Up bobs Bobby
AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON
'A few days ago the winners of the annual White House News Photographers' contest filed into President Johnson's office to have their pictures taken with the Chief Executive, each holding his prize enlargement like the game- winning football. Having insisted on checking each picture in advance, Mr Johnson posed laconically, but refused to discuss or even look at the best-in-show entry. Its subject: a tousle- headed Senator Robert F. Kennedy.'—New York Times, Sunday 5 March.
New York—Senator Kennedy's last meeting with President Johnson was nearly a month ago; and the cankered recollections of its par- ticipants seem by now to have rendered it, if possible, even more spiteful in the memory than it was at the moment. But now, seeing Mr Johnson's face, it becomes possible to believe those second-hand accounts which, in the light of the real needs of each man, had seemed so implausible then. The President did say to Senator Kennedy, just as the story has it, that 'in six months all you doves will be destroyed.' And, he may very well have said, as another story has it, 'I don't ever want to see you again.'
Unfortunately for both of them, they cannot afford that luxury of taste. Senator Kennedy is a Democrat; Mr Johnson is certain to be the Democratic nominee for president in 1968. There is nothing outside the party—even for a man of the Senator's mythic proportions— except the abyss. He is fated to appear at the next Democratic convention, clasping Mr John- son's hand; in something like the same fell clutch of circumstance, he cast his vote last week with an overwhelming majority of the Senate expressing the hopes of the Senate in Mr Johnson's search for peace 'as a man of goodwill.' The next day, Senator Kennedy spoke for forty-five minutes asking the President to halt the bombing of Hanoi and to offer to meet the government of North Vietnam in peace negotiations ismme. His proposals could hardly have been called dramatic, since they had been put forward quite a while ago by Democratic Senators like Fulbright and Clark and even Republican ones like Javits and Hatfield; it is possible that as many as a quarter of our Senators have said as much already. But as usual, the authority of Senator Kennedy lies less in what he says than in what he suggests; and the response of the administration was a sign that it regarded the suggestion that the Senator had surfaced as a very serious menace indeed to its home front.
Secretary of Stale Rusk issued a statement saying that he had heard all this before; Secre- tary of Defence McNamara, as though to give the lie to persistent imputations of too much sympathy with the king over the water, announced that he agreed with Mr Rusk on everything; and Mr Johnson himself permitted the release of a letter to Senator Henry Jack- son detailing both his personal agony and strategic satisfaction with the bombing of the North.
The means employed quite measured up to the size of the target. None the less, the option remains with Senator Kennedy; should he choose, even without getting bolder, even to go on in the same key, it is hard to believe that the war will be long supportable at home. Mr Ken- nedy has, of course, a way of speaking and then lapsing into long silences; he took issue with Mr Johnson's Dominican intervention two years ago, then kept quiet for eight months and again spoke out for admitting the Viet Cong to peace negotiations, and then returned to a silence only occasionally broken until his re- emergence as a cautious but unmistakable critic of the administration's foreign policy last week. But he cannot really be relied on to remain discrete for such long periods in the future. The
'Down ado!'
Senator is Mr Johnson's enemy as Mr Johnson is his: as long as the positions stay fixed there will be firing at least until 1968 brings the elec- tion truce.
Some of Senator Kennedy's long delay had to do with the good sense which suggests to him that, being young, he need only wait and look troubled and inherit our political system some year or other. An open conflict with an incum- bent Democratic president is hardly the way to secure a peaceful inheritance; and calculations of the risk have been prominent enough in the Senator's mind for him to have raised them even with President de Gaulle.
He remembers telling the General that he had differences with this Administration; still he had been part of it. He was disturbed by the war; still he had once pursued it. What was he to do? 'And there was a long silence for the translation, and de Gaulle answered that I was a young man and had a bright political future. "You are a young man," he said, "and I am an old one and I have known many battles and carry many scars. I will give you my advice: don't get involved with the problem".'
Still, Robert Kennedy is home and more in- volved than he may feel it is politic to be. One thinks, however, that his breakout, small use though it may be to him, must, to the degree that the obstacle to negotiations is American, bring an end to the war much closer. Quite aside from the majesty of his brother's ghost, the Senator has a vast constituency of his own; if the voters under twenty-five can be thought of as anyone's, they are his. The President can- not hope to be re-elected if Senator Kennedy moves through 1967 hostile and spends most of 1968 no more than formally loyal. We have no history of wars that endured against the opposition of a truly national political figure; Senator Kennedy, damage himself though he would in the process, still has it more within his power to destroy this war than Fox and Burke did the American war in 1784. President Johnson, whatever his personal feelings, is condemned to live with Senator Kennedy or not to live as a politician at all.
There is altogether the sense, with no sub- stantial knowledge, that the sort of things that happen when peace becomes inevitable are happening in America at this moment.
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