Presidential Dropouts

 Louis Jacobson at PolitFact:

By now, most of us are used to living in "unprecedented times." But just how unprecedented is Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race a little more than three months before Election Day?

Occasionally, incumbent presidents have decided to not seek reelection. But dropping out midcampaign is incredibly rare. And it has never happened this close to an election.

...

The two closest political shake-ups to Biden’s were withdrawals by President Harry S. Truman before the 1952 election and President Lyndon B. Johnson before the 1968 election.

Both Truman and Johnson had assumed office following a president’s death and served a full term of their own; they each would have been eligible to run for a second full term had they wanted to. But following poor showings in each of their respective New Hampshire primaries in 1952 and 1968, both exited the race.

Truman withdrew his name from the presidential election on March 29, 1952, or 220 days before Election Day. Truman, who was suffering from low popularity amid the Korean War, dropped out less than three weeks after losing the New Hampshire primary. (In that era, there were relatively few primaries; in many states, party insiders controlled the nomination process.)

Ultimately, Adlai Stevenson II won the Democratic nomination but lost in the general election to Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star U.S. Army general from World War II who ran as a Republican.

Johnson dropped out of the race March 31, 1968, 219 days before the election. Johnson — who had become broadly unpopular because of another war, Vietnam — had not formally filed to run, and was on the New Hampshire ballot only as a write-in. But after a poor showing, and facing primary challenges from two strong contenders, Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Johnson dropped out.

In the end, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was nominated but lost the general election to Richard Nixon.

Biden’s move is far closer to Election Day — 107 days — and comes after all Democratic voters have had their say in the presidential primaries.

LBJ on the Assassination of RFK

Lyndon B. Johnson, Address to the Nation Following the Attack on Senator Kennedy, June 5, 1968 Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/237145

Tonight this Nation faces once again the consequences of lawlessness, hatred, and unreason in its midst. It would be wrong, it would be self-deceptive, to ignore the connection between that lawlessness and hatred and this act of violence. It would be just as wrong, and just as self-deceptive, to conclude from this act that our country itself is sick, that it has lost its balance, that it has lost its sense of direction, even its common decency.

Two hundred million Americans did not strike down Robert Kennedy last night any more than they struck down President John F. Kennedy in 1963 or Dr. Martin Luther King in April of this year.

But those awful events give us ample warning that in a climate of extremism, of disrespect for law, of contempt for the rights of others, violence may bring down the very best among us. A Nation that tolerates violence in any form cannot expect to be able to confine it to just minor outbursts.

My fellow citizens, we cannot, we just must not, tolerate the sway of violent men among us. We must not permit men who are filled with hatred, and careless of innocent lives, to dominate our streets and fill our homes with fear.

We cannot sanction the appeal to violence, no matter what its cause, no matter what the grievance from which it springs.

There is never—and I say never—any justification for the violence that tears at the fabric of our national life; that inspires such fear in peaceful citizens that they arm themselves with deadly weapons; that sets citizen against citizen or group against group.

A great nation can guarantee freedom for its people and the hope of progressive change only under the rule of law. So let us, for God's sake, resolve to live under the law.

Let us put an end to violence and to the preaching of violence.

All the Presidents' Children

Aaron O'Neill at Statista:

The 45 men who have served as the President of the United States (officially there have been 46 as Grover Cleveland is counted twice) have fathered, adopted or allegedly fathered at least 190 children. Of these 190, 169 were conceived naturally, eleven were adopted and there are ten reasonable cases of alleged paternity (possibly more). Today, there are 34 living presidential children; the oldest of which is Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, daughter of Lyndon B. and Lady Bird Johnson; the youngest is Barron Trump, son of Donald and Melania Trump. John Tyler is the president who fathered the most children, having fifteen children over two marriages (and allegedly fathering more with slaves), while his successor, James K. Polk, remains the only U.S. president never to have fathered or adopted any known children. Coincidentally, as of November 2020, the U.S.' tenth president, John Tyler, has two grandsons who are still alive today, despite the fact that he was born in 1790.

The president, their children and spouse are collectively known as the First Family of the United States; the current first family is made up of President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, as well as their children, Hunter and Ashley. Two of President Biden's children died before he was elected to office; his son Beau died of cancer in 2015, while his one year old daughter Naomi was killed in a car accident in 1972, along with Biden's wife, Neilia (who was also Beau and Hunter's mother). Two presidents' sons have gone on to assume the presidency themselves; these were John Quincy Adams and George W. Bush respectively, while one presidential grandson, Benjamin Harrison, later became president.

Three U.S. presidents have allegedly fathered illegitimate children with slaves. The most well-known and substantial of these allegations relates to Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings; who was also the half-sister of Jefferson's wife Martha (with whom he had already fathered six children). Following Martha's passing in 1782, its is believed that the future-president would then go on to have a relationship with Hemings that spanned four decades and saw the birth of as many as eight children between 1790 and 1808. Hemings, thought to have been 14 years old at the beginning of the relationship (Jefferson was 44), and her children remained enslaved to Jefferson until his death in 1826. DNA tests conducted in recent years have confirmed a genetic connection between the Hemings and Jefferson families, and the majority of historians accept that Thomas Jefferson was the father of at least six of Hemings' children. Less substantial claims have also been levelled at John Tyler, with political opponents claiming that he fathered several children with slaves in the years following his first wife's death; although these claims have been widely disregarded by historians, with little investigation into their validity. It is alleged that William Henry Harrison also fathered at least six children with one of his slaves, Dilsia, however these claims are anecdotal and have been disregarded or ignored by historians. In spite of this, to this day, there are some African-American families in the U.S. who claim to be the descendants of both Harrison and Tyler.

It is generally accepted that two other presidents, Grover Cleveland and Warren G. Harding, fathered children through extramarital affairs. It is likely that Grover Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock in 1874; even paying child support to the mother, acknowledging that he could have been the father. When the child's mother accused Cleveland of rape, he had her institutionalized to discredit these accusations, and the child was taken away and raised by Cleveland's friends. The issue came to light nationally during the 1884 election campaign, but Cleveland still emerged victorious. In 1927, four years after his death in office, it came to light that Warren G. Harding had fathered a child out of wedlock a year before winning the 1920 election. The child was conceived during one of his two long-term, extramarital affairs, and Harding did pay the mother child support, although he kept the affair and child a secret. Harding died before the child's fourth birthday, his family dismissed these claims as rumors, claiming that he was infertile; however, DNA tests confirmed that the child was his in 2015. While there have been numerous accusations of presidents' infidelity in the past century, particularly relating to John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump; Trump is the only president since Harding to have had a child out of wedlock (although the couple did get married two months after the birth of their daughter, Tiffany).

Nixon Announces that JFK Has Won

On January 6, 1961, after the official counting of the electoral votes in a joint session of Congress, Vice President Richard Nixon announced the election of his 1960 opponent, John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Speaker,  since this is an unprecedented situation,  I would like to ask permission to impose upon the time of the Members of this Congress to make a statement which in itself is somewhat unprecedented.

I promise to be brief. I shall be guided by the 1-minute rule of the House rather than the unlimited time rule that prevails in the Senate.

This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the Presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated and announced the victory of his opponent. I do not think we could have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system and of the proud tradition. of the American people of developing, respecting, and honoring institutions of self-government. 

In our campaigns, no matter how hard fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict, and support those who win. And I would like to add that, having served now in Government for 14 years, a period which began in the House just 14 years ago, almost to the day, which continued with 2 years in the Senate and 8 years as Vice President, as I complete that 14-year period it is indeed a very great honor to me to extend to my colleagues in the House and Senate on both sides of the aisle who have been elected; to extend to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who have been elected President and Vice President of the United States, my heartfelt best wishes, as all of you work in a cause that is bigger than any man's ambition, greater than any party. It is the cause of freedom, of justice, and peace for all mankind.

It is in that spirit that I now declare that John F. Kennedy has been elected President of the United States, and Lyndon B. Johnson Vice President of the United States.

Members of the Congress, the purpose for which the joint session of the two Houses of Congress has been called pursuant to Senate Concurrent Resolution 1, having been accomplished, the Chair declares the joint session dissolved.

Unanticipated Consequences: the 1965 Immigration Law and Family Reunification

At NYT, Jia Lynn Yang writes about a 1965 deal between LBJ and Rep. Michael Feighan (D-OH):

For months, Johnson and his aides had been hounding Feighan over his resistance to one of the president’s top priorities: passing the most consequential immigration bill in nearly half a century. The proposed law would abolish the 1924 National Origins Act, which put in place a system of ethnic quotas to codify America as a white, Protestant nation.

The 1924 system greatly curbed the entry of Jewish, Italian, African and Asian immigrants while offering far more slots to immigrants from Northern Europe.
To Johnson, these quotas were nakedly unjust, akin to the Jim Crow laws restricting the political rights of black Americans in the South — another system that he was trying to dismantle.

But Feighan was nervous. If the country was going to get rid of the quotas, he believed, it still needed a way to control its racial makeup.

And so he offered a compromise: What if the country prioritized entry for people with family already in the United States? This way, Feighan reasoned, the country’s ethnic balance could change only so much. Since most Americans were white, their family members abroad would also be white.

Johnson accepted the deal, which avoided scaring off pro-immigration liberals while easing the concerns of immigration restrictionists in Congress. Four months later, at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, the president signed the compromise into law as the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, abolishing the 1924 quotas. “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” he promised. “It does not affect the lives of millions.”

What happened over the following decades would surprise nearly everyone. The system of family preference that Feighan had insisted upon, hoping to sustain America’s white identity, instead opened the door to Asian, Latin American, African and Middle Eastern immigration at a scale never seen before. Demographers now predict that nonwhite Americans will outnumber white Americans within three decades.

Progress and Poverty

At AEI, Richard Burkhauser have a study titled" Evaluating the success of President Johnson’s War on Poverty: Revisiting the historical record using a full-income poverty measure."  The abstract:

We evaluate progress in President’s Johnson’s War on Poverty. We do so relative to the scientifically arbitrary but policy relevant 20 percent baseline poverty rate he established for 1963. No existing poverty measure fully captures poverty reductions based on the standard that President Johnson set. To fill this gap, we develop a Full-income Poverty Measure with thresholds set to match the 1963 Official Poverty Rate. We include cash income, taxes, and major in-kind transfers and update poverty thresholds for inflation annually. While the Official Poverty Rate fell from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 12.3 percent in 2017, our Full-income Poverty Rate based on President Johnson’s standards fell from 19.5 percent to 2.3 percent over that period. Today, almost all Americans have income above the inflation-adjusted thresholds established in the 1960s. Although expectations for minimum living standards evolve, this suggests substantial progress combatting absolute poverty since the War on Poverty began.

Read the full PDF
Read the NBER working paper version here.

Forgetting Presidents

A release from Washington University in St. Louis:

American presidents spend their time in office trying to carve out a prominent place in the nation's collective memory, but most are destined to be forgotten within 50-to-100 years of their serving as president, suggests a study on presidential name recall released today by the journal Science.

 

...

Findings showed several consistent patterns in how we have forgotten past presidents and offer a formula to predict the rate at which current presidents are likely to be forgotten by future generations.

Among the six presidents who were serving or had served most recently when the test was first given in 1973, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Gerald R. Ford are now fading fast from historical memory, whereas John F. Kennedy has been better retained. The study estimates that Truman will be forgotten by three-fourths of college students by 2040, 87 years after his leaving office, bringing him down to the level of presidents such as Zachary Taylor and William McKinley.

...

America's memory for Johnson and Reagan, like that for most presidents, is destined to fade along a quick and predictable trajectory as new elections inexorably push them and their memories further down the list of the most recent and currently best-remembered presidents, the study suggests.

While most collective memory research conducted thus far has explored how we as a nation remember historic events, such as the Holocaust or the 9/11 terror attacks, this study is among the first to focus on how we forget salient events of the past over generations and to obtain estimates of rate of forgetting over time.

"Our results show that memories of famous historical people and events can be studied objectively," Roediger said. "The great stability in how these presidents are remembered across generations suggests that we as a nation share a seemingly permanent form of collective memory."


Journal Reference:
H. L. Roediger III And K. A. Desoto. Forgetting the presidents. Science, 28 November 2014: 1106-1109 DOI: 10.1126/science.1259627

"We Are Not About to Send American Boys..." -- LBJ, Fifty Years Ago Today

Fifty years ago today,on October 21, 1964, Lyndon Johnson went to Akron and spoke about the Vietnam War.  He said: “Sometimes our folks get a little impatient. Sometimes they rattle their rockets some, and they bluff about their bombs. But we are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

On September 24, however, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had told him that the situation was likely to deteriorate after the election:

President Johnson: I’ve been reading about all these coups out there, and all the problems of [South Vietnamese leader Nguyen] Khanh and everything. I was just wondering what’s happening to me. [Both chuckle.] I start out with a war.

Now, tell me, what’s your evaluation of the stuff we’re getting from [Ambassador Maxwell] Taylor tonight? I’m just reading it, and it doesn’t look very good.

McNamara: It doesn’t look good, Mr. President. It’s no different, you know, than what we’ve seen here and sensed here for some time. I think the odds are we can squeeze through between now and the next several weeks. But it certainly is a weak situation.
I’m going to meet tomorrow at 11:00 with Dean Rusk and Mac [Bundy] and others to reappraise it and see what we think can be done, if anything. I really don’t think there’s much we can do in the next several weeks to change the outlook. But neither do I think it’s going to completely collapse in that period.

Afterwards, though, after the election, we’ve got a real problem on our hands.

AUDIO AVAILABLE HERE 

The National Guard, Armed Forces, and Civil Disorder

Events in Ferguson raise the question of the role of the armed force in domestic unrest.  From Charles Doyle and Jennifer Elsea, "The Posse Comitatus Act and Related Matters: The Use of the Military to Execute Civilian Law," Congressional Research Service, August 16, 2012:

Section 333 of Title 10 permits the President to use the Armed Forces to suppress any “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” if law enforcement is hindered within a state, and local law enforcement is unable to protect individuals, or if the unlawful action “obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.” This section was enacted to implement the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee for equal protection. It does not require the request or even the permission of the governor of the affected state.

The provision lay dormant after the end of Reconstruction until 1957, when President Eisenhower ordered a battle group of the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock 246 and federalized the entire Arkansas National Guard 247 in order to enforce a court order permitting nine black students to attend a previously white high school. The proclamation to disperse cited both Sections 332 and 333 of Title 10, U.S. Code.248 By federalizing the Arkansas Guard, the President effectively deprived the governor of forces that had several days previously been used to enforce the governor’s view of law and order.249

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson followed the Little Rock precedent to deal with resistance to court-ordered desegregation in a number of Southern states. In 1962, after the governor of Mississippi attempted to prevent black student James H. Meredith from registering at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, President Kennedy sought to enforce the court order  with federal marshals.250 When marshals met with resistance from state forces and later a  riotous mob, President Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and ordered active Army troops  already gathered in the area to take action.251 The President’s proclamation to disperse named the governor and other state officials as forming the unlawful assemblies obstructing the enforcement of the court order, citing as authority both Sections 332 and 333.252 President Kennedy followed a similar course of action to confront state resistance to court ordered desegregation in Alabama twice in 1963.253 President Johnson cited the same authority in 1965 to deploy troops, both regular Army and federalized National Guard, to Alabama to protect civil rights marchers as they made their way from Selma, AL, to Montgomery.254

• 246 PAUL SCHEIPS, THE ROLE OF FEDERAL MILITARY FORCES IN DOMESTIC DISORDERS, 1945-1992  (2005), at 40. 

• 247 Exec. Ord. No. 10,730, 22 Fed. Reg. 7628 (Sept. 24, 1957).  

• 248 Proclamation No. 3204, 22 Fed. Reg. 7628 (Sept. 24, 1957).  

• 249 Robert W. Coakley, Federal Use of Militia and the National Guard in Civil Disturbances, in BAYONETS IN THE  STREETS, 17, 30 (Robin Higham, ed. 1989). The governor had ordered the National Guard to enforce segregation by  preventing students from entering any high school that had previously been used exclusively for students of another  race, in defiance of a federal court order. See SCHEIPS, supra footnote 246, at 34.  

• 250 See SCHEIPS, supra footnote 246, at 86-87.  

• 251 Id. at 87-93; Exec. Ord. No. 11053, 27 Fed. Reg. 9693 (Oct. 2, 1962).  

• 252 Proclamation No. 3497, 27 Fed. Reg. 9681 (Oct. 2, 1962).  

• 253 Proclamation 3542, 28 Fed. Reg. 5705 (June 12, 1963); Exec. Order No. 11,111, 28 Fed. Reg. 5709 (June 12, 1963); Proclamation 3554, 28 Fed. Reg. 9861 (Sept. 11, 1963); Exec. Order 11,118, 28 Fed. Reg. 9863 (Sept. 11, 1963).  

• 254 Proclamation No. 3645, 30 Fed. Reg. 3739 (Mar. 20, 1965); Exec. Ord. No. 11,207, 30 Fed. Reg. 3743. The governor was enjoined by court order from interfering with the march, and he refused to call out the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers on the grounds that he did not want the state to foot the bill. See SCHEIPS, supra footnote 246, at 162-63. 

In and Out of Poverty

Fifty years ago today, LBJ declared war on poverty. A Census report explains that poverty can be temporary:

The Census also offers an infographic (too big for the blog) about the measurement of poverty

Syria and Vietnam

A post in May discussed President Obama's 2012 comment about a "red line" in Syria. Now the government is contemplating military reprisals for Syria's use of chemical weapons.  Lloyd Green writes:

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, acknowledged the uncertainty of the Vietnam War in a memo to his boss: “We cannot assert that a policy of sustained reprisal will succeed in changing the course of the contest in Vietnam. It may fail, and we cannot estimate the odds of success with any accuracy.”
...

Back in the day—as America plunged itself ever more deeply into Vietnam, Bundy also told Johnson that “even if it fails, the policy will be worth it.” In that sense, Vietnam demonstrated America’s resolve to stand up against the Soviet Empire in the midst of the Cold War, and in the words of the late John F. Kennedy, “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship.”

But Syria? No. At best, American involvement in Syria would be a military commitment taken in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s having carelessly tossed out the phrase “red line,” in the course of a reelection campaign.

The Pentagon Papers were a classified official history of the Vietnam war, which Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the New York Times.  An excerpt:

"Humiliation" was much on the minds of those involved in the making of American policy for Vietnam during the spring and summer of 1965. The word, or phrases meaning the same thing, appears in countless memoranda. No one put it as starkly as Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, who in late March assigned relative weights to various American objectives in Vietnam. In McNaughton's view the principal U.S. aim was "to avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor)." To this he assigned the weight of 70%. Second, but far less important at only 20% was "to keep SVN [South Vietnam, then a separate country] (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands." And a minor third, at but 10%, was "to permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life."

The GOP and the South

At RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende takes on the notion that the GOP gained ground in the South only because of racial appeals that started in the mid-1960s:

In 1956, Eisenhower became the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a plurality of the vote in the South, 49.8 percent to 48.9 percent. He once again carried the peripheral South, but also took Louisiana with 53 percent of the vote. He won nearly 40 percent of the vote in Alabama. This is all the more jarring when you realize that the Brown v. Board decision was handed down in the interim, that the administration had appointed the chief justice who wrote the decision, and that the administration had opposed the school board.

Nor can we simply write this off to Eisenhower’s celebrity. The GOP was slowly improving its showings at the congressional level as well. It won a special election to a House seat in west Texas in 1950, and began winning urban congressional districts in Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Virginia with regularity beginning in 1952.

Perhaps the biggest piece of evidence that something significant was afoot is Richard Nixon’s showing in 1960. He won 46.1 percent of the vote to John F. Kennedy’s 50.5 percent. One can write this off to JFK’s Catholicism, but writing off three elections in a row becomes problematic, especially given the other developments bubbling up at the local level. It’s even more problematic when you consider that JFK had the nation’s most prominent Southerner on the ticket with him.

But the biggest problem with the thesis comes when you consider what had been going on in the interim: Two civil rights bills pushed by the Eisenhower administration had cleared Congress, and the administration was pushing forward with the Brown decision, most famously by sending the 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to assist with the integration of Little Rock Central High School.

It’s impossible to separate race and economics completely anywhere in the country, perhaps least of all in the South. But the inescapable truth is that the GOP was making its greatest gains in the South while it was also pushing a pro-civil rights agenda nationally. What was really driving the GOP at this time was economic development. As Southern cities continued to develop and sprout suburbs, Southern exceptionalism was eroded; Southern whites simply became wealthy enough to start voting Republican.

The President as Consoler

After the Connecticut massacre yesterday, an emotional President Obama made a statement on national television:

Other presidents have consoled the nation in times of grief:  Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster in 1986, Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and George W. Bush after 9/11.   President Obama himself did so after the Tuscson shootings in 2011.

But Americans have not always expected their president to play this role.  On August 1, 1966, a disturbed ex-Marine murdered his wife and mother, then mounted a tower at the University of Texas at Austin, where he went on a shooting rampage that slew 14 more.  Although the killings happened in President Johnson's home state, he did go on live television to console the nation.  Instead, his press secretary read a brief statement calling for stricter control of firearms. (LBJ later repeated it for broadcast.)

The following year, the space program endured its first deaths in the line of duty. During a routine ground test on January 27, 1967, an Apollo spacecraft suddenly caught fire, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. The White House Press Office issued this statement: "Three valiant young men have given their lives in the Nation's service. We mourn this great loss. Our hearts go out to their families."  That was it:  the president did not make an address to the nation, though he did attend funeral services.

Race and the Vote: More Historical Context

An earlier post presented exit poll data showing that, in every presidential election since 1972, the Republican has carried the white vote while the Democrat has carried the black and Hispanic vote.  There were no exit polls before 1972, but pre-election Gallup polls provide the closest equivalent.  The categories are different ("white" v. "nonwhite") but the overall pattern is roughly the same.  With one exception, whites voted Republican and nonwhites voted Democratic.

The exception was 1964, when Lyndon Johnson won a huge victory because of:

• Prosperity,
• The appearance of peace (though Vietnam was going more poorly than the government let on),
• A wave of sentiment following the JFK assassination,
• LBJ's political skills, and
• Barry Goldwater's political blunders.

LBJ managed to win a solid majority of the white vote and practically all of the nonwhite vote. Before this year, Republicans could typically win double-digit nonwhite support, but things changed when Goldwater alienated African Americans by voting against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  The GOP share among nonwhites has never recovered.

		1952	1956	1960	1964	1968
White	R	57	59	51	41	47
	D	43	41	49	59	38
Nonwhite	R	21	39	32	6	13
	D	79	61	68	94	87

Clergy and the 1964 Civil Rights Act

The new volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson has a fascinating passage about the role of clergy in the victory of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  It quotes Joseph Rauh, longtime general counsel of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights:

The clergymen helped shift the tide of battle off the familiar—and hostile— terrain in which civil rights had, time after time, become mired in the Senate. “This was kind of like getting an army with new fresh guns, fresh rations. . . . It made all the difference in the world,” Rauh says. These reinforcements concentrated their efforts in states, mostly midwestern, mostly Republican, mostly conservative, in which there had never been much interest in, let alone sentiment for, civil rights. In these states, labor unions and the NAACP and other African-American organizations had relatively few members. That wasn’t true of churches. And the clergymen stayed in Washington to see the fight through. “This was the first time that I ever recalled seeing Catholic nuns away from the convents for more than a few days,” says James Hamilton of the National Council of Churches. “There was agreement among religious groups that this was a priority issue and other things had to be laid aside." And the issue was, thanks to Johnson, finally understood. Senators from these states found themselves no longer able to maintain that they weren’t against civil rights but only against changing inviolable Senate procedure by cutting off debate through cloture. “Just wait until [these senators) start hearing from the church people,” Humphrey had predicted, and the prediction was borne out. Walking off the Senate floor after supporting the civil rights forces on a vote that defeated a Russell parliamentary maneuver, Mundt said, “I hope that satisfies those two goddamned bishops who called me last night.”

Robert A.Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 566.

November 22, 1963: JFK Dies, LBJ Takes Oath

John F. Kennedy died on this date in 1963. Professor John McAdams of Marquette University has an excellent web page on the assassination and has written a new book on the topic: JFK Assassination Logic.

Shortly after JFK's death, Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office. Article I, section 1 of the Constitution provides:

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--''I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

A year ago, Stephen Gillon wrote at The Huffington Post:

There was a great deal of confusion on the plane and in Washington about a very basic constitutional issue: When did the vice president assume the powers of the presidency? Everyone knew the vice president succeeded the president in the event of death. But did LBJ become president when Kennedy was declared dead? Or did he need to take the oath before he assumed the powers of the presidency? No one was sure. (The opinion of the assistant attorney general was that Johnson assumed the title of president, but lacked the power of the office until after he took the oath. These issues would not be clarified until ratification of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment in 1967).

Johnson was no constitutional scholar, and the abstract debates about the oath were of little interest to him. At a time when the operating assumption was that the assassination was part of an international conspiracy, Johnson needed to make sure there was no ambiguity about who was in charge of the nation. Taking the oath in Dallas was the right thing to do.

When Johnson took the oath, his left hand was not on a Bible, but on a Roman Catholic missal that happened to be aboard Air Force One at the time. Judge Sarah Hughes, who administered the oath, apparently assumed that the leather-bound prayer book was a Bible. It did not matter: nothing in the Constitution or federal laws requires the use of a Bible. When John Quincy Adams took the oath in 1825, he used a law book instead of a Bible.