The reviews were fine, the editorial pages of the papers all pretty much struck the same note: that the country should be grateful that in these trying times, after the terrible trauma of Kennedy’s violent death, we had a sober, experienced man at the nation’s helm. But at some primal level, Johnson could sense that, while the people were reassured, while they knew he was fully capable of managing the government, while they respected him, he simply did not inspire affection, warmth, emulation, aspiration.
LATE ON the freezing cold morning of January 20, 1961, the dignitaries began to gather on the steps of the Capitol’s East Front for the inauguration of Lyndon Johnson. Eight inches of snow had fallen the night before, paralyzing the city, turning the streets impassable, marooning hundreds of motorists, shutting down National Airport. By morning the temperature was 22 degrees, and the eighteen-mile-per-hour wind gusts made it feel more like zero. It was the kind of weather that had killed William Henry Harrison in 1841 (he’d come down with pneumonia after giving the longest Inaugural speech in history). Had it been a normal Inaugural, the weather would have created a social disaster, with dozens of parties and dinners canceled. But this was no normal Inaugural; for many of the Democrats who would have come to celebrate Kennedy’s triumph, the whole idea of ball gowns and tuxedos, dance orchestras and champagne dinners, was too jarring after the two months unlike any they had lived through. Indeed, the Inaugural Eve snowstorm itself was a cruel joke of fate, invoking the storm that had hit the capital the day John Kennedy was killed. There would be dinners and dances later that night—the world had to know that America wasn’t in some kind of comatose state, that it could mark the beginning of a new Presidency with pomp and circumstance—but among the powerful assembling on the Capitol steps the mood was dutiful, not joyous.
Shortly after noon, Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, stepped out of the Rotunda and made their way to their seats. The night before, he’d gathered at the White House with Eisenhower and former Presidents Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover—as strong a signal of continuity as could be mustered. Now, as he sat in the January chill, he glanced through the Inaugural address one last time and reassured himself that he and his speechwriters had made the right decision. He’d asked Sorensen to send him the drafts of what was to be Kennedy’s Inaugural, and Ted had agreed, but had warned, “I’m not sure this is a good fit.” And as soon as he read it, Johnson saw that Sorensen was right. It wasn’t just the cadence, with its metered, almost poetic rhythm and high-flown language (“now the trumpet summons us again . . .”); it was that the whole theme was framed around Kennedy himself. Why, that language right near the beginning—“the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans”—couldn’t possibly come out of the mouth of a man whose personality and character so clearly marked him as one of the old generation of leaders. And he knew he could never deliver that climactic call: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Johnson’s whole public life was rooted in what he could do for the people: bringing electricity into their farms and homes, roads into their towns, books into their schools.
So after Reverend Billy Graham delivered the invocation, Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the oath, and the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief,” Johnson delivered a speech that walked a fine line between the rhetorical demands of an Inaugural and his own nature.
“We gather under brilliant sunshine this day, but a shadow lies across our hearts,” he began.
“It is fitting and proper that we mourn the loss of the man we chose to lead us, but it is from John Kennedy’s own words that we will find solace and strength. On this winter’s day, we remember what he said on a summer night: ‘We are not here to curse the darkness; we are here to light a candle.’ He invoked the scriptural admonition to ‘be strong, and of good courage; be not afraid [nor] discouraged.’
“For a hundred and seventy years, this nation has met every challenge to its future; we won our freedom from the most powerful empire on earth; we healed from the conflict at home that tore us from each other; we overcame economic calamity that threw millions into poverty; conquered a madman’s lust for conquest that enveloped the world into war. Today, as we struggle to preserve peace and freedom in a dangerous world, we make this promise to John Kennedy: We will not succumb to the temptation to yield to our grief.”
He took a few lines from Sorensen’s draft, shaping them to his simpler style (“We will not negotiate out of fear, but we’ll never be afraid to negotiate”), and added a pointed reference to civil rights. After warning America’s allies to stay united because “a house divided against itself cannot stand, and the house of freedom must not fall,” he turned toward home and said, “We cannot claim to be defenders of freedom around the world if millions here at home are denied the fruits of freedom because of the color of their skin.”
It was by far the boldest statement any incoming President had ever made about the race issue, and it would have been the dominant story of the day . . . except that the moment that galvanized the country, the photo that was on the front page of every paper in the country, was the image of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, seated on the Inaugural platform next to Jacqueline Kennedy, watching the ceremony with tears streaming down his face.
Later that night and into the next morning, as Johnson obsessively watched the TV coverage and scanned the morning papers, the conviction grew that would guide him through the rest of his Presidency.
“I took the oath,” he told a confidant later. “I became President. But for millions of Americans, I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no Presidential covering, a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper . . . and then there were the bigots and the dividers, and the Eastern intellectuals, who were waiting to knock me down before I could even begin to stand up.”
From that first day, Lyndon Johnson was determined to win not just the respect of the country, but its love; he would show them, the Harvards, the snobs, the smug Georgetown set, that a poor boy from the hardscrabble world of southwest Texas, using the skills he had mastered over a lifetime, could deliver more, far more, than a manufactured hero. He knew every lever of influence and how to pull it; he could sense the strength and weakness of every man he’d ever met; and by the time his Presidency was done, he would have done more, given more to the American people than anyone since FDR . . . and by then, they would learn to love him.
And for a while, it seemed to work.
HE KNEW IT as surely as he knew the contours of the land where he was born, as surely as he’d known the men he’d led in the Senate: at the heart of what ailed the country, at the heart of his own ambitions for himself and his region, was race. It was what divided the South from the rest of America; it was for almost every politician from the South both sail and anchor. You played on the deepest fears of whites and rode those currents into office, but you could never really hope for the ultimate prize; you were held fast by the chains of color. Even as he had abandoned his youthful liberalism when he sought the Texas Senate seat in ’48, he’d always believed that the real hope for his region—and his Democratic Party—was to bring the black man and the white working man together. He loved to tell the story of the Southern politician who mused, “Just once before I die I’d like to go home and hear a real Democratic speech. All they ever hear down there now is ‘nigra, nigra, nigra.’”
And the way to do that, Johnson knew, was with the vote. He understood the Negro hunger for respect; he’d watched the Montgomery, Alabama, boycott in ’55 bring a whole colored community together risking jail, the loss of jobs, enduring the physical burdens of walking miles a day so as not to patronize segregated buses, elevating a young preacher to national prominence. He’d seen the sit-ins take root in ’60, beginning in February, when four students at North Carolina A & T walked into an F. W. Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, bought school supplies, then sat down at the segregated lunch counter and tried to order Cokes. It was a brilliant tactic: the Ne
gro boys and girls dressed in their Sunday best, sitting quietly at the counter, reading their textbooks, while a gaggle of slack-jawed white boys cursed them, doused them with ketchup and mustard. By late spring, the sit-ins had spread to dozens of cities, and in the North, sympathizers were picketing the Woolworth’s from New York to Los Angeles. The national chains were starting to feel the heat.
And yet, Johnson knew that at some level, the demand for respect at the lunch counter was touching the exposed nerve of the Southern white: You let them sit next to you, and the next thing you know, they’ll be in your schools, showering with your sons, threatening your daughters. There was no telling where this fear might lead, what response it would produce, but his own fear deepened in 1961, on the day after his Inaugural, when seven blacks and six whites boarded Greyhound and Trailways buses in Washington, D.C., bound for points throughout the South, where they intended to challenge the segregated seating in Southern bus terminals. In Alabama, mobs of whites organized by Police Commissioner Bull Connor and Sergeant Tom Cook savagely beat the protesters in Anniston, and then in Birmingham, as FBI agents stood and watched. The next day, Johnson called Vice President Humphrey to the Oval Office. “I’m telling you, this is the wrong goddamn fight! Never mind that it’s giving us a black eye all over the world; never mind that God knows how many Africans will see those pictures and decide, hell, maybe the Russians have a better idea. Never mind that some of those riders almost died. They’re aiming at the wrong target.
“Yes, Hubert,” he said, “I want all those things—buses, restaurants, all of that—but the right to vote, with no ifs, ands, or buts, that’s the key. When the Negroes get that, they’ll have every politician, north and south, east and west, kissing their asses, begging for their support.”
No one knew better than Johnson that getting a voting rights bill through the Congress was just about impossible. You could get it through the House of Representatives—that was a cinch; civil rights bills had passed any number of times, where the majority could do pretty much what it wanted. But the Senate was designed to slow things down—“the saucer in which you pour your coffee to cool it,” George Washington had said of it—and in 1961, Southern senators held a death grip on key committees, and had long ago mastered the rules of the chamber, where you could talk a bill to death unless two-thirds of the chamber voted to stop it, and where a single senator could bring the whole enterprise to a screeching halt. In ’57, he’d steered a civil rights bill through the Senate, the first since Reconstruction, but it was largely for show, and it accomplished almost nothing. It was supposed to help Negroes vote, but in 1960, fewer blacks had voted in the South than they had in ’56. So what to do? He found the answer in a favorite tactic of his idol, FDR. Whenever Eleanor would bring his liberal friends to the White House to complain about the slow pace of action, Roosevelt would always tell them the same thing: You have to put some pressure on me.
So two days after the first “Freedom Rides” had ended in violence, he placed a series of calls to the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, the Urban League’s Whitney Young, and to the young preacher Martin Luther King.
“I need you to come to Washington and start civil-righting,” he began every call bluntly. And he laid out exactly what he had in mind, as though he’d been studying three-dimensional chess—which, in a sense, he had been doing all his life.
“It’s like I said to you right after Jack Kennedy was killed,” he reminded King. “You win the vote, and everything else falls right into place. You can take the most bigoted man from Mississippi, the man who’s sure that if a Negro drinks a cup of coffee next to his wife, he’ll be raping her by sundown, but if you ask him if he really thinks it’s fair that a man can’t vote for his President or his congressman because he was born with black skin, he’s gonna stop and swallow hard”—Johnson gulped a couple of times at this point—“and he’ll be rocked back on his heels. And the way I need you to come down here and fight for that vote is with the biggest march this town has ever seen. Your man Bayard Rustin said it back in ’59: ‘If a hundred thousand people come to Washington, the President will meet with its leaders and the Congress will sit in special session.’ He was right: You need a march so big you’ll scare the daylights out of Washington. Hell, I might have to say something about my concern about disruption and violence. And you need your speakers to beat me up a bit, too.”
His message to Wilkins and Young had a slight variation. You know what they’re saying, the young Turks in Harlem and Chicago, and in the colored colleges all over the South: they’re saying you’re over the hill; they need new blood. You and I know it’s not true; hell, you’ve done more for the race than any fifty people I know. Reverend King has the newspapers and the magazine covers and the TV cameras, but you’ve got your friends in labor and business who can make this happen. And maybe you can show the young Turks what a couple of old tigers can do.
Within a week, a civil rights coalition announced plans for a major demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial to take place in April 1961, with a single demand: the right to vote. The younger, more militant wing of the civil rights movement was torn between tepid support of the march and a determination to continue the freedom rides across the South. In public, President Johnson expressed pro forma support for the right of demonstrators to come to Washington, but cautioned the organizers to avoid any words and deeds that might create an atmosphere where violence or disruption might occur, and urged officials and private citizens alike to avoid any acts of provocation. In private, he offered a very different view to Special Assistant Bill Moyers.
“Every time Bull Connor cracks a head open, every time Huntley and Brinkley put on a picture of a well-dressed colored boy with blood on his white shirt, I’m one step closer to a voting bill I can pass. Now, I don’t want to see anyone die on one of those buses, but I think I know something about the way the world works, and I don’t know that there’s ever been a revolution without a martyr or two.”
He pressed the point to one of his closest confidants, CBS president Frank Stanton, whose frequent visits to the White House rarely showed up on the official visitors’ log.
“You need to put those pictures on the news every day, they’re the biggest leverage I have. I know your stations in the South will black out those stories, but that’s not where it matters—we need the people all over the country to see what’s going on, so they’ll start yelling at their senators to do something about it.”
And when those images showed up night after night on the network news, when the AP and UPI pictures of bloody beatings hit the newspaper front pages—Johnson had quietly brokered sit-down interviews with Washington correspondents in return for the coverage—the President used the very images he had lobbied for when he called in the Southern senators for Oval Office conferences.
“I wonder,” he began, “how many of you are planning to send money to the Communist Party of Russia, so they can pay their stooges in Europe and Africa and South America to poison the people against the United States. Of course you wouldn’t do that, there’s no group of men in the Congress more against the Communists than you.” His face turned sorrowful, his chin almost grazing his neck. “And do any of you want me going off to meet with Khrushchev with a weight on my shoulders so heavy I could barely walk into the room? I know you don’t want to bear me down with that weight. But you have to know that every time Adlai stands up at the UN and starts talking to the Russians about freedom, they just hold up something like this”—he threw the front page of the Washington Post on the table in front of his chair—“and just laugh in our face. We’re in a death struggle with the Communists—you know, they have a whole university in Moscow, where they bring young people in from every country in Africa and Asia and God knows where else, to teach them why they should sign up with the Communists. And this”—he slammed his fist down on the front page of the Post with enough force to rattle the coffee cups—“is their biggest goddamn argument. ‘If you were American,’ the Communis
ts tell those Africans, ‘you wouldn’t be allowed to vote in your own country. And if you tried, you’d be killed.’ ”
“If those outside agitators and their left-wing friends in the press—” Senator John McClellan of Arkansas began.
“I know all about those agitators,” Johnson interrupted. “I get memos from Edgar Hoover every day. You think I don’t know what they’re up to, them and the press? You think I don’t know they want to embarrass me and my Presidency, make me out to be a redneck rube, prove a man from the South has no business in this office, so that Bobby has a reason to go against me? But that’s not what’s at stake here. I know what you need to do to make the folks at home happy, but I want you to know that I’m going to do what I have to do. I’m under tremendous pressure from the fire breathers to do a Second Reconstruction—I mean, they want me to put troops in every bus station and five-and-dime south of the Potomac. I’m trying as hard as I know how to keep them on the fight for the vote, so maybe we can keep the pressure off the lunch counters and the public swimming pools.”
When the gathering ended, he motioned Georgia’s Richard Russell to stay behind. Johnson sat down across from him, close enough so that their knees grazed each other.
“I want you to know, Dick,” the President said to the man he’d treated as a father in his years in the Senate, “I’m not going to compromise on this. If I have to, I’m going to run right over you.”
“You may do that,” Russell said. “But by God it’s going to cost you the South and the election.”
“So be it,” Johnson said. “But if I don’t do it, you’ll be running on a ticket in ’64 with Hubert, or maybe Bobby Kennedy at the top. There’re Democrats from New York to California who can’t wait to put one of their own in my place, and this is the only way to stop them.”
Then Everything Changed Page 7