“They made it,” Shriver whispered to Joe English, as the Marines aligned themselves in rows.
The late president and his entourage arrived at the White House at 4:30 a.m. Shriver was ready to greet them at the northwest gate with his casket team. Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy emerged from the ambulance first. As Shriver recalled, “The ambulance doors opened at the back, and Bobby and Jackie climbed out on the arms of two soldiers who helped them down. Then the soldiers slid the casket out into the night. Jackie walked up to me. I kissed her, and whispered condolences.” It required an effort not to gasp at Jackie’s appearance; she was spattered with blood, still clad in the outfit she had worn that morning in Dallas. Shriver clasped Bobby by the hands.
Seven soldiers carried President Kennedy up the steps of the north portico into the White House, across the marble hall into the East Room, where they laid his coffin on the catafalque. A priest said a short prayer and Jackie Kennedy knelt, pressing her face into an American flag. Then she climbed the stairs to her living quarters.
Shriver spent the next few hours greeting Kennedy relatives who had been arriving throughout the night and helping them to figure out where in the White House they would be sleeping. At about 6:00 a.m., he and Eunice’s sister Jean Smith knelt together in the East Room, their heads bowed near Kennedy’s coffin, to pray.
As the sun, oblivious to events on earth, rose stubbornly through the fog in the east, Shriver drove home to Timberlawn to take a shower and check on his children. Climbing the stairs to his bedroom that morning, Shriver felt more tired than he had in thirty years—since the night in 1942 when he had wearily climbed another set of stairs, aboard the USS South Dakota, slipping on blood shed by his fellow sailors at the Battle of Guadalcanal. On this night, as on that earlier one, he had performed heroically. His calm under pressure, his natural assumption of leadership, and his steady command once he had assumed it had kept the White House from devolving into dysfunction.
After changing clothes, Shriver drove back to the White House. The inner circle gathered for morning Mass in the family dining room, just across the hall from the formal State Dining Room. A makeshift altar had been set up, and people crowded around it, one’s proximity to the altar a rough signifier of how close one had been to Jack’s family: As the Kennedy siblings and cousins who were present all crammed into the front row, Sarge was relegated to the second row with his fellow in-laws Ethel Kennedy (Bobby’s wife) and Joan Kennedy (Ted’s wife); friends and aides were arrayed behind them.
After Mass, the parade of visitors began. Shriver stood with Angie Duke, greeting diplomats, legislators, and dignitaries as they passed through. It was deemed appropriate that the first person to visit President Kennedy after his family should be his successor, Lyndon Johnson. This should have been an uncontroversial matter. It wasn’t.
In Dallas, conflicts between the bereft Kennedy aides and the shell-shocked LBJ hardened long-simmering resentments. Johnson, eager to provide the appearance of stability for a shaken nation, pressed for a rapid swearing-in ceremony on Air Force One before returning to the Capitol, so that the reins of the presidency might not lie slack for too long. Many of Kennedy’s closest aides, who already could barely conceal their dislike for LBJ, were offended by how eager Johnson seemed to be to seize the mantle of power from their fallen leader.
Johnson felt as strong a distaste for many of Kennedy’s advisers as they did for him. He knew they looked down on him, despite his vastly greater political savvy and experience. But after the president’s death, Johnson knew he needed them—for advice and support, but also for the appearance of continuity. The American people would be profoundly shaken by the loss of their president, who had symbolized the promise of the New Frontier. Johnson knew it would be necessary to preserve as many as possible of the policies, personnel, and symbolic trappings of the Kennedy administration. So Johnson importuned the Kennedy advisers for assistance.
And some of them rejected him. Not outright, but everything in their tone and gestures signified their disgust for him. In their shock and grief, they could not get past the fact that Johnson was not Jack Kennedy and never would be. Some mouthed empty words of support; others simply turned their backs. (Some JFK aides, it should be said, pressed on valiantly in service to the new president, despite their grief. “It is hard to write for a new man,” Ted Sorensen was overhead to say of the challenge of composing speeches for LBJ.)
President Kennedy’s death had an enormous and direct impact on the United States, and everything that transpired the weekend after his death was of enormous symbolic significance for all the country’s citizens. But for Sarge Shriver in particular, that weekend established the context of much that would follow over the next decade. The death of Jack Kennedy thrust Shriver into a peculiar new role—a lonely and uncomfortable position between Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy family inner circle.
Shriver had grown to greatly admire and respect the former Senate majority leader. Johnson’s important interventions on behalf of the Peace Corps had solidified a bond between the two men. Shriver also now saw it as his civic duty to regard Johnson as the legitimate president of the United States and to view him with the respect that position accorded him. William Manchester divided the principal players that weekend into “loyalists” (most notably Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen, Ken O’Donnell, and, above all, Bobby Kennedy), whose first priority was proper respect to the slaughtered president, and the “realists” (most notably McGeorge Bundy, who kept exhorting everyone that “the show must go on”), whose first priority was the national interest. Shriver tried harder than any other individual to bridge the gap between the two groups. At one point on Saturday he walked over to the loyalists’ offices in the West Wing to offer his assistance in ensuring an orderly transition of government. To his surprise, the offer was not accepted; in fact, as he later recalled, he received “a lot of flak.” As Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson would later put it in their political column, “After the assassination, when Bobby’s bitterness boiled toward the new president, Shriver tried to act as a peacemaker. He failed. ‘I found it was a buzz saw,’ he told a friend, ‘and since then I have stayed out.’ ” The very act of offering to help ease the Johnson regime’s assumption of power was seen by the loyalists almost as an act of betrayal. In the loyalists’ minds, Shriver was signaling that he was more in the realist camp than in theirs.
Johnson recognized this. He genuinely like Shriver, and he admired what Sarge had done with the Peace Corps. But he also realized what a political asset Shriver could be: He was part of the Kennedy clan but not blindly loyal to it. Publicly associated with the Kennedys, Shriver often stood in the shadows of Jack and Bobby. But he was also clearly his own man. Out of a mixture of genuine admiration and political calculation, Johnson reached out to Shriver on the weekend of Kennedy’s death.
On Saturday afternoon at 2:30 p.m., while JFK still lay in state in the East Room, Lyndon Johnson presided over his first cabinet meeting as president of the United States. He began with a prayer and then asked each cabinet secretary to submit recommendations to him on Monday about what he should do. Bobby Kennedy, as attorney general, was a member of the cabinet and was accustomed to attending such meetings when they were presided over by his brother. On this day, however, preoccupied by funeral arrangements and his own grief, he planned not to attend. Only at the insistence of McGeorge Bundy did he consent to participate. But he arrived late, walking in and sitting down in the middle of Johnson’s remarks. Johnson interpreted this as a conscious attempt to humiliate him.
After the meeting, Johnson expressed his resentment at Bobby’s behavior but otherwise remained sensitive to the feelings of the Kennedy family. He discussed with another cabinet member when he should make his first address to Congress. The cabinet member suggested it should be as soon as possible, to lend the new administration legitimacy quickly. Johnson agreed but worried that addressing Congress too soon “might be resented by the family.”
Moyers’s demonstration of loyalty and support contrasted starkly with the behavior of other Kennedy aides on the flight back to Washington. Twice during the flight, Johnson sent Moyers back to ask Ken O’Donnell to come join him in his stateroom to discuss crucial matters of the transition. Twice O’Donnell refused, choosing instead to stay with Jackie Kennedy by her husband’s coffin. Kennedy’s aides likely saw Johnson’s very invitation as an affront to the slain president and to his grieving wife. Johnson saw their decline of his invitation as a direct rejection of him and of his presidency. In response to these sleights, Johnson drew the aides he could count on, like Moyers and Walter Jenkins, even closer around him. After this, LBJ would not allow Moyers to continue at the Peace Corps; the hard-driving young Baptist would henceforth be working in the White House, always within shouting distance of the president.
This would be a loss for the Peace Corps. Moyers worked well with Shriver, and his blend of idealism, organization, and political smarts was a good fit for the agency. And Moyers at some level regretted leaving the Peace Corps; it had been, after all, his dream job. But Moyers was dutiful (and ambitious) enough that he would never have considered turning LBJ down.
Moyers’s presence in Johnson’s inner circle should also have been a great political boon for Shriver—and in some ways it was. During the Kennedy administration Shriver had derived considerable political capital from being the president’s brother-in-law, but he didn’t have a strong champion in the West Wing of the White House. With Moyers soon to be installed there, however, he would. The problem for Shriver was that the more tightly connected to Johnson’s inner circle he appeared to be, the more he alienated Bobby Kennedy and other JFK loyalists, who would come to seem over the ensuing months almost like a government-in-exile. Although it would be some years yet before all these heated sentiments would develop and harden into full-blown, ill-concealed enmity, they were present in clear if incipient form in the emotional hours between the assassination and the funeral.
Shriver found Moyers in the foyer of Johnson’s suite. Johnson was inside his office, conferring privately with a member of his cabinet about what he believed were RFK’s attempts to humiliate him. Shriver and Moyers talked quietly until the cabinet member left. Moyers then ushered Shriver into LBJ’s office. Johnson slathered him with unctuous flattery.
“Well, Sarge, it’s a terrible thing,” Johnson said. “I’m completely overwhelmed, but I do want to say that I’ve always had a very high regard for you. It hasn’t been possible for me to do anything about it until now, but I intend to.” Shriver wondered what Johnson meant by this, but for the moment he focused on the challenges of the moment.
“Is there anything I can do?” Shriver inquired.
There were two things, Johnson told him. He was wrestling with difficult decisions. One was the question, which he had already discussed with several cabinet members, of when to make a televised address to a joint session of Congress. Bobby Kennedy and other family members and former Kennedy advisers, Johnson knew, would want him to delay the address as long as possible, to allow time for public recognition and mourning of JFK without the distraction of a new president moving into the limelight. But Johnson said there was also “pressure” on him to make the address as soon as possible—ideally Tuesday, the day after the funeral. Several members of the cabinet had, indeed, pressed for an address as soon as possible, as Moyers did again now, but it was clear to Shriver that much of the pressure to make the address sooner rather than later came from Johnson’s own anxiety about his legitimacy. Still, Shriver agreed. A shaken American public needed to be reassured that the previous day’s tragedy would not prevent an orderly transition of government. Based on his extensive Peace Corps travels in politically unstable countries, Shriver knew that many people in Africa, South America, and central Asia would conclude from the political logic of their own experience that “whoever had killed President Kennedy would now be president.” Thus, in order to broadcast the durability of constitutional democracy, he believed, it was essential to show that there would be continuity of government. The address to Congress would have to be soon, Shriver agreed.
An unspoken question hung in the air. Who would tell the attorney general? Shriver broke the silence. “I’ll tell Bobby,” he said.
Johnson had another, similar conundrum, equally vexing. When should he leave his vice presidential office in the Executive Office Building to take up residence in the Oval Office of the White House? Secretary of State Rusk and National Security Adviser Bundy were urging him to set up shop somewhere in the White House’s West Wing right away—if not in the Oval Office itself, then somewhere nearby. All the president’s important communications equipment was there, including the hotline to the Kremlin and the apparatus that gave the chief executive control over America’s nuclear arsenal. For symbolic reasons, too, it seemed important for Johnson to base himself in the White House soon; it would signal that he held the levers of power firmly in his grasp.
But there would be objections. After Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, his successor, Andrew Johnson, had waited eight weeks before moving to the White House, working in the interim out of the Treasury building. And with Jack’s personal effects yet to be removed, and with his body hardly cold, RFK and the Kennedy advisers would perceive a quick occupation of the Oval Office to be grossly insensitive.
Shriver was genuinely conflicted. On the one hand, the president was telling him that Bundy had justified a quick move by explaining that the Oval Office belonged to the office of the presidency, not to an individual person; as president, LBJ should be in there, hurt feelings be damned. But Shriver also knew from his discussions with Bobby and others that they felt the office was still Jack’s—that it should be preserved, at least for a time, as a shrine to him. “I’d been in the navy,” Shriver later recalled, “and I was inclined to agree with Bundy; you don’t leave a command post empty because the commander has fallen.” Yet “it seemed unseemly … to move into that office before Jack was out of the White House. Jack’s body, after all, was still lying in the East Room.” He made clear his ambivalence to LBJ, who decided that if Shriver, the most kindly disposed to him of all the Kennedy family, was not convinced that he should move right into the Oval Office, then he was better off waiting.
Shriver set off to carry out the unwelcome task of consulting Bobby about a Tuesday address to Congress. The task was more difficult than he knew. Unbeknownst to Shriver, Johnson had already dispatched Bundy to carry out the same mission—and Bundy had failed. Evidently, the new president thought a Kennedy in-law would have more success than the national security adviser. He was wrong.
Shriver walked back over to the White House, and when he found Bobby he relayed Johnson’s desire to make the congressional address on Tuesday. Bobby, having already told Bundy clearly that he thought Johnson’s address could wait until at least Wednesday, erupted in anger. “Why does he tell you to ask me?” Bobby said, as William Manchester re
ported. “Now he’s hacking at you. He knows I want him to wait until Wednesday.” There was clearly no point in arguing, so Shriver retraced his steps back to the Executive Office Building, where he again found Moyers, who took him into the president’s office. “Bob prefers you wait a day, unless there are overriding reasons for having the address earlier,” Shriver told LBJ. As president of the United States, it was officially Johnson’s prerogative—not Bobby Kennedy’s—to decide when to make the address. But Johnson said nothing in response to Shriver’s report; instead, as Moyers and Shriver watched, he picked up the phone, dialed, and said curtly, “It will be on Wednesday.” Shriver trekked across the White House lawn to the West Wing yet again and told Bobby the news. Although the scheduling of the address was resolved without the public knowing about the tug-of-war between RFK and LBJ that had gone on behind the scenes, Shriver recalled that it was clear from the conflict that “there was a condition that was exacerbating.”
Despite growing tension with Bobby, Johnson thought it important that he preserve as much of the Kennedy team intact as possible, as a sign of continuity with Kennedy’s New Frontier. He needed, he said, to retain the “aura of Kennedy.” And he seemed, in the first few days of his presidency, to believe that he could do this. But Schlesinger had already begun drafting his resignation letter, and Sorensen’s first meetings with Johnson made it obvious that the two men could never work together effectively. Others from Kennedy’s “Irish Mafia” had already made plain their dislike for the new president, to the point that it seemed at times they blamed him for Jack’s death. (If Jack hadn’t had to shore up weak Democratic senators in Johnson’s home state, the president would never have been in Texas.) Johnson soon realized he would have to make do with his own staff.
But he still felt he needed some publicly obvious link to the Kennedy administration. Johnson concluded that Shriver, as not only a Kennedy in-law but also the head of the New Frontier’s signature program, the Peace Corps, was a natural link. From this point forward, almost anything Shriver did—or didn’t do—for Johnson would become fraught with symbolic weight. In staying on as a prominent member of the Johnson administration, Shriver inevitably became, for good and for ill, “the Kennedy in the Johnson administration.” As Johnson had hoped, this did lend continuity to the functioning of the executive branch; indeed, Shriver’s presence was integral to the expansion of Kennedy’s New Frontier into Johnson’s Great Society. But Shriver also became, almost but perhaps not wholly against his will, a crucial pawn (a “hostage,” as some said) in the high-stakes political chess match between Johnson and Bobby Kennedy. This role—as the symbolic bridge and the symbolic wedge between Johnson and the Kennedys—was one that would in many ways define Shriver’s political existence for the next five years. In some ways it would define him for the rest of his public life.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 41