The office of Vice President has often been deemed, especially by men who held it, a job fit only for a nonentity. It was called "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived" (John Adams, the first Vice President), "a fifth wheel to the coach" (Theodore Roosevelt), "as useful as a cow's fifth teat" (Harry Truman), and not worth a "pitcher of warm spit" (John Nance Garner).
But as Lyndon Johnson would readily agree, and as the U.S. may rest assured, he is far from being a nonentity. Perhaps still another Vice President best described his skills. "He is," Richard Nixon once said, "one of the ablest political craftsmen of our time." During Republican Dwight Eisenhower's two terms, Johnson was the Senate's Democratic floor leader, and between presidential election years he was generally recognized as the U.S.'s most powerful Democrat. By the time he accepted his party's vice-presidential nomination, he was probably the only Democrat in the country who could step down to the nation's second-highest office.
Those Aching Arms. No one who ever saw him as Senate leader could ever forget it. He seemed to be everywhere —in the chamber, the cloakrooms, the caucuses and the corridors—cajoling, persuading, convincing and sometimes threatening. A fellow Senate Democrat once explained Johnson's techniques in relatively benign terms: "The secret is, Lyndon gives and takes. If you go along with him, he gives you a little here and there—a dam, or support for a bill." But a good many Senators can testify that when such conciliation failed, they had their arms twisted almost permanently out of place.
During those years, Lyndon loved to insist that he did not want to be Presi dent of the U.S. Once, while he was Senate majority leader, he and Ike were conversing in the President's office.
Pointing to the chair behind his desk, Ike volunteered: "Some day you'll be sitting in that chair." Replied Lyndon: "No, Mr. President, that's one chair I'll never sit in." He may have thought he meant it. But he is, in fact, as ambitious as he is able. And no man with the political capabilities and chemistry of Lyndon Johnson could help aspiring to the White House.
A Senator Is Born. His profession was forecast on the very day that he was born in a little frame house among the pecan and sycamore trees on the banks of the Pedernales River near Stonewall, Texas. On that momentous occasion his grandfather, Sam Ealy Johnson, an old Indian fighter and cattleman, raced around on horseback announcing to everyone within range of his roar: "A United States Senator's been born to day." Lyndon inherited his interest in politics; both his grandfather and father were members of the Texas legislature.
At 15, Lyndon and some chums went to California and took up odd jobs. But Johnson soon returned, borrowed $75 to get started at Southwest Texas State Teachers College. In 1932 he went to Washington as a congressional secretary, reorganized a group of Capitol Hill staffers who called themselves "The Little Congress," got himself elected "speaker," and turned the outfit into a hotbed of New Deal ideology.