Information about the book
I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American national election.
— Walt Whitman, "Democratic Vistas"
Because Vice Presidents traditionally counted for little after assuming office, presidential nominees thought almost exclusively about how their choice would affect the coming election. Indifference to qualifications had been so pronounced that in 1908, William Jennings Bryan had chosen an unknown wealthy eighty-four-year-old who would help finance his campaign. Woodrow Wilson had commented on the office, "In saying how little there is to be said about it, one has evidently said all there is to say." Despite seven presidential deaths elevating vice presidents, presidential candidates' thinking about possible successors remained largely the same. As recently as 1945, after making Truman his VP, Roosevelt had failed to inform him about the atomic bomb. The onset of the Cold War and Nixon's rise to political prominence, however, had made the vice presidency a more important office. And though Kennedy at age forty-three saw no reason to worry about dying, at least not since he had begun using replacement cortisone in 1947, he wanted someone who could help in a close election and have indisputable competence as a possible successor.
A rich field of candidates to choose from complicated Kennedy's decision. Humphrey, Johnson, and Symington were obvious frontrunners, because of their rival candidacies and their standing as experienced congressional leaders. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, an expert on defense issues, and even Stevenson were other possibilities.
Why and how Kennedy made his decision seems beyond precise recounting. We know that he had been thinking about the question for some time before the convention. On June 29, Sorensen had given him a list of twenty-one possibilities. According to Sorensen, Kennedy consulted other party leaders, who put Humphrey, Stevenson, Johnson, Symington, Minnesota liberal Orville Freeman, and Jackson at the top of their lists. Believing that it was an effective means to discourage bitter-end opposition from rivals for the presidency who were also interested in the second spot, Kennedy gave no clear indication of whom he would choose.
Liberal opposition to Kennedy before and during the convention reduced the likelihood that he would select someone from that camp. Stevenson's refusal to step aside and Humphrey's continuing resistance to Jack's nomination pushed them outside the circle. On July 14, the day after Jack's selection, when news commentator Edward Morgan privately asked him if he would give the vice presidency to Humphrey, Kennedy replied, "No, absolutely not. The credibility of that camp has been destroyed." As Stevenson, Humphrey, and Freeman urged party unity at the convention before Jack gave his acceptance speech, Joe, watching the proceedings at Time-Life publisher Henry Luce's house, made snide remarks about each of them. "There was no respect for any of these liberals," Luce said. "He just thought they were all fools on whom he had played this giant trick."
To be sure, in a race against Nixon, liberal support of the party's nominee was a given, but Kennedy's past problems with liberals and an aftermath of anger at him over Stevenson's defeat gave him reason to worry that some of them might stay away from the polls. He had tried to accommodate them by backing the strongest possible civil rights plank in the party's platform and telling Martin Luther King Jr. privately and the NAACP publicly that he wanted "no compromise of basic principles — no evasion of basic controversies — and no second-class citizenship for any American anywhere in this country." In his speech to the NAACP a few days before his nomination, he said it was not enough to fight segregation only in the South; he intended to combat "the more subtle but equally vicious forms of discrimination that are found in the clubs and churches and neighborhoods of the rest of the country." He also planned to use the "immense moral authority of the White House ... to offer leadership and inspiration. . . . And the immense legal authority of the White House" to protect voting rights, end school segregation, and assure equal opportunity in federally funded jobs and housing.
Kennedy himself, at the end of June and again at the convention, had told Clark Clifford that he favored Symington. Labor leaders were partial to him, and his candidacy might help in the Midwest, where Jack did not think he would do well. The journalist John Seigenthaler of the Nashville Tennessean cited Robert Kennedy as also saying that Symington was Kennedy's choice. But, in fact, Symington was no more than a stalking-horse. Truman's backing for Symington was more a minus than a plus: Richard Daley's assertion that Symington's appeal downstate could make the difference in Illinois and Sorensen's prediction that he could help with farmers were insufficient to counter his youth. He was "too much like JFK (We don't want the ticket referred to as 'the whiz kids')," Sorensen told Kennedy.
The logical choice seemed to be Lyndon Johnson. At a personal level, the Kennedys were not well-disposed toward him. He had said harsh things about Jack and Joe and antagonized Bobby by rejecting his father's suggestion of an LBJ-JFK ticket in 1956. In November 1959, when Jack had sent Bobby to see Johnson at his Texas ranch to ask if he was running, Johnson, in some peculiar test of manhood or as a way of one-upping the Kennedys, insisted that he and Bobby hunt deer. When Bobby was knocked to the ground and cut above the eye by the recoil of a shotgun Johnson had lent him, Johnson exclaimed, "Son, you've got to learn to handle a gun like a man." It was an indication of his low regard for the whole Kennedy clan.
But with so much at stake, Jack put aside personal feelings about Johnson. Annoyance at Johnson for his attacks on Joe and Jack did not diminish the belief that he was well qualified to be president, if it ever came to that. In 1958, Kennedy had told MIT economist Walt W Rostow that "the Democratic party owes Johnson the nomination. He's earned it. He wants the same things for the country that I do. But it's too close to Appomattox for Johnson to be nominated and elected. So, therefore, I feel free to run."
Politically, Johnson seemed the most likely of all to help win crucial states. The traditionally solid Democratic South promised to be a sharply contested battleground. An overtly liberal running mate wouldn't net any additional Kennedy votes in that region. In addition, reluctance among southern Protestants to vote for a Catholic worried Jack and encouraged him to seek an advantage in Texas and across the South by taking Johnson.
On Monday, July 11, when columnist Joe Alsop and Washington Post publisher Phil Graham urged Kennedy to pick Johnson, he "immediately agreed, so immediately as to leave me doubting the easy triumph," Graham recalled, "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. Kennedy was decisive in saying that was his intention, pointing out that Johnson would help the ticket not only in the South but in important segments of the Party all over the country." Johnson responded skeptically to the news, saying "he supposed the same message was going out to all the candidates."
Kennedy doubted that Johnson would accept an invitation to join the ticket. Johnson had declared, "I wouldn't want to trade a vote for a gavel, and I certainly wouldn't want to trade the active position of leadership of the greatest deliberative body in the world for the part-time job of presiding." On July 12, when Tommy Corcoran told Jack that asking Johnson was the best way to win in November and avoid a defeat that could discourage another Catholic from running "for generations," Kennedy had replied, "Stop kidding. Tommy, Johnson will turn me down." Kennedy found it difficult to imagine that as dominating a personality as LBJ would be willing to take a backseat to someone who had deprived him of the presidency, especially someone he viewed as less qualified and less deserving of the job.
In fact, Johnson wanted the vice presidency. By 1960, his control of the Senate as majority leader had begun to wane; the election of several liberals in 1958 had undercut his dominance. He also assumed that if Kennedy won the presidency without him, the White House would set the legislative agenda and he would be little more than the president's man in the Senate. Moreover, if Nixon became president, he would have to deal with a Republican chief who would be less accommodating than Eisenhower and less inclined to allow Johnson to exercise effective leadership. Running for vice president would not only free him from future problems as majority leader but also might give him significant benefits. If Kennedy lost, he would nevertheless have a claim on the Democratic nomination in 1964. And if Kennedy won, Johnson hoped to use his political talent, which had made him an exceptional majority leader, to expand the influence of the vice president's office as a prelude to running for president in 1968. The vice presidency is "my only chance ever to be President," Johnson told Clare Booth Luce, Henry Luce's wife and Eisenhower's ambassador to Italy. He also saw running with Kennedy as a way to elevate the role of his native region. As a congressman and a senator, he had devoted himself to bringing the South back into the mainstream of the country's economic and political life. An effective southern VP could influence policy making and open the way to the first southern president since the Civil War.
For all Jack's doubts about the majority leader's willingness to join him, Johnson had actually sent clear signals to Jack that he was interested in second place. Indeed, one month before the convention, in June, when Bobby Baker and Ted Sorensen had discussed the possibility. Baker had "cautioned" Sorensen "not to be so certain that his boss would reject a Kennedy-Johnson ticket." The day before Kennedy's nomination, Sam Rayburn told John McCormack and Tip O'Neill that "if Kennedy wants Johnson for Vice President. . . then he has nothing else he can do but to be on the ticket." Rayburn also said that if Jack called him with an offer for Johnson, he would insist that Johnson take it. When O'Neill gave Kennedy the message. Jack responded, "Of course I want Lyndon Johnson. . . . The only thing is, I would never want to offer it and have him turn me down; I would be terrifically embarrassed. He's the natural. If I can ever get him on the ticket, no way we can lose." Kennedy promised to call Rayburn that night. Immediately after Jack won the nomination, Johnson sent him a warm telegram of congratulations with the sentence, "LBJ now means Let's Back Jack."
The telegram solidified Kennedy's decision. At about 2 a.m. Powers called Johnson's hotel room so that Jack could speak with him. When an aide said that Johnson was asleep, Kennedy asked Evelyn Lincoln to arrange a meeting with Johnson at ten in the morning. At 8:00 a.m. Jack met privately with Bobby in his Biltmore suite. As they came out of the room where they had been talking. Powers heard Bobby say, "If you are sure it's what you want to do, go ahead and see him." Bobby returned to his room for a bath. When O'Donnell entered Bob's suite, Salinger greeted him with the news that Bobby had just asked him "to add up the electoral votes in the states we're sure of and to add Texas." O'Donnell, who, with Kennedy's approval, had promised labor leaders and civil rights groups that they would never take LBJ, was furious. In the bathroom of Jack's suite, the only place O'Donnell and Kennedy could find for a private discussion, O'Donnell told him, "This is the worst mistake you ever made." It meant going "against all the people who supported you." He warned that they would have to spend the campaign apologizing for having Johnson on the ticket and "trying to explain why he voted against everything you ever stood for."
Kennedy turned pale with anger. He was "so upset and hurt that it took him a while before he was able to collect himself." He explained that he was less concerned with southern votes than with getting Johnson out of the Senate, where he could play havoc with a Kennedy administration legislative agenda. With Johnson gone, "I'll have [Montana senator] Mike Mansfield as the leader ..." Kennedy said, "somebody I can trust and depend on." He urged O'Donnell to carry this message to labor leaders and liberals more generally, who were as exercised by the news as O'Donnell was.
But the liberals were not so easily appeased. When a labor group went to Kennedy's suite at eleven o'clock, Bobby "was very distressed, Ken O'Donnell looked like a ghost, and Jack Kennedy was very nervous." Jack justified his decision by saying that Johnson "would be so mean as Majority Leader — that it was much better having him as Vice President where you could control him." Kennedy also tried to leave the question open by saying that he could not "see any reason in the world why [Johnson] would want it." One of the labor leaders warned, "If you do this, you're going to fuck everything up." They threatened to block Johnson's nomination with a floor fight.
Jack and Bobby spent the afternoon trying to resolve the dilemma. Bobby went to see Johnson at about 2 p.m. to describe the opposition and suggest that he might want to be Democratic national chairman instead of vice president. When Johnson refused to see Bobby, he gave the message to Sam Rayburn, who fixed Bobby with "a long look and responded simply, 'Shit.'" Phil Graham then called Jack to say that Johnson would only take the nomination if Kennedy "drafted" him. Jack replied that "he was in a general mess because some liberals were against LBJ." Kennedy asked Graham to call back in three minutes, when he would finish a meeting and have a decision. During their next conversation, Kennedy told Graham, "It's all set. . . . Tell Lyndon I want him."
But Jack remained unsure. He sent word to Johnson through Rayburn that he would call him directly at about 3 p.m. When no call came, Graham called Jack at 3:30. Though Kennedy promised to call Johnson at once, "he then again mentioned opposition to LBJ and asked for my judgment." Graham predicted that southern gains would surpass liberal losses and urged against any change in plans. Shortly after 4:00 p.m., Johnson summoned Graham, who reported that Bobby had just been back and urged him to "withdraw for the sake of the party." As Bobby remembered it, he told Johnson that there was a lot of opposition and that his brother "didn't think he wanted to go through that kind of unpleasant fight." Instead, Jack wanted him to run the party, and he could put his people in control as a prelude to running for president in eight years. Bobby recalled that Johnson looked like "he'd burst into tears. I didn't know if it was just an act or anything. But he just shook and tears came into his eyes, and he said, I want to be Vice President, and if the President will have me, I'll join with him in making a fight for it.'" Bobby then reversed course and responded, "Well, then, that's fine. He wants you to be Vice President if you want to be Vice President."
Amid the confusion, Graham now called Jack again. Kennedy, to hide his own ambivalence and reassure Johnson, told Graham, "Bobby's been out of touch and doesn't know what's been happening." Graham believed that Bobby had acted on his own in trying to bar Johnson from the ticket. Bobby disputed this: "With the close relationship between my brother and me, I wasn't going down to see if he would withdraw just as a lark on my own." His explanation rings true. Jack was trying to avoid a fight with liberals, but ultimately he was less concerned about offending them than with the price of forcing Johnson off the ticket and then seeing him do nothing for, or even quietly oppose, his election in the South.
Kennedy was not alone in his calculations. More realistic liberals saw Johnson as adding strength to the ticket and had no interest in dividing the party and helping to elect Nixon. Realizing this, and because Johnson promised to support the party's civil rights plank, they backed away from a floor fight. The Kennedys further finessed the issue at the convention by suspending the rules and asking for a voice ballot just before the voting reached Michigan, the delegation most likely to oppose Johnson. Although the shouted "ayes" and "nays" seemed about evenly divided. Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, the convention chairman, declared that two thirds of the delegates had concurred and announced Johnson's nomination by acclamation. Eisenhower, who remembered Johnson's warnings about Kennedy, told journalist Earl Mazo, "I turned on the television and there was that son of a bitch becoming a vice-presidential candidate with this 'dangerous man.'"
