The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “Mr. Kennedy stopped by his desk, glanced at his schedule for the day, had a few words with … Kenny O’Donnell, looked at the clock, pushed back the hair from his forehead, seemed to wait a moment,” obviously killing time, Mrs. Lincoln was to recall. “And then he slowly walked through the door,” out through her office, and only then entered the Cabinet Room, where the legislative leaders—and Johnson—were standing waiting for him. He hadn’t wanted to walk into the meeting with Johnson beside him. And when he walked into the meeting, Johnson hadn’t been beside him.

  Then, when the meeting ended, Mrs. Lincoln says, “Mr. Johnson followed Mr. Kennedy right into the President’s office.” During the next fifteen minutes or so, she came into the office several times with telephone messages for Kennedy. Each time she came in, Johnson, standing in front of Kennedy’s desk, was talking, his right arm raised and his forefinger jabbing at Kennedy. “In a loud voice he would preface his remarks with, ‘Now let me tell you, Jack.’ ” And each time she came in, Kennedy, saying “very little,” was shuffling through papers on his desk. Finally, he stood up, looked pointedly at his schedule and said, “That’s fine, Lyndon,” and Lyndon left.

  That scene—Johnson lecturing and jabbing, Kennedy “fiddling with papers”—“was one that I was going to see many, many, many times whenever Johnson was in that office alone with Mr. Kennedy,” Mrs. Lincoln says. But, in fact, there weren’t all that many times. During the entire year of 1961, Mrs. Lincoln was to calculate from her diary entries, Johnson spent a total of ten hours and nineteen minutes alone with Kennedy—less than an hour per month. During that year, he had breakfast alone with the President twice. He had had more breakfasts, many more breakfasts, alone with a President—President Roosevelt—when he had been a junior congressman twenty years before.

  And if that incident was a response to Johnson’s pushing, there were others that couldn’t be laid at the Vice President’s door.

  Kennedy’s instructions that Johnson be invited to the large formal meetings of the Cabinet, the National Security Council and the legislative leaders were followed, at least for a while. In the Kennedy White House, however, as Theodore Sorensen was to admit, it was not in such formal meetings but in “the smaller and more informal meetings” of presidential intimates that “the final decisions were often made”—and to such meetings, from the early days of the Kennedy presidency, Kennedy quite often “did not invite him.”

  Johnson’s exclusion was particularly striking in the area in which he had expected to play his most significant role: guiding the Kennedy Administration’s program through Congress. Lawrence O’Brien was put in charge of that task, and Kennedy made it clear that O’Brien was, in fact, the man to see. When a senator or a congressman called the President, Kennedy would ask: “Have you talked to Larry O’Brien about this.… You should talk to Larry.” As O’Brien puts it: “It didn’t take long for them to recognize [that] Larry O’Brien spoke for the President.” Not long at all. Within a few days Johnson realized that he wasn’t the man whom senators and representatives were calling when they were negotiating about something with the Administration, or asking it for some favor.

  There were, of course, some strategic explanations for Johnson’s exclusion. One was his reputation, the aura of legislative genius that surrounded him in the eyes of newsmen who had watched his mastery of the Senate. One of the new President’s characteristics was an affection for the spotlight—and a disinclination to share it. To the suggestion that the renowned poet Robert Frost be given a role in the inauguration, he had responded with approval—and caution. The role should not be a speech, he said. “Frost is a master of words. His remarks will detract from my inaugural address if we’re not careful. Why not have him read a poem—something that won’t put him in competition with me?” Johnson was a master of something, too—legislative tactics—and, as one historian writes, Kennedy “did not want [Johnson] managing [the Administration’s] legislative program and creating the impression that the President was following the lead of his Vice President, a more experienced legislator.” Another explanation was Johnson’s ego, which, as O’Brien aide Myer Feldman puts it, Kennedy felt “was so great it might handicap the Administration.” Once Lyndon Johnson was again roaming free on Capitol Hill, his native habitat, there would be no controlling him. “If he had been unleashed he would have found it hard to refrain from running the whole show,” his aide Harry McPherson says.

  Considerations of policy may also have played a role. “If Kennedy had allowed Johnson to conduct his congressional relations, he would in effect have made the Vice President the judge of what was legislatively feasible and therefore lost control over his own program,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote. “This was something no sensible President would do. Kennedy therefore relied on his own congressional liaison staff under Lawrence O’Brien, calling on the Vice President only on particular occasions.”

  Johnson’s exclusion from this area of political activity extended to advice as well as participation, however. “Never in about two years” had O’Brien so much as stopped by his office to ask for any, he would tell McPherson near the end of 1962. O’Brien, a tough Irish pol, had great admiration for Johnson, as it happened, and was always “tactful and courteous” with him, but there was a line he never permitted Johnson to cross. On Sundays, O’Brien and his wife, Elva, invited senators, representatives and journalists to mingle with Administration insiders at brunch at their house in Georgetown. At one time—during his twelve years in the Senate, in fact, and, indeed, even before that, during his later years in the House—Lyndon Johnson’s house had been the place to be on Sundays if you wanted to know what was really going on on Capitol Hill.

  Not anymore.

  AND ON THOSE OCCASIONS WHEN, as at one of the Tuesday breakfasts, he offered his opinion on legislative matters, it was not treated with particular respect. “He was so resentful of being at the breakfasts with … Mansfield and Hubert Humphrey, who was quite voluble, speaking on every issue,” says O’Donnell. “And they sort of all treated Lyndon like he was one of them and he didn’t want to be treated like he was one of them. If he did say something, they’d say, ‘I don’t think you’re right. You haven’t been up there lately.’ ” These were men who had once shown him deference, and more than deference. Once, after Johnson had given Hubert Humphrey an order on the Senate floor and he hadn’t moved fast enough to suit the Leader, Johnson, snarling “Get goin’ now!,” had kicked him—hard—in the shin to speed him on his way, and Humphrey had accepted the kick without complaint, had even pulled up his pant leg the next day to proudly show a reporter the scar. Now Humphrey talked back to him, told him he was wrong.

  Estelle Harbin, the woman who had worked in the same office with Johnson when he first came to Washington, had observed that even as a new congressional aide, he “couldn’t stand being just one of a crowd—just could not stand it.” Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, who had come to know him later (and who became his mistress), had noticed the same characteristic: watching him on the floor of the House when he had been just another representative, she had seen “the picture of boredom, slumped in his seat with his eyes half closed. Then suddenly he’d jump to his feet, nervous … as if he couldn’t bear it another minute.” That was the picture of Lyndon Johnson at social as well as political gatherings; at dinner parties, he wanted to monopolize the conversation; if other guests persisted in talking, he would close his eyes and go to sleep, or at least appear to, until a gap in the conversation let him start talking again.

  And if the senators didn’t listen to him, certainly the bright young men of the Administration who attended the leaders’ breakfasts—O’Donnell, O’Brien and O’Brien’s aides Feldman and White—didn’t. Says an occasional attendee, Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, “The President had more or less shelved the Vice President, … turned him out to pasture.” The congressional leaders saw that the Administration’s men didn’t put much stock in his op
inions. So why should they? No one listened to him. “The greatest legislative prestidigitator of his time” had been stripped of any opportunity to use his sleight of hand.

  In status-conscious Washington, it did not take long for such a dramatic change to be noted. By March 19, Tom Wicker of the New York Times was writing that “Those who have watched his giant strides about Washington this past decade” are “puzzled.” The Administration has kept this “proud and forceful figure … out of sight and out of print.”

  Johnson’s response to the new position in which he found himself was to hardly talk at all at Cabinet, National Security Council and legislative leaders’ meetings—even when directly invited by the President. Kennedy would ask him for his recommendation on the particular issue at hand, or, if a decision was being taken, whether he approved of it. Johnson would answer in monosyllables—and in a voice so soft that sometimes it could not be heard, so that he would have to be asked to repeat himself. One of his tactics throughout his life—one of the techniques he employed to bend people to his will—had been to make them feel sorry for him, to pity him, until, moved at last by his distress and his sad state, they gave way, at which point he would promptly revert to his normal self, with a speed and thoroughness so dramatic that they made it obvious that this sad demeanor was indeed only a tactic. This technique had had success even with people as familiar with it as Jim Rowe. Having observed Johnson close up for more than twenty years, Rowe was aware, he says, that Johnson would always use “whatever he could” to “make people feel sorry for him” because “that helped him get what he wanted from them.” But that awareness didn’t help Rowe when, in 1956, the person from whom Johnson wanted something was him. Having observed also how Johnson treated people on his payroll, he had for years been rejecting Johnson’s offers to join his staff, and had been determined never to do so. But Johnson’s heart attack in 1955 gave him a new weapon—and in January, 1956, he deployed it, saying, in a low, earnest voice, “I wish you would come down to the Senate and help me.” And when Rowe refused, using his law practice as an excuse (“I said, ‘I can’t afford it, I’ll lose clients’ ”), Johnson began telling other members of their circle how cruel it was of Jim to refuse to take a little of the load off a man at death’s door. “People I knew were coming up to me on the street—on the street—and saying, ‘Why aren’t you helping Lyndon? Don’t you know how sick he is? How can you let him down when he needs you?’ ”

  Johnson had spoken to Rowe’s law partner, Rowe found. “To my amazement, Corcoran was saying, ‘You just can’t do this to Lyndon Johnson!’ I said, ‘What do you mean I can’t do it?’ He said, ‘Never mind the clients. We’ll hold down the law firm.’ ” Johnson had spoken to Rowe’s wife. “One night, Elizabeth turned on me: ‘Why are you doing this to poor Lyndon?’ ”

  Then Lyndon Johnson came to Jim Rowe’s office again, pleading with him, crying real tears as he sat doubled over, his face in his hands. “He wept. ‘I’m going to die. You’re an old friend. I thought you were my friend and you don’t care that I’m going to die. It’s just selfish of you, typically selfish.’ ”

  Finally Rowe said, “Oh, goddamn it, all right”—and then “as soon as Lyndon got what he wanted,” Rowe was forcibly reminded why he had been determined not to join his staff. The moment the words were out of Rowe’s mouth, Johnson straightened up, and his tone changed instantly from one of pleading to one of cold command.

  “Just remember,” he said. “I make the decisions. You don’t.”

  Now this technique was used with Jack Kennedy. At meetings, the soft voice was coupled with a face that varied between sullen and sorrowful—the look of a very sad man. And if pressed particularly pointedly by the President for an explanation or a recommendation, he would say, “I’m not competent to advise you on this,” sometimes adding that he didn’t have enough information on the subject, statements that Kennedy viewed, in Sorensen’s phrase, as being Johnson’s “own subtle way of complaining to the President” about his treatment.

  With Kennedy, however, the tactic had no success at all. “I cannot stand Johnson’s damn long face,” the President told his buddy Smathers. “He just comes in, sits at the Cabinet meetings with his face all screwed up, never says anything. He looks so sad.… You’ve seen him, George, you know him, he doesn’t even open his mouth.” Smathers suggested foreign travel. “You ought to send him on a trip so that he can get all of the fanfare and all of the attention … build up his ego again, let him have a great time”—and also, although Smathers didn’t say it, get him out of Kennedy’s hair. “You know, that’s a damn good idea,” Kennedy replied—and at the beginning of April sent him to Senegal, which was celebrating the first anniversary of its independence.

  ONE EARLY INCIDENT is difficult indeed to reconcile with statements that Lyndon Johnson was being included “at all the major meetings,” that he was being made “a working participant in national affairs.”

  On Saturday morning, April 15, he flew to Norfolk on a Military Air Transport Service plane, to crown his daughter Lynda Bird as Virginia’s Azalea Queen. As it happened, other military planes were in the air that morning: eight old B-26 bombers were bombing and strafing airfields in Cuba as a prelude to the Bay of Pigs invasion, which would take place in two days. Johnson did not know the bombing was taking place—or that the invasion was imminent. He may not have known that there was going to be an invasion. Shortly after the inauguration, he had attended a few meetings on the general Cuban situation, but from the moment serious planning began, he was, in Dallek’s words, “systematically excluded” from any part in it. During the month before April 15, meeting after meeting had been held at the White House and State Department to plan for the attempt to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Johnson had participated in none of them. Kennedy had, in fact, made sure that he wouldn’t even be in Washington on the weekend of the invasion. He had asked the Vice President to entertain German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that weekend—on his ranch in Texas.

  Flying there directly from Norfolk, Johnson was waiting at the ranch when the chancellor arrived. On Sunday, with the fourteen-hundred-man Cuban Exile Brigade at sea and heading for Cuba, Johnson was introducing Adenauer at the Gillespie County Fair in Fredricksburg, the German town near his ranch. And on Monday, the day the Brigade landed, to be pinned down on the beach and eventually forced to surrender—those of them who survived—to Castro’s forces, Johnson was introducing the chancellor before his speech to the Texas Legislature in Austin. Only that evening did he return to Washington.

  The next day Johnson was invited to attend a meeting on Cuba—a postmortem on what had gone wrong. Whatever mistakes the President had made in authorizing the invasion (which had left more than one hundred members of the Brigade dead, with an additional twelve hundred taken prisoner, and the strengthening of Fidel Castro’s position; it was, the historian Theodore Draper said, “one of those rare events in history—a perfect failure”)—an invasion in which, in an attempt to conceal American involvement, Kennedy refused to send air cover even when the men on the beach, encircled by thousands of Fidel Castro’s troops and being strafed by Soviet-made MIG-15 fighters, were asking for the American air support they thought they had been promised—the President accepted the blame for them. Misled though he had been by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (“Those sons-of-bitches with all the fruit salad” who “just sat there nodding, saying it would work”) about the invasion’s chances of success, he took every bit of the blame. “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” he said; not this defeat. “President Kennedy has stated from the beginning that as President he bears sole responsibility,” a White House release declared. “He has stated it on all occasions and he restates it now.… The President is strongly opposed to anyone within or without the administration attempting to shift the responsibility.” No matter how upset he was by having had to leave men on the beach (Salinger found the President crying in
his bedroom the morning after the invasion; when he came downstairs later, he looked a little disheveled, his hair not combed right, the knot of his necktie slightly askew; more than once in the days that followed the Bay of Pigs, friends saw John Kennedy talking to himself; sometimes he would blurt out, in the midst of conversations on other topics: “How could I have been so stupid?”), no matter how the realization of the cost of his miscalculations tormented him (walking into Ken O’Donnell’s office one morning, he told him he had had a sleepless night: “I was thinking of those poor guys in prison down there”; when he was arranging the ransom of the prisoners the next year, “It was,” Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston said, “the first time I ever saw tears in his eyes”), no one was taking the blame but him. During the postmortem meeting on the catastrophe, however, Johnson launched into what has been described as “a general criticism of” the CIA. Kennedy said, “Lyndon, you’ve got to remember we’re all in this, and that, when I accepted responsibility for this operation, I took the entire responsibility on myself, and I think we should have no sort of passing of the buck or backbiting, however justified.” At the first meeting on the Bay of Pigs to which Johnson was invited, he had been rebuked by the President in front of the other men at the table.

  PART OF THE EXPLANATION for the attitude of President Kennedy and many members of the Kennedy Administration toward Lyndon Johnson was suspicion and fear—of this figure who for so long had loomed so large over their lives, as the Leader, as their most feared opponent in the fight for the presidential nomination: of what he might do, this master of politics, if they gave him the slightest opening. All but unmentioned though the “Seward” episode may have been in the press, it wasn’t forgotten by the men who knew about it—White House aides were still repeating around Washington that Lyndon Johnson had tried “to pull a William Seward”—and it proved to them that the Vice President would grab power at the slightest opportunity; “newspapermen” were still telling Reedy and Busby, as Busby reported to Johnson, “that the White House is unhappy over the Vice President seizing power.” One journalist, Time’s Sidey, was later to write that “At least part of the problem in Johnson’s vice presidency was LBJ’s personality and lust for power. The more restless he got, the more suspicious of him Kennedy’s people became.” Part of the explanation was the fact that Johnson, as Kennedy put it, “knows every newspaperman in Washington,” and could, and probably would, leak to journalists any information they let him have. So they made sure he had as little as possible.