Section Six
16
No one was more instrumental in the political rise and acumen of future president Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas than Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia. Both Southerners, they were nearly inseparable Senate colleagues as members of the powerful “Southern Bloc” during the early to mid–1950s, when racial segregation was finally having an impact on the national consciousness after World War II as a result of President Truman’s post-war integration of the U.S. military, and the intensified demands of young African Americans for a better stake in the American way of life. For almost 100 years, or ever since the end of slavery and the Civil War, segregation—the social separation of the races—had been practiced in the South through the unceasing dedication and efforts of devout Southern leaders like Russell, a good man in every other respect and a loyal New Deal Democrat since rapidly ascending from speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives at just 30 years of age; to the youngest governor in the country by 33; and ultimately to the Senate by a twist of fate just 18 months later, when he decided to exit his gubernatorial term early in favor of a successful bid for Congress’ Upper Chamber, following the death in office of Georgia Senator William Harris.1
With what his recent biographer and niece, Sally Russell, termed his “well-honed sense of timing in the political arena,” this product of a large Georgia political family (15 children and his father as the elected chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court when he died), who never married, captured the first of seven straight elections to the U.S. Senate in 1932, a run that would last through 1971 and make him one of the most powerful politicians of the 20th century. Eventually, such prestige would elevate his status to the point of having not one, but two federal office buildings named in his honor in Washington and Atlanta. “Quiet, self-effacing” and “a workhorse in the Senate, not a show horse,” Russell was described by his niece as “a liberal in bad times and a conservative in good times,” who refused minority and majority leadership posts in order to remain “archly conservative on race relations” at a time of growing pressure within the Democratic Party to support the civil rights so long denied Southern Blacks. For him, defending the traditional White Southern view of segregated society became “a heavier and heavier burden,” as he led defense of it on the Senate floor in the decade of the 1950s.2
Nonetheless, it was a burden Richard Russell had accepted as early as 1948. As emphasized by his biographer, he had emerged as the undisputed leader of a group of Southern senators determined to derail all civil rights legislation. Although there is no evidence that he sought this role, Georgia’s junior senator (Walter George was an even longer serving “Peach State” senator at the time) had earned this status with his clear understanding of the way the Senate worked and his ability to react quickly with well-organized defensive measures whenever Truman and others put forth civil rights legislation. Johnson biographer Robert Caro would illustrate Russell’s influence this way: “Among Democratic senators, it was not the liberals who held the power in the Senate; it was the Southerners. Of the eight most powerful Senate committees, Southerners held the chairmanships of five and another was held by a dependable Southern ally.” As chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Russell usually spoke for this Southern caucus and hosted its regular meetings in his office. During a quarter century of his leadership up to that time, Southerners had never lost a civil rights battle and as a legislative strategist he was considered so masterful that political pundits even labeled him “the South’s greatest general since Robert E. Lee.”3
With federal office buildings named in his honor in both Washington and Atlanta, Georgia’s Richard Russell was a mainstay of the Senate for 38 years. He actually died while still in office in 1971, having been elected to six consecutive terms after initially leaving the governor’s mansion to run for the Senate in a special election (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division—Reproduction Number LC-DIG-ggbain-12826).
Into this Southern Senate dominance, confidently strode the ambitious presence of the newly elected junior senator from Texas, where he had staged a controversial, 87-vote upset of one of the most popular politicians in Lone Star State history, former Governor Coke Stevenson, in 1948. But 44-year-old Lyndon Johnson was not like most freshman senators. He was a politician in a hurry, and it did not take him long to assess who and what offered the best chance for rapid ascendance up the Senate pecking order. Explaining it in simple terms, esteemed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin described Johnson’s entry into the Senate in her book Leadership in Turbulent Times this way:
The Senate’s “folkways” and “unwritten rules of the game” called upon freshman senators to serve a period of apprenticeship, show deference to their elders, refrain from speaking too often on the floor, concentrate on learning the expected “norms of behavior”—[all] habits of mind Johnson had long cultivated. Had he become a senator in a different era, he might not have been able to exercise his unique leadership talents to full effect, but the Senate Johnson entered was perfectly suited to his leadership style. No sooner had he arrived than he set about figuring out the structural machinery of the institution and it quickly became apparent to the freshman senator that power resided in an informal coalition, an inner club of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans. A bargain had been struck whereby the conservative Republicans would vote with the South against civil rights legislation and, in return, the Southern Democrats would oppose liberal social and economic measures. The undisputed leader of this inner club, commanding the respect of almost every member of the Senate, was Richard Russell.4
Like Texan Sam Rayburn before him, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and another old bachelor whom Johnson had cultivated since first arriving in Washington as a congressional aide in 1931 (and later as a four-term congressman), Russell would become the next willing target of the LBJ admiration blitz. Recognizing that Russell, like Rayburn, was “lonely,” the Texas freshman began “courting” the Georgian, Sally Russell confirmed, carving out a plan whereby he might ascend the Senate ranks as quickly as possible. Obviously married to his job and public service (again, much like Rayburn), Russell normally spent his evenings and weekends in the District of Columbia alone in his small apartment reading, without much social interaction away from work. “The Senate is my life and work,” Caro reported Russell once told a reporter. “I don’t have any family or home life.” With the advent of Senator Johnson, however, that would gradually change.5
Originally striving for one of the coveted seats on the Senate Appropriations Committee regardless of his freshman status, Johnson would soon drop that request, focusing instead on the committee whose chairman was Richard Russell and his Armed Services Committee. Caro would note that Johnson believed there was only one way to get close to a man whose life was his work. “I knew there was only one way to see Russell every day, and that was to get a seat on his committee,” he often said. “Without that, we’d most likely be passing acquaintances and nothing more. So, I put in my request for the Armed Services Committee.” And once he landed one of the four vacant seats on the lesser-in-demand committee, he “threw himself” into the work and made a point of dropping by Russell’s office every afternoon to seek advice on whatever committee assignment he had been given, making sure to keep his approach deferential as he began to fashion a mentor-protégé relationship with the man he would nickname “The Old Master.” LBJ had always cultivated older, well-connected men who could aid his political rise and with Russell, as he had with Rayburn and so many others, he would take that practice and talent to another level. So much so, in fact, that the old bachelor—so used to big family gatherings and interactions whenever he was back home in Georgia—would become a regular guest at the Johnsons’ Washington abode and a favorite of LBJ’s wife (“Lady Bird”), and two young daughters (Lynda and Luci). Russell’s niece turned biographer even admitted “it became a great pleasure for him to be included in the Johnson family circle, usually on short notice,” and amidst Lady Bird favoring him with Southern cooking and the Johnson girls calling him “Uncle Dick,” it’s easy to understand just how close these old and new Southern senators would become. In the second of his volumes on the Johnson years, Caro even spelled out the bewitching ability LBJ had in this regard, when he wrote:
Cultivating and manipulating older men possessed of power that could advance his ambitions, the young Lyndon Johnson employed obsequiousness and flattery so striking that contemporaries mocked him as a “professional son”—but that was no more striking than the openness with which he explained to them in detail his techniques of cultivation and manipulation, and boasted and gloated over his success in bending older men to his will. Each stage of his political climb was marked by perhaps the ultimate manifestation of [such] pragmatism in politics in a democracy.6
After achieving a seat in the Senate in 1948 in a legendary Texas election decided by a mere 87 votes, Lyndon Johnson would rise to leadership of the Democratic Caucus five years later and become the most powerful Senate majority leader ever between 1955 and 1960. A master parliamentarian and arm-twisting vote-counter, he often kept the Senate in session over extended hours to get things done (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division—Reproduction Number LC-DIG-ppmsca-03141).
Johnson, who had entered New Deal politics by successfully cultivating the notice of then President Franklin Roosevelt as an up-and-coming young congressman in 1937, enhanced his Texas reputation and resources through his intimacy with Rayburn, “Mr. Sam,” and ultimately he would subscribe to what he believed all “schoolchildren of mid-century America learned” through their so-called “three Rs—readin’, riten’, and ’rithmetic” … only for LBJ, the three R’s would prove to be Roosevelt, Rayburn, and Russell.7
Throughout the 1950s, Johnson would not only entrench his relationship with Russell, but also his good standing with all of the Southern Bloc, strict segregationist senators like South Carolina’s previously mentioned Thurmond, Virginia’s Harry Byrd, Mississippi’s John Stennis, and 17 other Southern Democrats under Russell’s leadership. The benefits of this relationship would be manifested in 1955, just six years after LBJ’s election to the Senate, when he was named Senate minority and later majority leader, primarily because of Russell’s unflinching support. In the midst of the McCarthy years and Eisenhower’s ascendance to the White House, the Democrats (as revealed in the last section) were cast as being soft on communism. As a result, when the Republicans became the majority party in Congress in 1952, the shakeup in seniority and leadership on the Democratic side of the aisle provided opportunity for anyone willing to take hold of their minority reality and bipartisan necessity. Such a man (and opportunist) was LBJ, even though his first senatorial term was due to expire in two years. With the Democrats divided between progressive and conservative camps, but the liberals feeling more the brunt of Eisenhower’s victory over Adlai Stevenson, the path was open for the caucus’ most conservative voice, Russell, to either become the minority leader himself or decide who would be. In Master of the Senate, Caro described what initially transpired as Johnson, indeed, pushed Russell to become the Leader, promising, “I’ll do the work and you’ll be the boss.” But Russell declined as he had been doing for years, realizing that as the Southern spokesman, he could not hope to maintain overall command of a divided party when any compromise of his states’ rights leadership would no longer be possible. What he could do, however, was offer command to his Southern protégé, Johnson, which was probably what LBJ suspected he would do all along. So, when Russell’s name was “put forth to become the minority leader” in January 1953, his biographer confirmed he “instead backed Johnson,” who obviously wanted it and would have “the ability to affect compromise.” LBJ’s only condition, according to Caro … that Russell move his desk directly behind his own desk in the Senate Chamber, since he “would be constantly needing the Old Master’s advice.”8
“With Dick Russell’s endorsement, Johnson was unanimously elected.” Thus was unleashed the most impactful Senate leader in modern American history and arguably all time. As mentioned previously and acknowledged in Russell’s biography, “the goal” for Johnson and Russell “was not to oppose” the proposals of the new Eisenhower administration, but to see how they might be modified to “Democratic specifications.” And for two years, this minority approach and relationship with Ike would produce unusual bipartisanship. With Democrats split between Russell’s conservative South and the more liberal North and West, “Johnson, indeed, proved the man for the job and under his leadership, Democrats as opposite as Russell and the ultra-progressive Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota were soon working together within the caucus confines.”9
As a result, when the Senate and House reverted to Democratic majorities in 1955 (with LBJ having been easily re-elected in 1954), the Johnson-Russell strategy of bipartisanship had been vindicated and as Caro asserted, the position of majority leader was about to become “powerful.” Presidential historian William DeGregorio also acknowledged the youngest majority leader up to that time (46) “would emerge a dynamic, skilled parliamentarian with a keen instinct for workable compromise. Characteristically” DeGregorio continued, “he discouraged protracted debate [and] preferred instead to hammer out differences on the [Senate] floor. Unlike his predecessors, he routinely kept the Senate in night session to conclude pressing business.” In other words, he set the agenda; set the legislative schedules; and despite “criticism from some Democrats for failing to square off more often against the popular Republican president,” he got things done/passed10—what, unfortunately, has too often not been the case in American congressional history.
Over the next four years, Johnson would further inculcate his standing not only as a protégé of Richard Russell, but indeed, as the promising adherent of the entire Southern Bloc. As alluded to earlier, Lyndon Johnson was not just a Southern senator. Whenever it suited him, he could also be a Western senator, a rancher from the Texas Hill Country who shared Western as well as Southern ideals and roots. At the same time, he was a presidential aspirant despite being from the South and the existing belief in both major parties that no Southerner could be a legitimate presidential contender given the prevailing national bias against a section consumed with maintaining racial segregation. In The White House Looks South, William Leuchtenburg wrote:
A national identity Johnson may have had, but for two decades no one could differentiate his behavior from that of any other Southern congressman, who dutifully followed the lead of ardent White supremacists such Tom Connally, the senior senator from Texas. Not long after Johnson first came to the House [in 1937], Connally is said to have told him, “Lyndon, you’re a Texan. And don’t forget that as a Texan you’re a Southerner. If you throw down on the South and forget your origins, you’re going to foreclose your progress, because the only people that will stand with you are the people from the South. The people from the North are never going to have any respect for you.”
The leader of the Southern Bloc of senators who controlled the Upper Chamber of Congress during the 1940s and ’50s, Richard Russell of Georgia, shown here (third from left) with fellow Southerners (from left) Tom Connally of Texas, Walter George of Georgia, and Claude Pepper of Florida, was only 36 years old when he stepped down as Georgia’s governor to successfully run for the Senate in 1933 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division—Reproduction Number LC-DIG-hec-23959).
Meanwhile, Virginia Senator Willis Robertson voiced similar sentiments of the young LBJ when he said, “He was a Southern man … and some people called him Western, but we called him Southern and Texas [had been] in the Confederacy.”11
In keeping with such regionalized politics and in order to maintain electability as he first sought re-election in the House and eventually higher office in the Senate, LBJ would consistently oppose civil rights measures that came before Congress for two decades. Beginning with his initial election to the U.S. House of Representatives and continuing once he squeezed into the Senate in 1948, Leuchtenburg contended, “Lyndon Johnson gave the country good reason to think he was just another member of the Dixie [or Southern] Bloc.” Although younger than the majority of his vested Southern colleagues in the Senate, LBJ gave every impression that he was in lockstep with the older Harry Byrds, Strom Thurmonds, and Richard Russells of Capitol Hill, a next generation defender, so to speak, of the Southern faith, but someone who might also serve the South as a more youthful and thus more useful intermediary between the sections. As a narrative about the “strange friendship” of “Richard B. Russell and Lyndon B. Johnson” in a 1989 issue of the Missouri Historical Review quoted by Leuchtenburg assessed: “Johnson had been raised in a segregated society and had voted with Southerners on civil rights bills, but was not identified so clearly with White supremacy and segregation that he could not work with Northern liberal and moderate Democrats.”12
But “if conciliator, his inclinations retained a decidedly southward bend” as Leuchtenburg worded it, and he usually never strayed far from his power base—both his fellow Southerners in the Senate and the predominantly White, segregated voters of the Lone Star State. Perhaps the first time he did so as Senate majority leader followed the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in May 1954, which supposedly struck down racial segregation in public schools as unconstitutional, even if segregated schools were deemed equal in quality. That “separate but equal” mantra had become a mainstay of the South’s defense of its divided public education system and whether true or not (with most people believing the latter), the unanimous Court decision was deemed “a catastrophe” by the vast majority of White Southerners and something that must be overcome in the days ahead by their elected representatives. Reacting to the ruling as one of those elected representatives caught in the middle of a regionally divided party and nation, LBJ is reputed to have said, “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. The Southern caucus and a lot of my people at home will be on me like stink on shit if I don’t stand up and bray against the Supreme Court’s decision. [And] if I do bray like a jackass, the red hots and senators with big minority [voting] blocs in the East and North will gut shoot me.”13
One thing he did not do, however, was sign what became known as the “Southern Manifesto,” a document issued by the South’s congressional contingent less than two years after the Brown decision that, according to Leuchtenburg, “exalted Jim Crow” segregation as “‘a part of the life of the people of many of the states,’” while also praising “‘the motives of those states, which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.’” It also accused the U.S. Supreme Court of substituting “‘naked judicial power for the established law of the land’” and denounced “‘outside meddlers’” for trying to destroy “‘the amicable relations between the White and Negro races’” that had been built over 90 years, inflicting “‘chaos’” in its place. Sources agree, it was intended as a call on the Southern states to resist the Brown decision.14
Resisting what was described as “a calculated declaration of defiance by 100 men in the Houses of national political power” by John Egerton, a Southern journalist of the time, Johnson, as the Democratic Senate majority leader, would not sign the Manifesto (suffering a burned cross by night riders on his ranch property in Texas as a result). Instead, Caro confirmed that LBJ stayed as clear of the controversial document as possible and as far as Russell allowed him to stay. Admittedly, a few other Southern senators stayed clear as well, including Tennessee’s more progressive duo of Albert Gore and Estes Kefauver, both of whom retained national aspirations, but none was more conspicuous in their absence from the Manifesto than the Majority Leader. Indeed, Johnson would first claim he had never seen it before it was released, a somewhat “disingenuous assertion,” according to Caro, and later contend the Southerners had purposely not shown it to him in order to not put his Senate leadership in the compromised position of regional bias. He would also proffer the more heroic impression that they had not asked him to sign because they knew he would not bend to regional pressure. More likely was the idea that Russell and the other Southern Bloc leaders did not want to subject their suddenly ascendant political acolyte and potential national candidate to excessive media scrutiny or criticism.15
As already touched on, this latter rationale for the absence of his signature on the Southern Manifesto resided in the concept that in the Jim Crow era, a Southern politician, no matter how powerful or high ranking in the congressional pecking order, would have an impossible path to the presidency. Russell had already experienced the liability that was Southern roots on the national stage, as his presidential nomination at the Democratic Convention of 1952, although flatteringly promising early on and based on his burgeoning influence in the Senate, was doomed to a third place finish once national electability became a second ballot issue and a Northern liberal, Stevenson, emerged as the majority choice. Though his biographer called him “a gracious loser” for stepping aside in that moment of regional, intra-party tension, the loss nevertheless had to hurt, especially for a consummate Democratic mainstay like Russell, who realized his path to the nomination would be forever blocked by his segregationist history. Leuchtenburg also addressed the revered Georgian’s political limits when he quoted then North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford as saying, “I would have liked to have voted for Richard Russell, but [he] never had a chance because of the stance he had to take on the race issue. You know every real leader in the South was held back.”16
With Russell’s blessing, however, Johnson was determined to find a way around that roadblock. Always excessively ambitious, to the point of doing whatever it took to ensure electoral success and political progression, this was brought out repeatedly by Caro throughout his multi-volume masterpiece. In his Means of Ascent Introduction, Caro wrote: “Without the lure of new, greater power, the power he [already] possessed was meaningless to him.” Later, in the third chapter of that same book, he wrote: “If one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness on behalf of that ambition to make efforts that were also without bounds.” And by the time he wrote Master of the Senate, LBJ’s principal biographer would address the Senate majority leader’s elephant-in-the-room ambition when he penned: “No Democrat could become president without the North’s support—support not available to an advocate of segregation. It was therefore an article of faith in Washington that no Southerner could ever become president of the United States…. Lyndon Johnson was from Texas, one of the eleven states of the Confederacy. The taint of the South was upon him. For him to realize his greatest ambition, the taint would have to be removed.”17
Immediately after the Southern Manifesto and with Russell’s compliance, he set about removing the taint. Leuchtenburg also wrote about this new LBJ, who in 1957 would guide a watered-down civil rights bill through Congress—the first federal civil rights legislation passed in America since Charles Sumner’s landmark Reconstruction bill in 1875. Although the bill was drastically limited from the original voting rights legislation proposed by Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey and other Northern Democratic progressives, the Majority Leader was labeled “a traitor to his own people,” “a renegade,” and “a double-crosser” by newspapers throughout the South for even allowing such a thing to come to a Senate vote. Meanwhile, there’s every indication Russell was privately hoping LBJ might enjoy the presidential possibilities he had been denied and in so doing limit the civil rights bills he had to know were coming. As a result, Leuchtenburg recounted how Johnson was allowed to pursue this initial civil rights passage as a “safeguard” for “his party, the nation, and his career.” Although threatening filibuster, the constitutional mechanism by which the Southern Bloc had always blocked past civil rights attempts, LBJ would secure enough amendments to the bill “to get it down to just a ‘right to vote’ bill that won’t be too hard to live with,” meaning just enough that his Southern colleagues in the Senate could stomach, keeping their filibuster under wraps … at least for the time being.18
As determined as Johnson was to have the historic passage of a civil rights bill on his resume, Russell and the other Southerners “knew that he would give them some ‘face savers’ and that he had sufficient understanding of their plight [with their Southern constituents] to do things in such a way that they would not be isolated from the legislative process.” And “what was much more important,” according to Leuchtenburg, was that “the most important Southerners, led by Russell, thought of LBJ as the only Southerner who could become president and were [very] aware that he could not become president if he shared their unyielding opposition to civil rights.” In other words, there was an ulterior motive involved in how the Southern Bloc inexplicably stood down on Johnson’s 1957 bill, calculating they might gain more in the long run by not agitating their fellow Democrats from the North and West. After all, there was another presidential nomination already on the horizon for 1960 and when LBJ framed the impending Senate vote as “national rather than sectional legislation,” it might as well have been code for a modest step that merely enhanced Democratic chances (and his own) three years hence. “In truth,” as Leuchtenburg confirmed, “the [1957] law did not amount to much.”19
What it most certainly did not do was address the school desegregation that had been mandated by the Brown decision or the ongoing racial separation taking place in all other public places throughout the South, something intrinsic to its original intent from both the progressive and African American perspectives, but also something Johnson had assured Russell would be removed before any serious voting began. Was it in essence all for show (?)—probably. Ever the “master” politician as Caro labeled him, LBJ held a meeting at his ranch in 1958 among veterans of his political campaigns. “He was convinced that he was the best man to be president,” Caro acknowledged in the fourth volume of his Johnson biography, The Passage of Power. “He was very aggressive,” one of those in attendance confirmed. “Anyone who didn’t agree was wrong. He knew in his own mind that he was destined to be president of the United States.”20
Equally focused on the big picture nationally at this time was Richard Russell, “who had,” in Caro’s words, “made his Southern caucus understand that the only way to make the South part of the United States again, ‘to really put an end to the Civil War,’ would be to elect a Southerner president, and they understood that their beloved ‘Dick,’ [having given] up his own dream, had anointed Lyndon as that Southerner.” He had also made them understand “that in order for Johnson to attain the nomination he would first have to be perceived as a strong, successful Senate Leader, and therefore he would have to have a united party behind him and they must bend their views to support him.”21
Thus, did Lyndon Johnson enter the last two years of his second Senate term at the peak of his legislative power. Newspapers throughout the country had considered passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act the pinnacle of his congressional career and he would add more of those laurels in 1960, when he “engineered passage,” according to William DeGregorio, of another civil rights bill establishing federal inspection of voter registration polls, effectively eliminating discriminatory practices that had been utilized throughout the South for decades. Rated “the most powerful majority leader in the history of the Senate,” by award-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Johnson had also been judged “the best qualified candidate” by 1956 nominee Adlai Stevenson, and at one time (rather surprisingly) fellow senator and eventual 1960 Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy opined that he was “owed the nomination.” But for Stevenson, Kennedy, and the prevailing party leadership, there would always be that one negative to the chances of a Johnson presidential run—his Southern roots.22 That had to be why JFK felt comfortable in making his “owed” comment.
Regardless, LBJ sought to become the 1960 Democratic nominee despite his Southern heritage. To do so would have required just the right mix of a less than exciting field of candidates; the Democrats’ most formidable campaign apparatus; and the kind of never-say-die, in-it-to-win-it attitude from the get-go that had always characterized Johnson’s past political efforts. Unfortunately for him, none of those would be true. Although believing the nomination should be his by 1958, he delayed truly going for it until it was too late because of his belief that all of the other potential candidates had at least one fatal flaw, while he would be able to command the largest bloc of delegates—the South—going into the convention. At the same time, the field became more cluttered than he had assumed, as Kefauver, Humphrey, Missouri’s Stuart Symington, and Stevenson (for a third time) all appeared likely to throw their influential hats in the ring along with the young and suddenly formidable Kennedy of Massachusetts, who would mount one of the best campaigns of the modern political era, relying on his large and politically motivated family, and his father’s financial fortune. Taken by surprise as to the level of appeal for Kennedy, who would become the first Catholic president in U.S. history (finally overcoming the church-state bias that had doomed Democrat Al Smith’s candidacy three decades earlier), Johnson completely underestimated the Kennedy charisma that along with his campaign organization overcame every primary obstacle and earned JFK the nomination with almost twice as many delegate votes—806 to 409.23
Ironically, Johnson would ultimately become Kennedy’s vice-presidential running mate for the same reason most thought he could never be the top-of-ticket nominee—his Southern roots. Needing to ensure support from the traditionally Democratic South with what figured to be a very close election against Eisenhower’s two-term vice president, Richard Nixon, Kennedy opted for LBJ as his VP over the objections of his family and party liberals because of the aid Johnson’s presence on the ticket might provide the Northeastern-bred, Harvard-educated JFK among Southern voters (and indeed with Johnson on the ticket, the Dems would hold off the GOP in six Southern states, just enough to win one of the closest presidential elections ever). Johnson, meanwhile, also faced criticism from his backers for accepting the No. 2 slot, but after the requisite soul-searching and recovery from his earlier convention disappointment, his rationale for taking the VP job was simple—the fact that a return to the Senate would get him no closer to his presidential ambitions, while the vice presidency just might, as it had seven times before in American history when vice presidents ascended to the White House due to a presidential death in office. With Kennedy set to be the second youngest chief executive ever at 43, such developments did not seem likely in 1960, but given his lifelong ambitions and party loyalty, LBJ chose the course that made the most sense in that moment and following the narrow Kennedy-Johnson victory later that fall, he would faithfully serve the next three years in whatever assignment the President came up with despite never being in his inner circle.24
Through all kinds of foreign policy ups and downs, including the Bay of Pigs invasion disaster in Cuba in April of 1961, another Cold War Berlin Crisis later that same year, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, probably the closest the United States would ever come to nuclear war with the Soviet Union, the Kennedy administration rolled with the punches and generally came off the better for it in the eyes of history. But in the domestic arena, where much had been expected, JFK’s legislative initiatives had been stalled in Congress until the fate-filled day of November 22, 1963, forever changed the legacies of Kennedy, who was famously assassinated while riding in an open convertible motorcade through the downtown streets of Dallas, Texas, and his successor, Lyndon Johnson. Sworn in as president before ever leaving Dallas once Kennedy was pronounced dead, LBJ became president, not as he wanted, but just as he had always planned to be. And with his ascension to the White House, the Kennedy domestic agenda would be revisited in ways no one could have expected, least of all the senators of the Southern Bloc. All, that is, except Richard Russell.25
1. William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South, 250–252; Sally Russell, Richard Brevard Russell, xi, 80, 88, 105–106, 109, 141–143, 208–209.
2. Sally Russell, Richard Brevard Russell, 109–110, 114, 182, 190, back cover; Brian O’Shea, “Who Is the Russell Senate Building Named For?” ajc.com, August 27, 2018; Richard A. Baker and Neil MacNeil, The American Senate, 6–7.
3. Sally Russell, Richard Brevard Russell, 182; Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, xiv, final photo spread.
4. Robert A. Caro, Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, 141, center photo spread, 317; Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership in Turbulent Times, 193–194; Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, 157–158.
5. Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, 157–159, 203–207.
6. Ibid., 207, 208, 209; William DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, 564–565, 566; Sally Russell, Richard Brevard Russell, 191; Robert A. Caro, Means of Ascent, 8, 16–17.
7. F. Martin Harmon, Presidents by Fate, 150; Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, 163.
8. Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, 96, 474–475; F. Martin Harmon, Presidents by Fate, 151; Sally Russell, Richard Brevard Russell, 197.
9. Sally Russell, Richard Brevard Russell, 197–198.
10. Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, 557–558; William DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, 568.
11. William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South, 229–239, 245–246, 248–249.
12. Ibid., 246, 250–251.
13. Ibid., 249, 251.
14. Ibid., 251; Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, 785–786.
15. Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, 786–787; William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South, 251.
16. William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South, 277; Sally Russell, Richard Brevard Russell, 193–195.
17. Robert A. Caro, Means of Ascent, xxvii, 36; Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, 125.
18. William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South, 255–257.
19. Ibid., 260–263; Sally Russell, Richard Brevard Russell, 211.
20. William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South, 260–261; Robert A. Caro, Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, 11–12.
21. Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, 599.
22. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership in Turbulent Times, 198, 205; William DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, 568.
23. Robert A. Caro, Passage of Power, 10, 23–27, 33, 34–35, 47, 84–87, 107, 114, 155; Kenneth C. Davis, Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents, 484.
24. Kenneth C. Davis, Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents, 484; Robert A. Caro, Passage of Power, 109–115, 118–123, 132, 200–203, 224, 243; Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership in Turbulent Times, 205–206; William DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, 569.
25. William DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, 555, 557, 560; Kenneth C. Davis, Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents, 484–487; Robert A. Caro, Passage of Power, 311–312, 323, 354–355; Sally Russell, Richard Brevard Russell, 228–229, 230.