Exploring the bitter rivalry between RFK and LBJ by looking at their interactions, personalities and histories. From before Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson even met they were destined to hate each other. One was poor, the other was rich. One was quiet, the other was loud. One was compassionate, the other cruel. Both, however, were absolutely determined to have their own way.
THE BATTLE BETWEEN LBJ & RFK
MUTUAL CONTEMPT
Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and the Feud that Defined a Decade
JEFF SHESOL
W.W. Norton. 591 pp. $32.50.
It’s almost unconscionable that so many of us remain nostalgic about the 1960s, the decade that gave us a bloody, unpopular war overseas, riots and assassinations at home, and a legacy that includes entrenched racial polarization, a burgeoning drug culture and skewed, pseudo-idealistic advertisements aimed at the decade’s descendants that feature, among other things, cars that can “save your soul” while wrecking the environment.
But beneath (and amid) all the roiling domestic and international troubles that marked the era was the war within the war: LBJ vs. RFK. The battle that President Lyndon Johnson and attorney general, senator and aspiring presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy fought over the course of nine years was for the soul of the Democratic Party, which has never quite recovered from it or from the Kennedy assassinations. It’s not for nothing, after all, that Democrats in the Clinton/Gore age have recast themselves as “Republicans Lite.”
For followers of “Bobby,” Johnson was a boorish bully with no class or breeding – a “politician” in the worst sense of the word. For Johnsonites, “The Kennedy Corporation” meant effete blue-noses and cool, dispassionate Harvard intellectuals who sneered at their man because of his Texas Hill Country beginnings. The Kennedy camp’s disdain for Johnson had nothing to do with his mostly liberal policies (excluding Vietnam), but instead was based on his aggressive, homespun manner.
As Jeff Shesol, author of the seminal Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade, explains, neither simplistic perception is correct. For all of his blue, down-home (and often entertaining) witticisms and gruffness, Johnson was a man of sometimes considerable grace and compassion. Kennedy, meanwhile, wasn’t merely a silver-spooned scion of a prominent New England family, but a creative idealogue whose search for a new American unity – encompassing poor and rich, black and white – captured the imagination of millions.
Other than blaming the incredibly tense, fractious times, it’s often hard to see just why these two men couched their relations in terms of such enmity. “(O)n the continuum of American politics from left to right,” Shesol writes, “Kennedy and Johnson were not terribly far apart.” But Shesol, melding anecdotes, clips and interviews seamlessly, does his best to explain the schism to us.
The two hated each other, Shesol writes, for more than political reasons. “Culture as much as chemistry divided the two men,” he claims, “and the socioeconomic chasm between them was wider than any generation gap.” What united “the political titans of the decade” after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Shesol claims, was the timbre of the times and their ever-clashing power: “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.”
Prior to 1959, when Bobby Kennedy ran his brother’s presidential campaign (against LBJ, among others), the two had not considerably crossed each other’s paths. But late that year, Bobby visited the LBJ Ranch to “size up (LBJ’s presidential) ambitions.” Unknown to each of them, the first shot in their feud was about to be fired. During a Johnson-mandated hunting trip, Kennedy reeled from the force of the gun he had discharged and was thrown backwards, cutting his brow. Johnson helped up the younger Kennedy and said dismissively (according to Shesol), “Son, you’ve got to handle a gun like a man.”
Although this no doubt earned the wrath of the competitive, often combative Kennedy, LBJ was nonetheless later selected after much hand-wringing and political calculation as JFK’s running mate – a decision both Kennedy brothers came to regret. In fact, Johnson became a running joke as vice president, a disgraced and often-ignored presence in White House affairs. Bobby Kennedy’s friends, who like their mentor thought Johnson to be a “liar” and a philistine, bought him an LBJ voodoo doll.
Such details make their way into Shesol’s well-considered, thoroughly researched exposition, making Mutual Contempt a page turner as well as solid historical scholarship. Shesol’s organizational skills lead us smoothly through each man’s fight to build successfully on JFK’s legacy: the war on poverty, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, aid to education and – most notably – the war in Vietnam. One thing is clear: one never made a move without considering the reaction and power base of the other.
Mutual Contempt has an eminently palpable feel to it. It also has, Shesol believes, modern-day relevance. The weak-kneed moderateness of the Democrats of the ’90s, led by Clinton/Gore, is no accident. “(T)he Johnson-Kennedy feud looms above today’s clash between “old” and “New” Democrats,” Shesol writes. He adds later, “The failure of the Clinton health plan – and, two years later, the debate among Democrats over a Republican welfare reform bill – revealed a party deeply at odds with itself over the role of government and the efficacy of its programs.”
Mutual Contempt is the type of book that is too rarely written (or read) these days. An expansive, reconstructed history without revisionism or hagiography, Shesol’s work is the last word on two of this century’s strongest (and most overlooked) political presences. Someone has to be the Theodore White of this generation. Here’s one nomination for Shesol.
MEMO: Michael Anft is a free-lance writer and critic who lives in Baltimore.
10:54 am on August 17, 2024
