His finest years

Just after 8.50 on Tuesday morning, 26 November 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson sat down behind the desk in the Oval Office for the first time as President, four days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  According to Robert Caro, the new chief executive of the United States, now the most powerful person in the world, did not then make a call to his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev; nor did he confer with aides, or have his secretary place calls to the leaders of Congress, or issue an executive order. Instead, Johnson’s initial action was to phone, himself, the offices of the US Senate and order the desk he used as Senate Majority Leader to be delivered to the White House to replace the government-issue model installed the night before.

This was not merely an obsessive, self-absorbed act by a neurotic and insecure man, although LBJ was deeply neurotic and insecure.