The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro Read Free Book Online Page B

indecisiveness had exhausted their patience; they weren’t going to go for Hubert—he was so liberal he could never win. Symington was hardly known outside his own state. Kennedy was campaigning all over the country, but he not only was young—forty-one—but looked much younger, far too young to be a President. Furthermore, he was a Catholic. The veteran big-city bosses were Catholics, all of them: Daley, Lawrence, DiSalle, De Sapio, Prendergast,Bailey. They would never put a Catholic at the head of their party’s ticket. As
Newsweek
analyzed their feelings, “Thirty years have passed since the defeat of Al Smith, but they still remember vividly the violent anti-Catholic feeling which the 1928 campaign engendered.” Who would take Kennedy seriously anyway? Johnson said. He knew him from the Senate, and he was little more than a joke there: a rich man’s son, a “playboy,” and, he said, “sickly” to boot, always away from Washington because of some illness or other, and never accomplishing anything when he was present. “He never said aword of importance in the Senate, and he never did a thing,” he was to say. And he himself would have, between his southern support and the additional states his senators delivered to him, a substantial bloc of votes of his own with which to bargain. And the old leaders wouldn’t require much persuasion anyway; they knew the importance of experience and responsibility in a candidate. They would go for him. For example, he had already had discussions with De Sapio and Prendergast; he would have plenty of support in the New York delegation.
    The men to whom Johnson explained this reasoning—and soon he was having to explain it not only to Rowe but to Corcoran and other New Deal lawyers likeBen Cohen andAbe Fortas ( “I was so anxious for him to announce,” Fortas would recall), and to many other men in Washington—felt that it might have a certain degree of validity. His position as Leader made him vulnerable if he declared his candidacy. “I’m trying to build a legislative record over there,” he told one of Rayburn’s assistants,D. B. Hardeman. “The Senate is already full of presidential candidates. If I really get into this thing, they’ll gang up on me and chop me up as Leader so that I’ll be disqualified for the nomination.” “Speculation [over whether he is a candidate] merely adds to the burden of his leadership,” John Steele of
Time
magazine explained to his editors on March 4, 1958, in a memo following a conversation with Johnson. But the validity, these men felt, was only to a point. For one thing, Johnson’s belief that senators (and members of Rayburn’s House) would control delegations had long been disproved. Senators spent much of their time in Washington, and that made a difference.W. H. Lawrence was to point out in the
New York Times
that for decades, “the Congresional [
sic
] bloc has not been dominant in either party’s national conventions.… In convention delegations, governors—enjoying state-wide patronage and constantly on the job at home—usually exercise much more influence than do Senators and Representatives.” In fact, Johnson had seen this for himself. In 1952, another Senate Majority Leader, Robert Taft, had relied on senators to get him the Republican nomination against Eisenhower, with notable lack of success. And while Johnson may have believed that his triumphs in the Senate had given him national recognition, men like Rowe and Corcoran knew that this belief was unfounded. Outside of Washington, people simply weren’t that interested in the Senate, didn’t even know what a Majority Leader
did.
As a Johnson ally explained to Walter Jenkins, “You can cross the Potomac River and get out in the country and those folks haven’t the slightest idea how legislation is brought up—they don’t even know that Lyndon Johnson has the power to schedule legislation.” Moreover, Johnson’s strategy rested on his belief that