On November 22, 1963, the burdensome tasks of the American presidency were placed on the shoulders of a man who, very much to his own dismay, had remained at the periphery of power for some three years. For Lyndon Johnson, the vice presidency had become a depressing straitjacket from which there seemed no escape – “not worth a bucket of warm spit,” as his fellow Texan John Nance Garner (“Cactus Jack”) once famously said. Within a matter of hours, however, he was thrust into the full dimensions of the presidency under circumstances unimagined. Upon taking the presidential oath, it was incumbent on Johnson to provide leadership not just to his country but to the entire “free world.” Few people were as qualified for the harrowing task as Johnson, who was dyed in the wool of American politics and had reason to consider Kennedy his political junior. But since he had obtained the presidency in the wake of tragedy, Johnson was still very much working in Kennedy's shadow. With memories of the brutal murder in Dallas still afresh, he had little choice but to pose as the faithful executor of the murdered president's policies. “Let us continue,” he therefore pledged in his first presidential address to the Congress. “And now, the ideas and the ideals which [Kennedy] so nobly represented must and will be put into effective action.”

The American project for a multilateral nuclear force (MLF) within NATO seemed only one case in point – and it is on the ups and downs of this project during the Johnson years that this chapter will focus. Johnson had not been made aware of Kennedy's reservations about the project. He rather assumed that his predecessor's personal support was as strong as the official record. In 1964, the State Department's Europeanists even transformed the MLF into the spearhead of his transatlantic policies and a test of American leadership in Europe. They presented the establishment of a multilaterally owned and operated nuclear force as far and away the best approach to giving the European allies – above all Germany – a say in the nuclear defense of the West.