This Day in Political History (RFK Steals Show From LBJ at Convention)

August 27, 1964—Lyndon Johnson had shelved the tribute by Robert F. Kennedy for slain brother Jack to the last day of the Democratic Convention, when the President’s nomination would already be assured and he couldn’t be stampeded into naming the Attorney-General as his running mate.

But that still did not prevent the new bearer of the Kennedy legacy from stealing the President’s thunder in Atlantic City, as the 6,000 delegates gave RFK a wild ovation before he even spoke—22 minutes of clapping, foot-stamping, hoarse shouting, and crying.

I’ve seen this speech labeled one of the greatest in American political history. Judged strictly by content and style, it was not.

Much of Bobby’s 20-minute address was, in fact, political boilerplate—a thank-you to the delegates, a litany of the party’s great Presidents, a list of Jack’s achievements in the Oval Office. For better examples of Bobby’s oratory, turn to his 1966 “Day of Affirmation” speech in South Africa or his impromptu speech on the night Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died.

But one look at this YouTube snippet—the way the applause cascaded just when it seemed that it would finally die out, swelling to the point where the Attorney-General could not speak—is enough to show this was undoubtedly one of the most electrifying moments in the television era of American politics.

Kennedy said later that he understood the applause was meant for Jack, not him—but he would spend his last four years aiming to make it for all of them—Jack, himself and, later, brother Ted.

In a way, it is fitting that Ted Kennedy died almost 45 years to the day that Bobby introduced the convention film about Jack. Countless biographers have recorded the months of emotional devastation that JFK’s younger brother and closest political adviser experienced after the assassination in Dallas.

But the image of Bobby on the podium—appearing, before the world, so unutterably sad and haunted that many TV viewers must have wanted to hug him—conveys better than any words the loss and terrifying burden of carrying on—something, we have been reminded of again this week, that afflicted Ted later.

For anyone interested in the interplay between the light and the dark aspects of historical figures, Bobby is the most fascinating of the Kennedy clan. He’s the one that you can imagine as other occupations besides politician or lawyer: priest, hard-driving businessman, revolutionary—all vocations requiring levels of untold passion, concentration and commitment. That mixture also contributed to a not-entirely-unearned reputation for ruthlessness.

The Bobby captured on film is something else entirely—nakedly vulnerable and shy, grief clinging to him nine months after Dallas. Part of his discomfort may have resulted from puzzling out how these traits could allow him to project his brother’s charisma on the stump, but much of it also surely also lay in his persistent fear that Operation Mongoose--the plot he had urged to destabilize Fidel Castro's regime while Jack was alive--might have led to a hit on the President.

After four years at the center of the political world, Bobby was also feeling sidelined. The grief he displayed for months after Jack’s death was so all-pervasive that close associates feared for him.
But now, the one politician he simply could not abide had the office that belonged to his brother.
“The basic fact is those two men simply didn’t like each other,” recalled LBJ assistant George Reedy in an interview aired in the PBS documentary The Kennedys. “That’s all there was to it. Everybody has seen two dogs come into a room together and, all of a sudden, there’s a low growl from each one and the hair starts rising on the back of the neck. That was a real situation between Bobby and Lyndon Johnson.”

After everything that had happened between them—notably, Bobby’s last-minute campaign to drive LBJ from the Vice-Presidential slot at the 1964 Democratic Convention—it would have been insane for RFK even to think the Vice-Presidency would be offered to him, let alone that he’d enjoy occupying a position subservient to Johnson.

When Bobby went to the White House to discuss his future, LBJ tried to let him down easy. Opposition to Bobby was so strong in the South and West that he’d do better simply to take himself out of the running, the President said. Then, taking out one of the most potent weapons in his vast arsenal of persuasion—flattery—Johnson told Bobby he had “a unique and promising future in the Democratic Party.”

Bobby didn’t take the hint and withdraw, which led Johnson to announce that he would not consider any present cabinet members or anyone meeting regularly with them as running mates. It was so absurd on its face that it’s a wonder how two seasoned political pros like LBJ and Clark Clifford (who proposed the idea to the President) expected that anyone would buy it. Everybody knew who it was aimed at.

But LBJ’s decision to bypass Kennedy (at one point, he really got Bobby’s goat by floating the possibility of in-law Sargent Shriver as a running mate) rankled RFK’s pride. All of that came to a head in the decidedly perfunctory (one sentence) exhortation to the delegates that “The same effort and the same energy and the same devotion that was given to President John F. Kennedy must be given to President Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey.”

I was surprised to learn from Evan Thomas’ biography Robert Kennedy that Bobby had four journalists contribute to this speech. I wasn’t surprised that they did so (lines between journalists and those they covered were far more porous in those days than they are now), but that their effort proved so ineffectual.

If there was any moment in the speech when Bobby achieved something like emotional liftoff, it came not from his speechwriters, but from a powerfully evocative quotation, suggested by the fellow poetry-lover to whom he had drawn closer in the months after the assassination, sister-in-law Jackie Kennedy. He applied these lines from Romeo and Juliet to Jack:

And 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.

There it was—the magic of Jack, the deceased President now as much a cultural archetype as Shakespeare’s risk-taking youth. By his innate association with the fallen President, Bobby, as well as Jack, now blocked out “the garish sun”—Johnson.

LBJ and Humphrey delivered their acceptance speeches this same night, and in Humphrey’s case gave an impassioned performance. But the insecure President had been served notice that a sizable number of the delegates regarded him as an impostor. His Presidency would be overshadowed, and the rivalry between LBJ and RFK--one driven more by reasons of ambition than ideology--would split their party four years hence.