Holding Up LBJ

Senator Pastore gives President Johnson a helping hand.

I was in the archives of Senator John O. Pastore at Providence College this week doing research for my next book about the origins of public media. Pastore was a long-serving senator from Rhode Island and a stalwart proponent of broadcast regulation, higher textile tariffs, and expanded use of nuclear power. (A reminder that the policy bundles of the mid-20th century weren’t packaged in quite the same way as they are in the early 21st.)

In 1964, President Johnson came to Providence, Rhode Island to campaign. A newspaper photographer took this picture of Johnson waving from the back of a convertible. Pastore is seated just in front of his legs.

Standard stuff. Pair it with some boilerplate copy and you’ve got a simple article about Johnson’s campaign stop.

But there’s another picture that I find much more evocative. This is what Pastore was actually doing while seated beneath Johnson.

It solves two problems. You don’t want the President falling out of a moving vehicle, so having someone brace him makes sense. LBJ was the second tallest President in US history at almost 6’ 4”, so he particularly needed the support. He got it from the 5’ 4” Pastore, one of the shortest men in the Senate at the time.

You also want local dignitaries to be close by in order to bask in the reflected attention; thus Pastore needs to be in the car with Johnson, the nearer the better. This way, Pastore is both literally and metaphorically supporting the President.

The photographer clearly grasped the symbolic significance of the posture, thus the photo. But there are many ways of interpreting that symbolism. A Rhode Island booster might see it as personifying Rhode Island’s small but vital role in the nation. The often overlooked state nicknamed “Little Rhody” doing the unflashy work of keeping the nation on its feet.

I prefer a more pragmatic interpretation. It’s a tangible reminder that, despite their high office, senators still have to carry water—or, in this case, hold the legs—for the head of their party. Pastore was a noted orator and a skilled politician, yet when the President came to town he was relegated to leg-support in chief.

There’s even a little evidence that Pastore or his staff might have shared my interpretation. There was only a single copy of the full car shot (along w/ a negative) in the folder but multiple copies of the holding leg pic, suggesting that Pastore’s office distributed the first picture widely while just filing away the second. They knew which photo put their man in the best possible light and which did not.

Finally, I bet that Johnson would have loved the physicality of this moment and what it represented. He was well-known for using his size to dominate fellow senators, like the oft-repeated tales of whipping out his not-so-little Johnson (nicknamed “Jumbo”) in the little senators room while whipping up votes for legislation. If ever there was a politician who would have enjoyed standing over a subordinate and making him hold him up, Johnson would be that guy.