Bobby for Veep?

On the Democratic side of the New Hampshire primary, Lyndon Johnson got 29,317 write-in votes for President and Bobby Kennedy got 25,094 for Vice President. The 4,223-vote difference was not much, but it drew a sigh of relief that could be heard right in the White House oval office.

At one point, the write-in campaign for Bobby as the President's November running mate had threatened to embarrass Johnson seriously. It also stirred up a beehive of rumors about how Lyndon and Bobby were feuding and were no longer even on speaking terms.

Things were not actually that bad. At all times, the President and his Attorney General kept up normal business communications, and at a. recent farewell party for Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Johnson bussed Ethel Kennedy three or four times.

Yet there was some flame amid the smoke. Johnson and Bobby have never been cronies. Both are sensitive, stubborn, suspicious men. Bobby did not want Johnson to be his brother's running mate in 1960, advised against it, and did not care if Lyndon knew how he felt. After becoming Vice President, Johnson sank into the sort of semiobscurity traditional to holders of that post, and the standard gibe at New Frontier cocktail parties was: "Whatever happened to Lyndon?" Before President Kennedy's death, there was also a lot of talk about a "Dump Johnson" campaign. Through it all, Johnson kept silence. But he did not forget or forgive, and he blamed a lot of his problems on Bobby.

Eight & Eight. Yet Bobby stayed on as Attorney General at President Johnson's request. Last January the President sent him abroad to try to smooth over the conflicts between Indonesia, the Philippines and the new nation of Malaysia. While he was away, the Democratic city chairman of Manchester, N.H., Joseph R. Myers, conceived the idea of sponsoring a vice-presidential write-in campaign for him. "We didn't do this to embarrass Johnson," Myers said last week. "The Kennedy name is just magic up here."

It was also magic to one Paul Corbin, a Wisconsinite who climbed on the Kennedy bandwagon in 1960, worked in the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries, and was rewarded by Bobby with a job on the Democratic National Committee staff. Corbin was supposed to screen prospective Democratic job applicants, but his interviews often turned out to be diatribes. "Where were you," he would cry, "when we were fighting in West Virginia?" He was, first of all, a Bobby partisan. Once, when asked about his political future, Corbin said that he planned to "stay in Washington for 16 years, eight years with Jack and eight years with Bobby. And if Jack doesn't do better, we'll run Bobby in '64."

When he heard of the New Hampshire write-in campaign for Bobby, Corbin promptly got on the phone and began promoting it, freely using the phrase, "Bobby says . . ." On news of Corbin's activities, Johnson started burning. He called Bobby, said he deemed it "inadvisable" for Corbin to stay on at the National Committee under the circumstances. The word was passed from the White House that Corbin should be fired, and National Committee Chairman John Bailey was only too happy to oblige.

Meanwhile, the write-in campaign won the sponsorship of New Hampshire's Democratic Governor John King and began to snowball. Realizing the embarrassment that would result if he were to get more votes for Vice President than Johnson for President, Bobby sought out White House Aide Kenny O'Donnell, asked if the President wanted him to make a statement denying vice-presidential ambitions. The answer came back: no, such a statement would only stir things up even more.

But a few weeks later, the situation appeared even more serious, and Bobby finally released a rather limp announcement through Justice Department Aide Ed Guthman. It said that the Attorney General "wishes to discourage any efforts on his behalf in New Hampshire or elsewhere." At about that same time, New Hampshire's Democratic leaders woke up to the situation, began urging voters to write in Johnson as well as Bobby.

"I Don't Know." That move was successful--but it was far from the end of efforts to land Bobby on the national ticket this fall. In Milwaukee last week, two businessmen announced the formation of a "Draft Robert F. Kennedy for Vice President of the United States Grass Roots, Groundswell Committee." Write-in votes are illegal in Wisconsin's own primary, and the state's Democratic Governor John W. Reynolds emerged from a conference with President Johnson to declare the campaign "asinine and premature."

And how did Bobby feel about it all?

Talking to a Washington high school group, he said: "I'm not going to remain as Attorney General after November." Later, in answer to a question about his future plans from a group of Pennsylvania students who were visiting his office, Kennedy replied: "I don't know, I just don't have the answer to that. Scary, isn't it?"

Yet there is little question that Bobby is tempted by the idea of being Vice President, and would like to keep open all the avenues to the job. At the same time, President Johnson has every intention of naming his own running mate --and he will do just that at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City next August.

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