LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  After the election, he turned his attention to the ways that he could retain some of his old powers while seeking the broadest powers he could wrangle from the president for his new position. He had previously infused a number of positions he held with greater power than what existed before he held them, and he expected to do the same with this one. He had friends in the press to help instill this idea in the public mind-set, including Tom Wicker of the New York Times, who wrote, “The restless and able Mr. Johnson is obviously unwilling to become a ceremonial nonentity.”114 Johnson came up with a two-pronged approach to retain his old powers and simultaneously assume more power:

  • With help from his old friend and Senate secretary Bobby Baker, he would get his Senate colleagues to rally around the idea of keeping him on as leader of the Democratic Caucus. Baker was “astonished and horrified” at the prospect of such an audacious scheme, so contrary to the traditions and prerogatives of the Senate and a breach of the constitutional separation of powers. He asked Baker to “sound out” his colleagues on the idea, but he found the reaction was cold at best, and even broaching it “fueled apprehensions about the continued pressure of Johnson’s heavy hand.”115 When the caucus had their organizational meeting on January 3, 1961, they acknowledged Johnson’s accomplishments and elected Mike Mansfield as the new leader. Then Mansfield thanked his colleagues and proposed that Johnson be invited to act as coleader and be invited to chair future meetings. Five men rose to denounce the motion on general principles, having tired of being subjected to the “Johnson treatment,” and strongly objected on constitutional grounds. The caucus finally gave in to Mansfield’s threat to resign and voted 46 to 17 to uphold the motion, but it was hardly a victory. “Mortified, Johnson darted from the caucus room to which he would never return as vice president. Moments later, Johnson stalked the Taj Mahal in a paranoid rage. ‘Those bastards sandbagged me,’ he fumed to Bobby Baker. ‘They’d plotted to humiliate me, all those goddamn red-hots and troublemakers … Hell, we didn’t pull any big surprise on ’em! But no, they had to humiliate me in public.’ Over drinks, Baker spoke soothing words, but LBJ was inconsolable. ‘Now I know the difference between a caucus and a cactus,’ Johnson reportedly groused. ‘In a cactus all the pricks are on the outside.’”116

  • He then attempted to redefine the executive authority of the vice presidential role, seeking help from Nicholas Katzenbach, the new assistant attorney general, who sent him a long memo which found that “the office was endowed with more executive authority than generally presumed. A supervisory role, Katzenbach concluded, was not at all improper. Soon thereafter, a Johnson aide drafted an executive order granting the vice president ‘general supervision’ of a broad span of government activities, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Reports, plans, and proposals traditionally sent to the president would go instead to Lyndon Johnson … [Johnson] approved it … and forwarded it to the president. John Kennedy was astonished and bemused. He ignored the order. And Lyndon Johnson, now twice rebuffed, did not press the issue.”117

  Although Kennedy did not approve the draft order presented to him by Johnson, he did go out of his way to accommodate most of Johnson’s requests for special privileges. One of the most important of these would be the authority to control all patronage appointments in Texas, something usually reserved for the party’s representatives in the Senate, in this case Ralph Yarborough. Johnson was so jealous of Yarborough and so mean-spirited toward him that he did everything in his power to remind Yarborough just who was in charge of the state of Texas and took every opportunity to deny him any of the perquisites of power that he, Lyndon B. Johnson, took for granted. He had even blocked his fellow Texas senator from being permitted to be a delegate to the 1960 convention.118 But Kennedy did disapprove another request from Johnson, to have his office located close to the Oval Office in the West Wing; he was assigned an office across the street in the Executive Office Building instead. However, that did not stop his pretending to be at JFK’s right hand; as noted in chapter 3, Johnson had made his presence in the West Wing known, as he portrayed himself as being on the inside track of the Oval Office. His actions all during this period were directed to subverting JFK’s agenda from the very start of the inauguration of the Kennedy-Johnson “team.” Having failed in his audacious attempts to increase his power as the vice president, he would spend the next three years chomping at the bit. Those three years were dedicated to taking the overseas trips he hated, chairing the Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, whose objectives he carefully thwarted, and engaging in his continuing feuds with Ralph Yarborough and Bobby Kennedy.

  The Marginalized Johnson Causes Friction

  Johnson had felt from the start that Robert Kennedy, having failed to kick him off the ticket in Los Angeles, was intent on making him the most impotent vice president of all time: “‘He repeated that to me over a period of weeks,’ Pierre Salinger recalled of Johnson’s first months in the White House. After the inauguration, said [Ken] O’Donnell, Johnson felt Robert Kennedy ‘had taken over his rightful position as the number two man in the government.’”119

  Of his chairmanship of the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee, Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “Robert Kennedy and the successive Secretaries of Labor, Arthur Goldberg and Willard Wirtz, came to feel that the committee was badly run and that it was Johnson’s fault. ‘There wasn’t any problem about making it an effective organization,’ Bobby Kennedy said later, ‘just if the Vice President gave it some direction. It was mostly a public relations operation. I mean … a lot of it was public relations. Secondly there wasn’t any adequate follow-up. Thirdly, the head of the staff … Hobart Taylor, whom I have contempt for because I thought he was so ineffective.’”120 In a conversation between Bobby and John Kennedy regarding Johnson’s ineffectual handling of the EEO committee, JFK said, “That man can’t run this committee. Can you think of anything more deplorable than him trying to run the United States? That’s why he can’t ever be President of the United States.”121 JFK and RFK both had relied on Johnson to use his position as chairman of the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity to increase employment of minorities in all federal government jobs, and for two years had heard nothing but Johnson’s routine, perfunctory assurances that this was happening. At a meeting of this committee on May 29, 1963, Robert Kennedy found that out of two thousand such jobs in Birmingham, Alabama, only fifteen were filled by blacks; he verbally attacked James Webb, head of the NASA and a Johnson protégé. According to Arthur Schlesinger, the meeting was a memorable one for those present: “And then finally, after completely humiliating Webb and making the Vice President look like a fraud … he walked out.”122

  Both of the Kennedys, unaware of Johnson’s schemes against them, had misunderstood his ineffectiveness on the EEO Committee; they assumed that he was merely incompetent. They had still not realized that he had no interest in advancing their civil rights agenda because, evidently—looking at it retrospectively, with the benefit of the historical record—he needed to save that for his own program, which was still being planned. In May and June of 1963, as President Kennedy prepared for the introduction of a civil rights bill, he asked Burke Marshall, at the Department of Justice, to discuss it with Vice President Johnson. The meeting he had was related to the drafting of the legislation as well as the development of a strategy for getting the bill through Congress. Marshall said that Kennedy’s intent at the time was to make the bill as broad and all-encompassing as possible, including separate titles for voting rights, equal employment, and elimination of discrimination in public restaurants, hotels, and other public accommodations. But Johnson only wanted to talk about “economic problems” and how the public works programs of the ’30s were so effective. His interest seemed to be limited to only improving the economic situation of Negros. According to Burke’s oral history interview, his general impression of Johnson’s interest in civil rights legislation, only six months before he ascende
d to the presidency, was one of “diffidence.” He said that Johnson specifically questioned the broader approach being pushed by Kennedy and said that “he was very dubious that we could get it passed.” Marshall also stated that Johnson’s view was that “the President ought to hold it back until he thoroughly discussed it at least with the Congressional leaders.”123 (Emphasis supplied.)

  According to John Kenneth Galbraith, who became a friend of Johnson after having been a friend of JFK, “They each had their own agenda. LBJ didn’t urge a strong public program on Kennedy, and Kennedy was quite content to leave Lyndon to his own senate role, his own legislative role, and his own life. They were not close.”124 Perhaps in finally agreeing to allow Johnson to run as his vice presidential nominee, Kennedy had assumed that he would at least help him get legislation through Congress; after all, that is the rationale he used to explain the decision to the many people who questioned the move. The most likely explanation for this conundrum is that JFK had finally tuned out Johnson, becoming too weary of his boorish and crude behavior to even try to persuade him to use his legendary congressional skills.

  Johnson’s EEO Committee had succumbed to bickering from the very start because of his conflicted interests in securing real progress as well as his mismanagement involving the people he had appointed to it. One of these appointments involved Jerry R. Holleman, a Texan whom Johnson had placed into a high-level position as an assistant secretary of labor. He was assigned to work closely with the EEO Committee, though the question of how much “work” he did and whether he was pulling in the direction the Kennedys wished is another matter. Within months, it became apparent that Mr. Holleman’s primary qualification for the job was his willingness to expedite whatever fraudulent requests might come through for Johnson’s friend Billie Sol Estes. To smooth the way, Estes had given Holleman the customary bribes; that information became public eventually as the investigation got under way and came dangerously close to directly implicating Johnson before the murders of Estes’s associates frightened witnesses into keeping their mouths shut. By then, testimony had clearly tracked the money Estes paid Holleman for personal luxury items; his forced resignation soon followed.125 He wasn’t out of work too long, however, before Johnson’s longtime friend Morris Jaffe of San Antonio hired him; Jaffe was also the beneficiary of Estes’s bankruptcy, coming along just in time to buy up the Estes’s properties (presumably excluding the nonexistent grain silos and elevators) for pennies on the dollar.

  As the most powerful Senate majority leader ever, Johnson had enjoyed the perquisites of the office more than any majority leader before him. His carefully crafted ability to persuade men into taking actions that would normally be anathema to them was based on his exercise of that power, tempered with his own conniving personality and skills, together with his access to whatever secrets each of them might prefer to keep hidden. But as vice president, Johnson had lost most of his influence on Capitol Hill; as one observer noted, “Lyndon has no chits to call in anymore.”126 President Kennedy was angered by Johnson’s apparent abdication of his commitments to help facilitate the passage of the administration’s legislative agenda: “‘He thought that Lyndon ought to be up there really beating their heads in,’ as presidential aide Ralph Dungan recalled. Ted Sorensen, who was responsible for JFK’s legislative effort, said that ‘we expected him [LBJ] to be a major voice in not only shaping but delivering and selling the program, and he did very little, if any, of that.’ Johnson’s tentative, halfhearted advice disappointed Kennedy. His respect for LBJ began to wane.”127

  Robert Kennedy’s respect for LBJ was never great enough for it to ever wane. During the Cuban missile crisis, his utter contempt for Lyndon Johnson would become firmly established; the president himself would stop consulting Johnson altogether on anything of substance.128 Johnson rarely attended ExComm meetings but quickly sided with the hawks of the Pentagon and the unctuous Dean Rusk at the State Department, who felt an attack on Cuba was warranted to take out the missiles, regardless of the risks of unleashing a retaliatory attack by the Soviets. As noted by author Jeff Shesol, “‘Lyndon Johnson never made any suggestions or recommendations as to what we should do at the time of the Cuban missile crisis,’ Robert Kennedy complained later. ‘He was displeased with what we were doing although he never made it clear what he would do.’ According to Bobby, as the nuclear confrontation reached its climax the following Saturday, Johnson did no more than indicate displeasure with the president’s policy. ‘He was shaking his head, mad,’ Bobby recalled.”129 According to Adam Walinsky, the purpose of RFK’s book, Thirteen Days, was “to contrast the cool, rational, deliberate decision-making of the Kennedy cabinet with the muddled, reactive nature of Johnson’s Vietnam policy by 1967.”130

  Johnson’s attempt to show the public that he was a team player, despite his chronic disagreements with Kennedy, caused him to hide his disdain from reporters, but not necessarily his columnist friends like Walter Winchell. According to Schlesinger, “There was never a whiff of discord, complaint or self-pity to newspapermen or even to old friends on the Hill. This unprecedented self-discipline exacted a growing psychic cost. By 1963 the Vice-President faded astonishingly into the background. Evelyn Lincoln calculated that in 1961 he had spent ten hours and nineteen minutes in private conferences with the President, in 1963 one hour and fifty-three minutes. At meetings in the Cabinet Room he became an almost spectral presence. As the President’s ‘sureness and independence increased,’ Mrs. Lincoln noted, ‘the Vice President became more apprehensive and anxious to please.’ Bill Moyers, who had worked for him in the Senate and was now deputy director of the Peace Corps, thought that his self-confidence was trickling away. He was, said Moyers, ‘a man without a purpose … a great horse in a very small corral’ … Daniel Patrick Moynihan remembered looking into the Vice President’s eyes and thinking, ‘This is a bull castrated very late in life’”131 (emphasis added).

  As for Lyndon Johnson’s surprising attitude about the office that he had worked so hard to achieve, having even resorted to blackmailing Kennedy to get it, he now desperately feared the thought of losing it, even though he hated it: “I detested every minute of it,” he would say of his time as vice president.132 This is an absolutely stunning comment and begs the question: If he hated it so much, why did he force Kennedy to take him in the first place and why did he fear the Kennedy’s efforts to bump him off the ticket the following year? Perhaps that best explains a comment Johnson once made, “Every time I came into John Kennedy’s presence, I felt like a goddamn raven hovering over his shoulder.”133 There is only one possible explanation for this anomaly: Clearly, Johnson loathed every minute of his time as vice president, yet he feared losing it because he knew it would mean the end of his career, and worse, if he were to face prison time, it would mean his legacy would be disgraced forever. But he kept on sloughing through those times because he knew secrets that very few others knew and had known all along that the vice presidency was only a temporary position. He had to have known that he would soon be thankful for an end to his suffering and humiliation because by Thanksgiving Day 1963, his lifetime goal of becoming president would be achieved. Retribution against the Kennedys would then be his, and Bobby would be the one to suffer.

  The problem for Johnson was actually worse than simply losing his power base and suddenly becoming ineffectual. He saw that his rightful position as the second in command was overridden from the start by his nemesis, the president’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy. “‘Johnson,’ wrote O’Donnell, ‘blamed his fallen prestige on Bobby Kennedy.’ ‘His complaints against Bobby Kennedy,’ said Bobby Baker, ‘were frequent and may have bordered on the paranoiac.’ No affection contaminated the relationship between the Vice President and the Attorney General. It was a pure case of mutual dislike. ‘Maybe it was just a matter of chemistry,’ Johnson said in retrospect.”134 Within six months of the beginning of JFK’s term, the news magazine, U.S. News & World Report, “proclaimed Bobby the ‘
number-two man in Washington … second only to the president in power and influence.’ He was the ‘assistant president.’”135 Robert Kennedy’s rise in Washington was as rapid as Lyndon Johnson’s decline. His loss of power and prestige affected him much more than he had figured on, and he didn’t like it. His presence wasn’t missed at important meetings until the last minute, when JFK might occasionally remember to invite him belatedly. These slights greatly hurt the fragile but inflated ego of Johnson, who had trouble trying to pretend to stay busy, and usually did so with a simulated flair that evoked his old days as the “master of the Senate.”136 The reality was that John Kennedy simply stopped consulting Johnson on anything of importance and rarely invited him to meetings on substantive subjects.137 Despite his loss of power to Robert Kennedy during those years, or maybe because of it, Johnson “still derided Bobby quite loudly as a ‘snot-nosed little son-of-a-bitch.’ Bobby Kennedy, Johnson once told Bobby Baker, was laughably underprepared to lead the nation’s law enforcement effort and was sure to politicize the Justice Department.”138