The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Adding to the significance for the Kennedys of the Texas businessmen’s affection for the governor they were starting to call “Big John,” was the pivotal role that Texas traditionally played in the financing of Democratic presidential campaigns. The Kennedys were counting on major help from Texas now. And the businessmen would contribute at Connally’s direction. “John controlled the money in the state now,” Kilgore says. All through 1962, the President had been asking Johnson to arrange a fundraising trip to Texas, and there had been no result. The President may once have thought that Johnson could again deliver the Texas money, but by 1963 the White House had begun to recognize that that was no longer the case. For two decades, Lyndon Johnson had been the key to the electoral votes and the money of the great province in the Southwest. He wasn’t anymore, and he knew it. He was telephoning Kilgore “almost every night” now, and the congressman felt he knew why: “because I was close to John. He was scared to death that John would control the state in 1964, and might not be controlling it entirely for him.”

  Kilgore, who had traveled the Valley with Johnson and Connally during two long election campaigns, knew Johnson’s worries were baseless; that however much the quarter-century-long ties between the two men—the “loyalty,” the psychological ties—that bound Connally to Johnson might fray, in the end they would hold. “Of course, John would have been for him when the chips were down,” he says. But Lyndon wasn’t confident of that: the “falling out” had to come to an end. “After the talk [started] of Kennedy replacing him in 1964, we were in constant contact,” Connally says dryly. “He and I talked about” the possibility that he would be dropped from the ticket. “He told me, ‘Bobby’s around talking about dumping me. We’ve got to show him that we’ve got the power down here.’ ” Connally knew that Johnson was calling him now because he needed him. “He knew I controlled the Texas delegation”—and Texas, he was to tell the author. And he knew why Johnson and Kennedy needed him. “I had frankly been elected by the people that President Kennedy needed most, by the moderates and conservatives of the state.… [They] were not supporting him” and “he was looking at a tough election, at least in our part of the country, in 1964.” He understood that when Johnson talked about the necessity of showing the Kennedys that “we’ve got the power down here,” he really meant showing the President that he, Lyndon Johnson, had power—that he still had power. Connally was very careful to try to leave that impression in the White House, and to make it clear that Johnson would be the same asset to the ticket in Texas that he had always been, and that he, the governor of Texas, considered it imperative that Johnson be Kennedy’s running mate. After one conversation with Connally, Jack Kennedy told Evelyn Lincoln, “The one thing I noticed above everything else was his concern about Lyndon being on the ticket.”

  Jack Kennedy was not an easy man to fool, however. Johnson “did not want the President to see for himself how little prestige and influence the Vice President then had in his own home state,” Ken O’Donnell was to write—in a comment that shows that the President had seen. “The more liberal Texas Democrats … had always been against him,” O’Donnell wrote, and “since he had joined the New Frontier, his fellow conservatives had turned against him.”

  By early 1963, the President was becoming quite insistent on arranging that fundraising trip to Texas, but Johnson, aware that funds would be raised only on Connally’s say-so, had had to admit that the matter should be arranged through the governor. And Connally, “who had,” as O’Donnell understood, “no desire to be marked as a Kennedy supporter in Texas, had been stalling off the President,” using as an excuse the fact that he was in the midst of his first legislative session as governor. Finally, during a presidential swing through the West in June, Kennedy, Connally, and Johnson were alone in a hotel room in El Paso. “Well, Lyndon, are we ever going to get this trip to Texas worked out?” Kennedy asked—but as Connally knew, while “he was addressing Vice President Johnson, he was speaking to me.” And Johnson’s reply—“Well, the Governor is here, Mr. President, let’s find out”—was a tacit admission that decisions about the trip were Connally’s to make.

  “I knew at that point my string had run out,” Connally was to recall, but he asked Kennedy what kind of a trip he had in mind, and Kennedy proposed that the trip revolve around Johnson’s birthday, August 27, and that there be five separate fundraising dinners in the state’s five principal cities—Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin. Connally, shocked at the scope of the proposal, said he would “like to think about that.” Holding the dinners on Johnson’s birthday would be “a serious mistake” because it was too hot in Texas in August; people weren’t interested in politics in August: it was, he told Kennedy, “the worst month of the year to have a fundraising affair in Texas.”

  During the summer, Johnson kept trying to persuade Connally to accept the multi-dinner proposal, and Connally kept replying, “Well, that is a mistake.” Kennedy was later to tell his wife that “John Connally wanted to show that he was independent and could run on his own and … he wanted to show that he didn’t need Lyndon Johnson.” Indeed, he didn’t, and the polls that summer were proving that, and the Kennedys read polls. And if Connally didn’t need Lyndon Johnson, was Johnson really what Jack Kennedy needed in Texas? If Connally was more popular and also controlled the money he needed, perhaps it was Connally he should be working through instead. Furthermore, Connally would be running for reelection in November, 1964. Whether or not Lyndon Johnson was Jack Kennedy’s running mate, the name of a powerful, popular Texan would be on the ballot with him.

  The whole situation in Texas was an irritant to Kennedy. His Vice President was from Texas, yet he was being told it would be difficult to carry the state. “That thought irked him,” Connally was to say. “We shouldn’t have a hard race in Texas,” the President told the governor.

  A FEUD, PERSONAL AS WELL as political, between Connally and United States Senator Ralph W. Yarborough had split the state’s Democrats into two bitterly hostile factions. A presidential candidate wants a united party behind him in key states when he is running; “The last thing we want is a big political fight in Texas in 1964,” O’Donnell had told Yarborough back in January. But since then the feud had grown only more bitter, and the Vice President wasn’t helping to mend it, and Kennedy had become aware that he couldn’t help much, that, as the President was to tell Ben Bradlee that fall, Johnson had become “a less viable mediator than he had been.” If Johnson wasn’t the best person to raise money for him in Texas, if he wasn’t particularly popular in Texas, if he wasn’t a particularly viable mediator in Texas—what was the reason to keep him on the ticket?

  ON SEPTEMBER 2, 1963, Johnson was to leave for Stockholm and a fifteen-day tour of five Scandinavian nations, and about a week before the trip he told Ken O’Donnell that, as Charles Bartlett relates, “He’d like to see the President before he went and have a little bit of a send-off from the President to boost his own role.”

  “One of the weaknesses of the Kennedy White House staff was that individuals became rather arrogant,” Bartlett was to recall. “O’Donnell said it was impossible.” Reedy went hat in hand to Kennedy’s military aide, Major General Ted Clifton, who went directly to the President, and Kennedy said that Johnson’s plane could touch down at Hyannis Port on its way to Stockholm and the Vice President could have a brief talk. Kennedy had asked a houseguest, his old friend Red Fay, if he’d like to sit in on the talk, and Fay was “strongly conscious,” as he was to write, “of the contrasts in the room,” the President in a sport shirt and blazer, the Vice President too formal in both appearance—overdressed, as someone overdresses out of insecurity, “in a double-breasted blue suit that seemed unusually somber in contrast to Kennedy’s casual attire”—and manner, sitting “forward uncomfortably on the edge of his chair,” very “deferential, … very grateful” to have been granted the audience. “The apparent uneasiness and unsureness of the Vice President surprised me,”
Fay was to write.

  The conversation couldn’t have done much to boost his confidence. After discussing his Scandinavian itinerary, he said he would like permission to add a visit to Poland, saying, as Fay recalls, that “it would be a dramatic sign of our desire to be friendly with the countries behind the Iron Curtain … that have shown a desire for freedom.”

  Permission was refused. “Has this been cleared by the State Department?” Kennedy asked, and when Johnson said it hadn’t because he wanted to get Kennedy’s reaction first, Kennedy said he didn’t think it was a good idea “at this time.” “Maybe some time later,” he said.

  Then Kennedy asked to see the prepared speeches for the trip, and when Reedy provided him copies, not only read them, but edited them, turning the pages rapidly, crossing out paragraphs and lines. When he finished he simply handed Johnson the pages. They were “very good,” he said. “I have crossed out a few short sections which won’t hurt the speech[es] but which are better left unsaid.” A few minutes later, the visit was over; Johnson and Reedy were out the door. Johnson hadn’t been asked for comment on Kennedy’s changes; he had been treated like a speechwriter, and not a particularly respected one at that.

  ON OCTOBER 4, John Connally flew up to Washington to participate in a number of meetings on Texas problems, including one with President Kennedy to make definite plans for the President’s trip to the state. He had told Johnson he was coming to Washington, and Johnson had invited him for dinner that evening at The Elms. But he hadn’t told Johnson he was meeting with the President—and neither had the President.

  Connally was to say that when he entered the Oval Office he “frankly was a bit surprised that the Vice President wasn’t there. But he wasn’t.” The meeting was very cordial. Connally proposed that Kennedy’s visit, for which the dates of November 21 and November 22 had been tentatively set, include visits to five cities, as Kennedy wanted, but only one fundraising affair: a hundred-dollar-per-plate dinner in Austin, on the 22nd. Otherwise, Connally said, “ ‘people down there are going to think that all you are interested in is the financial rape of the state,’ and I used those words,” and Kennedy said he would accept Connally’s judgment.

  When Connally arrived at The Elms that evening, Johnson “already knew that I had been with the President.” His first words were: “Well, did you all get the trip worked out?” The Vice President, he was to say, “was considerably irritated with me.” “Irritated,” Connally said, wasn’t quite the right word. “Hurt” was the right word. But what could Connally say? “I suppose you think I don’t have any interest in what is happening in Texas,” Johnson said. “No,” Connally said, “I know you are extremely interested in what is happening in Texas.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Johnson asked. Connally said he had assumed he knew about the appointment, “trying to alibi any way I could because I recognized that he was really irritated about it.” But Johnson kept pressing him. Connally didn’t want to hurt him any more than he had already been hurt, but he finally had to give him the only answer he could: “I assumed if the President wanted you there, you would be there.” But he and Lyndon Johnson had had so many years together. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have talked to you before I went in to see the President.” While he had apologized, however, the fact remained that the President hadn’t wanted Johnson there. The arrangements for a major political event that the Administration was holding in his state had been made—and he hadn’t been told about them.

  10

  The Protégé

  IN OCTOBER, 1963, also, there was gathering, over the darkened landscape of Lyndon Johnson’s life, a thundercloud even more threatening than those already overhead.

  The first faint rumble of the approaching storm had come on that Scandinavian trip—on Friday, September 13, in Copenhagen, just after he had returned to the Royal Hotel from luncheon at the palace with the Danish king and queen.

  It came in a telephone call from Walter Jenkins. Reporters didn’t know about the call. All they saw was that, as Bart McDowell of the Associated Press was to put it, on that day in Copenhagen “there was a change in” Lyndon Johnson’s “personality … a great change.” There were changes in his schedule, too. “Whatever plans that were on the docket for him, he scratched and spent the entire day locked up in his room.” Several times that afternoon, Reedy emerged to deliver announcements: the trip was being shortened; “The press of business in the United States made it impossible” for Johnson to visit Greenland on Monday, as had been planned; the Greenland trip was canceled; the Vice President would be returning to the United States a day earlier than had been scheduled.

  Those would not be Reedy’s last announcements of schedule changes. A full-dress inspection of the Danish Navy scheduled for Saturday was canceled, as were other events for Sunday, so that, as a Danish newspaper put it, “An official guest could hardly see less of Denmark.” On Sunday, in fact, the Vice President didn’t emerge from his suite the entire day. Reedy told newsmen that, as one of them recalls, Johnson had remained in his bedroom, “closed the door, and spent the day on the telephone.”

  “We assumed that it was—heaven knows what,” McDowell says. Reedy tried to scotch rumors that the Vice President was ill, or exhausted from the trip, but “the press of business” was the only explanation he had been authorized to give. “We were just in the dark … totally,” McDowell says.

  Sunday evening, at 8:25, Johnson finally emerged from his suite with Lady Bird, his entourage behind him, for the lone event that day that had not been canceled: a visit to Copenhagen’s famous Tivoli Gardens amusement park, where he was to appear with the Tivoli Marching Band. His lips were pressed into a thin line, and his eyes were narrow and hard. “He had spent the whole day on the phone, and when he finally emerged to march in this lighthearted parade, he was obviously very grim and preoccupied,” McDowell says. The mood of the people walking behind him reflected his. “You could sense a change in the whole party.” No one in the group said a word as they walked downstairs to the waiting limousines.

  His expression hardly changed during the parade. It would have been a festive scene as the band, colorful in white trousers, red jackets and tall black bearskin shakos, its tubas and trombones glinting in the light of bright lanterns, marched through the park’s gaily colored thrill rides and turreted mock castles, playing lively tunes—except that the tall man in an overcoat striding with it was “as grim as a pallbearer.”

  Though the Greenland visit had been canceled, there was still a visit to Iceland scheduled for Monday, and a formal state dinner given by Iceland’s prime minister, and Johnson had been scheduled to fly back to Washington on Tuesday, arriving in the evening. But he told the State Department aides who had been rescheduling and rescheduling the trip that it was very important that he get back to Washington earlier than that, and he left the dinner early and took off Monday night, setting down at Andrews at one o’clock in the morning.

  THE CALL HAD BEEN about Bobby Baker.

  On September 9, Ralph Hill, the president of a firm that installed vending machines for coffee, candy and cigarettes in factories and collected the profits from them, had filed a lawsuit in United States District Court in Washington against another vending machine company, the Serv-U Corporation—and against Baker. The suit alleged that Baker had taken $5,600 from Hill to use his influence with the defense contractor North American Aviation Corporation so that one of its subcontractors would allow Hill to place his vending machines in its plant—and that Baker had then turned around and persuaded the subcontractor to oust Hill, and replace his company’s machines with Serv-U’s machines; that Baker had thus, as one writer later put it, “taken money to use his influence with a defense contractor and had then double-crossed the man who bought him.” Jack Landau, a reporter for the Washington Post who covered the District Court, was given a tip that there might be something interesting in the suit. The matter seemed minor—a dispute over a contract between businessmen�
��and Baker, an official of Serv-U assured Landau, had no connection with the company, and, it was later to be recalled, there was “considerable initial soul-searching by the Post’s editors” over whether to run a story about it, but it had finally been decided to do so, and on Thursday, September 12, while Johnson was in Scandinavia, the story was published, buried inside the newspaper’s city section, but with the headline SENATE OFFICIAL IS NAMED IN INFLUENCE SUIT. A couple of Post reporters were assigned to look further into the matter, as were a reporter or two from other papers—and by Friday morning, reporters had started calling Jenkins, which is when he telephoned Johnson in Copenhagen. And by Sunday—the day Johnson spent the entire day in his room, the day he became so “grim” and “preoccupied”—Jenkins had other news to report. The reporters had come across the fact that the vending industry’s trade journal, Vend magazine, had been looking into Serv-U for some time and, in fact, was about to run an article on the company in its next issue. And the article’s author, G. R. Schreiber, had allowed the Post to see the article, on condition that the newspaper not print any of its material before the magazine appeared—and the reporters, having seen it, had begun calling Jenkins with more serious questions because, Vend’s article said, with detailed documentation, that Baker, whom the article identified as the “protégé of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson,” was, despite all the assurances, not only connected with Serv-U but was in fact one of its stockholders, and in addition had substantial business dealings with the company; that the company, which had been founded in December, 1961, had enjoyed “remarkable” growth in the less than two years it had been in business; that in fact its annual gross income (the income of this firm intimately connected with a Senate employee whose salary was $19,611 per year) was “at or in excess of” $3.5 million—and that every cent of that amount came from companies that were in the aerospace industry and that were all “sizable contractors with Uncle Sam.” And Vend reported that Ralph Hill’s suit alleged that Baker had obtained the vending machine contracts for Serv-U because, “as Secretary of the [Senate] Majority, [he] was able to, and did, represent … that he was in a position to assist in securing defense contracts.” “In view of the phenomenal growth of Serv-U over a 20-month period in a handful of plants owned by corporations who do billions of dollars in business for Uncle Sam,” Vend said, “the question of any relationship between Serv-U and [Baker] needs an answer.”