The American Vice Presidency (63 page)

Johnson rode into the Senate at a propitious time, along with the Harry Truman upset of Thomas Dewey and the Democratic control of both houses of Congress. He allied himself with the conservative veteran Richard Russell of Georgia. Two years later, when the two top Democrats in the Senate were defeated, Johnson, with Russell’s backing, ran for and won the second post as majority whip. In 1954, with the Democratic leadership again vacant, Russell helped his protégé capture it. After barely six years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson was ruling the roost as majority leader.

With Dwight Eisenhower easily reelected in 1956 with a Republican Senate, Johnson was reduced to minority leader for two years. But when the Democrats regained control in 1958, he returned as majority leader for the next six, cementing his reputation as arguably the strongest and most effective occupant of that office in its history. With his own membership divided between southern conservatives led by Russell and the influx of northern liberals like Humphrey, Johnson’s masterful talent for compromise—a deft mixture of arm-twisting and sweet cajolery—dominated. It was soon known on Capitol Hill as the “Johnson Treatment,” featuring LBJ as a commanding figure cornering his prey with chest-piercing finger and jutting jaw or gangling arm wrapped over the shoulder of his victim.

The man seemed a force of nature but not immune to nature’s capriciousness. In 1956, he was suddenly stricken with a heart attack but returned after a few weeks to his old hard-driving self, as if to make up for the lost time. In 1957, as the country experienced the start of its historic pivot in civil rights from deep segregation of the races, especially in the South, to integration in schools, housing, and other public accommodations, Johnson became its champion. With bipartisan support, the Senate and House passed the first major civil rights act since Reconstruction days.

In 1958, economic woes for the Eisenhower administration contributed
to a Democratic landslide in the midterm congressional elections. The party’s two-seat majority in the Senate swelled to thirty, emboldening liberals to increase their demands on Johnson, both in their voice in the Senate and for a progressive agenda. His strength in the party remained centered in the chamber that he ruled with an iron hand but was not reflected to any such degree outside it.

Nevertheless, Johnson now entertained presidential ambitions for the 1960 campaign. He assumed his Senate mastery could assure him a major place in the competition for the party nomination that summer. Rayburn insisted he declare openly, but Johnson declined, saying he had his Senate leadership responsibilities to handle.

In the early primaries, Kennedy and Humphrey battled in Wisconsin and West Virginia, with the young Yankee senator emerging as the frontrunner and Humphrey bowing out. Kennedy then painstakingly courted party leaders at the city and state levels around the country, building delegate commitments.

Johnson meanwhile held his fire, in what was a severe underestimation of his pulling power outside his congressional orbit. He did not announce his presidential candidacy until July 5, only days before the opening of the national party convention in Los Angeles.

The showdown came when LBJ and JFK met in a joint appearance before the Texas and Massachusetts delegations. Johnson chided his younger competitor for missing many Senate quorum calls while out campaigning. Kennedy wryly conceded Johnson’s superior attendance record and endorsed him—for another term as Senate majority leader. With Johnson having failed to reach out beyond the Senate to build a campaign organization, the outcome was predictable: a first-ballot victory for JFK, winning nearly twice as many delegates as Johnson.

Unlike in 1956, when the presidential nominee Stevenson threw the choice of running mate to the convention and Kennedy lost, this time Kennedy was going to do the choosing himself. As a northern liberal he was well aware of his weakness in the South. Kennedy’s chief aides drew up a list with Johnson’s name at the top, considering Kennedy’s need to carry Texas’s electoral votes. Furthermore, the new nominee had agreed with his brother Robert that if Johnson indicated he wanted to be asked or thought he was entitled to the right of first refusal, then he would have to be asked.
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Other accounts argue that the offer was made in the expectation that Johnson would turn it down, preferring to retain his huge power base in the Senate, where he was up for reelection that fall and certain to be returned by Texas voters. John Kennedy went to Johnson’s hotel suite personally to make the offer. Robert Kennedy told Schlesinger later, “He [JFK] never dreamt that there was a chance in the world that he would accept it.”
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Robert Kennedy said he was in his brother’s suite when JFK returned, saying, “You just won’t believe it.… He wants it.… Now what do we do?” In light of all the opposition to Johnson voiced by labor leaders, they finally decided that “Bobby” would go back and try to get LBJ to withdraw. Bobby then made the effort, offering to make Johnson chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a crumb that Kennedy could not have seriously believed Johnson would swallow. As Robert Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger later, Johnson “just shook and tears came into his eyes, and he said, ‘I want to be Vice President, and if the president will have me, I’ll join with him in making a fight for it.’ ” To which Bobby said he replied, “Well, then that’s fine. He wants you to be Vice President if you want to be Vice President.”
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A slightly different version came from Phil Graham, the
Washington Post
publisher and friend of both Kennedy and LBJ. According to Graham, Johnson told him that after Robert’s visit, LBJ phoned JFK and was told, “Bobby’s been out of touch and doesn’t know what’s been happening.” John Kennedy then reassured Johnson that he wanted him, and both men made public statements that LBJ had accepted the offer.
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The key question remained: why did Johnson agree to accept the vice presidential offer when arguably he already was the second-most powerful politician in Washington as Senate majority leader? Speaker Sam Rayburn, who had first counseled Johnson to reject it, later changed his mind. A close Johnson friend reported that LBJ explained to him that “power is where power goes, thinking he could run Congress from the vice presidency.”
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But in so saying, LBJ demonstrated a mistaken confidence that the power was embodied in himself rather than in the office he held, and hence he could take it with him.

According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who worked closely with LBJ after his retirement, “Johnson recognized that his power in the Senate had depended in part upon having a passive Republican President
[Eisenhower] in the White House.… The world he had mastered so well would no longer be his. Even if Kennedy lost, Richard Nixon would be no Eisenhower; he would not accord the Majority Leader the respect or the power Johnson had enjoyed in the 1950s. Better, then, to help young John Kennedy.”
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Once the furor over Kennedy’s surprise selection of Johnson passed, the two men plunged into the general election campaign. Johnson stumped heavily across the South and wound up the campaign in Texas; in spite of his presence on the ticket it needed selling right up to the end. In the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas a few days before the election, Republican women coming from a Nixon rally subjected Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson to a rowdy and hostile reception. With television cameras capturing the scene, Johnson took his sweet time working his way through the crowds in the hotel lobby.
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On Election Night, Kennedy and Johnson beat Nixon and Lodge by three-tenths of 1 percent in the popular vote, with the Democratic ticket carrying Texas, making it believable if not certain that having the southerner Johnson on the ticket accounted for part of the victory.

In organizational meetings for the new administration, Johnson was invited to the Kennedy house in Palm Beach for critical political meetings of the Kennedy circle. When the new secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, recommended Johnson’s old aide, John Connally, for secretary of the navy, Johnson was not consulted until Kennedy informed him of the appointment.
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Johnson urged that Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas be appointed secretary of state, but Robert Kennedy balked, citing the peril of racial complications in his coming from a segregated state. Kennedy then nominated Dean Rusk, who phoned Johnson in Texas and offered to discuss foreign relations with him, but Johnson huffily waved him off.
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Right after New Year’s, Johnson was briefly sworn in for another Senate term in advance of the inauguration and sat in on the Senate Democratic Caucus, which he had chaired for eight years. At Kennedy’s suggestion, the easy-going senator Mike Mansfield of Montana agreed to take over as majority leader. At this first meeting with JFK, Mansfield in turn suggested that Johnson, as incoming president of the Senate, be invited not only to attend but also to preside at future caucuses. The notion, which few doubted was Johnson’s own idea, disturbed many senators and outraged a few. In a vote on the odd arrangement, forty-five acquiesced and seventeen voted
against. The uneven support amounted to a humiliating rebuff. Johnson attended the next caucus but immediately turned over the gavel to Mansfield and never attended again.
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He did, however, appropriate the large and ornate Senate office from which he had reigned as majority leader, called by other senators the Taj Mahal.

Shortly after the inauguration, having been reminded of his proper place in the legislative branch, LBJ set out to assure for himself a substantial role in the executive. He had an aide draw up an executive order for Kennedy’s signature stating he would have “general supervision” over certain federal agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The presumption on Johnson’s part was quickly shortstopped by the Kennedy staff and never signed by the president, if indeed he ever saw it.
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LBJ was, however, the first vice president to be given an office in the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.

Beyond these initial gestures seemingly toward self-aggrandizement, Johnson settled into the vice presidency with full awareness of his position, declaring to his staff that he intended to give Kennedy his total allegiance and expected his aides to do the same. That did not mean, however, that he never fell into brooding over his lack of influence or limited utilization, particularly in his specialty of steering legislation past congressional pitfalls and marshes. But having once had his wrist slapped by his old colleagues in the Senate, he uncharacteristically retreated.

Kennedy did make his vice president chairman of the Presidential Committee on Equal Opportunity, which gave him a voice in civil rights matters, and chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council. He also was a member of the National Security Council and attended cabinet meetings but was notably quiet. Even on occasions when Kennedy would invite him to comment, he often would plead insufficient knowledge of inside information on which to offer a constructive observation. He was not in charge, and that seemed to make all the difference in his demeanor.

During the first crisis of the Kennedy administration, the disastrous attempt to land Cuban military exiles at the Bay of Pigs with the objective of ousting the communist leader Fidel Castro, Johnson was at his Texas ranch entertaining the West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and apparently out of the loop. When a friend asked JFK why he hadn’t included Johnson, he explained, “You want to talk to the people who are most involved, and
your mind does not turn to Lyndon because he isn’t following the flow of [diplomatic] cables.”
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Kennedy did, however, follow Eisenhower’s practice of dispatching his vice president on foreign missions, despite Johnson’s very limited experience abroad. Early in their first year, JFK sent him on an important fact-finding visit to Southeast Asia. And in August 1961, Kennedy rushed LBJ to Berlin as a show of solidarity when the Russians suddenly slapped together a makeshift wall separating the Eastern zone, under their control, from the Western, under supervision of the Americans, British, and French. As an American convoy of armored trucks carrying U.S. troops rolled into West Berlin via the corridor through East Germany, LBJ was there to greet them, and afterward he addressed the parliament and another crowd outside the city hall. His visit proved to be a morale booster for the German people and for Johnson himself.
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Other foreign trips followed, on which he segued from diplomat to politician and plunged into crowds shaking hands, to the delight of the locals.

But, as Johnson’s special assistant Booth Mooney wrote later, “State Department stiff-collars, at home and abroad, were dismayed by such goings on. They wished the President would keep his Vice President in the United States. They passed among themselves with appreciative chuckles the statement of an assistant secretary in State that ‘like some wines, Lyndon does not travel well.’ Certainly there was no doubt that he upset the routine of every American embassy he visited. Which could not have mattered less to him.”
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The most revealing window into Johnson’s influence in foreign-policy crises came during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The vice president was a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or Ex Comm, created to deal specifically with the discovery that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had secretly slipped ballistic missiles onto the island. In Robert Kennedy’s account of the crisis,
Thirteen Days
, Johnson is mentioned only as “attending intermittently, at various meetings.”
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But at one point when a message came from the Kremlin indicating the Russians would remove their missiles if the United States would take theirs out of Turkey, Johnson at first seemed to seize on it. Then, noting
that the Soviets had shot down an American U-2 photo-reconnaissance plane, killing the pilot, and there had been no U.S. response, he warned that the failure to respond militarily would convey weakness on Kennedy’s part. Robert Kennedy said in an oral history later, “After the meetings were finished, [LBJ] would circulate and whine and complain about our being weak.”
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