Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade.

The rift between Robert F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson was the central fault line running down the center of the Democratic party at the time of the party's greatest influence since the 1930s. In his new book, Jeff Shesol makes a strong argument that it is impossible to "fully comprehend either [man] without considering his relationship with the other" Although the various biographers of each man have of necessity discussed the Kennedy-Johnson rivalry, none has covered the matter as comprehensively or as well as Shesol does here.

The bad blood between the two can be traced back to Johnson's rather anemic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, only to crystallize during JFK's administration.

Despite the president's efforts to include him in important discussions, Johnson was a virtual nonentity in the Kennedy administration, an object of derision for the New Frontier loyalists. When Johnson became president in November 1963, Kennedy aides reacted with the same incredulity as Franklin Roosevelt's staff had 18 years earlier when a former haberdasher was called upon to fill the shoes of the man whom they would continue to call "the President" well after April 1945. But Roosevelt had not been assassinated, nor had he an obvious successor for New Dealers to rally around. Almost from the moment he assumed office, Lyndon Johnson's chief political worry was the threat of a Kennedy restoration. He was hardly alone. For most pundits, the question was not whether RFK would seek the presidency, but when.

Shesol is a bit mingy in acknowledging LBJ's virtues. For example, he notes that the Kennedy administration had already lined up the necessary votes in the House to pass his civil rights act by November 1963. While this may be true, everyone knew that the real battle would be in the Senate where, as Jesse Helms has so recently demonstrated, geriatric Southern conservatives are still masters of obstruction. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 remain President Johnson's greatest accomplishments.

Yet for the most part, it is difficult to fault Shesol's judgment as he relates instance after well-documented instance of Johnson's pettiness and insecurity regarding the Kennedys. It is a backhanded testament to LBJ's remarkable industry that he was able to launch the Great Society and fight the Vietnam War, given all the time he lavished on foiling RFK initiatives' What is one to make of a man who not only questioned the propriety of burying the younger Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery, but also left it to his successor to appropriate money for the memorial's upkeep? (Not many people can claim to have been outclassed by the Nixon administration.) While the animosity was hardly one-sided and the President would have been foolish to ignore Kennedy's potential as an opponent, Shesol's use of the term "paranoid" to describe some of Johnson's actions is not out of order.

Even as John Kennedy's star has dimmed over the years, there still remains the glimmer of possibility about Robert. Shesol acknowledges the former attorney general's flaws but leaves little doubt as to where his sympathies lie in the Johnson-Kennedy feud. He echoes the words of numerous Kennedy partisans in suggesting that the hard-as-nails attorney general "grew" into a genuine champion of the downtrodden in the years following his brother's death. He also makes the intriguing suggestion that RFK's suspicion of bureaucracies and iconoclasm presaged Bill Clinton's "New Democrats" (It is a bit of a reach to believe that Bobby Kennedy is what Sam Nunn and LBJ son-in-law Chuck Robb had in mind when they founded the Democratic Leadership Committee.) But he is not alone in wondering--like many of those who care for Democratic ideals--whether Robert Kennedy could have succeeded where Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern failed, leading a unified party into the 1970s. If there is a flaw in Shesol's account, it is a failure to keep the reader fully abreast of "the big picture" The Republican party is but a chimera in the book, emerging from the mists to claim victory in the 1966 elections before vanishing again; the reader is assumed to know already the general arc of the civil rights movement; and while his discussion of the Vietnam War is strong, his failure to mention that the American media is now judged to have fumbled in its coverage of the The Offensive (see Peter Braestrup's The Big Story) is an oversight worth noting More importantly, the reader is left wondering what the Kennedy-Johnson schism meant in the broader context of the unraveling of the Democratic party. If Mutual Contempt makes the entire eight-year period prior to March 1968 seem a prelude to Robert Kennedy's campaign against Lyndon Johnson for the presidential nomination, it is a conflict without a climax. Johnson's withdrawal from the race two weeks later and Sirhan Sirhan ensured that neither would be the party's standard bearer in 1968. That the party proceeded to self-destruct at its August convention demonstrates that the fissures within the Democratic party ran much deeper than the competing ambitions of these two men. The narrative ends rather abruptly with the departure of its principals from political life; a more detailed examination of the legacy of these two remarkable figures would have been appropriate.

Shesol is so skillful in handling what he has chosen to include in his book that it is perhaps a bit unfair to complain about what he left out. He makes excellent use of both published and archival sources, including recently released dictabelt tapes of Johnson's White House telephone conversations. A talented writer, Shesol demonstrates the rare gift for clarity without sacrificing complexity.

Kevin A. Swope is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at Columbia University.