The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Sharpening his rhetoric, he trained it on the candidate who had suggested “regrets.” By the time he reached Spokane, where he spoke to the Washington State Democratic Convention, he was shouting, “I am not prepared to apologize to Mr. Khrushchev. Are you? I am not prepared to send regrets to Mr. Khrushchev. Are you?” And to each question, the audience shouted back: “No. No.”

  And it wasn’t only an issue that was working for Lyndon Johnson in the West—it was also his personality.

  Stiff, stilted and unconvincing though he had been when delivering prepared speeches during his congressional and Senate campaigns, shouting sentences without inflection, his gestures as awkward as his phrasing, when in the latter stages of some of those campaigns he had realized he was losing and in desperation threw away his text and spoke directly to his audience, he was suddenly something quite different. Lyndon Johnson without a speech in his hand, as I wrote about his first, seemingly hopeless campaign, “Lyndon Johnson alone and unprotected on a flatbed truck: no paper to hide behind, nothing to look at but the faces of strangers; Lyndon Johnson with nothing to rely on but himself,” was suddenly, gangling and big-eared and awkward though he remained, a candidate with a remarkable gift for establishing rapport with an audience. In 1960, of course, his platforms were not flatbed trucks but elaborately bunting-draped stages, and the candidate was no longer skinny and gangling, but on this trip into the West there were nonetheless moments that recalled those desperate early days.

  On the Saturday of that hectic trip, he was so far behind schedule that Governor Herseth had provided a helicopter; it wasn’t the tiny Sikorsky “Flying Windmill,” that then revolutionary machine, in which he had swooped across Texas in ’48, but it was a helicopter, and the plains he was flying over were plains as flat as those of Texas. And the audiences he spoke to during these days in the West had issues they shared with Texans, and those were the issues he spoke about.

  Back in his plane, he was flying over the great West’s rivers—the Columbia, the Colorado, the Snake, the Pecos, the Platte—and over the tiny gray-white lines across them that were the great dams the government had built to tame their floods, to make their waters work for electricity and irrigation; he flew, on the second of those western days, over Hells Canyon itself. Dams were the symbol of what government could do for the West, and he told his audiences about the dams he had built in Texas, and what they had done for the people of the Hill Country. Flying over Oregon, he had noticed strange lines on the earth far below, and someone had explained to him that they were ruts left by the wagon trains in which settlers had come into the Northwest. Those tracks had reminded him of the wagon trains that had come into the Texas Hill Country, he said, and had reminded him also that “those who remain behind in older sections don’t grasp the West, don’t understand it—and that is the West’s Number One roadblock and problem.” He spoke sometimes in terms out of another era—of the era of the Populists, of the People’s Party, which had been founded in the Hill Country not far from Johnson City. He told western ranchers that the “world of high finance” was cheating them; that its bias against the West was reflected in high interest rates on the financing for the development projects the West needed, and in discriminatory freight rates when they sent cattle and goods to market. That’s why the West needed “leadership which understands not how to keep the West in its place but how to give the West its place in the sun.”

  “The West,” Lyndon Johnson said, “needs a champion in Washington.”

  In Theodore White’s book on the 1960 presidential campaign, he linked the name of Lyndon Baines Johnson with the name of a Democratic presidential candidate from another century. If Lyndon Johnson could become “the candidate of the West” as well as the South, White wrote, if he could add its delegate votes to those of the South, “he could stand as the candidate of the wide-open spaces, the candidate of the William Jennings Bryan crescent, against the preponderant Northeastern bloc.” And if he could do that, White wrote, if he could in effect become another Bryan, he had a realistic chance of winning the Democratic nomination. “Let Kennedy be stopped … on the first ballot or two, and this crescent would close on the Northern delegates and roll east to victory.” Whether or not the people Lyndon Johnson was talking to now ever thought of Bryan’s name—and no newspaper mentioned it, and this author has been able to find no book other than White’s that does, either—the people to whom Lyndon Johnson was speaking recognized the similarity between his background and theirs. The fact that he was wearing boots didn’t hurt, of course, and neither did the accent: the southernness had faded from his voice; it was a West Texas twang now. A Wyoming rancher, trying to explain to Mary McGrory why he was for Johnson, said, “He has an honest-sounding voice.”

  Whatever the reason, the lieutenant governor of one western state was aboard his plane, and the governor of another, South Dakota’s Herseth, told reporters, “There’s no question but that he’s picking up support.” Returning from the western trip, the columnist Doris Fleeson wrote that on it Lyndon Johnson had been “a lion on the platform, a charmer in cozy conferences with delegates.” Journalists reported that, as one of them wrote, “party leaders as well as correspondents traveling on the plane with Johnson agreed that he had improved his position in the presidential sweepstakes in every state.” The West? Had he only started campaigning earlier, “he could have locked that place up without any difficulty at all,” Ted Kennedy said. Looking at that trip that Lyndon Johnson finally made at the end of May, 1960, it is easy to speculate about what he might have cost himself by his years of procrastination. If he had held the West, the convention might well have been deadlocked, been thrown into the back rooms from which, he was certain, he would emerge as the nominee.

  And, it is easy to speculate, had he only started sooner, he could have held the West.

  BUT NOW IT WAS too late. The Kennedys had been sowing in the West for two years. And now, almost as soon as Johnson returned from his Memorial Day trip, the Kennedys began to reap.

  Although none of the reporters understood the significance, there had been indications that during the trip itself it was too late. Seven states, not six, had been on the original itinerary; one of the seven—Montana—had been quietly dropped even while the Convair was heading west. Confident that he could count on that state—one of its senators, Mike Mansfield, was his Assistant Leader, after all—Johnson had told Rowe to schedule a full day of appearances there. Montana was Rowe’s home state, however, and when he began telephoning his old political allies, the reports he received were so disturbing that he contacted Johnson, who was already on his way, and told him to postpone his visit.

  (The reports were correct, as Rowe was to find when, two weeks later, he arrived on the scene himself, to prepare for the Democratic State Convention in Helena on June 27. Reporting to Jenkins over the phone on June 23, he told him that Kennedy was ahead in Montana, “and Symington next. Symington has seven people in here plus two airplanes and they are really covering the territory.” The Kennedys were playing hardball with the delegates, he said. “We had to do everything very quietly because every single time somebody comes out in the open [for Johnson], the Kennedy crowd move in [on him].” Just before the convention, Mansfield finally arrived in Helena—only to inform Rowe that, in Rowe’s words, “he’s for Johnson, but he won’t tell anyone who to vote for.” Though Johnson had been planning to address the convention on the morning it opened, Rowe telephoned him and said: “Don’t come. We are going to get badly licked.”)

  Another indication had come in Idaho—at the Idaho Falls airport, where the delegation welcoming Johnson had been led by thirty-five-year-old Frank Church, who was, in the Senate, a favorite of the Majority Leader: Johnson had given him a key role in the ’57 civil rights battle, and then a seat on Foreign Relations, simply bypassing half a dozen senators with greater seniority to do so.

  Having assessed Church’s ambition, he had once scribbled a note to him at a committee meet
ing to assure him he would help him realize it: he had, the note said, asked Drew Pearson “to help me give you a buildup over the years” so that one day “you can … be our President.” A faster buildup had been promised by the Kennedys, however: in return for his support they had offered Church, a stirring orator, the role of keynoter in Los Angeles, a role that Church believed would catapult him to national prominence. Church had agreed. Johnson had heard rumors that this was the case, and, reading the young senator’s eyes over the toothy smile he gave him at the airport, he saw it was true. Walking toward the terminal, he told Horace Busby: “The little sonofabitch has already sold out. They bought him.”

  “The halter and bridle” had been slipped on western delegates by Robert Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy was not a man to allow someone who had accepted the halter to take it off. One of Idaho’s delegates, a state legislator, had been moved by a Johnson speech, but had earlier given his pledge to Bobby Kennedy. When a reporter asked him if he would change, he replied that he “simply couldn’t.” Bobby, he said, was not a man who ever forgave a broken promise.

  In the weeks after his return to Washington, Johnson frantically worked the telephone for hours every day, and, since the time was earlier in the West, for hours every evening. His father had been a farmer, he told the head of a Minnesota farmers’ grange. The Hill Country was a land of farmers. “You and I have got a lot in common, and I don’t think you and your people have any with Boston.” And he was flying—to New York, to Oklahoma, back to Iowa: in May and June, 1960, Johnson logged 31,250 miles back and forth across the United States, making thirty-six speeches and holding twenty-seven press conferences. But, state by state in rapid-fire order now, his mistake in relying on senators was exposed. With Anderson and Chavez behind him, he had taken New Mexico for granted. Every delegate count on those laminated cards in his breast pocket had had all seventeen states from “Texas’s backyard” in the Johnson column. But when, a week after his western trip, New Mexico’s Democrats held their state convention, at which the delegates were actually selected, [Kennedy] received seven of the seventeen. The “successful [Kennedy] raid … deep in [Johnson’s] southwestern backyard” shook the Johnson camp, the New York Times reported.3

  Then there was Carl Hayden’s Arizona. That state had a unit rule, and suddenly Kennedy had all seventeen of its votes. In Colorado, Edwin (Big Ed) Johnson was denied even a seat on the delegation. Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming—by the end of June, the West was gone. For so many months, Irv Hoff had urged Lyndon Johnson to campaign in the West. “He had put it off, and put it off, and put it off as long as he could,” Hoff would say. “And he put it off too long.”

  THE DESPERATION WITH WHICH Lyndon Johnson was trying for the nomination now was visible not only in public but behind closed doors—Rowe and Corcoran and Connally and Clark saw that they had been right all along: that because “he wanted it so much,” “eventually he was going to do it,” was eventually “going to get in—get in all the way.”

  Having finally accepted Rowe’s offer of help, he asked him for advice, and when Rowe told him bluntly, “Kennedy has got this. There’s only one way to stop him that I can see. That’s for Adlai to give a signal [that he was willing to be drafted],” he acted on it.

  If the two-time nominee could attract enough votes, Rowe was saying, they might, combined with Johnson’s and a few from Symington and the favorite sons, be enough to deny Kennedy a first-ballot victory. Long though that shot may have been, Johnson tried it, suggesting, in a number of conversations with Stevenson, that Adlai “let his people be more active.” Johnson’s argument, according to a Stevenson aide, was, “Now listen, Adlai, just hang loose here. Don’t make any commitments. You may still get it. Don’t help that kid, Kennedy. Just stay neutral.” And the argument may have been persuasive: “I believe that Governor Stevenson … made a commitment to him that he would do that,” the aide says. At the end of the month, when Arthur Krock told Kennedy that Adlai had started making a real effort for the nomination, Kennedy said, “And how!”

  ON CAPITOL HILL, Johnson held a lot of cards, and now he was playing them. In several states crucial to his presidential hopes, Senate seats were becoming vacant in 1960, and some of the Democrats running for them—Thorn Lord of New Jersey and Representative Lee Metcalf of Montana, for example—had been promised financial support by the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee. Now these candidates were told that that support would be rationed out in inverse proportion to their support of Kennedy. And not only cash but committee assignments were in Johnson’s hand. What had he said to Governor Loveless in that brief meeting aboard his plane? Loveless was to tell an Iowa politician that his Senate assignments were going to depend on his convention activities. To all these men, it was becoming apparent, Johnson was saying, in effect, Vote for me if you can, but if you can’t, just don’t vote for Kennedy. And to all these men the message had been delivered in firm terms. After talking to Loveless, the Iowa politician said, “Rough stuff. These boys aren’t playing for peanuts.” “I’m not what you call a Kennedy fan,” one unidentified governor told the Wall Street Journal, “but these Johnson tactics almost have me mad enough to become one.”

  One card in Johnson’s hand could be played only if Sam Rayburn, who held the same card, agreed to play his. The Speaker had been reluctant to play it, telling Johnson its use would be “too raw,” but Representative Richard Bolling, a witness to some of their discussions, says that at seventy-eight “Sam was just old now; Lyndon finally wore him down.” On June 29, without warning, the two Texans suddenly announced that rather than Congress adjourning for the year before the convention, as had been expected, it would instead immediately recess, and return to complete the session on August 8—after the convention.

  Longtime congressional observers could recall only one maneuver even faintly comparable: Harry Truman’s 1948 masterstroke, following the Republican convention, of calling the Republican-controlled Congress back into session, and challenging it to deliver on the convention’s campaign platform. Truman, however, had been challenging a Republican Congress, in which he had limited influence. Johnson and Rayburn were talking about a Congress they controlled. Rayburn’s “word is virtually law among Democrats in the House,” James Reston noted. Power over legislation senators and congressmen wanted—or needed, to satisfy demands of their constituents—was in the hands of the two Texans, and in the hands of the committee chairmen who wanted Johnson to get the nomination. With the new congressional schedule, Johnson and Rayburn would be holding this legislation over the heads of senators and representatives in Los Angeles; as James Reston wrote, “The theory … was that the two Texans would be able, by their influence over legislation in the recessed session, to induce forty or fifty delegates to support Mr. Johnson.”

  Evans and Novak were to call the “audacious” maneuver “blatant political blackmail.” As the Senate, in previous years so efficient under Johnson, had dawdled through the year, there had indeed been speculation that the Majority Leader had, as the New York Times was to put it, “engineered a Senate slowdown to keep control of the fate of major bills during the Democratic convention.” (The speculation had been discounted because the maneuver would be “too extreme [an] exercise of power.”) There was, in reality, not much chance it would succeed—for the same reason that Johnson’s reliance on senators wasn’t succeeding. While he had power over them, they didn’t have power over their delegations. His use of it made clear, however, the lengths to which he was going in his last-ditch effort to get the nomination.

  “WORKED UP,” “revved up” now, Lyndon Johnson had convinced himself he was going to defeat Kennedy. He believed that thoroughly now. It was, after all, his destiny. “I was meant to be President.” Governor Lawrence had seen it. “The man has sold himself.” Now Johnson, meeting with a group of senators in the Taj Mahal, waved a copy of a newspaper article predicting a Kennedy win, and laughed at it. The winner was going to be him, he said.
“The bandwagon is rolling, boys. You might as well get on board.”

  AND HE WAS WORKED UP about his opponent. While he had begun deriding Kennedy as soon as the Massachusetts senator began running for the presidency, calling him “the boy,” or, in a contemptuous tone, “Sonny Boy,” or “Johnny” or “Little Johnny,” saying that he was just a rich kid whose daddy was trying to buy him the nomination, in public, for a time, he confined himself to the age issue (“He’s a nice, attractive young man,” he would say, heavily underlining the final adjective) and the absenteeism issue (“Jack was out kissing babies while I was passing bills, including his bills”), and the contrast between their roles in the Senate. Johnson “likes to portray himself as the man who made Senator Kennedy what he is today by securing him choice committee assignments,” David Broder reported. “He looks with paternal pride on the accomplishments of Kennedy, Symington and all the others … who flourished so well under his care.”

  As it became apparent that Kennedy’s bid was serious, however, in public the paternalistic note faded, and the jabs became sharper. To a press conference question about Kennedy, he responded that with the Cold War in such a serious phase, the United States shouldn’t be represented in world councils by someone “second-class.” After Kennedy said he would have expressed regret to Khrushchev, the word “guts” became a standard word in Johnson’s platform rhetoric, and the jabs started to be thrown in combination. “It is up to the American people in their wisdom to judge whether a man of that age can lead the country.… The next President should have a little gray in his hair, wisdom in his heart, and guts under his belt.” A full-page newspaper ad which his campaign took out in May in eighteen cities across the country said, “We cannot afford to gamble with inexperience, immaturity.” Jack Kennedy’s father had been an appeaser, Lyndon was to say. “I wasn’t any Chamberlain umbrella man. I never thought Hitler was right.”