The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  THE DRAMA THAT WAS to consume the rest of the day—Thursday, July 14, 1960—would play out on two sets in Los Angeles’ Biltmore Hotel.

  One was on the hotel’s ninth floor. It consisted of a large three-room suite in one corner of the floor, together with a series of individual standard hotel bedrooms that stretched along a rather dimly lit corridor. All the inner-connecting doors had been unlocked so that the suite and bedrooms comprised a single unit. During the hectic days earlier that week, this “Kennedy suite” had become known by the number on the door of the big corner suite: 9333. The candidate himself slept every night in a hideaway apartment his father had rented for him, but during the day 9333 was his headquarters.

  The other set, two floors below and in the corresponding corner and corridor, also with a large suite and adjoining bedrooms stretching down the corridor, was 7333, the Johnson suite. (Johnson and Lady Bird slept there during the convention, as did their daughters.) John Connally was in the first of the bedrooms, 7331, Walter Jenkins in 7330, and the rest of the staff had bedrooms further down the hall. Separating the two sets was the eighth floor, on which Robert Kennedy had a suite, 8315. Governer Lawrence had the big suite on the tenth floor, Stuart Symington on the sixth. Rayburn’s suite was on the seventh floor with Johnson’s, but at the opposite end of the corridor.

  The elevator in this section of the hotel was located near the far end of the line of bedrooms at the end of the corridor furthest from the corner suite. That morning what one reporter referred to as the “pushy, sweaty mass” of the press—newspaper and magazine reporters and photographers, television cameras, cameramen and correspondents—was clustered around the elevator’s doors. Kennedy had arrived at his suite very early, before any reporters had arrived, and it was assumed he was still at his apartment and would come up in the elevator, and might emerge and provide them with a clue as to the identity of the vice presidential nominee.

  There was another connection between the two sets, however: a back staircase almost directly across from the 9333 door in the floor’s corner, not a narrow back stairway but a broad one, with a broad open landing on each floor, as dimly lit as the corridors. If someone stepped out of the 9333 door of the Kennedy suite and walked almost straight across the hall and down the stairs, he had a good chance of avoiding the press, and that was what Jack Kennedy did, successfully, at about 10:15 that morning. Descending down the two flights of stairs, he knocked on the door of 7333.

  Johnson opened it. The corridor outside was empty. Reporters and photographers had been stationed outside the rooms of the men considered likely vice presidential nominees, but Johnson was not one of them. Johnson led Kennedy into the living room, and they sat down on a couch, each at an end, half turned to face each other, two very tough, very smart men. Someone closed the door to the living room.

  Johnson congratulated Kennedy on winning the nomination, and then the talk turned to Kennedy’s running mate. When Kennedy asked Johnson, as Kennedy was to recall it, “if he were available for the vice presidency,” Johnson “told me that he was. He then suggested that I discuss the matter with various party leaders.” Johnson’s recollection of his response was that he would consider the offer, but that before he could give an answer, “there are a couple of problems that have got to be worked out.” The main one was that he couldn’t even think of taking the job unless Sam Rayburn agreed, and that Rayburn was “dead set” against it. “You’ll have to get him to withdraw his objection.” Also, he said, “a lot of your own people are going to be madder than hell.… You’ll have to straighten them out.” Kennedy said he had already checked with some of the northern bosses—Lawrence and De Sapio were mentioned—and that they approved. Johnson said Kennedy should talk to labor and liberal leaders—“people like” Walter Reuther and Soapy Williams. He said Kennedy had said he would do that, and then had turned to the Rayburn situation. He asked Johnson, as Johnson was to recall, if Rayburn had anything against him personally, and whether Johnson would mind if he himself—Kennedy—tried to persuade the Speaker to change his mind. Johnson said he wouldn’t. Kennedy said he would call back in a couple of hours, and left, “with quick nods and a smile” to Connally and Baker and Walter Jenkins, who had come into the suite.

  Whatever had been said between Kennedy and Johnson, it had been said in terms vague enough so that their purport could be denied. The talk had taken about half an hour, and by the time Kennedy left there was a reporter, Marvin Miles of the Los Angeles Times, outside the door. “We talked mostly about what happened last night,” Kennedy told him. When Miles asked him if the vice presidency had been discussed, Kennedy said, “Nothing specific,” before heading back up the two flights of stairs to his suite, and Johnson was similarly noncommittal. Whatever had been said, however, it was said clearly enough so that both men understood it the same way. Calling Baker, Connally and Jenkins into the living room—he couldn’t locate Rowe—Johnson told them, “You were right. He offered me the vice presidency.” (“He said he had declined, but Kennedy had insisted,” Jenkins recalls.) Walking back up the stairs to his suite on the ninth floor, Kennedy was joined a few minutes later by a group of northern bosses, and informed them, as Ken O’Donnell was to put it, “that he had just talked to Lyndon, who wanted a little time to think it over, but it looked as though Johnson would take it.”

  AS WORD OF KENNEDY’S VISIT SPREAD, emotions boiled over among Johnson supporters who hated the Kennedys. Oklahoma’s burly senator Robert Kerr came “barreling into” the Johnson suite, livid with rage, shouting at Johnson, Lady Bird and Baker, “Get me my .38, I’m gonna kill every damn one of you. I can’t believe that my three best friends would betray me.” Johnson motioned Baker to take Kerr into the bathroom and calm him down, but as soon as the bathroom door closed behind them, Kerr slapped Baker across the face so hard that “It sounded like a dynamite cap exploding in my head! I literally saw stars. My ears rang. ‘Bobby, you betrayed me! You betrayed me!’ ” Baker explained the reasoning (“Even if Kennedy-Johnson loses, LBJ gets better known nationally.… If he’s elected vice president, he’ll be an excellent conduit between the White House and the Hill …”), and Kerr calmed down, apologized to Baker and, leaving the bathroom, hugged the Johnsons.

  Emotions were boiling over upstairs, too. Bobby Kennedy was later to state that his brother’s offer to Lyndon Johnson had been strictly pro forma, a courtesy to a powerful member of the party, and that he had neither expected him to accept the offer nor wanted him to. “The idea that he’d go down to offer him the nomination in hopes that he’d take the nomination is not true.… He never dreamt that there was a chance in the world that he would accept it.” Bobby said that when Jack returned from Johnson’s suite, he said, “ ‘You just won’t believe it.’ I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘He wants it,’ and I said, ‘Oh, my God!’ He said, ‘Now what do we do?’ ” And, Bobby said, “The only reaction that the President [Jack Kennedy] had after talking to Lyndon Johnson was just surprise and then concern that he would take it. He never dreamt—he never considered that he would take it. After that, there was a good deal of time spent in trying to get him off the ticket.”

  Bobby’s statement is buttressed by a remark that Jack Kennedy made a few days later to a friend, the syndicated columnist Charles Bartlett, a statement made off the record and not put in print by Bartlett until 1964. According to Bartlett, Kennedy told him that his offer to Johnson had been merely a “gesture”—and not much of a gesture, hardly an offer at all. “I just held it out like this,” he said, holding his hand two or three inches from his pocket, “and he grabbed at it.” The Kennedys, Bartlett wrote, were “shocked” when Johnson “seized the offer and held fast to it.”

  Those accounts are given weight by many historians because of Robert Kennedy’s repeated, and emphatic, reiterations of them, and because of the acceptance of those reiterations as accurate, and the restatement of them in books and articles by Arthur Schlesinger, whose writings on John and Robert Kennedy hav
e for decades set the template for the image of the two brothers in history. In 1984, Schlesinger would still be writing, “As Robert Kennedy’s oral history makes clear, the offer of the vice-presidential nomination was pro forma; the Kennedys never dreamed Johnson would accept.” Those accounts are not, however, supported by a number of actions that John F. Kennedy actually took that day.

  The first had occurred before his visit to Johnson’s suite—had occurred first thing that morning, at about 6:30 a.m. Telephoning Bobby in Suite 8315, he asked him to find out the number of electoral votes that could be won, in the November election, in the northern industrial states “plus Texas.” A few minutes later, Ken O’Donnell and Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger were summoned to 8315. Bobby was in the bathtub, but called out to them through the door, “How many electoral votes are we going to get if we capture the East, Northeast, and the solid South?”

  The solid South, Salinger realized, included Texas. “Are you talking about nominating Lyndon Johnson?” Salinger asked in astonishment. “You’re not going to do that!”

  “Yes, we are,” Bobby Kennedy said. Jack would be going down to Lyndon’s suite at ten o’clock to make the offer. “Thereupon,” Salinger says, “there ensued a violent argument between Kenny and I, and Bobby.” Bobby’s response was to point out that Johnson had great strength in the South.

  The second action that Jack Kennedy took occurred after his trip down to Johnson on the seventh floor—immediately upon his return to his own ninth-floor suite. Before going down to see Johnson, Kennedy had telephoned Governor Lawrence—his quarters were on the tenth floor—to remind him of his “guarantee” that if the vice presidential nomination was offered to Johnson, he would accept it, and Lawrence, anxious to have Johnson on the ticket because he felt southern electoral votes were necessary for victory, had not only come down the flight of back stairs to reaffirm his guarantee in person, but had also brought the witness to Johnson’s words—Matt McCloskey—with him. Kennedy had taken them into 9333’s bathroom for privacy, and then had said, as McCloskey recalls it, “I don’t want to go down and ask that guy [if he won’t accept the offer]. Are you sure now?” Lawrence and McCloskey had reassured him—had, in fact, in McCloskey’s words, “authorized him to say to Johnson that … the two of us had assured him that this was what Johnson had said.” Now, having met with Johnson, Kennedy returned to 9333, moments before Lawrence and McCloskey came back in, to be followed shortly by Governors DiSalle and Ribicoff and Mayors Daley and Wagner, along with Connecticut’s Bailey and Tammany’s De Sapio and Chicago’s Jake Arvey—the “old pros from the North,” as one reporter put it. When Jack told the group that “it looked as though Johnson would take it,” Lawrence, with a happy grin on his weathered old Irish face, reached out and grasped Kennedy’s hand in congratulation, to be met with a matching smile from the young candidate. Suddenly, in O’Donnell’s words, “all of them”—all the northern bosses who could count, and who had not previously been able to count enough electoral votes for Kennedy to win—“all of them milling around Jack Kennedy [were] congratulating him for offering the vice presidency to Johnson.” Lawrence was telling him that “Johnson has the strength where you need it most.”

  “I could have belted him [Lawrence],” O’Donnell was to recall. He had become very emotional. When Bobby had shouted out the news from his bathtub, “I was so furious I could hardly talk. I thought of the promises we had made to the labor leaders and the civil rights groups, the assurances we had given that Johnson would not be on the ticket.… I felt that we had been double-crossed.” Telling Bobby, “Now Nixon can say Kennedy is just another phony politician who will do anything to get elected,” he had demanded a chance to talk to Jack Kennedy himself, and Bobby had brought him upstairs so that he could do so. Seeing the expression on O’Donnell’s face, Jack took him into the bathroom and closed the door behind them—and attempts to maintain that Kennedy’s offer was pro forma, that he really didn’t want Johnson, have to take into account O’Donnell’s story of what happened when O’Donnell began to argue against the choice of Johnson.

  “Wait a minute,” Kennedy said. “I’ve offered it to him, but he hasn’t accepted it yet and maybe he won’t.” But, Kennedy said, “if he does accept it, let’s get one thing clear.” He then pulled out all the arguments that might work with O’Donnell’s labor and liberal clientele, none of the arguments terribly convincing (one was: “I won’t be able to live with Lyndon Johnson as the Leader.… Did it occur to you that if Lyndon becomes the Vice President, I’ll have Mike Mansfield as the Leader … somebody I can trust and depend on”; another that the offer had been made to keep Johnson—and Rayburn—friendly, so that liberal-labor legislation could be passed in that upcoming rump session of Congress; “Lyndon Johnson we don’t worry about, but Sam Rayburn is a tough cookie, and well liked and respected”). One other argument would be, in retrospect, terribly poignant: it didn’t matter who was Vice President, Jack Kennedy said. “I’m forty-three years old, and I’m the healthiest candidate for President in the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to know that I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn’t mean anything.” But whether O’Donnell’s clients were persuaded by those arguments or not, Jack Kennedy said, and whether O’Donnell himself was persuaded by them or not, that was the way it was going to be. “You get your tail over and get your labor friends,” he said. “You get them and tell them this is the way it has got to be.”

  “He wanted no back talk,” O’Donnell recalls. Kennedy said Johnson had surprised him by being receptive, but the important thing was to get him on the ticket. “He said getting Johnson on the ticket was worth it and I was to go to my clientele and make them see it.”

  There followed summonses to the top Kennedy staff people such as Lawrence F. O’Brien, his National Campaign Director, to come to the ninth floor, and when they arrived, they learned that, as O’Brien puts it, “Jack Kennedy had made a decision that he’d like to have Lyndon Johnson as his running mate.” For a moment, O’Brien recalls, “I was stunned … it was out of the blue”; he had never, he said, given “any serious thought” to the possibility that Kennedy would offer, or that Johnson would accept, the vice presidential nomination (“If I ever really gave more than a fleeting thought to Lyndon Johnson, it would be ‘He’s the Majority Leader. He isn’t going to sacrifice what he has to be on this ticket’ ”). But the moment he began giving it serious thought, O’Brien, a keen political strategist—and one who knew the importance of counting—understood Jack Kennedy’s logic. The night before—and for so many months before that, ever since 1958, in fact—the Kennedy camp had been counting convention delegate votes, the votes necessary to win the nomination. As soon as the nomination was won, Kennedy had begun counting the Electoral College votes necessary to win the real prize, the presidency—and even a quick, preliminary look at those votes showed that without Texas’ twenty-four votes, and at least a few of the other southern votes, in his column, Jack Kennedy stood almost no chance at all of defeating Richard Nixon or any other Republican candidate. Extended analysis was not required, O’Brien was to explain. Jack Kennedy hadn’t needed input from others; he had selected Lyndon Johnson because “he was perhaps the first to focus on ‘Are you going to be a footnote in history as a nominee for the presidency or are you indeed going to achieve election?’ ” The presence of Lyndon Johnson on the ticket was the single best way—by far—of assuring that the name “Kennedy” would not appear in history books only in small type at the bottom of a page. “With him [Johnson], you had the South and the Southwest.… It was a stroke of genius.” And O’Brien understood also, from Jack Kennedy’s mouth, that the decision was firm. His trip to Kennedy’s suite “was just an unbelievable experience,” O’Brien recalls. “When I got the call that morning,” he had felt that “obviously … the subject [was going to be] now let’s go over the list [of possible vice presidential candidates] and let’s get a consensus.” But “there wou
ld be no list. It would be Lyndon Johnson.” Orders were given on the assumption that Johnson would accept. “People fanned out and there were tasks to do. You had to decide who was going to place him in nomination, who was going to second the nomination.”