Landslide

by Jonathan Darman

  Before his death, that caution had greatly disappointed Kennedy’s supporters on the left. They bemoaned the gap between his soaring liberal oratory and his paltry liberal record. They assumed he wasn’t one of them—he was a conservative, like his father, or he was weak or vain. But they might have listened to his speeches more closely. Again and again, as a candidate and as president, Kennedy advised the nation that a better world was possible, but that it would not come easily and would not come soon. That was his real greatness: urging people to commit to take real risk, to work and to make sacrifices for noble goals even if they couldn’t know how long it would take for those goals to be fulfilled. “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days,” he said in his inaugural address. “Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”

  What, though, to make of those words now, when it had all come to an end? For the people Kennedy had left behind—his friends, his family, his followers—those were the hardest words to face. Kennedy had served as president a mere 1,036 days. The first one thousand days, the life of his administration, his lifetime on earth: all were one and the same. That couldn’t be the case for his greatness—his telling them that his work was far from done.

  They had to make the opposite message true: that the great struggle was over, that Kennedy’s brief presidency had been a moment of unprecedented progress and achievement, that his thousand days had been time enough. Soon, they would make this their explicit message. In 1965, Schlesinger would publish the first scholarly narrative of the Kennedy presidency. In it, he made the case that Kennedy’s presidency had brought transformative solutions in civil rights, nuclear arms control, the plight of the poor, relations with Latin America, and management of the economy. “He had so little time,” Schlesinger wrote, but “he had accomplished so much.” The author even reversed the meaning of Kennedy’s inaugural message with the title of his book: A Thousand Days.

  But in those first hours of grief, Kennedy’s aides were left with a problem—how to make the case that his record of accomplishments was matchless, when his record of accomplishments was so short? How to say he changed the country when his bills for change were still languishing on Capitol Hill?

  It was in that problem that Johnson saw his opening. For the Kennedys to have their myth, they needed some Kennedy accomplishments. Legislative accomplishments. And legislative accomplishments were something Lyndon Johnson knew how to deliver.

  Here was his chance to change the story, subtly but unmistakably. The Monday of the funeral, he met with the nation’s governors, who were assembled in the capital for the services. In tribute to the late president, he told them, he would make an all-out push for Kennedy’s languishing legislative priorities: the tax cut and the civil rights bill. With these goals, it would not be disrespectful of Kennedy’s memory for Johnson to seize the reins of power and lead the nation out of the swamp. It would be honoring Kennedy’s memory. Years later, Johnson described his thinking to the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin: “Everything I had ever learned in the history books taught me that martyrs have to die for causes. John Kennedy had died but his cause was not really clear. That was my job.”

  The Kennedy legend, which seemed at first like a weight around Johnson’s neck, would in fact be his means to rise. He would take the story that Kennedy’s courtiers and family were telling and use it as his pretext for setting the country’s eyes on him. The possibilities were endless. The country would watch him as he won John F. Kennedy’s battle. And after a while, people would get used to watching him do great things, until that was the only story on everyone’s mind. Carrying out the work of Kennedy’s thousand days, he would earn himself an even greater thousand days of his own.

  And he could see his chance to get started in the most dramatic setting possible. On Wednesday, he would address the nation at a joint session of Congress. There he would make the country watch as he grabbed hold of John F. Kennedy’s myth and began to tell a new story of even more exciting possibilities to come.

  JOHNSON’S UNIQUE POWERS of perception were never better than when he had a plan. When he’d set his mind on an objective, he could look at just about anyone, friend or foe, and figure out what that person needed. In their grief, it turned out, Kennedy’s men were beyond decency and decorum, but not beyond vanity. On Monday, after the funeral, a bleary-eyed Ted Sorensen returned to his West Wing office, where, at the new president’s request, he reviewed working drafts of Johnson’s upcoming address to the nation. John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal intellectual and Kennedy aide, had been making it known all weekend that the new president had personally requested that he draft the speech for the joint address. Sorensen was accustomed to having the final say on presidential speeches. Reading over the Galbraith draft that afternoon, he was unimpressed.

  “So you liked Galbraith?” he asked Johnson on the phone that night.

  “Yes sir, I did,” the president replied.

  “Well, you see, I didn’t. So, uh—”

  Johnson quickly reversed himself: “I didn’t think it was any ball of fire. I thought it was something you could improve on … I read it [in] about three minutes while the economic counselors were coming in here.”

  He went on, puffing up Kennedy’s speechwriter: “But I think a much better speech could be written. I’m expecting you to write a better one.”

  “All right,” Sorensen said. “I’ll give you another and I’ll give you Galbraith at the same time and you can take a look.”

  Not surprisingly, poor Galbraith ended up disappointed.

  But even as he genuflected, Johnson showed that he was beginning to move on. Editing Sorensen’s draft, Johnson and his aides accepted deference to the old president but drew a line at deprecation of the new one. A list of Kennedy’s accomplishments was shortened. The section on Johnson’s agenda was lengthened. Gone altogether was Sorensen’s opening line: “I who cannot fill his shoes must occupy his desk.”

  On the day of the joint session, Johnson asked three of the most diehard Kennedy loyalists—Ted Sorensen, Pierre Salinger, and Larry O’Brien—to ride to the Capitol with him. “This is a fine speech,” Johnson said during the car ride, meaning the prepared text. “Ninety percent Sorensen, ten percent Johnson.”

  Sorensen was not an admirer of the Johnson changes. “No, sir, that’s not accurate,” he said. “Not more than fifty percent Sorensen.”

  “Well, anyway,” said the president, “your fifty percent is the best.”

  “On that point, Mr. President, we agree.”

  Sorensen wasn’t joking, but Johnson chose to laugh in response.

  He laughed because he could; he knew that the speech he was about to give—100 percent of it—was going to be the start of something big. He knew it when he entered the House chamber to the booming introduction, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.” He knew it as he reached the podium and saw the chair beside Speaker McCormick where, as vice president, he had watched Kennedy address the Congress. No more—that chair would be filled by the president pro tempore of the Senate until 1965 when, in accordance with the Constitution, a vice president would be inaugurated along with the winner of the 1964 presidential race.

  And as soon as he spoke the first words of the speech, everyone in the quiet Capitol knew it too.

  “All I have,” he said, pausing, as if to emphasize just how much he had indeed, “I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.

  “Today John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works that he left behind. He lives on in the mind and memories of mankind. He lives on in the hearts of his countrymen.”

  First he echoed the sentiments that had been around the world in the past five days: “No words are sad enough to express our sense of loss.”

  But then he shifted that sentiment ever so slightly: “No words are strong enough to express o
ur determination to continue the forward thrust of America that he began.… And now the ideas and the ideals which he so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action.”

  Effective action, everyone in the chamber knew, was a Johnson specialty. And in that room, Johnson could see all of the people he would need to summon to action once more.

  Here was Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader from Illinois, in love with Senate custom, more in love with his own voice. Johnson would need his tacit support to break the Southern logjam on civil rights. He would use the post-assassination distaste for extremism to pressure Dirksen to be his bipartisan partner.

  Here was Harry Byrd, the patrician Virginia segregationist and ardent conservative, who railed eternally against excessive government spending and ballooning deficits. Johnson would need to find a way to appease him if he was to get the Kennedy tax cut through.

  Here was Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey, the great liberal workhorse of the Senate. He was already at the top of everyone’s list of possible running mates in the upcoming 1964 campaign. Johnson would have to dangle that job in front of Humphrey enough to make him Johnson’s workhorse in the Senate now.

  And here was Richard Russell, the elegant, eminent senator from Georgia, the man who had been Johnson’s mentor and father figure since his early days in the Senate. Russell was perhaps the most talented legislator of the twentieth century, and unquestionably the century’s most effective defender of racial segregation. The affection between Johnson and Russell was enduring. Johnson would call on the Georgian’s wise counsel again and again in the days and weeks ahead. He had already determined that Russell should sit on an independent commission, headed by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the Kennedy assassination. But if Johnson was going to pass the civil rights bill, he and Russell would have to go to war.

  And that war, Johnson made clear, was a war he intended to win.

  “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”

  Words like these reassured many in the president’s party. But Johnson was doing something more—he was recasting the country’s understanding of what the grand spectacle of the past five days had been about. The moment of infinite sadness was now, in the president’s words, a “moment of new resolve.” The American people had become “a united people with a united purpose.” By acting, under Johnson’s sure hand, the country would “resolve that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not live—or die—in vain.” He closed the speech with lines from the hymn “America.” Two days after the assassination, in the midst of that awful first weekend, he’d heard the hymn in a service at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill. There the words had brought tears to his eyes. But now he read them triumphantly: America, America, God shed his grace on thee!

  The ovation in the room was resounding, ongoing, and genuine. Members of Congress wept openly. In the press galleries, reporters’ minds and pencils raced. For days, there had been only one story that mattered in Washington. Now there were new stories appearing right and left.

  There was, for the first time in a long time, an exciting legislative story: a new push for action from a calcified Congress, led by the greatest legislator in a generation.

  There was a story of reconciliation and redemption: the first Southern president in a century was now pledging to be the president to finally end legalized segregation in the South.

  And there was a story of human will: the indomitable spirit and the restless energy of Lyndon Johnson were now married to the highest office in the land.

  Johnson, of course, was at the center of all these stories, and his erstwhile adversaries were left gasping. During the speech, Schlesinger watched Bobby Kennedy “pale, somber and inscrutable … applauding faithfully but his face set and his lips compressed.” Afterward, Joe Alsop came upon Ted Sorensen, who was still smarting over Johnson’s changes to his draft. Trying to be sympathetic, Alsop said that he thought that ending with the lines from “America” had been a “corny” touch. Sorensen stared back at him blankly. Including those lines had been his idea.

  But the praise for the address was otherwise unqualified, and Johnson basked in it. The crowd, he boasted afterward, had interrupted him with ovations no fewer than thirty-four times. When he’d finished speaking, he looked down at his lectern, took a sip of water, and put his glasses in his pocket. He was done for the moment, but the applause did not stop, and the camera did not cut away.

  JOHNSON HAD GIVEN the country, exhausted from five emotional days of mourning, permission to get back to normal again. Television, the voice of authority in the worst moments of the assassination weekend, bolstered Johnson’s message with a return to regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday afternoon. “We cannot bring him back by making sadness our national obsession,” the TV host Jack Paar reminded his audience that week. “Our life goes on. Scientists, students, mothers, laborers, entertainers, all must proceed with the business of living.”

  And so they did, turning toward happier, lighter things. On Fifth Avenue, the mourning crape came down and the Christmas decorations went back up. “You can’t stop the living from living,” said Robert Pell, chairman of the Packard Bell Corporation. “I don’t know of anyone who has called off his Christmas tree.” If anything, the trees would be taller and shinier this year. As the holiday approached, the nation embraced preparations for it with a manic intensity. Holiday sales in the first week of December would be up 7 percent over the same week a year earlier.

  All across the country, people who had wondered how life would ever return to normal found that life picked up right where it left off. And in the West Wing of the White House, the president of the United States proceeded with the nation’s business from the Oval Office. He had successfully and permanently taken possession of the space on Tuesday, November 26, when the last of Kennedy’s items had been removed. Behind his desk, he placed a photograph of his late predecessor. That was his message: Johnson’s toil would be blessed by Kennedy, looking on.

  In this time for legends, the new president had his eyes beyond the mortal world. By turning Kennedy’s work into “a martyr’s cause,” he would ensure that Kennedy could live forever. And that Johnson could, too.

  But immortality comes at a high price. In attaching himself to the Kennedy legend, Johnson was accepting the standard of great accomplishment Kennedy had been careful not to claim for himself. By aiming for immortality, Johnson was setting out to be the hero of a myth. And in this myth, the role of hero had already been filled.

  JACQUELINE KENNEDY RETREATED from public view after her husband’s funeral. She did not attend Johnson’s speech to the joint session. Thursday, November 28, was Thanksgiving. With her children, she spent the holiday at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod. Everything was eerily altered. The sprawling Kennedy family was there, but they were subdued and depressed rather than boisterous and irrepressible. They were in Hyannis Port, where her husband had basked so happily in the sunshine. But now he was gone and the sunshine was, too, replaced by gray skies and a cold New England wind.

  At the head of the table was her father-in-law, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. Joe Kennedy was the patriarch, the one who had dreamed it all: a public life for his children, a presidency for his son, a ruling dynasty for his family someday. He was the first one to see how the Kennedys’ unique mix of glamour, style, and power could be used to seduce the American public. Long before that November, before his son was turned into a martyr, he had invented a legend for the Kennedys.

  The ambassador and Lyndon Johnson had never been close, but they had maintained a cordial friendship of convenience. As two powerful Democrats, each was happy to accept flattery and favors from the other,
knowing fully that the time might come when one of them would have cause to put a knife to the other’s throat. In the 1960 presidential campaign, when Joe Kennedy’s grand ambitions for his son came up against Johnson’s ambitions for himself, the knives indeed came out. As the delegates gathered at the 1960 convention to select a nominee, Johnson, still in the running, had attacked the Kennedy patriarch for his infamous tour as Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in the late 1930s, when he’d counseled appeasement of Hitler’s Germany.

  For Joe and Jack Kennedy that was politics, nothing more. But others in the Kennedy family were less forgiving. Jackie, who doted on her father-in-law, had watched in horror when, on a postconvention visit to Hyannis Port as Kennedy’s newly minted running mate, Johnson had appeared before the press sitting in Ambassador Kennedy’s chair. “I was just thinking,” she later told Arthur Schlesinger, “ ‘Do you know what chair you’re sitting in after the things you said about that man?’ ”

  Now, at the forlorn Thanksgiving table, the ambassador sat in his own chair, but he seemed hardly himself. Shortly after his son became president, the elder Kennedy had suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed and largely unable to speak. In his house that holiday, Jackie saw a man who had lost everything. Over and over he repeated the one word he could still say: “No.”

  The next day, the acclaimed journalist Theodore White was in the chair at his dentist’s office when he was brought an urgent message: President Kennedy’s widow was trying to reach him. He rushed home and called the former First Lady, who was still at Hyannis Port. On the phone, Jackie told White she had some things she wanted to tell the nation. She hoped he would be the journalist to help her. Might he be able to come up from New York to the Cape that afternoon? She would be happy to send a Secret Service limousine.

  White called the editors of Life magazine, where he was a contract writer. The latest edition of the magazine was already being printed—a giant commemorative issue, with page after page of vivid photographs from the funeral ceremonies—and holding open the press run into Saturday would cost the magazine $30,000 an hour. But this was an incredible story—Jackie’s first interview since the assassination. The editors agreed to wait, and White hurried up to Massachusetts.