Mutual Contempt Quotes

“The columnist James Reston quipped that Johnson was “getting everything through the Congress but the abolition of the Republican party, and he hasn’t tried that yet.” Members of Congress were so overwhelmed Johnson might well have slipped it past them. In a typical year the White House transmits one or two dozen presidential messages to Congress; between January and August 1965, LBJ delivered sixty-five expansive requests for action. “If you’re not doing it to them, they’re doing it to you,” he told an aide, and this was the heart of Johnson’s congressional strategy: keep them busy. Two or three big proposals were not enough to occupy potential troublemakers (and they were all potential troublemakers); Johnson consumed the agendas of even the smallest subcommittees. The president knew his political capital would not last and he acted quickly and relentlessly to spend it. “You’ve got to give it all you can, that first year,” he lectured Harry McPherson. “Doesn’t matter what kind of majority you come in with. You’ve got just one year when they treat you right, and before they start worrying about themselves.” It was as if, in the 1950s, Majority Leader Johnson had staged a coup, deposed President Eisenhower, and ruled both branches of government. LBJ was more prime minister than president, and many observers made reference to the parliamentary system in which both branches—executive and legislative—propose, and both dispose. “There is but one way for a President to deal with the Congress,” Johnson later explained,” and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it’s really going to work, the relationship between the President and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous. He’s got to know them even better than they know themselves.”
― Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade

“In 1961, at Robert Kennedy’s first press conference as attorney general, he spoke of an “alarming increase” in juvenile delinquency. Juvenile delinquents intrigued Kennedy; he identified with outsiders, “young toughs,” underdogs. Bobby once said that if he had not been born a Kennedy he would have become “perhaps a juvenile delinquent or a revolutionary.” The issue of juvenile delinquency was something of a vogue among social scientists in the early 1960s, though on its face delinquency was a law enforcement issue. In May 1961, John Kennedy installed his attorney general as chairman of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency (PCJD); Bobby appointed a lifelong friend, David Hackett, as director. The square-jawed Hackett was a former Olympic hockey player and, though not exactly the administration’s best or brightest, possessed a shrewd intelligence. He knew nothing, however, about juvenile delinquency.”
― Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade

“Lyndon Johnson immediately saw its importance—both symbolic and material. “Push ahead full-tilt,” Johnson told Heller that evening without a moment’s reflection. “That’s my kind of program. It will help people.” On January 8, 1964, in his first State of the Union Address, Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America.” It was a characteristically bold claim—especially bold at a time when 83 percent of Americans believed poverty would never be eradicated. It was bolder still given that Johnson’s kind of program was not really a program at all, yet—it was only a loose collection of ideas, and most of them belonged to Bobby Kennedy.”
― Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade

“Poverty was one of those concerns. In the last days of November 1963, Robert Kennedy found a sheet of paper on which his brother had repeatedly scrawled and circled the word “poverty” during the final cabinet meeting of his life. Bobby framed the paper and hung it in his office at the Justice Department. Poverty was on both Kennedys’ minds that fall; earlier in 1963 they had begun to consider an antipoverty program—not a war but an “offensive” of uncertain magnitude. At the time of the assassination, Walter Heller, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, was preparing a comprehensive picture of the poverty problem. By the time Heller placed the memo on President Johnson’s desk the morning of November 23, the fight against poverty had attained the solemnity of a dead man’s last wish.”
― Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade

“But the words that lingered longest in the public imagination were those from Romeo and Juliet, “When I think of President Kennedy,” Bobby said, “I think of what Shakespeare said … “‘When he shall die Take him and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun.’” The hall burst again into applause. In a hotel room off the boardwalk, O’Brien, O’Donnell, Salinger, and Dave Powers watched the proceedings on television and wept. Elsewhere, Johnson men chafed at Bobby’s reference to the “garish sun.” An obvious, petty jab, they said. It was just like Bobby. After the twenty-minute film, as the lights in the hall were raised, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson entered the presidential box in which Bobby and Ethel had watched the tribute. Delegates began to cheer; the organ began a rousing reprise of “Hello, Lyndon!” The president shook Bobby’s hand. As Bobby and Ethel stepped to the back of the box, Johnson generously beckoned them forward. They sat at Lady Bird’s side while the president, moments later, gave his acceptance speech. “Let us now turn to our task!” Johnson charged the convention hall crowd in a fervent thirty-five-minute speech. “Let us be on our way!”
― Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade

“Then, with great relish, Lyndon Johnson spun a Texas tale. It was his pièce de résistance, the crescendo of an expansive, four-hour performance. “When I got [Kennedy] in the Oval Office,” Johnson began, “and told him it would be ‘inadvisable’ for him to be on the ticket as the Vice President-nominee, his face changed, and he started to swallow. He looked sick. His adam’s apple bounded up and down like a yo-yo.” For effect, the president gulped, audibly, at the reporters. He mimicked Bobby’s “funny voice” and proceeded to tell, in lavish detail and with evident delight, his version of the meeting. Finally, LBJ ran down a list of possible running mates and explained the ways each would hurt his chances. “In other words,” recalled Folliard, “he would do better in the November election if he had no running mate. This left Wicker, Kiker and me baffled—and that is just what the man evidently wanted us to be.” Within days Johnson’s story was the talk of Washington. His portrait of RFK as a “stunned semi-idiot” left columnist Joseph Alsop and other Washington insiders feeling rather stunned themselves. It was not long before the gossip found its way to Bobby Kennedy, who stormed back to the White House and accused the president of mistruths and a violation of trust. I knew the meeting was taped, he said, but I never expected this. Wasn’t our talk a matter of confidence? Aren’t we honorable men? LBJ was unrepentant: I’ve revealed nothing, he assured Kennedy, gesturing wanly at an empty page in his appointment book. He promised to check his notes for any conversations that might have slipped his mind. Bobby stalked out, seething, and caught a plane to Hyannis Port. “He tells so many lies,” Kennedy said of Johnson the next week, echoing the words of George Reedy, “that he convinces himself after a while he’s telling the truth. He just doesn’t recognize truth or falsehood.”
― Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade

“Kennedy’s influence was cut short by the assassination, but he weighed in with a memo to LBJ. The problem, Kennedy explained on January 16, was that “most federal programs are directed at only a single aspect of the problem. They are sometimes competitive and frequently aimed at only a temporary solution or provide for only a minimum level of subsistence. These programs are always planned for the poor—not with the poor.” Kennedy’s solution was a new cabinet-level committee to coordinate comprehensive, local programs that “[involve] the cooperation of the poor” Kennedy listed six cities where local “coordinating mechanisms” were strong enough that pilot programs might be operational by fall. “In my judgment,” he added prophetically, “the anti-poverty program could actually retard the solution of these problems, unless we use the basic approach outlined above.” If there was such a thing as a “classical” vision of community action, Kennedy’s memo was its epitaph. On February 1, while Kennedy was in East Asia, Johnson appointed Sargent Shriver to head the war on poverty. It was an important signal that the president would be running the program his way, not Bobby’s. It was also a canny personal slap at RFK—who, according to Ted Sorensen, had “seriously consider[ed] heading” the antipoverty effort. Viewed in this light, Johnson’s choice of Shriver was particularly shrewd. Not only was Shriver hardworking and dynamic—a great salesman—but he was a Kennedy in-law, married to Bobby’s sister Eunice. In Kennedy family photos Shriver stood barrel-chested and beaming, a member of the inner circle, every bit as vigorous, handsome, Catholic, and aristocratic as the rest. By placing Shriver at the helm of the war on poverty, Johnson demonstrated his fealty to the dead president. But LBJ and Bobby both understood that Shriver was very much his own man. After the assassination Shriver signaled his independence from the Kennedys by slipping the new president a note card delineating “What Bobby Thinks.” In 1964, Shriver’s status as a quasi-Kennedy made him Bobby’s rival for the vice presidency, but even before then their relationship was hardly fraternal. Within the Kennedy family Shriver was gently mocked. His liberalism on civil rights earned him the monikers “Boy Scout,” “house Communist,” and “too-liberal in-law.” Bobby’s unease was returned in kind. “Believe me,” RFK’s Senate aide Adam Walinsky observed, “Sarge was no close pal brother-in-law and he wasn’t giving Robert Kennedy any extra breaks.” If Shriver’s loyalty was divided, it was split between Johnson and himself, not Johnson and Kennedy.”
― Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade

“Here at the new frontier of urban policy the chairman and his committee were in harmony: PCJD staff members were not timid bureaucrats but lively, self-styled “guerrillas.” Bobby matched their social science credentials with his zeal. Together they developed contrarian, almost radical, views. Two, as it turned out, were crucial: first, that insufficient opportunity was the root cause of poverty; and second, that the problem required “community action”—a vague notion but clearly something other than bureaucratic, top-down, federal largess. “We felt that you could spend $30 million in one city and not have any impact whatsoever,” Hackett explained later. The committee held that government must not impose solutions but empower the poor to develop their own. The PCJD financed and coordinated a dozen local initiatives on an experimental basis in cities like Cleveland, New Haven, and New York. The programs provided comprehensive services (education, employment, and job training) that encouraged self-sufficiency.”
― Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade

“I am vice president,” wrote John Adams, the first to inhabit the office. “In this I am nothing. But I may be everything.” In January 1961, as Lyndon Johnson left the Senate for the vice presidency, his future held the dim but tantalizing promise of the presidency, of “everything.” But in the meantime LBJ would not resign himself to nothingness. It was not his nature. Throughout his life Johnson had assumed positions with no inherent power base and infused them with irrepressible energy, drive, and ambition: as assistant to President Cecil E. Evans of Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College, as speaker of the “Little Congress” of staff members in the 1940s, and as party whip and leader in the 1950s, power seemed to flow to him and issue from him naturally. In Johnson’s political ascent, power was the constant; public offices were quantities to be stretched, exploited for public and personal gain, and, ultimately, discarded along the climb. If this was arrogance, it was well grounded. Lyndon Johnson was never nothing; and if the vice presidency meant little today, that could not be the case for long. The press accepted Johnson’s bold claim with little skepticism. On the eve of the inauguration, U.S. News & World Report exclaimed that “the vice presidency is to become a center of activity and power unseen in the past.” The magazine foresaw “important assignments” for LBJ in foreign affairs, especially in the explosive Cuban situation. Undoubtedly, President Kennedy would rely heavily upon the negotiating skills of his brilliant second, Lyndon Johnson, “a new kind of vice president.” And LBJ, surely, would demand no less. “The restless and able Mr. Johnson is obviously unwilling to become a ceremonial nonentity,” Tom Wicker rightly predicted in the New York Times. Johnson’s former Senate colleagues agreed, assuring reporters that LBJ “will be very important in the new Administration—and much utilized.” Headlines heralded Washington’s new “Number 2 Man.”
― Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade

“Still, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich are no Johnson and Kennedy. The rivalry between LBJ and RFK was of a different magnitude—and of greater importance—than any of the postwar era. Their antagonism spawned political turf battles across the United States. It divided constituencies the two men once shared and weakened their party by forcing its members to choose between them. It captivated the newly powerful media that portrayed every disagreement between Johnson and Kennedy as part of a prolonged battle for the presidency or a claim on the legacy of the fallen JFK. It helped propel one man to the Senate and drive the other from the White House. Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy were a study in contrast—so dissimilar in background, character, and even appearance that they seemed natural antagonists. It was as if one were designed to confound the other.”
― Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade