Landslide

by Jonathan Darman

  Now, though, the gap between the Johnsons and Jackie was greater than the differences of region or taste; it was the gap between the living and the dead. In the first moments of unexpected widowhood, Jackie could not imagine life without her husband, could not imagine life at all. Accepting staffers’ condolences that weekend, she had a standard response: Poor thing, what will become of you? She might have been speaking to herself. Paying his respects the night of the assassination, Ben Bradlee found Jackie to be a “totally doomed child” who looked as though she had been “burned alive.” She would write to Bradlee a few weeks later: “I consider that my life is over and I will spend the rest of it waiting for it really to be over.”

  When Franklin Roosevelt died in office in 1945, his successor, Harry Truman, had rushed to the White House to call upon the dead president’s widow. Finding Eleanor Roosevelt in her sitting room in the residence, an emotional Truman asked if there was anything he could do for her. Mrs. Roosevelt was composed and correct. “Is there anything we can do for you?” she replied. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

  That was too much to expect of Jackie, the doomed child. The most she could do for Johnson, her husband’s constitutional successor, was to include him, briefly, in her despair. On Sunday, riding to a memorial service for her husband in the Capitol, she turned toward Johnson, sitting beside her in the limousine. “Oh, Lyndon,” she said, “what an awful way for you to come in.”

  Her first concern was the part she had to play. She was the president’s widow, a public figure, and she was determined to execute her performance flawlessly. She had personally selected many of the details of the two-day funeral ceremonies—the arrangement of the caisson, the officiant at the low funeral mass, the Irish cadets who would perform a mourning drill. A black lace mantilla would be fine for her to wear to the ceremony at the Capitol, she told her White House staff, but for the funeral, only a regular mourning veil would do.

  She knew that the nation would be watching. Bradlee that weekend noticed how Jackie grew distracted by the television, the images “of the country grieving, of people, including herself and her children and the other Kennedys, filing silently, prayerfully past the presidential casket on view in the halls of Congress.”

  Not only did she see the nation’s grief, she intuited its power. The tragic spectacle she created offered catharsis to the grieving nation—and made a resounding case for her husband’s greatness. It was Jackie who insisted that, to the extent good taste allowed, President Kennedy’s caisson should be fashioned in the form of President Lincoln’s; Jackie who took a special interest in the account of Lincoln’s funeral procession; Jackie who gave America majesty because she understood majesty’s special value to history. She made her husband’s greatness self-evident: Only a great president could provoke such a reaction from his people. Only a figure destined for history could earn such a day.

  And this case for Kennedy was, inevitably, made at the expense of his successor. What made her spectacle tragic was the unspoken belief that Kennedy’s kind of grace and greatness would not, could not, be seen again. However unconsciously, the story Kennedy’s widow told that day directly refuted the story Johnson was trying to tell. He believed the country desperately needed a new leader to follow, a man on a horse to guide everyone out of the mud. She gave the country Black Jack, the willful steed with empty boots reversed in its stirrups and no rider at all.

  And so as the hours passed, Johnson’s aides and advisers worried more and more about how he could possibly start his new story for the country. They suspected Kennedy loyalists when rumors spread through the press corps that Johnson had been afraid to walk in the procession behind Mrs. Kennedy on account of security threats. On Sunday afternoon, Johnson spoke with Jack Brooks, a Texas congressman and a close friend. “We’ve got to start being—not to be cold-blooded, but I mean, to be realistic,” said Brooks. “We ought to be pointing out that we’ve got a fine president that can do the job and is because it’s good for the … continuity of the country.”

  But Johnson did not take the bait. He simply changed the subject: “Where are you eating dinner?”

  His voice was calm and measured for a man who had endured three days of strain. By then, he had stopped trying to make the cameras turn toward him. Patience and restraint had never been Johnson virtues—“Lyndon wants it yesterday” was the saying among his staff—but there was one circumstance in which he was capable of not just patience but monkish discipline and self-denial, when he was capable of putting off all pleasure and gratification, of turning away from even the things he wanted most. He could deny himself anything when he had set his mind on a plan.

  And that was how he kept himself contained as the Kennedys had their days—Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. In those days they took the nation’s story further and further from him, into the realm of timeless drama, the realm of myth. He did not object; he mostly stood by and watched.

  In public, he would say nothing, because in private, he had come up with a strategy. He had a plan to take the emerging myth of John F. Kennedy and make it work for him.

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, there’d been another unfortunate scene with Bobby Kennedy at the first cabinet meeting of Johnson’s presidency. After the various department heads had gathered in the Cabinet Room, Johnson, sitting in the president’s place at the table, started the meeting, taking the lead in the most formal setting he’d yet attempted. But something wasn’t right. The attorney general’s chair was conspicuously empty.

  Its occupant was no farther away than the hallway. Tending a growing crop of resentment toward Johnson, Bobby Kennedy had thought about skipping the meeting, and entered only after some strong pleading from Mac Bundy. The other cabinet members, seeing the fallen president’s brother walk in, rose in respect. Johnson made a point of staying seated. Bobby looked at him in stunned disbelief. “It was quite clear,” Orville Freeman, the agriculture secretary, later said, “that he could hardly countenance Lyndon Johnson sitting in his brother’s seat.”

  What followed seemed like a scene out of Hamlet. The new president, in the old president’s place, spoke coldly of the constitutional succession. Then Adlai Stevenson, the UN ambassador, rose to read a lengthy statement he had prepared ahead of time, praising Johnson’s performance since the shooting. Stevenson, twice the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency, had long been disdained by the Kennedys, who saw him as weak—the most unpardonable sin. To Bobby, Adlai’s words were “a few paragraphs on how nice Lyndon Johnson was,” he would later say. “I felt it was fine. It just struck me that he had to read the damn thing.”

  Then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the senior cabinet member and another old target of Bobby’s disdain, stood to offer tribute and support. “A nice little statement,” Bobby would later say. “Afterwards, somebody told me how impressed Lyndon was with Dean Rusk because he’s the only one who spoke up at the Cabinet meeting. So I thought … what he wanted is declarations of loyalty, fidelity from all of us.”

  Given the circumstances, loyalty and fidelity were hardly unreasonable requests. But Bobby—sleep-deprived, transformed by grief—was not inclined to be reasonable. As the meeting progressed, he said nary a word, and his silent, sullen presence took hold of the president. Johnson’s own words grew uncertain and hollow. After twenty or so minutes the meeting broke up and the cabinet officers departed, unsettled.

  Johnson walked out of the meeting enraged, convinced that Bobby had deliberately come in late in order to humiliate him and thwart his efforts to take control. After the meeting, Johnson called House Speaker John McCormack. “I can’t sit still. I’ve got to keep the government going,” he told the Speaker. “But I don’t want the family to feel that I am having any lack of respect, so I have a very delicate wire to walk there.”

  And it wasn’t just the Kennedy family working against him—it was almost every member of the Kennedy court. By midday on Saturday, he had announced his intention to keep all of President Ke
nnedy’s cabinet. Nor would letters of resignation, he made it known, be accepted from any of the Kennedy White House staff. To a succession of bleary-eyed Kennedy men (for they were almost exclusively men) he’d offered the same “I need you more than he needed you” line. Sometimes he would add a hopeful corollary: “I consider you one of my men now.”

  A few of them were happy to become his men. McGeorge Bundy immediately attached himself to Johnson’s side, offering crisp tutorials on world affairs and confident advice on how to handle the extraordinary assemblage of foreign dignitaries descending on Washington for the funeral. Bundy had been a loyal aide and admirer of President Kennedy. The assassination, he told the columnist Joseph Alsop, had struck him harder than the death of his own father. But as a buttoned-up son of Brahmin Boston, he was out of place in the wistful Irish wake scene playing out in the White House. To serve the president, to remember that “the show must go on,” to work—that was the best way Bundy knew to cope.

  Others found this comforting as well. Robert McNamara, the dashing defense secretary whom Kennedy had lured away from the presidency of the Ford Motor Company, was known in the press for his superhuman work habits. Now was no exception. He was everywhere that first weekend, shuttling back and forth over the Kennedy-Johnson divide. One moment he was consoling Bobby and Jackie in the White House and trudging up a sodden hill at Arlington Cemetery in the pouring rain to select the Kennedy grave site. The next he was sitting attentively at a Johnson cabinet meeting, with no hint, save the water dripping from his suit, that he had anything on his mind beyond his ongoing responsibilities as secretary of defense.

  Dean Rusk quickly made himself available as well. The secretary of state had been a marginal figure under Kennedy, a president who had preferred to run his own foreign policy. But Rusk’s stiff propriety and bureaucratspeak—qualities that had bored the Kennedys to death—were a comfort to Johnson. And it was a comfort and a happy coincidence that these three men—Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy—who were so ready to offer their allegiance happened to be the administration’s three senior civilian national security officials.

  Meeting with these men, Johnson began to look like a president. On Sunday, they joined him to hear a report from Ambassador Lodge on the situation in South Vietnam. Few Americans were thinking much about Vietnam in November 1963, but Johnson was more than familiar with the dire situation there. It had been American policy since the Truman administration to oppose Communist-influenced nationalism in Indochina, a colonial holding of France. After the French were defeated by the Communist nationalist Viet Minh at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Vietnam had been partitioned into two zones divided at the 17th Parallel with a Communist north, led by Ho Chi Minh, and a non-Communist south with a capital in Saigon. Worried that a Vietnamese peninsula united under Communist authority could lead to Communist domination of Asia and the Pacific, the United States had become the chief patron of the Saigon government, a nominally republican regime led by a devout Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem.

  South Vietnam had been a canker throughout the Kennedy presidency. The Vietcong, a North Vietnamese–backed Communist insurgency, had waged a brutal and effective campaign against the Saigon government. They were supported by a growing number of peasants in the South Vietnamese countryside. As the situation deteriorated, the Kennedy administration bankrolled an expansion of the South Vietnamese army and sent several thousand military personnel to serve as “advisers” in South Vietnam. The administration grew exasperated with its client, Diem, whom it considered a hapless defender of the regime who had needlessly antagonized his people by oppressing the country’s Buddhist majority. Three weeks before Kennedy’s death, a group of South Vietnamese generals had, with tacit U.S. approval, overthrown the Diem regime and gone on to assassinate Diem and his brother. The bloody conclusion had demoralized Kennedy. By the time he’d traveled to Dallas, he was deeply pessimistic about the chances of success for his administration’s policy in Indochina.

  Now, though, Kennedy was gone and the policy remained. Johnson listened as his new advisers gave a grim report: the new, post-Diem regime in Saigon was incompetent, and there was little hope that any South Vietnamese government could withstand the Communists without direct U.S. military involvement. Johnson would have to make a decision about Vietnam policy in the not-too-distant future. None of this was startling news to him. Johnson had visited South Vietnam in 1961; he had shaken Diem’s hand. And he had been watching presidents face bad news from that part of the world for a decade, first as majority leader in the Eisenhower years, then as Kennedy’s vice president. This was what American presidents did: receive grim reports about Vietnam and conclude that there was no choice, for the moment, but to stay the course. Here at last was a chance to really act like a president. With Lodge, Johnson was forceful: “I am not going to lose Vietnam.”

  There were other grim comforts in those first days. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, delivered breathless updates to the new president on the investigation into the crime in Dallas. Under Kennedy, Hoover had been in an open state of war with Bobby Kennedy, his nominal superior in the Department of Justice. A Hoover friend of long standing, Johnson knew that the director had been particularly enraged by Bobby’s insistence that the director’s communications with the White House go through him. Shortly after his first contretemps with Bobby, outside the Oval Office, Johnson received an update from Hoover on the investigation in Dallas. When the director had finished, Johnson signaled to Hoover that things had changed: “I wonder if you will get me a little synopsis and let me have what developments come your way during the day.”

  In Hoover, Johnson found allegiance and validation for the fear he still felt, both of which he’d struggled to find elsewhere. In the first moments after the assassination, when an international conspiracy seemed a very real possibility, Kennedy’s aides were in a state of shock, too dazed to process the potential danger. By the time they emerged from that daze, Oswald had been captured. By Saturday morning, the consensus in the press seemed to be that Kennedy’s killer was a crazed lunatic, not an international saboteur, part of a larger conspiracy.

  But Johnson could remember the smell of gunpowder wafting over his limousine in Dealey Plaza. He had been roused from shock sooner than the others, jolted into reality by the fear that a nuclear war was coming and that he would have to stop it. He hadn’t quite let go of this fear. “What would you think of the possibility a foreign government was involved in this?” he asked Kennedy’s counselor, Ted Sorensen, on Saturday night. “Do you have any evidence?” Sorensen asked. Johnson showed him a classified memo that vaguely outlined a threat. Sorensen brushed it aside, dismissively: “Meaningless.”

  And as the hours rolled by, that was how most of the Kennedy men seemed to Johnson: animated only in their contempt. On Saturday, Arthur M. Schlesinger, the young historian turned Kennedy aide, quickly penned a letter of resignation to the new president, which the new president just as quickly rejected. Schlesinger begrudgingly agreed to carry on, but he wrote in his diary, “my heart is not in it.” Taking a phone call from Johnson that weekend, Sorensen replied, “Yes, Mr. President,” and then broke into tears. Recounting his long journey with the body of the fallen president on Friday night, Kennedy’s loyal aide Dave Powers was defiant: “I carried my president.”

  When he looked at the Kennedy aides, Johnson would later say, “the impact of Kennedy’s death was evident everywhere—in the looks on their faces and the sound of their voices.” This made sense enough. The Washington that Johnson knew was a kingdom ruled by various tribes, a place where the fortunes of lesser men and women were tied to the destinies of the politicians they served. Allegiance was everything: you were a Kennedy person or a Johnson person. That was what the Kennedy aides were struggling with, he thought—the fall from power. “Suddenly they were outsiders,” he said, “outsiders on the inside. The White House is small but if you’re not at the center it seems enormous … So I determined to k
eep them informed, I determined to keep them busy.”

  But Kennedy’s men were mourning more than just the loss of influence; they were mourning a part of themselves. Washington was “littered with male widows” after the assassination, Joe Alsop later wrote, men who knew that “nothing would quite be the same.” The dead president, with his wit and his charm and his erudition and his good looks, had taken the grubby work of politics and infused it with glamour, taken the drudgery of policy work and made it into the stuff of high purpose. Working for him, his aides felt like better, brighter versions of themselves.

  And they felt young. Everyone longed to be invited to the Kennedys’ dinner dances, magical evenings in the East Room where the president and First Lady hosted an eclectic mix of accomplished artists and intellectuals along with glamorous jet-setters from New York and Europe. A guest at one of these occasions could see Jackie and her sister Lee cheering on Averell Harriman, the seventy-one-year-old undersecretary of state, as he enthusiastically danced the Twist. There was sumptuous French cuisine and there were easy French customs—few expressed surprise at the sight of a powerful administration official shamelessly flirting with a woman who wasn’t his wife. That sort of thing was expected of Kennedy courtiers, along with a fondness for poetry and rollicking games of touch football, and a willingness to be thrown into Ethel Kennedy’s pool. All together, it was another, more golden adolescence for men with gray hair.