Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek

started. . . . It’s ridiculous that more work hasn’t been done already!” Appreciating Bobby’s tough-minded realism and signaling the group to prepare themselves to be pushed hard by Bobby, Jack joked: “How would you like looking forward to that voice blasting in your ear for the next six months?” To reassure Bobby and the rest of the gathering that he had been busy laying the groundwork for the campaign, Jack spent the next three hours describing in detail the political challenges they faced in every part of the country to his securing the nomination and winning the election.
    Bobby’s initial field assignment in November was to sound out Lyndon Johnson on his intentions. Although Johnson denied his interest in running, telling fellow senators that a southerner couldn’t get the nomination or be elected, few Washington insiders believed him. Adlai Stevenson, who was angling for a third nomination and refused to acknowledge his own ambition, assumed Johnson was in the chase and Jack thought he was “running very hard.” Bobby went to Johnson’s ranch in the Texas Hill Country—a show of deference by the thirty-four-year-old Bobby for the fifty-one-year-old majority leader, who saw Jack’s candidacy as a premature attempt to bypass senior, more accomplished, and more deserving members of the Senate and party. Johnson began reminding party bosses that the young man had little to show for his thirteen years in the House and Senate. “That kid,” as Johnson derisively called him, “needs a little gray in his hair.”
    During Bobby’s visit to his ranch, Johnson denied that he was running and refused to endorse Jack or anyone else, but he did say he opposed a third Stevenson nomination. Eager to put Bobby and his brother in their place, Johnson insisted that Bobby join him in a deer hunt. Johnson correctly assumed that Bobby would be out of his element and forced to take instruction from him. Bobby was, indeed, a reluctant participant. He was knocked to the ground and suffered a cut above the brow from the recoil of a shotgun Johnson had insisted he use. With thinly disguised disdain, Johnson said, as he helped Bobby to his feet, “Son, you got to learn to handle a gun like a man.” Bobby understandably took Johnson’s remark as a slap in the face—not only to himself but also to his brother, who was daring to oppose what Johnson saw as his greater claim on the presidency. Johnson’s behavior reminded Bobby of his earlier refusal to take up his father’s “generous offer” and gave birth to a feud that would color all future relations between Johnson and the Kennedys, but especially Bobby.
    Johnson’s response convinced Bobby and Jack that Johnson was in the hunt and strengthened their determination, as was typical whenever they faced opposition, to pull out all stops in the nomination fight. Bobby, like his father, took any defeat as not only a personal insult but also a demonstration of inadequacy. Any loss was proof of incompetence, of the larger society’s view of Irish Catholic inferiority. In 1960, an Irish Catholic running for president was a challenge to the unacknowledged hierarchy of white Protestant America. Many in the country saw the Irish as only one cut above African Americans, whose inferiority was written into law across the South.
    But as Johnson understood, in 1960, southern whites, like Catholics, were also unwelcome participants in the reach for the White House. True, Harry Truman, with his border-state twang and indelible middle American qualities—the bow tie, hair parted in the middle, and blue serge suits—had diminished some of the prejudices about who deserved to hold the highest office. But Johnson’s candidacy, like Kennedy’s, was a call to reshuffle the accepted standards for access to the Oval Office. They were implicit allies in trying to break down old barriers. But until they sorted out who would take the lead in redefining the country’s political