“It never would’ve happened,” Bobby Kennedy famously said, “except we were all so tired that night.”

What Kennedy was referring to was the nomination of Lyndon Johnson as his brother’s running-mate in 1960.

The background was this:

The race for the nomination had been modestly contentious among JFK, Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey (with Adlai Stevenson’s loyalists aligning with LBJ to try to stop JFK). LBJ was the Senate Majority Leader and an immensely powerful, suitably corrupt man. He and the Kennedys despised each other.

The Kennedys knew the race against Nixon would be close, and the electoral maps they were working with indicated that they would have to carry Texas in order to win the general election. JFK decided that in order to insure the active support of Johnson he would offer the vice presidential nomination to him.

At that time, the vice presidency was an office accurately described by a former V.P., John Nance Garner, as a “bucket of warm spit.” It held no power and was largely ceremonial; V.P.s were kept out of the policy loops. JFK was certain that Johnson, if offered the job, would decline it. But the offer itself would demonstrate good faith and help assuage Johnson’s supporters.

RFK tried to talk him out of it, without success. Then Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House and Johnson crony, convinced LBJ to accept.

The electoral map broke the way Kennedy had predicted, and Texas gave him a narrow victory over Richard Nixon.

The deal with Johnson, the offer of the second-spot on the ticket, was a fatal error for Kennedy.

No one speaks of it but it is nonetheless on a lot of minds. Barack Obama, for reasons some might find appealing, is an obvious target. If any person or group of persons are so endangered by his election that they feel warranted in going after him –– a clear possibility –– it would do him no harm to protect himself by selecting as his running-mate a vice president whose views, idealism, and toughness approach his own.

Barack Obama is young, brilliant, and guided by a strong moral compass. He is a very real threat to some very powerful people.

To offer the job to Clinton would therefore be a serious, perhaps dangerous, mistake.