The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  McCracken’s announcement came at ten minutes before eleven. Johnson had changed into pajamas and bedroom slippers as he saw how the vote was going, and was sitting on a couch sipping a Scotch and soda, and that’s how Lyndon Johnson was watching when he lost his chance at the prize he had yearned for all his life.

  Summoning Reedy and Busby, he told them, “I want to send a telegram to the nominee and pledge my full support.” They should draft one, bring it back for his approval, and then, to make absolutely sure Kennedy received it, make two copies, one to be sent by Western Union to the nominee himself, and one for Connally to deliver personally to the Kennedy people. They should do it as quickly as possible, he said. “I’m going to sleep. I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

  *

  1 Lucy changed the spelling of her name to Luci in February, 1964.

  2 FDR Jr. was later to call this maneuver “The biggest political mistake” he had ever made. After the campaign, he went to Humphrey’s office and apologized, but Humphrey never forgave him.

  3 In later maneuvering before the convention, Johnson would get three of them back.

  4

  The Back Stairs

  AND THEN, the next morning, Thursday, July 14, at about eight o’clock, the telephone rang in the darkened bedroom of Lyndon Johnson’s suite.

  Its jangling woke Lady Bird, and when she picked it up, it was Senator Kennedy, asking to speak to Lyndon, who was still asleep in the other bed. Saying “Just a minute,” she shook him awake, and when he picked up the phone, Kennedy said he would like to come down to talk to him, and it was agreed he would do so at about ten o’clock.

  Jumping out of bed, Johnson went into the suite’s living room and told a secretary to have it neatened up. And then, going back into the bedroom and sitting on the bed, he began making telephone calls. One was to John Connally, who was shaving. “Jack Kennedy just called me,” Johnson said. “He wants to come down and see me. What do you think he wants?”

  “I think he wants to offer you the vice presidency,” Connally said—and Johnson knew Connally was right.

  He called Jim Rowe. “We had lost and it was over,” Rowe was to recall. “I was still asleep.” “Kennedy is coming down here in a few minutes,” Lyndon Johnson told him, “and I think he’s going to offer me the vice presidency. What should I do?”

  Still “half asleep,” Rowe mumbled, “What do you want that for? You’ve got the power now.”

  The next words in his ear woke him up. “Power is where power goes,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I’ll still control the Senate.” And “the way he said it, all of a sudden a bell rang in my head, as sleepy as I was: ‘This guy is really thinking about it!’ ”

  IN ALL THE REAMS of speculation that had been printed during the previous weeks and months about the eventual makeup of the Democratic ticket, there had been very little about the possibility that Lyndon Johnson would be in its second slot. Almost no one in the political world even suspected that the Majority Leader of the Senate would seriously consider trading that position for the vice presidency. During Johnson’s six years in the job, the leadership had been a position of immense power, “the second most powerful man in Washington,” and the vice presidency was a position of almost no power at all—virtually its only constitutional responsibility that of presiding over the Senate (“but shall have no vote” except in case of a tie; of so little power, in fact, that its first occupant, John Adams, called it “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Its powerlessness was a staple of Washington humor: everyone in the capital, it seemed, knew the joke about the unfortunate mother who had two sons who were never heard from again: one was lost at sea, and the other became Vice President; everyone quoted—actually misquoted—the remark that one Vice President, the Texan John Nance Garner, had made about the job: “It’s not worth a bucket of warm spit.” (Actually, as Johnson knew because Rayburn had told him, Cactus Jack had said that what the job was not worth was “a bucket of warm piss.”) Any holder of the job became automatically a figure of ridicule in power-obsessed Washington, and, indeed, in the world beyond: the obscurity of the office had been the comic theme of a popular American musical of the 1930s, the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its depiction of a presidential campaign: in an early scene, none of a political party’s leaders can recall the name of the party’s vice presidential candidate—and neither can the presidential candidate, John P. Wintergreen. The name is Alexander Throttlebottom, and when he arrives on stage, it is to tell the leaders that he wants to resign from the ticket; the shame that would be brought on his mother should he win—and actually be the Vice President—might be too much for her to bear, he says. Although he is talked out of quitting and his ticket wins, he is still unrecognized; after the election the only way he can get into the White House is by joining a guided tour. And Johnson himself had repeatedly said, whenever the subject was raised by a reporter in 1958 and 1959, and, indeed, in the early months of 1960, that he would never consider leaving the Senate, and the leadership, for the vice presidency, in which his role in the Senate would be only to preside over it; “I wouldn’t trade a vote for a gavel” was his invariable remark. The remark was delivered, what’s more, with seeming conviction. When Hugh Sidey had persisted in probing Johnson about the possibility during a visit to the ranch in the spring of 1960, Johnson “got irritated and stormed … He declared that the vice presidency was a worthless job compared with being Senate leader, related the sad tenure of ‘Cactus Jack’ Garner … and said Speaker Sam Rayburn had told him to stay far away from it. If he could not be President, he would stay in the Senate, Johnson had told me with such rage and finality—his nose an inch from mine—that I chalked him off.” But in fact Johnson had for some time been seriously thinking about making the trade—as Jim Rowe himself realized as soon as he became fully awake after talking to Johnson that morning.

  Rowe should have been more aware of that possibility than almost anyone, he would recall years later with a wry smile, since he himself had been not only an eyewitness to, but the key go-between in, a previous Johnson effort to make that precise trade. Following the failure of Johnson’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination at the party’s 1956 national convention, the Majority Leader had made a try for the vice presidential nomination, sending a message (“Tell him I want it”) to presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson—and it had been Rowe whom Johnson had selected to carry the message. Stevenson, who was about to startle the convention by announcing that he would not suggest a vice presidential nominee but would let the delegates freely choose one, responded to the message noncommittally, and when Rayburn heard about Johnson’s attempt, he reacted with such furious disapproval (“I saw that red [flush] coming up over his neck and head, and I just said to myself ‘Uh-oh,’ ” Tommy Corcoran recalls) that Johnson hastily sent the embarrassed Rowe back to withdraw the demand.

  Several considerations made him think about it seriously.

  Some of them were merely tactical. No matter who won the presidency that November—Kennedy or the as-yet-unnamed GOP nominee—if Lyndon Johnson continued as Majority Leader he would still, within the world of the Senate, maintain much of the unprecedented power he had created for himself. Emboldened by the liberal success in 1958, Senate liberals had challenged him not only on the filibuster but by demanding that the Democratic conference or “caucus” take up a number of measures to end what Wisconsin’s William Proxmire called his “one-man rule,” including a resolution that the caucus, not the Leader, name the members of the Policy Committee. Liberal senators had delivered fiery speeches, and the Washington press corps had taken this threat to Johnson’s rule seriously, but the definitive verdict on its seriousness had been the number of votes this key liberal proposal had actually received in the caucus: twelve. Johnson had received fifty-one. Richard Russell said that the liberals’ “position reminded him of a bull who had charged a locomoti
ve train.… That was the bravest bull I ever saw, but I can’t say a lot for his judgment.” No Majority Leader in history had ever accumulated anything remotely comparable to the powers Johnson had accumulated; that was why he was able to run the Senate as no other Leader had run it. So long as the Democrats controlled the Senate, and the southern Democrats who controlled the Democratic Caucus (and the chairmanships of virtually all of the most powerful Senate committees) supported him, his power within the institution itself would remain solid; the Senate leadership would still be immensely more powerful than the position he was trading it in for. Should Kennedy win, on the other hand, Johnson’s position in relation to the world outside the Senate would be diminished both symbolically (he would no longer be the highest elected Democratic official in the country) and in a very concrete way as well: to the extent that there had been a Democratic legislative agenda during the past six years, he had had a major role, perhaps the major role, in setting it; now that agenda would be set by the White House: legislation—Democratic legislation—would be sent to the Senate for him to pass. “Although Johnson’s power emanated from the Senate, he had made the Senate felt across the land,” Evans and Novak wrote. “For the past half dozen years … he, more than any other single Democrat, spoke for his party.” Now, if Kennedy won, that would no longer be the case. And if he proved insufficiently compliant with a Democratic President, that President could always move against him. An antagonistic President of his own party could make life difficult for any Majority Leader.

  Other considerations, however, were much more than tactical—because they related not so much to a comparison between the Senate leadership and the vice presidency but to the great aim of his life: the job he had spent so many years scheming and sacrificing to obtain.

  His chance to win his party’s nomination in 1960 was gone now, and if in the general election Kennedy defeated the Republican nominee, and served his full two terms, he might not get another chance until 1968. There was of course a possibility—Kennedy might lose to the Republican—that he would get another chance at the nomination in 1964, but Kennedy, despite his loss, would be coming into that convention as the party’s last standard-bearer, and would be even harder to beat than he had just been; it wasn’t much of a possibility. Eight years would probably be how long Lyndon Johnson would have to wait. And in eight years Lyndon Johnson would be sixty—and that was an age that throughout his life had loomed before him with a grim, talismanic significance. All during his boyhood, he had heard relatives repeating a piece of family lore: that all Johnson men had weak hearts and died young. Then, while he was still in college and his father was barely fifty years old, Sam Ealy’s heart had begun to fail, and he had died in 1937, twelve days after his sixtieth birthday. Two years later, one of his father’s two younger brothers—Lyndon’s uncle—had died suddenly of a massive heart attack, at the age of fifty-seven.1 Lyndon, always conscious of his remarkable physical resemblance to his tall, big-eared, big-nosed father, was convinced—convinced, one of his secretaries says, “to the point of obsession”—that he had inherited the Johnson legacy. “I’m not gonna live to be but sixty,” he would say. “My daddy died at sixty. My uncle …” With attempts to argue him out of this belief he had no patience; once, when Lady Bird was trying to reassure him that he would not die young, he looked at her scornfully and said flatly: “It’s a lead-pipe cinch.” And then, in 1955, at the age of forty-six, he had had his own massive heart attack. Now, in 1960, with the nomination lost, he felt he couldn’t wait eight years for another chance to win it. When, following Kennedy’s victory on Wednesday night, Reedy and Busby had been called into his suite, they had seen how depressed he was, and Reedy had tried to console him by pointing out that he would have another chance in eight years. There was a long pause before Lyndon Johnson’s reply, and when it came it came in a very low voice. “Too long,” he said. “Too long.”

  In addition, waiting—whether it was for eight years or only four—might not help, so long as while he waited he continued as Senate Leader. As long as he stayed in that job, in fact, waiting might make his chances worse instead of better. If Lyndon Johnson’s age was one compelling consideration in his thinking, another was that “scent of magnolias.” Hard as he had tried—supreme as had been the effort he had made in passing those two civil rights bills—to scrub off the southern taint, it still clung to him, almost as strong as ever. And the reaction to the 1960 bill had shown him how hard it would be to ever scrub it off completely as long as civil rights were an issue—and, of course, civil rights would always be an issue: the issue. With civil rights militancy mounting by the month, it was clear, as Johnson had often explained to aides and colleagues, that the issue was going to become steadily bigger. Whenever he tried again for the nomination, he would be caught again in the trap in which he had found himself during the last congressional session: the South, the southern supporters he could not afford to alienate in the Senate, would demand the weakening, or death, of any civil rights bill—a demand which, if he complied with it, would antagonize the North even more. Scrubbing off the scent was going to be difficult, if not impossible, so long as he remained in the Senate.

  And of course if the scent of magnolias remained, it would taint him not only in the convention, but, should he by some long chance win the nomination, in the country as a whole. Should he win the nomination but not the presidential election which followed, he would be only a footnote in history, just another defeated presidential candidate. He wasn’t interested in being a footnote. He was interested in being “LBJ.” And was it possible for him to win a national presidential election with the scent still on him? Was it possible for any southerner to win? The last southerner to be elected to the presidency, Zachary Taylor, had been elected in 1848—more than a century before. Would it be possible for a southerner to be elected now? A southern candidate would have the eleven southern states behind him, of course, but with the states of the Northeast, and California, and the Republican Midwest so solidly against him, it was difficult to see how. Lyndon Johnson did not see how. “I don’t think anybody from the South will be nominated in my lifetime; if so, I don’t think he’ll be elected,” he had said flatly to one journalist. As long as he was Senate Leader—held responsible by civil rights militants, and segregationist militants, by northerners and southerners, and by the media, for the fate of civil rights in that institution—he would not be able to escape being viewed as a sectional candidate, from the wrong section. Lyndon Johnson’s path to the presidency—that route he had mapped out for himself so long before—had always been narrow, twisting. He had navigated so many treacherous turns—had come much farther along the path than might have been thought possible. But he could go no farther. That route was closed.

  But there was another route—and he had reconnoitered it.

  Sometime early in 1960, he had had his staff look up the answer to a question: How many Vice Presidents of the United States had succeeded to the presidency? The answer was ten: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester A. Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman. That route was well traveled.

  Furthermore, for a Texan who had only one goal, that route had some obvious advantages over the Senate leadership. The vice presidency might be a meaningless position, a joke position, when looked at as it was generally looked at: in terms of itself. When looked at as a means of becoming President, it took on a different aspect. For one thing, a Vice President was a national figure. As a Leader raised to Senate power by the South, Johnson had little choice but to represent southern interests, to be a sectional leader. He would continue to be, as he had been, bound to the South (just as—as a senator from Texas—he was bound to Texas oil interests, which were also unpopular in the rest of the country). To realize his great dream, those southern and Texas ties needed to be cut.

  As Vice President, those ties would be cut, to a considerable extent. He would no longer
have to represent Texas: the national Administration of which he would be a part represented not a state but a country. He would no longer have to represent the South—the South would be only one section of the country. His positions on issues could be those of an official representing the whole country—positions that would help, rather than hurt, in a future bid for the presidency. In addition, a Vice President was the logical candidate to succeed the President when his four or eight years in office ended, the natural heir to the presidency.

  And of course a Vice President might not have to wait that long. The alternative route had an abbreviated version—and Lyndon Johnson had reconnoitered that, too.

  He had his staff look up a second figure: How many Presidents of the United States had died in office? The answer was seven. Since thirty-three men had been President,2 that was seven out of thirty-three: The chances of a Vice President succeeding to the presidency due to a President’s death were about one out of five. And when that question was asked about Presidents in modern times, the odds against such an occurrence got shorter—better. During the last hundred years before 1960, five Presidents had died in office—Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, Warren Harding in 1923 and of course Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. During that time span, in other words, a President had died in office approximately every twenty years. There had been eighteen Presidents during that time, and five out of eighteen were odds of less than one out of four.

  Furthermore, those odds seemed even shorter—much shorter—when compared with the odds of a Senate Majority Leader, or, indeed, any senator, being elected President. If John F. Kennedy made it to the White House straight from the Senate, he would be accomplishing something that only a single senator—Harding—had accomplished before him. And the odds were perhaps even more favorable when compared with the chances of Lyndon Johnson, the southerner, being elected in 1964 or 1968 with the civil rights issue still burning in America. Johnson was to reiterate even during his retirement his belief that no southerner would be elected President in the foreseeable future, as when, in 1969, he told Texas’ young lieutenant governor, Ben Barnes, the state’s new rising political star, that the only way for a Texan to reach the presidency was through the vice presidency. He never referred to his analysis of the odds in public, of course, and so far as the author of this book can determine, he never referred to it in private during his vice presidency, except on the evening of its first day, the day on which he was inaugurated. Sitting beside him that evening on a bus carrying high-level guests to the Inaugural Ball, Clare Boothe Luce, the former congresswoman and the wife of Time, Inc. publisher Henry R. Luce, asked him why he had agreed to accept the vice presidential nomination, and he replied: “Clare, I looked it up: one out of every four Presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin,’ and this is the only chance I got.” But during the period immediately following the convention, he explained his thinking several times. Robert M. Jackson, editor of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times and a longtime ally, was to tell his reporter James M. Rowe (not the James H. Rowe Jr. of Washington) that, encountering Johnson at the Corpus Christi Airport during this period, he had asked him, “Lyndon, why in the world did you accept the nomination?,” and that Johnson had replied, “Well, six of them didn’t have to get elected.” When he was asked the same question by intimates in Texas, the precise figure, as often with Johnson, varied from telling to telling, but the theory remained the same: that because it was so hard for a Texan to be elected President, becoming Vice President was a Texan’s best chance to reach the Oval Office. “Well,” he replied when Joe Kilgore asked the question, “six of them [Vice Presidents] didn’t have to be elected [in order to become President].” “You know, seven of them got to be President without ever being elected,” he told Ed Clark.