Book: Jacqueline Kennedy Scorned Idea of Johnson as President, Disliked MLK

[mandym]

NEW YORK – President John F. Kennedy openly scorned the notion of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson succeeding him in office, according to a book of newly released interviews with his widow, former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

She said her husband and his brother then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a longtime LBJ antagonist, even discussed ways to prevent Johnson from winning the Democratic nomination in a future contest.

Jacqueline Kennedy also indicated that her husband was highly skeptical about victory in Vietnam, a central battleground of the Cold War and the conflict that brought down Johnson's presidency. She said that JFK, a Democrat, had named Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican he had defeated for a Massachusetts Senate seat in 1952, as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam because JFK was so doubtful of military success there.

Jacqueline Kennedy spoke skeptically of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. She called him "tricky" and a "phony" after hearing about FBI tapes of him and a woman in his hotel room, while noting that JFK had urged her not to be judgmental. (JFK's own adulterous affairs weren't yet widely known.) She said King had mocked her husband's funeral and Cardinal Richard Cushing, who celebrated Mass at the funeral.

"He made fun of Cardinal Cushing and said that he was drunk at it," she said. "And things about they almost dropped the coffin. I just can't see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man's terrible."

She also accuses sister-in-law Eunice Kennedy Shriver of undue personal ambition and says the president was anxious to dump FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. She confides she didn't trust the White House aide and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, believing he encouraged the perception that he had ghostwritten her husband's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Profiles in Courage."

"You know, Jack forgave so quickly, but I never forgave Ted Sorensen," she said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/09/0...nson-as-president-disliked-mlk/#ixzz1XTNQiY6t

 

[righteousdude2]

Hey, LBJ Signed My Draft Notice.....

....I scorned him as POTUS too! :smilewinkgrin: