The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [282]
Jack knew that Johnson was a brilliantly astute legislator and the most qualified choice for vice president, but the man was a southerner, and many northern urban Democrats had their own prejudice against those born south of the Mason-Dixon Line, considering them provincial, uncouth racists, stereotypes hardly dissipated by Johnson’s unsubtle, overweening persona. And yet Joe was not the first person to mention Johnson’s name. Before the convention, Feldman and Sorensen, men who billed themselves as liberals, had given Jack a memo in which they listed Johnson as an “outstanding possibility.” Over the weekend, Jack had seriously discussed that prospect with the Washington Post’s publisher, Phil Graham, one of Johnson’s closest advisers.
Joe was a philosopher of power, and he looked straight on at decisions that made his sons wince. “We need Texas,” Joe said, an argument that was impossible to deny. Jack listened while his father ran through the strengths that Johnson would bring to the ticket, piling more and more weight on the scale. Joe presented arguments that Jack had already heard, then added his considered judgment to the mix. In the end Jack called Bobby at the Biltmore and asked him to set up a meeting to talk with Johnson about the vice presidential nomination.
This was in many ways the most unpleasant task Bobby had yet performed for his brother, and he performed it poorly. Bobby could not accept the political charade of enemies donning the garb of friends overnight. His scorn was far more than a sneering disdain for a homespun southern vulgarian who had gone to Southwest State Teachers College in San Marcos, Texas. Bobby had his own firm reasons for loving some people and hating others, and no man ever moved from one category to the other. The Kennedys praised physical courage above all virtues, and it was one of the few qualities that Johnson did not have in excess. While Jack won his Silver Star helping to save the crew of PT-109, Johnson received the same high honor in the naval reserves, flying one combat mission as an observer. Bobby probably did not know Johnson’s war record, but Bobby was a man of brilliant instincts when it came to understanding the primitive drives of his fellow humans.
Bobby sensed that Johnson was not a worthy man, as he defined the term. He knew, moreover, that Johnson bore the Kennedys no goodwill. Indeed, he learned a few months later from journalist Peter Lisagor that just before the Los Angeles convention, Johnson had berated Jack in language streaked with profanity, excoriating his brother as a scrawny, sickly mite so unable to govern that “old Joe Kennedy would run the country.”
“I knew he hated Jack,” Bobby admitted sadly that day, “but I didn’t think he hated him that much.” Even without this confirmation, though, everything Bobby knew and thought and felt told him that Johnson should not stand beside his beloved Jack as his running mate, bonded to him forever as his political brother. But Bobby was his brother’s liege, and he would do what Jack asked him to do.
Those who were there that day had different tales to tell about how Johnson became the vice presidential nominee. “Well, you know, I don’t think anybody will ever know,” Jack told Feldman the following year. Bobby said later that Jack never intended to offer the nomination to Johnson. He was merely dangling it before the Texan’s eyes, thinking the prideful politician would never accept