Lyndon B. Johnson, vicepresident, was ignored and humiliated by the Kennedys, convinced that his political life—that is, his whole life—was over, Johnson only showed signs of his old vitality when it came to civil rights

.
LBJ : The greatest civil-rights President in the twentieth century, and his biographer Robet Caro :


The New Yorker
L.B.J.’s Biden Moment
by George Packer
May 15, 2012


L.B.J.’s Biden Moment


Some excerpts :

History remembers that much, even if most Americans forget. But what the great Robert Caro has revealed is the role L.B.J. played in civil rights during the Kennedy years. Ignored and humiliated by both brothers, convinced that his political life—that is, his whole life—was over, Johnson only showed signs of his old vitality when it came to civil rights. Kennedy hardly bothered to ask for the advice of the one American politician who had managed to get a civil-rights bill passed in the twentieth century (as Senate majority leader, in 1957, the climax of Caro’s previous book, “Master of the Senate”). But given the chance, on June 3, 1963, Johnson weighed in with the full passion and shrewdness of which he was capable.

First, tactically, he urged Kennedy to wait on a civil-rights bill, since the Southerners who controlled the key Senate committees would block every other Kennedy bill in order to defeat it. He explained how Kennedy could hold up other bills that every senator wanted—appropriations bills for dams and other public works—as he slowly built enough support for civil rights to defeat a filibuster. Johnson had to give Kennedy’s alter-ego, Ted Sorensen, a primer in the workings of the Senate, one that the Kennedy White House appeared to need badly. And in terms of the principle of civil rights, Johnson was clear. “I think that I know one thing,” he told Sorensen, according to Caro, “that the Negroes are tired of this patient stuff and tired of this piecemeal stuff and what they want more than anything else is not an executive order or legislation, they want a moral commitment that he’s behind them.”

Sorensen assured the Vice-President that he would pass on his suggestions. A week later, Kennedy gave his civil-rights speech and used the same word that Johnson had used—“moral.” How much direct influence Johnson might have had on the speech isn’t clear, since, having allowed the Vice-President literally fifteen minutes of advice, Kennedy and his brother quickly returned to shutting out and undermining Johnson, and L.B.J. fell back into a deep depression. But one thing is clear: Johnson got there ahead of Kennedy. And he already had a strategy for how to get a bill through a seemingly intractable Congress—a strategy that Kennedy would ignore, leaving it to Johnson to follow his own advice in 1964.

*************

But it was Johnson who pushed hard on civil rights where Kennedy, assuming he’d get to it after his reelection, hesitated. And it was Biden who, inadvertently, forced Obama to stop evolving and declare himself on an issue that the President clearly hoped would leave him alone until after November. Though same-sex marriage isn’t a cause on the same scale of historic injustice as the color line in America, it is the issue that forces today’s politicians to take a clear and politically difficult moral stand. It’s an issue for politicians whose egos are not under tight rational control—who are, come heaven or hell, passionate.

***************