The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  And tight as the time schedule was, it wasn’t the hardest problem confronting Johnson on the budget. The document, with its setting of governmental priorities, was a key battlefield in the war between liberals and conservatives. Liberals wanted a larger role for government, wanted bigger, and new, government social welfare programs and therefore a larger budget. They believed the $11 billion tax cut would, by putting more money into people’s pockets, stimulate the economy and thereby increase tax revenues, and the money the government would have available for these programs. Conservatives, uneasy about an expansion in government’s role and about the proposed new programs, were opposed to the deficits that would be produced by the higher spending, and believed the deficits would be increased by the tax cuts. So Johnson, in starting to deal with the budget, would immediately find himself plunged into the middle of the intense ideological warfare between conservatives and liberals.

  That very Saturday began a battle to influence the new President’s thinking on the budget–tax cut issue—a battle, Willard Wirtz said, “for his mind.” The militant conservative and former Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, whom Eisenhower had urged him to see, was Ike’s crack general on financial issues, and, in a long telephone conversation somehow crammed into Johnson’s schedule that Saturday, Anderson told him that the surest way to restore confidence was to cut the budget and reduce the deficit. The Cabinet’s most aggressive liberals, Udall, Wirtz and Freeman, had all urged Johnson in the opposite direction, Freeman in a note which, mindful of what he knew about Johnson, he was careful to keep to one page.

  Anyone who thought Johnson’s mind could be captured didn’t know it. He knew what his most important priority was. Leaving 274 that evening, Heller had opened the door—only to find it shut again, by Johnson’s big hand. Drawing him back into the room, Johnson said, “Now I want to say something about all this talk that I’m a conservative who is likely to go back to the Eisenhower ways or give in to the economy bloc in Congress. It’s not so, and I want you to tell your friends—Arthur Schlesinger, Galbraith, and other liberals—that it is not so. I’m no budget slasher.… If you looked at my record, you would know that I am a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a matter of fact, to tell the truth, John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.” But the liberals didn’t have the votes in Congress, didn’t have the nine votes necessary to get the tax cut bill out of the seventeen-member Senate Finance Committee. The economy bloc had the votes, and they had Harry Byrd. Smathers had summed up the prospects for passing the tax cut bill: “We’re not going to be able to do it.”

  THE PROBLEMS WITH Congress that he was aware of—not only the intertwined tax cut and budget bills and the eleven unpassed appropriations bills that were also tied in with them, but civil rights, foreign aid and school construction—were difficult enough, particularly because the deadlines for solving them were so close, but on Saturday, talking with Mansfield and Humphrey, he was suddenly made aware of another problem on Capitol Hill, one on which, to his surprise, the deadline was much closer.

  As part of his attempts to ease tensions with the Soviet Union, President Kennedy had, in October, offered to help alleviate its serious food shortage by selling it wheat from America’s surplus, and by allowing Russia, short of foreign exchange reserves, to finance the purchase on credit from the United States Export-Import Bank.

  Helping Russia out of a jam was anathema to Capitol Hill hard-liners. Calling Kennedy’s plan “indefensible,” one of the hardest, Republican Senator Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota, had attached an amendment to the foreign aid bill prohibiting the Export-Import Bank from extending the credit.

  The amendment would probably kill the wheat deal. It would certainly infringe on the President’s authority in foreign affairs. On November 14, a week before the President left for Texas, the Kennedy Administration had tried to defeat Mundt’s prohibition in the Senate—and had failed, mustering only forty votes. Mundt was then persuaded to withdraw it, so that the foreign aid bill could proceed—not that it did proceed—but only by Mansfield’s promise that he would be allowed to submit it as a separate bill and to have a vote on it on an early date, which had been set for Tuesday, November 26. At the legislative leaders’ breakfast on November 21, the day Kennedy left for Texas, Kennedy had insisted that the Mundt bill must be defeated. From the report Mansfield and Humphrey now gave Johnson, however, the former President’s words had little relation to reality: the bill, they reported, was probably going to be passed.

  In reporting this to Johnson, Mansfield and Humphrey seemed to feel that they were talking only about a vote on a wheat sale, and Smathers hadn’t considered the Mundt bill important enough to mention it, but none of these senators were Lyndon Johnson, who as master of the Senate had demonstrated a gift, an intuition, for seeing, in a vote on some individual bill, larger implications seen by no one else. In the instant the wheat sale vote was mentioned to him—“just the moment he heard about it,” George Reedy says—he knew that because of Kennedy’s death and the resultant change in Presidents, the vote was now about more than the wheat sale, that it now possessed a far broader significance.

  In confrontations with the former President during the past three years, Congress, and in particular the Senate, had won so often, had blocked so many Kennedy legislative proposals, that Congress now felt that in such confrontations, power rested on Capitol Hill, not in the White House. And the confidence among congressmen that they could win battles with the President had made them more willing to fight them, had emboldened them to contest the Kennedy program. “They’ve got the bit in their teeth,” Johnson was to explain to his aides.

  That was under the former President. A vote on the Mundt bill on November 26, the day after Kennedy’s funeral, would make that measure the first bill to be considered by Congress under the new President. The wheat sale vote was going to be Congress’s first confrontation with the Johnson Administration—and therefore its result would be an indication of whether, under the new Administration, the situation would remain the same, or if power would shift. The result, Johnson saw in an instant, would be crucial. The feeling on Capitol Hill had to be changed. If Congress won, its confidence that it could still defeat the President would make subsequent battles—over civil rights, for example, or the tax cut—much more difficult for him. “We could not afford to lose a vote like that, after only four days in office,” he was to explain in his memoirs. “If those legislators had tasted blood then, they would have run over us like a steamroller [on future votes], when much more than foreign aid would depend on their actions.” The Mundt bill had to be defeated; the issue, as a journalist was later to report after Johnson’s aides had explained it to him, “was simply” whether “presidential dominion over Congress” would be “reasserted”—or not.

  Since Johnson, at his ranch in Texas preparing for Kennedy’s visit, had missed the last leadership breakfast, he hadn’t been aware of the bill’s status. Learning it from Mansfield and Humphrey sometime on Saturday, he tried to rescue the situation, but when he gave the two leaders the instructions that to him were so elementary—not to schedule the vote on the bill until they were certain they had the votes to defeat it—he was informed that the vote had already been scheduled, for Tuesday. And when he told them to delay it—there was a perfectly good excuse for a brief delay, he said: the President’s assassination, and the resultant need for a new Administration to get its bearings—the answer from Mansfield was that he wasn’t willing to do that: he had promised Mundt the vote would be on Tuesday, he said, and he wouldn’t go back on his word. The leaders weren’t sure if they had the votes to defeat the bill. Johnson couldn’t even find out what the vote count was. “They don’t know how many votes they have,” he told Reedy in a tone of disbelief.

  Humphrey of course said he was sure they would have the votes, but Johnson, having had experience with Humphrey’s counts in the past, had no confidence in them, and the lack of confidence proved justified. “They tol
d me that the Mundt bill’s pretty close,” he was to say, “but when [we] checked it down, why they [the bill’s supporters] had a good many votes to spare.” He had three days—the vote would be held Tuesday afternoon—to turn the vote around, and not only did the leaders not know what the count was or which senators had to be turned around, the man who might know, Larry O’Brien, had made it clear that, at least for the moment, he didn’t even want to discuss working for Lyndon Johnson. When Johnson tried to reach O’Brien that Saturday, he was told that he was tied up—and would remain tied up for the next couple of days, helping with preparations for the funeral.

  HE HAD FOUR DAYS—until Wednesday at noon—before he would have to stand before a joint session of Congress and deliver his first speech as President. He would want to emphasize continuity in the speech, of course—to make clear that he was carrying on Kennedy’s program—and he knew who he wanted to write it: Kennedy’s speechwriter. He gave Ted Sorensen credit for the ringing phrases in Kennedy’s speeches; perhaps Sorensen could give his own some of that magic. At the conclusion of Saturday’s Cabinet meeting, he had walked over to Sorensen, sitting against the wall, and asked him to begin working on it. But Sorensen was still dazed by the “grief and disbelief” that had gripped him since he first heard the news. He was to say forty-five years later that he had never been able to remember “the details of that awful weekend … unreal … unbelievable … a blur of pain and tears.” That evening Johnson tried again in the inner office in 274. “I do not recall much” of that meeting, Sorensen was to say, “but I was blunt and unsmiling.” Most of the meeting, Sorensen was to say, “was devoted to his request that I stay: ‘I need you more than he needed you,’ ” but, as best as he could recall, his response was, “I’ve given eleven years of my life to John Kennedy, and for those eleven years he was the only human being who mattered to me.” Johnson may have intended to ask him again that evening to draft the joint session speech, but the request was not made.

  And all the time, the calls kept pouring in. “Gov. [George] Romney [of Michigan] is at the airport. An aide is asking if he [the governor] could talk to you if he came over,” said a note Roberts handed him that Saturday. “Aide holding on 304,” said another note a few minutes later. Picking up 304, Johnson said a few words to Romney, who might be his opponent in a few months. “Governor Lawrence … would like to stop by at your convenience,” said a note from Jenkins. “Harry Provence is at the Washington [Hotel], Room 432, and is waiting.” Suddenly Jenkins was coming in to tell him that McCone was in the outer office; he motioned to Jenkins to show him right in; entering, McCone closed the door behind him before he spoke: Oswald, the CIA had learned, had visited not only the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City but the Cuban Embassy as well. There was even a call from Ralph Yarborough; when, after a while, Johnson hadn’t returned it, the senator left a message with Jenkins: “The President will have my complete support in Texas and in the Nation.… If the President had lived another day, he would have seen some harmony in Texas.” (Returning the call after he received that message, Johnson said, “You’re wonderful, and I’ll be in touch with you—I appreciate it more than you know.” “I have no ideological problem; I’m willing to give at least 90 percent—” Yarborough said. “That’s right. Always have,” Lyndon Johnson interrupted. “Always have. I know that. Thank you, my friend.”) There was, Reedy was to say, “one call after another, all day” from Hoover and Bundy. There were the things to do that no one had thought of but that were essential. A presidential proclamation had to be issued to designate Monday, November 25, the day of the funeral, as an official “day of national mourning.” After it had been written and approved, a memo that Reedy stuck in front of him told him that something had been left out. The proclamation authorized the closing of all government offices, but no one had thought of the banks. “Apparently because of a legal quirk, we have not given the nation’s banks authority to close Monday. A bank can be sued if it is not opened during regular hours, and the only way in which they are safe from such suits on Monday is if the day is proclaimed a legal holiday.”

  By the time Saturday was over, Johnson had, since his confrontation with Robert Kennedy that morning, met with his Cabinet as a group, and with three of its key members—Rusk, McNamara and Labor Secretary Wirtz—individually; with Eisenhower and Truman; with leaders of Congress; with the CIA director; with Supreme Court Justice Goldberg; and, over and over, with his national security advisor; had gone to church; paid his respects to the dead President and to the dead President’s widow in the White House; and had talked on the telephone with, and won firmly to his side, perhaps another forty people.

  Arriving in the office on Sunday with a list of problems that must be faced immediately, he was handed the instructions for his participation in the day’s memorial ceremonies, which, he saw, would consume a substantial portion of the day. (“The President and Mrs. Johnson … will follow the casket through a cordon of honor troops from the East Room to the North Portico entrance where the casket will be placed on the caisson.… The President should place his right hand over his left breast while the casket is being placed on the caisson.… The President and Mrs. Johnson will board vehicle No. 1 for procession to the Capitol.… At the conclusion of the last eulogy the President will move from his position to the base of the catafalque where the wreath bearer will assist him in placing a wreath.”) And then he was told that also riding in vehicle No. 1 would be the attorney general. Just a few minutes later, as he was waiting in the East Room to step on the portico, an usher told him that Dean Rusk wanted to speak to him on the phone, and Rusk told him that Lee Harvey Oswald had just been shot “on television.” Shortly after the procession arrived at the Capitol, the assassin was pronounced dead, murdered by another assassin—and immediately the second murder, fostering as it did the impression that the assassination was part of a conspiracy, created a huge problem. Obviously some sort of major investigation was necessary—but what type of an investigation, and by whom?

  ONE PROBLEM he dealt with that Sunday seemed somewhat less pressing than the others. After his return from the Capitol (faster coming back, with motorcycle outriders clearing the way, no Kennedys in the car with him) there was a meeting in his office—on Vietnam.

  Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had returned from Saigon to report on the effects of the coup that had, three weeks previously, resulted in the assassinations of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, secret police chief Ngo Dinh Nhu, and the installation of a new government led by General Duong Van (Big) Minh. Most of America’s major newspapers had welcomed the end of the repressive Diem regime, and there had been relatively few public statements about the coup from Capitol Hill; Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Fulbright would soon be telling Johnson that he saw no need for any immediate action on his part: “I think we ought to give this new man a chance to see what he can do for a little while.” And the meeting didn’t make Johnson, who, Valenti recalls, had “talked little of Vietnam that first night,” feel the need for immediate action. Lodge, who had not been at all opposed to the coup, said that it had improved prospects for victory. None of the others sitting around the conference table in 274—Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, McCone and Ball—agreed with this prediction; McCone, in fact, said that the new military leaders were having difficulty organizing a government, that Viet Cong activity seemed to have increased since the coup, and that he saw no reason for optimism. But there was no strong feeling from anyone but McCone that there had been substantial deterioration, either, and Johnson was to recall that he found the “net result modestly encouraging.” A preliminary plan for covert operations against North Vietnam had been approved at a conference in Honolulu two days before Kennedy’s assassination, and it was decided at the meeting in 274 that when the plan had been refined, it would be sent to the President for approval.

  The “breathing space” in foreign affairs appeared to include Vietnam; of all the potential trouble spots in the
world, Johnson would recall in his memoirs, “Only South Vietnam gave me real cause for concern.… But, compared with later periods, even the situation in Vietnam appeared to be relatively free from the pressure of immediate decisions.” The solution seemed the same as in domestic matters: continuity—the continuation of Kennedy policies. Reinforcing that conclusion, furthermore, was a simple political calculation; as Bundy was to say, a presidential election was less than a year away, and major decisions on Vietnam in an election year were something no President would want to make. “It was so under Johnson, and it would [have been] under Kennedy as well. Neither man wanted to go into the election as the one who either made war or lost Vietnam. If you could put it off, you did.”

  With political calculations Johnson was at ease. While the range—from Lodge to McCone—of the assessments of the Vietnam situation may have been mixed, Johnson’s response wasn’t. When, at the end of the discussion, Lodge told the President that unfortunately hard decisions would be necessary on Vietnam, Johnson barely hesitated, and his instructions to Lodge, Wicker was to write, were “firm.” There had been, the President said, too much bickering among the various American agencies in South Vietnam—the Army, the CIA, the USIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department—over our aims there. “We had spent too much of our time and energy trying to shape other countries in our own image.” There would be time enough for broader objectives later, he said. At the moment, “The main objective” was to just “win the war—he didn’t want as much effort placed on so-called social concerns.” He told Lodge to return to Vietnam and assure its new government that his Administration would continue Kennedy’s policy of helping Saigon to fight the Communists.