The Democrats The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

John Kennedy would get a good chuckle out of today's reverence for the 1960 Boston-Austin political partnership meticulously reconstructed by Michael Dukakis with Lloyd Bentsen. Kennedy had planned a Boston-St. Louis axis, which doesn't even rhyme. He intended to run with Missouri's Stuart Symington.

J.F.K. had pondered the Vice President question very little as the Los Angeles convention approached. His consuming concern was to win a first-ballot nomination. He flew to New York City's Idlewild Airport on Friday night. He and Jackie had a suite in the nearby International Hotel. It was a strange evening. There were only a few reporters around and virtually no Kennedy aides or security people.

Near midnight the Kennedys headed upstairs. Kennedy, coatless, sat on a stiff couch with his feet up on a coffee table. He looked boyish, lonely, far from being a world leader. Yet there was a sense of events rushing in on him.

We talked convention mood and figures. As always, Kennedy wanted the latest gossip about Lyndon Johnson. He knew that I had been down with Johnson at his ranch a few weeks earlier and that I had been talking with the Texan right up to the day before. Kennedy and I agreed that L.B.J.'s late lunge at the presidential nomination would fail. But the vice-presidential nomination?

"There is no question in my mind," said Kennedy. "Lyndon would be the best man I could get to run with me. He's a Texan, a Southerner, he knows Congress, Washington, and he has the ability to be President. But I'm convinced he wouldn't take it. He'd be more powerful staying as majority leader. What do you think?"

I concurred and even added a few more doubts. I had gone over the question every which way with L.B.J., until he got irritated and stormed that he would not do the Kennedy family's bidding. He declared that the vice presidency was a worthless job compared with being Senate leader, related the sad tenure of "Cactus Jack" Garner, who had called the office nothing more than a "pitcher of warm spit," and said Speaker Sam Rayburn had told him to stay far away from it. If he could not be President, he would stay in the Senate, Johnson had told me with such rage and finality -- his nose an inch from mine -- that I chalked him off.

Kennedy listened, grinned, nodded. We both were awed and amused by the tumultuous Johnson. "Have you decided on a vice-presidential nominee?" I asked. "Yes," answered Kennedy. "Can you tell me?" I asked. "I will if you promise not to publish it," J.F.K. replied. "Senator, don't do that to me," I implored. "We've got two days before the magazine is printed, and I'm sure the name will leak. I don't want to be bound. So don't tell me." Kennedy gave a wry smile, said, "O.K., I won't."

"My hunch is that it will be Stu ((Symington))," I said. Kennedy shrugged, a soft confirmation of sorts. (It was not hardened until the following week, when Kennedy asked Clark Clifford, a Symington friend, to tell the Senator he was the choice.)

Kennedy had one final thought on that night 28 years ago. "We'll have to offer the job to Lyndon, that's for sure. He's a proud man, and he'd be mad if we didn't. He's too big a figure in the party and in the country. He'll enjoy turning it down; then we can make our choice." But he hadn't even thought about a Texas ambush.