The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  He would stay in his own home, too. Asked by reporters when the Johnsons would be moving into the executive mansion at the White House, Lady Bird replied, “I would to God I could serve Mrs. Kennedy’s comfort. I can at least serve her convenience.” Jacqueline and her children would move out on December 6th, the Johnsons would move in the following day. And although the address of The Elms was being printed in newspapers and television was showing pictures of the house during those three days, the number of persons standing outside remained surprisingly small. The President of the United States was living there—and, during those three days, the world didn’t seem particularly interested.

  But for anyone who cared about the art of governing, about political power—about the art of assuming, and employing, power in sudden, unexpected, without warning, crisis; about governing a nation, soothing its fears, restoring its confidence, keeping it on course and moving in such a crisis; about governing with hardly a moment for preparation—for anyone who cared about that, what was happening in EOB 274 during those three days was memorable, too.

  Part V

  TO BECOME

  A PRESIDENT

  16

  EOB 274

  SOME OF THE ITEMS on the list Valenti had scribbled in Lyndon Johnson’s bedroom were ceremonial, symbolic: to demonstrate appropriate respect on the part of the new President—respect for God: infrequent though his visits to church had been, one should be made on Saturday; respect for his living predecessors: not merely to telephone but to meet face-to-face with the two (Truman and Eisenhower) physically able to come to Washington (and to elicit from Eisenhower, still the most popular Republican in the country, an expression of support to foster the picture of unity he wanted to paint). Some were to demonstrate sympathy—“Call widow of Officer Tippett [sic],” Valenti’s list said, and of course there would have to be ceremonial calls on another widow as well—some to demonstrate continuity (and to get briefings on the international situation) by conferring with, and being photographed conferring with, prominent members of the late President’s Cabinet, in particular Rusk and McNamara. Some items were both symbolic and substantive: a foreign affairs briefing in the White House Situation Room. These items were quickly arranged and easily scripted. There wasn’t much time on Saturday for church, but the most convenient house of worship—St. John’s Episcopal Church, right across Lafayette Square—was also the most appropriate: it was called “the Church of Presidents” because many of them had worshiped there. After a visit to St. John’s pastor to request a special memorial service for John F. Kennedy that the new President would attend, the Secret Service assured Juanita Roberts, as she put it in a memo to Johnson, that “Services will be simple and will last approximately ten minutes.” Since Johnson’s attendance mustn’t appear to be a bid for publicity but rather a simple expression of sorrow and faith, presidential panoply would be kept to a minimum, her memo assured him. While there would be a full complement of Secret Service agents inside the church, only one “will be on the street in front at time of arrival.” He “will meet the President and Mrs. Johnson, take them into the church. Rev. Harper will lead the President and Mrs. Johnson down the aisle to second row. Turn left for sitting in the center.”

  Bill Lloyd, one of Johnson’s aides, had drafted talking points for the call to Marie Tippit, widow of the Dallas police officer Oswald had killed, and Valenti had redrafted them: “Mrs. Tippit, I know that words are not very useful when your grief runs so deep. But Mrs. Johnson and I wanted you to know that you and your children, Allen, Brenda Kay and Curtis Ray, are in our thoughts and prayers.” Colonel Roberts put a slip in front of him. “Mrs. Tippit is at the … funeral home now arranging for the funeral. She will be home after 1 pm, EST.” In his call, Johnson made the words more personal; “I just want to say ‘God bless you,’ and I know you’re a brave and a great lady,” he concluded. “I certainly appreciate your praise of him. It’s quite a consolation,” Marie Tippit replied. “Could I get your address there?” Johnson said. “I want to drop you a little note too,” and he scrawled an outline for Valenti to flesh out.

  Johnson began to move down the list with the briefings on the international situation, and here, in a tour d’horizon from Bundy and CIA director John A. McCone in the Situation Room, the news was good, with no sign that any foreign country was attempting to exploit the assassination—no troubling movement anywhere, not in Cuba, not in Vietnam (“It was,” Johnson was to say later, “almost as if the world had provided a breathing space within which I could concentrate on domestic affairs”). McCone explained the “President’s Checklist” (“with which,” he noted in a confidential memo for CIA files, Johnson “was not familiar”), the summary of international developments prepared by the CIA each morning for the President’s information. To Johnson’s request that he stay on as director, he simply replied he would do so, as did the next person Johnson conferred with: Secretary of State Rusk.

  While he was talking to Rusk in 274’s conference room, however, Colonel Roberts came in and handed him a note—“J. Edgar Hoover is calling on the White House line”—and throughout that day he would be interrupted by a torrent of calls from Hoover and McCone about new “developments” in the FBI and CIA investigations of Oswald: that in the past few weeks the assassin had visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, for example.

  And all that day, Saturday, November 23—and during the next two days—there would be other new developments for which no script had been prepared, but about which decisions had to be made.

  It had been expected, of course, that some world leaders would attend the funeral, but Bundy, repeatedly ducking in and out of EOB 274 those three days, kept adding names to the list—until it was obvious that leaders would be arriving in Washington in unprecedented numbers; one after another was notifying the State Department that he was coming. “There will be de Gaulle, Erhard, Douglas-Home—separate category, Mikoyan,”1 Bundy said in one call; scores were coming; Johnson would not be able to meet with all of them individually after the funeral; but did he want to meet with some of them, and if so, which ones?; it was important not to offend any—“I need your personal guidance on it.… It’s going to be awfully difficult to pick and choose here” but “I think in fact to have them come and go and not meet with you will be equally foolish.” And if he met with them, what, exactly, should he say to each one—in meetings in which every word counted? This was dangerous ground. These meetings would be foreign leaders’ first impression of Lyndon Johnson, and first impressions could influence the policy of nations; look at what had happened after Khrushchev, in Vienna, had met Kennedy for the first time! “Need to do,” Johnson scribbled on a notepad in front of him. “De Gaulle—Hume [sic]—Mikoyan.”

  Then there was Congress: the stalemate of the Administration’s legislative program on many fronts, including civil rights and the intertwined budget and tax cut proposals that had been held up, month after month, in Harry Byrd’s Senate Finance Committee.

  Because of his exclusion from Kennedy’s legislative efforts, he didn’t know what he needed to know about the status of those proposals; much of what he knew—not only about the tax cut and civil rights stalemates but about the reasons behind the seeming paralysis on other fronts as well—he knew only because, as he had told Sorensen in June, he had “got it from the New York Times.” But it was his Administration now, his legislative program; he was going to be held responsible for its success or failure; he had to find out what the situation was on Capitol Hill.

  To find out, he turned not to the Senate Leader, Mike Mansfield, because he felt that would be no help, but to a senator who knew how to count. Johnson had, in fact, turned to the suave Floridian George Smathers for help in counting before, during his time as Majority Leader, appointing him his “whip,” or Assistant Leader. The independent Smathers later refused Johnson’s request that he stay in the job, telling him flatly, “I don’t want to be your assistant.” (Johnson had flown into a rage. “What are
you saying?” he demanded. To Smathers, “It was just as though you had unleashed an awful smell. His nostrils flared, his eyes sort of looked funny.”) Since Smathers’ counting ability (and unapologetic pragmatism) made him too keen-edged a tool to be discarded, however, Johnson had found another use for him—raiser and dispenser of campaign funds as chairman of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee—until the end of his time as Leader, and now, three years later, needing him again, he telephoned him at 2:10 on Saturday afternoon.

  The purpose of the call was to obtain information, and “you don’t learn anything when you’re talking.” So, from Johnson, there wasn’t any talking. For ten minutes after Smathers began explaining the tax cut bill’s status, the only sounds Johnson made were noncommittal little grunts. And by the time Smathers finished, Johnson had learned that the situation was worse—far worse—than Marquis Childs or James Reston realized.

  For one thing, he had learned that Byrd’s opposition to the tax bill was linked to his feelings about the budget Kennedy was to submit to Congress in January. Smathers, a member of Byrd’s Finance Committee, said that on Kennedy’s behalf he had gone to Byrd, and learned that what he “was really trying to accomplish [was] to hold up the tax bill until he could see and prove that” Kennedy’s budget would be “over a hundred billion dollars”—in other words, that if it was above that figure, he wouldn’t approve the tax cuts. Then Smathers had tried to broker a deal with Byrd under which “the President would … tell him now … what he thought his budget would be” (Treasury Secretary Dillon thought that getting it down to a figure not too far above $100 billion would satisfy Byrd—“Current expectations were for $101.5 billion to 102 billion,” Dillon was to tell Johnson—and apparently Kennedy did, too), and in return Byrd would speed up the committee’s hearings.2 But that proposal had foundered, because, Smathers said, “he [Byrd] really doesn’t want it, you know. He’s really against the tax bill.” Then, Smathers said, he had, also on Kennedy’s behalf, tried to “go around Harry Byrd in the committee,” but going around a committee chairman was something very seldom done in the Senate—and never to Harry Byrd; although two Democratic members of the committee had pledged their votes to Smathers on the “going around” maneuver, after each had been summoned to a face-to-face meeting with Old Harry, each had withdrawn the pledge. Smathers had done some counting—of some of the seventeen committee members to ascertain how many votes the Administration proposals would have in a showdown with Byrd: not enough. “At the last legislative breakfast,” which Johnson, in Europe at the time, had not attended, the possibility of getting the tax bill to the floor had been raised, but Mansfield hadn’t been much help—he didn’t know “how many votes we got, I don’t know if the leadership isn’t in the dark”—and, in the crunch, neither was the President: “Kennedy was there; he wasn’t pushing it too hard,” Smathers said.

  Johnson asked whether there was any possibility that Byrd would agree to deal with the proposed amendments to the bill in a “reasonable time” and “pass it this year”—before Congress adjourned for the Christmas vacation and the end of its 1963 session.

  “I don’t think Byrd will … make that kind of an agreement,” Smathers replied. He told Johnson that in his opinion there was nothing that could be done about getting the tax reduction bill passed before Christmas. He himself, he said, evidently forgetting Dallas for a moment, but then catching himself in mid-phrase, would “do anything short of, you know, anything to try to get it passed.” But, he said, passing the bill before Congress adjourned would be simply impossible. There was so much “strong feeling” against the Kennedy measures not only in the committee but in Congress as a whole that Johnson should just abandon the fight: perhaps “the smart thing to do … would be for you to get the appropriation[s] bill[s] through real quick, and then just” adjourn for the year.

  Johnson told Smathers why he couldn’t do that (or at least one of the reasons why he couldn’t do that).

  “No, no,” he said, “I can’t do that. That would destroy the Democratic Party and destroy the election—destroy everything. We’ve got to carry on. We can’t abandon this fella’s [Kennedy’s] program because he’s a national hero and … these people [the Kennedy Cabinet and aides] want his program passed, and we’ve got to keep the Kennedy aura around us through this election.”

  But when he himself, during the same call, got down to another count—of the days remaining before adjournment—he learned how hard passing the tax bill, much less the rest of Kennedy’s program, was going to be. “Where are your holidays? … What are you planning for Thanksgiving?” he asked, and Smathers replied that because of the imminent holiday, the Senate wouldn’t be doing much work that week; “Byrd doesn’t plan any hearings—he couldn’t get a quorum, he told me.” And, Smathers said, “that puts us into December”—and the Christmas recess.

  “I tell you, Mr. President, I’d hate to see you make that [the tax bill] a big issue because I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to do it.”

  DISCOURAGING AS WAS the news on the tax bill, that same day—his first full day as President—he also got the news on the budget that was tied in with it. It came in an urgent memo on that budget—the so-called “1965 budget” that covered the fiscal year between July 1, 1964, and June 30, 1965—from Budget Bureau Director Kermit Gordon. “We stand at a critical stage in the 1965 budget process,” Gordon wrote. “Every agency has submitted its budget requests, and we are now about halfway through our intensive review of these submissions,” after which Kennedy’s economic team had been scheduled to meet with the President “to present our recommendations,” and explain the conflicts between these recommendations and the higher amounts requested by individual departments and agencies so that he could resolve them.

  The budget determined many government actions and policies. “Despite the fact that the time is late, I know that you will want to make this budget your budget,” Gordon wrote. “Accordingly, I hope we can sit down with you very soon.” And the memo closed with a list of dates—“the time schedule against which we must work”—that showed what “very soon” meant.

  As it happens, Gordon had the date at the top of the list incorrect. His memo said that January 19 was the date by which, under law, the “Budget [must be] submitted to Congress.” The correct date was January 20. January 20 was almost two months off. But that was the end date on the list. The line underneath it said “January 9—Budget message locked up.” By that date, all decisions on the message—on the final budget that would be submitted to Congress on January 20—had to be finalized, because it would take eight days for the final figures for expenditures to be calculated, and totaled, and measured against tax revenues, and for the message, the huge 439-page document, to be prepared and printed. And underneath January 9 were other dates: “December 26—Final day for decisions on proposed legislation”: on the bills, complicated bills that had to be drafted with care, that would authorize the creation of new federal programs that the President wanted funded in the budget. But before this legislation could be drafted—before any legislation for programs, either new or existing, could be drafted—decisions would have to be made on the individual requests from the departments and agencies: whether to approve or reduce them; which programs to continue or reduce or eliminate. Those decisions had to be made by the President—had to be made by him—after meetings in which, as Gordon’s memo said, we “present the major policy issues involved in the budget and obtain your guidance on how we should proceed.” Three weeks had been allowed for such meetings, so the final dates in the memo were “December 2–20—Final decisions on agency programs under existing legislation. (Defense and space decisions must be virtually complete by December 10.)” December 2 was a week from Monday, the day of Kennedy’s funeral. But, Gordon’s memo said, “very soon” meant even sooner than that. The economic team’s crucial meetings with President Kennedy “to present our recommendations [and] obtain his decisions” had actually been scheduled “
to begin next Wednesday,” a day four days off.

  At 7:40 Saturday evening, another member of the economic team, Walter W. Heller, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, was shown into 274’s inner office, and while underlining to Johnson Gordon’s urgency—“I told him [Johnson] we were pretty deeply in the process already, and that sometime in December or early January he would have to make final decisions,” Heller was to recall—he added an additional point: that Kennedy had received budget briefings and “a coordinated budget, revenue and economic picture” from the economic team on a regular basis, so that he had been familiar with many of the considerations that would be involved in making the impending budgetary decisions. Johnson had never received any such briefing.