Dallas Times
Herald reporter Margaret Meyer never saw a “more unhappy man” than Lyndon
Johnson on the night that he was elected Vice President (11-8-60) with president-elect
JFK. Lady Bird, however, was delighted that she was going to be Second Lady.
Source: Margaret Mayer who
was a longtime reporter for the Dallas Times-Herald.
QUOTE
Lady Bird was happy; she was going to enjoy being Second
Lady, she thought, and she did. Besides, she was always glad when a
campaign was over, victorious or not. Lyndon? Did he hoot and holler? Did he
even smile except for the photographers? He did not. He was demonstrably morose.
Margaret Mayer: “The night he was elected vice-president – very late, when it was quite
apparent that he and Kennedy had been elected – I don’t think I saw a more
unhappy man. He had been at the Driskill Hotel with the Homer
Thornberrys, the Connallys, Jesse Kellam, and sometime after midnight, maybe
one in the morning, they all came downstairs and went across the street to an
all-night café on Seventh Street.
“There
was no jubilation. Lyndon looked like he had lost his last friend on earth, and
later he was rude to me, very rude, and I tried to remind myself he was
unhappy, but he did the same thing the next day in the TV station. He was rude
to just about everybody. Now I’ve known Lyndon a great many years, and I’ve
never known him to act like that.
“It was
clear to me and a lot of other people that even then he didn’t want to be vice-president.”
UNQUOTE
[Merle Miller, Lyndon:
An Oral Biography, p. 273]
Picture of Dallas
Times-Herald reporter Margaret Mayer here:
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