Now for the US vice-presidency

Now that America’s exhausting primary campaign season has come to an end, the gossip will centre around the two candidates’ choices for ‘veep’.

It's a job that many occupants have described as worthless - but for the fact that so many veeps became president mid-term.

Hillary Clinton has already alluded to the possibility (and no doubt the subject of constant home gossip) of Barack (right) Obama’s taking a bullet.

It is usually the case that the vice-presidential candidate doesn’t really add much to the ticket. But this year it will.

McCain needs a younger running mate, given his age. Obama needs someone very unblack and possibly female to enthuse women voters who stuck by Hillary to her long-drawn out blackout. That won’t be Hillary herself, unless Obama wants to contemplate a divorce move by his wife Michelle.

But then it might be. There is one nearly precise parallel. It was 1960, Jack Kennedy had all but won the nomination in Los Angeles, but he had to contemplate a hard race against Richard Nixon, the incumbent vice-president. It wasn’t clear he could win.

The choice of vice president might deliver him a swing state, of which Texas was preeminent, and it was all but controlled by the senate majority leader - and second most powerful American - Lyndon Johnson.

Most of Kennedy’s entourage, and most especially his brother Bobby, who had managed his successful campaign for the nomination, were opposed with gale force to that idea. They hated Lyndon, for some of the same reasons Obama supporters detest Hillary -he didn’t know when to give up, and his style was antithetical.

Kennedy (left) and his team had, in fact, agreed to offer the prize to Stuart Symington of Missouri, a friend and middle-roader handsome senator. And then Lyndon and his mentor, House speaker Sam Rayburn (who would, as always, chair the convention), decided that the Texas senator must have the second spot.

He got it. The question is how. It was over the dead bodies of some of the innermost Kennedy supporters. I can tell you that the feeling was like a nuclear bomb over the city - I was there, a college freshman in the most junior of positions, delegate-chauffeur.

Si Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize winning super-journalist, wrote a stunning book ‘The dark side of Camelot,’ confirming some of the worst gossip about the Kennedy presidency and adding some black facts of his own. He devotes a chapter to the Johnson selection.

Edgar Hoover (right) was often described as the second most powerful American, the FBI director who, on the arrival of every new president, confirmed his own continuance in office by handing him a ream of seamy secrets about the new leader’s sex life or that of his opponents.

There was no candidate in memory about whom there were so many dirty secrets, and I refer to those amply confirmed in subsequent years. Not to put too fine a point on it, his womanising was notorious. And Hoover was close to Johnson.

The problem is that so many of the people who could confirm all this were and are dead.

But Kennedy’s long-time secretary Evelyn Lincoln, is quoted as saying: “(Johnson) had been using all the information Hoover could find on Kennedy…And Hoover was in on the pressure on Kennedy at the Convention…about womanising…anything he could dig up. Johnson was using that as clout. Kennedy was angry, because they had boxed him into a corner.”

Well, Johnson delivered. A lot of dead voters helped deliver the state, minutely divided, to the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. That, along with an equally corrupted process in Illinois, gave Kennedy the election, which Hersh calls “stolen”.

Entry by the back door?

Now how would Hillary ‘box in’ Obama to make a meaningful demand for the vice-presidency? His books don’t suggest much womanising - or anything beyond his self-revealed modest drug consumption in college. Nothing would stop the relentless Hillary at self-aggrandisement, as the campaign’s finish has shown. She’d use anything.

But my guess is that there isn’t anything really to blackmail him with. It wouldn’t even be credible for Hillary (left) to threaten to stay at home during the campaign. In a way that would give Obama too much pleasure.

My guess is that she can only hint at a campaign that gets out of control, where she and Bill get off-message and present a confused picture for the voter, effectively delivering the White House to McCain, since everyone thinks it will be a close election.

The sight of Bill running around making his usual innuendo against the Democratic nominee and Hillary destroying him with faint praise might be enough for Obama to forgive her for her suggestion that waiting out the primary season could bring a surprise like the Bobby Kennedy assassination.

It’s a long shot. But then Hillary, in that most hideous of suggestions of this long hideous season, is right. Obama would be unusually vulnerable as president, no matter how protected. And denied entry to the White House by the front door, she could come in by the back door. She has all but confirmed that this is what’s on her mind.

And that’s the person who was thought to have the presidency all sewed up, a year ago. (I note that, in 2006, I quoted a senior White House official as saying that they could leave the Iran problem ‘to Hillary,’ meaning her presidency in 2009.)

My guess is Obama won’t buy it. He’ll promise her the department of health, education and welfare, and then send his boys over there to cut her to ribbons until she resigns in despair, her senate seat lost, her career in ruins. As they say, revenge is taken as a cold entrée.

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W SCOTT THOMPSON is a national security expert who served for American Presidents and is a professor emeritus at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is the author or editor of 13 books on world political issues and resides in Washington, Bali and Manila.