DU Historians: Could JFK have won in '60 without LBJ on the ticket?

[book_worm]

given the razor thin margin of victory in 1960. Some Kennedyites say that JFK would have liked Humphrey of Minnesota or Scoop Jackson of Washington, but went with LBJ because 1)he needed to win Texas and some other southern states and 2) Johnson was the most powerful Majority Leader in the Senate history and JFK didn't want to be overshadowed (though in retrospect had LBJ stayed on in the Sentate as Majority Leader he may have been of more aide to JFK in passing his legislative program which was often bogged up in the Democratic congress).

What say you?

[madrchsod]

1. no he could`t... lady bird johnson also helped

..."Over 71 days, she traveled 35,000 miles through 11 states and appeared at 150 events.<3> Kennedy and Johnson won the election that November, with Johnson helping the Democratic ticket carry seven Southern states."

[book_worm]

3. Lady Bird was in a class all by herself

[KoKo]

2. Not at that TIME...he couldn't ...given the political landscape.

What history remembers of JFK wasn't the reality when he had to politically maneuver himself in to be President. So...yeah...Johnson got him votes... as a Mass. Catholic...he needed that Texan.

[Ishoutandscream2]

4. I loved JFK

but he needed my home state of Texas to win in 60. He had to have LBJ on the ticket. At the time, choosing LBJ as his running mate was an excellent move.

[jobycom]

5. JFK didn't think so. Another question: Could JFK win now?

JFK ran as a moderate to conservative, posturing to the right of Nixon on military and foreign policy issues. He was cautious on Civil Rights. He was closely allied with Joseph McCarthy before McCarthy's downfall. And he was close friends with Nixon before he ran, and from most reports, even after the campaign.

Not saying he was a conservative. Obviously not. But he campaigned as one on foreign policy issues and some domestic issues, and kept that up even after being elected. He tried to get MLK to halt the Civil Rights bus tours, for instance. He played both sides on Viet Nam, telling half his acquaintances that he wanted to pull out, the other half that he thought it was critical to stay there. Each side claims he really meant what they want him to have meant.

Given the reaction around here to Clinton, I suspect DU would have hated him.

I used to work for Ralph Yarborough, a former senator who knew JFK. He got upset once over some televised history show. I didn't witness it, I heard about it the next morning. The show claimed that JFK wanted Yarborough to be his VP, and that he offered the job first to LBJ, expecting LBJ to turn him down. He then planned to offer the job to Yarborough, his real preference, but LBJ took the position. As proof, they mentioned a sequence of phone calls involving JFK, Yarborough, and LBJ.

Yarborough says they got it wrong. He claimed that JFK wanted Johnson all along, because he had to overcome his liberal image (which is also why he ran so far to the right on key issues), and LBJ was the best hope for that. He also believed LBJ would turn him down. Yarborough and Johnson were notorious rivals, and it was well known that the best way to get LBJ to do something was to say that Yarborough would do it first. So, JFK and Yarborough worked out a strategy to offer the job to LBJ, and then start a rumor that Yarborough was JFK's real choice, and that when LBJ turned it down, JFK would announce Yarborough as his choice. The phone call sequence was part of the plot. And it worked--LBJ took the job, against everyone's expectations, except Yarborough's and JFK's.

That was Yarborough's story, anyway. Yarborough was a beautiful man, but he had a touch of a fragile ego. His story may have just been his perception. Or, JFK could have been playing both of them for different reasons--maybe convincing Yarborough he was part of the plot to keep Yarborough from being angry. Or, it may have been exactly as he said.

I've seen the other story, that Yarborough was suspected of being JFK's first choice, in other history works and biographies, so it seems to be fact that Yarborough was at least a player in the selection process.

[Strawman]

8. That's a really interesting story...thanks!

I just finished Master of the Senate and there wasn't too much in there about the LBJ-Yarborough relationship. Probably because RY came into the Senate in the late 1950's and the book deals with little after 1957. RY seemed like an intriguing figure to me. It made me wonder about the claim that LBJ was not a conservative at heart and was only kissing Herman Brown and Alvin Wirtz's asses to get elected but was liberal at heart. I had to wonder how did Yarborough ever get elected to the US Senate from Texas then if he was so liberal?

Yarborough refused to sign the Southern Manifesto also didn't he? I know LBJ got a pass from Richard Russell on that (he wasn't asked to sign to help his national/presidential ambitions), but it seems that Yarborough couldn't have been given a similar pass.

[jobycom]

10. Yarborough was an amazing man, and LBJ was much more liberal than he seemed.

For that matter, Texas wasn't as conservative as people think. It was personally conservative, but politically more libertarian, which sometimes comes off as Republican, but not always.

Yarborough got elected to the senate the old fashioned way. He kept preaching his message until people finally listened. Actually, there was more to it. He had been an assistant attorney general for the state, then he left to go to WW II, then he returned and was encouraged to run for AG. Instead, he ran for governor. And lost. Keep in mind, Texas was pure Democratic then, so the real election was the primary, usually between a liberal and a conservative. So he lost in the primaries in 1952. He ran again in 1954, the year Brown v Board of Education was decided. Allan Shivers, who was the incumbent in 52 and 54 (two year terms back then), ran a nasty, racist campaign, calling Yarborough an "Intergrationist." No newspaper endorsed Yarborough, but he came very close to winning, anyway, maybe in part because of the nastiness of Shivers. Yarborough believed he might have won, and had it stolen.

So, in 1956, all the polls where showing Yarborough beating Shivers, and there was only one politician who could head off Yarborough. That was the US Senator, Price Daniels. So the backroom Democrats decided to run Daniels for governor, to prevent the liberal Yarborough from winning. Yarborough's story, and this is born out by most researchers on the matter, is that the polls showed him beating Daniels, but that Daniels simply had the state certify him as the winner by 9,000 votes. Many historians believe Yarborough actually won by 30,000 votes.

Since Daniels won, he had to resign as Senator, and Yarborough ran for his vacant seat in a special run-off, in 1957. Under Texas law, he only needed a plurality, out of a lot of candidates. He got 38% of the vote, but that was enough. Once in, he had the edge of an incumbent, and won in 58--the next scheduled election for that seat, and in 64 (against George Bush). He lost in the primaries in 1970 to Lloyd Bentsen, in a nasty, nasty campaign that he never forgave. I know he didn't forgive, because I knew him in 92, while he was 90, and he was still angry.

And you're right, he refused to sign the Manifesto, and he voted for every Civil Rights bill, and against Viet Nam, and for health care and GI Rights, and bilingual education. I never found an issue I didn't agree with him on. Part of my job for him was to research his speeches in his private collection looking for certain phrases. I would get so caught up in reading his speeches I'd forget what else I was doing. He had a mind and an eloquence at least as strong, to me, as Kennedy's.

I met old-timers in the 90s while I worked for Yarborough who said they hated Yarborough's politics, but voted for him every time, because he was the only politician they ever trusted. I knew a cop, a real hero cop here in Austin who's nickname was "Super Cop," who told me once that his father had taught him to vote using Ralph Yarborough as an example. The cop was Hispanic, and he said his father would make him walk with him on election day several miles, and stand in line for hours, just to cast a vote for Ralph Yarborough. I never once, ever, heard anyone say anything bad about him, except in reprints from his two elections, when he was attacked not just by George Bush and Lloyd Bentsen, but by no less than John Wayne, who took time off his movies to campaign against Yarborough. Even those I met who voted against him swore he was the most honest politician they'd ever heard of.

As for LBJ, Yarborough said he was very liberal, as many of his actions proved, but he was afraid to run the way Yarborough did. LBJ could lie up a storm, had no qualms about stealing anything, and was a manipulative bastard, but I heard Yarborough personally say that he loved "Lyndon" like a brother. At the same time, he accused Lyndon of stealing the phrase and concept of The Great Society from him. I did some research through Yarborough's speeches, and it looked to me like he was right. So they were rivals, but apparently, at least Ralph thought, they were friends.

Thurgood Marshall told a story about LBJ that I wish every DUer understood by heart. After LBJ signed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, a group of civil rights leaders were in his office, and Lyndon let his hair down, so to speak, and was teary eyed about what they had finally accomplished. One of the leaders finally worked up the courage to ask him why he championed the bill so strongly, when he had always been so conservative as senator. LBJ made a comment about having to pretend to be conservative to win elections, so he could be where he was, and now that he was president, he said, he was "Free at last, free at last, thank God almight, I'm free at last." Marshall said that JFK had come late to the Civil Rights party, and that he never trusted RFK, but that LBJ had been a true believer his entire life.

LBJ had his fatal flaws, but his heart was better than people believe. But Ralph Yarborough was a saint. There aren't more than a handful in American politics who have been as pure as he was. He was the most impressive person I've ever met. I would go to his house being angry, wanting to go home, or just being plum worn out, and I never once left his house, no matter how bad my mood on arriving, without a big smile. They called him Smilin' Ralph, and I thought it was just about his constant smile before I met him. Afterwards, I realized it was because of how he made others feel. I've never met anyone else like that in my life.

Another long post, but one of my favorite subjects. :)

[Strawman]

12. The way Caro explains LBJ is interesting

Essentially he argues that there were two threads throughout his life, there was a visceral liberalism and there was his unrelenting ambition. When the two were in harmony he achieved great things (Civil Rights), but when the two were in conflict, ambition always won.

It is hard to trust LBJ's liberal statements (like the one you mention with Thurgood Marshall) because of what Caro describes as the "working up." He could get himself worked up about whatever it was he was pushing for and really believe it, even if it was the opposite of what he had believed before. "You gotta really believe in what your selling" was the quote I think that LBJ often repeated.

Ultimately, while that might matter in terms of assessing him as a human being, when it comes down to how he did his job, it doesn't matter how liberal he was in his heart of hearts. LBJ did more for African-Americans than any elected official in the 20th Century, whether he was the racist that dropped n-bombs and always seemed to prefer the company of the Herman Brown's and Alvin Wirtzes or whether his conservatism was a brilliant Machiavellian ruse and the mask was dropped once he was in power. I take that as the point you are making regarding how JFK would be received on DU as well. That our candidates need not be pure to be worth a damn. I think that's a good point and I agree. But I also think as a citizen who is liberal I need to signal my beliefs for them to have currency (to force the LBJ's in power to have to worry about them and account for them). The challenge is doing that without tearing potential allies down. They don't need to be pure of heart to be useful to me as a liberal. The challenge is recognizing the distinction between reasonable compromise by the LBJ's (those that constitute some genuine degree of progress) and those that merely represent outright worthless capitulation.

Also, a separate point would be that I think JFK would have moved to the left over time and would probably be ideologically similar to what Ted Kennedy is today. I think he would have had the same field of forces working on him. And conversely if DU was moved back to 1960, it would move a bit rightward as well, and I think JFK would probably be as well received as someone like Obama is here. He'd have his critics, but he'd have alot of support.

Here is another counter factual I have wondered about re LBJ: if LBJ were alive today and starting out in politics in the 1990's or 2000's would he be a Republican? I tend to think that he would because the Texas Republican party would have given him a better vehicle to realize his ambition for power. LBJ moved left because he thought he had to appeal to Northern liberals to be effective as president and as a candidate. During the 1990's and 2000's I think he would have faced a different calculus and that would have trumped his liberal instincts. He would have gotten himself worked up into believing conservative causes because that was where the power was at.

I'm curious what you think about that.

[H2O Man]

11. Very interesting.

Yarborough was a fascinating character. I have always been under the impression that JFK picked LBJ, despite the misgivings of some of his closest advisors (including RFK), simply because he knew he needed him in order to win. I think that he also had less of a personality clash wth LBJ than Yarborough or RFK.

It's no secret that a number of the people, especially in 2nd tier positions in the adminitration, mocked LBJ openly by 1963. There were people who hoped that the notorious trouble-making republican Richard Nixon was right when he began suggesting that JFK would drop LBJ from the '64 ticket -- something that realistically would not have happened.

I have never thought Kennedy would have seriously considered picking Humphrey for the ticket in 1960. It isn't simply because Hubert was so liberal that he would have changed the outcome of the election. My father told me that Kennedy had a sense that LBJ was a stronger character than Humphrey, and that while he may have had more in common with Humphrey on many issues, Kennedy respected strength of character.

JFK may also have believed that LBJ could help him get things through the congress as VP. There had to have been good reasons for him to have taken LBJ, in a move that caused serious distress among the liberals of the day.

I think that JFK the candidate, would be highly unpopular on DU. He is perhaps the best example of how a candidate campaigns in a manner different than they may behave if elected. That said, when we look at the campaigns today -- and especially the debates -- we should be fully aware that these do not really reflect how every candidate would actually behave if elected to the White House.

[Strawman]

6. I don't think so, but JFK might have gained a northern state or two

Currently reading Mutual Contempt by Jeff Shesol (excellent book on the LBJ/RFK feud) and he points out what an effective campaigner LBJ was for Kennedy in Texas and the South. I don't think he carries Texas without him.

It's hard to say. Texas alone wouldn't have swung the election to Nixon and who knows what the unpledged electors in some southern states would have done. West Va. and Louisiana voted for Ike in 1956 (along with Texas) and they returned to the Democratic column in 1960. I don't see that happening without LBJ.

Also, JFK was ambivalent about LBJ being his VP. He went back and forth on whether or not he wanted LBJ. He seemed to think that LBJ deserved it for his work in the Senate during the 1950's and was qualified for the job, although that assessment changed somewhat after JFK grew disappointed with LBJ's contributions as VP. RFK was the one who really hated Johnson and didn't want him. But even Bobby was somewhat ambivalent about it at the convention. They really hadn't put enough forethought into who they wanted as VP. I always thought Symington was the next most likely guy rather than Jackson. Humphrey was in the mix too. I think tey worried that Jackson and JFK were too similar and Humphrey was too liberal and didn't balance the ticket enough. LBJ was also seen as experienced so he balanced the ticket that way as well.

JFK was worried also about LBJ for purely electoral reasons. He worried about losing labor and liberal support in the north. That's another thing...LBJ may have driven some northern states into the Nixon camp because he was perceived as conservative and suspect on civil rights (even after passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957). Before the Southern Strategy, Nixon and the Republicans had a Northern Strategy in the late 1950's based on inroads Ike made into the African-American vote in 1952 and 1956. The Brownell bill that Nixon backed was much more liberal on civil rights than the bill Johnson passed.

Ultimately, I don't know enough about the margins in states outside of Illinois and Texas to guess about the counter factual result with any confidence though. I think Hawaii was close also (might have been called for Nixon initially even).

[papau]

7. Given absentee fraud in CA that gave Nixon state by 36k,- without Ill's 27 JFK still wins and

without Texas's 24 he still wins, but he had to win one of the two states or take California (where he was ahead before the count of the absentee votes- Nixon came from behind to win the state by 36,000 votes).

I was in Illinois (Lake County) in 1960 and the spring of 1961's floods brought to the surface the ballot boxes with Dem votes that the GOP had dumped and replaced with GOP votes - JFK won Ill by a lot more than the 9,000 votes that is the official margin.

[bellasgrams]

9. I watched that race very closely

JFK was the BEST candidate. He said all the right things in his campaign, all the things that needed to be said at that time. He was a true Democrat. Very popular with the voters except the anti-catholic folks. It was my first chance to vote.

[EFerrari]

13. Welcome to DU, bellasgrams.

:)