Ha, getting their hands dirty cleaning up after themselves!
That would be a first for the Kennedys!
The fact that old Joe Kennedy’s fixer found himself in Texas on this hot, dusty day spoke eloquently for itself. If the family had been paying attention the last few weeks it would have noticed that he had washed his hands of the whole lot of them!
His air-conditioned limousine had bumped and rumbled, rolling like a ship in a rough sea as it kicked up dirt and stones on the grit road, having left Route 290 some miles back to follow a half-surfaced track along the southern bank of the Pedernales River to approach the LBJ Ranch from the east. The Secret Service regarded the ranch’s frontage with the main highway as a dangerously exposed flank which most of the time the Vice President was in residence, was so heavily patrolled as to be virtually impassable. Besides, LBJ was not about to advertise the fact he was entertaining a man whose very name was anathema to the majority of his key Southern Democrat allies.
Claude Betancourt was surprised to be greeted on the front porch by Lyndon Baines Johnson, his wife Lady Bird and the Vice President’s sixteen year old daughter Lucy. He was even more surprised — although Southern hospitality being what it was, he ought not to have been surprised — by the warmth of his reception.
“We were all so pleased to hear how recovered your lovely daughter is, Mr Betancourt,” Lady Bird gushed, taking the old man’s arm after her husband had stopped pumping his hand and patting his shoulder. Lucy Baines Johnson had curtsied and smiled so sweetly that it had very nearly melted the visitor’s hard heart. “After everything she has been through. And married, too! We were so sad not to have been able to be in Philadelphia. You must be such a proud father?”
“Gretchen does me credit I really don’t deserve,” Claude Betancourt had confessed.
When Betancourt had first known Lyndon Johnson the tall Texan had chain smoked, and seemed as young as his years but that was before in July 1955, aged only forty-seven he had suffered a heart attack that had very nearly killed him. Since then Lady Bird had made him eat more sensibly, and no cigarette had touched his lips but for a man in only his fifty-sixth year Johnson was prematurely aged, often walking and moving with the stiff gait of a man in his sixties or seventies. Nevertheless, having acquired an exaggerated craggy gravitas from his near brush with death it was a thing he used to best effect.
That was one of the things Claude Betancourt had always admired about LBJ. His differences with the Vice President had been, and probably remained, personal not political; Johnson was the master of the possible, a hugely pragmatic, driven man who had literally hauled himself up by his bootstraps from the humblest of beginnings. Johnson had enjoyed none of the gilded advantages bequeathed to JFK by virtue of his birth; he had had to fight tooth and claw for absolutely everything he had ever achieved. Nothing had come easily to LBJ and in many ways his continuing public loyalty to the Kennedys and to the rapidly disintegrating Democratic Party, frankly astonished Betancourt.
Lyndon Johnson grinned.
There was a bottle of Bourbon and two empty tumblers on a table next to the chairs positioned by the broad windows looking through the trees towards the course of the Pedernales River.
“That girl of yours will light fires under the asses of the DOJ’s people when the Battle of Washington tribunals get under way!” He observed with no little pleasure. Despite having been Democrat Majority Leader in the House throughout Eisenhower’s Presidency LBJ had no love for the complacent Washington — and now Philadelphia — elite and the sclerotic, virtually moribund institutions of the Federal Government.
“Yes,” Claude Betancourt conceded ruefully, “I’m afraid she will.”
“Why’d you let her get herself into a bare-knuckle fight with those assholes at Justice?” In a moment the Vice President had retreated from the directness of the interrogative. “If you don’t mind me asking, sir?”
The two men settled in cushioned cane chairs and Johnson poured generous measures of amble liquid into each tumbler.
“That’s an interesting question, Mr Vice President,” the older man confessed. He was the best part of two decades his host’s age, a man who had forever operated behind the scenes and around the fringes of the Kennedy family. Even now he remained largely anonymous except to the people who actually cared about where the real power and influence lay. He had allowed the most precious thing in his life, his brilliant, beautiful daughter to openly take on the same entrenched ‘establishment’ that he had been so careful to avoid challenging his entire adult career. “I think the answer has, for once in my life, rather more to do with a father’s love for his child than politics. Gretchen is a free spirit and it would have been unspeakably cruel to cage her as if she was some exquisite, unique song bird.”
Lyndon Johnson arched an eyebrow.
He picked up his drink.
“Lady Bird won’t let me smoke. She weighs my food, she tells me when I have to come back home to rest. My girls aren’t any better. Daddy this, daddy that,” he chuckled, “without the ones we love we ain’t nothing!”
Claude Betancourt took it as read that the other man would know Gretchen was hand in glove with the FBI in the affair of the traitorous former special agent granted special immunity to hunt down the perpetrators of the Bedford Pine Park atrocities in Atlanta. It was in that enterprise — rather than in her defense of the Battle of Washington ring leaders — that the real dangers to his daughter’s future career most likely lay; a thing that LBJ would understand perfectly.
He took the whiskey tumbler offered to him; and unflinchingly met the Vice President’ stern, penetrating gaze. Symbolism was sometimes everything in politics and by coming to Stonewall, Claude Betancourt had told Johnson that Jack Kennedy had finally lost the Party.
The man who had been born in a ramshackle farmhouse not far from where the two men now sat, the oldest of five children brought up in grinding poverty and often hungry, who had been eased out of the Presidential ticket in 1960 by the wealth, slanders and duplicity of the Kennedys, was now the Democratic Party’s last best hope of salvation.
Johnson savored the moment as whiskey burned in his throat.
He had known his post Battle of Washington pact with Jack Kennedy would only last as long as it suited the President. When it became obvious that he and the President’s men were heading in opposite directions on the ‘Middle East question’, over the absence of any real movement on the civil rights crisis that was tearing areas of the Deep South to pieces, and that his role in the re-election campaign had become one of ‘keeping sweet the Governors who did not want to be seen in public with either Jack or Bobby Kennedy’ he had read the writing writ large upon the wall. JFK’s people, Bobby mainly, were hawking around for an alternative running mate; ‘somebody who could bring the big labor unions back into the stockade’ and who would ‘speak to the New England heartlands’ better than the son of an impoverished dirt farmer from the back of nowhere.
The dysfunction within both the Party and the Administration was graphically illustrated by the invidious situation of LBJ loyalist Marvin Watson, the man who had stepped into Kenny O’Donnell’s post — White House Appointments Secretary, an outdated title which actually described the post of Chief of Staff — after the Battle of Washington. That the man at the heart of the White House could be so marginalized, basically left out of the loop on so many important decisions was ludicrous and but for Johnson’s pleas he would have resigned weeks ago.