On a hurried political expedition into New York City last week, Texas' Senator Lyndon B. Johnson all but bumped into Massachusetts' Senator John F. Kennedy, who had slipped away from his seaside vacation retreat at Hyannisport, Mass, to do some New York politicking himself. Just as Kennedy headed into Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria, by long-shot coincidence the car bringing Johnson from the airport pulled up at the entrance. Johnson strode indoors so fast that he did not even see Kennedy, but Kennedy saw Johnson, and let out a startled semi-shout: "What's that guy doing here?"
That guy was belatedly running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Just when Jack Kennedy had settled back to polish his nomination-acceptance speech for delivery at Los Angeles, Lyndon Baines Johnson had saddled up and set off in an old-style pursuit of the rolling Kennedy bandwagon.
People's Choice. With only eight days to go before the start of the balloting, Lyndon Johnson galloped into the race later than any serious presidential hopeful on record. In setting off on his last-lap chase, he brought a surge of excitement into the race. More important, he raised an issue that will reverberate long after the convention is over and the last delegate has gone home. The issue: What is the business of a presidential nominating convention? By what criteria should it choose the nominee for the nation's highest and most powerful public office?
As Johnson saw it, the convention ought to be a serious conclave where the delegates meet "to consider who can best lead a party and the nation." Jack Kennedy, in his drive for the nomination, shaped his strategy to a newer concept: the idea that the business of the convention is to nomi nate the man who, eliciting the most popular support, winning the most primaries and drawing the most enthusiastic cheers, has shown himself to be the most politically glamorous candidate, the people's choice. Johnson, little known to the public, felt that he deserved the nomination because, more than any other Democratic hopeful, he had proved himself over the years in the arenas of government. Kennedy felt that he deserved it because he had won a batch of primaries.
Aura of High Places. The two approaches to the nomination were rooted in the history of U.S. politics: Johnson's in the theory of the Founding Fathers that a leader is chosen by his peers (the Electoral College picked the President; state legislatures chose U.S. Senators); Kennedy's in the populist theory of direct primaries (now augmented by the help of direct and almost instantaneous communications). The two approaches were also rooted in the radically different characters and careers of Kennedy and Johnson. They are sometimes thought to represent the liberal and conservative wings of their party, but allowing for the differences between Massachusetts and Texas, their voting records are similar. There the similarity ends (apart from the fact that both of them have money—Kennedy by birth, Johnson by marriage).