The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  The nominations for Vice President were to begin, in the Los Angeles Coliseum, where the convention’s final session was being held, at eight o’clock, and for a couple of hours there was, as Ken O’Donnell recalls, “the possibility of a messy floor fight over Johnson’s nomination.”

  The gasps from reporters that had greeted Kennedy’s announcement of his choice were echoed even by seasoned politicians. When a reporter said “It’s Johnson” to FDR’s tough old Democratic Party national chairman, “Farley’s jaw dropped.” “Why that’s impossible!” he exclaimed. And, Newsweek reported, “Jim Farley’s reaction was typical of the stunned disbelief that swept over the delegates to the Democratic National Convention at the news that Jack Kennedy wanted Lyndon Johnson.” The Michigan delegation, which included a large bloc of UAW delegates from the Detroit auto factories, declared that other candidates would be nominated for Vice President, and that there would be a floor fight, complete with a roll call, and members of several other delegations, including California, New York and Wisconsin, followed suit. Checking with Reuther’s aide Conway a little later, O’Donnell was told that the Michigan delegation would “definitely” nominate a candidate to oppose Johnson and was planning “a fight to the finish” against the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. “It looked like a bad night for all of us,” O’Donnell was to recall. The threat was less that Johnson might actually be defeated than that an open battle over Kennedy’s choice, the first decision he had made as the nominee, would embarrass him—and of course the man he had chosen. That threat of embarrassment “was,” in O’Donnell’s words, “very strong and real that afternoon.” Though Kennedy would win the fight, it would handicap his campaign at its very start, O’Donnell felt. “When you were on national television … the speeches were going to get a little rough after a while and would advertise … the split in the Democratic Party. It was going to be real, real tough. You were going to get into the Negro thing. You were going to get into the southern versus the northern.”

  To Lyndon Johnson, already strained to the breaking point, the threat certainly seemed real. On the television set in his suite Robert Nathan, chairman of the District of Columbia delegation, was telling CBS News that the delegation had decided on its candidate: Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman. That “revolt” against Kennedy’s choice was spreading, commentators said. “I don’t believe his managers or lieutenants can put this down,” Edward R. Murrow said. “He is going to have to deal with this himself.” The “humiliation” of defeat had loomed ominously before Johnson when he had been fighting for the top spot on the ticket. Now, was there to be a fight over even the second spot—with “humiliation” a possibility at the end of that fight, too? A new figure—a tall one—appeared on the back stairs. Rushing up the two flights to the Kennedy suite, Johnson conferred with Larry O’Brien about a floor fight: “He was concerned that … it could turn out to be a debacle, and that would be devastating not only to us but to him, too.” He talked with Jack Kennedy, and then they stepped out into the hall, and photographers caught their smiles: Jack’s wide, Lyndon’s wary—so wary that in some of the photographs it is more a grimace. Going back down the stairs, he picked up Lady Bird and left for their quarters, a model home that had been built by a real estate developer next to the coliseum, where he was to wait for the nominations, and as he was stepping out of his hotel suite—Lady Bird beside him with the set-in-stone smile for once chipping away at the edges into something on the verge of hysteria—a reporter asked him, “Are you going to the Arena later?”

  “That depends on developments,” Johnson replied.

  Just as he was about to enter the door of the model home, reporter Bill Downs of CBS shouted at him, and Johnson turned to face him as Lady Bird continued through the door, standing with television lights glaring on his face. Fleshy though it was, his face was gaunt and haggard, the circles under his eyes so dark they looked like bruises. Downs’ next words were a brutal reminder that Johnson had once hoped to be the presidential, not vice presidential, nominee. “Senator, this is the first time you’ve been out to the Arena,” the reporter said. “We expected you to come out in a different role.” Johnson smiled wanly, without a word. “How’s it feeling, huh?” Downs asked. Seeing that something was wrong, Lady Bird came back and took her husband’s arm. Lyndon Johnson stood there a moment in the glare of the television lights. Then, still without a word, he went inside.

  But the liberal bravado faded in the face of reality. The reality was the numbers: the figures in the Electoral College were all that mattered now. Thirteen-year-old Lucy Baines, tired out from crying over her father’s loss the night before, had been napping during the day’s developments, but she understood that reality as soon as she awoke, and was told that her father had accepted the nomination. “Kennedy couldn’t win without Daddy,” she said. An older person—and one with more experience with numbers—understood it, too. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith got the news from Robert Kennedy, who telephoned him and said, “Jack’s decided, and you’ve got a revolt on your hands.… Go out there and see what you can do.” Galbraith started circulating among liberal delegates, reminding them that the move was not unprecedented—after all, Roosevelt had picked the Texas conservative Garner—and had been made for the same reason: FDR needed Garner if he was to win. “For God’s sake, give Kennedy the same right that you would have automatically given FDR,” Galbraith said.

  The man who was probably best of all at realities was immediately confident of the wisdom of his son’s decision. That evening, in the courtyard of Joe Kennedy’s rented mansion, as Robert was on the telephone to the convention floor monitoring the vice presidential proceedings while Jack read a newspaper, both Kennedy brothers seemed in low spirits. Robert, Charles Bartlett felt, was “in near despair.” “Yesterday was the best day of my life,” he told the columnist, “and today is the worst day of my life.” Then, “their father appeared in the doorway” in a smoking jacket, and, standing there “in a very grand manner with his hands behind his back,” said, “Don’t worry, Jack, in two weeks they’ll be saying it’s the smartest thing you ever did.”

  It didn’t take even two weeks. Alex Rose was calmed down within minutes by his longtime ally, and fellow power in New York liberal politics, David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Telephoning Dubinsky to tell him of Johnson’s selection, Rose expected him to be as angry as he was, but Dubinsky’s immediate reaction was “Kennedy is making a smart move!” A moment later, he went further. “I think it’s a good ticket,” he said. “I think it’s a ticket that can win.” “A political masterstroke,” he said. On the coliseum floor, Soapy Williams angrily demanded of Abe Ribicoff, “Why retreat … from principle?” “We want to win,” Ribicoff replied. And, as the AFL-CIO’s general counsel, Arthur Goldberg, told Kennedy that day, labor and the liberals would have no option but to go along with his choice. They would hate the idea, he said—“Meany has developed a vendetta [against Johnson]”—but labor would certainly endorse him because under no circumstances could it support Nixon; “they had no choice.” (Besides, Goldberg was to recall, “I rather discounted the [importance of] the Vice Presidency. Who thought this young fellow might be assassinated? He [Johnson] will be just another Vice President, which you don’t take seriously.”) Forty-eight hours later, the Herald Tribune would be reporting that “the consensus of America’s traditional politicians, Republican and Democratic, is that the Democratic Kennedy-Johnson ticket is a ‘brilliant stroke.’ No question about it, the professionals see in” Kennedy’s choice “a swift, bold strike … a bridge to the South … by way of Texas.” Johnson’s selection, Doris Fleeson said, was simply “a decision to win the election.” And the reality went beyond the math. The southern delegations were enthusiastically for Kennedy’s choice (more than one southern governor told Kennedy it was “the only way” to hold the South); the most powerful of the northern big-city bosses were enthusiastically for it—and as for the l
iberals, as Newsweek put it, “they had no place else to go.” Bitter though Joe Rauh might be, he saw that. “What can I do—work for Nixon?” he said. And, finally, there was the overwhelming fact, what the Washington Star called “the tradition that a Convention does not deny a presidential candidate the right to pick his running mate.” Labor leaders bowed to these realities. “If Jack wants Lyndon, I’m for Lyndon,” David McDonald of the United Steelworkers of America said. Meany and Reuther were finally persuaded to pass the word to the union members in the New York, Michigan, and California delegations not to fight—word of that order was passed to O’Donnell, who had been working frantically with delegates on the floor, at 7:30, just a half hour before the nominations began. Orville Freeman told the District of Columbia delegates “very firmly” not to nominate him. “Although I am not completely enthusiastic about his [Kennedy’s] choice of a vice presidential candidate, I am certainly not prepared to nominate him yesterday and to oppose his choice for the vice presidential seat today,” he said.

  As eight o’clock neared, and the hopelessness of opposing Kennedy’s choice became apparent, the District’s delegation—and some liberal delegates in other delegations—remained determined, even if they did not nominate other candidates, to withhold their votes from Johnson, but in fact they were unable to register even this form of protest because Sam Rayburn knew how to make sure they wouldn’t be able to. After Johnson had been nominated by Governor Lawrence and seconded, and bands had played “The Eyes of Texas” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas” while delegates paraded through the hall in his honor (it was noticeable that few northern delegates got out of their seats, but the southern delegations, including those who had not joined the parade for Kennedy the night before, marched in strength), Rayburn’s Majority Leader in the House, John W. McCormack, made a motion: to suspend the convention rules (which allowed other nominations), and nominate Johnson by acclamation. Explaining that such a motion required approval of two-thirds of the delegates, Chairman Collins called for a voice vote. Estimates of whether there were more “ayes” or “nays” were to vary from newspaper to newspaper—in the opinion of most they were about evenly divided—and Collins hesitated, as a rising murmur began in the coliseum, during which the harsh, commanding voice of a bald old man in the Texas delegation could be heard, shouting, “Say ‘aye’! Say ‘aye’!,” and Rayburn’s man on the platform, the convention’s parliamentarian, Representative Clarence Cannon of Missouri, whispered something in Collins’ ear, and Collins announced that the rules had been suspended, and that Lyndon Johnson “has been nominated for Vice President by acclaim.”

  While the parade in his honor had been going on, Johnson and Lady Bird had come out of the model home at the head of his entourage to walk the few yards to the coliseum. As he emerged, Ed Murrow said to Walter Cronkite, “Johnson looks considerably older than when he arrived here, doesn’t he, Walter? Shows the strain.”

  “He certainly does,” Cronkite replied. “He looks exceedingly tired—and I would say somewhat downcast.” But while he waited behind the podium, the bands playing his songs, Chairman Collins announced that he was, by acclamation, the Democratic nominee for Vice President, and then he came out on the high platform above the crowd, and his smile broadened into a big smile, and he threw up his long arms in the “V for Victory” sign.

  *

  1 The other uncle lived to seventy-one, but after suffering a heart attack in 1946, at the age of sixty-five, and a second in 1947, spent his last years as a near invalid.

  2 There had been thirty-four presidencies, but Grover Cleveland had served two separate terms.

  3 Jeff Shesol, in his book about the Johnson–Robert Kennedy feud, also concludes that “Bobby’s case is not persuasive.” He feels that his account “cannot responsibly be dismissed as duplicity. It is more believable that Robert Kennedy, who despised LBJ even in 1960, remembered events as he saw them.”

  4 Philip Graham interprets his telephone conversations with Kennedy—in one of which Kennedy said he was in a meeting with liberals and “was in a general mess because some liberals were against LBJ” and to call back “in three minutes” and another of which he mentioned “opposition to LBJ”—to mean that Kennedy was wavering, but that interpretation conflicts with what in fact Kennedy actually did at each of those moments: when Graham did call back, Kennedy, with the liberals now gone, said simply, “It’s all set,” and added that he had already arranged for Lawrence to nominate Johnson; in the call in which he mentioned “opposition to LBJ,” he then also “agreed about the finality of things.” And in the last call, he had already delivered his formal statement announcing that he had picked Johnson.

  5

  The “LBJ Special”

  DURING THE CAMPAIGN that followed the convention, the campaign between the Kennedy-Johnson ticket and the Republican slate of Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge, it was important to Jack Kennedy’s chances that there be harmony, so when, the very morning after the vice presidential nomination, Robert Kennedy bumped into George Reedy, he said, in the friendliest manner, “Everything’s all right now, George.” Following a joint planning session at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, and the rump session of Congress—which, with its true purpose now gone, accomplished nothing: not one of the four major legislative proposals brought up was passed—Kennedy and Johnson opened the campaign by appearing together on Labor Day in Boston and later that week in cities across Texas, and the two candidates thereafter waged largely separate campaigns, on the same platform only a few times during the two months before Election Day. There was a minimum of interaction, or friction, between the Kennedy and Johnson camps.

  Johnson’s job was to hold the South—or, to be more precise, since Eisenhower had won five of the eleven states of the Old Confederacy in 1956, to win it back: a tough assignment, due to southern misgivings about the strong civil rights platform the Democrats had adopted in Los Angeles, and due also to Kennedy’s liberalism, civil rights views and religion. Kennedy’s hope that he had “settled the religious question for good” in the West Virginia primary proved, in Theodore White’s word, “naïve”; by September, “the old fears were boiling to the surface.… The reports from the South were bad; Baptist ministers had begun to preach against the Church of Rome and ‘its’ candidate.” Though Kennedy lanced the boil again in a speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, under the surface the issue still festered. A Gallup Poll at the end of September found the Kennedy-Johnson and Nixon-Lodge tickets in a dead heat in the South: 46 percent to 46 percent, with 8 percent undecided.

  Johnson’s campaign in the South included some very tough behind-the-scenes arguments to the most influential southern Democrats, such as the handful of key Florida leaders he flew to Miami to meet—in a very private meeting. So far behind did Kennedy’s private polls show him in that state that he had all but written it off, but Johnson, his face grim and his eyes blazing, told the Florida leaders that “This boy Kennedy is going to win, and he’s going to win big, and if he wins without the South, I’m warning you—I’m warning you—you bastards are going to be dead. You’ll get nothing out of the next Congress, and you won’t get anything out of the Kennedy Administration.” And “after that,” columnist Drew Pearson was to write, Florida’s top Democrats “really began to work.”

  And his campaign included a “whistle-stop” train tour down through the South on a thirteen-car “LBJ Special,” pulled by two locomotives, that chugged out of Washington’s Union Station in mid-October to spend five days wending its slow way through the little towns and cities of eight southern states.

  He designed the format for the stops himself, and, as George Reedy put it, “they were potent.” As the LBJ Special entered the outskirts of a town, its public-address system would be switched on, and over it would come the stirring strains of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” At first the tune would be played at low volume, but as the train approached the town’s center, where advance men would h
ave gathered a small crowd, “the volume would be turned up to a point where the tune could be heard from blocks away.” Record player and engine would stop simultaneously, a dark blue curtain that had been hung over the doorway onto the rear platform would be pulled aside, and the tall figure of Lyndon Johnson, waving a ten-gallon hat, would step through. Following him would be the town’s mayor and sheriff and perhaps the district’s congressman, and other local dignitaries, and Johnson would introduce them, perhaps say a word or two about one or another, and then shake their hands as they stepped down from the platform into the midst of their constituents. Then he himself would be introduced, in introductions that emphasized that he was from the South and the significance of that fact. Tennessee’s governor, Buford Ellington, who made a lot of the introductions, riding the train for the entire five days, would tell the audience that the platform adopted in Los Angeles didn’t really matter; “The main thing is to have a Southerner on the ticket.” Or an introduction might remind the crowd that Kennedy had been attacked for putting a southerner on the ticket. “Are we going to sit idly by while this great southerner is abused in this manner?,” Virginia’s governor, John S. Battle, demanded at one stop. And Johnson would step forward, sometimes throwing his Stetson into the crowd (where an advance man was supposed to retrieve it and bring it back; Stetsons were expensive), sometimes simply placing it conspicuously on the railing in front of him, to say he was happy to be back “in the land we love, with the people we love” (although he would then add that “In our campaign, there’s no North, South, East or West—it’s for all America”).