The impact of the murder was not confined to matters of the spirit. The mood and the weather combined to heavily dampen the gift-giving frenzy of the season. Retailers reported a 35 percent drop in sales, taking a measurable bite out of the economy. For some enterprises, the death of Kennedy was a special blow. Viking Publishers had signed up a British-born writer named Ian Fleming, who had authored a series of spy thrillers featuring a dashing, debonair secret agent named James Bond. The Bond books had never sold well in the United States, but a Viking executive had picked up a rumor that John Kennedy was a special fan of the series. “If we can get that word out, it’s going to be a gold mine!” a Viking marketing executive exulted. After Kennedy’s murder, little was heard of Fleming or James Bond again. A New York stand-up comedian named Vaughn Meader, who had begun to gain notice with his pitch-perfect impression of Kennedy, saw his bookings canceled within days of the killing.
This was the climate in which Lyndon Johnson put together his Cabinet and his White House staff. He began with a blend of prudence and audacity. He would, of course, keep J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and Alan Dulles at CIA—Kennedy had announced those decisions the day after his election, and there was no reason to roil those waters—and he kept McNamara at Defense and Dillon at Treasury. Putting two Republicans at those posts was exactly the right signal to send to Wall Street and the world. But for Secretary of State? The Washington Post had leaked the impending selection of Dean Rusk the very Sunday Kennedy was murdered, but for Johnson, the former career diplomat turned Rockefeller Foundation President was a symbol of the past. He knew whom he wanted in the job; he’d lobbied JFK hard to pick Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright.
“Johnson and Fulbright were ‘backyard pals’ and Fulbright had a reputation in academia and the press as a big-time thinker, sagacious,” recalled longtime Johnson aide Harry McPherson, and Kennedy was leaning toward the idea. But Kennedy’s liberal advisors like Harris Swofford had persuaded Kennedy to reject Fulbright because of the race problem; Fulbright, along with almost every other Southern senator, had signed the infamous 1954 “Southern Manifesto” opposing the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing school segregation. Kennedy couldn’t see how Fulbright could succeed when the U.S.-Soviet competition for friends in Africa and Asia was so intense. Fulbright said as much to Johnson when he was offered the appointment.
“Now let’s take a look at the way things will play out,” LBJ told Fulbright. “When I go out and announce you for State, who’s going to be standing right by my side? Hubert Humphrey, my Vice President, and there’s no better friend the Negroes have had in the Senate. And when I announce you, somebody else is going to be named right with you: Congressman William Dawson, from Illinois. I need a Postmaster General with good political smarts, just like Roosevelt had with Jim Farley. And I have to think that Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young just might want to be in that room when the first Negro ever is named to the Cabinet.”
He failed in his Cabinet hopes only once, when he tried to persuade Washington lawyer Abe Fortas to become Attorney General. No one was closer to Johnson than Fortas, who’d been at his side from his 1948 Senate race, when Fortas had persuaded his old friend Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to put Johnson’s name back on the ballot after a federal judge had invalidated Johnson’s 87-vote primary victory. And no Cabinet post was more sensitive, involving as it did decisions about which powerful companies and individuals to prosecute, which investigative roads the Justice Department and the FBI should or should not travel.
“I can’t do it,” Fortas told Johnson flatly. “Caroline [Agger, his wife and fellow lawyer] would make my life a living hell if I found myself working for $22,000 a year.”
It was when Johnson turned to the White House staff that the full dimensions of what he would face came into sharp, stark focus. He knew he wanted his own team around him—Busby, McPherson, Jim Rowe—but he also knew he had to have some of Jack’s men, too. For one thing, they were simply better than his guys; hadn’t they proved that in the 1960 campaign? So he called in Kennedy’s team—O’Donnell, Sorensen, O’Brien, Salinger—telling each of them, “I need you more than he did,” but he knew as he did that it was a futile effort. They had driven Kennedy’s campaign, but they had only begun to plan for his Presidency when he was killed. It wasn’t as if they had been in the White House for two or three years, with staffs of their own, experience with the levers of power and a taste for the heady life that came from being on the inside. What they had done, in fact, was to run a campaign against Johnson for the nomination; and no one knew better than Johnson that intra-party grudges die hard. Ted Sorensen agreed to help him with the Inaugural, and the others promised to think about it, but none of them seemed to be able to look him in the eye. He chalked it up to grief, until he asked Robert Kennedy to come to his office for a conversation in early January, and he got his first glimpse of what was in his Presidential future.
They met in Johnson’s seven-office suite that occupied the entire northwest Senate wing on the Capitol’s third floor. Kennedy glanced at the crystal chandelier, the frescoes on the ceiling of boys carrying baskets of flowers, young maidens reclining on couches; a Roman emperor’s banquet, the life-sized portrait of Johnson that hung over the mantel fireplace. Once they entered LBJ’s inner office, the two sat facing each other; Johnson, half a foot taller than Bobby, leaned forward, chin on hand, elbow resting on his knee, his face inches from Kennedy. I know we got off on the wrong foot, Johnson began, and I know we said things about each other that we might like to take back, but this isn’t about us. It’s about the country. I need you here, by my side, fighting for what Jack wanted. There’s no job, no position, you can’t have.
He said this knowing that the idea of Robert Kennedy as Attorney General would threaten a mass outbreak of cardiac arrest among his political supporters and campaign contributors. But as he talked, as his jabbing finger grew closer to Kennedy’s chest, he told Kennedy, “I want us to leave this room and announce you’ll be here, working for his ideas every day. There’s a room full of reporters waiting, and I’d like it very much if we could come to an agreement about what you’ll be doing to fight for all those ideas.” The younger man put up his hand and shook his head.
“That’s not going to happen, Lyndon. I’m going back to Massachusetts to take Jack’s Senate seat. The family’s decided this.” There was a long moment of silence as Johnson glared at Kennedy, as if he could will Bobby to un-speak the words.
“You mean your father’s decided this,” Johnson finally said.
“I think you’ve said more than enough about my father,” Bobby replied. “But we don’t need to have an argument about this. When Joe Jr. was killed in the war, Jack took his place; I’m going to take his. I don’t know if I’m cut out to be a senator . . . from what I saw on the Labor Rackets Committee, it’s a lot of nice words and angry words and more words. But I’ll have two years to decide that. For now, I think that’s where I belong, and I hope I can be helpful to you there. Besides, Lyndon”—everyone else was already calling him “Mr. President,” but the runt was still acting as if his big brother were going to be running things—“you need your own people with you. It wouldn’t be fair to you to have you surrounded with people you don’t know, and who don’t know you. If you’d like, we can meet the press together, and you can tell them this is what you’ve encouraged me to do. Or if you’d rather, I won’t say anything right now, and we’ll make the announcement back in Boston.”
They chatted inconsequentially for a few minutes more, so that the reporters staking out the Senate would not write that their conversation had only lasted a few minutes, that something must have gone awry. But as they talked about federal aid to education, and a health care plan for the elderly, and help for the impoverished of Appalachia, Johnson could only think of one thing: A goddamn government in exile, that’s what Bobby’s going to have here. And that’s why all his people couldn’t look me in the eye when I asked them to join me; the
y knew goddamn well they were all going with Bobby. And the next morning, Robert Kennedy stood on the steps of the state capitol in Boston, surrounded by Jackie, Ethel, Ted, Eunice, Jean, Joe, and Rose, and announced that he was accepting Governor Furcolo’s appointment. Furcolo and the Kennedys ardently disliked each other; John had actually backed his opponent, commenting that “sometimes party asks too much,” but if the soon-to-be ex-governor Furcolo had refused to appoint Bobby, he’d have been lynched. And Johnson stood before the microphones and cameras in Washington and welcomed the appointment, said he was looking forward to Kennedy’s voice and vision in the Senate, to his wise counsel in helping Johnson make John Kennedy’s dreams a reality, and he almost choked on the words.
“Rematch?” the tabloid headlines screamed the next day, and “Bobby in’64?” Within forty-eight hours of Bobby’s announcement, T-shirts were in the window of Times Square and Washington, D.C., tourist shops, picturing John Kennedy in heaven gazing down on his brother.
All through that season, Lyndon Johnson worked the phones, summoned the leaders of business, labor, education, agriculture, huddled with governors, senators, leaders of the House, Democratic Party chieftains who still controlled big-city machines and state organizations in New Jersey, Indiana, Missouri. In these counsels he was as masterful as he had been as the Senate’s puppet master. Yes, they told him, they would heed his pleas for forbearance, they would not press their demands too insistently. Yes, said Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, they would do all they could to damp down the passions of the young Negro firebrands, the John Lewises who were threatening to board intercity buses in the North to challenge the segregation that was in place in the South. Yes, the Chamber of Commerce said, they understood he’d be pushing for federal aid to education and medical care for old folks, and they’d try to turn down the thermostat when they fought him; surely they knew he had their interests at heart, he was the best friend business could have in the White House. Yes, labor leaders said, they knew Lyndon had to watch the budget, had to work with hawkeyed scrooges like Wilbur Mills and Howard Smith, men who ran their committees like absolute monarchs; yes, he’d fight for a higher minimum wage, but it couldn’t be that much higher—hell, they had to know he was the best friend labor could have in the White House (hadn’t he learned all he had to know about the fat cats and bankers from his granddaddy, who’d taught him, “They lived off our sweat and even before air-conditioning, they didn’t know what sweat was. They just clipped coupons and wrote down debentures we couldn’t spell and stole our pants out from under us”?).
It was his playing field, this inside game, and no one did it better. The problem, as the Inauguration approached, was that the Presidency wasn’t an inside game, or at least, not only an inside game. He’d had a taste of that when he’d gone up against Kennedy for the nomination, relying on his allies in the Senate to deliver him the delegates, but it was as if those delegates were listening to a message he could neither deliver nor even hear, so that when he matched his experience, his legislative triumphs, his masterful ability to guide a bill through Congress like a riverboat captain who knew every sandbar and current on the Mississippi, and matched it against the thin-gruel record of a show horse running on his good looks and his daddy’s money, the people who made the decisions had simply tuned him out, put him aside like yesterday’s paper. And now, as he used all of his skills to hold the fragile country together, as he pleaded and promised and cautioned and maybe even threatened a bit, as public opinion polls reported stratospherically high approval ratings, he sensed—no, he knew—that at some primal level he was not connecting.
A big part of the problem was television. By 1960, the medium had come to full maturity, had come in fact to domination over the political process. Johnson had seen it take hold back in ’52 when Eisenhower’s backers had watched on TV as the convention, wired for conservative hero Bob Taft, began to roll over Ike’s delegate challenges; they then swamped the convention with telegrams until the party wheel horses surrendered, gave the disputed delegations, and thus the nomination, to Ike.
He’d seen Richard Nixon a few months later, his Vice Presidential nomination hanging by a thread amid charges of financial chicanery, go on TV for a half hour, talking not of bills or proposals, but of his savings accounts, his mortgage, his wife’s cloth coat, his kids’ dog, for God’s sakes. And it had worked; this personal, face-to-face appeal had saved his career, and this past November he’d damn near won the White House. And he’d seen John Kennedy, with his angular face, his incandescent smile, his modulated voice and gestures, coolly project the image of a thoughtful, mature leader. It was a medium made for Kennedy; for Johnson, it was a nemesis. The intense lights deepened the furrows on his face, emphasized the jowls, enveloped him with a sense of weight, gloom, authority (visitors who met him for the first time in person were invariably struck by how handsome, how electric he was). In part, his trouble with the medium was a case of self-inflicted wounds. He was in face-to-face conversation animated, funny, acute. But he did not trust himself on the tube, thought he came off as vulgar, an uneducated rube. So he measured out his words . . . slowly . . . ponderously. It reeked of insincerity, which only deepened his self-consciousness, which only turned his public persona into the sort of stuffed-up, pompous political figure that had been the object of ridicule going back to Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Artemus Ward.
On January 4, 1961, the day after the new Congress had made it official, President-elect Johnson sat down in front of television cameras for an unprecedented conversation carried on all three networks. Negotiations over the ground rules were intense; one network executive said later, “It’d have been a lot easier if Khrushchev and Mao had been on the other side of the table.” Johnson’s emissary, the advertising and public relations man Jack Valenti, flatly rejected live coverage. Eisenhower’s press conferences were never broadcast live, he argued, and for good reason; there was no way the President-elect was going to risk the consequences of an untoward word (“Don’t you think the Russians will be watching?” Valenti said). He also insisted on final approval before letting the tape of the interview hit the airwaves (“What happens if you say no?” an NBC executive asked. “Have Perry Como on standby,” Valenti said). They bickered about how long it should be. Was an hour too brief? Was two hours too long? And they fought for days about where to do the interview. Johnson’s pashalike Senate offices? No, he was the President-elect, and a Senate setting would diminish him. A television studio? Worse—he was the incoming leader of the free world, not some TV pitchman. Well, the White House, then. No, he wasn’t yet the President; that would be arrogant. Don Hewitt, a young CBS producer who had supervised the Nixon-Kennedy debates, broke the impasse by suggesting Blair House, the town house just across the street from the White House, where world leaders sometimes stayed, and where incoming Presidents slept the night before they were inaugurated. He also resolved the issue of length: “Sixty minutes,” Hewitt said, “would be perfect.”
But who would sit down with the President-elect? Television may have come into its own by 1960, but Lyndon Johnson’s feet were planted squarely in an earlier era, where the newspaper columnist was king; they were the men whose words were read all around the country, digested over breakfast by anyone who mattered. Maybe Ed Murrow was in their class, but he was leaving CBS to run the U.S. Information Agency, a leaving made inevitable after the man who owned CBS, Bill Paley, had publicly emasculated him when Murrow had dared to slap the industry in public for its greed (on Election Night 1958, Murrow, the man who had brought Americans the news from London every night during the Blitz, the man who had challenged Joe McCarthy at the height of his power, was banished from the anchor desk, perched on a catwalk, reporting returns from a wall display). And even if you could get Murrow, you’d then have to have men from the other networks, and Lyndon Johnson wasn’t about to sit down with David Brinkley, the NBC smart-ass who palled around with the Kennedys and who had called Lyndon’s whistle-stop tour “th
e Cornpone Special,” words that had come straight from Hyannis Port. So on that January night, Johnson sat down with James Reston of the Times and Walter Lippmann of the Post, with Howard K. Smith from CBS moderating the conversation, a TV man chosen by lot. The questions were respectful, even deferential, and Johnson spoke only in the broadest of generalities. Was the conflict between America and Russia basically irreconcilable?
“I’ve always believed,” he said, with an attempt at a beatific smile, “that the hopes and dreams of a man who tills the soil are about the same whether he lives on the banks of the Colorado or on the banks of the Danube.”
And what about the challenges here at home, about which John Kennedy had spoken throughout the campaign? Here Johnson sounded a very different note. “I’ve always thought,” he said, “that what the man in the street wants is not a big debate on fundamental issues. He wants a little medical care, a rug on the floor, a picture on the wall, a little music in the house, and a place to take Molly and the grandchildren when he retires.”
Then Everything Changed Page 6