The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  His hands revealed how hard it was. Sometimes, as he sat at the long table in the Cabinet Room, listening to other men talk, those big hands would be clasped together, the intertwined fingers working nervously, so hard that his knuckles were white with the effort he was making not to speak. Sometimes, as Kennedy, directly opposite him across seven feet of polished mahogany, ran the meetings with his easy air of command, he would look away from the President for long minutes, staring down the length of the table, a faraway expression on his face. Sometimes he would put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands and stare down at the mahogany. Then he might raise his head, and lean forward across the table, a hand shielding his eyes, as if from the sunlight streaming in the windows behind the President. At the weekly legislative leaders’ breakfasts now, he “rarely said a word,” wrote Doris Kearns, whose future husband, Richard Goodwin, attended some of them. “His face appeared vacant and gray; he looked discontented and tired.” Even when, in response to a direct question from Kennedy, he offered an opinion, “he tended to mumble, his words barely audible to the person sitting beside him. On rare occasions, when he was particularly excited or perturbed, he would suddenly raise his voice for a few moments to its customary shout, only to let it sink again into an unintelligible murmur.”

  And by the summer of 1962, his predicament was in the press; for this man who so dreaded public humiliation, the spectre had arrived at his front door—in the newspapers that were delivered to The Elms each morning. And waiting for him each morning at his desk in the Taj Mahal were articles that had been scissored out of other newspapers by his staff and placed in a folder for his perusal. By the end of the day, each would have scribbled across it the big L that signified that he had seen it.

  WHERE’S LYNDON? asked a headline over a syndicated article that asked, “Why has Lyndon Johnson gone into eclipse?” LYNDON JOHNSON GUESSING GAME was another headline; the article under it asked the question, “why Johnson does not make the headlines now that he did once,” and answered it: “It is John F. Kennedy who makes the decisions—and gets the headlines.” In a syndicated column that appeared in scores of Hearst newspapers Marianne Means wrote, “He is usually so thoroughly ignored that it is hard to tell if he is here at all,” and, noting that, in conferences, “basically, Johnson remains an observer, not a participant,” mocked his “extraordinary efforts to keep himself in check.… None of these were Johnson traits before the vice presidency. His egotistical temper rarely has permitted him to share the credit for anything. Thus, Johnson appears to be working very hard at his tiny job.” One aspect to the mockery must have cut particularly deeply, to a man to whom it was so important to be thought of as shrewd, tough, always outsmarting other men, using them, and never being used himself. “Now that Johnson has served his purpose”—to get southern votes for Kennedy—“perhaps Kennedy was simply tossing him aside,” the Chicago Tribune speculated. And as the number of such articles increased, the headlines seemed to boil down to a single mocking question, repeated in a dozen newspapers: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LYNDON JOHNSON?

  On one such article, Johnson, in his agony, scribbled a note to his aide Charles Boatner: “Chas—Why? Not True.” But it was true, and he knew it.

  IT WASN’T ALL THAT HARD to break Lyndon Johnson. What lay beneath that blustering, bullying exterior was too fragile—had been broken too many times in his youth. Ever since those terrible years growing up in the Hill Country, ever since those years whose shadow never left him, any disparagement, any criticism, had hurt so deeply because it was cutting into a wound too deep ever to have closed. “It was most important to Lyndon not to be like Daddy”—not to become what his father, once so respected, had become: the object of public ridicule, of public scorn. But the parallel was inescapable now. His father had become a laughingstock. Now, so had he.

  His whole demeanor showed what had befallen him, showed that the effort he was making came at a very high price, that the self-discipline it took for him to act against his nature, the “self-effacement” that Arthur Schlesinger says “was for him the most unnatural of roles,” came at “a growing psychic cost.” The price was registered in his weight, which was dropping off him because he wasn’t eating much; although he ordered new suits, they were soon hanging loosely on his shoulders, his trousers, which he always liked cut full anyway, bagging around his shoes. It was registered in his face, which had become gaunt, haggard, so thin that the long lobes of his ears, the jut of his big nose, his heavy black eyebrows and the dark circles under his eyes—eyes sunk deep in his head now—were more prominent than ever, and the gauntness was accentuated by his expression, so gloomy, with the corners of his mouth pulled down and the jowls hanging down, that more than one journalist called it a “hangdog look.” It was registered in his stride: the old, long, imperious Texas lope was gone; he walked more deliberately, with shorter steps; his shoulders were slumped; when he was in the President’s presence, he seemed sometimes to be actually bending his knees a bit, as if he wanted to conceal the fact that he was the taller man. Bill Moyers—who had, within a few weeks of the inauguration, become publicity director for Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver of the Peace Corps—felt that Johnson’s self-confidence was gone, that he was “a man without a purpose … a great horse in a very small corral.”

  Others described the cost in terms of an image—not a pleasant image when applied to a man to whom being “a man” was all-important. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was to recall looking into Lyndon Johnson’s eyes during his vice presidency and thinking, “This is a bull castrated very late in life.” Nor was it only other men who applied that image to Johnson. He applied it to himself. In later years, when the vice presidency was behind him, he would apply it jokingly. “A vice president is a steer,” he would say. “You know what a steer is? A steer is a bull who has lost his social standing.” But there was no joke in the way he used it now. Late one afternoon, while Sam Rayburn was still alive, Johnson walked into Rayburn’s Board of Education. Instead of walking over and kissing Rayburn, as he usually did, he sat down without a word in one of the dark leather easy chairs, and put his head in his hands. Then he sat there for long minutes, oblivious to the other men in the room. His head kept dropping lower, until it was barely above his knees. And then, in a very low voice, Lyndon Johnson said, “Being vice president is like being a cut dog.”

  TALKING TO THE PRESS was too hard. The big names had stopped interviewing him, but there were still requests, relayed to him through Reedy, from other Washington reporters, or from reporters from Texas and foreign papers. “I am too worn out,” he said to one request; on another, he scribbled a single word: “No.” He couldn’t bear to appear on television, turning down even the popular Today show; he told Reedy to simply reply to television requests by saying that he didn’t go on television. Reedy, reluctant to make this bare, almost unbelievable statement—that the Vice President of the United States doesn’t go on television—resorted to different excuses, but they wore thin. In March of 1962, Adlai Stevenson’s press secretary, Clayton Fritchey, telephoned Reedy, an old friend, to say that the U.N. ambassador had agreed to host a program on outer space and international cooperation, and wanted Johnson to appear on the show, and Reedy pointed out to Johnson that, as chairman of the Space Council, it was only logical that he do so, and that if he didn’t, Fritchey would get someone else, perhaps one of Johnson’s space aides, like James Webb. Johnson told him to refuse, but instead Reedy sent Johnson a memo which he wrote and rewrote, trying to make Johnson see the folly of what he was doing. “After considering it from every angle I would like to suggest that you reconsider your refusal,” he wrote. “This program would definitely give you an opportunity to be associated with the space program, above and beyond almost anything else you could do.… The spotlight would be on you.” When Johnson told Reedy to say what he had been told to say, Fritchey’s response was curt. “I called Clayton Fritchey and told him that you do not go on TV shows,” Reedy reported. “His
exact response was: ‘All right! I might invite Jim Webb then. We want someone from Washington. I appreciate your efforts, George. So long.’ ”

  He couldn’t bear to stay in Washington. After Kennedy’s triumphant confrontation with Big Steel in April, during which, to battle inflation, the President forced the United States Steel Corporation to rescind the price increases it had announced—a four-day-long episode in which Johnson played no part—he began spending more and more time on his ranch, leaving Washington on Thursday and not returning until Monday. But he couldn’t relax there. To while away the time, he played endless games of dominoes with his ranch foreman, Dale Malechek. And he couldn’t sleep there, either. Malechek, milking cows at 4 a.m., suddenly felt a presence behind him, and, turning on his stool, saw Johnson standing behind him in his bathrobe.

  With the weather turning warmer in Washington that summer, he would invite Texas allies over to The Elms to swim or sit around the pool and then have dinner, but, one of the frequent guests, Congressman Jim Wright, recalls, he kept “grabbing the phone impatiently and calling somebody. He couldn’t relax, you couldn’t keep his mind on one subject.”

  And when he did sleep, his dreams—his nightmares—were of what Doris Kearns Goodwin, to whom he was later to recall them, called the “utter powerlessness” of being trapped, and the trap in which he was caught in his dreams was, in fact, the one in which, in daylight hours, he lived. In the dream that particularly tormented him, he was seated at his desk in the Executive Office Building, so near, and yet so far, from the White House just beyond his window. “In the dream,” he told Goodwin, “I had finished signing one stack of letters and had turned my chair toward the window. The activity on the street below suggested to me that it was just past five o’clock. All of Washington, it seemed, was on the street, leaving work for the day, heading for home. Suddenly, I decided I’d pack up and go home, too. For once, I decided, it would be nice to join all those people on the street and have an early dinner with my family. I started to get up from my chair, but I couldn’t move. I looked down at my legs and saw they were manacled to the chair with a heavy chain. I tried to break the chain, but I couldn’t. I tried again, and failed again. Once more and I gave up: I reached for the second stack of mail. I placed it directly in front of me, and got back to work.”

  In desperation he turned back to the staff member on whom he had relied for so many years, instructing George Reedy to draft one of his long memos laying out a strategy to deal with the predicament. But as always, he got from Reedy the truth: that there was, really, no way of dealing with it. “The question raised by so many newspapermen—‘What is the Vice President doing?’—is not going to be answered satisfactorily by more activity or by public relations moves,” Reedy told him in a memo. “They are accustomed to thinking of you as the man who for eight years was one of the dominant movers and shapers on the American scene and this does not accord in their thoughts with the picture of a man … meeting officials at the airport and going down to the White House to give advice but not to make decisions.… The question ‘What is the Vice President Doing?’ is going to persist with unfavorable undertones until they find some area in which you are actually making decisions.” And, Reedy went on, “Because of the inherent nature of the Vice Presidency, it is very difficult to put you in a decision-making role.… For the time being there is no conclusive answer to the ‘What is the Vice President Doing’ question. We have no choice other than to struggle along doing the best we can while laying our plans for the future.”

  Reedy was telling him that there was no way out of the trap in which he had caught himself. If, during the vice presidency’s early days, a gloomy demeanor had been a pose Johnson adopted to elicit sympathy, it was no longer a pose. He began telling even his most trusted staff members that they should start looking for other jobs. John Connally, running for governor of Texas, asked Ken BeLieu to leave Washington and join his staff in Texas. When BeLieu reported this to Johnson, Johnson replied: “Go. I’m finished. You follow him.”

  HIS MANNER WAS PARTICULARLY NOTICEABLE when John Kennedy was present, as Evelyn Lincoln noticed. As the President’s “sureness and independence increased, the Vice President became more apprehensive and anxious to please,” she was to recall. Sometimes, on the increasingly rare occasions when he was in the Oval Office, with Kennedy leaning back, relaxed and at ease in his chair, Johnson, sitting facing him in a chair beside his desk, would be on the edge of his seat, leaning forward as he talked, his pose that of a schoolboy trying to win a teacher’s favor.

  And, in the fall of 1962, in response to further humiliation from the Kennedys, he groveled even more deeply than before.

  In September, James Meredith’s attempt to become the first of Mississippi’s one million black residents to attend the state university was met by the defiance of Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, touching off two weeks of tense negotiations with the White House before, over the last weekend in the month, the tension erupted in violence that left two dead and scores injured, and in the dispatch of hundreds of United States marshals and the federalizing by Kennedy of the Mississippi National Guard. Johnson was not involved in the negotiations; during the crucial weekend he was not even in Washington but down at the ranch. Unfortunately, that fact became known, and on Monday morning the Houston Chronicle asked its congressional correspondent, Vernon Louviere, to ask the Vice President for comment. Strolling with an affectation of casualness up to the Senate Press Gallery, Boatner managed to get a look at the story in Louviere’s typewriter. “He has written only one paragraph,” he reported to Johnson, “but it was to the effect that the man who carried the South for President Kennedy apparently had not been called in for discussion of the Mississippi situation.” Telephoning Louviere, Johnson tried frantically for thirty minutes to convince the reporter that his information was incorrect, that in fact the White House had been constantly consulting him that weekend, that even when he had been out boating on a lake near the ranch, he had had a ship-to-shore telephone with him. But the information was accurate, and the article, which ran on Tuesday, reported that “over the weekend—one of the tensest in the nation’s history—Johnson was not in … close personal contact with the White House. He was relaxing at his ranch in Texas.”

  Johnson’s response to the story was panic—that it might offend the President. Telephoning Dean Rusk, the Cabinet member friendliest to him, he asked him to get a message to Kennedy—which Rusk did by passing it on to White House aide Dungan. The message was that the information in Louviere’s article had not come from him or anyone on his staff—that he had never discussed the Meredith situation with any journalist or leaked any information that would suggest discord within the Administration. And the message didn’t stop there. He wanted the President to know, it said, that “the situation in Mississippi had been handled better than he could ever have thought of handling it”—and that “He felt that he had been treated better than any other Vice President in history and knew it.”

  THEN, A FEW MINUTES BEFORE NINE O’CLOCK on Tuesday, October 16, 1962, as President Kennedy, still in his pajamas, was sitting in bed reading the morning newspapers, there was a knock on the door, and McGeorge Bundy came in, and under his arm was a sheaf of photographs—and the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis had begun.

  When, at 11:50 a.m. that Tuesday, the photographs—barely discernible lines and dots that were, a CIA analyst explained, missile sites that Russian technicians were assembling in Cuba for missiles, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, that would be able to reach targets in most of the United States and that would soon be operative—were shown to the group, mostly members of the National Security Council, that Kennedy had assembled in the Cabinet Room, Johnson, as a member of the NSC, was among them. The first reaction was shocked disbelief; for months the Russians had been assuring Kennedy that they would not put offensive weapons in Cuba. And when opinion in the group (which, during the Thirteen Days, would come to be known as “Ex
Comm,” for the executive committee of the National Security Council) came down in favor of quick action—an immediate air strike, delivered without warning against the missile sites, or a broader, more massive bombing campaign, or some other form of quick military action—Johnson was part of that hawkish majority. Prodded by Kennedy—“You have any thoughts, Mr. Vice President?”—after he had remained silent all afternoon, Johnson said he wanted to hear the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were meeting at the Pentagon. But, he said, “the question we face is whether we take it [the missile sites] out or whether we talk about it. And, of course, either alternative is a very distressing one. But of the two, I would take it out—assuming that the commanders felt that way.” He would not, Lyndon Johnson said, consult with America’s allies, or with its senators or congressmen. “I’m not much for circularizing it over the Hill or with our allies, even though I realize it’s a breach of faith, not to confer with them. We’re not going to get much help out of them.… Tell the alliance we’ve got to try to stop the planes, stop the ships, stop the submarines and everything else they’re [the Soviets] sending. Just not going to permit it.”

  THE JOINT CHIEFS ADVOCATED a surprise air strike, not just against the missile sites but against airfields and possibly other targets in Cuba, with a simultaneous buildup for a possible invasion. Kennedy ordered ExComm’s members to drop whatever else they were doing and analyze his options. Action was imperative, Kennedy said—“I don’t think we’ve got much time on these missiles. We can’t wait.… We’re certainly going to do [option] number one. We’re going to take out those missiles”—but, he said, he wouldn’t act immediately. He ordered more photographic reconnaissance flights; “We had to be sure,” in Sorensen’s words, “of what we were facing, had to have the most convincing possible evidence” to present to the world, had to know “what else was taking place throughout the island.” The President made a plea to the group for secrecy, until the evidence—and our response—was determined. “Any premature disclosure,” in Sorensen’s words, “could precipitate a Soviet move or panic the American public.” And if negotiations were decided on, leaks would make them more difficult. He and the Vice President, Kennedy told ExComm, were both scheduled to campaign for congressional candidates that week, and, so that the press wouldn’t get wind of the crisis, they would both keep those commitments until the group united behind a recommendation. Johnson was scheduled to leave the next day for appearances in the Midwest and West, and then Hawaii, but Kennedy’s appearances were in the East until Friday, so he could sit in on at least some of the group’s meetings.