thinking about naming him,” Johnson joked an hour before the announcement, “I’m gonna try to get ahold of Rusk.”

He couldn’t leave it there. The next day he called in a select group of reporters to brag, off the record, about how he’d crushed Bobby. With heavy embellishment, he walked them through the Oval Office meeting, beat by beat. “
When I … told him it would be ‘inadvisable
for him to be on the ticket,’ ” Johnson told the stunned newsmen, “his face changed and he started to swallow. He looked sick. His Adam’s apple bounded up and down like a yo-yo.”

Quickly, inevitably, word of this performance spread to Bobby. In the version the attorney general heard, Johnson portrayed Bobby as “
a kind of stunned semi-idiot,” journalist Stewart Alsop was later to recall. Bobby was furious. “This,” said Alsop, “was the final break.” Soon Bobby’s friends in the press were lobbing their own bombs back at Johnson. Bobby, they claimed, had never thought about challenging for the vice presidency. “
Mr. Johnson may have been seeing goblins where none ever existed,” Evans and Novak wrote. “The vice presidential choice was the president’s own from the beginning without any need for all the political gymnastics.”

Johnson knew that Bobby was angry. He feared further escalation in their conflict. He obsessed over reports that Kennedy lieutenants were meeting to plan some kind of effort at the Democratic convention. “
I think we ought to just watch that just like hawks,” he told an aide. He looked at the horizon—August, Atlantic City—and saw disaster coming for him.

O
N THE OTHER
side of the world, in the last days of July, the American destroyer
Maddox
approached the Gulf of Tonkin, the broad inlet enclosed by the Chinese island of Hainan and the mainland coastlines of China and North Vietnam. From the edge of hostile territory, the
Maddox
would lead an American intelligence operation, gleaning information on the coastal defenses of the Vietcong. The mission would require the
Maddox’
s chief officer, Captain John Herrick, to dance around the precarious border between international waters and North Vietnam’s sovereign territory. It was a dangerous task. The North Vietnamese had massed protective forces throughout their gulf coastline. The
Maddox
was huge and easy to spot on radar. In the early morning hours of August 2, ten miles from North Vietnam’s Red River Delta, a feeling of imminent danger came to Herrick. And when his radar interceptors informed him
that enemy forces had been ordered to attack the
Maddox
, he knew that the danger was real.

The Americans fired first as he dashed back to sea. Under pursuit from the North Vietnamese, Herrick requested reinforcements from U.S. bombers in the vicinity. The Communists fired torpedoes at the destroyer in response to the American attack but were unable to reach their target. Soon, the American bombers had downed a Communist ship, the
Maddox
was safe within international waters, and the frightening incident was over.

But Herrick and the other Americans remained on nervous watch. Under the order of the Pentagon, they were now joined by another destroyer, the
Turner Joy
, to undertake a new mission in the Gulf. As the historian Stanley Karnow demonstrates, this new charge was designed to provoke North Vietnamese aggression: “
The two destroyers would stage direct daylight runs to within eight miles of North Vietnam’s coast and four miles off its islands, as if defying the Communists to ‘play chicken.’ ” The American vessels “were effectively being used to bait the Communists.”

It is hard, when you are the bait, not to obsess over encircling sharks. On the evening of August 3, waiting for the enemy in a darkening, thunder-filled gulf, the crew of the
Maddox
sensed that it was under attack. Along with the
Turner Joy
, the
Maddox
launched a furious counterattack, firing its torpedoes into the dark abyss. The two destroyers engaged with a phantom enemy for hours on end until Herrick concluded that the danger had passed. In truth, he wasn’t sure
what
had just happened. The
Maddox
had not sustained any hit. None of his crew was certain they had seen the enemy at all. “
The entire action,” Herrick advised his superiors, “leaves many doubts.”

But back in Washington, there was little doubt. President Johnson had been presented with an apparently brazen attack on American forces. On the morning of August 4, he prepared a resounding response. American allies and congressional leaders were informed of a coming bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

All summer long, Johnson had obsessed over murky facts, ambiguous signals, and unspoken threats at home. By contrast, the path forward from Tonkin seemed quite clear. He had been trying to draw as little attention as possible to the continued American presence in South Vietnam, to the perennial instability of the nation’s South Vietnamese allies, and to the growing threat that American forces would be enmeshed in a wider war. But he also heard the ominous talk from Goldwater, and Goldwater allies like Reagan, about the dangers of Communist appeasement. “
Make no bones of this,” Goldwater had said in his convention speech. “Don’t try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the President, who is Commander-in-Chief of our forces, refuses to say … whether or not the object over there is victory.”