"After tomorrow, I'll never have to worry about those damn Kennedys again."
LBJ to his longtime mistress Madeleine Brown, November 21, 1963
LBJ, longtime protégé of U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn, was a crude, down and dirty back room, arm-twisting politician, and Kennedy's opponent for the 1960 Democratic nomination. He had traded his support for JFK into a VP slot on the ticket that had led nowhere. He knew, by 1963, that his political future and ambitions, which included a vow to be President, were virtually nonexistent. The Vice-President position he held was, as it has been for most of the second half of the 20th Century, of little power, and even less prestige, especially since JFK spent less than 3 hours in private sessions with Johnson for the time he was president. His own powerful Democratic Party in Texas was split between the conservatives under him and Connally and the new liberals of Kennedy and U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough. He was also aware that JFK was looking to drop him. In fact, Richard M. Nixon had, publicly, mentioned that very fact while in Dallas, the day before the assassination.
In addition, for the 3 years Johnson had been Vice-President, a number of political scandals had come to light that involved him:
The Billie Sol Estes agricultural scandal of 1961:
A Desperate and Dying Man
What are these 3 so smug about? Stock-market killing or the JFK killing?