The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” he said. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” Lodge raised a question about political support. “I don’t think Congress wants us to let the Communists take over South Vietnam,” Johnson said, noting that “strong voices” in Congress were urging the United States to take more forceful action in Vietnam.

  A tentative step in a different direction had recently been announced by the Kennedy Administration. On October 2, McNamara and Taylor, returning from an inspection trip to Vietnam, had recommended stepping up the training of the Vietnamese army so that American military personnel could be withdrawn from Vietnam, and had said that if this was done, “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of US personnel” by the end of 1965. Their report concluded that a thousand Americans could be withdrawn by the end of 1963. “We need a way to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it,” McNamara said. At the close of Kennedy’s meeting with his two envoys, on October 2, Pierre Salinger had publicly announced that the President had endorsed their recommendations, saying that the President accepted “their judgment that the major part of the US military task can be completed by the end of 1965 …. They reported that by the end of this year … 1,000 military personnel can be withdrawn.” The number of American personnel in Vietnam at the time was 16,732, and it was forecast that by the end of the year, the number would be reduced to about 15,700. That had been before the coup. Whether Kennedy, despite the coup, would have kept the pledge to withdraw the thousand troops is unknown, but the pledge was on the public record. Johnson, calling in reporters after his meeting with Lodge and the others, “reaffirmed,” the New York Times said, “the policy objectives of his predecessor regarding South Vietnam.” The Washington Post reported that after the meeting “White House sources said the late President Kennedy’s statement” about the troop withdrawals “before the end of the year remains in force.”

  Johnson’s statement said: “First, the central point of United States policy on South Vietnam remains: namely to assist the new government there in winning the war against the Communist Vietcong insurgents. The adoption of all measures should be determined by their potential contribution to this overriding objective. Second, the White House statement of Oct. 2 on the withdrawal of United States troops from South Vietnam remains in force. This statement … said the program for training of Vietnamese troops should have progressed by the end of this year to the point ‘where 1,000 United States military personnel’ can be withdrawn.”

  Two days later, on November 26, the reaffirmation—all the conflicting parts of it—was given official status. On November 21, the day before Kennedy’s death, Bundy had drafted a National Security Action Memorandum, a formal notification to the heads of government agencies of a presidential decision, and directives to take steps required to implement it. On November 26, Johnson approved the memorandum, NSAM 273. It emphasized that the Vietnam conflict was a war against Communism, and a war that had to be won, and that “It remains the central objective of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win” it.

  The specific withdrawal goals enunciated under Kennedy—a thousand by the end of 1963, “the bulk” of the rest by the end of 1965—“remain as stated,” the NSAM declared. Among the directives included in the document, however, was one for the planning of “possible increased [military] activity,” a reference to the plan for covert military operations against North Vietnam (CINCPAC Operations Plan 34-A-64, or OPLAN 34-A) that had been discussed and approved at the November 20 Honolulu conference.

  IF VIETNAM SEEMED—no matter how misleading the impression—“relatively free from the pressure of immediate decisions,” without deadlines by which specific actions had to be taken, little else was. All during those three days—“days filled with people, days filled with telephone calls,” in Juanita Roberts’ recollection—the crises never stopped. She, Marie Fehmer, Cliff Carter and Mildred Stegall would funnel the more important calls to the desk at which Walter Jenkins sat, taking notes on his legal pads, quiet, outwardly calm, the only sign of tension the steady reddening of his face as the day went on. A light on one of the buttons on the telephone console on Jenkins’ desk showed when Johnson, in his private office, was talking on that line. Except when Johnson was talking to someone in person in his office, one of the buttons was almost always lit. When, for a moment, Johnson was alone in his office and the buttons were suddenly all dark, Jenkins would seize the opportunity, snatching up his pads and going in, to read Johnson the messages that required immediate attention. The buzzer from the inner office would sound on their desks. Johnson would tell them to set up an appointment with someone, or to get someone else on the phone. “Sometimes he would buzz out and say, ‘What have you got?’ and we’d tell him,” Colonel Roberts says. Sometimes he would come out, into the two rooms with the desks crammed together and the phones ringing and people hurrying in and out, “and,” Roberts says, “if he’d pass our desks and we had something we thought he should see, we’d give it to him.”

  There was so much to do. “He was working as rapidly as he possibly could,” she recounts. And, of course, she says, “he was constantly having to leave for [the] ceremonies” for his predecessor. But, as had been the case Friday night, there was, during those next days in EOB 274, very little conversation, “no lost motion; it wasn’t necessary for us to talk.” To Marie Fehmer, her boss was “a changed man, transformed.” At first she couldn’t understand why he looked so different from the Lyndon Johnson for whom she had been working, but she came to realize, she says, that the very movements of his body were different; that instead of the awkward, almost lunging, strides and “flailing” movements of his arms that had previously often characterized Johnson under tension, now his stride was shorter, measured, and his arms were staying by his sides, hardly moving at all; that “there was no flailing,” that “only his head moved. It wasn’t just that there was no flailing emotionally. There was no flailing physically either. It was as if he was actively controlling his body.” Not only his movements but his voice was transformed, she says. It had none of the impatience in it that was often—usually—present, none of the anger and rage into which impatience so often morphed, none of any of the emotions with which it was generally filled. “His voice was not low so much as it was level—it didn’t fluctuate in tone. He was keeping it under control, calm.”

  It was an iron control, a discipline that, during those three days, never slipped. “I’ve never seen him as controlled, as self-disciplined, as careful and as moderate as he’s been this week,” Bill Moyers told Time’s Loye Miller. “He’s remained calmer … he’s been more careful to sort out and reason his feelings and his thoughts, and he’s been good to work with. You know very well how he used to thrash around and blow his top so often. It seemed like he had a clock inside him with an alarm that told him at least once an hour that it was time to go chew somebody out. But he hasn’t lost his temper once since two PM last Friday.”

  “It is remarkable, really,” Miller reported to Time’s editors in New York. “Some of us who have seen Lyndon at his most cantankerous in times of lesser stress were wondering what sort of tantrums he must be having behind the office doors as the immense pressures of his new job and necessity for seizing it quickly bore down on him. But … my every inquiry brings the reply” that there were no tantrums—none of the cursing, none of the glass-throwing, none of the vicious rages. And the replies Miller received were accurate. There was never a crack in the calmness, the aura of command, the sense of purpose. The few reporters who were allowed to spend time in 274 during those days saw it for themselves, and those of them who had known Johnson for years were startled by what they saw now. Hurrying from 274 to Time’s offices to describe Johnson in a wire to New York, John Steele used adjectives like “direct, calm, deliberate,” and nouns like “composure and sense of being collected.” Hugh Sidey felt he was showing more of such
qualities than he had ever demonstrated before. “There were questions, decisions to be made, just flooding in on him one after the other,” he says. “He just handled them, one after the other,” without a pause. Business in 274 “seems to be progressing matter-of-factly,” another reporter wrote, “and actually quite well compared to the tumultuous office atmosphere which has often surrounded Johnson in the past.”

  Conferring with Johnson on Saturday, Abe Fortas was struck by his “studied calm.” “Studied.” Other aides also felt the calm was a mask, and they had reason to feel that way. On Saturday night, after a twelve-hour working day, Johnson was having dinner at The Elms with Busby and Thornberry. At dinner, he was rather quiet, in a mood Busby recognized. “He was thinking things through,” he says. “Very intense. You could smell wood burning.” Going upstairs after dinner, he asked Busby to sit in his bedroom until he had fallen asleep, and after the lights had been turned out, Busby did that, until, after about a half hour of silence, he thought it was safe to leave, and started tiptoeing toward the door.

  “Buzz,” said Lyndon Johnson’s voice out of the darkness. “Buzz, is that you?” And when Buzz said that it was, the voice said, “Buzz, I’m not asleep yet.”

  Returning to his chair, Buzz waited for a while longer, but again, when he tried to leave, Johnson asked, “Buzz, are you still there?” Busby assured him he was, and that he had just been walking over to the window to adjust a curtain. It took several more attempts, and several more “Buzz, are you still theres?” before he finally made it out of the room. Busby, who loved him, didn’t mind waiting, he was to say. He had done it before, when Lyndon Johnson found it hard to get to sleep. “Anything I could do to gentle him down,” he says. “His mind just wouldn’t stop working, working, working.”

  ALTHOUGH DURING THOSE three days he didn’t have the use of the White House or adequate space for his staff while the Oval Office and its adjoining rooms stood empty across the narrow street, he had the telephone, and he used it—as only Lyndon Johnson could use it.

  “I knew I had to secure the cooperation of the … natural leaders of the nation,” he was to say, and it was over the telephone that he did it. For the sake of the country, he wanted unity behind his presidency, and for the sake of his political future—the 1964 election, and the convention, and the string of primaries and deadlines that loomed so imminently—he wanted it within his party, wanted to forestall any liberal attempt to contest his nomination, and wanted it fast. The leaders who would (in addition to the Kennedy faction, of course) be most reluctant to support him were the leaders who had opposed him so violently when he ran for the presidency in 1960: the liberal leaders of the great labor unions and the major civil rights organizations, the leaders who had opposed him even for the vice presidency, and who had called the nomination a “double-cross,” and threatened to stage a floor fight, even to name a rival candidate, against him. Although the hostility of some of these men had softened during his vice presidency—some of them regarded themselves as his friends now—he couldn’t feel confident of their support, particularly if in 1964 a rival candidate for the nomination was supported by the Kennedy faction, or was, in fact, named Kennedy. The hostility of many of them—perhaps most of them—had not softened at all; despite the St. Augustine tables and the Gettysburg speech, they still felt that at heart he was a Texas conservative, still felt that whatever he might have been saying for the last three years, Lyndon Johnson was still in reality what he had, in their opinion, always been: anti-union and not enthusiastic about civil rights, not a liberal at all. And among the union leaders whose hostility remained unabated was the most powerful of them, the man Lyndon Johnson called labor’s “stud duck” because other union chiefs followed his lead, the man who in 1960, calling him “the arch foe of labor,” had staged a “vendetta” against him, a vendetta in which, during the intervening three years, he had called no truce.

  In dealing with these men now, however, Johnson possessed advantages he had never had before—not only the power of the presidency but what the presidency symbolized, and the desire, evoked by that symbol, of Americans to support their President, a President who had taken office at such a difficult moment. The first call Lyndon Johnson made when he arrived in EOB 274 on Saturday morning demonstrated how much that might mean. “George,” Lyndon Johnson began. “Mr. President,” George Meany replied.

  “George,” Lyndon Johnson said, “you know how tragic this whole thing is. And I just called to tell you that you have been of inestimable help to this administration and to your country, and I need you as we’ve never needed you before.”

  “I’m still in a state of shock,” Meany said. But if the President needed him, he would be there. “I can tell you, we’ll go down the line with you and you have got an awful job. But I’m sure you can do it!”

  Johnson went on telling him how much he needed him. “I know I’m totally inadequate to it. But maybe with friends like you … and the phone’s always there … and you just let me know and come over.” He said it was time for enemies to unite. “Let’s try to pull our country … close ranks, and pull it out of this terrible situation in which we find ourselves.”

  Meany tried to encourage him. “It’s a tough job but I’m sure you can do it,” he said. “I think you, with your training and everything else, Mr. President, you can do it. And you’ll have me and all of our gang back of you one thousand percent.”

  “I want your counsel and I want your friendship,” Lyndon Johnson said.

  “Well, you have it,” Meany replied.

  By “our gang” Meany meant labor leaders like Reuther of the Autoworkers, McDonald of the Steelworkers, Rose and Dubinsky of the Garment Workers. Despite Meany’s assurance that Johnson would have them behind him, Johnson telephoned each of them himself, telling them that, as he said to Reuther, he would be loyal to the Kennedy program, the liberal program—that he wouldn’t “abandon the ship,” that “we’re going to turn our sails into the wind and we’re going places and we’re going to carry on,” telling McDonald, “I want to meet the needs of our people and there are many unfulfilled ones” so he would ask Congress to “do more good and less economizing.… We’ll just have to go after them, and we’ll need you then. You better stand ready and be armed.” He had the key line pretty well down now. When Reuther said, “Mr. President, [you have] my prayers, and my friendship, and every possible help that I can offer,” Johnson said, “Well, I need it all. I never needed it as much in my life.” And the line worked. “Anytime that you need me, you call and I’ll be there,” Reuther said.

  Arthur Goldberg, now a Supreme Court Justice but once, as general counsel to the Steelworkers, at the heart of labor’s hierarchy, had telephoned Reedy that morning and advised him that, as Johnson was to put it, Meany “liked the visible signs of consultation,” public acknowledgment of his importance—and wanted also acknowledgment that he was labor’s leader. Reedy had typed up this advice and handed it to Johnson. The call to Meany, Reedy’s memo said, “should be told to the press.” The calls to Reuther, Rose and the others “should remain off the record”—so that Meany would believe he had been the only leader called. Johnson told Reedy to make sure reporters knew he had telephoned Meany—and to make sure reporters didn’t find out he had telephoned the others.

  Then he turned to leaders of the civil rights movement. He told them his problems. “It’s just an impossible period,” he said to Martin Luther King Jr. “We got a budget coming up that’s—we got nothing to do with it, it’s practically already made. And we got a civil rights bill that hadn’t even passed the House, and it’s November, and Hubert Humphrey told me yesterday everybody wanted to go home. We got a tax bill that they haven’t touched.” He went to considerable trouble for them, graciously, warmly. When, at the end of his conversation with Johnson Sunday evening, Whitney Young of the National Urban League mentioned that he had “sort of expected” tickets for himself and his family to the Kennedy funeral services, but hadn’
t received them, Johnson said “Bobby,” not he, was handling the funeral arrangements, but “Let me inquire on it,” and added, “I’m taking my family and I’d almost take you as my guest if I can get an extra ticket.” He said he would get back to Young Monday morning, but then apparently realized that might be too late, arranged for the tickets with Sargent Shriver, and called Young back to tell him he had done so, and to tell him that if there was any problem with the tickets, he should call Moyers at once. (“God bless you,” Young said.) He made them laugh, using a Texas axiom to assure Young he wouldn’t stop fighting for civil rights. “We’ll keep coming,” he said. “Kind of like the fella who said, ‘What’s the difference between a Texas Ranger and a Texas sheriff? Well, when you hit a Ranger, he just keeps coming.’ ” Solemn though the day may have been, Young burst into laughter. He told them they could depend on him. When Dr. King mentioned Kennedy’s “great, progressive policies that he sought to initiate,” Johnson said, “Well, I’m gonna support them all, and you can count on that.” He told them he needed their support. “I’ll have to have you-all’s help—and I never needed it more than I do now,” he said. And they told him he would have it. “Just feel free to call on us for anything,” Dr. King said.

  One of the most difficult problems that had faced Johnson when he was thrust into the presidency was the dislike and suspicion with which he was regarded by not a few leaders of the labor and the civil rights movements whose support was indispensable to him if he wanted to unite the Democratic Party, and if he wanted to secure its presidential nomination. He didn’t solve that problem—didn’t eradicate those hard feelings—during his first three days in the presidency but, by the end of those three days, he was on his way to a solution.