The Passage of Power (53 page)

He kept the pressure on also in his vendetta against
Jimmy Hoffa. When Bobby had left the Senate Rackets Committee in 1959 to run his brother’s presidential campaign, he had failed,
“despite
1,500 witnesses and 20,000 pages of testimony,” to win a conviction against the Teamsters’ boss. But, he told his aides, “the game isn’t over.” No sooner had he assumed command of the Justice Department than he set up an elite “Get Hoffa” squad that reported directly to him. Were Justice’s resources not adequate? The
Internal Revenue Service and the FBI—with
“walkie-talkies
, electronic recording devices, cameras, informers, pressure, harassment, every conceivable tactic”—were deployed “to pin a criminal charge on Hoffa,” as one of Kennedy’s biographers puts it. At one time, fourteen grand juries had been impaneled in different cities. Not scrupling to employ the press as a weapon as well, while Hoffa was under indictment, he orchestrated a
Life
article that painted the Teamsters’ boss in unflattering terms.
“It
would be hard to find a man of the law who would consider it ethical for the Attorney General of the United States to work behind the scenes to discredit a citizen under federal indictment,” wrote
Nick Thimmesch, another of Bobby’s biographers. So relentlessly did he pursue the labor leader “that he accomplished the truly stupendous feat of making people feel sorry for Hoffa”; the
American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief on his behalf. It would eventually take seven years, but in 1964, Jimmy Hoffa would indeed be convicted.
“Bobby
hates like me,” Joe Kennedy said. “When I hate some sonofabitch, I hate him until I die.”

And Bobby Kennedy hated Lyndon Johnson. During oral history interviews he gave to the journalist
John Bartlow Martin, on May 14, 1964, he began discussing his
brother’s feelings about Johnson—
“I’m
affected considerably by, I suppose, what … the President thought of him, by, for example, the President’s resentment that he wouldn’t speak at meetings”—and then moved beyond his brother’s feelings to his own, to his feelings about Johnson’s constant lying, for example, and about his treatment of subordinates. “They’re all scared, of course, of Lyndon,” he said. “He yells at his staff. He treats them just terribly. Very mean. He’s a very mean, mean figure.” And then, comparing him with his brother, Robert Kennedy made a more general statement.
“Our
President was a gentleman and a human being,” he said. “This man is not.… He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.” Robert Kennedy told
Bobby Baker, “You’re gonna get yours when the time comes!”—and now he seemed to feel the time had come.

The reins on the Vice President were tightened by his hand. Johnson’s requests for planes—not for the foreign trips he took on presidential orders but for domestic trips—would be ignored until the last minute, and then the planes he was assigned were generally the small Military Air Transport Service planes with the wording he hated on their sides; it became more and more difficult for him to travel on a plane he considered appropriate for a Vice President. It was made clear now that not only his speeches but his brief introductory remarks—his every public utterance—had to be approved, and not only by the White House but by the attorney general. Working with the Justice Department on Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity matters was necessary almost every day, and Johnson’s secretaries and assistants, telephoning Bobby’s office, felt the contempt.
“They
went out of their way there to make you know that they were in and you were not,” Gonella says. “We just dreaded having to call over there.” So integral a part of the Hickory Hill gang’s culture was the contempt that at least once it was expressed, without thinking, in Johnson’s presence. Two middle-level Administration officials,
Ron Linton and
John J. Riley, were chatting at a cocktail party when Linton realized that someone was standing next to them, wanting to be part of the conversation. The listener was Lyndon Johnson. They didn’t stop talking. After a while, Johnson walked away. And when Linton said, “John, I think we just insulted the Vice President of the United States,” Riley blurted out, “Fuck him”—loud enough for Johnson to hear. Whirling around, he stared at the two men for a moment. But what was there to say? Turning again, he walked away.

I
N ATTEMPTING TO UNDERSTAND
Robert Kennedy’s treatment of Lyndon Johnson, is there a clue in his treatment of
Chester Bowles while his brother was watching, not interrupting because Bobby “was communicating exactly what his brother had wanted”? Was Bobby, with Lyndon Johnson, also serving as a weapon for his brother? Did the President want Johnson kept under tighter rein than ever—and was Bobby his instrument for doing this?

Whether or not that was one of the reasons, other—political—considerations
may have militated such treatment. Robert Kennedy, after all, had been part of the Senate world on days—and there had been many days—when that world marveled at the genius and power of Lyndon Johnson, when word spread through the Senate corridors (and down to the basement office of the Senate Rackets Committee) of how, up on the Chamber floor, the mighty Leader had just done it again: of how, with a vote seemingly sure to go against him, he had somehow once again turned defeat into triumph. Bobby had left the Senate Office Building very late on so many nights, to turn and see the lights still burning in the Leader’s office; he had said on one such night,
“No
one can outlast Lyndon.”

Because of the contempt with which Robert Kennedy always treated, and generally spoke of, Lyndon Johnson, many historians have felt that contempt was his basic attitude toward him; the title of the most detailed book on their relationship is, in fact,
Mutual Contempt.
But when Robert Kennedy was talking to men close to him, very different feelings emerged.
“I
can’t stand the bastard,” he once said to
Richard Goodwin, “but he’s the most formidable human being I’ve ever met.”
“He
just eats up strong men,” he said on another occasion. “The fact is that he’s able to eat people up, even people who are considered rather strong figures.” “Contempt” was not at all an accurate summation of his feelings about Lyndon Johnson, and powerless though Johnson might be at the moment, as Vice President he was still a threat. The more perceptive members of the staffs of both men understood this. Says
Harry McPherson, who had worked for Johnson before the vice presidency,
“If
your brother is President, and you’ve got this powerhouse accustomed to being in command as Vice President, it would make you as suspicious as anything.” Kennedy’s aide
William vanden Heuvel says that Robert Kennedy saw Johnson as
“a
manipulative force” who could, if he ever got off his leash, be very difficult to rein in again. So the leash had to be kept tight.

But there was also the aspect that lay beyond the political, and beyond analysis, too, the aspect that led George Reedy to ask, “Did you ever see two dogs come into a room … ?” There was Bobby’s hatred for liars, and his feeling that Lyndon Johnson
“lies
all the time … lies even when he doesn’t have to lie.” There was his hatred for yes-men—and for those who wanted to be surrounded by yes-men—and Johnson’s insistence on being surrounded by such men, an insistence which, Bobby was to say,
“makes
it very difficult, unless you want to kiss his behind all the time.” He detested the politician’s false bonhomie, and Johnson embodied that bonhomie.
“He
[Bobby] recoiled at being touched,” and of course Lyndon Johnson was always touching and hugging. And talking.
“It
was southwestern exaggeration against Yankee understatement,” Arthur Schlesinger has written. “Robert Kennedy, in the New England manner, liked people to keep their physical distance. Johnson … was all over everybody.” So many of Bobby Kennedy’s pet hates were embodied in Lyndon Johnson.

“No affection contaminated the relationship between the Vice President and the Attorney General,” Schlesinger writes. “It was a pure case of mutual dislike.” Lyndon Johnson, he writes, “repelled Robert Kennedy.” The two men were, as he
portrays them—in the portrayal that has become the model for other historians—opposites, and certainly in many ways, in all the obvious ways, perhaps, they were.

Y
ET, IN SOME WAYS
, “opposite” is not at all an apt adjective to apply to Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, as is shown by their approach to two of the most fundamental elements of politics.

One was counting votes.

“Vote-counting”—predicting the count for or against an issue or a candidate in advance of the actual ballot—is, as I have written, “one of the most vital of the political arts, but it is an art that few can master,” subject as it is to the distortions of sentiment or romantic preconceptions. A person convinced of the arguments on one side of a controversial issue feels that arguments so convincing to him must be equally convincing to others, a belief which leads to wishful thinking and to overoptimism in vote predictions. Even as a congressional aide—not even a congressman, yet—Johnson had been known among young Washington insiders as “the greatest vote-counter.”
³
In the Senate, leading a party that often had only a one-vote majority, a party with fiercely opposed liberal and conservative blocs so that the Democratic coalition was shifting constantly beneath his feet and he almost always had to cobble Republican votes together with it, he had almost never, during his six years as Majority Leader, lost a vote on a major bill. During the days leading up to the vote, he kept his count on the long, narrow Senate tally sheets, and his thumb, moving down the sheet from name to name, moved very slowly as he reflected, not moving on to the next name until he was certain about this one. To a staff member who, after talking to a senator, said he “thought” he knew which way the senator was going to vote, he would snarl, “What the fuck good is
thinking
to me? Thinking isn’t good enough. I need to
know
!”

In 1960, the man counting votes against Lyndon Johnson was Robert Kennedy, and Kennedy’s men had learned he didn’t want optimism or wishful thinking.
“I
don’t want generalities or guesses,” he told them when he gathered them together before the convention. “There’s no point in our fooling ourselves. I want the cold facts. I want to hear only the votes we are guaranteed to get on the first ballot.” He wanted to
know,
to know beyond doubt; he insisted on knowing:
“He
insisted practically on the name, address, and telephone number of every half vote,” someone who watched him recalls. And he
knew.
He
couldn’t be wrong: “If we don’t win tonight, we’re dead.”
Ben Bradlee was to remember
“Bobby
, literally sick with fatigue, going over the … first ballot with me at two o’clock in the morning, one last time, delegate by delegate.” Getting the necessary majority was going to be so close. He couldn’t be wrong—and he wasn’t.
He had told Ted that the outcome was going to come down to those last five votes from
Wyoming, and that was just how it turned out.

Johnson, who, after his long indecision, was battling in the last days before the 1960 convention for every delegate vote as the count swayed back and forth—
Delaware hinging on a single vote,
North Dakota on half a vote—was keeping his own tally. A master of an art recognizes another master when he encounters one, and Johnson knew there was a master battling—and counting votes—against him.

The other element, as important as counting votes, was holding them. When he was Majority Leader, nobody had been better at holding votes than Lyndon Johnson: keeping the vote of a senator who, after he had pledged him his vote, received a better offer—or a more effective threat—from the other side.
“Destroy
” was a verb he used to men who, having pledged him their support, were thinking about changing their minds: “I’ll destroy you.” “Ruin” was a verb he used. “I’m going to give you a three-minute lesson in integrity,” he told one politician. “And then I’m going to ruin you.” And, as he tried to take votes away from the Kennedys in 1960, there had been someone on the other side holding them fast, someone who, having slipped on “the halter and the bridle,” would not allow them to be slipped off. There were, moreover, other qualities to which the word “opposite” did not apply. Was Lyndon Johnson a smearer of opponents, a destroyer of reputations, without scruple? Watching Franklin Roosevelt Jr. destroy Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia with the “draft dodger” fabrication, Johnson knew who had orchestrated the tactic.
“That’s
Bobby,” he had told Tommy Corcoran—and he had been right. In some ways, Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were very different—and in some ways they weren’t.

Lyndon Johnson recognized the caliber of the man he was dealing with. He had recognized it even before the campaign. It had been in 1957, when he was the Majority Leader and Robert Kennedy had been a thirty-two-year-old Senate staffer, that he had said that an investigation of America’s
Sputnik
disaster might succeed
“if
it had had someone like young Kennedy handling it.” All during his life, words would, as if despite himself, burst out of him that revealed that he recognized Bobby’s abilities. Back on his ranch in retirement, watching on television the bumbling attempts of Edward Kennedy and a retinue of Kennedy advisers to explain away the Chappaquiddick drowning, he would say,
“Never
would have happened if Bobby was there.” And, recognizing that caliber, he was, as
Richard Goodwin says,
“always
afraid of Bobby. It was more than hatred. It was fear.”

And hatred and fear, no matter how deep they went, were not Lyndon Johnson’s only feelings about Bobby Kennedy, for the President’s brother had come to embody to him something deeper than the political.

Hickory Hill, that most “in” of all Camelot’s social “in” places, was the catalyst for these emotions. He and Lady Bird were almost never invited, of course, and in a town where everyone was talking about the gossip columns’ description
of the previous evening’s dinner party, he would invariably be asked if he had been there, and would have to say no. On those occasions when an invitation to the Vice President and his wife was unavoidable, they were seated at Ethel’s
“losers’
table.” While at the White House, protocol and the President’s expressed desire that the Vice President be treated with respect maintained a patina of courtesy—he and Lady Bird may have come down the staircase behind the President and the visiting head of state, but at least they came down the staircase, and then stood in the receiving line with them—at Hickory Hill, there was no patina at all.
Hugh Sidey was to call the mockery of the Vice President at Ethel’s parties “just awful … inexcusable, really.” At one party, to “overwhelming merriment,” Bobby was presented with a voodoo effigy of Lyndon Johnson for him to stick pins into.