The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “The moment Rusk made his suggestion it became apparent to all of us that we should agree,” and they did, Bundy says.

  And they agreed on something else: the nine men in that room swore themselves to secrecy. All were aware, as Bundy later put it, that if word of the missile trade—a “bargain struck under pressure at the apparent expense of the Turks”—leaked out, it might undermine the Atlantic alliance, and that “the potential political cost of appearing to ‘appease’ the Kremlin” would also be high. “Aware as we” also “were from the day’s discussion that for some, even in our closest councils, a unilateral private assurance might appear to betray an ally, we agreed without hesitation that no one not in the room was to be informed of this additional message,” Bundy was to write. The deal remained secret for years. The most important decision of the Kennedy Administration was made without Lyndon Johnson’s knowledge.

  AT HIS MEETING with Dobrynin, Robert Kennedy told the Soviet ambassador that a letter had just been sent to Khrushchev repeating the offer of a no-invasion pledge if all offensive weapons were removed from Cuba: “I said that those missile bases had to go and they had to go right away. We had to have a commitment by at least tomorrow.… He should understand that if he did not remove those bases that we would remove them. His country might take retaliatory action but he should understand that before this was over, while there might be dead Americans, there would also be dead Russians.” Then Kennedy said, not in writing but only orally, so there would be nothing on the record, that while there could be no direct quid pro quo for the Jupiters, “if some time elapsed … I mentioned 4 or 5 months—I was sure that these matters could be resolved satisfactorily.” Dobrynin did nothing to commit his country, and Robert returned to the White House, about 8:40 p.m., to give his brother, who was having dinner with Dave Powers, a report so pessimistic that Powers, listening to it, says, “I thought it was my last meal.”

  WHEN EXCOMM RECONVENED about nine o’clock that Saturday evening, the two brothers were a little late—and during the few minutes before they arrived, there were more strong words from Lyndon Johnson about how to handle the Russians, and, listening to him, Sorensen suddenly felt “chilled.” It wasn’t just the bellicosity of the words but the force behind them: Lyndon Johnson could persuade men, and, without the countervailing presence of the brothers, he might, Sorensen saw, be persuading these.

  “The hawks were rising,” he recalls. “Bobby wasn’t there, and I was rather concerned about that. The President wasn’t there, so I didn’t have my strongest allies there. Johnson slapped the table. ‘All I know is that when I was a boy in Texas, and you were walking along the road when a rattlesnake reared up ready to strike, the only thing to do was to take a stick and chop its head off.’ There was a little chill in the room after that statement.”

  There were strong words, also, from other hawks, these after the President and Bobby had entered the room, for there had still been no American retaliation for the death of an American pilot; Russian ships had been allowed through the quarantine line, and others, notably the Grozny, would reach the line Sunday morning; and the missile sites were about to become operational.

  “Do anything about the SAM site that shot down our plane?” Dillon demanded. Temporizing, the President said the guilty site had not yet been definitively identified. “We don’t know [which one] yet, Doug,” he said. McNamara said, “If our planes are fired on tomorrow, we ought to fire back.” Kennedy wanted to delay even that, to give negotiations more time, in hope that the messages delivered to Dobrynin might work. “Let me say, I think we ought to wait until tomorrow afternoon, to see whether we get any answers.… We’re rapidly approaching a real—” Wait until tomorrow, he said. “If tomorrow they fire at us and we don’t have any answer from the Russians, then Monday it seems to me” would be time enough. “And then go in and take all the SAM sites out.” The fate of mankind might hang in the balance; surely the chance for peace could be given one more day; “I think we ought to keep tomorrow clean,” Jack Kennedy said.

  There was still the Grozny. It was going to reach the quarantine line at about 8:15 or 8:30 Sunday morning. This time, it was the younger brother who spoke, in a low, very soft voice. “It’s just a question of whether we want to intercept that at all tomorrow, or let it go through.… Whether this ship gets in or not, it’s not really going to count in the big picture.… Isn’t it possible to decide tomorrow?” “Yes, we can wait until about noon tomorrow,” McNamara said. And finally, Jack Kennedy decided. “Give them that last chance,” he said—and peace had one more day.

  THERE WAS LITTLE OPTIMISM that that extra day would bring peace. “Saturday night was almost the blackest of all,” Schlesinger was to recall. “Unless Khrushchev came through in a few hours, the meeting of the Executive Committee on Sunday might well face the most terrible decisions.” Strategic Air Command bombers were circling endlessly over the Arctic that night; the crews of other bombers were being handed their target packets for bombing runs they might have to make the next day; American destroyers were circling in the Atlantic—with, a few fathoms below them, enemy submarines; the Fifth Marine Expeditionary Brigade began boarding ships to invasion staging areas; watching the sun set that Saturday night, McNamara wondered if he would live out the week. “But the next morning, a golden autumn Sunday morning,” the Grozny suddenly came to a dead stop, and the nine o’clock newscasts were interrupted by a bulletin: Khrushchev had accepted Kennedy’s terms, the no-missiles, no-invasion terms to which the President had brought him back by ignoring the second letter. The letter ended with this salutation to John Fitzgerald Kennedy: “With respect for you, Khrushchev.”

  ExComm met that Sunday at eleven. When the President walked into the room, everyone stood up, standing silently until he sat down. As he began the meeting, there wasn’t, Ted Sorensen recalls, “a trace of excitement or even exultation” in his bearing.

  IT HAD BEEN NO OVERSIGHT that Lyndon Johnson wasn’t invited to that crucial conference in the Oval Office on Saturday evening.

  On Sunday, after the final ExComm meeting, Jack Kennedy said to his brother that this was the night he should go to the theater, like Lincoln after the Union victory in the Civil War, and Robert—the subject of assassination having been raised, and with it, of course, the reminder that the Vice President would thereupon become President—said that “if he was going to the theater, I would go too, having witnessed the inability of Johnson to make any contribution of any kind during all the conversations.” In later years, he would recall Johnson’s displeasure “with what we were doing,” the way, in Bobby’s words, that “he would circulate and whine and complain about our being weak,” while never making “any suggestions or recommendations” himself. The people who “had participated in all these discussions,” Robert Kennedy was to say, “were bright and energetic people. We had perhaps amongst the most able in the country, and if any one of half a dozen of them were President the world would have been very likely plunged in a catastrophic war.” Lyndon Johnson, he would make clear, was one of that half dozen. Jack Kennedy, as always, was more oblique, but, through the means of another, shorter, list, he also made his feelings clear. Recalls his friend, the journalist Bartlett: “He said after the Cuban Missile Crisis that there were three men on that Executive Committee that he would be glad to see become President of the United States: McNamara, Dillon, and his brother Bobby. He said that a couple of times.” Three men whom John F. Kennedy would be happy to have succeed him as President. The Vice President wasn’t one of them.

  “You must know as well or better than I President Kennedy’s steadily diminishing opinion of him,” Jacqueline Kennedy would, years after the assassination, write in a private letter to Ted Sorensen. “As his term progressed, he grew more and more concerned about what would happen if LBJ ever became President. He was truly frightened at the prospect.”

  EARLY IN DECEMBER, Lyndon Johnson received a note from Robert Kennedy saying that he, “together wit
h some of the other Executive Committee members,” was buying a Christmas present for the President “in remembrance of our days together” during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “We are not yet certain of the cost but when that small matter is worked out I will write you a letter asking for a ‘voluntary’ contribution,” Kennedy said.

  While Johnson had not been one of the ExComm members who had planned the gift—a sterling silver plaque showing the month of October with the thirteen days of the crisis in bold numerals—the note at least implied that he would be invited to the presentation. “Mac Bundy will be in touch with you about” the arrangements, it said. When, however, on December 17, Bundy’s secretary called one of Johnson’s secretaries, Winnie Coates, to inform her that the presentation would be the next morning at 8:15, the call was not exactly an invitation. “She said Mr. Bundy felt it would not be necessary for everybody to be there at such an ungodly hour,” Winnie reported.

  Johnson got the idea. He didn’t attend. But when he was asked for the contribution—“The happy, joyful ceremony … must now be paid for,” Robert Kennedy wrote him. “I would greatly appreciate it, therefore, if you would send me a check for $200.00 which will cover your assessment”—he sent the check right off.

  “AFTER THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS,” Evelyn Lincoln was to write, “Mr. Kennedy seemed to be less concerned with making sure the Vice President was occupied, and from then on, he let Mr. Johnson seek his own place in the Administration.” Johnson’s response was the technique he had always used with people who had more power than he, as Mrs. Lincoln observed with barely concealed contempt. “The Vice President became more apprehensive and anxious to please. He tried even harder to enter into activities and become part of them. Whenever anyone mentioned Mr. Kennedy’s name he would immediately tell them what a good job he was doing. He praised the efficiency of the Kennedy staff and the soundness of the Kennedy ideas. Time and again, as they filed out of the Cabinet Room, I would hear Mr. Johnson making these glowing compliments.” Elbowing his way through a group standing in her office after one meeting, “he came up to the President. He stuck out his hand and said, ‘That was a fine speech, Jack.’ ” But he wasn’t dealing with elderly senators now. Fawn over Jack Kennedy though he might, Mrs. Lincoln says, “The President was … sending him fewer memos and giving him fewer assignments, and as a result, Johnson was fading into the background.” In 1963, “One saw much less of him around the White House than in 1961 or 1962,” Arthur Schlesinger was to write, and this wasn’t a mistaken impression; in 1961, according to Mrs. Lincoln’s detailed diaries of the President’s activities, Johnson had spent only ten hours and nineteen minutes alone with the President, a meagre enough figure; in 1962, the figure had been smaller; in 1963, the Vice President was alone with the President for a total of one hour and fifty-three minutes. And Kennedy’s attitude was reflected in the attitude of his staff. “I hate to admit it but in planning the surprise birthday party for Mr. Kennedy on May 29th, I forgot all about inviting Mr. Johnson,” Mrs. Lincoln says. “And no one reminded me.”

  The President was still, of course, dispatching him on foreign trips, and assigning him routine ceremonial duties. “The vice presidency is filled with trips around the world, chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping, chairmanships of counsils [sic], but in the end it is nothing,” Lyndon Johnson was to say years later. “I detested every minute of it.” And when he tried to make something more of the foreign trips, steps were taken to make sure he couldn’t. During his September, 1963, visit to Finland, recalls America’s ambassador to that country, Carl Rowan, “there was an earthquake in Iran, and he [Johnson] wanted to go there to demonstrate American caring. The White House said no.” It said no as well to the very possibility of another trip. In a casual conversation in the embassy in Helsinki one evening, Johnson, boasting about his ability to read men, said, in Rowan’s recollection, “that he could look into the eyes of the Soviet leaders and see what was in their hearts.” This statement was relayed to Washington, which evidently became concerned that the Vice President might try to visit Finland’s neighbor Russia. “I got a secret back-channel message saying, ‘Do what you must, under any circumstances, to prevent Johnson from going to the Soviet Union,’ ” Rowan recalls.

  And, as Schlesinger was to write, “the psychological cost was evidently mounting.” Historian and secretary use the same phrase: “He seemed to have faded astonishingly into the background,” he says. People who remembered him, tall and lean and bursting with energy, emanating power and authority as he strode through Capitol corridors and commanded the Senate Chamber from his front-row center desk, were shocked when they saw him now. His complexion was gray, and on that canvas face, now so gaunt, was painted sadness. Sitting at meetings in the Cabinet Room, gray, withdrawn and silent, he “appeared,” in Schlesinger’s phrase, “almost a spectral presence.” When some official did telephone him, he seemed unable to stop talking, until the official, the brief purpose of the call accomplished, became desperate to get off the phone. Social occasions could be poignant. Invited to a fundraiser at the Fifth Avenue apartment of a wealthy New York couple, “like a fool I went,” he told Harry McPherson. “The President was there, sitting in a big easy chair, and everyone was in a circle around him, leaning in to hear every word. I was leaning over, too, and suddenly I didn’t want to do that, to be leaning over listening to Jack Kennedy.” Walking over to the French doors, he stood there alone, staring out over Central Park, until the hostess noticed, and asked a group of young guests, “Will somebody go and talk to the Vice President?” A beautiful young heiress, Jeanne Murray Vanderbilt, said, “I’ll talk to him, but what can I talk to him about?”

  The hostess, who knew Johnson, told Vanderbilt, “Don’t give it a thought,” and, Vanderbilt was to say, “She was right. He never stopped talking and he was so charming.” After they had talked for some time, Johnson offered her a ride home—and as he let her out of the car, he said, “I’ll never forget how nice you were to me tonight.”

  And, of course, with the blood in the water so plainly visible now, the journalistic swarm was more avid than ever. “It would be a rich treasure for historians if there were a tape recording of the talk Jack Kennedy gave to Johnson in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles to persuade him to accept the nomination.… Few men in American history have given up so much for so little,” the Miami Herald said. By the end of the year, the boast he had once made was being used to taunt him. In an article in The Reporter magazine under the now-familiar headline WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO LYNDON JOHNSON?, journalist Ward Just wrote that once “Johnson had said, ‘Power is where power goes.’ … It has not worked out quite that way, as LBJ would probably admit.… The man of power who suddenly finds himself short of it is a fascinating study. Lyndon Johnson seems determined to shun controversy. With newsmen he is strictly for ‘background only.’ The result … is that LBJ has all but disappeared from official sight.… The relationship between Kennedy and Johnson is one of the most curious in Washington.… Is there, in fact, any business relationship at all?” Said a Time article in January, 1963: “ ‘Power is where power goes,’ Johnson confidently told a friend before taking office as Vice President. He was wrong—power has slipped from his grasp.” All of the jobs he had been given—the chairmanships of the Space Council and the CEEO, the membership on the National Security Council—“all of this together adds up to only a fraction of his old power and influence. He is free to speak up, but nobody, really, has to heed him anymore.” The popular television show Candid Camera asked random passersby: “Who is Lyndon B. Johnson?” Not one knew. One of those questioned said he couldn’t be expected to know: “I’m from New Jersey.” “Well,” said another, “he’s not President. Am I getting close?”

  AND IN 1963, also, his predicament was growing worse due to another factor. Over Jack Kennedy’s dealings with his Vice President there was painted—even if only lightly and only in public—a tint of respect, and of the wry amusement that made the President
call him “Riverboat.” Now Lyndon Johnson found himself increasingly dealing with—increasingly in confrontation with—the President’s brother.

  The hatred that Lyndon Johnson felt for Robert Kennedy on that terrible afternoon in Los Angeles had never faded. It would never fade; he would talk about that afternoon for the rest of his life. Years later, back on his ranch after his presidency, not long before he died, he would seize visitors’ lapels and bend his face into theirs in the intensity of his effort to make sure the visitor understood that it hadn’t been Jack Kennedy but Bobby who had wanted him to withdraw from the vice presidential nomination. Recording his thoughts to guide the ghostwriters of his autobiography, he made sure they understood. “He came to my room three times to try to get me to say I wouldn’t run.”

  Time was curing nothing between the two men. The traditional seating arrangement for Cabinet meetings, established in the chronological order of the creation of the different departments, placed the attorney general next to the Vice President. Saying he didn’t like that arrangement, Bobby had his place moved. With no formal seating arrangement at National Security Council meetings, sometimes the two men found themselves sitting side by side, and, as Richard Goodwin, seated against the wall behind the President, noticed, “They literally couldn’t look at each other.”

  And as Johnson knew—or thought he knew, or said he knew—who had been responsible for his humiliation in Los Angeles, he knew, or thought he knew, or said he knew, who was responsible for all the humiliations of the following three years. “Jack Kennedy’s just as thoughtful and considerate of me … as he can be,” he told Bobby Baker. “But I know his snot-nosed brother’s after my ass.”

  Such statements were made with a conviction that persuaded assistants and allies that Johnson believed what he was saying to be true, but the more perceptive of them wondered if the remarks were yet another example of him believing what he wanted to believe—in this case, what he felt he had to believe. Feeling as he did that the fulfillment of his dream—of his life—depended on his staying on as friendly terms as possible with the President, anger at Jack Kennedy wasn’t an option. And therefore, Doris Kearns Goodwin was to write, “Johnson projected his feelings onto … Bobby.” During her conversations with Johnson at the ranch, she says, “It was Bobby he reserved his anger for.