AT LYNDON JOHNSON’S TUESDAY MIDNIGHT PRESS CONFERENCE, one reporter had asked him if he would accept the nomination for vice president. “I have not the slightest interest in such an assignment,” he said. When, however, another reporter pressed him to make his reply definitive, to say that he would not accept the vice presidential nomination if it was offered to him, Johnson did not do so. He said something very different. “I am not saying that under NO circumstances would I refuse to serve,” he said.
Little attention was paid to the reply at the time; only one or two reporters even bothered to include it in their articles on the press conference. But attention should have been paid. Felix McKnight of the Dallas Morning News, who was close to Connally and got much of his information from him, was shortly to write that Johnson is “reported ready to accept the vice presidency if he is asked.”
In fact, he wasn’t waiting to be asked. Early Thursday evening a number of Johnson partisans, Tommy Corcoran prominent among them, “told Johnson that he ought to be Vice President,” and Johnson told Rowe: “Go in and talk to Adlai. Tell him I want it.” Rowe says that “I went in to where everyone was churning around at Adlai, and I said to Finnegan, ‘I have got to talk with you and Adlai right away.’ So they came out of the room and I said, ‘I have got a candidate for the vice presidency and he says he wants it.’” Stevenson reacted graciously, if noncommittedly, with “a very flowery, attractive speech … right off the top of his head, saying ‘I am a great admirer of Lyndon Johnson. I don’t know what I am going to do. I want you to go back and tell Johnson he is one of the great men,’ and so forth.” Finnegan was simply flabbergasted. He “just sort of sat there and said something like you can knock me [over with a feather]. I said, ‘That’s my message, gentlemen,’ and left.”
It was only after Rayburn had offered a little fatherly advice to Johnson on the subject that he dropped the idea. When Corcoran told Rayburn what Johnson was doing, the Speaker reacted with his unique version of disapproval. “I saw that red [flush] coming up over his neck and head, and I just said to myself, ‘Uh-oh,’” Corcoran recalls. The whole subject of the vice presidency had already proved irritating to Rayburn; reporters were constantly asking him if he himself would accept the job, a question Rayburn regarded as insulting; “I have never been a candidate for vice president of anything,” he growled to one. The advice he gave to Johnson was blunt, and profane—and within a very short time, Rowe was entrusted with a new message for Stevenson. “Johnson said, ‘Go back and tell Stevenson that NO Texan wants to be vice president…. The only thing I want is to be in the meeting where the vice president is selected.’ I don’t want to be humiliated by not being called into the meeting.” Returning to Stevenson and Finnegan, an embarrassed Rowe said, “I don’t understand what I am doing, gentlemen, but I now have a new message.”
SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE Rowe delivered his two messages, Stevenson and Finnegan had already privately decided on a startling move: instead of announcing his choice of vice presidential candidate as presidential nominees traditionally do, Stevenson would throw the convention open to make its own choice. An hour or two after Rowe had delivered the messages, at about the time Rayburn was announcing that Stevenson had won the nomination, Stevenson sent word to the Speaker on the podium—and to Johnson in the Imperial Suite at the Hilton—to please join him in a private room at the Stockyards Inn restaurant across a parking lot from the International Amphitheatre, and there gave them, and other party leaders, advance notice of his decision.
Rayburn denounced it, in John Bartlow Martin’s words, “profanely and contemptuously,” and Johnson was only slightly less violent. After all his work to keep the party united, Rayburn saw, Stevenson was about to divide it and throw the convention into turmoil. And the two Texans feared that in an open convention, the despised Kefauver would win: there were less than twenty-four hours before the balloting for vice president began, and the Tennessean, with his forces already organized, would have a long head start. Moreover, Johnson and Rayburn said, the decision would contribute to the impression, already far too prevalent, that Stevenson was indecisive. His face again red with rage, Rayburn stood there refusing to agree to what Stevenson was suggesting until Johnson took him by his arm and said, “Mr. Sam, it’s his decision, he has to live with it, not us,” and pulled him away. “All right,” Rayburn said, “if your mind’s made up, give me your arm and I’ll take you out there and introduce you to the convention.” Watching them leave the room, Democratic Deputy Chairman Hy Raskin warned a friend: “Stay out of the old man’s way—he’s madder’n hell.” Stevenson’s announcement ignited a mad scramble. “Within minutes,” Time said, “no delegate could buy his own drink and no elderly lady could cross a Chicago street without help from an eager vice-presidential candidate.”
Making clear that he himself was no longer interested in the vice presidential nomination (“Under no circumstances that I visualize will my name ever go before the convention,” he said now), Lyndon Johnson also made it clear that he intended to determine who did get it, but he had as little success—and adroitness—in the maneuvering for this nomination as he had had for the presidential nomination.
The South’s Number One priority was to stop Kefauver, and Johnson kept huddling with the leaders of the southern delegations to determine which of the other candidates—Kennedy, Humphrey, Gore, Wagner—would be most likely to do that, so that the South could unite behind him. The South was looking for leadership from him, but he seemed unable to decide. “I talked to Lyndon, too,” John Kennedy was later to recall, “but he gave me a noncommittal answer. Maybe Hubert thought Lyndon was for him and maybe Symington thought the same thing and maybe Gore thought that too and maybe Lyndon wanted them all to think that. We never knew how that one [Johnson] would turn out.” In fact, Johnson’s indecisiveness was making it difficult for him to keep even his own delegation in line, and he repeatedly had to be rescued by Rayburn.
His first choice to stop Kefauver was Humphrey, but Johnson was afraid of antagonizing his conservative Texas financial backers with that liberal choice and doubtful that the other southern states would rally behind a senator so strong for civil rights. When the Texans held their first caucus of the day at 10:30 a.m. Friday, he suggested Texas vote for Tennessee Governor Frank Clement on the first ballot as a holding action, with the idea of switching later to Humphrey. This idea appealed to almost no one—the delegation’s conservatives preferred practically anyone to Humphrey, the liberals preferred Kefauver—and Johnson was losing control of a hectic meeting when Rayburn, who had been sitting silently, stood up and said bluntly that “Kefauver can’t win in Texas,” and that Kennedy was unacceptable because of anti-Catholic prejudice in America. “You fellows are too young to remember the Al Smith thing,” Rayburn was to say later. “I’ve been through it.” (Rayburn had another reason, which he didn’t divulge, for opposing Kennedy; he had watched the young man’s performance in the House and considered him, as his biographers note, “a wealthy dilettante.”) The caucus agreed to vote for Clement on the first ballot.
But when Rayburn, high above the jammed, swirling floor on the podium, gaveled the convention to order that afternoon, Johnson got a rude shock: Clement wasn’t going to be on the ballot. The Tennessee Governor came over and informed him that he had withdrawn, and that Tennessee was going to nominate Senator Gore. One of the Texas delegates, Kathleen Voight, standing near Johnson, said sarcastically: “We’re gonna vote for a man who’s not even running.” Johnson then repeated to Clement that Texas intended to vote for him; Clement said politely that he “was very grateful,” but didn’t want the votes. Johnson hurried up to the podium, where Rayburn told him what to do: vote for Gore. When Johnson told the Speaker that he doubted he could persuade the delegation to do that, Rayburn said, “Use my name”—and it was only when Johnson did so that some order was restored. As Johnson cast Texas’s fifty-six votes for Gore, “the delegates sat stone-faced,” one account noted.
At the end of the first ballot, Kefauver had 4831/2 votes, Kennedy 304, the other candidates trailed far behind; it was clear that the race was between two men—neither of whom was Humphrey or Gore, the two men Johnson had suggested.
“As Rayburn surveyed the field,” his biographer notes, “Kennedy began to look better—anybody but Kefauver.” Johnson felt the same way. He told the delegation that he knew all the senatorial candidates, and that Kennedy was the best man. The delegates were not persuaded, and the Gore backers in the delegation kept fighting for their man. Then, as Time reported, “the delegation was faced down by grim old Sam Rayburn.” “We’ve got a choice of two men—Kennedy and Kefauver,” he said bluntly. “Gentlemen, you can vote as you please—but Sam Rayburn is voting for Kennedy.” Texas decided to vote for Kennedy.
On the second ballot, Kennedy surged ahead of Kefauver, with Gore far behind. When the roll call reached Texas, Johnson grabbed the floor microphone and shouted: “Texas proudly casts its fifty-six votes for the fighting sailor who wears the scars of battle….” With his announcement, it looked for a moment as if Kennedy would win, and Johnson shouted exultantly, “All right, it’s over!” But that was just another of his mistakes; at the very moment that he was shouting, the standards of half a dozen states were waving wildly in the air, in signals to Rayburn that they wanted to change their vote—and one of the standards was Tennessee’s. Grabbing a microphone himself, Gore announced that he was withdrawing—in favor of Kefauver.
Gore’s switch turned the tide. State after state switched to Kefauver. One state that did not switch, however, was Texas. Johnson sat at the foot of the Texas standard, holding the microphone in his lap, chewing his lip and looking more and more uncomfortable. As it became obvious that Kefauver would win, many Texans wanted the state to join him. Pushing his way angrily down the crowded aisle toward Johnson, one delegate shouted, “If we can’t drive the bandwagon, at least let’s ride on it!” Responding lamely, “We don’t want to be changing from one to the other,” Johnson was still sitting there, glumly holding the silent microphone, refusing to help nominate Kefauver, when suddenly Kennedy was striding out on the platform above him to move that Kefauver be nominated by acclamation. Over Johnson’s face came a grimace, in the words of one man who saw it, “of real, deep pain.”
HE HAD REASONS to grimace. His party’s nominees were two men he disliked and despised. (While he and his mother were being driven back to the Hilton from the International Amphitheatre after Stevenson’s acceptance speech that evening, she asked him what he thought of Stevenson’s chances to win the election. “He’s a nice fellow, Mother, but he won’t make it ’cause he’s got too much lace on his drawers,” Lyndon Johnson said.) He had done his best during the convention to “stop” both Stevenson and Kefauver—without success.
And there were other, larger, reasons. Before the convention, Lyndon Johnson had been almost universally portrayed as an enormously powerful and influential figure in the Democratic Party. By the end of the convention, it had become obvious that that portrait was overdrawn. His image as a brilliant political strategist had also been smudged. “Lyndon Johnson’s reputation as an uncommonly astute Senate leader remains unimpaired, but the fact has been established—as it was not before—that in the jungle of a national convention he cannot employ the gifts he uses in the Senate,” Richard Rovere wrote in The New Yorker. He had, in fact, looked almost foolish. Before the convention opened, summarized the Washington Post and Times-Herald, it had been expected that Stevenson “would have to make bargains if he hoped to win the nomination. He would have to ‘deal with’ the kingmaker, Sen. Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who was expected to corral a huge bloc of Southern delegates and tie them up until he got what he wanted. Adlai would have to be a supplicant and give Johnson his way with respect to a civil-rights plank and a vice presidential nomination…. Of course, it didn’t turn out that way…. Sen. Johnson, so his friends say, was carried away for a while with a vision of himself in the White House. At any rate, he waited too long to play his cards as a king maker…. The idea that [Adlai] would have to make concessions to Sen. Johnson … seemed a fantastic one in the storm of ballots and acclaim tonight.” “This great maneuverer from Texas has been outmaneuvered,” the Wall Street Journal said.
Even friendly Texas journalists agreed. “The Johnson bloopers on both candidates cannot be ignored for they were surprising at the hands of such a skilled political technician,” Leslie Carpenter wrote. Johnson’s tactics at the convention were a “mystery,” Sarah McClendon wrote. “Here is a man who wanted to be sought but would not seek. He wanted to be President, but he did not tell some states and would not go to ask for votes, even when invited and urged by those states.” Marshall McNeil used the same word. “What’s Sen. Lyndon Johnson actually been up to this week? Some regard this as the major mystery of the Democratic convention,” he said. “State after state, delegate after delegate,” had decided, “instead of being on the fence, to be on the side of the probable winner … but not Lyndon Johnson.” McNeil said that delegates were asking “a question”: “What had happened to a man who had always seemed one of the smartest operators around—never a man to get left out on the end of the issue.” “One of his [Johnson’s] aides” had assured McNeil early in the week, “He’s too smart to stay stuck all the way through. He’s too quick on his feet”—but in fact, McNeil noted, Johnson had “stayed stuck all the way through…. He is a skillful cloak-room and Senate floor operator, [but] a national convention is not the Senate; the same techniques don’t apply.” And those were the assessments of friendly journalists. Drew Pearson gloated that “Lyndon ended up looking like a cellophane bag with a hole in it.” Dreading humiliation though he did, Lyndon Johnson had brought a form of humiliation—ridicule—on himself.
There were also less subjective, more rational reasons for Lyndon Johnson to grimace, considerations that were much more serious than a failure to stop other candidates. Johnson’s foremost priority before the convention had been to avoid being labeled as the “southern candidate.” So overriding was this objective that his tactics had revolved around it: to achieve it, he had refused to seek southern delegates, had, in fact, declined the southern states’ offers of delegates. And yet that label had been pinned on him—quite firmly. Arthur Krock had flatly called him “a sectional candidate,” and James Reston had ridiculed his attempts to pretend that he wasn’t one. Describing Chicago as “a place … full of fantasy,” in which “normally serious, intelligent, experienced men, sweating under the Presidential fever … can convince themselves of anything,” Reston said that one of these “illusions” was that “Lyndon can persuade himself that he is really a national and not a regional figure.” In a sentence that must have been particularly hurtful to Johnson, Reston said he “is playing in this convention the role played by Richard Russell of Georgia in the last.” And the label fit, as the actual balloting had proved. The only state besides his own which had voted for him was the most segregationist state in the entire country.
Not only had he been tagged at Chicago with the label he didn’t want, Lyndon Johnson had also been given dramatic, devastating proof of how damaging that label was to his chances for national office, not only in 1956 but in any future year. He had learned for himself, the hard way, what before he had known only by observing the fate of others: you could not win a presidential nomination as the “southern candidate.” Even had he kept the South solid in Chicago—as he could so easily have done, simply by early and openly avowing his candidacy—the South would still not have been able to play a decisive role in the convention. It had, after all, been while the South was still holding aloof from Stevenson that Stevenson had wrapped up the nomination with northern votes. Influential, even decisive, as the South was in the Senate, with its chairmanships and its filibuster, in a national convention, it had only 262 of 1,373 votes, and that wasn’t enough. It was those huge non-southern blocs of delegates that a candidate needed—Michigan’s 44, Ohio
’s 58, Illinois’s 64, California’s 68, Pennsylvania’s 74, New York’s 98. If you wanted the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, you had to get votes from the North.
And, Lyndon Johnson had learned the hard way in Chicago, there had never been any realistic possibility that he would get those votes. He had entered the convention believing—and had, after Truman’s intervention, believed even more firmly on the Monday and Tuesday of that frantic week in Chicago—that he had a chance of getting at least some significant liberal support, and he had learned, learned beyond possibility of misunderstanding, that there was no chance of that, and never had been. He had thought he could split the North, but the North wouldn’t split—in large part because its antipathy toward him was so strong it didn’t want to give him an opening. One of the arguments most effective in persuading northern delegates to unite behind Adlai Stevenson, in fact, had been the argument that if they didn’t, Lyndon Johnson might exert significant influence at the convention, might even become the nominee. New York might not even have held firm behind its own Governor “if it looked like a coup by Johnson was in the making.” Johnson may have been aware before the convention of the depth of northern antipathy to him, of the implacability of liberal resolve to deny power to him, or to any other southern candidate. He could hardly have been unaware of this reality, having watched from a ringside seat as it crushed Richard Russell in 1952. But just as Russell had not understood the reality—understood it emotionally as well as intellectually—until it struck him personally, so Johnson had not understood it fully. When Jim Rowe had awakened him at 5 a.m. to tell him that Michigan was going for Stevenson, his reaction had been: “I don’t believe it.”
But he had to believe it now.
36
Choices
TWO INTERNATIONAL CRISES in the Fall of 1956—the brutal Russian suppression of the Hungarian uprising and the escalating Mideast conflict over the Suez Canal—rallied Americans behind their President, whose smile was as fatherly reassuring as ever. Dwight Eisenhower’s landslide popular plurality in his rematch with Adlai Stevenson approached ten million; Adlai won only seven states (all in the South). The Democrats hung on to Capitol Hill, however, overcoming Earle Clements’ medical discharge from the Senate to hold their 49–47 margin there. When Congress reconvened in January, 1957, Lyndon Johnson would still be Majority Leader.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 131