The Kennedy Half-Century (57 page)

Vietnam, more than any other single factor, reignited the smoldering hatred between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy. There had never been reconciliation between the two, although in the months immediately after Johnson’s ascension to the presidency—when grief was at its peak and RFK
entertained some hope of being picked for the 1964 Democratic ticket—the feud had been submerged. Kennedy’s nomination to the Senate created a temporary marriage of convenience between the two political heavyweights. But by 1965 the old angers and grievances were surfacing anew. Harry McPherson sent a scathing memo to the president in mid-1965 that called RFK “a man of narrow sensibilities and totalitarian instincts.” McPherson saw that the “intellectuals” who were “as easy a lay as can be found” were gravitating to RFK because of his “ ‘pure’ voting and adventurous speeches.” The problem, he said, was one of divided loyalties within the administration itself. Would they “go to the wall” for LBJ or be mainly faithful to the Kennedys?
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Realizing a “polygraph-loyalty test” would be controversial, McPherson stoked Johnson’s long-simmering resentment against the Kennedys, reminding LBJ that, “While you were
of
the Senate [in the 1950s], and took responsibility for getting the hard bills through … [John] Kennedy was merely
in
the Senate [and] had to lean on you to get his labor bills through …”
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By the way, none of the resentment toward the Kennedys has waned in almost a half century. McPherson told me in 2011 that LBJ is a far more significant historical figure than RFK, whatever popular tastes may suggest: “One of them [LBJ] is a whale and the other one is a minnow. [RFK] was a tuna at best.”
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Another aide, press secretary Bill Moyers, took pleasure in sending the president an “anti-Kennedy piece done by one of the most distinguished writers in Britain.” The right-wing British commentator, Peregrine Worsthorne, scalded RFK: “The crucial decision [on American involvement in Vietnam] was President Kennedy’s. For [Bobby] to exploit its consequences to destroy his brother’s successor might have struck Machiavelli as the epitome of princely conduct …”
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For Lyndon Johnson, the true test of loyalty became Vietnam, and Bobby Kennedy was to receive a failing grade. This infuriated LBJ because he truly believed he was carrying out John Kennedy’s policy; indeed, he saw Vietnam as a continuation of all post-World War II presidential actions. As he asserted in his State of the Union address in January 1966, “We have defended against Communist aggression—in Korea under President Truman—in the Formosa Straits under President Eisenhower—in Cuba under President Kennedy—and again in Vietnam.” In a fatal error that jumps out at anyone reading Johnson’s words, the president insisted, “This nation is mighty enough, its society is healthy enough, its people are strong enough, to pursue our goals in the rest of the world while still building a Great Society here at home.”
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This combination of “guns and butter” would sink Johnson and his party over the next three years, and it would have far-reaching consequences in the age-old battle about the proper size of the federal government.

Bobby Kennedy came slowly to full-throated opposition to the Vietnam
War. In 1966 he could still be found writing an encouraging note to President Johnson:

Reading the newspapers and their columnists and listening to my colleagues in Congress (including myself) on what to do and what not to do in Viet Nam must become somewhat discouraging at times.

I was thinking of you and your responsibilities while I was reading Bruce Catton’s book “Never Call Retreat.”

I thought it might give you some comfort to look again at another President, Abraham Lincoln, and some of the identical problems and situations that he faced that you are now meeting …

In closing let me say how impressed I have been [with] the most recent efforts to find a peaceful solution to Viet Nam …
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Johnson replied genially to “Dear Bob”:

Your warm letter arrived at an appropriate time. It was one of those hours when I felt alone, prayerfully alone.

I remembered so well how President Kennedy had to face, by himself, the agony of the Cuban missile crisis. I read the paragraph in Catton’s book that you had marked, and then I went to a meeting in the Cabinet Room with the Congressional leaders of both parties …

You know better than most the gloom that crowds in on a President, for you lived close to your brother. Thus, your letter meant a great deal to me and I tell you how grateful I am for your thoughtfulness …
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The friendly chain of LBJ-RFK correspondence didn’t last. Much of Johnson’s last two calendar years as president was marked by mounting tensions and recriminations between the two, which both sides tried to keep private at first. But Johnson’s staff monitored RFK and comments about him closely, sending gossipy, negative notes to LBJ or one another. When TV talk show host David Susskind all but endorsed RFK for president in a March 1967 chat with a British parliamentarian, presidential aide Mike Manatos made sure that LBJ knew “no one in the audience clapped, creating an embarrassing moment for Susskind.”
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Presidential press secretary George Christian received a note from a former Johnson White House staffer about a conversation with a reporter, who allegedly said, “I used to be a very close friend of Bobby’s, but I don’t like him worth a damn now. He is standing on Jack Kennedy’s casket and running for the presidency on that coffin.”
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Long-held suspicions that Bobby might challenge Johnson for renomination
deepened throughout 1967, culminating with RFK’s appearance on CBS’s
Face the Nation
on November 26. During that show, Kennedy went well beyond the public intimations he had made about Johnson’s prosecution of the Vietnam War. For the first time, RFK openly insisted that Johnson had “turned [and] switched” the policy of his brother: “We’re killing South Vietnamese, we’re killing women, we’re killing innocent people …” LBJ was incensed, demanding to see all of John Kennedy’s remarks about Vietnam while being assured by Secretary of State Dean Rusk that President Kennedy had been headed in the same direction in Southeast Asia.
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When Johnson was reminded of some rare pro-Johnson statements Bobby had made in an earlier speech, he ordered it surreptitiously distributed to the Democratic National Committee and every state party chairman.
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Other Kennedy strands wove themselves in and out of Johnson’s White House tenure, among them race riots in major cities, the relationship with Jackie Kennedy, and the growing dissatisfaction with the Warren Commission report.

Even LBJ’s worst critics would concede that he did more for the civil rights of African Americans than any president since Lincoln and, indisputably, far more than John Kennedy had achieved. JFK’s tentative steps were replaced by historic legislation and many African American firsts (not least Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall). Yet legal equality had not yielded de facto or economic parity with whites for the black community, and these frustrations exploded in four successive “long hot summers” across America. Beginning with the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles on August 11, 1965, racial riots caused immense destruction, deaths, injuries, and looting in hundreds of urban areas from 1965 to 1968.
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The insurrection in Detroit in July 1967 was so massive that LBJ had to send forty-seven hundred federal troops to restore order. Johnson’s role as the “civil rights president” did not prevent him from being reviled in many black communities as the enforcer of law and order, and the defender of economic inequality. At the same time, John Kennedy, with his meager record in civil rights, was regarded as a hero and a martyr—something that Johnson found hard to take. His abandonment by many blacks, Johnson told Doris Kearns Goodwin, was an act of rank ingratitude:

How is it possible that all these people could be so ungrateful to me after I had given them so much? Take the Negroes. I fought for them from the first day I came into office. I spilled my guts out in getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. I put everything I had into that speech before the joint session in 1965. I tried to make it possible for every child of every color to grow up in a nice house, to eat a solid breakfast, to attend a decent school … But look at what I got instead. Riots in 175 cities. Looting. Burning. Shooting. It ruined everything.
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Of far lesser importance but still often on the radar screen was Jacqueline Kennedy. “Managing Jackie” was a subtext for both Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. The new First Lady named a White House garden
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after her predecessor in April 1965, but Mrs. Kennedy begged off attending the ceremony, writing, “It is my hope that you can understand my feelings at this time—that it would be quite painful to return to Washington and so many associations with the past. Perhaps some day I shall return but right now it would be too difficult to relive so many memories.”
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When LBJ offered to let Jackie and JFK’s two brothers use a presidential jet to attend the dedication of the Runnymede battlefield
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in May 1965, Jackie thanked him but pleaded, “Do not let it be Air Force One, and please let it be the 707 that looks the least like Air Force One inside.”
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Mrs. Kennedy understandably wanted no reminders of her last flight aboard Air Force One, and she was instead given a regular jet for the trip.

Then there was the strange incident involving the “Resolute desk,” a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880.
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White House social secretary Bess Abell wrote a distressed note to Lady Bird Johnson in July 1965:

In the spring of 1964 the Kennedy family requested the [Resolute desk] which President Kennedy had used during his years in office as a loan to the Kennedy family exhibit in New York.

Since this time the exhibit has toured the world and apparently the Kennedy family has no intention of returning the desk.

Because it has been used by 16 Presidents it is probably the single most valuable piece in the White House collection.

I bother you with this because there is a possibility you or the President—or both—may receive a call from Mrs. Kennedy or some member of the family asking for the desk.

Legally, it would take an act of Congress to give it to them.
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There is no record of any request by Mrs. Kennedy or any other Kennedy to keep the desk permanently. Theoretically, it was a possibility to be guarded against, yet even today, Bess Abell’s alarm puzzles Stephen Plotkin of the John F. Kennedy Library:

Ms. Abell’s letter seems to me sensationalistic at best. I have a difficult time believing that Mrs. Kennedy, who had spent so much time on the White House renovation, and therefore would have had a working knowledge of the legalities involved, could have contemplated something so egregious as removing the Resolute desk into private ownership.

The exhibit in question was not a “Kennedy family” exhibit, but rather a publicity exhibit for the building of the proposed Kennedy Library, and therefore at least as much a government project as it was a private project. At the conclusion of the tour, the desk was turned over to the Smithsonian. To the best of my knowledge it was never requested by President Johnson; that does not surprise me, given the degree to which the public identified the desk with John F. Kennedy. The desk stayed in the Smithsonian until the election of President Carter, who requested it back.
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Secret Service protection for Mrs. Kennedy and her children led to another subterranean controversy. At the time of JFK’s assassination it was unprecedented for a former First Lady and family to have government-paid security. But the wrenching, instantaneous nature of Mrs. Kennedy’s White House departure and, apparently, some menacing communications had caused President Johnson and Congress to extend Secret Service protection for two years.
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In the summer of 1965 Senator Robert Kennedy requested a further two-year extension. LBJ aide Marvin Watson, in a memo to the president, argued that since “it has been six months since Mrs. Kennedy has received a threatening letter or phone call,” just a one-year extension should be approved.
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Johnson signaled his agreement. However, at about the same time, Congress passed a bill providing for extensive security coverage for the spouses and children of former presidents.

Thanks to recollections Mrs. Kennedy shared with the historian and JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in April 1964 that were published in 2011, we now know the depth of the tension that existed between Jackie and the Johnsons.
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Mrs. Kennedy was merely petty concerning Lady Bird.
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But on President Johnson himself, she was scathing, claiming that on several occasions, JFK had said to her or Bobby, “Oh God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?”
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According to Jackie’s recollections, Johnson had been drunk when asked to be on the ticket in 1960 and JFK regarded him as a nonentity as vice president, of little help when needed and vague in his opinions when asked.
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Some of this is probably bitterness that the Johnsons, not Kennedys, were at the center of the nation’s attentions. Nonetheless, the words sting even after a half century, and hint at a relationship that was less than ideal.
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