The Passage of Power (26 page)

And of course if the scent of magnolias remained, it would taint him not only in the convention, but, should he by some long chance win the nomination, in the country as a whole. Should he win the nomination but not the presidential election which followed, he would be only a footnote in history, just another defeated presidential candidate. He wasn’t interested in being a footnote. He was interested in being “LBJ.” And was it possible for him to win a national presidential election with the scent still on him? Was it possible for
any
southerner to win? The last southerner to be elected to the presidency,
Zachary Taylor, had been elected in 1848—more than a century before. Would it be possible for a southerner to be elected now? A southern candidate would have the eleven southern states behind him, of course, but with the states of the Northeast, and California, and the Republican Midwest so solidly against him, it was difficult to see how. Lyndon Johnson did not see how.
“I
don’t think anybody from the South will be nominated in my lifetime; if so, I don’t think he’ll be elected,” he had said flatly to one journalist. As long as he was Senate Leader—held responsible by civil rights militants, and segregationist militants, by northerners and southerners, and by the media, for the fate of civil rights in that institution—he would not be able to escape being viewed as a sectional candidate, from the wrong section. Lyndon Johnson’s path to the presidency—that route he had mapped out for himself so long before—had always been narrow, twisting. He had navigated so many treacherous turns—had come much farther along the path than might have been thought possible. But he could go no farther. That route was closed.

But there was another route—and he had reconnoitered it.

Sometime early in 1960, he had had his staff look up the answer to a question: How many Vice Presidents of the United States had succeeded to the presidency? The answer was ten:
John Adams,
Thomas Jefferson,
Martin Van Buren,
John Tyler,
Millard Fillmore,
Andrew Johnson,
Chester A. Arthur,
Theodore Roosevelt,
Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman. That route was well traveled.

Furthermore, for a Texan who had only one goal, that route had some obvious advantages over the Senate leadership. The vice presidency might be a meaningless position, a joke position, when looked at as it was generally looked at: in terms of itself. When looked at as a means of becoming President, it took on a different aspect. For one thing, a Vice President was a national figure. As a Leader raised to Senate power by the South, Johnson had little choice but to represent southern interests, to be a sectional leader. He would continue to be, as he had been, bound to the South (just as—as a senator from Texas—he was bound to Texas oil interests, which were also unpopular in the rest of the country). To realize his great dream, those southern and Texas ties needed to be cut.

As Vice President, those ties
would
be cut, to a considerable extent. He would no longer have to represent Texas: the national Administration of which he would be a part represented not a state but a country. He would no longer have to represent the South—the South would be only one section of the country. His positions on issues could be those of an official representing the whole country—positions that would help, rather than hurt, in a future bid for the presidency. In addition, a Vice President was the logical candidate to succeed the President when his four or eight years in office ended, the natural heir to the presidency.

And of course a Vice President might not have to wait that long. The alternative route had an abbreviated version—and Lyndon Johnson had reconnoitered that, too.

He had his staff look up a second figure: How many Presidents of the United States had died in office? The answer was seven. Since thirty-three men had been President,
²
that was seven out of thirty-three: The chances of a Vice President succeeding to the presidency due to a President’s death were about one out of five. And when that question was asked about Presidents in modern times, the odds against such an occurrence got shorter—better. During the last hundred years before 1960, five Presidents had died in office—Abraham Lincoln in 1865,
James Garfield in 1881,
William McKinley in 1901, Warren Harding in 1923 and of course Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. During that time span, in other words, a President had died in office approximately every twenty years. There had been eighteen Presidents during that time, and five out of eighteen were odds of less than one out of four.

Furthermore, those odds seemed even shorter—much shorter—when compared with the odds of a Senate Majority Leader, or, indeed, any senator, being elected President. If John F. Kennedy made it to the White House straight from the Senate, he would be accomplishing something that only a single senator—Harding—had accomplished before him. And the odds were perhaps even more favorable when compared with the chances of Lyndon Johnson, the southerner,
being elected in 1964 or 1968 with the civil rights issue still burning in America. Johnson was to reiterate even during his retirement his belief that no southerner would be elected President in the foreseeable future, as when, in 1969, he told Texas’ young lieutenant governor,
Ben Barnes, the state’s new rising political star, that the only way for a Texan to reach the presidency was through the vice presidency. He never referred to his analysis of the odds in public, of course, and so far as the author of this book can determine, he never referred to it in private during his vice presidency, except on the evening of its first day, the day on which he was inaugurated. Sitting beside him that evening on a bus carrying high-level guests to the Inaugural Ball,
Clare Boothe Luce, the former congresswoman and the wife of
Time,
Inc. publisher
Henry R. Luce, asked him why he had agreed to accept the vice presidential nomination, and he replied:
“Clare
, I looked it up: one out of every four Presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin,’ and this is the only chance I got.” But during the period immediately following the convention, he explained his thinking several times.
Robert M. Jackson, editor of the
Corpus Christi Caller-Times
and a longtime ally, was to tell his reporter
James M. Rowe (not the James H. Rowe Jr. of Washington) that, encountering Johnson at the Corpus Christi Airport during this period, he had asked him,
“Lyndon
, why in the world did you accept the nomination?,” and that Johnson had replied,
“Well
, six of them didn’t have to get elected.” When he was asked the same question by intimates in Texas, the precise figure, as often with Johnson, varied from telling to telling, but the theory remained the same: that because it was so hard for a Texan to be elected President, becoming Vice President was a Texan’s best chance to reach the Oval Office. “Well,” he replied when
Joe Kilgore asked the question, “six of them [Vice Presidents] didn’t have to be elected [in order to become President].”
“You
know, seven of them got to be President without ever
being
elected,” he told Ed Clark.

A
ND, OF COURSE
, if the odds paid off, it might not require waiting eight years for them to do so.

The possibility that fate might intervene was vivid in the mind of anyone who had been in Washington on April 12, 1945, and especially vivid to members of Sam Rayburn’s basement
“Board
of Education” in the Capitol, where Harry Truman had often sat having a late-afternoon drink—and where he had been having a drink when, that day, the summons had come from the White House that had been Franklin Roosevelt’s. Lyndon Johnson hadn’t been in that room when the summons came, but he arrived there a few minutes later. He had known Truman for years as a senator, and then Harry had been plucked from the Senate to be Vice President—and then, less than four months after he had been sworn in, he was President.

The possibility had been kept vivid in Washington by what had happened during the presidency of Truman’s successor. Three times in twenty-six months, Dwight Eisenhower had been hospitalized with serious illnesses (in 1955, a heart
attack; in 1956, an attack of ileitis, an abdominal obstruction that required surgery; in 1957, a stroke), and each time the capital seethed with rumors that the President might die—or that he
had
died and that Richard Nixon would become President, or, particularly in the case of the stroke, that Eisenhower might be disabled, and that Nixon would, while remaining Vice President, assume presidential duties and powers. If
John Adams had once called the vice presidency
“the
most insignificant office,” he had also, on another occasion, made a statement that cast the position in a different light.
“I
am Vice President,” Adams had said. “In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.” All his life, Lyndon Johnson had aimed for a single goal. The path he had originally chosen, he now realized, might be closed to him by the magnolia taint. But there might be another path. As long as he had felt he had a good chance to win the presidential nomination—as he
had
felt, until the
West Virginia primary—this alternative route had remained only a dim possibility, and consideration of it had stayed on a back burner; it was winning that nomination that he was focused on. But West Virginia had wakened him to reality. That primary had been held on May 10. Thereafter, even while he was continuing to try to obtain the presidential nomination by deadlocking the convention, he was careful not to close the door to that alternative route. While before the primary, he had been so definitive about never accepting the vice presidential nomination—angrily dismissing reporters’ questions on the subject—when, shortly after West Virginia, the question came up at a press conference, he was suddenly not so definitive. That’s a
“very
‘iffy’ question,” he said, and then added:
“When
and if my country wants me to serve her, I will give it every consideration.”

Private as well as public signals were soon being sent out. Ending a conversation with Ted Sorensen in June,
Bobby Baker suddenly said,
“Maybe
the ticket will turn out to be Kennedy and Johnson.”

“I think that would be wonderful, but I doubt very much that the second man on that ticket would agree to it,” Sorensen said.

“Don’t be too sure,” Bobby Baker said, and walked away.

And with men whose voices would carry weight in discussions about the vice presidency, Johnson made very sure indeed that the door was not closed, even if keeping it open required him, on one occasion, to do what he almost never did—disagree, to his face, with Sam Rayburn.

The disagreement occurred in late June while he and Rayburn were meeting with Governor Lawrence and the powerful Democratic fund-raiser and Kennedy supporter, contractor Matt McCloskey. To McCloskey’s suggestion that “It would make a great team if you would take the second spot,” Rayburn exploded, “We didn’t come down here to talk about the second spot, we came here to talk about the first spot,” but Johnson said, “Now, wait a minute, Sam, I don’t want these boys to go out of here and not know where I stand. First of all, I am a Democrat, and I am going to do anything my party wants me to do.” (So firm was that statement that Lawrence would mention it to Kennedy at the convention,
saying that because of it, he, Lawrence, “guaranteed” that Johnson would take the job if it was offered.)

Reiterating a week before he left for Los Angeles the phrase that had caught his fancy, Johnson responded to a reporter’s query about the vice presidency by saying,
“Well
, that is a very iffy question, and I wouldn’t want to have it even thought that I would refuse to serve my country in any capacity, from running the elevator to the top job, if I felt that my services were needed.” Even at the press conference at which he at last formally announced his presidential candidacy, he was sending the signal. When a reporter offered him, as the
New York Times
put it,
“an
opportunity to rule himself out as a possible nominee for Vice President,” he “passed [it] up,” saying, “I have been prepared throughout my adult life to serve my country in any capacity where my country thought my services were essential.”

These signals were overlooked, largely because, before West Virginia, he had been saying for months—often, and in seemingly unequivocal terms—that he would never, under any conditions, accept the vice presidency, and because prominent figures in the Kennedy campaign—including the most prominent figure—had been saying for months that Johnson would never be offered the vice presidency. Ken O’Donnell, the campaign’s liaison with the country’s top union officials, was to write that
“The
labor people had warned me repeatedly that they did not want Johnson on the Kennedy ticket. I had promised them that there was no chance of such a choice.” These reassurances had continued right into the convention; when some liberal delegates, wavering up to the last minute between Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, had said they were leaning to Stevenson because they feared there was a chance—no matter how slim—that Kennedy might select Johnson, O’Donnell gave them
“the
same assurance.” And this assurance came right from the top; O’Donnell says that he had made his promise
“with
[Jack] Kennedy’s knowledge.” O’Donnell had not the slightest reason to doubt that the promise would be honored. During the months prior to the convention, he had flown thousands of miles with Jack Kennedy, he was to recall, “and once in a while we’d discuss the vice presidency and he never mentioned Lyndon Johnson’s name.” Some black delegates and civil rights leaders had the same concern as the “labor people,” and to Joseph Rauh, Jack Kennedy made the same promise—not through intermediaries but in person. A month before the convention, when Rauh told Kennedy that it was important to him that “It not be Johnson,” Kennedy replied, “It will not be Johnson.” “Kennedy promised me it would be—and this is a direct quote—‘Humphrey or another midwestern liberal,’ ” Rauh says. And in the last days before the balloting that assurance was repeated to other liberals. The assurances were repeated also by the candidate’s brother. Robert Kennedy
“pledged
to a number of those working with him—including Rauh, who was trying to deliver the District of Columbia [delegation]—that Johnson would not be on the ticket,” the
Washington Post
was to report. After Humphrey removed himself from contention by refusing to endorse Kennedy, the candidates most often mentioned for the ticket’s vice presidential slot were
Stuart Symington, Governor
Orville L. Freeman of Minnesota and Senator Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson of Washington.
“The
one name never mentioned was Lyndon Johnson,” Arthur Schlesinger states. “Quite the contrary: the Kennedy people told everybody as categorically as possible that he was not in the picture.” This was the stance not only in public but behind closed doors.
“There
was
never
any talk in the office that Mr. Johnson was to be the running mate,”
Evelyn Lincoln was to recount.