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

pros, not having a candidate in the race was an unsupportable idea: if he convinced them he wouldn’t be a candidate, they would select someone else. He himself was in that situation, Rowe had been warning him. “I finally said, ‘I want to get into the campaign, and if you’re going to go, let’s go. If you aren’t, I’m going over and join Humphrey.’ I talked this way to him for two or three months, and he said, ‘I am not going. You can count on it. I am not going to run.’ ”
    “I think you are making a mistake,” Rowe wrote him. “But I will
not
press you again.” He signed up with Humphrey—and the day after Rowe’s decision was announced in the press, Johnson had a few words on the subject with Tommy Corcoran. “Jim betrayed me,” he said. “He
betrayed
me!” He was going to need Jim when, at the proper time, he stepped in to get the nomination, he said, and now Jim wasn’t going to be available. Corcoran tried to point out that he had told Rowe something else, but, Corcoran says, “You couldn’t reason with him.”
    H AD IT NOT BEEN for one factor, Lyndon Johnson’s strategy—whatever its roots: calculation or fear—might have worked. Johnson did, after all, possess a number of assets the other candidates did not: a solid, substantial bloc of delegates—the South’s—that would be behind him when the convention started; the support of his senators, and ofSam Rayburn. And the fact that each of the other contenders had at least one major liability (Humphrey’s extreme liberalism;Symington’s lack of national recognition; Stevenson’s and Kefauver’s previous losses) while Kennedy had two (his youth and his Catholicism) made Johnson’s belief that none of them would be able to command a majority on early ballots seem, at the beginning of 1958, well founded, as did his belief that therefore the convention would be deadlocked and thrown into the hands of the big-state leaders, who would turn to him.
    But there was the one factor: this great reader of men, this man who thought he could read any man, had read one man wrong.
    ----
    1 Since Zachary Taylor in 1848. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was not elected but completed Abraham Lincoln’s term.

2
The Rich Man’s Son
    L YNDON J OHNSON MIGHT have been excused for misreading John Kennedy. A lot of people in Washington had misread him. When he arrived on Capitol Hill as a newly elected representative from Boston in January, 1947, he was twenty-nine years old, but so thin, and with such a mop of tousled hair falling over his forehead, that he appeared even younger. He was the son of a rich man, a very rich man—a legendary figure in American finance: Joseph P. Kennedy, who had made millions in the stock market on its way up during the Roaring Twenties, and then, selling short on the eve of the 1929 Crash, had made millions more on its way down; who had then turned from amassing wealth to regulating it, asFranklin D. Roosevelt’s dynamic chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission; who had been FDR’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s; who had then, through investments in real estate, and movies (and, some incorrectly said, through bootlegging), turned millions into tens and then hundreds of millions—into one of America’s great fortunes, into wealth that seemed almost limitless, and into influence, in Hollywood, in the media, that seemed to match. Everyone in Washington seemed to know that the ambassador had given Jack—along with each of his other eight children—his own million-dollar trust fund, as everyone in Washington seemed to know that the ambassador had bought Jack his seat in Congress with huge campaign expenditures. And for some years after Jack Kennedy’s arrival on Capitol Hill, that was all he seemed to be: a rich man’s son.
    His appearance reinforced the stereotype. He was not only thin—barely 140 pounds on a six-foot frame—but, in the words of one House colleague, “frail , hollow-looking,”