CHAPTER 25

BOBBY

IT IS INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT TO WORK WITH THISfellow Lyndon Johnson,” Orville Freeman recorded in his diary in a mid-1964 evaluation of the new president. “Actually, I guess he is doing a great job. He’s certainly enjoying every minute of it. But one never knows what to expect. There are about a half dozen people in the White House, any of them are apt to call at any time on any thing, and seldom does one know what the other is doing. [Johnson] lays out in all directions, you can’t be sure when he really means it. He is quite a kidder but with a bite, and of course, a complete ham, grandstander, political par excellent [sic]. He reminds one very much of Humphrey without Humphrey’s sensitivities really, but with all of Humphrey’s ego drive and demand to grab and hold the limelight … He sure loves being President … On the other hand, in all fairness, a real human side comes out.”¹After witnessing LBJ’s efforts to convince reporters that he was physically robust enough to be president by leading them on breakneck walks around the White House grounds, Freeman observed, “He is doing this kind of thing constantly. His whole life is involved in his job. His family, his recreation, his avocations—everything revolves around this and every person seems to be a target to be shot at, hit, and then consumed.”²

It seemed a foregone conclusion that LBJ would be a candidate for president in his own right in 1964 and that he would win. And yet, as LBJ’s friend Ed Weisl observed, “The real liberals never truly accepted Johnson. I don’t know why, because he was more liberal than the most liberal of them … It’s partly style, partly the fact that he’s from Texas … They would tell you. ‘He’s good and he’s wise and he’s effective, but well, he just isn’t our kind of a guy.’ ”³Commenting on the photo of LBJ in his 1964 campaign volume,My Hope for America , Murray Kempton wrote, “There is on this face both the effort to believe everything and the experience to believe nothing. It is a low face of high aspiration … Being the king’s face, it is innocent in a way in which General Eisenhower could not imagine being innocent; being also the minister’s face, it is devious to a degree that Everett Dirksen would find serpentine. Of course, it lies to itself, and that is proper. Hervey said to Walpole: ‘All princes must now and then be deceived by their ministers.’ ”⁴In short, in the view of most liberal intellectuals, LBJ was a man devoid of integrity. The hypersensitive Johnson sensed this disdain, of course, and it deeply embittered him. “What’s the difference between a cannibal and a liberal?” he would ask. “A cannibal doesn’t eat his friends.”⁵

Johnson knew that he could do the job, and he was determined to prove his critics absolutely wrong. When a story by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak appeared in theWashington Post just a month after the assassination to the effect that Bobby would be a much stronger candidate than LBJ, the president called David Lawrence, former governor of Pennsylvania and a Democratic power broker. “Now I think you ought to talk to [Chicago Mayor] Dick Daley [a rumored Bobby supporter] and talk to three or four of them, and you ought to tell Mr. Evans and the rest of them that, by God, we’re in better shape than we’ve ever been,” Johnson said. “The Jews have been for me before they were for anybody else. I’m the leader in the civil rights thing with all the Negroes, and every one of them has said so when they come out of here. Labor unions were throwing their hats through the Cabinet Room the other day when I finished with them.”⁶At another level, Johnson feared that his critics were right, that he was not equipped by education or temperament to be president, that he would be unable to unite the country. These doubts stemmed from Johnson’s deepseated feelings of insecurity, his vulnerability to sharp mood shifts, worries about his health, but also from a mind that was closely attuned to the political realities of the day. He later recounted what went through his mind as he considered the future in early 1964:

I had decidedly mixed feelings about whether I wanted to seek a four-year term … in my own right … I knew enough, in those early months in the White House, that the Presidency of the U.S. was a prize with a heavy price. Scathing attacks had begun almost immediately, not only on me but on members of my family … There was, in addition the constant uncertainty whether my health would stand up through a full four-year term … I believed that the nation could successfully weather the ordeals it faced only if the people were united. I deeply feared that I would not be able to keep the country consolidated and bound together … And I did not believe, any more than I ever had, that the nation would unite indefinitely behind any Southerner … the metropolitan press of the Eastern seaboard would never permit it.⁷

Sometime after the New Year, Lyndon and Lady Bird sat down to list the pros and cons of running. She believed that if her husband did not offer himself for election to a full term, their remaining years would be a living hell. Enemies would speculate on unrevealed skeletons in the closet that had been responsible for driving Johnson out of a race that he surely could have won. Friends and supporters and the rank and file of the Democratic party would be embittered if the ticket lost in November, forever convinced that LBJ had let them down. True, he might live longer and could spend his remaining years at the ranch, but there would be the gnawing feeling that he could be doing better than whoever was sitting in the White House. “You may look around for a scapegoat,” she said. “I do not want to be it. You may drink too much for lack of a higher calling.” If he ran, she observed, he would probably win. There would be unfair criticism, personal attacks, some bad decisions, disappointment at the inadequacies of self and others, and perhaps an early death. But it would be worth it. “My conclusion,” she said: “Stay in. If you win, let’s do the best we can for 3 years and 3 or 4 months—and then the Lord letting us live that long, announce in Feb. or Mar. 1968 that you are not a candidate for reelection.”⁸

Even more than Lady Bird’s support, Johnson’s hatred of Bobby Kennedy pushed him to run. Indeed, Pierre Salinger later opined that the only reason a reluctant LBJ had decided to throw his hat in the ring in 1964 was to keep Bobby out of the White House.¹⁰And so Lyndon decided to run, and having done so, he would devote every spare moment to the campaign, lashing his subordinates and supporters to redouble their efforts even when it was clear that he was going to win in a landslide, and stage-managing the 1964 Democratic Convention down to the last detail. Yet, he regularly considered dropping out. Ambition was a constant with Lyndon Johnson, but so was ambivalence.

 

LBJCONSULTED with a wide variety of people concerning strategy—Rowe, Clifford, Fortas, Russell, Robert Anderson (Eisenhower’s secretary of the treasury and a fellow Texan), Larry O’Brien, and many others—but his principal adviser was Horace Busby. The message that Busby continually conveyed during the spring and summer of 1964 was that the Democratic party wasnot the majority party in the United States (notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary) and that Johnson could lose the election. Busby claimed that Democrats were laboring under assumptions that were patently and dangerously false: that beginning in 1932, the political tide had set against the Republican party and was continuing to run against it; that the Democratic party was the majority party in 1964, not only in congressional and local politics but at the presidential level as well; that aside from its traditional base in the South, the Democratic party was the party with the broader national appeal; that the Republican incumbency during the 1950s was an aberration attributable to Eisenhower’s war hero appeal; that the Kennedy-Johnson victory was a party victory that validated the previous assumptions. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Only when FDR ran for the presidency did the Democrats command a majority of voters, some 55 percent during his four elections. No Democrat since Roosevelt, including Harry Truman, had come close. The average for the four Democratic electoral victories in the twentieth century other than FDR’s—Wilson in 1912 and 1916, Truman in 1948, and Kennedy in 1960—had been 46.6 percent.

Busby argued that polls taken in 1964 showing the party to be, by overwhelming margins, the majority party at the statehouse and courthouse levels did not translate to the national level. The cumulative plurality for the GOP in the four postwar presidential elections stood at 13,934,000 votes. If the South was removed from those totals, the figure rose to 15,725,750. The Democratic victory in 1960 was “the first victory in which the construction of the ticket and the positive electoral vote contribution of both Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates was responsible for the outcome, narrow though it was. A large number of voters were attracted to the ticket for reasons of religion, region, and factors other than loyalty to the Democratic party.”⁹

Johnson’s other advisers were similarly cautious. More and more, they worried, the Democratic party was coming to be seen as defender of the status quo, protector of those blocs and interests that composed the New Deal coalition. The one exception was in the area of civil rights, and that, as Henry Wilson, an aide to Larry O’Brien, observed, was an extremely dangerous exception. That issue alone, in the wake ofBrown , Birmingham, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, could cost the Democrats the presidency in 1964. “When race prejudice gets going,” he warned, “organized labor can move right out from under its leadership en masse.”¹⁰The Republicans, especially the Goldwater wing of the party, were posing as reformers. What they proposed to reform was bloated government that, acting in the name of special interests such as big labor, minorities, and the welfare community, was taxing the average American into penury and trampling on his and her liberties.¹¹

Finally, Busby was blunt in assessing LBJ’s liabilities as a campaigner: he was perceived as a mere tactician rather than a person of vision; he was given to exaggeration and excessive enthusiasm; everything seemed of pressing, immediate urgency, implying that Johnson had no sense of judgment or proportion; he was prone to sloganeering and building straw men to knock down; he pandered to the press; and he was vulgar.¹²This pessimism fed Johnson’s insecurity but also served to motivate him. What Busby failed to stress—perhaps intentionally, to avoid complacency—was the fact that sympathy for the assassinated JFK washed over Johnson, and made it seem like an insult to the late president to reject his successor.

Philosophically, LBJ could not abandon the notion that the federal government was an instrument to be wielded for the good of the people. White House support for the poverty bill and the civil rights measure, as well as the Great Society speech delivered at the University of Michigan, had underlined the president’s commitment to the notion of positive government action to end discrimination, guarantee equal opportunity, regulate the marketplace, and aid the disadvantaged. These goals would be obtained without revolution; indeed, they were an alternative to revolution. Eric Goldman urged LBJ to point out that positive action by the federal government actually enhanced individualism in America rather than detracted from it. The effect of antitrust legislation, worker safety laws, hours and wages legislation, a commitment to civil rights by the federal government, financial and occupational aid to the disadvantaged “has actually been to create much more opportunity for the American to be a genuine individual, with much more chance to express his individual self in both the practical and non-practical sense of living,” he wrote LBJ.¹³Tactically, of course, Johnson had to reach out to traditional Republicans and whittle away at the GOP base. Given the likely defection of the South, such an effort was crucial. In an economic climate of a growing GNP, increasing wages and prices, and ever rising family incomes, Johnson could practice the “politics of productivity.” “Until recently it had been assumed there was only so much pie,” Walter Lippmann observed, and the social question was how to divide it. But in the current generation, a revolutionary idea had taken hold: you could make the pie bigger with fiscal policies, “and then a whole society, not just a part of it will grow richer.”¹⁴Finally, LBJ should continue to pose as the “cando” statesman, a prudent man of vision who could tease progressive legislation from the bureaucratic and political morass in Washington.¹⁵

April brought the perfect opportunity for LBJ to showcase his talents as political mediator and highlight the virtues of the corporate state. For five years the nation had been confronted with the possibility of a nationwide railway strike. By the spring of 1964, negotiations had completely stalemated, and the railroad brotherhoods made plans to walk out. Shortly before they announced their intentions, unknown agents dynamited a section of track, blowing up a locomotive and derailing twenty-seven cars.¹⁶Knowing that a prolonged work stoppage would threaten the health of the economy, Johnson summoned negotiators from both sides to the White House in a last-ditch effort to stop the walkout. Aware that the public had JFK’s success in settling the 1962 steel strike on its mind and fearful of the political consequences for his prestige and the prestige of his office if he intervened and failed, LBJ was at his most intense. What Johnson wanted was for both sides to agree to give him time to work out a settlement before they inflicted a strike on the nation. He subsequently described the negotiations to his journalist friend from Texas, Marshall McNeil:

I told them that this country couldn’t stand this … It meant that everything we’ve done all year since I came in November would fall back. And that I wanted them to give me twenty days to see what I could do about it and for them to go off … and come back and tell me. They came back. And the carriers said, “We accept your proposal.” The labor people said, “We do not accept your proposal … We’ve been at this four years and Presidents have asked us to postpone time and time again … and we just lost our ass every time … ” I said … “I’m not going to take that kind of no. I’m supposed to be a great healer and a great pleader. You go in that President’s private office by yourselves. Talk it over and see if you want to tell the people of this country that you said no to their President when he hasn’t had a chance … ” Finally I went in there. I said … “There’s a poll over on my desk—Gallup, says 77 percent approval Johnson for President … Now look at that, fellows. You wouldn’t want me to say to the people of this country that you-all wouldn’t give me two weeks to try to do my duty” … So … they came back and the old boy said … “We’re going to go with you.”¹⁷

LBJ brought the Illinois Central president and the head of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers into the Fish Room, where he announced his achievement on national television. McNeil was impressed. “I thought you were just cuter than a pig on that television last night,” he told Johnson.¹⁸Eric Goldman, who was present throughout, remembered the call to patriotism. “I want all of you to recognize,” he remembered the president saying, “that we are in high focus throughout the world tonight. Please give me this opportunity to show that our system of free enterprise really works. As patriotic Americans, I tell you, you must delay.”¹⁹Roy Davidson, head of the International Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, later said, “What else do you do if the President looks you straight in the face and tells you that it is your duty as an American?”²⁰

During the next two weeks, Johnson oversaw negotiations in the Executive Office Building. Twice a day he would stick his head in, warning of the dire consequences of a strike and appealing to the participants’ patriotism. “Every night Lyndon and I talk about what’s happening to the railroad negotiators,” Lady Bird recorded in her diary, “and I know how much is hanging in the balance for him.”²¹In the end, management accepted most of the union’s demands in return for concessions from the government. LBJ promised to press Congress to grant the railroads greater leeway in setting rates, and he intervened with Attorney General Kennedy, asking that Justice stretch the letter of antitrust laws and approve rail mergers whenever possible.²²On April 22, over coffee, the two sides indicated to LBJ that they were ready to sign an agreement. Overjoyed, he swept up the four negotiators, stuffed them into the presidential limousine, and with police sirens screaming, drove directly to the local CBS affiliate, WTOP, where his friend, CBS president Frank Stanton, had arranged for a three-network broadcast. Jubilant, LBJ hailed the settlement as a triumph for American industrial democracy. The press reaction was more than LBJ’s campaign staff could have hoped for. “The President scored a great coup—a ‘miracle’ some called it—in helping to settle the five-year-old railroad dispute that had defied all previous efforts at solution,” declared aNew York Times editorial. James Reston lauded “the tireless negotiating skill” of the president as “one of the vital natural resources of this country.”²³

 

THE END OFAPRILsaw LBJ riding high in the polls. A political cartoon reflected the strength of the president’s position. It showed him seated at a card table with a deck before him and “tax cut” cards tucked in the brim of his Stetson, “R.R. Settlement” and “Boom Times” cards coming out of his sleeves, and “Common Touch” and “Poverty Fight” cards protruding from the cuffs of his pants. A smiling LBJ asked, “Now who’d like to play?”²⁴Johnson was the only presidential candidate in history, complained the chairman of the Republican National Committee, to have both poverty and prosperity going for him. There even seemed some hope of capturing the South. In January, no less a Dixiecrat than Strom Thurmond declared in Houston that LBJ had a much greater chance of carrying the South than JFK would have had.²⁵In July, southern moderates Luther Hodges, LeRoy Collins, and Buford Ellington embarked on a trip through the former Confederacy, meeting with every southern governor except Wallace of Alabama and Johnson of Mississippi to lobby for LBJ. You tell them “it’s a hell of a lot easier to sit beside a Negro in a restaurant than to fight beside him with a gun overseas,” LBJ instructed.²⁶

Outside the Deep South, the only possible chink in the president’s political armor was his home state of Texas, thanks to the continuing bitter feud between conservative and liberal Democrats and the love-hate relationship between Lyndon Johnson and John Connally. During the early months of 1964, it appeared unlikely that Connally would even support Johnson for president, much less nominate him. Johnson had called his protégé while he was still in the hospital recovering from Oswald’s gunshot wounds. “I just wanted to tell you I loved you,” LBJ said. “I didn’t have a thing in the world—was just thinking about you, and I wanted to be damn sure you were doing all right.” Connally thanked him, told him he was doing a whale of a job, but suggested, “For God’s sake, meet with the businessmen. You been getting a little too much emphasis on meeting with the civil rights boys every day, and labor.”²⁷In the Texas senatorial primary, Johnson refused to support Connally protégé Joe Kilgore over Ralph Yarborough. The governor’s hatred of Texas’s second most successful liberal continued unabated.²⁸

In February, during a presidential trip to Texas for the funeral of KTBC manager Jesse Kellam’s wife, Johnson and Connally openly feuded. The governor turned down an invitation to the ranch, telling the president that he and Nellie were building a new ranch house at Floresville and he had “to pick out marble and brick and tile, fabrics, fixtures, and every other damn thing.”²⁹ “I can be just as cold and hard as he is,” LBJ subsequently remarked to Jack Valenti, “and let’s just see who survives.”³⁰To make matters worse, liberal Democrat Don Yarborough, who had lost in the primary to Connally by only twenty-five thousand votes in 1962, announced that he was once again going to challenge for the governorship. Connally may not have believed that LBJ had put Don Yarborough up to running, but he did believe that he could have stopped it. When mutual friend Lloyd Hand suggested that the president call Connally and try to work things out, LBJ exploded: “I talked more with that son-of-bitch than with any of the other Governors in the United States put together.”³¹

Connally, however, was unbeatable. He continued to be the darling of the Texas political establishment, and his November wounds had made him something of a folk hero. Liberals began to snicker about the “silver bullet” Oswald had offered up to Connally. “He ain’t never done nothing but get himself shot in Dallas,” Texas comptroller and liberal Bob Bullock quipped.³²When he beat Don Yarborough two to one in the Democratic primary, however, Connally began to mellow, and he and Johnson reconciled.

Indeed, it was Big John who put Johnson’s name up for nomination at the Atlantic City convention and subsequently acted as his emissary to the white power structure in the South. The Texas governor was the perfect intermediary. In 1963 Connally had come out publicly in opposition to the Kennedy administration’s civil rights bill. He had made a survey of the Lone Star State’s hotels, motels, swimming pools, and theaters, he said, and concluded that Texas was doing splendidly in the area of voluntary desegregation. At the same time, he refused to denounce integration per se, and at various southern governors’ conferences was careful to distance himself from the likes of George Wallace, Ross Barnett, and Orval Faubus.³³

As the nominating conventions approached and GOP aspirants fought it out in various state primaries, all the Republicans could do, it seemed, was keep the Bobby Baker scandal alive. Though the brouhaha was a tempest in a teapot, Johnson characteristically overreacted, and his paranoia and lack of candor created more problems for him than the charges themselves. It will be remembered that at the prodding of Republican Senator John Williams of Delaware, the Senate Rules Committee had opened hearings on the Baker case. Clearly, the secretary to the majority had been associating with underworld figures in his business dealings and was involved in a kickback scheme involving a vending company and a defense plant. But what was of particular interest to Williams and the GOP was the charge that Baker had compelled one Don Reynolds to buy several thousand dollars’ worth of advertising from KTBC and to give a high-priced Magnavox stereo set to the Johnsons in return for a $200,000 life insurance policy that LBJ had purchased following his heart attack.³⁴Johnson had gotten off on the wrong foot when he was vice president, when the scandal first broke, by telling reporters, “I hardly knew Bobby Baker!” George Reedy remembered being dumbfounded at the time: “My God! Bobby was one of his messiahs … He had just fantastic confidence in Bobby Baker,” and everyone knew it. Johnson’s claim, indeed, pointed to something of a character flaw. “You know, one of the things about Lyndon Johnson you always have to be careful of,” Reedy observed. “Whatever Johnson tells you at any given moment, he thinks is the truth. The first victim of the Johnson whopper is always Lyndon Baines Johnson. In his own mind I don’t think the man has ever told a whopper in his life.”³⁵The first week in February, acting on a tip from the White House, Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson wrote a column in theWashington Post charging that Reynolds had been dismissed from West Point and subsequently lied about it.³⁶The Baker scandal quickly died down.

One of the problems facing LBJ and his campaign strategists as spring gave way to summer was that they were not at all sure who the GOP nominee would be. Former vice president Richard Nixon had thrown his hat in the ring, as had Governors Scranton and Rockefeller. Henry Cabot Lodge had returned from Vietnam hoping to be embraced as a heroic proconsul. Of these, Rockefeller seemed the strongest. JFK had always believed that if the GOP had run Rockefeller instead of Nixon in 1960, it would have won. Bright, attractive, Rockefeller was possessor of one of the most famous names in American history. But in a scandal that seems absurdly mild by today’s standards, he had left his wife of thirty-one years to marry another woman who had also abandoned her marriage. Scranton of Pennsylvania was a feared contender among Democratic strategists. He was moderate, reasonable, intelligent, and seemingly trustworthy. He was also tough. “They say he’s a real character assassin,” LBJ observed, “but he does it in a Brooks Brothers style.” Finally, Scranton would be able to rely on the support of internationalist Republicans with their money and press connections.³⁷Fortunately for LBJ and the Democratic party, the Republicans were in no mood for moderation and reason in 1964. Contorted by internal bickering and frustrated by the Democratic resurgence of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the GOP abandoned the middle course it had been following since 1940.

 

THE DARLING OF THE NEW RIGHTwas Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona, the heir to a department store fortune and a reserve air force general who had first been elected to Congress in 1952. There seemed to be two Goldwaters, columnist Richard Rovere noted; one was the easygoing, affable southwesterner whom most senators knew personally. The other was the humorless, ideologically rigid author ofThe Conscience of a Conservative. That book, ghost-written by Goldwater’s handlers as a campaign tract, called for reduced government expenditures, elimination of government bureaucracies, an end to “forced” integration, reassertion of states’ rights, an end to farm subsidies and welfare payments, and additional curbs on labor unions. Above all, Goldwater called for “total victory” over communism both at home and abroad. Laissezfaire in domestic policy and aggressive in foreign, Goldwater, who had never authored a bill, declared, “My aim is not to pass laws but to repeal them.” On the other hand, containment was too defensive, “like a boxer who refuses to throw a punch.”³⁸

Early in the 1960s, conservative party operatives such as Peter O’Donnell of Texas, Clifton White of New York, and John Grenier of Alabama had set about capturing the party for Goldwater. They were the intellectual and political heirs of Robert Taft, convinced that the “metooism” of Thomas Dewey and the eastern, liberal wing of the party, which had controlled the presidential nominating process since the Roosevelt era, had bankrupted the GOP politically and failed to offer the voters a clear choice. As these true believers gained control of grass-roots organizations within the party and Goldwater assumed an ever-higher profile, the moderate wing of the party wallowed in disarray. Conservative activists held a rally at Madison Square Garden and thousands applauded as Brent Bozell, editor of theNational Review , called on the United States to tear down the Berlin Wall and immediately invade Cuba.

Meanwhile, the moderate candidates were battering each other. Rockefeller managed to eliminate Lodge in the Oregon presidential primary but then lost to Goldwater in the crucial California contest. At the Republican Convention in San Francisco, held during the second week in July, the delegates chose Gold-water and, as his running mate, William E. Miller, New York congressman, chairman of the GOP National Committee, and an accomplished political polemicist. It was a raucous affair. Goldwater’s supporters openly ridiculed Rockefeller and the moderate wing of the party. When the New Yorker derided the extremists and “kooks” he saw arrayed against him, the Goldwaterites jeered, rang cowbells, and blew horns to drown him out. One irate blonde in the galleries stood, shaking her fists, and screamed, “You’re a lousy lover! You’re a lousy lover!”³⁹

Goldwater’s nomination was stunning. Johnson and other observers believed it signaled the demise of the Republican party. The new right was “a pretty intense, fanatical group,” the president told newspaper publisher Houston Harte, “a bunch of screwballs … the Birch Societies … I think it [will] probably mean the death of the Republican party … He [Goldwater] wants to drop atomic bombs on everybody. I don’t believe the people will stand for that.”⁴⁰But the demise of the GOP did not necessarily translate into a victory for LBJ in November. The country seemed in a mood for extremism. An article in theNew York Times by James Reston warned that America better take the Republican candidate seriously. Orville Freeman observed in his diary that “Goldwater has capitalized on a general frustrated feeling of people in a complex society, that he has picked up the backlash on the racial question, that he is capitalizing on the general fear of bigness and anti—big government attitudes, that he is emphasizing the individual in his efforts to maintain his identity in an increasingly large and collectivized society both publicly and privately.”⁴¹

But Barry Goldwater was not the only figure in American politics in 1964 seeking to gnaw away the edges of the vital center. On May 19, George Corley Wallace won 43 percent of the vote in the Maryland Democratic primary against Senator Daniel Brewster, a standin for LBJ. In June 1963, the Alabama governor had become segregation’s newest hero by standing in the door of the University of Alabama admissions building in an attempt to bar the registration of two black students, James Hood and Vivian Malone. Though he was forced to stand down, Wallace used the incident to whip white voters into a fury and to become a factor in presidential politics. When, on August 28, Martin Luther King led the famous March on Washington, Wallace made a point of declaring to reporters that he had better things to do than “waste my time” watching a march led by “communists and sex perverts.”⁴²When he subsequently announced that he was going to be a candidate for president on the Democratic ticket, pundits scoffed; many thought that the Dixiecrat card had been played and discarded in 1948. Others were not so sure. “Wallaceism is bigger than Wallace,” King had warned CBS television reporter Dan Rather following the schoolhouse door incident.⁴³The Alabama governor, one of his contemporaries observed, was “emotional, energetic, singleminded, roughhewn, strong and appealing to the masses,” a kind of redneck Ivanhoe “astride a great white charger,” doing battle for the white people of Alabama and the South.⁴⁴

Millions of working-class whites, not just in the South, but in the North and Midwest, felt socially and economically threatened by the civil rights movement and sided with Wallace. In July, rioting erupted in Harlem after an off-duty police officer shot a black teenager. Amid arson, looting, and violent clashes between the police and black youths, one died and more than one hundred were injured.⁴⁵Reporting from his heavily Polish district in Illinois, Democratic Congressman Dan Rostenkowski told Jack Valenti that there was a definite white backlash among voters. A recent poll showed that 78 percent opposed the civil rights bill. Fear of job competition and declining real estate values had overridden the Catholic Church’s strong stand in behalf of the Second Reconstruction.⁴⁶Wallace subsequently dropped out of the race, but he had mobilized a potent constituency that would presumably switch their support to Goldwater. “It is time someone said to the President what apparently no one has yet said to him,” a White House staffer memoed Bill Moyers, “that he could lose this election and that he could lose it despite having lined up all the press and the television networks, all the top labor leaders, most of the top business leaders, all of the negro vote, and perhaps even Lodge and Rockefeller.” A Gold-water campaign based on “three potent commodities: Race prejudice … chauvinism … [and] simple answers to complicated questions” could produce an upset.⁴⁷

The president’s advisers need not have worried about their man. Johnson fought every campaign as if it were in doubt, as if every vote against him would be taken as a personal affront. He would leave no stone unturned in his search for support, no effort unexpended in campaigning. From his first run for Congress through the 1964 presidential campaign, he always ran scared. Even when the polls showed him far ahead and a sure winner, he worked tirelessly. Johnson coveted a landslide for his own personal gratification, but also as a mandate for the Great Society.

Johnson’s biggest decision during the campaign was selection of a running mate. Early in the spring of 1964, Schlesinger, O’Donnell, and their allies in the press started a Kennedy for vice president boom. It worked. National polls indicated that the people preferred Bobby to his nearest rival, Hubert Humphrey, by a four-to-one margin. Syndicated columnist Stewart Alsop observed that it would be virtually impossible for LBJ to reject the attorney general as his running mate. To do so would risk losing Catholics, blacks, and the labor vote in the large industrial states of the East and Midwest.⁴⁸

Three weeks after JFK’s death, Johnson had told Kenny O’Donnell, “I don’t want history to say I was elected to this office because I had Bobby on the ticket with me. But I’ll take him if I need him.” But he also said, “If I don’t need him, I’m not going to take him.”⁴⁹LBJ later recalled the situation in a conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Every day, as soon as I opened the papers or turned on the television, there was something about Bobby Kennedy; there was some person or group talking about what a great Vice President he’d make. Somehow it just didn’t seem fair. I’d given three years of loyal service to Jack Kennedy. During all that time I’d willingly stayed in the background; I knew that it was his Presidency, not mine. If I disagreed with him, I did it in private, not in public. And then Kennedy was killed and I became the custodian of his will. I became President. But none of this seemed to register with Bobby Kennedy, who acted like he was the custodian of the Kennedy dream, some kind of rightful heir to the throne. I’d waited for my turn. Bobby should’ve waited for his … I simply couldn’t let it happen. With Bobby on the ticket, I’d never know if I could be elected on my own.⁵⁰

But how to get Bobby out of the unofficial race for the vice presidency without appearing to be mean and vindictive? To soften the blow, LBJ paid court to other Kennedys. His solicitous calls to Jackie continued, as they did to Joe Sr., bedridden with a stroke. When Ted suffered a broken back in a plane crash, LBJ telephoned him at the hospital. “Well, you’re a great guy and you got lots of guts and stay in there and pitch and anything we can do, we’re ready,” Johnson told the youngest Kennedy, who would soon be campaigning for the Massachusetts Senate seat from the hospital. “And we’ll elect you by a bigger vote than you got before.”⁵¹May gave way to June and Bobby still refused to withdraw. Yet he told his friends that he was not sure he wanted the job. He had heard that LBJ had said that whoever became vice president, “I want his pecker … in my pocket.”⁵²And, of course, he hated Johnson. “He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.”⁵³In fact, Bobby wanted the second spot—and he wanted it desperately. “Well, he wants that job,” McGeorge Bundy told the president in late July, having just conferred with RFK. “I don’t think he finds fault with your right to have a view. I think he just plain wants it.”⁵⁴

On July 9, Johnson again met with Bobby in the Oval Office. This time, the conversation was dignified and to the point. LBJ told him that he had decided not to consider any sitting cabinet member for a running mate. Kennedy flushed slightly and then asked if he had settled on anyone. LBJ said no, but that he was faced with the same issues of geographic and philosophical balance that had confronted JFK in 1960. He told Bobby that he had a very bright future in the party and that he would do whatever he could to advance his career. He asked Bobby to stay on as attorney general. Not surprisingly, Kennedy refused and recommended Nick Katzenbach as his replacement. “He seemed to have expected what happened,” LBJ subsequently told Clark Clifford, “but cherished the kind of hope. He kind of swallowed deeply a time or two. He wasn’t combative in any way. I leaned over backwards not to be in the slightest arrogant.” As he was departing, Bobby looked up at LBJ, smiled, and said, “Well, you didn’t ask me. But I think I could have done a hell of a job for us.” LBJ responded, “Well, I think you will do a hell of a job for us … And for yourself too.”⁵⁵Leaving the White House, Bobby met with O’Donnell and O’Brien at Sans Souci for lunch. “He told me he wouldn’t take me under any circumstances and that’s it,” O’Donnell recalled his saying. “He [Bobby] was kind of laughing. He was mad but laughing.”⁵⁶

Obviously, Bobby felt humiliated, and it would have served Johnson well to have let the matter blow over as quickly as possible. But once again, he let stories in the media that he considered to have been planted by the Kennedys goad him into an error of judgment. Typical of the pieces was that by David Wise appearing in theNew York Herald Tribune. He described the decision to keep RFK off the ticket as a “swift and final dumping” that constituted a “bitter blow” and “brought an end to a gay and glittering era that became known as ‘The New Frontier.’ ”⁵⁷Infuriated, LBJ invited reporters from theWashington Post, New York Times , andNew York Herald Tribune for a four-hour lunch at the White House on July 31. He went into his meeting with RFK in great detail, exaggerating the attorney general’s discomfort and implying that he begged for the vice presidency. LBJ mimicked a high squeaky voice and a man gulping. Bobby’s Adam’s apple had bobbed up and down like a cork in the water, he chortled.⁵⁸Tipped off to the interview, an enraged RFK confronted the president and chastised him for breaching a confidence. When LBJ denied that he had met with the reporters, Bobby accused him of lying. He would check his calendar to see if he had made an error, Johnson replied. (Kennedy was convinced that Johnson had secretly taped their conversation. He had not.)⁵⁹The feud was on again, full force.

If not Kennedy, then who? The Johnsons returned to the ranch to celebrate July 4th. In her diary, Lady Bird recalled breakfast with John and Nellie Connally, the Frank Ikards, and the Homer Thornberrys. “We discussed the vice presidency. Two of us there were for [Senator Eugene] McCarthy—the Thornberrys. Six were for McNamara [John Connally, who had served for a time as JFK’s secretary of the navy, and Robert McNamara had become close friends].⁶⁰They pretty much all agreed that Humphrey would be their third choice, although they’ve not forgotten the South’s antipathy for him … No voice was raised for Shriver.”⁶¹Johnson had earlier considered McNamara and rejected the idea. “I believe that the liberals, and I believe that the Negroes, and I believe that the labor folks, and I believe that the bosses … would revolt if I tried to cram Bob down their throats,” he subsequently observed to McGeorge Bundy.⁶²He had also considered Shriver, perhaps, as some said, to bait the Kennedys. But the brother-in-law had no real constituency.

In January, Johnson had encouraged Humphrey by telling him that he “could take confidential soundings and scout for support for the vice presidency.”⁶³Despite the fact that his advisers warned him that LBJ would “cut his balls off ” if he took the job, Hubert Humphrey coveted the second spot.⁶⁴It was probably his last, best chance to be president, a heartbeat away from a man whose heart had come perilously close to never beating again in 1955. LBJ kept Humphrey’s appetite whetted. In the early spring, Jim Rowe, friend to both men, asked the ebullient Minnesotan to come to his house in fashionable Cleveland Park. There he told Humphrey that he was being considered seriously for the vice presidency. He then began to ask him personal questions: How much money do you owe and to whom do you owe it? Are there other women in your life? Above all, will you be loyal? Humphrey reassured Rowe on every count, but received no commitment in return.⁶⁵“Two weeks before the convention,” Eric Goldman recalled, “I watched him [Humphrey] eating lunch in the White House Mess. Despite his ebullience, his face was that of a man who was being drained. These days he was telling friends the sad little story of the girl whose hero was the handsome captain of the football team. He would keep phoning her—always to ask her opinion of some other girl and never for a date.”⁶⁶

Johnson wanted to keep the vice presidential issue open until the last possible moment, to focus press attention on him, the Democratic ticket, and the forthcoming convention at Atlantic City. He also took puerile satisfaction in torturing Humphrey. Moreover, though he genuinely liked Humphrey and knew that their political values were essentially the same, he also perceived that the Minnesotan was ambitious, had a strong ego, and would have difficulty standing in LBJ’s shadow for four years. And there was Hubert’s penchant for “bouncing verbosity,” as Orville Freeman termed it.⁶⁷Two days after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Humphrey had given a wide-ranging interview to reporters during which he speculated about the origins and ramifications of the encounter. In the process, he revealed much of the information that had been imparted at the legislative leadership meetings. Johnson was angry and discouraged. “Our friend Hubert is just destroying himself with his big mouth,” he told Jim Rowe. “He just has hydrophobia … and every responsible person … gets frightened when they see him … because he just blabbed everything that he had heard.”⁶⁸

On the second day of the convention, Rowe asked Humphrey to dinner and told him that he would be the nominee but that he could say not a word to anyone. The next day, Rowe phoned and told Humphrey that they would be taking a plane to Washington to meet with the president and that Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd would be joining them. “What? Is Tom Dodd being considered too?” Humphrey inquired. No, no, Rowe assured him. The president simply wanted to maintain the suspense for as long as possible and give Dodd a boost in his bid for reelection. When the three men landed at Washington National, Jack Valenti picked them up and drove them around the city aimlessly while Reedy assembled the White House press corps. In due time, the limousine carrying the three men pulled up outside the executive mansion. Dodd was ushered in first while the exhausted Humphrey napped in the backseat.⁶⁹“A knock on the car door awakened me,” Humphrey wrote in his memoirs, “and someone said, ‘Senator Humphrey, the President wants to see you.’ I was led to the Fish Room, outside the President’s office, and shortly Johnson himself appeared, saying, ‘Hubert, let’s go into the Cabinet Room.’ ” LBJ asked the Minnesotan if he wanted to be vice president, and Humphrey replied in the affirmative. Johnson warned him that the new relationship between the two men would probably ruin their friendship. “There is something about the jobs and the responsibilities that seem to get in the way of those friendships and understanding … You have to understand,” he said, “that this is like a marriage with no chance of divorce. I need complete and unswerving loyalty.”⁷⁰Again Humphrey assured him, and the deal was done. LBJ proposed that they call Muriel Humphrey and give her the news. “Muriel,” LBJ asked melodramatically, “how would you like to have your husband be the vice presidential nominee?” And then, “We’re going to nominate your boy.”⁷¹

 

THE APPROACHof the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City saw LBJ’s paranoia and obsessiveness in full bloom. He asked J. Edgar Hoover to dispatch a secret team of agents to the site under the direction of Deke DeLoach to gather intelligence on potentially disruptive elements, including political enemies. Fearing a stampede to draft Bobby for the vice presidency, Johnson was asking the FBI director to spy on his immediate superior, the attorney general of the United States.⁷²The director was happy to do so. Their rivalry dated back to the 1950s, when, as special counsel to the McClellan Committee, young Kennedy stole Hoover’s thunder as the nation’s top crusader against organized crime. At the 1960 Democratic Convention, Hoover had made no secret of his preference for LBJ as the nominee, and subsequently Jack had named Bobby attorney general, in no small part to keep a tight rein on Hoover. The Kennedys knew that the FBI had compiled a thick dossier on Jack’s sexual exploits. Any possibility of reconciliation went by the boards when Bobby let it be known that the administration would not lift a finger to exempt the director when he reached mandatory retirement age in January 1965.⁷³

No sooner had JFK’s body been interred than Hoover began reporting directly to LBJ, bypassing Bobby.⁷⁴The Hoover-Johnson relationship stretched back twenty years. The two men’s homes in Washington were both on 30th Street, directly across from each other. The Johnsons would occasionally ask Hoover over for a drink, and they encouraged Lucy and Lynda to call him “Uncle Edgar.” Privately, Johnson considered Hoover, who never married and lived alone in the same house with his deputy, Clyde Tolson, to be a hypocritical “queer.”⁷⁵But as Deke DeLoach recalled, the two men found each other useful. “President Johnson,” he said, “knew of Mr. Hoover’s image in the United States, particularly among the middle-of-the-road to conservative elements, and he knew it was vast. He knew of the potential strength of the FBI—insofar as being of assistance to the government and the White House is concerned.”⁷⁶ There was an irony, also. By having Hoover and the FBI head investigations of abuse of civil rights activists by white supremacists, by involving the Bureau as deeply as possible in the movement, the president could give it some cover from segregationist charges that it was communist-inspired and-dominated. To seal their alliance, Johnson assured Hoover that he would be able to stay on as director well beyond the mandatory federal retirement age.⁷⁷But, typically, LBJ never let the director forget who was boss. During one of their early conversations after Johnson had become president, he said, “Edgar, I can’t hear you well. What’s the matter, you got this phone tapped?” Hoover laughed nervously.⁷⁸

Johnson had a reason other than subverting a possible Kennedy coup for dispatching a team of FBI agents to Atlantic City. The all-white Mississippi delegation was being challenged for its spot on the floor by the mixed-race Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP). The looming conflict, if allowed to get out of hand, might very well split the Democratic party and lead to a Dixiecrat walkout or to the disaffection of the party’s increasingly important black constituency.

By the summer of 1964, Mississippi had once again become the principal battleground in the struggle over civil rights. The black population there was the most disfranchised in the nation. “Only 5 percent of black Mississippians [who made up 45 percent of the state’s population] were registered to vote, the lowest rate in the United States,” Juan Williams of theWashington Post reported. “With majorities in many counties, blacks might well have controlled local politics through the ballot box. But segregationists were not about to let blacks vote; many would sooner kill them.”⁷⁹In April delegates assembled in Jackson and voted to establish the MFDP.⁸⁰During the ensuing Freedom Summer of 1964, local activists joined with volunteers from CORE and SNCC to try to register the disenfranchised. Rebuffed at every turn, they announced a “freedom registration” campaign. On August 6, twenty-five hundred people jammed into the Masonic Temple for the MFDP State Convention. There they selected sixty-four blacks and four whites to be the MFDP delegation to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. The plan was to challenge the regular all-white Mississippi delegation on two grounds: that it had racially discriminated and that its members would refuse to sign a loyalty oath and thus might bolt the party for Barry Goldwater and the GOP.⁸¹

The revolt among Mississippi’s black voters frightened Johnson. As John Connally indelicately put it to LBJ, “If you seat those black jigaboos, the whole South will walk out.”⁸²Mississippi and Alabama were probably going to withdraw anyway if a loyalty oath was required, but this was not likely to precipitate a bolt by the entire South. “I think what they ought to do is to put Mississippi and Alabama near the nearest exit,” Johnson told Speaker McCormack, “so that if they want to walk out, let them walk out … but [do] not let us throw them out.”⁸³In a telephone conversation with Roy Wilkins on August 15, LBJ declared, “If I were the Negro … I’d just let Mississippi [the all-white delegation] sit up on the platform, if they wanted to, and I’d stand at attention and salute the son of a bitch. Then I’d nominate Johnson for president … and I’d go out and elect my Congressman … And the next four years, I’d see the promised land.”⁸⁴“If I know anything, I know this,” LBJ told Humphrey. “If we mess with the group of Negroes … who said we want you to recognize us and throw out the governor and the elected officials of the state … we will lose 15 states without campaigning … I don’t want to do anything in Mississippi to lose Oklahoma for me and I don’t want to do anything in Mississippi to lose Kentucky for me … and most of all I damn sure don’t want to lose Texas.”⁸⁵

But the principal civil rights organizations, CORE, SNCC, the SCLC, and even the NAACP, were mobilizing in behalf of the MFDP. On July 17, Bishop Stephen Gill Spottswood, chair of the NAACP Board of Directors, sent a telegram to LBJ demanding that he take over administration of the state of Mississippi under Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.⁸⁶On August 19, LBJ met with a delegation from the MFDP as well as CORE and SNCC. He pled with them to listen to reason. If the MFDP tried and failed, there were liable to be massive and probably violent demonstrations across the country. The ensuing white backlash could well undermine what he was trying to do in the area of civil rights. Law and order would be the bedrock of the fall campaign; it would be the base on which the administration would build its case in the South for obedience to the Civil Rights Act. His pleas fell on deaf ears.⁸⁷

The MFDP delegation arrived by bus in Atlantic City on August 21. The group included a handful of experienced local politicos, but most were farmers, sharecroppers, and domestic workers. After settling in the tiny, rundown Gem Hotel, they began fanning out to lobby members of the Credentials Committee. On the 22nd, David Lawrence gaveled that body to order, and spokespersons for the MFDP and the regular, all-white delegation proceeded to make their cases in front of a bank of television cameras. Heading the regular contingent was Governor Paul Johnson, who had once joked that NAACP stood for “niggers, alligators, apes, coons, and possums.”⁸⁸The regulars cited the long history of Mississippi as an integral part of the Democratic party and denied that blacks had been barred from voting in their state. Speaking for the MFDP was Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, a black sharecropper from Ruleville who had been driven off her farm, jailed, and finally beaten for trying to vote. Before the Credentials Committee and a rapt television audience, she described her travails, and asked, “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”⁸⁹Privately, Paul Johnson dismissed Hamer as “a bootlegger and a whore.”⁹⁰

To prevent a donnybrook on the floor of the convention, Lawrence appointed Minnesota Attorney General Walter Mondale as head of a subcommittee to investigate and recommend a solution to the Credentials Committee. Pressure for compromise was exerted by African American lieutenants of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and white heavyweights like Abe Fortas and Governor Pat Brown of California. On Tuesday, the White House proposed a solution. Two MFDP delegates, Aaron Henry and Ed King, would be seated as delegates-at-large; only those members of the regular Mississippi delegation who signed a loyalty oath would be seated; and the Democratic party would prohibit discrimination in the selection of delegates to all future conventions.⁹¹The Credentials Committee was deeply divided, but in the end announced at a televised press conference that it had voted to accept the two-seat compromise. Despite the pleadings of Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, and others, the MFDP would have none of it. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” Fannie Lou Hamer exclaimed.⁹²The all-white Mississippi delegation, most of whose members immediately departed Atlantic City, were just as disgruntled. On Tuesday evening, twenty-one MFDP delegates, furnished credentials by friendly delegates, pushed their way into the seats vacated by the regular delegation. After an unsuccessful effort to evict Hamer and her colleagues, the sergeant at arms and his men simply ignored them, and the convention proceeded with its business.⁹³

The MFDP brouhaha was a watershed in the history of the civil rights movement. It helped radicalize SNCC and CORE, and in the minds of some activists, it painted King, Whitney Young, Rustin, and Randolph as Uncle Toms. Civil rights activists in general became dubious about working within the Democratic party. For many people, observed SNCC’s Joyce Ladner, “Atlantic City was the end of innocence.”⁹⁴

The fight over the seating of the MFDP traumatized Johnson. At 7:50 on the morning of August 25, he called his Texas friend and business partner, A W. Moursund. He was profoundly discouraged and depressed. He informed Moursund that he was leaning toward announcing later in the day that he was withdrawing as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination and retiring to Texas.⁹⁵At eleven o’clock he broke the news to George Reedy by reading from a handwritten statement he had prepared: “On that fateful November day last year, I accepted the responsibility of the President, asking God’s guidance and the help of all of our people … Our country faces grave dangers. These dangers must be faced and met by a united people under a leader they do not doubt … The times require leadership about which there is no doubt and a voice that men of all parties and sections and color can follow. I’ve learned, after trying very hard, that I am not that voice or that leader … I am absolutely unavailable.”⁹⁶

Racial politics aside, Johnson had been hurt by recent columns and news articles concerning him, his candidacy, and his presidency. “I look at theHerald Tribune. There’s nothing but the things that we’ve done terrible,” he complained to Reedy. “I read theNew York Times. We had a ‘pallid platform.’ That was outrageous.” He complained about a Henry Brandon piece in thePhiladelphia Inquirer that described him as “a textbook caricature of a fast-dealing politician [who] has not aroused any excitement as a person or any emotion or enthusiasm as a human being.” The previous weekTime had run a long article on the Johnson family fortune, entitled “The Multimillionaire,” that included a graceless swipe at Lady Bird’s looks, clothes, manners, accent, and taste in music.⁹⁷He was worried about his health, and the grave responsibilities of the office. “I don’t want this power of the Bomb,” he exclaimed. “I just don’t want these decisions I’m being required to make. I don’t want the conniving that’s required. I don’t want the disloyalty that’s around. I don’t want the bungling and the inefficiencies of our people.”⁹⁸In a subsequent conversation, he told Walter Jenkins, “I don’t want to be in this place like Wilson” (who spent his last seventeen months in office incapacitated by a stroke).⁹⁹He was disgusted by the ongoing political infighting in Texas and was not sure that he would even be able to carry his home state. But in the end, it was the knockup over the MFDP that had been decisive.

“I am absolutely positive that I cannot lead the South and the North,” Johnson told Reedy. “And I don’t want to lead the nation without my own state and without my own section. I am very convinced that the Negroes will not listen to me. They’re not going to follow a white Southerner. And I think the stakes are too big to try to compromise.” At the same time, he told Jenkins, “I don’t feel good about throwing Alabama out and Mississippi and making them take an oath.” Both Reedy and Jenkins, who had dealt with the Johnson doubts before, tried to talk him out of withdrawing. “I think this just gives the country to Gold-water,” Reedy told his boss. “He’s just a child. And look at our side. We don’t have anybody. The only man around I’d trust to be President would be McNamara, and he wouldn’t stand a chance.” Johnson replied, “I don’t care … I’m not seeking happiness. I’m just seeking a little comfort once in a while.”¹⁰⁰To Jenkins later: “People I think have mistaken judgment. They think I want great power. And what I want is great solace—and a little love. That’s all I want.”¹⁰¹

His aides began discussing whether to announce the decision from the Oval Office or at the convention in Atlantic City. After lunch, Johnson spent several intense hours with Lady Bird. She helped him work on his abdication statement, while struggling desperately to buoy his spirits and confidence and to talk him into staying in. “I do not remember hours I ever found harder,” she later recalled in her diary. Following a long walk with Lynda around the South Grounds, Lady Bird wrote her husband, “Beloved, You are as brave a man as Harry Truman—or FDR—or Lincoln. You can go on to find some peace, some achievement amidst all the pain. You have been strong, determined, patient … I honor you for it. So does most of the Country. To step out now would be wrong for your country, and I can see nothing but a lonely wasteland for your future. Your friends would be frozen in embarrassed silence, and your enemies jeering.”¹⁰²At 2:30 Humphrey and Reuther phoned and informed LBJ of the two-delegate MFDP compromise. Neither Mississippi delegation was likely to be satisfied, but there would be no open floor fight, and if the southern delegations bolted, it would be over the loyalty oath and not race explicitly. Talk of withdrawal ended at once.¹⁰³

The rest of the proceedings at Atlantic City were anticlimactic. On the evening of Wednesday, August 26, Lyndon’s name was put in nomination by John Connally and California governor Pat Brown. He was quickly and unanimously elected. The candidate stood in the wings and listened to the cheering and demonstrations for what seemed to many to be an interminable period. Finally, with Carol Channing singing “Hello Lyndon” to the tune of “Hello Dolly,” her Broadway showstopper, the party’s standard-bearer made his way to the podium and took the gavel from Speaker McCormack. He announced that his choice for running mate was Hubert Humphrey.

The following evening, the last of the convention, Johnson’s and Humphrey’s acceptance speeches were sandwiched between gala celebrations of Lyndon’s fifth-sixth birthday. “The end of the Convention Hall is decked with five pictures,” Orville Freeman noted in his diary. “Three small pictures across the top—Roosevelt, Kennedy, Truman—and on the side enormous Johnson pictures dominate the hall. This has been a Johnson show beginning to end with the complete dominance of the man evident at every hand.”¹⁰⁴

As the final night’s proceedings unfolded, Bobby Kennedy waited patiently in a small room under the podium. When finally he was welcomed to the platform, the delegates went wild. For the next twenty-two minutes the assembled Democrats cheered, applauded, stomped, and whistled. Bobby then delivered a moving, graceful tribute to his brother, ending with a quote fromRomeo and Juliet that Jackie had given him:

When he shall die

Take him and cut him out in little stars

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night,

And pay no worship to the garish Sun.¹⁰⁵

Garish sun my ass, thought Lyndon, as five thousand wept and applauded. Johnson’s acceptance speech was tepid and uninspired, and paled in comparison with Humphrey’s litany: “Most Democrats and many Republicans in the United States Senate … are for the nuclear test ban treaty. But not Senator Goldwater. Most Democrats and most Republicans in the United States Senate voted for the $11.5 billion tax cut for the American people. But not Senator Goldwater.” As Humphrey continued, the delegates joined in each refrain, “But not Senator Goldwater.”¹⁰⁶The evening’s festivities concluded with a huge fireworks display that featured a red, white, and blue portrait of Lyndon spread across the New Jersey skies.¹⁰⁷