Johnson-Kennedy Rift ‘Complete’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31319, 15 March 1967, Page 7

Johnson-Kennedy Rift ‘Complete’

(From FRANK OLIVER, Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.) WASHINGTON, March 13. The break between the President of the United States, Mr Johnson, and Senator Robert Kennedy seems now to be complete. It just had to come, almost everyone in Washington is saying.

But it represents more than a rift between two men over foreign policy. It also represents a sharp division within the Democratic Party and involves party policy. The rift between the two men may be as sharp and unbridgeable as that of Peking and Moscow. The split in the party, though not visible, has to be rated as very serious.

The personal break began v'hen Senator Kennedy undertook what looked like some personal diplomacy in Europe, particularly/in Paris. Rumours state that this made the President angry. One columnist has said that Mr Johnson flatly informed Senator Kennedy that their meeting then, on February 6, was the last.

The same writer records that not long ago, the U.S. Vice-President, Mr Hubert Humphrey, made an off-hand comment to an old political friend that when Lyndon and Bobby get together, good sense flies out the window and they become like two animals tearing at each other’s throats.

This quarrel appears to go much deeper than the argument about how to end the Vietnam war.

In the eyes jf Johnsonian Democrats, Ihe critics of his Vietnam policy, whom Kennedy has novi openly joined,

are rebels who are nor cciy unciermining the Administration in its efforts in Southeast Asia, but are wrecking the party to which they belong. The so-called rebels take the stand that they are where they were in 1964 and that the President and those who support him have left them.

It is clear, of course, that Mr Johnson has reversed the stand on Vietnam he made during the 1964 campaign. It is equally clear that he has been doing during the last two years many of the things which Senator Barry Goldwater urged regarding Vietnam.