The evolution of hatred
Samuel Francis
MUTUAL CONTEMPT: LYNDON JOHNSON, ROBERT KENNEDY AND THE FEUD THAT SHAPED A DECADE by Jeff Shesol W. W. Norton, £23.50, pp. 591 n the afternoon of 9 July 1960, Jeff Shesol informs us in his massive exploration of politics and personalities and the paranoia that animated them for nearly a decade, Robert F. Kennedy consumed a late lunch consisting of a turkey sandwich and a glass of milk and expressed his preference for Washington Senator Henry Jackson as John F. Kennedy's vice-presidential running mate. So it goes for nearly 600 pages of relatively small print, and if you are fascinated by such matters as what Bobby Kennedy said to campaign aide Ken O'Donnell about Lyndon Johnson's possible effect on the 1960 Democratic ticket as he lay in the bathtub at 6.30 on the morning of 14 July 1960 or, for that matter, by President Lyndon Johnson's reluctance to allow the murdered Bobby to rest in Arlington National Cemetery next to the grave of his elder brother and what sort of expletives Johnson employed to characterise the most recently deceased Kennedy, then this is the book for you.
Mr Shesol, a graduate of Brown Univer- sity and a Rhodes Scholar, has assembled a gargantuan record of the evolution of the hatred that Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson felt for each other, and in the process he has also assembled what is surely one of the most detailed, not to say pedantic, volumes on recent American political history ever written. The level of detail would be excusable if very much of it served to illuminate anything of impor- tance in the eight or nine years that his book covers, but by the time one reaches page 475 one has long since despaired of any such hope. Mr Shesol has indeed explored some important episodes of the period — the Cuban missile crisis, the development of the Vietnam war, most of the political decisions of both Kennedy brothers and of Johnson himself, among others — but it is never clear why these explorations are best understood within the frame of the mutual hatred that is the author's theme, and, in the end, his effort does not seem justifiable.
Whether the differences and conflicts between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and the substance of what they each believed about political issues were really driven by their personal dislike for each other or whether their dislikes were the product of serious political differences remains as murky as ever. At the beginning of his last chapter Mr Shesol finally con- fesses:
Issues divided personalities, grudges stoked policy disputes, honest differences created political opportunities and vice versa. Where a 'grudge' ended and an 'honest difference' began was anyone's guess.
We did not need the preceding 464 pages to know this, and if Mr Shesol is unable to explain such endings and beginnings by that point, one is forced to demand of him what his purpose is.
Nevertheless, what does evolve from this large record is the barrenness of the `liberalism' that underlay the political belief and policies that both Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson professed, and in that sense the exploration of the personalities that fed their hatred and their egos is pro- ductive. Their hostility derived from several things — the class, regional, and education- al differences between the two men as well as their different temperaments and, of course, the circumstances by which John- son acquired the presidency — but neither personality emerges as a healthy one. Some years ago, in reviewing the Kennedy- Johnson speechwriter Richard Goodwin's memoirs, I faulted the author for speaking carelessly of Lyndon Johnson's 'paranoia'. I now retract that criticism. Goodwin was not the only associate of the power-hungry and resentful president to use this term at the time, and Johnson's delusion of a vast Kennedy conspiracy directed against him is only part of the unbalanced obsessiveness he displayed.
As for Bobby himself, who has long been a kind of once-and-never-was-to-be Arthur whose own presidency could have restored the Camelot destroyed in Dallas by the assassination of his brother, the myth simply can't survive Mr Shesol's depiction, A woman can never be too thin or have too many cats.' as sympathetic to Bobby as he strives to be. Robert Kennedy was a swaggering, bossy, snobbish, ambitious, bullying and rather narrow-minded man who lacked both the charm of his brother and the political skills of his rival. Mr Shesol recounts how the Kennedy courtiers began muttering about Johnson's possible involvement in the assassination of John Kennedy on the airplane that brought the whole bunch of them back to Washington from Dallas, and at the Kennedy household in northern Virginia during the Johnson administra- tion, the Kennedyites used to play parlour games, mercilessly ridiculing the new presi- dent. Kennedy himself possessed a voodoo doll in the likeness of Johnson into which he used to stick pins.
Kennedy's lurch to the Left after his resignation as attorney general and his election as senator from New York owed as much to his personal hatred of Johnson and his suppressed conviction that the death of his brother had somehow cheated him and the country of the blessings of a continued Kennedy presence in the White House as it did to any serious reconsidera- tion of Johnson's policies. It never occurred to either man that the vast centralisation of power that they construct- ed and wanted to construct even further in Washington would not lead to the utopian outcomes they envisioned. Their political beliefs, like their personal hatred of each other, were rooted in an inchoate blend of not very deeply examined ideologies, senti- mentalities, personal resentments and incalculable arrogance. When Kennedy finally announced his decision to run for the presidency against the incumbent John- son in 1968, he breathlessly informed his listeners that what was at stake was 'our right to moral leadership of the planet'. It is unclear from the context whether 'our' refers to America's or Bobby's 'right' to global importance, but either way it was an incredible assertion.
The result of Bobby Kennedy and Lyn- don Johnson together was a disaster, for America and arguably for the planet itself, with the bungled and useless Vietnam war, the racial polarisation of the country, the ruin of American cities, the welfarisation of the American people, and the colossalisa- tion of the federal state. One can only shudder at the thought of how much worse the disaster might have been had they actu- ally been friends. Mr Shesol tells us that in the months after John Kennedy's death Bobby immersed himself in Greek tragedies and underlined a particular pas- sage of Aeschylus. The passage ought to serve as the epitaph of both men and a fit- ting summation of the legacy they left behind: 'All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears. God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride.'
Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist and editor of The Samuel Francis Letter, a monthly newsletter.
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