The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  The motorcade pulled away on its sixteen-mile trip to the medical center, and hardly had it entered the streets of San Antonio when huge crowds were waiting for it, packed four-deep on sidewalks, jumping and screaming and shouting, “Jack! Jackie!” as it approached, with thousands of children, released from school for the day, waving little hand-colored American flags. In the presidential limousine, the Kennedys and Connallys, two handsome, poised men and their wives, Jackie radiant in a stylish suit, Nellie Connally, once “Sweetheart of the University” at the University of Texas, still beautiful at forty-four, basked in the adulation, smiling and waving at the crowds and chatting together. Behind them came a long line of open cars, jammed to the gunnels with congressmen and camaraderie; in one convertible two congressmen sat in front with the driver, and five more were crammed in behind them, three sitting in the back seat and two on the top of the seat, with their legs hanging down into the car. And in the midst of this procession of smiling, waving men crowded happily together was one car in which, in the wide back seat (too wide in the circumstances; the Johnsons’ situation was “awkward,” said one account, “no matter how wide they spread themselves, they were obviously missing a passenger”), the Vice President of the United States sat alone with his wife, unaccompanied except for the driver and Youngblood in the front seat, because the man who had been assigned to ride with him had refused to do so.

  Alone, and naked to the gaze of the reporters behind him, who knew he wasn’t supposed to be alone—Ken O’Donnell had given them a list of the car assignments for the principals in the motorcade—and who knew why he was. When, later, a reporter asked Gonzalez what the day’s main story should be, the congressman said it should be the tumultuous reception San Antonio had given the President. No, the reporter said, the headline was going to be, “Yarborough Refuses to Ride with Lyndon Johnson.” Johnson knew the reporters had been given the list. He knew that they knew why he was alone. The trip from the airport to the medical center took a little more than an hour. It must have been a long hour for Lyndon Johnson.

  AFTER KENNEDY’S SPEECH at the medical center, there was another motorcade, to the planes that would carry the party to Houston. Yarborough got into Gonzalez’s car again, and Rufus Youngblood got out of Johnson’s and went back to the senator, to ask him to ride with Johnson. With a curt wave of his hand, Yarborough had him go away. Returning to Johnson’s convertible, Youngblood slid into the front seat, turned to Johnson and spread his hands in a helpless gesture, saying simply, “Well, I told him.” The reporters were watching.

  Then there was Houston: another airport, with Johnson (whose plane had of course landed first) waiting at the foot of the ramp to welcome the Kennedys and Connallys (and Yarborough) as if he was the state’s official greeter, another motorcade through cheering crowds that weren’t cheering for him, with him and his wife again conspicuously alone in their car (new attempts to persuade Yarborough to join him had been made by Congressman Thomas, the honoree of the evening’s dinner, and by Youngblood—“I’ve bugged him enough,” the agent said when he came back to Johnson’s car this time). And then, during a three-hour rest stop at Houston’s Rice Hotel before the dinner, Jack Kennedy asked Lyndon Johnson to come to his suite, and the door was shut behind them—and there were, perhaps for the first time since Kennedy had been elected, loud, angry words directly between the President and Vice President.

  No one knew quite what those words were; Johnson was later to deny there had been any: “There definitely was not a disagreement.… There was an active discussion”; he and the President had been “in substantial agreement,” he said. The hotel waiters who came in and out of the suite, interviewed later by the author William Manchester, told him, in his summation, that they “heard Yarborough’s name mentioned several times,” and that they had received the impression that Kennedy “felt the Senator [Yarborough] was not being treated fairly, and that he [the President] was expressing himself with exceptional force.” Jackie Kennedy, rehearsing her speech for that evening’s dinner in the next room, heard raised voices, but said only, “There was all of this [talk] about people not wanting to ride in the car with him.” After Johnson had left, she asked her husband, “What was that all about? He sounded mad.” “That’s just Lyndon,” her husband replied, seeming amused. “He’s in trouble.” On a later occasion, she said, “I remember asking Jack … what the trouble was. He said 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, or something. And that part of the trouble of the trip was him [Connally] trying to show that he had his own constituency.”

  That day, Kennedy had asked Albert Thomas to intercede not just with Yarborough but with Connally, to bring the party-splitting feud to an end, and on the brief flight from San Antonio to Houston, Thomas had in fact asked Connally to allow Yarborough a more prominent role at the Austin dinner. Thomas had had to report to Kennedy that Connally had not been receptive. One of the purposes of the trip—to create the party unity Kennedy needed for his reelection campaign in a key state—was not being accomplished. The President may, behind that closed door at the Rice, have let his anger loose at the Texan he had put on his ticket but who was proving not to be a “viable mediator” at all. And Johnson may have responded that it was not his fault that Yarborough was still hostile—that Yarborough wouldn’t even ride in his car. Whatever was said, when Johnson opened the closed door, nothing had been settled. Johnson came rushing out into the corridor with an angry expression on his face; “he left that suite like a pistol,” one of the Secret Service agents on duty outside said.

  AFTER THE DINNER, the President rode to the Houston airport with the Houston Chronicle’s publisher, John T. Jones Jr., and his wife, Winnie. Jones shared with the President the results of a Texas poll that would be published in his newspaper on Friday. It showed Yarborough’s approval rating—57 percent—above that for a Kennedy-Johnson ticket. “He’s in trouble,” Kennedy had said about Johnson, and whatever the President had meant when he said it, that poll—which, of course, reinforced the other Texas polls he had seen—indeed meant trouble for Johnson. He had been supposed to be holding together the conservative and liberal wings of the Texas Democratic Party. The conservative leader, Connally, had been trying to demonstrate to Kennedy that he didn’t need Johnson—and the demonstration had been convincing. The liberal leader, Yarborough, didn’t need Johnson, didn’t want him—wouldn’t even ride in a car with him. And both Connally and Yarborough were running well ahead of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. They didn’t need Kennedy nearly as much as he needed them. Not only might his Vice President no longer be a “viable mediator” in the feud, he was beginning to seem, in a way, almost irrelevant.

  *

  1 The television checks are made out to the “KTBC Cable and Television Station and the Mid-Atlantic Stainless Co., Inc.” because Reynolds, in an attempt to recoup some of the $1,208 he was being forced to spend for advertising that could have no possible benefit to him, had resold part of the advertising time to the Mid-Atlantic Company, a manufacturer of pots and pans.

  2 No explanation was given for the discrepancy between the $25,000 Reynolds was supposed to deliver and the $15,000 he actually delivered.

  Part III

  DALLAS

  11

  The Cubicle

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963, began for Lyndon Johnson with the headline he saw on the front page of the Dallas News that morning: YARBOROUGH SNUBS LBJ—hard to think of a verb that would have hurt him more than that one.

  At about eight o’clock Texas (Central Standard) time—the time in Washington (Eastern Standard) was an hour later—Johnson, in his suite in Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas, telephoned George Reedy in Washington to find out how other newspapers had covered the trip. Reading Johnson the passages that mentioned him, Reedy cringed inside, for every detail of the previous day’s humiliation had been chronicled. “Twice at San Antonio … Johnson sent
a Secret Service man to invite Yarborough to ride with him in his car. Both times the senator ignored the invitation and rode with someone else,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The Chicago Tribune noted the “curt wave of his hand” with which Yarborough had sent the Vice President’s emissary packing. The feud—and not Kennedy’s triumph—was the main story of Kennedy’s trip not just in Texas but across the country. Lyndon Johnson sat there with the Texas papers in front of him—there were four separate stories in the Dallas paper alone: in addition to the SNUBS story, others were headlined STORM OF POLITICAL CONTROVERSY SWIRLS AROUND KENNEDY ON VISIT; PRESIDENT’S VISIT SEEN WIDENING STATE DEMOCRATIC SPLIT; NIXON PREDICTS JFK MAY DROP JOHNSON—and then he had to go downstairs for an early-morning rally of five thousand labor union members, and join Kennedy, Yarborough, Connally and some local congressmen, all of whom had of course read those headlines. As they walked across the street to the rally, a light drizzle was falling. Johnson was wearing a raincoat and a hat; Kennedy, as always, was bareheaded and lithe in an elegant blue-gray suit. Johnson hastily snatched off his hat. His assignment, as usual, was to introduce Kennedy, and as he finished, the crowd roared for the young man beside him. Explaining why Jackie wasn’t there (“Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes her a little longer, but of course she looks better than we do when she does it”), Kennedy was easy and charming. Johnson had had to ask Kennedy for a favor: to be allowed to bring his youngest sister, Lucia, and her husband, Birge Alexander, who lived in Fort Worth, to meet him; shaking hands with Kennedy in his suite after the rally, she was thrilled; she had always wanted to shake hands with a President, she said.

  Getting dressed that morning, Kennedy, after strapping the brace around him tightly, had wrapped over it and around his thighs in a figure-eight pattern an elastic Ace bandage for extra support because it was going to be a long day. Now it was nine o’clock, time for a breakfast speech to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce in the hotel’s ballroom. “All right, let’s go,” he said.

  NINE O’CLOCK IN TEXAS was ten o’clock in Washington: at about the same time that Kennedy was heading downstairs in Fort Worth, Don Reynolds, with his attorney beside him, walked into Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill to begin answering questions from the Senate Rules Committee.

  Reynolds was not under oath—it was expected that he would shortly testify to the committee itself under oath; the purpose of this interview, conducted by Burkett Van Kirk, counsel to the committee’s Republican minority, and Lorin Drennan, an accountant from the General Accounting Office who had been assigned to assist the committee with its investigation of the Bobby Baker case, was to determine which areas the committee should pursue when Reynolds appeared before it. But on the advice of his counsel, James F. Fitzgerald, who was seated beside him, Reynolds had brought documents with him that he said would prove his contentions about a number of Baker’s activities, two of which—the purchase of television advertising time and an expensive stereo set in return for the writing of an insurance policy; and Matthew McCloskey’s payment of $109,000 for a performance bond that had only cost $73,000—related to Lyndon Johnson.

  In New York, the meeting of the Life investigative team in George Hunt’s office began at about 11:30, with a dozen reporters and editors present, and it soon became apparent that the meeting was going to be a long one, for there was much to report to the managing editor.

  Even in the day or two since Wheeler and Lambert had last spoken to Hunt, the reporters who had been sent to Texas had found new areas ripe for inquiry. For one thing, they had begun searching through deeds and other records of recent land sales in county courthouses not only in Blanco County, but in Gillespie and Llano as well, and in Austin, and had found that the real estate transactions of the LBJ Company were on a scale far greater than had previously been suspected. And other reporters were digging into the advertising sales and other activities of KTBC, and these too were turning up one item after another that the reporters felt merited looking into. “With every day that week,” the story “had kept getting bigger and bigger,” Lambert says, and it was no longer a Bobby Baker story but “a Lyndon Johnson story.” But, he says, so many reporters were working in Johnson City, Austin and the Hill Country that “they were tripping all over each other.” The areas for further investigation had to be weeded down to the most promising, and reporters divided up among them. Moreover, Wheeler, who had written the story that was already on the newsstands that week, said that enough material had already come in so that he could write another one—immediately. A decision had to be made on whether he should do that, or whether the material already in hand should be held until more was available, and combined into a multi-part series on “Lyndon Johnson’s Money”—the “net worth job”—that would run in several issues.

  AS DON REYNOLDS was providing the Rules Committee staff with information that might—and very shortly—produce headlines, and as Life was mapping out assignments for an investigation that might produce even bigger headlines, the presidential motorcade was pulling away from the hotel in Fort Worth for the airport, and the brief flight to Dallas.

  In Lyndon Johnson’s lapel was a white carnation that had been pinned on him at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast, and in his car was Ralph Yarborough. “I don’t care if you have to throw Yarborough into the car with Lyndon,” Kennedy had told O’Brien that morning. “Get him in there.” He told O’Donnell to give Yarborough a message: “If he doesn’t ride with Lyndon today, he’ll have to walk.” And while these statements may have been a bit of presidential bravado, the President himself had had a few words with the senator that morning. When, after he asked Yarborough to ride in the car to which he had been assigned, the senator had remained evasive, Kennedy spoke another sentence in a quiet voice. If he valued his friendship, the President told him, he would ride with Lyndon. Yarborough took a good look at the President, and shortly thereafter spoke a few words to O’Brien, and when Johnson came out of the hotel for the motorcade, O’Brien was able to tell him, “Yarborough’s going to ride with you.” (“He is?” Johnson said. “Fine.”) On the thirteen-minute flight to Dallas, the President took care of the other public aspect of the feud. Taking Connally by the arm, O’Donnell pushed him into Kennedy’s cabin and closed the door. “Within three minutes,” he was to recall, the governor had agreed to invite Yarborough to the reception at the Governor’s Mansion and to seat him at the head table at the Austin dinner. Emerging, Connally asked, “How can anybody say no to that man?”

  AS AIR FORCE ONE was heading for Dallas, the last of the clouds cleared. “Kennedy weather,” O’Brien said.

  It seemed as if it was going to be a Kennedy day. As Air Force One touched down at Dallas’ Love Field at 11:38—12:38 Washington time—everything seemed very bright under the brilliant Texas sun and the cloudless Texas sky: the huge plane gleaming as it taxied over closer to the crowd pressing against a fence; the waiting open presidential limousine, so highly polished that the sunlight glittered on its long midnight-blue hood that stretched forward to the two small flags fluttering on the front bumpers. There was a moment’s expectant pause while steps were wheeled up to the plane, and then the door opened, and into the sunlight came the two figures the crowd had been waiting for: Jackie first (“There is Mrs. Kennedy, and the crowd yells!” the television commentator yelled), youthful, graceful, tanned, her wide smile, bright pink suit and pillbox hat radiant in the dazzling sun; behind her, the President, youthful, elegant (“I can see his suntan all the way from here!” the commentator shouted), with the mop of brown hair glowing, one hand checking the button on his jacket in the familiar gesture, coming down the steps just so slightly turned sideways to ease his back that it wasn’t noticeable unless you looked for it. A bouquet of bright red roses was handed to Jackie by the welcoming committee, and it set off the pink and the smile.

  No time had been built into the schedule for the President and Jackie to work the crowd, but who could resist doing it, so
adoring and excited were the faces turned toward them, so imploring the hands stretched out toward them, and they walked along the fence basking in the smiles and the sun, grinning—laughing, even—at things people shouted as they stretched out their hands, in the hope of a touch from theirs. “There never was a point in the public life of the Kennedys, in a way, that was as high as that moment in Dallas,” a reporter who had covered the entire presidency was to write.

  Taking Lady Bird by the arm to bring her along, Lyndon Johnson walked over to the fence and started to follow the Kennedys, but the faces remained turned, and the arms remained stretched, toward the Kennedys even after they had passed, and Johnson quickly moved back to the gray convertible that had been rented for him. O’Brien made sure Yarborough got in. The senator sat on the left side of the back seat, behind the driver, a Texas state highway patrolman named Herschel Jacks, the Vice President on the right side, behind Secret Service Agent Youngblood. Lady Bird, sitting between Yarborough and her husband, tried to make conversation but soon gave up. The two men weren’t speaking to or looking at each other—the only noises in the car came from the walkie-talkie radio that Youngblood was carrying on a shoulder strap—as the motorcade pulled out.

  SENATE HEARINGS NORMALLY break for lunch, but at 12:30, after two and a half hours of explaining his overall business relationship with Bobby Baker, Reynolds had begun telling his two Rules Committee questioners—Van Kirk and Drennan—specifically about the pressures that had been brought on him to purchase advertising time on Lyndon Johnson’s television station, and they didn’t want him to stop. They sent a secretary out to bring back sandwiches and milk, and Reynolds continued talking.