Senate Majority Leader, 1956–1959
In one sense, Johnson had campaigned for the presidency for much of his lifetime and with increasing resolve for at least two decades, ever since the 1941 incident mentioned above, when he turned down an offer to a Texas oilman because it might interfere with his future presidential aspirations. Yet in another, more direct sense, his was arguably the shortest campaign of any candidate in memory: He announced his candidacy only five days before the 1960 Democratic National Convention commenced. The reasons for this dichotomy were rooted in Johnson’s disease: According to the assessment of author Hershman, his bouts with manic euphoria caused him to be deluded about his own talent, intelligence, social status, and powers—his own were those usually associated with divinities—but all of this could turn quickly to severe depression; he alternately worried that his health would give out and his death would mean he could never get to be president, and that would trigger a vicious cycle of hopeless depression, which convinced half of his mind that he couldn’t run because he could not withstand his depressive periods. His utter fear of the agony of ego-crushing rejection caused him to refuse to enter the political campaigning that had taken him so far previously.6 A preview of the 1960 campaign occurred in 1956: He convinced himself that the Northern labor block would flock to his support despite his repeated efforts against civil rights laws and join with his Southern base to take the nomination away from Stevenson at the last minute, as some kind of dark horse “people’s candidate.” This “plan” was revealed at a surprise announcement on August 13, 1956, the first day of the 1956 Democratic National Convention, when he announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.7 Most of the delegates there were flabbergasted, and not particularly impressed. Johnson had lost his first attempt to run for the presidency in 1956. There were many reasons for this, but the primary one was his lack of a national base and the corollary image of him being a regional, Southern, and Western man, beholden only to the interests of the population of that area and not appealing to the more urban Midwestern and Eastern electorate. After the failed candidacy of 1956, he knew that he would—he must—make his move in 1960 if he was to have any chance of fulfilling his dream.
Ironically, despite his reputation for hard work, efficiency, and masterfully running the Senate, his own legislative record was weak. As Robert Sherrill noted, “Forget the stereotypes the newspapers and weekly news magazines used to make of Johnson—the legislator possessed, the architect of government—and look back over his career for yourself. After twenty-three years in Congress, Johnson left not one progressive piece of legislation with his name on it, not one piece of legislation that measurably advanced the nation beyond the stage in which he discovered it at the time he entered Congress in 1937.”8 Even after the recession of 1957–1958 resulted in a huge Democratic congressional victory with 62 Democratic senators versus 34 Republicans and 282 Democratic congressmen versus 158 Republicans, Johnson accomplished little. He “settled down into his customary cautious posture, agreeing that there must be no ‘reckless spending’ and permitting Senator Harry F. Byrd, of whom he never lost his freshman’s fear, to torpedo a Senate-approved workman’s compensation measure by surrendering in a House-Senate conference committee. This was only symptomatic of the leadership’s malaise.”9 After engineering a cutback in a bill introduced in the Senate in 1959 calling for a ten-year $600-million-per-year expenditure to assist cities with infrastructure assistance, to a one-year $900-million bill, and then passing the antilabor Landrum-Griffin Act, a younger Texas congressman observed that “in the final analysis, the largest Democratic majority in Congress since 1936 out-did the Republican 80th Congress [which passed the Taft-Hartley Act] in passing anti-labor and in not passing pro-people legislation.”10
Johnson’s handpicked biographer Doris Kearns-Goodwin dutifully repeated his thoughts, attitudes, and opinions, one of which was the observation that “the qualities the Senate rewarded were not adapted to the institutional process of presidential nomination nor, probably, to that of presidential election, for it was unlikely that Johnson could have moved from majority leader to election as president on his own”11 (emphasis added). The essential truth of that statement would have been derived directly from Johnson, and it must have been his overriding, perplexing thought as he considered how he would attain his prized, single-minded goal to become president. If it appeared to many that he gave up trying to win the 1960 nomination before the election season had even started, the idea sprung more from substantive reality than ephemeral thought. After his aborted effort to run for president in 1956, Johnson decided that if his boyhood promise was to be fulfilled, it must be done in 1960. If not, it was likely that “waiting his turn” would mean he wouldn’t have another chance until 1968, when he would be sixty years old and probably near the end of his life expectancy, given his family history and considering his 1955 heart attack. Then there was the likelihood of RFK being positioned to succeed his brother in that year. He knew that this would be his last realistic chance to take the office he felt was his ultimate destiny.
Preparing for the 1960 Presidential Election
Johnson wanted to be in a position to run for president or vice president in 1960, but at the same time, afraid of the risk of losing, he did not want to have to forfeit his senatorial position, the term of which was expiring in 1960. He began planning for this dilemma in 1958, when he went to Texas State Senator Dorsey Hardeman, a leading conservative legislator, to sponsor a new bill to allow him to simultaneously run for president or vice president and the Senate at the same time.12 This suggests that he was fully intent to enter the race in some capacity regardless of the pretense of his seeming ambivalence leading up to the 1960 convention. The other most active potential candidates, John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, were planning their own runs, and Johnson hoped they would beat each other up in their primary battles, leaving the convention deadlocked and providing his entrée as a “dark horse” candidate to win the nomination in the smoky back rooms without having to dirty his hands trying to beat Kennedy in the primary states. In case he was unable to win the nomination—which he had always regarded as unlikely anyway—he would position himself as the leading candidate for the vice presidential nomination. As previously noted, Bobby Kennedy visited him in 1959 on his ranch, for the express purpose of finding out what his plans were in 1960; Johnson denied planning to run for president even as he was then working through Senator Hardeman to pass enabling legislation to allow him to run simultaneously for two positions.
In 1960, the Democratic Party “pros” in most states selected their favored nominee for the presidency; there were only seven states that held full “primary” elections where registered party voters were allowed to select the candidate. Illinois had a “write-in preferential primary” event, where 34,000 people wrote in JFK’s name, compared with only 8,000 for the former governor, Adlai Stevenson—and only 442 named Lyndon Johnson.13 The seven primary states were all relatively small states: New Hampshire and a couple of others like Oregon and Maryland were solidly in Kennedy’s camp, so the primary race came down to two hotly contested states: Wisconsin and West Virginia. While Kennedy won the first of these, Wisconsin, the press claimed that it was a moral victory for Hubert Humphrey because the victory wasn’t as high as the margins that had been predicted. During these primary elections, while Kennedy was campaigning in Oregon, a reporter asked him, “What would you have done when the U-2 plane was shot down over Russia? How would you, what message would you have sent to Chairman Khrushchev?” And he said, “I would have apologized.”
This report was not received well back on Capitol Hill, and many of Johnson’s fellow senators began pressing him to enter the fray because they feared Kennedy becoming president. Horace Busby said that they would come up to Johnson in the Capitol corridors, alarmed at Kennedy’s response to the U-2 controversy:
This must have sent a chill down the spine of all of those people in, the elders of
the Senate. They began coming to Johnson—I was present once or twice—and they were saying, “You have got to make this race for your country. We’ve got to have an alternative to Kennedy. We cannot have him as president. He’s weak; he’s inexperienced. A remark like that by a president, or an action like that by a president would tilt the balances of power.”14
Despite this groundswell of support in Congress, Johnson steadfastly refused to enter the campaign while Congress was still in session. His plan was to take a Shermanesque position and decline for the time being, hoping that people would see his martyr side and assume that such dogfights were beneath his dignity. His alternate strategy—because he could not stand the possibility of rejection in the primary battles—was to stay in Washington and attempt to show the world what a hard worker he was. He wanted people to understand that his responsibilities were too enormous and that he couldn’t leave the Senate because someone had to “mind the store,” unlike the “boy wonder” Kennedy, whom he kept calling the “absentee senator” in his statements to the press. Somehow, Johnson was able to finagle an endorsement from the controversial Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell through some kind of horse-trading deal, which raised a few eyebrows: According to Evelyn Lincoln, “Not everyone seemed to believe he did so on a popular demand from his Harlem constituents.”15 Instead of entering any of the state primary elections, Johnson sat out all of them, thinking that while his opponents were splitting the delegates in the primary states, he could do an end run at the smoke-filled rooms of a deadlocked convention, garnering enough votes from nonprimary states and horse-trading with the runner-up candidates to take the convention through the back door. In his last-ditch effort to win the presidential nomination, he planned to derail the Kennedy candidacy in the days before, and during, the convention through personal attacks—made through his surrogate John Connally—alluding to the then secret fact that John Kennedy suffered from the incurable Addison’s disease, which RFK said was “malicious and false.”16 Johnson’s knowledge of JFK’s secret disease could have only come directly from the “personal and confidential” files of J. Edgar Hoover.
It was assumed that Humphrey would win West Virginia, because of a perception that Kennedy’s liberal East Coast and Catholic background would not work in that state. But the pundits did not anticipate Joseph Kennedy’s willingness to buy that election, committing at least $2 million (over $20 million in today’s dollars) and possibly twice that, to ensure the critical victory in West Virginia.17 The paymasters included JFK’s brothers, Bobby and Teddy Kennedy, who focused on the county sheriffs as being in local control of all election workers, some of whom pocketed up to $50,000 of Kennedy money to throw the election.18 The man in charge of Harrison County, Victor Gabriel, was too honest to accept any more than he calculated his expenses to be and indicated that he only needed $5,000 to accomplish the goals for his county. At the victory party in Charleston, Bobby couldn’t understand this thinking and pulled him aside to show him the ledger in which he recorded the amount given to other county chairmen, such as the $40,000 given to Sid Christie in McDowell County, and how all the others were accepting much larger sums than Gabriel had. However, Gabriel still couldn’t understand how such sums could be spent beyond the amount he had accepted, so he declined taking any more money for his efforts. Mr. Gabriel was obviously not a typical 1960 West Virginia Democrat campaign worker.19 The archbishop of Boston, Richard Cardinal Cushing, later revealed to Humphrey that he had met with Joe Kennedy to come up with a plan to counter West Virginia’s anti-Catholicism. Their plan was to bribe Protestant churches, especially those in black communities: “We decided which church and preacher would get two hundred dollars or one hundred dollars or five hundred dollars.”20 Joe Kennedy also involved his Mafia friends in helping to raise funds for the West Virginia primary. He promised Paul “Skinny” D’Amato, who ran certain Atlantic City and Nevada nightclubs, that Jack would reverse a deportation order against Mafia boss Joey Adonis if he was elected. Against his father’s wishes, Bobby refused to do this and even had D’Amato indicted for income tax evasion.21
Johnson had, with Bobby Baker’s assistance, total control over the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. All funds collected by this committee were doled out to senators for their respective campaigns in whatever manner Johnson determined was appropriate. As it happened, most of these funds were showing up only in the states where Johnson had his greatest hopes for gaining convention delegates; Kennedy protested this result, to no avail.22 One month before the convention, the polls were showing Kennedy with 620 convention delegates, Johnson 510, Symington 140, Humphrey 100, and Adlai Stevenson 75, with 761 needed to win.23 Johnson thought that he might have a chance to stop Kennedy on the first ballot and peel away enough votes from him and others on the second and third ballots to win the nomination.
Johnson fought his entire presidential campaign in the corridors of the Capitol. Having purloined Kennedy’s medical records with help from his friend Hoover, coupled with stories of JFK’s philandering, he set out to run an entirely negative campaign against his primary challenger. The other notable part of his campaign was his use of blackmail against his fellow Democratic delegates. According to author Anthony Summers, in his interviews with Evelyn Lincoln, she stated that “sexual blackmail … had long been part of Lyndon Johnson’s modus operandi—abetted by Edgar. ‘J. Edgar Hoover’ … gave Johnson the information about various congressmen and senators so that Johnson could go to X senator and say, ‘How about this little deal you have with this woman?’ and so forth. That’s how he kept them in line. He used his IOUs with them as what he hoped was his road to the presidency. He had this trivia to use, because he had Hoover in his corner.”24 With Hoover’s help, Johnson was able to keep his presidential campaign confined to the smoke-filled back rooms, almost entirely in Washington DC and Los Angeles. As the foremost political pro of the age, he apparently expected to be able to control enough votes to deny Kennedy a first-ballot win without even leaving town. Johnson’s 1960 presidential campaign strategy was arguably not just the oddest attempt by any presidential candidate in history, it can also be said to have been the shortest and most negative, since there was very little that could be called positive, or even considered by anyone as a normal campaign. In any case, it was wholly ineffective, at least in terms of an attempt to get the Democratic nomination for president in 1960.
His strategy of relying on his Senate cronies, instead of going out to hustle delegates, had taken him as far as it could; he must have seen the futility in that before he arrived in Los Angeles with his wife and daughters.25 One sign that he did was that, since Kennedy’s win in West Virginia, Johnson grew very irritable and extremely temperamental, blasting his “volunteers” for things he thought they should have done. “‘He barked at aides, cursed, slammed down telephones,’ recalled [his] aide, Bobby Baker. ‘He refused to go and thank his exhausted campaign workers.’”26 It was reported that Johnson’s mood would swing from one extreme to another—from being docile and quiet to lashing out to everyone around him—and that his staff could never predict how long one mood would last before it would swing back to the other side.27
Johnson and his friend the Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn decided one way they might coerce senators and representatives to vote for him was by not adjourning Congress sine die just before the convention. By keeping Congress open for three weeks after the convention before adjourning it the end of August, they thought they could force them to vote for him in order to get pending legislation passed. This idea was roundly criticized on both sides of the aisle of both houses because of the usual hot and humid summer days, which hit Washington particularly hard that year. It was not something that John F. Kennedy came to appreciate either, when he returned to the Hill for three weeks instead of starting his campaign for the presidency.28
The 1960 Democratic Convention
For the previous six years of the Eisenhower era, the second most powerful man in Amer
ica was Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader. He had grown to love the power he wielded and was eager to ascend to the number one position, as though it should automatically be his right. But he recognized that his base was only regional—only his own state actually, and only fractionally there—and he was not psychologically prepared to launch a serious national campaign. His efforts to mount such a campaign were as perfunctory as they were futile; he had decided he would have to gain office in another way. As the leader of the party, he believed the other contenders would eventually be shown to be lightweight junior senators who were not quite ready for the Oval Office. Although he had marshaled the assistance of some very powerful men—from Joseph Alsop the columnist, to the publisher of The Washington Post Philip Graham, to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and the king of all lobbyists Tommy Corcoran—to help him win the nomination, that was not nearly enough to stop the momentum that Kennedy had built up from his primary election victories and preconvention campaigning across the country. Johnson would take excursions into key states while campaigning only in a negative context, at every stop brutally attacking John Kennedy and his father.29
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