Forcing a Vice Presidential Nomination
An AP story this morning featured former DNC chairman (and aggressive Clinton supporter) Steve Grossman asking current DNC chairman Howard Dean to relay “how very focused [Clinton fundraisers] are on Hillary being on the ticket.” The Grossman overture came after even blunter demands from Clinton allies Bob Johnson, Lanny Davis, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones. (It’s unclear why the Obama campaign would in any way welcome messages from the above quintet, who regularly criticized Obama during the primary.) While Clinton issued a statement yesterday seeming to distance herself from these demands, the Grossman item casts some doubt on the senator’s sincerity.
Candidates don’t usually launch a public campaign for the vice presidency, and certainly not in as stark terms as we’ve seen from the Clinton Team. But one candidate did so. In 1964, Robert Kennedy allowed his name to be entered on the New Hampshire ballot (for vice president). A DNC employee (and strong Kennedy backer), Paul Corbin, headed to the Granite State to coordinate the Kennedy effort. Kennedy allies in Congress championed the idea. In the months after the assassination, RFK vacillated on the bid. In more realistic moments, he seemed to realize that serving as LBJ’s vice president would not be a good idea for him. On other occasions, however, he told associates that he might use the office to rally sympathetic figures in the bureaucracy and keep alive the New Frontier.
In late June, Kennedy gave a frank interview to Newsweek’s Ben Bradlee. “I’d be the last man in the world he would want because my name is Kennedy, because he wants a Johnson administration with no Kennedys in it.” Nonetheless, “most of the major political leaders in the North want me. All of them, really.”
The article appeared while the Attorney General was visiting Poland. But Johnson and Kennedy had a tense conversation about Bradlee’s piece as soon as the AG was back in the United States, and Johnson made clear his disdain for Kennedy’s remarks.
The next day, in a conversation with Texas governor John Connally, the President continued to fret.
A few days later, after yet another article touting Kennedy appeared (in the New York Daily News), Johnson sounded out Chicago mayor Richard Daley about the possibility of immediately excluding RFK from the position. Daley, however, was uncertain, and worried that preemptively and publicly eliminating RFK might hurt Johnson in the fall campaign.
By July 29, however, Johnson had had enough. He called Kennedy in to say that the Attorney General wouldn’t be the nominee, citing a memorandum prepared by advisor Clark Clifford on the need for a VP candidate who could contest the “battleground” states in the Midwest. In a rambling call with Clifford right after Kennedy left the Oval Office, Johnson recounted the meeting.
The next day, with Kennedy reneging on an agreement to announce his withdrawal from the race, Johnson issued a statement on the question. But he didn’t want to single out the Attorney General, and so ruled out all members of the Cabinet. The President and aide Jack Valenti prepared the statement, with Valenti joking that the President had wiped out the whole slate of possible candidates with his Cabinet exclusion.
Barack Obama probably will be able to come up with a less transparent excuse for excluding Clinton—perhaps citing Bill Clinton’s likely refusal to submit to a full vetting process. But, in the end, he’s likely to come to the same decision that Johnson did in 1964: the nominee won’t be pressured into choosing a running mate he would prefer to do without.