Read Online If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History by Jeff Greenfield - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jeff Greenfield
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forhimself as the price of doing business with the government. It was so easy to grasp, in fact, that it leached into the popular culture.
On January 10, NBC launched a new half-hour topical political comedy program,
That Was the Week That Was
, an American adaptation of a successful BBC broadcast. It was a sharp departure for American TV, whose most daring foray into politics came when Ed Sullivan had booked JFK impressionist Vaughn Meader and his feather-light jibes at the Kennedys.
But in its debut broadcast,
TWTWTW
featured a sketch portraying Lyndon Johnson as Senator Midas King (“Every bill he touches turns to gold—for him!”) and ended with a pointed version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”:
He’s the richest politician
That Texas ever saw,
And he gets even richer,
Every time he writes a law.
How did he get so wealthy
Working for the U.S.A.?
It’s really very easy
If your name is LBJ!
Johnny Carson followed suit. The
Tonight Show
host rarely dealt in political humor, so it was telling that on January 11 he began his monologue by announcing, “We’ve just learned what Vice President Johnson will be having for dessert tonight at dinner—
impeachment
pie.”
Faced with a mortal threat to his political survival, Lyndon Johnson became ill—a response utterly unsurprising to his lifelong aides and supporters. He’d been struck with an appendicitis attack two days before Election Day as a twenty-nine-year-old candidatefor the U.S. House of Representatives; bad political news had hospitalized him with depression during his first campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1941; he’d come down with a powerful case of kidney stones in his second Senate campaign in 1948 and almost pulled out of the race. Now, facing public embarrassment and a congressional investigation, convinced that his humiliation was being orchestrated by his mortal enemy who held the post of U.S. attorney general, he awoke in the middle of the night on January 15 sweating profusely and complaining of severe abdominal pains and an accelerated heart rate. The doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recommended “extended bed rest”—but it was the recommendation of two lawyers that proved decisive.
On the evening of January 16, two of the most significant inside players in Washington slipped quietly into the hospital and into the Vice President’s VIP suite. Abe Fortas, a onetime New Deal liberal crusader, had built one of the most politically powerful law firms in Washington. He’d been a friend and counsel to Lyndon Johnson for years, and saved his political life by persuading Supreme Court justice Hugo Black to leave Johnson’s name on the ballot for senator in ’48, despite powerful evidence of blatant voter fraud. Clark Clifford, the elegantly dressed, soft-spoken onetime Truman aide, was a master at exercising behind-the-scenes influence, doing more with a single phone call than most lawyers did with a hundred-page brief.
They spoke in sympathy and in sorrow; agreed that Bobby Kennedy had embarked on a ruthless, unprincipled vendetta; acknowledged that old Joe Kennedy had consorted with gangsters and bought his boy the White House; sat mute as Johnson remembered telling Clare Boothe Luce why he’d taken the vice presidency (“One out of every four presidents has died in office; I’m a gambling man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I’ve got”). But they were firm in their counsel.
Which is why, when President Kennedy stepped to the rostrum in the House of Representatives on January 21 to deliver his delayed State of the Union speech, House speaker John McCormack and Senate president pro tempore Carl Hayden were seated behind him. Lyndon Johnson, the former vice president, was home in Texas . . . where, two months before, he’d come within inches of becoming the thirty-sixth president of the United States.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE FIGHT FOR FOR A SECOND TERM
M is-tah Speak-ah . . . the President of the United
On January 10, NBC launched a new half-hour topical political comedy program,
That Was the Week That Was
, an American adaptation of a successful BBC broadcast. It was a sharp departure for American TV, whose most daring foray into politics came when Ed Sullivan had booked JFK impressionist Vaughn Meader and his feather-light jibes at the Kennedys.
But in its debut broadcast,
TWTWTW
featured a sketch portraying Lyndon Johnson as Senator Midas King (“Every bill he touches turns to gold—for him!”) and ended with a pointed version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”:
He’s the richest politician
That Texas ever saw,
And he gets even richer,
Every time he writes a law.
How did he get so wealthy
Working for the U.S.A.?
It’s really very easy
If your name is LBJ!
Johnny Carson followed suit. The
Tonight Show
host rarely dealt in political humor, so it was telling that on January 11 he began his monologue by announcing, “We’ve just learned what Vice President Johnson will be having for dessert tonight at dinner—
impeachment
pie.”
Faced with a mortal threat to his political survival, Lyndon Johnson became ill—a response utterly unsurprising to his lifelong aides and supporters. He’d been struck with an appendicitis attack two days before Election Day as a twenty-nine-year-old candidatefor the U.S. House of Representatives; bad political news had hospitalized him with depression during his first campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1941; he’d come down with a powerful case of kidney stones in his second Senate campaign in 1948 and almost pulled out of the race. Now, facing public embarrassment and a congressional investigation, convinced that his humiliation was being orchestrated by his mortal enemy who held the post of U.S. attorney general, he awoke in the middle of the night on January 15 sweating profusely and complaining of severe abdominal pains and an accelerated heart rate. The doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recommended “extended bed rest”—but it was the recommendation of two lawyers that proved decisive.
On the evening of January 16, two of the most significant inside players in Washington slipped quietly into the hospital and into the Vice President’s VIP suite. Abe Fortas, a onetime New Deal liberal crusader, had built one of the most politically powerful law firms in Washington. He’d been a friend and counsel to Lyndon Johnson for years, and saved his political life by persuading Supreme Court justice Hugo Black to leave Johnson’s name on the ballot for senator in ’48, despite powerful evidence of blatant voter fraud. Clark Clifford, the elegantly dressed, soft-spoken onetime Truman aide, was a master at exercising behind-the-scenes influence, doing more with a single phone call than most lawyers did with a hundred-page brief.
They spoke in sympathy and in sorrow; agreed that Bobby Kennedy had embarked on a ruthless, unprincipled vendetta; acknowledged that old Joe Kennedy had consorted with gangsters and bought his boy the White House; sat mute as Johnson remembered telling Clare Boothe Luce why he’d taken the vice presidency (“One out of every four presidents has died in office; I’m a gambling man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I’ve got”). But they were firm in their counsel.
Which is why, when President Kennedy stepped to the rostrum in the House of Representatives on January 21 to deliver his delayed State of the Union speech, House speaker John McCormack and Senate president pro tempore Carl Hayden were seated behind him. Lyndon Johnson, the former vice president, was home in Texas . . . where, two months before, he’d come within inches of becoming the thirty-sixth president of the United States.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE FIGHT FOR FOR A SECOND TERM
M is-tah Speak-ah . . . the President of the United
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