Kennedy’s aides were to say later that they weren’t aware at that moment that Johnson and his party were aboard the plane, that they had assumed that he had returned to Air Force Two, and in fact had already taken off for Washington. In the confusion, they hadn’t noticed that Air Force Two was still parked nearby. As soon as the Kennedy party was on board, while the coffin was being lashed to the floor, Jackie, seeking a few moments alone, walked past it and opened the door to the bedroom, thinking it would be empty—and instead encountered Lyndon Johnson. Whether, when she opened the door, Johnson was, as Manchester wrote after talking to her, “reclining on the bed” in his shirtsleeves, or whether, as Fehmer later stated (“in an effort to clear up the bedroom thing”), he had already risen from the bed and was about to leave the bedroom when, “as he opened the door, there was Mrs. Kennedy,” she was evidently shocked; hastily retreating to the rear compartment, she told O’Donnell, he relates, “something that left me stunned: When she opened the door of her cabin, she found Lyndon Johnson.” She wasn’t the only one who retreated. “She was entering her private bedroom,” Fehmer says. “She … saw a stranger, in his shirtsleeves yet … in the hallowed ground.… We, of course, scurried out of that bedroom. It was really embarrassing.”
Returning to the rear compartment, Jackie sat down in one of the two remaining seats, across the aisle from the coffin. In a moment, Lyndon, having collected Lady Bird from the stateroom, came back to see her. “It was a very, very hard thing to do,” Lady Bird Johnson was to recall. “Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked—that immaculate woman—it was caked with blood, her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them; I never could. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights … [Mrs. Kennedy] exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.” Shocked though she was at Jackie’s appearance, Lady Bird found the right things to say: “Dear God, it’s come to this …,” and Jackie responded, making “it as easy as possible. She said things like ‘Oh, Lady Bird … we’ve always liked the two of you so much.’ She said … ‘Oh, what if I had not been there. Oh, I’m so glad I was there.’ ” Only once did Jackie’s voice change: when Lady Bird asked her if she wanted to change clothes. Not right then, Jackie said. “And then … if with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’ ” And Lyndon finally raised the subject. “Well—about the swearing-in,” he said—according to Manchester, he had to use the phrase twice before Jackie responded, “Oh, yes, I know, I know.” “She understood the symbols of authority, the need for some semblance of national majesty after the disaster,” Manchester was to write; whether she agreed explicitly or not, there was an understanding that when Johnson took the oath, she would be present.
AND WITH HIS WORK with the Kennedys done, Lyndon Johnson headed back to the stateroom.
It was crammed now with people—Secret Service agents; the three Texas congressmen; Kennedy’s aides and secretaries who had come aboard with the coffin; two uniformed generals, Kennedy’s military aides Clifton and Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh; Johnson aides Carter, Valenti, Fehmer, Liz Carpenter; Bill Moyers, who, hearing of the assassination while in Austin on a trip for the Peace Corps, had chartered a plane, flown to Dallas and come aboard Air Force One; two presidential valets, Kennedy’s Thomas and Johnson’s Glynn—all crowded together in a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot square that was so dimly lit (with the shades still drawn across the windows, the only lighting came from dim fluorescent bulbs overhead) that the generals’ gold braid glinted only faintly in the gloom, and that, with no air-conditioning, had grown so hot and stuffy that, one man says, “It was suffocating in there; it was hard to think.” The low, penetrating whine of the single jet engine that was operating never stopped. There was weeping in the room, and whispering—and confusion. Kennedy’s aides had been able to remove the dead President’s coffin from the hospital only after an angry confrontation with the Dallas County medical examiner, who, insisting that an autopsy had to be performed first, had stood in a hospital doorway to block them, backed by a policeman. They had literally shoved the examiner and the policeman aside to get out of the building, and now, on the plane, O’Donnell says, he “kept looking out the window, expecting to see the flashing red lights” of police cars, “coming with a court order to stop our takeoff.” Not knowing when they came aboard that Johnson had decided to wait for Judge Hughes and take the oath on the ground (not knowing for some minutes, in fact, that Johnson was even on board; he was at that time behind the closed door of Kennedy’s bedroom), General McHugh had gone forward to the cockpit and ordered Colonel Swindal to take off immediately. Swindal couldn’t—the plane’s forward door was still open, with the ramp still pushed up against it—and by the time the door was closed, Malcolm Kilduff had come to the cockpit to tell him that the plane wouldn’t be taking off until after the swearing-in ceremony. When McHugh, who had apparently passed Kilduff in the aisle without knowing what message the press secretary was bearing, realized the plane wasn’t taking off, he rushed back to the cockpit to repeat his order, and Kilduff countermanded it. Not until O’Donnell, “in a highly desperate strait,” he says, headed for the cockpit himself did he learn of Johnson’s plans. The conflicting orders were less the bitter series of confrontations between Kennedy and Johnson aides that would be later pictured than a misunderstanding, but they added to the confusion. McHugh and other Kennedy aides were still pushing back and forth down the crowded aisle in the passenger portion of the plane, and in the stateroom men and women were asking each other what was happening, what was going to happen, without anyone really knowing.
And then, in the narrow doorway that led back toward the presidential bedroom, there suddenly appeared, in Jack Valenti’s words, “the huge figure of Lyndon Johnson.”
The carnation was gone; the dark gray of his suit, which appeared black in the dim light, was relieved only by the tiny Silver Star bar in his lapel and a corner of a white handkerchief peeking out from the breast pocket. His thinning hair was slicked down smooth, so that as his head turned from side to side as he surveyed the cabin, checking on who was there, there was nothing to soften that massive skull, or the sharp jut of the big jaw and the big nose, and his mouth was set in that grim, tough line.
Seeing him standing there, Valenti, whose acquaintance with Lyndon Johnson had taken place mainly during his vice presidency, was startled. “Even in that instant, there was a new demeanor in him,” he was to say. “He looked graver.” The restless movements were gone. “Whatever emotions or passions he had in him, he had put them under a strict discipline” so that “he was very quiet and seemingly very much in command of himself.” There had, Valenti says, been “a transformation.… [He] was in a strange way another man, not the man I had known.”
Other Johnson aides, who had known him longer, saw, after he had returned to Washington that night, the same transformation, but found nothing strange in it. The Lyndon Johnson that Horace Busby saw in Washington that night was a Lyndon Johnson he hadn’t seen for three years, but it was a Lyndon Johnson he remembered very well. The Johnson he saw—and that George Reedy and Walter Jenkins and other longtime aides saw—was simply the old Lyndon Johnson, the pre–vice presidential Lyndon Johnson. And Busby understood why he had changed back, and why he had been able to change back so quickly. “You see, it was just that he was coming back to himself,” he says. “He was back where he belonged. He was back in command.”
As the people in the stateroom noticed Johnson standing in the doorway, the ones who had been sitting rose to their feet. The whispering stopped—even, for a moment, the weeping.
“When I walked in, everyone stood up,” Johnson would write in his memoirs. “Here were close friends like Homer Thornberry and Jack Brooks; here were aides.… All of them were on their feet.… I realized nothing would ever be the same again.… To old friends who had
never called me anything but Lyndon, I would now be ‘Mr. President.’ ” In the memoir, he says that this “was a frightening, disturbing prospect.” But if it was, he gave no sign of that at the time. In the silence, Congressman Thomas said, “We are ready to carry out any orders you have, Mr. President.” Walking into the stateroom, as the people made way before him, he sat down in the high-backed President’s chair. Beckoning Kilduff over, he told him to make sure a photographer and reporters were aboard to record the swearing-in ceremony. “Put the pool on board,” he told him. He beckoned over Valenti. “I want you on my staff,” he said. “You’ll fly back with me to Washington.” And when an order was challenged, no challenge was entertained. When O’Donnell and O’Brien came up to him and asked if the plane could take off immediately, he said: “We can’t leave here until we take the oath of office. I just talked on the phone with Bobby. He told me to wait here until Sarah Hughes gives me the oath.” (Then he added a line with connotations. “You must remember Sarah Hughes,” he said.) O’Donnell didn’t believe him—“I could not imagine Bobby telling him to stay”; Johnson had become President the moment Kennedy died; “the oath is just a symbolic formality”; “there is no need to hurry about it.” (And later that night, at Hickory Hill, his skepticism would be confirmed. “Bobby gave me an entirely different version of his conversation with Johnson.”) Whether O’Donnell believed him or not no longer signified, however. Johnson’s expression hardly changed as he spoke; his voice was so low that, one observer says, “he was almost whispering.” But if the voice was soft, that was not the case with the message. “Johnson was adamant that the oath be administered by Judge Hughes,” Larry O’Brien was to say. “There was adamancy. It became clear that the oath was going to be administered on the ground.” General McHugh was still pushing up and down the aisle, trying to get the plane to take off, not having talked to Johnson directly, but O’Brien and O’Donnell stopped arguing.
Standing up, Johnson moved to the center of the crowded little room (he was, as was the case in most rooms he was in, the tallest person in it), and through the recollections of people present in that room, there runs a common theme: a sense that, out of aimless confusion, order was quickly emerging.
If one reason for his insistence that the swearing-in take place at the earliest possible moment was to demonstrate, quickly, continuity and stability to the nation and the world, then it was important that the nation and the world see that a new President had taken office.
Luckily, White House photographer Cecil Stoughton had come aboard, and almost as soon as Johnson had told Malcolm Kilduff to make sure a photographer was present at the ceremony, Kilduff bumped into him in the aisle. “Thank God you’re here,” Kilduff said. “The President’s going to take the oath.” And when Stoughton, carrying two cameras, entered the stateroom, seeing “Johnson in there, standing tall,” Johnson asked him, “Where do you want us, Cecil?” Stoughton told him that the room was so small that he would have to place his own back against a wall, and, to gain height for a better view, stand on the sofa, and that Johnson and the judge should be directly in front of him, but back a few feet; Johnson began moving people around, directing them to their places with jerks of his thumb—“taking command,” in Stoughton’s words. Witnesses were important; Kilduff asked Johnson whom he wanted present; “as many people as you can get in here,” he replied. Witnesses whose presence—whose photographed presence—would be testimony of continuity and legitimacy, of the Kennedy faction’s sanction of his assumption of Kennedy’s office, were particularly desirable; two of Jackie’s secretaries, Mary Gallagher and Pamela Turnure, were in the forward cabin, crying, and he dispatched Kilduff to get them, and they came in, and so did General Clifton.
And he wanted from the Kennedy people another, more durable, demonstration of continuity; Judge Hughes had not yet arrived; there were a few minutes to spare; he used them.
Sitting down again, he changed both his chair (to one at the conference table; the fact that he was not in the President’s chair “in itself did not go unnoticed” by the two men he beckoned over to sit with him) and his tone—in a change so abrupt and dramatic that it would have been startling to anyone who had not witnessed, over the years, Lyndon Johnson’s remarkable ability to alter tone completely and instantaneously to accomplish a purpose. Where, just a few minutes before, in his conversations with O’Donnell and O’Brien, there had been “adamancy,” in full measure, now—in a new conversation with the same two men—there was humility, and in the same measure.
He wanted them to remain in their White House posts, he told the two Irishmen, still in the first throes of grief for their dead leader, because the best tribute that could be paid to President Kennedy would be passage of the programs he had believed in; they and he should fight for them together, he said, “shoulder to shoulder.” And, he said, leaning across the table toward them and looking into their eyes, they should stay on because he needed them. He had so much to learn about his new responsibilities, he said, and he just didn’t absorb things as quickly as Jack had. Jack had had not only the experience but the education and understanding; he didn’t. “I need your help,” he said. “I need it badly. There is no one for me to turn to with as much experience as you have. I need you now more than President Kennedy needed you.”
He only had a few minutes to make the plea—hardly had he finished when Judge Hughes arrived. But although O’Donnell and O’Brien made no response at the time—“We can talk about all that later,” O’Brien said; O’Donnell was to describe himself as “noncommittal”—events were to prove that his plea had softened their feelings toward him.
JUDGE HUGHES ARRIVED, a tiny woman in a brown dress decorated with white polka dots, and Johnson showed her to the place Stoughton had selected, in front of the sofa on which the photographer was standing, and someone put a small Catholic missal in her hands. Then, a moment later, three reporters—Newsweek’s Roberts, Merriman Smith of UPI and Sid Davis of Westinghouse Broadcasting—came on board after a wild trip to Love Field in a police car, with the uniformed officer who was driving them speeding through red lights, avoiding tie-ups by bumping over median strips and driving against oncoming traffic; despite their pleas, the driver had refused to notify their editors of their whereabouts, telling them, Davis recalls, that radio silence had to be maintained because “They don’t know whether there is a conspiracy or not.” “We were speculating on ‘Are they going to try for Johnson, and where have they taken him?’ ‘Are the Russians trying to take over Berlin?’ ” Roberts says. Seeing them enter the stateroom, Johnson said, “We’ve got the press here, so we can go ahead.”
HE MADE HIS FINAL ARRANGEMENTS. Crowded though the stateroom was, a few more witnesses could still be crammed in. Raising his voice so that he could be heard in the forward cabin, he said, “Now we’re going to have a swearing-in here, and I would like anyone who wants to see it to come on in to this compartment,” and, Judge Hughes says, “in they came, until there wasn’t another inch of space”—until twenty-seven people were wedged into the stateroom, among the desk and the table and the chairs.
The Kennedy presence was still not all he wanted it to be. “Johnson particularly wanted Evelyn Lincoln,” Judge Hughes was to recall, but when she came, she stood in the midst of the crowd behind him, so that she was not sufficiently prominent; he made a gesture and she squeezed forward until she was standing directly behind him. He made sure his position in front of the judge was precisely where Stoughton wanted him, and placed Lady Bird on his right. He had Kilduff, who had obtained a Dictaphone machine, kneel on the floor next to the judge to record the ceremony.
ONE WITNESS WAS STILL MISSING, the most important one. He told Judge Hughes that, as the judge recalls his words, “Mrs. Kennedy wanted to be present and we would wait for her.” “Do you want to ask Mrs. Kennedy if she would like to stand with us?” he asked O’Donnell and O’Brien. When they didn’t respond at once, the glance he threw at them was the old Johnson glance,
the eyes burning with impatience and anger. “She said she wants to be here when I take the oath,” he told O’Donnell. “Why don’t you see what’s keeping her?”
The scene was still eerie: the gloom, the heat, the whispering, the low insistent whine of the jet engine, the mass of dim faces crowded so close together. But one element had vanished: the confusion. Watching Lyndon Johnson arrange the crowd, give his orders, deal with O’Donnell and O’Brien, Liz Carpenter, dazed by the rush of events, realized that there was at least one person in the room who wasn’t dazed, who was, however hectic the situation might be, in complete command of it. “Your mind was so dull, but one of the thoughts that went through my mind … was ‘Someone is in charge.’ … You had the feeling that things were well in hand.” Carpenter, like Valenti, was an idolater, but the journalists had the same feeling. On the ride out to the airport, Sid Davis, who, as he recalls, “had not known this man except as Majority Leader, and as someone who was … thought of by some … as ‘Colonel Cornpone,’ ” had said to his colleagues in the car: “It’s going to be hard to learn how to say President Lyndon B. Johnson.” As Davis watched Johnson in the stateroom now, it was, suddenly, no longer hard at all: “Soon—immediately—we started to see the measure of the guy and his leadership qualities.” Part of the feeling stemmed from his size. As he stood in front of Judge Hughes, towering over everyone in the room, Stoughton realized for the first time how big he was: “Big. Big. He loomed over everyone.” But part of it was something harder to define. As Lyndon Johnson arranged the crowd, jerking his thumb to show people where he wanted them, glancing around with those piercing dark eyes, Valenti’s initial feeling that this was a different man was intensified; Johnson was suddenly “something larger, harder to fathom” than the man he had thought he knew. He looked, in fact, for the first time in three years, like the Lyndon Johnson of the Senate floor. Now he had suddenly come to the very pinnacle of power. However he had gotten there, whatever concatenation of circumstance and tragedy—whatever fate—had put him there, he was there, and he knew what to do there. When O’Donnell, obeying his order, went to her bedroom and asked Jacqueline Kennedy if she wanted to be present at the swearing-in, she said, “I think I ought to. In the light of history it would be better if I was there,” and followed O’Donnell out, to the door of the stateroom.
The Passage of Power Page 55