#1575 Mind the Gap: Between Presidential Administrations

If you think of a tic-tac-toe, what's between those lines are called the interstices. And so when there's a gap in the continuity of government, terrible things can happen and some opportunities can happen too. And so today we have, for example, uh, one president creating Bears Ears National Wildlife Refuge in Utah, and then the next president, by executive order, reduces it by half.

And then the next president restores it. This is no way to, uh, operate government. Or think of the border, you know? One one president signs executive orders that do such and such on the Mexican border. The next president, uh, undoes this and goes in the other direction. Hey, these are things that Congress should be doing.

These are not presidential decisions, uh, of of things of that magnitude. Although the president does have the power, under the Antiquities Act, to name, by executive order, national monuments. But they were meant to be small, not these gigantic ones that we're using these days. This is no way to run a government. I mean, it's, it's quite clear, but it is what it is. But I'm interested in what happened in three instances. I was thinking, I was reading this new book about, uh, Harry S.

Truman the accidental president. And I realized again that, you know, he was put in an almost impossible situation when he had to make decisions about the use of the atomic bomb. Having never even heard of it until the day that, uh, his predecessor, U.h. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, died at Warm Springs, April 12th, 1945. And an unfair thing. That is for the world, for the Japanese, for the world, for the Cold War, for Harry Truman, for American GIS. Have some. The someone who's not really ready to be the president have to take on those responsibilities, and the learning curve had to be so fast, so high.

And so that I was thinking about that. And then I remembered, you know, in my book on Meriwether Lewis, the character of Meriwether Lewis, explorer in the wilderness. I have a chapter on, called The Problem of Silence, about the fact that Lewis stopped communicating with Washington. And because Jefferson had just retired and washed his hands of the whole thing. And Madison was the new president, and Madison didn't care about Lewis, the way Jefferson cared about Lewis, that Lewis got caught in the intersection, um, and it led to his a formal rebuke by the War Department that never would have occurred under Jefferson's watch. I feel, uh. And this led to a series of of erratic actions by Lewis that that brought on his suicide on October 11th, 1809. And I feel that if Jefferson had stood for a third term, Lewis would not have been rebuked by the War Department, you know, whether Lewis would have committed suicide is another question.

I don't think so, we can't know, uh, but I think that. It was directly related to the rebuke that he received in July of 1809 from William Eustace, the secretary at war. Uh, and then more recently, I've been doing a lot of work on the Kennedy administration and Camelot for this book, I'm doing on, uh, John Steinbeck and the Mort d'Arthur. And when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, Johnson took the oath of office within hours and became the next president, the 36th president of the United States.

And he then had to try to fulfill what he took to be John Kennedy's agenda. Both in Vietnam, uh, the space program, civil rights movement, and so on, uh, and did a masterful job in some ways, but. But the great question that hangs in the air is what would have happened to civil rights legislation if Kennedy had lived? Answer Almost certainly not as quick and not as thorough that legislation that it was Johnson who really caused it to be passed in Congress. Because of his strong arm tactics, his enormous political mastery as Senate majority leader. And that Vietnam might not have turned out the way that it did if Kennedy had lived, you know, it's, it's. We don't know, of course, but we have to wonder what Kennedy would have done had he not been martyred? In November of 1963, would we have wound up at the Gulf of Tonkin incident and would we have sent 500,000 Americans? Tropes to Vietnam and the carpet bombing of Hanoi and all the things that followed? We don't know, we can't know, but we certainly can think about it.

We do know that these interstices, these gaps are really dangerous moments. And we've been in one with respect to the speaker of the House of Representatives, in a certain sense, we've been in one since the 2020 election. Because the Republican candidate refused to concede, and tens of millions of his followers believe the election was rigged and stolen. And so we don't have the authority, the the power, the legitimacy, the credibility of the presidency that we need in the time of international crisis. Now we have at least two, three, if you include China and Taiwan, but we have Ukraine, and we have now Gaza and Israel. And then sort of just looming over the edge of the horizon is Taiwan.

We need a stronger presidency, with greater national legitimacy and agreed upon outcomes. So that the president has something like a working consensus. And it's not strictly partisan on every possible issue. And so this is really, very troubling, but I'm very fascinated by these interstices. And so I asked my friend David Horton to moderate this discussion and we had a really interesting time of it. So I hope that you're going to ltamerica..org. I hope you've signed up for our newsletter.

I hope you'll consider contributing to the Great Travels of Charlie Tour that we're going to undertake next year and contributing to the success of our new podcast, LTAmerica.

Org. David's going to be guest host once a month, sometimes twice, still wanting to find a semi-permanent guest host. And so we're working on that, but lots to be done here. I'm excited about all of this. This has been a dizzying time in my intellectual life and I'm so glad that you're along for the ride.

I hope you like this program. Please let us know and make suggestions people. We should interview places that I should go on, the Travels of Charlie Tour and and and everything that comes beyond it. Books I should read. As we come towards the 250th birthday of the United States. So thank you very much everyone. I'm I'm just really delighted that you're my listeners and my friends.

Clay, How are you today, my friend?

Jefferson became the president of the United States in March of 1801.

He knew of the Lewis family, he knew Lewis's mother, who lived nearby on a on a plantation not so far from Monticello. And he knew Lewis was had wanderlust and that he was interested in the West. Lewis was in the army at the time, so Jefferson wrote to him and said, Would you like to come to Washington to serve as my private secretary? And who wouldn't want to get that letter?

Imagine being young Meriwether Lewis and receiving this missive. He was out in the Ohio country, in the Illinois country, so he hastened back to Washington. And he served as Jefferson's private secretary for a couple of years. As a kind of aid to camp, Jefferson explained to him all of his geopolitical purposes. They talked about a mission to the Pacific and back again.

If ever a mission was planned spectacularly, with the greatest sense of detail, it was this one. And I think we have to attribute a lot of that to Thomas Jefferson, you know, who was a genius. So Lewis makes the trip, he hires Clark to be his co-captain, even though Clark never really had that military rank. And they got together a couple of dozen, eventually 33 total people.

And they went from, well, we're actually Pittsburgh, all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back again. But the official mission was from St. Louis to the source of the Missouri, and then over the Rocky Mountains and down to the Pacific. And they did this in 28 months.

They traveled almost 8,000 miles. This, of course, is before the internal combustion engine, before steam. So they were using the backs and thighs of their young men to propel themselves across the American West. And for much of it, they were possibly first white explorers, first white people, maybe in much of Montana, much of Idaho, much of Washington and Oregon. They came back successfully in September of 1806..

Only one of their people had died, and he of natural causes. They had killed two natives, unfortunately, in a skirmish. And Jefferson rewarded Lewis and Clark by giving them plum jobs in St. Louis. Clark was a superintendent of Indian Affairs, and Lewis was to be the governor of the territory. And Lewis's job then was to sit down and write out his account, which for Jefferson was equally important.

It was maybe more important than the journey itself, because the publication was to tell the world, the enlightened world, the scientific world and the geopolitical world. What we had done. And Lewis couldn't do it for some reason, he never finished the book, he never even wrote the book, so far as we know.

And so Jefferson was deeply disappointed, couldn't understand why Lewis would have writer's block of this sort. Jefferson didn't really understand. Mental imbalance. You know, he was such a serene and stoical man, incredibly productive he, in a sense. He never had a bad day.

He had an enormous discipline and I think he just assumed, how hard can it be to write up an account of your travels? And when Lewis didn't, we lost just a stupendous amount of insight into the American West. That died with Lewis, who put a bullet to his head and to his abdomen on October 11th, 1809. And Jefferson and Clark, the two closest men in Lewis's life, both immediately realized that it was suicide. So that's the background to the story.

It's even possible, David, that Jefferson might've regarded Lewis as presidential material, I mean, he did. Monroe. So, if Lewis had had risen to the challenge and had been a superb governor and had kept his paperwork in order? And communicated regularly with Jefferson and the War Department? And triumphed in this post-expedition job, he would have only been about 40 years old. And, you know, if you look around for presidential material, Jefferson's looking to Madison, his closest friend. Then they sort of slightly reluctantly accept Monroe as next in line. I think it's possible that that Lewis could have been a member of the Virginia Dynasty.

But here's what Jefferson didn't understand Two things First of all, how complicated Lewis was. Lewis was not stable in the same way that Jefferson was stable, and Jefferson just. I think, really just couldn't understand that period. There was no psychiatry at the time, no counseling, Jefferson was a deist.

So he had no pastor, Lewis was probably a deist, too, so he had no minister. So Jefferson, I don't think, could understand what whatever it was that was wrong in Lewis's soul, but also Jefferson didn't really understand how crazy it was. In St. Louis. So you have Spanish land grants and French land grants, and now the Yankees are suddenly there. And you have Osage natives and other natives coming down the river and wanting to treat with the government. And the government trying to buy land from sovereign tribes and lots of rascals.

On every frontier there are lots of rascals. And so it was almost an impossible challenge for anyone to be a good governor at that instance in Upper Louisiana. And Lewis wasn't wired temperamentally to be able to withstand all of the pressures. Clark probably could have done it, but not without trouble, I think.

If Jefferson had not made Lewis, the governor had kept him close at hand, had assigned a secretary, or an Amanuensis, or a ghostwriter to help him, had provided him space. Say, in the White House, or nearby, or at Monticello, or send him back to Philadelphia to work with the American Philosophical Society, and so on. It would have been better for Lewis, so I think Jefferson got a little ahead of himself and Lewis even a. Let's just say, erase everything that I've said so far. During his time as governor, Lewis was just too busy, too overwhelmed with too much, that he didn't have time to write the book.

He was not in on the planning, he didn't know what was going on. FDR had really irresponsibly failed to brief him on anything. And suddenly, he's the president of the United States at the end of this colossal war. So I've been thinking about these, what these interstices, they're called between administrations.

So Jefferson retires in 1809.

Madison's elected his best friend, Jefferson, then, in typical Jefferson fashion, sort of washes his hand of the whole thing and says, I'm out. I'm going to garden and I'm going to read Tacitus and Homer, and I'm not subscribing to any newspapers. I, I won't interfere.

I want nothing, I'm, I'm retired. At last, I found my happiness. And Madison, his successor, Brilliant man, was not a westerner.

He was not particularly interested in the American West, and he was not a Lewis fan. Not sure why, but he was not one to indulge Lewis, and Lewis was crosswise with the war Department. Because he wasn't communicating and his finances were in disarray, and his official finances were in disarray. And he had made some decisions which were really questionable, about public private partnerships and spending money without congressional authorization.

And but mostly, he just wasn't communicating, he had just shut down somehow. And so if Jefferson had still been President David, he probably would have been notified by the War Department that Lewis is really failing here. And surely Jefferson would have said, Let me step in, I'll handle this. Be patient.

He's a good man, he's a hero. Let's work this out. But since Jefferson was gone and had made himself unavailable, he sort of pulled the plug on his phone. As it were, Madison had lost patience with Lewis, too, and he had other things on his mind. The war is coming, the war of 1812..

And so when the War Department officially challenged Lewis and rebuked him in a severe way. The letter that William Eustace sent from the War Department said it was really snarky and and and negative and creepy letter. And then, he said, And by the way, we've talked to the president of the United States about this, and he agrees with me. So he had, he said, and it probably was true that Madison had officially endorsed the rebuke. So think of the difference between Jefferson, who would have said We, we'll probably find a way to make this work, or he would have eased Lewis out in some generous way.

But instead, William Eustace wrote a letter that was so hostile it's hard to read even today. That Lewis flew into a rage. And and I think this led a couple of months later to his suicide. Because he had been challenged by the government of the United States as a. As someone who was corrupt and he couldn't take that honor meant everything to someone like Lewis. He had almost fought a duel earlier in his life, and he'd almost fought a duel in St. Louis. And now, in a sense, it's an affair of honor with the War Department. And so he felt that his basic integrity had been besmirched.

And it just ate him, it ate him alive.

Welcome back to Listening to America, with Clay Jenkins and I'm David Horton serving as guest host this week. And we're spending a little time speculating about what if what might have happened if history had turned out a little differently. In our first segment, we talked a little bit about President Jefferson and Mary Weather Lewis. In this segment. It would be interesting to talk a little bit about that time period in 1944 1945, when we had a transition of government and the greatest weapon of destruction ever created. Can you talk a little bit about Truman's ascendancy?

And then what kind of all transpired over a four or five month period? To get us where we were in 1945, at the dawn of the nuclear age?

And so it became clear that we should get one first, because we couldn't allow Hitler to have an atomic weapon.

So we had an emergency program called the Manhattan Project, and J. Robert Oppenheimer was recruited to build the bomb. To create it at Los Alamos, a site that he chose in New Mexico. By the way, I'm taking a cultural tour of people to New Mexico in April, so we'll go to Los Alamos and Santa Fe. And so I can't. I can't wait to to talk about this on site. But at any rate, FDR was the only president in American history who served a third term, and then the beginning of a fourth.

He stood for a fourth term in 1944.

I think rightly believing that he needed to see the war through. He was really ill by this time and dying, frankly, and everyone around him knew that. He was almost certainly not going to live through a second, a fourth term, and somehow he chose an unlikely vice president. There were people that would have been better suited for this moment. But it was a whole series of political complications and FDR was sort of indifferent to the whole process.

But in the end, a senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, was chosen to be the vice president. That's a really, I think, irresponsible thing for FDR to have done and the Democratic Party to have done. But even more irresponsible was not training Truman to take over when it was clear that he was going to have to. And so, by the time FDR died at Warm Springs on April 12th, 1945, Truman had been vice president for 82 days.

He'd had a couple of perfunctory meetings with FDR, but they had never had a discussion of anything of substance, period, and now suddenly, FDR is dead. Truman ascends to the office, he said to the reporters. I don't know if any of you fellows have ever had a, like a hay truck fall on your neck, but that's what this feels like. And so he takes the oath of office, and on that afternoon, he learns of the Manhattan Project for the first time.

So this is exactly what I'm talking about, these interstices. So if he had been around and had been part of this for the last three years and had been briefed and gone to Los Alamos. And had met Oppenheimer and had learned about the destructive capacity of the atomic bomb, he would have been in a better position to make some hard decisions. In the end, he chose to use the bombs. We don't know whether FDR would have used them against Japan, but we assume he probably would have. But he knew the whole story and had been there at the beginning. Remember, Einstein had written him a famous letter in 1939 to FDR, saying, You should probably know that the atom has been split and this opens all sorts of possibilities of energy and maybe bombs.

And so FDR had had time to process this, and FDR was a deeply humane and in some ways, a very soft hearted individual. Churchill was afraid that FDR was growing soft at the end of the war, so we actually don't know what would have happened if FDR had lived. But I'm going to assume that he probably would have allowed the bombs to be used, at least the first one. But poor Truman, and not only does he have to take on them. I mean, when he took the oath, Hitler was still alive.

Mussolini was still alive. The assumption was that the war in Europe would last another six or seven months, maybe another year, and that the war in Japan would last maybe a couple of more years. And suddenly, Mussolini is killed by partisans. A little later, Adolf Hitler commits suicide in the bunker.

Suddenly, Europe is no longer at war. And at that point, it raises a very serious question. If the bomb was created to get there. Before Hitler, no word of Japan, and now Hitler is dead and the war is over, should we even use the bomb? At this point? Maybe, maybe we choose to shelve it. Well, there was a momentum.

You have this weapon, do you use it and maybe devastate your enemy, but save the lives of your citizens? Versus saying you would sacrifice 10,000, 50,000, a hundred thousand more American lives to do this to save the aggressor in this situation, and it's an almost unwinnable decision to make.

There is no answer that could potentially save Truman in this situation. I am interested and I wanted to throw one more thing at you, and then I'm going to ask you to reflect on all of this. What if Henry Wallace, who had been FDR's vice president the previous four years, had remained vice president for the end of the war? I mean, he, he would have known.

At that point, he had had a significant experience, although, you know, Roosevelt wasn't necessarily as much of a mentor as one might like, but he had been there. What if they had stuck with Henry Wallace, knowing it's very likely he would have become president? I mean, that's the whole reason that they made the switch, that Henry Wallace was too far to the left. And that somehow they had to find someone who could balance the ticket a little bit more. Make the conservative Democrats happy and and pull things along. So that's a question for you, Sir. Had we gone in a slightly different direction with the vice presidential selection, that person elevated to the presidency, what might've happened?

And I did not know much about Henry Wallace before I read this book. But Wallace was a leftist way to the left of FDR. And he had some associations with people who had associations with communism, with the Communist Party. And so he was a serious leftist. And he was regarded as too liberal, too too far to the left to be kept on for another term. Maybe because they feared that FDR would not survive the term, and they didn't want a person of that kind of political persuasion to be the next president of the United States. Through the back door, coming in on the on the death of the president. But at any rate, uh, we would have been in better shape if Wallace had been president because he had had four years to get to know FDR. He knew his thinking, he was more central to the political establishment in Washington than Harry Truman was.

So I just want you to imagine for a moment, as a kind of a thought experiment. We have a weapon of mass destruction. It's just being tested in the summer of 1945, the first test is July 16th. While Truman, by the way, is at Potsdam, near Berlin, having a meeting with the others, um, the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill.

Who do you want to be inheriting the presidency at this point? Someone who has no idea of what's been going on, but is a good and decent man? Or do you want someone who really has a track record in Washington, who knows the ways of the world, who knows FDR's mind? I think that if you were just looking at it from the outside, you would say only a. Only. A really insane country would put an amateur into the presidential chair. At this moment. That this is a reckless thing for America to do, and that's that's the issue I'm trying to get at here. David is, we have our system. Every four years, a president has to be elected or reelected, which means there are these interstices, these gaps. And, uh, Meriwether Lewis got caught in the gap.

Uh, now Harry S. Truman gets caught in the gap because we our system prizes the UM change of office. We wanted to avoid lifetime presidencies and a kingship, but because of that, there is a continuity problem, and it happens again later. Uh, in the Kennedy administration we'll talk about, but so Truman did a great job.

Don't get me wrong. And this book about his time, called The Accidental President Harry S. Truman and the Four Months to Change The World is a spectacular book. And it makes me fall in love with Harry Truman because he did so many things right. And you know, he, he knew he wasn't really presidential material, but he rose to the presidency. And he said something that just moves me almost to tears every time I hear it, he said. I'm going to be the president for all the people who do not have a lobbyist in Washington.

I'm going to be the president of the common man, I'm a common man, and I'm going to be the president of average Americans. There are so many of them. I don't want to be a president of the of the privileged, uh, and the entitled, and the establishment. And so we got lucky that Truman was as great a human being, had as much character, had as much integrity as he had. But it was a terrible injustice to force him to make this decision.

And I think that's the balance, that's the difficult piece that you have to weigh, and it does bring up an interesting point. We have intentional presidents and we have accidental presidents in our history. But in many ways, we almost have to think that, as we go into the presidency and presidential elections, that that vice presidential candidate may ascend to the power position. And what might happen, it is a fascinating subject. And what might have happened had there not been that person at that moment, at that time, with that situation?

I don't know that anyone could have made a different choice. I think that's the hardest part.

That's again having the bomb, having the war, having the situation. What do you do?

And I think there are millions of Americans who have some anxiety about Kamala Harris. You think, well, if, if, if Joe Biden is an elderly man, you'd think? The thing that you would want to do most is to pick a vice president who's ready on day one? If that person has to take that job now, maybe she is. I'm not making a comment on Kamala Harris, I'm just saying that that this is a much more important decision than FDR. Let it be.

And he got very lucky, as you say, that he chose an extraordinary human being, one of the great Americans in Harry S. Truman. But he couldn't know that he didn't know anything about Harry Truman. Except that he was had been kind of a nuisance at times in the Senate. And he was kind of a war bow ties, and he was a little goofy. And he certainly wasn't suave. The way FDR was, and he wasn't of intellectual capacity, of the kind of people that FDR liked to surround himself by. So, as you say, we got very, very lucky, and I'm not saying we shouldn't have dropped the bomb. David This is not about that, it's about the burden of inheriting gigantic decisions without having been prepped for them.

So I think it is fascinating, but I think in all of these situations, we see sort of the cautionary tale. Of how you not only choose that person who may be serving in this seat, but also how you bring them along, how you work with them, how you develop that person. But also the mess you've left behind as president, how do they help clean that up and move forward from there?

You know, Ronald Reagan chose George Herbert Walker Bush, and if Reagan had died, or if we'd known about his dementia sooner? Under the 25th Amendment, George Herbert Walker Bush was ready on day one to be the president of the United States. He'd been the head of the CIA, he'd been an ambassador to China. This was a person who really understood how power works in the world.

I think that Dan Quayle less so, you know? Nixon chose Gerald Ford, and he said, in part, No one will dare impeach me now. And so that turns out. Gerald Ford was a good and decent man who did a pretty good job of trying to clean up after the debacle of the Nixon administration. So we should really think about this as a nation. And I think that if, for example, if there were a figure like Herbert Walker Bush as the vice president now, or if there were a figure like Lyndon Johnson or Theodore Roosevelt. I think a lot of people would be more likely to vote a second time for Joe Biden, knowing we're fine here. I'm not sure what the anxiety about Kamala Harris is, but you and I both know there is a fair amount of it. And I hear people who are my friends saying, I, you know, I would vote for Biden, but I'm not sure. I want her to be the next president after, if something happens during his second term.

That might be unfair, David, but but it is what it is. So, as you say, ego gets in the way, political horse riding gets in the way. But there's a second part of this I just want to quickly point to. There was also, uh, an interstices with Churchill, because when Churchill went to Potsdam, and I would think you can say that Churchill and Stalin saved the world. In the 1940s. He was in an election campaign in England as prime minister and he wasn't sure whether he would win. He he thought he would, but he didn't.

And so he had to go back to England, and then they sent Clement Attlee, his replacement prime minister, who knew nothing about any of this either. And so here you have Stalin, one of the great iron men of history. Perfectly happy to kill tens of thousands, even millions of people, to to stay in power. ruthless in every possible way, and yet probably saved the world at Moscow and Stalingrad.

And now you have two amateurs, Clement Attlee, like in his first week as the prime minister following Churchill. And now you have this Haberdasher from St. Louis and his bow tie following FDR. So two giants have left the stage. And from their point of view at the time, two of the B-list people, maybe C-list people, are now making decisions that will affect the entire future of the post-war world. And, as you know, um, the Cold War came, the iron curtain, Stalin broke all of his promises.

Now, whether FDR could have kept Stalin true to his promises? Probably not, but certainly he was in a better position to do it than poor Harry Truman.

Welcome back to Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. I'm David Horton serving as guest host. And we are talking about what if in history with the American presidency. We've had a fascinating discussion about Meriwether Lewis and Thomas Jefferson, Harry Truman and the Atomic Bomb. Now we're up to the 1960s, the new frontier. John Kennedy elected president, this incredible new era in politics and the deals that he had to make to become the Democratic candidate to ultimately win the presidency. In his view, he needed Lyndon Baines Johnson, someone who was an old Washington hand. Because he was the youngest man to ever run for president to be in that role at that time. Can we talk a little bit about how Johnson ascended to the vice presidency, which many people thought he would never accept in a million years, of course? But how Lyndon Johnson ascended to the vice presidency? And then, after the tragedy in Texas, when Kennedy was assassinated, how Johnson became president, and how that affected so much of the 1960s.

And also, I'm working on this because I'm writing a book on John Steinbeck and Camelot and Arthur. Here's what we know. Kennedy did not want Lyndon Johnson to be his running mate, and Lyndon Johnson didn't want to be Kennedy's running mate. Lyndon Johnson thought that Kennedy was a bright young man with a lot of promise, but not really of the same caliber as as himself. Johnson had been a masterful member of the Senate, one of the great power brokers in American political history. But he didn't get the nomination in Los Angeles, and John Kennedy did, and the Kennedy's decided they needed Texas.

They wanted to repair some of the tensions, and so they chose Lyndon Johnson as vice president. Nobody was happy, particularly not Robert Kennedy. Bobby and Johnson only did it because you, he's an opportunist, I mean, you, you took it because you don't know what's going to happen. But he was a deeply unhappy vice president, and the Kennedy's did not make it easy for him. Although John Kennedy had a certain affection and respect for LBJ, but none of his best and the brightest were very nice to LBJ. And the book you all have to read is Robert Caro's Passage of Power The Years of Lyndon Johnson, which is one of the greatest books of history in my lifetime, Robert Caro.

He's not done yet. But this book on the passage of power has a hundred pages on the week after the assassination, and there's some of the best hundred pages I've ever read. So Kennedy's killed, Johnson takes the oath of office. There's a lot of tension between the Kennedy people and the Johnson people, but Kennedy is is a martyr.

He's a young, vibrant, vigorous, glamorous president with a stunning wife and young children. And the country sort of exfoliates into kind of a glorious memory of Camelot and the Kennedy years. And Johnson felt that he had a duty to fulfill Kennedy's mission, his agenda, to the extent that he could. So there's a good side of this, David, and a bad side of this, and you mentioned the good side, the good side of civil rights.

John Kennedy came late to the civil rights movement. He was half-hearted, uh, he tried to talk Martin Luther King out of giving the I Have a Dream speech. He was, he was late to that game. But he did introduce legislation in the Congress, which was stalled and probably was never going to be passed. Because he died in the way that he did. Johnson decided to see it through, and Johnson had the oomph, he had the political capacity to make it happen. Then, you know, he would buttonhole people, and he would threaten people, and he would seduce and cajole people.

And he would promise them earmarks. And I mean, he was a masterful, masterful political figure, and so he took Kennedy's stalled civil rights agenda and made it happen. And then he went farther to voting rights, and to the Great Society, and to the War on poverty. And he became one of America's greatest presidents, partly inspired by his sense of moral duty to fulfill Jack's agenda.

So every African American, every American, is the beneficiary of that. And if Kennedy hadn't died, we don't know what would have happened, do we?

And certainly, Kennedy might've been the biggest champion for civil rights and voting rights in the Great Society. But I wonder if his aura, if his legacy, if the myth of Kennedy as this legendary figure, actually helped more than Kennedy the man might have. And I think that's kind of what you're getting to.

Johnson then picks up the mantle You know, remember Barack Obama? He, he was a really extraordinary and inspiring figure. But he didn't have the capacity to go get in the face of a senator and take him by the lapel and say, you are going to pass this law and I'll tell you why. And threaten them and promise, and to do all the things that Johnson could do. Johnson was one of the handful of greatest legislative figures in American history. So I feel certain that the civil rights laws and the Great Society were more Johnson's work than Kennedy's, and that Kennedy was, on the whole, pretty half-hearted about a lot of this. But on the other hand, David Johnson felt that Kennedy had committed us to Vietnam to save the South Vietnamese people from being overrun by communism.

He was the first of two presidents to say, I'm not going to be the first president to lose a war. Richard Nixon said the same thing in 1969. We don't know what Kennedy would have done. This is one, as you know, this is one of the great debates, what would John Kennedy have done had he lived?

Would he, would we have wound up with 585,000 Americans in Vietnam, 58,000 deaths, untold numbers of Vietnamese deaths? Or would he have felt compelled to deepen our commitment in Vietnam, just as LBJ did? In other words, I think I don't know what I think about this. I'm interested in your thoughts, David. But I do think this that liberals and Kennedy idolaters, and in some moods, I'm one of them, want to exonerate him and say. If he had only lived the sixties would have been so different, and we wouldn't have wound up in the quagmire and wouldn't have torn the country. There would have been no Kent State, there would have been no Jackson state, the March on the Pentagon, and so on. That that he would have found a graceful way out, or he would have at least handled it more adroitly than did Lyndon Johnson. I think that's a very questionable myth. It might be true, but we have mixed signals from Kennedy in the last year of his life.

We don't know what he would have done. I don't think that Johnson was a warmonger. He agonized, he suffered more than probably John Kennedy would have suffered. Kennedy had emotional detachment, Johnson had none.

We don't know what would have happened had Kennedy lived, but I think it's fair to say that the idea that Kennedy would have prevented the Sixties from going sour is a pretty shallow myth.

I think the Cuban missile crisis points to his willingness to go to the brink of dealing with Russia, with the Soviet Union, with the Cold War. And I think it would have been very challenging for a young president to truly be able to wind down what was happening in Vietnam. And still remain credible here at home and internationally. Now, one thing I will say is Kennedy had an ability to inspire in a way that Johnson struggled with, other than the period where he was invoking Kennedy's memory. And I think that's a big difference there. But for me, what I see in this is that it might have felt different, even if the outcome wasn't different.

There's a lot about messaging, there's a lot about inspiration that comes with the presidency. And there are some people who can help the country through a situation differently than others. And I think that was Kennedy's greatest asset, that he could inspire, that he could soothe, and that he could perhaps take us to a different place. As we move through this really challenging period, the outcome probably would have been somewhat similar.

The difference is Kennedy, by the time things got really bad, would have been finishing his second term and would have probably found a way to have a few small victories. And then say, whoever takes over this is your hot potato. I'm out of here and go from there. It's always hard to know and I don't disagree with you.

I I think Johnson was the political partner Kennedy needed, whether he knew it or not, because he was not the right man to push things through. He had not had that experience and he relied on his charm and charisma to get things done. As opposed to the political back rooms deals that sometimes are so necessary at the federal level, at the very least.

To the point where he's, he's still, he's, he kept.

He, but he is incapacitated in some way, let's say that he. He has to withdraw from the presidency and Johnson takes over on a kind of a 25th Amendment approach. If Johnson had been able to go up to Hyannisport and say to John Kennedy, What are your? What were your intentions in Vietnam? What do you think I should do here? If they had had a chance to confer, things might've been somewhat different. I think that it's the it's the abrupt death of John Kennedy and Johnson suddenly having to fill that gap.

And and of course, there's a there's a second element to it, David. Because Johnson and Bobby Kennedy had one of the most vicious feuds in American political history. If they had been able to get along and Johnson had said, Look, Bobby, what do you think? Jack would really have wanted me to do here, and he had been willing to listen to Robert Kennedy? That might've made things different, but I let me change the subject just slightly. Uh, you mentioned the Moon program.

I feel we landed on the moon in 1969 because of the assassination of John Kennedy. It's not clear to me that we would have made it within that decade if he had lived. And we know from Douglas Brinkley's really interesting book on this subject that John Kennedy was not particularly interested in the space race, that he was again, he came lately, it was after the Bay of Pigs.

He was in disarray because it was such a debacle. And suddenly, Alan Shepard had launched into space in a suborbital flight of 15 minutes. And Kennedy saw the possibilities that this was a new frontier moment, that this could, he could get behind this, that this was exciting, that this was a kind of alternative to the Cold War. But it was in competition with the Soviet Union. And he glommed onto. He seized upon the space program as a kind of a Johnny come lately, in many respects. And I think that if he had lived, he might have lost some interest in this. I think Congress also had to live in the shadow of John Kennedy's martyrdom, and they thought we better do this for Jack.

We better give Apollo all the money it needs so they can fulfill this thing. And then, of course, the irony of irony, of ironies, as you well know, it's a tragic irony. On the same week that we landed on the moon, July 1969, Ted Kennedy caused the death of a young woman, a chappaquiddick. And somehow, even though that didn't spoil the moon landing, it creates a dark, ironic shadow over the whole Camelot myth.

And Johnson, certainly one of those men that in my life has gone. From being a goat in terms of a bad president, so to speak to being one of the great presidents. For all the things that he was able to accomplish. And I think the perception as we move through time changes, as we get further away from wars. As policy becomes clearer, as the advances our nation has made becomes clearer. Then I think it puts us in a different state of mind.

I have a long chapter on the problem of silence and how this is really. What wound up killing Lewis? Because he wasn't communicating with the War Department and Jefferson wasn't there any longer to protect him? And in that interstice, Lewis got ground up between administrations. And I don't think he would have been rebuked in the way that he was. If, if, if Jefferson had stood for a third term, or if Madison had had consulted Jefferson about this. Number two, the accidental president Harry S.

Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World by Bame. It's a marvelous book, it's extremely well-written. People can find a review I wrote of it at ltamerica..org.

It's one of the best written books about this period of time, and it really explains the dilemma of being Harry Truman. And then, finally, we have to hope that Robert Caro lives to finish his biography of of LBJ. Passage of Power was the last of them. There's at least one more coming.

He hadn't even gotten to civil rights and the war. We must have Robert Caro's brilliance on those subjects, and we just have to hope that he lives long enough to do it. But the book to read is Passage of Power The Years of Lyndon Johnson, so those three are extremely useful books on this subject. I might do some writing about this myself, David.

It's just so interesting what happens when there is a gap in power and we're going to see more of this. Unfortunately. Because now, in addition to the fact that the torch is passed from one president to the next, we now have candidates who are routinely refusing to accept the idea of peaceful transfer of power. And right now, with respect to the House of Representatives, and we were for three weeks without a speaker of the House. While Gaza is on fire, while the Israelis are being terrorized, while Ukraine is fighting for its survival. While the budget of the United States is in disarray, this is not good government and so the British have an advantage over us.

They have a permanent bureaucracy just below parliamentary level that maintains the continuity of government. When there are these changes, they have trouble too, but not the way we have, and I hope we will repair this. Because I ache for poor Meriwether Lewis, I feel for Harry Truman, who rose to the occasion. And I feel that. The sudden death of John Kennedy probably brought on the catastrophe of the second half of the 1960s. Because Johnson just could not know what the right thing to do was, and Nixon couldn't either.

And Clay, my friend, thank you so much. It is always wonderful having a conversation with you. This is Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson.