The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  The offer, O’Brien was to say, had been couched in terms of “a feeler” because if Kennedy had made a formal offer, “and it was turned down, that could be adverse to his campaign.” But the offer had been understood. “Did Kennedy come back from that meeting with the notion that Johnson would accept it?” O’Brien was asked. “That he would be thinking about it,” O’Brien replied.

  In contrast to Bobby Kennedy’s account that Jack’s offer had been pro forma, that he had not wanted Johnson to accept and had hoped he wouldn’t, and that Jack Kennedy had vacillated for some hours over whether or not to withdraw the offer, O’Brien says the opposite was true. Asked whether “the offer was intended as one that Johnson would decline,” O’Brien replied, “Oh, no.” On the contrary, he said, the ninth floor was worried because “we were not at all sure that he would accept.… The word would come back, ‘Well, no, he’s not going to take it,’ and then, ‘Well, he’ll think about it some more.’ This sort of thing just went on and on.” But through it all, O’Brien says, one thing did not change: Jack Kennedy’s decision. “Jack Kennedy had made up his mind this was absolutely the right thing to do, and there were no alternatives.”

  And perhaps most definitively, the story that Kennedy’s offer to Johnson was only pro forma and that Kennedy had not wanted it to be accepted is made less credible by what Kennedy did that morning to solve the problem of Sam Rayburn. Johnson had said he couldn’t even think of accepting the offer unless Rayburn agreed—so Kennedy went down the back stairs again, this time to Rayburn’s suite to try to persuade him to agree.

  Johnson himself had begun the persuasion process even before Kennedy came down and made the offer, sending emissaries to soften Mr. Sam’s opposition: not just Clements but Homer Thornberry and Wright Patman. “Sam was in the bathroom in his shorts, and he was shaving,” Patman was to recall. “He was blistering mad about Lyndon’s even considering the vice presidency.”

  As soon as Kennedy left him, Johnson sent another emissary, Tommy Corcoran, and asked Clements to go back again. Corcoran knew how important his mission was: “Johnson was going to do whatever Mr. Rayburn told him to do,” he was to say. But neither he nor Clements had any luck with the Speaker. “Rayburn was adamant about it,” Clements was to confess. “I wouldn’t say I made any headway with him.” As Corcoran was walking away from Rayburn’s suite, however, he encountered in the corridor a member of Rayburn’s House team, Majority Whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana, a state which had voted for Eisenhower in 1956. Boggs told Corcoran that Johnson’s presence on the ticket would guarantee that Louisiana wouldn’t vote Republican again. Corcoran had him go in and tell that to Rayburn—and Boggs pulled out another argument, one that evidently had some impact on the Speaker. Rayburn’s distrust of Richard Nixon was legendary in Washington; Boggs told him that without Johnson and the South in the Democratic column, Nixon would win the presidency. “I knew that this was the one thing he didn’t want to happen,” Boggs was to recall. And Johnson himself telephoned Rayburn. Mr. Sam “reiterated strongly that he felt it would be a mistake for me to take it,” he was to recount. The Speaker added to his other objections (among them: “He said I could do a better job for the Democratic Party and the country as Majority Leader”) one that was very personal—and poignant—coming from a childless man who for years had been able to work closely every day with a young man who said he looked on him as a father: “He said he would not be happy without me on the Hill.” Johnson emphasized how much the nomination meant to him, however, and when he asked Rayburn to hear Kennedy out if he telephoned, Rayburn said he would. “I think Jack will be calling you soon,” Johnson said.

  “John, I’ve got to think a little bit,” Rayburn said to his aide John Holton, and Holton gave him the key to his room, and “twenty, thirty minutes later” Rayburn emerged, and told Holton that if Kennedy met certain conditions, he would advise Johnson to accept. And when Kennedy did call, and came down to see Mr. Rayburn, Rayburn gave his conditions, and Kennedy agreed to them. Within a few weeks—the interview transcript is dated “Summer, 1960”—Rayburn gave another assistant, D. B. Hardeman, his account of what had happened when Jack Kennedy came down to see him.

  I told him, “I’m dead set against this, but I’ve thought it over, and I’m going to tell you several things: if you tell me that you have to have Lyndon on the ticket in order to win the election, and if you tell me that you’ll go before the world and tell the world that Lyndon is your choice and that you insist on his being the nominee, and if you’ll make every possible use of him in the National Security Council and every other way to keep him busy and keep him happy, then the objections that I have had I’m willing to withdraw.”

  Kennedy said to me, “I tell you all those things.”

  Kennedy walked out of Rayburn’s suite. “He was positively exuberant,” says Boggs, who saw him emerge. Returning to his suite upstairs, he told O’Brien and other aides to set the wheels in motion for Johnson’s nomination; O’Brien, for example, was to inform the campaign’s various state coordinators that Kennedy had decided on Johnson. If these were the actions of a man who had made a pro forma offer, and was hoping it would not be accepted, they were strange ones. Rather, they were the actions of a man who very much wanted Lyndon Johnson on the ticket—and who was determined, despite opposition, to persuade him to accept his offer.

  When Kennedy left his suite, Sam Rayburn walked—“briskly,” according to a Dallas Morning News reporter who saw him—down the hall to Johnson’s suite. Taking Johnson and Connally into a bedroom, he had Connally run through all the reasons why he felt Johnson had no choice but to accept the nomination. When Connally finished, the great bald head nodded. “I don’t like it,” he said to Lyndon Johnson. “But I don’t think you do have any choice.” Jokingly, Johnson said Rayburn had evidently changed his mind since the previous night. “I am a wiser man than I was last night,” Rayburn said. The three men assumed, Connally was to say, that everything had been settled.

  “AND THEN,” Connally was to say, “Bobby Kennedy showed up, and said he wanted to see Mr. Johnson”—and from that moment, and for approximately the next three hours, nothing was settled, and during those hours what had previously remained, despite all the tension, within the boundaries of normal political behavior, was transformed, with the admixture of personal hatred, into confusion and chaos, a chaos whose aftermath would, during the next eight years, affect profoundly the shape of American politics and, to a lesser but still surprisingly significant degree, the shape of American history.

  No two people of the many who were involved can agree on anything that happened during those hours. Each account, and some are quite detailed and convincing, contains statements that are impossible to reconcile with, or that directly contradict, statements in other accounts—which are also quite detailed and convincing. To try to reconcile the recollections of those hours is to be reminded, again and again, of what Theodore White wrote (after trying to reconcile them): “It is a trap of history to believe that eyewitnesses remember accurately what they have lived through.” Chronologies of that afternoon’s events were later compiled by more than one of the participants—but no two chronologies are the same. There is no agreement, to take just a single example, about the number of meetings that Robert Kennedy held with Johnson, Rayburn and Connally—either with one of them alone or with various combinations of the three Texans. Arthur Schlesinger says there were two, Connally says there were three, in fact there were probably four—all that is certain is that for three; hours Robert Kennedy ran up and down those back stairs. There is no agreement on the number of telephone conversations Jack Kennedy held with Johnson and his allies. Philip Graham, who was in Johnson’s suite during part of the three hours and later wrote a memorandum trying to recount what had occurred during that time, says there were four such conversations, Rowe says there were three. In the various versions of the afternoon’s activities, two meetings (or three) are conflated into one, or what happened in one m
eeting is divided as if it occurred in two (or three). The only summary statement about the meetings that can be made without dispute is that each of them was a drama in itself, a vivid, tension-fraught drama of powerful men in confrontation.

  In what may have been the first of them (it occurred at about 1:30)—the one at which, unexpectedly, “Bobby Kennedy showed up, and said he wanted to see Mr. Johnson”—Bobby did not in fact see Mr. Johnson. “I don’t want to see him,” Johnson said. Lady Bird said she didn’t think Lyndon should see him, so, John Connally says, “Rayburn and I saw him.”

  Rayburn and Connally were waiting, in Graham’s phrase, “for the obvious”—the formal offer of the vice presidential nomination; they were expecting Bobby to formalize the offer his brother had made to Johnson that morning by inviting him, in so many words, to be on the ticket—but the obvious was not what they got. The young man sitting before them in the suite’s living room was upset, “his hair all hanging down in his face,” in Rayburn’s description. He “told me that there’d be a fight over Lyndon.” In Connally’s recollection, “Bobby said, ‘We’ve got to persuade Lyndon not to take this vice presidential thing. I don’t know why my brother made the offer, but it’s a terrible mistake. There’s a revolt brewing on the floor. Labor is off the reservation. The liberals are in revolt. You’ve just got to persuade him not to accept this.’ ” And he asked if Johnson would, instead, accept the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. Rayburn refused that invitation with a single word: “Shit,” and went into a bedroom, where Johnson, Lady Bird and Graham were sitting on the twin beds, to tell Johnson that perhaps he should talk to Bobby in person. “Lady Bird intervened, apologizing by saying she had never yet argued with Mr. Sam, but repeating that she “felt L.B.J. should not see Bobby.” Agreeing with her, Graham told Johnson that his position should be that “You don’t want it, you won’t negotiate for it, you’ll only take it if Jack drafts you, and you won’t discuss it with anyone else.”

  “All of us were pacing around the bedroom, in and out of the bathroom,” Graham says. And “finally, in that sudden way decisions leap out of a melee, it was decided”: Rayburn would return to the living room and tell Bobby that Johnson would indeed accept the nomination, but only if Kennedy “drafted” him (by which, it soon turned out, Johnson meant merely that Kennedy would have to publicly make him a formal offer), and “I [Graham] was to go phone Jack” and tell him Johnson’s position directly. Rayburn went back and delivered that message to Bobby, whose response, according to Rayburn, was: “Then it’s got to be Lyndon. I’m going up to tell Jack.” Racing out of the room (“Suddenly, the door burst open, and Bob Kennedy ran out and up the steps two at a time,” the Dallas Morning News reported), brushing past reporters, Bobby shouted, “I can’t say anything now!”

  This was the formal offer—or as formal an offer as Bobby was ever to make, and one not made directly to Johnson.

  Meanwhile, Graham, pulling Rowe along “as witness,” went into a vacant bedroom down the hall to telephone Jack Kennedy and tell him Johnson’s position.

  Jack’s response did little to immediately firm up the situation. “He said something to the general effect that he was in a general mess because some liberals were against L.B.J.,” Graham was to recall. “He said he was in a meeting with others right then and that people were urging that ‘no one had anything against Symington’: … He then asked me to call back for a decision ‘in three minutes.’ ”

  When Graham did call back, not in three minutes but in about ten (he and Rowe “both agreed that ‘three minutes’ in these circumstances mean ten minutes”), the confusion vanished, as far as Jack Kennedy was concerned. “Jack was utterly calm,” Graham says. “It’s all set, he said. Tell Lyndon I want him and will have (Gov.) Lawrence nominate him, etc.” The confusion was not ended in Lyndon Johnson’s suite, however, for Bobby Kennedy was to return there, several times.

  On what appears to have been the second of his trips, apparently made while Jack was in the meeting with the liberals upstairs, Bobby was, for a moment, alone with John Connally in the living room, but only for a moment. Connally may have been tough enough to handle Bobby Kennedy, but Connally knew someone who was tougher—and he knew he needed that man now. Going out into the corridor, he started looking for Sam Rayburn. Encountering Horace Busby, he shouted, “Come with me!,” grabbed his arm and dragged him back to the suite. “Bobby Kennedy’s in there,” he said. “You go in there and make sure he doesn’t leave until the Speaker gets here.”

  Busby went in, “and there was Bobby Kennedy pacing furiously, just furiously, you know, just, almost at a trot.” The glare he gave Busby was the glare he had given Busby before—in the Senate cafeteria, seven years before, when Lyndon Johnson had come over to the table at which Bobby was sitting with Joe McCarthy. “It was the same expression that I told you about,” Busby told the author. It had nothing to do with him personally, he knew. “It was just that I was a Johnson man.” It had lost none of its ability to intimidate the timid little speechwriter, and anyway he was no Rayburn or Connally, and he knew it. “So I came back out.… There wasn’t a point in me saying anything to him, I could tell. And I came back out into the anteroom (the suite’s vestibule) and told John—who was on the phone—I said, ‘I’ll try to tackle him from out here, but I’m not staying in there with him.’ And at this moment the Speaker arrived—you know the Speaker was a short fellow and bald-headed, completely bald—and he … looked at me and he said, ‘Where is the little son of a bitch?’ And I said, ‘He’s in there.’ And he said, ‘What the goddamn hell is he trying to do now?’ ” The short bald-headed man opened the door, and went in to see Bobby Kennedy. He wasn’t in there long, and then “the door burst open, Bobby sprinted past us out in the hall, disappeared.” Rayburn came out right behind him. Connally was standing in the vestible, and Walter Jenkins had come in, and everyone asked Sam Rayburn what had happened inside. And none of them would ever forget Sam Rayburn in that moment. He was old, and he was blind, and, as would soon become apparent, he was very, very ill. But, as he told them what had happened, he didn’t seem old, or blind, or ill. He said that Bobby Kennedy had told him that liberal and labor leaders were going to stage a floor fight against Johnson’s nomination, and that perhaps Johnson would prefer to withdraw. He said he asked Bobby one question: “Are you authorized to speak for your brother?” Bobby said no.

  “Come back and see the Speaker of the House when you are,” Sam Rayburn said.

  AND THAT WAS NOT THE END of the confusion, because that was not the last of Bobby Kennedy’s trips downstairs.

  During the next hour, there was one—the consensus among the accounts makes this the third meeting—at which he met John Connally. Rayburn refused to see him again, so Connally saw him alone. “It’s getting worse. You’ve just got to convince Lyndon not to take it.” Connally reiterated Rayburn’s stance, saying that Jack had made the offer, and if the offer was to be withdrawn, it had to be Jack who withdrew it. “I said, ‘This is a very simple matter. All your brother has to do is call Mr. Johnson and say, “I’ve re-evaluated the situation and I want to withdraw the offer.” ’ He said, ‘He can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Why in the hell can’t he? I’ll tell you this: Mr. Johnson’s not going to be persuaded by the conversations that are taking place here.’ ”

  Bobby then said—Graham puts the time at “roughly, 3:00”—that Jack would phone at once to make the formal offer. No call came, however, and, Graham says, Johnson “was considerably on edge.” Graham telephoned Jack, saying, “Johnson hasn’t heard from you, and you’d better call him.” Jack said he had assumed the message—“It’s all set”—he had sent through Graham would suffice, and “He said he’d call at once.” (But he also mentioned again the “opposition to LBJ.” Graham responded that he should “stop vacillating,” and, Graham says, Kennedy “agreed about the finality of things.”) Rowe went down the hall to Johnson’s suite. “Just don’t go wandering,” he told him; Kennedy
was about to call. He did, at perhaps 3:30. “Johnson took the call sitting on one bed; I was on the other.” Kennedy read Johnson a press release saying he had selected him as the vice presidential nominee. “Do you really want me?” Lyndon Johnson said. Rowe says he could hear Kennedy say, “Yes, I do.” “Well, if you really want me, I’ll do it,” Johnson said.

  “EVERYBODY SORT OF RELAXED, thought it was all settled,” Jim Rowe recalls. A statement accepting the nomination had been typed up, and Johnson was preparing to go out into the corridor, now jammed from wall to wall with reporters, photographers and television lights and cameras, and read it. But, in fact, the worst of the confusion, fueled by hatred, was yet to come. For there was one more trip downstairs by Robert Kennedy, and on this trip he met, alone, with Lyndon Johnson.

  Not long, perhaps half an hour, after the phone call from Jack Kennedy to Johnson, Graham and Rowe were sitting in a bedroom down the hall that they had commandeered, when suddenly, as Rowe recalls it, a young man “whom I had never seen before”—it was a young Johnson aide named Bill Moyers—came running in, yelling, “Graham, my God, Bobby is in the room.” Grabbing Graham’s arm, he dragged him out into the crowded corridor, and, pushing through the crowd with Rowe behind them, down the hall to Johnson’s suite, where they learned Bobby Kennedy had just left after being closeted alone with Johnson in the suite’s living room.