from   Lawrence F. O'Brien Oral History Interview I*
LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON LIBRARY ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION 
The LBJ Library Oral History Collection is composed primarily of interviews conducted for the Library by the University of Texas Oral History Project and the LBJ Library Oral History 
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LAWRENCE F. O'BRIEN ORAL HISTORY, INTERVIEW I 
PREFERRED CITATION 
For Internet Copy: 
Transcript, Lawrence F. O'Brien Oral History Interview I, 9/ 18/ 85, by Michael L. Gillette, Internet Copy, LBJ Library. 
For Electronic Copy on Diskette from the LBJ Library: 
Transcript, Lawrence F. O'Brien Oral History Interview I, 9/ 18/ 85, by Michael L. Gillette, Electronic Copy, LBJ Library. 
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NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION 
LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON LIBRARY 
AND 
JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY LIBRARY 
Legal Agreement Pertaining to the Oral History Interview of Lawrence F. O'Brien 
In accordance with the provisions of Chapter 21 of Title 44, United States Code, and subject to the terms and conditions hereinafter set forth, I, Lawrence F. O'Brien of New York, New York, 
do hereby give, donate and convey to the United States of America all my rights, title and interest in the tape recordings and transcripts of the personal interviews conducted on September 18, 
October 29, October 30, December 4, December 5, 1985; February 11, February 12, April 8, April 9, June 25, July 24, July 25, September 10, September 11, November 20, November 21, 
December 17, December 18, 1986; April 22, April 23, June 18, June 19, July 21, July 22, August 25, August 26, September 23, September 24, November 3, November 4, December 10, December 
11, 1987 at New York, New York and Cotuit, Massachusetts and prepared for deposit jointly in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library 
This assignment is subject to the following terms and conditions: 
(1) The transcripts shall be available for use by researchers as soon as they have been deposited in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library. 
(2) The tape recordings to which the transcripts relate shall be in the possession of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and shall not be available for use or review of or by any source 
during my lifetime and for a period of time thereafter ending with the 10th year anniversary of the date of my death. At such time, access to the tape recordings by 
researchers shall be permitted but only for the limited purpose of background use, and researchers may not cite, paraphrase, or quote therefrom under any circumstances. 
(3) During my lifetime, I retain all copyright in the material given to the United States by the terms of this instrument. Thereafter the copyright in the transcripts shall pass to the United 
States Government. During my lifetime, researchers may publish brief "fair use" quotations from the transcripts without my express prior consent in each case, but no 
other quotations from the transcripts shall be published, except with my express prior approval in writing. 
(4) Copies of the open portions of the interview transcripts, but not the tape recordings, may be provided by the library to researchers upon request, subject to the terms, conditions 
and restrictions set out herein. 
(5) Copies of the interview transcripts, but not the tape recordings, may be deposited in or loaned to research institutions other than the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library or the John 
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Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, subject to the terms, conditions and restrictions set out herein. 
Signed by Lawrence F. O'Brien on April 5, 1990. 
Accepted by Donald Wilson, Archivist of the United States, April 25, 1990. 
Original Deed of Gift on file at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, 2313 Red River, Austin, TX 78705. 
ACCESSION NUMBER 92-12 
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INTERVIEW I 
DATE: September 18, 1985 
INTERVIEWEE: LAWRENCE O'BRIEN 
INTERVIEWER: Michael L. Gillette 
PLACE: Mr. O'Brien's office, New York City 
Tape 1 of 5, Side 1 
G: Let me ask you first to review some of the episodes at the 1960 [Democratic National] Convention and particularly Lyndon Johnson's selection as vice president. 
O: As they headed into the convention, our game plan, to secure the nomination over that two-year period after Kennedy's re-election to the Senate, was based on utilizing primaries 
selectively. We felt that we had to be awfully concerned about the party pros accepting a Catholic nominee, for obvious reasons. It presented difficulties, too. As it turned out, 
that was exactly the case. So we attempted to very carefully orchestrate our primary effort and my recollection is that we wound up in seven primaries. We negotiated out of 
some major primary states--California, Ohio, Pennsylvania--in a variety of ways; we'd stay out if this happened or that happened, and whatever commitments could be made for the 
future, favorite sons in some instances, like [Michael] DiSalle in Ohio, Pat Brown's activities in California and the rest. 
But the effort was to build up within the party a recognition that Kennedy could be a strong candidate for president regardless of the aspect of his religion. And in doing that 
we really were fortunate because of the seven primary states, three or four of them were rather easy marks for us. Avoiding major states where we required a great deal of money 
and organization was very helpful. And the primary focus in terms of national attention and party attention really became Wisconsin and West Virginia. The Hubert Humphrey 
efforts in Wisconsin and West Virginia did elicit a great deal of media attention. And the West Virginia primary, where it was predicted Kennedy would lose but he ultimately won, 
really was the catalyst that moved us forward. 
So then we had to focus our attention on the party pros, whether it was Michigan, Ohio, California, Pennsylvania--the major delegate states that we had some degree of 
entree to. It was very difficult because, interestingly enough, it wasn't a matter of liking or disliking Kennedy. It was a matter of self-preservation among the pros, and the most 
difficult people to deal with in the final analysis, as we headed toward Los Angeles, were Catholic pros. David Lawrence was governor of Pennsylvania; Mike DiSalle was 
governor of Ohio; Dick Daley was the kingpin, of course, in Chicago and, therefore, Illinois. In each instance there was deep concern--Bill Green was a powerhouse in 
Pennsylvania, also--that the nomination of Kennedy could bring down the ticket in their states, the governorship or a Senate contest or a local contest. So [we had] to persuade 
them that while they thought Jack was a nice guy and all the rest, the political reality was 
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O'Brien --Interview I --2 
that he could be a winner and, consequently, could indeed be a help to them in their individual state efforts to maintain party control. 
So, going into Los Angeles, we had continuing question marks. My recollection is that Mayor Daley did not join the Kennedy effort until Los Angeles. David Lawrence and 
Bill Green still were concerned. Pat Brown was off again, on again. He had an Adlai Stevenson situation in California. We weren't locked in. 
But, nevertheless, once we had completed our primary route in those seven states--and that included Maryland, Oregon--we were able to organize quite well in all of 
them. They were doable in terms of our resources, and we were successful. And in the process, as I said, we had elicited a terrific amount of national attention and, obviously, a 
great amount of professional Democratic Party people's attention. So we developed a system of checking and rechecking every delegate. Bobby Kennedy and I jointly put 
together an organization for Los Angeles in which every state delegation was assigned to a Kennedy person, and that Kennedy person, whether it was Abe Ribicoff or John Bailey 
or whoever--and there were a large number of them then--would literally live with the delegation. That was the contemplation; regardless of whether they were delegates from 
their own states, they would literally live in the hotel where the delegation was located that they were assigned to monitor. 
So each morning for several days prior to the opening of the convention, we would meet at our headquarters in Los Angeles and each of these assigned people would go 
over, name by name--it was a rather tedious task--the delegates of the state or states in a couple of instances, two or three small states put together, that they were responsible for. 
So we got to caucuses--the route that Lyndon Johnson and other candidates were obviously following in Los Angeles--going around to the various caucuses. I remember 
particularly the California caucus--still trying to lock up those last pieces. But we had a pretty clear idea that we had the nomination. Now, it could be taken away. You could 
have dissipation of delegate strength, particularly if you had a major party leader that had a change of heart or change of mind. But the objective was to win on the first ballot. 
G: Did you feel then that if it didn't go over on the first ballot that you might have some erosion? 
O: Yes, we felt that that would create a danger and certainly make it much more difficult. I remember the California caucus, because while you had candidates--we had Scoop 
[Henry] Jackson, as I recall, Stu Symington, we had a number of them, and we had Lyndon Johnson. 
Jack Kennedy and I were returning to our hotel from the California caucus when I told Kennedy in the car that the Johnson delegation had extended an invitation to Kennedy 
to appear before the Texas delegation. I immediately followed up by saying, "Of course, there's no point to that. First of all, you're not going to gain a darn thing. Secondly, you'll 
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O'Brien --Interview I --3 
get into a direct confrontation," because Lyndon Johnson would appear jointly with him and it might cause problems. And I attempted to persuade Kennedy not to do it. I felt 
that there was no valid point to it. Kennedy thought about it. His first reaction was "yes, I've got a lot of other things to do." But it was a long trip in; I think we were out in 
Hollywood somewhere at this California caucus--you know the travel problems on the roads in Los Angeles. And the more Kennedy thought about it, the more intrigued he 
became with it. He then concluded before we got to the hotel that he was going to appear later that afternoon before the Texas delegation. It kind of intrigued him. I therefore had 
lost the argument. My argument was obviously based on what I thought was political reality, delegate counts. 
So he did appear, and from that came the long-remembered comment that Kennedy made that he thought Johnson was certainly the greatest majority leader the 
Senate had ever had, and he, Kennedy, was going to do everything possible to ensure that he continued as majority leader. And so nothing negative occurred, we gained no 
delegates, but it achieved a dimension of publicity. The Johnson-John Connally effort to stop Kennedy--which was an obvious effort I would have been making if I were with 
them--was intense. And our continuing delegate counts showed that we were withstanding that effort. 
We then had the unexpected. That was the appearance of Adlai Stevenson and Eleanor Roosevelt at the convention in an attempt to swing the convention with the 
enthusiasm of the moment. However, the efforts we had expended over that long period of time stood us in good stead because, again, there was no erosion. So when the actual 
balloting started, we were very confident that we were going to win on the first ballot, and we did. In fact, I think, as I recall it, we were within three votes of our head count when 
the roll call was completed. 
Then, at that moment, after the nomination, Kennedy chose to appear before the convention that night even though he was to formally accept the nomination at that 
stadium the following day or a couple of days later. But through this entire effort, we had had no serious contemplation of a running mate. 
G: You'd never talked to Kennedy about that before? 
O: Oh, you know, there were a lot of names out there and I guess we probably talked at one time or another about eight or ten possibilities. So I think the enthusiasm of the moment, 
the culmination of a couple of years of effort, the fact that we had achieved the nomination was so overwhelming to all of us that we just didn't focus. So after that long night, we all 
went to bed in the early hours of the morning, I received a call from Kennedy early--it probably was 6: 00 a. m. or something like that--to immediately join him in his suite. So I 
hastily dressed and went down to the suite, and there were several people there, of course, Bobby, Ken O'Donnell, and now I don't recall the others. And I don't recall specifically 
how this had taken place over a matter of very few hours, but Jack Kennedy had made a decision that he'd like to have Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. 
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O'Brien --Interview I --4 
I don't know what came first in terms of whose great thought it was. There were those that later claimed it was their thought; Joe Alsop claimed that and Phil Graham 
claimed that. But I think in the normal course of events, Jack Kennedy came up with this idea, because I think perhaps he was probably the first to focus on "Are you going to be a 
footnote in history as a nominee for the presidency or are you indeed going to achieve election?" And you had the South and the Southwest; you had this whole problem of 
bringing a high degree of unity in terms of the ticket to this campaign effort, and it was a stroke of genius. I can't lay any claim to participating in it in terms of it being a stroke of 
genius. 
G: When Kennedy mentioned this, were these the elements that he cited? 
O: Basically, he felt that it would achieve great balance on the ticket and that now we had just come off within hours of, not a bitter struggle, but certainly a vigorous struggle with 
Lyndon Johnson, who was our prime opposition as we got to the close-out of the nominating process. 
G: So you're convinced that the offer was not intended as one that Johnson would decline? 
O: Oh, no, we were not at all sure he'd accept. No. In fact, it caused turmoil, off-again, on-again activity over a period of a couple of hours. Johnson was in his suite, as I 
recall--it was just below Kennedy's--and Sam Rayburn was there and others. It was a matter of some time elapsing and I believe that there was, during that period, [the feeling 
that] no, he won't accept. Sam Rayburn was absolutely adamant that he not accept; a quote attributed to him is "I'll shoot you, Lyndon, if you take this," something to that 
effect. He felt very strongly about it. 
G: Let me ask you to go back to that suite, the Kennedy suite, and the initial meeting when the proposition of asking LBJ to serve as the nominee of vice president. What was your 
reaction to it? 
O: I was stunned. Because I guess whatever little thought I ever gave to the second place on the ticket, I don't think I ever focused at all on having your major opposition wind up your 
running mate. Now, obviously, that's something that's happened many times in American political history, but somehow or other if I ever really gave more than a fleeting thought to 
Lyndon Johnson, it would be in the context, "Heck, Lyndon Johnson would not accept second spot. He's the majority leader of the Senate. He isn't going to sacrifice what he 
has to be on this ticket." So I never gave it any serious thought myself. Maybe I was thinking of Stu Symington or whoever. 
G: Was Symington your own personal choice? 
O: I didn't have one. There were half a dozen people that obviously would be the people on a list that you would ultimately select from. None of them were stick-outs in the sense that, 
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O'Brien --Interview I --5 
boy, this has got to be it. But see, Lyndon Johnson was another dimension. He wasn't one of these fellows that really never had a chance to be nominated but had gone through 
some of the exercise and, consequently, had reasonably high national visibility and therefore could be on the ticket. Now this was entirely different. Of course, part of the 
problem was that some of our most ardent supporters in acquiring the nomination would be nothing short of appalled with a decision of this nature, in the event Lyndon Johnson 
accepted. That wasn't a happy task that Jack assigned his brother, Bob, who was to go up and visit with Governor G. Mennen Williams and Walter Reuther, and advise them of the 
decision. 
G: Was this at that early meeting that he asked his brother to--? 
O: Once it was determined that Lyndon Johnson would accept the nomination, there were a couple of assignments. I remember, because immediately as part of that you had to think 
about your own supporters and what their reaction would be, and I guess you would direct your thought process immediately to Michigan, to G. Mennen Williams and to 
Walter Reuther. They were very liberal. They were certainly in leadership roles in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Reuther as the head of the UAW obviously was a 
very prominent and important force in the activity that brought about the nomination. Bobby was charged with that duty, and Bobby was not at all enchanted with the selection 
of Lyndon Johnson. 
G: What was his reaction? 
O: As mine, I think he was shocked, probably for different reasons. I'm going back twenty-five years, but I would react in terms of trying to put the numbers together right 
away rather than any of the philosophical views or the rest. But there had been some fairly bitter moments in the process. As for Bobby Kennedy, it was his nature to strongly 
react pro and con to most things. I think that he perceived attacks on his brother Jack as highly personal as far as he was concerned. 
G: So he felt this should eliminate Johnson? 
O: Yes. So Bobby first had to accustom himself to this, and then take on the job of smoothing some of what would be obviously ruffled feathers. 
G: How did the discussion go between the two Kennedy brothers, can you recall? 
O: Some of that discussion was just between the two of them. 
G: Really? 
O: Yes. 
G: By the time you came, was this still being debated? 
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O'Brien --Interview I --6 
O: No, this was off and on, but Jack would go in the other room, Bob might go in another. You know, this was one of these totally unstructured situations. Everybody, I think, was 
in somewhat of a daze. The whole thing was unfolding, and as the minutes went on, will he or wouldn't he if he was offered? And then he's offered, would he take it? No, he 
won't, and then the word would come back, well, no, he's not going to take it, and then, well, he'll think about it some more. This sort of thing just went on and on. The key to it 
all was that Jack Kennedy had made up his mind this was absolutely the right thing to do, and there were no alternatives. 
During the course of this activity, you got to the stage where Lyndon Johnson agreed to take it. Before this would ever become public knowledge--it was still confined 
to this room and Lyndon Johnson's suite--it was necessary to round up all of the potential vice presidential nominees one by one and have them come in and meet privately with Jack 
Kennedy, where Jack Kennedy would tell them individually that he had made his decision. Part of that brought Scoop Jackson to becoming national chairman during the campaign. 
It was just an unbelievable experience in every respect. It absolutely shook all of us, because to my knowledge, I don't know who might have whispered in Jack's ear or 
something like that. I certainly didn't. I know my mind was wide open. When I got that call that morning, obviously I knew the subject. The subject was now let's go over the list 
and let's get a consensus among the half-dozen of us that were intimately involved with Jack and the campaign and let's put this to bed, because we're going to have a session of 
the convention starting at noon and we've got to resolve this. I didn't go into his suite with any thought in my mind about Lyndon Johnson, not only that he'd be on the list, [but] 
there would be no list. It would be Lyndon Johnson. I did not know Lyndon Johnson intimately at all. Perhaps I had met him once or twice. 
But, anyway, people fanned out and there were tasks to do. You had to decide who was going to place him in nomination, who was going to second the nomination. 
Then the report back from the Michigan delegation was that they were totally displeased, and then there was the threat that this would be a floor fight. So that required all kinds of 
posturing on the convention floor and all kinds of assurances that we had everybody in place and that the motion to close the nominations and the motion to declare the election 
of Lyndon Johnson be made from the floor. I forget now, but Abe Ribicoff was a party to it in the Connecticut delegation. There was someone else; in case the chair didn't 
recognize one, they'd recognize the other. John McCormack was up on the platform with Rayburn. So all of this was part of what had to be done before the afternoon. At a point 
when things settled down in the suite, people moved out to carry on their tasks, including Bobby going up to whatever hotel it was to meet with Walter Reuther and the Governor. 
G: Soapy Williams? 
O: Soapy Williams. There were other assignments. You knew what your soft spots were. You knew there was going to be some strong adverse reaction. 
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O'Brien --Interview I --7 
Then Lyndon Johnson came into the suite. And I remember that because Jack Kennedy took a call or went off into another room for a while, so that left Lyndon 
Johnson and me alone. At which point Johnson said to me just what I have stated, "You and I don't know each other well at all. I know of you and obviously you know of me. 
But I want to tell you something. In making this commitment, I am going to do everything humanly possible to help this man and to help this ticket. I am going to do 
everything physically and mentally that I'm capable of doing in the interests of this campaign and this ticket. And I want you and whoever else that handles this campaign to 
tell me what I should be doing, assign tasks to me. I don't care how difficult the task might be. Move me everywhere and anywhere you can. I am totally committed, and 
you're going to find that I am everything that you would want me to be in terms of being a running mate." It was a very impressive monologue. I was impressed. I started even then 
adjusting. I don't know as it had fully penetrated with me that, by gosh, this was a coup and this was something that was going to really have an impact on this election. 
But anyway, that's what took place, and I must say, throughout the campaign, Lyndon Johnson did everything he had committed to do. 
G: Who were the other people considered for the vice presidential nomination? 
O: No one had been, as I said, contacted even indirectly regarding it, and we had not had any kind of a formalization of discussion regarding it. But as I recall it, and I'll miss some 
names, but Symington sticks out, Scoop Jackson sticks out, Orville Freeman was another fellow on that list, also Humphrey. And it seems to me there were a couple more who 
elude me at the moment. When I say half a dozen, I think there were half a dozen names that were bandied about by the press as potential VP candidates. 
G: Were there any other southerners considered? 
O: I don't know of any. It's probably somewhat remote, but only because of his position and his early advocacy of Kennedy that the name of Terry Sanford might have come up. 
G: That's who I was wondering about. 
O: Yes. 
G: What in particular did you hope Johnson would add to the ticket's electability? 
O: I think first of all it gave what we like to term geographical balance. He was nationally prominent and he was from Texas; Kennedy was the nominee and he was from 
Massachusetts. Johnson, as majority leader and for other reasons obviously, had entree to the South and the Southwest. He was eminently acceptable on the ticket, and more than 
that, with some degree of enthusiasm on the part of any number of southerners. As for Kennedy, his strength was in the West, the industrial Midwest, and the East. And it 
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O'Brien --Interview I --8 
seemed that they complimented each other in that sense, in terms of a campaign. There was no great disagreement between them regarding the issues and their views on where 
they might tend or hoped to go once they achieved election. 
G: Did you ever do a state-by-state breakdown of what numerically Johnson could add to the election? 
O: No. All of that might have been something we kicked around after the fact, but I can tell you that I don't think, even though I'm trying to reflect on it after twenty-five years, my 
reflections today would alter in any meaningful sense what actually occurred. It was out of the blue; there was an initial disbelief, there was concern on the part of Bobby about 
our supporters and their reactions. And then there was the problem of making sure that you kept a pleasant relationship with all the candidates or potential VP nominees. All of 
that was swirling around the suite. And you had a time frame. You had to try to smooth the ruffled feathers of a number of liberals in the Democratic Party that had supported 
Kennedy. You didn't have that kind of problem with a Dick Daley or a Dave Lawrence, or those people; they were political pros and it wouldn't take more than a few minutes for 
any of them to say, "Well, this sounds good." 
G: Was there anybody that served as a go-between between the Johnson forces and the Kennedy forces? You know, Jim Rowe and Phil Graham have been mentioned as people 
who shuttled back and forth. 
O: No, I don't think so. I think it was a relatively easy matter. There were people, I don't know how many people were around Johnson at that point, but I don't think the 
structuring of it in any sense ever occurred. In other words, "All right, you speak to so-and-so," or "You do this and you do that, and then you have him speak to Johnson or 
to Rayburn. "This just. . . . If you had had two days to plan this coup, I'm sure you would have had it well orchestrated and well organized, and everybody would know what 
everyone else was doing. But we, who had some reputation, at that hour at least, of being fairly good organizers and all the rest, found ourselves without a game plan other than 
"let's get him," which was Jack Kennedy's game plan. 
G: Jack Kennedy did go down to the Johnson suite that morning and talk with him. 
O: Yes. Yes. 
G: It's unclear exactly what was said, but apparently there was no outright, formal offer at that point, is that correct? 
O: It was a feeler, yes. 
G: It was a feeler. Okay. 
O: Yes. Because, you see, he had to wrestle, too, with if you placed it in a formal context 
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O'Brien --Interview I --9 
and it was turned down, that could be adverse to this campaign. So how do you get to putting the thought across, avoiding the formalization, and yet getting the temperature? 
G: Did Kennedy come back from that meeting with the notion that Johnson would accept it? 
O: That he would be thinking about it. But Sam Rayburn got into that picture at some stage, and Rayburn was doing everything he could on the basis of their lifelong friendship to 
dissuade him. 
G: Now, Kennedy did talk to Rayburn at this point, didn't he? 
O: Yes. 
G: Do you recall the circumstances of that? 
O: No. There was just a lot of movement up and down the stairway. 
G: Then Robert Kennedy went and talked with the Johnson people--Johnson, Rayburn, Connally, and the like--and told him of the opposition to LBJ, particularly in the Michigan 
delegation, and suggested maybe that he consider the chairmanship of the DNC as an alternative to VP. Do you remember that? 
O: No. 
G: Do you have any--? 
O: No. No. And I can say this, in the group meeting with Kennedy present, there was never a reference to that. 
G: Really? 
O: No. Not in my recollection. Because I know, twenty-five years later, what my reaction would have been to that. I would have thought that was ridiculous, to put it mildly. I 
think it would have bordered on the insulting rather than getting the objective accomplished. 
G: Well, why would Robert Kennedy have done this? 
O: Robert Kennedy was not enamored with the whole concept. He had a responsibility to fulfill his brother's direction, and Bob was good at that, and as the years went on, Jack 
Kennedy never at any fleeting moment was other than president of the United States. His brother was the attorney general and his brother was his confidant and adviser, but the 
decision maker sat in the Oval Office and the decision maker sat in the suite that day. It took some doing, and obviously Bobby wasn't saying "I'm going to fight my brother" or 
anything, but it took some doing, first of all, to have Bobby get to the point of the 
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O'Brien --Interview I --10 
accommodation, and then to carry out his responsibilities as a spokesman for his brother with Johnson, Rayburn, as well as Williams and Reuther and the rest. And I don't confine 
it to Williams and Reuther; there were others that were aroused, and there was the threat. 
I don't want to overemphasize the threat of a floor fight, but I must say when you're engaged in something like that you don't just overlook any possibility of difficulty 
arising, and the threat was made. We didn't contemplate that somehow or other they could defeat Johnson on the floor, but, obviously, we were contemplating how to avoid 
this. So before the Michigan delegation got into the act and there was a roll call, you had to plan something, because you didn't want to walk out into that convention with that kind 
of controversy if you could avoid it. 
G: It would have been an embarrassment. 
O: Of course. So, you see, this was not a simple matter. I'm talking about 6: 00 or 6: 30 a. m., or whatever it was, to noontime, when all of these things occurred--the fanning-out 
process around the city. 
G: Did Jack Kennedy ever seem to waver on Johnson during the course of this? 
O: Not to my recollection. 
G: This has been one possible explanation. 
O: Waver on Johnson? 
G: On his choice of Johnson as the nominee. 
O: I don't recall it. If that occurred, I didn't perceive it. 
G: All right. Now let me ask you to describe the anti-Kennedy propaganda that seemed to come from the Johnson forces. Was this, do you think, the genesis of the friction between 
some of the Kennedy people and the Johnson people? 
O: I suppose so. As it got to D-day, hour by hour the effort on the part of the Johnson people seemed to us to become more intense, more personalized. There were all kinds of 
rumors around and circulation of stories about Kennedy's health and that sort of thing. 
G: How could you trace these to the Johnson people? 
O: Well, we really tabbed John Connally and a lady whose name eludes me. 
G: Oh, India Edwards, yes. 
O: Yes. Whether rightly or wrongly, we felt that was the source and that Connally was a 
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O'Brien --Interview I --11 
good bare-knuckle fighter and this was desperation. It was a little bit like it happened by sheer coincidence that I was being interviewed by Mike Wallace up in the booth at the 
time of the Adlai Stevenson demonstration. And Mike Wallace, in his inimitable style, started in saying, "Well, look at this! Look at this, I'm looking out the window of the 
booth. The aisles are jammed and the enthusiasm is great. You people have felt you had this set and now look at this. This could turn out to be a debacle for you." My only 
comment was, "Mike, why don't you look at the floor? The delegates are all in their seats. The people in the aisles, the demonstrators with the balloons and the horns and 
everything, all came from the balconies." And that was really what was happening and it meant little or nothing. But, of course, if you're a reporter, you're hoping that something 
like that will occur so it's a much better story. 
But on the Johnson side it didn't take that form at all. It was the difficult, difficult situation that you have when it's clear that your opponent has "pledges," quote, unquote, 
that indicate he's going to win that nomination and on the first ballot. How do you try to peel off some of that support? How do you try to disrupt this bandwagon? And that's 
really the position Johnson was in. You resort to whatever comes to your mind, I guess. I don't recall that I reacted to the attacks the Johnson people were making or the effort 
they were expending in a very, shall I say, personalized manner. I think that I had enough years behind me in politics to kind of ride with that. 
But there were those among us in this little handful of people who had not had that background. And, of course, you had Bobby, who was reacting much more strongly than 
I was because it was his brother they were attacking. 
G: Had he had a dislike for Johnson before this point, do you think? 
O: I don't recall. I don't think there was anything like a relationship or contact between the two of them that would have brought about any. . . . 
G: Okay. The health accusations are well known. What else did Johnson's forces promote, do you recall? Was there any anti-Catholic propaganda? 
O: I don't really recall any. I think that what happened with the Johnson forces, as Lyndon Johnson years later told me when we discussed a lot of this in a different context, was that 
he had a team out there dealing with delegates. He wasn't in primaries, but he had them fanned out across the country during that same period. These fellows would meet back in 
Washington and report on their findings and delegate count and Johnson felt his people had failed him because they had given him all kinds of reports over those months that gave 
him a true belief that he had a good shot at the nomination. I don't recall now, but I remember Johnson and I discussing specific states in conversations over the intervening 
years. 
G: North Carolina, Arizona. . . . 
15
O'Brien --Interview I --12 
O: Yes. And he said, "I got counts from my people, and then, my God, it was just the other way around!" He told me on a number of occasions that he thought truly that he had a 
good organization in the field with accomplished pros, and that their organized effort in the delegate hunt was productive, and their reports to him, which he insisted upon--I'm 
sure he did--being specific, were very encouraging. And he was truly taken aback to find there was so much air in all of this and that we somehow or other--this is [in] nonprimary 
states--had due to our efforts, as he pointed out, clandestinely really made an impact state by state on these elected delegates. He insisted that there were times when he had X 
number of delegates in certain states and somehow or other we were able to shake them loose. I don't know if he was giving us too much credit; I think he probably never had 
them. 
G: Anything else vis-a-vis Johnson at the convention? 
O: No. I think that he exhibited a little concern in that suite in the conversation about the upcoming session to nominate the VP. He was obviously totally aware of the 
disenchantment of some of those Kennedy supporters, the opposition indeed of a number of prominent Kennedy supporters. He exhibited to me, in the conversation, a confidence 
that we'd get that resolved, but it was clear, too, that he was concerned that having made this commitment it could turn out to be a debacle, and that would be not only devastating 
to us but to him, too. He did exhibit that. But I must say in the context of that discussion, he also went on to talk about what his role would be. 
Tape 1 of 5, Side 2 
G: At the point that Johnson agreed to go on the ticket with Kennedy, did he have any requirements with regard to patronage or responsibilities as vice president? Did he want 
any conditions? 
O: Not that I'm aware of. None. I think that what transpired was that the assignments given Johnson, which he readily accepted throughout the campaign, were the rather traditional 
assignments of a VP candidate. A great deal of emphasis was placed on the train through the South and all of this sort of thing, but also a great deal of emphasis on the travel in the 
Midwest, in states like Indiana is a good example, where the nominee has the big street parades and all the rest. The VP candidate gets in there and speaks to smaller groups and 
hits a lot of the smaller communities that the candidate doesn't, this type of thing. Johnson, as I recall it, never had a complaint to make of any kind, and acquitted himself 
admirably. 
And at no time, and this went on beyond when I really got to know the man in the White House and the rest, was his loyalty to Kennedy questioned by me. I resented some 
of the writings of later years, indeed by some of my colleagues, that indicated that the relationship between Kennedy and Johnson was not of the level that some people might 
have thought, and that Kennedy contemplated dropping him from the ticket at the time of re-election. Never a word such as that was ever uttered in my presence. Never. 
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O'Brien --Interview I --13 
G: Anything to the contrary that might--O: 
To the contrary, I cite one incident, as it never left my mind. I don't recall the circumstances of the meeting that was to take place, but we, by that I mean the special 
assistants--that would be Ken O'Donnell, [Theodore] Sorensen, and me, but probably more Ken O'Donnell than me--were involved. The instructions were that any meeting of a 
substantive nature that we were going to have in the White House, and that would involve, obviously, contemplation of messages to Congress or other decisions, 
automatically the Vice President was to be invited. If he was out of the country or something, perhaps it would be well to reschedule the meetings so he could be present. 
An occasion arose and we were in the Cabinet Room, and there were a number of us sitting there, and it had to do with some kind of domestic message. As I say, I don't 
remember the specifics, but I do remember the President sitting down. We just barely got started, and it hit him, and he said, "Where is the Vice President?" Everybody just looked 
at him. And it turned out we had neglected to notify the Vice President. Kennedy expressed his views in the strongest terms. 
G: What did he say? 
O: Well, he said in substance, "Don't let this ever happen again. You know what my rules are, and we will not conduct meetings without the Vice President being present. I want 
his input, and I don't want this ever to happen again, and I want to be darn sure that it doesn't." He couldn't have been stronger. That incident really, I think, exemplified the 
professional relationship between the two men. Now, I'm not suggesting that Johnson and Kennedy became social buddies any more than I was a social buddy of Jack Kennedy's. 
But in a professional sense, Jack Kennedy was extremely appreciative of Johnson's support, which was evidenced in every way. I had a relationship of fourteen years with 
Jack Kennedy; I wasn't at social events with him. We had a friendship of fourteen years, but my relationship with him was not one of an intimate buddy from college days or what 
have you. So in the Johnson relationship--they were two entirely different types of fellows; they accommodated each other. I'm not saying it was love and affection for 
Johnson, although I never heard Kennedy say a bad word about Lyndon Johnson in all of those years. But, certainly, as president he wanted to ensure that the role of the Vice 
President was as meaningful a role as could be provided and that he wanted the Vice President at his right hand. 
G: How would you assess LBJ's relationship with Bob Kennedy during this period, not the later period, but during this transitional [period]? 
O: I don't recall anything untoward in the early stages. I was involved between those two men at a later stage, but I don't recall anything in those early days. 
G: Writers have suggested a bad chemistry between the two. Was this at all evident at the time? 
17
O'Brien --Interview I --14 
O: Not at that time. 
G: Do you think that after the convention, when both the Johnson forces and the Kennedy forces were working on the general election, was there sort of a good feeling between the 
two camps, or how would you describe the working [relationship]? 
O: Yes, because I was responsible for the organization. I was national director of the campaign. Bobby Kennedy was the campaign manager. But as far as staff melding and all 
the rest of this, I have no recollection of anything other than upbeat. Following the selection of the vice presidential candidate, you selected the Democratic national chairman 
the day following the formal convention. We then met with all of our Kennedy leaders across the country before we left Los Angeles. We had schedules and material already 
prepared. We had an intensive briefing session with them. We then set up a series of regional meetings across the country to get to the grassroots, or as close as we could, of 
the party organization and the Kennedy activists across the country, in an organizational context. We toured the country, and we had eight or nine organizational meetings in a 
period of I think probably seven to ten days. We just flew across the country and met in all the major areas and brought in everybody we could from the surrounding areas or in 
some instances three or four surrounding states. We had representatives of all the elements of the campaign, the women's division and the Citizens [for Kennedy], Whizzer 
[Byron] White and people like that. There was a team and I'd conduct the meetings. We made every effort to put in place what really had been our organizational effort in 
Massachusetts when Kennedy defeated [Henry Cabot] Lodge all the way back in 1952. It was a basic fundamental manual we followed that maximized the potential. So off we 
went. The candidate went his way and we went ours, which is the way it should be. 
G: One final question on the convention itself. In your own mind, did you ever come up with a reason why Johnson agreed to step down as majority leader to accept the vice 
presidential [nomination]? 
O: No, I didn't. I think there was one probable misjudgment that Johnson made, and that was if he were no longer majority leader but vice president of the United States it would [not] 
significantly change his position and role in the Senate among his colleagues. That took place in the early stages of the Congress. Although I don't recall the details, apparently 
Lyndon Johnson made some effort to retain a formalized leadership position even as vice president, and he was advised, which I think he probably should have anticipated, that he 
was no longer a member of the club. It wasn't personal, but you're no longer a member of the club, my friend. And I think that bothered him because, and we'll get into it later, 
there were times when he made comments to me that indicated he was bothered by that. 
We then went on through the campaign and there was one element of surprise at Hyannis Port on election night, and that was the closeness of the election. I remember 
while flying to Hyannis election day recalling the Harris and Gallup polls and the others that showed Kennedy a winner a week before the election, which was comforting. They 
18
O'Brien --Interview I --15 
then started to close over that weekend, and they were quite close as of election morning. I was somewhat disbelieving. But as the night unfolded, it turned out, as we know, to be 
a very, very close election. It was a long night. 
As a matter of fact, when it was decided that we would go to the national guard armory in Hyannis and claim victory with all the Kennedy family and entourage, I went 
with the group, but I was still just a little uneasy. I didn't like the way this was turning out--the closeness of it. So I went into a side office while all of this excitement was 
unfolding and called Chicago. I didn't locate the Mayor, but I did talk to an election official or somebody who was in a position of authority, and my simple question was, 
"Has the count been completed in Illinois?" He said that it had just been completed downstate. While Daley had been accused of thievery over the years, we were fully aware 
of the games played by the Republicans downstate, so they tried to get the downstate vote in before the final count in Cook County. He said there were approximately 25,000 votes 
for Kennedy which as yet had not been officially recorded, and downstate was already complete. So we had squeezed out Illinois. 
I came out of the office and Ted White was standing there. Ted was a perceptive fellow, and he had gone through the entire campaign with us. He said, "I bet I know who 
you were talking to." And I said, "Who was I talking to?" He said, "You were talking to Dick Daley." I said, "No, I wasn't," which was a truthful answer, and I walked away from 
him. But that was an indication of my concern. 
G: The story goes that in later years Jack Kennedy at troublesome times would say he was going to demand a recount in Illinois. 
O: (Laughter) 
G: Do you think that Daley threw in some extra votes? 
O: No. Because we had the reverse of that, a very close margin, with Humphrey, when I ran the Humphrey campaign [in 1968], which went in the wrong direction. No, there was a 
degree of hanky-panky somewhere in Illinois, but I always felt that whatever it was--and I had no knowledge of it and if it indeed existed--it appeared to be in the southern part of 
the state, because they were very adept at that sort of thing. No, it was just a darn close race. You could look across the results and Illinois didn't stick out in any sense. You lost 
a couple here and there by small margins, you won a couple by small margins--more than a couple, it was a very, very close election. 
G: Texas was relatively close, too. 
O: Yes. 
G: Do you recall any of the problems there? 
19
O'Brien --Interview I --16 
O: No, that was Johnson's territory. We went through the whole campaign thinking that "Lyndon is going to carry Texas for us, just don't dwell on it. It's in his hands and we're 
confident," but it was close. The whole election, actually, when you think about it, was extremely close; closer than we had anticipated. We eked it out, that's about what it 
amounted to. And the fact of the matter is we lost twenty-one seats in the House in that election. 
G: Did you play any role in Kennedy's speech to the Baptist ministers in Houston? 
O: I was with him. Contrary to what was the prevailing view after the speech and I guess historically is the view, I never accepted the feeling that he had turned something around. 
G: Really? 
O: No. I was with him, and I remember being in the elevator with him and going to the hall. You could always depend upon Kennedy to acquit himself well. I saw so many occasions 
over those fourteen years of association that I certainly didn't have any feeling that it was going to be otherwise. Obviously, the Houston ministers conference was going to treat 
him cordially. There wasn't going to be any conflict. He'd make his presentation and leave. But I never accepted that it impacted on the election. 
I think that what happened on the religious issue is underscored by the West Virginia primary. Lou Harris was our pollster. That was prior to Lou Harris becoming a 
national pollster. And I remember he'd have a pad just like that one, and he'd do his polling, and we'd sit in the lobby of that Kanawha Hotel down there, and he'd go over his 
numbers and I would tell him about certain arrangements that had been made, to be slated with county slates I thought would be helpful, and we might adjust the numbers a little bit 
in that regard. But the fact of the matter was that the Sunday before the West Virginia primary we were rained out on a tour; it called for a plane tour and we were grounded. 
So Kennedy and I were sitting in the hotel and we were depressed. The conversation went along these lines: "Well, if we come within two or four percentage points of Hubert, 
maybe we can claim some sort of a moral victory, because everybody's predicting we're going to lose and the polls indicate we're going to lose." That was really our view, and the 
scope of the victory was very surprising to us. 
G: Well, isn't it correct that you got a lot of sheriffs behind you and other county [officials]? 
O: Well, we got the organization, because it is an organization state--but you have to remember that was their first presidential primary. There was no interest on the part of 
the pros. The last item on that ballot as far as they were concerned was the presidential primary. No interest. I remember talking to the clerk of courts in a county trying to get 
slated on the slate they'd have printed to pass out to the voters. I regretted what I said to him, because I suggested that a) I was confident that Kennedy would be the next president 
of the United States; b) I wanted him to understand that we would never forget him, that the White House door would be open to him. And he said to me, "O'Brien, stop there. I 
20
O'Brien --Interview I --17 
can work this out. He seems to be a nice guy and I don't mind him being on the slate. But I couldn't care less about the White House door. I don't know if there's more than a 
handful of people in this whole state [who've] ever been in the White House. But," he said, "I want to have you understand I'm not interested in the White House; I'm solely 
interested in the courthouse," and that was the story of West Virginia. 
But we worked hard at it and it was helpful to tie in to some of the county organizations around the state. But the fact of the matter was that later that Sunday 
afternoon, reporters had gone off on tours of their own during the day, and some of them had visited churches. Almost invariably the preacher or minister in his sermon spoke 
about the primary. And I guess, at least from what they detected, it was in the context of "let's not be what people think we are. We resent it." There was a distinct statewide 
reaction to this repeated media suggestion that because Kennedy was a Catholic he couldn't carry the state. Something had to happen in those twenty-four or forty-eight 
hours. Now, Kennedy had the debate, maybe there was a delayed reaction from the Kennedy-Humphrey debate, because Kennedy had acquitted himself extremely well in the 
debate. Kennedy had gone on television that Sunday. No script, just went on for the half-hour, and he talked about his heritage and his religion and his contemplation of the 
future and his country. You know, Kennedy was an excellent communicator. 
So all of those things, you see, probably went into the mix when Tuesday came. But there was great pride across West Virginia, interestingly enough, in Kennedy winning 
that primary, because they felt that an unfair weight had been put on them. I really believe to this day something had to happen to change the Lou Harris poll that showed us losing 
by six or eight percentage points, and we were hopeful that we might reduce the two to four, and we won strongly. 
G: Critics have argued that the victory was a result of Joe Kennedy having pumped a lot of money into the effort. 
O: I'll tell you, any money that was pumped into West Virginia I had knowledge of and made decisions concerning. And I'll tell you, the entire expenditure in West Virginia in that 
primary wouldn't have financed a Congressional election in Massachusetts. 
G: Did you feel that you had adequate financing in that primary? 
O: Yes, because it really was Kennedy at the mine shafts, Kennedy on the street corners, Kennedy with FDR [Jr.] traveling around. And what we found was that all over West 
Virginia you'd go into these homes, go into stores, and there was a picture of Roosevelt. That made an impact. No question that we tried to organize West Virginia, as we tried to 
organize anything we were ever engaged in. And we had Bob McDonough, that was the local Kennedy director, and he was very good, very dedicated, and did an excellent job. 
And there were any number of West Virginia folks with Bob that formed the campaign effort there. We had an extremely well organized campaign, because as I said early on, 
we're dealing with seven primaries in relatively small states. If you take New Hampshire 
21
O'Brien --Interview I --18 
and a couple of others that were walk-through primaries, or Maryland, we really had Oregon, Wisconsin, West Virginia. And West Virginia became pre-eminent off the results 
of the Wisconsin primary that preceded it. We had won Wisconsin, but the press across the country said that it was a moral victory for Hubert Humphrey because we hadn't come 
up to the press' predictions. We came very close to our own but not to the press' predictions. Bobby Kennedy and I had to hustle the next morning to West Virginia on the 
"Caroline" and meet with McDonough, and we traveled to four or five locations to reassure our own troops in West Virginia that indeed we had won the Wisconsin primary, 
and they were not to believe the media claims. 
I came out of West Virginia with great admiration for those people. Also, I think I learned a lot. I know Jack Kennedy learned a lot and he never forgot it. 
G: Well, the story goes that it was that experience that really made him aware of the poverty in this country. 
O: That's right. And you have to realize the breakthrough, and this was this man's breakthrough. Sure, there was an organization; there was O'Brien doing his thing or 
whatever. But the fact of the matter is that to see this man waiting in a mine shaft for those miners to come up all blackened and stick out his hand and say, "I'd like to meet 
you," and then visit with them. He had to break through. He had to break through. This didn't happen easily, but he did break through. They did accept, but not at the outset. It 
was a difficult task. 
G: Remarkable. Did you play a role in the television debates? 
O: Yes. 
G: What was your [role]? 
O: Well, the role was really in trying to take advantage of an opportunity in terms of early acceptance. Our absolute conviction, certainly mine, [was] that if we could get to those 
debates, Nixon would live to regret it. The total understanding we had [was] that Nixon felt completely otherwise, as evidenced by the failure of Nixon to go back and take a look 
at the Lodge-Kennedy debate in Massachusetts, and to take a look at the Humphrey-Kennedy debate in West Virginia. Nixon was very self-assured. 
The debates were something that we wished for and anticipated from the day the agreement was formalized. I was with him at all four debates. Jack Kennedy was a 
remarkable fellow and I had great admiration for him or I wouldn't have gone through all I did with him on these things. I never had a moment's discomfort when it came to Kennedy 
going one-on-one under any set of circumstances. He had a lot of guts. He was an extremely courageous guy. Really, it was just like with the Texas delegation; he couldn't 
resist it. Even if it might have hurt, he just couldn't resist it. He couldn't resist going to the Houston ministers conference. That sort of thing got his adrenalin flowing, and I think 
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O'Brien --Interview I --19 
that without question, particularly in retrospect on the closeness of the election, those debates, or that debate really, the first one, had a tremendous impact. I had occasion to 
recall it recently. Some reporter called me. Apparently it's the twenty-fifth anniversary of the debate coming up in the next few days. And I remember it vividly. There wasn't that 
much planning. There were position papers and Jack took whatever opportunities he could between stops to brief himself. You know, you're pretty limited on how deeply you 
can get into it. But there was the regular briefing procedure with Ted Sorensen and others providing material. 
But that debate was not a substantive debate, nor did you contemplate it would be. You don't know what's going to happen. But the question is, what is the mass audience 
perception going to be? And when we gathered in Chicago for that debate, in that holding room Kennedy had already taken a look at the studio, just as Nixon had. Kennedy had 
suggested it was too cold in the studio and insisted they turn up the heat a little bit. As we sat in the holding room, I remember there were some sandwiches and tea, and Kennedy 
did pour a cup of tea for himself. Nobody else touched anything, Joe Kennedy, Ken O'Donnell--there were about five or six of us, including Ted Sorensen, I guess. I was a 
wreck. 
G: Were the Nixon people in the same area? 
O: No, they were on the other side of the studio. Time starts to run; now you're just checking your watch. And there were ten minutes or so to go, or probably between 
fifteen and ten minutes to air time. There was no outward indication at least of any Kennedy concern. He was very self-composed. But there wasn't a normal conversation 
taking place, and I really couldn't stand it, so I walked out of the room and strolled down the hall. Down the hall a short distance, I realized that was the door to the studio, so I 
opened the door, walked in, closed the door and stood there. There were a number of staff people, camera crews and all that, finalizing everything, checking the lights, et cetera. 
And I looked across this very large studio and noted a fellow pacing up and down alone, and it was Nixon. As I watched him, at one point he went over and checked the podium, 
where his position would be, and he went back. And even with my rather poor eyesight I could see that this man was heavily made up. He just didn't quite look like Nixon in a 
way. But clearly I was observing a fellow that was terribly uptight. 
Then the countdown over the loudspeaker began, and I am still standing there. Nixon hasn't left the studio. And the countdown came and I don't recall the exact minutes, 
but four minutes to air time there's no Kennedy. Three minutes to air time, there's no Kennedy. At which point I'm semi-hysterical standing there, and I'm just about to say, 
"God, didn't you hear the--?" And at perhaps two minutes to air time the door opened, Kennedy walked in, moved directly to the podium and stood. Nixon, looking ill at ease, 
took his position, attempted to speak to Kennedy--Kennedy nodded. And they were on the air. 
After that debate, I visited the press room. There were hundreds of press present, 
23
O'Brien --Interview I --20 
many of whom I knew, and I asked, "What do you think?" While they were relatively noncommittal, it was clear to me that the prevailing attitude was Kennedy had done a 
great job. He had won that debate; to what degree might vary from writer to writer. 
Then I went over to the hotel lobby, which was jammed with all the Daley pros, Dick Daley's organization, and I started to chat with some of them. Then it hit me, and I 
started to say, "What do you think the two major issues were?" Nobody had the faintest idea. There was fleeting reference to Quemoy and Matsu, but nobody there had any real 
idea of the debating points. 
The next day, it was the first stop in Indiana--Evansville--and the crowd at the airport was two to three times what we had experienced at earlier stops. In a few hours 
that debate had made a major impact. I was at all four debates with Jack, and all he had to do was just play out the other three. 
There's no question that first debate had a real impact. Now, there are those that say, "If you just read the transcript." And others will say, "Well, if you'd listened to it on 
radio you would have concluded it either was a draw or Nixon won." The fact is that it was the first, it placed every candidate from then on in a tough position on debates, to this 
day. Debates now take place at every level of politics all over America. People even started to debate empty chairs. 
The Jack Kennedy I knew and saw in action was a remarkable fellow when it came to a crisis. He came up to it. Typical of him was his handling of the Bay of Pigs. It was a 
disaster, and he, figuratively, went out on the White House steps and said to the American people, "My fellow Americans, I goofed. I have absolutely blown this. I let you down. 
All I can say to you is I hope I've learned a lesson. I pledge to do better in the future." My God, the polls showed his ratings went up off disaster, not down! So that really was 
the type of courageous man you were dealing with. 
While we had attempted at all times to be as organized as we could be in the political context, in the elections in Massachusetts, in the nomination quest and the 
election, we now focused on the future in specific terms, programmatically. I remember very well being with him at Palm Beach. He put together his cabinet. Each cabinet 
member selected then met with me, generally over dinner in my suite at the Mayflower Hotel, to review his role as a member of the team. I made it very clear that the President--G: 
What does this encompass, can you--? 
O: Everything they would be engaged in would focus on the President. The President's programs--i. e., legislative programs--would be a responsibility shared by every cabinet 
member. Each cabinet member would be in communication with us on the selection of all his top people in his department, and we would be advising him. 
Now, that was an integral part of the process. Some of these people were 
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O'Brien --Interview I --21 
relatively new to me. Bob McNamara was a good example. I spent an evening in my suite at the Mayflower with Bob McNamara, telling him as best I could, as diplomatically 
as I could, the political facts of life as we saw them, now that he was a member of the team. And this fellow had not had an experience like that before. So, you know, you had 
to be very careful about how you presented it. It might take a few hours over dinner before you finally painted the whole picture. 
G: Were they all receptive to this element, dimension? 
O: Yes. I think in a couple of instances you had to be. . . . Some obviously not only were receptive, but they knew the name of the game, but there were others that just never had 
been in politics. Then, with all of that, while sitting in Palm Beach and the selection process is reasonably completed, we're talking about the White House staff, about 
relations with the Congress, and we look at, I guess they call it, the green book where it listed the positions in departments, agencies, starting with the White House staff, and it 
was like looking at a Christmas catalog. 
The President-elect and I are looking at this book, thumbing through it and discovering all of those goodies. We talked about the White House, and I think it again 
underscored our lack of basic understanding of the whole process, the separation of powers, in terms of how you deal with the Congress. Because I remember that the top 
special assistant to Eisenhower, Bryce Harlow, was special assistant for congressional relations. And then there was an administrative assistant for personnel and Kennedy 
suggested to me that we combine the two jobs, because we both understood personnel meant patronage. It sort of fitted, congressional relations-patronage, and the title would 
be special assistant for congressional relations and personnel. And we both thought that was a whale of an idea, and that's what happened. 
Tape 2 of 5, Side 1 
O: --press relations and personnel, and we were busily engaged, among other things, or I was, in the upcoming inauguration, because there again, we wanted to ensure that all our 
friends and loyal supporters around the country had an opportunity to participate in this great event. So again we were involved in organizational activity. Simultaneously, I had 
to work on my assignment. I had no perception of it, no knowledge of it, even to the point where perhaps somebody might have to steer me toward the Hill. 
The fact of the matter was that all I could do and did was talk to a couple of people that had had some White House experience in Democratic administrations: Dave 
Bell, Clark Clifford, Charlie Murphy. They'd tell me about it, give me a feel for it, and relate how the President, President Truman, or [in the case of] Jim Rowe, President 
Roosevelt, handled their relationships with the Hill in the context of their legislative programs. There had been no formalization at any time; it was just sort of 
seat-of-the-pants. The President might make a call or send somebody to see someone. But it wasn't organized. I guess I wasn't shocked or stunned because I didn't know 
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O'Brien --Interview I --22 
whether it required organization. 
We took the occasion to ask a couple of old hands that were knowledgeable to give us a written evaluation or analysis of this kind of activity. One was Clark Clifford, 
the other was Dick Neustadt. We did know that the first occasion for the White House to have a formalized congressional relations entity was under Eisenhower with Bryce 
Harlow. I hadn't met Bryce Harlow, and inauguration was upon us. Bryce Harlow had called me and had offered his services, which I deeply appreciated. It turned out after I 
did get to know him that he was just a really fine fellow. He was very helpful. 
But in any event it began to penetrate what Bryce Harlow's role was in this formalized congressional relations activity in the Eisenhower Administration. And it 
seemed to me, from what little I'd learned, in fleeting moments before actually going in the White House, that the congressional relations activity in the Eisenhower Administration 
had focused on blocking legislation, avoiding its arrival at the White House for a potential veto, because they were dealing with a Democratic Congress and they had no very 
meaningful legislative program of their own. So it was sort of, if you can call it that, a negative approach: see what you can do up there to stop Democrats from enacting 
legislation that we disapprove of. 
The Clark Clifford presentation, as I recall it, was [to] have a White House activity that was very limited in staff, was not involved in a public context, tried to avoid general 
knowledge of its existence, and did not engage the departments and agencies in joint activity. Let them (departments and agencies) handle their own matters directly with the 
Congress. 
Dick Neustadt chose to chat with me as part of a written outline that he presented and his view was just the opposite--that you should enlist the aid in an organized sense of 
everyone you could throughout the administration. This was a big effort--you were dealing with five hundred and thirty-five people--and as you would not have a large White 
House staff, you'd have to look elsewhere for support. And it wasn't because of any knowledge I had of what was going to transpire, but I guess by nature most of my life had 
been organizing and maximizing the potential. I knew some congressmen and senators, but not well, and only in the political context, certainly not in the legislative context. So I 
decided that we ought to try to build an organization in the executive branch. I had been forewarned by both Clifford and Neustadt that it was a very sensitive area. The separation 
of powers was there, and it certainly could be counterproductive if you didn't handle whatever activities you engaged in with an understanding of this great sensitivity, impact, 
or recognition of the constitutional provisions. 
In any event, none of this was in place come Inauguration Day. I had developed a list of possible staff people. Somewhere along the line Mike Manatos was brought to my 
attention. I contacted Mike and asked if he'd like to join the White House staff as the Senate representative. Henry Hall Wilson, similarly, who had been very active in the 
Kennedy campaign, very close to Terry Sanford, and a member of the state legislature in 
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O'Brien --Interview I --23 
North Carolina--I asked him to join us. And I had a fellow that was associated with me and continued to be associated with me intimately over his lifetime, and that was Claude 
Desautels. These were supplemented from time to time by others over those years: Chuck Daly, who later was vice president of Harvard and the University of Chicago; Dick 
Donahue, a very prominent, very able attorney from Massachusetts and a long-time Kennedy associate. And there were others in later years, but basically the White House 
staff started with Manatos, Henry Hall Wilson, and Claude Desautels, my administrative assistant, and my long-time secretary, Phyllis Maddock. 
G: Was there anybody that you tried to get that you couldn't get to join the staff? 
O: No, and I really didn't know what to look for. You have to understand that this was from ground zero, and all of the organization that ultimately took place over the first few 
months of the Kennedy Administration, putting it in place and refining it, was not remotely in place or really carefully thought out by inauguration time. In fact, it was so, if you will, 
disjointed that we all went into the White House the day after inauguration and we didn't even have office assignments. 
I hadn't seen Bryce Harlow. I called Bryce; I was just stuck with the inauguration. Again, it was the politics of it. I didn't want any disappointed long-time Kennedy 
campaign leaders. And I concentrated on all of that, and Phyllis went over to the White House. I got to call Bryce and apologize that I haven't been back to him, and I was 
looking forward to sitting down with him. Well, Phyllis went over. He said, "Well, maybe some of the details of the way the White House operates I can go over with Phyllis." And 
that was very kind of him. She went over and spent several hours with him. That was the extent of my knowledge of it. I'd never been in the building, even as a tourist. 
So we walked in, with the staff, and looked around the two floors. I don't think I even knew the basement was there. And I found this corner office on the second floor, 
and I noted that there was space for two secretaries and a conference room, and about three offices. So I planted myself in the center office and my staff on each end. And that's 
how the office was established. Somebody then suggested that everybody on the staff go downstairs to the Fish Room, outside the Oval Office, to be sworn in. I didn't go 
downstairs. I was never really sworn in. (Laughter) 
Now what do you do, where do you go and how do you put this together? Well, I received this call from a fellow that was over in the EOB building next door--the old State 
Department. He introduced himself to me on the phone and said he was looking forward, along with the personnel staff, to meeting their new boss. And he knew it was premature, 
but inasmuch as it was snowing he thought he would get directions from me regarding my decision on whether or not to close down the federal establishment early that day. I was 
obviously taken aback, and I said, "Well, let me get back to you." So I called Phyllis in and I said, "Let's see if we can find what department of government has responsibility for 
the Weather Bureau." Lo and behold, there was a fellow by the name of Dan [Clarence Daniel] Martin, Jr., who was under secretary of commerce, who had been a staunch 
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O'Brien --Interview I --24 
Kennedy supporter from California, and under him came the Weather Bureau as we noted in the table of organization. 
Well, that was a relief, because I knew Dan intimately, and I called him. And I said, "How are you doing?" "Fine." I said, "What decision are you going to make today, 
Dan, on closing the federal establishment?" Of course, he didn't know a thing more about what I was talking about than I did when this Lyons called me. "God, what?" I said, 
"Well, the Weather Bureau [is under you]." He said, "It is?" And I said, "Yes, you're responsible for the Weather Bureau. So you'd better just check on what the procedure has 
been in the past, determine whether the projected snowfall justifies early departure of the federal employees for their homes, and I'll give you the extension number of Mr. Lyons, 
and you can advise him on your decision." I hung up. In addition, there were half a dozen telegrams laying on my desk inviting me to various functions, get-acquainted functions, of 
federal unions, employee unions. It hit: personnel wasn't what the President and I had envisioned at all. This was the job of maintaining liaison with the various elements of the 
federal employee establishment, which was of no interest to me whatsoever. I then had Phyllis check with the printing office; it was too late to eliminate "and personnel" from my 
title in the Congressional Directory, so it stayed there for a year. And I never did to this day meet Mr. Lyons or any of the staff over in the EOB building. 
So with that, and with all of the excitement of this new experience, we scheduled the first leadership meeting with the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, the 
weekly breakfast meeting, four days after the inauguration. The first order of business in the House would be the vote on expanding the Rules Committee. So at the leadership 
breakfast, the President welcomed the leaders; pointed out that there would be a leadership breakfast on a regular basis, and we chatted for a while. 
Then the President said to the Speaker, "You have the vote on expanding the Rules Committee scheduled as the first order of business." The Speaker said, "Yes, as a 
matter of fact, we're going to vote tomorrow." And the President, I'm sure, assumed that everything was in order. It was a fairly routine activity in the house. Mr. Rayburn said, 
however, "I'm concerned about it." "Oh?" "Yes, as a matter of fact, I don't think we have the votes. It's very, very difficult, and we've had compromise after compromise on what 
to do with the Rules Committee, but now this expansion and the assignment of these new members to the Rules Committee would give us, as we saw it, just a majority, that's all, to 
bring your program to the floor." So whatever else was discussed at the leadership breakfast eludes me, and probably everything else that might have been discussed that 
morning eluded me because I was in a state of semishock. 
So after the leadership breakfast the President and I discussed this and it dawned on us that, my God, we can't let this go forward. So the Speaker was contacted. 
G: Did you call him or did the President call him? 
O: The President called him. And he came down again that afternoon, and as a result of the 
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discussion he agreed to postpone it for a week. And if you want a cold shower, you've had it; if you wanted to learn how congressional relations are supposed to function, you're 
going to have a quick learning process, and we had to try to develop a head count. 
There were some close and friendly Democrats up there we contacted who we thought would be in a position because of their seniority to be helpful to us in trying to 
determine what the true story was. There was no head count or anything; Rayburn was worried--that was his gut feeling, and it turned out he was right, of course. 
So we got together with Congressmen Frank Thompson, Carl Elliott, Bob Jones, I believe, and went over every member of the House and their perception on how these 
fellows could be categorized at that point. Got hold of Bobby, and Stu Udall, [who] was a former member of the House and was now in the cabinet; got hold of Andy Biemiller of 
the AFL-CIO, and we tried to put together to the best of our ability a head count, and that head count showed that we would lose the Rules fight by at least seven votes, probably 
more. That was our most optimistic view. 
I have some statistics here, because I wanted to recall it. You take the breakdown of the House at the outset of the Kennedy presidency. First, we had lost twenty-one 
Democrats in the Kennedy presidential election victory. The coalition, so-called, of southern Democrats and Republicans was well known, and it had been effective in many 
ways during the Eisenhower period. My notes indicate the vote was scheduled for January 25 and it was postponed to January 31. That may or may not be accurate. 
G: That's what my notes show, too. 
O: At that moment, the House consisted of 174 Republicans, 151 Democrats, non-southern, 108 southern Democrats, and two vacancies. So clearly, the only way this could be put 
together was to get a minimum of twenty Republicans, as we tried to put numbers to this, a third of the southern Democrats, and a united non-southern Democratic vote. The 
southern Democrats had been subjected to a great deal of pressure and media attention back in their districts, to varying degrees throughout the South, opposing any change in 
the Rules Committee, Judge [Howard] Smith or the others. And I remember Overton Brooks of Louisiana saying that it was so difficult. After the fact he told me that he had 
been viciously attacked by his local media and he had a cross burned on his lawn. So that was what we were up against. 
But the time was utilized to the best of our ability. We didn't have the staff, you know, in agencies or departments of government; we just went at it, one on one, phone 
calls and what have you. During the entire course of that several days, we did not involve the President. The President finally made one call, and that was to the chairman of the 
North Carolina delegation, Harold Cooley, and he asked Cooley if he couldn't help--on the basis of our head count there was a serious problem with the North Carolina delegation. 
We felt maybe this was the delegation that might take a second look, or some of them. Cooley convened them--he'd agreed to do that--and I assume that he probably didn't exert 
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O'Brien --Interview I --26 
any great pressure on them, but they did discuss the matter, discuss the President's interest, and Cooley then told the whole world that the President had called him. Then 
some of the media decided that if he had called Cooley, he must have been calling the world, which wasn't the case. 
But anyway, the effort was expended to the best of our ability, and the end result was that we won by five votes. And I believe that we got--what?--twenty-two 
Republicans. 
G: That's right. 
O: I had it broken down. Yes, twenty-two Republicans. We got thirty-four southern Democrats, which was close to one-third of the southern Democrats, and we got a solid 
additional Democratic vote, and we won by five votes. 
Now, first of all, as belated as our recognition of the seriousness of this problem [was], the effect a loss would have had on anything we attempted to do with the Congress 
would have been far-reaching, but we had salvaged it for the moment. If we had failed, there wouldn't have been, in my judgment, any Kennedy program during that two-year 
period that would have gotten to the floor of the House. 
The other aspect of it, however, was that with the effort we expended over about a week, with the closeness of the vote, with the anticipation that you were not apt to get 
twenty Republican votes in many matters up there, clearly we were faced with a very difficult situation, but at least we had salvaged enough so that we would have a chance to 
give it a real try in due course. 
But it was a lesson, and that lesson brought me to the realization that I'd better move as quickly and as vigorously as possible to put together an organized congressional 
relations entity in the executive branch of government. And so we proceeded posthaste. And that, as it unfolded, took the form of weekly, written, detailed reports that had to be 
submitted by noontime every Monday from every department and agency, reviewing what had transpired between their department or agency and the Congress the prior week, 
projecting what they anticipated the next week and beyond, and explaining to the best of their ability any failure of movement, and [they were] to be as specific and detailed as 
possible. 
We then, in our small staff, would analyze and evaluate those reports on Monday afternoon, compile the salient elements for the President's night reading on Monday night, 
and develop the agenda, at least the domestic side of the agenda, legislative side of the agenda, for the President for the breakfast meeting with the congressional leaders on 
Tuesday morning. In addition, the some-forty congressional relations people from these departments and agencies would meet with us regularly at our direction, in the White 
House, and we would review, face-to-face, the entire legislative program, so that all departments and agencies knew their responsibility and the responsibility of their 
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O'Brien --Interview I --27 
respective bosses in the cabinet. It extended even well beyond their own departments and agencies, so that they were responsible, indeed, got specific assignments from time to 
time, for legislative matters that didn't relate to their department or agency directly. 
We then endeavored to orchestrate Kennedy's contact with the Congress, and that took a variety of forms. We put into effect briefing sessions with selected members of 
Congress, probably specific committee members depending on the issues at the moment, in the White House. Twenty or thirty members would come in, and the President would 
meet with them directly and review the specific matter of the moment. We had individual meetings with key members of Congress that would come in the back door, if you will, of 
the White House, not on the President's schedule: Bob Kerr, Wilbur Mills, people like that, on a regular basis. 
We would develop a program where every department and agency that had good news to announce, contracts in a member's state or district, or whatever--Defense 
Department contracts would be a good example--were to advise us of these decisions and the anticipated announcement, and we developed in the White House, on my staff, a 
procedure to notify "friendly" quote, unquote, members of the House and Senate, twenty-four hours in advance of these announcements from the department or agency so 
that they could get out their own press releases to their local media. 
How do you utilize the President? At this point I think it's worth mentioning that President Kennedy had spent four terms in the House, eight years; one term in the Senate, 
six years. He had been on the Hill fourteen years, but he had not been part of the establishment on the Hill. He had not been a total, full-time activist in that sense. He did 
not have the kind of seniority in either the House or Senate, obviously, to be a prime mover. He was very much junior to all his former colleagues, and how do you utilize him? 
The Cooley experience indicated that you would husband the President's direct intervention, that you never wanted to reach a point where the President's direct 
involvement would cause members on the floor to say, "Oh, I got another call from the President today." You wanted that member, if he said anything, to say, "What do you 
think, buddy, happened? I got a call from the President today." He talked to the President of the United States. And that, of course, was the way to go, and it was the 
only way you could maintain presidential impact, hopefully at a given moment under extreme circumstances. 
G: Was the key to doing that limiting the President's--? 
O: It was ensuring that anytime the President intervened, it would have an individual or collective impact. Whether it succeeded in accomplishing the purpose was another thing. 
But there would be a recognition on the Hill that you don't hear directly from the President, or the President will not call you down to the White House unless he is directly, 
seriously involved and this means everything to him. And you've tried to use every other source of persuasion to the fullest in every conceivable way before you bring the President 
into the act, and you try to avoid doing that because there will always be another time. If 
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O'Brien --Interview I --28 
there's not a need for it, a perceivable need, then you shouldn't do it, and you shouldn't--my responsibility was to husband the President's time and effort, and the easy 
route was to say, "Here's a list, Mr. President. In your spare time why don't you call these thirty fellows? Or have them come down one by one?" It just didn't make sense; it would 
be counterproductive over the long haul. It would be meaningless ultimately. 
Just as a statistic, through this organized effort, in 1961, the first year of President Kennedy's term, he presided over thirty-two leadership breakfasts. He had ninety group 
meetings the first year in the White House, by personal invitation of the President, meeting directly with selected groups of members of the House and Senate. He had five hundred 
members, the entire Congress, at one time or another at coffee hours, which were informal. They weren't briefing sessions, they were just little social hours. We had a 
regularly scheduled ceremony every bill signing--we made sure that we extended personal invitations to appropriate members of Congress to participate in every bill signing. Every 
member of the Congress received a letter personally from the President on his birthday with birthday greetings. I took the occasion to send a letter to every member, too, on his 
birthday. That became an established procedure. I had the Sequoia made available to me to take out small groups of members at appropriate times--and this became a regular 
event--for a three-hour trip on the Potomac, where we'd have a buffet dinner and maybe an accordion player, at times, or a sing-along. We would leave the dock at 6: 00 p. m., 
return at 9: 00. And that became the greatest tool available to us, and I utilized it to the fullest. It became a great bore to be on that Sequoia for my wife for three hours, 
sometimes two and three times a week. (Laughter) 
G: When we talked last time, you made the comment, I suspect not in jest, that you felt that one of President Carter's biggest mistakes was selling the Sequoia. 
O: (Laughter) I guess you shouldn't say we were appalled. It isn't that big a thing in that sense, but I certainly reflected upon the Sequoia when I read about the President and his 
economy drive--all presidents have economy drives, but we'll get into those. President Kennedy had one and President Johnson had one. So Jimmy Carter had his, and the 
Sequoia was just a great help in maintaining this dialogue and improving this relationship and getting better acquainted, whatever way you want to describe it. There was nothing 
approaching it. For instance, I was in Washington just two weeks ago, and I was talking to some of our old friends. Two members that I talked to brought up the Sequoia to me 
and reflected on the times that I had invited them on the Sequoia. And they never saw it again. 
G: Well, you described at length how you found out about the White House proper, and allocated your own office space, and things of this [nature]. How did you become aware 
of the Sequoia and--? 
O: I became aware of it in the sense that it was one of two, as I recall, presidential yachts. And it was the largest of the two and therefore it could accommodate more people. And 
the recognition that it is a presidential yacht, the president can designate the utilization of 
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it as he sees fit, and the president doesn't use it very often. So that moment it occurred, the light went on and I thought to myself, "It's too bad to have that yacht [and] staff over 
there on the dock somewhere. I can think of a way to utilize it, hopefully effectively." And I spoke to the President about it, and I had the free use of the Sequoia, unless the 
President was using it, on a designated time frame, from then on. 
G: Were there others that you had to negotiate times with, or did you have first dibs after the President? 
O: No, first dibs after the President. I don't recall any time being told that the Sequoia would not be available when I wanted it. 
G: Did you go out on it with the President first, before this, at least to become--? 
O: No. 
G: You just found out that the yacht existed and--? 
O: There were a couple of occasions with President Kennedy and President Johnson that I was on the Sequoia, not related to this activity but, no, all I knew was, hey, how many 
people can it accommodate, and how many people can be handled reasonably? They have a pleasant little trip down to Mount Vernon and have the salute and the music play and 
turn around and come back. And [you] utilize that three hours of confinement to make it as pleasant as you can, with food and drink, but also circulate and put little groups 
together on the Sequoia so that at the end of the three hours you've felt you might have made your sales pitch, hopefully effectively, and not to such an extent that you turn 
anyone off, so that they did leave feeling that it was a social hour but incidentally there was some conversation about some pending legislation that they were significantly 
involved with. 
G: Would you speak generally to the group or would you speak one on one to--? 
O: One on one. Or when you got with one, then you'd keep your eyes open and maybe you'd want to bring one or two more into that little corner of the boat for that little chat. 
G: Did you normally organize the trips around a legislative issue? Let's say if a bill was coming to a vote, would you get the people who were--? 
O: You tried to, but it didn't work out quite that way because you wanted to utilize it as often as you could. So there were times where you just tried to anticipate that you would be 
busily engaged with these fellows say a month or two from now, and it wouldn't hurt a bit to just get to know them better, have them know you better, and have a pleasant social 
evening with them prior to trying to convince them to be supportive. 
G: Say, for example, if you had a labor bill, minimum wage or something like that and you 
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O'Brien --Interview I --30 
were working on this particular element, would you have lobbyists or people from, let's say, the labor movement, invited as well? 
O: No, this was confined. No, I wouldn't do that. I thought about that, frankly, but then I thought, "That's just takes away some of the niceties of the whole thing." So it was 
confined to my wife and me with one or two members of the White House staff, depending on the circumstances. And it was always a melding of senators and 
congressmen; you never did an exclusive either way, sort of balanced it that way. And really, it was an opportunity that was there, available. These people were all on standby 
on the Sequoia, just waiting for the President or under the President's direction, somebody to say, "Okay, tonight you're going out." 
But what else can you do? You see, in that first year, literally, as a statistic, President Kennedy had 2,500 individual contacts with members of Congress. Now, that's 
really from our records. That took all those forms that I enumerated, but that's direct contact: there's been a chat; there's been a briefing; there's been a visit under any number 
of circumstances. This doesn't include any contacts that we on the staff made at all. This was presidential. So at the end of the year we felt that we had utilized his time fairly. He 
and I had a standing sort of--I don't know how to describe it, but I'd say, "Mr. President, I've got three dates I'd like to put on the calendar for some coffee hours or briefings. I 
have a few dates, and I think we ought to get it done." "Well, all right, come on, level with me. How many dates and what are you involving me in?" He'd always agree. You 
know, I tried to make it just as light as I could and get by and say to Ken O'Donnell, "Okay, it's done. Put them on the schedule." 
But he was accommodating. I had to recognize we had our problems--it did involve his New Frontier program--but he had problems that extended far beyond that, 
and his time had to be properly utilized. And it couldn't be wasted; it couldn't be something to engage in small talk, it had to have some meaning to it if I was carving out of 
his schedule X amount of time over a period of weeks and months. 
And how do you supplement it? We came up with another idea, and this was all part of trying to do an organized effort. We decided to have Sunday brunches at my 
home. We had rented a house in Georgetown, and so that became a regular activity of ours. We tried to meld members of Congress and their wives with members of the media, 
and I was really surprised how successful they were, because it would be a simple sort of breakfast, a little buffet--just have a table and have some bacon and scrambled eggs and 
baked beans or something, and a bloody mary if you wanted it. That was the extent of it. And it would start at noontime and go just like any social time you have at your home, a 
couple of hours or so, and people would drift away. 
I remember the first one I had. There'd be a half a dozen media people I'd invite: Joe Alsop, who at that time was an extremely important member of the media; his column 
was extremely important to everybody. And I invited Joe, and Joe came, and Joe was so struck by the whole thing and the people he met that the next day he called me and asked 
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me if I would include him in some future ones because he just enjoyed it so much and it meant a lot to him. He met people. What amazed me about those meetings was that, 
particularly on the House side, you had important members of Congress: Wilbur Mills, Al [Albert] Thomas, the fellow that was chairman of the Appropriations Committee from 
Texas--G: 
Oh, George Mahon. 
O: George Mahon. You know, another twenty of that level in Congress that--this is long before House reform. And to have a brunch and to have three or four fellows like that 
along with half a dozen, or whatever it was, younger members of the House and Senate, and have Walter Lippmann and Joe Alsop, people like that, saying to me, "Who is that 
fellow over there?" Or having Al Thomas say, "That's Walter Lippmann? I've never met him." Or "That's Joe Alsop? I've never met him." What I realized early on was that with 
all of these people reporting about Washington, particularly the more senior and more widely known columnists and senior reporters, a great deal of their personal contact and 
concentration was on the Senate side of the Congress. 
Tape 2 of 5, Side 2 
O: The brunch [was part of] that continuing effort, again, I repeat the cliche: maximize your potential. And the objective--I'd have members of my White House staff at these 
brunches--we were trying in every conceivable way to get to know these people, to have some reason for contact. They talked about patronage, you know, as though you could 
control the Congress through some patronage device. And it was just not realistic; it never has been and never will be. First of all, it's very limited. Sure, Congress might 
recommend somebody to be an assistant secretary of something or other. Maybe six congressmen recommended somebody; maybe three or four senators recommended 
somebody. An ultimate decision has to be made and there are going to be nine disappointed people and one that feels pleased. That's a task that has to be discharged. 
What do you do in servicing these people or trying to ensure that they know that you care about them, you're interested in them, and you recognize their importance? And all of 
these things I've discussed are all part of it. 
Now, constantly, every day, I had reams of phone calls from the Congress, from members of the House and Senate, and sometimes it was a hang-up on a constituent 
inquiry; maybe a department or agency was aggravating the member because he couldn't get a response, that sort thing. And we were quick to do that. Every cabinet member 
knew that Larry O'Brien calling him called for an immediate response. 
G: You were sort of an ombudsman for the Congress then in terms of [inaudible]. 
O: You did; that was part of it, too. And it was just a part of trying to be as alert as you could, and as communicative as you could with these people. And oftentimes the day 
would end and you hadn't completed your phone calls, but all of us on the staff, four or 
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five of us, would see to it that our phone lists were complete. And we knew that complete meant that that return call had been made, or attempted, even if it were six or seven or 
eight o'clock at night. No answer in the office, maybe you'd call the man's home. You tried to find some way of letting a man know that you did return his call, although you 
[had] missed each other, and not have that hang over. 
All of that was geared to the day, which was every day, that you were going to drop by offices. You'd walk in, and the staff would know who you were at least--you 
were from the White House. And the member would not be reluctant to see you, and in most instances, frankly, he would be pleased that you dropped by. Now, that drop-by may 
be at the time when you're trying to prevail upon the member to change his point of view and support you. People used to envision that that was some kind of a weapon that you 
could use or something, but it was human relations. And I'll tell you, out of every five occasions when we or any one of us would try to persuade a member to come aboard who 
was reluctant or a question mark or indeed, had indicated he was voting wrong as we saw it, I'd say four out of five times those efforts were personalized: "The President would 
appreciate it." And I remember [on] so many occasions, I'd say, "Gee, don't do this. The President's having a hell of a time as it is. You know it's tough up here." And very 
honestly, I think that was more effective than debating the substance. 
Now, they'd talk about constituents: "Well, I'd like to go along with you, but this is going to hurt me." We had the cardinal overriding rule: you never, never suggest 
remotely to a member that he should commit political hara-kiri to support the President. Understand, he was elected to office; none of us have been. There's only one guy 
downtown in that White House that was elected to anything and his name is Kennedy, and up there, there were five hundred and thirty-five people that have constituents and want to 
stay in office and you've got to be realistic, you've got to be understanding, and on the occasion when the fellow says sorry, but no, don't take it personally at all. There'll be 
another occasion when maybe it will be yes, or maybe, or I'll abstain, or I'll pair, or something. Somewhere along the line, if you stay with it, and you communicate and you 
get to know people more and more, there's going to be a greater tendency on the part of that individual to try to be helpful to you somewhere, somehow. As long as it isn't going 
to cause him great political harm, at least potentially. 
For example, foreign aid, which we will get to. Ultimately, and it took a long time to get into this, [we would] do an analysis of the expenditures of foreign aid money 
district by district. People disliked foreign aid but if you could point out to them over in Missouri that X number of dollars flowed into companies and to employees in Missouri of 
foreign aid money as part of that foreign aid budget, that could be helpful in suggesting to the members' constituents that it wasn't a giveaway program, that they got a piece of the 
action. 
Now, I don't know, but you kept trying to think of these things, to develop them. Then the most sensitive part of it, and that was the difficulty because you had to be so 
careful. When I started in the job, first of all, I didn't know Mr. Rayburn. I had to get to 
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know him somehow. I would see him at the leadership breakfasts, I understood that, but I had to be up there and I had to see if I couldn't be a fellow who could drop in with some 
regularity and have a nice pleasant visit. And that applied to the Speaker on down through the key people in the Congress, in the House and in the Senate. 
G: Was Rayburn approachable in that sense? Could you set up an appointment and just go and--? 
O: At the outset it wasn't easy. He didn't make it difficult, but it was something that took him out of his normal pattern; here was this guy from the White House, you know. So I made 
the point when I'd make an appointment in advance, and I'd get the appointment but when I went in, I would play it as low key as possible and elicit from Mr. Rayburn conversation 
about Sam Rayburn and his life and his background and his experiences. And over a period of time it got so that I would drop in regularly, the blinds would be drawn; his 
eyesight was obviously deteriorating. He was using the spittoon and hitting it remarkably well, and he would talk about the Texas Rangers and the porch on his house that he used 
for an office, and all of the years, and how he tries to tell these members that you get this publicity in Washington, you enjoy the Washington social life, but you won't be here long 
if you don't remember back home and pay attention to back home, and all of this. 
Well, that's going on. On the Senate side, Mike Mansfield is extremely supportive and without my effort said to me at the outset, "This back room in my office suite, this 
room is yours to come and go as you please and have any meetings you want to in here." 
G: So was that your base on the Hill then? I was going to ask you about that. 
O: Yes. 
G: Did you keep any staff there or did--? 
O: Oh, no, no. 
G: Did you requisition some of their staff? 
O: No, on the Senate side, let's talk about Mike's role. Hubert was the number-two fellow in the leadership, but Mike was--I don't know whether I'd call him reticent--not a gregarious 
guy, let's put it that way, but very interested in the President's program, and he had been a Lyndon Johnson supporter for the nomination. But he was a staunch, loyal, just 
completely committed and dedicated supporter of the New Frontier program and Kennedy. And it was nice to be able to come into the back door of that room, and I 
would go and have a cup of coffee with him during the course of the day. Mike Manatos had the daily contact responsibilities, but I would be in with him [Mansfield], and 
depending on what was going on at the moment, he would arrange to have somebody go out on the floor and call in the appropriate senators, whether it was Bob Kerr, Clint 
Anderson, or what have you, so we could talk about our interests in the legislation, maybe 
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O'Brien --Interview I --34 
talk about an amendment or whatever. And then he'd even have a group of senators come in at lunch from time to time, where he'd serve lunch and I'd sit there, and he'd say, "Okay, 
Larry, now you tell them your sad story," or "Go ahead." And I'd make my pitch. Now, my God, you know, that's of tremendous value. Well, in the course of this, and with 
Rayburn, it got so that I didn't make an appointment. I didn't have to. I would drop in, and I would say, "Is the Speaker in?" "Oh, wait a couple of minutes; he's got somebody in 
there. I'm sure he'll be glad to see you." So it became informal, dropping by. 
So then it got to the next stage. With John McCormack I had a personal problem, at least I envisioned it might be, because I had been a Young Turk back in Massachusetts 
in the Kennedy group that got into a big battle with the McCormack people over control of the party structure there. And being an arrogant young guy, as you're apt to be when 
you're young, I thought that those old geezers ought to be thrown out and we'd take over. And it became a real riot in Massachusetts, not to get into all of that. But that was in the 
background. So it was with a little trepidation that I would walk in to see John. Well, to the contrary, John couldn't have been more cooperative and pleasant and gave me advice 
right from the start. Carl Albert and Hale Boggs were tremendous guys, and Sam--you know, he was a little remote, but at least I had established some contact with him. And so 
had Henry Hall Wilson. 
In any event, you've got to take it to another stage, and that's where the sensitivity came in. It was unheard of, I'm sure unprecedented, to have a joint head count, [between 
the White House staff and the congressional leadership], House and Senate--to sit down, actually in a room on the Hill, compare notes on the members of the House and the 
members of the Senate, with the leadership of the House and Senate, the Democratic leadership, and work out a joint head count. Now you're getting perilously close to 
violating the separation of powers, and there was a little flak on the House side in that regard. Because as this moved along, Rayburn and McCormack would call in the regional 
whips, and then we'd go over the whole--well, you know, you might as well set up shop up on the Hill, you're just about at the verge of that. There was no outward indication of 
any disturbance about it, but, I can't remember who it was, finally I saw an item in a column one day that one of the whips had said that he had registered his objection to the 
Speaker or the leadership about the incursion of the White House--O'Brien and his people from the White House--who had moved into activities up there that he felt weren't 
appropriate or proper in terms of the separation of the Congress and the White House. But that blew over, and I never had it brought directly to my attention. 
So over a period of time and then through the Johnson period [there were] even more refinements, more activities, so that it was a totally accepted procedure. And it was 
unprecedented. It wasn't motivated by any great strokes of smartness or genius or anything else; it was purely trying to utilize what you had available to try to cope with 
your responsibilities to promote the President's program with the Congress. And how do you do it? You did it the best way you could and tried to personalize it in human terms. 
G: Tell me, what was the significance of the joint head count? Did that give you an added 
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O'Brien --Interview I --35 
leverage because of the dynamics between the two? How did that work? 
O: Well, it was a cross reference and double check, for one thing, because you get to John Smith and we'd say, "Our information on John Smith is that he's right." The regional whip 
or the leader would say, "I question that. What's your source?" And then you go into that: "Because I feel that he has not made up his mind, that he's a question mark." So you 
go over name after name, and then [when] you get to the end of it, you have the number of rights, the number of wrongs, and the number of question marks. Then you get to what 
are the possibilities, and you put together a possibility list. Then you determine whether one of the whips or somebody else should be contacting the member, or somebody from 
downtown ought to be contacting the member again, or jointly you should be contacting the member, or the member should be asked by Sam Rayburn, and later John McCormack, 
who vigorously got into all of this, to come into his office to have a personal chat and McCormack would, incidentally, take on a lot of this. He would bring them off the floor 
all day long one-by-one to try to see if he couldn't sell them. So you pooled your intelligence. 
Now, you had an outside part of the head count and that was the White House outside, not White House-Congress jointly outside. And that would be head counts that 
we'd engage in that we would bring into the White House Biemiller and others in the AFL-CIO, maybe depending on the circumstances the teachers' federations or whatever, 
unions of one sort, or people that are natural allies, or allies in this given instance. Then you would bring them in and you'd work the head count there. That head count would be 
utilized after you refined as best you could the joint head count on the Hill. 
G: I see. But in these joint head counts on the Hill, would you have the House leadership and the Senate leadership there together? 
O: No, no. 
G: Oh, by joint you mean joint White House and legislative [liaison staff], but you wouldn't combine the two legislative sides? 
O: No. On the Senate side, of course, it was always much simpler. You know, it's again the numbers. So we'd sit in Mansfield's office on the Senate side, and Bobby Baker, who was 
in a key position in those early days, would join in the head count. And Mike would call in probably the chairman of the appropriate committee, or others, whatever, and we'd 
work out the head count of the hundred. Now, you're working out a head count of four hundred and thirty-five over on the other side and it can be much more complex. 
On the Senate side, you could get to that bottom line pretty well with the contributions. Baker was very good, you know. He was very knowledgeable and he'd 
just be around the floor and then he'd check out the ten or eleven and just see what the feel was. We would be talking to them directly. We had occasions, as you know, in these 
legislative struggles, to deal with the Republican side of the aisle. Ev [Everett] Dirksen, 
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O'Brien --Interview I --36 
specifically, was dealt with with regularity. On the House side [we dealt with] Charlie Halleck, Gerry Ford, and a handful of others up there that were in key positions. At times 
you'd find a friendly member. [William] McCulloch was a stalwart in the whole civil rights struggle in the House Judiciary Committee, and he was the senior minority member of the 
committee. 
But you knew that you'd better not spin too many wheels. You knew that under normal circumstances the maximum number of Republicans that you could attempt to do 
business with in a New Frontier legislative proposal probably was limited to no more than thirty, and that was based on the districts they represented. And on the Senate side it 
wouldn't be any more than [a handful], if indeed it was a handful. [Jacob] Javits comes to my mind, because Javits was a New York congressman and therefore there'd be an 
inclination on the part of Javits--or John Lindsay when Javits was a New York senator or Lindsay a New York congressman. Now, Lindsay voted with us on some occasions 
because it was in his best interests to do that. 
(Interruption) 
It should be mentioned at this time that it might be well to consider the role of the Vice President in the legislative process, because apparently, and I never had direct 
knowledge of this but it was perceived by me, [he had some] sensitivity regarding the initial treatment he received in terms of his colleagues in the Senate and what his 
continuing role would be with them. I think that bothered him for a long time. I'll tell you that we never had a Senate head count in Mike Mansfield's office, or a substantive 
discussion with a senator or senators in Mike Mansfield's office, without requesting the presence of the Vice President, who was across the hall in his office. And the Vice 
President would come over and join us, because there'd generally be a group or something where we were sitting around a table. And he'd participate fully in all of the give and take, 
and the guessing games at times about attitudes, or the perception of why I thought [someone] might be for or against, and all the things that go into trying to develop a 
majority vote. 
But you have to remember, too, that in the Senate we had a much easier time. The Senate was strongly Democratic anyway, even though it had its composition of southern 
Democrats. The fact is that you had a pretty darned good shot at an up vote, a plus vote, most of the time in the Senate, if you put the work and effort into it. I'm not suggesting it 
was just a simple rollover, but it was just easier to handle, easier in the sense that the number of people you were dealing with, the Democratic-Republican breakdown in the 
Senate, and you had Mansfield and Humphrey in the leadership, both of them working arduously on behalf of the program. And the Vice President would participate in all these 
meetings, and his input was always sought and welcomed. But nevertheless, I was never quite sure--I never discussed it with the Vice President, or later President for that 
matter--but I always had the feeling that he was sensitive to what he perceived as somewhat of a change in the attitude of senators toward him, because he was no longer a 
member of the club. 
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O'Brien --Interview I --37 
G: Was he more tentative than he had been before, do you think? 
O: Seemed to be or--yes. And certainly I didn't see any indications of personal effort along the often-reported, traditional, Johnson nose-to-nose, chest-to-chest persuasion. He had 
stepped back from that. But he was ever present and involved and interested. It didn't even have to do with the Senate. I remember on one occasion, when it had to do with I 
think perhaps Medicare, and we had that long bout with Medicare that extended into the Johnson presidency. We had Kerr-Mills; we had Wilbur Mills' reluctance to go with our 
program; we had the terrific effort being made by the American Medical Association and others to block all this; we had in Kerr, obviously, on the Senate side a very strong 
member that wielded a lot of power. All of this added up to an effort that extended, as you know, over a long period of time before we began to approach a breakthrough. 
I remember, and I believe it was in that context, at some stage I was talking to the Vice President, and I may have suggested to him that perhaps he could talk to Wilbur 
Mills, or three or four members in the House. It might not even have been Medicare, but I think it involved three or four key members of the House on this particular issue. This 
was in the White House one day, and we had just left a meeting in the Cabinet Room and were standing in the hallway. And he said, "Well, sure, I'll be happy to. I'll get hold of 
them. But Larry, I just wonder about my influence on them. I just wonder about my impact. I'm not sure that it really may mean as much as you think," something like that, 
that indicated to me that that was a feeling he retained throughout. 
When I first took over the task, he contacted me and we visited, and he at that time said he was fully prepared and would have the time to do it and he was located up in 
the Senate, to be a total participant in the effort and that he fully intended to do that. Which was great. And he invited my wife and I out to his house one evening and we spent 
a long evening just chatting. And it was clear--this was early on--that he envisioned that he could make a continuing significant contribution to the movement of the New Frontier 
program in the Congress generally and in the Senate specifically. And he undertook that with these head counts and these meetings we'd have and these strategy sessions we'd 
have. But I don't think he felt, as time went on, as comfortable as he had envisioned in this activity, or that he was really making the impact he had hoped to make. 
G: Do you think it was a result of that caucus where it was [inaudible]? 
O: I think that was part of it. It had to be. I never, as I said, was intimate with what took place, I was just on the periphery of that activity. But it became widely known that there 
had been an impasse of sorts or a degree of conflict, or that Lyndon Johnson had been diplomatically advised that he was not going to be playing the role he envisioned. 
G: Do you think it had to do with his own disillusionment with the vice presidency in general and perhaps--? 
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O'Brien --Interview I --38 
O: No. I think that, no, it was more personal than that. It was that he was a member of the club for a long time, and somehow or other he was--what do they do with people on 
occasion? They become a member emeritus, sort of. You know, you're just not as intimate with us as you used to be; you can't be. You're in the executive branch of 
government, you know, therefore you can't be. 
This whole thing involved two very different human beings, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, during an eight-year span at different periods, having the same 
responsibility and the same goals, objectives, whether it was called the New Frontier or the Great Society. But [they were] very different kinds of people. 
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but while I think of it, these meetings that I have described and these contacts that Jack Kennedy had, Jack Kennedy would not force 
the issue with a group of senators or congressmen or a mixed group in terms of securing their support. He would present his case, he would respond to questions, he'd engage in a 
vigorous exchange of views and all the rest, but he would stop short of sort of putting the finger on the fellow's chest and saying, "Are you with me? You've got to be with me," 
that sort of sales pitch. In that area, he didn't feel that degree of comfort or that "we're old buddies," you see. I mean, he knew them all, they all knew him, but he wasn't an intimate, 
really, of any of them in the final analysis. Maybe there were two or three congressmen or a couple of senators that he had close friendships with but it was there, he was the 
president of the United States and he had been junior among them, and it wasn't his nature, to use the vernacular, to put the arm on you directly, frontally. But he would 
vigorously present his views and his arguments. 
Now, Lyndon Johnson in the same set of circumstances, the same kind of a grouping or meeting, would make an effort, before that meeting ended, to really get a 
complete, total commitment from the individual or individuals within a group. It was a difference in approach. But you see, both men recognized that within the time limits 
imposed upon them as president, that it was of overriding importance to try to get their program enacted. Sure, you have foreign policy, you have crises, you have all the rest, but 
this is integral to the whole activity and integral to establishing a record and making progress. 
In both cases, with both men, I attended every cabinet meeting from day one with President Kennedy. The cabinet members sat at the cabinet table. Those of us [on the 
White House staff], the three or four or whatever it was that might be in there for a purpose as participants in the meeting, would sit along the wall. But the legislative 
program would be on the agenda every cabinet meeting, without fail. It would be on the formal agenda of the meeting. Therefore I would be a participant at that point in the 
meeting, in terms of discussing the progress, or lack of it, of the legislative program. When I became a member of the cabinet with President Johnson, it was a simple matter of 
moving from the wall to a seat at the table. But the item was still on the agenda--there was very little discussion of the Post Office Department in cabinet meetings--and when the 
item came up, I would handle the presentation. 
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O'Brien --Interview I --39 
There was another difference. I would report at the cabinet meeting as a noncabinet member, with President Kennedy, on progress or lack of progress. And 
Kennedy would allow comments [from] the appropriate members of the cabinet, naturally, as we discussed these matters. And that was it. With Lyndon Johnson, when my end of it 
would be completed, he would literally point the finger at the specific members of the cabinet, about lack of progress. And he would want to know, not from me, but from 
whoever it might be, why. And "When's the last time you saw the chairman of the committee?" "Have you been up on the Hill recently?" and, you know, all of that. That 
was another added dimension, just the approach to things of the two very different kinds of men. 
Furthermore, at the leadership breakfasts, while Kennedy was content to have the full discussion of the legislative program and have Mike Mansfield and the Speaker and 
McCormack and whoever, or Humphrey, report on what they anticipated and when a bill might come up and what the committee progress looked like and all the rest of it, and 
you'd have a full-blown discussion, Lyndon Johnson wasn't satisfied with that. So we developed flow charts, and at each leadership breakfast somebody on the staff would get 
up there in the dining room and put those flow charts up on easels, show what progress had been made since the prior week, listing the legislation, having a big circular thing with 
a dial on it or whatever. Then everybody would have to turn to the flow chart and stare at it while the President wouldn't only verbalize this, but he would actually specify 
percentages of progress to date in terms of the overall program, what percentage of bills were out of committee, what percentage of bills had passed either house, either body, and 
so forth. So that was an additional refinement, which is a reflection on the man's approach to things. 
G: How did the flow charts get started? 
O: I don't remember. I think I had the Defense Department--we got some department to make these flow charts. I really don't know. I think it was my reaction to President 
Johnson, frankly, that he would be so specific. The general discussion, fine. But then he'd be so specific that it might be better to have flow charts. Well, flow charts, the first time 
we ever put them in the leadership breakfast, [it] startled the devil out of the leaders. Because they looked, and you were coming perilously close to where some leader might 
say, "Hey, wait a minute, I really don't work for you." (Laughter) "You're asking me all these questions, the man needs to know why the color hasn't changed or--" 
G: That's incredible. 
O: But that, anyway, is part of the role of the Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, in the legislative process and I think his personal perception regarding it, and the approach of 
both Presidents to the legislative process. 
G: Fascinating. You mentioned that you went out to his house for dinner, and that you met 
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O'Brien --Interview I --40 
with him when you first got that job. What advice did he give you in terms of dealing with the Congress? 
O: I think he refrained from any specific advice. There were two other couples present. One was Bobby Baker and his wife, and I must say--it was a Texas congressman and his wife. 
Jack Brooks. I didn't think after twenty-five years I'd recall who was at dinner that night, but I think I have it right. 
The conversation after dinner really went along the lines of the struggle, the House situation, the Senate situation, the New Frontier program, the activities that we were 
jointly engaged in, and Bobby Baker's ability to contribute in terms of head counts and giving us counsel and up-to-date knowledge on what was transpiring. The Vice 
President--his office was up there and he was alert to everything and would continue to be, and the three of us would be in communication, along with Mike Mansfield, on a 
regular basis. And I don't recall that he ever said, "And here, A, B, C, D, is what you ought to contemplate doing." I think it was very general, but clearly, we're part of a very 
small team up in the Senate, the three of us along with Mike. 
G: You've mentioned that he did participate in those meetings, but do you think he was utilized as much as he should have been on the Hill? 
O: I don't know. I think he was kept advised of and privy to everything. He was kept abreast of what we might have determined was the current state of something, where the holes 
and the individual problems were, whether it was substantively with the legislation under consideration or with the member of the Senate or House that we were trying to persuade. 
He was privy to all of that. And I was not, frankly, other than I'll bet [on] a rare occasion--one I recall of asking him specifically--I didn't feel I was in a position to say to 
the Vice President of the United States, "Will you contact these five fellows?" On a couple of occasions it occurred, only in general conversation. My responsibility was to be 
sure that he was fully abreast of everything that was going on, and from that point on he would make his contribution to progress as he saw it. You know, you were not dealing 
around the table as with a cabinet member; you were dealing with the Vice President of the United States. Now, I would feel fairly comfortable--I would feel comfortable, I 
wouldn't say fairly--saying to John Gardner or Bob McNamara or anybody, "Here's what I think you ought to do, and you want to get back to that chairman and from what we've 
learned you've just got to--" you know, that kind of conversation, not arrogant or anything, but just sort of you're on an even keel, among equals, in a sense. But with the 
Vice President of the United States, it would not be seemly to say, "By the way, this is what I think you ought to do." He had all the facts, he had all the problems before him, he 
could make his own judgments on how he could be most effective. 
G: You've covered a lot of ground here, and I want to ask you to go back in some detail on some of the various facets of your congressional relations job. First of all, let's talk a little 
bit more about the Sequoia. I would like for you to describe, if you will, a trip on it. You mentioned some of the elements of it, but tell me how you would describe an evening. 
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O'Brien --Interview I --41 
What did it entail? 
O: Well, first of all, I'm not familiar with yachts, but the Sequoia to me was rather an impressive yacht, or boat or whatever you call it. I recognized it as a tool that was highly 
usable. By the same token, at least on the first few occasions, it was a pleasant experience. I think the crew was composed probably of about seven people. It would 
leave the dock promptly [at six o'clock], or as promptly as we could. Sometimes there was a delay of ten or fifteen minutes while one of our guests and his wife hadn't arrived, 
but we found that guests arrived promptly as a rule. It would be very unusual for it to have any undue delay. There was never a declination of an invitation that I can recall on 
it. Maybe a fellow had a conflict on a date and asked to be considered the next time out, but I don't recall anyone saying, "Oh, that's nice, but I'm not interested." This had not 
been a boat that members of Congress were used to being aboard. 
The trip was carefully structured so that six o'clock was an appropriate departure time because an hour out you would probably be at the point where you would give a 
signal to start serving food. An hour and a half out, you were at Mount Vernon where this little recorded ceremony would take place with the flags flying, and [then] the boat 
would turn around. 
The first hour, generally, was sitting around, roaming around, just small talk, and everyone with a drink of one sort or another. Occasionally we'd bring an accordion player 
aboard, so you might have a sing-along, depending on the nature of the group as you got a feel for them. And sometimes yes, sometimes no, maybe it was just the accordion player, 
or maybe you decided to tell the accordion player to take a long break because it wasn't that kind of a group. 
But you tried to make everybody comfortable; it was a very pleasant boat to be on. It was roomy, and it had the two decks. Along about the end of the first hour, you had 
figured who you would like to chat with for a few minutes, to get things rolling. And you would make that effort. My wife would be visiting with the ladies, and I'd make the effort 
to have three or four individual or two or three-member group conversations to start to get the ball rolling on whatever I felt the subject or subjects should be. We would then try 
to build on that by enlisting more discussions or conversations which might wind up with six or eight members at the prow or somewhere having a chat. But not heavy, not heavy. 
I didn't envision one of those trips as a trip where I did a head count, that hopefully positions would be altered from what I perceived to be the positions of the various people 
on that boat before the trip started. I wanted to leave a good feeling. The follow-up would be with them in their office or elsewhere, so it was a trip not where any member 
would leave and say, "Gee, that damned trip, that O'Brien or some staff guy just was a pain in the neck." 
G: You didn't try to exact a commitment out of them? 
O: No, nothing like that. 
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O'Brien --Interview I --42 
G: Okay. 
O: We'd talk about current events, current activities. You might switch it to baseball, and you might talk about any subject. And there'd be a little music playing, and then we had 
these little tables they could put up around. I think we could accommodate, for a buffet dinner, somewhere around thirty-four to thirty-six people fairly comfortably in the various 
parts of the boat. 
Then after dinner, the last hour of the trip, you'd probably stay pretty much social, because then there was a blending of the members and their wives, all sort of mixed 
together in what was truly a social occasion. Very light touch. Really what you were building was if the member enjoyed the trip, that was going to make it, hopefully, a little 
easier to talk to him about substance in a week or two. It was all just part of the "let's maintain contact" activity. 
Now, there would be times, however, as the boat approached the nine o'clock docking, where the conversations had taken a turn that I felt we ought to pursue it for 
another fifteen minutes or half-hour, at which time I would tell the captain not to dock. No one knew the difference. We'd j