The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Late in the year, trying to solve what Look magazine called “The Number One enigma of United States politics,” Jack Kennedy dispatched Robert to the Johnson Ranch to decipher his intentions face-to-face.

  The trip did little to ease the tension between the two men. There was a deer-hunting trip—Bobby didn’t want to go but Johnson insisted—and when Bobby fired the powerful shotgun he had been given, instead of the rifle customary on deer hunts, the unexpected force of its recoil knocked him to the ground. Helping him to his feet, Johnson said, “Son, you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.” Nor did it do much to solve the enigma. Assuring Bobby that he had decided not to run and to stay neutral as the other candidates fought it out, Johnson made these statements so convincingly that Bobby returned north to tell his brother that Johnson probably wasn’t running. While Bobby had been in Texas, however, an interview with Johnson had appeared in the Christian Science Monitor. To the interviewer’s inquiry about the burgeoning number of “Johnson for President” clubs, he had replied, “I hear what some of my friends are doing, and I see what they are doing. The people usually have a way of selecting the person they think best qualified”—the strongest public indication he had yet given that he was running. Then there was an interview in Time magazine. “I am not a candidate and I do not intend to be,” Lyndon Johnson said. Soon thereafter, Jack Kennedy found himself on a train from New York to Washington with Texas reporter Leslie Carpenter, and, Carpenter was to say, Kennedy “spent the whole time trying to find out what I knew about whether Lyndon Johnson was actually going to be more than a favorite son candidate.” Kennedy remained puzzled. He was sure that Lyndon Johnson was running—but how could he be running if he was acting like this?

  THEN IT WAS 1960—if he wanted to reach for the prize, he couldn’t wait any longer. Within Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle there was no longer any pretense that he wasn’t running. He had persuaded Sid Richardson to lend John Connally to him for the campaign—he considered that very important; he felt, Busby says, “that Connally was the only man tough enough to handle Bobby Kennedy”—and John was directing the work of a full-scale national campaign headquarters: a twelve-room operation in an Austin hotel with fourteen paid staff members and scores of volunteer workers. Walter Jenkins was organizing new “Johnson for President” clubs every day; by the end of January, they would be operating in twenty-seven states. Speechwriters were being hired; Theodore H. White was one of those recommended, but White said he was going to be working on a book in 1960. A score of surrogates were fanning out across the country talking up his candidacy before local Democratic groups, and thanks to Rayburn, they were very well-connected surrogates: Oscar Chapman, former secretary of the Interior, for example, and India Edwards, a onetime vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In 1959, Jack Kennedy had sent an emissary to ask Mrs. Edwards, in her words, “what it would take to get me on his bandwagon,” and she had refused, feeling he was “too young and inexperienced.” But when Sam Rayburn asked her to work for Johnson, of course she accepted. And all these operations were funded with a lavishness awesome to anyone not familiar with the scale, and casualness, of campaign financing Texas-style. “I have some money that I want to know what to do with,” George Brown said in a call to Johnson’s office on January 5. “I … will be collecting more from time to time.” He collected a lot more. Envelopes stuffed with cash cascaded up to Washington, for the other Texas oilmen were aboard. Booth Mooney had left Johnson’s staff to work for oilman H. L. Hunt, and, he was to relate, “Twice I personally carried packets of a hundred hundred-dollar bills, the common currency of politics, to Jenkins.”

  ON THE EVE of the New Year, at the end of December, 1959, Lyndon Johnson convened a meeting at the ranch to begin a drive to capture those ten western states that were the key to his plan.

  There was a lot of power at that meeting: Mike Kirwan, a senior member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that approved (or disapproved) western public works projects; Governor Buford Ellington of Tennessee; a couple of western senators; Bobby Baker, “the man who knew where all the bodies were buried”; as well as the right guy to scout the western political landscape—Irvin Hoff, Washington senator Warren Magnuson’s administrative assistant, who had been loaned to Johnson because of the expertise he had demonstrated while running senatorial campaigns in several western states. When, however, just after the first of the year, Hoff headed into the West, he found that “Wherever I went, Bobby Kennedy had been there.”

  “He was easy to track—and the tracks were everywhere,” Hoff says. And whatever Bobby had done to tie delegates to the Kennedys, he had been very effective. “People who would normally have been with Johnson had been approached six months earlier, and had already had the halter and bridle. By the time I got there, it was already too late.” In every state that Hoff visited, a smoothly functioning Kennedy organization had been in place for some time. When Hoff asked Larry Jones in Johnson’s Austin headquarters about their own western organizations, the report was clear: “We have no organization in the state of Montana, either contacting potential delegates or delegates; nor do we have an organization building popular support.… We have no organization in the state of Idaho.” Even as Hoff was traveling, Johnson organizations were being set up, but it was too late. Rowe’s warning two years earlier that ignoring western delegates could be “disastrous” had been borne out. Johnson’s headquarters was sending the new organizations crates of buttons bearing the legend “All the Way with LBJ.” Hoff telephoned Austin to say it would be necessary to design a different button: “Many people do not know what LBJ means.”

  The accuracy of Rowe’s prediction struck George Reedy at about the same time. While Johnson was still refusing to leave Washington on days when the Senate was actually meeting, “quick weekend trips”—in a specially equipped twin-engine Convair that Johnson had leased for campaigning—were possible, and the first of those trips was to Wyoming, a state Reedy (and Johnson) had believed bore the “LBJ” brand.

  That belief didn’t last even as long as it took Reedy to get out of the Cheyenne airport. Piling into a car along with several Washington newsmen to follow Johnson to the hotel at which he was to speak, Reedy found himself sitting next to a man he didn’t know. One of the reporters asked the man whom Wyoming would be supporting at the convention. “Oh, Kennedy,” the man replied matter-of-factly. Startled, Reedy asked the reason. “He’s the only one who’s been out here and asked us for our vote,” the man said. The man turned out to be Teno Roncalio, chairman of Wyoming’s Democratic Party. Reedy had never heard his name, but learned that his preference was quite firm. “Wyoming was a state that Lyndon Johnson should have had; and we would have had if we had merely done some organization work in it a few months earlier,” Reedy was to say. Johnson’s fear of trying had held him back until now—and now it was too late.

  In addition, while he was at last actively planning his campaign within his inner circle, outside that circle he was still refusing even to acknowledge that he would one day become a candidate. His public refusals might be laid to the fact that by saying—so often and so convincingly—that his Senate responsibilities were his first priority, he had trapped himself: with the Senate still in session, how could he openly run for President? But that explanation doesn’t make clear why he didn’t say—wouldn’t say; adamantly refused to let his representatives like Irv Hoff say, even in private—that he would announce his candidacy after the Senate adjourned. And he wouldn’t say that, or let men like Hoff say it, not even in private, not even in the West, where he had to have delegates if he was to stop Kennedy, not even to men in the West, who, if he didn’t say it, would—with the time before the convention growing short—align themselves irrevocably to another candidate.

  Despite the Kennedys’ activities, there was still solid Johnson sentiment in the West, but politicians there had to be assured that the sentiment would be requited. “They’re a pretty cagey bunch of guys o
ut there, and they’re not going to support someone who maybe won’t run, and then they’ve alienated the guy who was going to win,” Hoff said. “It was pretty hard to sell a guy if all you could say was: ‘Maybe he’s going to run.’ ” Flying back to Washington, Hoff told Johnson that he had to give western delegates at least an assurance that while he was not announcing at the moment, he would eventually do so. “I said, ‘Senator, I’ve got nothing to sell. The media out there all want to know if you’re running. What can I tell them?’ He said, ’Irv, I’m not at this point saying. I have ten bills I have to pass here.”

  At one point, Hoff thought he had made Johnson understand. In Idaho, where the Hells Canyon Dam was rising day by day, and where political leaders knew who had gotten them the dam at last, the Democratic state chairman, Tom Boise, had told Hoff that, despite all the Kennedy efforts, many party leaders were still considering supporting Johnson. “These guys were for Johnson,” Hoff says. “If we had been able to tell them that he was going to run, we’d have had that delegation.” He explained this to Johnson, and Johnson accepted an invitation to speak in Lewiston, Idaho, and afterwards to have a drink with Boise and his leaders in a hotel suite. But in the suite, Johnson said all the right things—except the one thing it was necessary for him to say. “Lady Bird had gone to bed in another room, and he was in his living room, walking around in his pajamas holding a drink, stirring it with his big finger. They said, ‘We’re for you, but we need to know if you’re going to run.’ He said, ‘What the hell do you think I’m out here for—catching butterflies? Do you see me carrying a net?’ ” But there were future government positions at stake, careers at stake, issues at stake—with the convention so close, rhetorical humor wasn’t enough. They pressed him further. But all Johnson would say was, “I’ll let you know.… You’ll be the first to know.” Recalling the scene years later, Hoff would say, “It was like he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He had flown out there to say it, but he couldn’t bring himself to get the words out.” Witnessing similar scenes, Bobby Baker felt he understood them, that “The problem was LBJ’s fear of being defeated”: that saying it would be admitting that he was trying, and trying might mean failing, “so he couldn’t bring himself to say it.” After Johnson had gone to bed, Boise told Hoff quietly that Johnson’s assurances had not been adequate. “He said, ‘We’ve got to know, and we’ve got to know pretty soon. I’m for him one hundred percent, but we’ve got to know.’ ” Hoff understood, but when he raised the subject the next day, Johnson again refused to authorize him to give Boise any firm assurance.

  And at least Johnson was willing to go to Idaho, where people were friendly. To any suggestion that he visit a state where his reception would be problematical, he was still shying away, quite violently.

  There was a hint of desperation now in the telephone calls that Walter Jenkins was receiving from California. An opening—an 81-vote opening—was ready to be exploited there, he was being told. Pat Brown’s attempt to keep his delegation uncommitted until he could decide on a candidate was falling apart, and despite the governor’s hostility to Johnson, “If I could bring Lyndon in contact with” the delegates themselves, “he would own them like he does everybody he meets,” Judge Walter Ely told Jenkins on January 25.

  The old problem remained, however. Among the key California Democrats favorably disposed toward Johnson was the delegation’s vice chairman, Clinton D. McKinnon. “I asked him if he would help,” Leonard Marks reported to Jenkins. “He says he can’t make a commitment until he knows for sure that Johnson is a candidate. He says when I ask him to help Johnson I am talking about some very practical things in his life, and something that might affect his future so he wants to make sure that he is a candidate.”

  Yet Johnson wouldn’t even visit California. After first accepting, and then declining, a number of speaking engagements there in January, he repeated that performance in February. At the end of March, Hoff, who had been touring California sounding out individual delegates, sent Jenkins two memos telling him that although “Johnson hadn’t even set foot in California for too many years,” he still had a chance to win a substantial number of delegates there. “The California delegation is far from being committed to anyone,” Hoff said. “Kennedy may have a few more commitments than anyone else but all the delegates are very friendly to Johnson.” But, Hoff said, if he “is going to get any place in this delegation, he has just got to come out here.” There was simply no alternative. “They all know who he is but don’t know him. You can’t turn the Johnson sentiment into solid support without Johnson coming out.”

  Johnson then agreed to go during the Senate’s Easter recess, and Bobby Baker told Ely to arrange a statewide tour, saying, “I can practically guarantee you he will be there.” The guarantee proved worthless, however; at the last minute, Bobby had to tell Ely that “The senator is disinclined to come.” In desperation, Ely tried to telephone Johnson directly; Johnson refused to take the call. Phoning Jenkins, Ely said that many of the delegates were saying of Johnson, “Oh, he is the best man, but … he is not a real candidate.”

  “Hell, Walter, he either wants it or he doesn’t,” Ely said, “and he has never even been out here to make a speech.… Walter, he simply must let people see him. It is when they meet him and shake his hand that they are won over. I just don’t believe he can do it unless he comes.… There comes a time when you can’t just continue to keep fighting for a phantom.”

  TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE, civil rights came up again. The assurance Johnson had given liberals to persuade them to support the weak 1957 Act—that it would be quickly amended to strengthen it (“Don’t worry, we’ll do it again in a couple of years”)—had not been redeemed in 1958 or 1959; in ’59, in fact, Johnson’s power had been the principal obstacle. Emboldened by the 1958 elections, which had given liberals an overwhelming two-to-one (64 to 34) majority in the Senate, liberal senators moved to amend Rule 22, the “filibuster rule” that ensured the tactic’s effectiveness. Johnson placed himself in their path. “Jesus, it was rough,” recalled one of them. “Lyndon was going around with two lists in his inside pocket. One was for committee assignments and anything else you wanted, and the other was for Rule 22. He didn’t talk about the first until you’d cleared on the second, and that was all there was to it.” With no new legislation to strengthen the civil rights bill in 1958 or 1959, he had to produce some in 1960 if he was to reduce the hostility of northern convention delegates.

  Liberals were insisting now on the part of the 1957 bill that had been cut out: Part III, the section that would ban segregation in public venues such as theaters, restaurants, hotels, buses and trains—and in schools, where, six years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, only a tiny percentage of black children were going to school with white children in the South. Without enactment of Part III, the federal government would still in effect have done nothing about the most painful injustices to which millions of American citizens were subjected because of their race.

  Johnson had hoped that Richard Russell, understanding Johnson’s need to placate liberals, would compromise as he had done in ’57, but, as I have written, “However much affection Russell might feel for Lyndon Johnson, the overriding reason that Russell wanted him to become President was to protect the interests of the South; when Johnson’s interests collided with those interests, it was the South’s, not Johnson’s, that would be protected,” and to Russell, Part III, in any form, struck at the heart of the southern way of life. By banning segregation in social settings, it would, Russell felt, inevitably lead to what was for the Georgian the horror of horrors: what he called the “mongrelization” of the noble white race. When, in January, 1960, Johnson tried to explain that he had no choice but to bring a civil rights bill to the floor, Russell, “cool” and “aloof,” said, “Yes, I understand that you let them jockey you into that position. I understand.” A Johnson proposal to bypass the southern-controlled Judiciary Committee and bring the bill to the floor
by adding its provisions to a House measure on an unrelated topic caused the first rupture in the eleven-year alliance of the two legislative titans; Russell called the move “a lynching of orderly procedure in the Senate.”

  Johnson’s angry response—that “this was the only kind of lynching he had ever heard Russell object to”—was blurted out only in private, to two staffers in his limousine; Johnson had had no choice but to repair the breach. Though he made a show of attempting to break a Russell-led southern filibuster, with around-the-clock sessions, veteran Senate observers saw that it was all a charade, “a cozy and often rather jolly affair”; “bonhomie has been rampant,” one was to write. “The Senate has never seemed more like a gentleman’s club.” Never had the South’s power been more clearly demonstrated than in the 55–42 vote against cloture: not only had liberals been unable to muster the necessary two-thirds vote, they hadn’t even been able to get a majority. Working with Eisenhower’s attorney general, William P. Rogers, Johnson then watered down Part III until by the time it passed little remained but an amendment that supposedly strengthened the voting rights provisions of the 1957 bill but from the start proved next to worthless. Although Russell made a show of dismay at the bill’s passage, it was, Jacob Javits of New York said, “a victory for the Old South.” Accusing Johnson of collaborating with Russell to reduce the measure to “only a pale ghost of our hopes of last fall,” Pennsylvania’s Joseph Clark turned to the southern leaders on the Senate floor, and said, “The roles of Grant and Lee at Appomattox have been reversed. Dick, here is my sword. I hope you will give it back to me so that I can beat it into a plowshare for the spring planting.”