“In the terms that mattered to Johnson—which senators got things done in the Senate—Kennedy didn’t measure up,” Kennedy’s aide Ted Sorensen was to say. “So Johnson underestimated him; he, who had done everything, felt that he didn’t have to take him seriously.” When, in January, 1957, another vacancy opened on Foreign Relations, Joe Kennedy importu

By the time all these initial maneuvers were over—by the end, certainly, of the first month of the Kennedy presidency—the misreading of John F. Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson was over, too. He had read him now, all the way through: The younger man was a lot smarter than Johnson had thought he was—and a lot tougher, too. He was always, without exception,

One of Jack Kennedy’s most impressive characteristics was an ability to observe—and to generalize from his observations, to understand the implications of what he was seeing—no matter how hectic his pace might be: to “learn on the run,” as one of his aides would put it. And as he raced back and forth across the United States in 1957, and continued

Lyndon Johnson had grasped in an instant what needed to be done with Kennedy’s men and Kennedy’s legislation: his insight into the crisis and the rapidity of his response to it a glimpse of political genius almost shocking in its acuity and decisiveness. But the genius in knowing what he needed to do was no more vital in the crisis than the self-di

“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

Kennedy aides gave him advice—lectures, in some cases, so all-knowing was their attitude—on how best to get the tax cut and civil rights bill passed, lectures on legislative strategy to the master of the Senate. Johnson sat and listened, attentively, earnestly; it seemed all he could do to keep himself from taking notes. Moreover, as Doris Kearns G

Familiar with the feelings of the Kennedy men toward the new President, many insiders had considered it simply impossible that Johnson would be able to persuade more than a few of them to stay. He had persuaded all of them to stay.

Says Jim Rowe: “He wanted one thing. He wanted it so much his tongue was hanging out; then he had another part inside him that said, ‘Why get my hopes up? I’m not going to try. If I don’t try, I won’t fail.’ ” And indeed, as the men who had worked with him longest knew, failure—the dread of it, the fear of losing, that is a factor in the equation t

Over and over again, Kennedy delayed a decision to take a step that would require force and might be met by force—and therefore might escalate into the war that would destroy mankind. Over and over again, he tried to give Khrushchev more time to think—until on Friday night, a cable clattered over the State Department teletype, a long, rambling mess