The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  So he didn’t try.

  On the Senate floor, in 1958, he was the same as he had always been: a man in command—from the moment, just before noon each day, when he pushed open the tall double doors at the rear of the Chamber so hard that they swung wide as he strode through them, and came down the four broad steps to the front-row center Majority Leader’s desk.

  No assistant accompanied him as he walked down to the little clutch of journalists waiting for him in the well below his desk. He knew all the details himself: the intricacies of bills, not only major bills but minor ones, too; the number that each bill had been assigned on the Senate Calendar; where in the subcommittee or full committee approval process it stood at the moment; what new amendments had been added to the bill, or defeated, that day, and why they had been added or defeated; what the arguments on each side had been; when the bill would be brought to the floor for a vote.

  And there was never any question of him making a slip and giving the journalists information he didn’t want them to have. “You didn’t get any more than Lyndon Johnson wanted to tell you,” one of them says. “Never.… He knew exactly what he wanted to say—and that was what he said. Period. I never felt in all those years that he ever lost control [of one of those briefings]. He was always in charge.”

  In charge—“in command”—journalists said about him. In part, they say, it was because of the aura around him, what one of the journalists says was “the knowledge we had of what this guy had done, of what this guy could do. Of what he wanted to be.” But there was something more. As another reporter says: “Power just emanated from him. There was that look he gave. There was the way he held his head. Even if you didn’t know who he was, you would know this was a guy to be reckoned with. You would feel: don’t cross this guy.… He would look around the Chamber—it was like he was saying, ‘This is my turf.’ ”

  Prowling the Chamber during debates, he would put a long arm around a senator, grasp his lapel firmly with the other hand, put his face very close to his colleague’s as he tried to persuade him. His hands never stopped moving, patting a senator’s shoulder, straightening a senator’s necktie, jabbing a senator’s chest, gesturing expressively, his face breaking into a grin if the senator agreed to the proposition being made, turning cold and hard if he didn’t. He would be snatching a tally sheet out of Bobby Baker’s hands—or, dispatching Bobby on an errand, grabbing his shoulders and shoving him violently up the aisle if he wasn’t moving fast enough; rasping at the assistant of some other senator, who was still back in the Senate Office Building, “Get your fucking senator over here!”

  During votes he controlled the very rhythm of the roll call. For some reason—perhaps all his senators were present, and there were absentees on the other side—he might want the roll call to be fast, before anything could change. Or, if he didn’t have all his men there, he wanted the vote to be slow. Standing at that front-row desk, towering over the well, dominating the Chamber of the Senate of the United States, Lyndon Johnson would raise his right hand high in the air and make “revving-up circles” to hurry the clerk through the names, or make a downward shoving motion with his hands meaning “slow down,” “for all the world,” as Time said, like “an orchestra conductor” leading the Senate as if it were an obedient orchestra. “It was a splendid sight,” the journalist Hugh Sidey would recall years later. “This tall man with … his mind attuned to every sight and sound and parliamentary nuance.… He signaled the roll calls faster or slower. He’d give a signal, and the door would open, and two more guys would run in. My God—running the world! Power enveloped him!”

  And one of the key elements in Lyndon Johnson’s command of his world—the Senate world—was his decisiveness.

  During the previous four years of his majority leadership (the situation would not be ended until a Democratic landslide in November, 1958) he was usually operating with a mere one-vote margin, and in a Senate in which both parties contained differing, hostile blocs, the vote on proposed measures was constantly shifting, changing; amendments that could alter the balance were constantly being introduced, so a Leader had to know the moment at which to allow (or not allow) an amendment, or the moment at which, if he called a bill to the floor, it would pass—to know the moment, and to seize the moment. Month after month, year after year, when those moments came, Lyndon Johnson knew them—and seized them, with a decisiveness so quick and firm that it obviously came naturally to him, that it was obvious that deciding—acting—was something he enjoyed doing, something that he had the will, the desire, the need to do.

  And in his office after the day’s session, in that incredible office with its desk up on a low pedestal so that he sat higher than his guests and its spotlight in the chandelier focused on his chair, that office so opulently furnished that it was nicknamed “the Emperor’s Room” and “the Taj Mahal,” he was in 1958 the same as always, too. Holding court for senators and favored journalists, with his feet, clad in either highly polished black shoes or elaborately hand-tooled “LBJ” boots, up on his desk and a glass of Scotch in his hand (he would hold it out, rattling the ice in it, to summon a pretty secretary for a refill), he would dominate the conversation as he recounted the day’s triumphs and the next day’s strategy: at ease, confident, purposeful, assured.

  EXCEPT WHEN THE SUBJECT turned to the presidential nomination.

  George Reedy or Walter Jenkins might bring in a sheaf of speaking invitations—they were pouring into Johnson’s office every day from all over the country. The boots would come off the desk, and Lyndon Johnson would begin to pace back and forth around the office. Or he would walk over to the window, plunge his hands into his trouser pockets, and stand looking out for long minutes, his tall figure, silhouetted against the fading late-afternoon light, very still—except that his assistants would hear a continual low jingle as his hands restlessly shuffled the coins and keys in his pockets. Returning to the desk, he would agonize over each invitation, unable to decide whether or not to accept it, at one moment saying he would, the next moment changing his mind, wavering back and forth.

  Almost always, he wound up declining—declining even invitations that a candidate (even an unannounced candidate) for the presidency would obviously be well advised to accept; among the seventeen invitations to deliver major speeches he received during March, 1958, were personal requests from the grande dame of his party, Eleanor Roosevelt, for a speech before the American Association for the United Nations, and from the governor of Iowa, Herschel C. Loveless, who had recently announced that he had not decided whom his state’s delegation would support in 1960. Sometimes, Johnson would accept one or another invitation—but then invariably would change his mind and refuse (as he did eventually with every one of the seventeen March requests), and then would regret that he had refused. Finally, in October, he agreed to visit six states in which Democratic candidates for the Senate were involved in tight races, and he told Reedy to set up small private meetings in his hotel suite after each appearance so that he could meet local political leaders. But at these meetings, he told the leaders he had come to their state strictly in his capacity as Senate Majority Leader, to help the Democratic senatorial candidate get elected; when they asked him if he would be a candidate for President, he said he would not, and said it so emphatically that they believed him. And then, as soon as he returned to Washington, he, in secret, took a step in the opposite direction. While in Tennessee, he had spoken at a Democratic fundraising dinner that brought in $10,000 for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Instead of having the money used in Tennessee, he directed the committee’s chairman, Senator George Smathers, to have it sent to West Virginia, to be used by Democratic officials who would have influence in that state’s 1960 Democratic primary, and to make sure the officials knew the money was coming at his, Johnson’s, direction. He told Smathers he wanted the committee’s resources husbanded for the moment—so they could be used in 1960. All through 1958, Johnson wavered between his yearning f
or the prize and his fear of being seen to yearn for it.

  His explanations for not becoming an active candidate—for not traveling to other states to rally delegates and leaders to his cause—varied widely. One day he would give someone the “tending the store” explanation, saying he wouldn’t campaign, at least not for a while, because that was the best strategy to win the nomination; he was going to remain the responsible leader above the fray, minding the nation’s business, while the other candidates killed themselves off in the primaries; then, when the party was deadlocked, it would turn to him. Time magazine’s Hugh Sidey, who spoke to Johnson frequently during this time, says that he “had decided … that being above the battle was the big thing.” The next day—or to someone else the same day—he would say he didn’t want the nomination: that the South’s power was on Capitol Hill (“This is my home,” Corcoran recalls him saying. “This is where we have our strength”) and that he had decided to stay there, in the Senate. On other occasions he said he wasn’t running because it was impossible for him, for anyone from the South, to win the nomination, that he was tarred not only with being a southerner but, despite his refusal of Charles Marsh’s offer, with being an oilman as well, since he had supported legislation benefiting his state’s oil interests; even if he received the nomination, the North would never accept him, and he could not possibly win the election; therefore he would not allow himself even to be drafted; if he was drafted, he said, he would refuse. His decision, he would say on these occasions, was final.

  The year was summed up in his relationship with Rowe, who kept urging him to run. But “he didn’t do anything, said he wasn’t going to do anything. This went on for a long time. Any reasons? Just that he couldn’t make it. My argument was that you certainly can’t make it if you do nothing.” The harder Rowe pushed, however, the more adamant Johnson became. A few days after the end of the year, Rowe finally gave up, in a way that dramatized the validity of at least one aspect of his warning. He had been telling Johnson that one reason he couldn’t wait—that while he could say publicly that he wasn’t a candidate, he had to let party insiders, men with influence or power over other delegates, know that he would announce his candidacy when he judged the time right—was that these insiders were choosing up sides; many of them favored him, Rowe said, but for these political pros, not having a candidate in the race was an unsupportable idea: if he convinced them he wouldn’t be a candidate, they would select someone else. He himself was in that situation, Rowe had been warning him. “I finally said, ‘I want to get into the campaign, and if you’re going to go, let’s go. If you aren’t, I’m going over and join Humphrey.’ I talked this way to him for two or three months, and he said, ‘I am not going. You can count on it. I am not going to run.’ ”

  “I think you are making a mistake,” Rowe wrote him. “But I will not press you again.” He signed up with Humphrey—and the day after Rowe’s decision was announced in the press, Johnson had a few words on the subject with Tommy Corcoran. “Jim betrayed me,” he said. “He betrayed me!” He was going to need Jim when, at the proper time, he stepped in to get the nomination, he said, and now Jim wasn’t going to be available. Corcoran tried to point out that he had told Rowe something else, but, Corcoran says, “You couldn’t reason with him.”

  HAD IT NOT BEEN for one factor, Lyndon Johnson’s strategy—whatever its roots: calculation or fear—might have worked. Johnson did, after all, possess a number of assets the other candidates did not: a solid, substantial bloc of delegates—the South’s—that would be behind him when the convention started; the support of his senators, and of Sam Rayburn. And the fact that each of the other contenders had at least one major liability (Humphrey’s extreme liberalism; Symington’s lack of national recognition; Stevenson’s and Kefauver’s previous losses) while Kennedy had two (his youth and his Catholicism) made Johnson’s belief that none of them would be able to command a majority on early ballots seem, at the beginning of 1958, well founded, as did his belief that therefore the convention would be deadlocked and thrown into the hands of the big-state leaders, who would turn to him.

  But there was the one factor: this great reader of men, this man who thought he could read any man, had read one man wrong.

  *

  1 Since Zachary Taylor in 1848. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was not elected but completed Abraham Lincoln’s term.

  2

  The Rich Man’s Son

  LYNDON JOHNSON MIGHT have been excused for misreading John Kennedy. A lot of people in Washington had misread him. When he arrived on Capitol Hill as a newly elected representative from Boston in January, 1947, he was twenty-nine years old, but so thin, and with such a mop of tousled hair falling over his forehead, that he appeared even younger. He was the son of a rich man, a very rich man—a legendary figure in American finance: Joseph P. Kennedy, who had made millions in the stock market on its way up during the Roaring Twenties, and then, selling short on the eve of the 1929 Crash, had made millions more on its way down; who had then turned from amassing wealth to regulating it, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dynamic chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission; who had been FDR’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s; who had then, through investments in real estate, and movies (and, some incorrectly said, through bootlegging), turned millions into tens and then hundreds of millions—into one of America’s great fortunes, into wealth that seemed almost limitless, and into influence, in Hollywood, in the media, that seemed to match. Everyone in Washington seemed to know that the ambassador had given Jack—along with each of his other eight children—his own million-dollar trust fund, as everyone in Washington seemed to know that the ambassador had bought Jack his seat in Congress with huge campaign expenditures. And for some years after Jack Kennedy’s arrival on Capitol Hill, that was all he seemed to be: a rich man’s son.

  His appearance reinforced the stereotype. He was not only thin—barely 140 pounds on a six-foot frame—but, in the words of one House colleague, “frail, hollow-looking,” and below his tousled hair was a broad, gleaming, boyish smile; when a crusty Irish lobbyist, testifying before one of Jack’s committees, repeatedly addressed him as “laddie,” he did so not out of disrespect, but, as James MacGregor Burns wrote, because “it was just the natural way to talk to someone who seemed more like a college freshman than a member of Congress”; one of Kennedy’s fellow members, in fact, once asked him to bring him a copy of a bill, under the impression that he was a page. The college-boy image was reinforced by the fact that he dressed like one, not infrequently appearing on the House floor in crumpled khaki pants and an old seersucker jacket, with his shirttail hanging out below it; sometimes he wore sneakers and a sweater to work. And when he wore a suit, so loosely did it hang from his “wide, but frail-looking shoulders” that he looked, in one description, like “a little boy dressed up in his father’s clothes.” And reinforcing the image was his attitude: his secretary, Mary Davis, a woman who had worked for other congressmen, liked Kennedy “very much” when she met him: “He had just come back from the war and wasn’t in topnotch physical shape. He was such a skinny kid! He had malaria, or yellow jaundice, or whatever, and his back problem”; his suits, she says, were just “hanging from his frame.” But she grew annoyed by his cavalier attitude toward his job: by the way he would toss a football around his office with friends; once when she complained about his absences when there was work to be done, he said, “Mary, you’ll just have to work a little harder.” “He was rather lackadaisical,” she says. “He didn’t know the first thing about what he was doing.… He never did involve himself in the workings of the office.” For constituents’ problems, he had little patience: once, having set aside two days to see them in his Boston office, he gave up after the first day, telling another secretary, “Oh, Grace, I can’t do it. You’ll have to call them off.” His service in World War II had included a highly publicized exploit in the Pacific—a long article had been written in The New Yorker about it—but in 1947 th
ere were scores of men in Congress with celebrated war records, and some of those records wouldn’t stand close scrutiny: the new senator from Wisconsin, for example, liked to be known as (and sometimes referred to himself as) “Tail-Gunner Joe” McCarthy and had received the Distinguished Service Medal, although he had never been a tail (or any other variety of) gunner but rather an intelligence officer whose primary duty during the war had been to sit at a desk and debrief pilots who had indeed flown in combat missions; Lyndon Johnson himself, who constantly wore his Silver Star pin in his lapel, was given to regaling Washington dinner parties with stories of his encounters with Japanese Zeroes, although his only brush with combat had been to fly as an observer on a single mission, during which he was in action for a total of thirteen minutes, after which he left the combat zone on the next plane home. Exaggeration was a staple of the politician’s stockin-trade; understanding that, congressmen discounted stories about wartime heroism. And stories about a war faded before Jack Kennedy’s conduct in Washington, for sometimes he seemed to be doing his best to reinforce the stereotype. Everyone on Capitol Hill seemed to know that he lived in a Georgetown house that was so filled with his friends, and with movie industry friends of his father’s, dropping in from out of town, that it seemed like a fraternity house, or, as one friend said, “a Hollywood hotel”; that he had his own cook and a black valet, who delivered his meals to the House Office Building every day. And everyone seemed to know about the glamorous women he dated—one, whom he dated until he told her he couldn’t marry her, was the movie star Gene Tierney; sometimes his charming, apparently carefree smile would be in magazines after he was photographed with these women in New York nightspots, and he would drive them around Washington in a long convertible with the top down: the very picture of a dashing young millionaire bachelor playboy. Watching Jack stroll onto the House floor one day with his hands in his pockets, a colleague said his attitude suggested: “Well, I guess if you don’t want to work for a living, this is as good a job as any.”