The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  WANTING, NEEDING to unify more than the party, from one telephone call to another he shifted from one tone to another, and back again. Had he told a liberal that he was going to ask Congress for “less economizing”?—to the conservative Robert Anderson he said he was going to ask Congress for more: “to try to watch expenditures.” With Democrats, he invoked Truman’s name, telling Carl Albert he wanted to speak to a joint session “similar to what President Truman had after President Roosevelt died”; with Republicans, it was Eisenhower’s name: he had just been in an “elevator with President Eisenhower,” he mentioned to Everett Dirksen. “He had lunch with me and we were talking.… It might be a good thing … to have a Joint Session.… Ike thought I ought to.” Liberals he told that they should support him because he was going to reform the system, Republicans that he was going to preserve it, hinting to them that because of things that had not yet come to light about the assassination, the system (under which of course their wealth had been accumulated) might be under attack, telling his key link to Wall Street, Ed Weisl, that “your folks” should be given a hint that “this thing … this assassin may … have a lot more complications than you know about.… It may lay deeper than you think” (“Oh, no,” Weisl interjected), but that his folks shouldn’t be afraid because “we’re going to preserve this system”; therefore it was vital that the financial world show confidence in him. He himself called Frederick Kappel, president of the country’s largest corporation, American Telephone and Telegraph, and chairman of the influential Business Council, to tell him, “We’ve got to preserve this system, my friend. And there’s a good deal more.” The key to the financial world was Wall Street—it had panicked on Friday on news of the assassination; based on the experience with previous sudden presidential deaths, it would rebound when it reopened on Tuesday, as long as it had confidence in the President. Picking up the phone to call Bundy, Johnson told him that Treasury Secretary Dillon and Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin should make “a statement about continuity, stability or something, and express their confidence” before the market opened. After letting Weisl know that “I’ve been visiting with President Eisenhower” and that “I was thinking of you and I never needed you as much as I do now,” he told him to “tell Bobbie [Robert Lehman of Lehman Brothers] and some of his group—you just say that it’s very tragic, but you have great confidence in me and my experience, so on and so forth.… We don’t want anybody to panic.”

  And all the time other calls were pouring in, from congressional leaders, from governors like Pat Brown, whose previous experience with Lyndon Johnson had been so unpleasant but who now wanted to “offer you all the help a governor can give to you” (“Pat, you’re wonderful and I appreciate it, and I sure reciprocate it, my friend. And I’ve never needed help as bad as I need it now”), from governors two at a time, John Reynolds of Wisconsin and Karl Rolvaag of Minnesota, both in Washington for the funeral, on the line at the same time. Mentioning that they had visited him on one of his trips to the Mayo Clinic, Johnson said, “You came to see me when I was sick. I don’t forget. Now you let me know if there’s anything I need to know out there. I’m going to depend on you.”

  OF ALL THE PROBLEMS facing Lyndon Johnson, one of the most delicate—and, to his mind, most urgent—was to persuade key Kennedy Administration figures to remain in their jobs. While his plea on Friday that they stay on had worked with McNamara, Rusk and Bundy, it hadn’t with O’Brien, O’Donnell or Sorensen, and on Saturday it quickly became apparent how difficult it was going to be to keep with him some of the other most visible symbols of the Administration. When, early Saturday morning, Johnson woke its public face, Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, to ask him to stay in his job, Salinger agreed to do so—through Monday. Telling his friend the journalist William V. Shannon that he would handle press arrangements through Monday’s funeral because he wanted everything to go as smoothly as “the President”—he didn’t mean the new President—would have wished, he said he would resign first thing Tuesday morning. As for Arthur Schlesinger, not a significant figure within the Kennedy Administration but, to liberals, the very embodiment of liberalism, on Saturday, while President Kennedy’s body was still lying in the East Room, he convened a lunch in a private dining room in Washington’s Occidental Restaurant. Present, along with their wives, were Walter Heller; Heller’s fellow economists Ken Galbraith, Sam Beer and Paul Samuelson; William Walton and Richard Goodwin. The topic was the possibility of denying Johnson the nomination at the 1964 Democratic convention by running a ticket of Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.

  In trying to persuade the Kennedy men to stay in their jobs, Johnson had working for him, to a varying degree in each case, of course, fundamentals of human nature—the desire to hold on to position and power and the perquisites that came with them—but he was confronted, again to varying degrees depending on the man he was talking to, with a quality not universal at all: the feelings of the Kennedy men about a dead leader who, as far back as PT-59, had elicited an unusual depth of loyalty in men who served under him. “Almost all Presidents evoke intense loyalty from their aides; a few, something quite beyond,” Eric Goldman says. “These men had not only admired John Kennedy as President but had been entranced by him as a human being and had found a good deal of the excitement and of the meaning in their own lives through their feeling of closeness to him.” On the evening of Kennedy’s funeral, Schlesinger wrote in his journal, “I keep supposing that tomorrow morning, I will come down to the White House, Evelyn will be in her office and Kenny in his, and in a few minutes the President will be along, with some jokes about the morning papers. The thought that we will never see him again is intolerable and unacceptable and unendurable.” To an unusual degree, the loyalty was to the man—and now the man was gone. “We came with him, we should leave with him,” William Walton said.

  Complicating Johnson’s task were the feelings of the Kennedy men about him, Lyndon Johnson—the contempt many of them felt for him exacerbated now by contempt for his state that had turned into hatred because it was there in that outpost of braggadocio and prejudice that their leader had been murdered. Walking into Ted Sorensen’s office, Kennedy aide Ted Reardon shouted, “I’d like to take a fucking bomb and blow the fucking state of Texas off the fucking map.” Sorensen wasn’t a shouter; his quiet words to Reedy—“George, I wish to hell that goddamned state of Texas of yours had never been invented”—let Reedy understand how deep his feelings ran. In addition, they had seen the way he treated his staff, and the cost exacted by such treatment. “Johnson really took from Walter Jenkins his substance,” Ralph Dungan was to say. “He is that way with people.… He really took the substance, the psychological and spiritual substance of people and sucked it right out like a vampire.… He could not leave a man whole with his own dignity and his own self-esteem.” And what programs would the new President ask them to support? They had believed not only in a President but in a program, a liberal program, and they believed—many of them and perhaps almost all of them—that Lyndon Johnson was, despite his recent statements about civil rights, fundamentally a Texas conservative. Joining anyone else’s team after working for John F. Kennedy wouldn’t have been easy; joining the team of Lyndon Johnson would be particularly hard.

  With each of them, Johnson employed the same basic line: “I need you more than President Kennedy needed you.” Comparing notes, they realized they had all heard the line, and mimicked it, exaggerating the Texas drawl—“Ahhh need you, really ah do”—laughing about it among themselves. And journalists would repeat their mockery, enshrining it in print, as if Johnson was simply repeating the same line over and over. But, although no one realized it, in each case that line had been subtly altered, tailored to the man he was talking to, by this great reader of men—tailored, for example, not only to Kenneth Galbraith’s idealism but also to his ambition to be what Kennedy hadn’t allowed him to be: an insider like his friend Schlesinger. He, Lyndon Johnson, and Galbraith ha
d both been young men in Washington in the early days of the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson reminded him; they had both believed in the ideals of the New Deal, he said; they both still did—wouldn’t Ken help him turn those ideals into reality? And he had that joint address to give to Congress, he said; he would appreciate it if Ken could get up a draft for him as quickly as possible. Tailored to Schlesinger’s intellectual arrogance: “I just want to say that I need you far more than John Kennedy ever needed you. He had the knowledge, the skills, the understanding himself. I need you to provide those things for me.… You have a knowledge of the programs, the measures, the purposes, of the history of the country and of progressive policies, you know writers and all sorts of people. I need all that, and you must stay.” With Adlai Stevenson, he played on ambitions, thwarted ambitions, and, it may have been, on regrets, on thoughts of what might have been. “I know, and you know, that you should be sitting behind this desk rather than me,” Lyndon Johnson told him. Played on resentments. “There has been no consultation around here,” he told Stevenson. “You know, they put in the tax bill without ever talking to me … I know they haven’t consulted you either. So far as I’m concerned, that is all changed.… I want you to play a big role in the formation of policy.”

  And it wasn’t just the line, or the variations on the line, but the way it was delivered. He humbled himself before these men, abased himself. He wasn’t as smart as Jack Kennedy, he told them. He needed them to think for him—to “think, think, think.” He didn’t absorb things as fast as President Kennedy, he said. “Don’t expect me to absorb things as fast as you’re used to.” They would have to be patient with him, he said. When one of them suggested that because of the strain he was under he should consider going to the ranch for a vacation over the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, he said, “I’m afraid to. I don’t have enough time to keep abreast.… I just haven’t read one-third of the stuff I need to read, and I read until two o’clock in the morning.” He pleaded with them. He was helpless because of his background, he said—in his notes on his conversation with Johnson, Heller wrote that the President had said that “he did not have the education, culture and understanding that President Kennedy had … but he would do his best”—and because he didn’t even know people as smart as them to staff the government. “I don’t know the kinds of people that we’re going to need—I don’t have anyone to replace you with,” he told one man. “Please stay—I don’t know anybody,” he said to another. “In these early days,” as Doris Kearns Goodwin puts it, he “spoke to the Kennedy men with a subdued tone. He requested rather than ordered; he spoke of his shortcomings and shared his doubts.” Evans and Novak, who interviewed many of these Kennedy men during this period, were to write in their study of Johnson and The Exercise of Power that “In [these] first few days … Johnson subdued his energy, lowered his voice and assumed a posture of humility.… Old friends and aides remarked they had never seen him so self-possessed, so humble.”

  If the humility, the deference, he showed was a mask, as it had invariably proven to be in the past—after he had cried in front of Jim Rowe years before, for example—it was a mask that, in those crucial days, never slipped. Men who had watched Johnson for years could hardly believe the depths of the humility they were seeing now. His onetime aide Harry McPherson was in the inner office in 274 when “McGeorge Bundy entered with several cables and memoranda. They were not urgent but the President should see them before evening. Johnson was extremely deferential. He said, ‘Whenever you need me, let me know.’ Bundy replied, ‘Oh, Mr. President, you let me know when you need me.’ That made sense; Presidents pushed the button to summon aides, not the reverse. But I wondered if there was, in his correct, fluid response, the tone of a professor gently chiding a student who’d got it wrong.” Johnson gave no indication that he had noticed the tone. Kennedy aides gave him advice—lectures, in some cases, so all-knowing was their attitude—on how best to get the tax cut and civil rights bill passed, lectures on legislative strategy to the master of the Senate. Johnson sat and listened, attentively, earnestly; it seemed all he could do to keep himself from taking notes.

  Moreover, as Doris Kearns Goodwin says, “Never once did he permit himself even to imply that, however things were done before, this was now his White House. Where one might have expected bitterness—for all the slights received from some of these same men when he was Vice President—Johnson showed only benevolence.” In fact, quite deliberately, he was telling them that it was still going to be their White House. “I knew how they felt,” he was to tell Goodwin. The impact of Kennedy’s death was evident everywhere—in the looks on their faces and the sound of their voices. “He was gone and with his going they must have felt that everything had changed.… So I determined to keep them informed. I determined to keep them busy. I constantly requested their advice and asked for their help.” “Never once.” His “restraint,” as Goodwin wrote, was “continuous.” Summing up descriptions of Johnson conversations they received from a dozen Kennedy aides, Evans and Novak said that his “restraint” was “magnificent.”

  And the restraint and humility got him what he wanted—“induced in these men the very cooperation and submission that Johnson was after,” as Goodwin was to comment. By Sunday night, as one reporter wrote, “he obviously had good news he wanted to share,” and although he restrained himself from making the announcement himself, “associates of President Johnson” told reporters that “President Kennedy’s Cabinet will be kept virtually intact until after the 1964 election.” As for the Kennedy staff, Salinger had intended to brief the press for the last time on Monday; on Tuesday, he was still briefing, “with swollen eyes,” one reporter wrote. Adlai Stevenson had been so thoroughly convinced that he would be playing “a big role in the formulation of policy” that he couldn’t resist gloating over the alteration in his status. Johnson and he “talk the same language,” he told Schlesinger; in fact he felt that had he “said the word,” Johnson would have fired Rusk and Bundy, “but I told Johnson … that they should both be kept.” “You know,” he told Schlesinger, “things are ten times better for me now than they were before.” Adlai would remain as ambassador to the United Nations until his death in 1965. When, during his conversation with Schlesinger, Johnson saw that the historian’s resistance might have withstood the “need” plea, he lightened the mood with a little joke, saying about Schlesinger’s letter of resignation, “If you act on it, I will have you arrested.” Still trying to demur, Schlesinger said that every President should have his own men around him. Johnson said, “I consider you one of my men.

  “I hope you will consider yourself that way too,” Johnson went on. “I just want you to know that I have complete and unlimited faith and confidence in you. I want you to stay. I know it will be a sacrifice for you, and I know that you have many other things you can do. But I am asking you, for my sake and for the sake of the country, to stay with me for at least a year. By that time I hope I will have earned from you the same confidence and faith which I know you had in John F. Kennedy.”

  “He said all this with simplicity, dignity and apparent conviction,” Schlesinger was to write in his journal that evening. “I am a little perplexed as to what to do. I am sure that I must leave, but I can see the problem of disengagement is going to be considerable.”

  Disengagement was, in fact, to prove to be impossible, at least for a time. Schlesinger, still speaking frequently with Robert Kennedy about strategies for 1964, would remain in his White House office until the end of January.

  To the idealistic Sorensen, who despised him—“To me, he personified the kind of hyperbole and hypocrisy that defined the worst aspects of politics in my eyes,” he was to say—his appeal was based on Sorensen’s loyalty to the Kennedy program, and to his love for the man himself. When Sorensen mentioned that he had already submitted a letter of resignation, Johnson said, “I know. I got it.” He didn’t mention it again. Instead, he said, “I want you to draw the threads together on the
domestic program.” In another meeting, he asked him to draft the address to the joint session. These were the right notes to hit. “I agreed [to draft the speech],” he was to say. “I wanted to help commit LBJ to carrying on Kennedy’s program for 1964, and Kennedy’s legacy for the ages; and I wanted him to invoke these policies and words specifically as well as the late President’s name.” And, in addition, “I knew that JFK would not have approved my leaving during the brutal, grim post-assassination transition.”

  Johnson was aware of the significance of his accomplishment. “By remaining on the job, they helped give the government and the nation a sense of continuity during critical times—a sense of continuity which in turn strengthened my hand as Chief Executive,” he was to write in his memoirs. Washington insiders were aware of it, too—and were aware also of how difficult that accomplishment had been. Familiar with the feelings of the Kennedy men toward the new President, many insiders had considered it simply impossible that Johnson would be able to persuade more than a few of them to stay. He had persuaded all of them to stay. And he had done it so fast! Johnson’s “intensity and persistence … in carrying out this job was … extraordinary,” Evans and Novak wrote. “There was no hesitation, no ceremony, no delay.” Almost the entire job had been carried out in three days—Saturday, Sunday and Monday—those three days during which the nation had paid little attention to what Lyndon Johnson was doing. By the time on Monday afternoon that their beloved leader’s body had been laid to rest, his men had agreed to stay and serve under his successor’s flag.

  “THE END OF THE SERVICE at Arlington,” to McGeorge Bundy, “was like the fall of a curtain, or the snapping of taut strings”—and when the curtain came up again, it came up on Lyndon Johnson.