JFK Survives Dallas. What Happens To LBJ?
- Thread starter spitfire
- Start date
I don't think so. Johnson would be needed to maintain a strong Southern presence, something I think Kennedy would need - especially in light of his civil rights' bills that would cost him a lot of support there. Johnson also had a fair amount of influence on the Senate, so that's important - he was a respected and experienced congressman. I suppose it's not a 'sure' thing for him to keep Johnson around, but I can't exactly think of a better running mate for the time, either.
Not that I'm an expert by any means.
Not that I'm an expert by any means.
While I know that there are contrary arguments, the fact that JFK was in Dallas with LBJ in November 1963 underscores the importance of Texas to his reelection, as he was there to help mend fences among a rather fractious Democratic party there in advance of the 1964 election. While it's hard to comprehend compared to the politics of today, the South was, in those days, a key part of the Democratic coalition. There were reasons LBJ was on the ticket in the first place and, in my opinion, those reasons still existed for 1964. Kennedy still needed LBJ politically. Moreover, I think JFK was as aware as Johnson of the truth that it is sometimes better to have someone inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. If anyone would have been capable of pissing inside the JFK '64 tent from the outside, it would have been LBJ.
One other thing here: if the assassination attempt in Dallas happens, with Oswald missing the final shot, you might find that something of a paradox arises in which JFK is even more compelled to keep LBJ on the ticket to avoid offending Texans. At a minimum, dumping LBJ after an assassination attempt would be politically awkward.
Thus, assuming that LBJ stays on the ticket and JFK is reelected, I think that the end of the second Kennedy term is probably the end of LBJ's career. If LBJ does run and win in '68, he probably passes away in office. Whether that might come to pass would depend on a lot of unknowable factors, including how well the JFK 2nd term went.
One other thing here: if the assassination attempt in Dallas happens, with Oswald missing the final shot, you might find that something of a paradox arises in which JFK is even more compelled to keep LBJ on the ticket to avoid offending Texans. At a minimum, dumping LBJ after an assassination attempt would be politically awkward.
Thus, assuming that LBJ stays on the ticket and JFK is reelected, I think that the end of the second Kennedy term is probably the end of LBJ's career. If LBJ does run and win in '68, he probably passes away in office. Whether that might come to pass would depend on a lot of unknowable factors, including how well the JFK 2nd term went.
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I speculated on this as well. Johnson's death in OTL was in January 1973, days after he would've left office if he ran for another term. He could probably serve one term and then not run for another... but of course, not being president from '63 to '69 could've given him an extra year or two to live.
Appollo 20 and JVM are right about the political fundamentals that should have been driving Kennedy's decision making process for reelection; but the famous Evelyn Lincoln anecdote RE Jack telling her LBJ was gone from the ticket come '64, and more importantly the LIFE magazine investigation into Johnson's crony capitalist personal fortune, this raises the serious possibility he was for the chop.
I genuinely think the Kennedys were headstrong enough to consider trying to win with a new Dem electoral coalition, one which excluded the '60 South and made no attempt at all to get back into the '48 interior West/Great Plains states, Iowa accepted.
I've looked at the numbers for the electoral college that year, and you know what, the Kerry/Edwards states from 2004, minus Vermont but plus West Virginia in the Dem column (the ol' Dukakis switcheroo!), that results in a JFK margin of victory that's only 3 EC votes less than in 1960, which was 303 to begin with.
That's a reasonable firewall strategy for the time, IMO.
I genuinely think the Kennedys were headstrong enough to consider trying to win with a new Dem electoral coalition, one which excluded the '60 South and made no attempt at all to get back into the '48 interior West/Great Plains states, Iowa accepted.
I've looked at the numbers for the electoral college that year, and you know what, the Kerry/Edwards states from 2004, minus Vermont but plus West Virginia in the Dem column (the ol' Dukakis switcheroo!), that results in a JFK margin of victory that's only 3 EC votes less than in 1960, which was 303 to begin with.
That's a reasonable firewall strategy for the time, IMO.
It's not unlikely. The Kennedy-Johnson ticket was polling very poorly in the South, and winning it was a vanishing dream. Meanwhile, the ticket was polling well in the north and west. So LBJ's reason to be on the ticket was no longer there. The trip to Texas, which was largely about building money, demonstrated LBJ was irrelevant - the state's conservatives were under the control of Governor Connally, and so was the state's conservatives' money. The liberals didn't want anything to do with him; Ralph Yarborough wouldn't even ride in the same car with Johnson, a headline-making snub. And then there was the Bobby Baker scandal, which was just blowing up to include allegations of corruption by Johnson. The first evidence implicating the Vice-President was being presented on November 22. Life magazine, responding to leads they had dug up in the scandal investigation, was preparing to do a huge, multi-part story on LBJ's money, which involved reporters all over the country turning up all kinds of questionable issues about how exactly a man on the government payroll since college became a multi-millionaire. As Kennedy was waving to the crowds in Dallas, they were debating whether to release the first findings in the next issue, or wait until they were ready to release all the next parts in the following issues.
JFK, who never especially respected Johnson and whose brother loathed him, was about to return from a trip to Johnson's home state, where he had seen with his own eyes how politically powerless the Vice-President was, to find the breaking edge of a massive scandal centered around a man who was of no electoral value to him.
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JFK, who never especially respected Johnson and whose brother loathed him, was about to return from a trip to Johnson's home state, where he had seen with his own eyes how politically powerless the Vice-President was, to find the breaking edge of a massive scandal centered around a man who was of no electoral value to him.
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At this point in time, he had no influence on the Senate. He attempted to cling to some of his Majority Leader power when he transitioned to the executive branch, but was rejected even by his biggest congressional allies. And the Kennedy administration wouldn't even listen to his advice on how to handle legislation.
Yes. Usually, approval ratings go up after you survive a crackpot trying to knock you off. It would help a lot, I'd bet.
LBJ had no influence in the Senate, he was utterly powerless as VP, and any ratings boost would be based on sympathy for JFK. Even if the South was put back in play by the sympathy vote, Johnson is still unpopular within the administration and about to be hit by a major scandal. His appeal to the South, such as it still existed, could be replaced by the candidate JFK's secretary said he wanted, Terry Sanford.
Edit: Also of note is LBJ's connection to Sam Rayburn, powerful both in Texas and the House. By 1964, he was dead.
Edit: Also of note is LBJ's connection to Sam Rayburn, powerful both in Texas and the House. By 1964, he was dead.
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This was certainly true in the Deep South, but less clear in some of the borderish states, Florida (where JFK was earlier that week in November) and Texas. Moreover, at the time, there was the hope that the region's long and deep historic ties to the Democratic Party, combined with a huge potential black vote, just might be enough to keep the bulk of the region in the Democratic column.
The contrary argument, which I should have considered in my prior post, is that if Goldwater emerged as the GOP nominee as in OTL, Kennedy might have felt that he had greater latitude to make a change in the ticket and gone with one of the more moderate Southern/border state Democrats who were credible candidates. And I had forgotten about the incipient Baker scandal...
Still, though, none of this affects the problem of what to do with LBJ if he's bumped off the ticket, which I still think is a problem, particularly if, as I suspect, LBJ had some inside knowledge of some of JFK's less savory after-hours activities; if LBJ didn't, Hoover's FBI certainly did. LBJ could be bumped off the ticket, but it was an open question as to what price that might entail. In that regard, I still maintain that the safer course of action -- the more prudent one -- would have been to avoid setting off that particular landmine by keeping the ticket intact.
Paul V McNutt
Banned
I think LBJ stays on the ticket and JFK and LBJ are relected in 64. Johnson would have run for president in 1968. His opponents for the Democratic nomination are Humphrey and RFK. If he is elected president, I think he is happier and lives longer. So he could have lived longer into a second term.
LBJ was popular in the South and influential in the Senate - in 1960. When he left the Senate and his position as Majority Leader, he lost all his power in that chamber. He attempted to hold on, basically trying to be de facto leader of the Senate Democrats with merry Mike Mansfield as a willing puppet, but he was harshly and immediately shut down by his own Southern Democratic allies, who were Senators above all else, and jealous of their privileges. Further, the Kennedy administration soon made clear by their actions that LBJ was not in the loop and his advice wasn't valued, and even those who still cared to deal with him began to ignore him. When it comes to the South, once Johnson started giving speeches about the need to move forward on civil rights, beyond his paper tiger 1957 bill, and insisted on speaking in front of integrated audiences, the South turned on him. After his decades of civil rights obstructionism, he was seen as two-faced.
I'm not sure how it would play out with a Sanford, for instance, versus Johnson in those states. The border states, he might do better. Not Texas, obviously, but I think it was Kennedy's impression, and probably the reality, that Johnson had lost touch with Texas's powerful. And Texas had gone for Eisenhower twice, and took massive fraud to win even in 1960, when LBJ was popular and powerful and seen as a hero for the south. So I don't know. Also, there was the chance of flipping California, which would more than make up for Texas, with Pat Brown.
Hoover certainly did, but he was on JFK's side. He helped tamp down the Baker investigation from expanding into Baker's alleged pimping, because one of the women was an East German who may have slept with Kennedy. He did that by threatening senators with their dirty laundry, and I'm sure they had plenty on LBJ. With his involvement in the Baker scandal, Johnson has plenty of trouble without crusin' for a brusin' against Hoover's FBI and RFK's attorney general's office.
I didn't intend to imply Johnson still had legal power in the Senate, just that he knew many of them reasonably well enough that his presence on the ticket did more harm than good legislatively speaking... reading over the posts now, I can completely see why I was wrong, but I did want to clarify.
Sounds to me like Johnson would've been politically done for if not for Kennedy's assassination propelling him to the office, depending on if he decided to be a candidate in 1968, which butterflies a lot on how the extra five years go.
Sounds to me like Johnson would've been politically done for if not for Kennedy's assassination propelling him to the office, depending on if he decided to be a candidate in 1968, which butterflies a lot on how the extra five years go.
No, it wouldn't have been Baker-before-the-senate-committee per se that did him in if JFK lives; the only Bobby Baker related stuff that could have hurt Johnson was that which was tied directly, on the ground, to his Texas business empire, and then only as long as the LIFE magazine reporters were able to make the connection for their emerging narrative.
IMO the senate investigation into Bobby Baker was all about damage control for the Democratic majority, and damage control for whichever Democrat was in the WH, whether it be Kennedy or Johnson. So it can't be used as a primary rationale for ditching LBJ. Too risky, draws attention to stuff the party establishment wants swept under the rug.
And I've mentioned this before, but my reading of Robert Caro is that he all but states that the Baker callgirl ring actually connects to JFK, not LBJ--so if Jack lives, that senate investigation is even more of a whitewash than it was in OTL. And Caro doesn't even take the Ellen Romesch claims all that seriously.
Eh, I guess twelve years is 'decades', but let's not get carried away here; LBJ in his New Deal phase was openly on the side of economic inclusion for minorities, which was the practical civil rights issue at the time. He goes Right when he gets to the senate.
Thinking about this more, I'm inclined to think a Sanford pick is really about appealing to the border states; also, it's about having a political naif in the VPship, one who can't threaten RFK if Bobby seeks the nomination in 1968.
If this is a reference to the Voting Rights Act, it's not in play for 1964.
Even in OTL it didn't pass until 1965.
I don't believe it's credible to accuse any of these elected officials of going in for 'suicide bomber' revenge like this; for instance, LBJ never did anything to help publicly bust open the claims about Nixon sabotaging the 1968 Paris Peace talks, and if Johnson was ever genuinely repelled and horrified by another POTUS, then Nixon is it. As it was LBJ was reasonably neutral about JFK the man, so I can't see him attacking the guy. Of course, if RFK seeks the nomination in 1968, then Hubert Humphrey has just garnered a lot of LBJ influence peddling IOUs to cash in for himself.
Hoover, well, even accounting for his near-sociopathic tendencies, there is no evidence of him sabotaging any presidential campaign.
Pretty much so, particularly considering the rise of Connally as primo Dem boss in Texas during the Kennedy administration, as mentioned above.
I'm reading Randall Wood's bio of Johnon after having read Dallek and several of Caro's volumes, and once again I'm confronted by the same old explanation for Johnson taking the V-P slot: 'he had to do it lest he be left out in the cold (if Kennedy won), or in case he be accused of having let Kennedy fail by not joining the ticket.'
But I'm less and less convinced it was in Johnson's immediate shortterm interest that he accept running mate at Los Angeles.
He must have been betting everything on Kennedy's Addison's disease killing him before '64.
I am *not* an expert on this stuff, especially the assassination, but according to several biographies on the subject, LBJ was intensely suspicious of Nixon sabotaging the 1968 'Peace Process' (actually, more than less a way that USSR could help LBJ get Humphrey elected, and retain LBJ's power. After Nixon won, LBJ pretty much politically got in bed with Tricky. For example, the lame duck period there was practically unprecedented liaison for a two party change over.
It lasted until the end of Watergate, where Nixon called up two people. One was Wallace, who refused to help except "I'll be praying for you". The other was LBJ, who politely refused to intervene. With the lack of pull of the senators, the impeachment vote was assured and Richard said "There goes the Presidency." These quotes are in the book Nixon, A Life, and Robert Caro's third LBJ book.
You see, the value added ability LBJ had to that day was to know everyone in the chamber backwards and forwards and sideways. Nixon respected and used that ability. JFK in oversight did not during his presidency. In fact, Kennedy was completely turned down in an overwhelming majority of his program bills, especially the Great Society ones, amazingly with a majority Democratic congress in both chambers, and he never asked LBJ to assist.
Towards 1963 both Kennedy's were very dismissive and verbally abusive to LBJ, as they were to PM Diefenbaker, Henry Ford II "from Fat Pointe"making fun of exclusive city Grosse Pointe in Detroit and the Ford Bros. girth, Blacks "Watermelons" during a roaring crowd in Harlem or such, and many others. Wonder how many he tempted fate with a veto with his program bills dying right and left in congress.
LBJ felt himself 'pretty much repudiated' by the Vietnam War in 1968-9. He needed Nixon and Nixon extremely needed LBJ. (In example, to narrowly pass the ABM funding in congress of one or two votes, which according to the footnotes and passages I have read, Brezhnev immediately upon passage, or by an associate, said "deal with Nixon", opening up the path to Detente.) Nixon had neither House nor Senate in the first term, the others being two highly ineffective presidents in the mid 1800's I recall.
Also of possible note:
Of the 1968 Peace Initiatives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chennault
(Funny thing is that neither USSR nor LBJ wanted to deal with Nixon at all, until he got elected. Then both did a 180 degrees turn, the USSR permanently long after 1974 stood by RMN as some one to have nostalgic feelings toward as a good deal maker.)
Another more extreme issue of Conspiracy Central Control?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Duncan_Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79lOKs0Kr_Y
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKjohnsonJ.htm
(I understand that this area is a pretty harsh area of AH.com, and do not wish to discuss it, nor do I know much about the subject. However, it is a possibility, and noted mild mannered biographer Robert Caro describes and researched at great lengths the risk taking extreme episodes of LBJ from childhood to his final years in many areas of his life.)