The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “A hush, a hush—every whisper stopped,” Roberts recalls. She was still wearing the same suit, with the same bloodstains. Her eyes were “cast down,” in Judge Hughes’ phrase. She had apparently tried to comb her hair, but it fell down across the left side of her face. On her face was a glazed look, and she appeared to be crying, although no tears were coming out. Johnson placed her on his left side, and nodded to the judge, who held out the missal. He put his left hand on it—the hand, mottled and veined, was so large that it all but covered the little book—and raised his right hand, as the judge said, “I do solemnly swear …” Valenti, watching those hands, saw that they were “absolutely steady,” and Lyndon Johnson’s voice was steady, too—low and firm—as he spoke the words he had been waiting to speak all his life. In the back of the room, crowded against a wall, Marie Fehmer wasn’t watching the ceremony because she was reading the oath to make sure it was given correctly. (“He taught you that, by George, you can do anything.”)

  The oath was over. His hand came down. “Now let’s get airborne,” Lyndon Johnson said.

  *

  1 The Cabinet plane, notified of the assassination by the White House, had already turned around, but neither Johnson nor anyone in the room with him was aware of that.

  Part IV

  TAKING

  COMMAND

  13

  Aboard Air Force One

  THE DEATH OF A PRESIDENT—with the necessity for the sudden transfer of his enormous powers—is in many ways a supreme test for a democratic government.

  For what if the transfer did not go smoothly? What if policies were changed—foreign policies: what if a détente was ended, new orders given; what if, along a border, the border between East and West Berlin, perhaps, tensions rose; what if tanks began to rumble forward, troops began to march; what if, in the harbors of naval bases, anchor chains began to rattle aboard so that fleets could sail? Or domestic policies: what if interest rates set by a government agency of which people had previously been only vaguely aware suddenly began to be raised, and raised too high—what if, as a result of that change, businesses that had planned to borrow money to expand suddenly found the cost of money too high, and had to contract instead, laying off employees? What if the rates were lowered—and lowered too far—and, as a result, inflation rose, and rose too far; what if currencies crumbled, life savings were eaten away, elderly couples suddenly facing impoverished old age? What if tax policies, or depreciation allowances, were changed, so that corporations abruptly found that expansions planned under the old policies would now be unfeasible, so they could no longer afford to add employees? What if previously announced government appropriations were suddenly rescinded or the schedule of their payments stretched out so that schools, hospitals, clinics, day-care centers, suddenly had bad news for students and patients; what if decisions were made not to build dams or roads on which people had been counting for employment? What if naval yards, aircraft factories were closed, their thousands of employees thrown out of work? What if adjustments were made in government health-care policies, so that families that had been struck by illness but had believed that at least their medical expenses were covered found all at once that in fact they weren’t?

  And beyond institutions and policies, what of the man—the new President? The old President had been elected to that office, installed in it by the will of the people, by the hard, concrete totals of the ballots they cast, his place, his authority, “legitimated,” in the word used by Richard Neustadt, perhaps the era’s leading analyst of the presidency, “by a national election after national campaigning.” The people he was governing had given him the authority, legal and moral, to govern them. Although his successor was of course entitled under the Constitution to the office to which he was succeeding, and the electorate was of course aware when it voted for the ticket of which he was a part that he would occupy that office should the President die, the possibility of the President doing so had not been prominent in its mind—it never is: voters focus on the candidate at the head of the ticket, not on his running mate, and they focus on the candidate, not on what would happen should the candidate, having been elected, suddenly die. The draping over a Vice President of the mantle of authority that had been conferred on the President is not guaranteed to be straightforward. For what if, because of the new President’s early actions in his new office, the people found that they did not have confidence in him? What if they felt that the government had abruptly altered course to a wrong course, or that the firm hand at the helm of state was not a firm hand, and that therefore the circumstances of their own lives, dependent in so many ways (they suddenly realized now that the President’s death had made them think of it) on presidential performance, were suddenly more uncertain than before? If there was no confidence in the continuity and stability of the new government, no feeling that, despite a President’s death, someone competent was in charge, what then might be the consequences for a democracy?

  In America, the test is made easier to pass because under the Constitution the transfer of power is swift and unquestioned. Seven of the nation’s thirty-five Presidents had died in office before John F. Kennedy died; in each case, presidential power had passed to the Vice President in a smooth and systematic manner, even in the case of the two deaths that had come at particularly crucial moments of history—Lincoln’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s, both of which presidencies had ended as the great wars they had directed were ending, with postwar decisions immediately ahead; Roosevelt’s death, just eighteen years before Kennedy’s, had elevated to the place FDR had filled so long that many Americans could hardly envision anyone else holding it a man largely unknown to America, and seemingly very ill fitted for the office, yet the transfer had been instantaneous and smooth. Aspects of the transfer of power which made such transfers fraught with uncertainty and danger in other nations had barely even been thought of, if indeed they were thought of at all; as one political scientist was to put it, the questions that were not raised at the time of Roosevelt’s sudden death—and that were not raised at the time of other presidential deaths, either—“illustrate how fundamental and implicit is the commitment to” America’s governmental institutions; “it is, for example, not so much that the American military did not attempt to take control of the government; it is that no one even thought to ask where the military’s support lay.” Harry Truman, raising his hand in 1945 to take the oath as Roosevelt’s successor before a group of officials in the Cabinet Room of the White House, realized that “although we were in the midst of a great war, only two uniforms were present,” and, noting that “this passed unnoticed” by anyone but him, understood the significance of that fact: “the very fact that no thought” was “given to it demonstrates how firmly the concept of the civil authority was accepted in our land,” he wrote.

  Yet in certain crucial aspects Lyndon Johnson’s ascension to the presidency—the presidential transition of 1963—took place in uncharted waters, in circumstances that made it different from, and in some respects significantly more difficult than, any of the seven previous transitions, even the one that had followed the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

  Two of these circumstances were products of the age in which this transition occurred, for 1963, unlike 1945, was the age of television, and of nuclear weapons.

  Roosevelt’s death, the death of this President who had become a father figure to much of America, was a shock, and resulted in immense grief and anxiety: would, for example, the war drag on longer, now that the great leader was dead? Nevertheless his death, of a stroke after years of failing health that had become increasingly apparent, was a natural death; as one writer put it, “violence was missing from the story of Roosevelt’s demise; as it must to all men, death came to him.” And there was in effect no television; only a few thousand American families had a set; FDR’s funeral ceremonies in Washington and at Hyde Park were moving, but while the radio let America listen to them, America couldn’t watch them while they were ta
king place; could see them only in still newspaper photographs and newsreels, after the fact. John F. Kennedy’s death was unnatural, terrible: violence, murder, blood—and mystery; as Air Force One was flying back to Washington, commentators were speculating, and America was wondering: murder by whom, and at whose orders? Forty minutes into the flight, it was announced that a Dallas policeman had been shot, and, a few minutes later, that a twenty-four-year-old man, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been arrested in connection with that slaying, and that “he also is being questioned to see if he had any connection” with Kennedy’s assassination, and then, an hour later, that he was “a definite suspect in the assassination,” and then there were rumors that he had not been the only gunman. And Kennedy’s death was made more terrible because of television. Television had, during the almost three years of his presidency, brought JFK and his wife and children into America’s homes: the first detailed study of America’s reaction to the assassination found that four out of five of those surveyed (79 percent) felt with the “very deepest feeling” or “quite deeply” that not just a President but “someone very close and dear to them,” almost like a member of their own family, had died when JFK died. And television intensified the shock and horror—the unnaturalness—of the death of a President who had been the epitome of youth and promise by the rapidity with which it broke the news, the report of the assassination crossing the country, Newsweek said, “like a shock wave.” By the time Air Force One touched down in Washington, 92 percent of the American people had heard the news; television, almost instantaneously, it seemed, bound an entire nation together in “a communion of disbelief, sorrow and anger.” And two days later the shock would be multiplied by television, for on that day the murderer was murdered, on live television, the shot fired and Oswald’s face contorting in pain as the nation watched—and more questions were raised, about what had really happened at Dealey Plaza, and why it had happened.

  During the day of the assassination and the next three days, furthermore, the nation would be bound together by television not only in shock but in mourning. From shortly after the shots in Dallas on Friday to the conclusion of the funeral services in Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, America’s three television networks canceled all regular programs and all advertising, and carried only news related to the assassination and the events that followed, in coverage uninterrupted by commercials. As the day of the assassination and the three days of memorial pageantry for John Fitzgerald Kennedy unfolded in Washington, America sat before its television sets watching it as if the country was gathered in one vast living room: a nation that was, for those four days, a single audience—in a way that had never happened before in history. A survey by the A. C. Nielsen Company, the leading commercial firm conducting television surveys, showed that during these four days approximately 166 million Americans in fifty-one million homes were tuned in at some time to the Kennedy coverage—and surveys by Nielsen and social science organizations showed that in most homes the time was substantial: during the three days, according to these surveys, the average American family watched the ceremonies for an almost incredible total of 31.6 hours, almost eight hours per day. The pervasiveness as well as the immediacy of television coverage made the assassination and the events following it an event “probably without parallel in the past,” the Social Science Research Council said. Not only was “President Kennedy’s loss the first loss of a national leader reported in any such detail on the picture tubes of a nation,” but “For all practical purposes there was no other news story in America during those four days,” a study by the National Opinion Research Center concluded. “There were times during those days when a majority of all Americans were apparently looking at the same events and hearing the same words from their television sets—participating together … in a great national event. Nothing like this on such a scale had ever occurred before.” After President Roosevelt’s death—the event social scientists consider most similar to Kennedy’s in American history—only 88 percent of Americans said they listened to the radio “at some time during the three days” that followed. A characteristic of television is its ability to magnify and reinforce emotions. “It seems more personal when you see something happening on TV than just listening about it,” as one viewer said. “It brought you there as if you were one of the close spectators.… You felt as if you were one of the people watching on the scene,” another said. “When President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, there were memorable radio reports,” wrote Jack Gould, the television critic for the New York Times, “but the person at home mourned through the eyes and ears of the unseen commentator.” But the Kennedy ceremonies were carried on television. “To read or hear about a nation in the agony of unexpected transition is one thing; to see it in terms of close-ups of persons who are familiar faces in one’s own home is searing.” All sudden, unexpected transfers of presidential power produce shock and anxiety and uncertainty; by reinforcing and magnifying these emotions, while blanketing them in a mantle of grief that made them stronger still, the new medium of mass communication intensified, sharpened, deepened, the impact of the assassination, and therefore the concern about whether the government would continue to function, whether it would be stable, whether its reins would be in firm hands. The National Opinion Research Center survey would not be begun until five days after the assassination, and would not be completed for another three days, an eight-day interval following the assassination during which such anxieties had been eased, and even so, almost half those surveyed were still “worried” with the “very deepest feeling” or “quite deeply” about how it “would affect our relations with other countries” or how it “would affect the political situation in this country” or “how the United States would carry on without its leader.”

  And television was only half of the new equation. The year 1963 was the age of the Bomb, and America was only a year away—the Cuban Missile Crisis had taken place in October, 1962—from being dramatically reminded of the implications of that fact. The questions that were raised now—was the assassination of the President an isolated act or was it part of a conspiracy to leave the government leaderless, or in disarray, so that, as Tom Wicker put it, “the Soviets might try something, in Cuba, again, or in Berlin, that might rapidly lead to escalation, and the possibility, in a nuclear age, of annihilation”—possessed more urgency because of this new factor. Presidents had always had a large measure of what Neustadt calls the “terrible responsibility for the use of force,” but now, because the force a President could employ—and that could be employed against us—was nuclear, a decision a President made might be a decision which could not be called back, might be a decision which was irreversible and irreparable. In the past, during every previous transition, a snap decision by the new President—a wrong snap decision, perhaps: a miscalculation—might mean war. Now it might mean the end of much of mankind. The number of Americans who might die in the first hours of a full-scale nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, the Atomic Energy Commission had calculated, was thirty-nine million. This was a situation that was new, unprecedented, in presidential transitions. No situation even remotely similar had confronted any of the seven other men who had been suddenly placed in the presidency by death. This new President, a man made President in an instant, without being elected to the presidency, held in his hands the fate of mankind. “The advent of nuclear weapons, together with the fact that another nation—a foe—also possessed nuclear weapons,” Jonathan Schell was to write, “has done nothing less than place the President in a radically new relation to the whole of human reality. He along with whoever is responsible in the Soviet Union has become the hinge of human existence.” Lyndon Johnson was the first President ever to have been given, without being elected, such power, such responsibility; the American people hadn’t given him that power, and didn’t know him very well, as the Candid Camera show had demonstrated. The death of a President, and the resultant sudden transfer of power, had always produced a measure of anxiety.
But on November 22, 1963, there was a new, overriding, reason for anxiety. “Lyndon Johnson’s ascent to the presidency,” says presidential historian Henry Graff, “came at the most traumatic moment in American political history.”

  AND OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES surrounding the presidential transition of November, 1963, made it unprecedented in American history, circumstances that had nothing to do with the age in which it occurred.

  Vital as are continuity and stability—and the impression of continuity and stability—in any sudden transfer of power, now, given the unprecedented shock and anxiety of November 22, that impression was needed more than ever, and a crucial element in creating it would be the continuation in office of the men John F. Kennedy had appointed to the Cabinet and to key, visible White House staff positions, men who were linked in the public mind with his Administration. If “some or most of them moved out of their old jobs,” Evans and Novak were to write, “the country would draw an obvious conclusion: these Kennedy men did not choose to work for Johnson. That could destroy confidence.” He had to prevent “even the appearance of an exodus.” And merely keeping them in their jobs wouldn’t do the trick: the press would be watching to see whether these men were working at them as diligently as they had worked under Kennedy, whether they were taking the new President’s orders, giving him loyalty. But these were—many of them—the same men who had been sneering at Lyndon Johnson for years, who had called him “Rufus Cornpone” behind his back, and “Lyndon” instead of “Mr. Vice President” to his face, who had snickered as people asked whatever had become of him, and roared as pins were jabbed into his voodoo effigy. Besides, many of them had come to Washington not to work for a President but to work for John Fitzgerald Kennedy; they—men like O’Donnell and O’Brien and Dave Powers—had followed his banner for years, since the long days campaigning across Massachusetts. Others, like Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and Freeman and Salinger—and, most of all, Sorensen—had been inspired and thrilled by Kennedy, and their devotion to him was deep and personal. If he was gone, would they want to stay? “We came down to be with Kennedy, and he [is] no longer President, so perhaps we ought to leave,” legislative aide Mike Manatos said on one of the first days after the assassination. And some of these men were aware that their leader had lost confidence in Lyndon Johnson; they had, for example, noticed who wasn’t invited to the decisive meeting on the missile crisis. The “noncommittal” response of O’Brien and O’Donnell to his plea on Air Force One that they stay had demonstrated how difficult preventing an exodus would be.