| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
During his three years as John F. Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon Johnson made eleven trips to thirty-three countries, covering over 120,000 miles, more than any of his predecessors. Yet, few contemporaries, including the journalist who described Johnson as someone "who chases around continents in search of the duties of his office," considered these trips significant.1 Some even suspected that he was sent away so often simply because JFK wanted to keep the overbearing Texan occupied and hence away from him; Kennedy, one West Virginia newspaper wrote, had recently sent him overseas twice in order "to keep his Vice President busy."2 Most policymakers also saw these missions as unimportant. Deputy Undersecretary of State William Crockett, who sometimes accompanied Johnson, recalled that "on the trips he took as Vice-President, there wasn't much policy to discuss; they were essentially representational functions."3 Such sentiments were both common and unsurprising, as Americans everywhere recognized that Johnson played virtually no role in the major policy decisions of the administration. In 1963, Time Magazine noted that the former Senate leader was now "lost in the vice-presidency," and a Newsweek article entitled "LBJ: Who's That?" described its subject as "as powerless as a freshman Senator and almost as obscure."4 A year earlier, Newsweek had noted of the former leader that "Lyndon Johnson is in the position of an abdicated king, and kings who abdicate are monarchs without power."5 His nonexistence seemed confirmed by the television show Candid Camera, which asked random people, "Who is Lyndon Johnson?" Answers flew: a baseball player, an astronaut, but no one (at least, no one who was televised) identified him as the vice president of theUnited States. "No, I don't know him," explained one man. "I'm from New Jersey.
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