George Smathers also said that he asked Kennedy if he was going to drop Lyndon over the Bobby Baker issue, and Kennedy replied that dropping Lyndon would look bad because it'd look like he was trying to get away from a scandal when there was no scandal
Agreed. At the end of the day, Kennedy will consider dropping Johnson in favor of Sanford, but won't pull the trigger. Bobby will strongly advocate such a course, but Jack was smart enough to know that it would create an unnecessary distraction and only widen the gulf between the President and Southern Democrats. So Sanford may get a visit to the Oval Office and potentially a visit from the President to North Carolina (just to make Johnson sweat) but there won't be any sort of swap.
I repeat what I've said before: if the news media can connect some of those petty, small Baker kickback stories, the ones where the money fed into the Johnsons' less-than-ethical ad-selling practices at their Texas TV stations,
then there will be explicitly political Baker controversy in 1964. There's at least one such story that did begin to emerge in OTL (on the day Kennedy died, IIRC) with the senate privileges committee hearings, but that went nowhere. Thank you U.S. senate, you old boys club, you.
And the reason this stuff couldn't be teased out by reporters, going over the head of the DC insiders, is because rally round the flag after Dallas, that's why. Presumably this dynamic is absent if Dallas doesn't happen.
So if they feel they have to 1964, there's still plenty of time for the living Presdient Kennedy to direct shame at LBJ, to get him off the ticket. And boy, was shame a great motivator for him when he was in the dumps, emotionally. It doesn't matter if there was no decision reached about his fate IOTL 1963.
He'd go willingly if that Baltimore insurance salesman of his is the source of every second TV comedian's joke in the lead-up to convention season.
Seriously, I don't get the concern from Kennenthusiasts about 'OMG, St Lyndon has to stay on the ticket, he just has to!' In pragmatic terms, he's worth very much less as a VP electoral asset than he was in 1960. And if he goes off the reservaton about Civil Rights, complaining that any failure to pass that bill in the '64 legislative session is a disgrace for the adminstration, he's worth nothing in the South and border states, nothing. He becomes a drag, in fact.
Now, conversely, JFK almost certainly deliberately withheld from his brother the truth about having had a longheld, serious conviction to pick LBJ as running mate at the 1960 convention.
That's not just Caro's conclusion I'm relying on; Schlesinger's 1965 account of Bobby running back and forth between those hotel suites, vainly trying to get Johnson to reject the offer, it only makes sense if Jack was quietly dedicated to that ticket, regardless of his campaign manager's repulsion towards the majority leader; poor Arthur actually writes something along the lines of "I can only surmise JFK had delegated this power to get rid of LBJ off the ticket to his brother," but then Schlesinger doesn't follow up with any details about the nominee being even slightly concerned about his brother failing to exercise this 'power'.
What I'm getting at is this: adding Evelyn Lincoln's comments on top of the events from LA, I see a pattern of Jack Kennedy reserving the right to tell Bobby bupkis, squat, nada about whatever it was he had planned for the bottom of the ticket. In both election cycles.