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“I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.”
-- John Adams
I have begun Robert Caro’s “The Passage of Power”, his latest book on Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ, in his towering ambition for the White House, naturally had no desire for the vice presidency, which was a much plainer office fifty years ago. However, after his failed bid to clinch the Democratic nomination for the top spot on the ticket in 1960, and thinking that it was late in the game to count on running again in four years and then another four years, he started to see the vice-presidential office in a new light - just a heartbeat away. As he would put it, with a big helping of humble pie, to reporters when they asked if he would accept the second spot on the ticket if it were offered:
“Well, that is a very iffy question, and i wouldn’t want to have it even thought that I would refuse to serve my country in any capacity, from running the elevator to the top job, if I felt that my services were needed”.
Liberals, who were actually dominant at the time, if you can imagine, were up in arms over the idea of Johnson being their vice-presidential nominee, and while Johnson may have been harboring hopes of becoming everything, Jack Kennedy was obviously banking on the opposite result, as he sought to alleviate protests:
“I’m forty-three years old, and I’m the healthiest candidate for President in the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to know that I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn’t mean anything.”
Kennedy is going to lose that bet, and Johnson will win big. However, as it turned out, Kennedy needed Johnson to grab some southern votes from Nixon and the Republicans in order to win and become president in the first place. And, yes, I will probably rake in a number of quotes from this book.
-- John Adams
I have begun Robert Caro’s “The Passage of Power”, his latest book on Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ, in his towering ambition for the White House, naturally had no desire for the vice presidency, which was a much plainer office fifty years ago. However, after his failed bid to clinch the Democratic nomination for the top spot on the ticket in 1960, and thinking that it was late in the game to count on running again in four years and then another four years, he started to see the vice-presidential office in a new light - just a heartbeat away. As he would put it, with a big helping of humble pie, to reporters when they asked if he would accept the second spot on the ticket if it were offered:
“Well, that is a very iffy question, and i wouldn’t want to have it even thought that I would refuse to serve my country in any capacity, from running the elevator to the top job, if I felt that my services were needed”.
Liberals, who were actually dominant at the time, if you can imagine, were up in arms over the idea of Johnson being their vice-presidential nominee, and while Johnson may have been harboring hopes of becoming everything, Jack Kennedy was obviously banking on the opposite result, as he sought to alleviate protests:
“I’m forty-three years old, and I’m the healthiest candidate for President in the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to know that I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn’t mean anything.”
Kennedy is going to lose that bet, and Johnson will win big. However, as it turned out, Kennedy needed Johnson to grab some southern votes from Nixon and the Republicans in order to win and become president in the first place. And, yes, I will probably rake in a number of quotes from this book.
