The Passage of Power

When some in Johnson’s administration wondered whether fighting poverty and discrimination could harm efforts to woo suburban voters, the president snapped, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”
 
 •Breaking the logjam in Washington. Those convinced by the recent debates on health care and debt limits on Capitol Hill that Congress and the executive branch have never been less productive or more at odds might want to read Caro’s book for a reminder that history repeats itself. The Southern caucus, beginning in 1937 with FDR’s failed bid to pack the Supreme Court, swatted away not just Civil Rights bills, but almost all of each president’s legislative agenda for 25 years. Even after Harry Truman won a tight race in 1948 by campaigning against the Do-Nothing Congress (cue the 2012 comparison for the current incumbent’s strategy), Capitol Hill proved every bit as recalcitrant over the next four years. The lone exception: LBJ’s tenure as Majority Leader from 1955-60, when he reached across the aisle to strike pragmatic accords with Dwight Eisenhower.
 
The stakes were, of course, enormous and became exaggerated when combined with Johnson’s lifelong insecurities and fear of failure. A man who graduated not even from the state university of Texas but instead from Southwest Texas State Teachers College took note of the Rhodes Scholars and Ivy Leaguers surrounding him now. Johnson openly feared being branded “illegitimate” and a “pretender” in the White House.

Caro sums up the self-loathing this way: “Nothing the Kennedys felt about Lyndon Johnson could be any worse than what Lyndon Johnson felt about himself.”

So, even as Johnson courted the Kennedy cabinet, did a delicate dance with his enemy RFK while honoring the fallen president’s memory, grappled with an intractable Congress and, oh by the way, had less than two months to prepare his first State of the Union while also eyeing a presidential election less than a year away, the new president also summoned some of his worst traits to fight off personal scandal. His longtime protégé, Bobby Baker, a Senate staffer, had already become, in the weeks before Kennedy’s death, the subject of national media scrutiny over kickback schemes involving government contracts and vending machines. The morning of Kennedy’s assassination, a team of editors from Life magazine met to discuss a planned exposé of how Johnson became a millionaire despite a life in low-paying government jobs. It died when Kennedy did. In other cases, Johnson quashed dissenting and critical stories in Texas newspapers by threatening regulatory and investigative retaliation of various media companies from the White House.

Caro makes a convincing argument against the conventional wisdom submitted by the late historian and Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger and a score of others that JFK intended to keep Johnson as his running mate in 1964. By 1963, Johnson had fallen so far from relevance that it was his former aide, John Connally, now the governor of Texas, who controlled the state’s political power, and not LBJ. Just before his death, President Kennedy told his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, “I will need as a running mate in sixty-four a man who believes as I do.”

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