LBJ In Chains
[This blog is back from its CATAM-induced hiatus. If you’re not a mathmos, the CATAM is (according to Wikipedia) an abbreviation for Comando Aéreo de Transporte Militar, a military base in Colombia. Of course it’s well-known that Cambridge sends math students there for some extra training.]
When we last saw our hero anti-hero, Lyndon B. Johnson had become the Senate Majority Leader.1 The only politician more powerful than LBJ was President Eisenhower, who would not run for reelection in 1960. So Johnson felt that the presidency was within his grasp.
It wasn’t.
If you don’t run, you can’t win
Fun fact: You cannot win the Democratic presidential nomination if you don’t announce you’re running for president.
LBJ really wanted to be president, so he wanted to run. Simultaneously, he didn’t want to run, since then he could lose, and he hated to lose.
So he compromised by setting up a secret campaign headquarters. It didn’t stay secret for long, so LBJ ordered it to close. It did, but then:
Baker [an aide] had indeed closed the office, the furniture and telephones had been removed, but someone had forgotten that large signs—one for the K Street side of the Ambassador, one for the Fourteenth Street side, each proclaiming in huge letters, NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS—LYNDON B. JOHNSON FOR PRESIDENT CITIZENS COMMITTEE, had been ordered. No one had canceled the order. All at once reporters were calling, and Johnson’s horrified staff learned that the signs were being hoisted into place at that very moment, and that television crews had arrived, along with newspaper photographers. Telephoning the sign company, Jenkins [an aide] demanded that the signs be taken down immediately, but when workmen started to do so, it turned out that while the company had a permit to erect the signs, a different permit was required to remove them.2
When LBJ finally did announce his candidacy, it was almost too late.
Worse, LBJ underestimated his main opponent, JFK.
Did LBJ have the support of Texas’s wealthy oilmen? JFK had the support of his father, who had made millions during the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression.
Did LBJ sometimes campaign despite painful illnesses? JFK had Addison’s disease, which would bring him so close to the brink of death that he was given last rites four times. And the treatments made his spine rot away.3 But he concealed that it hurt whenever he walked.4
Did LBJ pretend to be a war hero despite only being in combat for thirteen minutes?5 JFK was an actual war hero who had used his teeth to tow a wounded sailor while swimming for five hours.6 Did I mention that he did this despite his back problems?
It didn’t hurt that the Kennedys were photogenic:7
JFK got the Democratic nomination.
Who is Lyndon B. Johnson?
Kennedy offered Johnson the vice-presidency because LBJ could carry Texas in the 1960 election. LBJ took the job, since he had a three-prong plan to control the legislative and executive branches:
Stay in command of the Senate by telling the new Senate Leader (LBJ’s former assistant leader) what to do.
Keep sucking up to the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn. Rayburn treated LBJ as a son and was glad to pass whatever laws LBJ wanted.
Convince JFK to give him lots of power over the executive branch.
Johnson and Kennedy were elected. But LBJ’s plan completely failed:
The senators thought it was creepy for the vice-president (in the executive branch) to have influence over the legislative branch, so they refused to cooperate.
Rayburn died.
JFK was not a pushover, so he gave LBJ the traditional powers and responsibility of the vice-president: Nothing.
The vice-president is the ultimate tourist. You get to meet famous and powerful people, eat at state dinners, fly around the world, and you don’t have to make any hard decisions about policy.8 But for LBJ, this was hell. He wanted power; he wanted to be somebody that mattered.
LBJ was not a nice man. But I do feel sorry for him as vice-president. The job gave him nightmares:
In the dream that particularly tormented him, he was seated at his desk in the Executive Office Building, so near, and yet so far, from the White House just beyond his window. “In the dream,” he told Goodwin [his biographer], “I had finished signing one stack of letters and had turned my chair toward the window. The activity on the street below suggested to me that it was just past five o’clock. All of Washington, it seemed, was on the street, leaving work for the day, heading for home. Suddenly, I decided I’d pack up and go home, too. For once, I decided, it would be nice to join all those people on the street and have an early dinner with my family. I started to get up from my chair, but I couldn’t move. I looked down at my legs and saw they were manacled to the chair with a heavy chain. I tried to break the chain, but I couldn’t. I tried again, and failed again. Once more and I gave up: I reached for the second stack of mail. I placed it directly in front of me, and got back to work.”
LBJ would wander into the White House to see if anyone had any work for him, or if the president wanted to consult with him about anything. But Kennedy never had anything for Johnson to do. In 1963, JFK and LBJ spent exactly 113 minutes talking to each other in private.9
And soon the public forgot who Johnson was:
The popular television show Candid Camera asked random passersby: “Who is Lyndon B. Johnson?” Not one knew. One of those questioned said he couldn’t be expected to know: “I’m from New Jersey.” “Well,” said another, “he’s not President. Am I getting close?”10
But there were worse things than obscurity.
The Quorum Club
Sailors fear fire. Politicians fear scandal.
Exhibit A: In October 1963, British prime minister Harold Macmillan had resigned because of the Profumo affair: The War Secretary11 had an affair with Christine Keeler, which made headlines because she was also having an affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet spy.
(Ivanov’s memoirs are (honestly) called The Naked Spy.)
OK, but LBJ knew that scandals are bad, so he made sure never to get near one, right?
Well, that same autumn, the media started publishing stories about LBJ’s friend and former assistant, Bobby Baker. Baker had been taking bribes from companies in exchange for influencing the Defense Department to hire those companies.12
OK, but at least it wasn’t a sex scandal, right?
Well, it turned out Baker also ran a club13 (“The Quorum Club”) near the Senate Office Building. Newspapers used a lot of innuendo to describe the club’s purpose (an “intimate” club for “romantic caucuses”), but it was essentially a brothel for congressmen.
OK, but at least there weren’t any spies involved?
Well, one of the Quorum Club’s employees was an East German, Ellen Rometsch, who was (falsely) rumored to be a spy who had slept with JFK.14
OK, but at least this was solely Baker’s problem? He broke the law, and he knew Johnson, but he didn’t break the law working with Johnson, right?
Well, it turns out Johnson and Baker had colluded to extort about $1200 (plus a $500 stereo) from Johnson’s insurance salesman, Don B. Reynolds.15 And then Baker had convinced Reynolds to funnel $25,000 (about £159,000 today16) to LBJ’s campaign.17
The media did not yet know Reynolds’s story, but they would soon: On November 22, 1963, Reynolds began testifying to Senate staffers about his business dealings with Johnson.
That same day, Life magazine was holding a meeting, where reporters were discussing the subject of their next investigation: LBJ. They had heard (correct) rumours about how he had illicitly become a millionaire.
That same day, Kennedy was visiting Texas. On the trip, JFK discovered that LBJ no longer had the strong support of Texas’s Democratic Party. (One Texas Democrat even refused to ride in the same car as LBJ.)
If a vice president can’t get his state to support him, if he bent the law to get rich, if his assistant is about to go to jail, then perhaps it’s time to find a new vice president. Three days before, JFK had told his personal secretary that he would choose a different running mate in 1964.18 It would take a miracle to save LBJ’s political career.
The opposite of a miracle
In Los Angeles, the rush of automobiles on the freeways began to slow, and then to halt, as drivers stopped their cars as they heard the bulletins coming over their radios. Motorists behind them, jumping out of their cars to expostulate, got the news from the drivers ahead, and stood in stunned silence, listening to the bulletins through the windows.19
That same day, JFK was assassinated, and LBJ became president.
Footnotes:
In Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate. All my page number references are from the sequel, The Passage of Power.
p. 132
p. 68
One of JFK’s doctors was called Dr. Feelgood because of all the drugs he prescribed.
p. 58
p. 70
Photo stolen from here.
Modern vice-presidents (that is, Dick Cheney) have more power than that, but they still have no power independent of the president.
p. 331
p. 333
now called the Defence Secretary
p. 401. Worse, Baker had then double-crossed one of those companies, which then sued him. (Is it really a good idea to publicly sue someone for not staying bribed?)
p. 420
p. 421. Although JFK did have affairs while president
p. 413
$25000 in 1960 is about $221000 today, which is about £159000
p. 425
p. 428. Although Evelyn Lincoln also said that she thought “Lyndon B. Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the Mafia, the CIA, and the Cubans in Florida” had killed JFK, so perhaps she’s not the most reliable source.
p. 506