Ep 71: LBJ (Part 2)

In the last episode, we studied Lyndon Johnson’s early life, from his time as a 29 year old congressman, all the way up to 1948 when he was elected to the United States Senate with the help of George Parr and his fraudulent extra votes in Precinct 13 of Jim Wells County.  

We’ll be getting to Bobby Baker, Billie Sol Estes, Mac Wallace, Texas Oil Tycoons and related issues soon. In this episode, we look at Johnson’s time in the Senate, his views on Civil Rights, and the story of how Lyndon Johnson secured the Democratic Vice Presidential nomination in the 1960 election. Did JFK choose Johnson, or - was the decision forced on him?  

Time in the Senate

Lyndon Johnson entered the Senate in 1949 coming off of an 87 vote win, which has since been proven to be the result of fraudulent ballot stuffing by George Parr’s South Texas political machine. This extremely close and disputed election earned Johnson the sarcastic nickname of “Landslide Lyndon” in the Senate.[1]

Once he began his Senate term, Johnson worked closely with Senator Richard Russell, who had been representing Georgia since 1933. Russell was the chair of the Armed Services Committee.[2] Johnson’s ascent within the Senate began in 1951 when he was elected party whip for the Democrats – a role in which Johnson excelled given his extremely strong ability to persuade others to do what he wanted.[3] Two years later, Johnson would rise to the role of Senate Minority Leader. He was assisted by Senator Russell, who wrote on his desk calendar on November 10, 1952, QUOTE “Saw L. Johnson & buttoned up leadership for him.”[4]

In 1954, Johnson was re-elected to the Senate and, because the Democrats won the election, Johnson became Senate Majority Leader. Historians Robert Caro and Robert Dallek considered LBJ to be the most effective Senate majority leader of all time. This was partially because Johnson had a knack for gathering intelligence and finding out where each Senator stood on any given issue. He used all of the tools of the position, including sending Senators on NATO trips if Johnson thought they were going to cast a dissenting vote.[5]

In addition to being the Majority Leader, Johnson, served on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a new subcommittee – the Joint Committee on Foreign Intelligence, to which Johnson appointed his ally, Senator Russell, to serve with him. On that subcommittee, Senators Johnson and Russell worked together to ensure that CIA operations remained exempt from congressional oversight.[6]

Speaking of the CIA, Johnson’s benefactors from Brown and Root, Herman and George Brown, were assets of the agency, beginning in 1953, in addition to nine other Brown and Root employees. Notably, Herman and George Brown were not simply assets of the Domestic Contact Service, which would be expected for businessmen who regularly travel abroad. The Browns were also assets of the CIA’s clandestine services, which focused on covert operations.[7] Of course, during Johnson’s time in the Senate, he used his status as Whip and then Leader to secure contracts for Brown & Root to build military bases all over the world, including in Guam, Spain, and France.[8]

Johnson & Civil Rights

When he eventually became President, one of Lyndon Johnson’s most significant achievements was the passage of two landmark civil rights laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These new laws were a major blow to Jim Crow segregation, and a huge step in the direction of equality under the law. Today, in addition to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, Johnson’s civil rights legislation is viewed very positively – as it should be.

On the other hand, as more information has come out over the years, it appears that Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with race was more complicated than meets the eye. As a child, Johnson would throw rocks at black children to make them leave swimming holes.[9] He also got a kick out of putting snakes in his trunk and asking black gas station attendants to check the spare tire.[10]

After the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision – the one that ended school segregation – Johnson said QUOTE “all hell had broken loose.”[11] He also famously boasted that QUOTE “I’ll have them [N WORD]s voting Democratic for two hundred years.”[12] When Johnson was president, he explained his decision to nominate Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court this way, QUOTE “When I appoint a [N WORD] to the bench, I want everyone to know he’s a [N WORD].”[13]

Robert Parker, a black man, was Johnson’s sometimes chauffer during his time in the Senate in the 1950s. In Parker’s memoir, he tells the story of when Johnson asked him whether he would like to be referred to by his name instead of ‘boy’, ‘chief’, or ‘[N WORD]’. When Parker responded that he would like the dignity of being called by his name, Johnson told him QUOTE “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, [N WORD], you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”[14]

Bobby Kennedy said that Johnson as Vice President rarely helped to get Civil Rights votes in the Senate and was not involved at all in drafting the 1963 Civil Rights Bill. Bobby viewed Johnson as obstructing the bill because he underestimated the importance of its proposed mandate for equal access to public accommodations and minimized the need to end segregation.[15] So, while Johnson deserves credit for signing landmark civil rights legislation, there are real questions about his underlying motives, given his clear history of racist acts and words.

Backstory To Getting on the Ticket

Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy were different in many ways. But, one thing that they had in common was a shared ambition to be President of the United States.

In 1955, Joseph Kennedy, Sr, JFK’s dad, had a plan to get Lyndon Johnson to run for president on the 1956 Democrat ticket, with John Kennedy as the Vice President. President Eisenhower was popular at the time and was almost certain to be re-elected. But, Joseph Kennedy thought that JFK running as Vice President and losing would help elevate him into the national spotlight and position him for a run for President in 1960. The plan never got off the ground because Johnson told Joe Kennedy, Sr. that he did not want to run for president against Eisenhower in 1956.[16]

In 1959, on behalf of his brother, John, Bobby Kennedy traveled just west of Austin to Lyndon Johnson’s ranch to find out whether Johnson intended to run for president in 1960. Johnson and RFK had mutual distaste for each other from the moment they first met in 1953, when Bobby, then an aide to Joseph McCarthy, did not stand up to greet Senator Johnson and instead looked at him with contempt.[17]

On this 1959 trip, Johnson assured Bobby that he would not be running for president in 1960. After their talk, Johnson took Bobby deer hunting, but didn’t mention to him how much kick the rifle had. When Bobby fired a shot he was knocked to the ground and cut his forehead, prompting Johnson to stand over him and say QUOTE “Son, you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.”[18]

It turns out that Johnson was lying to Bobby Kennedy. He did intend to run for president in 1960. In fact, Johnson began planning his run in 1958 when he asked Texas State Senator Dorsey Hardeman to sponsor a bill that would allow Johnson to run for Senate re-election and for President or Vice President at the same time. This meant that Johnson could fall back to the Senate if he secured the nomination but his presidential bid failed. Hardeman told the press in May of 1959 that the bill was the “Lyndon Johnson for President Bill.”[19]

As we all know, Lyndon Johnson ended up being John F. Kennedy’s Vice President on the 1960 Democratic Party ticket. So, how exactly did that come to be?

Getting on the Ticket – The Official Story

In 1960, only seven states were decided by Democratic primary elections. Lyndon Johnson’s name was not on the ballot in any of those states. Instead, Johnson’s strategy was to let the other candidates attack each other and position himself as the dark horse candidate at the Democratic Convention. Johnson thought he had a good chance to make a deal behind the scenes.[20] Johnson, as Majority Leader of the Senate, had total control over the funds of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. He made sure that he only provided campaign funds to senators in states where Johnson had the best chance of picking up convention delegates.[21]

A month before the convention, the polls showed Kennedy with 620 delegates, Johnson with 510, Stuart Symington with 140, Hubert Humphrey with 100, and Adlai Stevenson with 75. A total of 761 delegates was needed to win.[22] Johnson had been trying to chip away at Kennedy’s lead by running a negative campaign led by his campaign manager, John Connally.[23] On July 4th, 1960, Connally gave a press conference where he told the world that John Kennedy had Addison’s disease, and implied that he would die from it soon. Just two weeks earlier, the offices of two of Kennedy’s doctors had been broken into and had their records ransacked. The burglars were never caught, but Bobby Kennedy thought the J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI was behind it.[24]

When it came time for the vote of the delegates at the Democratic National Convention on July 13th, Johnson had 409 to Kennedy’s 806, which meant that John F. Kennedy would become the Democratic nominee for the White House.[25] The exact details of how Lyndon Johnson became Kennedy’s vice president are disputed to this day.

There are two overlapping parts of the official story. First, there’s the political strategy that Kennedy wanted Johnson on the ticket because he had more experience, and because Johnson was from the South, which would bring geographic balance.[26] The second story that is sometimes told is that Kennedy offered the position to Johnson as a courtesy, assuming that he would not accept the vice presidency when he could go back to being the Senate Majority Leader, a position that had real power.[27]

But, those arguments for why Kennedy would choose Johnson don’t take into account the extent of the policy differences between the two men. Johnson, as a Southern Democrat, had very different political priorities and allies than the liberal, Northeastern, Democrat, Kennedy.

Kenny O’Donnell, one of JFK’s trusted staffers, expressed his concerns to Kennedy about Johnson. O’Donnell asked him, QUOTE “Are we going to spend the whole campaign apologizing for Lyndon Johnson and trying to explain why he voted against everything you ever stood for?” To which Kennedy responded, QUOTE “I’m forty three years old, and I’m the healthiest candidate for President in the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to know that. I’m not going to die in office. So the Vice Presidency doesn’t mean anything. I’m thinking of something else, the leadership in the Senate. If we win it, it will be by a small margin and I won’t be able to live with Lyndon Johnson as the leader of a small Senate majority. Did it occur to you that if Lyndon Johnson becomes Vice President I’ll have Mike Mansfield as the Senate leader, somebody I can trust and depend on?”[28]

After Johnson accepted the nomination, the Kennedy camp tried to get him to back out. They sent Bobby, who hated LBJ - and who LBJ hated - to ask Johnson to withdraw on multiple occasions in separate visits to his hotel suite. Bobby later said that Johnson is QUOTE “one of the greatest sad-looking people in the world…You know, he can turn that on. I thought he’d burst into tears…He just shook, and tears came into his eyes and he said ‘I want to be vice president, and if the president will have me, I’ll join him in making a fight for it.’ It was that kind of conversation.” In the end, Bobby Kennedy left the conversation with Johnson by telling him that if he wanted to be vice president, the Kennedy’s would like to have him.[29]

A Darker Explanation

But, there’s a darker potential explanation for Johnson making his way on to the 1960 ticket.

According to insiders, Clark Clifford and Hy Raskin – two people who were physically present at the convention and have first hand knowledge, John Kennedy had already selected Stuart Symington for Vice President before Johnson cajoled his way onto the ticket. Hy Raskin was a senior strategist and campaign advisor for Kennedy for more than two years at the time of the 1960 convention. Clark Clifford was a campaign advisor for Stuart Symington and also was the personal lawyer for John Kennedy.[30]

Both Raskin and Clifford, recalled a meeting on the night of July 13th where Kennedy told Clifford QUOTE “We’ve talked it out – me, my dad, and Bobby – and we’ve selected Symington as the vice president.” Clifford was then sent to find out if Symington would accept. Soon after, he let the Kennedy campaign know that Stuart Symington would accept the vice presidential nomination. Clifford told journalist Seymour Hersh, QUOTE “I and Stuart went to bed believing that we had a solid, unequivocal deal with Jack.”[31]

Hy Raskin said that on the night Kennedy was nominated, he was supposed to meet with party leaders who thought they had a chance to be vice president, but weren’t being offered the job. But, Bobby Kennedy told Raskin to cancel the meeting that night. When Raskin asked him why, Bobby said, “Tell them the truth. You don’t know.”[32]

On the next morning, July 14th, Clark Clifford was summoned to an early morning meeting with John Kennedy. According to Clifford, Kennedy said QUOTE “I must do something that I’ve never done before. I made a serious deal and I’ve now got to go back on it. I have no alternative.” Symington was out. And Johnson was in.[33]

Around lunch that same day, once the news had begun to come out that Johnson would be the vice presidential nominee, JFK told Raskin QUOTE “You know we had never considered Lyndon, but I was left with no choice. He and Sam Rayburn made it damn clear to me that Lyndon had to be the candidate. Those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems. And I don’t need more problems. I’m going to have enough problems with Nixon.”

According to Raskin, Johnson was not being given the slightest bit of consideration by the Kennedys before the convention.[34] Kennedy Press Secretary Pierre Salinger wrote in his memoir that he asked Kennedy whether he really expected Johnson to accept the offer to be vice president and Kennedy replied QUOTE “The whole story will never be known. And it’s just as well that it won’t be.”[35]

So why did John Kennedy offer the vice presidency to Symington, only to renege on the offer at the last minute? At some point between when Symington was offered the position and the next morning, Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn spoke to JFK in private. We don’t have the exact details of this meeting, but we know it happened because Kennedy told Raskin about it.

Kennedy’s long time personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, told British author Anthony Summers, that Lyndon Johnson QUOTE “had been using all the information Hoover could find on Kennedy – during the campaign, even before the Convention. And Hoover was in on the pressure on Kennedy at the Convention…about womanizing, and things in Joe Kennedy’s background, and anything he could dig up. Johnson was using that as clout. Kennedy was angry, because they had boxed him into a corner.”[36]

As we discussed when we covered the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover kept dossiers on important politicians. One of them was John F. Kennedy. Among other extramarital affairs, Hoover had proof that Kennedy had an affair with Inga Arvad fifteen years earlier. Arvad was close to Hitler, having shared a box seat with him at the 1936 Olympic games.[37]

So, according to Evelyn Lincoln, it was Johnson’s threat to use blackmail against Kennedy that put Johnson on the ticket. Lincoln told Anthony Summers that she saw Bobby and John deep in conversation on the morning of July 15th – after the Johnson VP choice had been announced. She said QUOTE “I went in and listened. They were very upset and trying to figure out how they could get around it, but they didn’t know how they could do it.” While Lincoln did not hear of any specific threat from Johnson, she did say that QUOTE “Jack knew that Hoover and LBJ would just fill the air with womanizing.”[38]

Ultimately, the details of how Johnson became the Vice President remain shrouded in secrecy. Evelyn Lincoln’s claims should not be dismissed. She had been Kennedy’s personal secretary since he first made it to the Senate in 1953.[39] This is a woman who was clearly an insider and was privy to a lot of private information. Still, Lincoln doesn’t mention an explicit threat from Johnson.

Let’s review what we do know: 1) JFK didn’t want LBJ before the convention, 2) JFK first offered the position to Stuart Symington at the convention, and 3) Bobby Kennedy tried to get Johnson to change his mind after the VP spot had already been offered. The strongest evidence that something shady happened is from Hyman Raskin, the Kennedy campaign aide who says that JFK admitted to him that Johnson and Rayburn tried to frame him.

In my view, it’s not crystal clear, but enough evidence exists to conclude that, most likely, Lyndon Johnson did exactly what JFK told Hyman Raskin he did – which was to try to blackmail Kennedy if he didn’t put Johnson on the ticket as vice president.

NEXT TIME ON SOLVING JFK: We continue to examine the life and times of Lyndon Johnson, as we turn our attention to Johnson’s business dealings and three Texans who were tied to Johnson – Bobby Baker, Billie Sol Estes, and Mac Wallace.  

[1] https://www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_JohnsonLyndonBaines.htm

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Russell_Jr.

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson

[4] Joan Mellon, Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson & Mac Wallace in the Robber Barron Culture of Texas, at 113.

[5] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson

[6] Mellon at 66.

[7] RIF # 104-10117-10203, Memo from Sarah Hall to Hief, LEOB/SRS; Memo: December 1967 Ramparts Article Entitled “The CIA’s Brown and Root Dimensions”, 12/20/1967 - https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=40038#relPageId=7

[8] Mellon at 59.

[9] D. Jablow Hershman, Power Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson, at 30;

[10] Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, at 715.

[11] Robert G. Baker, Oral History Interview IV, February 29, 1984, LBJ Library.

[12] Ronald Kessler, Inside The White House: The Hidden Lives of the Modern Presidents and the Secrets of the World’s Most Powerful Institution, at 33-34.

[13] https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lyndon-johnson-civil-rights-racism-msna305591 (Indeed, Johnson used the N Word behind closed doors a lot. So much so that, he would use different versions of the word depending on how racist the people were that he was speaking with. When Johnson spoke to most politicians from the South behind closed doors, he would use the version with the hard R on the end.)

[14] https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lyndon-johnson-civil-rights-racism-msna305591; Robert Parker, Capitol Hill in Black and White.

[15] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, at 62.

[16] Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, at 647.

[17] Mellon at 60.

[18] Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade, at 10.

[19] https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,892487,00.html

[20] Nelson at 272.

[21] Id. at 273.

[22] Id.

[23] https://www.tsl.texas.gov/governors/modern/connally-p13.html

[24] Richard D. Mahoney, Sons & Brothers – The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, at 126; Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, at 273-274.

[25] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Democratic_National_Convention

[26] https://www.lbjlibrary.org/life-and-legacy/the-man-himself/biography

[27] Roger Stone, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, at 78; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Democratic_National_Convention

[28] Kenneth O’Donnell, Life Magazine, August 7, 1970, at 47; Nelson at 289.

[29] Shesol at 54.

[30] Stone at 80.

[31] Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, at 125.

[32] Id. at 125.

[33] Id. at 126

[34] Id. at 124.

[35] Id. at 128.

[36] Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, at 272.

[37] Summers at 271-273.

[38] Hersh at 129.

[39] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Lincoln