Horace Busby, Oral History Interview—5/26/1982 Administrative Information Creator: Horace Busby Interviewer: Sheldon H. Stern Date of Interview: May 26, 1982 Length: 22 pages Biographical Note Busby was an aide in Lyndon B. Johnson's House and Senate Offices, (1948-1950); staff member, U.S. Senate Armed Services Preparedness Subcommittee, (1950-1953); consultant, U.S. Senate Armed Services Preparedness Subcommittee, (1957-1958); advisor to the Vice President, (1961-1963); and special assistant to the President and secretary of the Cabinet, (1963-1965). In this interview, Busby discusses Lyndon B. Johnson’s relationships with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., Robert F. Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy (JFK), among other issues. Access Open. Usage Restrictions According to the deed of gift signed on February 24, 1998, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. 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The copyright law extends its protection to unpublished works from the moment of creation in a tangible form. Direct your questions concerning copyright to the reference staff. Transcript of Oral History Interview These electronic documents were created from transcripts available in the research room of the John F. Kennedy Library. The transcripts were scanned using optical character recognition and the resulting text files were proofread against the original transcripts. Some formatting changes were made. Page numbers are noted where they would have occurred at the bottoms of the pages of the original transcripts. If researchers have any concerns about accuracy, they are encouraged to visit the Library and consult the transcripts and the interview recordings. Suggested Citation Horace Busby, recorded interview by Sheldon H. Stern, Mary 26, 1982, (page number), John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program. Horace Busby Table of Contents Page Topic 2 Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) in the 1930s and ‘40s 4, 14 Relationship between LBJ and John F. Kennedy (JFK) in Congress 6 Relationship between LBJ and Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. 8 Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.’s attempts at orchestrating JFK’s congressional career 12 Robert F. Kennedy’s association with Joseph R. McCarthy and antipathy for LBJ 15 1960 Democratic primaries 19 1960 Democratic National Convention 22 Meetings between JFK and LBJ during the 1960 general election campaign Oral History Interview with Horace Busby May 26, 1982 By Sheldon H. Stern For the Oral History Program of the John F. Kennedy Library STERN: I wonder if you have any recollections of the relationship between JFK [John F. Kennedy] and LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson] in that period when Kennedy was still in Congress? BUSBY: Yes, I do. Kennedy’s election in 1946—that was the Eightieth Congress and it was his first Congress—his election out of which I had carried a memory of that photograph that was in all the newspapers of him walking in a parade—at the head of a parade—I think of Irish, something to do with Irish. STERN: Charlestown, right. BUSBY: It stuck in my mind for a particular reason. I was at the time working in Austin after, my first job after college, with International News Service. I was political correspondent at the state capitol. Well, we all knew in INS that Jack Kennedy had worked for INS, and, you know, this was intriguing. And also you could not— of course I was in grade school and finally became a teenager and was in high school in the thirties and through the war—and you could not go through that period and have any kind of an interest in politics without understanding the very strong feelings that existed at different places against the father, Joe Kennedy [Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.]. And the death of the—well, as a matter of fact, the brother [Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.] who was killed in the war, the pilot, his co-pilot was from Fort Worth, Texas, which was where I was, which was my home. And so, you know, you had a certain amount—you merged [-1-] after World War II with a certain amount of knowledge in your head about the Kennedys and all like that. My attention focused on Jack Kennedy because of the [laugh] nominal relationship through INS, so I was quite aware of him. And when I came to work for the President—I mean I refer to him as the President, it was Congressman Johnson—in March of 1968, I mean ’48.... As a footnote, I arrived in Washington on March the sixteenth, and the next day I had my first great political—non out-of-Texas—political discovery when I went to report to work and the Congressman took me to the dispersing office to be sworn in and get on the payroll. And there I saw in full flower, for the first time in my life, Irish politics. Everybody in the dispersing office was an Irishman and all were wearing green and their green was all over Capitol Hill that day. And it was readily identifiable in most instances that the wearer of the green was indeed Irish. And I had just never.... In Texas you had Irish, but you thought of Irishmen as these roly-poly faced tenors who came through in vaudeville, you know, and you’d never seen them in a political sense. One of the—I have a very distinct memory that one of the first things I did was to, during the first week that I was here, was to find out where John Kennedy’s office was and, you know, walk past it hoping to see him, something like that. Well, I didn’t see him in those circumstances. But I did. My very first encounter with him just spoke a lot about the kind of things that you’re interested in. First of all, precede the encounter with this: when I was a— when I entered Mr. Johnson’s life, one of the things that from which my close relationship with him evolved, was that I as a kid had just become a buff on Washington, on national politics; read everything I could about it; knew all the actions that had been taken, you know, and all like that. And the New Deal period, the thirties, more than any other period since, was full of memorable episodes and events and even antidotes for one reason: it was the first time we had a national government in any real sense. It was all a new experience and it therefore was ingrained in the minds of everybody for a number of generations because nothing like this had happened before. My father, for example, voted for president three times before he ever heard one speak. And I heard Franklin Roosevelt [Franklin D. Roosevelt] both make his New Deal speech to the Chicago convention in July of 1932 and then, in the third grade, sat at home and listened to his inaugural address. So, the whole business of a president, a national government of Washington in our lives, was all new. And I think people remembered better. And it’s still, I would say as an aside, that it’s still capital for me in what I do because there are all so very, very few people left in Washington who have any memory of that period. There are many who were here, but they don’t, they’re not focused on politics in the way that I was. But, anyway, the President could sit in his office—everyone else had gainful tasks to pursue—and my principal task was, it turned out to be, was to talk with him and let him relive the years which he thought were the best years of life and that nothing would ever equal it and—because of his own involvement in it—and perhaps that was true. But we went on and on through the late afternoon and early evening hours. And of course, I was learning from him and, because I knew as much as I did, it drew things out of him, I mean it remembered as much of the history. Anyway, as part of this, he would relate to me these dramatic episodes out of his own life, from the time principally that he came here as congressman and fell immediately.... You know, when Lyndon Johnson was elected to Congress it was in a special election upon the death of the chairman of the Appropriations Committee named Buchanan [James Paul Buchanan]. That attracted national attention in itself. It also—the election [-2-] occurred in April of 1937, and that was in the middle of the Supreme Court packing fight. And from the 1936 election forward, instead of things going well with Roosevelt as they had in his first term, everything had gone against him. Johnson ran on a platform of being one thousand percent for Roosevelt.