The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Though “I saw a disaster in the making,” Baker says, when he attempted to “interpose reservations …, I had a hard time doing so.” Having worked himself up into believing that the plan would succeed, willed himself into the state in which he believed that whatever was in his mind was reality, Johnson just talked over him. “Blinded by his plans, his ego and his past Senate successes,” Baker says, he refused to listen to anything he didn’t want to hear. As had been the case ever since he had accepted the vice presidential nomination, in fact, this “revving up” was at a level of intensity rare even for him. Baker had often seen him in what he calls a “manic mood”; this time, he says, Johnson “seemed excessively manic.”

  An aspect of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and power that had been evident through his life was that the more of it he got, the more intoxicated he became with it. Now he had had a lot of it (“My God—running the world!”), and had had it for a long time: the eight years he had been the Democratic Leader of the Senate, minority and majority. And there was on Capitol Hill an understanding that he had restored the Senate to respect it had not enjoyed for more than a century, that he had transformed the institution from something very near a joke into a force to be reckoned with, and had therefore transformed its members as well, so that being a senator now meant so much more than before. Surely, he felt, these men wouldn’t want to go back to the situation that existed before he became Leader. He had boasted to his aides that he had the Old Bulls who ran the Senate in the palm of his hand, and indeed he did; the feelings of many of them toward him were almost paternal. As long as he had them behind him, the more junior senators didn’t much signify. But, he felt, the juniors, too, must of course be grateful for all he had done for them: changing the seniority system to place them in their freshman year in prestigious committee seats it would previously have taken them years to attain, giving them in other ways, too, opportunities to play a significant role in achieving governmental objectives of which they could be proud. “They were his children; it was his Senate.” “I feel sort of like a father to these boys,” he had explained to reporters. “A good father uses a gentle but firm rein.” He had been “enveloped” by power (“Good morning, Leader,” “Could I have a minute of your time, Leader?” “Mr. Leader, I never thought you could pull that one off”). Of course, they would be happy to let him keep running it. “He thought he was the Senate,” Neil MacNeil says.

  Johnson’s reasoning was overlooking two factors. One was personal, and had to do with those young senators he treated like “boys.” As had been the case throughout his life, the more power Johnson acquired, the more cavalier he became in its use; respectful, even obsequious to men whose backing he needed to get power, as soon as he didn’t need them anymore, he became overbearing, domineering, in his dealings with them. In the Senate, too, that had been the pattern—not with the most powerful of the Old Bulls: “He didn’t rant and rave at the Harry Byrds of the world,” George Smathers would say. “Oh no, he was passive, and so submissive, and so condescending, you couldn’t believe it! I’ve seen him kiss Harry Byrd’s ass until it was disgusting”; with these powerful committee chairmen, he was as fawning as he had ever been—but with the younger senators. Another continuing motif of Lyndon Johnson’s career—one that had been repeated in every institution in which he had climbed to power—was that the more power he acquired, the more he reveled in its use, flaunting it, using it often just for the sake of using it, bending men to his will just to show them he could, as, at college, no student was given one of those desperately needed jobs just because the student needed one, or because the student was a friend, no matter how close a friend, of Lyndon Johnson’s. “You had to ask.” And when the power had been solidified—when he was in charge, and confident of staying there—the flaunting was as dramatic as the fawning had been. “During his early years as Leader, he put on a humble-pie act that would have done credit to Ella Cinders,” George Reedy was to say. “This faded overnight.” With senators other than the Old Bulls, he made it clear that no disobedience to his wishes would be tolerated, that his leadership had to be accepted completely, that as he had told Estes Kefauver, a senator who wanted to get ahead in the Senate not only had to be on his team but had to “want to be on that team.” Senators who accepted the rein received rewards from his hand—prize committee assignments; prize office space; prize junkets; a place for their bills at the head of the Senate calendar. Those who didn’t, he not only ignored but humiliated—in the hundred ways a Leader could humiliate a junior senator. And not all senators, no matter how junior, liked being reined in, liked having to ask for things to which, under Senate rules and traditions, they were entitled, liked having to beg. And those of them who were liberal—and this included not only junior senators but longtime liberal stalwarts like Herbert Lehman, Paul Douglas and Albert Gore of Tennessee—felt, as well, that by allying himself on crucial matters with the southern Bulls, Johnson was the most formidable obstacle to the achievement of liberal objectives. They were already, in Evans and Novak’s description, “brooding that Johnson would try to run the Senate from the Vice President’s chair, with Mansfield, the self-effacing, introspective former professor who was uncomfortable with power, deferring to him,” and they felt their misgivings deepen as news leaked out about his plan. “Having watched him operate for eight years, Democratic senators were fearful of what he might do now if he got a toe in the door. An unspoken sentiment among many senators was the fear that if Johnson became de facto chairman of the conference, he would use that position to become de facto Majority Leader, with tentacles of power into both the Steering and Policy Committees,” which he, not Mansfield, would still control.

  The feelings of these senators didn’t matter so long as Johnson still had the Old Bulls behind him, as the 51–12 vote on Proxmire’s resolution had proved. But Johnson was not taking into account that the particular issue at hand—allowing a Vice President to preside over the Democratic Senatorial Conference—was one issue on which the Old Bulls wouldn’t be behind him. Strong as was their affection for Johnson, they loved the Senate more, and the heart of the Senate to them was its independence of the executive branch.

  Johnson must have been aware of their feelings, and of their reverence for this Senate tradition, and if he needed to be reminded, both Humphrey and Baker tried to remind him. But, having worked himself up, he wasn’t listening to anything he didn’t want to hear.

  And then he had no choice but to listen. At 9:45 a.m. on January 3, still a senator—he would not resign until the new Senate convened at noon—and still Majority Leader and Caucus chairman, he strode into the Democratic Caucus with a broad, confident smile on his face, sat down at the small table that had been placed in the front of the room, gaveled the caucus to order, and said that the first order of business was to elect a new Leader. After Mansfield was elected (by acclamation), however, Johnson did not hand him the gavel and surrender his chair. And Mansfield, sitting down instead in a chair next to Johnson’s, made a motion, the minutes state, that “the Vice President–elect preside over future conferences.”

  “Can you imagine that?” Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a Johnson team member but also a very firm believer in senatorial precedents, was to ask. “This action … reflected the quiet and unassuming nature of Mike Mansfield, but it was a mistake.” Another historian writes that until that moment, “Despite Johnson’s signals, few senators [had anticipated] the extent of his power grab.” Now, with understanding suddenly dawning, one by one, liberals—Douglas, Gore, Joseph Clark—rose to stand at their seats, right in front of Johnson, to denounce the proposal to his face. “I don’t know of any right for a Vice President to preside or even be here with senators,” Gore said. “This Caucus is not open to former Senators.” Johnson’s face flushed with anger.

  While objections from liberals could, of course, be disregarded, other hands were being raised—the hands of Old Bulls. One after another, Johnson recognized them, expecting
them to support Mansfield’s motion; one after another, they attacked it. Even Clinton Anderson, one of Johnson’s closest allies in the Senate, attacked it, saying that “to allow a member of the Executive Branch to preside over the Conference would not only shatter the principle of separation of powers but would make the Senate look ridiculous.” Johnson’s face, so red a few minutes before, had turned ashen. All of the Old Bulls included praise of Johnson in their remarks, Baker says, “but there was no getting around that they were inviting him out of their inner circle.” Insisting that he had no intention of “sharing either [his] responsibility or authority,” and that he had intended the motion only as recognition of Johnson’s achievements, Mansfield said the motion was entirely his own idea. He repeated this several times. “With each repetition, fewer members believed that to be true,” says a Mansfield aide who was present. “Instead, the murmurs of disbelief indicated that they were beginning to suspect that Mansfield had been had by Johnson.” When Mansfield made a personal appeal for his proposal, a vote was taken supporting it, “but,” as Baker says, “everyone in the room knew that Johnson had been rebuffed.” Hardly had the Democrats left the caucus room when word began circulating through the Senate Office Building that if necessary there would be another vote—one that would have a different result. When several friendly senators tried to make this clear to Johnson, they found only a reluctance to face reality—“It was too much for him to leave that center of power,” Humphrey says. “He was just very reluctant to give up those reins.” The senator to whom he had to listen was delegated to make him face it, and after Richard Russell spoke to him, he did: at the next day’s Democratic Caucus, there was only one chair at the presiding officer’s table, and Mansfield was sitting in it; Lyndon Johnson was not present. As always, he had a vivid phrase to describe what had occurred. “I now know the difference between a caucus and a cactus,” he told Baker. “In a cactus, all the pricks are on the outside.” But no words could hide the pain. “Those bastards sandbagged me,” he told Baker. “They had to humiliate me in public.”

  THE OTHER FRONT OPENED BY JOHNSON in his campaign for power as the Vice President was a mile and a half west on Pennsylvania Avenue. Previous Vice Presidents had had their office in the Capitol; no Vice President in the country’s history had had one in the White House. Johnson asked Kennedy for an office there, and not just any office but a room right next to the Oval Office. Johnson’s predecessors had had staffs of their own, but rather small ones, housed either in the Capitol or some government office building. Johnson wanted a large staff—a very large one; he had had some fifty persons working for him as Senate Majority Leader, and he seems to have envisioned keeping most of them as Vice President. And he didn’t want them set off from Kennedy’s staff. He was to ask Kennedy for permission “to appoint a staff within the Executive Office of the President.” And this would have been quite a staff. “He told me, ‘I want to establish a little Joint Chiefs of Staff in my office,’ ” says Colonel Kenneth E. BeLieu, a longtime Johnson aide and at that time executive officer to Secretary of the Army Frank Pace. So confident was Johnson that he would be allowed to establish one that he told BeLieu to begin interviewing senior military officers for the posts; BeLieu, taking into account what Johnson wanted in his advisers, had to tell one candidate, an Army colonel otherwise well qualified, that “You have a habit of telling people when you think they’re wrong, and I don’t think you’d get along with Lyndon.” (Actually, BeLieu explains, with a smile, the first time the colonel disagreed with Lyndon, “Lyndon would have crucified him.”)

  And then there was the proposed executive order that Johnson, shortly after the disastrous Senate caucus, sent to the White House for President Kennedy’s signature.

  The date and exact wording of the order originally sent to Kennedy’s office, and of a letter, also drafted by Johnson for Kennedy’s signature, that accompanied it, are unknown. No copies can be found in either the Lyndon B. Johnson Library or the John F. Kennedy Library. Several persons who saw the order at the time say it would have given the Vice President “general supervision” over a wide range of national security issues. After discussing the matter with the Harvard historian Richard Neustadt, who was advising Kennedy on the transition, Doris Goodwin was to write that the “unusual” document, “outlining a wide range of issues over which the new Vice President would have ‘general supervision,’ ” also “put all the departments and agencies” concerned with national security “on notice that Lyndon Johnson was to receive all reports, information and policy plans that were generally sent to the President himself.” The draft of the order and the letter would be revised, perhaps on suggestions from the White House before Kennedy himself saw them. The revised drafts finally submitted to the President—they have been preserved for history—do not contain the words “general supervision.” Instead the draft of the executive order states that “in order to provide a more effective coordination of the departments and agencies of the government concerned with national security, the Vice President is hereby designated and empowered to exercise continuing surveillance and review, and to advise the President, with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign and military policies relating to national security.”

  Vague though the “surveillance and review” phrase may have been, succeeding clauses in this final draft of the executive order made it more specific. One authorized the Vice President “to obtain all pertinent information concerning the policies and operations of” the State Department, the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Budget Bureau and the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization as well as “other Government departments involved in national security matters.” Another clause said that “in the performance of [these] functions,” the Vice President, “whenever necessary and with the approval of the head of the department or agency concerned,” was authorized to use their “established facilities and personnel.” And another clause would make it difficult for a department or agency head to refuse that approval whenever the Vice President asked for it. “All elements and agencies of the United States shall cooperate fully with the Vice President in the carrying out of these assignments,” it said.

  The order was not written by, or, during its preparation, even seen by, the man who had for the past decade been so successfully playing the key role in drafting Johnson documents: George Reedy. Lyndon “did not like opposition, and was in a mood where he was bypassing me on projects to which he suspected I might be negative.” And “He was right about this one,” Reedy says. When he finally got a glimpse of it (BeLieu showed it to him), he knew at once that it was “a blunder on his part—far greater than his misreading of the Senate Democrats.” No opportunity was given him to offer any input, however. “Before I could protest, it was on its way to the White House.” A friend—apparently Jim Rowe—to whom Johnson showed it after it had already been sent was, Evans and Novak wrote, “flabbergasted.” It was, Rowe said, “frankly, the most presumptuous document any Vice President had ever sent to his President.”

  Of even more significance was Kennedy’s handling of the executive order and letter that Johnson was suggesting he sign. When Johnson met with Kennedy in the Oval Office on January 28, no executive order but only a letter (“Dear Mr. Vice President …”) was handed back to him, and it contained no authorization for him to conduct “continuing surveillance” or “general supervision” of anything; no such phrases remained in the letter, and neither did the phrase “I am directing you”; all the letter said on the subject of national security was “I am hereby requesting you to review policies relating to the national security”—a meaningless phrase that conferred no power at all. There was no provision in Kennedy’s letter for any additional staff—there was no mention in the letter of any staff at all. There was no mention of any use by the Vice President of the agencies’ “facilities and personnel”; all Kennedy was now saying was that he would expect the agencies “to cooperate fully with you in providing informatio
n.” As for the proposed executive order, that had disappeared from the scene entirely. Kennedy did not hand Johnson any version of an order at all, edited or otherwise; no executive order bearing on the Vice President and national security was ever issued.

  REEDY HOPED AGAINST HOPE that no word of the incident would leak out, but these hopes were dashed on February 9 when the nationally syndicated columnist Marquis Childs walked into his office and said, as Reedy later reported to Johnson, that “he understood the relations between you and the President were ‘like this’ (making jabbing motions with his hands like two men fighting)” and mentioned that “a very responsible White House official” had told him that there had been an incident between the two men that was “so major that a parallel could not be found in history without going back all the way to Seward’s letter to Lincoln.” The White House official, Childs said, “declined to describe the incident other than in terms of the” Seward parallel, but since Seward’s letter to Lincoln—actually a memo sent by Secretary of State William H. Seward shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration—had sought extraordinary power for himself at the President’s expense (it would have made him, an historian wrote, the equivalent of “a prime minster, with Lincoln the figurehead”), Reedy knew that the Kennedy official had been referring to Johnson’s proposed executive order.

  Aside from one rather oblique reference in Childs’ column (“There were predictions that Johnson would insist that … he should be at least equal [to the President] in executive authority. Knowing persons suggested a parallel between Abraham Lincoln and … Seward”) and in a few others, the incident received little publicity—a fact that is perhaps the most significant aspect of the incident. Kennedy simply didn’t publicize it and, except to a very few close aides, didn’t even disclose it. Lincoln had handled Seward’s power grab by all but ignoring it; he wrote a response to Seward—if a policy was to be carried out, he said, “I must do it”—but never sent it; it remained buried in his papers until it was discovered decades later. As one of his biographers later wrote: “Had Mr. Lincoln been an envious or resentful man, he could not have wished for a better occasion to put a rival under his feet,” even, perhaps, by dismissing him, but instead he demonstrated an “unselfish magnanimity” which was “the central marvel of the whole affair.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy had handled Johnson’s power grab the same way, as Reedy saw: thanks to Kennedy, he was to say, “the whole thing was lost in charitable silence.” The President had handled it magnanimously and casually—as if there had been no reason to take it seriously.