The Passage of Power (35 page)

On a national scale, of course, other factors were more significant in the 1960 campaign: Kennedy’s triumph over Nixon in the televised debates; his courageous speech before the ministers in Houston; the telephone call he made to Martin Luther King’s wife when the minister was arrested in Atlanta; the style, the elegance, the wit, the charisma of the handsome, debonair candidate that brought larger and larger, and more and more frenzied, crowds out to greet him in the cities of the Northeast. Despite all these factors, however, Kennedy might not have been elected President without Johnson. “John F. Kennedy
could
not have been elected President without the South,” Evans and Novak were to conclude. “Could he have carried enough southern states to win” without Johnson on the ticket? “Probably not.”
“The
key to the election had been in the South,” said
U.S. News & World Report.
“And this was the land of Lyndon Johnson. It had backed him for the presidency and he had been put on the Kennedy ticket to hold it for the Democrats. Mr. Johnson did the job. He campaigned and cajoled and persuaded and wound up by getting almost all of the top-level Democrats in the South out fighting for the ticket.” In Kennedy’s suite at the Biltmore Hotel the morning after his nomination, the southern governors had told him, one after the other, that the only way to hold their states was to put Johnson on the ticket. Kennedy had put
him on—and the states had been held. Eighty-one of the South’s 128 electoral votes had gone to Kennedy-Johnson; Nixon had received only 33 (14 went to
Mississippi’s independent slate).

As the decades have rolled by since that election, the picture of the Kennedy campaign etched at the time by the journalists traveling with it and by the campaign’s first—and most famous—chronicler,
Theodore H. White, became a staple of American political legend. Lyndon Johnson was only peripherally a part of that legend. In the 173 pages in
The Making of the President 1960
that White devoted to the post-convention campaign, the Adolphus incident is mentioned only in a phrase, as was Johnson’s role in the South as a whole; his name appears in those pages exactly seven times, always as a brief mention. In a vivid portrait of efficiency and sophistication, of Ivy League charm and a group of brilliant young men transforming American politics, what room remained for a tall, thick, bellowing figure with his arms flailing above his head, shouting, “What has Dick Nixon ever done for Culpepper?,” for the endless blaring repetition of
“The
Yellow Rose of Texas,” for the
“Cornpone
Special”? In the years since White’s book established the terms of reference by which the 1960 campaign is considered, there has been scant reference to the scene at the Adolphus. Even in discussions of possible fraud in the election, and of how it might have changed the overall result, it had been
Illinois on which most of the focus has remained, not those border counties down on the Rio Grande. But Johnson should have been a part of the chronicles, as one of Kennedy’s intimates, Ted Sorensen—the only one, really, to give Johnson more than passing mention—acknowledges. Noting that Kennedy’s margin of victory in Texas had been 46,000, and that a switch in votes by 23,000 voters would therefore have turned the tide, Sorensen wrote that “The maltreatment to which he [Johnson] and his wife were subjected by a shoving and booing crowd of disorderly Republican fanatics in Dallas undoubtedly helped switch more than the 23,000 …. And had it not been for the return of Texas and
Louisiana to the Democratic column … and for the Carolinas staying Democratic against a predicted Republican victory, Nixon would have won the election.” Kennedy had “gambled” on Lyndon Johnson, Sorensen wrote. “That gamble paid off.” Jack Kennedy himself was to say to Ken O’Donnell in 1962:
“You
have to admit I was right. We couldn’t have won without him.”

On election night, from Austin, Johnson made a call to Jack Kennedy. “I am carrying Texas,” he said. “I hear
you
are losing
Ohio, and
we
are doing fine in
Pennsylvania.” Kennedy turned away from the phone with a smile. “We?” It was
he
who was going to be President. Lyndon Johnson was going to be Vice President.

“P
OWER IS WHERE POWER GOES
”:
the most significant factor in any equation that adds up to political power, Lyndon Johnson had assured his allies, is the individual, not the office; for a man with a gift for acquiring power, whatever office he held would become powerful—because of what he would make out of it.

Johnson felt he had that gift—
“I
do understand power, whatever else may be said about me,” he had once told an aide. “I know where to look for it, and how to use it”—and nothing in his career, at least nothing in his career before he began running for the presidency, made that assessment seem immodest. At every stage in his life, from college onward, he had demonstrated not only that he possessed the gift, but that he possessed it in a particularly rare and creative form: the ability to look at an organization that had little or no political power, to perceive in it political potentialities that no one else had ever seen, to acquire a position in the organization, and then to transform the organization into a political force, so that the office he held, and he, as its holder, became powerful. At every stage, the gift had been maximized by the ruthlessness with which he grabbed for the power he perceived and with which he wielded the power once he had it, but nothing could diminish the brilliance of the perception.

At college—a sleepy teachers college deep in the Texas Hill Country—the organization was a small social club, the “White Stars.” Becoming its leader, he turned it into a political organization, disciplined and secret, brought it into campus politics—“he
created
campus politics, really”; previously, “no one even cared” about campus elections—and through means that included a stolen election and the use against a young woman student of what his lieutenants called “blackmail,” made himself, an extremely unpopular young man on College Hill, the student with the most influence there. Then he persuaded the college president to give him a say over which students would get campus jobs. At this “poor
boys’ school” the choice was often stark: get a teaching diploma or live out a life of drudgery on your family’s lonely farm or ranch. The wages from a campus job were often a student’s only hope of paying his tuition. “Twenty cents an hour and you either went to school or you didn’t,” one says. “And Lyndon would say [who would] get that job.”

The gift worked on Capitol Hill as well as on College Hill. There, the organization was the
“Little Congress,” an almost moribund debating society of congressional aides that had degenerated into little more than a poorly attended social club, and the office he acquired was its Speaker. After Johnson won that office, in an election, in 1933, that also would not bear close scrutiny, the organization was transformed, an invitation to address it now prized in Washington, and the Speaker became one congressional aide who had access to powerful congressmen and senators, and prestige as well: seeing Johnson striding self-importantly down a Capitol corridor, a newly arrived congressional aide asked who he was, and was told, “That’s the Boss of the Little Congress.”

The
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, with two employees and little cash, was, in 1940, another almost moribund organization that no one took seriously—except Lyndon Johnson. The junior congressman saw two things that no one else saw. The first was a possible connection between two groups that had previously had no link: conservative Texas oilmen and contractors—most notably his financial backer,
Herman Brown, of
Brown & Root—who needed federal contracts and tax breaks and were willing to spend money, a lot of money, to get them; and the scores of northern, liberal congressmen, running for re-election, who needed money for their campaigns. The second was that he could become that link. Although the only position he could obtain with the committee was a vague, informal one, without any title at all, with it he forged the link: made himself the conduit through which the Texas contributions passed, the congressman to whom, junior or not, other congressmen had to appeal for campaign financing. By the end of the 1940 campaign, the committee had become a key funding source, and at the age of thirty-two he had his first toehold on national power.

Hardly had he arrived in the Senate in 1949, after the most notorious of his elections, when he began seeking the post of his party’s Assistant Leader, or “whip.” Two years later, he got it—got it easily: no one else wanted it; it was, everyone agreed, a “nothing job.” But Johnson made it a significant job, and then became Leader, a position historically so powerless—“I have nothing to threaten them with, nothing to promise them,” one of his immediate predecessors as Leader had said—that no one really wanted that job, either; the most influential and respected senators routinely refused to take it; previous Leaders’ inability to actually lead the Senate, or even to control it, had for years made Leaders figures of ridicule. Johnson took it—sought it, maneuvered for it—and so transformed it that a journalist, watching him run the Senate, said he seemed to be “running the world!” and journalists in general bestowed on him the title “The second most
powerful man in the country.” All his life Lyndon Johnson had been taking “nothing jobs” and making them into something—something big.

And now, no sooner had he been elected to the vice presidency than he tried to do the same thing with that office.

T
HE
C
ONSTITUTION OF THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
says that the Vice President shall preside over the Senate, “but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.” It says that in case of the President’s “death, resignation or inability to discharge the powers and duties of said office, the same shall devolve on the vice-president.” And, in regard to the powers of a Vice President, that is all it says.
¹
With the exception of his ability to cast a vote to break a tie in the Senate, the document that created the office attached to it, not a single specific power. Provisions in the Constitution, moreover, stand in the way of a Vice President’s acquiring power. Its very first lines—Article I, Section 1—state that “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States,” that the Congress “shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives” and that the Senate “shall be composed of two senators from each state.” Of senators only—no mention of a Vice President. The Founding Fathers were concerned that the mere fact of the Vice President presiding over the Senate might blur the overarching principle of separation of powers, that the office, as
Hugh Williamson of North Carolina put it during the
Constitutional Convention of 1787, would then
“mix
too much of the Legislative and Executive, which … ought to be kept as separate as possible.”
“In
particular,” as one study of the office put it, the Founders “seem to fear that the President would somehow gain ascendance over the Senate through the Vice President.” They needn’t have worried. No body could have been a more staunch guardian of the separation principle, more fiercely jealous of its independence from the executive branch. The Senate, the Constitution says, makes its own rules, and its rules (together with its precedents) grant only to senators (and, upon appropriate notice, former Presidents) the right to address the body or to participate in debate. It doesn’t give that right to a Vice President. He could sit in the presiding officer’s chair in the Senate; he couldn’t be a part of it, couldn’t even speak on the floor except with its consent. As for the authority given him by his right of presiding over it, the Senate had, after some decades in the early nineteenth century in which Vice Presidents had indeed intruded, taken care that its rules and precedents would in future keep such intrusion by the executive branch to a minimum, had done so
with such thoroughness that in fact by 1960 a Vice President possessed no significant power that couldn’t be exercised just as well by the newest freshman senator, if
he
was presiding in the Vice President’s place (and in fact, with Vice Presidents having little taste for the almost purely ceremonial role, it was often freshmen senators who were assigned to sit in the presiding officer’s chair).

Article I of the Constitution deals with legislative powers. Article II deals with executive powers.
“The
executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America,” states the Article’s first lines. In the President—not in any manner in the Vice President. Succeeding sections of that Article enumerate the presidential powers—to act as commander in chief of the armed forces, for example, or to veto legislation passed by Congress, or to grant pardons. No provision in the Constitution authorizes a President to delegate any of these powers—any of
“the
executive power”—to a Vice President. Even should Congress wish to, it can’t get around that barrier.
“Any
formal allocation of power to the Vice President would conflict with the clause in the Constitution vesting the undivided ‘executive power’ in the President,” stated one study of the situation.
There
was, moreover, a further barrier. The various great departments of government—not only the
Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, all the departments whose heads sat as the President’s Cabinet—but other major if non-Cabinet-level federal agencies as well had been established by law: by statutes enacted by Congress. In establishing these departments, Congress had laid out boundaries, statutory boundaries, of their authority. Powers delegated to a Vice President by a President might infringe on those statutory powers. This conflict—and the weakness of the Vice President’s role in it—had become clear during a President’s attempt to give his Vice President what was accurately called “the only big job ever handed a Vice President” during the almost two centuries the United States had been in existence: the executive order that Franklin Roosevelt issued in July, 1941, after, with war looming, he had declared a state of national emergency. “By virtue of the existence of the emergency,” he created an
Economic Defense Board to coordinate planning for the looming war with broad powers over areas such as imports, exports and the stockpiling of strategic materials, and made Vice President
Henry A. Wallace its chairman, in a position that gave Wallace broad authority in such areas. No sooner had the board been created, however, than the inherent conflict between the Vice President’s role and the powers of other Cabinet members had erupted in open hostility. In their conflict with Wallace, the Cabinet members had Congress behind them. No President since then had made any similar attempt.