The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  There was more waiting. “Lyndon and I didn’t speak,” Lady Bird Johnson says. “We just looked at each other, exchanging messages with our eyes. We knew what it might mean.” Johnson said very little to anyone, moved around very little, just stood there. Asked to describe him in the hospital, Thornberry uses the same word Youngblood used to describe him in the car. “All through the time he was … very calm,” Thornberry was to say. Kellerman’s deputy Emory Roberts came in and said that he had seen the President as doctors were working over him in the emergency room, and said, as he was to recall, that “I did not think the President could make it”—and that Johnson should leave the hospital, get to Air Force One “immediately,” and take off for Washington. Youngblood agreed. The word “conspiracy” was in the air. Not merely the President but the governor had been shot; who knew if Johnson might himself have been the next target had not Youngblood so quickly covered his body with his own? The Secret Service wanted to get Johnson out of Dallas, or at least onto the plane, which would, in their view, be the most secure place in the city.

  But Johnson did not agree. No one had yet given him any definite word on the President’s condition; no one had yet made, in that little curtained room, any explicit statement. In Brooks’ recollection, he said, “Well, we want to get the official report on that rather than [from] some individual.” He wouldn’t leave without permission from the President’s staff, he said, preferably from the staff member who was, among the White House staffers in Dallas, the closest to the President: Ken O’Donnell. Youngblood and Roberts continued, in Youngblood’s phrase, to “press Johnson” to leave the hospital “immediately”—they “suggested that he [the Vice President] think it over, as he would have to be sworn in”—but Johnson didn’t change his mind “about staying put until there was some definite word on the President.”

  And there was still, for minutes that seemed very long, no definite word. “Every face that came in, you searched for the answers you must know,” Lady Bird Johnson was to say. Lyndon Johnson still stood against the wall in that small, curtained space, his wife sitting beside him, two or three men off to one side, standing silent or occasionally whispering among themselves; standing in front of him, “always there was Rufe,” Mrs. Johnson says. Johnson stood there for about thirty-five minutes. Then, at 1:20, O’Donnell appeared at the door and crossed the room to Lyndon Johnson, and seeing the stricken “face of Kenny O’Donnell who loved him so much,” Lady Bird knew.

  “He’s gone,” O’Donnell said, to the thirty-sixth President of the United States.

  When the first calls came into George Hunt’s office at Life reporting “that Kennedy had been shot—at first, that’s all: just that he had been shot,” Russ Sackett recalls—the meeting broke up immediately, with editors and reporters running back to their offices.

  While, during the next few minutes, the news was trickling in from Dallas, one decision was made quickly: Keith Wheeler’s proposed second article on Lyndon Johnson would not run in the next issue of the magazine: there was obviously going to be so much other news that there would be no room for it. About a week later, William Lambert went in to see executive editor Ralph Graves and told Graves that any further investigation into Johnson’s finances should be postponed. “I told him I thought we ought to give the guy a chance,” he said about the President, and Graves agreed, saying, in Lambert’s recollection: “If you hadn’t said that, I was going to tell you that.”

  NO ONE THOUGHT to notify the four men meeting behind closed doors in Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building about what was happening in Dallas, and Don Reynolds continued giving his account, and pushing his checks and invoices across the table to Van Kirk and Drennan. According to the most definitive account of the Bobby Baker case, it was shortly after 2:30 Washington time (1:30 Texas time), about ten minutes after O’Donnell had told Lyndon Johnson, “He’s gone,” that Reynolds finished, and just as he did, a secretary “burst into the room … sobbing almost hysterically,” and shouting that President Kennedy had been killed. Reynolds, saying that since Johnson was now President, “you won’t need those,” reached for his documents to take them back, but Van Kirk refused to let him take them, saying that they now belonged to the Rules Committee.

  AT THE MOMENT the news from Dallas reached Abe Fortas’ office, he was conferring with Bobby Baker, who had retained him as his attorney in the Rules Committee investigation, and in any criminal prosecutions that might follow.

  “As soon as” the news came, Baker recalls, he realized that if Fortas continued to represent him, the attorney might find himself in “a conflict-of-interest situation.” Telling Fortas, “I know Lyndon Johnson will be calling on you for advice,” he released him as his attorney.

  12

  Taking Charge

  “HE’S GONE,” Ken O’Donnell said—“and right then,” Homer Thornberry says, “he took charge.”

  Even before O’Donnell came in, as Lyndon Johnson had been standing against the back wall of that curtained cubicle in Parkland Hospital, there had been something striking in his bearing, something that had first shown itself that day in the tone of his voice as he lay on the floor of a speeding car, with a heavy body on top of him and the frantic voices on the shortwave radio crackling in his ears. Johnson’s aides and allies knew that for all his rages and bellowing, his gloating and groaning, his endless monologues, his demeanor was very different in moments of crisis, in moments when there were decisions—tough decisions, crucial decisions—to be made; that in those moments he became, as his secretary Mary Rather says, “quiet and still.” He had been very quiet during the long minutes he stood there in the little room—“very little passed between us,” Homer Thornberry says; no words even to Lady Bird; as he stood in front of that blank wall, carnation still in his buttonhole, there was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been seen very much during the past three years. Though he had been for those years restless, unable to sit still, unable to keep his mind on one subject, unable to stop talking, he wasn’t restless in that little room.

  And the hangdog look was gone, replaced with an expression—the lines on the face no longer drooping but hard—that Jack Brooks describes as “set.” Lyndon Johnson’s oldest aides and allies, the men who had known him longest, knew that expression: the big jaw jutting, the lips above it pulled into a tight, grim line, the corners turned down in a hint of a snarl, the eyes, under those long black eyebrows, narrowed, hard, piercing. It was an expression of determination and fierce concentration; when Lyndon Johnson wore that expression, a problem was being thought through with an intensity that was almost palpable, a problem was being thought through—and a decision made. That expression, set and hard, was, Busby says, Lyndon Johnson’s “deciding expression,” and that was his expression now. To Lady Bird Johnson, looking up at her husband, his face had become “almost a graven image of a face carved in bronze.”

  What was going through Lyndon Johnson’s mind as he stood there history will never know. The only thing that is clear is that if, during those long minutes of waiting, he was making decisions—this man with the instinct to decide, the will to decide—by the time O’Donnell spoke and the waiting was over, the decisions had been made.

  O’Donnell and the Secret Service agents were still urging him to leave the hospital and fly back to Washington at once. “We’ve got to get in the air,” Emory Roberts said again. The possibility of “conspiracy” was looming larger, because Johnson now learned, or was reminded, that six members of the Cabinet—including Secretary of State Rusk and Treasury Secretary Dillon—together with Press Secretary Pierre Salinger were not in Washington but in a plane en route to a conference in Japan; in fact, they were at that moment somewhere west of Hawaii. Johnson, as one account puts it, was “disturbed to learn that half the Cabinet [was] five time zones away, somewhere over the vast Pacific Ocean,” and all together on the same plane. The Dallas motorcade had been one of the rare occasions when President and Vice
President were not only both out of Washington but both in the same motorcade; with so many other officials away from Washington at the same time, and bunched together on the same plane, the shots at the President had been fired at a moment when the government of the United States was unusually vulnerable. Was that fact only a coincidence, or was it the reason the moment had been chosen? The possibility that the shooting was “part of a far-ranging conspiracy” that “had not yet run its course” was “in the thoughts of everyone,” Youngblood recalls. Among the reporters being herded into a nurses’ classroom at the other end of Parkland Hospital that was going to be the press briefing room, there was, as Charles Roberts, Newsweek’s longtime White House correspondent, recalls, “a fear that—perhaps a lot of people thought, as I did, of Lincoln’s assassination, where not only Lincoln, but four or five of his Cabinet were marked for assassination, that it might be, just might be, an attempt to literally wipe out the entire top echelon of government. We certainly had no way of knowing that it was a lone … gunman.” The urging from the three men standing in front of Johnson intensified. “Sir,” Youngblood said, “we must leave here immediately.” O’Donnell told him “that in my opinion he ought to get out of there as fast as he could.” “We’ve got to get in the air,” Emory Roberts said.

  But Johnson reached a different decision—and he announced it as quickly as if he had already thought through all the options and decided what he would do. When O’Donnell kept pressing him to leave Dallas, he asked him, “Well, what about Mrs. Kennedy?” and when O’Donnell said that she was determined not to leave her husband’s body (at that moment, she was standing, shocked and silent, in a corridor outside the room in which the body was lying) and that Johnson should fly back without her, while she and her husband’s body and aides followed in another plane, Johnson said he wasn’t going to do that—that he would take her back on the same plane with him. O’Donnell said she would never leave the hospital without the body. Johnson said in that case he would leave the hospital but not Dallas; he would go to the plane, but he would wait aboard it for the coffin, and the widow, to arrive. A contrary course continued to be urged. A new adjective entered the descriptions of Lyndon Johnson. He was, Youngblood says, “adamant.”

  He wasn’t ignoring the conspiracy possibility; in fact, he “mentioned … the attempt on the life of Secretary of State Seward at the time of Lincoln’s assassination,” O’Donnell says. Therefore, Johnson said, since they were going to leave the hospital, they should leave immediately. Exchanging quick sentences, he and Youngblood agreed that because of the possibility of another assassination attempt, the trip back to Love Field should be made in as much secrecy as possible: by different hospital corridors from the ones they had run through on the way in; in different cars from the ones they had arrived in; by a different route from the one the motorcade had taken into the city. Youngblood said that when they started moving, they should move fast, and should use black, unmarked cars, with Johnson and Lady Bird in separate cars, and Johnson told him to have the cars gotten ready, and Youngblood sent an agent to do so, telling him to have the cars waiting, with their motors running, in the ambulance bays at the emergency room entrance, and to make sure the drivers knew backstreet routes to the airport so they could use them if necessary. “Quick plans were made about how to get to the car … who to ride in what,” Lady Bird was to say. Her husband, she was to say, “was the most decisive person around us. Not that he wasn’t willing to listen … but he was quick to decide.”

  A MOMENT LATER, another decision had to be made. The press secretary on the Texas trip, Salinger’s assistant Malcolm Kilduff, came into the curtained room to ask Johnson’s permission to announce Kennedy’s death to the press corps that was waiting in the nurses’ classroom.

  “Mr. President,” he began. It was the first time that anyone had ever called Lyndon Johnson that, but when he answered Kilduff, it was a President answering, firm and in command. “He reacted immediately,” Kilduff was to recall. Immediately, and unequivocally. “No,” he said, don’t make that announcement yet. “Wait until I get out of here and back to the plane before you announce it. We don’t know whether this is a worldwide conspiracy, whether they are after me as well.… We just don’t know.” And get in touch with that plane carrying the Cabinet, he said. Get that plane turned around.1

  He made his dispositions. There hadn’t been many allies in that motorcade; three whose loyalty he could count on were the Texas congressmen, and he told the two who were in the room, Homer Thornberry and Jack Brooks, to ride back to the plane with him. He wanted every one of the few aides who had accompanied him to Dallas rounded up: he told Cliff Carter not to leave the hospital with him, but to find Liz Carpenter and Marie Fehmer and bring them to the plane. That still wasn’t much staff. Among the handful of people in his party was a Houston public relations man, Jack Valenti, who had caught Johnson’s attention a few years before by writing favorable newspaper columns about him, and who had worked with him on arrangements for the Albert Thomas Appreciation Dinner. He told Carter to find Valenti, and bring him. Carter and his crew would need a driver, he told Youngblood, and Youngblood assigned an agent to wait at the ambulance bays until they arrived. Then he was ready. “Homer, you go with me,” he said. “Jack, you go with Bird.”

  In a rush—not running, because that would call attention to them, but walking as fast as they could—they left the cubicle, through hospital corridors, following a red stripe on the floor to the emergency-room exit where the cars were waiting, Youngblood first, his head turning ceaselessly from side to side as he searched for danger, Johnson second, his eyes down as if he didn’t want to catch the eye of anyone who might be watching, then the two congressmen, and then two more Secret Service agents, and Lady Bird, who kept breaking into a trot as she tried to keep up. “Getting out of the hospital was one of the swiftest walks I have ever made,” she was to recall. The White House press corps was gathered in the nurses’ classroom at the other end of Parkland Hospital, waiting for word on Kennedy’s condition. As the new President of the United States headed out of the hospital, Robert Pierpoint of CBS News caught a glimpse of him, but didn’t follow him. No other reporter followed him, or, apparently, even knew he was leaving. “We weren’t thinking about succession,” Newsweek’s Roberts would explain. “I don’t remember anybody saying, ‘My God, Johnson is President.’ … There was almost no focus of attention on him, and this was true as they left the hospital.… Nobody made any attempt to follow him, although he was then President of the United States.” One photographer, official White House photographer Captain Cecil Stoughton of the Army Signal Corps, happened to be standing by the emergency-room reception desk at the moment the little procession hurried by. Suspecting that Kennedy was dead, he decided to follow and caught a ride a few minutes later with Carter and Valenti.

  Getting into the back seat of the first car, Johnson sat behind the driver, Youngblood by the window on the other side of the back seat, in the place where the Vice President normally sat, so that if someone fired at the person in that seat, thinking it was the Vice President, the bullet would hit him instead of Johnson. Thornberry sat in front. Youngblood told Johnson to keep below window level, and he slouched down on his shoulder blades.

  As they were pulling away from the hospital, another piece of protection was added. Congressman Thomas, standing near the ambulance bays, saw the cars, and motioned for them to stop for him. Youngblood told the driver to keep going, but Johnson said, “Stop and let him get in.” Thomas got in the front seat, beside Thornberry. As the car started moving again, Johnson told Thornberry to climb across the back of the front seat, and get in the rear. Thornberry did, but did not wind up sitting in the vacant space between Johnson and Youngblood. Instead, Youngblood was to report, he “took a position on the window side” behind the driver, where Johnson had been sitting. Whether Johnson had changed seats by accident or design, he now had a human shield between him and any bullets on the left side as
well as the right.

  One of the motorcycle policemen in front of them began to sound his siren. “Let’s don’t have the sirens,” Johnson said. As they sped through the Dallas streets, Lady Bird, following in the second car, saw, atop a building, a flag at half-mast: “I think that was when the enormity of what happened first struck me.” And then they were on the Love Field tarmac, and, Youngblood was to recall, “suddenly there before us was one of the most welcome sights I had ever seen”—Air Force One. The staircase to the rear door and the presidential quarters was in place, and he and Lyndon Johnson “practically ran up” the steps.

  ENTERING THE REAR of the plane, Johnson walked forward down a narrow aisle, past a sitting area with six first-class-type plane seats, and then past the small bedroom with beds for the President and his wife—“I want this kept strictly for the use of Mrs. Kennedy, Rufus,” Johnson said; “see to that”—and into the President’s stateroom, a compartment sixteen feet square with a small sofa attached to a wall; a small desk, with a high-backed armchair, for the President; and a small conference table with four chairs. A handful of crew members and White House staff, including two secretaries, were watching the television set. Back at Parkland Hospital, Kilduff had announced Kennedy’s death, and Walter Cronkite of CBS News was reporting it to the country. Youngblood was shouting to everyone to pull down the window shades; the possibility of a conspiracy, and of snipers at the airport, still seemed “very real indeed,” the agent was to say. From the secretaries came the sound of weeping.