Boy, Bobby Kennedy was a MEAN person! Wow! I sort of got a negative impression of him when I read about how he was a "nothing burger" of empty promises and deceit in the whole Civil Rights Movement when I read the Taylor Branch series, Parting the Waters, Pillars of Fire, and At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1954-1968.
Despite my dislike of Johnson's character, the passage of the Civil Rights Amendment soon after he assumed the office of President at the death of Robert F Kennedy, was his crowning achievement. It is widely accepted that it never would have passed under Kennedy's leadership. Johnson was a master at negotiation and getting people to do what he wanted them to do. He also had compassion for the poor and people of color, having grown up poor himself.
The Kennedy's were intellectual elites, and they were very condescending to this low-born Johnson. That made me sad. His high-brow aides called Johnson, "Rufus Cornpone." That is just plain elitism.
Here are some quotes:
90
...therefore it was important not to let a conversation end until you learned what the man wasn’t saying until you “got it out of him.” Johnson himself read with a genius that couldn’t be taught, with a gift that was so instinctive that one aide, Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, calls it a “sense.”“He seemed to sense each man’s individual price and the commodity he preferred as coin.”
808
And from these descriptions, also, there emerges a picture of a Lyndon Johnson who was hard, tough, canny—tough enough and canny enough to transmute passion and empathy into the legislative accomplishment that had been so lacking during the past three years. When he had entered the Oval Office for his conversation with Johnson, Wilkins had not had much hope for the civil rights bill. If it passed, he felt, it might do so only in a drastically watered-down form. Kennedy, he was to recall, “believed that his package would have passed Congress by the following summer. I am not quite sure how much of it would have survived.” But by the time the conversation ended, he had been “struck by the enormous difference between Kennedy and Johnson.… Where Kennedy had been polite and sympathetic on all matters of basic principle, more often than not he had been evasive on action. Kennedy was not naïve, but as a legislator he was very green. He saw himself as being dry-eyed, realistic. In retrospect, I think that for all his talk about the art of the possible, he didn’t really know what was possible and what wasn’t in Congress.… When it came to dealing with Congress, Johnson knew exactly what was possible.… Johnson made it plain he wanted the whole bill. If we could find the votes, we would win. If we didn’t find the votes, we would lose, he said. The problem was as simple as that.” Wilkins had entered the Oval Office without much hope; that wasn’t the way he left it. 808
812
He wasn’t fooling them, wasn’t merely posturing. No television cameras had been present, no reporter taking down his words, when he had sat on the steps in Cotulla with the janitor Thomas Coronado. (Regarding his true compassion for the poor. Thomas Coronado was a man Johnson helped when he was a teacher among Mexican American kids.)
945
“It is time … to write it in the books of law.” By the time Lyndon Johnson left office, he had done a lot of writing in those books, had become, above all Presidents save Lincoln, the codifier of compassion, the President who, as I have said, “wrote mercy and justice into the statute books by which America was governed.”
989
Schlesinger’s opinion of Johnson was to change drastically. By 1978, he would be writing, “For all his towering ego, his devastating instinct for the weaknesses of others, his unlimited capacity for self-pity, he was at the same time a man of brilliant intelligence, authentic social passion, and deep seriousness.…”
992
But the succession of Lyndon Johnson deserves a better fate in history. For had it not been for his accomplishments during the transition, history might have been different. Because the headlines in that first blizzard of news—PRISONER LINKED TO CASTRO GROUP; SUSPECT LIVED IN SOVIET UNION—have long been proven false or exaggerated, it has been easy to forget that for several days after the assassination America was reading those headlines, easy to forget the extent of the suspicions that existed during those days not only about a conspiracy but about a conspiracy hatched in Cuba or Russia, two nations with whom, barely a year before,
995
By moving as quickly as he did, Johnson caught a tide, seized a moment, that might not have lasted very long. Caught the tide—and rode the tide, using its force as it rolled forward beyond the
996
These seven weeks, the seven weeks between November 22 and January 8, were therefore a period in which there took place in the capital of the greatest republic in the western world a remarkable demonstration of the passage of power, immense power—of its passing, in an instant, from one hand to another, and of its wielding by that new hand, in the first weeks after it closed on that power, with history-changing effectiveness.
998
"Almost at once, the whining self-pitying caricature of Throttlebottom vanished," George Reedy was to write. "During this whole period, there was no trace of the ugly arrogance which had made him so disliked in many quarters...situation brought out the finest that was in him.”
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