The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  As vital as an impression of continuity was an impression of competence, of decisiveness—an impression that the new President was immediately filling the office as it should be filled—and that impression, that image, would be hard to create for the same reason: that the men this new President was taking charge of, or trying to take charge of, had little respect and in not a few cases actual contempt for him. If that attitude wasn’t changed, they would communicate their feelings to the journalists who would be creating the impression in their articles about the transition. Making it even harder to create was the existence of the same attitude among some of the journalists themselves, the men and women he lumped together as “the Eastern intellectuals,” journalists who had asked the “whatever happened” question in print, and had joined in the mockery of Lyndon Johnson at Georgetown dinner parties. And not only had the new President not been elected to the office, his predecessor had not merely died but had been assassinated (“I always felt sorry for Harry Truman and the way he got the presidency, but at least his man wasn’t murdered,” Lyndon Johnson was to say)—and, in addition, assassinated in his own state; “A Texas murder had put a Texan in power,” as one Kennedy partisan was to say. Johnson himself felt this deeply. “I was still illegitimate, a naked man …, a pretender …, an illegal usurper. And then there was Texas, my home, the home of … the murder.”

  And of course taking charge would mean dealing—successfully—with Capitol Hill.

  The upper house of Congress had rejected him emphatically three years before, the respect and fear with which the Senate had once regarded him evaporating since without a trace, and the senatorial snubbing was merely one aspect of a situation on Capitol Hill that made Johnson’s ascension to the presidency especially difficult.

  Just ten days before President Kennedy had left for Texas, Democrat Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut had risen in the Senate to publicly assail Majority Leader Mansfield—“I wish our leader would be more of a leader … [or] we shall go on dribbling our way through the legislative session”—and had, as Newsweek put it, “thereby opened the cloakroom doors and let the nation in on the gossip” that had been rampant in Washington all year: that Congress was in stalemate, and that there was no sign that the stalemate was being broken.

  A number of factors had contributed to the deadlock, but the key factor was the one about which Lyndon Johnson had, through Ted Sorensen, tried to warn Kennedy in June: not to send Congress a civil rights bill until all his other major bills had been disposed of, lest the other bills be held up, as hostages against civil rights. Kennedy had sent Congress the civil rights bill anyway—and now the other bills were being held up. These included bills to provide health insurance for the elderly, to assist education, including a bill to finance desperately needed construction of new school buildings, foreign aid bills, even routine appropriations measures. Kennedy’s other major legislative priority had been a bill to reduce income and corporate taxes by a total of $11 billion per year, a reduction that many economists felt would provide a stimulus to the economy perhaps three times the amount of the reduction (about $33 billion per year, in other words) and would therefore not only ease a persistent unemployment problem but would also, despite the reduction in rates, increase tax revenue, thereby providing funds for the expansion of government spending on social programs liberals advocated. That bill had arrived on the Hill in January, along with a plea from the President. Noting that without the bill, “you increase the chances of a recession,” and that unemployment was already uncomfortably close to an unacceptable 6 percent, the President said the bill was “the first priority.… Nothing should stand in its way.… We have to get a tax cut this year.” Priorities, however, are in the eye of the beholder—in this case in the eye of Harry Byrd of Virginia, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Byrd hadn’t even begun public hearings on the measure until October 15, and had announced that scores of witnesses who had already testified before the House Finance Committee would be welcome to repeat their testimony before the Senate committee. And the pace of the hearings had been kept very slow. Byrd didn’t press his committee’s seventeen members to attend; sometimes there weren’t enough of them to make up a quorum; that didn’t perturb the chairman; the hearings would just be postponed to another day. When a hearing was held, moreover, the pace was leisurely, starting late, finishing early—and with absolutely no feeling that the members should limit their participation. The tax reduction bill affected many industries; many of the senators had good reasons to speak, to make a record for their constituents; Byrd made clear that he wouldn’t even consider trying to stop a United States senator from expressing his views in full. It was November now. The list of witnesses still to be heard seemed endless; there was absolutely no sign that the committee was anywhere near ready to start voting on the bill; it hadn’t even begun taking up the list of proposed amendments to the measure, each of which might be discussed in detail, and there were, at the moment, thirty amendments, with more being submitted all the time.

  As for the civil rights bill, the demonstrations throughout the South were continuing and rising in intensity, but the bill hadn’t even arrived in the Senate. Having finally been reported favorably out of the House Judiciary Committee, it had passed into the hands of the House Rules Committee, without whose approval no bill could be sent to the floor. And the Rules Committee’s chairman, Judge Howard J. Smith—of Virginia—was refusing even to set a date on which its hearings on the measure would begin, much less give an estimate of how long the hearings might last.

  The inefficiency of Congress was nothing new, of course—the only period since the Civil War that the pattern had been broken in the Senate, the principal logjam, was the six years of Lyndon Johnson’s leadership—but now, in both houses of Congress, it was escalating to a new level, a level at which some analysts were questioning the efficiency of the governmental framework of which Congress was so pivotal a part. In a book, The Deadlock of Democracy, published earlier in the year, the distinguished historian—and unabashed Kennedy admirer—James MacGregor Burns said that “we are at the critical stage of a somber and inexorable cycle that seems to have gripped the public affairs of the nation, … mired in governmental deadlock, as Congress blocks or kills not only” Kennedy’s programs but Republican programs as well. Concluding that “We … underestimate the extent to which our system was designed for deadlock and inaction,” he said that perhaps the system would have to be changed. Writing shortly before Kennedy’s assassination, the respected columnist Walter Lippmann said: “This Congress has gone further than any other within memory to replace debate and decision by delay and stultification. This is one of those moments when there is reason to wonder whether the congressional system as it now operates is not a grave danger to the Republic.” Commenting that the Eighty-eighth Congress had “sat longer than any peacetime Congress in memory while accomplishing practically nothing” and that “feebly led, wedded to its own lethargy and impervious to criticism,” it is “a scandal of drift and inefficiency,” Life magazine said that “This scandal has put our whole system of parliamentary democracy in question.”

  The extent of the impasse on Capitol Hill was just beginning to be discussed in all its ramifications during the last few days before Kennedy had left for Texas—in discussions of which the word “impossible” had been not infrequently employed to describe the prospects for breaking it. “It has seemed impossible to bring about any resolution of the deep and embittering divisions in Congress,” the columnist Marquis Childs wrote. In his final press conference—on November 14—Kennedy, instead of repeating his demands for speedy passage of the two key bills, had spoken of an “eighteen-month delivery,” which would mean that the tax cut bill, at least, would pass by mid-1964, and the civil rights bill by the end of that year. But, Childs noted, in an opinion that was, in the days before Kennedy’s death, starting to be heard more and more frequently as more and more observers began to focus on the realities on Capitol Hill,
“there was no assurance in view of the sit-down strike of the southern committee chairmen and the certainty of a filibuster conducted with all the resourcefulness of such an implacable enemy as Senator Richard Russell of Georgia that action will come on the rights” in 1964—or at any other specific date. In its first post-assassination issue, Life magazine said that “Congress is reluctant to bypass Judge Smith because of its respect for its own hoary rules and seniority rights. Senator Byrd enjoys a similar veto over the tax bill.… Ours is still a system of divided and mutually checking powers.” No matter who is President, Life said, Congress would still be the same Congress.

  And yet, it was felt, a civil rights bill must pass. There must be a release for the emotions boiling up in the streets of the South, release—or explosion. The stalemate in Congress “is, here and now, the great test of the American system,” Evans and Novak wrote. The system’s “constitutional fragility” has been exposed by the inability of the Administration to move its crucial legislation through Congress. And, they wrote, the stalemate is due primarily to civil rights. “For the last six months, the country has been torn apart on the civil rights issue.… This is the underlying reason for the legislative stalemate.” The stalemate could wreck America’s image in the eyes of the world. “We are now the center of the world stage. Every nuance, every subtle shift of policy, every shift of an Assistant Secretary of State have their implacable effect on international politics. But compared to these, the sudden, involuntary change of an entire Administration is an incalculable disaster. That is why the transition of power today, with its brutal finality, places on the American people a terrible responsibility.” And, they wrote, it is on Lyndon Johnson that the responsibility rests; “To break” the congressional stalemate “now becomes the new President’s high responsibility.”

  THE FACT THAT THE HEART of the stalemate was civil rights made the problem of Congress even more difficult for Lyndon Johnson to solve than it would otherwise have been, a problem that was not only personal but political. His passage of civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960 hadn’t eliminated the suspicion with which he was regarded by many liberals, and neither had the two “Negro tables” at the St. Augustine banquet or the speech at Gettysburg. Some liberals, indeed, saw a change in him; the New York Post said, in a profile of the new President, “A man who wore a ten-gallon Stetson and spoke with a magnolia accent had little hope of winning the Democratic nomination in 1960 …. But the mantle of national office wrought change.” To most liberals, however, the operative facts were still the accent and the Stetson—the fact that Lyndon Johnson was from the South, that hated South which, in recent months, had, with its fire hoses and its police dogs, reminded the rest of America that the South was still the South. No southerner had been elected to the White House in a century; that was still the case, although a southerner would be sitting in it now. The very raising of the civil rights issue had hurt Johnson in 1960 because for Washington observers it was a reminder of his twenty-year record as a southern vote and a southern strategist, and of the fact that he was Richard Russell’s protégé; most liberals viewed Johnson’s more recent civil rights record—the two bills, the Gettysburg speech—with distrust, as maneuvers by a man who was, as Joseph Rauh had said, “trying,” because of his presidential ambitions, “to be all things to all people.” The taint of magnolias still remained to be scrubbed off.

  So deep were the suspicions of Lyndon Johnson that the only way of reducing them would be by concrete achievement: the passage of laws that the liberals wanted—the tax bill, for one, but especially the civil rights bill. Kennedy had spoken eloquently for a civil rights bill, had promised one; eloquence and promises wouldn’t be enough for Johnson. He would have to deliver, would have to have a record of his own in civil rights to run on. For him to be assured of the nomination of his party if he decided to run for President in his own right in 1964—for him to obtain his party’s endorsement for the post to which he had been raised only by accident—he would have to have the support of northern liberals because it would be the big northern liberal states that would hold the balance of power at the 1964 Democratic convention, and political observers agreed that, without the passage of a civil rights bill, that support was far from assured. Telephoning political observers the day after the assassination to get their opinion on Johnson’s problems, reporter Vincent J. Burke of the Los Angeles Times found them agreed on one point: “Mr. Johnson needs a meaningful civil rights bill much more than did Mr. Kennedy, whose favorable ‘image’ among Negroes was so solidly fixed that apparently nothing could undercut it.” “Mr. Johnson,” Burke said, “is now more appealing to the conservative elements of the party than to liberals who comprise the dominant factor in the party.… To strengthen his position for the 1964 election campaign, party liberals and professionals generally agree that he needs from the balky Congress a meaningful civil rights bill.” “As the first southerner in the White House in over a century, this will be an absolute necessity for him,” the liberal columnist William V. Shannon wrote in the New York Post. It would, in other words, be an absolute necessity for him to break the stalemate in Congress over civil rights—a stalemate it seemed impossible to break.

  AND THEN THERE WAS the element of time—in a number of permutations.

  The most obvious was in itself daunting. Taking over the machinery of government—selecting a Cabinet, a White House staff, filling as many as possible of the seven hundred high-level governmental posts within a President’s discretion, drafting a legislative program, preparing for decisions on urgent foreign policy and defense questions left unresolved by the previous Administration, writing an inaugural address that would be measured against the great inaugural speeches of the past—is, even under normal circumstances, difficult enough. Prior to passage of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933, a President-elect had had four months—from Election Day in November to March 4 of the following year—to prepare to be President; after the amendment, he had between ten and eleven weeks. “The eleven weeks,” wrote Neustadt, who advised Kennedy on his transition, “are hazardous because they are so few. They leave but little time to turn a campaign into an Administration.” John F. Kennedy, assigning men to begin analyzing the “problems in the executive branch” because “If I am elected, I don’t want to wake up [the next morning] and have to ask myself, ’What in the world do I do now?,” had found those weeks to be barely enough time. Lyndon Johnson had less time than that. One moment he was not President—and the next moment he was. The interval between the moment he arrived in the cubicle at Parkland Hospital and the moment he took the oath on Air Force One—the time he had in which to prepare himself—was slightly less than two hours.

  Then there were, looming dead ahead, startlingly close, various dates.

  One was the date of the next presidential election: November 3, 1964—less than a year away. Of the seven Vice Presidents who had previously succeeded to the presidency due to the death of the President, five—John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman—had done so with more than three years remaining before the next presidential election; one, Millard Fillmore, had done so with more than two years remaining; only one, Calvin Coolidge, had come to the office with less time remaining than that, and even Coolidge had had well over a year—more than fifteen months.

  And Lyndon Johnson was facing deadlines that were even closer.

  While the election would be in November, 1964, the Democratic National Convention, at which it would be decided whether he would receive the nomination to run in the election, would begin on August 24, 1964, a date only nine months away.

  Like so many other aspects of Lyndon Johnson’s assumption of the presidency—the presidential transition of 1963—the imminence of those dates made it a transition unlike any other in American history. No Vice President had ever come to office with so little time in which to establish a record on which he could run in his own right. Johnson, Neustadt was to write, “faced the
unprecedented challenge of assuming office and then running for election in the same first year.” Needing a record on which to run, he had very little time to create one.

  Those were political deadlines. Other deadlines were governmental. The President had to deliver the State of the Union address when Congress reconvened, and in 1964 Congress was scheduled to reconvene on Monday, January 6—in six weeks. By law—an unbreakable deadline, the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921—the President was required to submit his budget for the next fiscal year to Congress fourteen days after that Monday, on January 20: in eight weeks.