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Finest Hour. With her occasional bias of the 1960s, Kearns tends to belittle L.B. J.'s politics of consensus. But she understands that consensus was needed after John Kennedy's assassination and that Johnson provided it in what was his finest hour. Reaching the presidency on that grim November day was no joy to Johnson, as he explained: "For millions of Americans, I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne. And then there was Texas, my home, the home of both the murder and the murder of the murderer. And then there were the bigots and the dividers and the Eastern intellectuals who were waiting to knock me down before I could even begin to stand up. The whole thing was almost unbearable." But Johnson presided over the transition with such compassion and acumen that for a few months at least, he came close to achieving his lifelong ambition of getting everybody to love him.
His relations with the Kennedy family and their supporters remained ambivalent; they were too much identified with the enemy intellectuals. On the one hand, he was more than generous to Kennedy appointees; he kept many of them on and gave them a major role in Government. But he felt the need to humiliate others. For Johnson, love too often meant submission; and once a man submitted, Johnson despised him. Crudity was a favorite weapon. With great glee, L.B.J. described a "delicate Kennedyite" whom he dragged into the bathroom to continue a conversation. He "found it utterly impossible to look at me while I sat on the toilet." L.B.J. badgered him to come closer so that they could talk. "Then began the most ludicrous scene I had ever witnessed. Instead of simply turning around and walking over to me, he kept his face away from me and walked backward, one rickety step at a time. It certainly made me wonder how that man had made it so far in the world." Johnson was obsessed with Robert Kennedy, whom he considered as skilled and ruthless as himself in acquiring and exercising power. L.B.J. resisted all the Kennedy supporters who importuned him to put Bobby on the ticket in 1964. He felt that if Kennedy were his Vice President, he could not be his own man and could never prove his electability.