“I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization,” he said, “than full recognition of the place of the artist.” And then he offered his vision of the American promise.
I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.
I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.
I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. . . .
I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.
This was his sense of the future, and he embraced it as if on a rising tide of confidence. A few days later at a press conference someone asked him how he felt about the Presidency. He replied, “I have given before to this group the definition of happiness of the Greeks, and I will define it again: it is full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, the Presidency provides some happiness.” For all the congressional problems of 1963, he knew he had had a good year, and he anticipated 1964 with relish. So much beckoned: the enactment of the civil rights and tax reduction bills; the war against poverty; education and Medicare; the pursuit of peace beyond the test ban; the advance of the Alliance for Progress; a visit from de Gaulle in February; a trip with Jacqueline to the Far East in the spring; the presidential election in the fall.
He had little real doubt, I think, that he would win the election with ease, especially against Goldwater. This would give his second term the congressional margin and the popular mandate the first had lacked. He saw his second administration, like Theodore Roosevelt’s, as the time of great legislative action, when the seeds planted in the first term would come to fruition. He expected, of course, to make some changes. The conduct of foreign affairs never ceased to bother him. Discussing the de Gaulle visit with Ambassador James Gavin in late October, he said, “In the meantime, though, I must get something done about that State Department.” He continued to hope for the best from his Secretary of State; but the frustrations—the Under Secretaryship for Inter-American Affairs was only the most recent and one of the more trivial—were accumulating. He wanted ideas, initiatives and action from State, not cautious adherence to the policies of the past varied by anxious agnosticism in face of new problems—for example, the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis, Berlin, Vietnam, the Congo, disarmament, Skybolt, de Gaulle, Italy, Latin America, India—on very few of which had his Secretary of State vouchsafed a definite view. With reluctance, because he still liked Rusk and thought he had useful qualities, he made up his mind to accept his resignation after the 1964 election and seek a new Secretary. He always had the dream that a McNamara might someday take command and make the Department a genuine partner in the enterprise of foreign affairs (though he also said that he had to have a McNamara at Defense in order to have a foreign policy at all). He planned other changes in his administration, some notable, though none, so far as I know, in the cabinet (unless he could not persuade his brother to stay on as Attorney General). Then after the election, he could not only complete his present program but move forward to new problems—tax evasion was one, an attack on the structure of government subsidies was another, the rationalization of the city, the promotion of the arts and the protection of the natural environment, others. In foreign affairs he looked forward particularly to the possibility, if the détente held, of a journey to the Soviet Union.
Sometimes he would muse about life beyond 1968. He had remarked early in his administration that, “whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age—too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.” Many thoughts drifted through his mind about the future—publishing a newspaper (he sometimes joked with Ben Bradlee about buying the Washington Post), returning to Congress like John Quincy Adams, traveling around the world, writing a book. As the plans for his presidential library at Harvard took shape, he began to visualize the future with more particularity. They would, he thought, live part of each year in Cambridge. Here he could use his offices in the Library, work on the history of his administration, hold seminars and talk to students. He hoped that the Library might become a center where academicians, politicians and public servants could challenge and instruct one another, thereby realizing his old dream of bringing together the world of thought and the world of power.*
But 1969 was a long time away, and there remained the hurdle of 1964. The President looked forward with high anticipation to running against Goldwater. I think he felt that this would give him the opportunity to dispose of right-wing extremism once and for all and win an indisputable mandate for his second term. On November 12 he convened his first strategy meeting for 1964—Robert Kennedy, O’Brien, O’Donnell, Sorensen, John Bailey and Richard Maguire of the National Committee, Stephen Smith and Richard Scammon, a political scientist, director of the Census Bureau and a lively expert on voting statistics. They discussed the South and its representation at the national convention, meditated on the suburbs, considered the organization of the campaign, then reverted to the South, where the President was to go in another ten days to carry the fight to Florida and Texas. It was a sanguine meeting, filled with badinage about the future. A notable absentee was the Vice-President of the United States.
Johnson’s absence stimulated a curious story that the Kennedys intended, in the political idiom, to dump him as the vice-presidential candidate in 1964, as Roosevelt had dumped John Nance Gamer in 1940. These stories were wholly fanciful. Kennedy knew and understood Johnson’s moodiness in the Vice-Presidency, but he considered him able and loyal. In addition, if Goldwater were to be the Republican candidate, the Democrats needed every possible asset in the South. The meeting on November 12 assumed Johnson’s renomination as part of the convention schedule.
It had not been an easy year for Johnson. One saw much less of him around the White House than in 1961 or 1962. He seemed to have faded astonishingly into the background and appeared almost a spectral presence at meetings in the Cabinet Room. Though his fidelity to the President was constant and his self-discipline impressive, the psychological cost was evidently mounting. Theodore White has written, “Chafing in inaction when his nature yearned to act, conscious of indignities real and imagined, Johnson went through three years of slow burn.” The Vice-President disagreed with administration tactics in 1963 on a number of points—on the civil rights bill, on the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, on selling wheat to the Soviet Union, on Vietnam. He evidently felt he should have been consulted more, especially in legislative matters. Yet about the President himself Johnson always spoke with deep and unaffected admiration. He would mention the grace with which he bore his burdens and say that, when Kennedy went around the room with the question “What would you do?”, he would pray that he would not have to answer first.
As 1964 approached, Kennedy looked to Johnson for particular help in the Vice-President’s own state. There John Connally, who had resigned as Secretary of the Navy to run successfully for governor, and Senator Ralph Yarborough were engaged in the latest phase of the quarrel which had plagued the Texas Democratic party ever since Garner had opposed a third term for Roosevelt in 1940. The conservative Democrats of Texas were increasingly based on the oil industry, the young suburban businessmen and the rural conservatives, while the liberal Democrats had joined the old populist tradition with the new force of organized labor. The conservatives had won out in the late forties and fifties; thi
s had been reflected in Johnson’s own movement from the aggressive young New Dealer to the cautious middle-of-the-roader of the Eisenhower years. Yet, though in the course of this journey he had estranged many Texas liberals, his heart had remained with the New Deal. Kennedy now looked to him to use his personal influence with Connally and his ideological affinity with Yarborough to end the wracking fight in the Texas Democracy. By going to Texas himself, the President hoped to use the presidential authority to help the Vice-President bring the warring Texans together.
On November 19 he had the usual breakfast with the congressional leaders. Chatting about his trip, he said that the Texas feuds would at least create interest and bring people out. He added, “Things always look so much better away from Washington.” The next night was Robert Kennedy’s thirty-eighth birthday. At the party at Hickory Hill, Ethel Kennedy, instead of making her usual chaffing toast about her husband, asked us all, with simplicity and solemnity, to drink to the President of the United States. The next morning the President and Mrs. Kennedy flew to Texas, with stops scheduled for San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Austin.
10. DALLAS
Exactly four weeks before, Adlai Stevenson had gone to Dallas for a meeting on United Nations Day. The National Indignation Convention, still active on the radical right, decided to counter this visit by holding a “United States Day” meeting the previous day with General Edwin A. Walker as the main speaker. Governor Connally, without perhaps knowing the character of the occasion, dismayed the friends of the UN by giving “United States Day” the sanction of an official proclamation. That night General Walker denounced the United Nations. The next day handbills with photographs of the President of the United States—full-face and profile—were scattered around Dallas: “WANTED FOR TREASON, THIS MAN is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States,” followed by a scurrilous bill of particulars.
That evening many of Walker’s patriots returned to the same auditorium to harass Stevenson. While Adlai spoke, there was hooting and heckling; placards and flags were waved, and noisemakers set off. When the police removed one of the agitators from the hall, Stevenson, with customary poise, said, “For my part, I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.” At the close he walked through a jostling crowd of pickets to his car. A woman screamed at him, and he stopped for a moment to calm her down. The mob closed in on him. Another woman crashed a sign down on his head. A man spat at him. As the police broke through to him, Stevenson, wiping his face with a handkerchief, said coldly, “Are these human beings or are these animals?”
The next morning Kennedy read the story in the papers. He considered Stevenson’s coolness under fire impressive and particularly admired the presence of mind which produced the line about forgiveness and redemption. “Call Adlai,” he instructed me, “and give him my sympathy, and tell him we thought he was great.” Stevenson had left Dallas, but I soon tracked him down in Los Angeles and transmitted the President’s message. He was pleased, joked a bit about the night before and then said, “But, you know, there was something very ugly and frightening about the atmosphere. Later I talked with some of the leading people out there. They wondered whether the President should go to Dallas, and so do I.” After all, the assault on Stevenson was by no means an isolated event. During the 1960 campaign Lyndon Johnson himself, accompanied by his wife, had been hissed and spat upon by a screaming mob in the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel.
Still, as Kenneth O’Donnell said later, the President “could not possibly go to Texas and avoid Dallas. It would cause more controversy—and it would not accomplish for us what really was the long-range purpose of the visit.” In any case, I was reluctant to pass on Stevenson’s message lest it convict him of undue apprehensiveness in the President’s eyes. In a day or so Adlai called again to ask whether I had spoken to the President and expressed relief when I said I had not. He said that it would of course be out of character for Kennedy to avoid something because physical danger might be involved. Moreover, he had just received a reassuring letter from a leading Dallas businessman reporting that the outrage had had “serious effects on the entire community. . . . You can feel that your visit has had permanent and important results on the city of Dallas.”
Dallas plainly was a peculiar place. It was the newest rich city in the country. As late as 1940, it had been a medium-sized community of less than 300,000 people. But the discovery of the East Texas oil pool was already turning it into the financial capital of East Texas. Its population considerably more than doubled between 1940 and 1960; and now it was dominated by raw new wealth flowing from the oil fields into banking, insurance, utilities and real estate. The manners of the Dallas plutocracy had been somewhat refined by Neiman-Marcus, but its politics had been kept in a primitive and angry state by the Dallas Morning News, whose publisher two years before had told Kennedy at the White House that the nation needed a man on horseback while he was riding Caroline’s tricycle. A white collar city, it had neither a traditional aristocracy nor a strong labor movement to diversify its opinions or temper its certitudes. The fundamentalist religious background of many of its inhabitants had instilled a self-righteous absolutism of thought; the Dallas Citizens’ Council, an organization of leading businessmen, imposed a solid uniformity of values and attitudes; and the whole community, with bank clerks and real estate hustlers sporting Stetsons and sombreros, carefully cultivated the myth of the old Texas and its virile, hard-riding, hard-shooting men taking the law into their own hands.* Texas had one of the highest homicide rates in the country—far higher, for example, than New York—and Dallas, which murdered more people some years than England, doubled the national average. By November 1, it had already had ninety-eight murders in 1963. It was a city of violence and hysteria, and its atmosphere was bound to affect people who were already weak, suggestible and themselves filled with chaos and hate.
But not all Texas was in the image of Dallas. San Antonio, where the President stopped early Thursday afternoon, had recently sent Henry Gonzalez, a liberal Democrat, to Congress, and it greeted Kennedy with great enthusiasm. Even conservative Houston was almost as friendly later that same day. Kennedy, delighted by the warmth of his reception, remained, however, in a mood of puzzlement and annoyance over the backbiting of Texas Democratic politics. He had insisted that Senator Yarborough come along; but Governor Connally, it seemed to the White House, despite the presidential wish for reconciliation, was doing all he could to keep Yarborough out of as many things as possible, including even the great reception at the gubernatorial mansion designed to climax the trip Friday evening in Austin. Yarborough, sure that Johnson was siding with his former protégé, declined both in San Antonio and Houston to ride in the same car with the Vice-President.
Kennedy, who thought these disputes childish and unnecessary, wanted Yarborough to have the respect due the Democratic Senator of the state; and he counted on Johnson to compose matters. But Johnson had lost much of his standing in Texas: his association with the New Frontier had greatly hurt him with the conservatives, and the liberals had mistrusted him for years. In the limbo of the Vice-Presidency, he was now only a name and a memory. Yarborough and Connally, on the other hand, had their own political bases in Texas, and each was a determined man—the one to uphold the banner of New Frontier liberalism, the other to display his control over the Texas Democratic party. Probably the President overestimated the Vice-President’s capacity to deal with the situation. In any case, in a brief but cogent private talk at the Rice Hotel in Houston on Thursday afternoon Kennedy expressed his discontent with the situation.
Later the President spoke to the League of United Latin-American Citizens, recalling the Good Neighbor policy and the Alliance for Progress. Then, “in order that my words may be even clearer,” he introduced Jacqueline who said a few words in Spanish. As they left for a dinner in honor of Congressman Albert Thomas, a group of Cuban refugees held signs and shouted slogans. In their midst, Ronnie Dugger of the Texas Ob
server saw one old man waving over his head a small sign: “Welcome Kennedy.’’* At the dinner Kennedy began by saying that, when he heard Thomas was thinking of resigning, “I called him up on the phone and asked him to stay as long as I stayed. I didn’t know how long that would be.”
Later that night the presidential party went on to Fort Worth. Before breakfast the next morning, Friday, November 22, Kennedy read the Dallas Morning News. The day before a sports columnist in the News had suggested that the President talk about sailing in Dallas in order to avoid trouble. “If the speech is about boating you will be among the wannest of admirers. If it is about Cuber, civil rights, taxes or Vietnam, there will sure as shootin’ be some who heave to and let go with a broadside of grape shot in the presidential rigging.” This morning the News ran a full-page advertisement headed: WELCOME MR. [sic] KENNEDY TO DALLAS. It claimed to speak for the “America-thinking citizens of Dallas” who still had, “through a Constitution largely ignored by you,” the right to disagree and criticize. It then set forth a series of questions: why had Kennedy “scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’”? why had the foreign policy of the United States “degenerated to the point that the C.I.A. is arranging coups and having staunch Anti-Communist Allies of the U.S. bloodily exterminated”? why had Kennedy “ordered or permitted your brother Bobby . . . to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you”? why had Gus Hall, head of the American Communist Party, “praised almost every one of your policies and announced that the party will endorse and support your re-election”? why, why, why—a list designed to suggest that the President was systematically pro-communist if not a traitor. Kennedy pushed the paper aside with disgust. He asked, “How can people write such things?” To Yarborough he said, “Did you see what the Dallas News is trying to do to us?” adding that he had “a very strong feeling” about this sort of thing. “He did not say it,” Yarborough said later, “in the light bantering manner that he often used when meeting criticism.”
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