Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, And the Feud that Defined a Decade

Jeff Shesol

With political history currently being written by the hour it's a tonic to be able to revisit ancient political history - the 1960s. Several times during Jeff Shesol's history of the LBJ-RFK feud I found myself thinking in black and white telly, not least in the chunks devoted to the Vietnam conflict. The idea that America, with a quarter of a million men on the ground and with a reasonably substantial local ally (surely superior both to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance and to whatever gets cobbled together in the next few days in Iraq), was unable to achieve a quick and easy victory seems discordant and puzzling. So too the willingness to press on with a failing and painful strategy year after year.

Shesol's history does exactly what it says on the tin. It picks up the Johnson-Kennedy story with the jockeying for places on the Democratic ticket in the 1960 election without worrying too much about how either man got to 1959. Bobby Kennedy is Number Two to JFK while Johnson is the Senate majority leader. Similarly, Shesol wraps things up in short order in 1968 following Johnson's withdrawal from that year's presidential race and Kennedy's assassination a few weeks later. But in between, Shesol's book tells the story of eight years of mutual loathing between the two men.

The notes at the back of the book list the vast resources of tapes, transcripts and private papers available to Shesol. While applauding his scholarship and energy in trawling through the material its vastness does gives rise to the suspicion that Shesol's research occasionally became a fishing expedition. I mean, on occasion, you wonder whether references, privately expressed, within LBJ's team to Kennedy as a "demonic little shit" (and similar insults hurled in the opposite direction) are given excessive weight compared to the substantial (but very briefly mentioned) peace feelers which the two camps exchanged from time to time.

Nevertheless, Shesol does a good job of explaining why the two men disliked each other so much, how their mutual dislike evolved and deepened and why the failure of their relationship was important to American history.

I've always found Bobby the most appealing of the Kennedy brothers. Whereas JFK, on film, comes across as confident but rather block faced and piggy-eyed, RFK seems awkwarder, slighter and more earnest. And the question which sticks for ever to JFK is "Who?" whereas with RFK it's the more intriguing "What If?". Shesol doesn't tell us how far Bobby's campaign could have gone if he hadn't been shot, nor is he interested in speculating on what an RFK presidency would have looked like. But he does convince us former president Lyndon Johnson wouldn't have much liked it.