The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  In fact, when Kennedy is assassinated, none of his major legislation—civil rights, various other bills, his tax-cut bill—none of them were going to be passed. But nobody comes and asks Lyndon Johnson about legislation. No one asks for his help.

  DR: John Kennedy took a trip to Texas in November of 1963. Why did he need to go to Texas when he had Lyndon Johnson as vice president? Why did he need to shore up Texas?

  RC: The situation in Texas was that Lyndon Johnson’s protégé and longtime administrative aide, John Connally, had become governor. I spent several days with Governor Connally down on his ranch. He was a very conservative man. He really was philosophically opposed to Lyndon Johnson’s liberal philosophy. And he had taken over not only the Democratic political machine in Texas but the money-raising.

  Texas was the major source of financing for the Democratic Party as a whole. Connally had brought that under his control, and he and Johnson were in a very tense situation.

  Eisenhower had actually carried Texas in 1952 and 1956. And Jack Kennedy knows that he has to have Texas, the money and the vote, in 1964.

  Was he planning to drop Lyndon Johnson from the ticket? If you talk to anyone who was close to Lyndon Johnson, it’s very important to them to say that Kennedy was not planning to drop him from the ticket, and of course Jack Kennedy would say in public, “No, of course I’m not going to do that.”

  In fact, Kennedy said different things to other people. There’s enough reason to believe that Johnson might have been dropped.

  DR: So President Kennedy is assassinated. Where is Lyndon Johnson at the time of the assassination?

  RC: He’s three cars behind Kennedy’s car in the presidential motorcade in Dallas. In the motorcade there is, first, the open limousine with Jack Kennedy and Jackie. In front of them on the jump seats were John Connally, this tall, very handsome man with a leonine head of white hair, and his wife, Nellie Connally, who was once Sweetheart of the University at the University of Texas, still a very beautiful woman.

  Behind them was the Secret Service car known as the Queen Mary because it was so heavily armored. In that car, there were four agents standing on the running boards, and inside there were four agents in the back with their automatic rifles concealed on the floor of the car.

  Then there’s a seventy-five-foot space between the cars, because the Secret Service wants the president and vice president to be separated. And then comes Lyndon Johnson’s car. He’s sitting in the back seat on the right-hand side. Lady Bird’s in the center. On the left is the senator from Texas, Ralph Yarborough, and in the front seat next to the driver is a Secret Service agent named Rufus W. Youngblood, a tall, lanky Georgian.

  They hear a sharp, cracking noise. Nobody knows what it is. It sounds like the backfire from a policeman’s motorcycle or someone popping a balloon. But when I interviewed John Connally, he said to me, “You know, Bob, I was a hunter. I knew the moment I heard it that it was the sound of a hunting rifle.”

  Nobody quite knows what’s happening. Youngblood, in the front seat of Johnson’s car, hears this sound. He doesn’t know what it is.

  Youngblood recalls, “I saw the president leaning to the left. All of a sudden, I saw the Secret Service agents in the Queen Mary jumping to their feet. One of them has a rifle in his hand and was looking around.”

  And then they realize what’s happening, and Youngblood whirls around. Lady Bird Johnson, who recalled this very vividly, says, “He shouted in a voice I had never heard him use before, ‘Get down! Get down!’ ” And he grabs Lyndon by the right shoulder and pulls him down onto the floor of the back seat and jumps over the back of the front seat and lies on top of Lyndon Johnson to protect him with his own body.

  Because it wasn’t just the president who was hit by a shot; so was the governor of Texas. Who knew if there were going to be more shots, if the vice president would be a target?

  The Secret Service agents then all had radios, which they wore like a shoulder holster. As Youngblood is lying on top of Johnson, his radio is near Johnson’s ear, and Johnson hears all this jumble of voices and he hears someone saying, “He’s hit! He’s hit!”

  Someone says, “Get out of here! Let’s get out of here!” Then he hears the word “hospital.”

  Youngblood realizes that the place where he’ll have the most protection for Johnson is to be as close as possible to the Secret Service car. He tells the driver, a Texas highway patrolman named Herschel Jacks, “Close it up.”

  If you look at films of this, Jacks puts the vice president’s car almost against the bumper of the Queen Mary. And the three cars squeal up onto the expressway, race along the expressway, squeal off the expressway and into the emergency bay at Parkland Hospital.

  DR: Johnson is then put in a separate room and guarded by Youngblood and others. When they’re told that President Kennedy has died, what happens?

  RC: Johnson is not told that President Kennedy is dead for forty-five minutes. He’s standing in this room. No one will give him any information. Twice he sends somebody out to try and find out, and both times that person comes back with the word, “The doctors say they’re still working on the president.”

  So Lady Bird writes in her memoirs about one of Kennedy’s closest aides who had worked for him all his life, a man named Kenny O’Donnell. Lady Bird says, “Then Kenny O’Donnell came through the door and, seeing the stricken face of Kenny, who loved him, we knew.”

  A moment later, another Kennedy aide comes in, goes over to Johnson, and addresses him as “Mr. President.” That’s the first Johnson knows that he’s president.

  No one knows what Johnson is thinking during these forty-five minutes. I certainly don’t know. But when this word finally comes and the Secret Service starts to try to give him orders, he knows what he wants to do.

  Remember, it’s the height of the Cold War, and they don’t know if the attack is part of a conspiracy. And they say, “The place we can protect you best is Washington. We have to get to Air Force One and get off the ground and get back to Washington.”

  Johnson says, “I’m not leaving without Mrs. Kennedy.” They say, “Mrs. Kennedy won’t leave without her husband’s body.” He says, “Then we’ll go to the plane and wait for her there.”

  DR: So they go to the plane. But the local police say, “We’re not giving you the body. We have to do an autopsy. A murder has been committed in the state.” But Kennedy’s aides got the casket to the plane. Mrs. Kennedy is on the plane and they’re getting ready to go, and Lyndon Johnson wants to be sworn in. How did that come about?

  RC: He makes a call to Robert Kennedy. It’s a very sad scene. As I say, these two men really hated each other.

  You want to know how historians get information? Robert Morgenthau was for many decades the U.S. attorney for New York, a very respected figure and a friend of mine. We always go to the same Hanukkah party every year, and he always comes over to me to tell me some wonderful story.

  While I was writing this last book, he says to me, “Bob, I have something I really want to tell you now.” I said, “Let’s wait till after the service.” He says, “No. I really want to tell you this right away.” So we go into another room. And he says, “I was there when Lyndon Johnson called Robert Kennedy.”

  Robert Kennedy was at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy family home in McLean, Virginia. J. Edgar Hoover calls him to tell him his brother’s dead. And ten minutes later, the man he truly hates, Lyndon Johnson, calls to ask the exact procedure by which he can take over his brother’s presidency.

  He didn’t have to do that. The information on that happens to be in the Constitution.

  DR: Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general, calls back and says, “The oath of office is in the Constitution.” Lyndon Johnson wants to get a judge that he likes, Sarah Hughes. She comes out [to Love Field]. She swears him in. Why does Lyndon Johnson insist that Mrs. Kennedy get in the picture of the swearing-in?

  RC: What I’m saying now is what the Kennedy peop
le believe. They believe that he was using Mrs. Kennedy, that he wanted to convey the feeling that the Kennedys were behind him in his new presidency. I do not know if that’s true or not.

  DR: The plane ultimately takes off. It comes back to Washington. Lyndon Johnson is president. Does he go to the Oval Office right away?

  RC: He goes to the Oval Office the next morning, and one of Kennedy’s secretaries is there and runs and gets Robert Kennedy and says, “He’s going into the Oval Office.” When Johnson sees the reaction, he goes back and he works out of his office in the Executive Office Building for the next four days.

  DR: How did he decide to have a report on the Kennedy assassination, and how did he persuade Earl Warren and Richard Russell to be on the Warren Commission that prepared that report?

  RC: These are two of the strongest-willed men in Washington. Earl Warren is the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and he has said to people, “I will never serve on any commission like this. The Supreme Court should stay aloof from things like this.”

  Johnson comes in and says to him, “You were a private in World War I.” He says, “You put on our uniform for your country. Now your president is asking you to serve as head of this commission.” And Warren agreed.

  With Richard Russell, he called Russell, who’s back in Winder, Georgia, his hometown. Johnson calls, and Russell says, “I will not be on this commission.” Among other things, Warren passed the Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared school segregation unconstitutional, so Russell truly hates Earl Warren and he doesn’t want to be on this commission anyway. He says, “No. I won’t do it.”

  Johnson calls back a few hours later and says, “I want to read you the press release that I’ve just announced.” Russell says, “I’m on it?” And Johnson says, “Yes.” Russell says, “Take my name off.” Johnson says, “You know, we passed the deadline for the New York Times about ten minutes ago.”

  DR: We’ve largely covered the four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson that you’ve written. With the beginning of the Johnson administration, you end the fourth volume. When is volume five coming out? Is it going to be one volume or two volumes?

  RC: Well, you’re ruining this terrific interview. I’m about halfway through.

  DR: You do all your research and then you write—or type—on your Smith-Corona?

  RC: That’s in theory true, but when you get into each chapter, you suddenly realize that some file that you had thought wasn’t important at the Johnson Presidential Library is key. So you have to go back and look into it.

  I want the last book to be in one volume. I’ll tell you why: because the arc of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency is one arc. He starts with the greatest victory in the history of American politics—to this day, still. Sixty-one-point-one percent over Barry Goldwater, his Republican opponent in the 1964 presidential election.

  So he starts with the greatest triumph you can imagine. By the end of it, Vietnam has consumed his presidency, and he has to leave office and go back to his ranch. I want that all to be in one book because I see it as one story.

  DR: One question that I’ve always wondered about is this. John Kennedy proposed belated civil rights legislation but didn’t get any of it anywhere. Lyndon Johnson bonded with members of Congress who were segregationists.

  Why does Lyndon Johnson decide to be Mr. Civil Rights? Was it to prove that he could do something better than Kennedy, or did he really believe in the end that civil rights legislation was necessary?

  RC: Lyndon Johnson really believed. How do I feel, anyway, that I know this?

  The Vietnam War challenged Johnson’s legacy. LBJ with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (right) and Secretary of State Dean Rusk (left), July 21, 1965.

  He was very poor when he went to college, and between his sophomore and junior years, he has to take a year off from college to make enough money to go on. What he does for that year is he teaches in a little town called Cotulla, Texas. He teaches in what was called the Mexican School, for the children of migrant workers.

  Some of the students later gave oral histories, and as I wrote, “No teacher had ever cared if these children learned or not. This teacher cared.”

  He thought it was desperately important that they learned to speak English. So he insisted they speak English, and if at recess he heard some boy shouting something in Spanish outside the window, he would run out and spank him. If it was a girl, he would yell at her.

  You could say, if you want to be hard on him, that this was just an example of Lyndon Johnson doing the best job he could at whatever job he had, which was a characteristic of his. But I felt, I knew that he really believed in this because he didn’t just teach the children, he taught the janitor.

  The janitor’s name was Tomas Gomez, and he said Johnson wanted him to learn English, so Johnson bought him a textbook. Before and after school each day, they would sit on the steps of the school and, if I remember the janitor’s words correctly, he would say, “Johnson would pronounce, I would repeat. Johnson would spell, I would repeat.”

  So when Johnson becomes president and he’s given these great civil rights speeches to deliver, one of Kennedy’s speechwriters who was still working for him, Richard Goodwin, asked that question: “Do you really believe?” He asks it in a more polite way, although not much more polite. “Do you really believe in this?”

  And Johnson said, “I swore when I was teaching those kids that if I ever had the power, I would help them. And now I have the power and I mean to use it.”

  DR: Lyndon Johnson died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-four, relatively young. Would he have been able to survive with modern medical technology?

  RC: I asked his cardiologist that very question. He said, “We could have fixed him in a half-hour angioplasty.”

  14 BOB WOODWARD

  on Richard M. Nixon and Executive Power

  “He had the idea that he was untouchable. He was president of the United States. He thought no one would ever find out about these tapes, let alone get access to them.”

  BOOKS DISCUSSED OR MENTIONED:

  All the President’s Men (with Carl Bernstein; Simon & Schuster, 1974)

  The Final Days (with Carl Bernstein; Simon & Schuster, 1976)

  The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat (Simon & Schuster, 2005)

  The Last of the President’s Men (Simon & Schuster, 2015)

  Fear: Trump in the White House (Simon & Schuster, 2018)

  Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (Simon & Schuster, 1999)

  The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court (with Scott Armstrong; Simon & Schuster, 1979)

  The Commanders (Simon & Schuster, 1991)

  Bush at War (Simon & Schuster, 2002)

  Plan of Attack (Simon & Schuster, 2004)

  Obama’s Wars (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

  Bob Woodward is without doubt the best-known, most respected, and most prolific journalist/author of the past half century.

  He first came to the public’s attention as the partner with Carl Bernstein in breaking and pursuing the Watergate story for the Washington Post, reporting for which the paper won the Pulitzer Prize.

  These two young journalists (Woodward was twenty-nine and Bernstein was twenty-eight) demonstrated the power of persistent, focused, and investigative journalism. They had a major role in the disclosures that ultimately forced President Richard M. Nixon to resign. Bob and Carl subsequently wrote two New York Times number-one best sellers about Watergate: All the President’s Men and The Final Days.

  With the publication of those books behind him, Bob Woodward has continued, for the ensuing four decades, a dual-track career—as a journalist and editor at the Post and as a best-selling book author.

  Last year, he wrote Fear: Trump in the White House, a best-selling account of the Trump tenure. That was Bob Woodward’s nineteenth book.

  Every single one of Woodward’s books has been a New York Times best seller—thirteen of them at numb
er one, a record matched by no other nonfiction writer.

  I have known Bob since my days working in the Carter White House in the late 1970s. He managed to obtain and write about one of my memos (written with Stu Eizenstat, then my boss) to President Carter. That was not an especially pleasant experience for me at that time. But I came to know—and greatly admire—Bob after the Carter administration ended and have interviewed him on other occasions.

  His careful research, persistence, focus, hard work, and fairness are legendary. For journalists and writers about government, he is the gold standard.

  In this interview, I tried to cover many of Bob’s books, though there are too many of them to do any one justice in an hourlong interview. The principal focus was on Nixon, for Bob’s work there is what launched his unrivaled career.

  In the conversation, Bob Woodward recounts how, by sheer happenstance, he was in the right place at the right time. He had been working at the Washington Post for only nine months when the Watergate break-in occurred, and his editor assigned coverage of the story (thought at first to be about a normal burglary) to him and to another young reporter, Carl Bernstein.

  Bob describes how he and Bernstein doggedly pursued the story—when others thought there was little real interest to it—and how they made mistakes that could have been career-ending. And their perseverance paid off. The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for their work; the criminal activities surrounding the Watergate break-in (most especially the presidential cover-up) were exposed; and a president was forced to resign for the first (and so far only) time in the country’s history.

  While Bob Woodward wrote best-selling books about all of Nixon’s successors—and gives his views on them in this interview—he will forever be linked with Nixon.

  And he reveals that at no point did he ever meet Richard Nixon. One wonders how such a meeting might have gone.