The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Writing in later years about that Friday night, Hugh Sidey said that it was in Johnson’s meeting with the congressional leaders “that perhaps more than in anything else lay the real clue to his flawless assumption of power.” “The meeting had no real purpose,” Sidey wrote—yet it was very important. “It was a kind of tribal ritual of those men who wielded the power in the legislative halls [where] meetings are a way of life and a sign of authority.” Once Johnson had called such meetings, summoning such men. He hadn’t called one for three years. But now he had called one again. And, Sidey wrote, “these men understood.”

  THAT STATEMENT for the press wasn’t the only thing Lyndon Johnson wrote that evening. Sitting at his desk in his inner office, door closed against the voices outside, he wrote two letters in longhand. “Dear John,” said the first, “It will be many years before you understand fully what a great man your father was. His loss is a deep personal tragedy for all of us, but I wanted you particularly to know that I share your grief—You can always be proud of him.” The second said, “Dearest Caroline, Your father’s death has been a great tragedy for the Nation, as well as for you, and I wanted you to know how much my thoughts are of you at this time. He was a wise and devoted man. You can always be proud of what he did for his country.” He signed them both, “Affectionately, Lyndon B. Johnson.” Even Manchester had to write, of those letters, “He would never be a simple man. He was capable of tactlessness and tenderness, cunning and passion.” Then he was almost done with his office work for the evening. He telephoned the young man who had always been closer to him than any of his other aides, and to whom he talked in a kidding tone that he didn’t use often with the others. “I’m going to be leaving here soon,” he said without preamble when Buzz picked up the phone. “I’ll come by and pick you up—you wait at the curb.” And when Buzz, knowing that with the world watching on the evening of an assassination, the new President should not stop on Connecticut Avenue and pick someone up, said that he would drive to The Elms in his own car, Johnson asked, in the old kidding tone, “What’s the matter? Are you running from the press?”

  IT WAS 9:24 P.M. Valenti, who had received an order to get on the plane, and then one to get on the helicopter, now received one to get in the car (“Drive home with me, Jack. You can stay at my house tonight and then we will have a chance to do some talking. Are you ready to leave now?”), still, he was to say, “not quite sure precisely why I was even here in the first place.” Gathering up Carter and Moyers as well, Johnson led them out to his car, two Secret Service agents in front of them, two behind, Youngblood at his shoulder. Two agents were already sitting in the front seat, a convertible full of agents behind; as Johnson got into the car, two of the agents stood up, automatic rifles in their hands; then as the White House gates swung open ahead of them and the two cars pulled out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, a half dozen waiting police motorcycle outriders swung out in front of them, their sirens wailing. At the other gates—at The Elms—men were holding shotguns as well as pistols; the street around them was filled with reporters, television mobile units, telephone trucks and telephone linemen hooking up the new, secure lines, and a cluster (surprisingly small, in reporters’ memories) of neighbors and onlookers.

  Busby, arriving at The Elms a few minutes earlier, had seen at once that “the aura of the office preceded” the man he had worked for for so long. No one wanted to be in the foyer when the new President came in; it was “conspicuously empty; when people crossed through it, they hurried their steps.” Yet they wanted to see him coming in; “whenever the front door opened to admit a Secret Service agent or a telephone installer, faces appeared” at the five other doorways that opened off the foyer, “peeking around doorframes to see if the sound meant that he had come.” When he did indeed come, Busby counted sixteen faces (including “my own”) at the doorways.

  Walking through the hallway to the sunroom at the back of the house, Johnson sprawled down in the big green chair. Framed in each of the French doors, there was, suddenly, a Secret Service man, his back to the windows. Asking for a glass of orange juice, Johnson raised it in a toast toward the grim photograph on the wall. “Hello, Mr. Sam. Sure wish you were here tonight,” he said.

  Dr. J. Willis Hurst, Johnson’s cardiologist, was waiting in the sunroom; hearing the reports that Johnson had gone into Parkland Hospital rubbing his left arm, Dr. Travell had called him. Johnson told Hurst he had no pain in his arm, and observing him, Hurst was reassured about his health. Busby, observing him from a different perspective, was reassured in other ways; he saw in an instant that his calmness was only a façade: “he was more controlled than calm.” But he saw also that the control—the “composure and coolheadedness”—was complete.

  After watching television for a few minutes, Johnson said, “I guess I know less than anybody about what’s happening in the United States.” Then the films on the screen were of Kennedy’s appearance in Fort Worth that morning. Raising his hand as if to shield his eyes from the screen, he said, “I don’t believe I can take that. It’s too fresh,” and the channel was changed to one showing, first, films of Kennedy’s early career and then films of his own. An announcer mentioned the plane bringing the Cabinet members back to Washington. “That’s the last damned time that the President, the Vice President, and six Cabinet members are going to be out of Washington at the same time, I can tell you that,” he said. Calling in the head of the Secret Service, James J. Rowley, he told him about Youngblood protecting his body with his own. “I want you to do whatever you can, the best thing that can be done for that boy,” he said. He told Busby to get Nellie Connally on the phone, and asked her about the governor’s condition. “Take care of Johnny,” he said at last. “I need him now.” He told Valenti, Moyers and Carter that they could sleep at The Elms, told Valenti he could stay there—or at the White House when he, Johnson, moved in—until he found a place to live in Washington. And in a low voice, “almost to himself,” he repeated, over and over, as if he was working himself up, preparing himself, the same sentence: “We really have a big job to do now.”

  At about midnight, Busby left for his home, after a conversation in which Johnson said, “You know, almost all the issues now are just about the same as they were when I came here thirty years ago.” Those issues were still on the table, he said, and he intended to get action on some of them. He went upstairs, and directed Moyers, Valenti and Carter to the bedrooms they were to use, but they had only begun undressing when he called them on the intercom and told them to come to his room because “I want to think out my agenda.”

  Johnson was in bed, in striped pajamas, propped up against a pillow, with memoranda and reports spread out around him; Mrs. Johnson was in bed in another room. The three men pulled chairs up next to the bed.

  The men didn’t talk much; very little input from them was required. Lyndon Johnson just wanted, Carter was to say, “a sounding board.”

  The “agenda” he was planning was his schedule for the next day—what he had to do, what people he should see, what he should say to them. There was the Cabinet meeting: What time should it be? What White House staffers should be invited to attend? What should he say there? He had to meet with Eisenhower: What did he want to accomplish at that meeting? What did he want to say to him? Buzz should be told to draft talking points. Pulling out a notebook, Valenti started scribbling frantically. What legislation was most urgent? What could he do to get it passed? Who in the House and Senate should he talk to about it—the budget, and the tax bill that was tied in with it, in particular? How to deal with Harry Byrd? Harry Truman had given an address to a joint session of Congress the day after Roosevelt’s funeral; he wanted to give one, too—when should it be scheduled?; what should he say in it?; who should draft it? “We sat and talked so long, we were talking about the many, many details of things that needed to be done, the bases that needed to be touched with foreign governments, with governors, with senators, congressmen, mayors, certain things with the Cabin
et members,” Cliff Carter was to say. Some of the things were sensitive, because if he appeared to be assuming power quickly he might offend the Kennedys, but if he didn’t, the public might not see that the government was in firm hands: “Everything was weighed out … to make sure that he was walking this chalk line not to overdo but yet where the people had confidence that he could do the job.” All this time the television set was on, and the newscasters’ words would remind him of other things: Harry Truman was mentioned; “By God, I’m going to pass Harry Truman’s medical insurance bill,” he said. The three men around the bed sat silently; the man in the bed talked, and talked—he didn’t want advice; he knew what should be done the next day; he just wanted to lay it out. “That whole night he seemed to have several chambers of his mind operating simultaneously,” Moyers was to say. “It was formidable, very formidable.” Valenti kept scribbling things to be done on his pad—ten pages were to be covered with notes; he gave them the next morning to a secretary to have them typed up, but they were lost; “do you realize how valuable they would be?” he was to moan to the author years later. There was the question of who was going to carry out the tasks listed on the pad. Johnson made clear that they were all on his staff now: “He told Moyers that he wanted him back from the Peace Corps,” Carter says. He told Valenti to take a two-year leave of absence from his public relations firm because he would be working at the White House, and he told Carter “to move over to the Democratic National Committee to represent his interests there.” Johnson started to firm things up, mapping out an hour-by-hour schedule of what he would be doing Saturday. He stopped talking at about three a.m. It was about twenty hours since he had woken up in Fort Worth that morning. “Well, good night, boys,” he said. “Get a lot of sleep fast. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”

  14

  Three Encounters

  AT ABOUT 4:30 A.M., while Johnson was sleeping, the autopsy was finally completed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and the coffin was brought by that gray Navy ambulance to the White House, Bobby and Jackie sitting in the back beside it—Jackie was still wearing the pink suit—and was carried into the East Room by a Marine honor guard. Jackie had sent word that she wanted the room to look “as it did when Lincoln’s body lay there,” Dick Goodwin recalls, and sketches from 1865 had been located, and black crepe had been draped in folds over the long gold curtains and the three crystal chandeliers. A catafalque, similar to Lincoln’s, a black stand on a black base, had been found, and set up in the center of the room. A group of Kennedy aides was standing in a far corner of the room when the coffin was carried in. Jackie followed it, Bobby beside her, Kenny and Larry behind. “Her face was fixed straight ahead, lovely, painful to see,” Dick Goodwin says. Walking over to the coffin, she knelt on the floor, turned her face away so that the watching group could not see, and rested her cheek on the flag that draped the long box. Then she put her arms around it. Anyone who hadn’t been crying before was crying now. After a while, she got up; the aides followed the Kennedys out of the room. There was still a decision to be made—Jackie wanted the coffin closed, so that the world would remember her husband as he had been; McNamara said it must be open, because the world would demand to see the body of a head of state—a hard decision, so it was made by the man who made those decisions. Going back into the East Room alone, he had the casket opened so he could see his brother’s face. After a while, he came out, and asked Arthur Schlesinger to go in and look. “For a moment, I was shattered,” Schlesinger recalls; “It was not a good job.” “Close it,” Robert Kennedy said. Tall candles stood flickering at each corner of the catafalque, and at each corner, also, was a man in uniform with his rifle at parade rest, guarding it; at the head of the coffin stood the honor guard’s commander, a Navy lieutenant, of course, rigidly at attention. At two wooden prie-dieux knelt two priests in cassocks, praying.

  ROBERT KENNEDY’S FACE had remained pale and sad, but set, resolute, and, apparently, calm. He went up to the Lincoln Bedroom, still seemingly so “controlled,” says Charles Spalding, who went upstairs with him. “There’s a sleeping pill around here somewhere,” Spalding said, found one, gave it to him, and then closed the door. “Then I just heard him break down.… I heard him sob and say, ‘Why, God?’ ”

  FOR LYNDON JOHNSON, Saturday could hardly have gotten off to a worse start.

  Arising after only a few hours’ sleep, he breakfasted and left for the White House at 8:40, planning to begin working on the agenda he had outlined during the night. Instead, he began with a confrontation with Robert Kennedy.

  McGeorge Bundy had told Johnson Friday evening that he would be able to move into the Oval Office Saturday morning, but subsequently the national security advisor had learned that that would not be a good idea, and, going to the Executive Office Building early Saturday morning—8:05 a.m.—he left a note for Johnson there, telling Mildred Stegall to give it to him as soon as he came in. “When you and I talked last night about when the President’s office in the West Wing would be ready, I thought possibly it would be immediately,” the note said. “However, I find they are working on President Kennedy’s papers and his personal belongings and my suggestion would be that—if you could work here in the EOB today and tomorrow, everything will be ready and clear by Monday morning.” Johnson, unfortunately, didn’t get the message. Emerging from his limousine at about 8:55, he didn’t go to the EOB, but walked into the West Wing instead—to the Oval Office—and walked in on Evelyn Lincoln as she was beginning to pack up Jack Kennedy’s belongings. “I have an appointment at 9:30,” he said. “Can I have my girls in your office by 9:30?”

  That would give her a half hour to pack. “I don’t know, Mr. President,” she said. “Grief-stricken and appalled,” in a friend’s words, she walked out of the office and began to cry—just as Bobby walked in. Sobbing, she said, “Do you know he asked me to be out by 9:30?”

  At Bethesda Hospital the previous evening Bobby had been, Evan Thomas says, “a commanding figure,” making funeral arrangements, giving orders “in Jackie’s name, just as he had in Jack’s.” He had kept telling little jokes, trying to keep everyone’s spirits up. “Composed, withdrawn, resolute,” was how Arthur Schlesinger saw him; he was “clearly emerging as the strongest of the stricken,” Ben Bradlee said. But, Schlesinger says, “within, he was demolished.… He didn’t know where he was.… Everything was just pulled out from under him.” Only the two words Spalding heard because Bobby Kennedy didn’t know anyone would hear had revealed the depth of his anguish. But when Mrs. Lincoln told him what Johnson had asked her, he blurted out, “Oh, no!” Not wanting to talk to Johnson in the office that had been his brother’s, he went with him into the small adjoining private office and told him that crating his brother’s possessions would take time, and asked him if he could wait until noon. Johnson said he could, that the only reason he had wanted to move in was that his advisers had insisted that he should. He quickly walked downstairs to the Situation Room for a briefing from Bundy and CIA Director McCone, and then went across the street to Room 274. He didn’t return to the Oval Office at noon; he didn’t return to it for three days.

  The confrontation had been due to a misunderstanding—“a mix-up,” Bundy called it—and he explained that to both Kennedy and Johnson later that day, but between these two men the blackest interpretation was placed on every action; a misunderstanding was only a new cause for rage. Johnson felt that in pushing past him on the plane at Andrews Bobby “ran so that he would not have to pause and recognize the new President.” “Perhaps some such thought contributed to Robert Kennedy’s haste,” Schlesinger commented. “But a man more secure than Johnson would have sympathized with the terrible urgency carrying him to his murdered brother’s wife.” And he saw not only personal but political motives in the Oval Office scene. To Johnson, it was part of a plot. “During all of that period,” he was to say years later, “I think [Bobby] seriously considered whether he would let me be president, whether he should really take
the position [that] the vice president didn’t automatically move in. I thought that was on his mind every time I saw him in the first few days.… I think he was seriously considering what steps to take. For several days he really kept me out of the President’s office. I operated from the Executive Office Building because [the Oval Office] was not made available to me. It was quite a problem.” And that afternoon, at 2:30, was the Cabinet meeting, and the attorney general was a member of the Cabinet.