The stateroom was already warm. Having been alerted to prepare for an immediate takeoff, Air Force One’s pilot, Colonel Jim Swindal, had disconnected the air-conditioning unit, mounted on a mobile cart, that kept the plane cool on the ground. The plane’s own air-conditioning functioned only when the plane’s engines were running. Swindal had only one running, at a low speed that provided electricity for lights in the cabins but not air-conditioning.
For a few minutes, there was a hurried conference between Johnson and the three Texas congressmen, because there were decisions to be made: when and where to take the oath of office, whether here, in Dallas, or in Washington, where there could be a formal ceremony, in an appropriate setting, with the oath administered by Chief Justice Earl Warren, as Warren had administered it to John F. Kennedy at his inauguration. Harry Truman, another Vice President brought to the presidency by the sudden death of his predecessor, had not been sworn in for two hours and twenty-four minutes after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death (and almost two hours after he had been notified of it), waiting until the Cabinet, congressional leaders and several other key government officials could be assembled in the Cabinet Room at the White House to watch Chief Justice Harlan Stone swear him in. Thornberry argued for Washington, Thomas and Brooks for Dallas, so that the country would immediately see that the succession had taken place: “Suppose the plane is delayed?” Thomas asked. But a few minutes was all that the discussion lasted. There were reasons for the swearing-in to take place quickly: the fact that the President had been assassinated, and that a wider conspiracy might be involved, made the need to establish a sense of continuity, of stability, more urgent; should the Russians try to take advantage of the situation, there should not be the slightest doubt about who was in command. A panic on Wall Street that was to wipe out more than ten billion dollars in stock values within slightly more than an hour was already under way. Although the taking of the oath was a merely symbolic gesture—no one but a Vice President had ever ascended to the presidency when a President died, so precedent had established that a Vice President became President automatically, immediately upon a President’s death—it was a powerful symbol. To Johnson it seemed particularly meaningful, as if, despite the fact that he had actually been President since the moment Kennedy died, it would be the taking of the oath that would truly make him President; later, discussing November 22, he would say: “I took the oath. I became President.” During the discussion, a crew member saw that Johnson was “very much in command,” and as soon as Thomas finished arguing for taking the oath in Dallas, he said, “I agree.”
IF COOLNESS and decisiveness under pressure were components of Lyndon Johnson’s character, there were, however, as always with Johnson, other, contrasting components.
Aware though he was of considerations that militated against anyone entering the presidential bedroom, that it should be kept “strictly for the use of Mrs. Kennedy,” as he had instructed Youngblood, there now arose another consideration. He had telephone calls to make, including one of a particularly delicate nature, and he wanted privacy while he made them.
Privacy was available in the stateroom where he was standing (as it happens he was standing right beside a telephone); doors on either side of the room could close it off completely from the rest of the plane; he could have asked the people in the room to leave and closed the doors. But he had more privacy in mind than that. Leading Marie Fehmer—and Youngblood, who said he would not leave his side until the plane was in the air—into the Kennedys’ bedroom, he closed the door, pulled off the jacket of his suit and sat down, sprawling down, on one of the beds.
And these other components were demonstrated also by the identity of the person to whom the delicate phone call was made, and by the questions Lyndon Johnson asked during the call.
Objective, rational reasons can explain why Lyndon Johnson called Robert Kennedy. One of the purposes of the call was to obtain a legal opinion on a matter of governmental policy, and Kennedy was the country’s chief legal officer. And, the decision to take the oath having been made, the wording of the oath was needed, and there was also the question of who was legally empowered to administer it, and these pieces of information could be obtained most authoritatively from the same source.
And there were strategic reasons for him to have called Bobby. Lyndon Johnson seems to have had even in this first hour after John F. Kennedy’s death feelings that would torment him for the rest of his life—feelings understandable in any man placed in the presidency not through an election but through an assassin’s bullet, and feelings exacerbated in his case by the contrast, and what he felt was the world’s view of the contrast, between him and the President he was replacing; by the contempt in which he had been held by the people around the President; and by the stark geographical fact of the location of the act that had elevated him to office. Recalling his feelings years later, in his retirement, he would say that even after he had taken the oath, “for millions of Americans I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper. And then there was Texas, my home, the home of … the murder.… And then there were the bigots and the dividers and the Eastern intellectuals, who were waiting to knock me down before I could even begin to stand up.” He seems to have felt even in this first hour that the best way to legitimize his ascent to the throne, to make himself seem less like a usurper, would be to demonstrate that his ascent had the support of his predecessor’s family. The decision to be sworn in immediately, in Dallas, instead of waiting until he returned to Washington, had been made, but he wanted that decision to be approved by the man whose approval would carry the most weight.
There were, of course, reasons for him not to have called Robert Kennedy, reasons for him to have obtained the information he wanted from someone else—from anyone else. The questions he asked on the call—whether the swearing-in could take place in Dallas? what was the wording of the oath? who could administer it?—were not complicated questions, and could have been answered by any one of a hundred government officials. One of them, in fact, was an official he had already dealt with extensively on questions of vice presidential procedure—on the drafting of the executive order establishing the Committee on Equal Opportunity, for example—and whom he trusted and even felt a rapport with: the number two man in the Justice Department, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.
And there were other—non-governmental—considerations that might have led him to telephone Katzenbach or some other official rather than the one he called, considerations of humanity rather than of politics. But none of these more personal considerations appear to have had much weight with him (unless, perhaps, they did). Whatever the reasons, a half hour after Robert Kennedy had been told that the brother he loved so deeply was dead, the telephone rang again at Hickory Hill, and when Kennedy picked it up, he found himself talking to the man he hated so deeply—who was asking him to provide details of the precise procedure by which he could, without delay, assume his brother’s office.
ROBERT KENNEDY HAD BEEN having lunch with Ethel, United States Attorney Robert Morgenthau of New York and Morgenthau’s deputy Silvio Mollo by the side of the swimming pool at Hickory Hill. It was a bright, sunny day, warm for November. At the top of the lawn sloping up from the pool, workmen were painting a new wing that had been added to the rambling white house. Suddenly, Morgenthau saw one of the workmen start running toward them. He was holding a transistor radio in his hand, and he was shouting something that no one understood. Just then a telephone rang on the other side of the pool, and Ethel walked around the pool to answer it, and said it was J. Edgar Hoover, and Bobby walked over to take the call, and Morgenthau saw him clap his hand to his mouth and turn away with a look of “shock and horror” on his face. “Jack’s been shot,” he said. “It may be fatal.” He walked back to the house, and tried to get more news, and a few minutes later—at 2:25, according to White House phone logs—he got it, from a White House aide, an
d a few minutes after that it was confirmed by Hoover, and then, at 2:56, Lyndon Johnson was on the phone.
This call—and a second one between Johnson and Robert Kennedy six minutes later—was not recorded, and, as had been the case with the meetings of the two men in Los Angeles three years before, their recollections differ. The only witnesses to the calls—Rufus Youngblood and Marie Fehmer—heard only one side of them, and their impressions of what occurred differ markedly from those of Katzenbach, to whom Robert Kennedy spoke both between the two calls, and immediately afterwards. But whatever the differences, there emerges from the recollections and impressions a picture of two conversations between a man who knew exactly what he wanted and what to say in order to get it, and a man so stunned by grief and shock that he hardly knew what he was saying, or even, to some extent, what he was hearing.
Johnson would give accounts of the telephone calls several times, both in the months immediately following the assassination, and in 1967, when the dispute over the conversations grew so public and bitter that it, along with the dispute over his Los Angeles meetings with Robert Kennedy, not only became a crucial element in this great blood feud, perhaps the greatest blood feud of American politics in the twentieth century, but also one that played a role, small but not insignificant, in decisions that shaped the course of American history. By his account, he telephoned Kennedy because “I wanted to say something to comfort him in his grief.” And, by Johnson’s account, he succeeded in this purpose, bringing Kennedy’s mind around to practical matters. “In spite of his shock and sorrow,” Johnson said, Kennedy “discussed the practical problems at hand with dispatch”; he was “very businesslike.” They discussed “the matter of my taking the oath of office,” and “the possibility of a conspiracy,” Johnson was to say. Kennedy, he says, “said that he would like to look into the matter of” when and where the oath should be administered, and “call back,” and when Kennedy called back, “he said that the oath should be administered to me immediately.” Kennedy’s accounts of the conversations, including one he gave that evening to Ken O’Donnell after O’Donnell had arrived back in Washington, were different. Johnson had, Bobby said, told him that “a lot of people down here had advised him to be sworn in right away” and asked if he had any objections. When there was no immediate reply, Johnson pressed him, asking, “Do you have any objections to that?” Bobby said he hadn’t replied to the question. “I was too surprised to say anything about it. I said to myself what’s the rush? Couldn’t he wait until he got the President’s body out of there and back to Washington?” Johnson, in this account, took—or used—silence as assent. “He began to ask me a lot of questions about who should swear him in. I was too confused and upset to talk to him about it.” In a later conversation Bobby taped for posterity, he said he had never told Johnson that the oath should be administered immediately. “I was sort of taken aback at the moment because I didn’t think—see what the rush was.” In fact, he says, his wishes were the opposite of what Johnson portrayed them to be. “I thought, I suppose, at the time, at least, I thought it would be nice if the President came back to Washington [as] President Kennedy.” The only aspect of the conversation that is agreed on was that Kennedy said he would look into the matter and call Johnson back.
Kennedy called Katzenbach, who recalls him saying: “They want to swear him in right away in Texas. That’s not necessary, is it?”
“No, not necessary,” Katzenbach replied. And when Kennedy asked who could swear him in, Katzenbach said “anyone who can administer an oath,” a category that included any federal judge or hundreds of other federal officials; the place or exact time of the swearing-in didn’t matter; “You become President when the President dies—that’s accepted. It’s not a question.”
Katzenbach was to say he agreed that an immediate swearing-in, while not necessary, was desirable, “given its symbolic significance.” But, he told the author, he was “absolutely stunned” that Johnson had made the call to Bobby Kennedy so soon after his brother’s death. So many federal officials could have given Johnson the information he was seeking, he says. “He could have called me. I was in my office.” He felt Johnson might have made the call because “he may have wanted to be absolutely sure that there wouldn’t be an explosion from Bobby’s end”—wanted to ensure that Bobby would not later say that the immediate swearing-in showed a lack of respect for the dead President. But, he says, given Bobby’s “feelings about Johnson, and about his brother,” the fact that Johnson had called Bobby so soon after his brother’s death “frankly appalled” him. “Calling Bobby was really wrong.”
Then there was a second call—the return call from Robert Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson—about which, as William Manchester writes, “the facts are unclear and a dispassionate observer cannot choose.” Johnson was to say that on this call Kennedy advised him “that the oath should be administered to me, immediately, before taking off for Washington, and that it could be administered by any judicial officer.” During the call, however, it became clear that the questions of when and where the oath should be administered were in fact now moot, and that all Johnson wanted from Kennedy was the oath’s precise wording. Kennedy said he would have Katzenbach dictate it; telephoning his deputy again, he said, “They’re going to swear him in down there, and he needs the oath.” Katzenbach pulled a copy of the Constitution off his bookshelf, and read the thirty-seven-word declaration that is in Article II, Section 1: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Johnson had told Marie Fehmer to go out to the staff section of the plane and take down the wording. “Bobby started it and turned the phone to Katzenbach,” she recalls. (Katzenbach apparently patched in to this second call.) What was Katzenbach’s voice like at that time? she is asked. “It was controlled; he was like steel,” she replies. “Bobby’s was not when he started. I kept thinking, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this.’ ” When Katzenbach finished, she says, she asked him, “ ‘May I read it back to you?’ Which I afterward thought may have been a little cruel, but yet I wanted to check it.” As for her own emotional state at the time, she says, “I was all right. I broke up later that night, but I was all right. You get that feeling from him [Johnson]. He taught you that, by George, you can do anything.… There was a job to be done.”
Whatever the disputes over the telephone calls, the oath was dictated, and typed out, and if the desired assent by Bobby Kennedy to its immediate administration was not obtained, at least he had been asked whether he objected to that, and had not replied, so it would be difficult for him to criticize it later; the possibility of public criticism from the President’s brother had been muted (as it would turn out, only for a time). The call to Hickory Hill had achieved its purpose. Whatever the details of the conversation between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, when Johnson hung up the phone he had gotten enough of what he wanted so that he could go ahead.
HANGING UP THE PHONE, he began giving orders. Any federal judge could swear him in, he had been told. He knew what judge he wanted—and she was right in Dallas.
“As much as any single person possibly could,” an historian has written, this judge had “personified Johnson’s utter powerlessness” during his vice presidency. He had been unable to secure her appointment; she had been named to the Federal District Court in Dallas only after Sam Rayburn had intervened, a fact which had made Johnson feel like “the biggest liar and fool in the State.”
“Get Sarah Hughes,” he told Marie Fehmer.
Judge Hughes’ law clerk told Ms. Fehmer he didn’t know the judge’s whereabouts—the last he knew, he said, she had been at the Trade Mart luncheon waiting for the President to arrive—and Fehmer told Johnson that.
He told her to call the clerk back, and picked up the receiver himself. “This is Lyndon Johnson,” he said. “Find her.”
S
he was found, and she hurried to Love Field.
HE WANTED SOMETHING MORE from the Kennedys, and he got that, too.
No single gesture would do more to demonstrate continuity and stability—to show that the government of the United States would continue to function without interruption despite the assassination of the man who sat at its head—and to legitimize the transition: to prove that the transfer of power had been orderly, proper, in accordance with the Constitution; to remove, in the eyes of the world, any taint of usurpation; to dampen, so far as possible, suspicion of complicity by him in the deed; to show that the family of the man he was succeeding bore him no ill will and supported him, than the attendance at his swearing-in ceremony of the late President’s widow.
Was this consideration part of the reason—in addition to the humanitarian consideration that he didn’t want her left behind in Dallas—that when the Secret Service and Ken O’Donnell had told him that Jacqueline Kennedy would follow in another plane, he had refused to leave Dallas without her? Certainly some of the Kennedy loyalists harbored that suspicion. “Some of us did feel that he was using Mrs. Kennedy and the Kennedy aura when he stage[d] his oath-taking ceremony … with her present, and so he could arrive in Washington with her and President Kennedy’s casket,” O’Donnell was to write. History will never know the answer to that question. All history can know for certain is that now, on Air Force One, he moved with determination to obtain her presence.
HIS EFFORTS WERE almost derailed at their very start by a moment of awkwardness.
While he was making phone calls—not only to Bobby Kennedy but to Walter Jenkins and McGeorge Bundy—in the plane’s bedroom, hammering began on the other side of the bulkhead that separated the bedroom from the rear seating compartment, and when Fehmer went out into the corridor and asked what it was, crew members told her that four of the six seats in the compartment were being removed to make room for Kennedy’s heavy bronze coffin, which was about to be brought on board through the plane’s rear door, followed by Jackie and Kennedy’s aides.
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