The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Late Sunday night Johnson learned what Pennsylvania was going to do when it caucused Monday morning. Nonetheless, that morning, before the actual vote he had to attend a breakfast meeting of the Pennsylvania delegation, where he, Kennedy, Symington and, speaking for Stevenson, Mike Monroney would give brief talks to the delegates before they voted; he had to sit beside Kennedy all through that breakfast, keeping a smile on his face. At one point, Lawrence opened the doors and let photographers in. Leaping to his feet, Johnson stood between Kennedy and Symington, who had remained seated, and put a hand on each of their shoulders so that in the photographs he would be the dominant figure. But after the photographers were ushered out, the doors were closed again, and Lawrence introduced the speakers. Johnson received polite applause. Then Lawrence introduced Kennedy. With a spontaneous roar, the delegates stood and cheered him. After the talks, the speakers left, and the doors were closed again. Back in his suite at the Biltmore an hour later, Johnson got the exact count: he had received 4 of Pennsylvania’s 81 votes, Stevenson 7?, Kennedy 64 (1? had gone for “others”). Later that day he had to keep a commitment to speak to New York. “I am not a naïve person,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I know that a preponderance of the cards are stacked against me here.” Of the 114 delegates in the audience facing him, 4? would vote for him. That night, he sat watching the opening of the convention in his suite at the Biltmore, alone except for Jim Rowe. Rowe was staring at the screen when he heard a voice beside him say softly, “I don’t see how we can stop this fellow.”

  TUESDAY BROUGHT TWO EPISODES of note. One was the wild demonstration touched off by Senator Eugene McCarthy’s emotional speech placing Stevenson’s name in nomination, a riotous parade around the convention floor that moved television commentators to speculate that the convention might be stampeded for Adlai. The political pros in the hall, however, noticed that very few of the paraders were delegates; in terms of changing votes, the demonstration had little significance.

  In those terms, the other episode didn’t have much significance, either—but it may have given Lyndon Johnson a new appreciation of John F. Kennedy.

  Trying to give as many delegates as possible a chance to meet Kennedy, his campaign headquarters had sent a telegram, signed by him, to the chairman of each delegation, asking for permission to address it “to explain my views and to answer their questions.” The chairman of the Texas delegation was Lyndon Johnson, and no one had thought to omit him from the list.

  It was only a form telegram, but when Johnson received it, he seized upon it as the opening he had been waiting for: the opening that could, even at this late moment, change everything—a chance to trap Kennedy into a debate.

  “I want to get on the same podium with Jack,” he told Irv Hoff. “I’ll destroy him.”

  Connally, Reedy and Busby, when they were called in, were unanimously enthusiastic; “One major error” by Kennedy, Connally felt, and the Kennedy bandwagon, which he believed was not yet on completely firm ground anyway, would be overturned. A reply from Johnson was drafted, ostensibly “in response to your request” but in terms that would elevate the event to a more significant level: a debate between the two leading contenders for the nomination. It challenged Kennedy to “appear together” with him at three o’clock that afternoon before a joint caucus of the Texas and Massachusetts delegations “and debate the major issues,” and on Tuesday morning, even before it was sent to Kennedy, Johnson called a press conference and read it to reporters. “It would be in the interest of our party that this session be open to” television coverage, it said. “If it went well, enough delegates would be watching to tip the balance,” Reedy said.

  Kennedy had every reason not to accept, and his advisers told him not to: as the front-runner, he had a lot to lose and not much to gain. But Kennedy did not look at it that way. His father heard about Johnson’s telegram that morning as he was sitting next to the swimming pool at the Marion Davies estate, which he had rented for the duration of the convention, giving an interview to the friendly journalist John Seigenthaler. His son would be “a damned fool” to accept, the ambassador said. But Jack’s sister Jean Kennedy Smith said, “I know, Daddy, but he’s challenged him to a debate.” To Seigenthaler, she said, “You’ll see. That’s the way they are. He’ll debate him.” He announced he would.

  In describing Johnson’s reaction, Philip Graham was to call it “tremendous exhilaration. Once again he was a candidate for the presidency with a chance, even an unlikely one.” He told Graham what he wanted to say, “which seemed a bit harsh and personal.… He began talking in ad hominem terms about Kennedy,” and Graham tried to dissuade him, saying, “No, we’re not going to say that sort of thing. We’re going to talk about … the world situation.” And he wrote a ten-minute “high road” statement for Johnson to use.

  In accepting Johnson’s invitation, Kennedy had said that he had appeared before many delegations, and “I have never found it necessary to bring the Massachusetts delegation with me. I will appear alone before the Texas caucus.” Trying to elevate the newsworthiness of the event, Johnson had announced that Kennedy was violating the terms of his invitation, and Kennedy finally said he would try to round up some Massachusetts delegates, but there weren’t more than a handful or two in the Crystal Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel when Kennedy arrived, with his brother Robert and a few aides, a little after three o’clock. The entire sixty-one-man Texas delegation seemed to be there, as well as scores of other Texans, the men in big Stetsons, the women wearing “All the Way with LBJ” pins; under glittering chandeliers, the huge ballroom was jammed wall to wall with reporters; “TV cameras bristled like machine guns from every point in the ornate gallery,” one wrote.

  As he took his seat on the stage, Kennedy wasn’t at ease—a reporter noticed his leg shaking under his trousers—but no one seeing only his face would have known it. And when he rose to speak, looking out at the ballroom that, one Texas reporter wrote, “Johnson had packed full of his folks,” Kennedy said with a smile that he was glad the vote for the nomination wasn’t being taken there. “I doubt whether there is any great groundswell for Kennedy in the Texas delegation,” he said. The audience chuckled at that, and laughed when, after promising to campaign for Johnson if Johnson won the nomination, he said, “And if I am nominated, I am confident that Senator Johnson will take me by the hand and lead me through the length and breadth of Texas.” He said he wasn’t going to argue with Johnson on the issues—“because I don’t think Senator Johnson and I disagree on the great issues that are facing us”—and said he admired him for his work as Majority Leader. “If [I am] successful in this convention,” he said, “it will be the result of watching Senator Johnson … for the last eight years. I have learned the lesson well, Lyndon, and I hope it may benefit me in the next twenty-four hours.… So I come here today full of admiration for Senator Johnson, full of affection for him, and strongly in support of him—for Majority Leader.” The audience laughed again. When Kennedy sat down at the end of his opening statement, there was quite a bit of rather warm applause.

  Johnson started off on Phil Graham’s “high road,” although it was an arm-waving, blustering journey—“And when I take the oath of office next January …”—but before long he veered off.

  He had gotten a civil rights bill through the Senate, he said, but not every senator had been present to help him. “Six days and nights we had 24-hour sessions,” he said, shouting every word. “Lyndon Johnson answered every one of the fifty quorum calls. Some men who would be President answered none.” He had voted in all forty-five roll calls, he said. “Some senators missed 34.” A Texas legislator, George Nokes, leaned over and whispered loudly to the other people in his aisle, “Lyndon sure bear-trapped him, didn’t he?”

  After a brief, whispered conference with his brother, Kennedy rose to reply. Johnson’s face had been grim as he spoke. On Kennedy’s face was a grin. Senator Johnson had criticized some senators, he said, but he had not identified those h
e was talking about, so “I assume he was talking about some other candidate, not me.”

  The grin broadened. “I want to commend him for … a wonderful record answering those quorum calls,” he said.

  People in the audience started to chuckle, and then others started to laugh, and a wave of laughter swept over the hall. Turning to Johnson, Kennedy shook his hand for the photographers, and walked out of the hall, his little band following him.

  Watching Johnson as Kennedy spoke, Arthur Schlesinger saw his face change. “Johnson felt that Kennedy had the drop on him,” he was to say. That was what the Texas delegates thought, too—even those who, like Jim Wright, had been Johnson’s “eager disciples.” Wright, a very tough politician—he would later rise to Sam Rayburn’s place as Speaker of the House—heard Johnson’s attack, and then, he was to recall decades later, saw Kennedy give that “big Irish grin of his, and say, ‘Since Lyndon mentioned no names, I’m sure he wasn’t talking about me.’ Then he began bragging about Lyndon. By the time he ended, he had won our admiration—begrudging but admiration.” In fact, in describing the debate, Wright bestowed on Kennedy what was, for a Texan, the highest accolade possible. Jack Kennedy, he was to recall, had reminded him that afternoon of the legendary Texas Ranger who was sent in 1906 to a city down on the Rio Grande border in which a riot was raging. The city’s sheriff had telegraphed Ranger headquarters for assistance, and had been told it would arrive on the next train. When the train pulled in, and only one man disembarked, the dismayed sheriff asked, “Only one Ranger?” “Only one riot,” the Ranger explained. When Jack Kennedy had walked into that hostile ballroom, packed with his enemies, Wright said, “Came in all alone, walked in bareheaded, I made that comparison in my mind. By the time he finished, we were all identifying with that old Texas Ranger.” Even Johnson’s most loyal staff members felt the same way. “Really, it didn’t come off as we had expected it to,” Jake Jacobsen says. Months earlier, Jim Wright had tried to warn Lyndon Johnson about “the Kennedy magic.” Now Johnson had experienced it for himself. “He got cured once and for all of getting into a debate with Jack Kennedy,” Irv Hoff says.

  AFTER THE DEBATE, less than twenty-four hours remained before—on Wednesday, July 13, in midafternoon—the convention would be called to order to nominate the candidates, and those hours were filled with a desperate last round of infighting. Delaware and North Dakota were both states with eleven votes—which would, in both cases, be cast as a unit—and in both states a delegate with half a vote held the balance; Kennedy held North Dakota, but Johnson brought Delaware into his camp. And Robert Kennedy and John Connally were both pleading with Robert Meyner, Kennedy for New Jersey to throw its forty-one votes to his brother on the first ballot, Connally for the state to stick with Meyner as a favorite son on the first ballot at least, and Connally won. Johnson raced from delegation to delegation in a last-minute attempt to pick up some votes. Bumping into Jack Kennedy once, he accused him of using unfair tactics. “Johnson’s eyes were like flamethrowers,” said a man who was present. His bile against Kennedy was spilling over. Before the Washington State delegation, he attacked the Kennedys, father and son, saying again that the father had been a “Chamberlain umbrella man” while he himself had “never thought Hitler was right,” and bringing up Joe McCarthy. The Kennedys, he said, had advised the Wisconsin senator on strategy and contributed money to his campaigns, and, of course, Jack had not voted with the rest of the Democrats to condemn his methods. “I was not contributing comfort to his thinking or contributions to his campaign,” Johnson said. “When he was on the march in this country and someone had to stand up and be counted,” every Democratic senator “stood up and voted with their Leader,” he said. “That is, all those who were present.” And more personal feelings spilled out as well. “No one handed any wealth down to me,” he told the Kentucky delegation. “I haven’t had anything given to me. Whatever I have and whatever I hope to get I got through my own energy and talents.” He had helped Kennedy in the Senate, he said, and “Now this young man I appointed to the Foreign Relations Committee claims he knows more about foreign affairs than I do. You know, there are some people who will throw crutches at their doctor and get smarter than their daddy.”

  Johnson’s emotions were no hotter than those of the Kennedy who hated him. Bobby Baker, to whom politics was all a game, if a dirty one, was slow to realize this; “as one accustomed to the rough-and-tumble of politics, after which foes might sit down together over a drink,” he had “thought nothing” of Johnson’s attacks, and noticing Bobby Kennedy outside the Biltmore coffee shop where he and his wife, Dorothy, were eating, he invited him to join them. Then, however, in the course of what he regarded as “normal banter between political adversaries,” he ventured to remark that some of the Kennedy criticisms of Johnson had been “a little rough.”

  In an instant, Robert Kennedy’s face had flushed so deep a red that Baker “thought he might have a stroke.”

  “You’ve got your nerve,” he said. “Lyndon Johnson has compared my father to the Nazis, and John Connally … lied in saying my brother is dying.… You Johnson people are running a stinking damned campaign, and you’re gonna get yours when the time comes!” Baker tried to calm him, but there was no calming Robert Kennedy when his family was concerned. “Leaning forward, clenching his fists, thrusting his face into mine,” he went on shouting, until he finally jumped up, threw some money on the table and stalked off, on his face that glare that men feared.

  AFTER THE CONVENTION was gaveled to order at three o’clock that afternoon, Sam Rayburn got out of his seat in the Texas delegation’s section to make the first nominating speech, and the two thousand delegates on the floor of the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena rose in a great ovation as they saw the familiar bald head moving through a crowd to the high platform. Johnson had sent Lady Bird and his two daughters to his box in the arena; Mary Margaret Wiley and Johnson assistant Bob Waldron were in his suite with him, and George Reedy was in and out; Johnson sat on the edge of a sofa, hunched forward, watching the Speaker on the television screen.

  Rayburn’s speech was a very personal one. “I am going to present to you today … a man that I have known since his babyhood,” he said. “I knew his pioneer father and mother, who faced the ravages of the great West when there was little or no civilization there.” Lyndon Johnson, he said, was “a poor boy who dreamed great dreams. A young man who worked his way through school, a young man in his youth who did menial work, who climbed with an ambition, superb and superior.” During his forty-seven years in Congress, Rayburn said, he had served with three thousand men and women. He knew leadership when he saw it, and Lyndon Johnson was a leader.

  In the left-hand pocket of Lyndon Johnson’s suit jacket as he sat in his suite watching Rayburn was a folded sheet with the delegate count, and it showed that Kennedy was going to have enough votes to win on the first ballot—just barely enough, but enough. Despite those hard figures, Johnson was evidently unable to give up his hopes. Perhaps feeling that Rayburn’s speech might sway a few delegates’ votes, and at the very last minute start a drift away from Kennedy, he tried a last maneuver. As the nominating speeches for other candidates dragged on into the early evening, he phoned John Connally, reaching him on the telephone that had been set up next to the Texas delegation’s standard on the convention floor, and told him to suggest to the convention’s chairman, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, that, since it was growing late, the convention should recess after the speeches and postpone the voting to the next day. Connally made the request, but Collins quickly rejected it. At about 9:15, the voting began. By the State of Washington, Kennedy’s count was 710; at West Virginia, it was 725; after Wisconsin, 748. Johnson had 405. The next state was Wyoming, Wyoming that Johnson could once have had so easily, but that he hadn’t bothered to visit until it was too late. Teno Roncalio still only had ten of its fifteen votes for Kennedy; the other five were under the control of the delegation’s chairman, Tracy
McCracken, a “very, very conservative” publisher who was “a strong Johnson person.”

  Ted Kennedy was standing with the Wyoming delegation. That morning Bobby, counting delegates, had told him that the first ballot might come down to those five votes. Ted hadn’t believed him, but he had gone to McCracken and asked him, “If it comes down to Wyoming, will you cast all fifteen votes for my brother?” McCracken said, “I can’t believe that after all those states, it will come down to those five votes.” But he said that if it did, he would cast the whole fifteen votes for Kennedy. And now it did. “Wyoming casts all fifteen votes for the next President of the United States,” McCracken announced. Kennedy had 763. Sam Rayburn shut his eyes, and began to cry. He put his head down on a friend’s chest, and tears ran down his cheeks. After a while, he sat up in his seat, squared his shoulders, lit a cigarette and took a long puff.

  After several states, seeing that Kennedy had won, switched to him to be with the winner, Kennedy finished the first ballot with 806 votes. Johnson had 409. All the other possibilities—Symington, Stevenson, Humphrey and the various favorite sons—had a total of 306.

  FOR A WESTERN STATE to have cast the decisive votes was a fitting denouement to the fight for the nomination, for it was western votes that had given Kennedy victory, and denied the possibility of victory to Lyndon Johnson. His boasting during the Kennedy debate that he had passed a civil rights bill had cost him some southern support—at the last minute Mississippi had switched its 23 to Governor Ross Barnett and Florida its 29 to Senator Smathers as a protest—but he had still received 281 votes from the South. He had added to those the 54? he had expected from border states Oklahoma and Kentucky, and 40 scattered tallies from other states. But out of the 172 possible votes from the western states, he had received only 22?. (Kennedy had received 119, other candidates a total of 30?.) Had he received more—had he held the West—would Kennedy have won on the first ballot, or would the convention have ended with a different outcome?