Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination Read Online Free PDF Page A

telephone rings in Lyndon Johnson’s bedroom where he’s sleeping with Ladybird. It’s Jack Kennedy.
    He says, “I want to come down and speak to you.” They make an appointment for ten o’clock, and someone says to Johnson, “What did he call about?” Johnson says, “He’s going to offer me the vice presidency.” At about the same time, Jack Kennedy is calling his brother Bobby. In the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, Kennedy has the corner suite on the ninth floor; 9333 is the number. Johnson is two floors down: 7333. Bobby Kennedy is in the middle, on the eighth floor. Jack Kennedy calls Bobby early in the morning and says, “Count up all the votes we’d get if I hold the big states in the North that I know I’m going to hold, and add Texas.” Bobby Kennedy calls in two of his aides, Kenny O’Donnell and Pierre Salinger, and tells them to count up those votes.
    “Count up all the votes we’d get if I hold the big states in the North that I know I’m going to hold, and add Texas.”
    Salinger says, “You’re not thinking of nominating Lyndon Johnson, are you? You’re not going to do that?” And Bobby says, “Yes, we are.”
    That is startling and also brilliant. Jack Kennedy always sees the big picture. Maybe noone else had bothered to add that up. They were all focused on the nomination. No one had bothered to add up what Jack Kennedy was going to win once he got the nomination. Was he going be president of the United States or just a defeated nominee for president? He was going to have a tough race against Richard Nixon. Had Jack Kennedy been thinking about this all along? We will never know. But as soon as he’s nominated, the very next morning he’s offering the vice presidency to Lyndon Johnson.

    Suddenly Johnson finds he has no power at all. During the three years of Kennedy’s presidency, Johnson spends very little time with the president. Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy’s secretary, put together from the presidential log just how little time Johnson was alone with Kennedy, although he wanted to be alone with him a lot. The first year, 1961, he’s alone with Kennedy ten hours and nineteen minutes. Second year, I don’t remember the number, but it’s less. The third year, in the whole year of 1963, the vice president is alone with the president only an hour and some minutes. Johnson is cut out of power completely.
    Johnson was the great legislative magician. He passed bills no one else could pass. In fact, in 1957 he passed the first civil rights bill that had been passed since Reconstruction. But under the Kennedys he isn’t allowed to participate in the legislative process at all. Part of it is simply that they’re afraid of Lyndon Johnson. They had seen him in his days of power, how he was the most powerful man in Washington. They want to keep Lyndon Johnson on a very short leash because if they let him off the leash, who knows what he’s going to do? Second, Johnson is always interested in publicity for himself. They’re afraid that if they let him run the legislative program, it will become Lyndon Johnson’s program and not Jack Kennedy’s program. Third is simply the hatred between Johnson and Robert Kennedy.
    The Kennedys do everything during that presidency to humiliate Johnson. He’s not allowed to have a plane to go to an event unless Robert Kennedy personally approves it. Every speech, even a minor speech, has to be approved by the Kennedys. They leave him with no power at all. Ofall the things that bothered Johnson, nothing bothered him as much as not being allowed to ride on Air Force One with the president. At one point Kennedy says to Evelyn Lincoln, “You don’t mean he’s asking to ride on Air Force One again? I’ve told him that for reasons of security, the vice president and the president should never travel on the same plane.”

    When they get off the plane [in Dallas], the second car of the motorcade is a Secret Service car. They call it the Queen Mary because