THE AURA WASN’T misleading. In that room, history was just a button away. The telephone consoles on the desk and coffee table resembled ordinary telephone consoles, albeit with an unusually large number of buttons: twenty-seven. While twenty-five of the buttons were the customary transparent, whitish buttons of the ordinary console, two, however, were not. One was amber in color, the other red. Both were linked directly to the “war room” in the Pentagon and to the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Both were linked also to an army switchboard, and through it to the Secretaries of Defense and State, to the directors of certain crucial government agencies, and to key members of the White House staff. And when a President pushed the red button, he would also be connected through the war room to Strategic Air Command bomber bases, to other military commanders, and to the heads of government of America’s allies. When the red button was pushed, moreover, the President’s telephone line would be scrambled electronically so that he could be understood only by men with a similar line on their desks. And on a late November day, like the day Lyndon Johnson took possession of the Oval Office, when the leaves were off the trees beyond the three tall windows, visible through the windows and the bare branches beyond was a reminder of history’s ultimate prize, for beyond the windows and the branches was the great, shining white marble pillar, the Washington Monument, towering over the capital as a symbol of a President who achieved immortality, as a reminder of what the man behind the desk can become, of what the stakes are for him now, of the prize he can win in history’s great game for which he has at last a seat at the table.
LYNDON JOHNSON HAD BEEN in that room many times before, of course, many times with Roosevelt as a young congressman, two or three times with Truman, often with Eisenhower, and then with Kennedy, but always on the other side of the desk. He wasn’t on the other side now. Sitting down behind it, he telephoned the Senate offices to order the desk he had used in his Majority Leader’s office delivered, and then directed his secretaries to start placing calls.
THAT FIRST DAY, and the next, were devoted mostly to preparing his Wednesday speech to the joint session, but there was a major problem he hadn’t addressed, and on Thursday he turned his attention to the investigation into his predecessor’s murder.
THE PROBLEM OF who was going to investigate the assassination, and the assassin’s murder, had to be addressed, he knew—“The atmosphere was poisonous and had to be cleared”—for he was aware of the directions in which the poison might spread. “Russia was not immune,” he was to write in his memoirs. “Neither was Cuba. Neither was the State of Texas. Neither was the new President of the United States.” The rumors about Russian or Cuban involvement in a conspiracy, rumors being kept fresh every day with new reports, mostly false, of Oswald’s connections to the two Communist countries, had “very dangerous implications,” he felt, since “if they got a headstart”—if suspicions mounted that Khrushchev or Castro was responsible for Kennedy’s death, or if, in Russia, fears about America’s suspicions, and about the possibility that they might cause America to retaliate, created a feeling that perhaps Russia should move first—they contained the seeds of escalation, in an age in which escalation could mean annihilation. Jack Ruby had added fuel to the fire, he was to write. “With that single shot the outrage of a nation turned to skepticism and doubt”—to heightened fears of conspiracy, international or not, that further unsettled a country to which he was trying to bring a feeling of calm and stability.
Intensifying the sense of urgency was the fact that Congress was already busily circling around the bright lights in which any assassination investigation would be bathed. The House Un-American Activities Committee, which saw a Communist under every bush, had already announced it would hold an investigation, as had the Senate Judiciary Committee, chairman James Eastland, whose obsession with Communists might, in other circumstances, have been a joke: If the Mississippi River flooded, Johnson himself had said, Eastland would say “the niggers” had caused it, “helped out by Communists.” “Vying for the limelight,” as one account was to put it, other committees, in both the Senate and the House, were proposing their own investigations—investigations with their inevitable attendant television cameras, leaks, baseless speculation, half-truths and innuendo. More anxiety, more danger.
In his attempts before Thursday to deal with this problem, however, Johnson had shown none of the sure-footedness with which he had dealt with the other problems that had confronted him since November 22. To cut off the congressional publicity hunt (“a lot of television show,” as he put it) in its infancy, he wanted the investigation carried out by some other entity, but his first suggestion, made, after consultation with Abe Fortas, on the evening of November 25, the day of Kennedy’s funeral, was that the entity be either the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which of course was already investigating, or a special “Texas State Court of Inquiry,” staffed only by Texans, that would be convened by the state’s attorney general, Waggoner Carr.
There were legal, jurisdictional, rationales for his suggestion. The murder of a President, or of the President’s murderer, was, under criminal justice law, no different from other murders; they were not federal but state crimes, and prosecutable only under state, not federal, law. And there were political rationales as well. Fortas was later to explain that he had advised Johnson against the formation of any special new national investigating body such as a presidential commission on the grounds that its formation would be counterproductive to the aim of tamping down suspicions of a broader conspiracy since “people would gather there was more to” the two murders “than appeared on the surface”; therefore, he said, “ordinary procedures”—like the Texas court of inquiry and the FBI investigation—should be followed. Fortas was also “leery” of having Johnson appoint the investigating body, since that might raise suspicions among those who believed the President himself might have had a role in the conspiracy. Personal, subjective considerations figured in the decision as well: the state with the legal authority to investigate the murders was Texas, his state, its name already blackened by November 22 and November 24. To turn over that authority to an outside body would, Johnson felt, be an admission of the state’s lack of competence to conduct the investigation. The reaction to Fortas’ suggestion was predictably unenthusiastic. Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach told Fortas it would be a “ghastly mistake”; explains one account, “Texas justice was so tainted that any purely state verdict on what happened would not be credible”; as for the FBI, liberals’ distrust of that agency “would undermine the credibility of any report it issued”; only a special national commission composed of men of national prominence and respect, and endowed with broad investigating latitude, would command the necessary credibility.
Johnson’s first responses to that reaction were ones that would have been expected from the pre–November 22 Lyndon Johnson: anger, a refusal to change his mind, and a secretive move designed to ensure that his solution would be the one adopted. He quietly gave Carr his approval of the state Court of Inquiry proposal—“Good idea, but purely a state matter. Can’t say President asked for it,” was the word Cliff Carter passed to the Texas attorney general—and after Kennedy’s funeral on Monday, Carr announced its formation. So were his next responses. Learning that the Washington Post was planning to run an editorial on Tuesday calling for the creation of a national commission, he had Fortas telephone its two top editors to try to kill it, and he himself made three calls for the same purpose: to J. Edgar Hoover, asking him to use his contacts on the Post to explain that an investigation by a commission might expose FBI sources and methods; to the paper’s publisher, Katharine Graham; and to Post columnist Joseph Alsop. During his conversation with Alsop, the calm cracked—for the first time in any call during this period that has been recorded, Johnson’s voice rose as he railed against Bobby Kennedy’s lawyers: “they thought of the blue-ribbon commission first at Justice. And we just can’t have them lobbying against the President, when he make
s these decisions.” He was yelling into the phone as he said, “They lobbied me last night! … I spent the day on it.… I spent most of my day on this thing yesterday,” and in describing the proposed commission he used the term that, to any Texan, was particularly pejorative. “We don’t send in a bunch of carpetbaggers,” he told Alsop. “It’s the worst thing you could do right now.… We don’t want to be in a position of saying we have come into a state … with some outsiders, and have told them that their integrity is no good, and that we’re going to have some carpetbagger trials.… We can’t haul off people from Dallas and try them in New York. It’s their constitutional right.” But while, after those calls, the Post did tone down its editorial—it no longer mentioned a presidential commission—it nonetheless still said that “No state or local inquiry will meet the situation, in view of the dreadful record of justice miscarried that already has been made,” and that the inquiry must be prosecuted by “the Federal Government.” And outside Texas, almost no one was buying the Texas Court of Inquiry proposal; the reaction of newspapers across the country to its formation was “generally scathing.”
Two days later, Johnson reversed his course. On Friday, November 29, he created, by Executive Order No. 11130, a “Special President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” a seven-member bipartisan body (five of its members, in fact, were Republicans), “to satisfy itself that the truth is known as far as it can be discovered,” and to report its findings and conclusions to him, the American people and the world. His order gave the commission powers so broad that they superseded all other inquiries, including those by the FBI or any state agency.
IN FORMING HIS COMMISSION, Lyndon Johnson displayed another of the qualities that had made him, to men and women who had worked for him over the years, a figure who inspired not only fear and respect, but awe: his ability that had led to his reputation as “the greatest salesman one on one,” to persuade someone to do something he didn’t want to do—to do something, in fact, that the person had been determined not to do.
The purpose of the commission was to reassure the country, so he felt its members must be public figures whose very presence on it would be reassuring, “men,” in his phrase, “known to be beyond pressure and above suspicion.” When, in response to his request, Robert Kennedy suggested two names—former CIA director Allen Dulles and a longtime adviser to Presidents, John J. McCloy, both of them Republicans—Johnson made them two of the seven, along with three respected Capitol Hill figures, Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, a Republican, and, from the House, Democratic whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana and Republican Gerald R. Ford Jr. of Michigan, a young representative who had risen fast in the House hierarchy. But it was the two other men he wanted to appoint whose presence on the commission he considered indispensable.
Its chairman had to be not only a Republican, he was to say, but a Republican “whose judicial ability and fairness were unquestioned.” Although he had only a passing acquaintance with Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court (“We had never spent ten minutes alone together”), “to me he was the personification of justice and fairness.” As for the other man whose presence Johnson considered essential, he was less well known nationally than the chief justice, but to Capitol Hill Richard Russell personified, in every area but race, similar attributes, and if the commission’s investigation and subsequent report should prove to be controversial, his unrivaled power there would be an effective means of keeping the controversy under control. Johnson may have been remembering, too, another investigation, one that had taken place at a time when America had been “as close to a state of national hysteria as it had ever been before in its history,” a crisis that in its challenge to civilian authority over the military had threatened constitutional upheaval: the controversy that had erupted in 1951 over President Truman’s firing of Douglas MacArthur. Johnson, then a junior senator, had observed how his seniors, even those most avid for publicity, had shrunk from the responsibility of chairing Senate hearings on MacArthur; had seen how, in a time of crisis, even though the Senate’s militant liberals generally regarded Russell as the Enemy, “that did not prevent them from running to him for shelter.” And Johnson had witnessed the results: how the calmness and patience with which Russell conducted months of hearings—a “firmness, fairness and dignity” that Life magazine said was “almost unmatched in recent Congressional history”—had taught the country that “things were more complicated than they had seemed,” calming its passions in what one historian called “a demonstration of what the Senate at its best was capable of doing.” The intervening twelve years had done nothing to diminish the reputation of the Georgia Giant; when, during their discussions of the executive order, Johnson told Fortas he wanted Russell on the commission, the lawyer, normally reserved, burst out, “Oh, I would too. Yes sir. I’d rather have him than most anybody for anything.” He hadn’t mentioned Russell’s name himself, Fortas said, only “because I thought it would be foreordained.”
A further consideration was that a President appointing a commission or committee to investigate a controversial issue wants to have an ally on it—someone he can trust, a member who will quietly keep him informed about the investigation’s course and its findings, and about the conclusions of the report the panel is likely to issue, so that, if necessary, there can be intervention to effect an alteration in course or a change in emphasis in the report, a member who would be, in the political parlance of the day, the President’s “man” on the panel.
Richard Russell, of course, would never be anyone’s “man” on anything, yet he and Johnson had, over the years, quietly worked hand in glove on so many sensitive issues (and for similar aims: on most questions—almost all, really, that did not involve race—their views were very much alike) that the quiet rapport between them was an established element of their relationship; private discussions of the commission’s work would be only normal for them.
Nor were these the only reasons he wanted Russell on the commission. There was only one head of the table at which the Southern Caucus met: wherever Richard Russell sat; the southern senators, so many of them powerful in their own right, looked to him for guidance on many issues, and followed his lead all but automatically. On racial issues—on the great civil rights fight to come—he and Russell would be unalterably opposed, but there would be other issues. The more of them on which he could make Russell an ally—strategizing and persuading together as they had in the past—the easier things would go for him in the Senate.
There was, however, a problem. Warren and Russell were both very strongminded men, and neither wanted to serve on a commission investigating the assassination. Indeed, each of them had made up his mind not to do so.
Warren had strongly held views about Supreme Court justices serving on what he called “extrajudicial bodies.” No justice, he felt, should ever do so. Every time that precept had been violated, he felt, the results had been unfortunate. “The service of five justices” on the commission investigating the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 had, he was to write, “demeaned” the Court; the appointment of Justice Owen Roberts as chairman of the presidential commission investigating Pearl Harbor—and the resulting criticism of that commission’s report—had tarnished the Court’s august image; and he had several other examples to prove his point. During his tenure as chief justice, in fact, the justices had discussed the question, and “I was sure that every member of the Court was of the opinion that such appointments were not in its best interest.” The formation of a presidential commission now was undoubtedly necessary, he felt: to have several congressional investigations going on at once “would have been chaos.” But he was not going to serve on it. When, at Johnson’s request, Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach and Solicitor General Archibald Cox called on him in the Court at 2:30 in the afternoon of November 29, to sound him out about accepting the chairmanship, he “told them,” he was to recall, that “I thought the President was wise in
having such a commission, but that I was not available for service on it.” He told the two men to tell the President that if he was asked to serve, he would refuse, and, he says, “I considered the matter closed.”
As for Russell, one of his reasons—the emphysema that was draining his energy so that he worried, with reason, that he was not fulfilling his Senate responsibilities as he once had—was poignant. When Johnson telephoned him at his home in Winder that afternoon, and asked him to serve on the commission, Russell’s reply was “Oh, no, no. Get somebody else now. I haven’t got time.” His health simply wouldn’t permit him to assume any new duties, he said. Not being appointed would “save my life, I declare. I don’t want to serve on that committee.”
Johnson didn’t press the point, because the call had other purposes: to conceal from Russell, at least for the moment, any connection between the commission on which he was being asked to serve and the two men whom Russell distrusted above all others in public life—one of whom, Robert Kennedy, Johnson had allowed to name two members of the commission, the other of whom, the man who had led the Warren Court to foist the Brown decision on the South, he wanted to be its chairman. The concealment required an outright falsehood. During the call, Russell asked Johnson, “Now you [are] going to let the Attorney General nominate someone, aren’t you?” Johnson’s reply was “No, uh-uh,” although, of course, he not only had asked Robert Kennedy to nominate someone, but had already accepted both his nominees, Dulles and McCloy. On another point, there was, if not falsehood, indirection. During his conversation with Russell, Johnson had said to Moyers, “Bill, give me that list of people” he was considering so that he could read it to Russell “to get your reaction to it.” But he read only six of the seven names on the list: he didn’t read the seventh name, the one that in fact headed the list. Throughout the long, rambling call, Johnson never revealed that Warren was being actively considered for membership on the commission, let alone for its chairmanship: the closest he came was to say that for the seventh member he was considering “maybe somebody from the Supreme Court.” At one point he dropped a hint, asking Russell, “Who would be the best one if I didn’t get the Chief?” But his next words obscured it. He understood that “none of the Court” would want to serve because of the past history of justices in non-judicial roles, he said. And, he said, “that’s why he’s [Warren] against it now.” And there were other words to obscure it. Since he didn’t think any member of the Supreme Court would accept an appointment to the commission, he brought up the possibility of naming a judge from a lower court, even asking Russell’s opinion of several. The call ended with Russell saying that he was sure Johnson could get “the name of some outstanding circuit court judge,” and Johnson saying, “Okay. You be thinking.” Russell, too, assumed his refusal had closed the matter.
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