The Passage of Power (49 page)

Johnson got the idea. He didn’t attend. But when he was asked for the contribution—
“The
happy, joyful ceremony … must now be paid for,” Robert Kennedy wrote him. “I would greatly appreciate it, therefore, if you would send me a check for $200.00 which will cover your assessment”—he sent the check right off.

“A
FTER THE
C
UBAN
M
ISSILE
C
RISIS
,”
Evelyn Lincoln was to write, “Mr. Kennedy seemed to be less concerned with making sure the Vice President was occupied, and from then on, he let Mr. Johnson seek his own place in the Administration.” Johnson’s response was the technique he had always used with people who had more power than he, as Mrs. Lincoln observed with barely concealed contempt. “The Vice President became more apprehensive and anxious to please. He tried even harder to enter into activities and become part of them. Whenever
anyone mentioned Mr. Kennedy’s name he would immediately tell them what a good job he was doing. He praised the efficiency of the Kennedy staff and the soundness of the Kennedy ideas. Time and again, as they filed out of the Cabinet Room, I would hear Mr. Johnson making these glowing compliments.” Elbowing his way through a group standing in her office after one meeting, “he came up to the President. He stuck out his hand and said, ‘That was a fine speech, Jack.’ ” But he wasn’t dealing with elderly senators now. Fawn over Jack Kennedy though he might, Mrs. Lincoln says, “The President was … sending him fewer memos and giving him fewer assignments, and as a result, Johnson was fading into the background.” In 1963,
“One
saw much less of him around the White House than in 1961 or 1962,” Arthur Schlesinger was to write, and this wasn’t a mistaken impression; in 1961, according to Mrs. Lincoln’s detailed diaries of the President’s activities, Johnson had spent only ten hours and nineteen minutes alone with the President, a meagre enough figure; in 1962, the figure had been smaller; in 1963, the Vice President was alone with the President for a total of one hour and fifty-three minutes. And Kennedy’s attitude was reflected in the attitude of his staff. “I hate to admit it but in planning the surprise birthday party for Mr. Kennedy on May 29th, I forgot all about inviting Mr. Johnson,” Mrs. Lincoln says. “And no one reminded me.”

The President was still, of course, dispatching him on foreign trips, and assigning him routine ceremonial duties.
“The
vice presidency is filled with trips around the world, chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping, chairmanships of counsils [
sic
], but in the end it is nothing,” Lyndon Johnson was to say years later. “I detested every minute of it.” And when he tried to make something more of the foreign trips, steps were taken to make sure he couldn’t. During his September, 1963, visit to
Finland, recalls America’s ambassador to that country,
Carl Rowan, “there was an earthquake in
Iran, and he [Johnson] wanted to go there to demonstrate American caring. The White House said no.” It said no as well to the very possibility of another trip. In a casual conversation in the embassy in Helsinki one evening, Johnson, boasting about his ability to read men, said, in Rowan’s recollection, “that he could look into the eyes of the Soviet leaders and see what was in their hearts.” This statement was relayed to Washington, which evidently became concerned that the Vice President might try to visit Finland’s neighbor Russia. “I got a secret back-channel message saying, ‘Do what you must, under any circumstances, to prevent Johnson from going to the Soviet Union,’ ” Rowan recalls.

And, as Schlesinger was to write, “the psychological cost was evidently mounting.” Historian and secretary use the same phrase:
“He
seemed to have faded astonishingly into the background,” he says. People who remembered him, tall and lean and bursting with energy, emanating power and authority as he strode through Capitol corridors and commanded the Senate Chamber from his front-row center desk, were shocked when they saw him now. His complexion was gray, and on that canvas face, now so gaunt, was painted sadness. Sitting at
meetings in the Cabinet Room, gray, withdrawn and silent, he
“appeared
,” in Schlesinger’s phrase, “almost a spectral presence.” When some official did telephone him, he seemed unable to stop talking, until the official, the brief purpose of the call accomplished, became desperate to get off the phone. Social occasions could be poignant. Invited to a fund-raiser at the Fifth Avenue apartment of a wealthy New York couple,
“like
a fool I went,” he told
Harry McPherson. “The President was there, sitting in a big easy chair, and everyone was in a circle around him, leaning in to hear every word. I was leaning over, too, and suddenly I didn’t want to do that, to be leaning over listening to Jack Kennedy.” Walking over to the French doors, he stood there alone, staring out over Central Park, until the hostess noticed, and asked a group of young guests, “Will somebody go and talk to the Vice President?” A beautiful young heiress,
Jeanne Murray Vanderbilt, said, “I’ll talk to him, but what can I talk to him about?”

The hostess, who knew Johnson, told Vanderbilt, “Don’t give it a thought,” and, Vanderbilt was to say, “She was right. He never stopped talking and he was so charming.” After they had talked for some
time, Johnson offered her a ride home—and as he let her out of the car, he said, “I’ll never forget how nice you were to me tonight.”

And, of course, with the blood in the water so plainly visible now, the journalistic swarm was more avid than ever.
“It
would be a rich treasure for historians if there were a tape recording of the talk Jack Kennedy gave to Johnson in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles to persuade him to accept the nomination.… Few men in American history have given up so much for so little,” the
Miami Herald
said. By the end of the year, the boast he had once made was being used to taunt him. In an article in
The Reporter
magazine under the now-familiar headline
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO LYNDON JOHNSON?,
journalist
Ward Just wrote that once “Johnson had said, ‘Power is where power goes.’ … It has not worked out quite that way, as LBJ would probably admit.… The man of power who suddenly finds himself short of it is a fascinating study. Lyndon Johnson seems determined to shun controversy. With newsmen he is strictly for ‘background only.’ The result … is that LBJ has all but disappeared from official sight.… The relationship between Kennedy and Johnson is one of the most curious in Washington.… Is there, in fact, any business relationship at all?” Said a
Time
article in January, 1963:
“ ‘Power
is where power goes,’ Johnson confidently told a friend before taking office as Vice President. He was wrong—power has slipped from his grasp.” All of the jobs he had been given—the chairmanships of the Space Council and the CEEO, the membership on the
National Security Council—“all of this together adds up to only a fraction of his old power and influence. He is free to speak up, but nobody, really, has to heed him anymore.” The popular television show
Candid
Camera
asked random passersby: “Who is Lyndon B. Johnson?” Not one knew. One of those questioned said he couldn’t be expected to know: “I’m from New Jersey.” “Well,” said another, “he’s not President. Am I getting close?”

A
ND IN 1963
, also, his predicament was growing worse due to another factor. Over Jack Kennedy’s dealings with his Vice President there was painted—even if only lightly and only in public—a tint of respect, and of the wry amusement that made the President call him “Riverboat.” Now Lyndon Johnson found himself increasingly dealing with—increasingly in confrontation with—the President’s brother.

The hatred that Lyndon Johnson felt for Robert Kennedy on that terrible afternoon in Los Angeles had never faded. It would never fade; he would talk about that afternoon for the rest of his life. Years later, back on his ranch after his presidency, not long before he died, he would seize visitors’ lapels and bend his face into theirs in the intensity of his effort to make sure the visitor understood that it hadn’t been Jack Kennedy but Bobby who had wanted him to withdraw from the vice presidential nomination. Recording his thoughts to guide the ghostwriters of his autobiography, he made sure they understood. “He came to my room three times to try to get me to say I wouldn’t run.”

Time was curing nothing between the two men. The traditional seating arrangement for Cabinet meetings, established in the chronological order of the creation of the different departments, placed the attorney general next to the Vice President. Saying he didn’t like that arrangement, Bobby had his place moved. With no formal seating arrangement at
National Security Council meetings, sometimes the two men found themselves sitting side by side, and, as
Richard Goodwin, seated against the wall behind the President, noticed, “They literally couldn’t look at each other.”

And as Johnson knew—or thought he knew, or said he knew—who had been responsible for his humiliation in Los Angeles, he knew, or thought he knew, or said he knew, who was responsible for all the humiliations of the following three years.
“Jack
Kennedy’s just as thoughtful and considerate of me … as he can be,” he told
Bobby Baker. “But I know his snot-nosed brother’s after my ass.”

Such statements were made with a conviction that persuaded assistants and allies that Johnson believed what he was saying to be true, but the more perceptive of them wondered if the remarks were yet another example of him believing what he wanted to believe—in this case, what he felt he
had
to believe. Feeling as he did that the fulfillment of his dream—of his life—depended on his staying on as friendly terms as possible with the President, anger at Jack Kennedy wasn’t an option. And therefore,
Doris Kearns Goodwin was to write,
“Johnson
projected his feelings onto … Bobby.” During her conversations with Johnson at the ranch, she says, “It was Bobby he reserved his anger for.

“It was Bobby who was cutting him off the list of invitees at the White House.… If he had submerged feelings towards Jack—and they had to be there—then Bobby becomes the target of those feelings. He blamed him for the
ill treatment—he couldn’t afford to blame Jack Kennedy—although clearly Bobby wasn’t acting in any way his brother would disapprove of.” Everything was Bobby’s fault.
“He
couldn’t be rational where Bobby was concerned,” Bobby Baker says. Says
Ashton Gonella: “He thought he was sneaky, he thought he lied—I can’t say the rest. He just
hated
him.”

There was an additional, ironic, note. In explaining to his angry allies why he had accepted the vice presidential nomination, Johnson had said, in a phrase he used repeatedly, that if he couldn’t be “The Number One Man” in Washington, he would at least be “The Number Two Man.” Now, however,
Life
magazine’s issue profiling Bobby bore the headline “
THE
NO. 2 MAN IN WASHINGTON,
” and
U.S. News & World Report
’s said, “
ROBERT KENNEDY: NO. 2 MAN IN WASHINGTON,
” and
Time
’s said simply, “
NO. 2
”—each headline another dash of salt in Lyndon Johnson’s wounds.

And Johnson had read at least one aspect of Bobby Kennedy well enough to know the feelings were mutual. “When this fellow looks at me, he looks at me like he’s going to look a hole right through me, like I’m a spy or something,” he told
John Connally.

But to a man whose life is based on calculations of power, the crucial factor in any equation is who possesses it, and Lyndon Johnson’s eyes, so keen at these calculations, knew the answer; knew the headlines had ranked Bobby correctly. By the beginning of 1963, all Washington understood that Robert Kennedy had transformed the Justice Department, turning it into a newly aggressive foe of organized crime and juvenile delinquency, and that his role in government had been expanded far beyond his department—that, following the
Bay of Pigs debacle, his brother had assigned him foreign policy responsibilities as well, had in fact brought him into the inner circles in which foreign policy is decided. But Johnson saw more than that. He saw the signs that, to the skilled calculator of power, meant more than the assignments: who entered a meeting beside the President, which meant that the President had been consulting with him before the formal deliberations began; who the President quietly asked to stay behind after the meeting; whose views at the meeting were embodied in the presidential decision that followed.
“Every
time they have a conference, don’t kid anybody about who is the top adviser,” Johnson blurted out one day. “It isn’t McNamara, the chiefs of staff, or anybody else like that. Bobby is first in, last out. And Bobby is the boy he listens to.” Nor was it merely a matter of advice: Bobby was more than an adviser; he was a brother, in a family in which the blood tie meant all. The attorney general was unfailingly formal during meetings, never forgetting that he was addressing
“Mr
. President,” but sometimes on the way out, in a brief huddle together, the names the attorney general and the President called each other in private slipped out: “Johnny”; “Bobby.” It was the way that they sometimes communicated without words, the reaction of one brother to the other’s statement being conveyed in a shrug of the shoulder or a shake of the head. It was the way that, as Arthur Schlesinger wrote,
“They
 … always talked in the cryptic
half sentences that bespoke perfect understanding,” the way they finished each other’s sentences. Watching them at a formal state dinner, where they were sitting far apart, a guest was struck by how each heard, through the chatter, what the other was saying, and chimed in on it.
“They
hardly had to speak with each other,” the guest said. “They understood each other from a half word. There was a kind of constant, almost telepathic, contact between them.” Asked once to explain, Jack Kennedy said, “It’s by
osmosis
.” Lyndon Johnson heard and saw it all. He sued for peace.