Episode 34: The Johnson Treatment (Part 3) The Vice Presidential Problem

Few relationships in the history of our country were as important as the one between President Lyndon Johnson and his Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and fewer still, were as bad. The two men could not stand one another and it was like that from the start. In 1960, Bobby Kennedy had tried to get Lyndon Johnson to back out of his acceptance of the Vice Presidential slot on the Democratic Ticket. It was a slight that had never been forgiven.

Through out the Kennedy Administration Robert Kennedy had marginalized LBJ, and kept him out of major policy decisions. Many around the President had often joked to one another, out in the open, "What ever happened to Lyndon Johnson?" 

On November 22, 1963, an assassin changed everything, suddenly Lyndon Johnson was the center of the political universe. But he still needed the Kennedy family and that meant keeping Robert Kennedy in place, at least for the immediate future. The two men tried to make it work and together they managed to get one of the main pieces of civil rights legislation in history passed in 1964. 

But as the Democratic Convention grew nearer the strains in their relationship grew more extreme. Robert Kennedy had ambition to be Vice President and get himself in line to reclaim the Presidency that had once been his brother's job.  Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, would have preferred, as Presidential aid Dick Goodwin said, Ho Chi Min himself to having to put Robert Kennedy on the 1964 ticket. Here we look at all the maneuvering in both directions that was done by one man to get on the ticket and by another to prevent it from happening, all with a scandal mixed in in between. 

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