The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “The best way” to meet those problems, Lyndon Johnson said, “is to pass the tax bill and get some more jobs and get some more investments and, incidentally, get more revenue and taxes, and pass the civil rights bill so that we can say to the Mexican in California or the Negro in Mississippi or the Oriental on the West Coast or the Johnsons in Johnson City that we are going to treat you all equally and fairly, and you are going to be judged on merit and not ancestry, not on how you spell your name.”

  Forget your party for a moment, Lyndon Johnson told the men before him. “We are going to have plenty of time after the conventions to get out … and campaign and talk about ourselves and our merits. Let’s talk about the country until then.”

  And “let’s not just talk about it,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Let’s get some action on it and do something.”

  “Do something.” Lyndon Johnson wasn’t smiling and friendly anymore. When he said the Let’s do something, “he just snarled it,” Valenti was to say. There had been exaggeration in his description of the scene in Dallas. John Connally’s hand had not been torn off. But there was a vividness in the description, too—not John Kennedy’s head in Jackie’s lap but “his skull in her lap”—the vividness of a great storyteller whose words caught men up in their grip. And there was a vividness in the part of his talk that wasn’t exaggerated that caught them up, too. “The only thing you could see moving in that room was the reporters’ pencils,” Valenti was to recall. “No one moved. No one budged. The room was absolutely still. No one took their eyes from his face.” Reedy was very proud; others were finally seeing what the Senate cloakroom had seen.

  Johnson finished by talking for a moment about himself. “I am not the best man in the world at this job, and I was thrown into it through circumstances, but I am in it and I am not going to run from it,” he said. “I am going to be at it from daylight to midnight, and with your help and God’s help we are going to make not ourselves proud that we are Americans but we are going to make the rest of the world proud that there is an American in it.”

  Some of the governors facing him had risen to their office through their capacity for leadership, and others had learned leadership since they were in the office, but one way or another many of them had learned to know leadership when they saw it. When Johnson finished, they stood and applauded him. A reporter asked Pat Brown his reaction to the speech. This was the Pat Brown who, three years before, had been thoroughly repelled by Johnson’s manner.

  “Astounded,” Brown said.

  OTHERS SAW IT, too—including men more accustomed to dealing with hard, cold numbers than with intangibles: the economists who had been preparing President Kennedy’s budget.

  Six of them had been waiting outside during Johnson’s meeting with the governors: the Administration’s three top advisers on economic policy—Dillon of Treasury, Heller of the Council of Economic Advisers and Gordon of the Bureau of the Budget—who called themselves Kennedy’s “troika,” after a Russian sleigh that is pulled by three horses; and their top assistants, Treasury Undersecretary Henry H. Fowler, Gardner Ackley of the Council and Budget Deputy Director Elmer Staats.

  As soon as Johnson began talking to them, they realized that the sleigh had a very different driver now.

  They were conscious, they were to say, of some of what Johnson had done that day: marching in the procession past a thousand windows after his predecessor had been shot from a window, attending the funeral, dealing with de Gaulle and Mikoyan and scores of foreign leaders, and then, as they sat waiting outside, with the governors, dealing with the investigation of the murders in Dallas—as well as, they were sure, carrying out a dozen other tasks of which they were not aware. They knew his day must have begun early that morning—actually it had begun at about 6:30 in the morning, and their meeting began at 9:15 that night, almost fifteen hours later—but, Ackley was to record in his notes on the meeting, “The President showed no signs of his tiring day, looked fit and vigorous, was affable and relaxed, but always in command.”

  “In command.” “The most impressive thing,” Ackley wrote, “was the confident way in which he approached the whole problem—not necessarily implying that he knew the answers, but that he knew the score, and that the problem could be solved. All we had to do was to decide how to tackle it.” And a moment later, they realized that he had decided: that he already knew how he was going to deal with the problem—of getting a tax reduction bill through Congress—that had stymied them for almost a year.

  “What about your tax bill?” he asked Dillon—and before Dillon could reply, Ackley wrote, “he answered his own question.” Dillon and the other members of Kennedy’s economic team had believed that getting the budget down to $101.5 or $102 billion—reasonably close to the $100 billion figure Harry Byrd kept mentioning—would satisfy Byrd and his fellow Finance Committee conservatives. The previous year’s budget had been $98.8 billion. Mandatory “built-in” increases would add $1.8 billion more, new expenses required under legislation already passed and signed an additional $1.6 billion. Even if no department or agency was given a raise, the total therefore currently stood at $102.2 billion. Dillon felt that figure might possibly be reduced to the $101.5 billion figure but no further. But Johnson told Dillon that he had been checking with senators on Finance (“The President indicating pretty clear knowledge of every vote,” Ackley noticed) and the team’s belief was wrong: the $100 billion wasn’t an estimate, a rough figure, but a hard one, not an approximation of what Byrd wanted but a limit, “a psychological barrier that should not be breached,” in the words of one senatorial observer, a “magic number” with a deep symbolic significance to the chairman; no peacetime budget had ever reached that figure, and he was determined that this budget wouldn’t reach it either; unless the budget was reduced below that figure, the tax bill, with its savings to taxpayers of $11 billion and the resultant three-to-one stimulus for the economy that would produce badly needed new jobs and programs, wasn’t going to be released by the committee and sent to the full Senate for a vote. There was no choice, Johnson told Dillon: “We won’t have the votes to get it to the floor unless we tell them the budget will be about one hundred billion.”

  “It was as simple as that,” Johnson said, according to Ackley’s notes. “If you want to get an $11 billion tax bill, you’re going to have to give up $1, 1½ billion of expenditures. Which would you rather have?”

  The troika began to tug against the reins. To get the budget down to $101.5 or $102 billion, Kermit Gordon said, they had already had to cut from it so many items that shouldn’t have been cut, including every single new dam and irrigation project, and to drastically reduce expenditures for reclamation and rural electrification. Johnson interrupted Gordon. “He knew about what $101.5 meant,” he said. “He’d been hearing about it from Freeman, Wirtz and company—all of Heller’s liberal friends.” In a manner that Ackley described as “half-jokingly, but pointedly,” he told Heller, “Tell them to lay off, Walter. Tell them to quit lobbying. I’m for them.” He was a liberal, he said. “I want an expanding economy.” The budget should actually be far higher than the figures they were talking about, and he knew it. “They don’t need to waste my time and theirs with their memorandums and their phone calls.” But if they didn’t get the budget down below $100 billion, Byrd was not going to allow the tax bill to get to the floor. Heller tried to argue that the $101.5 billion budget already represented such substantial economies that the President could defend it persuasively. “I can defend one hundred and one point five,” Lyndon Johnson said. “You take on Senator Byrd.” He had talked with the conservatives and knew what they wanted. “Unless you get that budget down around one hundred billion, you won’t pee one drop.”

  They seemed to feel there were alternatives to giving Byrd what he wanted, he told the six economic advisers; there weren’t, and he gave them a lesson in political realities.

  You couldn’t get around the Senate, he said, telling them about a President, a
President at the very height of his popularity, who had tried it, attempting in 1938 to unseat southern conservative senators by going into their states to campaign against them. “Of course, you could try to take it to the country. FDR tried that, with his tremendous majority, and got licked,” he said. “It wouldn’t work” if they tried it now, either. He gave them a lesson in parliamentary tactics—a master class in Senate tactics. As Ackley recorded, “The civil rights bill came up. The President said he [had] told President Kennedy not to send it up at least until after the appropriations [bills] were passed. Once it was sent up, Russell gave the orders to stall, to do nothing, and that’s what happened.” And that’s what was going to continue to happen on the tax bill, and the budget, and the appropriations bills unless the conservatives got what they wanted. Economists could talk all they wanted, he told the economists; the reality was the Senate, the Senate Finance Committee—and Harry Byrd. “You had to give up something to buy off Byrd,” he told them, and what they had to give up was that billion and one hundred and fifty million.

  His message hadn’t gotten through to the Administration before. But it was his Administration now, and they heard what he was saying. “Dillon agreed that you had to pay the price to get the tax bill, but it was worth it,” Ackley’s notes say. (“Then when you have it, you can do what you want,” Dillon added, and Johnson agreed: “Like Ike did … talked economy and then spent.”) And “at the end Heller agreed that if it were a real choice between a tax bill right away and one and a half billion of expenditure … it was worth the price.” The deal would be made, Johnson indicated. “It might take a week to work [it] out.”

  The troika and their deputies filed out. They had been meeting with Johnson for about an hour. When the meeting had started, they had felt the tax bill was stalled. Now they saw a way it could be passed. They felt it would be passed. Had the governors been impressed with Lyndon Johnson? So were they. The budget–tax bill situation contained so many complexities. They had been grasped so quickly. Decisions had had to be made. They had been made—so quickly. When the economic advisers had entered his office, their tax bill and budget had been trapped, the government still operating, as it had been operating for months, under a makeshift budget, with the budget for the year to come still in limbo. If, to use Lyndon Johnson’s terms, they had been mired in a congressional swamp, “caught … unable to move … simply circling ’round and ’round,” needing someone “to assume command, to provide direction,” needing, in other words, a leader, by the time they left, an hour later, they felt they had one, “affable and relaxed, but always in command … confident … that the problem could be solved,” a leader who might, in fact, have found at last a way out of the swamp.

  As for America as a whole, during the past three days the country, its eyes riveted on the memorial ceremonies for John F. Kennedy, had paid little attention to Lyndon Johnson, and there was widespread uneasiness about what lay ahead—a nation’s need to feel that, its leader dead, it had a new leader. But by the end of those three days, while America as a whole had not yet paid much attention to Lyndon Johnson, people who had, during those days, dealt with him in person, face-to-face or over the telephone—the troika, the governors, the princes and prime ministers, the worried young State Department aides, his own ministers: Bundy, Rusk, McNamara—those who had watched him up close as he wrestled with problems that had to be resolved, that could not wait, knew, by the end of those three days, that America did in fact have one.

  The drama into which Lyndon Johnson had been plunged was a drama that had begun with the transfer of power—great power—in an instant, without warning. It had continued with the assumption and use of that power in its very early stages—in its first three days, in what is called the “transition” between the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, the passage of power from one Administration to the other. And in these early stages, already perilous because of circumstances that made it difficult for him to create an impression of continuity and confidence, it was a passage through uncharted waters, a passage that in significant ways was without parallel in American history. No precedents existed to guide Lyndon Johnson through some of the problems that confronted him. He had had to create his own precedents, and had done so with such success that Time’s Sidey, writing years later, said, “Even now … one must marvel at Johnson’s total grasp of the machinery of government.” There was “no script” for what he had done, Sidey said, and yet “his assumption of power” was “flawless.”

  AND BY THE END of the third day—or, to be more precise, by early the next morning, Tuesday morning—America had a leader who had assured himself of victory in his first battle.

  “I want somebody to give it a little attention,” Lyndon Johnson had told Larry O’Brien about the Mundt bill, and O’Brien had gone to work—and no sooner had Johnson finished with the troika at about 10:15 Monday night than he gave it a little attention himself, working to defeat the bill by telephoning not only senators who were undecided about it, but senators who had announced unequivocally that they would support it. There was no time to lose. The vote was only a few hours away. “All of us worked far into the night on that,” Johnson was to write. He had a strong argument to use: that a vote for Mundt would be a repudiation of Jack Kennedy—and of him. “He came hard to the point,” reported Evans and Novak, who spoke to several of the recipients of his calls, transforming the issue “from a question of foreign policy toward Moscow … into a vote of confidence in the new President. In essence, he said: Do you want the first action of the United States Senate to be a posthumous repudiation of John F. Kennedy and a slap in the face of Lyndon Johnson.”

  Framing the issue that way changed votes, and by about eleven o’clock that night, he had enough so that he knew he had won.3 But for his purpose—to show he was in charge—he wanted not just a victory, but a rout. “That wheat thing—I hope that gets murdered,” he said. He kept making calls. And the vote against the bill the next day would be 57 to 36. “WHEAT BILL—FIRST JOHNSON VICTORY,” the headlines said.

  During his years in the Senate as, year by year, during his time as Assistant Leader and then Leader and Majority Leader, the legend of Lyndon Johnson had grown, one element that had contributed to his mastery of the Senate had been his intuition, his rare gift for seeing the larger implications in an individual bill. Another element had been his decisiveness: his gift, equally rare, not only for sensing in an instant, in the midst of the cut and thrust and parry of debate on the Senate floor, which way the Senate’s mood was running on a bill, and not only, if the mood was running in the wrong direction, for sensing the moment at which the tide might be turned, but a gift as well not only for sensing the moment, but for seizing it—for launching, on the instant, maneuvers that turned the tide.

  Three years though it had been since he had had an opportunity to use those gifts, he hadn’t forgotten how.

  THOUGH THE SCENES Lyndon Johnson had played that day—with the hundred heads of state, the thirty-five governors, the troika—had been crucial, they had been played before small audiences, and before such audiences, the smaller the better, he had usually performed well throughout his career. But on Wednesday, in his address to the joint session of Congress, he was going to have to appear before the entire country.

  He was well aware that, as Newsweek warned its readers that week, while he could be “charming, informed and persuasive in man-to-man talk, he often seems corny and tedious in public address”—in prepared, full-length speeches to large audiences. With very rare exceptions, such as the talks at the Zembo Mosque, in formal addresses before large audiences he had, all his life, been unable to conquer his tendency to talk too fast, to rush over—and blur—the points he wanted to make. And the audience for this address would be not merely the thousand or so people seated before him and in the galleries above but the tens of millions who would be watching him on television—the medium that had always been particularly unkind to him, the medium in which the impressio
n he made with his bellowing, hectoring, vigorously gesticulating style had almost invariably merited the “corny” and “tedious” adjectives, and other adjectives as well: ponderous, dogmatic, loud, overbearing, irritating, off-putting. On Wednesday, in addition, he would be following onto the television screen a very hard act for anyone to follow: the greatest political performer who had ever appeared on television, one whose grace and wit, handsome face and boyish smile had been made newly vivid to America by the replays of his speeches and press conferences that had been on that screen, hour after hour, for three days.

  A lot was riding on this speech for Lyndon Johnson. The country wasn’t familiar with him, didn’t feel it knew him. This address would, to a great extent, be its first impression of him—and first impressions can be lasting. As Time’s Loye Miller put it, “Overshadowing everything else” Johnson had done since taking office, “it would be beyond doubt the most important speech of his political life, because from it a very shaken citizenry would form judgments” of him, “take away impressions and opinions which it would” be hard to change. The American people, Miller wrote, “are anxious to size up their new President, anxious to believe that he has what it takes.” But if, at the end of the speech, they didn’t believe that, everything he had accomplished in the past three days wouldn’t matter very much. “If it failed, all the doubts, oh, more than doubts, all the suspicion of him would only be fortified, and nothing he said in the future would erase that original mistake,” another Miller, the author Merle Miller, was to write. Johnson himself was aware of the stakes. As Bill Moyers told Loye Miller, “He knew that the people watching it were burning with the question, ‘Who is this man?’ He felt that it would be setting off a chain reaction of opinion about the President. And he felt that since he was in office by accident, it was very important to show people right now that his Administration would not be government by accident.” But what if he didn’t show them that? He had understood from the first moments after the assassination the importance of instilling confidence in him in the American people. After the speech, they would either have confidence in him—or not. And if they didn’t, all the assumptions about the inevitability of renomination for a sitting President would be meaningless. Speculation about rival candidates would begin immediately.