Free Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek

Senate committee to consider McCarthy’s censure, Johnson persuaded conservative Democrats and Republicans to serve. It was an effective strategy that made Senate and national audiences receptive to Bobby’s report.
    Although Jack and Bobby both worked in the Senate, and saw each other on a regular basis—socially, if not professionally—they operated in separate spheres: Bobby focused on domestic corruption as the subcommittee’s chief counsel and Jack increasingly concerned himself with foreign affairs. Because Bobby had not spent time abroad, except for his 1948 and 1951 excursions, Joe insisted that he travel to the Soviet Union with associate Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, who was a compulsive traveler to remote lands. Bobby spent much of the 1955 trip arguing with his Russian hosts until Douglas told him, “You can never argue with these fellows, so why don’t we just forget about it,” and not spend evenings “trying to convert some guy who will never be converted.” By the end of the trip in September, Bobby had become sympathetic to the Soviet masses, especially the various ethnic groups in Central Asia he viewed as victims of communist exploitation that was the equal of anything European nations had done to Asian and Middle Eastern peoples under colonial rule. His sympathy for Soviet citizens, however, did not reduce his distrust of the Kremlin: On his return, he publicly warned against being fooled into concessions to Moscow without reciprocal commitments.
    In 1956, he and Jack came together again on trying to make Jack a potential presidential candidate. It was a considerable reach: A first-term thirty-nine-year-old senator with no visible credentials as a national political leader, Kennedy needed to expand his public profile as an attractive personality with whom millions of people could identify and as someone capable of dealing with the communist threat abroad and the racial divide at home.
    Jack and Bobby saw the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nomination as a giant step toward the Oval Office. Traditionally, the vice presidency had been a burying ground of political ambitions. Vice presidents had come and gone without much public notice of who they were or what they had accomplished. By contrast, Vice Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman had performed admirably after succeeding to the presidency on the deaths of William McKinley in 1901 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, respectively, and winning elections in their own rights, in 1904 and 1948. They had significantly increased public regard for vice presidents and how service in the office could prepare someone for the presidency. Moreover, Richard Nixon’s three years as an active vice president under Eisenhower from 1953 to 1956 had added to the view that the office counted for something, especially since Nixon seemed likely to run for the higher office in 1960 at the end of a second Eisenhower term or if Ike lost his bid for reelection.
    When Jack and Bobby told Joe, who was out of the country, that Jack was about to try for the vice presidential nomination at the Democratic convention, Joe exploded in anger. Initially, he had been ambivalent about the idea. In October 1955, when Eisenhower was recovering from a heart attack and speculation abounded that he would not run again, Democrats believed that they might recapture the White House the following year. In these circumstances, Joe agreed that the vice presidential nomination was worth fighting for. At least, he believed it worthwhile to have Tommy Corcoran, a prominent Washington fixer and friend, approach Lyndon Johnson about making Jack the VP candidate. It was accepted wisdom that Johnson, the Senate majority leader, was running for president, and that he had a better chance than Adlai Stevenson, who had lost to Ike in 1952, to win the White House. Joe told Johnson that if he would publicly announce his candidacy and privately commit to taking Jack as his running