The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  The rapport was gone, as became apparent to the men and women in the White House press lobby. “Reporters … every day saw numerous slight indications that he [Salinger] was not really as happy with the new regime as he said he was,” one said. That analysis was correct. “It was impossible for me to stay, and it was just a question of how I figured out how to get out of the White House,” Salinger was to recall. And when Johnson noticed the unhappiness, tensions rose on both sides. “The White House press operation … deteriorated badly,” as the Los Angeles Times put it. By February, Salinger was determined to resign. A Senate seat was opening in California, and the deadline for filing nominating petitions was March 20. Early in March, Salinger decided to run—if lawyers could assure him that he was eligible for the seat although he had been living in Virginia. He didn’t mention his plans to Johnson—didn’t give him any hint of them—even as the deadline approached. The lawyers’ definitive answer, that he was indeed eligible, came through on March 19, the very day before the deadline, while he was having lunch at the Sans Souci Restaurant near the White House. And then, needing to be in California the next day to file his petition, he quit—virtually on the spot—in a resignation (“so abrupt as to be rude,” one account called it) whose brusqueness made it one of the more startling in White House annals. Walking out of the restaurant (as he passed Ken O’Donnell, sitting at another table, he told him, “I’m on my way to the President’s office to resign”; O’Donnell recalls that he “almost fell out of [my] chair” in surprise), Salinger went to the White House, arriving shortly after three o’clock, and went upstairs, where Johnson was having a late lunch with a group of newspaper publishers and reporters in the Family Dining Room. Encountering Jenkins and Moyers outside in the corridor, he told them that he needed to see the President “as quickly as possible,” and told the two “startled” men why. Moyers rang Johnson in the dining room. Picking up the phone at the head of a table lined with journalists, the President was told that his press secretary was just outside the door waiting to offer his resignation—which was to take effect that very afternoon.

  Johnson’s self-possession didn’t desert him for an instant. Not one of his luncheon guests, listening to his end of the conversation, had any idea what he was being told. Hanging up the phone, he resumed the lunch as if nothing had happened. And when, after the publishers left, he saw Salinger in the Oval Office at about 3:30, he was all graciousness, telling him he understood perfectly, and that if Salinger would write him a letter of resignation, he would answer it immediately.

  Despite the haste with which they were composed, the letters, which were exchanged in the Oval Office at five o’clock, met the requirements of the genre. Salinger’s, telling the President “what an honor it has been to serve you,” offered his resignation “with sincere regret” and “warm gratitude for your many and repeated kindnesses,” and Johnson’s accepted the resignation “only with the greatest regret and with a reluctance that bows only to your strong personal desire to return to California.… I hate to see you go.” Then, in a gesture to reinforce the friendly tone, the President asked Salinger how much the California filing fee would be—$450 was the answer—and, pulling out a roll of bills, paid it (or at least part of it: “He must have heard $250,” Salinger was to say), saying, “Here’s your first campaign contribution.”

  “I had given LBJ very little time to consider my successor,” Salinger was to write in his memoirs, hardly an overstatement. When Johnson asked the press secretary who should succeed him, Salinger suggested Reedy, because of the “high regard” in which he “was held … by the Washington press corps.” Johnson told Jenkins to telephone Reedy and “tell him to get over here. He’s the new press secretary as of now.” The President was therefore able to have an obviously well-qualified successor in place when Salinger, having returned to his office, called in reporters and said he was resigning “effective immediately.” And when articles about the “surprise” and “startling” resignation appeared the next day, Johnson made a trip to the press room to assure reporters he was “not disturbed” about it. There was, however, no disguising the basic fact: that the press secretary to the President of the United States had resigned, giving the President less than two hours’ notice. Cleaning out his desk, Salinger drove to the airport, catching the seven o’clock flight to San Francisco. With him on the flight was deputy press secretary Andrew Hatcher, who, informed of the impending resignation, had told Salinger to announce his own “at the same time you announce yours. I’m going back to California with you.”2

  Writing in her diary that evening, Lady Bird was more frank. A “bombshell … dropped into our lap late this afternoon,” she wrote. “Pierre Salinger walked into Lyndon’s office … and told him that he was going to resign.… Of all the people from the Kennedy Administration, I had felt that Salinger was one of the most professional, most committed to doing a job. Although he is very attached to the Kennedys, I thought we had established a certain simpatico relationship with him. So his sudden departure leaves a big uncertainty in my own thinking.”

  BUT THAT WAS the last crack in the façade. None of John F. Kennedy’s other staff members would resign during 1964. The biggest remaining names on that staff—O’Donnell, O’Brien, Dutton, Dungan—would still be in their White House offices when Lyndon Johnson ran for reelection that year, and when he won the presidency in his own right that November. With the single exception of Robert Kennedy, the faces around the Cabinet table—McNamara, Rusk, Freeman, Udall—would be the same. Key advisers like McGeorge Bundy, Walter Heller and Kermit Gordon would still be at their desks. And even the loss of those three symbolic figures—Sorensen, Salinger and Schlesinger—would not, in the event, have much significance. For in terms of the Johnson presidency, the crucial fact about the three men was that they, like Robert Kennedy, had stayed long enough. Lyndon Johnson had known that after the shock of his predecessor’s assassination America needed continuity, and that the key to continuity was that Kennedy men like Sorensen, Salinger and Schlesinger stay in their jobs. And they had stayed—until, for Johnson’s purpose, their leaving did little harm. By the time the three men left, short though that time was, the situation had changed. “Continuity”—keeping draped over the new Administration the mantle of its predecessor—was no longer nearly as essential as it had been.

  By the time of Salinger’s resignation, Washington had been reassured not merely by the continuance in office of members of the old Administration, but by the performance in office of the new Administration—of the new President. Discussing Salinger’s resignation in the New York Times on March 20, the day after it occurred, James Reston said it did not have the significance it would once have had. While “the nostalgic pretense of the first three months [sic] of the Johnson Administration is vanishing” and “The elaborate effort to prove that Boston loves Austin, and vice versa, is less apparent,” he wrote, the pretense was no longer necessary because “people here are planning their lives on the assumption that the Johnson Administration is going to be around for quite a while.”

  The new Administration wasn’t going to be the same as the old one, Reston wrote, but that didn’t mean that it would be less effective—nor, in fact, that it might not be more effective. “It is not clear who” among the Johnson staffers—Jenkins, Moyers, Valenti or Reedy—will “bring to the White House those useful commodities of vivid language, a sense of history, and, most important, a sense of humor, but Johnson himself will provide many other attributes,” Reston wrote. “He is effective precisely because he is so determined, industrious, personal and even humorless, particularly in dealing with Congress.” Kennedy, he wrote, “retained an inordinate respect for the … elders of the Congress. When they growled, he paused and often retreated,” and he had a “detached and even donnish … willingness to grant the merit in the other fellow’s argument.” Johnson, he said, “is not so inclined to retreat,” and “grants nothing in an argument, not even equal time.… Ask not what y
ou have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately. This may not be the most attractive quality of the new Administration but it works.… The lovers of style are not too happy with the new Administration, but the lovers of substance are not complaining.”

  By March 20, of course, tangible evidence of Johnson’s effectiveness was piling up: the passage of the tax cut, foreign aid, education, and appropriations bills, the progress toward passage of the civil rights bill. And beyond these concrete successes was one less tangible but just as impressive: the confidence engendered not just in Washington but in the country as a whole by the aura of competence and determination that emanated from the White House.

  The confidence and success were documented in public opinion polls. In March, the country’s most respected sampler of such opinion, the Gallup Poll, asked Americans, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Johnson is handling his job as President?” Seventy-three percent of the respondents said they approved—an overwhelming percentage. In April, the figure would be 77 percent. Even more eloquent was the fact that of the respondents who did not approve—a small enough percentage, in any case—the reason most gave for withholding their approval was not that they disapproved but that they were undecided. In both March and April, months in which over 70 percent of the American people approved of the way Lyndon Johnson was handling the presidency, the percentage that disapproved was 9. The figures for April were 77 percent approval, 9 percent disapproval, 14 percent undecided. Americans of every political persuasion were united in approval. “Two out of three Republicans say that he is doing a good job as President,” the poll reported. Seventy-seven percent to 9—disapproval in a single digit. “Every President, of course, enjoys a ‘honeymoon’ period of high popularity after taking office,” Gallup had noted. Still, after the May poll showed similar results, Gallup stated that Johnson’s approval ratings “compare favorably with the popularity ratings accorded any of Johnson’s predecessors” in a comparable pre-election period since scientific polling techniques were developed.

  And the confidence and success were the theme in scores of newspaper columns in addition to Reston’s. “In the few short months since last Nov. 22,” America has watched “Lyndon B. Johnson making Washington and the government his own,” Joseph Alsop wrote. “Acid tests” still lay ahead, he wrote, “but even the Kennedy men whom Mr. Johnson had not quite won over … have no doubt that the acid tests will be successfully met when they come.” Alsop, Johnson’s Washington acquaintance of many years, had always been kindly disposed toward him. Marquis Childs had often, over the years, been extremely critical of him. Now Childs wrote that Lyndon Johnson is “the most energetic and the most ambitious President to occupy the office in a very long time. His ambition … is on a heroic scale. It is to unify the country—to resolve the fundamental differences between black and white, capital and labor, rich and poor, North and South.” And, Childs said, “he believes he can do just this and his confidence carries with it an added measure of strength. Strength attracts strength, and this is surely one explanation for his extraordinary standing in every indicator of public opinion.”

  The public persona that had once made him an object of mockery had not disappeared, far from it. He was, at Georgetown dinner parties at least, “the same Lyndon Johnson,” Tom Wicker wrote. “Once again he is being referred to as ‘ol Cornpone.’ ” But now, suddenly, the corniness wasn’t a drawback, Wicker said. Now “there is usually in the phrase a touch of awe and not infrequently a tone of respect. To paraphrase Lincoln on Grant, a good many people seem to believe it would be wise to find out what brand of corn he uses and send some to the other politicians.… Cornpone it may be … but so long as Lyndon Johnson’s evangelism comes from the heart, the nation is likely to get the message more often than not.” Said Roscoe Drummond: “The Johnson Administration is getting more Johnsonian every day. He is just doing what comes naturally. The country likes it. [He] is throwing away most of the old rules about how to be President of the United States—and making his own.”

  In some of the columns, in fact, there was more than a touch of the awe Wicker mentioned.

  “Lyndon Johnson resembles an elemental natural force of some hitherto undiscovered sort—an amiable force, to be sure, not destructive like an earthquake, but still a very powerful force that is only subject to its own natural rules,” wrote Alsop. Awe particularly when talking about the new President’s legislative accomplishments. Johnson was managing, “in a good deal less than a year, to get through Congress the two most important pieces of domestic legislation to be adopted in a quarter of a century—in a sense, the only important pieces of domestic legislation in that long period,” Richard Rovere wrote in The New Yorker. “It has been an astonishing performance, and one, it seems clear, that was beyond the reach of John F. Kennedy.” Part of the explanation for Johnson’s legislative success was the momentum generated behind Kennedy’s proposals by his assassination, Rovere wrote. “It … seems necessary to believe that the gods of history are not above arranging things in such a way that a man may contribute more to the fulfillment of his ideals by being the victim of a senseless murder than by living and working for them.” But part was something more, Rovere had to admit, grudging as were the words with which he acknowledged it. “It is hardly possible to believe that a Texas drawl, a strategic display of frugality, and some soft-soaping of Senator Byrd can replace domestic discord with harmony. It seems necessary, though, to believe that such things can—for a time—at least—go quite a long way toward promoting this sort of change, for a change has in fact occurred. The change, Rovere wrote, “is reflected” not only “in the opinion polls” but “in the graciousness and ease with which” Senator Byrd and Representative Smith, the pair of Virginians “who had been thwarting Presidents almost, it seems, since time began,” have been “lending themselves to the designs of President Johnson.” Awe at the speed with which the accomplishments, accomplishments that went beyond the legislative, had been achieved. Recalling the “people who, in December, were worried that Mr. Johnson would not have time enough before the election to put his own stamp on the country,” Eric Sevareid said that the new President had had to accomplish three objectives to put the stamp there. “He had to stamp his own leadership on his predecessor’s administration, and this he did in a matter of days; he had to impress and beguile the Congress into a bill-passing frame of mind, and this he did in a matter of weeks; he had to imprint his own personality on the country at large, on a people just getting used to Mr. Kennedy’s far different nature, and this Mr. Johnson began to do the moment propriety permitted.”

  The tone of columnistic comparisons with his predecessor no longer contained even a touch of condescension. In fact, many of them conveyed a journalistic evaluation that the influential Reston put in a single succinct sentence: “President Kennedy’s eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson’s hammer blows are designed to make men act.”

  THE MAGNITUDE OF the success was apparent also in discussions about politics. By March, 1964, speculation about the identity of the Republican nominee for President—about the merits and chances of Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater—was the hot topic in political circles. By March—by the time Pierre Salinger quit—there was no speculation about the identity of the Democratic nominee. The last of that speculation was over. The Democratic nominee for President would be the man who was now President; there may have been doubts about that in December, but even among Robert Kennedy’s most ardent supporters, there was no longer any doubt about that at all.

  And the President was going to be a hard man to beat in November’s general election. Between March 13 and March 17 Gallup polled Americans about Lyndon Johnson’s chances against each of the most likely Republican nominees. “If Barry Goldwater were the Republican candidate and Lyndon Johnson were the Democratic candidate, which would you like to see win?” Gallup asked. Thirteen percent of the respondents said
they would like to see Goldwater win. Seventy-eight percent said they would like Lyndon Johnson. (The remaining 9 percent were undecided.) For Goldwater’s leading opponent for the nomination, the figures were similar: 16 percent for Nelson Rockefeller and 77 percent for Johnson. Richard Nixon, who had taken himself out of the running, would do better against the President, Gallup found, but not that much better: 24 percent to 68 for Johnson. Time magazine said the identity of the Republican nominee didn’t really matter. “President Johnson’s rising popularity” had made “the whole show academic.”

  *

  1 Schlesinger’s opinion of Johnson was to change drastically. By 1978, he would be writing, “For all his towering ego, his devastating instinct for the weaknesses of others, his unlimited capacity for self-pity, he was at the same time a man of brilliant intelligence, authentic social passion, and deep seriousness.…”

  2 Salinger won the Democratic nomination for the California Senate seat, and was appointed to the seat after the incumbent, Clair Engle, died on July 30, 1964, but was defeated in November by the Republican George Murphy.