The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  During the very next week in this November—the week in which President Kennedy was to be buried—an arbitrator’s decision on railroad featherbedding was scheduled to be filed with a United States District Court. The decision, fraught with implications both for railroad labor unions and for presidential relations with them, was being warily awaited both by the unions and by the railroad companies, and it had been warily awaited by the White House, too, because of the presidential actions that might be required as a result of it. A few days after the arbitrator’s decision, a presidential decision was supposed to be made on the wage-price guidelines vital to the economy. Now, suddenly, the decision on these issues would not be Kennedy’s but Johnson’s. And, excluded as he had been from Administration discussions, he was only vaguely familiar with the issues involved.

  And tangled with and complicating the time factor—and every other factor associated with the transition; looming over every aspect of Johnson’s ascension to the presidency—was one that made that ascension uniquely difficult, a complication that wasn’t out of the new age but seemed rather as if it were out of an age long past, a complication that required to plumb its depths not a Reston but a Shakespeare. The President, the King, was dead, murdered, but the King had a brother, a brother who hated the new King. The dead King’s men—the Kennedy men, the Camelot men—made up, in Shakespearean terms, a faction. And it was a faction that had a leader. An election was coming in less than a year, and a convention in nine months, but due to the faction and the brother, these were not the crucial dates. Because if the King’s faction, and the King’s brother, decided to contest Lyndon Johnson’s right to the nomination, the crucial date would be the first of the party primaries which preceded the convention—the New Hampshire primary, on March 10, less than four months off. Unprecedented shock and grief and anxiety; unprecedented danger to America and the human race. Unprecedented time pressure, and problems with staff and Cabinet made uniquely difficult by the brother factor. Even Truman’s transition problems, Neustadt was to conclude, had been “easier” than Johnson’s. “Johnson’s situation was extreme.” Although seven Vice Presidents before him had suddenly been thrust into the White House by the President’s death, Johnson’s situation—the problems that confronted him, and that would confront America should he fail to solve them—were indeed in many ways without parallel in the transitions that had come before his.

  AND AS WAS ALWAYS the case with Lyndon Johnson, in addition to the obstacles before him there were the obstacles within, the emotions inside him that had been rubbed raw by that terrible youth in the Hill Country, the scars so deep that they raised the question of whether they would ever be healed—of whether anything could make him feel secure.

  When he looked back on his ascension to the presidency in later years, these feelings were still vivid in his memory. The fact that he hadn’t been elected to the office was an objective consideration. But the words in which he described that aspect of his ascension went beyond the objective. “Illegitimate,” “naked,” “pretender,” “illegal.” And “the bigots and the dividers and the Eastern intellectuals, who were waiting to knock me down before I could even begin to stand up.… The whole thing was almost unbearable.” Fears, doubts, almost unbearable fears and doubts.

  The need for continuity in personnel—the need to keep the Kennedy men from resigning, to keep Cabinet and staff in place—was a genuine need, an objective, rational, political consideration. But in describing that need, Johnson went beyond the political. “I simply couldn’t let the country think that I was all alone,” he was to say.

  His education—his lack of a good one, of even an adequate one—added fuel to those emotions, because of the way he felt about that education. During his presidency he would often say that when he convened a meeting of his top advisers, at the table would be men with Harvard degrees, Rhodes Scholars, Phi Beta Kappas—“and one from Southwest Texas State Teachers College.” The story was supposed to be funny, but when at the end, he laughed, he “always laughed loudly—too loudly,” says the reporter Hugh Sidey, who heard it many times. “He obviously was only half joking.” And once, during the very early days of his presidency, Sidey, walking out of the Oval Office after an interview, heard behind him words from Lyndon Johnson that were not spoken loudly but very quietly, as if he was speaking to himself: “I’m not sure I can lead this country and keep it together, with my background.” His staff heard many similar remarks. “He felt a lack of sort of erudition,” Walter Jenkins says. It wasn’t just that he was not well educated. It was that he knew he wasn’t—and that that knowledge hurt.

  The Kennedy men, the “Harvards,” in his term, were so brilliant—“a lot of damn smart men,” he would call them—and his men weren’t. That was how he saw it. At a meeting on economic policy a few weeks after he became President, Horace Busby found himself disagreeing with two key economic advisers who had been appointed by Kennedy, Kermit Gordon and Walter Heller. Sneaking a glance at Johnson, Busby saw that he was very disturbed, and after the meeting the President, taking him aside, told him angrily, “You just came here to embarrass me. Here you’ve got Rhodes Scholars and you’ve got Ph.D.s and all like that and … you’re telling them that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t you understand? These are the people that Kennedy had in there. They’re ipso facto a hell of a lot smarter than you are.” And the key word that let him understand Johnson’s feelings, Busby says, was “embarrass”—“He was embarrassed.”

  Not only were the men on his staff not smart enough, he believed, he also felt that his personal acquaintance didn’t include as many “smart” men as he was going to need to bring into the Administration. Among the “things he envied about the Kennedys most of all was that their old school ties go back so many years and so when Kennedy became President, he had people he could really trust because he’d gone to prep school with them, college with them and all that. Johnson didn’t have these old school ties and friendships,” says his aide James Jones. However unjustified Johnson’s statement about his lack of “smart” men—and it was quite untrue; it would have been hard to find a political strategist more astute than George Reedy, who had, after all, been at Johnson’s right hand during all the years of his ascent to power in the Senate; Busby, forgotten though he may be by history today, was to Lyndon Johnson what Ted Sorensen was to Jack Kennedy, a wordsmith with a rare gift for turning his principal’s thoughts into memorable prose—that was nonetheless how Johnson felt. In an indication of his feelings, Lady Bird would say, “Our pool of high-calibre brains … is not too deep and wide.” Nothing the Kennedys felt about Lyndon Johnson could be any worse than what Lyndon Johnson felt about himself.

  The strength of these feelings, these insecurities—these terrors from his youth that combined to create a fear of failure so strong that, in words he frequently used to describe himself, they “immobilized” and “paralyzed” him—had been dramatically apparent in the effectiveness with which they had kept him from entering the race for President until it was too late.

  And now, stepping into the presidency, if he failed, the failure would be on a gigantic scale, on the largest scale of all, under the brightest lights of all, before an audience that would be the entire nation.

  WHILE SOME COMPONENTS of Lyndon Johnson’s character added to the difficulties of his ascension to the presidency, there were, however, within that complex persona, other components.

  One was the fact that in addition to his knowledge of governing, his understanding of the craft of governance—and no one understood that craft better than Lyndon Johnson—he possessed something that was beyond knowledge and understanding, that was instinct. It is possible—probable, in fact—that he had thought through long before November 22 what he would do if he suddenly became President. But unless one believes that he planned or in some way was aware in advance of the assassination (and nowhere in the letters, memoranda and other written documents in the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, the Joh
n F. Kennedy Library and the other public and private collections the author has reviewed—and nowhere in the interviews that the author has conducted—has he found facts to support such a theory), he couldn’t have foreseen the unprecedented circumstances under which it actually happened. Nonetheless, he seems to have known instantly—or at least by the end of those minutes in the Parkland cubicle—what had to be done.

  “Everything was in chaos,” he was to recall years later. “We were all spinning around and around, trying to come to grips with what had happened, but the more we tried to understand it, the more confused we got. We were like a bunch of cattle caught in the swamp, unable to move in either direction, simply circling ’round and ’round. I understood that; I knew what had to be done. There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp. And that is for the man on the horse to take the lead, to assume command, to provide direction. In the period of confusion after the assassination, I was that man.”

  And there was his willingness to do it—his will to decide, his will to act, to use power. During the last three years, the ability to use power had been taken from him, but with the crack of that gunshot in Dallas, he had power again, had again the ability to act. Fears had to be overcome for him to do so, for him not only to act but to act firmly and decisively; there was more reason than ever before—far greater possibilities for failure—for him to be “immobilized,” “paralyzed” now. His memories of that time reveal how clearly he understood the possibility of failure before him. Recalling for his memoirs how he felt after O’Donnell told him “He’s gone,” he said, “I was a man in trouble, in a world that is never more than minutes away from catastrophe”; “I realized that ready or not, new and immeasurable duties had been thrust upon me. There were tasks to perform that only I had the authority to perform.… I knew that not only the nation but the whole world would be anxiously following every move I made—watching, judging, weighing, balancing.

  “I was catapulted without preparation into the most difficult job any mortal man could hold. My duties would not wait a week, or a day, or even an hour.”

  But this time he couldn’t give in to his feelings. “I knew I could not allow the tide of grief to overwhelm me,” he was to say. “The consequences of all my actions were too great for me to become immobilized now with emotion.… I knew it was imperative that I grasp the reins of power and do so without delay. Any hesitation or wavering, any false step, any sign of self-doubt, could have been disastrous. The nation was in a state of shock and grief. The times cried out for leadership.… The entire world was watching us through a magnifying glass.… I had to prove myself.”

  And, knowing what had to be done, and that only he could do it, he did it.

  LIFTING AIR FORCE ONE off the Love Field runway in the takeoff so steep that to Sid Davis, watching from the tarmac, it seemed “almost vertical,” Colonel Swindal turned northeast. He had leveled off at twenty-nine thousand feet when his Air Force command post advised him of tornadoes over Arkansas, dead ahead. Taking the big blue-and-white jet up to forty-one thousand feet, high enough to fly over the storm, he roared toward Washington, with a strong tailwind behind him, at more than six hundred miles per hour. At every Air Force base along his flight path, jet fighter planes sat on runways with their pilots already strapped into the cockpits, ready to take off at the first hint of danger; in the bases’ radar shacks, men sat watching for any unidentified blip on their screens, for who could know yet whether the assassination had been the first step in some Soviet or Cuban plot, and Air Force One the next target; “who knew then,” as Tom Wicker was to write, “who had pulled the trigger or ordered the shots,” who knew whether Lyndon Johnson, “even while aloft on the way to Washington … might have to confront a fearful challenge?” Along the Rio Grande, the Mexican border was being sealed to keep conspirators from escaping.

  AS THE PLANE carrying two Presidents, “one alive and one dead,” as a journalist was to put it, flew across the country, beneath it, all along its route, and in a thousand towns and cities from coast to coast, flags were being lowered to half-staff, and the bells of churches were starting to toll.

  In Los Angeles, the rush of automobiles on the freeways began to slow, and then to halt, as drivers stopped their cars as they heard the bulletins coming over their radios. Motorists behind them, jumping out of their cars to expostulate, got the news from the drivers ahead, and stood in stunned silence, listening to the bulletins through the windows. In New York, traffic came to a standstill on a thousand streets and avenues across the five boroughs—and angry horns would start to blare, and then, the New York Times reported, “went soundless as word of the President’s death filtered from driver to driver.” On Manhattan’s crowded streets and avenues, at every red light “the cry,” as the Times reported, “cascaded from car to car, from pedestrian to motorist: ‘Is it true?’ ” A driver whose car didn’t have a radio stopped in the middle of traffic, walked over to a sidewalk lunch stand, and asked the question of the vendor, who was sitting on a stool, staring down at the sidewalk. “Yes,” was the reply, “he’s dead.” In cars that had pulled over to the curb, radios were playing, and the car windows were open, and around them, knots of people were standing, and as they heard the bulletins, people clapped their hands to their mouths in horror.

  Dusk had begun to fall, and marquee lights had been lit at Broadway’s theaters in preparation for the evening’s performances. First at one theater, and then at another and another, the lights went off, and after a while signs were posted that the performances were canceled. At dusk, automatic timers switched on Times Square’s huge, garishly illuminated signs. One by one, the signs went dark. Along Fifth Avenue, stores had already put up their Christmas lighting and installed their spectacular Christmas displays in their windows. They turned off the lighting, and the windows went dark—except for a few: in one of them, at Saks Fifth Avenue, salespeople came into the window and carried away the mannequins, and then carried in a large photograph of President Kennedy, which they placed on a chair, and flanked it with urns filled with red roses. A crowd gathered in front of the window, crying. In the windows of other stores, television sets had been placed, and crowds stood in front of them, watching the news. And over the noises of the avenue came the sound of bells; the chimes of St. Patrick’s Cathedral had begun to toll.

  The news came so fast. The first bulletins (SHOTS FIRED—PRESIDENT HIT—UNKNOWN HOW BADLY) had begun at about 1:34, Eastern Standard Time—but they were confused, unclear. As Air Force One was turning northeast toward Washington, it was still barely an hour since Walter Cronkite had said it was apparently official: the President was dead. Pearl Harbor had been, as one historian was to put it, “the last thunderbolt of comparable magnitude,” but it had “belonged to another communications era. Radio was in its heyday then.… Now it had been replaced by TV and the transistor.” Speed—together with the fact that the news came as a running account, almost as it was happening—intensified the shock. America was convulsed with grief and horror.

  ONE ELEMENT IN THE UNCERTAINTY was the fact that for some time the United States did not know the whereabouts of its new President. The exact time John F. Kennedy died—whether he was killed by the bullet that shattered his brain at 12:30 p.m. or whether his time of death was the time, “approximately one o’clock,” at which the doctors at Parkland pronounced him dead—would become the subject of endless dispute, but the time at which it was announced to the world, by Malcolm Kilduff to the press corps in the nurses’ classroom at Parkland, was 1:36, more than half an hour later than the doctors’ pronouncement. So for a period of time that was at least thirty-six minutes and possibly more than an hour, the world did not know that Kennedy was dead. Lyndon Johnson had been President for at least thirty-six minutes before the world knew it. And when the world found out that he was President, it was still not told where he was. Kilduff told the press corps that, as the New York Times reported, “Mr. Johnson, who had not yet been sworn in, was safe … at
an unannounced place.” Walter Cronkite had to say, on CBS, that “Vice President Johnson has left the hospital … but we do not know to where he has proceeded.” (“We began to be concerned about where Lyndon Johnson was, and when—and where—he might be taking the oath of office,” Cronkite was to recall.) The place was not announced for about an hour. At 2:04, when Johnson was back on Air Force One, ABC still had to report that “there has been no immediate word on when (or where) Mr. Johnson will take the oath of office.” Two thirty-five p.m. was when ABC reported that “we have learned from our man in Dallas that Lyndon Johnson will be sworn in shortly at Love Field.” (He was sworn in at 2:38.) So for about an hour, an hour of tension and fear, America was not sure of the whereabouts of its President. During this period, little more than rumors (“It appeared Vice President Johnson might have been struck. He walked into the hospital holding one arm as if he had been hit by one of the bullets”; “We now have a report that is unconfirmed, I repeat this is unconfirmed, that Vice President Johnson has suffered a heart attack”)—rumors quickly denied—were all the world was told about him. It was not until 2:49, eleven minutes after Johnson had taken the oath from Judge Hughes, and Sid Davis had left the plane and given a pool report to the press—after Air Force One had taken off—and reporters had raced to find telephones to call their city desks, that the world was given definite information. Then, for more than two hours, while Johnson was on Air Force One, America, except for the handful of people contacted over the plane’s radio, was again out of touch with its President.

  Anxiety and uncertainty about more than the new President. As Air Force One flew—eight miles up—across America, the country beneath it was being swept with rumors.