The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  JOHNSON’S VISIT TO ST. AUGUSTINE started at an old mission that housed the casket of the Spanish explorer who had said the first Mass at the site of what was to become the city, and he was very silent as a priest guided him through the buildings, until, coming to the coffin, he saw the dates of the explorer’s birth and death—1519 and 1574—and then the only words he spoke were a number: “Fifty-five.” He was going to be fifty-five on his next birthday; he seemed unable to escape reminders that time was running out on him. But when he was met at the gates to the Stratos plant, there was a black man on the welcoming committee, which sat behind him on the platform as he spoke. Sitting in the audience, Reedy heard people saying that, as he was to report to Johnson, “This was probably the first time in the history of the County that a Negro had appeared on the same platform with a white speaker.” At his next speech, at the dedication ceremonies for a memorial to St. Augustine, there was also a black face on the platform. And at the banquet, there were two “Negro tables,” and they were, Reedy says, “good tables close to the speakers’ platform.” Reedy and Peek were sitting at these tables when Peek suddenly got word that Johnson wasn’t coming down from his suite until it was time for his speech. He understood that Johnson was nervous—“he didn’t want to have anything that was a situation”—but he went upstairs to Johnson’s suite to protest, telling him that not showing up for dinner would give the appearance that he was boycotting the blacks. “I’m eatin’ with ’em,” Peek said. “At least you can come.” Johnson came downstairs with a grim expression on his face that Reedy knew only too well. But as the Vice President looked out over the hall he seemed to relax, and his speech went well. While members of the audience were coming up to his table to shake his hand afterwards, he caught Reedy’s eye, with a look that Reedy understood; he and Peek brought the little group of African-Americans up to the dais, and Johnson was, Peek says, “very cordial with them, very cordial—they had a good time talking to him.” As he turned away after a while, one said, “Don’t forget us, Mr. Vice President.” His flight back to Washington that night was in the small MATS JetStar he detested, but, flying back with him, Peek, who during his eleven years as Smathers’ assistant had spent enough time with Johnson to know his moods, saw that he was “very happy.” “Happier than he had been for months,” Reedy says.

  IN A MEMO summarizing the St. Augustine trip, Reedy wrote that “a major breakthrough on the color line was achieved” because, in allowing the events to be integrated, and in agreeing to negotiate about segregation in the city in general, “local people [had] made … concessions, which in light of the history of St. Augustine, are startling.”

  This evaluation was to prove overoptimistic. When the next day at 9:30 a.m., a nine-member NAACP delegation went to City Hall for the promised meeting, there to greet them in the commission chamber were no commissioners but only a tape recorder sitting on a bare table; a city functionary told them they could record their complaints on that; the commissioners had been unable to attend, he said.

  Leaning forward one by one to talk into the recorder, the black men and women asked for the removal of “Colored Only” signs at least in city-owned facilities, for the inclusion of at least one black person among poll watchers at elections, and for the end of various other humiliations routinely inflicted upon black residents of the city. One of the nine, a carpenter, said that when his sister had died recently, and he and his family had gone to City Hall to obtain a death certificate, “we had to stand on the outside to give the information they wanted.… It was cold and raining.” No response would ever be vouchsafed to the delegation’s requests—no attempt by the commissioners to live up to their promise to Reedy. With Johnson gone, the leader of the delegation came to realize, he had lost any leverage with the commission. A report later sent to Washington concluded that St. Augustine officials regretted the extent to which they had cooperated with Johnson: “They feel that they went even further than they should have gone to accommodate the Vice President when he was here.”

  Yet despite this denouement, and despite the fact that he had no power to do anything to change the situation, Lyndon Johnson had not accomplished nothing, in George Reedy’s opinion. The mere fact that blacks had been in the banquet hall had not been meaningless, he said. “One of the Negroes said that never before in the history of the hotel had a Negro eaten in it except in the kitchen.… The whites … have had the experience of sitting down in the city’s finest banquet hall with Negroes to eat a meal. The roof did not fall in and the walls did not collapse. Furthermore, they have had the example of one of the highest officials of the United States insisting upon equality.”

  And the incident in St. Augustine had an effect also on that official. Fighting on a civil rights issue—taking a step, however small, against racial injustice; trying to do something for people of color—had always roused something in Lyndon Johnson. That had happened again, from the moment he insisted that the hall in St. Augustine not be segregated. After his return to Washington, his staff saw, he was “revved up” as he hadn’t been since the start of his vice presidency.

  His depression was gone. After months of refusing to give interviews, now, when Reedy left him a note saying that Jack Bell of the Associated Press wanted one, back came a note saying, “Set up a date.” He even agreed to do one on television—his first since the earliest days of his vice presidency. “LBJ last night broke his self-imposed silence to deny allegations that his post of Vice President is a comedown,” Evans and Novak reported on March 28. Facing three reporters from ABC, he seemed calm, poised and content as he said, “I am very happy. I have everything a man could want. I have a lovely family. I enjoy my work.… I have never felt that the vice presidency was a comedown from anything except the presidency.” The only tense moment came when a questioner noted that Johnson had once “reached for the presidency” himself. “I don’t consider that I ever reached for the presidency,” he said. “My friends put me in the race.… I didn’t feel I was a candidate. I didn’t go into any of the primaries.”

  Now that he was involved in civil rights again, the uncertainty was gone. He understood the importance of gestures, gestures that indicated respect, to people starved for respect, and he knew just what gestures to make. The great African-American singer Marian Anderson was giving a concert in Austin. The city’s university-centered liberal community welcomed the news, but there was a studied disdain from its conservative establishment; Johnson invited her to visit—and stay the weekend—at his ranch. He knew just what words to use. Every year the press club for African-American journalists in Washington tried to get a high-level speaker from the federal government, sending invitations first to the President, then to the Vice President, “and so on down the Cabinet,” as a club officer put it. None had ever been accepted. But in 1963, the club was able to stop with the Vice President. The other speaker was a southern governor, Terry Sanford of North Carolina, who called for “moderacy and restraint” on the civil rights issue, “sounding,” in the opinion of the Washington Afro-American, “like the siren call of the last 100 years … like the last grunt to the chorus of the ‘Volga Boatman.’ ” And then the Vice President spoke. “The sands of time are running out,” Lyndon Johnson said. “The hours are short and we have no moral justification in asking for an extension.” Six years earlier, he recalled, when the first civil rights law had been passed, he had said that half a loaf was better than none. Now, he said, “It seems to me that we are well past the stage where half a loaf will do.” He understood, the Afro-American said, “the reasons that drive colored men and women to fight for their rights these days.” Before he spoke, a young black woman, shortly to graduate from a Washington high school, had been called to the stage and awarded a scholarship to enable her to go to college. At the end of his speech, Johnson turned to her and said she would probably need more financial aid than the scholarship would provide; she should come to his office, he said—he would see she got it. While he was shaking hands a
fter the speech, an African-American woman came back to her table holding one hand in the air. “I shall never wash this glove,” she said.

  HE DECIDED TO ACCEPT an invitation to deliver the Memorial Day speech at the Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania, where, one hundred years before, Abraham Lincoln had given a speech. He had received the invitation months before, but had told his assistant, Juanita Roberts, a former WAC colonel, to decline; among other reasons, he was afraid his speech would be compared to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. But Horace Busby had begged Colonel Roberts not to send the letter, and she, aware of how often Johnson changed his mind—and hoping he would change it this time—simply filed the invitation away. Now, after his success in St. Augustine, he asked her if she had replied to the invitation. When she said she hadn’t, he told her to accept.

  A few days before the Memorial Day weekend, he had Busby come out to The Elms, and they sat by the swimming pool and talked, with Johnson doing most of the talking, about what should be in the speech. He expected Busby to follow their usual practice and turn his rough views into a polished speech, but this time the speechwriter didn’t think much polishing was required. “I knew what I had heard,” he says. He had been writing speeches for Lyndon Johnson for fifteen years, and he felt that this time Johnson had said exactly what he wanted to say. In Busby’s car was a large, clumsy recording device, and, he recalls, as he was driving away from The Elms, “I stopped the car a half a block away and recorded what we’d been saying pretty much as” he remembered it, and the next morning took the recording to his office and had his secretary transcribe it, “and when I saw the transcription, I got very—uh, huh!” He added two introductory paragraphs, and one at the end, and took back to Johnson essentially what Johnson had said to him by the pool.

  It was a very short speech—much shorter than the usual Johnson speech—and he had expected Johnson to discuss it with him, to change and edit it, and to tell him to add to it. And he had expected Johnson to tell him to clear it with the Kennedys. “But,” he was to recall, “I didn’t hear any more from him.” The next thing Busby saw or heard about the speech was when he read it—in the Washington Post; as the lead story in the Washington Post.

  So short was the speech—barely two typed pages—that it had taken Johnson only eight minutes to read it, but Lincoln’s speech had been short, too, and, the Post said in an editorial, this one, too, had “eloquence … political courage … vision.”

  “One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” Lyndon Johnson had said. “One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin. The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’ … To ask for patience from the Negro is to ask him to give more of what he has already given enough.… The Negro says, ‘Now.’ Others say, ‘Never.’ The voice of responsible Americans—the voices of those who died here and the great man who spoke here—their voices say, ‘Together.’ There is no other way.”

  And, for a while, it seemed that the speech would be just the start. His longtime Texas allies had phrases to describe how Lyndon Johnson threw himself into a cause, even if it was sometimes a cause in which he had not previously believed, even if it was in fact a cause he had previously opposed—phrases to describe the “revving up,” the “working up,” when he made himself believe in the cause absolutely, with total conviction, when, as Ed Clark puts it, “He could … convince himself” something “was right, and get all worked up, all worked up and emotional, and work all day and all night, and sacrifice, and say, ‘Follow me for the cause!’—‘Let’s do this because it’s right!’ ” And, Clark says, Johnson would believe it was right—no matter what he had believed before, so that, as Reedy says, “he acted out of pure motives regardless of their origins.”

  And in the case of helping people of color, there had always been something very pure about Lyndon Johnson’s motives. Definitive though his twenty-year record of voting against and carrying out southern strategy against every civil rights bill might seem, it was not in fact the whole story. Even during the early years of his life, the story had had a very different side. At the age of twenty, he had been a teacher in the “Mexican school” in the desolate South Texas town of Cotulla; no teacher had ever really cared if the Mexican children learned or not—until Lyndon Johnson came along. And it was not only the children whom Lyndon Johnson taught; to help the school’s janitor, Thomas Coronado, learn English, he bought him a textbook, and before and after classes each day, sat tutoring him on the school steps. The anger, “sometimes just about to tears,” of which aides spoke was something they saw often when Lyndon Johnson was talking about the indignities that his black household staff had to suffer in their daily lives. Whether it was because he had had to do “nigger work” as a youth—picking cotton, chopping cedar in the Hill Country—or because as “a Johnson” he had felt the sting of unjust discrimination, there had always existed within Lyndon Johnson genuine empathy and compassion for Americans of color. Hidden though it had been for years—twenty and more—because during those years compassion conflicted with the ambition that was the force that drove Johnson more than any other, when, in 1957, compassion had, for the first time, coincided with ambition, the compassion had been released. And it was released now. May of 1963 had been the month of Birmingham—of Martin Luther King’s desperate decision to throw his last resource, children, into the fight to desegregate that tough southern city—the month of the fire hoses (“They’ve turned the fire hoses on a little black girl.… They’re rolling that little girl right down the middle of the street”) and of the dogs, the big German shepherds that Bull Connor’s police kept on leashes, but not tightly. And all that month, the President and the attorney general and their aides were discussing what to do in Birmingham, and whether or not to propose new civil rights legislation, and what that legislation should be, but they hadn’t been discussing it with him. On Sunday, May 12, after bombs had exploded in front of the home of King’s brother, and at the motel where King himself was supposed to be staying, Kennedy headed back from Camp David for a long day of crisis meetings with his aides and Cabinet members, who arrived at the White House in a procession of limousines; the Second Infantry Division and the 82nd Airborne were put on alert, and the paperwork was drawn up to federalize the Alabama National Guard at a moment’s notice. None of the limousines contained the Vice President; that afternoon, he was at a garden party at the home of Congressman Hale Boggs, where the gathering buzzed with rumors of what was happening at the White House, so all the guests were aware that whatever was happening, the Vice President was most definitely not a part of it. The Administration was drawing up civil rights legislation, but he was not part of that either. For the past two and a half years, Johnson’s response to such exclusion had been to retreat into silence and sulking, but he didn’t retreat now. He asked to meet with the President, and when he was put off, he kept repeating the request, finally, on Saturday, June 1, telling O’Donnell—this is what Lyndon Johnson had been reduced to—that, in the words of one Administration official, “he thought he should have fifteen minutes alone with the President.”