The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “It was,” Conway says, “a pretty brutal business, very sharp. It brought tensions between Johnson and Kennedy right out on the table and very hard. Everybody was sweating under the armpits.… And then, finally, after completely humiliating Webb and making the Vice President look like a fraud and shutting up Hobart Taylor completely,” Kennedy abruptly stood up. Johnson had started trying to explain the situation to him. “For your information, Mr. Attorney General, we of the committee have met with the leading agencies who have the most contracts, namely the Department of Defense.… The Defense Department told us they had some 30 or 40 people working on this.… Mr. Webb doesn’t do that. This man here [Hartson] doesn’t do it anymore than you try to call a case in the Department of Justice. You have got a District Attorney down there that does that.” To Judge Lawson, “It was very obvious that he was angry … but he was clearly more in control, or more dignified in the encounter, than Bob was.” But as he was speaking, Kennedy started walking out of the room. Then, changing his mind, he walked around the table to where Conway was sitting, shook his hand, and stood there chatting with him, in Conway’s words, “about how things were going here, there, and every place,” as casual and relaxed as if nothing else was going on—and then, while Johnson was still talking to him, walked out the door.

  As the door closed behind him, “There was a great silence for a while” before the meeting resumed, Judge Lawson says. If Bobby Kennedy was still trying to get revenge for Los Angeles, he got a full measure of it that day.

  AFTER THAT MEETING, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t wound up anymore. “In the late summer of 1963,” Harry McPherson says, Johnson “looked miserable,” more depressed, Horace Busby says, “than I had ever seen him. Nothing to do—frustrated.” Friends invited to swim and have dinner at The Elms were shocked when they saw him in a bathing suit. His weight had always fluctuated wildly; now he had gone from thin to fat—very fat. “His belly … enormous,” McPherson says. “He looked absolutely gross.” His face was flushed and mottled—“maybe he had been drinking a good deal.” Sitting by the pool, he seemed unable to relax for a moment. Grabbing the phone impatiently, he would make a call, his conversation jerking without transition from one topic to another. Then, hanging up abruptly, he would make another call, and another.

  The fact that Robert Kennedy had not only harassed him (“humiliated” was the word he used; “he humiliated me”) but had done so in public (and, in fact, in a setting—a meeting packed with government officials—that ensured that the scene would become known throughout the capital) had, in Johnson’s mind, the most ominous implications: that it was no longer just 1968 that the Kennedys were thinking about but 1964; that they must be planning to drop him from the ticket in the next election because Bobby would never have made him look ineffectual and incompetent if he was still going to be his brother’s running mate. He felt his suspicions were confirmed when Kennedy loyalists began spreading the story of the meeting around Washington.

  Washington had had its suspicions even before the confrontation. By the summer of 1963, speculation was rife that he was going to be dumped from the ticket.

  Dampening the speculation was the fact that every time the President was asked about the rumors, he denied them. “There have been rumors in print and out that Vice President Johnson might be dropped,” a reporter asked him on one occasion. “I am sure that the Vice President will be on the ticket if he chooses to run,” Kennedy replied. “We were fortunate to have him before—and would again. I don’t know where such a rumor would start.” “Assuming that you run next year, would you want Lyndon Johnson on the ticket, and do you expect he’ll be on the ticket,” he was asked at another press conference. “Yes, to both of these questions,” Kennedy replied. “That is correct.” Denying the rumors in private, he was equally emphatic. When Ben Bradlee asked him, after a quiet dinner for the two men and their wives upstairs in the White House in October, if he was considering dumping Johnson, he said, “That’s preposterous on the face of it. We’ve got to carry Texas in ’64, and maybe Georgia.” When George Smathers, riding with him on Air Force One in November, said, “Everybody on the Hill says Bobby is trying to knock Johnson off the ticket,” he said, “George, you have some intelligence, I presume.… Why would we want to knock Lyndon Johnson off the ticket? Can you see me now in a terrible fight with Lyndon Johnson, which means I’ll blow the South? I don’t want to be elected, do you mean? You know, I love this job, I love every second of it.… I don’t want to get licked … and he’s going to be my vice president because he helps me.”

  “What do you mean, am I going to dump Johnson?” he had demanded when his friend Paul B. (Red) Fay visited him in the Oval Office in the spring. “What do you ask a question like that for? Of course I’m not. He’s doing an excellent job in the most thankless position in Washington. He’s my man for the job. He’s going to be my man in ’64, and I don’t know why you’re asking.” No denials could have been more unequivocal. John Kennedy’s assurances, in public and private, that Johnson would be on the ticket were, in fact, as unequivocal as his assurances in 1960 that Johnson would not be on the ticket. No one could have echoed the denials more firmly than Robert Kennedy—“There was no plan to dump Lyndon Johnson,” he would say in his oral histories. “There was never any discussion about dropping him”—unless it was Lyndon Johnson in his later years. “Reports … that I was going to be dumped from the ticket … were rumors and nothing more,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I had every reason to believe that he intended for us to go forward together.… What some people did not understand was that our relationship … had always been one of mutual respect, admiration, and cooperation.” The denials made their way into the historical record. “The ticket was definitely to be the same,” Arthur Schlesinger would write in 1978; he knew because Kennedy’s brother-in-law and campaign strategist Stephen Smith had told him so—“emphatically.” Indeed it has become an historical axiom, totally accepted, that there was never any serious discussion of dropping Johnson from the ticket; that, as Schlesinger put it in 1980, “There was no discussion. This idea is total fantasy.” “I have never encountered anything that corroborates that story” (the story that he would be dropped), journalist Max Frankel says, adding that in addition to the political considerations there was John Kennedy’s personality: “Whether he would have … been capable of the ultimate, really, destruction of Lyndon Johnson—I would doubt it.” Johnson’s conviction at the time that he would be dumped—and in complete contrast to later statements, his conviction at the time was firm (“In the back room they were quoting Bobby, saying I was going to be taken off the ticket”)—is explained away by amateur psychoanalysis; “obsessed” is the word Reedy uses to describe this conviction. “His complaints against Bobby Kennedy may have bordered on the paranoiac,” is Bobby Baker’s analysis; “among the other things Bobby was doing to him was to drive him from the national ticket.” The axiom has endured to this day. Yet, in fact, as summer turned to fall in 1963, the question of whether Lyndon Johnson would be on John Kennedy’s ticket again was beginning to be shrouded in ambiguities.

  His value to a Kennedy ticket had rested on very solid ground in 1960: Kennedy had needed at least a few southern states, and in particular Texas, to win the presidency—and the best way to win these states was to have Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. By 1963, however, that ground was shifting beneath Kennedy’s feet—and it was shifting fast. In 1960, Kennedy’s civil rights record had been inoffensive enough to minimize the antagonism of southern white voters, and therefore it was possible for him to win some southern states and Texas if he had a southern running mate. But in 1963, there had been his outmaneuvering of Governor Wallace, and on June 13 he had delivered an inspiring televised address in which he said that civil rights was “a moral issue”—“as old as the scriptures and … as clear as the American Constitution.” And not paranoia but only polls were required to explain Lyndon Johnson’s fears.

  One, taken i
n September, 1963, by the Democratic National Committee, showed that if the election were held then, Kennedy would lose not only Texas but Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas and both Carolinas, the states whose electoral votes were largely responsible for his victory in ’60. Another, by the Gallup Organization, showed that winning the South would not only be much more difficult for him in 1964, but that it might, in fact, be all but impossible if the Republican candidate was one whose stance on civil rights was attractive to that region, and by the fall of 1963, it was becoming increasingly likely that the Republican candidate would be one with a very attractive stance: Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Gallup pitted Kennedy against Goldwater head to head in a thirteen-state bloc, the eleven of the Old Confederacy and Kentucky and Oklahoma on its borders—the result was Kennedy 41 percent, Goldwater 59 percent.

  And Johnson’s own stance on civil rights had changed, of course, and while it had given him a new popularity in liberal precincts of the North, it hadn’t had the same effect in the cotton mills of the South—as conversations in the Senate cloakroom showed. “I don’t know what’s got into Lyndon, but he’s outtalking Bobby Kennedy in civil rights,” one southern senator said. “Lyndon never had a more devoted admirer than myself,” said another. “Now I wouldn’t give two cents for his winning an election in my state.” And those mills were significant to Kennedy’s reelection plans. Johnson had held the South for Kennedy in 1960; he might not be able to hold it in 1964. Democratic political strategists, interviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer in the summer of 1963, “said they doubted whether … Johnson would be able to overcome anti-Kennedy sentiment in the Deep South stirred by civil rights unrest.” “The President and his political advisers probably have written off the South for 1964 on the civil rights issue,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer said. “If they haven’t, they should.”

  Polls were showing, as well, that holding the South might no longer be imperative for Kennedy’s reelection, so long as he did better in the North than he had in 1960, and they were showing also that his popularity was holding fairly steady there, at about 60 percent. Strength in the North (holding the big northern states he had won in 1960 and picking up states such as Ohio that he had lost) and picking up also some electoral votes in the West, most importantly California’s thirty-two, that he had lost in ’60 might be the key to victory in ’64; it might be more important he have a running mate who added strength to the ticket in those areas rather than in the South. Which led of course to the subject of Lyndon Johnson. “If the solid South is to be written off in 1964, the question is whether Mr. Johnson will be retained on the ticket and if so what his function will be,” the New York Times asked. The question was being asked more and more by Democratic strategists, however much the Kennedys denied it—asked so frequently that in October the syndicated columnists Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott could write that a “new political strategy [is] being hammered out at the party’s secret deliberations,” a strategy which “calls for major Democratic efforts to increase the party’s vote in all the northern industrial areas to offset expected Republican gains in the South.” Specific names were starting to be mentioned: Pat Brown of California, for example. If the Democrats have “written off the South for 1964 … the question becomes whether they should recognize this fact publicly and go west for a vice presidential candidate.… Kennedy strategists are saying that they may have to carry California to win next year. But California is where Barry seems to be running best. Will the President decide that his best chance lies with a Californian or some other westerner as his running mate?”

  AND THEN THERE WAS the situation in Lyndon Johnson’s own state. Carrying Texas against the conservative tide rising there had, of course, been hard even in ’60 (even with those votes from the Rio Grande Valley), and since ’60 that tide, strengthened by a backlash against civil rights, had been rising even faster. In 1961 John Tower became the first Republican United States senator elected from Texas since Reconstruction—and, as the United Press reported on October 2, “The mere mention of Goldwater as the GOP presidential nominee in 1964 has caused thousands of conservatives” to change party affiliation, sending them into a booming Republican Party in Texas. Were the Arizona conservative to be the nominee, state GOP leaders were predicting, he would carry the state by about the same 200,000-vote margin Eisenhower had rolled up. Kennedy’s approval ratings in Texas, which had been slipping steadily, falling to 59 percent in May, had been plummeting since then, and in September, according to the state’s definitive Belden Poll, were down to 50 percent. Johnson’s popularity, tied to his, had dropped to the same level.

  His identification with Jack Kennedy was only one of his problems in Texas. What George Reedy had warned against two years before—that he would be “forgotten” in his home state—had in fact occurred: after three years of trying to stay out of the news, to the mass of the state’s voters he was no longer nearly as towering a figure as he had been. And with the Texans who mattered most in the state’s politics—the reactionary, in fact ultra-reactionary, business establishment: the oilmen and big government contractors, who had always been the source of his most important support, financial and otherwise—with these men his position was even more precarious. Haters of Roosevelt, of the New Deal, of liberals in general, they had never really forgiven him for going on Kennedy’s ticket; they had taken his decision to do so, after they had contributed so generously to his campaign against Kennedy, as an act of betrayal. And that decision had, in their eyes, been only the beginning of his apostasy. They had believed all those years—because he had made them believe—that he felt the same way as they did about people of color. (“Basically, Lyndon was more conservative, more practical than people understand,” George Brown says. “You get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical. He was for the Niggers, he was for labor, he was for the little boys, but by God … he was as practical as anyone.”) Reading what Lyndon was saying about civil rights now, they wondered if he had been deceiving them all along.

  During the three years since 1960, moreover, there had been what was, in their minds, a more mortal sin, one that involved not philosophy but money. To cool their rage over his acceptance of the vice presidential nomination, he had told them that by becoming a part (an important part: the “Number Two Man”) of the Kennedy Administration, he would be in a position to moderate its policies from the inside, to act as a rein on liberal tendencies, and in particular he had let them understand that he would be able to be a force within the Administration against the tendencies that mattered most to them: tendencies to regulate, and reduce, their wealth. Business regulation, tax reform, all forms of government intervention in their enterprises—these matters, as Brown & Root lobbyist Frank C. (“Posh”) Oltorf was to put it, “transcended ideology.… That’s how they viewed politics. ‘Any son of a bitch who makes me a million dollars can’t be all bad.’ As long as you put dollars in their pockets, they’d forgive your ideology.” When it became apparent to them that Johnson did not in fact have the power to protect them from the liberal impulse—that, to them, was the unforgivable sin. Early in 1963, a quote from a Texas businessman appeared in the “Washington Whispers” column of U.S. News & World Report: “Lyndon as vice president just can’t do as much for Texas any more as he could as Senate Leader.” That quote was mild; what was being said about Lyndon Johnson in the Petroleum Club of Houston and the Riata Club of Dallas and the other big business watering holes of Texas wasn’t. “He had promised to protect them,” says Ed Clark, attorney for some of the biggest of them, “and he couldn’t deliver. He couldn’t deliver!” Kennedy was still proposing tax reform legislation, bills to close tax loopholes. “Loopholes! Those were their loopholes he [Kennedy] was talking about!,” Posh Oltorf says. In particular, there was the oil depletion allowance. Although the Kennedy plan ostensibly kept the rate of the allowance at 27½ percent, the oilmen’s attorneys, analyzing the measure, had concluded that changes proposed by the administration in the tax code
would cut the effective rate to 17½ percent. To the rest of the world, such a reduction would be only justice—or at least the beginning of justice. To the oilmen, it was robbery. The change—together with the elimination of some of the hundred hidden tax breaks for oil in the Internal Revenue Code—would cost them millions, perhaps billions, of dollars a year. These big businessmen who controlled so much of the state’s political machinery were no longer enthusiastic about controlling it on behalf of Lyndon Johnson, not at all. He was “losing some of his grip on the … party machinery of that state,” U.S. News reported.

  As Johnson’s star had been waning in Texas, furthermore, another star—that of John Connally, elected Governor in 1962—had been rising. The same Belden Poll that showed Kennedy-Johnson’s approval at 50 percent put Connally’s at 61 percent, and likely to go higher; formerly undecided voters had begun swinging over to him. Lyndon Johnson’s onetime assistant was heading rapidly toward the pinnacle he would one day occupy as a three-term governor, one of the most popular and powerful in the history of the state. No sooner had Connally moved into the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, moreover, than he began to demonstrate that the organizational and political skills he had deployed for Lyndon Johnson were just as effective on his own behalf. Sitting on the fence of his ranch in Floresville just after sunrise one morning decades later, watching Mexican vaqueros exercising his stable of quarter horses, he would say, “One thing I’m proudest of: We built the strongest organization in the history of the state while I was Governor.” His pride was justified, and the base of his power was the people who controlled Texas: the powerful conservative establishment. Lyndon might have turned liberal; they didn’t have to worry about John. He was already, in the first year of his governorship, showing that he was willing to lower taxes on banks and business, and to fight proposals by liberals in the legislature for increases in the minimum wage. They saw, also, that he was, as governor, talking the same way he had talked as Lyndon Johnson’s aide and Sid Richardson’s lawyer, as he had been talking all his life; he shared their views—with the fervency of the true believer. Johnson and Connally “still had the same political base,” Joe Kilgore says, but, as the congressman adds, it had become “just a little bit more John’s political base than Lyndon’s.”