Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon B. Johnson was Vice-President in the Kennedy administration. He was from Texas and had been the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on which Kennedy had served. His father had been a member of the Texas legislature and as soon as Lyndon finished college, he obtained a job in the office of the local congressman. He headed the National Youth Administration in Texas and ran for a vacant House seat in 1937. His first attempt for the Senate in 1941 failed but he was elected in the late 1940s and spent the 1950s moving up the ladder in the Senate power structure.

Johnson was not a member of the Eastern elite as many of the Kennedy men had been. He was in many ways the opposite of Kennedy. Kennedy was an avid reader; Johnson very rarely read books. Johnson would humiliate people in front of...