LYNDON B. JOHNSON
36th President, 1963–1969
Overall Rank: 10
Total Score: 687
Among the top ten presidents, LBJ has the widest variation in category ranks. In 2017, he ranked 1st in relations with Congress and 2nd in pursued equal justice for all. But historians ranked him 24th in moral authority and 38th in international relations—the lowest category ranking of any of the top ten presidents.
Party: Democrat
b. August 27, 1908, Stonewall, Texas
d. January 22, 1973, Stonewall, Texas
First Lady: Claudia “Lady Bird” Alta Taylor Johnson
Age entering office: 55
Historian: Robert A. Caro
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Robert Caro discussed his book, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV, his fourth book in a series on LBJ that totals over three thousand pages. Caro appeared in a two-part interview for C-SPAN’s Q & A on April 24, 2012.
All his life, the one quality about Lyndon Johnson, above all, is his decisiveness, his willingness to act, to make decisions, and to try as hard as he could for everything. Lyndon Johnson has only one goal in his life—to be president. In 1958, he seems perfectly positioned to become president. He’s been Senate majority leader. He has all the senators in his camp. He has passed the first civil rights act in history to blunt some of the Northern antagonism, too. In 1958, he calls seven or eight of his top lieutenants to his ranch. He says, “I am destined to be president. I was meant to be president. You all know that. And I’m going to be president.” And then, they’re waiting for the campaign to begin, and, suddenly, he doesn’t run. He doesn’t give any orders. He doesn’t want to go and speak anywhere. He’s terribly indecisive and he throws away his chance at this 1960 nomination.
People who knew him best [had a theory], like John Connally—who later became secretary of the Treasury, secretary of the navy, this great politician, [who] once had me down to his ranch for three days. Those interviews were fascinating because he was closer to Lyndon Johnson during his early years than anyone else.… I asked him [why Johnson didn’t campaign in the primaries in ’60], and he said, “The one thing about Lyndon Johnson. He was afraid to fail.”
Why was he afraid to fail? His brother Sam Houston Johnson said to me, “The one thing that was most important to Lyndon was not to be like daddy.” His father had been a politician for a while, a successful politician, and had failed, lost the ranch, and the family was plunged into not only bankruptcy, but into being the laughing stock of their town. Johnson, when he was Senate majority leader, had Bobby Baker as the man who counted [senators’ likely] votes for him, and Baker says, “I learned never to let him fail on a [Senate] vote. Never.” All the people who knew him best say that Lyndon was afraid to fail, to be like his father, and he was afraid that if he ran for the presidency he would fail. That’s really why he didn’t run in 1960, why he didn’t run hard.
There’s no question about it that Robert Kennedy tried desperately to get Lyndon Johnson to withdraw, or not to accept, the offer of the vice presidency [on his brother’s ticket in 1960]. John Kennedy had won [the Democratic nomination] the night before with 806 votes on the ballot. The next morning at 8:00—this is in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles—the two suites of the two candidates are in a back corner of the hotel. Johnson is on the seventh floor in 7334. Kennedy is two floors up at 9334. In the morning, either Jack Kennedy or Robert comes down the back stairs, because they don’t want the reporters to see them, and has a conversation with Lyndon Johnson. Whenever there are only two people in a room, you really can’t say, as a historian, what happened because one gives one version and one gives the other. But we know what happened after the meeting. Johnson calls in his three closest advisers: John Connally, Bobby Baker, and James H. Rowe Jr., who had been Roosevelt’s adviser and Truman’s adviser. And he says, “Jack Kennedy was just down here, and he offered me the vice presidency.” Kennedy goes back upstairs where there’s a group of Northern bosses who can count votes. They know that Kennedy has to have Texas and some Southern states. Dave Lawrence, for one, was there and says Kennedy walks into the room and says, “Johnson hasn’t said he’ll accept it, but it looks like he’s going to.” Lawrence,… a tough old Irish politician, reaches out his hands to Jack Kennedy, this young great, charismatic, handsome Irish politician, and they shake hands because Lawrence knows [Johnson] is the key to the election. What happens the rest of that day, no one can know. Everybody has different versions, but we do know that Bobby Kennedy came down those back stairs at least three times, and each time tried to get Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the ticket.
The first time that Bobby Kennedy comes down, he meets with John Connally and Sam Rayburn.… Bobby is very upset. Rayburn says in a statement, “His hair was hanging down all over his face. He says we’re going to have a floor fight. Labor and the liberals won’t stand for Lyndon Johnson. They’re going to put up their own candidate [for vice president], so we’d like him to consider, instead, being the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.” Rayburn replies with a single-word epithet, and Robert Kennedy leaves.…
… At each of these three meetings, Robert wants to meet directly with Lyndon Johnson. Lady Bird is saying, “I don’t think they ought to meet together,” and Rayburn also knows they shouldn’t meet together; there’s simply too much antagonism there. The second time that Bobby Kennedy comes down, Connally says, “I’ve got to get Rayburn.” Johnson said… that he had made [Connally] his campaign manager because he was the only man tough enough to handle Bobby Kennedy. But Connally knows that as tough as he is,… there’s someone a lot tougher, and it’s Sam Rayburn. Sam Rayburn is old. We know now he has cancer at the time. He’s blind. But he’s Sam Rayburn, this massive, unsmiling, grim figure who has ruled the House of Representatives for a quarter of a century. [He and Johnson were] almost a father-son thing. Rayburn loved Lyndon Johnson like a son; he would spend most Sundays in Washington at Johnson’s home. He loved the two Johnson girls, and all during Johnson’s Senate career, Rayburn is his rock. Rayburn is his support. Rayburn is the guy nobody can go around. And he’s for Lyndon Johnson. Connally says to Horace Busby, Johnson’s speechwriter, “Go in there and talk to Bobby Kennedy. Keep him occupied. I’ve got to find Sam Rayburn.”
Connally comes back with Sam Rayburn, and Bobby Kennedy says that he wants Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the ticket.… This old, blind man, so tough, says, “Are you authorized to speak for your brother?” Bobby Kennedy says, “No.” Rayburn says, “Then come back and speak to the speaker of the House of Representatives when you are.” Bobby Kennedy leaves, goes back upstairs, and there is yet a third time he tries to come down to get Johnson to withdraw from the ticket, and this time he meets with Johnson alone.
No one can really know [whether Jack Kennedy sent his brother down to entice Johnson off the ticket or if Robert was freelancing]. Robert Kennedy in his oral history says,… “Of course not. I was so close to my brother. What do you think I did? Go down and secretly try to get his vice president off the ticket?” However, one of the things we know is that all that day, Jack Kennedy did everything he could to get Lyndon Johnson to accept the nomination. At one point Jack Kennedy goes down the same back stairs to see Sam Rayburn alone.… Rayburn, in his description of this, says to Jack Kennedy, “I ask you two things. Will you keep Lyndon Johnson occupied and happy as vice president?” And something else: “And will you make him a real part of your administration?” Kennedy says, “I can tell you that [I will].” Rayburn says, “Then Johnson will go on. I agree that Johnson can go on the ticket.” Johnson will not go on the ticket if Rayburn doesn’t approve.
… People are saying to Johnson, “Don’t take the vice presidency. Right now, you are a powerful majority leader. Don’t take the vice presidency. You won’t have any power.” Johnson says, “Power is where power goes.” Meaning, I can make power in any situation. Nothing in Johnson’s life previously makes that seem like he’s boasting because that’s exactly what he had done all his life. He was a junior congressman; he got himself a position of real power. He took the job as the whip in the Senate. He took a nothing job,… a job no one wanted, and he made it have real power. He took the majority leader job. The majority leader didn’t have much power, and he made that position. He thought he could do the same thing with the vice presidency.
… [The vice presidency was] one of Johnson’s worst misjudgments because as soon as the election is over, it’s as if the realization comes to him that “God, I have no power now.” So, he’s got to try to make some. He does it on two fronts. One was on Capitol Hill, where he tries to remain as the power in the Senate. Kenny O’Donnell, one of Kennedy’s aides and his appointment secretary, says, “Johnson wanted to be both vice president and majority leader.” If he had succeeded,… think what you would have had: a president who had a vice president who had his own independent source of power. The Senate would be independent of Kennedy. But that bid fails. At the same time, Johnson submits this letter to Kennedy which asks for general supervision of various government agencies, something no vice president has ever had before. He asks for an office right next to the president’s in the White House. He asks for his own staff within the executive wing. He thinks he’s going to get these things. He’s absolutely confident he’s going to win on both fronts.
… This great reader of men, Lyndon Johnson, this man who thought he could read any man had read one man wrong—and the one man was John Kennedy. He doesn’t realize how tough JFK was.… He gives this memo to Kennedy, and Kennedy handles it by utterly ignoring it and being very cool about it; and Johnson loses, fails.
[Behind his back, the Kennedy people called Lyndon Johnson names] among other things, “Rufus Cornpone,” “Uncle Cornpone,” “Uncle Rufus.” They are, of course, mocking the fact that he has this Southern accent. They’re mocking the fact that he is a big, clumsy Southerner. Beyond that, why did they treat him with a meanness—in fact, a cruelty, when you get down to it—for three years?… Among other things, they were afraid of him. They had watched Lyndon Johnson when he was majority leader running Washington. They had seen his incredible energy, his incredible drive. One night, John Kennedy, when he was still in the Senate, was leaving. He’s been working until midnight or 1:00 a.m. He’s walking out, and there’s one light burning in the Capitol, and it’s in Lyndon Johnson’s office. He turns to his aide and says, “Nobody outworks Lyndon.” [The Kennedys] were afraid that if they let Lyndon Johnson off a very tight leash, he will start to build up his own power in Washington.
[The strained Lyndon Johnson/Robert Kennedy relationship] had an immense impact, although that’s going to play out in 1967 and ’68 largely over Vietnam and, in a way, over civil rights, too. But the seeds of it all, the absolute antagonism, is when Bobby Kennedy is attorney general and has the power in the administration. Johnson is the vice president, and Bobby Kennedy just humiliates him, time after time. Every time Johnson wanted to use a plane, he had to get written permission from the Pentagon. That was Robert Kennedy. Every time he wanted to give a speech, every word had to be cleared. And Bobby Kennedy does more.… There are scenes between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in my book that when you’re writing them, you can hardly believe you’re writing them. You keep looking down at your notes to see, are you exaggerating or not, because it seems you must be exaggerating.
Probably the hardest [part of the Johnson story] to write, the hardest to research, too, was Johnson’s vice presidency because it was so poignant during this period to see this powerful man humbled, humiliated, day after day, that it was actually painful for me to learn about it. Horace Busby once said he couldn’t go over to the White House on the rare occasions when Johnson was there and watch how the Kennedy lower-level people treated him because it was so horrible. Johnson’s a very complicated character. You felt that this is a terrible thing to happen to any human being, but to happen to Lyndon Johnson? Somebody said it was like a great bull put out to pasture late in life. He doesn’t know what to do. That’s what happened to Johnson.
[The Kennedys] made sure Lyndon Johnson didn’t even know about the Bay of Pigs [crisis in April 1961]. That whole weekend, Johnson is sent by Kennedy to introduce Konrad Adenauer, the German chancellor, around Texas. He has to introduce him to the legislature. He takes him to a country fair in Stonewall, Texas.… I’d have to say, probably, he never knew there was a planned invasion.
One thing after another that the Kennedy administration does, they don’t tell him about. When Kennedy introduces the Civil Rights Bill in 1963, for a while they won’t bring Johnson into the picture at all. Finally, aide Ted Sorensen is told to call Johnson and get his advice on the Civil Rights Bill. Johnson has to say to him, “I don’t know what’s in the bill. The only thing I know about it is what I read in the New York Times.” This is the greatest legislator, the greatest parliamentarian of America in the twentieth century.… This was a man who could get things through Congress that no one else could get through Congress, and they haven’t even consulted him on the bill or told him what’s in it.
The Cuban missile crisis [in October 1963] is a more involved story. But at the end of it, Ted Sorensen would tell me… they were really frightened, the Kennedys, of what might happen if there was a similar crisis and Lyndon Johnson was president. That’s how hawkish they felt that he acted.
The last half of my book is the assassination and what happens in the forty-seven days after that. I’m writing it, and I’m watching Lyndon Johnson take up the reins of power. It’s so dramatic to see what he does. I don’t regard this as just the biography of Lyndon Johnson; I want each [volume of the series] to examine a kind of political power in America. This is a kind of political power, seeing what a president can do in a time of great crisis,… what does he do to get legislation moving, to take command in Washington. That’s a way of examining power in a time of crisis.
[On November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was shot,] Robert Kennedy is sitting by the swimming pool at Hickory Hill, his Northern Virginia estate, and… he’s talking to Robert Morgenthau, the great district attorney of New York who later is United States attorney,… and suddenly they see a number of things happen simultaneously. They see a workman at Hickory Hill… suddenly stop. He’s holding a transistor radio to his ear, and he comes running down this long lawn toward the swimming pool where Kennedy and Morgenthau are sitting. Before the man with the radio arrives, the telephone rings and it’s [FBI director] J. Edgar Hoover to tell Robert Kennedy that his brother has been shot, perhaps fatally. Hoover didn’t like Robert Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy didn’t like him. Robert Kennedy was later to say that Hoover didn’t show any emotion at all. He just delivered the news. So, sitting on the other side of the pool, Morgenthau sees Robert Kennedy clap his hand to his face in shock and horror.
Lyndon Johnson calls Robert Kennedy from [Air Force One as they were bringing the slain president’s body back to Washington]… to ask him two things: Should I take the oath of office in Texas, or, wait until I get back to Washington to take it? But Johnson has not really asked; he knows he wants to take it in Texas. He wants Robert Kennedy to agree that that’s the best course. And, he wants the wording of the oath. Deputy Attorney General [Nicholas] Katzenbach said to me, “I was really appalled that he would call Robert Kennedy twenty-six minutes after he learns his brother is dead.” The man [Robert] hates is now his brother’s successor and is on the phone asking him for the formal details on how to take office.
The [next] forty-seven days, seven weeks, is a period unlike any other in Lyndon Johnson’s life. He has all these forces within him. Lying is a big part of his entire career up to here. But it’s like he rises to something else… because he knows he has to be a president. The country needs continuity. Their young president has just been struck down in an instant, and, although most of these conspiracy theories are disproved in a couple of days, that’s not the headlines. As Air Force One is flying back to Washington, here are the headlines: “Suspect Arrested”; “Suspect Charged”; “Suspect Visited Soviet Embassy in Mexico City”; “Suspect Has Ties to Anti-Castro Groups.” We had just come through, a year before, the Cuban missile crisis, a crisis of nuclear war. It would be very easy for the country to become worried. Let me strike that: the country was worried. There was a great anxiety in the country.
Johnson knows he has to step off that plane and be a president. And he is. He rises to it. And for the next seven weeks, he is the president. There are no rages. A big part of Lyndon Johnson’s life is not just his lying, but his raging, his bullying of subordinates. There’s none of that. Someone says it’s like an alarm clock had always told him to yell at somebody every twenty minutes, and for seven weeks, this alarm clock didn’t go off.
You had a Lyndon Johnson who before… the assassination was a certain type of man, bullying, ruthless, conniving. He has to rise above that to make the country know it has a president. He has to curb his temper. His secretary, Marie Fehmer,… gave me a brilliant insight when she said his very physical movements changed on the plane going back to Washington. She said he always shambled; suddenly he’s walking disciplined, like a president. And that doesn’t change; that’s the way he acts [going forward].
He has to be humble with the Kennedy people, to ask them to stay on—people he knows despise him. So, he humbles himself. He says, “I need you more than Jack Kennedy ever needed you.” He says to one of them, “Jack Kennedy understood things about history that I don’t. But you understand them. You have to stay with me. You have to help me.” So, he changes in that way. No more rages in that way. He walks with dignity.… He’s not going to be able to [maintain] that very long, as we’re going to see as soon as my next book opens. But as this book says, he had done it long enough.
[Johnson was willing to lie to the public, and he also threatened the media.] I don’t think we’ve known this about Johnson.… In December 1963, he’s been in office for a month, and he’s defeated Congress. He’s got Kennedy’s civil rights bill started through Congress. He’s got Kennedy’s tax cut bill, which was stalled, started.… He flies off to Texas for a two-week vacation, during which he starts to create the War on Poverty, a wonderful thing. But he also has a number of conversations about how he’s worried that the press is getting too close to the fact that he’s accumulated a fortune during his life.
One story involves a man, Jesse Kellam, who comes out to the Johnson ranch and says, “There’s a reporter, Margaret Mayer, from the Dallas Times-Herald who’s sent me this list of questions. What do I do about it?” Johnson telephones the managing editor of Mayer’s newspaper and says, “You don’t want to be investigating me because someone might investigate you.” I don’t know if he actually uses the words “tax returns,” but it’s pretty [clear what his meaning is].… The managing editor, named Albert Jackson, is heard on the phone, saying, “Don’t worry. We’ll stop her. We’ll stop Margaret Mayer. I’ll talk to her next week.” Johnson says something like, “Next week’s not good enough. It’s a Saturday. Call me back tomorrow morning.” Tomorrow morning, Jackson calls back and says, “She will be stopped.”… They made clear to her they didn’t want the story. They didn’t want her investigating it anymore.… Margaret Mayer covered Lyndon Johnson for years and years, and she knew she was stopped on this.
[Johnson’s finances were supposed to be in a blind trust, but] the people involved say it wasn’t very blind. There was a law firm called Morrison and Ferguson. Morrison was one of the trustees of the blind trust, and his partner, Thomas Ferguson, who was a judge in the Texas Hill Country, would tell me that it seemed almost every night Johnson was talking to Morrison and telling him what to do. There was a special telephone line in Morrison’s house. You just picked it up and got the White House; there was a special telephone line on the desk of someone named Earl Deeth, who was the general manager of KTBC [Johnson’s radio station] and several others. Life magazine had found out about this,… they had been investigating. They had started by investigating Bobby Baker and campaign contributions, but they soon found that it was leading to Lyndon Johnson. The very morning that Jack Kennedy is assassinated, at the same time that the motorcade is going through Dallas, there is a meeting in the offices of Life magazine to divide up the areas for a major series on what one of them calls Lyndon Johnson’s money, and they’re about to investigate. [Events, of course, forestalled this.]
The civil rights bill and the tax cut, to understand how Johnson got them moving again, it’s like a lesson in politics.… You want to see what he does in this time of crisis and what he does with these two bills, which are effectively stalled, how he almost immediately comes in and gets them moving, and you say, wow! If you’re interested in political power, Johnson has a gift, a legislative gift—it’s a gift beyond a gift, a talent beyond a talent—that is genius. To see Johnson, in an instant, grasp the situation and know what to do about it, it’s hard to figure out what he does, but when you figure it out, it’s thrilling.
This book ends with the State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. In this period of time, Johnson takes Kennedy’s programs, he gets them started, he makes the country have a feeling of continuity. But he does something more. He says to friends, “I’ve got to continue Kennedy’s programs, but if I want to run for re-election and I want to do what I want to do with the presidency, I have to make a program of my own.” And that Christmas, down at his ranch, he has his advisers create the War on Poverty. In the State of the Union address, he says, “Too many Americans live on the outskirts of hope,” and he lays out the basic outline of the Great Society and the War on Poverty.
You get really angry when you follow some of Johnson’s methods, some of the things that he did. In my first volume, when you learn about Lyndon Johnson in college, you say, this is really incredible, the things that he did to get campus power—stolen elections, blackmailing a woman student. You do get angry at him. It’s disgusting. Each one of my books is supposed to be an aspect of political power. So, my second book is about a stolen election. Stolen elections are part of American political life. When you see him stealing this election and you see the negative campaigning he uses, you get angry at him. My third volume is probably the angriest I ever got because there’s a section on Leland Olds, a liberal New Dealer, a member of the Federal Power Commission. Johnson becomes senator, and he’s been financed by the oil and natural gas people; his job is to destroy Leland Olds, and he destroys him. Anyone who watches Johnson through my writing… destroy this man’s reputation so that the rest of his life is just ruined, it’s horrible. And when Johnson comes over to Olds in an interval of the hearings which Johnson is chairing and destroying his reputation, and says, “You don’t take this personally, do you, Leland? It’s only politics,” you get very angry at him.
Power always reveals what you wanted to do all along. The cliché is Lord Acton’s statement, “All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I don’t think that that’s always true. I think what’s always true is that power reveals, because when you have enough power to do whatever you want to do, then people see what you wanted to do. This is particularly true in the case of Lyndon Johnson.