He arrived in Hyannis Port late in the evening, in a driving rainstorm. Ushered into the house, he found Jackie waiting for him in black slacks and a beige pullover sweater. She was “without tears,” White would say, “drained white of face.” She looked at him plaintively: “What can I do for you?” she asked softly. “What shall I say?”
It was she, however, who had summoned White to the meeting. And it was she who would control the conversation and the story. Starting in, White recalled something she’d said to him earlier on the phone, a concern she’d expressed about how history would remember her husband. He wondered if she might expand on that. Instead, she launched into something else entirely—a graphic, detailed narrative of the events in Dallas and the moments after:
Then Jack turned back so neatly, his last expression was so neat …
I could see a piece of his skull coming off. It was flesh-colored, not white …
I kept bending over him saying, Jack, can you hear me? I love you, Jack …
Those big Texas interns kept saying, Mrs. Kennedy, you come with us … but I said, I’m not leaving.
White listened in growing confusion and dread. Jackie clearly needed to get these details out of her, but they were too much for the grieving nation, too soon. Was this the reason she had summoned him? He looked at the clock. Midnight was fast approaching, and the editors of Life were waiting. Where was the story he was to write?
But the former First Lady knew what she was doing. “There’s one thing I wanted to say,” she said, shifting away from the horrid assassination scene. “I keep thinking of a line from a musical comedy.… At night before we’d go to sleep … we had an old Victrola. Jack liked to play some records and the song he loved most came at the end of this record:
‘Don’t let it be forgot,
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot.’
That word—Camelot—no one had attached it to the Kennedy administration before. But how perfectly it fit. Camelot, the mythical capital of King Arthur’s court, a place removed from constraints of time and geography, a place removed from the squalid ordinariness of mortal life itself. Camelot, home to the beautiful Queen Guinevere, fated to love King Arthur and to lose him and mourn him. Camelot, the poets’ symbol of the ancient bond between love and predestined doom: Oh brother, had you known our Camelot, built by old kings, age after age, so old the King himself had fears that it would fall. Camelot, the city of lore, where knights of the Round Table dreamed of the Holy Grail and eternal life.
Camelot, not Dallas, was what Jackie wanted White to remember that night. When she’d finished talking, he stole away to a servant’s room and quickly pulled together a draft that had Camelot as its central theme. It was late when he’d finished, but Jackie was still awake, waiting. He handed her a copy of his story. Then he hurried to the kitchen, where he dictated the story to his editor over the telephone.
Soon it was two in the morning. In the kitchen, White haggled with his editor, who worried that he was overplaying the Camelot theme. As they spoke, Jackie entered the room. Listening to the argument, she shook her head—Camelot had to stay. White continued to resist the editor’s entreaties, and after a time he prevailed.
Jackie handed her draft to White. She’d marked it up heavily with her own edits and additions. After the mention of Camelot, she had amended her comments to make her meaning more explicit. Now there was an expanded quotation: “There will be other great presidents and the Johnsons have been so kind to me but there will never be a Camelot again.” And at the end of the draft, White found an entirely new sentence the former First Lady had written in pencil in her own neat handwriting, her own end to the story: “And all she could think was to tell people there will never be that Camelot again!”
The careful planner: Lady Bird at The Elms, November 1963.
© Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library
CHAPTER FOUR
Home
December 25, 1963–January 6, 1964
Christmas Day 1963 dawned bright and clear in the Texas Hill Country. Lady Bird Johnson greeted the morning from her own bed at the LBJ Ranch. She’d had a long journey from Washington the day before and a long first month in the White House. Still, she rose early to set about her day, delivering poinsettias to Hill Country neighbors and pulling together a Christmas celebration for her family.
It had been only one month since she’d last been home. A month since she’d busily prepared for a post-Dallas visit from the Kennedys that would never come to pass. A month in which she’d seen her life altered beyond recognition. She found even the ranch transformed. Guardhouses dotted the perimeter and large searchlights surrounded the house. From now on, she supposed in her diary, “we will never be quite settled into the anonymity of darkness.”
Christmas, at least, would bring some reprieve from the intrusions. The doormat at the LBJ ranch house read ALL THE WORLD IS WELCOME HERE, and over the years the Johnsons had hosted countless acquaintances from their Washington life. Christmas, though, had always been different, a retreat into another time. Typically, Lyndon and Lady Bird and their daughters would open presents and spend the day motoring through the hills of Lyndon’s boyhood on the Pedernales River delivering gifts to friends and relatives—a box of candy here, a bottle of Scotch whisky there. The plan for Christmas dinner this year was much the same as it had been in years past—twenty-three family members gathered at the ranch house table.
But the old times were gone. Just as the assembled kinfolk were about to sit down to their dinner that afternoon, a large bus appeared outside the ranch house. Out poured a pack of reporters and photographers who had come for a prearranged photo opportunity of the new president celebrating his holiday.
For President Johnson, these were the most important guests of the day. He greeted them eagerly and posed happily for the photos, dressed in a green plaid jacket. The whole thing was supposed to take a moment: the press pack would get its picture and then return whence it came so that the Johnsons could celebrate the holiday in private. But after posing, the president lingered with the press, introducing his relations. The reporters dutifully wrote down the names—Uncle Huffman Baines, Cousin Oriole Bailey. Lyndon sucked in the attention. Perhaps the reporters would like a tour of the house?
Lady Bird looked on warily. Already, she’d agreed to host the press corps for a barbecue in two days’ time. “Honey,” she reminded her husband, “I promised to give them a wonderful tour when they come back on Friday. The turkey is ready and the dressing is not getting any better.”
The president would not be deterred. “It’ll only take a minute,” he told her. He beamed at the reporters: “Come on in.”
And so, with the dinner guests waiting, some fifty journalists trailed along behind the president as he led the way through his ranch house. He walked quickly, sharing details of the house’s construction, pointing out the paintings of Texas landscapes hanging on the walls. He guided them through the collection of framed photographs, a window on Johnson family greatness. He proudly showed off a letter from Sam Houston, first president of the Republic of Texas, written to one of Lyndon’s great-grandfathers.
Meanwhile, Lady Bird dashed toward the master bedroom. She knew her husband, and she knew what was coming next. She hurried to lock the door behind her and began preparing the room for outside eyes. Sure enough, in a moment came a knock at the door and the sound of someone fiddling determinedly with the knob. Then came the raised voice of the president: “Mrs. Johnson’s locked the door on me!” She opened the door and smiled as the mob barreled in.
The next stop on the tour was the outdoors, where the president held forth on the habits of the four-hundred-acre working ranch and the modern conveniences with which he had equipped it. “Lynda,” he called to his elder daughter, “do you know where to turn on the Muzak?” Soon, there was dance music blasting from a speaker in a large live oak tree. He was proud of his sophistic
ated system: “We used to dance a lot.”
Lady Bird watched as her smiling husband made his way through the pack of admiring observers. Her dinner was getting cold and her private peace had been disturbed. But here was her husband, showing off his ranch, talking of great Johnsons past and present. Watching Lyndon perform for a captive audience—this, more than anything, was what Lady Bird knew as home.
FOR A MONTH, the nation had watched with eager attention as Johnson performed an unending, fast-paced “Let Us Continue!” show. In his first weeks in office, the new president had met with the nation’s governors, the Kennedy cabinet, the congressional leadership, representatives of business and labor, and leaders of the civil rights movement. He had plotted legislative strategy, consulted with his counterparts around the globe, and played host to some two hundred visitors, including much of official Washington.
It seemed he was always working, always moving. “He assumes that if there is something to be done, it must be done immediately, if not sooner,” wrote James B. Reston in The New York Times. “He now has three telephones in his car, with five circuits, and the amazing thing about it is that he seems able to talk on all five at once, carry on a conversation in the back seat, and direct traffic on the side.” Johnson, Reston wrote, “has done everything but cut the White House lawn.”
Of course, this sort of showing was nothing new for Johnson. He remembered his goal: seduce the country with a fresh story of all the great things that were soon to come. And when he had his mind set on a goal, Johnson’s labors knew no limit. Washington was a city that ran on the currency of ambition, a city where ostentatious displays of overwork were obligatory. And yet for the last thirty years, people who came across Lyndon Johnson had said the same thing: “I never saw a man work harder.” In the 1950s, he had amassed enormous power in the Senate by making it a hub of constant activity, a study in contrast to the languid Eisenhower White House. His senators were expected to match their leader’s output. One night, when Hubert Humphrey complained that he really must be getting home for dinner with his family, Johnson lost his patience. “Dammit, Hubert,” the majority leader said, “you’ve got to make up your mind whether you’re going to be a good father or a good senator.” For Johnson, the answer was self-evident.
Now every waking minute was about proving he was a good president. He seemed to be everywhere. Invited for a breakfast meeting at the White House, Republican Charles Halleck, the House minority leader, accepted the president’s offer of a chauffeured car to bring him to the Executive Mansion. Opening the door to the limousine, the congressman was surprised to find the president of the United States waiting for him inside. Johnson popped up constantly on Capitol Hill, dropping in at the last minute at a surprise party for the Senate majority leader one day, a Christmas party with the minority leader the next.
Arriving for a meeting with Johnson at the White House one afternoon, two Baltimore Sun reporters found him itching to make a jail break. Hurrying the reporters into his car, they headed for lunch with the Texas delegation on Capitol Hill. Walter Lippmann, the columnist and lion of the left, picked up the phone at his Northwest Washington home one evening in early December and heard Johnson’s voice on the other end of the line: “Could I drop by and bum a drink from you?”
He was working harder than any president Washington had seen before, and he made sure the country knew it. “Man-in-Motion Johnson,” Time called him, “mixing solid business with image-making busy-ness.” As the Johnson presidency entered its second and third weeks, his staff began feeding morsels to the press about the boss’s punishing routine. Readers soon knew all about the new president’s “two shift day”: Up by seven with papers in bed, dictating orders to his aide, Jack Valenti. Then over to the Oval Office by nine for meetings that lasted through lunch. Next, a brief nap, followed by a swim in the White House pool, usually accompanied by a coterie of staffers who offered advice on strategy as they paddled around with their boss. (These sessions could get awkward—usually, at Johnson’s insistence, no one wore clothes.) Toweled off and changed into a fresh shirt, he’d work until seven-thirty or eight, barking orders at his secretaries to get this senator or that cabinet secretary on the line. Then a late dinner with Lady Bird and their high-school-age daughter Luci (their elder daughter, Lynda, was studying at the University of Texas) and whatever pack of aides or congressmen he’d chosen to bring in for the occasion. Then more work, maybe a massage just before midnight, with three TVs blaring in the background, then reading until one or two in the morning. Then, four or five hours later, the same thing all over again.
An endless cycle of work, work, work, not just for the president, but also for his staff. The papers were full of details about the circle of able men Johnson had brought in for his White House staff—men like Valenti, the former Texas adman; Walter Jenkins, the first-among-equals aide of long standing; Bill Moyers, the polished twenty-nine-year-old Texan who, since Dallas, had never been far from Johnson’s sight. These men, the press noted, had designed their lives so they could do their boss’s bidding at all times. They’d learned it was best not to lunch outside the White House, lest they look up from their meals to find an alarmed maître d’ rushing over to alert them to the very important person calling on the phone. They installed telephones beside their beds. In time, they would receive special cars with radio-phones so that there would never be a minute when they were out of reach. “The LBJ phone calls would catch people in the most intimate circumstances,” Johnson aide Liz Carpenter would later write. “Shaving, bathing, pulling a new girdle over the knee-bones.… Suffice it to say that my husband more than once shouted into the night, ‘I don’t care if he is President of the United States! Does he have to butt into everything?’ ”
Just about. After a photo op in the White House Treaty Room, Johnson asked the assembled reporters if they’d care to walk back to the West Wing with him. Soon they found themselves on an impromptu tour of the residence, following him into the quiet splendor of the Queen’s and Lincoln bedrooms. This was unknown territory. Jackie Kennedy had allowed reporters into the residence only on special occasions, during which every step had been carefully stage-managed. Now things felt considerably more ad hoc. “Isn’t that bed a little short for you?” a reporter asked Johnson. “I don’t know,” the president replied. “I haven’t slept in it.”
At least not yet. If he had his way, it seemed, the new occupant of the White House would ruffle every bedspread in the residence, stamp on every piece of grass on the White House lawn, and personally inspect every piece of state silver.
And, most important, sign every bill he could get the Congress to pass. For Johnson, there was no more pressing task than proving he could get the Congress to act. Only by getting the Kennedy bills out of the Congress could his new story start to look real. The press profiles that December invariably described the new president as a master legislator, just as they invariably noted that most of the Kennedy program had been hopelessly stalled on Capitol Hill for the better part of a year. “We shall be wrong … if we look upon the Kennedy program as if they were an architect’s plans for a building which is begun but only partly completed,” Walter Lippmann wrote on December 3. “The truth is that Johnson has suddenly become president at a time of deadlock and standstill.…”
If Johnson didn’t do something, fast, the whole mood of rapid reanimation in the country would be at risk. He spent December signing bills, puffing them up with all the drama of his office. He held grand White House signing ceremonies for billion-dollar bills subsidizing college construction, vocational training, and the fight against air pollution. He’d ostentatiously hand out pens marked “President of the United States—The White House” to grinning members of Congress. (“You’re the y in Lyndon,” he told one senator.) “Altogether,” Newsweek noted just before Christmas, “the President used and gave away 169 pens (cost $177.45) last week and dispensed more energy than a man half his age of 55.”
In exchange for tho
se pens, he got that most valuable commodity for a president: momentum. Every new bill that Johnson signed in Kennedy’s name made Johnson look like more of a winner, easing the way for an even easier victory to come. Opposition was nearly nonexistent, so determined was the country to join in the spirit of moving on. The conservative intellectual William F. Buckley was a rare voice of dismay: “Are we now being emotionally stampeded into believing that Kennedy was the incarnation … and that respect for him requires that we treat his program like the laws of the Medes and the Persians?”
But Johnson knew that the biggest prize—passage of Kennedy’s civil rights bill—would not come nearly so easily. Over Thanksgiving, Johnson had asked Larry O’Brien, Kennedy’s chief vote counter, about the prospects of the civil rights bill. O’Brien delivered a bleak report. The bill was stuck in the House Rules Committee, thanks to the committee’s obstinate chairman, Howard Smith of Virginia. The White House would have to break a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans to get it out. Johnson advised a strong public campaign of moral pressure against the GOP. “Say to the Republicans, you’re either the party of Lincoln or you ain’t.”
The message from the administration was simple: this time would be different, this civil rights bill wasn’t going away. Johnson pressed the point in the most personal of ways. On December 7, he greeted Dick Russell at the White House. Throughout the difficult period of transition Johnson had leaned on his old mentor for counsel. (“Nobody ever has been more to me than you have, Dick, except my mother,” he reminded the distinguished Georgian on the twenty-ninth of November.) But now, when Russell appeared at the White House, Johnson greeted him as an adversary.
Landslide Page 12