The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  There were words on hate. “The time has come for Americans of all races and creeds and political beliefs to understand and to respect one another. So let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence.” And then there were the final lines of the speech—from a song. He spoke them in a very soft voice, very slowly, with so much emotion that his voice seemed on the verge of breaking. No one listening to those last lines would recall that Lyndon Johnson was not an eloquent speaker.

  “America, America, God shed His grace on thee,” Lyndon Johnson said. “And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.”

  Although the speech had been interrupted thirty-one times for applause, the applause had not come from everyone in the Chamber. Republicans had not applauded many of his points, and the southerners had applauded none that dealt with civil rights. But as Lyndon Johnson spoke those last words, and closed his notebook, and took off his glasses, the Chamber—to the last man and woman in it, it seemed—rose to its feet, and began clapping. And as Johnson walked off the dais, and back up the center aisle, the applause didn’t stop. It didn’t stop until he had left the Chamber. Yet it wasn’t the applause that most forcefully struck some of the reporters watching the scene from the Press Gallery, but the tears. “Everywhere you looked,” Hugh Sidey said, “people were crying.”

  THE APPLAUSE WAS echoed in the press. Newspapers across the United States and, indeed, the world used “triumph” and synonyms for that word to describe the speech. “In the most important address of his life,” Evans and Novak were to write, “Johnson achieved a tour de force.” And filled as it was with eloquent, memorable phrases—“All I have I would have given gladly”; “The greatest leader … the foulest deed”; “let us continue”; “I cannot bear this burden alone”—the power of Lyndon Johnson’s first speech as President, his “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress” on November 27, 1963, lay as much in the manner in which the words were delivered as in the words themselves: “It was,” Wicker wrote in the New York Times, “the way the President spoke, the dramatic force of his delivery … that impressed a city long accustomed to thinking of Mr. Johnson as flamboyant.”

  The awkward, bullying gesticulations—the upraised hand with the jabbing forefinger, the upraised arms with the clenched fists pounding the air—the off-putting delivery, alternating between ponderous and rushed, with shouting as the principal vocal means of emphasis, that had characterized Lyndon Johnson’s formal speeches during his decades in public office were totally absent during the twenty-seven minutes he had spoken to Congress. During the entire speech, his hands had lain flat on the lectern, moving only to turn the pages of the notebook; “his only gesture,” as the Times reported, “an occasional forward snap of his head to emphasize his points.” There was no shouting. “Several times, his voice dropped almost to a whisper; at other times, it rang out challengingly,” the Times said, but never in a “flamboyant” way. And no rushing: Rather, the Washington Post said, the speech’s “most striking” aspect was its “delivery, slow, solemn, measured.… Missing totally were the excesses of speech so widely associated with his earlier career.” The words used to describe him were unlike any words that had been used about him before; he had, the Boston Herald said, “demonstrated a sense of the grandeur of language that we did not think was one of his talents.” A headline in the New York Times said, JOHNSON EMERGES GRAVE AND STRONG. Analyzing the speech’s impact, the Times’ Washington bureau chief, James Reston, wrote that “It would have been so easy in the emotion of the moment for him to have gone too far today, or, being deeply moved, to have choked on the lovely cry ‘America, America’ at the end. But he was both bold and restrained.” Trying to find words to praise him adequately, Reston gave him what was for the columnist his highest compliment: “He sounded for all the world like Mr. Sam Rayburn today, ever so slow and serious, but with repressed emotion always behind the deep strong Texas voice.” Sitting in the rows of congressmen looking up at the House dais, Joe Kilgore, who had been so worried, could, he says, “hardly believe” what he was seeing. “I had never seen him speak in public like this,” he says. “Never.” The discipline that Lyndon Johnson had imposed on himself within EOB 274—that he had imposed on himself for five days—had held firm in what was, for him, the most difficult setting of all.

  Beyond merely avoiding the mistakes of the past, moreover, he had—for this one speech, at least—transformed himself into what the New York Times called “an orator,” and a remarkable one.

  The manner in which he spoke of his grief—the moving first line of the speech and the apparent sincerity and deep, solemn emotion with which he delivered it, together with the many lines thereafter in which he spoke of John Kennedy—accomplished what may have been the most difficult feat of all: to convince even men and women who, long familiar with Johnson and his ambitions as well as with his ostracism by the Kennedys, had not been disposed to accept his sincerity. Perhaps no columnist fell more completely into that category than Mary McGrory, but, she wrote, “No one doubted for a moment that he spoke nothing but the truth when he said, ‘All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.’ No man, regardless of his ambition or his drive, would have wanted to stand in Lyndon Johnson’s shoes on Wednesday.” Said Doris Fleeson: “His grief was obvious for all to see.” And his determination to continue, and to push toward enactment, Kennedy’s policies had been convincing, too—because of the determination written on his face as well as in the pages of his notebook.

  He had wanted the speech to reassure the country about its government, to give it confidence in the continuity and stability of the government’s policies, to make it feel that policies would not be suddenly changed but would in fact continue unchanged. The speech had done that. “President Johnson has seized the New Frontier in an all-encompassing embrace under the slogan: Let us continue,” Doris Fleeson wrote. And he had wanted it to reassure the country about himself, to give the nation confidence in him, to show a people that had not elected him to the presidency that he was competent to handle the job, to demonstrate to a country that was worried, uncertain, anxious for someone to “take the lead, to assume command, to provide direction,” that it had someone to do that: a new leader to replace the old one. He had wanted to show the country that he was in charge—that he knew what to do, and that he would do it. And the speech had done that, too. It had not been merely the words—“The need is here. The need is now”; “We must act, and act now”—that had done it. It had been the determination with which the words were spoken—the determination and the air of command. The big head had swung slowly, deliberately, back and forth as he spoke, traversing the ranks of faces below him, with the same air with which he had once looked around the Senate, an air that had once moved a reporter who covered the Senate to say, “It was like he was saying, ‘This is my turf,’ ” an air that made a watching nation feel not only that he knew what should be done, but that if Congress resisted he knew how to get Congress to do it—and would get Congress to do it. As Lyndon Johnson’s narrowed eyes, tightened lips, and jutting jaw filled the television screen with fierce resolve, no one could doubt his willingness to act, and to triumph. “Across the nation and around the world,” Newsweek said, “there was evident relief in the strength … he showed.”

  The speech reminded journalists and congressmen as well that in fact he had, for six years, gotten Congress to do it—had made the Senate act, and not only act but take the initiative in governmental action, as no other senator in American history had done. Johnson, Reston wrote the next day, is “something different in the Congressional mind” from Kennedy or Eisenhower or Truman. When he was Majority Leader, Reston wrote, “He ran the place, and without his special magic and cunning, his urgent energy, and his bag of tricks and treats, nothing has quite seemed to run as well on Capitol Hill since he left … [Johnson] is, to use his own inelegant phrase, ‘a gut fighter’ … and a parliamentary tactician with few
equals. Congress did not always like him—often it hated him—but it never trifled with him.”

  In trying to illustrate his meaning, Reston found an apt quotation. It came from Woodrow Wilson, who wrote, “When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire—that it is best not incautiously to touch that man—that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him.”

  Congress was going to be a lot less willing to cross Lyndon Johnson than it had been to cross John Kennedy, Reston wrote. “President Kennedy had a way of seeing all sides of a question.… President Johnson has a way of concentrating on his own side of a question.” When a congressman disagreed with him, Reston wrote, Johnson will say, “ ‘I know how you feel, but can I count on you?’ … and when the thing is put that way, upstairs in the White House, with Lyndon’s long arm on a man’s shoulder, voting suddenly becomes slightly complicated.”

  The tragedy of Kennedy’s death had changed Washington, Reston wrote. “He is very much on the memory and the conscience of the Congress.… [He] apparently had to die to create a sympathetic atmosphere for his program.” And in Johnson there was a man who could take advantage of that atmosphere. Between the tragedy and Johnson’s abilities, Reston wrote, “the mind and spirit of [Washington] have been transformed.”

  Making the triumph even more dramatic was the fact that it was so unexpected. After an entire career, three decades, spent anxiously but unsuccessfully attempting to overcome his faults as a speechmaker, Lyndon Johnson had, in the most important speech of his career, overcome them completely. A headline over David Lawrence’s column summed it up: JOHNSON’S SPEECH: HE MET THE TEST.

  Before the speech, during the five days since Ken O’Donnell had told him “He’s gone,” he had met other tests; thrust without warning into a crisis with potentiality for disaster, he had risen to the occasion—to every occasion. And now, on what may have been for him the toughest occasion of all, he had risen again.

  The feeling of confidence, in his Administration and in him, was, furthermore, described by journalists who had known him for years in words—or rather, in a word—that demonstrated that it was not just a city but a man who had, during crucial days, a crucial moment in American history, been transformed.

  To Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post, watching from the Press Gallery, the man below him, whom he had known for so long, all at once had “established himself as the dominant personality in American life.” Suddenly, Roberts wrote, below him “there stood Lyndon B. Johnson, President of the United States.”

  “President.” The applause at the end of the speech was “for the tradition he had summoned and so well embodied, and for the dead President whose programs he had taken as his own,” Time magazine said. But there was another reason for the applause as well, Time added: “The formidable and elusive Majority Leader of the United States Senate sounded like a President.”

  “Not a fluke of history,” the Herald Tribune said, “but a President.”

  *

  1 British Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home and Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan.

  2 According to Evans and Novak, who had evidently been allowed to read a report Heller had prepared on the subject, “Kennedy had set an arbitrary [budget] ceiling of 101.5 billion dollars,” although even after he did so in internal memos the figure of $102 billion kept cropping up.

  3 Among the senators whose vote he changed were two Democrats, Russell Long of Louisiana and Thomas McIntyre of New Hampshire.

  17

  The Warren Commission

  AND, AT LAST, he was in the President’s office.

  There hadn’t even been an oval-shaped office in the White House until 1909, when one was built as part of William Howard Taft’s expansion of the West Wing, and that one had been in a different part of the building. The room into which Johnson walked on Tuesday morning had been created only twenty-nine years earlier by Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1934 had the President’s office moved to the West Wing’s southeast corner, from which it was easier to roll in his wheelchair to his living quarters in the Mansion, and who, working with the architect Eric Gugler, designed the room himself. As soon as John Kennedy had left for Texas, it had been redecorated with a red carpet and red-trimmed white drapes, ordered, as a surprise for her husband, by Jackie Kennedy.

  When Lyndon Johnson walked into the room at 8:50 a.m. Tuesday, two white couches were still standing in front of the fireplace at one end of the room, along with lamp tables and a coffee table with a telephone console on it at the room’s other end, in front of three tall windows; the American and presidential flags still were standing behind a desk, a large, standard-issue government desk, bare except for another telephone console, that had been brought in the night before, along with Johnson’s big leather desk chair, his own rocking chair, a side table and a couple of chairs to put in front of the desk. Colonel Roberts had had these items moved in on Monday night, along with a bust of Franklin Roosevelt that Johnson had told her to bring, and framed photographs of Lady Bird, Lynda, Lucy and John Kennedy. But Kennedy’s rocking chair, the Resolute desk, the coconut shells and the ship models were gone, as were the naval paintings and the books. Noticing that there were not even any shades on the windows, Roberts had located a White House seamstress, and had had her run some up, and Roberts had carried over two vases, and put flowers in them, but without paintings on the walls or books on the shelves, there was nothing to soften the bareness of the long curving white walls, newly painted and gleaming, except for a lone pair of sconces.

  THE ORNAMENTATION OF THE ROOM—an oval thirty-five feet, ten inches long and twenty-nine wide at its widest point, with a ceiling rising in a gentle arch from a cornice sixteen feet high—was restrained. The symbols of power in it—on the ceiling, in plaster, the presidential seal; above French doors classical pediments and representations of “fasces,” bundles of bound rods with an ax protruding, that in ancient Rome symbolized a magistrate’s authority—were muted, subtle, in low relief and painted to blend in with the ceiling and walls. The room was gracious and serene, the four doors leading out of it to other parts of the White House set flush into the walls, so that, closed, they didn’t interrupt the walls’ long, graceful curves, which were broken otherwise only by bookshelves set into them and topped by graceful seashell designs. Through the French doors one could glimpse a garden with a row of rosebushes along one side. Yet despite the restraint in its decoration, there was something about the room that made it seem special, somehow larger and more imposing than its dimensions, something dramatic, memorable—unforgettable, in fact.

  Its shape had something to do with that. So rare in America were oval rooms that on entering this one you felt immediately that you were in a place that was out of the ordinary. And with the four doors set flush into its walls, those walls curve in an unbroken sweep, imposing, powerful; the shape of the room somehow imprints itself on the consciousness. From the time it was first built, newspapers and magazines started referring to it not simply as “the President’s office” but, more often, as “the oval White House office” or “the President’s oval office in the White House.” The silence inside it had something to do with it, too. With the glass in the windows and French doors layered three inches thick, thick enough in 1963 to stop an assassin’s bullet, few noises penetrated from outside; there is a particular intensity to the quietness in that oval room. And it is special because of the light that suffuses it. The artificial lighting set invisibly behind the cornice that rims the room is very bright, but artificial light is the least of it. At one end of the room, filling its southern curve, behind the President’s desk, are three great windows, each eleven and a half feet tall. In its eastern wall are the three tall French doors. On clear days, the room was bathed in light, sunshine pouring in through all this glass in a flood of light so brilliant that, together with the expanse of white walls—during the twenty-nine years since the office had been built, the walls had always
been white—it seemed as luminous and dramatic as a stage set. Because the room is an oval, furthermore, there are no corners in it, no shadows, no darker areas. Day or night, there was nothing to dim the brightness of the Oval Office of the White House.

  But the room seemed special mostly because of what had happened in it.

  History had happened in it. Franklin Roosevelt had sat at that desk in front of the flags and windows bantering with reporters as he guided a nation through a great depression and a great war; hidden below the desk, his paralyzed legs. Harry Truman had stood behind the desk to announce Japan’s surrender, had later placed on it the plaque that said “The Buck Stops Here.” Television had made the nation familiar with the setting—the President at the desk, flags flanking him—as a grim-faced Eisenhower announced in 1957 that he was sending troops into Little Rock or, smiling his wonderful smile, stood behind the desk, bantering with the press corps, or as Kennedy, sitting at the desk, told the nation about the missiles in Cuba, or leafed through papers while his little son peeked out of the desk’s cubbyhole. The room had an aura of great events. And since the desks of all of the four Presidents who had occupied it—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—had been placed at one end of the oval in front of the tall windows and the tall flags, over three decades the setting had become emblematic of the presidency. So familiar was it becoming by November, 1963, thanks to Kennedy and television, that journalistic references to the office were changing, and, as with all things involving Kennedy and television, they were changing fast. The room was, in fact, well along the road to becoming simply the capitalized, iconic “Oval Office,” perhaps the most famous room on earth.