WASHINGTON--When the political history of the 1960s and 1970s is definitively written, Lawrence F. O'Brien, who died Friday at the age of 73, will probably be identified in two ways.
The first is as the architect of the 1960 election of President John F. Kennedy, and the second is as the prime target of the 1972 Watergate break-in of the Democratic National Committee that ultimately drove President Richard M. Nixon into resignation in disgrace.
These two identifications are certainly significant. In electing Kennedy, Larry O'Brien literally produced the textbook for achieving the presidency--"a 64-page black-bound book," Theodore H. White reported in "The Making of the President 1960," that provided "the diagram of organization for every Kennedy campaign from beginning to end" henceforth known among political operatives as "the O'Brien Manual."
As Democratic National Chairman in 1972, O'Brien was fingered by the Nixon reelection campaign, which hoped to find damaging information with which to drive him from that office or harass him through tax audits directed against him by the politicized Internal Revenue Service, on orders from the Nixon White House.
The eventual outcome, in addition to Nixon's departure, was a $775,000 civil-suit settlement to the DNC from the Nixon reelection committee, of which O'Brien got $400,000, which he promptly turned over to the DNC. He favored Nixon's criminal prosecution, yet said he shouldn't be sent to jail if convicted, and should be pardoned.
O'Brien, however, will also be remembered for other things. He was the Kennedy loyalist who stayed in his White House job as chief congressional liaison man for President Lyndon B. Johnson when most of the other leading members of JFK's "Irish Mafia" left with bitterness toward the man who in their view had usurped "Camelot."
O'Brien saw his obligation to Kennedy's memory as well as to the institution of the presidency to help LBJ with his pledge to carry out the JFK legislative agenda. Together they achieved much of it and much more.
O'Brien's talent for soft persuasion was an effective complement to Johnson's style of the cajoling, and oftentimes intimidating, hard sell.
LBJ rewarded O'Brien with appointment as postmaster general, a throwback to days when the occupant of that office was the president's chief political adviser in the cabinet, in the manner of James A. Farley under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
