The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  He was reduced to begging—although he did it, at least mostly, through aides. “Charlie,” Liz Carpenter asked Charles Bartlett, “could you get the President to check with Lyndon once in a while on matters of foreign policy that he’s considering?” She said, in Bartlett’s recollection, that “the Vice President was very frustrated by the fact that he was out of these deliberations; he felt a little bit sort of out of it, and perhaps if the President would just call up once in a while and ask his opinion, it would be a great help.” Bartlett did bring the matter up with Kennedy, asking him, “Why don’t you call Lyndon more often and ask his opinion?” Replying that he really should have done so more often, Kennedy said, “You know, it’s awfully hard because once you get into one of these crunches you don’t really think of calling Lyndon because he hasn’t read the cables. When you get into one of these things you want to talk to the people who are most involved, and your mind doesn’t turn to Lyndon because he isn’t following the flow of cables.” That explanation might have been valid except that Kennedy, had he wanted to, could simply have included Lyndon as one of the people who got the cables.

  In any case, the begging didn’t help. It wasn’t simply foreign policy from which Johnson was being excluded. Consideration was being given to changing the jurisdiction and procedures of the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, of which he was the chairman, by an executive order. “For nine months,” Shesol was to report, “memos [about the changes] circulated between the White House and the Justice Department.… At no point did a copy reach the vice president.”

  DURING THE ADMINISTRATION of John F. Kennedy, Washington was Camelot, and in Camelot, the political world included parties. Johnson was always invited to formal state dinners; he and Lady Bird would be escorted upstairs to the family quarters in the White House with the evening’s other honored guests, so that they could come down the staircase with the President, a careful several steps behind him, taking their pace from him, and they would be part of the receiving line. And they were invited to some smaller dinners in the White House, too, including some of the black-tie, candlelit dinners—the “dazzling mixture of ‘beautiful people’ from New York, jet-setters from Europe, politicians, reporters who are friends and Kennedy relatives,” at which “the crowd is always young, the women are always gorgeous,” described by Ben Bradlee—to which invitations were highly prized; they were invited, that is, if Kennedy was directly asked about including them. Recalls Angier Biddle Duke: “I would get the list pretty late and see that the Vice President wasn’t on it, and call the White House—it was often in the afternoon of the day of the party—and remind—usually it was Kenny O’Donnell, that [since it was so late] the President himself would have to invite the Johnsons,” and “he would, and they would come.”

  But Johnson felt just as out of place at the parties as in the West Wing. Everyone—Schlesinger, the Galbraiths, the Bundys—seemed to know everyone else so well. He didn’t. And in Washington, parties are a place for conducting business; after dinner, two or three men would be holding a quiet conversation. None of the business was with him. “Nobody was terribly interested in him,” Duke says. Things got worse. At the third White House dinner-dance, on November 11, a particularly dazzling affair which lasted until 4 a.m. and at which the champagne flowed quite freely, Lester Lanin’s society orchestra played, and many of the eighty guests began doing a new, hip-swiveling dance called the twist. Johnson asked the scintillating Helen Chavchavadze (who, as it happened, was one of the President’s mistresses) to dance—and slipped and fell on her, knocking her to the floor. It took a minute or two for him to be helped to his feet. By noon the next day, word of Johnson’s fall, couched in vivid phrases (“He lay on her like a lox,” one of the other guests reported), had reached Camelot’s most distant frontiers—as Johnson was well aware.

  And sometimes he wasn’t invited—and he seemed simply unable to accept that. Evelyn Lincoln picked up her phone one day to find the Vice President on the line; “Mrs. Lincoln,” he said, “I’ve just looked over some of the lists of dinners to be given by Mr. Kennedy and on one of them I don’t find my name. I wonder if you would check and see if there has been a mistake.” The dinner in question was one for the President’s personal friends, she was to recall. When she told Kennedy about Johnson’s call, Kennedy asked, “You mean he called and wanted to be invited?” Mrs. Lincoln said that was correct. “Call and tell him that you have checked and you found that there was no mistake,” Kennedy said.

  WASHINGTON HAD IN MANY WAYS always been a small town, and in small towns gossip can be cruel, and the New Frontiersmen—casual, elegant, understated, in love with their own sophistication (“Such an in-group, and they let you know they were in, and you were not,” recalls Ashton Gonella)—were a witty bunch, and wit does better when it has a target to aim at, and the huge, lumbering figure of Lyndon Johnson, with his carefully buttoned-up suits and slicked-down hair, his bellowing speeches and extravagant, awkward gestures, made an inviting target. “One can feel the hot breath of the crowd at the bullfight exulting as the sword flashes into the bull,” one historian wrote. In the Georgetown townhouses that were the New Frontier’s social stronghold “there were a lot of small parties, informal kinds, dinners that were given by Kennedy people for other Kennedy people. You know, twelve people in for dinner, all part of the Administration,” says United States Treasurer Elizabeth Gatov. “Really, it was brutal, the stories that they were passing, and the jokes, and the inside nasty stuff about Lyndon.” When he mispronounced “hors d’oeuvres” as “whore doves,” the mistake was all over Georgetown in what seemed an instant.

  His accent—his pronunciation of the personal pronoun (“Ah reckon,” “Ah believe,” “Well, ahm just an ol’ country boy”); the way he slipped into saying “nigrah” instead of “Negro” no matter how hard he tried—his clothes (for one white-tie dinner-dance, he wore, to the Kennedy people’s endless amusement, not the customary black tailcoat but a slate-gray model specially sent up by Dallas’ Neiman-Marcus department store): all were grist for the Georgetown mill, as were his loquacity and his endless, corny stories. Any lull in the conversation could be filled with a question based on his rapid descent from power to obscurity: “Say, whatever happened to Lyndon Johnson?” Nicknames—shorthand for that fall—were coined for him: “Judge Crater,” for example, after a New York City judge who, during the 1920s, had disappeared one day, never to be seen or heard from again. Some of the New Frontiersmen had a gift for words, and the terms that finally became the accepted nicknames for Lyndon Johnson in their social gatherings—“Uncle Cornpone” or “Rufus Cornpone”—were, in their opinion, so funny. They had a nickname for Lady Bird, too, so when the New Frontiersmen referred to the Johnsons as a couple, it might be as “Uncle Cornpone and his Little Pork Chop.” The journalists who, as members of the in-group, were at the parties would hear a West Winger laughingly refer to “Lyndon? Lyndon Who?” and references to the situation would creep into print.

  *

  1 The 1942 episode, with much of the same wording, is from The Path to Power. The story of Sam Rayburn is in that volume, in the chapter entitled “Rayburn.”

  8

  “Cut”

  THE LARGE, FORMAL MEETINGS that were the only ones to which the Vice President was invited were becoming more and more infrequent. Regarding them as “a waste of time,” Kennedy cut back on sessions of the Cabinet and the National Security Council; soon the Cabinet was meeting less than once a month. And with the Space Council running itself and the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity being run by Labor Department officials, Lyndon Johnson had very little to do. He spent a lot of time at the Capitol, in the Taj Mahal and, sometimes, presiding over the Senate, sitting on that dais on which, even as a freshman senator years before, he “couldn’t bear” to sit, so removed was it from the action; presiding often over a Chamber in which a senator would be giving a speech to rows of desks empty except for two or three colleagues. During t
he early weeks of his vice presidency, he would sometimes, during a speech, step down from the dais to the Chamber floor and begin to make conversation with a senator. The senator would be polite, but often he would have to break away after a bit—he had other things to do. After a while, Lyndon Johnson stopped coming down to the floor. And once he came into the Democratic cloakroom, where, for eight years, he had been the cynosure of senators’ attention, where he had stood dispatching senators to the floor for a speech or a parliamentary maneuver, leaning over to hear as Bobby Baker or some senator whispered in his ear, senators clustered around him, trying to catch his eye. This time, when he came in, a few senators were in the cloakroom, sitting in armchairs or on the sofas, reading newspapers or chatting. He greeted them. They greeted him back. Then Lyndon Johnson stood in the center of the cloakroom for a few minutes. No one stood up to talk to him. No one invited him to sit down. One of the men who was there that day says, “I don’t think he ever came into the cloakroom again.”

  His big car would take him the mile and a half back up Pennsylvania Avenue. He had a suite, EOB 274, of three rooms on the second floor of the Executive Office Building, and his private office was high-ceilinged with ornate moldings, a marble fireplace and tall windows—which looked almost directly down, across the narrow pavement of West Executive Avenue, at the entrance to the West Wing of the White House, with the cars pulling up at it and the men getting out of them to hurry inside to important business.

  It was so close. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off it. His chair faced away from the window, but it was a swivel chair. In the midst of talking to someone—usually an aide: Buzz or Reedy or his Air Force aide, Colonel Howard Burris; he had few other visitors—talking across a desk that was all too empty of anything that mattered, he would swing the chair around so that he was facing the window, and then jump up and stare out so that he could get a better look, a tall figure silhouetted against a tall window, looking out at the place he had always wanted to be. He couldn’t stay away from it. Suddenly he would stride out of the office, without a word of explanation, and “you knew where he was gone to,” Horace Busby says. He had no reason to be in the White House, of course—no assignment from the President required his presence. He might give O’Donnell some reason he wanted to see the President, and sit there beside O’Donnell’s desk, waiting for a few minutes of another man’s time. The door would open; a group of men would come out, chatting, perhaps laughing, with one another. He wouldn’t know what they had been talking about. He might be told to go in then—or he might not. Or he would walk around the halls. “This was a period in which he proceeded to ‘hang around’ the outer offices of the White House—something like a precinct captain sitting in the anteroom of a ward leader hoping to be recognized,” George Reedy was to write. “It was not a very prepossessing sight and certainly not worthy of a man of his stature.” And in so many rooms in the White House, it seemed, there would be meetings going on: the smaller, informal conferences through which much of the business of the Kennedy Administration was conducted. The halls were filled with men walking and talking together, or standing in little groups, having come out of one of the offices, and continuing their discussion in the corridors. “The White House is small,” Lyndon Johnson was to recall years later, “but if you’re not at the center, it seems enormous. You get the feeling that there are all sorts of meetings going on without you, all sorts of people clustered in small groups, whispering, always whispering. I felt that way as Vice President.”

  Among Johnson’s assistants were men who loved him, and they could hardly bear to watch the way their Chief was being treated. The adoring Horace Busby, to whom Johnson would have been a father figure had Busby loved and revered his father, was, in fact, physically unable to bear it. Going across to the West Wing one day on some errand, he saw Johnson “wandering around, kind of your obedient servant just waiting for somebody to say, ‘Lyndon, would you run down and get the President an apple or something,’ … just kind of exposing himself so they would notice that he was on call.” And he saw what the Kennedy staffers were doing to Johnson: ignoring him. Returning to the Executive Office Building, he went into a bathroom and vomited. Lyndon’s brother couldn’t bear it. His visits to Washington became increasingly infrequent, Sam Houston was to say, “because I didn’t want to be a firsthand witness to my brother’s day-to-day humiliation.”

  In the little world of Washington, what’s more, everyone knew the situation: knew that Lyndon Johnson was no longer on the inside of anything. The discipline with which, during the early months of his vice presidency, he had imposed on himself a policy of silence with journalists who had previously known him as a master leaker of inside information was no longer necessary, since, as Booth Mooney puts it, “he could no longer be regarded as an important news source.”

  Where at one time influential members of the Washington press corps had pleaded for a few moments of his time, the situation was reversed now. “He used to call me—he was very lonely,” Time’s Sidey recalls. “ ‘Hugh, you haven’t been to see me, you haven’t called me.’ Lonely. Pathetic.” But Sidey had no reason to call him now. “He wouldn’t know what the President was going to do. He couldn’t talk about things in detail like he used to do.”

  Spotting Russell Baker of the New York Times outside the Senate Chamber one day, he “clapped my back, mauled my hand, massaged my ribs … all the time hailing me as though I were a long lost friend and simultaneously hauling me into” the Taj Mahal, where he launched into a seemingly endless monologue. “Torrents of words poured out of him”—on a dozen subjects. Although Baker had covered him in the Senate for years, Johnson didn’t know his name. Sometime deep into the monologue, he scrawled a few words on a slip of paper, and called in a secretary to take it, and, Baker recalls, “a few minutes later his secretary brought him back a message” on another piece of paper, which Johnson looked at, and then crumpled up and threw into a wastepaper basket. When Baker was finally able to leave, he bumped into a friend who had been in Johnson’s outer office when the secretary came out with Johnson’s note. The friend told Baker that Johnson’s note asked the secretary: “Who is this I’m talking to?” Aware of Baker’s name or not, however, he had found a journalist willing to listen to him for a while, and the “torrent of words” went on. The monologue had a purpose. “Its central theme was his devotion to John F. Kennedy.” He put on a front. “To hear him tell it, there had never been a happier second banana. Never mind that the Kennedys’ glittering young courtiers—the ‘Harvards,’ as Johnson called them—joked constantly and cruelly about him.… Never mind realities. On this day, playing to a nameless Capitol reporter, he spoke of the vice-presidential life as a friendship with a man he admired extravagantly.… He was making it plain what the headline should say: ‘Lyndon Johnson Utterly Devoted to John F. Kennedy!’ ” But Baker, of course, recognized the truth: that Johnson “knew he was the butt of cruel humor among many of President Kennedy’s people, and was trying to pretend it wasn’t so, that he still counted as he had counted back in the Fifties when he was Johnson the Genius Who Ran the Senate.… I felt sorry for him. If you had once been the great Lyndon Johnson … it was painful to be laughed at and called ‘Cornpone’ by people you thought of as arrogant, smart-ass Ivy League pipsqueaks. Here was greatness comically humbled.”

  It wasn’t only newspapermen who had stopped calling. Washington was a Kennedy town now; it wasn’t a good idea for Lyndon Johnson to be able to say he had been talking with you. A friend who visited him in EOB 274 says, “I couldn’t believe it. I sat there for an hour and the phone didn’t ring.” When old allies from Texas—who, not being familiar with vice presidential traditions, assumed that a Vice President would have an office in the White House—visited Washington, he was ashamed that he didn’t, so he would bring that fact up himself, as if doing so made it less bad. Charlie Herring came by, and Johnson said, “You know, I feel like I’ve got nothing to do. I don’t even have an office
in the White House. Let’s go out for a while.” Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark of Texas, an old ally, was at home, and they dropped in on him “just to have something to do.” Dropping by for another visit some months later, Herring found that nothing had changed. “He was completely at loose ends. He had nothing to do. He said, ‘We might as well get out and see the country,’ ” and in the middle of the day they drove down to Fairfax, Virginia, to see a facsimile of George Washington’s will.

  THE FORMAL MEETINGS in the Cabinet Room—of the Cabinet or the National Security Council—at which Johnson sat, in the center of one side of a long table, directly across from President Kennedy, were particularly terrible hours for Lyndon Johnson. Not just his desire, his need, to dominate, but also his need to decide—his will for decision, his will to act, what Theodore H. White was to call his “yearning” to act—were fundamental to his inner being. But if at first his reluctance during the Kennedy Administration to speak at such meetings had been a manifestation of sullenness or self-pity, or a bid for sympathy, or a desire to show his loyalty (“I agree with what the President said”), another consideration had now, with the increasingly open hostility of the New Frontiersmen, been added to the list of those that militated silence: any comment that he made in a meeting seemed to be quoted—or misquoted—to the press, in ways that made him seem southern, or militaristic, or uncouth. “I don’t want to debate these things around fifteen men and then have them all go out and talk about the Vice President and what he thinks,” he explained once. So while other men discussed, while another man decided, Lyndon Johnson sat silent, in a role that was, like so many aspects of the vice presidency, foreign to his very nature, sat so silent that people who had watched him at meetings in earlier years marveled at what they were seeing now, at what Dean Rusk was to call the “great self-discipline and strength,” the “self-control,” that enabled Johnson “with all that volcanic force that was part of his very being … [to] fit into that new role.” Not even when the discussion turned to problems with Congress would he comment unless asked directly by the President, and then the answer would be brief. “He had to sit there … and observe controversies and frustrations which for years he had managed, and be totally passive,” his old friend Elizabeth Wickenden points out.