New York City official who abruptly disappeared in the 1920s and was never seen again. One White House staffer was overheard at a dinner party joking, “Lyndon? Lyndon who?”
But Johnson is anything but gone, and anything but a hillbilly. During his time as Senate majority leader he was masterful at passing difficult legislation. His favorite biblical verse, Isaiah 1:18, exemplifies his passion for building coalitions: “Come now, let us reason together.”
Truth be told, the vice president is a complex man, whose tastes run the gamut from spicy deer sausage to Cutty Sark scotch to Viennese waltzes. And he is almost as sexually active as the president—only far more discreet about how he manages his affairs.
This discretion carries over into politics. The gregarious Johnson has stifled his personality, disciplining himself to be completely silent in meetings in order to avoid offending the president. It’s killing Johnson that he has to endure a nonstop barrage of insults. The vice president has become anxious, depressed, and overeager to please. He barely eats. He has lost so much weight that his always-baggy suits look enormous on him. Even the vice president’s nose and ears appear proportionally larger—like how a political cartoonist might draw him in caricature.
LBJ has almost nothing to do. His phone barely rings. From his office in the Executive Office Building, he can look out the window and see the comings and goings across the street at the White House. Sometimes the vice president will leave his desk to meander through the West Wing hallways, wishing for a meeting to attend or a decision to make. Other times, he’ll take a seat outside the door to the Oval Office, hoping to catch John Kennedy’s eye and be invited inside.
But those occasions are fewer and fewer. The president and vice president will spend less than two hours alone in the year 1963.
Still, Johnson puts up with the abuse. Because, without the vice presidency, he has nothing. There is no Senate opening in Texas for which he can run. And the former Kennedy insider John Connally filled the governor’s seat there just four months ago. But at the end of four more years, Johnson can run for the most powerful job in America.
And why shouldn’t LBJ be president? He served twelve years in the House of Representatives, twelve more in the Senate, and ruled for six years as majority leader. He is versed in foreign policy and domestic legislation and can give a tutorial on the subtleties of backroom wheeling and dealing. There isn’t a more qualified politician in the land.
LBJ is fighting for his political life as he locates the two token tables of racial integration in that St. Augustine hotel ballroom. And while the occasion may officially be the anniversary of the city’s founding, it also marks the day when Lyndon Johnson takes a public stand in favor of civil rights.
The Kennedy brothers have deliberately kept him out of their escalating battle for racial equality. They know that as a southern politician, he could use the issue to gain power.
Johnson understands this as well. And he does everything he can to be at the forefront of JFK’s civil rights campaign.
For Johnson, civil rights has nothing to do with right or wrong. Taking this stand just makes good political sense.
So LBJ waits, castrated and emaciated, hoping it will all pay off.
* * *
On March 4, just one week before Lyndon Johnson’s St. Augustine speech, Attorney General Robert Kennedy responds to the
But is he qualified? Bobby Kennedy is a lawyer who has never tried a case in court, and he’s an attorney general who got the job because of his father and brother. Since then, he has often ignored his duties at the Justice Department to serve as JFK’s mouthpiece and sounding board. And the CIA certainly doesn’t approve of his job performance. One popular bumper sticker at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters reads “First Ethel, Now Us.”
But the world is changing drastically, and Bobby Kennedy reflects the youth and vitality of Camelot instead of the stodgy cold war values synonymous with the older Johnson. American culture is under siege by new influences.
A British rock-and-roll band named the Beatles is releasing their first album.
A new comic book character named Iron Man makes his debut.
Writer Betty Friedan ignites a new wave of the women’s movement with her book
The draconian U.S. penitentiary on Alcatraz Island is closed for good. As if to mark the event, the CIA expands its powers even further into J. Edgar Hoover’s world by creating a domestic operations division.
Bobby Kennedy is aware of his cultural influence; he well understands the Camelot allure. Yet he is still obsessed by his rivalry with Lyndon Johnson. In fact, he hates him. Bobby does such a poor job of hiding his loathing that friends once presented him with a Lyndon Johnson voodoo doll, complete with stickpins.
The one thing Bobby can’t stand is a liar, and he believes that Johnson lies all the time.
Still, there is something in Johnson that inspires fear in Bobby. He once told a White House staffer, “I can’t stand the bastard, but he’s the most formidable man I know.”
And so two intense and ruthless politicians are set against each other. But neither one has an inkling about the calamity that is now just eight months away.
* * *
Lee Harvey Oswald is growing more isolated. He has turned a closet in his home into an office. There he writes angry diatribes about the world around him. Oswald is growing increasingly agitated, and people are beginning to fear him.
On March 12 in Dallas, just one day after Lyndon Johnson’s speech in St. Augustine, Oswald decides to buy a second gun to go along with the pistol he keeps hidden in his home. This time it’s a rifle, purchased through the February 1963 issue of
