RFK: The Hidden Factor in the Decision-Making of the LBJ Presidency

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RFK: The Hidden Factor in the Decision-Making of the LBJ Presidency

"As historical figures, [Lyndon] Johnson and [Robert] Kennedy are forever entangled: one cannot fully comprehend either man without considering his relationship with the other."1

Throughout the decade of the 1960s, political titans Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy battled for control of the United States government. Their mutual dislike for one another sparked heated debates and played an important part in major policy decisions of both the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson presidential administrations. However, the relationship between LBJ and RFK made its most significant impact during Johnson's presidential reign. The purpose of this paper is to show the importance of "the Bobby factor" in decisions made during the Johnson administration. Analysis of LBJ's decision-making in three areas demonstrates the fact that RFK was a crucial factor: the passage of civil rights legislation, staff selections within the Johnson administration, and evolving policies about Vietnam.

To begin with, it is necessary to understand the root of the dislike between LBJ and RFK. A brief discussion of the two men's families, educations, political experiences, and character traits indicates that conflict was inevitable. Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in 1908 and spent his childhood in the Hill Country of Texas. The Hill Country of Texas was one of the most remote parts of the country, and its occupants went without radio or electricity. Johnson's father, Sam, was a widely known political figure and state legislator. As a young boy, Lyndon often tagged along with his father, witnessing the way Sam would chat with farmers about everything from crops to new legislation.2 The Johnson's thrived on local politics, and it was expected that young Lyndon would follow his father's lead. Indeed, LBJ inherited his father's gregarious, back-slapping political style, he "delighted in the sweaty personal tangle of local politics; there was no doubt he would end up in Austin, if not Washington."3

Worlds away in Boston, few would have predicted the same of the third son and seventh child of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. The Kennedy patriarch, despite his Irish Catholic decent, had moved his family to the world of the wealthy and privileged via the stock market and the government. Joseph Kennedy's visions for his sons were even greater, "my work is my boys," he once said.4 However, for much of their childhood, those visions did not include his third son. Robert Francis Kennedy, born in 1925, spent his childhood wallowing in the shadows of his elder brothers John and Jack. Joseph called young Bobby the "runt" of the family. As one Kennedy biographer put it, "he lacked the jaunty, glowing air of a young Kennedy."5 After Joe's death in World War II, the family's attention centered on Jack. Despite his father's lack of attention, Robert began to develop politically on his own and wound up with a law degree from the University of Virginia. After a few years with the Justice Department, Robert finally gained political clout as the Jack's campaign manager in his upset victory of Henry Cabot Lodge in the Massachusetts Senate. He went on to receive national acclaim in his own right for his prosection of organized crime. However, for the most part RFK rejected the spotlight, and as a young man never showed any interest in running for office himself.6

The political experiences [pre-1960] of Johnson and Kennedy are as divergent as their backgrounds. After a stint in Austin, Johnson made it to Washington in the 1930s as a legislative aide. He paid his dues as both an aide, and then a Congressman before finally landing the coveted spot as a Senator in 1949. Along the way, LBJ became a political mastermind: "Johnson cultivated his colleagues and savored their company. To woo them or to conquer them, Johnson had to know them, had to understand their fears and desires. This he did masterfully, emerging during the course of the 1950s as the most powerful politician on Capitol Hill."7 Through his thirty years as a Congressional insider, LBJ came to believe that he had earned his position as one of the leaders of the Democratic Party. With the 1960 Democratic National Convention quickly approaching, many believed that LBJ desired the presidential nomination as the pinnacle to his political career.
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RFK's road to the 1960 election was not as conventional. During the 1950s, Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, a Kennedy political friend, appointed twenty-seven-year-old RFK as an assistant counsel of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.8 It was while with this committee that he "discovered his true interest in the netherworld of organized crime."9 RFK turned his ambitions toward union racketeering, and found the perfect nemesis in Jimmy Hoffa. After a successful prosecution of Teamsters president Dave Beck thrust RFK and the Rackets Committee into the national spotlight, Bobby became a lot more than just Senator Jack Kennedy's younger brother.10 ...

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