In Los Angeles Graham thus had an almost unique access to all the key figures. On Monday, with the tide apparently running strongly for Kennedy, Graham and another longtime Johnson admirer, Joseph Alsop, decided that Kennedy must be persuaded to take Johnson as his running mate. At Alsop’s urging, Graham accompanied him to Kennedy’s suite, where they sent in a message requesting five minutes of his time. When Kennedy appeared, Alsop made a brief argument for Johnson, adding that Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia thought that Johnson would accept. Then he fell into unwonted silence and whispered to Graham, “You do the talking.” Graham developed the case for Johnson. As Graham remembered the meeting, Kennedy immediately agreed—“so immediately,” Graham later wrote, “as to leave me doubting the easy triumph.” Graham therefore restated the argument, telling Kennedy he could not assume that Johnson would decline and he must make the offer compelling enough 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.” Alsop does not remember Kennedy’s reaction as quite this clear-cut; he went away with the feeling that Kennedy was “about 80 per cent” convinced.
Graham, in any case, was astonished that Kennedy should respond to Johnson at all, especially since Robert Kennedy had told him that Johnson would not be considered. He now called James Rowe and asked him to pass the word on to Johnson. Rowe, reasonably taking Kennedy’s remark as a traditional and transparent attempt to coax a rival out of the race, reported the meeting to Johnson with reluctance and skepticism. Johnson dismissed it at once, saying impatiently that he expected the same message was going out to all the candidates.
Graham also authorized his colleagues on the Washington Post to write for Tuesday that “the word in Los Angeles is that Kennedy will offer the Vice-Presidency to Lyndon Johnson,” forbidding them to make it more specific lest it embarrass Kennedy. It was specific enough, however, to terrify the members of the District of Columbia delegation when, by special arrangement, they received their copies of the Post the next morning. The Negro delegates descended on Joseph Rauh, who had been working hard to keep them in line for Kennedy, and demanded an explanation. Rauh went immediately to Robert Kennedy, who said Rauh could assure everyone that Johnson was not in the picture.
Graham had meanwhile arranged to lunch that day with Johnson in the double hope of persuading him to release Stevenson from his neutrality pledge in order to nominate Kennedy and also of persuading Johnson himself to accept the Vice-Presidency. But he found the Senate leader far from Isaiah and in no mood for reasoning together.* By some mischance the Kennedy staff had left Texas on the distribution list of a telegram sent routinely under Kennedy’s signature to uncommitted delegations requesting a chance to talk to their caucuses. The Johnson people had joyfully seized on this to propose a debate that afternoon before a joint session of the Texas and Massachusetts delegations. Johnson was in a state of mingled fatigue and exhilaration, worn out by his own dogged rounds of the delegations but excited by the idea that he might best Kennedy in face-to-face encounter and put himself back in the race for the nomination.
In this battle atmosphere Graham realized that he could not conceivably ask Johnson about Stevenson or the Vice-Presidency. They talked instead about the debate. Johnson was under evident strain, and his thoughts as to what he should say seemed to Graham “a bit harsh and personal.” The Johnson people were already hinting in the corridors that Kennedy had an undisclosed and probably fatal disease and that his father had been pro-Nazi. Fearing an outburst that Johnson might later regret, Graham urged him to avoid ad hominem remarks and to use the occasion to present himself as a man of experience and responsibility, especially in world affairs. He also advised Johnson to take a nap. Johnson readily agreed; and, while he slept, Graham wrote out a few notes for him to use later. During the debate Johnson opened with Graham’s “high road” but went on to attempt the personal thrusts which Kennedy parried with such ease and mastery.
That evening Kennedy and Johnson met again before the South Carolina delegation. The South Carolinians were in a private dining room adjacent to the Stevenson headquarters. To avoid the crowds milling in the corridor, the candidates chose to slip into the caucus through the Stevenson office. While Johnson was speaking inside, Kennedy paced about the Stevenson room. After a few moments, Johnson came out, placed his hand on Kennedy’s shoulder and his nose next to Kennedy’s face and said with great emotion, “Jack, if you don’t stop acting the way you are, we’re liable to have to support that little fellow we nominated in ’56 and ’52.” A member of the Stevenson staff who witnessed the exchange, told me later, “Johnson’s eyes were like flame throwers.” Kennedy smiled enigmatically and, without saying a word, entered the other room. The observer’s impression was that Johnson “felt that Kennedy’s tactics were very unfair and he was ready to do anything to stop his nomination.”
At five o’clock Wednesday morning Graham conceived a new idea—a message to the convention from Kennedy to be read by Stevenson on Thursday asking the delegates to draft Johnson for Vice-President. He passed this on to Kennedy later that morning. The two men were driving from the Biltmore to another hotel, where Kennedy was meeting still another caucus. Graham explained that he could leave a draft of the message with Bobby or Ted Sorensen. Kennedy said, “Leave it with me only.” He added that he might be twenty votes short on the first ballot and asked if there were any chance of getting Johnson votes out of the Vice-Presidency offer. Graham said he could think of none unless George Smathers could swing some votes in Florida. Kennedy said that the trouble was that Smathers wanted to be Vice-President too. Graham then said that Kennedy could not miss by twenty votes and, dropping into the argot of the Harvard Law School, observed that his nomination was guaranteed by res ipsa loquitur. In the midst of the traffic jam and convention hubbub, Kennedy looked up, always ready to learn something new, and said, “What does that mean?”
3. FALLING INTO A DECISION
The week of the convention had been too tense and chancy to give Kennedy time for serious thought about the Vice-Presidency. Now the question could no longer be postponed. During the victory celebrations Wednesday night he observed a little wistfully how terrible it was to have only twenty-four hours in which to make so fateful a choice. But he came that night to a quiet decision to make the first offer to Johnson.
He decided to do this because he thought it imperative to restore relations with the Senate leader. Johnson was the man whose cooperation would be essential for the success of a Kennedy legislative program, and he was in addition the representative of the section of the country which regarded Kennedy with the greatest mistrust. News of the offer, Kennedy hoped, would reunite the Democrats, please the older generation of professionals, now so resentful of the ‘angry young men’ who had taken over their party, improve the ticket’s chances in the South and lay the basis for future collaboration with Johnson. He was certain, on the basis of Johnson’s multitudinous declarations and attitudes, that there was practically no chance that Johnson would accept. Very few people in Los Angeles that week imagined for an instant that Johnson would exchange the power of the majority leadership for the oblivion of the Vice-Presidency.
Accordingly he called Johnson’s suite at eight forty-five on Thursday morning. Johnson was still sleeping, and his wife answered the phone. Kennedy said that he would like to come down and see the leader. Lady Bird awoke her husband, who nodded assent. As she put down the phone, she burst out, “Honey, I know he’s going to offer the Vice-Presidency, and I hope you won’t take it.”
This was not Johnson’s first intimation that the question might be raised. The Johnsons had taken defeat philosophically. When his downcast associates gathered after the balloting in Johnson headquarters in the Sports Arena, Lynda Bird, Johnson’s seventeen-year-old daughter, had dispelled their gloom with a cheerful speech, saying that all was not lost and they would li
ve to fight another day. James Rowe, calling on Johnson later that evening at the Biltmore, found him in his pajamas, smiling and good-humored and looking forward to his first tranquil night’s sleep in a week. But a few minutes later Sam Rayburn had disturbed the tranquillity. He telephoned Johnson and said, “They are going to try to get you to go on the ticket. You mustn’t do it. It would be a terrible thing to do.” Johnson expressed great doubt that he would be asked but said he would do nothing without checking with Rayburn.
Kennedy’s call now made it highly likely that an offer would be forthcoming, and Johnson, bestirring himself, began the telephone rounds he customarily made when large decisions impended. He was, as one of his associates put it, a “spectrum thinker,” consulting a carefully selected panel of advisers from left to right at critical moments. If the adviser gave the expected counsel, Johnson moved on. If the advice differed from what he expected, he would pause and brood.
He first alerted Rayburn, who repeated his dour warnings of the night before. He called a Texas intimate, Congressman Homer Thornberry, whom he caught shaving. Lather on his cheek, Thornberry went to the phone, heard Johnson’s story and emphatically advised him not to touch the Vice-Presidency. Johnson, listening silently, finally said, “But what will I say to Senator Kennedy?” A few minutes later, Thornberry, back before his mirror, began to wonder what right he had to tell anyone that he should not become Vice-President of the United States. He returned to the telephone and reported his change of mind to Johnson, who again listened silently and finally said, “But what will I say to Mr. Sam?” Another adviser, Rowe, started out by opposing the Vice-Presidency on the ground that Johnson had more power as leader. When Johnson seemed not a little resistant to this argument, there flashed through Rowe’s mind the astonishing thought that Johnson might be considering the idea seriously.
This was, indeed, the case. It is true that a week before Los Angeles, when George Smathers remarked in the leader’s office that Kennedy might offer Johnson the Vice-Presidency, Johnson, reflecting that the only duty assigned by the Constitution to the Vice-President was that of presiding over the Senate, had said with feeling, “I wouldn’t trade a vote for a gavel.” Yet there are reasons to suppose that the idea of the Vice-Presidency had lain for some time in the inner recesses of that infinitely complex and subtle mind. Indeed, in the winter and spring of 1960, he had striven to avoid trouble with Kennedy almost as if he wished to keep the vice-presidential option open. Thus he had shunned confrontations in the primaries, even though he had been under great pressure to enter West Virginia where his southern accent and Protestant faith might have made him a powerful contender. Only toward the end, carried away by the emotions of combat, had he risked personal clashes with the man who seemed most likely to win the nomination.
During the spring Johnson must have thought a good deal about his future if Kennedy and Nixon became the nominees. Whoever won the election, the post of Senate leader would be very different from what it had been under an indifferent and passive President like Eisenhower. Johnson could hardly expect to retain the power he had exerted with such relish and skill in the late fifties. Moreover, it was a taxing job, and he was tiring of it. And he could not but recall the fate of his predecessors, Knowland and McFarland and Lucas, all of whom had become politically vulnerable at home as a result of their absorption in the responsibilities of Senate leadership.
Beyond this, Johnson had long wanted to be a national and not a sectional political figure. But this ambition had always been blocked by his identification with his Texas constituency. The Vice-Presidency had attracted him before as a way of escape from the purely regional role. In 1952 Rayburn had urged Stevenson to take him on the ticket, and for a moment in 1956 Johnson had succumbed to the pleadings of Senator Russell of Georgia and allowed his availability to be reported to Stevenson and James Finnegan. Now he saw what might be a last chance to break out of the Texas trap and become a national leader.
He had, in addition, a deep sense of responsibility about the future of the South in the American political system. He used to lament the fact that so much southern political energy was diverted from constructive channels to the defense of the past, that a Senator with the manifest abilities of Russell, for example, had wasted his talent and energy in fighting for lost causes. If the Democratic party did not give a southerner a place on the ticket in 1960, it would drive the South even further back on itself and into self-pity, bitterness and futility. He may well have seen in the Vice-Presidency a means of leading the South back into the Democratic party and the national consensus.
Such considerations were doubtless in his mind when Kennedy arrived around ten o’clock, and the two men sat together on a couch in the living room of Johnson’s suite.
Kennedy began by telling Johnson, as Johnson later recalled the talk, “that he had said many times that he thought I was the best qualified for the Presidency by experience, but that as a southerner I could not be nominated. He said he felt that I should be the one who would succeed if anything happened to him.”
Then, to Kennedy’s astonishment, Johnson showed every interest in the project. “I didn’t offer the Vice-Presidency to him,” Kennedy told a friend later. “I just held it out like this”—here he simulated taking an object out of his pocket and holding it close to his body—“and he grabbed at it.”
Having indicated receptivity, Johnson went on to say that his own people—Lady Bird and Sam Rayburn in particular—did not want him to go on the ticket. He asked what alternatives Kennedy had in mind. Kennedy mentioned Freeman, Symington and Jackson, and Johnson had the impression that his thoughts were running toward Freeman. Then Kennedy asked whether Speaker Rayburn had anything against him. Johnson said that he did not; Rayburn simply thought that Johnson should stay as leader—perhaps Kennedy should talk to him. Finally Johnson asked time to think the matter over. Kennedy left, saying, “I’ll call you back in two or three hours.’’
Johnson now resumed his canvass of opinion. Most of the southern leaders who had backed him for the nomination vigorously opposed his taking second place. A parade of southern governors, led by Price Daniel of Texas, insisted that the burden of running in the South with a man who was both a Catholic and a champion of civil rights was too much to carry; one handicap might be tolerable, but not both. Someone suggested that Kennedy might have mentioned the Vice-Presidency on the assumption that Johnson would turn it down; and this thought evidently preyed on Johnson’s mind. He paced his suite, made telephone calls around the country (including one to his fellow Texan John Nance Gamer, who had served as Vice-President for two terms under Roosevelt and who reminded Johnson of the influence a Vice-President could exercise in critical debates by his power to give or deny Senators the floor), collared his associates and demanded their advice, thought, agonized and paced some more.
In the meantime, Kennedy had returned to his own suite in a state of considerable bafflement. “You just won’t believe it,” he said. “. . . He wants it!” Still, having started on the Johnson road, he had no immediate choice except to follow it a little further. He accordingly went to Rayburn. He said that he wanted to be the candidate of a united party and that he planned to give the Vice-President significant assignments, especially in foreign affairs. Rayburn listened carefully and, as he later recalled it, replied, “Well, up until thirty minutes ago I was against it, and I have withheld a final decision until I could really find out what was in your heart.” The Speaker ruminated a moment about his age—“I am in the twilight of my life, walking down into the valley”—and said that he had wanted to keep Johnson in the legislative end because he needed him there. “Now the way you explain it I can see that you need him more. You are looking at the whole.” He mused for another moment about Johnson. “Well, there is always the thought in a fellow’s mind that he might get to be President. Lyndon is a good soldier, and he will hear the call of duty. I yield on one condition . . . that you go on the radio or television and tell the peop
le you came to us and asked for this thing.” Kennedy agreed.*
Rayburn then called Johnson and said, “Lyndon, you’ve got to go on the ticket.” Johnson replied, “But last night you told me that, whatever happened, I should not go on the ticket. What has made you change your mind?” Rayburn said, “I’m a wiser man this morning than I was last night. Besides, that other fellow [Nixon] called me a traitor, and I don’t want a man who calls me a traitor to be President of the United States. We’ve got to beat him, and you’ve got to do everything you can to help.”
4. THE NOMINATION OF LYNDON JOHNSON
Back again in his own suite, Kennedy now began to review the situation. The offer to Johnson and the appeal to Rayburn had been more effective than he had anticipated. Contrary to every expectation, Johnson evidently wanted the Vice-Presidency. Kennedy’s problem now was whether this was the result he himself, as presidential nominee, wanted, and, if not, whether he could get out of it.
As he discussed the matter with his brother, they saw strong arguments for taking Johnson. He would probably help the ticket more than anyone else because he could bring with him states which Kennedy might not otherwise carry—Texas and possibly other states in the South. Even more important, as the Kennedys talked it over, a Kennedy administration would certainly have a greater prospect of success with Johnson as a collaborator in the executive branch than as a competitor on the Hill. And Johnson, as Kennedy had often acknowledged, was a man of force and decision to whom, in case anything happened, the government could be responsibly consigned.
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