But the moment that mattered, the moment that splashed across every front page in America, every front page in the world, for that matter, came before he’d said the first words of his address, when the House doorkeeper, Fishbait Miller, intoned: “Mistah Speak-ah, the majority leader of the United States Senate!” and Lyndon Johnson walked into the chamber with Jacqueline Kennedy on one arm and Robert Kennedy on the other. For a long moment the three of them stood motionless, Jacqueline in her widow’s weeds, the two-piece black button-front jacket and dress—the same dress she had worn to the christening of her infant son John six days earlier, Bobby in a black suit, white shirt, black tie held in place with one of his brother’s PT-109 tie clips. The applause which had begun with the doorkeeper’s announcement stopped in a heartbeat; the chamber was utterly, impossibly still as the trio walked through the well of the House, to the steps that led up to the rostrum. Then the applause began again, and did not stop for ten full minutes; no cheers, no shouts, just the clapping, on and on, until Johnson beckoned to the two men seated behind the rostrum . . . and Vice President Richard Nixon and Speaker Sam Rayburn came down to the well to embrace the two Kennedys. Johnson then shook Bobby’s hand, gently pressed Jacqueline’s hand between his own and escorted them to two seats in the front of the chamber where members of the Cabinet sat during State of the Union addresses. Just before he turned to go to his seat, Robert Kennedy leaned back to Johnson and said, “This is for him, you know. It’s all for him.”
“I know,” Johnson said. “I know.”
How had it happened? At some point the night before John Kennedy’s funeral, Johnson had called Joseph Kennedy, Sr. Whatever was said, whatever was promised, Joe had called Bobby with a message strong enough to bring the widow and the oldest surviving brother to Johnson’s side. Its essence was simplicity itself: No one has more reason to hate the son of a bitch than I do. He called me a goddamn Nazi sympathizer when he was running against Jack. A month from now, you can start planning to take him down in ’64. But right now this country needs you and Jackie to do this. In fact, it did not take much persuasion from Joe; there was a message America had to deliver to the world, and the Kennedys understood that, understood what it would signal if the First Family of America was supposed to have seemed to be denying the legitimacy of the President they now had to have, if only by their absence. So Jackie and Bobby took their seats, and when the Speaker intoned, “I have the high honor, the distinct privilege, to introduce the majority leader of the United States Senate,” they rose with the rest of the chamber to applaud.
“All that I have,” Johnson began, “I would have given gladly not to be standing here at this moment. An American hero has fallen—and we are the lesser for it. Two other American heroes—his wife and his brother—have come tonight to say that we will not let John Kennedy’s death turn us from the course he was charting—and we are the better for their courage and their love of country.
“And I have come here to say that we will never forget the spirit, the vision, the energy John Kennedy embodied . . . and to say that while the leader we chose may have been taken from us, the government he would have led so brilliantly lives . . . and our system that the founders shaped nearly two centuries ago will survive and endure and prevail.
“This dark hour demands nothing less than a clear, honest explanation to our countrymen, and to a waiting world, of where we will go from there, and how we will get there. It is true that never before have we had to choose a President under these conditions. But our Constitution is more than equal to the task. And tomorrow, America and the world will see this for themselves.
“When I leave this chamber, I will go to the White House, along with the leaders of the Congress from both parties, and with Vice President Nixon. There, President Eisenhower, along with Presidents Truman and Hoover, will detail the course we will follow. It will, to the best of our ability, reflect what we believe to be the will of the American people. And it will demonstrate to every nation, whether it wishes us well or ill, that while our hearts have been broken, our will has not.”
An hour later, Johnson, Nixon, the leaders of the Congress, and two former Presidents stood behind Eisenhower as he talked about what would happen the next day: how those Presidential electors whose states did not bar them from acting as independent agents would cast Presidential votes for Lyndon Johnson, and Vice Presidential votes for Hubert Humphrey; how those votes would force the House of Representatives to choose the President, and the Senate to choose the Vice President. Eisenhower and the others took no questions; when the statement was over, he and Johnson went together into the Oval Office for hours of conversations with the world leaders who had come to Washington for Kennedy’s funeral. For eight years, the two men had forged a close working relationship, and now the departing President was signaling, as clearly as he could, that the transition of power would be seamless.
Not that there was national unanimity. Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer who led a two-year-old organization in Belmont, New Hampshire, the John Birch Society, fired off telegrams to his members urging them to oppose “a blatant coup d’état to destroy our system of government.
“As you know,” he wrote, “I have long argued that both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country’s sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order managed by a ‘one-world socialist government.’ Now that betrayal is about to be complete.”
A thirty-five-year-old editor of a five-year-old conservative magazine, William F. Buckley, Jr., went on NBC to urge Republican members of Congress to oppose this “flagrant effort at political manipulation. It is no disrespect to the dead—indeed, it is, rather, respect for our system of government—to note that it is by no means apparent that John Kennedy was legitimately elected to the Presidency. No Constitutional exegesis would permit such a rendering of the Framers’ intent.” There were grumblings on the Left as well: Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers, and Joe Rauh, who led Americans for Democratic Action, had spent an anguished hour on the phone, sifting through ways to deliver the Presidency to Humphrey, or to Stevenson or to someone besides the Senate majority leader whom they had tried unsuccessfully to drive off the Democratic ticket back at the Los Angeles convention.
In the end, these were futile flailings. Even if the country had been prepared for an uprising over succession, there were no mechanisms to organize one. There was, for instance, no readily accessible list of Presidential electors; only the state election officials and political parties had such lists, and there was no quick, easy way to find phone numbers, addresses, names of officials. More important, there was no efficient mechanism for countless numbers of disaffected individuals to communicate with likeminded citizens, no way to arouse potential sympathizers. Long-distance telephone calls and telegrams were expensive, unwieldy; and on television, three networks dominated the conversation. For example, when William Buckley finished speaking, a roundtable of heavyweight historians and analysts dismissed his argument, warning of the fragile state of the American body politic. A citizen at his home in Rockford, Illinois, or Boulder, Colorado, could read a newspaper, listen to a radio, or watch the round-the-clock coverage on television, but he had no way of connecting with those who shared his views. Nor was there a quick, readily available tool for an ordinary citizen to gather information on his own. In 1960, communication was a one-way street, and information was fundamentally inaccessible. The whole idea of summoning up data or reaching thousands of individuals with the touch of a finger was a science-fiction fantasy. The mass media world was, as one observer defined it, the “simultaneous transmission to anonymous multitudes,” and what those multitudes heard was that the men who governed America had charted a course designed to bring us through the horror that was John Kennedy’s death.
ME
ASURED PURELY BY civic calculations, the elevation of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey went as smoothly as possible. On December 16, the day after Johnson’s speech to the Joint Session of Congress, 535 electors gathered at the fifty state capitols. One hundred Kennedy electors voted for Johnson for President; two hundred of them, along with seventy-five Nixon electors, voted for Hubert Humphrey for Vice President after Richard Nixon publicly urged them to do so (Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, known for a wicked wit that spared no one but himself, offered a paraphrase of Shakespeare: “Nothing in Nixon’s political life became him like the leaving of it—we may devoutly hope”).
On January 3, the new Congress gathered in joint session to tabulate the results. In a thoroughly choreographed sequence, Speaker Rayburn and Senate Minority Leader Dirksen rose to suggest that Kennedy’s electoral votes should not be counted, on the ground that electors could not legitimately choose a dead person. The session promptly recessed; the members of the Senate and House retreated to their respective chambers; and they returned an hour later to report that the members had agreed to the objection. With Kennedy’s votes discounted—and with furious objections from freshman Congressman (and John Birch Society member) John Rousselot gaveled out of order, the presiding officer, Vice President Nixon, declared that no candidate had received an electoral majority for President. The House of Representatives would decide the matter, with each state having one vote, determined by a majority of each state’s delegation. (Nixon also invoked “a point of personal privilege” to offer up a tribute to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, and to rework a line from Jefferson’s first Inaugural address: “Today, we are all Democrats; we are all Republicans.” Reporters promptly dubbed it “the opening speech of the 1964 campaign.”)
That same evening, meeting in an extraordinary evening session, the House of Representatives voted to make Johnson President. From a hundred microphones, a thousand typewriters, came the same invocation: “The system worked!”
Unfortunately, the resilience of a late-eighteenth-century political mechanism no more measured what was happening in America than would an effective plumbing system in a house infected by the plague . . . in this case, a contagion of the spirit.
“A melancholy has settled on our land,” wrote New York Times columnist James Reston the Sunday after the electors had met, and if the prose was tinged purple, the sentiment was sadly accurate. The ascension of John Kennedy had a consciously generational cast; the oldest President would be succeeded by the youngest ever elected, who had promised “a new generation of leadership”; a frail septuagenarian with a wife out of a Helen Hokinson New Yorker cartoon replaced by a President and a First Lady who could stir sexual fantasies; the World War II commanding general succeeded by one of the thirteen million who served under him in that war. Surrounding the forty-three-year-old onetime naval officer had been a corporal’s guard of impossibly young men: His campaign manager-brother was thirty-four; his closest advisor was thirty-two; his press secretary was thirty-five; his de facto Chief of Staff was thirty-six. Beyond the statistics was the sound of a new generation coming to power. A photo that appeared just after the election had captured John, Bobby, and Ted, all toothy grins and compact bodies, a virility that all but crackled.
And now that was gone, obliterated in an instant of smoke and fire. Lyndon Johnson and his colleagues had done all that could have been asked of them to bring a measure of reassurance to the country, their work had brought them praise from editorial pages across the country, and from the men who sat at anchor desks, and in offices and coffee shops and at family gatherings, the conversation was filled with such sentiments: Thank goodness the country’s in good, responsible hands. What Johnson and his colleagues could not do was to ease the palpable emptiness of the spirit, a sense that something important, something of limitless possibility, had been lost. Lyndon Johnson was fifty-two, young by Presidential standards, but there was nothing young about him at all. His face, with cheeks and jaw descending like a basset hound, his $400 custom-made suits, the senators who surrounded him (young men did not become Congressional leaders; you made it through seniority, so those around him in the pictures and TV news film were in their sixties, seventies, eighties), all reflected solemnity, gravitas. The idea of Lyndon Johnson throwing a football or skippering a sailboat or tussling with a child at a backyard barbecue was almost literally inconceivable. He was a man born for back rooms; chandeliered, wood-paneled offices thick with the smell of tobacco and whiskey, filled with men of furrowed brows and whispers behind hands that covered mouths. It was not his fault, he had done all that anyone could ask of someone thrown into such uncharted waters; but the very fact that he, Lyndon Johnson, was there, was about to step into John Kennedy’s job, seemed in itself evidence that something had gone wrenchingly, horribly wrong.
At a meeting in mid-December of Kennedy’s campaign staff, Dick Goodwin wordlessly passed out copies of a quotation from T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. It read:We lived many lives in those swirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves any good or evil; yet when we had achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again, and took from us our victory, and remade it in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven, and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly, and made their peace.
It quickly found its way into Mary McGrory’s Washington Post column. “Goddamnit!” Johnson exploded when he read the quote, “I didn’t take a damn thing away from Jack. He wouldn’t have won without me! A lunatic blew him up!” But for countless men and women of Kennedy’s generation, it seemed to say everything. Indeed, Johnson’s senatorial office and the Democratic National Committee both reported a steady stream of telephone calls from around the country, asking that their applications for jobs in the new administration be returned. The idea of picking up stakes and setting out to conquer the New Frontier suddenly seemed a lot less appealing.
Even the weather conspired against the nation’s spirits. That vicious winter snowstorm that had hit the Northeast on the day John Kennedy was murdered kept tens of millions snowbound in their homes, unable to escape outdoors to relieve the grief pouring into their living rooms from their televisions. It stayed unusually cold throughout December all through the East and Midwest, and in mid-December, the steady encroachment of darkness by mid-afternoon fed and reflected the national mood. And, of course, it was the Christmas season; so the holly and the decorations, the displays in department store windows, the carols and seasonal songs on the radio, had an almost mocking quality. If you said “Merry Christmas!” to a passerby on the street, you were more than likely to be answered with pursed lips and a slow shake of the head.
On New Year’s Eve, the crowds that usually jammed New York’s Times Square and the downtowns of dozens of other cities were little more than dispirited clumps of indifferent celebrants. Even the frenzy that normally surrounded the climax of National Football League season was affected; when the Philadelphia Eagles met the Green Bay Packers at Franklin Field for the championship (pushed back to early January to make up for the games canceled on the day Kennedy had died), the game began with a moment of silence for Kennedy, and the halftime ceremonies were dedicated to his memory.
There was, curiously, one exception to the sense of numbed indifference. Just a few days before Kennedy’s murder, a new musical had opened on Broadway, written by the Lerner-Loewe team that had created My Fair Lady. It starred Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, and was set in the court of King Arthur: Camelot, it was called. While the reviews were mixed, the audience responded to the doomed romance of Guinevere and Sir Lancelot with an intensity that astonished the show’s creators; audiences routinely wept as if at a funeral, then cheered for endless minutes.
“It’s almost like a catharsis,” director Moss Hart said, “as if they were seeing a mythical version of what’s been taken from them.” That cat
harsis, unfortunately, was limited to a few thousand people a night in a single Manhattan theatre. For the rest of the country, the aftermath of the killing infected the spirit. Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” a topselling single the week Kennedy was killed, now took on a far more consequential meaning; it was played incessantly on the radio—almost as much as Ferlin Husky’s “Wings of a Dove” (“. . . He sends His pure, sweet love / A sign from Above / On the wings of a Dove”). Toward year’s end, a new song began receiving major airplay on the nation’s top forty AM radio stations that then dominated the airwaves. The Kingston Trio, among the most popular acts in the increasingly popular folk song genre, had recorded a song called “The New Frontier” just days before Kennedy’s death, a rousing anthem celebrating what had become the candidate’s catchphrase. The release was canceled, and replaced by the Trio’s reworking of an old Irish anti-war song, “Johnnie, We Hardly Knew Ye.” Its dirge-like melody in a minor key, and its mournful lyrics only thickened the funereal atmosphere of the holidays. (“We were marching out to the New Frontier / Now all we can do is shed a tear / And weep that you’re no longer here / Johnnie, we hardly knew ye.”)
Then Everything Changed Page 5