The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV

No Vice President had ever come to office with so little time in which to establish a record on which he could run in his own right. Johnson, Neustadt was to write, “faced the unprecedented challenge of assuming office and then running for election in the same first year.” Needing a record on which to run, he had very little time to create one.

“John F. Kennedy could not have been elected President without the South,” Evans and Novak were to conclude. “Could he have carried enough southern states to win” without Johnson on the ticket? “Probably not.” “The key to the election had been in the South,” said U.S. News & World Report. “And this was the land of Lyndon Johnson. It had backed

Johnson’s strategy rested on his belief that the bosses would turn to him if there was a deadlock. But they wouldn’t turn to him unless he had proven that he could win outside the South. That meant entering the primaries, and Johnson was saying he wouldn’t enter any primaries. If he wouldn’t do that, there was a slim chance—very slim, but nonethele

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 tic

Thirty-one thousand and 21,000—in an election that was decided by 46,000 votes, the weight of those votes could hardly have been a minor factor. Whatever the explanation for the results from the “ethnic bloc” in Texas, John Kennedy had selected Lyndon Johnson in part to take back Texas for the Democratic presidential ticket, and Johnson had done it

“But the next morning, a golden autumn Sunday morning,” the Grozny suddenly came to a dead stop, and the nine o’clock newscasts were interrupted by a bulletin: Khrushchev had accepted Kennedy’s terms, the no-missiles, no-invasion terms to which the President had brought him back by ignoring the second letter. The letter ended with this salutation t

Kennedy “had genuine regard for Johnson as a ‘political operator’ and even liked his ‘roguish qualities,’ ” Robert Dallek wrote in 1998. “More important, he viewed him as someone who, despite the limitations of the vice presidency, could contribute to the national well-being in foreign and domestic affairs and, by so doing, make Kennedy a more effe

By March 20, of course, tangible evidence of Johnson’s effectiveness was piling up: the passage of the tax cut, foreign aid, education, and appropriations bills, the progress toward passage of the civil rights bill. And beyond these concrete successes was one less tangible but just as impressive: the confidence engendered not just in Washington but

Those four days have become enshrined as among the most memorable days in American history. But the achievements of Lyndon Johnson during those four days and the rest of the transition period—the period, forty-seven days, just short of seven weeks, between the moment on November 22, 1963, when Ken O’Donnell said “He’s gone” and the State of the Uni