The Passage of Power (31 page)

But while Bobby Kennedy may have changed his mind, Jack appears never to have changed his. And emotional though the scene at the Statler Hilton may have been, it doesn’t explain Bobby’s repeated attempts, attested to not only by Johnson but by Rayburn and Connally, to persuade Johnson to withdraw from the ticket. O’Donnell, who says he was present when Bobby reported back to his brother on his meeting with the angry union and liberal leaders, says that Bobby asked Jack,
“Do
you want me to tell Lyndon that there’s a possibility of a floor fight?” and that Jack replied, “Maybe you better go downstairs and tell him that. I doubt that it will bother him, but we ought to let him know that there might be a floor fight against him, in case he doesn’t feel up to facing it.” According to O’Donnell, that was all Jack said. He didn’t, according to O’Donnell, tell Bobby to try to persuade Johnson to withdraw. And throughout that afternoon, Jack’s determination to keep Johnson on the ticket appears never to have wavered. As liberal outrage mounted, he treated it with cool indifference. At one point, as Kennedy was meeting in his suite with a group of southern governors exuberant over Johnson’s selection, Soapy Williams unexpectedly walked in. Shocked by what he was hearing—the governor had just been assuring his
Michigan delegation that rumors they had been hearing about Johnson’s selection were false—he shouted that he would lead a floor fight against it. Several of the southerners threatened to punch him, and were actually advancing on him when cooler heads pushed them back. All during the scene, Jack Kennedy, “sitting in an armchair with one leg hanging over its arm, watched without saying a word,” O’Donnell says. Asked whether, during the course of the long afternoon, “Jack Kennedy ever seem[ed] to waver on [the choice of Johnson],” Larry O’Brien says,
“Not
to my recollection.” (Kennedy had asked David Lawrence to nominate Johnson, and all during the time Bobby was making his trips down the stairs to the seventh floor, Lawrence’s speechwriters were drafting the nominating speech.) And of course when Philip Graham telephoned Kennedy while he was in the middle of a meeting with a group of angry liberals, Kennedy asked him to call back in three minutes, and when Graham did, Kennedy’s answer, “utterly calm,” was “It’s all set. Tell Lyndon I want him.” Some minutes later, after Bobby had finished his one-on-one session with Johnson, during which, Johnson said, Bobby had told him, “[Jack] Kennedy doesn’t want me” (Bobby explains that meeting by saying,
“The
President wanted to get rid of him”), Graham spoke to Jack Kennedy again. Saying, “Oh … Bobby’s been out of touch,” Jack told Lyndon to make his statement accepting the nomination immediately, because he himself had already made his, announcing that Lyndon was his choice. And Jack’s statement to Johnson was accurate. He
had
made his announcement, some minutes earlier.

Robert Kennedy could of course have been doing what he thought his brother wanted him to do but didn’t want to put into words, even to him, or he could have been hearing—hearing through the haze of his hatred for Johnson—
what he wanted to hear. But there is another possible explanation. Close though the two brothers may have been, in their relationship it was only the elder brother who made the decisions.
“As
the years went on,” O’Brien says, “Jack Kennedy never at any fleeting moment was other than the President of the United States. His brother was the attorney general and his brother was his confidant and adviser, but the decision maker sat in the Oval Office and the decision maker sat in the suite that day.” And it may be that the elder brother had not, before he got the nomination, allowed the younger brother to know what he was planning to do after he got it because if anyone, including his brother, knew, it would make it harder for him to get it. In his biography of Robert Kennedy, Evan Thomas, after summarizing Robert’s account of the long afternoon, says,
“That
was [Robert] Kennedy’s story, but it wasn’t the whole story or, the evidence suggests, an entirely accurate account.… Robert Kennedy later said the complete story would never be known, but that may be because he hoped it wouldn’t. Jack Kennedy relied on his brother, trusted him, needed him, but he didn’t always tell him everything he was thinking or doing.”
³
More than one Kennedy adviser arrives at the same conclusion.
Fred Dutton, for one, says,
“I
always suspected that Jack didn’t tell Bobby everything about LBJ because Jack figured Bobby would try to stop him.”

It may be that Jack Kennedy didn’t always tell
anyone
everything he was thinking or doing. In attempting to understand why he declared to his journalist friend
Charles Bartlett that his offer to Johnson had been merely a gesture (“I just held it out like this, and he grabbed at it”)—a statement at direct variance not only with Johnson’s account of the conversation but with what Kennedy himself told O’Donnell, O’Brien, Governor Lawrence and others immediately after it took place—one possible explanation is that since he had allowed unequivocal “promises … assurances” to be given in his name to liberals and labor leaders that Johnson would not be offered the vice presidency, the easiest way to explain why the offer had been made was to say he
hadn’t
really offered it, had only “held it out like this,” and that Johnson had, “to his shock,” “grabbed at it,” and he, Kennedy, then had had no choice but to let the offer stand.
⁴

That explanation raises the possibility that Jack Kennedy may have known all along—for months, perhaps for years—that if he won the presidential nomination he would try to persuade Lyndon Johnson to join him on the ticket, and that he simply hadn’t dropped a hint of that to anyone, even his brother. Such an explanation suggests, of course, cold calculation—very cold; it suggests the existence of a deep reservoir of calculation and reserve beneath Jack Kennedy’s easy charm. But that explanation—that for months he had concealed his true intentions from his brother, his closest adviser—is not definitive, nor is any other. All it is possible to say is that however shrouded the events of that afternoon in Los Angeles may remain for history—however undefinitive, resistant to proof, every explanation subject to contradiction—that is nonetheless one possible explanation for them.

Since rumors and the reports of rumors, confusion and conflicting stories, are a staple of all contested political conventions, the questions surrounding Lyndon Johnson’s acceptance of John F. Kennedy’s offer to be his Vice President, and Kennedy’s decision to make (or not to make) the offer to him, might not warrant as much consideration—so much effort to resolve them—as they have, for decades, been given, except that, because of November 22, 1963, the events of that long afternoon in 1960 were to affect so profoundly the course of American history. As Evans and Novak were to write, the alliance between John Kennedy and Johnson
“that
opened to Johnson the door of national power set in motion the mutual suspicion between” Johnson and Robert Kennedy “that would grow in importance and depth as the years went by.” After that afternoon, Robert Kennedy wasn’t the only one of the two men who hated the other. Whatever Lyndon Johnson’s feelings toward Robert Kennedy had been before, the events of that afternoon had intensified them. He never blamed Jack Kennedy for the uncertainties and indignities—and the attempt to destroy his hopes, to snatch away from him the opportunity he so much wanted—that were visited upon him that afternoon. He knew who was behind them, he felt.
“Bobby
was against my being on the ticket in 1960,” he was to say years later. “He came to my room three times to try to get me to say we wouldn’t run on the ticket.” At the end of that long afternoon, after he had stepped down from the chair in the Biltmore corridor on which he had stood to make his acceptance statement, he came back into his suite, and closed the door behind him, and cursed Robert Kennedy. He called him,
Bobby Baker was to write,
“ ‘that
little shitass’ and worse.” Perhaps much worse.
John Connally, who during long days of conversation with this author was willing to answer almost any question put to him, no matter how delicate the topic, wouldn’t answer when asked what Johnson said about Robert Kennedy. When the author pressed him, he finally said flatly:
“I’m
not going to tell you what he said about him.” During the months after the convention, when Johnson was closeted alone back in Texas with an old ally, he would sometimes be asked about Robert Kennedy. He would reply with a gesture. Raising his big right hand, he would draw the side of it across his neck in a slow, slitting movement.
Sometimes that gesture would be his only reply; sometimes, as during a meeting with Ed Clark in Austin, he would say, as his hand moved across his neck,
“I’ll
cut his throat if it’s the last thing I do.”

The nominations for Vice President were to begin, in the Los Angeles Coliseum, where the convention’s final session was being held, at eight o’clock, and for a couple of hours there was, as Ken O’Donnell recalls, “the possibility of a messy floor fight over Johnson’s nomination.”

The gasps from reporters that had greeted Kennedy’s announcement of his choice were echoed even by seasoned politicians. When a reporter said “It’s Johnson” to FDR’s tough old Democratic Party national chairman, “Farley’s jaw dropped.” “Why that’s impossible!” he exclaimed. And,
Newsweek
reported, “Jim Farley’s reaction was typical of the stunned disbelief that swept over the delegates to the Democratic National Convention at the news that Jack Kennedy wanted Lyndon Johnson.” The
Michigan delegation, which included a large bloc of UAW delegates from the Detroit auto factories, declared that other candidates would be nominated for Vice President, and that there would be a floor fight, complete with a roll call, and members of several other delegations, including
California, New York and
Wisconsin, followed suit. Checking with Reuther’s aide Conway a little later, O’Donnell was told that the Michigan delegation would “definitely” nominate a candidate to oppose Johnson and was planning “a fight to the finish” against the Kennedy-Johnson ticket.
“It
looked like a bad night for all of us,” O’Donnell was to recall. The threat was less that Johnson might actually be defeated than that an open battle over Kennedy’s choice, the first decision he had made as the nominee, would embarrass him—and of course the man he had chosen. That threat of embarrassment “was,” in O’Donnell’s words, “very strong and real that afternoon.” Though Kennedy would win the fight, it would handicap his campaign at its very start, O’Donnell felt. “When you were on national television … the speeches were going to get a little rough after a while and would advertise … the split in the Democratic Party. It was going to be real, real tough. You were going to get into the Negro thing. You were going to get into the southern versus the northern.”

To Lyndon Johnson, already strained to the breaking point, the threat certainly seemed real. On the television set in his suite
Robert Nathan, chairman of the District of Columbia delegation, was telling
CBS News that the delegation had decided on its candidate: Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman. That “revolt” against Kennedy’s choice was spreading, commentators said. “I don’t believe his managers or lieutenants can put this down,”
Edward R. Murrow said. “He is going to have to deal with this himself.” The “humiliation” of defeat had loomed ominously before Johnson when he had been fighting for the top spot on the ticket. Now, was there to be a fight over even the second spot—with “humiliation” a possibility at the end of that fight, too? A new figure—a tall one—
appeared on the back stairs. Rushing up the two flights to the Kennedy suite, Johnson conferred with Larry O’Brien about a floor fight: “He was concerned that … it could turn out to be a debacle, and that would be devastating not only to us but to him, too.” He talked with Jack Kennedy, and then they stepped out into the hall, and photographers caught their smiles: Jack’s wide, Lyndon’s wary—so wary that in some of the photographs it is more a grimace. Going back down the stairs, he picked up Lady Bird and left for their quarters, a model home that had been built by a real estate developer next to the coliseum, where he was to wait for the nominations, and as he was stepping out of his hotel suite—Lady Bird beside him with the set-in-stone smile for once chipping away at the edges into something on the verge of hysteria—a reporter asked him, “Are you going to the Arena later?”

“That depends on developments,” Johnson replied.

Just as he was about to enter the door of the model home, reporter
Bill Downs of
CBS shouted at him, and Johnson turned to face him as Lady Bird continued through the door, standing with television lights glaring on his face. Fleshy though it was, his face was gaunt and haggard, the circles under his eyes so dark they looked like bruises. Downs’ next words were a brutal reminder that Johnson had once hoped to be the presidential, not vice presidential, nominee. “Senator, this is the first time you’ve been out to the Arena,” the reporter said. “We expected you to come out in a different role.” Johnson smiled wanly, without a word. “How’s it feeling, huh?” Downs asked. Seeing that something was wrong, Lady Bird came back and took her husband’s arm. Lyndon Johnson stood there a moment in the glare of the television lights. Then, still without a word, he went inside.