[SeekAndFind]

RE: Seymour Hersh claims that Kennedy was planning to select Stuart Symington of Missouri as his running mate but was blackmailed into picking LBJ by J. Edgar Hoover.

So, what skeletons were in JFK’s closet that makes him so eminently blackmailable?

[Verginius Rufus]

Hersh has 9 or 10 pages in his book on how LBJ forced Kennedy to pick him for VP. The gist of it is LBJ knew about JFK's womanizing (from Hoover) and used that to blackmail him.

Kennedy narrowly lost California in 1960. Hersh thinks he would have carried it with Symington on the ticket because Symington was popular there (he had been Secretary of the Air Force in the Truman administration) and that would have offset any losses in the South if Johnson had not been on the ticket.