The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  His decline after the Fourth of July was rapid. Back in Washington, he had no appetite and began losing weight; he had cancer, probably pancreatic (no one knows for sure). He didn’t want the House to see him like this; he was going to “get away from here so the boys won’t see me until I lick this thing,” he told a friend. On August 16, he told a shocked and silent House that he was returning to Texas for medical treatment.

  He didn’t leave for a few more days, and during those days there was a moment Lady Bird Johnson never forgot. On the weekend of August 18, Lyndon Johnson was in Berlin, as President Kennedy’s representative to assure that city of American support in a Russian-instigated crisis, and when he returned to Washington, Lady Bird was waiting for him at Andrews Air Force Base.

  Almost twenty years before, in January, 1942, Lyndon Johnson and John Connally had been boarding a train at Union Station, for war service which would presumably take them to the South Pacific. Lady Bird and Nellie Connally went to the station with them, and, at the last moment, Rayburn said he was going, too. He didn’t presume to intrude on the two young couples as they said their goodbyes; he stood well behind them on a platform in the giant terminal. Lady Bird would always remember that short, blocky figure—so massive and strong, then—standing, unmoving and unsmiling, grim as always, amid the tumult of young men rushing for the trains that would take them off to war, and the young couples kissing goodbye; she had never forgotten how hard this man who could never be cheerful tried to be cheerful to her and Nellie as, after Lyndon and John’s train pulled out, he said, very gruffly, the only words he could think of to cheer them up: “Now girls, we’re going to get us the best dinner in Washington.”

  Now, in 1961, waiting for her husband’s plane to touch down at Andrews, Lady Bird happened to glance behind her, and there, to her surprise, standing on the tarmac, shrunken and almost blind, still as grimly expressionless as ever, was Sam Rayburn.

  “Dear Mr. Speaker,” she wrote him a few days later. “As I stood by that airplane in the gray, grizzly morning waiting for Lyndon, I looked up and saw you and my mind went back to so many times and so many trouble-fraught situations when you have stood by our side.… Next April is my twenty-fifth anniversary as a wife of a member of Congress. This quarter century of our lives has been marked most by knowing you.” On August 30, Rayburn wrote back, even in this last letter stilted and formal: “Dear Bird, Your note was very refreshing and highly appreciated by me.”

  Here are the words I wrote in the first volume of this work:

  “Although the pain was very bad that day, the hand that wrote that letter did not shake. There was not a tremor in the name ‘Sam Rayburn.’ The next morning, Rayburn went home to Bonham to die.”1

  “YOU’LL STILL HAVE THE SPEAKER,” John Connally had told Johnson in Los Angeles, advising him to accept the vice presidential nomination: as long as he had Rayburn behind him, he would have power in dealing with the Kennedys.

  Now he no longer had the Speaker behind him. He no longer had the Senate behind him. He had no one behind him in Washington. “Was it worse for Johnson after Rayburn died?” the author once asked John Connally.

  “Yes,” Connally replied.

  LYNDON JOHNSON, WHO HAD DEVOTED all his life to the accumulation of power, possessed now no power at all, and as Vice President the only power he would ever possess was what the President might choose to give him. He understood that now: understood that it was imperative for him to remain in the President’s good graces. All his life Lyndon Johnson had been as obsequious to those he needed as he had been overbearing to those he didn’t—and now he needed Jack Kennedy desperately.

  He gave him gifts: four Hereford heifers, two with calves, all granddaughters of Real Silver Domino 203rd, “Bridwell’s top bull,” which, he informed Jack Kennedy after a legislative leaders’ breakfast in 1961, he was having sent to the estate, Glen Ora, that the Kennedys had rented in the Virginia hunt country; a pony for four-year-old Caroline (he suggested the name “John Jr.” but Jackie preferred “Tex”)—and he got as much mileage out of the gifts as possible, telling the President he would like to be at Glen Ora when the cattle and pony arrived so that, Mrs. Lincoln writes, “he could see that they were in good order.” And he said he would like to have a picture of Tex with all of them together—Jack, Jackie, Caroline and him—on the White House lawn.

  The photo session went off smoothly—after Mrs. Lincoln had recovered from her surprise when, one morning, she glanced out her window and saw a strange pony grazing outside the Oval Office. She arranged for a photographer to snap a picture of Tex with Caroline in the saddle, Jack and Jackie standing behind her, and Lyndon holding the reins, and “You could tell Mr. Johnson was really enjoying this, because he strolled around patting Caroline on the head and patting the horse.” Nonetheless, these gifts were not a total success. When the Vice President saw Caroline in Mrs. Lincoln’s office a few days later, he told her, according to Mrs. Lincoln’s recollection, “I’m your Uncle Lyndon, remember? I’m the one who gave you that fine riding horse, Tex.… Now remember what I told you, Caroline. I want you to call me ‘Uncle Lyndon’ whenever you see me.” Caroline, as it happened, already had a pony—Macaroni—whom she had been learning to ride, and a couple of uncles. Although she and the Vice President often bumped into each other in Mrs. Lincoln’s office, “She never … called him ‘Uncle Lyndon,’ nor did he ever mention it to her again.”

  As for the cows, raising cattle had not been what Jackie had in mind when she acquired a country home. She didn’t know what to do with them. The first year, the heifers and their calves were pastured on a neighboring farm, but the farmer said he wouldn’t have room for them the next year. And, in the course of nature, the gift kept multiplying. By 1962, there would be eleven cows, and Jackie, in the process of renting another hunt-country estate, had to write Lyndon a letter: “I can see myself plodding down a dusty lane—beating the rumps of a lowing herd in front of me—which is what your cows have now grown into.” There wasn’t going to be room for the cows on the new estate, she said, so she had two suggestions: either “We give them back to you—with all the new ones they have produced” or “We sell them … and with the money give a present in your name to the White House.” The letter was as gracious as possible under the circumstances (“It was so incredible of you to give them to us. I love animals so much I feel badly to have any that I can’t care for properly.… The only sad thing about having cows is the little calves you love the most always end up at the butcher. So the one thing I won’t do is eat any of them—as I have loved them so much”), but the message was clear: the present was being disposed of. (In the event, Johnson sold the herd, and with the proceeds bought a Lincoln manuscript for Jackie’s White House restoration project.)

  With livestock failing to produce the desired effect, there was an escalation—to pearls. On Christmas, 1961, while the Kennedys were vacationing in Palm Springs, they received presents from the Johnsons which Jackie found “unbelievable.” “Jack is enchanted with his pearl cufflinks—and has dressed for dinner with them two nights in a row,” she wrote Lady Bird. “As for me—a black pearl was always the most romantic exotic piece of jewelry—which I never imagined I would be fortunate enough to have—I wear it on my little finger.”

  MATCHING THE GIFTS in extravagance was the deference. Over the same Christmas, at the Johnson Ranch, a great deal of care was going into a letter to Kennedy which was edited and re-edited, and then copied out by Johnson by hand so that it would seem more personal. It was a paean of praise for the President. “Sitting in front of the ranch fireplace at Xmas Lady Bird and I had many long, long thoughts. This year has been one of peaks and depths for us. The loss of the Speaker as well as many people dear to us put many sad milestones in our lives. But there have been many joys. Never was I prouder than the day last January 20 when I sat on the platform and heard my President rally his country to ‘begin now.’ I am even prouder at the year’s end to look back and see
where you have been and see ahead and know where you are going.” The paean swelled. “Winning the peace is a lonely battle, as you have said so well.… But you have inspired so many. You will win it for us all.” And the letter ended with a coda of loyalty.

  “Where you lead, I will follow,” Lyndon Johnson wrote.

  Similar pledges of loyalty were delivered orally, for conveyance to the President’s ears, to Johnson’s few friends in the Administration. “I want you to get that point over to him that I’m not playing any games here,” he told Angier Duke. “I’m sincere. I would like to be part of his team and play on the team. If he thinks I’m out playing for myself … it’s not so. How can I get that through to him?”

  And, during the almost three years of Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidency that followed the failure of his “Seward” campaign, the pledges were honored. All his life, since his youth in the Hill Country had taught him the horror of defeat and public humiliation, Lyndon Johnson had done whatever he had to do to avoid them, willing himself, whenever he was in trouble, to do whatever was necessary to win; willing himself into those efforts that astounded men who were close enough to grasp their dimensions, that made Ed Clark say he had never thought it possible for anyone to work so hard. What Lyndon Johnson had to do now was very hard. In a way, for this man to whom it had always been so terribly important that other men know he had power and that they know also how shrewd he had been in acquiring it, and in using it, and how he reveled in its use, few things could have been harder. But he did it.

  During the summer of 1961, the Washington bureau chiefs of several magazines were invited to the Taj Mahal. The scene was one they had witnessed before, during Johnson’s days as Majority Leader: the big desk on its platform, the big man behind it, spotlit from above, doing all the talking, in what one of the newsmen, Time’s John L. Steele, described, in a memo to his editors, as a “three-hour monologue.” The monologue’s theme, on the other hand, could not have been more different from those of the earlier era, which had invariably been Lyndon Johnson’s power and shrewdness. The theme of this one was that Lyndon Johnson had no power—that on his foreign trips, for example, he was no more than a messenger boy for the President—and that he didn’t want any. Before he left on those trips, he told the journalists, “I had President Kennedy write down for me what he wanted in the communiqués for every country I visited,” and he said he had stuck to the letter of what the President had written. He had, he said, carried messages not only from but to the President: “Ayub told me to tell the President …,” “I was taking a message for the President from de Gaulle.” The startled Steele told his editors: “He is, by his own words, a mouthpiece, a message bearer … surrendering any notion that he had an important substantive impact himself.”

  That was his attitude not just about foreign policy, but about every aspect of his job, Johnson told the journalists. All he wanted to be, he said, was “the kind of Vice President I would want if I was President.” And, Steele wrote, that was what Johnson was, in fact, succeeding in being. “There is about Lyndon Johnson these days a quiescent air, an attitude of submission to the young President.… The surprise of the first six months of the Kennedy Administration is the ‘new’ LBJ—far quieter, far less aggressive and considerably less exciting. He isn’t running the Senate, he isn’t running anything except his office.… By every word and deed [he] is the President’s man.”

  If this was a mask, it was one in which not a single crack was allowed to appear. Precautions were taken against the utterance of a single wrong word—or against a single word that could be interpreted wrongly. He announced that he would hold no press conferences, so that, as Jack Bell of the Associated Press explained, reporters would have no opportunity to “get him into a position at cross purposes with the President,” and for some time except for occasions—such as a return from a foreign trip—when a press conference was unavoidable, he adhered to that ban. Reporters weren’t able to get him into that position in private, either. “In private, serious talks about John F. Kennedy, there was never a hint of criticism from the Vice President,” wrote Evans and Novak, with whom Johnson would have such talks. The two columnists, who had seen a lot of Johnson over the years, noted that “For Johnson, whose pleasure in mocking competitors and politicians behind their backs was legendary in Washington, that self-control must have stretched his endurance.” Stretched or not, however, it held.

  It had always been so important to him that the world know he was on the inside of things, and all his life, what’s more, he had used inside information, the “inside story,” as a tool to woo journalists and dominate conversations, vividly leaking details and anecdotes—some true, some partly true, some false (but during the Senate years he had been leaking to a captive Senate press corps that generally never questioned what he said)—about policies and maneuvers and individuals. Now that changed—completely. One reporter, looking for news, and feeling, from past experiences, that Johnson was always good for some, recalls that he “made an appointment with him and rode from the Capitol to the White House, and tried to talk with him about [some] situation, and he said absolutely nothing.” This experience jibed with that of other reporters: “He was maintaining a very rigorous self-imposed silence.”

  With his staff—or old allies from Texas—he would sometimes burst out in anger against Bobby Kennedy’s latest affront or comment acidly on mistakes he felt the Administration was making, but these outbursts were very rare. And they were never about the President. “Even in his most private harangues, LBJ never denounced John Kennedy,” as one account says. And not only would he permit no word of criticism of the President to cross his lips, he would permit no word to be uttered in his presence. In the fall of 1961, the Johnsons, together with their daughters, seventeen-year-old Lynda Bird and fourteen-year-old Lucy Baines, moved to 4040 52nd Street Northwest, in Washington’s Spring Valley, into a house, in the style of a small French château, that had been owned by the Washington hostess Perle Mesta, who had named it “Les Ormes” for the big trees outside. (Johnson changed the name to its English translation, “The Elms,” and added a heated swimming pool and piped-in music.) When, at a dinner there, a former staff member, Mary Fish, who had been working for the State Department in Europe, repeated a joke about the Kennedys that was circulating there, Johnson told her to “Either quit talking that way or quit your job!” It wasn’t only with his staff that he acted like this. “Even old Johnson friends in the Senate did not receive any signal by word or inflection of significant disagreement with Kennedy,” Evans and Novak write. Looking back later on his entire vice presidency, Charles Bartlett, the columnist who was John Kennedy’s friend, would write, “There was never any word that ever drifted back to Jack Kennedy of any criticism from Lyndon Johnson.… There was certainly not one word—and I’m very sure of this—of disloyalty that the Vice President ever uttered in terms of the President, no comment, no criticism.”

  At the outset of his vice presidency, his silence at meetings had been a kind of sullenness, an attempt to evoke Kennedy’s pity. There was more behind it now. When asked a question directly, he would say, “I agree with what the President said.” He told journalists that when he was at a meeting, “I always hope that the President won’t turn to me and ask, ‘Lyndon, what would you do?’ ” The President had a terribly difficult job, he said. “There were difficult, terrible decisions to make and there was only one person to make them: the President.”

  Of all the types of loyalty that Lyndon Johnson could have demonstrated, verbal restraint must have been one of the hardest for him to impose on himself. “For a man given to majestic displays of rage, to shouting and swearing and pounding on desktops,” to nonstop monologues, Johnson’s restraint was uncanny, the historian Jeff Shesol writes. “His ability to suppress explosive emotions … revealed a personal power few had ever seen.” A journalist calls his vice presidency “a triumph of self-discipline.” Difficult though the restraint may have been, however
, it never faltered. Hard as it must have been for him to honor his pledge of loyalty, honored it was.

  HIS LOYALTY DIDN’T do him any good, however. Walking across West Executive Avenue and into the White House, he would enter Ken O’Donnell’s office and say he would like a minute or two of the President’s time when he was free, and sit by O’Donnell’s desk waiting for an opportunity.

  But others would also be waiting. They would be put in the Cabinet Room or the Fish Room to wait, and sometimes the appointments were so closely stacked that, O’Donnell recalls, both rooms “would be filled with callers,” and others would be put in other aides’ offices, “or any place in the West Wing where a few feet of empty space happened to be available.” And these callers had specific business, often urgent, with the President—matters on which he had asked to see them. He would buzz out to O’Donnell or Evelyn Lincoln to bring one of them in; the visitor would be ushered into the Oval Office as Lyndon Johnson still sat outside. Or there would be emergencies, and “Dean Rusk or another State Department officer would want thirty minutes of the President’s time for an urgent discussion involving top-priority national security matters”—audiences “that could not be denied.” Sometimes Lyndon Johnson had to wait quite a long time to see the President.

  And sometimes, after he finally did get in to see him, the meetings weren’t that satisfactory. More than once, when Johnson was in the Oval Office with the President, Robert Kennedy simply walked in and interrupted to discuss some new matter, “without,” as one account puts it, “so much as a nod of apology toward LBJ.” Nor was it only the President’s brother who was permitted to interrupt. Once, for example, Arthur Schlesinger, sticking his head through the open door behind Mrs. Lincoln, saw Johnson sitting next to Kennedy’s desk, and “began to retreat,” but the President beckoned him to come in. Johnson was being treated as if he were simply another member of Kennedy’s staff.