CHAPTER 17

1960

INOCTOBER1959, LBJHOSTED A VISIT BY MEXICANpresident Adolfo Lopez Mateos at the ranch. Here was an opportunity for the majority leader to showcase himself as a major figure on the international stage and the ranch as a symbol of the growing power of the West with LBJ as its spokesman. A Dallas newspaper called the gala put on by the Johnsons in Lopez Mateos’s honor “one of the most dramatic outdoor shows since they produced Aida with live elephants.”¹

Lyndon and Lady Bird, together with Governor and Mrs. Price Daniel, were on hand at Bergstrom Air Force Base to greet the Mexican president and his party. Six helicopters then ferried the entourage to the ranch. En route, LBJ was able to point with pride to the system of dams and lakes that made up the Lower Colorado River Authority. On landing, the party was met by several hundred guests that included Speaker Rayburn and former President Truman. While those in attendance feasted on barbeque and beer under tents erected in the pecan groves along the Pedernales, Rayburn and Truman discussed Lyndon’s presidential chances. Both had noted the numerous banners adorning the grounds that read “Lyndon Johnson Sera Presidente.” Truman told the speaker that although he was nominally committed to fellow Missourian Stuart Symington, his heart was with Johnson.²

Both Johnson and Lopez Mateos made speeches; the latter’s was pro forma, but LBJ proposed the creation of a new and better-funded Latin American development bank. The next day, Lopez Mateos and his party were helicoptered back to Bergstrom for the return flight to Mexico City.

In the weeks that followed, pictures of Johnson, the western statesman at home on his Ponderosa, were splashed across the front pages of the national press.³During September and October, LBJ made several trips to Texas in behalf of his phantom presidential campaign. At the Palomas Ranch at Falfurrias, he met with a group of deep pockets led by Herman Brown. “I’m thinking about running for president,” Johnson told the group, “and if I do, it’s going to cost all of you a lot of money. So, I want you to think about it.” He had one of the men present list all the states on a pad of paper and he then went down the list, putting each one in either the Johnson or Kennedy camp. He, of course, won.⁴

From Falfurrias LBJ proceeded to Galveston, where he addressed a “Gulf Coast Hamburger Party” hosted by the Democracy Club of Galveston County. “His effectiveness is recognized by his colleagues and indeed by the nation,” Walter G. Hall said in introducing him, “and it is the hope and prayer of many that the role he has played foretells greater things to come.”⁵Leaving the Lone Star State, Johnson made a quick speaking trip through Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Arizona, states where he believed he had natural appeal.

It seemed that not a campaign season passed for LBJ but the ghost of 1948 reared its head. As 1959 came to a close, George Parr was fighting a mail fraud conviction. Fearful that the Duke of Duvall would spread incriminating rumors about him if he did not help, Johnson arranged to have Abe Fortas and Paul Porter represent Parr in his appeal, which he subsequently won.⁶

In February 1960, Jack Kennedy formally announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president. He had already been running for over a year. “In the past forty months,” he told reporters at his coming out, “I have toured every state in the Union. Any Democratic aspirant should be willing to submit to the voters his views, record, and competence in a series of primary contests.” He already suspected that LBJ would not be willing to so expose himself. Kennedy later observed, “Johnson had to prove that a Southerner could win in the North, just as I had to prove a Catholic could win in heavily Protestant states.”⁷By the time of Kennedy’s announcement, his staff had built a central file of seventy thousand local Democratic leaders who were showered with autographed copies ofProfiles in Courage , Christmas cards, and surprise drop-in visits by the candidate. “Everywhere he goes he leaves behind an organization,” Sam Rayburn observed admiringly.⁸

By March, the usually sanguine George Reedy had become so alarmed that he was urging his boss to authorize a series of attacks on Joe Kennedy. “His [JFK’s] real Achilles heel is that the American people are not going to stand for a wealthy man buying the Presidency for his son.”⁹Before LBJ and his staff could react, Eleanor Roosevelt, an avid Stevenson backer, did their work for them. In a television interview, the former first lady lambasted the Kennedys for trying to spend their way into the White House. JFK asked for a retraction, but to no avail.¹⁰

As Stewart Alsop had predicted, Johnson anticipated using Hubert Humphrey as a stalking horse to stop the Kennedy juggernaut. If the Minnesotan could win some primaries and keep Jack Kennedy from accumulating a majority of delegates before the nominating convention opened in Los Angeles, LBJ would have a chance. “There were two Humphrey camps rolled into one,” Joe Rauh recalled. “One Humphrey camp was for Johnson and was ‘Stop Kennedy,’ and the other Humphrey camp was for Humphrey and against Johnson. The ADA people in the Humphrey camp … were all for Humphrey 100% … The others in there were really for Johnson with Humphrey taking the Vice Presidency or whatever crumbs he could get.”¹¹

In April, Kennedy beat Humphrey in the Wisconsin primary, but did so by a small margin and only after a great deal of effort. All eyes turned to the West Virginia contest, where the voters were 97 percent Protestant. Aside from the religion issue, there were other reasons for optimism. Robert C. Byrd, the state’s junior senator, was a Johnson supporter and promised to do all he could to help Humphrey. Humphrey announced that if he lost, he would withdraw from the race. But the combined efforts of LBJ and HHH were no match for the Kennedy money. In a state whose politics one journalist described as among the “most squalid, corrupt and despicable in the United States,” Kennedy’s people were able to outbid Humphrey’s lieutenants for the allegiance of local bosses. Humphrey recalled that one of his operatives visited a county judge with a $2,500 payment in hand. He was told “we were not even close.”¹²

Later, Judith Campbell, who at the time was the mistress simultaneously of Jack Kennedy and Mafia boss Sam Giancana, claimed to have carried messages and money between the two men regarding the buying of votes in West Virginia. Supposedly, Giancana dispatched Paul “Skinny” D’ Amato to the impoverished state with a “suitcase full of money” ($50,000).¹³

Humphrey lost. Even without the Mafia, the Kennedy people had sufficient resources to accomplish their goal. Their money probably had the greatest impact in buying television time for the glamorous JFK.

After their loss in West Virginia, HHH and his advisers huddled. Rowe and company wanted Humphrey to stay in until the convention, but Rauh and the ADAers urged their candidate to withdraw and hope for a vice presidential bid. Humphrey elected to withdraw, but those who anticipated a Kennedy-Humphrey ticket were deceiving themselves. Joe Rauh recalled the scene when Bobby Kennedy came down to offer condolences and congratulations on a good race: “He walked over to Hubert and Muriel and he leaned down and kissed Muriel on the cheek. I swear to God I thought she was going to hit him. Humphrey’s family and many of his supporters literally hated the Kennedys, and they urged Hubert not to run for Vice President with Jack Kennedy.”¹⁴

Shortly after Humphrey dropped out, LBJ called Jim Rowe. Were there any options left? Could a Kennedy bandwagon be stopped? Perhaps they could persuade Stevenson to declare, Rowe suggested. “If you two get together, you might stop him,” he said. “I don’t think you can, but nobody else can.”¹⁵LBJ met with Stevenson several times in the weeks that followed, but the most Adlai would agree to do was not commit to a Kennedy candidacy. “I think LBJ was using Governor Stevenson,” said Newton Minnow, a Stevenson adviser. “I think he was attempting to keep the situation fluid in the hope that he, LBJ, might get nominated … But Governor Stevenson and I had a specific argument about whether or not he was being used by Johnson, and he did not think so. He thought Johnson was playing it straight.”¹⁶Whatever the case, to the great irritation of Jack and Bobby, Stevenson continued to encourage his supporters to plan a draft at Los Angeles.

Following the West Virginia victory, the Kennedy machine viewed LBJ as the only real obstacle left in the way of nomination. Behind the scenes and in the press, the two men began to slug it out. Johnson got on the phone to Democratic leaders in the West and in farm states, arguing that Kennedy and they had nothing in common and that the American people would never elect a Catholic president. The Kennedys worked assiduously to portray LBJ as a stalking horse for Richard Russell and the Dixiecrats and insisted to labor leaders that as the ambassador to the United States from Brown and Root, LBJ had been and would continue to be antiunion.

 

BY THE END OFMAY,LBJ’s supporters were beside themselves at their man’s coyness, or indecisiveness, or naïveté, or whatever it was that they believed was holding him back. He seemed to alternate between desperately wanting the nomination and feverishly planning how to capture it, with resignation at the probability that he could not obtain it. A number of the western states held their primaries very late. Gerry Siegel urged Johnson to enter the Oregon contest. He was popular in the West and sure to make a good showing. “You can’t get out of that one,” he told LBJ. “Go out there and try to either win it or make a hell of a strong showing.” He just could not do it, Johnson told Siegel.¹⁷

But in late May, Johnson, appearing on a nationally televised political talk show, insisted that Kennedy’s primary victories represented only a small fraction of the electorate. In the weeks that followed, he continued to telephone local leaders trying to undermine Kennedy’s candidacy. Mr. Sam had hoped that Johnson would announce after he won the Democratic senatorial primary in Texas on May 7, but his protégé remained mum. Finally, the frustrated seventy-eight-year-old, who saw his dream of a Texan in the White House slipping away, took it upon himself to ask John Connally to open a Johnson for President campaign headquarters in Washington. “I thought that this had all been cleared with LBJ,” Leonard Marks, the Johnson family attorney, later said. “Well, he was just furious. He called John Connally and he called Walter Jenkins and he called everybody involved, and he said, ‘You get that sign down! I am not a candidate.’”¹⁸Then three days later, Connally received permission to open the headquarters.

By June, though Johnson had still not officially declared, his campaign began to look like it was in earnest. The Scripps-Howard newspaper chain announced its support. The Connally team divided the nation into six districts and began establishing contacts with state delegations. Eisenhower confided to Arthur Krock that “Lyndon Johnson … ; would be the best Democrat of them all as President from the viewpoint of responsible management of the national interest.” Kennedy was nothing more than an “inexperienced boy.”¹⁹

The last week in June, the majority leader persuaded Congress to recess rather than adjourn. The promise of a rump session following the conventions gave him added leverage, Johnson believed. Finally, on July 5, LBJ announced that he was a candidate for president of the United States. He predicted that he would win on the third ballot and told reporters that only his sense of duty as majority leader had kept him out of the campaign thus far: “But after July the bandwagons will be silent; the dark horses will be out to pasture; and we will stand face to face with whatever destiny this century holds for us.”²⁰

On June 11, the Johnson campaign had circulated a memo to reporters showing that LBJ would poll 526.5 ballots on the first vote at the convention. This was only 150 shy of the 761 needed to win. But Johnson’s support was soft. “The Arizona delegation, where we thought we had it sewed up,” recalled John Singleton, a campaign worker from Houston, “and at the last minute we learned that … one of the leaders … had a ten thousand dollar note at the bank that was suddenly paid. When it came down to the nut-cutting, Arizona voted for Kennedy.”²¹Bill Moyers, another campaign aide, felt that these last-minute defections—“The Kennedy people came in and took delegates away, western delegates, there in his own backyard”—were decisive. He remembered Johnson remarking, “There I was, looking for the burglar coming in the front door, and little did I know that the fox was coming through the fence in back. When I woke up, the chickens were gone.”²²

The majority leader and Mrs. Johnson arrived in Los Angeles on Friday, July 8. Jack Kennedy did not come in until Saturday. He had no doubt been distracted by his father, who, having promised to keep a low profile, stopped in Las Vegas and bet heavily on his son, not to make money but to ensure that the odds favored Jack and hopefully contributed to a bandwagon mentality at Los Angeles.²³The Johnsons occupied a suite on the seventh floor of the Biltmore. Kennedy and his entourage were two floors above, although he would take up residence at several different locations during the convention. Stuart Symington also stayed at the Biltmore, while Adlai Stevenson, in a fittingly symbolic move, booked rooms at the Beverly Hills, forty minutes away from the convention hall. Humphrey selected the Statler Hilton.

From the beginning, the convention was a melancholy affair for Lyndon and Lady Bird. “I was staying at a small hotel across from the Biltmore,” remembered John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who had signed on as a member of Kennedy’s brain trust, “and fairly early on in the convention I was coming out from a meeting in the Kennedy headquarters late one night and there was a big crowd assembled at each side of the sidewalk, watching the notables coming in and out, including Kennedy … And as I came out, Johnson was coming in, and he was bowing to the crowd, and nobody recognized him.” Jim Rowe recalled that he and Johnson had dinner together on opening night. As they watched Frank Church deliver the keynote address on television, Johnson said, “ ‘There’s no way we can stop this fellow, is there?’ Said it just as quietly as that. I don’t think he had any illusions at all.”²⁴

Johnson rather liked Jack Kennedy but, like Bill Fulbright, did not initially think there was much to him. He had referred to him as a “playboy” and a “lightweight” who was good-looking and intelligent but certainly lacking in the drive required to become and be president of the United States.²⁵He felt contempt for Bobby. When Jack had sent his brother and campaign manager to the LBJ Ranch in the spring to ask the majority leader directly what his intentions were, LBJ had a chance to play the alpha male. After telling Bobby that he was not a candidate but would not endorse Jack, Lyndon insisted on a deer hunt. Instead of arming the younger Kennedy with a deer rifle, the leader gave him a ten-gauge shotgun. When Bobby fired it, the recoil knocked him down, cutting his eye. Helping the thirty-four-year-old Bobby to his feet, LBJ remarked, “Son, you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.”²⁶

But, as would become increasingly apparent, there was a world of difference between Lyndon’s attitude toward JFK and his feelings about Bobby. He regarded the latter as incredibly arrogant—a sort of “liberal fascist,” he would later term him—but he found Jack unassuming and appealing.²⁷A mutual friend recalled a compelling scene from the 1956 presidential campaign: “Johnson and [John] Kennedy were at a motel on the edge of San Antonio. Kennedy was the main speaker at our rally there … ; I was in there talking to them, and the picture that stands out in my mind is John Kennedy sitting in a bathtub filled with hot water to ease the pain in his back, and LBJ sitting on the side of the tub pouring water on his back.”²⁸

Perhaps Johnson had no illusions about Kennedy being stopped, but his staff and supporters apparently had not gotten the word, and the days prior to the presidential balloting witnessed some nasty infighting. Two weeks before the convention opened, John Connally and his minions had decided to take off the gloves. In telephone calls, interviews with journalists, and press releases, they attacked the Kennedys for their intimacy with Joe McCarthy, Jack’s poor voting record in the Senate, and Joe’s fondness for fascism. They also hinted that the “boy” was hiding some grievous health defects. On the McCarthy issue, they received some much needed help from the Stevenson camp. Neither Senator Eugene McCarthy nor former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, two of Adlai’s biggest supporters, had much use for the Kennedy clan. McCarthy fancied himself Jack’s intellectual superior and believed that if there were to be a Catholic in the White House, it ought to be he. Eleanor’s husband had fired Joe Kennedy as ambassador to Great Britain. Referring to JFK’s Pulitzer Prize? winning book,Profiles in Courage , she remarked to reporters, “A man cannot be President who understands what courage is, and admires it but has not quite the independence to have it.”²⁹

On July 4, Connally and India Edwards, former head of the DNC’s Women’s Division, held a news conference in Los Angeles. She had irrefutable proof that John F. Kennedy had Addison’s disease, Edwards declared, a potentially fatal malady of the adrenal glands. Connally called for a full and frank evaluation of the Massachusetts senator’s physical fitness to be president. Edwards for one had anticipated a firestorm: “John, let me do it,” she had told Connally. “I have no career ahead of me, and you’re a young man. It will cause a terrible stink.”³⁰

She could not have been more prescient. “It was as though a bomb went off” in the Kennedy headquarters, Clark Clifford recalled. Jack’s aides quickly arranged for a manufactured medical report giving him a clean bill of health. Whatever “adrenal insufficiency” Senator Kennedy suffered from was a minor holdover from “wartime shock and continued malaria.”³¹Clifford also remembered that “Ambassador Kennedy, Senator Kennedy’s father, was outraged by the charge. The entire family—Senator Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, all the sisters and all the rest of them—was embittered as far as Senator Johnson was concerned. They felt it was grossly unfair.”³²Actually, according to Edwards, LBJ rebuked her for the Addison’s story and announced that health should not be a consideration in the race at all.

But, of course, the charges were entirely true. Not only did JFK have a chronically bad back, he had been suffering from Addison’s disease since 1950. The only thing that kept him alive was daily doses of cortisone, by mouth, by injection, and by pellets implanted in his thighs. Rumor had it that Kennedy senior had stashed supplies of the drug in safety deposit boxes all across the country. The Catholic Church had administered last rights to John F. Kennedy at least four times. But investigative reporting was still in its infancy in 1950, and the charges, unsubstantiated, ultimately generated sympathy for JFK rather than mistrust of him.³³

 

DETERMINED NOT TO BE BEATENby that “forty-two-year-old kid,” LBJ made a last-ditch effort to block Kennedy’s nomination. Making the rounds of state delegations he believed were still wavering, Johnson delivered another blow. “I wasn’t any Chamberlain-umbrella policy man,” he told the Washington state delegation. “I never thought Hitler was right.”³⁴The Kennedys cried dirty pool, but again, LBJ was but speaking the truth. As ambassador to Great Britain in the 1930s, Joseph Kennedy and his wife, Rose, had been close to Lady Astor and the Clivenden set, a high-society salon with reputed pro-Nazi sympathies. Ambassador Kennedy had lauded Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 deal with Adolf Hitler at Munich. Kennedy’s proposal to resettle the Jews of Germany as a solution to the dilemma posed inMein Kampf revealed strong anti-Semitic tendencies.³⁵Ironically, LBJ had been present in President Roosevelt’s office the day he fired Joe Kennedy as ambassador.

If the shooting humiliation at the ranch were not enough, the Edwards-Connally press release coupled with LBJ’s reference to Chamberlain converted Bobby Kennedy into an implacable foe of the Texan. Bobby Baker saw him at breakfast in the Biltmore on the morning of July 12. “Lyndon Johnson has compared my father to the Nazis and John Connally and India Edwards lied in saying my brother is dying of Addison’s disease,” he snarled to Baker. “You Johnson people are running a stinking damned campaign and you’re gonna get yours when the time comes!”³⁶

In a last-minute gambit, LBJ and his staff hit on the idea of having Johnson and Kennedy stage a televised debate before the combined Texas-Massachusetts delegations on Tuesday the twelfth. Phillip Graham, publisher of theWashington Post and by then one of LBJ’s staunchest supporters, recalled that Johnson was exhilarated by the notion of debating Kennedy but also dog-tired from the long congressional session and last-minute campaigning. Graham convinced him to nap and subsequently described the scene: “A Negro couple from the Ranch were in the room throughout our lunch, and the three of us converged upon him, disrobed him, pajamaed him and got him to bed.” He awakened after a thirty-minute nap completely refreshed.³⁷

The debate was scheduled to begin at three, but no one was certain that Kennedy would participate. He and Bobby arrived five minutes late. LBJ eschewed issues of health and patriotism and concentrated on his opponent’s terrible attendance record in the Senate. JFK disarmed him with humor. After telling the assemblage that there was little difference between his and Johnson’s views on the great issues of the day, he expressed admiration for the Texan’s attendance and voting record. He was the best majority leader the country had ever had and should continue in the position.³⁸

By this time, the pressure on Hubert Humphrey to jump on the Kennedy bandwagon had become intense, but still he resisted. Jim Rowe recalled that one of the times he and Johnson were closeted with Humphrey and his aides discussing strategies for blocking Kennedy, there was a loud knocking on the hotel suite door. It was Joe Rauh who continued to bang and yelled,“HUBERT! HUBERT, I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!” Finally an aide to Humphrey, Pat O’Connor, opened the door and punched Rauh. Daunted, the leader of the ADA departed, and the meeting continued.³⁹

On Tuesday the twelfth, the day before the presidential balloting, Bobby Kennedy rushed up to Humprey and, poking his finger in the older man’s chest, said, “Hubert, we want your announcement and the pledge of the Minnesota delegation today—or else!” According to Humphrey, he jabbed a finger back at Bobby’s chest and told him to “go to hell.”⁴⁰

 

IN THE LATE AFTERNOONof Wednesday, July 13, thousands of people began pouring into the Los Angeles Convention Center, including the 1,520 delegates who would select the Democratic party’s nominee for the presidency. With Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Lehman looking on from the VIP box, Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman nominated John F. Kennedy. Sam Rayburn did the honors for LBJ. The speaker was not in good health, but he was still capable of a vigorous speech. With a noticeable quaver in his voice, he declared, “I have been a member of the Congress of the United States for nearly half a century. I have worked beside more than three thousand members of Congress from every nook and cranny of America. Every giant of the past half century in this country I have known personally. I think I know a great leader when I see him … This is a man for all Americans.”⁴¹It was all for naught.

The quickness and decisiveness of the Kennedy victory stunned the Johnson camp. JFK won on the first ballot, polling 806 votes to Johnson’s 409. Texas’s favorite son had chosen not to attend, preferring to view the proceedings on television. “After Kennedy was nominated,” campaign manager Booth Mooney recalled, “Johnson snapped off the television and said, ‘Well, that’s that. Tomorrow we can do something we really want to do—go to Disneyland, maybe.’” For the next few hours he lounged in his pajamas, receiving close friends, apparently relaxed and free of regret.⁴²

 

JACKKENNEDYhad won the nomination, but he could not triumph in November without Lyndon Johnson on the ticket. He was Irish Catholic, recently liberal, the darling of organized labor and civil rights organizations—in short, a reincarnation of Al Smith. The South and Southwest would have to have some reason, a good reason, to go to the polls and vote Democratic. Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, might be a ruthless opportunist, but then again, Kennedy was a ruthless opportunist, and Nixon would be formidable. Jack Kennedy not Bobby or Joe or anyone else made the decision concerning his running mate. Lyndon Johnson, not Phil Graham, Jim Rowe, or anyone else, with the acquiescence of Sam Rayburn, made the choice to accept.⁴³

In the runup to the nomination, Bobby had repeatedly promised Walter Reuther, Joe Rauh, and Roy Wilkins that LBJ would not be the vice presidential nominee, but Jack knew that in the end they would rather have the presidency than their choice of the second person on a failed ticket. And, in fact, if he mistrusted and disliked Lyndon Johnson, it would be better to have him in the innocuous position of vice president than as majority leader. “The son of a bitch will do us a lot less harm as Vice President than he will as Majority Leader,” Kennedy said to Orville Freeman.⁴⁴

What touched off twelve hours of confusion and turmoil the night of July 13 and morning of the 14th was the determination by Kennedy that his offer be accepted, and the determination by Johnson and Rayburn that they appear to be dragooned into accepting and not perceived as supplicants. Perhaps most important, Jack and Bobby wanted to humiliate Lyndon, to make him feel their spurs.

For their part, Lyndon Johnson, George Reedy, Jim Rowe, and Sam Rayburn had viewed the Senate leadership as a nonoption for nearly two years. With the sweeping Democratic victories in the midterm election of 1958, the majority had become virtually ungovernable. “He knew that no matter what was going to happen at the convention,” Bill Moyers said, “the glory days of the majority leadership, in which he reveled, were over. That is, if a Democrat got the nomination and won the election, then that Democrat was going to be Mr. Democrat in the nation. Not Lyndon Johnson … Second, if Nixon got the nomination for the Republican party and was elected, Nixon was not going to be Eisenhower. Eisenhower was benevolent, passive, cooperative, collaborative, as much a Democrat as a Republican … On the other hand, if Nixon were president—partisan, narrow, an in-fighter, a vehement man, not given to collaboration, a loner, not trusting of the legislative process—Johnson knew that his relationship with the White House was over.”⁴⁵

If the vice presidency were offered, LBJ would have to take it. If he hoped ever to be president, he could not lay himself open to charges that he had opened the door to a Republican victory in 1960 by turning down the second spot on the ticket.⁴⁶For political and personal reasons, Sam Rayburn would never allow that to happen. “That man called me a traitor,” the speaker said of Nixon, “and I don’t want a man who calls me a traitor to be President of the United States.”⁴⁷

Moreover, there was the South to think about. No less a Kennedy loyalist than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recognized this as a prime motive. Johnson “had a deep sense of responsibility about the future of the South in the American political system,” Schlesinger later wrote. “If the Democratic party did not give a Southerner a place on the ticket in 1960, it would drive the South even further back on itself and into self-pity, bitterness and futility.”⁴⁸

In addition, George Reedy believed that the vice presidency would be of help in the never-ending struggle to portray Lyndon Johnson as a national rather than just a regional figure. “From your own standpoint,” he had advised the leader in June, “the Vice Presidency would give you an opportunity to grow in depth that you do not have as majority leader … The Majority Leadership is an action post which gives few people a real opportunity to find out about your philosophy and your convictions. The Vice Presidency is not an action post and strangely enough, this is somewhat of an advantage because it does give a man an opportunity to think and to express his thoughts without fear of destroying a legislative program.”⁴⁹

Finally, if India Edwards’s information concerning JFK’s Addison’s disease was correct, who knew what the future might hold? Clare Booth Luce, admittedly no friend of LBJ, rode on the bus to the inaugural ball with him after the election. She pressed him to tell her why, after a year and a half of denials, he had agreed to accept second place on the ticket. “And he leaned close and said,” Luce recalled, “ ‘Clare, I looked it up; one out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darling’, and this is the only chance I got.”⁵⁰

 

THE DRAMA THAT PLAYED OUTthe night of July 13 and the morning of July 14 was, in fact, a charade, but a most interesting one, and one that has become part of American political folklore. Johnson and Rayburn knew very well that Jack Kennedy would have to offer the vice presidency to the Texan.

On Monday, July 11, Phil Graham and Joe Alsop visited Kennedy and urged him to pick Johnson for second place on the ticket. “He immediately agreed,” Graham recalled, “so immediately as to leave me doubting the easy triumph and I therefore restated the matter, urging him not to count on Johnson’s turning it down but to offer the Vpship so persuasively as to win Johnson over.” The next morning thePost published a story reporting that “the word in Los Angeles is that Kennedy will offer the Vpship to Lyndon Johnson.”⁵¹

For his part, Kennedy was reasonably sure that LBJ would accept. On the evening of July 13, the day of the presidential balloting, Massachusetts congressman Tip O’Neill waited outside a restaurant for forty-five minutes to tell the nominee that he had talked with Sam Rayburn, and after initial reservations, had agreed that LBJ should be vice president. Jack said that that was what he wanted but reiterated his desire not to be turned down. O’Neill arranged for a clandestine meeting in the stairwell of the Biltmore between Kennedy and Rayburn, during which the speaker assured JFK that Johnson would not say no.⁵²

Johnson and Rayburn talked around midnight and then again at 2A.M. They reaffirmed their decision that LBJ ought to accept the vice presidential nomination if offered, but only if Jack Kennedy was unequivocal in offering it and promised to make the office more than just a figurehead. At eight o’clock on the morning of the 13th the phone rang in the Johnsons’ bedroom. Lady Bird answered. “Just a minute,” she said. She shook her husband awake. “Lyndon, it’s Senator Kennedy, and he wants to talk to you.” LBJ sat up in bed and took the phone. “Yes, yes, yes, yes sure,” he said, “come on down.” Lady Bird said, “I wonder what he wants.”⁵³

Russ Brown, LBJ’s old friend from law school, recounted what followed: “The next morning, Thursday, the LBJ group congregated in the Johnson suite … Sam Rayburn was there, Tommy Corcoran, [famed Washington hostess and Johnson friend] Perle Mesta, and ten or fifteen others … ; Al ittle after 9 o’clock Bob Kennedy came by and went out to the bedroom to have a private talk with LBJ. He stayed about ten minutes and we learned he had said John Kennedy wanted LBJ to be the candidate for vice-president.”⁵⁴

Johnson did not immediately accept but told Bobby and his brother that they should make sure of organized labor, the big city bosses, and blacks. Around ten, Jack Kennedy telephoned. Johnson took the call in his bedroom, sitting on one bed with Jim Rowe on the other. Kennedy read Johnson the press release he was preparing. LBJ asked, “Do you really want me?” When JFK said he did, the Texan accepted. “That was the end of that,” Rowe recalled.⁵⁵At 10:58 Jack Kennedy came down to confirm the deal in person.⁵⁶

According to Bobby Kennedy and Kenny O’Donnell, that was not the end of it. RFK later recounted to Arthur Schlesinger that his brother was in a panic following his conversation with LBJ. “You just won’t believe it. He wants it,” Jack told his brother. “Oh, my God!” Bobby declared. “Now what do we do?”⁵⁷

What followed was a tumultuous several hours in which many of Kennedy’s principal constituencies threatened to revolt. “I was vehemently against the Johnson selection,” O’Donnell later wrote, “because it represented precisely the kind of cynical, old-style politics we were trying to get away from. I also knew our liberal friends would be appalled by it.”⁵⁸

He was certainly correct about the liberals’ reaction. Labor leaders Walter Reuther, Arthur Goldberg, and Jack Conway of the UAW met with Jack and Bobby to protest the choice. Conway told Bobby, “If you do this, you’re going to fuck everything up.” “All hell broke loose!” Hubert Humphrey recalled. “They were just up in arms,” he said of the delegates who had voted for Kennedy after news of his choice reached the floor of the convention. Black leaders accused the Kennedys of selling them out.⁵⁹Joe Rauh and Governor G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams of Michigan declared that they could not vote for the ticket if Johnson was on it.⁶⁰Mayor Richard Daley told JFK that having Johnson on the ticket would make it harder to carry Illinois.⁶¹Leonard Woodcock of the UAW remembered running into Joe Rauh, “who had tears literally rolling down his cheeks.”⁶²

Many of LBJ’s supporters were just as vehemently against his accepting the second spot on the ticket as the liberals were. When Bob Kerr heard the news he went directly to the Johnson suite to try to talk his friend out of it. As a conservative oilman and an ardent Baptist, he was intensely anti-Kennedy. Price Daniel, who had spent the summer trying to convince Texans that Kennedy as president was an unthinkable idea, was opposed. So was Ed Weisl Jr., the wealthy New York Jew who had been a Preparedness Subcommittee staffer and was now a major Johnson supporter. “Joe Kennedy was a vitriolic anti-Semite,” Harry McPherson recalled, “and had been on the board of Paramount with Ed Weisl, Sr. At one point, in one crucial meeting involving the future of Paramount, I think, Ed Weisl took a position opposed to that of Joe Kennedy, Sr. and Kennedy said, ‘I don’t have to sit here and listen to some kike lawyer.’”⁶³

 

ON THE AFTERNOON OF THE13THBobby made several trips to the Johnson suite to see if LBJ would be satisfied with something less than the vice presidency. In his account, written after his brother was dead and the hated Lyndon was president, RFK recalled again that he and Jack had had no idea that LBJ would accept and that JFK was genuinely trying to get out of the commitment. That explanation is surely incorrect. Labor leader Albert Zack remembered that early in the morning of the 13th, Reuther, Goldberg, and Alex Rose, head of the hatters union and of the Liberal Party in New York, visited Kennedy. JFK pulled Goldberg into the bathroom and told him it was LBJ. Later, Bobby paid the labor leaders a visit at the Statler and overruled their objections. “There’s nothing more to talk about,” he said, “the candidate’s made up his mind.”⁶⁴

It may have been, as some have speculated, that Bobby and Jack were not communicating, but more likely Bobby’s visits were for the purpose of appeasing distraught liberals. The Kennedys could argue that they had never dreamed that the proud majority leader would “trade a vote for a gavel,” as LBJ once put it, referring to the vice president’s role as president pro tem of the Senate, but then had had no choice when the Texan refused to back out.

Around 1:30 Bobby called the Johnson suite to say he was coming down. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to see him,” LBJ said. Bobby arrived—“He had that hair hanging down in his face,” Rayburn remembered—and huddled with the speaker and John Connally. Things were in a terrible uproar, Bobby said. Labor and black leaders were threatening a revolt. Would LBJ accept the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee? “Aw, shit!” Rayburn exclaimed and walked out of the room.⁶⁵If Jack wanted Johnson to pull out, Jack was going to have to call personally and ask him to decline.

Bobby left but was back in ten minutes with the same story about impending revolt. In between RFK visits, Phil Graham had frantically called Jack Kennedy, asking him to do something. “Oh,” JFK told him, “that’s all right; Bobby’s been out of touch and doesn’t know what’s happening.” He then got Johnson on the phone and asked him to make a statement at once.⁶⁶The Democratic ticket for 1960 was going to be John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.⁶⁷

In fact, outside the Rauh-Reuther circle, the selection of Lyndon Johnson was a popular one with Democratic party leaders. Governors David Lawrence of Pennsylvania and Pat Brown of California had urged JFK to name the Texan. David Dubinsky, the influential head of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), was enthusiastic. Richard Daley quickly came around. Congressman Carmine deSapio of New York had told JFK that he would certainly lose without Johnson on the ticket, as had southern leaders like Buford Ellington and Luther Hodges, governors of Tennessee and North Carolina, respectively.⁶⁸

Lyndon’s name was placed before the convention on the evening of the 14th. With some difficulty, party leaders had managed to head off a floor revolt led by the Michigan delegation. Black delegates had been somewhat appeased when Johnson, at a meeting held at the Biltmore that afternoon, had assured them that he would support with enthusiasm the party’s civil rights plank, which was more advanced than either the 1952 or 1956 versions.⁶⁹

Phil Graham persuaded the irreconcilable Joe Rauh not to place Orville Freeman’s name in nomination. LBJ could hear the proceedings as he waited in the tunnel leading up to the platform. Fearful of counterdemonstrations, the Kennedy people had arranged for Congressman John McCormack of Massachusetts to call for a voice vote and convention chairman LeRoy Collins to suspend the rules so that such a vote could be taken. When Collins called the question, the shouted “ayes” and “nays” seemed about evenly divided, but the chair declared the motion carried and Lyndon Johnson was nominated by acclamation. LBJ was joined on the podium by Lady Bird and Lucy. Somehow Lynda had not gotten the word and, to her father’s intense displeasure, had gone off to Disneyland.⁷⁰

 

THE RACEfor the Republican nomination was a comparatively closed affair. The only serious rival to Vice President Richard M. Nixon was Nelson Rockefeller, who had defeated Averell Harriman for the governorship of New York in 1958. The GOP was still the minority party, and its leaders knew it. They had enjoyed control of the White House for the past eight years because of Dwight Eisenhower’s popularity and not because of any major organizational or ideological victories. Consequently, the president’s endorsement of the GOP nominee was crucial.

Ike did not like Richard Nixon, preferring the secretary of the treasury, John Anderson, a quiet Texan who had no chance at the nomination. The vice president seemed to Ike to be a tin man, incapable of conviction and even genuine feelings. Rockefeller was handsome and hard-driving, the epitome of an eastern, liberal Republican, but Eisenhower regarded him as a wealthy spendthrift who would permanently unbalance the budget. Reluctantly, the president endorsed the author of the “Checkers” speech.

Shortly after the Eisenhower announcement, Rockefeller withdrew from a race he had never really entered and focused his efforts instead on liberalizing the GOP platform for 1960. It just so happened that his campaign coincided with and complemented Nixon’s attempts to moderate his own image as a red-baiting, partisan political opportunist.

In an effort to unify the party and stake out a claim to America’s all-important political center, Nixon flew to New York for a secret meeting with Rockefeller. In the “Compact of Fifth Avenue,” Nixon agreed to support a platform that called for preservation of New Deal?Fair Deal reforms and an ongoing effort to secure equal rights for African Americans and other minorities. Although the old Taft wing of the party denounced the compact as a betrayal of the hallowed principles of Republicanism, Nixon was easily nominated on the first ballot. He subsequently named Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a prominent member of the eastern, liberal wing of the party, as his running mate.

 

THEKENNEDY’S MADE IT CLEARthat they expected LBJ to carry Texas and as much of the South as possible. The Lone Star State had gone Republican in every election since 1948, and the Democratic candidate had picked up only sixty electoral votes in the South in 1956 compared to Eisenhower’s sixty-seven.⁷¹In this scenario, LBJ would be a purely regional candidate whose mission it was to “solidify the party” in the South and West, areas where Kennedy’s Catholicism would hurt him most. In this way, Johnson could avoid speaking out on civil rights and remain firm on such issues as the oil depletion allowance. Jim Rowe, Booth Mooney, and George Reedy were adamantly opposed to such a role for their boss.

For a number of reasons, they insisted that LBJ run as a national candidate. He should campaign in the industrial Northeast and Midwest as well as the South and West. LBJ, they pointed out, was at last free to be himself. He could adopt reasonable, progressive positions on civil rights, labor issues, and matters of social security and justice. If he were to limit himself to the South and West and cater to Texas-style conservatism, Johnson would simply confirm the belief by his detractors that he was but a provincial phenomenon, placed on the ticket to appease Dixiecrats and Shivercrats. If LBJ accepted the role of regional candidate, he would be identifying himself with the old Democratic party, not the new.⁷²

In fact, at the outset of the campaign, both Johnson and Kennedy resisted the notion that they must present themselves to the entire nation, not just those areas in which they felt most comfortable. Kennedy initially argued that he should stick to the Northeast and Midwest, where blacks, union members, city bosses, and Catholics, offended by the religious bigotry that was sure to play a part in the campaign, would carry the day. Indeed, if he could just get the Catholics in the suburbs who had defected to the Republicans in 1952 and 1956, he could win. But Jim Rowe, whom the Kennedys pressed into service as scheduler for both the presidential and vice presidential efforts, challenged him. He must appear in the South and West to demonstrate to voters there that at least he “did not have horns.”⁷³

Rowe made the same plea to LBJ, but it was not an easy sell. “There are three places that I will not go,” LBJ told advance man James Blundell, “so don’t even schedule me … New York, Chicago, and California.” The three contained a huge number of electoral votes, Blundell pointed out. “Yes, but I’m not going in there and have those liberals beat my brains out and embarrass Kennedy and embarrass me.”⁷⁴But he did campaign in New York, Illinois, and California and did very well. Likewise, Kennedy ventured into Texas and delivered what some believed was the decisive speech of the election.

 

THE LAST WEEK INJULY,Lyndon, Lady Bird, and selected staff members, accompanied by a bevy of reporters, flew to Hyannis Port for a strategy meeting with the Kennedys. For two days LBJ and JFK ostentatiously conferred. All the while, Lady Bird and Jacqueline Kennedy warily circled each other. Following the convention in Los Angeles, Jack had phoned Lady Bird at the ranch and asked her to head up the women’s campaign. Jackie was pregnant and feared a miscarriage, he said. In truth, at Hyannis Port what struck Lady Bird most about the candidate’s wife was her vulnerability. “She had a doll-like expression on her face and she spoke in a soft, airy voice,” she recalled. While they toured the house, Jackie blurted out that she felt “so totally inadequate, so totally at a loss” to help with the campaign. To others in the Johnson entourage, Jackie seemed not helpless and vulnerable, but rude. “Jack Kennedy could not have been more gracious,” Betty Hickman, an aide to Lady Bird, recalled. “He came over three or four times. ‘Betty can I get you more coffee? What can I do?’ But Jacqueline didn’t even speak to Lady Bird. She hardly acknowledged that we were in the room.”⁷⁵

To reporters and fashion magazine editors, the two women seemed a study in contrasts. Jackie was the thirty-one-year-old debutante who had graduated from the Sorbonne, wore the latest designer fashions with style and grace, lived lavishly, and disdained the rough-and-tumble of everyday politics. Lady Bird was attractive but certainly not glamorous, the working politician’s wife who could press the flesh with the best of them. She dressed very conservatively, deferring to her husband’s preference for straight skirts and bright colors. And compared to LBJ, she was frugal. Lyndon, who had grown up in very modest means in the Hill Country, bought $200 suits six at a time, while Lady Bird, who grew up rich during the Depression, kept herself and the girls on a tight budget. The staff at Nieman-Marcus, where she shopped in Dallas, recalled that she would not go one cent over the amount she had allotted herself.⁷⁶

One of the things Lady Bird and Jackie had in common was unfaithful husbands. JFK’s staff lived in constant fear that his numerous affairs would become public knowledge. Jack’s affair with Marilyn Monroe had begun in 1959, and it was she rather than Jackie who accompanied JFK to the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Lyndon was in the midst of a long-running affair with Helen Gahagan Douglas, the movie star wife of actor Melvyn Douglas and one-time congresswoman from California. A tall, sophisticated, handsome brunette, Helen Douglas was in many ways comparable to Alice Glass. According to Horace Busby, the liaison began in LBJ’s office in 1944, when both were in Congress, and continued off and on for the next twenty years.

During the Hyannis Port visit, LBJ seemed to observers to be more hyperactive than usual. He seemed never to sit still, never to stop talking. He dominated the closing press conference. Jack Kennedy later expressed satisfaction at this because, he said, it demonstrated how completely reconciled LBJ was to being his running mate. Behind their backs, the Kennedy staff made fun of “Mr. and Mrs. Cornpone.”⁷⁷

In fact, many in the Kennedy entourage were convinced that LBJ was as much a burden as an asset to the ticket. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Harvard historian and ADA activist, reminded JFK how hard it had been to wean liberal intellectuals away from Adlai Stevenson. These were the “kinetic people” who had “traditionally provided the spark” in Democratic campaigns. “Putting Lyndon on the ticket … interrupted the emotional momentum of your drive,” he wrote Kennedy. “The kinetic people … are not at the moment committed heart and soul to the Kennedy-Johnson campaign.”⁷⁸

From Hyannis Port, LBJ flew to Nashville to confer with a group of southern governors and Democratic party leaders who had congregated at Buford Ellington’s mansion. The gathering ran the gamut from Luther Hodges and LeRoy Collins to Herman Talmadge. LBJ told the assemblage that he was a national candidate and, like JFK, committed to representing all the people, including blacks. But at the same time, he assured everyone that the new administration would be sensitive to the South’s need for gradual change with the least possible amount of turmoil. Later, when LBJ was campaigning in that same city, he spied some racist graffiti. “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he remarked to Bill Moyers. “If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”⁷⁹

At the gathering at the governor’s mansion, Lyndon asked Robert Troutman, the prominent Georgia Democrat who had helped arrange the conference, to persuade Richard Russell to support the ticket. Troutman and others tried, but the Wizard of Winder insisted on sitting out the election. “I have turned them down in my own state and in South Carolina,” he later told Walter Jenkins. “The Democratic ticket is going to win and I have bet $2,000 to that effect. I am not sure it will be a good thing for Lyndon if it does.”⁸⁰

 

THE PREVIOUSJUNE,LBJ had arranged for Congress to recess rather than adjourn. He believed that whoever the Democrats selected as their presidential and vice presidential candidates could use the session effectively in the campaign. If the Democratic majority was able to enact the progressive agenda LBJ had formulated at the beginning of the session, the ticket could claim credit. If conservatives in league with the Eisenhower White House managed to stymie such legislation, Democrats could, as Harry Truman had done in 1948, campaign against a “do-nothing” Republican party.

Jack Kennedy was still a senator, and he quickly embraced the strategy. He and Johnson pinned their hopes on four pieces of legislation: an increase in the minimum wage, Medicare for the aged, a housing bill, and a federal aid to education measure. Kennedy and Johnson’s Senate colleagues immediately noticed some tension between the two. LBJ was the majority leader, but Kennedy was leader of the party. Suddenly the master of the Senate had to make way for a junior colleague noted for his indifference to the workings of the upper house. “This fellow who had just been one of the senators hanging around,” as Kennedy aide Kenny O’Donnell put it, “was suddenly the boss calling the shots on what they do with the bills, and that irritated quite obviously.”⁸¹

Nothing came of the rump session. Liberal Republicans were not going to cross the aisle in an election year, and they joined with conservative Democrats and the administration to block the Kennedy-Johnson program.⁸²

 

NOCATHOLIChad ever been elected president of the United States, and there were large numbers of Protestants who were determined that one never would. Anti-Catholic sentiment was particularly strong in the South, including Texas. Even a person as liberal as Virginia Durr confessed that she opposed a Kennedy candidacy on religious grounds. On September 9, 150 Protestant clerics under the leadership of the Reverend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, an Eisenhower disciple, congregated in Washington and issued a press release stating that in their opinion a Catholic president would have to subsume his will to that of the pope. At the same time, LBJ’s contacts in Texas were telling him that the Democratic ticket was in deep trouble. “There are many responsible citizens,” state senator Charles Herring wrote Walter Jenkins, “who believe the party is dominated primarily by Eastern liberals who take from the industrious and frugal and the financially successful for the benefit of the lazy and ‘withouts.’” But above all there was the religious issue.⁸³LBJ and Jim Rowe convinced Kennedy that he would have to confront the matter of his faith, and what better place to challenge southern white Protestants than in Texas.

At Johnson’s urging, JFK accepted an invitation to speak before the Greater Houston Ministerial Alliance on September 12. LBJ and JFK rendezvoused that morning and proceeded to San Antonio for a noontime rally. When they arrived at the Alamo, the venue that had been selected, the two Democratic standard-bearers were greeted by protesters carrying signs reading “We don’t want the Kremlin or the Vatican” and “We Want the Bible and the Constitution.” Johnson immediately seized the podium. How dare anyone question the patriotism of Catholics or the religious beliefs of any American? At the Alamo 125 years earlier, “side by side with Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty, Bailey and Carey, but no one knows whether they were Catholics or not. For there was no religious test at the Alamo.”⁸⁴The crowd responded with a sustained ovation, and all but a few of the picketers put down their signs.

When the Kennedy-Johnson party arrived at the Houston Convention Center that evening, the tension was as thick and stifling as the humidity outside. One could feel all the old prejudices of 1928. Sam Rayburn had been totally opposed to Kennedy’s visit to Houston. “These are not ministers,” Mr. Sam told JFK. “These are politicians who are going around in robes and saying they’re ministers, but they’re nothing but politicians. They hate your guts and they’re going to tear you to pieces.”⁸⁵

Rayburn was wrong. In his speech before three hundred mostly Protestant clergymen, Kennedy shone. “I believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute,” he proclaimed, “where no Catholic prelate would tell the president, should he be a Catholic, how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote … I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish … for while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist.”⁸⁶Gradually the tension ebbed, and the gathering concluded with a round of polite applause.

 

LADYBIRD,together with Ethel and Eunice Kennedy, JFK’s sisters, was already in Houston campaigning. That afternoon, the trio had entertained some five thousand Texas women at a massive “tea party.” While Bird was briefing her husband on the day’s events, the telephone rang in their suite. It was her father’s doctor calling from Marshall. Her eighty-six-year-old father, T. J., had developed blood poisoning, and one leg would have to be amputated. “I watched her on the phone,” an aide remembered, “and saw her whole body flinch when she got the call.”⁸⁷

Lady Bird recognized that this was probably her father’s last illness and told her husband that she would have to leave the campaign for a few days. He nodded. Early the next morning, she and Liz Carpenter, the tough-talking Texas newspaperwoman Lady Bird had hired as her assistant, left for East Texas. When they arrived, they found not only Mr. Taylor in the hospital but also his third wife, Ruth, who was being treated for prescription drug dependency. Ruth and Lady Bird had never gotten along, and T. J. Taylor’s impending demise only made matters worse.

The patriarch of the Taylor clan died on October 22. LBJ helicoptered in for the service attended by several hundred people at the tiny Methodist church in Karnack. Taylor left the bulk of his estate, valued at more than $1 million, to Ruth. Included was the Brick House, from which Ruth subsequently barred Lady Bird until the former’s death. Her father was gone, but his place in Lady Bird’s life was more than taken by Lyndon. “I feel sure my ideas of what a man was were formed by my father,” she later observed. “I adored him.” She even admitted that she had married Lyndon in part because “subconsciously I suppose I was looking for my father.”⁸⁸“The key to understanding Lady Bird,” Horace Busby observed, “is to understand that in her mind her father was the role model for how all men are and should be. It explains why she put up with LBJ’s womanizing, and why she idealized him for being a public servant. She grew up with her father and assumed all men had a wife but also had girlfriends.”⁸⁹

 

ONOCTOBER5,LBJ, Lady Bird, and their daughters departed on a five-day train trip through the South. It was time to make good on the implicit deal to deliver Dixie for the Democratic ticket. Lindy Boggs, wife of the Louisiana congressman, remembered that the Johnson staff dispatched an all-woman advance team, dressed in blue blazers, white pleated skirts, and blouses. The plan was to use the South’s reputation for chivalry against its seething racial hatred. “What southern gentleman is not going to receive southern ladies when they are coming to his state and his city?” as Boggs put it.⁹⁰

The idea of a whistle-stop campaign, reminiscent of Harry Truman’s famous 1948 tour, appealed to LBJ. But it was a calculated gamble that could easily back-fire. Much of the white South was up in arms over the lunch counter sit-in demonstrations and over Martin Luther King’s campaign to end discrimination in the “cradle of the Confederacy,” Birmingham, Alabama. They were convinced that the new leadership in the Democratic party would make matters worse. Not only had the Kennedys pressed successfully for an advanced civil rights plank in the 1960 platform, they had named a group of strident liberals, including Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Philip Hart of Michigan, and Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, to their inner circle. “The only name missing is Thaddeus Stevens,” George Reedy reported to LBJ with disgust.⁹¹JFK had stated publicly that he was opposed to Rule 22 requiring a two-thirds vote of the Senate to close debate. Thus did Richard Russell decide to sit out the election and thus was LBJ left with little maneuvering room in dealing with the South.

The tour, which began in Virginia and wound up in New Orleans, took the vice presidential candidate’s party through the more conservative Piedmont. Bobby Baker, who helped organize the event, described the daily routine: “We had a fantastic speaker system set up on the train that as we would come into the station you could hear, ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas,’ and as we would leave you could hear it. It was about a forty-minute production per stop by the time you introduced the locals and had your picture made with Lady Bird, and Lucy and Lynda and Lyndon and the local politicians.” He and Kennedy would continue to support the South on its journey toward modernity and prosperity, Johnson told his audiences. In the twentieth century in America, religion should not, could not be an issue in politics. “He would always tell the story of Jack Kennedy’s brother, Joe Junior, going down in that airplane with a copilot from New Braunfels, Texas,” Jim Blundell recalled, “and he said, ‘I’m sure that they didn’t ask each other what church they went to. They both died for their country.’”⁹²

The LBJ Special never knew what kind of reception to expect. In one of the first stops, at Culpepper, Virginia, the crowd was thin and generally hostile. Irritated, LBJ yelled, “What has Nixon ever done for Culpepper, Virginia!” as the train pulled out of the station. At Clemson University in South Carolina, a stronghold of southern conservatism, the band began to play “Hold That Tiger” every time Johnson started to speak. By contrast, the reception in New Orleans was a thundering success. A crowd of two hundred thousand led by Senator Russell Long, Congressman Hale Boggs, and Mayor DeLesseps Morrison met the train and gave the Johnson party ovation after ovation.⁹³

 

IRONICALLY,given his reputation as a political wheeler-dealer committed to the notion that ends justified means, LBJ was obsessed with the ethics of campaign financing. A savings and loan executive had given LBJ $50,000 and then used the contribution as leverage to get a spot on the LBJ Special. When Lyndon heard about it, he had James Blundell physically eject the man from the train at Greenville, South Carolina, and return the donation.⁹⁴The “Irish Mafia,” the coterie of largely Irish staffers and family members close to JFK, had no such scruples; it would take money anywhere, anytime, and do whatever favors were called for in return. “Steve Smith, who was his treasurer in 1960, said that once a week he left his office, went out to Kennedy’s house, and went through every suit, just collecting money,” Jim Rowe recalled. “He collected cash, checks, etc., in all of Kennedy’s suits, all contributions, and took them back and used them.”⁹⁵“Johnson was petrified of campaign contributions,” Baker said.⁹⁶

 

AS THE CAMPAIGN WORE ON,the press, noting that Kennedy and Johnson had not made a joint appearance after Houston, began speculating that a rift had developed. LBJ himself wondered if the Kennedys were holding him at arm’s length. “Why don’t they ever ask me to appear with Jack?” he asked an aide. “Nixon has Lodge with him quite often, but the Democratic candidates haven’t appeared together.”⁹⁷Actually, both Kennedy’s and Johnson’s handlers had agreed early on that joint appearances were not a good idea. “The contrast between you and Kennedy, in my opinion, is always poor,” Jim Rowe had told LBJ in August. “When you are together, Kennedy looks like your son. The Kennedy people also feel very strongly about this. Confidentially, they think the contrast hurts Kennedy.”⁹⁸

But the press continued to gossip and LBJ to gripe, so Leonard Marks and Ted Sorenson, LBJ and JFK aides respectively, arranged for a joint appearance in New York on the Thursday evening before the election on the following Tuesday. Johnson flew in from Los Angeles especially for the occasion. The schedule called for the candidates to meet at the Biltmore in the late afternoon to strategize before going on television that night. LBJ and his entourage ensconced themselves in the Biltmore and waited. Finally, word came from the Kennedy camp, which had been campaigning in Harlem, that JFK would be staying in the family apartment in the Carlyle. Marks loaded LBJ and his staff into waiting cars and proceeded to that hotel in a driving rain. No sooner had they settled in than they learned that Kennedy had just checked into the Biltmore. Johnson finally rendezvoused with his running mate, but he felt humiliated. Despite the confusion, the joint appearance received nationwide coverage and was seen by both camps as a definite plus.⁹⁹

 

BY THE CLOSING DAYSof the campaign, LBJ and his staff had come to view Bobby Kennedy more as an enemy than a friend. In truth, JFK’s younger brother and campaign manager would never forgive Johnson for the humiliation at the ranch and the slurs against his family at the Los Angeles convention. Bobby was more like his father, Joe, who reveled in his younger son’s hardness. “You can trample all over him [Jack],” Joe told Tip O’Neill, “and the next day he’s there for you with loving arms. But Bobby’s my boy. When Bobby hates you, you stay hated.”¹⁰⁰

Prior to Jack’s trip to Texas in September, Bobby had come down to discuss arrangements with LBJ’s staff. Among other things, the Johnson advisers were concerned that Jack would say something inappropriate regarding the oil depletion allowance, still sacred to Texans. Campaign worker John Singleton met Bobby—“the most arrogant person I had ever met in my life”—at the airport. Singleton gave him a copy of a prepared, noncommittal statement about the depletion allowance. “He read it, tore it up and threw it on the ground and said, ‘We’re not going to say anything like that. We put that son of a bitch on the ticket to carry Texas, and if you can’t carry Texas, that’s y’all’s problem.’”¹⁰¹

LBJ was not a natural politician. He was frequently uncomfortable in crowds, and he tried too hard with people.¹⁰²Quite simply, he did not like to campaign. Insecure, compulsive, he quickly worked himself into a state of exhaustion and, usually, illness. Campaigning in 1960 was no exception. He blew up at his staff if his suits were not properly ironed, if his showers were not hot enough, if there was a glitch in the campaign schedule, which there inevitably was. He would rage particularly at Lady Bird, who stoically took it.¹⁰³“I was so exhausted after one week of scheduling Johnson that I quit,” Jim Rowe recalled. “‘Get somebody else. I’ve scheduled Adlai, Kefauver, and Kennedy, but all three of them gave me less trouble in the whole business than you’ve given me in one week,’ I said.”¹⁰⁴

Before he departed, Rowe wrote his fellow New Dealer a letter that would break their relationship until Johnson ascended to the presidency. “Somebody ought to tell you the truth occasionally—and there is no one around who does,” it began. “I would tell you to your face but I have learned I can’t get one word in edgewise with you … Don’t you ever pause for a moment and wonder why such old and devoted friends—at least a quarter of a century apiece—like John Connally and Jim Rowe find it impossible to work for you? … I have not seen you pay one compliment, thank one person, be the sweet and kind and attractive Lyndon I used to know in all the time I have traveled with you. I have seen you do nothing but yell at them, every single one of them … And most of the time, you, LBJ, are wrong and they are right … They bend their heads and wait for the blows to fall—like obdurate mules who know the blow is coming. It makes me so goddamn mad I’d like to sock you in the jaw!”¹⁰⁵

So frantic did LBJ become at one point during the campaign that Jack Kennedy told him, “I believe you’re cracking up.”¹⁰⁶Among other things, LBJ was sick with worry over the prospect of losing Texas. “I need you as I have never needed you before,” he cabled wealthy Fort Worth publisher Amon Carter.¹⁰⁷

In a last-minute effort to generate support, LBJ decided to travel into that heartland of radical conservatism, Dallas. Aides in Texas scheduled a luncheon address at the Adolphus Hotel on November 4. Lyndon and Lady Bird flew into Fort Worth that morning and were picked up by Carl Phinney, a retired military officer and Democratic activist. Approaching the outskirts of Dallas, the Johnson party was stopped by city police and told that there was a “disturbance” at the Baker Hotel, where Lyndon and Lady Bird were booked. The officer in charge insisted on taking the Johnsons in through the back entrance of the hotel. There was no avoiding the lobby, however, and what Lyndon and Lady Bird found there was a throng of well-heeled Republicans led by the reactionary congressman from Dallas, Bruce Alger, and Lyndon’s opponent in the Senate race, John Tower. The crowd, bearing banners reading “LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists” and “Beat Judas,” booed and hissed when they saw the vice presidential candidate. The party shouldered its way to the elevators.

While LBJ was dressing for his speech at the Adolphus, located just across Commerce Street from the Baker, his advance men urged him to allow them to take him and Lady Bird through the restaurant exit and then by auto to the back door of the Adolphus. LBJ flatly rejected the suggestion. “If the time has come when I can’t walk through the lobby of a hotel in Dallas with my lady without a police escort,” he said, “I want to know it.”¹⁰⁸

Commerce Street between the two hotels was a mob scene. In the forefront of the crowd were young, well-to-do Junior Leaguers Alger had whipped into a frenzy. “The Mink Coat Mob,” one newspaper dubbed them. As LBJ clutched Bird to him, the crowd closed, shouting “Traitor,” “Socialist,” “Judas,” and less polite epithets. A woman snatched Lady Bird’s white gloves from her and threw them into the gutter. “It came upon me as a tremendous surprise and sort of an assault on my spirit,” Lady Bird said, “because we had felt that we were working for them all these years.”¹⁰⁹Bird, her gorge rising, started to answer one young woman who was screaming at her, but Lyndon put his hand over her mouth. Suddenly, she noticed that her husband was moving very slowly, more slowly than he needed to. She also recalled that he had told Phinney and other staffers there to escort them to disappear. Finally, the vice presidential couple reached the friendly confines of the Adolphus, and Lyndon went on to speak. As he knew would be the case, the “Adolphus riot” received nationwide attention in both the print and broadcast media. A groundswell of sympathy for the Johnsons swept the Lone Star State. The next day in Houston, home to both conservative and liberal Johnson-haters, the couple was treated to a uniformly warm reception.¹¹⁰

 

IN AN EFFORTto cut into the Republican lead, the Kennedy camp challenged Nixon to a series of four debates. Only in this way, Democratic strategists believed, could their candidate answer the charges of inexperience and force Nixon into the position of defending a passive administration. The Republican candidate’s advisers warned him to refuse, but he was proud of his forensic skill and psychologically incapable of dodging a challenge. Both candidates understood that the impressions they made in their first confrontation would be hard to alter. Kennedy prepared like a skilled trial lawyer, mastering position papers until the points were second nature to him.

On September 26 the curtain rose on one of contemporary history’s most memorable dramas. Speaking first, Kennedy invoked the image of a revived, activist, successful America. He was handsome, suntanned, and well-groomed, radiating self-assurance and competence. Whether because of studio lighting or an inept makeup person, Nixon appeared unshaven and drawn. Worse, he perspired, causing his makeup to run.

A poll of radio listeners showed the debaters had tied. A postelection survey indicated, however, that of the 4 million Americans who indicated that they had been decisively influenced by the debate, 3 million had voted for Kennedy. Most rated the three remaining debates a draw, but the damage had been done.