from Robert A. Caro's The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson:
The tone was to get meaner. "I'm just like a fox," Lyndon Johnson once boasted. "I can see the jugular in any man and go for it, but I always keep myself in rein. I keep myself on a leash, just like you would an animal." The first phrase in that boast was accurate. Lyndon Johnson had always had a gift for finding a person's "jugular," his most vulnerable spot, the one in which he could most deeply be hurt. The rest of the boast, however, was not. If he kept himself in rein, on a leash, it was a leash that, all through his life, had been frequently unfastened. His ability to hurt had always been combined with a willingness--an eagerness, in fact--to put the ability to use; with a cruelty, a viciousness, a desire to hurt for the sake of hurting. Now his unerring eye had located, beneath the pale mask of Robert Kennedy's grief, the place in which, because of his brother's assassination, Robert Kennedy was most vulnerable. And the leash came off. Johnson told Pierre Salinger, in a remark he obviously intended to get back to Kennedy, that Jack Kennedy's death might have been "divine retribution" for his "participation" in assassination plots against other heads of state. "Lyndon Johnson said to Pierre Salinger that he wasn't sure but that the assassination of President Kennedy didn't take place in retribution for his participation in the assassinations of Trujilo and President Diem," Robert Kennedy said during an oral history interview in April, 1964. "Divine retribution. He said that. Then he went on and said that when he was growing up, somebody he knew--who had misbehaved--. . . ran into a tree, hit his head, and became cross-eyed. He said that was God's retribution for people who were bad. . . . God put his mark on them. And that this [President Kennedy's assassination] might very well be God's retribution to President Kennedy for his participation in the assassination of these two people."
Although neither of the two assassinations to which Johnson referred had been authorized by the late President, Johnson didn't believe that. Pointing to the picture of President Diem in The Elms the day after Kennedy's funeral, Johnson had told Hubert Humphrey, "We had a hand in killing him. Now it's happening here." In his remark to Salinger, Johnson didn't include the assassination attempts against a third head of state, Fidel Castro, although he was aware that they had occurred, and believed that the Kennedys had had a hand in them as well. A week after the assassination, he was asking J. Edgar Hoover "whether [Oswald] was connected with the Cuban operation [Mongoose]?" His suspicions were soon to harden. By 1965, he was telling an aide, "President Kennedy tried to get Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first." During his retirement, he would tell a journalist that the Kennedys "had been operating a damn Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean." Whether or not his remark to Salinger brought the Castro attempts to Robert Kennedy's mind, the remark was made, as Evan Thomas says, "cruelly and with an unerring instinct for Kennedy's hidden vulnerabilities." And the fact that it struck home is testified to by its target. It was, Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, "the worst thing Johnson has said." Kennedy was to tell a friend that the new President "does not know how to use people's talents, to find the very best in them and put the best to work. But more than any other man, he knows how to ferret out and use people's weaknesses."
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