As if to verify Johnson’s ability to orchestrate events, Harry Blackstone Jr., a radio broadcaster who worked for him at KTBC and whose father was a magician known as the Great Blackstone, was quoted in a newspaper article professing, “I worked quite some time for Lyndon Johnson as broadcast personnel, and I think I learned more about the art of deception from him than I did from my father … he was a man who understood the art of misdirection—of making the eye watch ‘A’ when the dirty work was going on at ‘B.’”184
During Lyndon Johnson’s twelve years as a senator, having risen to become the minority leader after four years and then majority leader after two more, he had acquired almost as much power as the president, and was willing to cast aside moral or ethical considerations to attain more. One of the most revealing and troubling insights into this part of Johnson’s character appears in Robert Caro’s biography: Johnson’s hunger was for power “in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will … it was a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it” (emphasis added).185 Becoming the vice president would have represented a step backwards, unless the office was seen as Johnson saw it—merely a stepping stone on his path to the presidency.186
Johnson’s Vice Presidency
Beginning with his ascension to the Senate and then his position as majority leader, Johnson knew his boyhood dream, the one that he long ago resolved would be kept, was within his grasp. He knew that in order to successfully run for the presidency, he would need to redefine his base, which had always been what he thought was the vast middle class, not wealthy landowners but working class people in Texas. He tried to be a populist candidate, while simultaneously staying grounded on the conservative side of the Democratic Party. He would have to shift toward a more liberal position once he gravitated to a national base; however, those lines had become more and more blurred to him anyway. He was conservative on some issues while taking a very progressive and liberal position on others as he began his makeover. He had started out with a more conservative stance when he first went to Congress but shifted toward the left the more he infused his district with federal funds for New Deal programs, which ultimately paid dividends at the ballot box.
But Johnson’s ostensible metamorphosis was diluted even more because of his lack of real convictions—he was driven only by his own need for more power and progress toward his lifelong objective—and a growing tendency to present himself as very conservative when speaking to a like audience, while deftly converting himself to a liberal when the occasion demanded it. His oscillation between political ideologies increased when he “won” his Senate seat and had to appeal to voters throughout the then-largest state in the nation. His psychological need to be universally liked must have caused him extreme frustration, since his actions to appease one group caused such consternation among others. The resulting impasse would come to a head when he tepidly sought the nomination for president and, to an even greater extent, when he decided to aggressively pursue the vice presidential nomination, which caused the issue to become part of the public debate.
Many Southerners felt betrayed by Lyndon Johnson in the late 1950s and were as dismayed by Kennedy’s selection of him as the vice presidential nominee as were the Northern liberals. James J. Kilpatrick, then editor of the Richmond News Leader, noted in Human Events that “however he may be respected on the Senate floor, [he] is neither liked nor admired below the Potomac. In the South of 1960, as in the South of 1870, a carpetbagger may be bad, but a scalawag is worse.” The article continued, “If it had been established that he believed deeply and profoundly both in the need for this (civil rights) legislation and in some constitutional justification for it, his loyalty to personal principle would have won a measure of respect. No such record, and no such dedication, were in evidence. ‘South is Betrayed Again by Johnson for the Sake of His Own Ambitions,’ cried the Augusta Herald. ‘He is despised by the people he has betrayed,’ claimed the Shreveport Journal. ‘A political charlatan,’ declared the Nashville Banner. ‘The Southern Benedict Arnold,’ alleged the Jacksonville Times-Union. In South Carolina, the Columbia State termed him ‘the Texas Yankee.’ In Virginia, the Richmond Times-Dispatch bitterly assailed him as ‘just another office-hungry Senator.’ In Birmingham, South magazine called him a ‘political polygamist.’”187
Despite the rancor from conservative Southerners, Lyndon Johnson had won the enmity of liberals too, as he emasculated the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Thus, when Kennedy announced his selection of Johnson for the vice presidential nomination, civil rights activists like Joe Rauh and Walter Reuther threatened to bring the matter to a floor fight at the convention. To appease them, Johnson promised to support any civil rights legislation proposed by Kennedy, but Johnson would eventually spend most of his time as vice president on advancing his own agenda while undermining Kennedy’s: Within weeks of JFK’s inauguration, Johnson would pressure the secretary of agriculture to relax regulatory rules so his friend and benefactor Billie Sol Estes could carry out massive financial fraud; collude with military and intelligence officials to subvert Kennedy’s Cuban policies; sabotage Kennedy’s efforts to secure viable relationships with other countries, notably South Vietnam; continue financially beneficial scams through his numerous contacts in the underworld of mobsters and crooked lobbyists; and extend his own fraudulent schemes with the help of his longtime protégé Bobby Baker.
Lyndon Johnson had learned that power enabled him to control appointments to high-level positions, and the higher his own level, the higher the positions he could control and exploit for his own interests. He exerted direct control over fundamental government decisions, even as the vice president, which was not previously a very powerful position. Before he became president, he was able to manipulate, cajole, and blackmail John Kennedy into making key appointments that Johnson himself had arranged. One such appointment, to replace John Connally as secretary of the navy—an office he had originally been put into through Johnson, and that he was leaving after one year to run for the governorship of Texas—involved Johnson’s old crony Fred Korth, the former president of the Continental National Bank of Fort Worth, Texas; he was given the job of derailing the choice of Boeing Aircraft Corporation as the builder of the new TFX fighter jet, awarding it instead to General Dynamics of Fort Worth, Texas. This event was only one of the Johnson-caused scandals the Kennedy administration would have to defend.
Another example of Johnson-arranged, high-level appointments involved top officials at the Department of Agriculture (DOA), who would become enablers for Johnson’s friend and associate Billie Sol Estes. The plethora of confidence schemes and frauds Johnson and Estes conducted would eventually lead to a series of murders (not so carefully disguised as suicides) of men who had obstructed the two of them; these sordid affairs will be detailed in later chapters.
During the early months of the Kennedy administration, Johnson liked to wander around the White House as if he were attending to important business when in fact he was merely snooping around, reading people, and attempting to insinuate himself into current events. Though it seemed innocent enough, Johnson’s morning routine was calculated: His chauffer would drop him off at the front of the White House, and where he walked through the gates into the entrance, through to the West Wing and out the rear door before going to his own office in the adjacent Executive Office Building (EOB). He may have had many reasons for such an itinerary, but he clearly hoped to learn as much as possible about the latest controversy in the Oval Office.
Horace Busby, in an interview conducted by Michael L. Gillette, attested that:
Vice President Johnson would disappear out of his EOB offices—well, he didn’t disappear, he was gone and you knew where he was gone, most likely was over to the White House—and he was over at the White House wandering around, kind of, you know, your obedient serva
nt just waiting for somebody to say, “Lyndon, would you go down and get the President an apple,” or something. It was funny, and these guys, the Kennedy guys, mostly came from the Hill and they’d known him as the awesome majority leader and they were deferential to him, and yet at the same time they didn’t want him to mess up anything of theirs, which there had been episodes about that along the way. And he was over there just kind of exposing himself to serve notice that he was on call. If you need somebody to go to Greenland, I’m here. And so he came back one afternoon, “All right, this is the way they’re going to play it.” And I don’t remember—he had a whole string of paranoid reactions to what he imagined somebody at the White House was setting him up [for], see. Well, this played out that we went to Dakar and word came—what had preceded this, I don’t know—word came that we were to go to Spain to a military base there and meet with Spanish government officials. Oh, he just went up the wall. He said, “They got Henry Cabot Lodge’s brother there as ambassador,” which was true; (inaudible) he hadn’t been replaced by the new administration, so we still had a Republican ambassador. And he said, “I can see what they’re up to. They want me to come flying in there, and dime to a dollar they’d have Franco out there to meet me” … Johnson saw it only as an effort to embarrass him by saying that first crack out of the barrel, you let him go to Washington and he runs off with his natural ally Franco, because he is obviously a Texas fascist and ultra-conservative and all that kind—oh, he was furious.188
Lyndon Johnson’s ego, despite being bigger than Texas, was nonetheless extremely fragile; he saw not only real slights but imagined ones as well, and never learned to ignore either. He told Clark Clifford of how he seethed over an incident that occurred while he was sitting in the reception area outside the Oval Office waiting to see President Kennedy; Bobby Kennedy walked rapidly through the room and into the Oval Office, without greeting him or even acknowledging his presence.189 Given that their relationship was built on derisive bitterness and outright animosity toward each other, it is curious that he let such a minor slight bother him. Much has been written about the long-term feud between Johnson and Bobby Kennedy but little about how he really felt about John Kennedy. Many authors mistakenly thought the two basically liked each other yet acknowledged that Kennedy’s tolerance of Johnson was tenuous at best, which was evidenced by Johnson’s steadily decreasing presence in White House meetings. In the spring of 1960, Peter Lisagor, a Chicago Daily News reporter and regular pundit on Face the Nation, conversed with Johnson on a plane ride. According to Robert Dallek’s account, when Lisagor repeated the conversation to Robert Kennedy,
“All of the enmity and hostility [Johnson] held for the Kennedys came out.” Johnson described Jack as “a little scrawny fellow with rickets” and God knows what other kind of diseases. Johnson predicted that Jack’s election would give Joe Kennedy control of the country and would make Bobby Secretary of Labor. When Lisagor finished, four letter words and all, Bobby turned to the window and said: “I knew he hated Jack, but I didn’t think he hated him that much.” Bobby gave clear expression to his feelings about Lyndon’s performance at the CEEO … “It brought tensions between Johnson and Kennedy right out on the table and very hard. Everybody was sweating under the armpits … what Bobby and the White House saw was a Vice President unable to convince people that his effort to advance black job equality was anything more than a sham.”190
The hateful relationship between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had many origins, but one in particular would have probably been a major incident in the long litany of examples. It occured in 1959, when Bobby went to Johnson’s ranch to discuss LBJ’s plans for the 1960 presidential election; he assured RFK that he had no intent to run (despite having the Texas legislature pass enabling legislation to allow him to run for reelection as a senator while simultaneously running for the presidency or vice presidency). He then invited Bobby to go deer hunting with him and handed him a powerful ten-gauge shotgun, without warning him about the recoil it had compared with a rifle, which had little kickback. When Bobby shot it, the force of the recoil knocked him to the ground and the flying gunstock cut his forehead. Lyndon’s response was to reach down to help him stand up, saying, “Son, you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.”191 His failure to warn Kennedy in advance—since he was obviously a novice who had never fired a ten-gauge shotgun—was clearly an attempt to humiliate his guest and show who was the “better man.” That shotgun was powerful enough to tear an average whitetail deer in half; no one uses such a gun for anything other than big game or bears, except Lyndon Johnson, who used it as an act of meanness because he doubtlessly knew it would knock Bobby to the ground and in the process possibly injure him when the gunstock flew upward to his face, which in fact it did. After having humiliated and purposely injuring him, it is no surprise that the relationship between them would never recover.
According to Horace Busby, the bad blood between RFK and LBJ started at least as early as 1953, when Joseph McCarthy introduced three of his new aides, one of whom was Bobby, to Johnson in the Senate cafeteria:
“Oh, I want you to meet my staff here.” And the two, two of the guys stood up to meet the imminent leader; and Bobby didn’t stand up. But Joe introduced the two who stood up, and they shook hands with Johnson, and then he said, “And Senator, this is the newest member of our staff, Senator, I mean, Robert Kennedy.” Kennedy did not stand up. And when he looked up at Johnson, I was just startled, because it was, it was contempt … But it was just almost a tangible thing when he looked up at Johnson. And Johnson said, “Hi, Bobby,” and just kind of waved his hand. Bobby made no move either to speak or shake hands or anything.192
In those early days, Bobby’s emotions and attitudes required no abstruse interpretations, as they were visible if not unmistakable to all; their relationship started sourly and never improved. RFK would later say that “Johnson had this ability ‘to eat people up, even people who are considered rather strong figures … He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.’”193 The two had a confrontation at a 1962 White House event, where Johnson asked him, “‘Bobby, you do not like me. Your brother likes me. Your sister-in-law likes me. Your daddy likes me. But you don’t like me. Now, why? Why don’t you like me?’ A witness to the performance said it ‘went on and on for hours.’ Finally, Johnson supplied the answer: Bobby thought he had attacked his father at the 1960 convention and had tried to deny Jack the nomination. When Johnson denied both facts, it incensed Bobby, who later complained that Johnson ‘lies all the time. I’m telling you, he just lies continuously, about everything. In every conversation I have with him, he lies. As I’ve said, he lies even when he doesn’t have to’”194 (emphasis added). JFK agreed on this point, telling Jackie on the evening of November 21, 1963, that Lyndon Johnson was “incapable of telling the truth.”195
President Kennedy quickly became aware of Johnson’s fragile ego, easily hurt feelings, and sensitivity with respect to his schedule. When JFK wanted someone to attend Senegal’s independence celebration, he asked McGeorge Bundy, “How about sending Lyndon? … feel him out. You know how he is—sort of sensitive. He doesn’t like to be pushed into anything.”196 Later, he told Bundy, “Since I am going to Paris in May, I wonder if it is a good idea for Johnson to go to Paris. If it is possible for him to go to Rome without going to see the pope, perhaps that would be a better trip. If not, France would be all right … it would be best if he … not plan to see de Gaulle.” When Bundy pointed out that Congressman Rooney, who was planning to go on the trip, would want to see the pope if they went to Rome, Kennedy instructed him to “draft a letter to be sent to Lyndon suggesting the visits to Geneva and Paris.”197 When Johnson initially flatly refused to go on a trip to Vietnam, saying he did not want to become a roving ambassador, Mrs. Lincoln wrote that “Mr. Kennedy, his Irish temper rising a bit, stood his ground. After Mr. Johnson had left the office, Mr. Kennedy said, ‘What do you know about that? Lyndon stalked out of here
, mad as a hornet, when I asked him to go to Southeast Asia.’”198
During his vice presidency, Johnson constantly tried to finagle trips with Kennedy on Air Force One, and had to be repeatedly reminded that, as a matter of security, they should never ride on the same plane. Kennedy consistently refused to share the airplane but always did something to smooth Johnson’s ruffled feathers; according to Mrs. Lincoln, “It seemed that that one thing bothered the vice president more than anything else.”199 It probably didn’t occur to her that Lyndon simply felt he was being shortchanged, that it was he who should have been riding on Air Force One. Johnson’s oversensitivity about how other people treated him, especially any hint of criticism from others, eventually led JFK to say that sending a birthday greeting to Lyndon was like “drafting a state document.”200
Lyndon constantly complained to the president about the things his brother, Bobby, did to embarrass or humiliate him. JFK’s aide Kenneth O’Donnell described the routine he and JFK established to remedy Johnson’s ego, according to which JFK would call him in “and denounce me in front of Johnson for whatever the Vice President was beefing about. I would humbly take the blame and promise to correct the situation, and the Vice President would go away somewhat happier.”201 O’Donnell related when RFK had declined Johnson’s request to appoint Judge Sarah Hughes to a federal judgeship; Bobby thought Mrs. Hughes, then sixty-five, was too old for such an appointment. Johnson became upset when he learned that she had been given the judgeship after all; Sam Rayburn had subsequently made the same request, threatening to tie up Justice Department bills in the judiciary committee unless she got the appointment. When Bobby told him that he had declined Johnson on the basis of Mrs. Hughes’ age, Rayburn, then almost eighty, glared at the thirty-five-year-old Kennedy. “‘Son, everybody looks old to you. Do you want those bills passed, or don’t you?’ The next day Sarah Hughes was nominated for the federal bench.”202 That Rayburn succeeded where he had failed embarrassed Johnson.
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