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LBJ IV pg. 269
"Over the same Christmas, at the Johnson Ranch, a great deal of care was going into a letter to Kennedy which was edited and re-edited, and then copied out by Johnson by hand so that it would seem more personal. It was a paean of praise for the President. “Sitting in front of the ranch fireplace at Xmas Lady Bird and I had many long, long thoughts. This year has been one of peaks and depths for us. The loss of the Speaker as well as many people dear to us put many sad milestones in our lives. But there have been many joys. Never was I prouder than the day last January 20 when I sat on the platform and heard my President rally his country to ‘begin now.’ I am even prouder at the year’s end to look back and see where you have been and see ahead and know where you are going.” The paean swelled. “Winning the peace is a lonely battle, as you have said so well.… But you have inspired so many. You will win it for us all.” And the letter ended with a coda of loyalty.
“Where you lead, I will follow,” Lyndon Johnson wrote.
"Similar pledges of loyalty were delivered orally, for conveyance to the President’s ears, to Johnson’s few friends in the Administration. “I want you to get that point over to him that I’m not playing any games here,” he told Angier Duke. “I’m sincere. I would like to be part of his team and play on the team. If he thinks I’m out playing for myself … it’s not so. How can I get that through to him?”"
"And, during the almost three years of Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidency that followed the failure of his “Seward” campaign, the pledges were honored. "
"In a way, for this man to whom it had always been so terribly important that other men know he had power and that they know also how shrewd he had been in acquiring it, and in using it, and how he reveled in its use, few things could have been harder. But he did it"
" in what one of the newsmen, Time’s John L. Steele, described, in a memo to his editors, as a “three-hour monologue.” The monologue’s theme, on the other hand, could not have been more different from those of the earlier era, which had invariably been Lyndon Johnson’s power and shrewdness. The theme of this one was that Lyndon Johnson had no power—that on his foreign trips, for example, he was no more than a messenger boy for the President—and that he didn’t want any. Before he left on those trips, he told the journalists, “I had President Kennedy write down for me what he wanted in the communiqués for every country I visited,” and he said he had stuck to the letter of what the President had written. He had, he said, carried messages not only from but to the President:"
“He is, by his own words, a mouthpiece, a message bearer … surrendering any notion that he had an important substantive impact himself.”
The surprise of the first six months of the Kennedy Administration is the ‘new’ LBJ—far quieter, far less aggressive and considerably less exciting. He isn’t running the Senate, he isn’t running anything except his office.… By every word and deed [he] is the President’s man.”
If this was a mask, it was one in which not a single crack was allowed to appear. Precautions were taken against the utterance of a single wrong word—or against a single word that could be interpreted wrongly. He announced that he would hold no press conferences, so that, as Jack Bell of the Associated Press explained, reporters would have no opportunity to “get him into a position at cross purposes with the President,” and for some time except for occasions—such as a return from a foreign trip—when a press conference was unavoidable, he adhered to that ban. Reporters weren’t able to get him into that position in private, either. “In private, serious talks about John F. Kennedy, there was never a hint of criticism from the Vice President,” wrote Evans and Novak, with whom Johnson would have such talks. The two columnists, who had seen a lot of Johnson over the years, noted that “For Johnson, whose pleasure in mocking competitors and politicians behind their backs was legendary in Washington, that self-control must have stretched his endurance.” Stretched or not, however, it held.
It had always been so important to him that the world know he was on the inside of things, and all his life, what’s more, he had used inside information, the “inside story,” as a tool to woo journalists and dominate conversations, vividly leaking details and anecdotes—some true, some partly true, some false (but during the Senate years he had been leaking to a captive Senate press corps that generally never questioned what he said)—about policies and maneuvers and individuals. Now that changed—completely. One reporter, looking for news, and feeling, from past experiences, that Johnson was always good for some, recalls that he “made an appointment with him and rode from the Capitol to the White House, and tried to talk with him about [some] situation, and he said absolutely nothing.” This experience jibed with that of other reporters: “He was maintaining a very rigorous self-imposed silence.”
With his staff—or old allies from Texas—he would sometimes burst out in anger against Bobby Kennedy’s latest affront or comment acidly on mistakes he felt the Administration was making, but these outbursts were very rare. And they were never about the President. “Even in his most private harangues, LBJ never denounced John Kennedy,” as one account says. And not only would he permit no word of criticism of the President to cross his lips, he would permit no word to be uttered in his presence.
LBJ IV pg. 275
“There was never any word that ever drifted back to Jack Kennedy of any criticism from Lyndon Johnson.… There was certainly not one word—and I’m very sure of this—of disloyalty that the Vice President ever uttered in terms of the President, no comment, no criticism.”
"HIS LOYALTY DIDN’T do him any good, however."
"And sometimes, after he finally did get in to see him, the meetings weren’t that satisfactory. More than once, when Johnson was in the Oval Office with the President, Robert Kennedy simply walked in and interrupted to discuss some new matter, “without,” as one account puts it, “so much as a nod of apology toward LBJ.” Nor was it only the President’s brother who was permitted to interrupt. Once, for example, Arthur Schlesinger, sticking his head through the open door behind Mrs. Lincoln, saw Johnson sitting next to Kennedy’s desk, and “began to retreat,” but the President beckoned him to come in. Johnson was being treated as if he were simply another member of Kennedy’s staff.
He was reduced to begging—although he did it, at least mostly, through aides. "
In any case, the begging didn’t help. It wasn’t simply foreign policy from which Johnson was being excluded. "
"DURING THE ADMINISTRATION of John F. Kennedy, Washington was Camelot, and in Camelot, the political world included parties."
"But Johnson felt just as out of place at the parties as in the West Wing."
" And in Washington, parties are a place for conducting business; after dinner, two or three men would be holding a quiet conversation. None of the business was with him."
"And sometimes he wasn’t invited—and he seemed simply unable to accept that. "
According to "Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973",
-Roosevelt had "Style and substance". Kennedy had "style" (looked fine, made good speeches) but was incapable of getting much done. LBJ was substance, but without style.
-LBJ's work habits as president: Up at 6:30 or 7:00 AM. Read papers, memos, etc. In the office at 9:00 AM-2:00 PM . 2 hour break (exercise, naps in his pajamas, shower) 4:00 PM-12:00AM- 2:00 AM. So the a ~13 hour day plus 2 hrs of reading. (15 hrs or more of work a day).
LBJ IV pg. 284
"years later, “but if you’re not at the center, it seems enormous. You get the feeling that there are all sorts of meetings going on without you, all sorts of people clustered in small groups, whispering, always whispering. I felt that way as Vice President"
"just kind of exposing himself so they would notice that he was on call.” And he saw what the Kennedy staffers were doing to Johnson: ignoring him.'
““because I didn’t want to be a firsthand witness to my brother’s day-to-day humiliation.”
“He wouldn’t know what the President was going to do. He couldn’t talk about things in detail like he used to do.”
"TALKING TO THE PRESS was too hard. The big names had stopped interviewing him, but there were still requests, relayed to him through Reedy, from other Washington reporters, or from reporters from Texas and foreign papers. “I am too worn out,” he said to one request; on another, he scribbled a single word: “No.” He couldn’t bear to appear on television, turning down even the popular Today show; he told Reedy to simply reply to television requests by saying that he didn’t go on television. Reedy, reluctant to make this bare, almost unbelievable statement—that the Vice President of the United States doesn’t go on television—resorted to different excuses, but they wore thin."
n desperation he turned back to the staff member on whom he had relied for so many years, instructing George Reedy to draft one of his long memos laying out a strategy to deal with the predicament. But as always, he got from Reedy the truth: that there was, really, no way of dealing with it. “The question raised by so many newspapermen—‘What is the Vice President doing?’—is not going to be answered satisfactorily by more activity or by public relations moves,” Reedy told him in a memo. “They are accustomed to thinking of you as the man who for eight years was one of the dominant movers and shapers on the American scene and this does not accord in their thoughts with the picture of a man … meeting officials at the airport and going down to the White House to give advice but not to make decisions.… The question ‘What is the Vice President Doing?’ is going to persist with unfavorable undertones until they find some area in which you are actually making decisions.” And, Reedy went on, “Because of the inherent nature of the Vice Presidency, it is very difficult to put you in a decision-making role.… For the time being there is no conclusive answer to the ‘What is the Vice President Doing’ question. We have no choice other than to struggle along doing the best we can while laying our plans for the future.”
LBJ IV pg. 306
"Sometimes, on the increasingly rare occasions when he was in the Oval Office, with Kennedy leaning back, relaxed and at ease in his chair, Johnson, sitting facing him in a chair beside his desk, would be on the edge of his seat, leaning forward as he talked, his pose that of a schoolboy trying to win a teacher’s favor.
And, in the fall of 1962, in response to further humiliation from the Kennedys, he groveled even more deeply than before."
LBJ IV pg. 312
in 1963, the Vice President was alone with the President for a total of one hour and fifty-three minutes."
"The vice presidency is filled with trips around the world, chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping, chairmanships of counsils [sic], but in the end it is nothing,” Lyndon Johnson was to say years later. “I detested every minute of it.” And when he tried to make something more of the foreign trips, steps were taken to make sure he couldn’t."
People who remembered him, tall and lean and bursting with energy, emanating power and authority as he strode through Capitol corridors and commanded the Senate Chamber from his front-row center desk, were shocked when they saw him now. His complexion was gray, and on that canvas face, now so gaunt, was painted sadness. Sitting at meetings in the Cabinet Room, gray, withdrawn and silent, he “appeared,” in Schlesinger’s phrase, “almost a spectral presence.”
"Feeling as he did that the fulfillment of his dream—of his life—depended on his staying on as friendly terms as possible with the President, anger at Jack Kennedy wasn’t an option. And therefore, Doris Kearns Goodwin was to write, “Johnson projected his feelings onto … Bobby.” During her conversations with Johnson at the ranch, she says, “It was Bobby he reserved his anger for.
“It was Bobby who was cutting him off the list of invitees at the White House.… If he had submerged feelings towards Jack—and they had to be there—then Bobby becomes the target of those feelings. He blamed him for the ill treatment—he couldn’t afford to blame Jack Kennedy—'
Everything was Bobby’s fault. “He couldn’t be rational where Bobby was concerned,” Bobby Baker says. Says Ashton Gonella: “He thought he was sneaky, he thought he lied—I can’t say the rest. He just hated him."
"And Johnson had read at least one aspect of Bobby Kennedy well enough to know the feelings were mutual. “When this fellow looks at me, he looks at me like he’s going to look a hole right through me, like I’m a spy or something,” he told John Connally"
LBJ IV pg. 341
"“Why?” he kept asking. “Why don’t you like me?” He was begging, crowding against Bobby, and Bobby kept retreating—and letting him beg. “It was a role … Bobby was enjoying.… The discussion was completely in his favor and in his hand,” Spalding says. And although Johnson asked the questions “again and again” (it seemed to Spalding that “this went on and on for hours”)—“Why don’t you like me? I don’t understand it. Now, why?”—Bobby wouldn’t answer them."
Among the aspects of Robert Kennedy’s character most conspicuous to his intimates was what Life magazine called his “genuine contempt for liars.” “He could forgive anything in a staffer except lying,” one aide says. “If you tried to fool him …” The only result of the encounter in the White House kitchen was a reinforcing of his convictions about Lyndon Johnson. “My experience with him since [the convention],” he was to say, “he lies all the time, I’m telling you, he just lies continually about everything.… He lies even when he doesn’t have to lie.
Listing, years later, the qualities that had made him admire, and want to follow, Robert Kennedy, Archibald Cox would include “his willingness to listen and reconsider his initial reactions.”
Standing behind his desk, jacketless, shirtsleeves rolled up, necktie pulled down, talking to them about what he thought the Justice Department should be doing, “he had,” one of them says, “a way of creating an impression that if he thought something was wrong, he’d do something to right it. He had a way of saying it, a lilt to his voice. I can still hear it, a little higher pitch.… He had a passion.” Says another: “He had that quality of leadership that made us all play above our heads,” the quality of “bringing out the very best in everyone who worked for him.” He inspired them, and bound them to him, by his commitment to social justice, by an instinct for what was right, and by his insistence on doing it—at once. “Bob never pauses to regroup and say, ‘Now what shall we do?’ ” Dolan recalls. “When he is saying, ‘What shall we do now,’ he is doing something.” “Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” he told them. “Tell me what I can do.” They learned he was willing to take on the most unpleasant tasks himself, that if one of them made a mistake, he would stand behind him. They started to roll up their own sleeves, to pull their own neckties down. "
“That was one of his great gifts,” says Robert Morgenthau, the new United States attorney in New York, “to make people feel they were part of the team.”
And he made people have a broader, deeper idea of what the team should be doing. "
LBJ IV pg. 395
But by 1963 Washington was becoming aware that the President’s brother had set his sights on the same prize.
In the March issue of Esquire, Gore Vidal predicted that Johnson wouldn’t be the nominee in ’68. “Time is no friend to Johnson’s candidacy,” he wrote. “The public … has already forgotten the dynamic Lyndon Johnson who was once master of the Senate."
Bobby’s situation was the opposite, Vidal wrote. “During the next few years, he will be continually in the headlines and” by 1968 “even his numerous enemies will have a hard time trying to pretend he is not ‘experienced.’ ” He will “have the support of the Kennedy political machine, easily the most effective in the history of the country.… One cannot imagine any Democrat seriously opposing Bobby at the ’68 convention.”
"He’s using Lady Bird to soft-soap me.” And, he was to say, he knew the reason for the silence. “I was thinking: LBJ’s right there by her side, but he won’t talk to me because he wants to be able to say that he hasn’t.” "
"Baker visited him for a day at his ranch in October, 1972, “We spoke not a word and communicated only through intermediaries” (and, even through intermediaries, very rarely). "
LBJ IV pg. 515
*Questions to ponder: Why do some influential people live in the memories of others and why are others quickly forgotten after they cease to have use?
"But in 1963, Connally had been retired for ten years, and the turnout of officials at his funeral was slim. Although Presidents Kennedy and Truman had sent elaborate floral arrangements, the Presidents weren’t there themselves, and neither were any senators or congressmen, not even the representative from the local district."
“I think it’s a disgrace that there was no delegation there from Congress,” he said, as Oltorf recalls it. “As powerful as he was, and with all he had done, if he had died when he was in office, you wouldn’t have been able to get into Waco for all the airplanes.”
"Tom Connally had been a powerful senator, but no one remembered him. Lyndon Johnson had been a powerful senator. He was thinking he would never be President—and no one would remember him, either"
President LBJ
"But part of it was something harder to define. As Lyndon Johnson arranged the crowd, jerking his thumb to show people where he wanted them, glancing around with those piercing dark eyes, Valenti’s initial feeling that this was a different man was intensified; Johnson was suddenly “something larger, harder to fathom” than the man he had thought he knew. He looked, in fact, for the first time in three years, like the Lyndon Johnson of the Senate floor.""
LBJ IV pg. 522
“It was,” Johnson was to say later, “almost as if the world had provided a breathing space within which I could concentrate on domestic affairs”
Then there was Congress: the stalemate of the Administration’s legislative program on many fronts, including civil rights and the intertwined budget and tax cut proposals that had been held up, month after month, in Harry Byrd’s Senate Finance Committee.
Because of his exclusion from Kennedy’s legislative efforts, he didn’t know what he needed to know about the status of those proposals; much of what he knew—not only about the tax cut and civil rights stalemates but about the reasons behind the seeming paralysis on other fronts as well—he knew only because, as he had told Sorensen in June, he had “got it from the New York Times.” But it was his Administration now, his legislative program; he was going to be held responsible for its success or failure; he had to find out what the situation was on Capitol Hill.
To find out, he turned not to the Senate Leader, Mike Mansfield, because he felt that would be no help, but to a senator who knew how to count. Johnson had, in fact, turned to the suave Floridian George Smathers for help in counting before, during his time as Majority Leader, appointing him his “whip,” or Assistant Leader. The independent Smathers later refused Johnson’s request that he stay in the job, telling him flatly, “I don’t want to be your assistant.”
"The purpose of the call was to obtain information, and “you don’t learn anything when you’re talking.” So, from Johnson, there wasn’t any talking."
LBJ IV pg. 536
"n confrontations with the former President during the past three years, Congress, and in particular the Senate, had won so often, had blocked so many Kennedy legislative proposals, that Congress now felt that in such confrontations, power rested on Capitol Hill, not in the White House. And the confidence among congressmen that they could win battles with the President had made them more willing to fight them, had emboldened them to contest the Kennedy program."
"But, compared with later periods, even the situation in Vietnam appeared to be relatively free from the pressure of immediate decisions.”
. Reinforcing that conclusion, furthermore, was a simple political calculation; as Bundy was to say, a presidential election was less than a year away, and major decisions on Vietnam in an election year were something no President would want to make."
"One of the most difficult problems that had faced Johnson when he was thrust into the presidency was the dislike and suspicion with which he was regarded by not a few leaders of the labor and the civil rights movements whose support was indispensable to him if he wanted to unite the Democratic Party, and if he wanted to secure its presidential nomination. He didn’t solve that problem—didn’t eradicate those hard feelings—during his first three days in the presidency but, by the end of those three days, he was on his way to a solution."
LBJ IV pg. 540
“Almost all Presidents evoke intense loyalty from their aides; a few, something quite beyond,” Eric Goldman says. “These men had not only admired John Kennedy as President but had been entranced by him as a human being and had found a good deal of the excitement and of the meaning in their own lives through their feeling of closeness to him.”
"Complicating Johnson’s task were the feelings of the Kennedy men about him, Lyndon Johnson—the contempt many of them felt for him exacerbated now by contempt for his state that had turned into hatred because it was there in that outpost of braggadocio and prejudice that their leader had been murdered."
"“Johnson really took from Walter Jenkins his substance,” Ralph Dungan was to say. “He is that way with people.… He really took the substance, the psychological and spiritual substance of people and sucked it right out like a vampire.… He could not leave a man whole with his own dignity and his own self-esteem.”
"Tailored to Schlesinger’s intellectual arrogance: “I just want to say that I need you far more than John Kennedy ever needed you. He had the knowledge, the skills, the understanding himself. I need you to provide those things for me.… You have a knowledge of the programs, the measures, the purposes, of the history of the country and of progressive policies, you know writers and all sorts of people. I need all that, and you must stay.” With Adlai Stevenson, he played on ambitions, thwarted ambitions, and, it may have been, on regrets, on thoughts of what might have been. “I know, and you know, that you should be sitting behind this desk rather than me,” Lyndon Johnson told him. Played on resentments. “There has been no consultation around here,” he told Stevenson. “You know, they put in the tax bill without ever talking to me … I know they haven’t consulted you either. So far as I’m concerned, that is all changed.… I want you to play a big role in the formation of policy.”
And it wasn’t just the line, or the variations on the line, but the way it was delivered. He humbled himself before these men, abased himself. He wasn’t as smart as Jack Kennedy, he told them. He needed them to think for him—to “think, think, think.” He didn’t absorb things as fast as President Kennedy, he said. “Don’t expect me to absorb things as fast as you’re used to.” "
LBJ IV pg. 542
"Heller wrote that the President had said that “he did not have the education, culture and understanding that President Kennedy had … but he would do his best”—and because he didn’t even know people as smart as them to staff the government. “I don’t know the kinds of people that we’re going to need—I don’t have anyone to replace you with,” he told one man. “Please stay—I don’t know anybody,” he said to another. “In these early days,” as Doris Kearns Goodwin puts it, he “spoke to the Kennedy men with a subdued tone. He requested rather than ordered; he spoke of his shortcomings and shared his doubts.” Evans and Novak, who interviewed many of these Kennedy men during this period, were to write in their study of Johnson and The Exercise of Power that “In [these] first few days … Johnson subdued his energy, lowered his voice and assumed a posture of humility.… Old friends and aides remarked they had never seen him so self-possessed, so humble.”
If the humility, the deference, he showed was a mask, as it had invariably proven to be in the past—after he had cried in front of Jim Rowe years before, for example—it was a mask that, in those crucial days, never slipped. Men who had watched Johnson for years could hardly believe the depths of the humility they were seeing now."
Johnson was extremely deferential. He said, ‘Whenever you need me, let me know.’ Bundy replied, ‘Oh, Mr. President, you let me know when you need me.’ That made sense; Presidents pushed the button to summon aides, not the reverse. But I wondered if there was, in his correct, fluid response, the tone of a professor gently chiding a student who’d got it wrong.” Johnson gave no indication that he had noticed the tone. 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 Goodwin says, “Never once did he permit himself even to imply that, however things were done before, this was now his White House. Where one might have expected bitterness—for all the slights received from some of these same men when he was Vice President—Johnson showed only benevolence.” In fact, quite deliberately, he was telling them that it was still going to be their White House. “I knew how they felt,” he was to tell Goodwin. The impact of Kennedy’s death was evident everywhere—in the looks on their faces and the sound of their voices. “He was gone and with his going they must have felt that everything had changed.… So I determined to keep them informed. I determined to keep them busy. I constantly requested their advice and asked for their help.” “Never once.” His “restraint,” as Goodwin wrote, was “continuous.” Summing up descriptions of Johnson conversations they received from a dozen Kennedy aides, Evans and Novak said that his “restraint” was “magnificent.”
And the restraint and humility got him what he wanted—“induced in these men the very cooperation and submission that Johnson was after,” as Goodwin was to comment. By Sunday night, as one reporter wrote, “he obviously had good news he wanted to share,” and although he restrained himself from making the announcement himself, “associates of President Johnson” told reporters that “President Kennedy’s Cabinet will be kept virtually intact until after the 1964 election.”
LBJ IV pg. 545
Adlai Stevenson had been so thoroughly convinced that he would be playing “a big role in the formulation of policy” that he couldn’t resist gloating over the alteration in his status. Johnson and he “talk the same language,” he told Schlesinger; in fact he felt that had he “said the word,” Johnson would have fired Rusk and Bundy, “but I told Johnson … that they should both be kept.” “You know,” he told Schlesinger, “things are ten times better for me now than they were before.”
Johnson said, “I consider you one of my men.
“I hope you will consider yourself that way too,” Johnson went on. “I just want you to know that I have complete and unlimited faith and confidence in you. I want you to stay. I know it will be a sacrifice for you, and I know that you have many other things you can do. But I am asking you, for my sake and for the sake of the country, to stay with me for at least a year. By that time I hope I will have earned from you the same confidence and faith which I know you had in John F. Kennedy.”
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. And he had done it so fast! Johnson’s “intensity and persistence … in carrying out this job was … extraordinary,” Evans and Novak wrote. “There was no hesitation, no ceremony, no delay.” Almost the entire job had been carried out in three days—Saturday, Sunday and Monday—those three days during which the nation had paid little attention to what Lyndon Johnson was doing."
LBJ IV pg. 550
“The President had had a terribly busy day,” he was to say, “doing the thousand-and-one things that he needed to do in those desperate early days. And the briefing time was just non-existent.” Read had typed notes on five-by-eight white cards, and “we would put these little cards into his hand just moments before he would be greeting these people.”
Nor was it just with talking points that Johnson was making an impression. As each minister or prime minister or prince came up to him, Johnson would shake his hand. But then that hand wasn’t released. Still holding it, Johnson would grin—and in almost every case, the prince or prime minister would grin back. From his earliest days campaigning in the Texas Hill Country as a gawky, awkward young politician, Johnson had displayed a remarkable gift for making an immediate connection with people he had never met before. Part of his technique was a handshake, which he turned into more than a handshake. Max Frankel of the New York Times, watching nearby, wrote, “The average dignitary received a firm handclasp that was held for minutes, if necessary, until condolences and wishes had been expressed. Older acquaintances received not only the prolonged handshake but also the covering clasp of the left hand; they were held there through longer remarks and, usually, broad smiles.” Held firmly—but also in a friendly way."
As he had been walking down the hill at Arlington that afternoon, he had noticed a number of state governors in the crowd, and “their presence,” as one account gives it, “had suddenly registered on him,” and he had realized that, trying as he was to meet with the nation’s leaders to build rapport with them and to build their confidence in him, here, in the governors, were whole handfuls of key leaders, chief executives of the states of the Union, all in Washington at the same time, ready to hand. And he had thought, moreover, thought in an instant—biographies of a writer or an artist would call such a moment an “epiphany”—of a way to make use of governors."
To break the logjam on Capitol Hill, he needed to influence senators and representatives—needed levers outside Congress to put pressure on it—and he had learned during the 1960 campaign that governors could put quite a bit of pressure on senators and representatives.
"Talking points for the meeting—mostly platitudes—had been hastily prepared by Valenti, and they were lying on the desk in front of him, but after a minute or two, the platitudes were forgotten, and Lyndon Johnson got to the point."
LBJ IV pg. 556
He explained what type of help he was thinking of. “I want to appeal to you … to get your delegations”—their congressional delegations: their states’ senators and representatives—“to help us break through this impasse.” He needed them to help influence public opinion back in their states. “I not only need your hands; I need your voice,” he said. He couldn’t “make Congress legislate” by himself, he said.
There had been exaggeration in his description of the scene in Dallas. John Connally’s hand had not been torn off. But there was a vividness in the description, too—not John Kennedy’s head in Jackie’s lap but “his skull in her lap”—the vividness of a great storyteller whose words caught men up in their grip. And there was a vividness in the part of his talk that wasn’t exaggerated that caught them up, too. “The only thing you could see moving in that room was the reporters’ pencils,” Valenti was to recall. “No one moved. No one budged. The room was absolutely still. No one took their eyes from his face.”
They seemed to feel there were alternatives to giving Byrd what he wanted, he told the six economic advisers; there weren’t, and he gave them a lesson in political realities.
You couldn’t get around the Senate, he said, telling them about a President, a President at the very height of his popularity, who had tried it, attempting in 1938 to unseat southern conservative senators by going into their states to campaign against them. “Of course, you could try to take it to the country. FDR tried that, with his tremendous majority, and got licked,”
" And that’s what was going to continue to happen on the tax bill, and the budget, and the appropriations bills unless the conservatives got what they wanted. Economists could talk all they wanted, he told the economists; the reality was the Senate, the Senate Finance Committee—and Harry Byrd. “You had to give up something to buy off Byrd,” he told them, and what they had to give up was that billion and one hundred and fifty million"
LBJ IV pg. 572
he gave it a little attention himself, working to defeat the bill by telephoning not only senators who were undecided about it, but senators who had announced unequivocally that they would support it. There was no time to lose. The vote was only a few hours away. “All of us worked far into the night on that,” Johnson was to write. He had a strong argument to use: that a vote for Mundt would be a repudiation of Jack Kennedy—and of him. “He came hard to the point,” reported Evans and Novak, who spoke to several of the recipients of his calls, transforming the issue “from a question of foreign policy toward Moscow … into a vote of confidence in the new President. In essence, he said: Do you want the first action of the United States Senate to be a posthumous repudiation of John F. Kennedy and a slap in the face of Lyndon Johnson.”
"The manner in which he spoke of his grief—the moving first line of the speech and the apparent sincerity and deep, solemn emotion with which he delivered it, together with the many lines thereafter in which he spoke of John Kennedy—accomplished what may have been the most difficult feat of all: to convince even men and women who, long familiar with Johnson and his ambitions as well as with his ostracism by the Kennedys, had not been disposed to accept his sincerity. "
. He had wanted to show the country that he was in charge—that he knew what to do, and that he would do it. And the speech had done that, too. It had not been merely the words—“The need is here. The need is now”; “We must act, and act now”—that had done it. It had been the determination with which the words were spoken—the determination and the air of command.
To Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post, watching from the Press Gallery, the man below him, whom he had known for so long, all at once had “established himself as the dominant personality in American life.”
aspiring copy-paste professional? 
LBJ IV pg. 591
"there is a particular intensity to the quietness in that oval room. And it is special because of the light that suffuses it. The artificial lighting set invisibly behind the cornice that rims the room is very bright, but artificial light is the least of it."
"Sitting down behind it, he telephoned the Senate offices to order the desk he had used in his Majority Leader’s office delivered, and then directed his secretaries to start placing calls."
"The purpose of the commission was to reassure the country, so he felt its members must be public figures whose very presence on it would be reassuring, “men,” in his phrase, “known to be beyond pressure and above suspicion.”
N FORMING HIS COMMISSION, Lyndon Johnson displayed another of the qualities that had made him, to men and women who had worked for him over the years, a figure who inspired not only fear and respect, but awe: his ability that had led to his reputation as “the greatest salesman one on one,” to persuade someone to do something he didn’t want to do—to do something, in fact, that the person had been determined not to do."
Much of Lyndon Johnson’s accomplishment thus far in his presidency—creating an impression of continuity by holding the Kennedy men and of competence by his first speech—had been, while important, symbolic in nature. Dealing with Congress wouldn’t be symbol but substance, indispensable substance, the very essence of governing in a democracy, for in dealing with Congress a President was dealing with a democracy’s very heart: the creation
of the laws by which it was governed."
LBJ IV pg. 602
DURING 1963, it wasn’t merely major legislation that had become caught in the jam. Appropriations bills, too, weren’t moving normally through the congressional machinery—hadn’t been moving normally for months.
Each year, twelve appropriations measures had to be passed to pay the operating expenses of the government’s departments and agencies, for under the Constitution no government agency can spend any federal money unless it has been appropriated by Congress. "
The twelve bills sent to Capitol Hill by the White House early in the year had been referred to each Chamber’s appropriations committees. Four had been passed by both houses, but in different forms, and, although there seemed to be no major points at issue, were tied up in conference committees. Four had been passed by the House but not by the Senate. As a result, with eight bills not passed, eight departments had been limping along for months under “continuing resolutions,” renewed and then re-renewed every month or so, which allowed them only to proceed with projects and programs already under way, but not to undertake any new ones, and which required them to hold their overall spending to the level of the previous fiscal year, and not spend at the higher levels that would have been authorized under Kennedy’s proposed more liberal 1964 fiscal year appropriations."
RECOGNIZING THE STRATEGY—to defeat a civil rights bill by holding other bills hostage until, to secure their release, the White House or liberal senators agreed to withdraw it—"