Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  In those first days and weeks, Lyndon Johnson’s instincts were flawless, nowhere more so than in those first hours. The Capitol meeting was ending, the participants preparing to drive to Andrews Air Force Base to meet the plane bearing what remained of Kennedy to Washington. Lyndon, the others urged him, you need to go on television from the airport, the country needs to hear from you. He said, No, I’m not the President, I’m not the President-elect—I’m not anything, at least for a few days, and if I’m on television tonight, then I’m the usurper. The only one who should speak tonight is Ike. Mr. Sam and Ev and Joe and me can stand behind him, that’d probably be a good thing for the country to see.

  So late on the night of December 11, Johnson and his colleagues were grouped behind President Eisenhower as a Boeing 707 VC-137, designated SAM 972—“Air Force One” when the President was on board—touched down at Andrews with the casket bearing the remains of John Kennedy, or so the nation and the world was told. In fact, a team of Secret Service agents had scoured the scene of the suicide bombing, retrieving what shards of flesh and bone they could find. They were placed in a casket along with enough ballast to give the coffin weight. The images of an honor guard straining with effort while bearing the casket from an ambulance to the 707 jet reinforced the impression that a human body was being transported. None of the solemn voices narrating the event on television and radio even contemplated raising the unsettling question of just how an intact human body could possibly have been retrieved from so massive an explosion.

  When the plane landed at Andrews late that Sunday night, the President and the other high officials of the government were there to meet it—and so was Robert Kennedy. Again, Johnson’s instincts were perfectly tuned. Stay here, he motioned his colleagues. This is Bobby’s grief. No one watching the coverage—and that included just about everyone with access to a television set—would ever forget those black-and-white images of Robert Kennedy standing alone on the tarmac beneath the tail of the 707, watching as the casket was lowered by forklift to a waiting hearse, then helplessly resting his right hand on the casket as President Eisenhower, ramrod-straight, his face torn between sympathy and rage, put his hand on Robert Kennedy’s shoulder.

  When the hearse drove away, taking the casket to the Capitol Rotunda, Eisenhower strode to a bank of microphones and spoke as the Congressional leaders and Vice President Nixon stood behind him.

  “This is a dark night for our country,” he said. “A gallant young man who inspired millions has been struck down by a madman. We pray for John Kennedy’s soul; we pray for his family. And we resolve that his spirit and energy will give us strength in the days ahead. John Kennedy is dead, but the country he loved and served with bravery and grace will endure.” The President and the leaders walked off into the darkness; fortunately, they were beyond the range of the microphones when one of them muttered, “Now what the hell do we do?”

  It was Lyndon Johnson who provided the answer.

  The men gathered again in Speaker Rayburn’s hideaway Monday at six a.m. The room was strewn with newspapers, their front pages all splashed with huge black-bordered banner headlines (no television news penetrated the hideaway; Speaker Rayburn hated the medium, had banned TV coverage even of Congressional hearings; the members didn’t like that, thought the TV cameras in Senate hearings made that body even more prominent, but there was no arguing with the Speaker). The men wolfed down the breakfasts brought up from the House dining room—scrambled eggs, sausages, country ham, grits, biscuits, coffee by the gallon—and set down to deal with two urgent questions: first, how to memorialize the fallen John Kennedy; second, how to navigate the treacherous Constitutional waters of succession and leadership.

  “Where’s Lyndon?” Ev Dirksen asked.

  “Said he’d be along in a bit,” Speaker Rayburn said with studied offhandedness. “Said to start without him.”

  There was quick agreement on the pageantry. Kennedy’s body was lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda—even in the immediate aftermath of the murder, Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy had agreed to that—and the crowds had begun lining up all night long, waiting to pay their respects. The queue now stretched more than a mile down Pennsylvania Avenue. At noon the next day, Tuesday, a small memorial service would be held in the Rotunda. The formal funeral would be held on Wednesday, in Washington’s National Cathedral; that would give leaders from around the world time to attend. The protocol was a mare’s nest; John Kennedy was not the head of state, was not even formally the President-elect. But French President Charles de Gaulle had already signaled his intention to pay his respects—“He is a fallen soldier, and deserves the ultimate tribute of my presence,” the General had said—and others were bound to follow suit (“After all,” British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan said to one of his aides, “his father was ambassador here—even if he did want to sell us out to Hitler”). While the final decision had yet to be made, the Kennedy family was leaning toward a burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy’s service in World War II had earned him that honor, although a quiet debate was underway about the size and nature of the burial plot.

  But what then? On Friday, less than forty-eight hours after the burial, the Electoral College would convene; more precisely, the electors from fifty states would gather in the fifty state legislatures to cast their votes. The dilemma posed by Speaker Rayburn the night before was even more pressing: How could Lyndon Johnson legitimately claim the Presidency? And how to legitimately “elect” a Vice President?

  The House Parliamentarian had just begun a mind-numbing rehash of the Constitutional maze when the door to the hideaway was flung open. And Lyndon Johnson, trailed by Senators Richard Russell and Hubert Humphrey, nodded to the others, took a seat on one of the overstuffed chairs, leaned his six-foot four-inch frame over, put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and told them what he had decided to do.

  WHEN IT CAME RIGHT down to it, there was only one logical choice for Vice President. One or two of the more zealous members of Kennedy’s political family suggested that Bobby should have the post (one even urged Jack’s electors to vote for Bobby for President); but the whole idea was absurd. Never mind that Bobby was barely eligible—he’d only turned thirty-five two weeks before Jack’s murder—he had no credentials. However impressive he’d been as a Congressional staff counsel and campaign manager, he’d held no elective office, no significant executive job, never mind that he and Lyndon couldn’t stand each other (“Have you ever seen two dogs walk into a room from opposite sides and all of a sudden there’s a low growl and the hair starts going up on the back of the neck?” one of Johnson’s closest aides said. “That’s how those two reacted”).

  He’d called Bobby in the first hours after the assassination, telling him there were a hundred million aching hearts around the country, that they would honor Jack however the family wished.

  “And when the time is right, you come and see me and we’ll talk about how we can work for what Jack wanted,” he’d added. “As far as I’m concerned, whatever’s happened in the past is over, done with, gone. I know how much Jack needed you, but Bobby, I need you more than he did. You have so much to give to this country. . . .”

  Robert Kennedy mumbled a few words of gratitude, and the call ended (when he put the phone down, Bobby turned to a Kennedy campaign worker and said, “You have one job left—make sure I never have to speak on the phone with him again—or at least as little as I can get away with”).

  Johnson had thought seriously about going beyond the Democratic Party. That new governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, impressed him mightily: Rocky thought big, the way Johnson did. Rockefeller was already pushing for a huge expansion of the state university system, for roads and housing all across the state. And he played politics like a contact sport; he’d humbled Richard Nixon last summer by threatening him with a nomination fight, then forcing Nixon to come to Rockefeller’s palatial Fifth Avenue apartment to sign off on big changes in the Republi
can platform, with a huge boost in defense spending—the big contractors in Texas loved that idea. Like Johnson, Rockefeller was a Cold War internationalist: You had to face down the Russians all over the world, with missiles and bombers, yes, but with schools and roads and dams, to give the folks in those poor countries something to hope for, just like Roosevelt had given the poor in the Pedernales down in Texas something to hope for almost thirty years ago. Rocky knew that, too—and besides, wasn’t a reach across party lines the best way to show that America was not going to let some lunatic rip us apart?

  But it couldn’t work, Johnson realized. The politics of it were just too daunting. He and his colleagues who’d gathered in Rayburn’s office were about to set out on some very treacherous waters. It was going to be hard enough to work out the Constitutional arithmetic with the electors, allocating enough votes for President and Vice President to deal with any potential challenge; asking lifelong Democrats to cast a vote for a sitting Republican just might be asking too much. Besides, could you really be honoring the people’s will if you put a man who’d flirted with running for the Republican nomination a suspect-heartbeat away from the Oval Office? Putting Republicans in the Cabinet, yes; he thought Jack had done well in picking Doug Dillon for Treasury—C. Douglas Dillon, that first initial should warm the hearts of the Wall Street boys—and he’d been mightily impressed by the fellow with the Sta-Comb in his hair, the man from Ford, Bob McNamara. And maybe down the line, he’d see if he could persuade Rockefeller to come to Washington, although when a man has the Presidency in mind, it’s a tough thought to set aside. But the Vice President? No, he knew what he had to do: Stay with a Democrat, and reach North and Left. And that meant . . . Hubert.

  He and Humphrey had both come to the Senate in ’49: Humphrey was the fire-breathing Minneapolis mayor who’d helped trigger a walkout of Southern delegates at the ’48 convention with a fiery speech that called on the party to move “out of the shadows of states rights, into the bright sunlight of human rights.” Johnson was the newly minted segregationist who’d boasted of his votes in the House against anti-lynching bills and anti-poll tax bills and fair employment laws. But they seemed to see something of themselves in the other: both from small towns, both knowing very hard times in the Depression, both climbing the greasy pole of politics by working longer, harder than anybody else. When Johnson had reached for the post of Senate Democratic leader, there’d been resistance from the liberals, but Hubert had said, No, he’s the right man for the job. When Humphrey would lead another charge for a civil rights bill, doomed to defeat by the arcane rules of the Senate, Johnson would tell his fellow Southerners to go easy on Humphrey: “He’s my link to the bomb-throwers.” And more and more he’d brought Humphrey into his inner circle, managing bills, rounding up votes from liberal colleagues.

  For his part, Humphrey had told more than one supporter that if he couldn’t have the nomination, he’d want it to go to Lyndon. And in the first hours after the suicide bombing, when some of his longtime allies were speculating about denying Johnson the Presidency—those electors are free agents, Hubert, they don’t have to vote for Lyndon, hell, most of them probably hate the idea of Lyndon in the White House—he’d been as adamant in private as he’d been in public. This is the man John Kennedy chose to stand a heartbeat from the Presidency; to do anything else dishonors his legacy and our system of government.

  And now Lyndon Johnson looked around the room, and pointed to Senator Humphrey, and said simply, “I need him—I want him.” And Humphrey simply nodded, and welled up, and said, “I’d be proud to stand with you,” and then Johnson was gesturing to Richard Russell, the man to whom he’d once said, “I haven’t got any daddy, and you’re it,” the man Humphrey had been fighting on civil rights from the day he walked into the Senate almost twelve years ago.

  “Dick and I have talked this through,” said Johnson. “He and I and every other Southerner know I could never have become President on my own. The way we talk, and the whole nigra issue, means all any of us could aspire to is to be another John Nance Garner. Dick, you found that out in’52 when you tried to run. Now I have the chance to end this once and for all—if I can be a halfway success, it means a Southern boy can dream of growing up to be President, too. But that means I have to show the rest of the country I’m not some Texas oilman that wants to keep the colored man down. I didn’t win this election, Jack Kennedy did—at least as far as the country’s concerned. So I have to do the right thing and honor his memory and that means doing things and picking people you might not like. But it’s the only chance we have to stop being second-class Americans.”

  “I don’t think you could make a better move,” Russell said. “Hubert, I’ll be fighting you six days a week on civil rights, but Lyndon, I’ll probably be fighting you six days a week on civil rights sooner or later, no matter who your Vice President is. And I can’t even imagine who’d be better protection for you when the New York Times and the NAACP start complaining that you’re not moving fast enough. Hubert, you know I may have to say something tough about you . . .”

  “You just call him up first to let him know it’s coming,” Johnson said. It was the first time any of them had laughed in almost twenty-four hours.

  “If you remember back, I’m pretty sure I’m the one who taught you about keeping the waters calm,” Russell said, “although I sometimes think you learned this in the womb. Anyway, I’ll do what I can to see if I can keep some of the fire-breathers around here from throwing a fit. Lyndon, I don’t know any man who’s ever come into office with the burdens you’re carrying. I’m damned if I’m going to add to them.”

  It was in the hours that followed that Johnson’s powers of persuasion were on full display, as he worked the phones, an instrument that he had long ago mastered as thoroughly as had Rubenstein the piano or Heifetz the violin. His first call was to Martin Luther King, Jr.—Johnson mentioned that fact no less than three times—and he spoke for almost a half hour, a stream-of-consciousness monologue about his days teaching poor Mexican-Americans, about his hunger to be free from the racial prison of Southern politics, his pride in not signing the “Southern Manifesto” that committed virtually every Southern member of Congress to segregation, his shame in opposing anti-lynching and other civil rights bills.

  “I mean no disrespect,” he said to King, “and I know how much those calls to you and your wife from Jack meant—they may have saved your life, may have won the election for us—but I frankly thought Jack was a bit . . . conservative.

  “Those Harvards,” he said, “think that a politician from Texas doesn’t care about Negroes. In the Senate, I did the best I could. But I had to be careful. I couldn’t get too far ahead of my Texas voters. Now I represent the whole country, and I have the power. I always vowed that if I ever had the power I’d make sure every Negro had the same chance as every white man. Now, because of this awful tragedy, I will have it. And I’m going to use it.” As soon as was decent—after the memorial service for Jack, after the electoral confusion had been cleared away—he would meet with King and other Negro leaders.

  “And, Reverend,” he added. “Keep your eyes on the prize: I understand the sit-ins, and the bus boycott—it’s a damn disgrace that a Negro can’t sit in the front of the bus or get a hamburger at a lunch counter—but it’s the vote, the vote, the vote. You said that back in April of ’59 at that youth march for integrated schools—when the Negro in the South gets the vote, you’re gonna be amazed at how many friends the Negro will find with sheriffs and county clerks and everyone else that needs votes to keep his job.”

  Then came the calls to the Jews who’d been among his strongest, if least likely, allies and supporters. When he’d first run for the Congress in’37, an all-out supporter of FDR, he’d attracted money from Democrats in New York who were eager to help a young New Dealer running in such hostile territory (one of them had slipped $5,000 to Franklin Jr. for a forged note from FDR implying that Johnson had his support). Je
ws like Bobby Lehman and Ed Weisl were never that sold on Jack Kennedy; they had too many memories of Old Joe Kennedy’s defeatism in the years before World War II, and the old man’s ingrained anti-Semitism was an open secret. When he was running for the nomination, Johnson had said, “I was never an umbrella man,” meaning Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who’d come back from Munich waving an umbrella and promising “peace in our time” after selling out the Czechs to Hitler. The message was simple: You let your liberal friends in New York and Chicago and California know that I mean to finish what Roosevelt started. It’ll take time. The country’s in shock and we’ve got a first-class mess to fix before we can give the public a clear idea even of who the President’s going to be or how. But you have my word on this. And if you don’t think you can trust me on this, ask yourself why I picked Hubert to take over if my heart isn’t up to it.

  When those calls ended, he was on the phone to his fellow Southerners in the Senate: to Florida’s George Smathers, one of Jack Kennedy’s closest friends and a fellow hell-raiser; to Alabama’s Lister Hill and John Sparkman; to Willis Robertson of Virginia, whose son Pat had gone into preaching, just started some kind of Christian broadcasting operation in Virginia Beach. It was the same message he had given to Dick Russell, who was burning up the telephone lines as well: We have a chance to end a hundred years of bigotry against everyone who speaks the way we do, who comes from where we come from. I don’t expect you to vote with me on the race question, but I need you to understand that the country can’t stand to be torn up on black and white, or on North and South. You know that Khrushchev and Mao are over there licking their chops, and if we start falling to pieces, why, we could deteriorate pretty quick.

  In those first days, Johnson was as effective in public as he was in private. He had remained in the background during Tuesday’s ceremony at the Capitol, and at Wednesday’s service at the National Cathedral. He had walked with de Gaulle and the other heads of state from the Cathedral to Arlington—the Secret Service had furiously objected, but de Gaulle had simply shrugged and said, “If they wish to arrest me, so be it,” and that was that—but he had deliberately walked a row behind the Kennedy family and the heads of state. It wasn’t until Thursday at noon, in an address to a Joint Session of Congress, that Johnson emerged from his self-imposed shadow. He’d understood instinctively that the speech was a tightrope walk between a eulogy to a fallen leader-to-be and a pre-Inaugural address. He’d turned to Ted Sorensen, John Kennedy’s wordsmith and chief policy advisor, for help on the speech. I’m not asking you for me; I’m asking you for him. Sorensen mumbled that, yes, he’d do what he could, and turned in a masterpiece—but it was a masterpiece of unfettered grief, a lament for the irreplaceable loss of a leader whose vision and courage we will not see again in our lifetimes, and a near confession of inadequacy: “Though I cannot fill his shoes, I must occupy the desk he earned,” Sorensen had written, and Johnson smiled mirthlessly as he struck the line out of the draft. He’d done more; he’d reached out to John Barlow Martin, Adlai’s favorite writer, he’d even placed a call to Dick Goodwin, the kid—he wasn’t even thirty!—who’d backstopped Sorensen on the Kennedy campaign. And most significant, he brought in Horace Busby, who’d been with him even before he got to the Senate, who could write words that fit Johnson like a custom-made suit, and who understood him as well as any man. I want it short, he’d told Buzz, and I want it to put us back on our feet. You can mourn some, but if I give the Sorensen speech, people are gonna be throwing themselves off their roof. Make it brief, tough, plain, blunt.