If the Democratic members of the U.S. Senate had been given the power to select the Democratic candidate for President in 1960, Lyndon Johnson would have been their choice. But a fact of political life Johnson never fully grasped was that the Senate did not possess this power. A dozen years after his abortive campaign, Johnson believed, on the one hand, that no matter how shrewdly he had planned his strategy, his Southern heritage would have prevented his nomination and, on the other hand, that his ignorance of national politics was responsible for his humiliating defeat at the hands of John Kennedy.1
As it happened, Johnson never really got to the point of running a full-fledged campaign. Insecure about his legitimacy as a national politician, longing for the Presidency, yet terrified at losing his prestige in the Senate, he became muddled and ineffective in his actions. Without the single-mindedness that had propelled him to power in the Senate, removed from that assembly of men he knew so well and over which he had possessed boundless influence, Johnson’s instincts failed. New experience ceased to educate. Johnson remained the perpetual tourist in the alien land of national politics. Confusing the national campaign with bargaining in the Senate, he wrongly assumed that each Democratic Senator controlled the delegates from his state. While John Kennedy and his men crisscrossed the country, winning primaries, attending state conventions, and rounding up delegates, Johnson remained in his office in Washington, expecting somehow to make the right deals with the right people. Johnson’s experiences in the Senate might have been considerably more relevant in 1952 or even in 1956, when conventions were still the vast bargaining arenas they had been since Andrew Jackson’s time. But 1960 brought a different breed of Democratic Convention. It was, in some ways, the first postbroker convention. By the time the party convened in Los Angeles on July 10, 1960, all the important deals had already been made. John Kennedy captured the nomination on the first ballot.
This left Johnson with only one chance to move up in the political world, and he took that chance. He accepted Kennedy’s offer of the second spot. It was a decision few understood at the time. Friends and colleagues could not imagine why Lyndon Johnson would exchange the real powers of the Majority Leader for the ceremony of the Vice-Presidency. “Power is where power goes,” he explained to a friend who was counseling him to reject Kennedy’s offer.2 Johnson believed he could carry his powers with him. Give him time, and he would make the Vice-Presidency powerful. That Johnson should believe it possible to do what no other political figure had been able to do was characteristic. Again and again—as assistant to President Evans at San Marcos, as speaker of the Little Congress, as party whip and leader—Johnson had taken positions with no apparent base of power and then, by recasting and expanding their functions, he had pyramided meager resources into substantial political holdings. Why should this experience be different? At the very least, the Vice-Presidency was a way of shedding his regional image once and for all and placing him in line to succeed John Kennedy at the end of his two terms in office.
There remained an additional reason for accepting the offer. Lyndon Johnson recognized that his power in the Senate had depended in part upon having a passive Republican President in the White House. Under the shadow of an active Democratic President, the Majority Leader would be reduced in size. No matter what Johnson decided about the Vice-Presidency, the election of 1960 would affect the Senate leadership in uncomfortable ways; the world he had mastered so well would no longer be his. Even if Kennedy lost, Richard Nixon would be no Eisenhower; he would not accord the Majority Leader the respect or the power Johnson had enjoyed in the 1950s. Better, then, to help young John Kennedy win. For whether he won or lost, the contrast with the 1950s Senate would be real; indeed, Johnson’s anticipation of the difference made him ready, perhaps eager, to leave, thereby sparing himself the agony of watching his prestige diminish day by day.
In the past, Johnson’s willingness to accept a subordinate position had come from the conviction that initial deference was but a means to eventual replacement of the figure in authority. Repeatedly, Johnson had played the role of apprentice with consummate skill. Cecil Evans, Harry Greene, Franklin Roosevelt, Sam Rayburn, Richard Russell: all these men had served as his master, teaching him the skills and the secrets of their trade. In return, Johnson had given the full measure of his attention, talent, and respect. Now Lyndon Johnson was Vice President; and to the outsider looking in, the role of apprentice appeared ideal for both the man and the office. The Founding Fathers had created the office of the Vice-Presidency precisely for the purpose of providing an understudy to the President in the event the Chief Executive’s office fell vacant. Beyond this major role, they had given the Vice President only two functions: to preside over the Senate—a duty that could easily be delegated—and to cast the deciding vote if the Senate was equally divided—a rare occurrence. In a political system where seven Vice Presidents—one of every five—had succeeded to the Presidency, clearly the Vice President’s most important role was as an apprentice, participating in the daily decisions, soberly learning the main tasks of the Presidency.3
Kennedy tried, at the start, to provide Johnson with meaningful work and to keep him informed on all major issues. He appointed Johnson chairman of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and Chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council. He invited the Vice President to attend his staff meetings, his Cabinet meetings, and his briefings before news conferences. He asked Johnson to represent him in numerous functions abroad and at home. He sought Johnson’s opinion on speeches and strategy. They were, to be sure, very different men: the one a disciplined, precise, and detached New Englander; the other an emotional, expansive, and intimate Texan; yet they respected one another. Indeed, they even developed a measure of affection few would have guessed possible. On his part, Johnson exhibited complete loyalty and self-discipline. When he disagreed with the President—as he did, among other issues, on his handling of the steel crisis, on his approach to the Soviet Union, on his policy toward Diem, and on foreign aid—he kept his disagreement to himself. Reporters, trained in the ways of provoking reluctant politicians to speak, found it impossible to get Johnson to criticize Kennedy in public. Even among friends at the dinner table, Johnson talked about Kennedy as if he were speaking before a formal audience; he measured his phrases. For the man who had for many years taken great pleasure and received much satisfaction from mocking his colleagues, friend as well as foe, behind their backs, Lyndon Johnson’s Vice-Presidency was a triumph of self-restraint.4
But, in the end, tradition joined with personality to prevent Kennedy and Johnson from sustaining a commitment to their respective roles as master and apprentice. No matter how often Kennedy spoke about including Johnson in the daily work of the White House, the fact is that no President in history has ever shared the major tasks of office with his Vice President. Wary of a potential rival and aware of past habits, Presidents have been inclined to leave their Vice Presidents with little more than special assignments; traveling abroad or chairing a council on space or heading a committee on employment are fair first steps toward vice-presidential participation, but they are only first steps, and somehow the process never seems to move forward. The second and third steps are untaken, and Vice Presidents are consigned to essentially peripheral tasks. As one observer put it: “The very fact that a problem is turned over to the Vice-President argues that it is not very important or that the Vice-President actually is going to play a far less critical role in solving it than announced or that the President recognized the impossibility of solving the problem and therefore wants to stay as far away from the whole thing as possible.”5 No good politician willingly cedes power to another politician he cannot control. And unlike the members of the White House staff—to whom recent Presidents have given considerable power—the Vice President cannot be fired.
In Johnson’s case, personality compounded the problem. It was not easy for him to apprentice himself to a backbencher nine years his junior. Nor was it easy for Kennedy to play the role of master. After all, Kennedy once explained, “I spent years of my life when I could not get consideration for a bill until I went around and begged Lyndon Johnson to let it go ahead.”6
Within a matter of months, the inevitable followed. Had arrogance and ambition not blinded his vision, Johnson’s instinct and intelligence would have led him to foresee this. Like every Vice President before him, he found himself stifled in the Vice-Presidency, reduced to the role of an onlooker, in office but out of power. The only exception was in the field of civil rights, where Johnson’s work on equal employment clearly occupied his energies and evidenced his talent.
Johnson reckoned the days spent in the office described by its first occupant, John Adams, as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Perhaps the only useful purpose the Vice President served, he later suggested, was to remind the President of his mortality—a ghastly function at best. “Every time I came into John Kennedy’s presence, I felt like a goddamn raven hovering over his shoulder. Away from the Oval Office, it was even worse. The Vice-Presidency is filled with trips around the world, chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping, chairmanships of councils, but in the end, it is nothing. I detested every minute of it.”7
Nowhere did Johnson feel his loss of power and his uselessness more painfully than in his relations with Capitol Hill. When the Senate Democrats convened in caucus on January 3, 1961, Mike Mansfield of Montana, the new Majority Leader, proposed to change the rules and elect the new Vice President the chairman of the Democratic Conference, which would make him the presiding officer at formal meetings of the Senate’s Democratic members. Mansfield’s proposal, which he had discussed with no one but Johnson, met with strong opposition. Liberals and conservatives joined in arguing that such a move would surely violate the spirit of the separation of powers. When the motion came up for decision, seventeen Senators voted nay, a number large enough to persuade Mansfield and Johnson to let the motion die.8
Johnson interpreted the vote as a profoundly personal rejection. All the hopes he had entertained of leading the Congress from the Vice President’s chair were discarded. Suddenly he felt separated forever from the institution to which he believed he had given the best part of his life. Time and the success of the Eighty-ninth Congress under his presidential leadership would alter this perspective, but in 1961 Johnson was so hurt and angry after the seventeen negative votes that he simply retired from the Hill. From that day on he was of minimal help to Kennedy on legislation, the area in which the President most desired his help. At the weekly White House breakfasts for legislative leaders, Johnson rarely said a word. As observers have described him, his face appeared vacant and gray; he looked discontented and tired. He offered an opinion only when asked directly by Kennedy to give one; and even then, he tended to mumble, his words barely audible to the person sitting beside him. On rare occasions, when he was particularly excited or perturbed, he would suddenly raise his voice for a few moments to its customary shout, only to let it quickly sink again into an unintelligible murmur.9
No matter how much he longed to participate in these meetings on legislative strategy—especially because he believed the Kennedy men were blundering badly—Johnson could not bear being treated as one of many advisers. Shortly after the inauguration, he sent an unusual Executive Order to the Oval Office for President Kennedy’s signature. Outlining a wide range of issues over which the new Vice President would have “general supervision,” it put all the departments and agencies on notice that Lyndon Johnson was to receive all reports, information, and policy plans that were generally sent to the President himself. It led to remarks in the White House that compared Johnson to William Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, who had sent his President an equally preposterous memo on how the government should be conducted and how he, Seward, should be the lead conductor. Kennedy’s response was similar to Lincoln’s; in both cases, the memos were diplomatically shelved.10
The loss of a leadership position amounted to political death. There were times, Johnson later admitted, when he felt that he would simply shrivel up. What inflamed him the most was that no one seemed to appreciate his loyalty and self-discipline. On the contrary, the same critics who had originally predicted that Lyndon Johnson would be a runaway Vice President, arrogating too much power to himself, were now putting him down for his quiet demeanor. “Whatever happened to Lyndon Johnson?” they asked, implying that in the glitter of the Kennedy administration Johnson had simply faded away.
Johnson was angered by political criticism, but he was used to it; far more difficult for him to accept was the cultural critique, the implicit comparison between the Western cowboy and the urbane aristocrat. It is easy to imagine the uneasiness Johnson felt as John Kennedy came to be admired more and more for the very qualities Rebekah Johnson had always hoped to find in her first-born son. The more praise Kennedy received for his oratorical ability, for his skill in debating, and for his brilliant parries at press conferences, the more uneasy the Vice President felt in front of even the most friendly audience. Worse still was “all the fuss and excitement,”11 to use Johnson’s words, about Kennedy’s transforming Washington into a cultural center. After a state dinner in October, 1961, scenes from several Shakespearean plays were performed; it was, the New York Times reported, the first time in anyone’s memory that this had happened in the White House, and for it, Kennedy was “ranked with such Presidents as Lincoln, Jefferson, and Adams in their demonstrated love of Shakespeare.” The following month Pablo Casals performed for guests at a formal party; it was his first appearance at the White House since 1904, when he had played for Theodore Roosevelt. The evening of chamber music reaped praise from artists in every field. There was more. In the spring, the White House sponsored a performance by Jerome Robbins’ “Ballets: U.S.A.”; it was the first ballet ever danced at the White House.
Apprehensive of being culturally inferior, Johnson groaned at every announcement of another luncheon for writers and scholars and loathed each new invitation to a formal dinner. He read the lists of the invited guests: Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Edmund Wilson, Elia Kazan, Leonard Bernstein, Fredric March, Sir Ralph Richardson. He knew at most the names of two or three. He could never think of more than ten words to say to any of them. In the hush of these formal settings, when, as Johnson later put it, the White House smelled like a musty museum or a university lecture room, he felt called upon to talk about music or literature or art. Perhaps he mistook his own projected ideal for the expectations of others, but he was convinced that “high” conversation was required. At such functions, he felt himself launched upon waters where he was never meant to sail. Sorely conscious of being seen as an outsider, assuming that politics had no currency with these people, he stood in the corner, his hands in his pockets, his mind detached.
Yet in some things Johnson tried to imitate the Kennedys. When, on a trip abroad, he read that John Kennedy loved soups, he insisted that his plane be stocked with dozens of soups. He watched McNamara once in a restaurant ordering shrimp salad with three shrimps. For weeks after that Johnson ordered exactly the same thing.12
Vice President Thomas Marshall in 1920 compared the Vice President to a cataleptic: “He cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; yet he is perfectly conscious of everything that is going on about him.” Marshall anticipated the nature of Johnson’s difficulties. During this period, Johnson said, he dreamed again of physical incapacity, recreating at night the condition of utter powerlessness he experienced during the day. The dream that stood out in his memory found him seated at his desk in the Executive Office Building, a few yards in space, but an infinite distance in significance, from the West Wing of the White House. “In the dream, I had finished signing one stack of letters and had turned my chair toward the window. The activity on the street below suggested to me that it was just past five o’clock. All of Washington, it seemed, was on the street, leaving work for the day, heading for home. Suddenly, I decided I’d pack up and go home, too. For once, I decided, it would be nice to join all those people on the street and have an early dinner with my family. I started to get up from my chair, but I couldn’t move. I looked down at my legs and saw they were manacled to the chair with a heavy chain. I tried to break the chain, but I couldn’t. I tried again and failed again. Once more and I gave up; I reached for the second stack of mail. I placed it directly in front of me, and got back to work.”13
When Johnson, at the age of fifteen, had a dream that resembled this one—the dream in which he saw himself enclosed in a small cage—he had escaped by running away from home to California. Now, forty years later, Johnson found a similar escape from a different cage; during his Vice-Presidency he made eleven separate foreign trips, visiting thirty-three countries, including Italy, Great Britain, Senegal, Jamaica, Scandinavia, Cyprus, Greece, South Vietnam, and Israel. Away from the United States, Johnson shed his mantle of restraint. When he landed on foreign shores, his energy gathered force again. In striking contrast to the sluggish image he projected in Washington, this Lyndon Johnson was characterized by high spirits, joyful emotion, and readiness for all kinds of action.14
He was once again the spoiled, demanding, and exuberant child. Before each trip he compiled a long list of the things he needed to have with him: an oversized bed to fit his six-foot, four-inch frame, a shower attachment that emitted a hard needlepoint spray, two dozen cases of Cutty Sark, five hundred boxes of ball-point pens, six dozen cases of cigarette lighters. The pens and the lighters were brought along by the thousands as gifts. In the poorest slums of India, on the crowded streets of Dakar, in the markets of Thailand, Johnson passed among the people distributing LBJ-inscribed pens, shaking hands, patting heads, inviting a camel driver to America. The Vice President’s personal diplomacy and impulsive behavior appalled many officials in the Foreign Service. He provokingly refused to take their rules of etiquette seriously; he was, they believed, confusing diplomacy with campaigning. Yet with all the confusion of pens and crowds and abrupt changes in plans, Lyndon Johnson was clearly successful as an ambassador of goodwill, though none of this restored even a measure of authority. His energy and his friendly manner were contagious; but then he came home, ending his brief return to center stage and retiring to his cage once again.
Curiously, Johnson, with little else to do, seemed to learn little or nothing about international relations from these trips. Conceivably, foreign travel could equip the American statesman with a feel for another culture, or at least with the ability to comprehend differences in political and economic structure from one country to another. Johnson’s utter lack of prior experience with people from outside the United States ill-prepared him to ask questions that might have elicited a deeper understanding.15 Without informal contacts among foreigners, he seldom strayed beyond carefully planned stops. When he was removed from his native ground, Johnson’s sensitivity to nuance, tone, and inflection diminished. He saw each country and all the people he met through an American prism. In 1961 Johnson made a trip to Vietnam at Kennedy’s request. In the report he wrote as a follow-up, he spelled out in the strongest terms his belief that our failure to stand in Vietnam would lead to a crisis of confidence throughout Southeast Asia and would consign all the mainland countries to eventual Communist rule. “I felt a special rapport with all those Asians,” Johnson later said. “I knew how desperately they needed our help and I wanted to give it. I wanted them to have all the dams and all the projects they could handle.”16
Thus the circumstances of the Vice-Presidency seemed to conspire against Johnson, imparting wrong lessons, impeding the development of his talents, stifling his spirit. For all this, Johnson did not resign himself to life as he found it. In the summer of 1963, he no longer even guessed what the years ahead had in store, but he still looked with a flicker of hope toward the future. A change of circumstances, the challenge of new work—there was still a chance that, in some later engagement, he might turn the tables on the world, that his energies and talents, gathering force, might join together once again.