Not to mention that obviously Johnson was aware of how the knob worked. And I find that it's funny that people think that a Vice President can't get temperature adjusted to his liking and should or would play games with him. "Oh there he goes again" type of thing. I don't think you get to be in a position of being able to fly a President or Vice President of any country by having an attitude and not being fully respectful of those in power.
No, he wasn't. It was intentionally put in place to deceive him, and the deception worked.
> "people think that a Vice President can't get temperature adjusted to his liking"
Most VPs could get the temperature adjusted to their liking. Johnson was a special kind of control freak. He liked to make people uncomfortable by making it extra hot, extra cold, walking around naked (it's why he replaced some of the solid bulkheads with transparent plexiglas), raising the hydraulic table and his hydraulic chair so high that people at the table looked like children who could barely reach, and so on.
The Air Force crew got sick of his being in the cockpit, and they didn't much care for those antics, so they gave him the fake temperature control. No, he didn't know how it worked, and no, they didn't make it as hot or as cold as he wanted it to be, they just went along enough to keep him from making trouble for them.
> "not being fully respectful of those in power"
How many Air Force Colonels do you know? They'll give a guy the respect he earns, but they're not known for their willingness to defer to LBJ-style bullshit.
[One of our volunteers was the plane's crew chief for most of a decade. We got a lot of interesting inside stories on slow days.]
However as another commenter pointed out the "phony" switch worked.
Plus according the the above book not only did the crewman adjust the temperature when he saw the light flash, but Johnson felt the temperature was adjusted.
The idea here is not whether or not Johnson understood the technology. But I find it hard to believe that a man who is vice President of the United States is so easily duped. He asked for a switch to adjust temperature and he got a switch that could adjust temperature.
Despite the fact that "one of our volunteers was the plane's crew chief" do you think that it's at all possible that the story was somewhat embellished for effect? (Not saying it was but we are not talking about sworn court testimony when someone relates something that happened many years prior, right?)
> "I find it hard to believe that a man who is vice President of the United States is so easily duped"
You don't think highly-ranked Air Force officials can pull off a deceptive trick like this? They couldn't give the VP a switch, lie to him about what it did, and then manually mimic what he was trying to do but to a lesser degree? (They would also sometimes start with a large effect and then slowly return the temperature to normal.)
> "do you think that it's at all possible that the story was somewhat embellished"
We had multiple sources for this particular story.
