where power goes

{excerpt, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson And His Times, 1908 - 1960.}------------------------ Meanwhile, Lyndon also had to convince some political allies that he should take the vice presidency. ..."We can't carry this boy [Kennedy]," Daniel said. Anderson told Lyndon: "You're young. You'll be elected some day yourself. Don't take a chance on getting messed up now." Warned not to trade the powers of the Majority Leader for the emptiness of the vice presidency, Lyndon replied: "Power is where power goes." {stop Excerpt}----------------

The phrase (statement) "Power is where power goes" has a curious, familiar ring to it: I can remember my father saying, "Pretty is as pretty does." A memory that seems familiar and distant at the same time.
Pretty is as pretty does.
Power is where power goes.
The title of the book I'm quoting from may seem strange -- "1908 - 1960" -- Why stop at 1960, right? This mightily diligent and enthusiastic biographer couldn't contain the life and times of Lyndon Johnson in one gigantic (591 pages) book: there's a second volume out there that covers 1960 - 1973...years of being vice president, then president, etc. (!! that's alotta Lyndon Johnson...well--he did alotta-stuff...)

----------------{Excerpt, Lone Star}: Johnson in fact had good reason to want the vice presidential nomination. In Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s view, Johnson had "a deep sense of responsibility about the future of the South in the American political system. He used to lament the fact that so much southern political energy was diverted from constructive political channels to the defense of the past . . . fighting for lost causes. If the Democratic party did not give a southerner a place on the ticket in 1960, it would drive the South even further back on itself and into self-pity, bitterness and futility. He may well have seen in the Vice-Presidency a means of leading the South back into the Democratic party and the national consensus.

...Tommy Corcoran also urged Kennedy to take Johnson as his running mate. Catching Jack in an elevator, Corcoran said it was the best way to bring the party together, win the South in November, and avoid being beaten on the "Catholic issue," which would rule out another Catholic candidate "for generations." After the day's events, in which Lyndon had attacked Joe Kennedy and struck out in his debate with Jack, Kennedy doubted that Lyndon would run with him. While Corcoran held open the elevator door, "which was spastically trying to close on my foot," Jack said, "'Stop kidding, Tommy. Johnson will turn me down.'" When Corcoran asked Kennedy to "let me see if he'll take it," Jack "smiled, nodded and said, 'Tommy you have peculiar abilities.'" {stop Excerpt}----------------------

(Why do I want to know about John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson? Main two reasons I can think of: 1) in our time, I feel like people's image of "President Kennedy" is sort of "taken over" by the knowledge of the assassination. The shock provoked by that has a sort of reductive power -- it takes over. But -- all people die. Yes, President Kennedy died, but he did other things too -- I want to know things he did and said while he was alive!

And -- 2) some people used to say, & some still speculate, Things would have been different, would have not gone the way they did, with Vietnam and the other assassinations, and riots, if it hadn't been for the murder of Pres. Kennedy. [Hunter Thompson wrote, "The shittrain began November 22, 1963, in Dallas. ..."])

---------------------------------------
{Excerpt}:
...In a last-ditch effort to turn the tide against Kennedy, Johnson challenged him to a debate before the Massachusetts and Texas delegations on the afternoon of July 12. Confident of winning the nomination and eager to show his regard for Johnson, whom he saw as a potential running mate, Kennedy accepted. Lyndon used the occasion to attack Kennedy's voting record on farm legislation and civil rights. Johnson noted that Kennedy had voted six out of eight times for Eisenhower's stingy farm support programs, and pointed out that "some Senators" had missed all fifty quorum calls and voted on only eleven of the forty-five roll call votes on the 1960 civil rights bill.

Kennedy deftly turned aside Johnson's attack, saying he didn't see any need for a debate with Lyndon "because I don't think that Senator Johnson and I disagree on the great issues that face us." His answer to Lyndon's recounting of Senate attendance records amused the audience and defused the issue.

Since Lyndon was not specific about what senators were absent, "I assume that he was talking about some of the other candidates and not about me." Kennedy praised Lyndon's "wonderful record in answering those quorum calls," and declared himself "strongly in support of him for majority leader and . . . confident that in that position we are all going to be able to work together."

...
It was also clear to Johnson that he could no longer control the Senate as he had in 1955 - 58. In 1959 and 1960, party liberals and Eisenhower's assertiveness had undermined Johnson's effectiveness as Leader. "Johnson felt he had lost control," Janeway says. "He had lost emotional control of the Senate."...Theodore F. Green of Rhode Island told Tommy Corcoran that "Lyndon was finished as an effective majority leader. . . . If he went back, Green said, they might give him the title again but they wouldn't follow him." Lyndon didn't need Janeway or Green or Corcoran to tell him what he already knew.
...If he ran with Kennedy and they lost, he could still go back to the Senate and be in a stronger position than ever to seek the presidential nomination. Should Kennedy and he win, Lyndon might...convert the vice presidency, as with the Senate Leadership, into something more than it had been before.--------------------{end Excerpt.}
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{Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and his Times, 1908 - 1960.
by Robert Dallek. Copyright 1991. Oxford
University Press. New York, New York.}

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