JFK no quería a LBJ como su sucesor

Es un avance del documental que emitirá la ABC el próximo martes sobre una inédita serie de entrevistas realizadas por Arthur Schlesinger a la ex Primera Dama Jackie Kennedy pocos meses después del asesinato de JFK.

President John F. Kennedy was so "worried for the country" about the prospect that Vice President Lyndon Johnson might succeed him as president that he'd begun having private conversations about who should become the Democratic Party's standard-bearer in 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy recalled in a series of oral-history interviews recorded in early 1964.

She said her husband believed strongly that Johnson shouldn't become president and, in the months before his death in November 1963, he'd begun talking to his brother, Robert Kennedy, about ways to maneuver around Johnson in 1968.

"Bobby told me this later, and I know Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, 'Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?'" she said.

The president gave no serious consideration to dropping Johnson from the ticket in 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy recalled. But he did have some talks about how to avoid having Johnson run for president in 1968, at the end of what would have been Kennedy's second term, she said.

"He didn't like that idea that Lyndon would go on and be president because he was worried for the country," she said. "Bobby told me that he'd had some discussions with him. I forget exactly how they were planning or who they had in mind. It wasn't Bobby, but somebody. Do something to name someone else in '68."

(...) When they were fellow senators in the late 1950s, Johnson's profanity and political trickery "sort of amused" Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy said. She said the future president "didn't particularly like him."

By Jacqueline Kennedy's telling, her husband never really wanted Johnson on his 1960 ticket in the first place. She said he really wanted to choose Missouri Sen. Stuart Symington, and even indicated that Symington was his choice to a mutual friend, Clark Clifford, on the day of his nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

In choosing among possible running mates in 1960, Kennedy and his close allies "liked Lyndon Johnson the least," Jacqueline Kennedy said. But Kennedy believed he needed to offer Johnson a spot on the ticket "to annul him as majority leader," she said, fearing that his "enormous ego" would have led Johnson to block Kennedy's agenda in the Senate as president if he felt slighted.

"Everyone was even amazed that he accepted," she said. "Some other people can tell you about it, going down into his room and everything -- and I guess he was drunk, wasn't he?"

Recorded in early 1964, Kennedy was seeking to shape her late husband's legacy at the same time that the new president was adjusting to the office in which he was suddenly thrust. She fretted that Johnson was currying favor with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whom her husband, she said, planned to oust after the 1964 election.

That decision was among several that have "all been done the wrong way" under President Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy said.

She depicted the new president as struggling with the burdens of the office, saying "the poor man's terrified" and appeared "panic-struck."

(...) Jacqueline Kennedy was also dismissive of Johnson's wife, Lady Bird Johnson. She recalled that Lady Bird Johnson would follow her husband around and make notes about his conversations with others, "sort of like a trained hunting dog."

"She had every name, phone number – it was a – ewww – sort of a funny kind of way of operating."

* Enlace relacionado: Kennedy-Johnson, un ticket de compromiso