The Presidency: Memories of Uncle Lyndon

THE PRESIDENCY Memories of Uncle LyndonWorking from a lode of salvaged notes and firsthand memoranda, Evelyn Lincoln assembled a 1965 memoir, My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy, that gave readers a faithful slavey’s-eye view of the boss she loved and served as personal secretary. Her second installment, Kennedy & Johnson, about to be published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, wastes little love on J.F.K.’s succes sor. Her book’s opening description of L.B.J., in Florida at their first meeting after the 1960 election, speaks of him as “Heavy. Heavy footsteps. Heavy body. Heavy, slow-moving motions. He walked strangely with his body bent slightly to the right.” A few weeks later, at their second meeting, Lyndon Johnson swiped Jack Kennedy’s unopened New York Times.

In Mrs. Lincoln’s rear view—highly partisan, not to say catty and rather naive—Johnson comes off as a shambling, loudmouthed oaf from Texas. As she tells it, his cronies (Bobby Baker, Walter Jenkins, Joe Alsop, Sam Rayburn) maneuvered him into the vice-presidency but his legendary prowess at senatorial politics was a fraud. Mrs. Lincoln even claims that President Kennedy came to rely on Bob Kerr and Mike Mansfield when his programs were stalled on Capitol Hill, believing that Johnson hung around talking instead of getting legislation moving.

Gift Horse. Still, the then Vice President apparently had time to scratch for a piece of the limelight by coming through Mrs. Lincoln’s White House office nearly every day, then on to the reception room, where newsmen could see him and assume he had just emerged from consultations with Kennedy. “Does he use this door very often? What is he doing in these offices?” she quotes J.F.K. Johnson, she says, asked her: “Be a good girl and see that I get invited to all the meetings in the White House.” She observes that he wasn’t, noting that in addition to her normal duties, one major task was to keep explaining to L.B.J. that, for security reasons, he could not ride in Kennedy’s plane.

Mrs. Lincoln suggests that Johnson’s 1961 gift of a horse to Caroline Kennedy, then three, was not unmitigated generosity. He immediately asked for —and was granted—a ceremonial photograph with the Kennedy family. Shortly after, he came through Mrs. Lincoln’s office again and spied the child drawing pictures by her desk. As she tells it, L.B.J.’s face lit up, and he said: “Do you know who I am, Caroline?” The little girl stood mute. “I’m your Uncle Lyndon. I want you to call me ‘Uncle Lyndon’ whenever you see me.” When he left, Caroline asked: “Is he really my uncle?” Told that if he were, he would have to be either her father’s or her mother’s brother, Caroline giggled and said, “Oh, Mrs. Lincoln.”

Running Mate. The author saves her most cutting shaft for last. Rocking in her office, Jack Kennedy was musing over the impending trip to Dallas, which Mrs. Lincoln says he had promised to make only in order to patch up the perpetual Texas Democratic feud. She quotes him: “I will go because I have told them I would. And it is too early to make an announcement about another running mate [remarking on rumors he would dump L.B.J.]—that will perhaps wait until the convention.” Dissatisfied, Mrs. Lincoln asked him pointblank: “Who is your choice as a running mate?” Jack Kennedy, according to his secretary, answered: “At this time I am thinking about Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.”