LBJ vs. RFK: a case of mutual contempt.

The story unfolds like a Greek tragedy played out on a nation's center stage. The protagonists are flawed, very human men, and their conflict illuminates not only their characters but their era. As historical figures, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy are forever entangled: One cannot fully comprehend either man without considering his relationship with the other. Their antagonism was, from the beginning, very personal, but it was also a complicated blend of politics, ideas, ambitions, and anxieties. Kennedy's challenge to johnson says much about his own evolution as a public figure. LBJ's nervous response to the "Bobby problem" speaks volumes about the Johnson presidency. This became the defining relationship of their political lives.

Nor can one fully comprehend the 1960s without considering the Johnson-Kennedy feud. The issues that wrenched these two men apart -- Vietnam, race, poverty -- were at the heart of many personal political cleavages in those years of division. But Johnson and Kennedy were not, like student demonstrators or civil rights workers, peripheral anonymous figures. After John Kennedy's assassination, they were the political titans of the decade. They not only responded to issues but also shaped them. From the war in Vietnam to the war on poverty, from the "problem of the cities" to the collapse of the Democratic coalition, the major events of the 60s bear the imprint of this personal rivalry.

Politics, too, bore its mark. Johnson and Kennedy personalized, embodied, and, crystallized growing rifts among Democrats. Their feud was, in large part, an ideological and general struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party and the future of American liberalism. Would liberals, like LBJ, continue to represent unions, federal paternalism, and globalism? Or would they move with RFK toward "a newer world" -- a broader coalition, more decentralized decision making, and "empowerment" of the underprivileged? These tensions linger: the long shadow of the Johnson-Kennedy feud looms above today's clash between "Old" and "New" Democrats. Johnson and Kennedy's struggle for power, a focal point of the Democratic search for identity, is a lens through which to examine these larger divisions.

In 1961, after a White House dance, a group of officials gathered upstairs for a late-night batch of scrambled eggs. In the kitchen, Vice President Lyndon Johnson accosted Attorney General Robert Kennedy. "Bobby, you do not like me," Johnson moaned. Bobby recoiled; the situation was painfully awkward for everyone, but the vice president was unrelenting. "Your brother likes me," Johnson went on. "Your sister-in-law likes me. Your Daddy likes me. But you don't like me. Now why? Why don't you like me?"

It remains a central question, charged with emotion and invested with significance. Its answer reveals a great deal about two men, their times, and the nature of power.

The Offer

In the Kennedy suite, it was not altogether clear that an offer was imminent. Overwhelmed by the excitement of victory -- on the first ballot, no less -- Kennedy advisers found it difficult to focus on the thorny and less glamorous matter of the vice presidency. Joe Kennedy dropped by and urged jack to pick Lyndon Johnson, but the candidate appeared irresolute and went to bed at 2:00 a.m., leaving advisers with the impression that only Stuart Symington and Scoop Jackson were being considered. Neither John nor Bobby said a word about LBJ.

Thus began, in Bobby's view, "the most indecisive time we ever had," a period hopelessly snarled by confusion, miscommunication, and murky, mixed intentions. Jack "thought how terrible it was that he had only 24 hours to select a vice president. He really hadn't thought about it at all" According to Bobby, it was only after the presidential nomination, the night of July 13, that they learned johnson was interested in the vice presidency. And yet JFK had been receiving signals for days. Unless Bobby's recollections are wholly inaccurate, which seems unlikely, it appears that he knew nothing of House Speaker Sam] Rayburn's, Washington Post publisher Phil Grahams, or others' overtures on Johnson's behalf. "Well, we couldn't believe [LBJ] would [want the vice presidency]," Bobby said later, speaking more for himself than for his brother, "but Jack decided that he'd go down and talk to him about it anyway."

At 6:30 a.m. on July 14, Pierre Salinger stepped across the hall from his suite into Bobby Kennedy's suite. Ken O'Donnell stood outside the bathroom, where Kennedy was bathing. "How many electoral votes are we gonna get if we capture the East, Northeast, and the solid South?" Bobby shouted from the bathtub. The solid South included Texas. "Are you talking about nominating Lyndon Johnson?" Salinger demanded. "You're not going to do that."

"Yes, we are," Bobby said matter-of-factly. JFK was heading to Johnson's suite at 10 a.m. to make the offer. At this news, the two advisers exploded. O'Donnell violently protested' Johnson's presence on the ticket; he had not forgotten the ugliness of the johnson campaign. Bobby calmly cited Johnson's unique strength in the South. Then, rising from the tub, he dried, dressed, and excused himself to conduct a morning meeting.

Had Bobby been converted to a Kennedy-Johnson ticket? It seems highly unlikely, for as Bobby later explained, johnson had 'said some rather nasty things -- or his people had -- and we hadn't really gotten over that' Bobby spoke for Salinger and O'Donnell and especially for himself, revealing an antipathy that ran deeper, predating the campaign. Time's Hugh Sidey recalled Robert Kennedy's "contempt for Johnson as majority leader." But by the morning of july 14,1960, Bobby knew an overture to Johnson was imminent and seems to have been preparing or warning his like-minded advisers. He was not going to undercut his brother's decision.

Shortly after 10:00 a.m., John Kennedy traced the two flights back up from Johnson's suite to his own. He arrived, according to Bobby, in a panic of misgivings. You just won't believe it. He wants it," the dazed Jack told his brother.

Oh, my God!" Bobby exclaimed.

"Now what do we do?"

Bobby later told Arthur Schlesinger that "the idea that UFK would] go down and offer him the nomination in hopes that he'd take the nomination is not true. The reason he went down ... [is] because there were enough indications from others that he [Johnson] wanted to be offered the nomination. But [JFK] never dreamt that there was a chance in the world that he would accept it"

Bobby's case is not persuasive. It is hard to fathom that John Kennedy, after clear signals from Rayburn, Graham, Massachusetts Congressman Tip O'Neill, and New Deal guru Tommy Corcoran, could possibly have been surprised by Johnson's answer. JFK, after all, had earlier told O'Neill that he would be "embarrassed" if Johnson rejected an offer.

It is also doubtful that, as Bobby argues, JFK offered the vice presidency only to appease Johnson's self-importance and without any "hopes" that LBJ would accept. Graham, columnist Joseph Alsop, and O'Neill clearly recall encounters with JFK in which he convincingly sang the praises of a Kennedy-Johnson ticket, impressing others with his "positiveness." Hale Boggs thought it obvious, despite the political chaos, that JFK considered Johnson essential to victory. Tip O'Neill thought JFK "delighted" at the prospect of a Kennedy-Johnson ticket.

The accounts seem irreconcilable. What can explain Bobby's puzzling version of events? It is tempting to dismiss it as fabrication. Yet Bobby's version emerged in a series of private, sealed oral history interviews with historians and trusted friends Schlesinger and John Bartlow Martin. Over the course of eight conversations, spanning a full year, Bobby's story was consistent and emphatic: under no circumstances was JFK'S offer either intended or expected to be accepted by LBJ. This account cannot responsibly be dismissed as duplicity. It is more believable that Robert Kennedy, who despised LBJ even in 1960, remembered events as he saw them.

The Fallout

What followed was chaos. "We both promised each other that we'd never tell what happened," Bobby recalled, but we spent the rest of the day alternating between thinking it was good and thinking it wasn't good ... and how he could get out of it." Their initial misgiving were compounded by a staff which, once informed, stormed on the verge of insurrection. Salinger was outraged; O'Donnell was almost hysterical. Turning on Bobby, O'Donnell denounced the choice of Johnson as a "disaster" and told JFK it was the worst mistake" he ever made. "In your first move after the nomination, you go against all the people who supported you," he said. O'Donnell, JFK's liaison to labor, "was so furious that I could hardly talk. I thought of the promises we had made to the labor leaders and the civil rights groups.... I felt that we had been double-crossed"

Taut with anger, John Kennedy whitened and composed himself. He protested stiffly that his offer had not been accepted. "Did it occur to you," he pointed out, "that if Lyndon becomes the vice president, I'll have Alike Mansfield as the leader in the Senate, somebody I can trust and depend on?" The argument won few converts other than Bobby Kennedy.

By late morning, word of an impending johnson nomination had reached the convention floor. "All hell broke loose! They were just up in arms," Hubert Humphrey said of his fellow liberals. The normally sanguine Arthur Schlesinger lit into Phil Graham with such ferocity that Grahams wife, Katharine, had to pull them apart. New Mexico Congressman Stewart Udell ran from delegation to delegation "putting out fires," promising his liberal friends that a Kennedy-Johnson ticket was the surest route to victory. It was a difficult pitch. Negro leaders cried "sell-out", the D.C. delegation, infuriated by rumors of Johnson's selection, threatened hollowly to tear the convention apart. As word of the spreading liberal revolt reached JFK's suite, Robert Kennedy in particular saw the choice of Johnson as a grave mistake.

Johnson had his own fires to quench. Few Texans had even considered that LBJ might take the vice presidency. Now, most felt deserted and sick at heart, just as bitter as the Kennedy supporters. "Who'd want to be vice president for that man?" Jake Jacobson demanded. Juanita Roberts, Johnson's secretary, was not the only one to characterize the ticket as upside down. In Johnson's suite, political leaders gathered to voice their support or outrage. Robert Kerr was so livid that upon confirmation of the bad news, he reportedly slapped Bobby Baker in the face. Get me my .38," Kerr yelled at Baker, LBJ, and Lady Bird. "I'm gonna kill every damn one of you. I can't believe that my three best friends would betray me" Eventually, either Rayburn or Baker converted Kerr, who apologized to the Johnsons for "los[ing] my head "

Meanwhile, the two Kennedy brothers sat alone inside Jack's suite in utter indecision. "Jack changed his mind back and forth, as I did ... at least six times," Bobby remembered. "The problem was, if it wasn't a good idea, how you'd get [Johnson] out of it. Secondly, if you did get him out of it, how bitter would he be?" Shortly after 1:00 p.m. they decided to talk Johnson off the ticket, to undo "the terrible mistake"

The Aftermath

The accounts of Robert Kennedy's subsequent visits to the Johnson suite -- three in all -- are jumbled and contradictory. What remains clear is that each trip generated a wider wake of confusion and disaffection, with Bobby at first going ostensibly simply to test Johnson's commitment to the ticket then later, as Bobby recalled of 4is final visit, "to see if I could get him to withdraw.' In between Bobby's visits, Johnson and his people were on the phone to JFK, who, even as his brother was attempting to ease Johnson off the ticket, called Graham and announced: "It's all set.... Tell Lyndon I want him"

Sometime after JFK's final offer to Johnson, Graham phoned the nominee to express confusion that Bobby had again returned to Johnson's suite and was encouraging Lyndon to withdraw. "Oh," Jack replied serenely, that's all right; Bobby's been out of touch and doesn't know what's happening." He instructed that LBJ make a statement right away, and then talked for a moment to Johnson, who was sprawled across the bed. Baker, meanwhile, tugged an utterly exhausted Bobby Kennedy back into the room.

"Bobby, your brother wants to speak to you," Graham said, thinking himself a character in an increasingly absurd melodrama. According to Graham, Bobby took the phone, listened a moment to JFK, and said, "Well, it's too late now," before half slamming down the receiver. Robert Kennedy remembered no such phone call.

John Kennedy had changed his mind while Bobby was trying to change Johnson's. The nominee decided a reversal would do him more damage than an anti-Johnson revolt. "I just got a call from Clark Clifford ... saying that this [indecision] is disastrous, you've got to take him," Jack explained when Bobby returned from Johnson's suite. There was more: As Bobby recalled, JFK had concluded that Johnson "would be so mean as majority leader that it was better having him as vice president, where you could control him' And "particularly after you had offered him the job, then it would have been disastrous to have that affront and withdraw it."

As it turned out, it was disastrous just to attempt to withdraw it. In the wake of Bobby's last visit, a pall hung over the Johnson suite. Lady Bird was in tears. LBJ returned from his press conference sour-faced and seething. Yet he did not blame John Kennedy as the agent of his s@ repudiation; the villain, Johnson believed, was Bobby Kennedy -- Bobby, who opposed Johnson from the beginning; Bobby, who sided with labor against him; Bobby, who ruthlessly tried to humiliate him. In Baker's recollection it was Bobby, not Jack, whom Johnson denounced as "that little shitass" and a score of epithets more coarse.

Johnson's friends joined in the recriminations. Connally seconded LBJ's suspicion that Bobby was the mastermind. JFK was too "practical [a] fellow," Texas Governor John Connally said, to make an offer without expecting it to be accepted. Joe Alsop believed that Bobby took the initiative to talk Johnson off the ticket and that Jack, seeking to avoid "an exhausting fraternal argument during an already stressful time," placated Bobby by allowing him to do so. Even Graham, who remembered John Kennedy's last-minute qualms and "mind-changing" more clearly than anyone, could not believe JFK had authorized Bobby's inept political maneuver. Graham instead imagined that Bobby was fulfilling a promise to liberal delegates to deny Johnson the nomination. My guess"' Graham concluded in his memorandum, "is that he made that assurance on his own and tried to bring it about on his own"

In later years, Bobby Kennedy was incensed, "flabbergasted," by the Graham memo. Bobby argued that when he had left the Kennedy suite to meet with Johnson, the two brothers had been in agreement; If Johnson seemed amenable, Bobby should ease him off the ticket. "Obviously," Bobby said to Arthur Schlesinger, "with the close relationship between my brother and I, [I] wasn't going down to see if he would withdraw just as a lark on my own -- 'My brother's asleep so I'll go see if I can get rid of his vice president."'

Although Bobby's self-justifying claims cannot be verified, they make more sense than LBJ's conspiratorial account. At conventions, as George Reedy explained, "people become extremely emotional. They have a tendency to believe things that they would never believe ... in their calmer moments." Johnson had a tendency to believe such things even in his calmer moments. And in the distorting heat of Los Angeles, and forever afterward, LBJ was absolutely convinced that Robert Kennedy had acted alone, with premeditated spite, to destroy his political future.