Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

“Don’t smile too much or they’ll think we’re happy about the appointment,” Senator John F. Kennedy told his younger brother, Robert. It was late 1960. Jack Kennedy, now president-elect of the United States, opened the front door of his stately home in Georgetown to inform a pack of awaiting reporters that he would name Bobby to the post of attorney general.

It was the worst-kept secret in Washington, and as the family expected, few seasoned political hands approved of the selection. “It is simply not good enough to name a bright young political manager, no matter how bright or how young or how personally loyal, to a major post in government,” the New York Times editorialized. Worse, a close associate later observed, “it was nepotism, I mean, he was the brother of the president.” Anthony Lewis, a veteran courts reporter, was “appalled … thought it was a simply awful idea.” Kennedy was “a zealot with no understanding of the terrible responsibilities of an attorney general.”


Bobby Kennedy has since become an American folk hero—the tough, crusading liberal gunned down in the prime of life. But his appointment at the age of 35 to a powerful government post—a post that he was singularly unqualified to hold—at the time struck many in Washington as irresponsible and inappropriate.

More than that, it rankled one very important person in particular—Lyndon Johnson, who loathed RFK intensely and must certainly have borne that hatred in mind when, in 1967, he signed into law a nepotism statute that, among other provisions, appeared to make it impossible for a president to appoint immediate family members to the Cabinet or, some argue, to the White House staff. (The law explicitly prevents “public officials” from promoting a “relative” "to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control.”) LBJ knew that the law would have no immediate bearing on the Kennedy family. But as one aide later noted, he “couldn’t be rational where Bobby”—whom he dubbed “that little shitass”—“was concerned.” Signing the bill must have felt good.

Almost 50 years later, it’s that law—LBJ’s sweet revenge—that could prevent President-elect Donald Trump from bringing his son-in-law and chief whisperer, Jared Kushner, to Washington as an adviser—a possibility that Trump denies, despite the flurry of leaks emanating from his unorthodox transition headquarters in Trump Tower. (Trump may still be able to grant security clearance to Kushner and rely on him as an outside adviser. But he can’t place him in the Cabinet or even, some claim, on the White House staff.)

Even if LBJ signed the law out of personal animus, there’s a reason that Congress passed it by a comfortable margin. And it’s a reason worth remembering today. Presidents enjoy enough power and access to talent without needing to resort to nepotism—and as we can see from RFK’s appointment, all family members—though personally loyal to the president—are not necessarily fit to hold high office.

***

Shortly after naming his brother attorney general, Jack Kennedy told family friends, in jest, that he “just wanted to give him a little legal practice before he becomes a lawyer.”

Bobby was mortified. “Jack,” he complained “you shouldn’t have said that about me.”

“Bobby, you don’t understand,” JFK explained. “You’ve got to make fun of it, you’ve got to make fun of yourself in politics.”

“You weren’t making fun of yourself,” Bobby parried. “You were making fun of me.”

It stung because it was true. At age 35, RFK had just a few years of government service under his belt; he had worked as legal counsel to two Senate committees—jobs that his father and brother had arranged for him—but otherwise claimed no qualification for the role of attorney general.

But JFK had grown to rely on Bobby—the brother who, years earlier, he had dismissed as “kind of a nasty, brutal, humorless little fellow,” “moody, taciturn, brusque, and combative”—as his campaign manager, right hand and principal sounding board. “I have now watched you Kennedy brothers for five solid years,” Connecticut Governor Abraham Ribicoff told the president-elect, “and I notice that every time you face a new crisis, you automatically turn to Bobby. You’re out of the same womb. There’s empathy. You understand one another. You’re not going to be able to be president without using Bobby all the time.”

Not everyone looked warmly on Bobby’s appointment, particularly Vice President-elect Johnson, who privately reviled him as a “snot-nosed little son of -bitch.” Their mutual enmity—almost Shakespearean in its richness and depth—would drive power dynamics in Washington for the next decade and beyond. During his tenure as Senate majority leader, LBJ had sized up RFK (who was then a lowly committee aide) as a “snot nose,” though he acknowledged that he was “bright.” Ever eager to diminish others to aggrandize himself, he would greet Bobby in the hallways as “sonny boy.”

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when the two men developed their all-consuming hatred for each other. It might have been in late 1959, when Jack dispatched his brother to the LBJ Ranch in Texas to determine whether Johnson intended to run for the Democratic presidential nomination the net year. In a deliberate attempt to humiliate JFK’s little brother, Johnson took him deer hunting and purposely handed him a high-caliber rifle with an especially powerful recoil. It knocked Kennedy to the ground. “Son,” Johnson said, “you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.”

Or, it might have been several months later, when LBJ’s campaign spread (true) rumors that Jack Kennedy was concealing a serious illness and reminded liberal delegates to the Democratic National Convention that the candidate’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s war preparedness policies in the late 1930s. “Lyndon Johnson has compared my father to the Nazis and … lied by saying my brother was dying of Addison’s disease,” Bobby complained to one of Johnson’s close aides. “You Johnson people are running a stinking damned campaign and you’ll get yours when the time comes.”

The time came soon enough. After JFK secured the nomination, Jack offered LBJ the vice presidential slot. Johnson accepted it, and then Bobby—apparently on his own authority, or because of a miscommunication—attempted to rescind it. The story leaked widely and caused Johnson considerable embarrassment, for which he never forgave RFK.

As vice president, Johnson stoically and without public complaint weathered almost three years of endless humiliation at the hand of Bobby Kennedy. Though JFK insisted that his staff members accord LBJ all of the consideration and courtesy due to the vice president, Bobby and his loyalists were uniformly dismissive and impolite. They frequently disregarded instructions that LBJ be included in key policy and security conclaves. At Cabinet and interagency meetings, Bobby took every opportunity to humiliate the vice president.

Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson were rarely granted invitations to parties at Hickory Hill, Bobby’s estate in Northern Virginia and the unofficial social capital of Camelot. On those few occasions when they were included, Ethel Kennedy relegated them to her “loser’s table,” a repository for random guests of little social or political import. Hugh Sidey, a leading journalist, recalled the Johnson’s treatment at Hickory Hill as “just awful … inexcusable, really.” At one party, staff aides presented Bobby with a cloth effigy of Johnson, with pins sticking out of it. Then as now, Washington was a small town. The story got around.

Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy aide who later served as chief speechwriter in Johnson’s White House, observed that “Bobby symbolized everything Johnson hated. He became the symbol of all the things Johnson wasn’t … with these characteristics of wealth and power and ease and Eastern elegance; with Johnson always looking at himself as the guy they thought was illiterate, rude, crude. They laughed at him behind his back. I think he felt all of that.”

Johnson miserably accepted that such disgrace would be his lot in life for eight years—unless the Kennedys dumped him from the ticket in 1964, a fear that haunted him nightly. It was an open secret that Bobby coveted the 1968 nomination for himself. He was, according to all the news magazines, the “No. 2” man in Washington. “When this fellow looks at me,” said the actual No. 2 man during his tenure as vice president, “he looks at me like he’s going to look a hole right through me, like I’m a spy or something.”

In a particular moment of weakness, the vice president cornered Bobby inside the White House residence and pleaded, “I don’t understand you, Bobby. Your father likes me. Your brother likes me. But you don’t like me. Now, why? Why don’t you like me?” According to a bystander, RFK “agreed to the accuracy of all this.” It was the ultimate turn of the knife.

When, on November 22, 1963, fate reversed their fortunes, Johnson tried at first and of necessity to be gracious to the man who was now his attorney general. He had to serve out John Kennedy’s remaining 13 months in office before he could lay claim to his own mandate. But the relationship, already bad, grew poisonous from the start. Bobby deeply resented that LBJ insisted on flying back from Dallas on Air Force One, rather than on the vice presidential plane, and he believed—though he was not entirely right—that LBJ had treated Jackie Kennedy shabbily that day. At Cabinet meetings, he would show up late and openly brood, or stare with undisguised aggression at the sight of the new president sitting in his brother’s chair.

“Our president was a gentleman and a human being,” Bobby told an interviewer in confidence, even while he still served in Johnson’s Cabinet. “This man is not. … He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.”

Despite his hatred of Johnson, Bobby was eager to reclaim the Kennedy family’s power base and made overtures for the vice presidential spot in 1964. When LBJ turned him down, Bobby resigned his post and ran for the Senate in New York. It proved a tougher race than anyone expected. In the closing days, RFK had to swallow his pride and ask the president—who was then riding high and on his way to a landslide victory against GOP nominee Barry Goldwater—to campaign with him in the Empire State. LBJ agreed. The photographs show a very glum Senate candidate hating every minute of their joint appearance.

In the coming years, even at the height of his power, LBJ feared that his one-time tormenter would tack to the left and challenge him for the presidency in 1968. He worried that the Kennedys might seek to launch a dynasty that lasted into the 1970s and beyond: first Jack, then Bobby, then younger brother Teddy. Goodwin thought that the president was “always afraid of Bobby. It was more than hatred. It was fear.”

In 1967, LBJ signed the law that would bar future presidents from naming their brother to the Cabinet. The anti-nepotism law was a rider to a bill that established salary rates for postal workers and other government employees. The Iowa congressman who introduced the nepotism provision later claimed that it was not inspired with RFK in mind, and indeed, it covered broader categories of public employees. But it was widely assumed at the time and now by historians that Johnson requested the rider, and it soon acquired the popular moniker, “the RFK bill.” Johnson’s morbid obsession with the Kennedys was so all-encompassing that it’s not hard to believe that he was motivated in part by a desire to stop their dynastic trajectory in its tracks.

***

However personal his motivations, LBJ had other reasons to be wary of RFK’s appointment. Historians are divided as to whether Robert Kennedy was a strong attorney general or presidential counselor. During his tenure the Department of Justice undertook vigorous prosecution of organized crime and launched a small, but inventive pilot initiative to combat juvenile delinquency—an initiative that later influenced components of LBJ’s War on Poverty.

But on the central issue of his time—civil rights—he was at best a temporizer.

When in 1961, Freedom Riders tested a ruling by the Interstate Commerce Commission that barred segregation in bus terminals serving interstate routes, RFK at first tried to persuade civil rights leaders to abandon their campaign. When white civilians and law enforcement officials in Alabama massacred two busloads of riders (and burned one of the buses), the Justice Department quietly cut a deal whereby a new contingent of activists was escorted to the state line unharmed, and then placed under arrest for violating Mississippi’s segregation ordinances.

Though in later years, as a senator, Bobby proved a stalwart supporter of civil rights, as attorney general he allowed Southern authorities to flout federal authority and often expressed as much frustration with demonstrators as with white officials in the South. He did so out of political expediency (RFK was loath to lose the Solid South in 1964); a commitment to federalism (he believed that the constitution limited his scope of action); and moral failure (civil rights was simply not an issue that he’d had to confront in his 35 years).

A hard-line anti-Communist, Bobby also authorized FBI wiretaps against Martin Luther King Jr. He did so on the advice of J. Edgar Hoover, who claimed that MLK associated with communist organizers. Though the Kennedys harbored no illusions about Hoover’s personal and political motives, RFK armed him with the ability to surveil and later blackmail a Nobel Prize laureate. It was not a proud moment in the history of the FBI or the Justice Department.

Jared Kushner is approximately the same age that Bobby Kennedy was in 1960. He brings less government experience, not more, to the table.

But it’s not just a matter of experience. It’s a matter of propriety. When JFK first appointed his brother, the New York Times remarked that Bobby was a “political manager”—the Justice Department, it argued, “ought to be kept completely out of the political realm.” Just as it was wrong to install a political operative in the attorney general’s seat, it’s wrong to invite the president’s son-in-law into the West Wing, in whatever capacity. He and his wife cannot be disinterested stewards of the president-elect’s business empire—and their own—while enjoying sway over government officials and agencies and receiving classified information that could inform their commercial activities.

Donald Trump enters the White House with a very thin mandate. If his victory in the Electoral College tells us anything, it’s that many Americans are tired of living in a system that they regard as “rigged,” in which elite families subsume an outsized share of power and profit. If it was true of the Kennedys in 1960, or of the Bushes and Clintons in 2016, it must surely be true of the Trumps in 2017.