Politics and Aviation
Lady Bird Johnson has died. That brings back hundreds of memories of days gone by…
For you really young folks, Lady Bird was the wife of Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), the vice president who became president when John Kennedy was killed in 1963 in Dallas. At the end of that term he ran for president on his own, defeating Barry Goldwater by a landslide.
According to Robert Caro, in one of his great books about the man, LBJ was one of the first politicians to use aircraft for campaigning. He hired a piston-powered helicopter to fly him from one Texas town to another while stumping for the senate in 1948. The pilot, who flew LBJ to parking lots, football fields, shopping centers and elsewhere, described LBJ as being absolutely fearless about flying, and also ignorant about and totally uninterested in the subject. No matter how tight the landing site nor how hot the Texas weather, if the pilot thought he could take off, LBJ didn’t argue. The pilot himself might be worried, but often LBJ sometimes went to sleep before the takeoff. Surely sounds like ignorance to me.
That election was the one giving LBJ his nickname, “Landslide Lyndon,” because he won by such a small margin. Some say the votes he stole exceeded the margin by which he won. In fact, it is alleged that late in the 1970s an election official confessed that he helped rig the election.
LBJ later said that main thing he missed about being president was no longer having access to Air Force One.
Jim–
Yes, and that story is reported by many reliable sources, pretty much like you told it. I started to put the story in my column, but didn’t have room. Thanks for adding it.
Ralph Hood
Ralph’s right, LBJ really hated to give up Air Force One, so much so that.. Nixon let him fly home to Texas in it! Story is that they got a frantic phone call, “They are taking EVERYTHING off the airplane”. Blankets, china, anything that wasn’t bolted down. Nixon staff said…let em go, we got more stuff! Like some of Ralph’s stories, it’s surely half true!