The American Vice Presidency (64 page)

Whether or not Johnson’s thoughts on a deal involving the American missiles in Turkey had any influence on the final swap, it was a crisis breaker, though unannounced at the time and not publicly acknowledged until years later, long after American missiles had been quietly removed from Turkey. According to Robert Kennedy in his chronicle, when the crisis finally ended, the president said to him, in obvious reference to the Lincoln assassination soon after the Civil War had ended, “This is the night I should go to the theater.” Bobby shot back, “If you go, I want to go with you.”
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Bobby did not spell it out, but one could speculate that he didn’t want to be around for the resulting Lyndon Johnson presidency if Jack Kennedy was going to meet Lincoln’s fate.

With the missile crisis finally behind the administration, thoughts turned in 1963 to matters of civil rights, including the violence at the University of Mississippi over the admission of the first black student, James Meredith. Johnson was not involved, and when Kennedy began planning a broad civil rights bill and LBJ was asked his thoughts, he essentially limited his comments to the timing and tactics he would employ in seeking to pass it. With the approaching presidential election year, a restless and disappointed Johnson complained to friends about slights by Kennedy aides and the possibility of being dumped from the 1964 ticket. The previous May, Kennedy had been asked about rumors that Johnson might be dropped from the ticket. He replied, “Well, I don’t know what they’ll do with me, but I’m sure the Vice President will be on the ticket if he chooses to run. We were fortunate to have him before—would again—and I don’t know where such a rumor could start.”
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All this came amid administration concerns about a Democratic civil war in Texas between John Connally, the governor at the time and LBJ’s old lieutenant, and the state’s more liberal forces, led by the outspoken U.S. senator Ralph Yarborough. With the next presidential election in mind,
the administration decided that President Kennedy should undertake a political trip to the Lone Star State to try to patch things up in the Texas Democratic family. It was to be a triumphal visit to San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, and Dallas.

Early on Johnson had advised against a trip that would put the president in the middle of a seething party feud. Connally insisted on handling the Texas end of the planning and in advance met with Kennedy with no notice to Johnson. When the Kennedy party set off for Texas, Yarborough hitched a ride on
Air Force One
and en route likely got the president’s ear on his beefs with Connally and with Johnson. In an effort to bring the feuding sides together, Johnson was to ride with Yarborough in the motorcades, but Yarborough had refused. An incredible fandango ensued, with LBJ prompting White House aides to drive the balking senator like a Texas steer into the desired corral. After several failed attempts, Yarborough was finally herded into Johnson’s car for the Dallas motorcade.

Shortly after 12:30
P.M
. Central Standard Time, past the Dallas intersection of Houston and Elm Streets, a shot rang out. Two cars behind the presidential limo, agent Youngblood turned and lunged toward the vice president of the United States, ordering him, “Get down!” President Kennedy and Governor Connally were both hit, the president fatally. In the vice presidential car, Yarborough called out, “Oh, my God! They’ve shot the president!” Youngblood told Johnson simply, “An emergency exists. When we get to where we’re going, you and me are going to move right off and not tie in with the other people.” Johnson muttered, “OK, partner.”
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The lead cars in the motorcade immediately peeled off and headed for Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy and Connally were swiftly wheeled into separate trauma rooms as doctors rushed in and administered to them. Efforts to revive the president were unavailing, and at about 1:00
P.M
. Jacqueline Kennedy, at her husband’s side, was told that he had expired. At that moment, by virtue of JFK’s assassination, Lyndon Baines Johnson became president of the United States. Governor Connally, who had lapsed into a semicoma, survived his wounds and went on to be reelected in 1964.

The most shocking presidential drama since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, nearly a century earlier, played out on and was conveyed to
the American people through the immediacy of television. So was the scene of the official transfer of presidential power when Johnson was sworn in from the cabin of
Air Force One
, parked at Love Field, in Dallas. He took the oath of office from an old Texas friend, the federal district judge Sarah Hughes, with his wife, Lady Bird, and a blood-spattered Jacqueline Kennedy as witnesses.

Johnson as the new president joined in the national mourning but also moved rapidly to strike a theme of continuity by embracing major aspects of the Kennedy agenda, most notably in the realm of civil rights. In a stirring address to Congress, he rallied the nation with “let us continue” Kennedy’s goal of racial and social equality, pledging in the words of the old Negro spiritual, that “we shall overcome” the divisions in the country.

Left vacant again until the following year’s presidential election was the vice presidency. Johnson, yet another accidental president, was easily elected to a full term in his own right in November 1964, over the weak Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Johnson instituted his version of social and economic advancement in what he called the Great Society, with the most ambitious domestic agenda since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal had lifted America from the Great Depression.

But Johnson’s continuation and then escalation of the U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam proved to be the undoing of his highest aspirations. He attempted simultaneously to raise the quality of life for the neediest Americans through costly social programs at home and to wage an ever more draining and futile war abroad, undertaken to stop the spread of communism around the globe. This policy of “guns and butter” ultimately forced him to abandon the quest for another presidential term in 1968, ostensibly to focus on ending the war in Vietnam. Instead it went on for another seven years.

Before peace finally was achieved, Johnson died at age sixty-four on January 23, 1973, at his Texas ranch. As the presidential standby for nearly three years, he was never utilized to the fullness of his governmental experience, energies, and imagination, demonstrating only later the qualities that the highest office requires when the power of the presidency moved unexpectedly to him.

The personal closeness and shared liberal outlook between Lyndon
Johnson and his choice for vice president might have been expected to bring the second office to its highest peak. But, as we shall see in the next chapter, LBJ’s domineering ways and the ultimate humiliations he was to inflict on his standby would only reinforce the public perception, and the reality, of the limited influence of another vice presidency.

HUBERT H. HUMPHREY

OF MINNESOTA

A
prime requisite for the American vice presidency is loyalty, and Hubert Humphrey had it in overabundance toward his president, Lyndon Johnson. That loyalty to the man, and to most of his legislative objectives, undeniably brought the vice presidency to Humphrey in 1964. But his unwillingness thereafter to separate himself from LBJ over the Vietnam War, which was bringing Johnson down, eventually brought Humphrey down with him as he reached for the White House on his own.

Humphrey started out in the small-town footsteps of his namesake father as a pharmacist. Born in the small Dakota town of Wallace on May 27, 1911, in a room over the family drugstore, “Pinky” Humphrey, as he was called, later moved on with his family to Doland, still in South Dakota but near the Minnesota border, where Hubert Horatio Humphrey Sr., known as HH, opened another drugstore. His son, a mischievous but otherwise well-mannered boy, worked at the soda fountain and became a pharmacist himself. But a lot of talking was always in him, as a champion member of the school’s debating team. He took after his father in his two main interests beyond family—politics and the spoken word.
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When the Great Depression hit the prairie states, wheat and other grain prices plummeted, and in 1926 the two banks in Doland failed. His father was forced to start selling goods other than pharmaceuticals and also began vaccinating farm animals to make ends meet. In 1931, HH moved the
business to the larger town of Huron, South Dakota, where a dust storm hit the next year. In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt came there on an inspection tour, and HH, now the local Democratic Party chairman, took Hubert Jr. to meet him.

Hubert Jr. was sent to a pharmacy college in Denver, completed a two-year course in six months, and returned to the store. The next year he married a local girl, Muriel Buck, and moved to Minneapolis to complete his schooling. But Hubert had more in mind than peddling pills, as he told his father.

Majoring in political science, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and upon graduation got a small teaching fellowship at Louisiana State University, in quest of a doctoral degree and a college teaching career.
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He taught political science at Minnesota through the summer of 1941, then took a job instructing Minnesota teachers in FDR’s Works Projects Administration (WPA). He later moved into other New Deal agency posts, including state director for war production training and assistant state director of the War Manpower Commission.
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Meanwhile, as crime mounted in Minneapolis, young Humphrey ran for the mayoralty in 1943 at the age of thirty-one, finishing second in a nine-man field but losing a runoff against the incumbent, Mayor Marvin Kline. Courted thereafter by Republicans to join their ranks, he declined, wedded as he was to the party of his father and FDR.

Humphrey soon concluded, however, that the Democratic Party in Minnesota as then constituted was a losing proposition. He brought about a merger with the Farmer-Labor Party, then the third political force in the state, creating the Democratic Farmer Labor Party (DFL), soon to be the dominant force in Minnesota politics.
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Many in the new party wanted to nominate Humphrey for governor, but with the war still on he decided to enlist.

Well before Pearl Harbor he had been classified as 3-A and exempted from the draft as a father. (His daughter, Nancy, was born in 1939.) Later, as teacher of air force officers at Macalester College, he was reclassified as 2-A as an “essential civilian.” He asked that his exemption be removed, was reclassified as 1-A, and got as far as an army induction center, where he was turned down for a double hernia, lung calcification, and color blindness.
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All this history would later be revisited when political foes repeatedly
accused him of draft dodging, which he refuted with draft board documents and affidavits.

Humphrey then plunged into the politics of FDR’s bid for a fourth term, leaving his teaching job at Macalester and serving as the president’s Minnesota coordinator. In 1945, he filed again for the mayoralty of Minneapolis and was elected at age thirty-four over the incumbent.
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His reformist agenda not only reduced crime but also combatted racial discrimination and anti-Semitism in the city. In 1947, during a time when communist elements had begun to infiltrate the DFL, Humphrey went to Washington for the founding meeting of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), formed to strengthen anti-communist political and labor involvement in the Democratic Party, and was elected vice chairman.
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In the summer of 1948, Humphrey was propelled into the national spotlight when he led the fight for a strong civil rights plank in the party platform at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. He argued strenuously with Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois for a stronger and more explicit plank in defiance of the party’s southern wing. Lucas at one point demanded to know: “Who does this pipsqueak think he is?”
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When the committee voted to send its own plank to the convention floor, Humphrey joined in writing a single additional paragraph calling on Congress to guarantee the rights of “full and equal political participation … equal opportunity of employment …, security of person, and equal treatment in the service and defense of our nation.”
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Lucas and others warned that this plank would split the party and cost the Democrats the 1948 election. But Humphrey went ahead. “There are those who say … we are rushing this issue of civil rights,” he said. “I say we are a hundred and seventy-two years too late. There are those who say this issue is an infringement on states’ rights. The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
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The Humphrey plank triggered a walkout of southern delegates, but the convention passed it, and Harry Truman was easily nominated over Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, supported by southern delegates who remained behind.
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