LBJ
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A few days after the decision had been made, Pierre Salinger asked Kennedy why. Kennedy’s last words on the subject were, “The whole story will never be known. And it’s just as well that it won’t be.”85 Salinger then added, “I cannot explain the cryptic remark. I can only report that JFK made it.”86 Although he did not say categorically that he thought Johnson had blackmailed Kennedy to get onto the ticket in his 1966 book, With Kennedy, anyone coming away with such an impression from reading between the lines could be forgiven for coming to such a conclusion through the use of basic deductive reasoning. That cryptic remark as he called it was far more revealing than most other entire accounts of Johnson’s selection, including Phil Graham’s self-serving account87 of how he practically single-handedly engineered the decision. It also no doubt helps explain why Pierre Salinger was the first of Kennedy’s aides—all of whom Johnson had begged to stay on with him, separately telling each one, “I need you more than he did”—to leave the White House, in March 1964. Salinger’s dislike of Johnson probably stemmed from the 1960 campaign, when he was trying to give him advice on how to increase his appeal to voters; Johnson interrupted him to make his own suggestion, which was to present himself as another “Matt Dillion,” the favorite television Western hero of the time: “You know … big, six-foot-three, good looking—a tall, tough Texan coming down the street.” Pierre Salinger, despite his 1966 book in which he thanked Johnson for his “many kindnesses,”88 clearly knew he did not want to be around the new president any longer than necessary; he proved it by leaving as quickly as he could.
More than one person familiar with what really happened said, “The full story of how Kennedy selected Johnson as vice president will never be told.” One was Myer Feldman, a special counsel to President Kennedy, who asked him what the true story was and received this response: “Well, you know, I don’t think anybody will ever know.”89 The fact that this answer was adopted by both JFK and RFK, and used as a pro forma, boilerplate response, after both promised each other to never reveal the truth, suggests that the secret they were trying to contain was a major sore point. That the rationale for selecting the vice presidential nominee of their party had to be kept a secret for all time indicates as clearly as anything could that they acceded to a forced request against their will. It is axiomatic that the wrong person was selected if he was chosen for illegitimate reasons. The next logical progression, given his criminal past and the precarious position he was in by November 1963—that he would have had nothing to lose and everything to gain from JFK’s murder—leads to an inescapable conclusion, which shall be held in abeyance for a few more chapters.
The 1960 Campaign
Johnson’s tainted victory in winning the vice presidential nomination did not make him jubilant. In fact, he became depressed immediately afterward. He became so upset that Lynda Bird could not be found in time to join the family on the convention platform, playing her role as a smiling member of the happy Johnson family, that Lyndon launched into a public rage which embarrassed “Uncle” Sam Rayburn, who had witnessed such outbursts before. Johnson knew that he had succeeded in getting into the office that he would use as a springboard into the Oval Office, yet the stress that that success produced would fuel even stronger swings from euphoric mania to irritable and depressive mania.
The infamous “rump session” of Congress required that all senators and representatives return to Washington for three weeks beginning August 8. Johnson had managed to alienate practically everyone on Capitol Hill because of that dubious idea, not the least of whom was his own new leader, John F. Kennedy, who said, “Why Mr. Johnson, the masterminded Majority Leader, would ever dream up a scheme like this is beyond me. Even if he is the Democratic nominee, what can it possibly gain? The Republicans will do everything in their power to embarrass the Democrats.”90 Throughout the strange three-week rump session held in the middle of a very hot and humid Washington August, Kennedy struggled to get the national campaign kicked off, holding strategy meetings, planning schedules, and making all other campaign decisions ordinary to the general election, which was always expected to be a very close contest. The Democratic congressmen were trying to make the best of a very difficult situation created by their esteemed senator and his friend, the Speaker; Johnson, of course, was simultaneously rerunning for his Senate seat and the vice presidency, not willing to sacrifice one for the risk of losing the other. They had hoped that if the majority leader could get some worthwhile legislation passed, at least it could be made into a productive session; those hopes were dashed from the start, and practically nothing came of the legislative circus other than extreme frustration on the part of everyone having to participate in it.
In order to get some semblance of order, Kennedy requested the sergeant at arms to provide a suite of offices near the Senate floor where he could meet with staff members and leaders and hold conferences. He was able to assign JFK a small suite, with a desk in one corner and a refrigerator and sink in another to store soft drinks for visitors, along with a small conference room. This suite was, ironically, directly across the hall from Johnson’s main (one of three) Senate office, a huge space he had remodeled with garish green and gold drapes and ankle-deep carpeting, which reporters had taken to calling the “Taj Mahal,” or the “Nookie Room,” which was filled with the latest telephonic push-button gadgetry, the finest furniture and accessories, the largest conference room facilities of any Senate office suite, and of course, Johnson’s own personal adjoining “throne room” so he didn’t have far to go when he had to find a toilet, usually taking an aide with him to complete his dictation. Everything in his suite was of the finest linen or leather, all stamped with his cattle brand, “LBJ.” Kennedy tried his best to ignore this contrast, but it became difficult because of all the well-wishers dropping by the crowded little suite across the hall from the majority leader/vice presidential nominee’s big suite. It was also difficult because Lyndon would constantly come over to offer his suggestions for the campaign and, sometimes, would storm off in a huff when he couldn’t get his way or had to wait to see JFK on some matter he considered more important than whatever else was going on. The “final blow,” according to Mrs. Lincoln, was when the two bills which Kennedy had pushed the hardest—for increasing the minimum wage and funding aid to schools—were defeated; the only good thing about this strange congressional episode was that it finally ended before fistfights broke out on the floor of both houses.91
As Johnson started his dual campaigns—on the Kennedy-Johnson presidential and vice presidential offices, while simultaneously running for his third term as a senator, thanks to the passage of the new Texas law he had pressed for to enable him to do that—he was left in a dilemma over the conflicts in the party’s Texas platform and the national platform; the contrasts between the two reflected the differences between his old Southern base and the national base to which he aspired. They were stunningly polar opposites:
• The national platform called for greater federal concentration of power, while the state platform denounced the “growing and menacing power in central government.”
• The national platform endorsed sit-in demonstrations, and the state called for the “enforcement of laws designed to protect private property from physical occupation.”
• The national platform called for the closing of the oil depletion allowance, while the state platform demanded the “retention of the present oil and gas depletions allowance.”
• The national platform called for federal aid to education; the state platform opposed it.
• The national platform called for school desegregation; the state platform pledged local operation and control of schools.
• The national platform called for medical care for the aged; the state platform deplored socialistic medical measures.
• The national platform called for legislation repealing the state right-to-work laws, while the state endorsed the existing Taft-Hartley right-to-work law as essential to free
enterprise.92
Lyndon Johnson, accustomed to playing both sides of the political spectrum, managed to position himself as firmly behind both the national and the Texas state Democratic platforms in the 1960 elections despite the diametrically opposite positions. The Texas state platform was essentially a “state’s rights” position written by a conservative, Johnson-controlled committee; the national platform was written by a committee so liberal that the socialist pundit Norman Thomas called it “utopian.”93 In a stroke of sheer hypocrisy, according to Victor Lasky, “in Las Vegas, Johnson assailed the Republicans as a party of ‘two faces.’ One face, in the North, was that of Governor Rockefeller ‘who rewrites the Republican platform’ to appeal to Liberals. The other, in the South, was that of Senator Goldwater assuring the people of conservative government.”94 Shortly after this paradoxical gaffe, he was in New York, to accept the nomination of the Liberal Party, which threw a third platform into the mix (Johnson, struggling for something smart to say, came up with “you are against the sweatshop and I am against the sweatshop”).95
Throughout the campaign, Johnson was wound very tight as he attacked Nixon and likened attacks on Kennedy’s Catholicism to the prejudice against the South he confronted. He was greeted by hecklers with signs declaring “LBJ is a Friend of Socialism.”96 He was even worried about whether the ticket would carry Texas, an eventuality that would cost him any chance of ever running again on a future ticket. This was undoubtedly a factor in what would later be shown to be massive election fraud, as we will shortly review in more detail. His anxiety about possibly losing Texas caused him to fly off the handle with everyone trying to help him; practically anything that went wrong caused him to launch into a tirade with his staff—a tight schedule, crowds he considered as too small or unresponsive, a podium that didn’t meet his specifications. According to Robert Dallek’s account, “When Johnson tried to bully Kennedy into rushing to make an appointment with Sam Rayburn, Jack told him, ‘I believe you’re cracking up. If you do, where do you want me to send it?’”97 His longtime supporter Jim Rowe was so upset with him that he called him a “Mogul emperor.”98 A very ugly incident in Dallas four days before the election occurred when Lyndon confronted a group of angry protestors at the Adolphus Hotel as Lyndon and Lady Bird crossed the street and made their way to the elevator. As they inched along, Lyndon told the police to leave, saying, “If the time has come when I can’t walk through the lobby of a hotel in Dallas with my lady without a police escort, I want to know it.”99 Seeing all the photographers and reporters recording the event, Johnson milked it for all it was worth: People who were there said it could have been done in five minutes, but they took thirty minutes as they soaked up all the publicity, exploiting the incident to criticize Republicans for being extremists.100
While Kennedy was trying to ignore—even minimize—Johnson’s part in the campaign, on September 14, William S. White wrote of a new issue that Johnson had stumbled onto in Jacksonville, Florida, when he snapped, “I wasn’t the Vice President who presided over the communization of Cuba.”101 White wrote that “the Democrats believe they have got hold of something—the charge that a Republican administration permitted a pro-Communist bridgehead to rise within 90 miles of the American coastline—which well might hit the Republicans with violent impact in November.” By October 6, Kennedy made a major address in Cincinnati slamming Nixon’s involvement in managing the Cuban “problem,” charging that “as a result the Communists took over Cuba with virtually no opposition from the United States.”102 This was the first time Kennedy had expressed any interest in Cuba; his previous visits there were purely social—nightclubs, golfing, and sailing.
Kennedy had been given classified information by a Castro supporter in the State Department, William Wieland, who “unbeknownst to the CIA, [Cuban exile leader Mario Garcia] Kohly,* and Nixon, introduced the Cuban Revolutionary Council’s leftist leaders to Kennedy at the time of the Democratic National Convention. The CRC leaders gave the presidential nominee what details they had on the planned Cuban invasion.”103 Kennedy wanted to contrast his aggressive approach to the Cuba issue to an image of Nixon as a typical politician who made promises that he reneged on, so he had his aide “Richard Goodwin—an abrasive, pockmarked, twenty-eight year old former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and recently hired Kennedy political writer—[release] a story to The New York Times on the day before the last political debate … The release of [the] story was a great political coup. Kennedy knew that Nixon, abiding by security restrictions he could not disavow, was bound to limit his debate discussions to the official government line: there was to be no U.S. intervention in Cuban affairs.”104 This gave Kennedy a major advantage over Nixon in this debate, further boosting his position in the polls. The result of suddenly making Cuba the focus of the 1960 presidential campaign would play out over many years, with tragic and fatal consequences for many participants; John F. Kennedy would be among those.
Kennedy must have heard the joke that circulated during the 1960 presidential campaign, especially in the bars and parties around Austin, Boston, and Washington, that had Kennedy telling Johnson, “Lyndon, when we get elected I’m going to dig a tunnel to the Vatican,” to which Lyndon replied, “That’s OK with me, as long as Brown & Root gets the contract.”105 JFK’s knowledge of Johnson’s corrupt past, using his senatorial office as a branch office of the company he had so long championed, was implied in the joke, as was the general public knowledge of Johnson’s murky past.
Johnson Ascends to the Vice Presidency
The Chicago Tribune described the eventual voting irregularities in Cook County: “The election of November 8 was characterized by such gross and palpable fraud as to justify the conclusion that [Richard Nixon] was deprived of victory.” In one place 100 votes were cast before the polls even opened; in another precinct 71 votes were cast by people giving false names; 34 others voted twice and “residents of Chicago flophouses were hauled in to vote the names of absent or dead voters.”106 The Daley machine in Chicago, with the assistance of the Giancana Mob, manufactured 10,000 additional votes mostly from people who were deceased, allowing the Democrats to offset losses downstate and win statewide by 8,585 votes.107 The fraud was much grander in the state of Texas where “a minimum of 100,000 votes tallied for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket never existed in the first place. Yet despite all this, the ticket finally carried Texas by a slim margin of 46,000 votes.”108 In one Texas precinct, there were 86 total voters receiving ballots, yet the number cast was 171: Nixon got 24 and Kennedy got 147. This pattern was repeated all over Texas: “Tens of thousands of ballots disappeared overnight … in one county which voted Nixon over Kennedy, 458 to 350, 182 ballots were declared void at the ‘discretion of the judges.’ But in the other, 68 to 1 for Kennedy, not a single ballot was declared void.”109
Although it might be argued that Illinois wasn’t essential anyway, without it, Kennedy would have had a plurality of only seven electoral votes over Nixon, which would have caused more unpledged electors in certain Southern states to switch their votes to Senator Harry F. Byrd, of Virginia, as fourteen of them eventually did anyway. That would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives and opened the possibility of a more aggressive investigation of voter fraud in up to eleven states. As it was, the complaints filed by the Republicans were stymied by the Justice Department, which was due to get a new attorney general.110 Richard Nixon was unusually magnanimous in defeat; despite knowing of the many irregularities, he refused to challenge the results and even asked The New York Herald Tribune newspaper to cancel the remainder of their series because “our country can’t afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.”111
There was no victory celebration in the Johnson’s hotel suite at the Driskill Hotel in Austin on election night even though it was apparent shortly after midnight that the Kennedy-Johnson ticket had won in what might charitably be called a close election. Johnson must have been particularly sho
cked and disappointed at the closeness of the Texas victory, especially considering that 100,000 bogus votes were required to do it, as noted earlier. After the victory was declared, the Johnson “party” left their suite and walked across Seventh Street to an all-night café to get a bite to eat. “There was no jubilation. Lyndon looked as if he’d lost his last friend on earth,” one of his secretaries, who was appalled by LBJ’s rude behavior, recalled.112
As author Victor Lasky noted, “At seven the next morning … Liz Carpenter walked into the living room of the suite. It was littered with coffee cups and cigarette butts, souvenirs of last night’s nervousness. There, amid the rubbish, Johnson sat alone, staring at the television. His unhappiness at winning the vice presidency was palpable. Of his many political victories, this was the least welcome.”113 The reason for his despondency was the growing realization that the power he had come to enjoy as the majority leader would be forfeited. He knew the vice presidential position would lack any autonomous power at all—only that which would be delegated to him by the president, or worse, his brother Bobby, who was already being recognized as the “assistant president.” Considering how hard—viciously hard—he had fought for the vice presidential nomination, and knowing in advance the diminution in power from his previous position as majority leader, the picture of him, ascribed to his secretary and Liz Carpenter, as being dejected about having won the election is of more than passing interest; it reveals his internal conflict over losing real power in exchange for attaining a position having no power other than that which might be delegated to him by the president. Unless, of course, the new president should die in office, in which case he would automatically become the most powerful man in the nation. It was arguably that possibility which provided him the resolve to go forward with his plan to become president through the only constitutional framework possible, given his lack of a national base and a very limited amount of time to accomplish it through the more customary channel.