@EC145@Lambach
Lambach schrieb:Ja, er hat sogar vorgeschlagen, daß Johnson den Eid ablegt, noch bevor das Flugzeug Dallas verlässt:
from the minute, at the Dallas hospital, when he received confirmation that Kennedy was dead, Johnson was all decisiveness. Advised to hurry back to Washington, since there might be more conspiratorial action against the government, he overrode that advice, declaring that he would not leave until Kennedy’s body was released, so it and Mrs. Kennedy could ride with him on Air Force One back to Washington. He wanted to be sworn in on the plane before he left Dallas, with his old friend Judge Sarah Hughes administering the oath of office. Legally, he did not need the oath—he succeeded Kennedy as president the moment he died—but he felt it would give visual force to the legitimacy of his succession.
Then, on the plane, he performed what must be one of the most mysterious actions of his life. He called Bobby in Washington. Why? Not to console him—which, coming from him, would have been grotesque. Not to gloat—even Johnson was not monstrous enough to do that in the anguished moment when Bobby first learned the dreadful news. Not to try to put their relations on a new basis—something that, if it were ever possible, could not be done then of all times. He invented an excuse—he wanted to know the procedure for his swearing-in—but that was information he could have got from many sources. Bobby in fact had to get it from his Justice Department associate, Nicholas Katzenbach, who later said, “Calling Bobby was really wrong.” Even Johnson’s loyal secretary Marie Fehmer, who was told to take down the phone conversation, would remember, “I kept thinking, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this.’”
Was Johnson in effect “clearing” his decision to go ahead with the swearing-in, lest Bobby should later claim he had not known of it and would have disapproved of it? If so, that too was a futile effort. Bobby later bitterly attacked Johnson’s impatience to claim the office publicly—and especially his use of Jackie Kennedy by his side to show he was heir to the Kennedy mystique. Johnson could not rationally have expected his call to pacify, or think it would not provoke. Then why did he do it? Hate goes automatically, as to a magnet, toward the hated object. Bobby filled Lyndon’s mind, even at this most terrible hour, and he always thought of himself as caught in a deadly dance partnership with him....
Bobby delayed Johnson’s occupation of the Oval Office, his move into the White House, and his address to Congress (planned for one day after Kennedy’s funeral), all in the name of Mrs. Kennedy’s grief. He came late to the new president’s first cabinet meeting, at which he was making a plea that Kennedy staffers stay on with him in this volatile period.
Bobby was putting off as long as he could any acknowledgment that Johnson was the president—and he would never, in the future, refer to him as such. Johnson’s usurpation of office had begun, in Bobby’s eyes, when he forced his unwanted way onto the ticket in Los Angeles, making all his subsequent acts illegitimate.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/05/24/americas-nastiest-blood-feud/
