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by veterans of earlier administrations, who found their way into the White House and believed themselves better prepared to lead the country than he was.
    As for Neustadt, Kennedy had no plan to appoint him to some White House job that carried greater importance than the one he had held during the Truman presidency in the Bureau of the Budget. A personal encounter with Neustadt in December 1960 leads me to think that Kennedy’s decision disappointed him. Neustadt spoke to a lunch meeting of Columbia College faculty, including myself, a new instructor in the history department. I have vivid memories of Neustadt speaking to us at the university’s Faculty Club from notes written on the back of an envelope about a recent meeting with the president-elect on plans for the transition. Listening to the professor, who seemed like a consummate Washington insider, I could not imagine Neustadt not wanting to become part of Kennedy’s White House and a contributor to the young president’s development of exciting New Frontier programs.
    Kennedy saw Lyndon B. Johnson, the vice president–elect, as a prime example of someone convinced he had greater understanding than Kennedy of how to set the direction of the new administration. Vice presidents had traditionally been men of limited influence in the government. John Adams, the first vice president, described the position as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Woodrow Wilson asserted, “In explaining how little there is to be said about it, one has evidently said all there is to say.” During the 1960 campaign, when Eisenhower was asked to name a major idea of Vice President Nixon’s that he had adopted as president, he replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” Eisenhower’s comment spoke more about his reluctance to back Nixon’s reach for the White House than Nixon’s performance as vice president.
    As the former Senate majority leader and a domineering personality who hated being anything less than top dog, Johnson arrived in the vice presidency determined to transform the office into something more important than it had been, though he was mindful of how Nixon had used the office to make himself into a credible presidential candidate. Johnson’s twenty-seven years in Washington, first as a secretary to a Texas congressman, then as a congressman for eleven years and a senator for twelve, had been a case study in mastering the Capitol’s congressional politics and making himself a prominent national figure. Many astute Washington insiders wondered why he would trade his powerful Senate post for the less consequential VP job. But Johnson believed that his days as a dominant majority leader were coming to an end: If Nixon became president, he would be less cooperative with a Democratic-controlled Senate than Eisenhower had been; if Kennedy won the White House, Johnson assumed that he would be a secondary player with a Democrat as president. Better to be second fiddle to Kennedy as vice president than to be just one of several senators eclipsed by his party’s new leader.
    But presiding over the Senate and casting rare tie-breaking votes—a vice president’s only constitutional duties—was not Johnson’s idea of how he would serve in Kennedy’s White House. Within days of becoming vice president, he asked Kennedy to sign an executive order giving him “general supervision” over a number of government agencies and directing cabinet secretaries to copy the vice president on all major documents sent to the president. Seeing Johnson’s request as the opening wedge in a campaign to make himself a co-president, Kennedy simply dropped the memo in a drawer, where it was left to languish along with Johnson’s ambitions for a larger role in the administration. In a 1964 interview with Arthur Schlesinger, Jackie Kennedy recalled Jack and Lyndon together vying or