The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Richard Nixon probably did more than any previous vice president to elevate the office in the eyes of average Americans. But what followed ultimately obscured that distinction. His role of goodwill ambassador around the world won him much notoriety and acclaim. In political seasons, however, the role of the president’s and the party’s hatchet man and the Watergate scandal colored much of the American public’s view of him. His pursuit of politics at all costs eventually brought him to the Oval Office, but in the end it also drove him from it.

  LYNDON B. JOHNSON

  OF TEXAS

  Despite the gestures of some presidents to give their understudies a more significant role in their administrations, the reputation of the vice presidency remained low in the minds of power wielders in Washington in the mid-twentieth century. So when Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson was approached in 1960 by the Democratic presidential nominee, John F. Kennedy, to be his running mate, Johnson’s acceptance was both surprising and puzzling. As a tough, overbearing, and crafty politician, he was widely regarded at the time as second only to the president himself in terms of influence in national public affairs.

  Why Kennedy wanted Johnson, however, was easy to comprehend. As an overwhelmingly popular Texan and southerner, LBJ could help deliver votes in his state and region that otherwise might seem out of reach for a Yankee liberal from Massachusetts. Beyond that, having him under JFK’s tent as vice president would remove a potential rival power center on Capitol Hill. From Johnson’s point of view, he might have calculated that with a Democrat in the Oval Office, his own clout as party leader in the Senate would be seriously diminished, so he might as well be inside that tent.

  Johnson may have expected that he would wield even more influence on legislative matters on Capitol Hill as the president’s man there. But matters were not to work out that way. Instead, destiny intervened with the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963 and catapulted Johnson to the presidency itself. There, his extraordinary political talents eventually came into play in building a remarkable legislative record, only to be marred by a calamitous war in Vietnam.

  Lyndon Johnson’s roots in rural Texas Hill Country, in the central part of the state, hinted at a career in politics, though never at reaching the heights that were to come. A great-great-uncle, John Wheeler Bunton, a tall transplanted Tennessean, was a signer of the Republic of Texas Declaration of Independence and a hero of the war with Mexico, which prompted that declaration.1 A grandfather, Joseph Wilson Baines, was a teacher, lawyer, newspaperman, Texas secretary of state, and member of the state legislature.

  Lyndon’s father, Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., was a farmer and young Texas state legislator, and his mother, Rebekah Baines Johnson, an elocution teacher. The two shared an interest in politics and often spent their dates listening to political orators, including William Jennings Bryan. They were married in 1907, and their second son was born on a farm near the small town of Stonewall on August 27, 1908. Lyndon’s mother, as a college graduate, did not appreciate her husband’s gruff country ways and speech, and she found adjustment to farm life difficult and depressing. She compensated by concentrating on young Lyndon, her favorite among his brother, Sam Houston, and three sisters, Rebekah, Josepha, and Lucia, focusing on his education at home and as he advanced through grade and high school levels.2

  From some of his earliest days, the boy talked politics with his father, who when Lyndon was about ten would take him to Austin during legislative sessions and as he campaigned.3 Sam and Lyndon liked to talk and, as the boy got older, to argue, but the men who engaged them saw one difference: Lyndon always insisted on winning.4 And he seemed to learn by talking and listening, not by reading much. In his family he was known to skimp on doing homework but got by as a quick study. When his father was away, leaving Lyndon with chores around the house, he would push them off on his siblings.5

  During Lyndon’s grade-school years, his father fell on bad economic times in his real estate and other financial ventures, requiring severe belt-tightening, which nonetheless did not free him from deep debt. Living now in Johnson City, a poverty-stricken backwater where the Depression came as early as 1924, Lyndon took the circumstances particularly hard. Upon Lyndon’s graduation from the local high school, his parents insisted that Lyndon go to college, despite their financial straits, but the boy refused. The only job available was road work, and he abhorred physical labor. When four of his local friends went to San Marcos to register for college, he went along on his father’s orders but returned to Johnson City without signing up.

  Subsequently, again ignoring the wishes of his father, Lyndon ran away and joined four older boys in buying an old Model-T Ford and driving to California in quest of preferable work. Eventually they split up, and he wrote later, “Up and down the coast I tramped. Washing dishes, waiting on tables, doing farm work when it was available, and always growing thinner.”6 By his eighteenth year, in late 1925, he was back in Texas, working for the State Highway Department. He fell in with some older and wilder companions, developed a conspicuous if awkward swagger, and came home one night bloodied in a one-sided fight.

  He finally agreed, in 1927, to go to Southwest Texas State Teachers College, and he talked his way into a campus job and its meager sustenance, inflating his résumé by falsely claiming he came from the founders of Johnson City. He inflated his IQ and his grades as well and made the college debating team but, because of his boasting, exaggerating, and dominating conversation, was not very popular. He earned the nickname Bull Johnson, which the campus College Star explained this way: “Bull: Greek philosophy in which Lyndon Johnson has an M.B. degree.”7

  In 1928, extravagant purchases such as expensive clothes and a car left him unable to pay his tuition, so he took a teaching job at $125 a month at a Mexican school in the small south Texas town of Cotulla. On arrival he was made principal, at last in charge of something, with five housewife-teachers under his authority. In June 1929, he returned to college in San Marcos, where he broke into campus politics and developed the persuasive powers that would come to be his trademark. After graduation, he got a job teaching public speaking at Sam Houston High School, in Houston, and coaching the school debating team, which reached the state finals.8

  In Lyndon’s second year there, he received a phone call from Richard Kleberg, a scion of the King Ranch dynasty in Texas and a newly elected Texas congressman looking for a secretary to head his office in Washington. Five days later, with a leave of absence from Houston High, Johnson was on his way to a career in national politics that would not end until he reached its pinnacle.9 Kleberg enjoyed being in Congress but had other interests, including golf, polo, hunting, and an eclectic range of endeavors that gave his secretary, later called administrative assistant, a heavy workload and wide latitude in handling it. Kleberg authorized Johnson to answer and sign letters in the congressman’s name and make phone calls identifying himself as Kleberg.10 Johnson also ran the congressman’s successful 1932 reelection campaign.

  In 1934, he met Claudia “Lady Bird” Taylor, a recent University of Texas graduate and daughter of well-off parents. He proposed marriage on the first day they met and then conducted a whirlwind courtship that included a visit to the impressive King Ranch before heading off to Washington, alone. They were married in San Antonio two and a half months later and set up housekeeping there in a one-bedroom apartment. Johnson used his Texas connections to become the state director of the new National Youth Administration, where he first met FDR.11 Lyndon and Lady Bird later moved to Austin, where he focused on finding construction jobs for young workers, enabling them to stay in school, and kept his eyes open for political opportunities.

  In 1937, when a Democratic congressman from central Texas died, Johnson’s father-in-law bankrolled him to run for the seat. In a six-man field, 28 percent of the vote was enough to win, and Johnson was elected as a solid backer of Roosevelt’s agenda. When Roosevelt next visited Texas, Johnson met him and won appointment to an important
House subcommittee.12 Now under the guiding wing of the senior Texas congressman Sam Rayburn, Johnson became a champion of rural electrification, power, and public housing projects in his district. Then in 1941, when Texas’s senior senator, Morris Sheppard, died of a stroke, Johnson decided to run in the special election. Linking himself again to Roosevelt, on Election Night he appeared to be on the way to victory over Governor Lee “Pappy” Daniels. But Daniels scraped up enough late-reported rural votes of questionable legitimacy to edge Johnson out by 1,311 out of more than 350,000 votes cast.13

  Barely a month later, when Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the war, Johnson was drawn into it as well. During his failed campaign for the Senate, he had promised voters, “If the day ever comes when my vote must be cast to send your boy to the trenches, that day Lyndon Johnson will leave his Senate seat and go with him.”14 In fact, several months earlier he had been commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, and the day after Pearl Harbor he wrote to Roosevelt asking him to assign him “immediately to active duty with the Fleet.”15 He thereafter stood up in the House of Representatives and won unanimous consent for an indefinite leave of absence.

  FDR got Johnson assigned to Navy Undersecretary James Forrestal, and Johnson, along with his congressional aide John Connally, later a governor of Texas, was sent to the U.S.–New Zealand Command in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Lady Bird ran his congressional office in his absence. Aware that this stateside duty would not help his political career, Johnson flew back to Washington to lobby for overseas duty. Through Forrestal, Roosevelt sent him to the Pacific with a message to General Douglas MacArthur to provide what Johnson later called “a very low-ranking set of eyes and ears” for the president.16

  Johnson flew to MacArthur’s headquarters in Melbourne, Australia. From an airfield on Port Moresby, he decided to hitch a ride on a B-26 bomber making a run over a Japanese target. Two bombers were available for him and two army colonels. They boarded the first one; the other was shot down, and all aboard were drowned. Johnson’s bomber also came under attack by Japanese fighters but managed to return safely. For unexplained reasons, MacArthur awarded Johnson a Silver Star, although he did not engage in any military action, and no one else aboard got one.17

  Eight days after the mission, Roosevelt ordered that members of Congress on active duty return to inactive duty and to their political offices. Of the eight involved, four resigned their seats and stayed on duty in uniform. The other four, including Johnson, returned to Washington. When he ran for reelection in 1944 and in 1946, his opponents called him on breaking his pledge to serve “in the trenches” with other Americans, and one of them charged that FDR’s order was “an excuse to return to an air-cooled foxhole in Washington.”18 But Johnson trumpeted his “combat” service in these and future campaigns.

  Still determined to move across the Capitol to the Senate, he ran again in 1948. In keeping with the postwar climate, he also did not hesitate to stamp himself as an unvarnished anti-communist and, in the South, as anti-union, without surrendering his populist strain. He campaigned fervently across his broad state by helicopter against Governor Coke Stevenson in the election, which required a runoff between the two top finishers. Johnson trailed Stevenson by about 70,000 votes going into the runoff, and when it was completed, Stevenson was ahead by only 349 votes with 40 uncounted. But some Johnson precincts came in late under suspicious circumstances, and LBJ was declared the winner by 87 votes, thereafter dubbed “Landslide Lyndon.”19

  Johnson rode into the Senate at a propitious time, along with the Harry Truman upset of Thomas Dewey and the Democratic control of both houses of Congress. He allied himself with the conservative veteran Richard Russell of Georgia. Two years later, when the two top Democrats in the Senate were defeated, Johnson, with Russell’s backing, ran for and won the second post as majority whip. In 1954, with the Democratic leadership again vacant, Russell helped his protégé capture it. After barely six years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson was ruling the roost as majority leader.

  With Dwight Eisenhower easily reelected in 1956 with a Republican Senate, Johnson was reduced to minority leader for two years. But when the Democrats regained control in 1958, he returned as majority leader for the next six, cementing his reputation as arguably the strongest and most effective occupant of that office in its history. With his own membership divided between southern conservatives led by Russell and the influx of northern liberals like Humphrey, Johnson’s masterful talent for compromise—a deft mixture of arm-twisting and sweet cajolery—dominated. It was soon known on Capitol Hill as the “Johnson Treatment,” featuring LBJ as a commanding figure cornering his prey with chest-piercing finger and jutting jaw or gangling arm wrapped over the shoulder of his victim.

  The man seemed a force of nature but not immune to nature’s capriciousness. In 1956, he was suddenly stricken with a heart attack but returned after a few weeks to his old hard-driving self, as if to make up for the lost time. In 1957, as the country experienced the start of its historic pivot in civil rights from deep segregation of the races, especially in the South, to integration in schools, housing, and other public accommodations, Johnson became its champion. With bipartisan support, the Senate and House passed the first major civil rights act since Reconstruction days.

  In 1958, economic woes for the Eisenhower administration contributed to a Democratic landslide in the midterm congressional elections. The party’s two-seat majority in the Senate swelled to thirty, emboldening liberals to increase their demands on Johnson, both in their voice in the Senate and for a progressive agenda. His strength in the party remained centered in the chamber that he ruled with an iron hand but was not reflected to any such degree outside it.

  Nevertheless, Johnson now entertained presidential ambitions for the 1960 campaign. He assumed his Senate mastery could assure him a major place in the competition for the party nomination that summer. Rayburn insisted he declare openly, but Johnson declined, saying he had his Senate leadership responsibilities to handle.

  In the early primaries, Kennedy and Humphrey battled in Wisconsin and West Virginia, with the young Yankee senator emerging as the frontrunner and Humphrey bowing out. Kennedy then painstakingly courted party leaders at the city and state levels around the country, building delegate commitments.

  Johnson meanwhile held his fire, in what was a severe underestimation of his pulling power outside his congressional orbit. He did not announce his presidential candidacy until July 5, only days before the opening of the national party convention in Los Angeles.

  The showdown came when LBJ and JFK met in a joint appearance before the Texas and Massachusetts delegations. Johnson chided his younger competitor for missing many Senate quorum calls while out campaigning. Kennedy wryly conceded Johnson’s superior attendance record and endorsed him—for another term as Senate majority leader. With Johnson having failed to reach out beyond the Senate to build a campaign organization, the outcome was predictable: a first-ballot victory for JFK, winning nearly twice as many delegates as Johnson.

  Unlike in 1956, when the presidential nominee Stevenson threw the choice of running mate to the convention and Kennedy lost, this time Kennedy was going to do the choosing himself. As a northern liberal he was well aware of his weakness in the South. Kennedy’s chief aides drew up a list with Johnson’s name at the top, considering Kennedy’s need to carry Texas’s electoral votes. Furthermore, the new nominee had agreed with his brother Robert that if Johnson indicated he wanted to be asked or thought he was entitled to the right of first refusal, then he would have to be asked.20

  Other accounts argue that the offer was made in the expectation that Johnson would turn it down, preferring to retain his huge power base in the Senate, where he was up for reelection that fall and certain to be returned by Texas voters. John Kennedy went to Johnson’s hotel suite personally to make the offer. Robert Kennedy told Schlesinger later, “He [JFK] never dreamt
that there was a chance in the world that he would accept it.”21

  Robert Kennedy said he was in his brother’s suite when JFK returned, saying, “You just won’t believe it.… He wants it.… Now what do we do?” In light of all the opposition to Johnson voiced by labor leaders, they finally decided that “Bobby” would go back and try to get LBJ to withdraw. Bobby then made the effort, offering to make Johnson chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a crumb that Kennedy could not have seriously believed Johnson would swallow. As Robert Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger later, Johnson “just shook and tears came into his eyes, and he said, ‘I want to be Vice President, and if the president will have me, I’ll join with him in making a fight for it.’ ” To which Bobby said he replied, “Well, then that’s fine. He wants you to be Vice President if you want to be Vice President.”22

  A slightly different version came from Phil Graham, the Washington Post publisher and friend of both Kennedy and LBJ. According to Graham, Johnson told him that after Robert’s visit, LBJ phoned JFK and was told, “Bobby’s been out of touch and doesn’t know what’s been happening.” John Kennedy then reassured Johnson that he wanted him, and both men made public statements that LBJ had accepted the offer.23

  The key question remained: why did Johnson agree to accept the vice presidential offer when arguably he already was the second-most powerful politician in Washington as Senate majority leader? Speaker Sam Rayburn, who had first counseled Johnson to reject it, later changed his mind. A close Johnson friend reported that LBJ explained to him that “power is where power goes, thinking he could run Congress from the vice presidency.”24 But in so saying, LBJ demonstrated a mistaken confidence that the power was embodied in himself rather than in the office he held, and hence he could take it with him.