The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  The great questions about the Vietnam War—including the questions of whether Lyndon Johnson had feasible choices other than the ones he spelled out in that telephone call; of whether it is true, as one of his biographers says, that “no President, especially an unproven, unelected one, could simply have withdrawn without some real hope that the South Vietnamese could have held off a Viet Cong–North Vietnamese takeover”; of whether, if other feasible options existed, Johnson pursued them with sincerity; and of whether, had John F. Kennedy lived, United States policy would have been different from the policy Johnson pursued—these questions are among those that must remain to be examined in the next volume of this work. However, two aspects of the early decisions on Vietnam, early steps on what was to be a very long road, that Johnson took during that Christmas vacation on the ranch, are clear: first, whatever steps he took during that vacation, he took as well steps to conceal them, to keep them secret from Congress and the American people; and, second, the steps he took had, as their unifying principle, an objective dictated largely by domestic—indeed, personal—political concerns.

  By the time McNamara had completed his trip to Vietnam, “it was clear” that “the plan for withdrawing U.S. forces was no longer workable,” says William C. Gibbons, author of a definitive study of Vietnam policy-making, but no announcement was made that the plan—the first stage of which was the withdrawal of a thousand troops “by the end of the year”—was not being carried out. Instead, there was, in Gibbons’ phrase, “juggling the figures.”

  Every month, more than a thousand soldiers routinely left Vietnam as part of regular troop rotations, to be replaced by an equal number of new soldiers. During the first part of December, the rotation schedule had been on a pace to achieve the thousand-man reduction, but following McNamara’s trip, while the rotation out of Vietnam was continued, “the replacement pipeline was slowed somewhat.” The departure of the troops originally scheduled to be sent to Vietnam in the last weeks of December was delayed. They were simply sent in January and February instead. “In the last weeks of 1963 … plans for phased withdrawal of 1,000 advisers by end-year 1963 went through the motions by concentrating rotations home in December and letting strength rebound in the subsequent two months,” the Pentagon Papers explained. At the end of the year, the number of United States military personnel in Vietnam was 15,914, a number which, as the Pentagon Papers noted, “did not even represent a decline of 1,000 from the peak of 16,732,” being, in fact, only 818 lower. Even the 818 figure was illusory. As soon as the year ended, the replacement pipeline was speeded up, and within a matter of weeks, troop strength was back at its peak level, so that there was in fact no reduction at all. December’s “planned 1,000-man reduction [therefore] proved essentially an accounting exercise,” the Pentagon Papers explained.

  But Johnson was to announce that the plan had been carried out. “We have called back approximately 1,000 people,” he said in a press conference on March 7, 1964.

  In another development, the “more forceful moves” for which McNamara had said the Administration should be “preparing” were indeed being prepared. The Krulak committee’s report, which had arrived at the ranch on January 2, would not be formally approved by the President until January 16, but the covert operations it authorized—including the ones around the Gulf of Tonkin—were to begin on February 1. The approval of the plan—in effect, an escalation of the war, although a minor one—was never announced to the public or revealed to Congress (although a few members may have been quietly advised of some of the details). A National Security Action Memorandum would have normally been signed by the President as a result of the approval. No such memorandum was ever signed.

  The overriding aim of the withdrawal and covert operations decisions—and of other decisions about Vietnam during the early days of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency—was to keep Vietnam from becoming a major political issue, “above all else,” as Fredrik Logevall put it in Choosing War, a detailed study of American decision-making from 1963 through 1965, “to keep Vietnam from complicating his election-year strategy.… The president judged all options on the war in terms of what they meant for November.” So close to his vest was Johnson holding his cards on Vietnam that even McGeorge Bundy, who was carrying out his strategy, wasn’t sure what it was. When, on March 2, 1964, the national security advisor was driven to ask him, “What is your own internal thinking on this [the overall Vietnam situation], Mr. President?,” Johnson gave him his clearest answer yet. “I just can’t believe that we can’t take 15,000 [sic] advisers and 200,000 people [South Vietnamese troops] and maintain the status quo for six months. I just believe we can do that, if we do it right.” Six months might have been a minor miscalculation. Election Day, 1964—November 3—was not six months away, but eight. But it might not have been. The Democratic National Convention would begin on August 24, in slightly less than six months. Sitting President though he was, there was Bobby Kennedy to consider. Miscalculation or not, however, the President’s aim was clear: the maintenance of the status quo until a date set by a political calendar.

  RUTHLESSNESS, SECRETIVENESS, DECEIT—significant elements in every previous stage of Lyndon Johnson’s life story. Not always, however, the only elements, not always the only character traits, contradictory though other traits might be. And sometimes these other elements—the anger at injustice, the sympathy, empathy, identification with the underdog that added up to compassion—had been expressed, by this master of the political gesture, in gestures so deeply meaningful, so perfect in their symbolism, that they reached a level for which “mastery” is an inadequate term. “By God, we’ll bury him in Arlington,” he had blurted in the very instant he was told that a Mexican-American war hero had been denied burial in a whites-only cemetery in South Texas.4 This stage of the story—Christmas vacation at the ranch—was no different. If most of the gestures Lyndon Johnson made during those two weeks in Texas were mainly for effect, stage business to reinforce the personal image he wanted to project, one gesture was something more.

  Friends of Horace Busby were giving him a birthday party that New Year’s Eve in Austin’s Forty Acres Club, which was, like most of the city’s clubs, rigidly segregated. Although many University of Texas faculty members had resigned from the club in protest the previous year after a black Peace Corps official had been told he couldn’t have a drink there, the rule against any African-American being given a room, a meal or a drink was still firmly in place.

  On New Year’s Eve, however, Johnson went party-hopping in Austin. Lady Bird, exhausted, said she was staying home, so Johnson took his secretaries along on the helicopter ride to Austin, and then in his limousine, and one of the parties he went to was Busby’s, and just before he entered the Forty Acres Club, he took Gerri Whittington’s arm and put it through his.

  The guests at Busby’s party were standing around having cocktails and talking. “All of a sudden the Secret Service appeared,” recalls a law professor, E. Ernest Goldstein, “and a few minutes later in walked President Johnson with Gerri Whittington on his arm, and she was beautiful and black.”

  No one told Johnson he and his companion couldn’t come in; no one, in fact, made any fuss at all. To Moyers, trailing behind the couple, the striking fact about the guests’ reaction was that there was none: “No gasp, nothing was made of it”; everyone studiously went on with their conversations.

  “Does the President know what he’s doing?” Goldstein asked Moyers.

  “He always knows what he’s doing,” Moyers replied. The President stayed for about an hour, Gerri Whittington on his arm, chatting with the Busbys and their friends, and during that hour no one mentioned civil rights or desegregation. (Among the items of conversation was banter about how many supermarket trading stamps the White House must be accumulating because of all the groceries it had to order for dinner parties.) But the next day—the day following what Goldstein calls “that magnificent evening”—the professor telephoned the club to ask if
he could bring black guests that afternoon. “The answer was laconic,” he would recall. “ ‘Okay—no problem.’ I insisted, ‘Is the club really integrated?’ The reply this time was loud and clear. ‘Yes, sir. The President of the United States integrated us on New Year’s Eve.’ ”

  AND SOMETIMES, as in previous stages of Lyndon Johnson’s life when compassion and ambition had coincided, during that Christmas in Texas the compassion was expressed in a manner that went beyond a gesture. During that Christmas, in fact, Lyndon Johnson was taking steps that would place his stamp on the presidency in a manner more significant than image, in not style but substance—substance, moreover, on the grand scale: in a program whose goal, the institutionalization of compassion in government policy, was, in fact, of a scope so vast that were it to be realized, it would transform a nation.

  He had known back in Washington, of course, that new substance was a necessity: that while “I have to carry out the Kennedy legacy,” “at the same time I’ve got to put my own stamp on this administration in order to run for office.” The Christmas interlude on the ranch was the time to make the necessary preparations, for almost immediately after his return from Texas—at 12:30 p.m. on January 8, 1964—he would deliver the State of the Union address to Congress.

  If he wanted to announce new policy, that speech was the place to do it. The origin of the annual address was the constitutional provision that the President “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient,” and the speech had evolved over the life of the Republic into the vehicle in which a President, at the beginning of each congressional session, announced policy, revealed programs and set the agenda which his Administration would be pursuing; it was largely because of Woodrow Wilson’s determination to take a more forceful role in proposing and pushing for the passage of legislation that he had, in 1913, revived the original practice—followed by George Washington and John Adams but abandoned by Thomas Jefferson5—of delivering the address in person instead of sending it to the Hill in writing; Franklin Roosevelt had announced many of his New Deal programs, Harry Truman all of his Fair Deal, in their State of the Union speeches. Because the speech was televised, furthermore, it was an opportunity for a President to talk beyond Congress to the people, to address the nation as a whole. Some of the agenda Lyndon Johnson would lay out on January 8 would still have to be Kennedy’s: the tax cut and civil rights bills, still not passed by Congress, would have to be the first priorities; continuity would have to remain a theme in the speech—but, he knew, there would have to be something more, something new. It was time to make the presidency his presidency.

  IRONICALLY, THE PROGRAM with which he did it had had its beginning under Kennedy. In 1962, Michael Harrington’s book The Other America, together with a lengthy review of the book by literary critic Dwight Macdonald in The New Yorker, had aroused liberals and intellectuals to the dilemma of one-fifth of America’s population, the thirty million people who, in the midst of a wealthy and prosperous nation, were living in poverty that seemed intractable; studies by sociologists were finding not only that the number of the poor was not falling but that it was rising, and was going to continue to do so. “There will be considerably more poor even with a more affluent America” because “They are not part of the economic structure,” one study concluded. “Future economic growth alone will provide relatively few escapes from poverty,” concurred a report by Walter Heller’s Council of Economic Advisers. Existing government programs did not address that dilemma; “Social Security does not cover them. Minimum-wage laws specifically exempt them.… Government welfare unwittingly contributes to broken homes and illegitimacy.… School-lunch programs have not nourished the communities that could not afford to transport the surplus foods or the children who could not make even the token payments.” Then, in early 1963, articles by Homer Bigart in the New York Times on the plight of coal miners in Appalachia stirred President Kennedy, reminding him of the conditions he had witnessed when he had campaigned in the region in 1960. “Anti-poverty,” as an historian wrote, “was in the air” in Washington. When, in the spring of 1963, Heller asked the President for permission to conduct “a quiet investigation” into the problem of long-term, hard-core poverty in America with a view to developing a program to deal with it, Kennedy gave him the go-ahead, and early that fall a task force of Cabinet officers was organized, at first with Heller as chairman, for a rather vague purpose: as Heller’s chief aide on the group, William M. Capron, was to put it, “to come up with suggestions for items that might be included” in proposals for legislation that would be introduced in Congress in 1964.

  But it wasn’t much of a beginning. Operating without clear direction from the President, the group produced results that were, in Capron’s words, “perhaps predictably disastrous … a lot of … warmed-over revisions of proposals that had been around a long time, coming up out of the bureaucracy … programs that had already been rejected by Congress.… Little bits and pieces that didn’t really hang together.” Although in October, Sorensen took over the chairmanship of the group, “the agencies weren’t paying a lot of attention because they weren’t sure that the President really wanted it.” At a White House meeting in mid-October, Sorensen told the task force to, in effect, “Go back and do some more homework.” Heller was to recall him saying, “Keep at it, it’s the kind of an issue we should sign on to, and it’s a terribly important thing.” Then, on November 13, during the first planning session for the 1964 presidential campaign—the meeting to which Johnson wasn’t invited—Census Bureau director Richard Scammon, on whom Kennedy was relying to analyze the demographics of the 1964 election, told the President that “You can’t get a single vote more by doing anything for poor people.… Those who vote are already for you,” and advised him to concentrate instead on issues that would be popular in the rapidly expanding, vote-rich, middle-class suburbs. “I then heard from Ted Sorensen some rather disquieting comment about, ‘We may have to put more emphasis on the suburbs,’ ” Heller says. Going directly to Kennedy, he asked the President to tell him his “current feelings.” Heller left a number of versions of that meeting. According to one set of notes he made, Kennedy’s response was “I am still very much in favor of doing something on the poverty theme to make sure we can get a good program, but I also think it’s important to make clear that we’re doing something for the middle-income man in the suburbs, etc. But the two are not at all inconsistent with each other. So go right ahead with your work on it.” According to another version Heller left, the President told him to “ ‘Come back to me in a couple of weeks.’ This is what Kennedy told me on November 19th.”

  With little sense of urgency emanating from the Oval Office, when Heller’s aides tried to discuss specific legislative proposals with Cabinet officials, they sometimes had trouble even getting appointments—“Gordon’s schedule was too jammed up or something,” Capron recalls of one attempt. While it was still possible that some bills might be drawn up for 1964, “it was generally thought that they wouldn’t be pressed very hard until after the 1964 presidential campaign.”

  In addition, that beginning had received scant notice from the press. Congress had never held a single full-scale debate on the subject. “Public awareness of poverty” as a governmental or political issue was, in Evans and Novak’s term, “virtually nonexistent.” An anti-poverty program would not—unlike the tax cut or civil rights—be identified with Kennedy, would not, in the public mind, be a Kennedy program that Johnson was continuing. It was an issue that he could make his own.

  And he made it his own.

  When Heller had first mentioned it to the new President, the response had a different tone from the one he had received from President Kennedy.

  The mention, and the response, had occurred during Heller’s first meeting with Johnson in the Executive Office Building on the evening of November 23, as the econ
omist was briefing the new President about economic issues that had been under discussion in the Kennedy Administration. When he told Johnson about the poverty issue, “his reaction immediately was, ‘That’s my kind of program. I’ll find money for it one way or another. If I have to, I’ll take money away from things to get money for people.’ ”