The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  This last point was subtle, but some felt it keenly. As the day grew older, individual resentments deepened. To some, the conduct of those who could think of the Presidency as an impersonal institution was considered callous. Dodging across rain-swept West Executive, Kenneth Galbraith saw a member of the Cabinet, seized his arm, and said urgently, “We’ve got to take care of some of these liberals now, so they don’t go shooting off their mouths”—a curious choice of words from the author of The Liberal Hour. There were those in the administration who felt that such demeanor was correct, but it was undoubtedly controversial.

  Some of those whose alacrity was regarded with disapproval were not conscious of the reproachful glances around them. One confided to his diary that he heard “no bitter word, and only encouragement from both sides, in my double loyalty.” He was misinformed. The words were spoken. He just didn’t hear them. Of this same man a colleague was writing in his diary: “I have never seen his instinct for power more naked and ruthless.” The validity of such acrimony is disputable. “To be charitable,” Arthur Schlesinger observed the following spring, “the government would have been paralyzed if everyone had behaved like me and Ken O’Donnell.” And at the time he wrote that “for some people, personal emotion is very difficult.… Bundy has everything under iron control. I do not think that this means that they feel things less than the rest of us.” It didn’t. Schlesinger was a man of generous spirit. Yet even he did not know that McGeorge Bundy, the efficiency expert, the human computer, the robot of tempered steel—that Mac had cried in the night for John Kennedy.

  An individual’s attitude toward the shift in power was, in short, almost entirely a matter of temperament. Background was entirely irrelevant. Schlesinger, Galbraith, and Bundy had all been recruited from the Harvard faculty. Ken O’Donnell was not seen in the Vice Presidential suite all day, yet Larry O’Brien went over to discuss a Congressional maneuver which would boost the Russian wheat sale, and Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy’s brother-in-law, was a realist by any standard. Anxious to see an orderly change of government, Shriver walked across West Executive and volunteered his services. When he attempted to bring the two groups together and ran into what he called “a lot of flak,” he was baffled. In retrospect the flak may seem puzzling now. In the context of that Saturday, however, events were very different. The loyalists, swept up in the mightiest current of emotion in their lives, were determined to show proper respect toward the murdered President. The realists played a valuable and difficult role—and history may award them the higher grade, for their service to the national interest was great.

  The country, hypnotized by the catafalque, was unaware of any conflict within the government. It was virtually impossible to think beyond yesterday’s death and the coming funeral. Hugh Sidey argued (in vain) that Time should hold its cover portrait of the new Chief Executive for another week’s issue because “Nobody is interested in Johnson yet.” Not many were. Nevertheless, depicting his mood during his first full day in office is a matter of intrinsic interest. A precise delineation is elusive. The man’s chameleon nature had never been more evident. There had never been so many Lyndon Johnsons. It was almost as though a score of identical Texans were holed up backstage in Room 274, each with the same physiognomy and drawl, yet each with his own disposition, ideology, sense of timing, and objectives. George Reedy stepped in, and Lyndon the clairvoyant appeared. “Everything was chaotic,” Reedy said afterward. “Only the President knew what he was doing.” Galbraith was announced and greeted by the left-of-center champion. “I want to come down very hard on civil rights,” Johnson told him, “not because Kennedy was for it but because I am for it. Keep in mind that I want a liberal policy because I’m a Roosevelt Democrat.” Averell Harriman arrived with his Edwardian gait, and Lyndon said: “You know I’ve always thought of you as one of my oldest and best friends in Washington.”

  The President was exploiting his great gift for exposing this or that facet of his character so that each visitor would leave with a feeling of warmth and reassurance. Since the visitors entered one at a time, his success was almost universal. The out-and-out loyalists, while remaining distrustful of colleagues who had raced to 274, saw a Lyndon so humble, so shattered by his own anguish, that even Sorensen and Schlesinger were impressed; to David Ormsby-Gore this Lyndon said brokenly, “If my family took a vote on whether or not I’d stay, there’d be three votes for quitting right away—and maybe four.” That Lyndon vanished, and another appeared, shrewdly advising O’Brien on a technical point of parliamentary procedure. There is no way to reconcile the various members of the flexible Presidential cast. The fact is that each played his part superbly and richly deserved applause. Only the naïve would be offended by the variety; John Kennedy would have been engrossed by it. Despite the accuracy of Sidey’s judgment, Johnson was a fascinating man that Saturday. One must merely recognize that the man was many men.

  Which was the real Johnson is a question best left to his biographers. This much is certain: he was putting in his most active day in three full years. Last evening he had only been warming up, honing skills grown rusty from disuse. Now he was alive again. Overnight he had acquired fresh momentum, and those who were skeptical of his wisdom couldn’t doubt his stamina. At each briefing or conference he seemed to be tapping fresh reservoirs of energy. Repeated calls were placed to the Connallys at Parkland;7 he fenced sharply with the soft-spoken but immovable Nick Katzenbach over whether the assassination should be investigated by a federal or state board of inquiry; he applied the Johnsonian prod to J. Edgar Hoover, who by now was dispatching fleets of agents to Love Field; he proclaimed Monday a day of official mourning; he received Arthur Goldberg; and he took time to pose for still photographs with Rusk, Bundy, McNamara, and Eisenhower, which were released to the networks at 5:13 P.M. (“First Pictures of LBJ at Work as President”).

  In lesser jobs there is a direct correlation between effort and results, but as Kennedy could have told Johnson, and as Johnson painfully learned that first day, the ratio is meaningless in the Presidency. Historic achievements may be credited to a Chief Executive while he is fast asleep; awake he may sweat like a slave and accomplish nothing. Johnson’s Saturday was a curve which alternately plunged and zoomed and ended nowhere. After his encounter with Robert Kennedy he had enjoyed an easier interim; the Congressional leadership had come to the EOB to pledge its support. Today, as yesterday, the Senators and Congressmen offered him nonpartisan backing. The GOP’s Charlie and Ev Show had been unsuccessfully attempting to bait Kennedy since his inaugural; this morning Charlie Halleck was the first man to encourage Johnson, and after he had spoken Everett Dirksen said, “We’ll work together for our country. God bless you, Mr. President.” The rest of the delegation echoed, “God bless you, sir.”

  It was after this heartening pledge that the President, joined by Lady Bird, led the leadership past the waiting Cabinet, into the East Room. Leaving the catafalque, he sighted Dwight Eisenhower and invited him to cross the street for a twenty-minute talk. Actually, the appointment turned out to be the longest of Johnson’s day. It lasted two hours, and to the thirty-fourth President the thirty-sixth seemed anxious. The President asked General Eisenhower’s advice on a number of current problems ranging from internal matters, such as the tax cut, to foreign policy, specifically Laos and Cuba. At this early stage Lyndon Johnson was chiefly concerned with informing and preparing himself so that he could continue his predecessor’s policies. General Eisenhower saw that President Johnson was determined to come to grips with his new responsibilities.

  During the long session Mac Bundy—Mac’s own description of his function was of a “maid of all work” who “fussed around”—tiptoed in and placed Schlesinger’s letter of resignation on the desk. Johnson glowered. “Tell him to take it back,” he said. “I don’t want any such letters. And tell everyone I mean that.” Moyers, who was in the background, slipped out and phoned Schlesinger that the President wanted him to stay. General
Eisenhower suggested to Johnson that the new President should choose his own team. Johnson regarded him moodily. After the funeral he was to become adept at shaping his staff, easing out even those advisers who would have preferred to stay; on November 23, however, he treated any suggestion of change with a negative, highly emotional response, and he seemed to regard retirement from the government as tantamount to desertion. At that afternoon’s Cabinet meeting Dean Rusk reminded him that it was traditional for all Cabinet members to submit resignations when a new President took office. Johnson shook his head doggedly; he said that he wanted every man there as a Johnsonian adviser. Rusk pointed out that this was a matter of form, a tradition, the thing to do. Precedent was involved, he observed; some future Chief Executive might not want all his ministers to stay. Still Johnson balked. The Cabinet resignations, which went in anyhow, weren’t even acknowledged. And when he met Sorensen that evening, and Sorensen mentioned his own note, the President replied brusquely, “I know, I got your letter,” and quickly changed the subject.

  The new President and the new First Lady attended a memorial service for Kennedy at St. John’s on the north side of Lafayette Square. Twenty-four hours had now passed since the assassination. It was past noon once more, and Schlesinger had arranged what came to be known as “the Harvard lunch” in a private upstairs room of the Occidental Restaurant, on the opposite side of the Treasury Building from the White House. The meal was characteristic of the transition. The diners—the host, Ken and Kitty Galbraith, Bill Walton and his son Matt, Sam Beer and his wife, Paul Samuelson, and Walter Heller—were all enervated and adrift in what everyone considered a national crisis. In attempting to peer into the future, they were failing miserably. They couldn’t even agree among themselves upon a course of action. Afterward Galbraith wrote in his journal that “Arthur was in a rather poor mood.… He was reacting far too quickly to the chemistry of the moment and was dwelling on the possibility of a ticket in 1964 headed by Bob Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. This of course is fantasy, unless of course Johnson stumbles unbelievably or even then.” (Schlesinger’s own estimate of his guest is instructive: “Like Mac, Ken is a realist. He would infinitely have preferred Kennedy, but he is ready to face facts and make the best of them. Like Kenny and Bobby, I am a sentimentalist. My heart is not in it.”)

  The aftermath of the luncheon was equally typical. Schlesinger attended a staff meeting, where Bundy implored everyone to stick to his post, and Galbraith collided with the new President on West Executive. “I’ve been looking for you,” Johnson said—Galbraith doubted that this was true—“I want to see you. Come on up.” Toward the end of their chat Johnson asked him to write a speech for delivery before a joint session of Congress. Galbraith, having finished his Post eulogy to Kennedy that morning, craved another excuse to finger a typewriter keyboard, and was immensely flattered. He needn’t have been. The President was making the same request of a half-dozen men. If you were literate, informed, and empathic, you were being drafted.

  In his subsequent notes on this conversation with Johnson, Galbraith referred to “the speech he was to give to the joint session that Wednesday.” This was hindsight. At the time of their conversation the date had not been set. Johnson yearned to speak to the Congress, and understandably so. The people had been badly shaken. The sooner they heard the voice of their new leader in an address of substance, the better. In the State Department that morning Harriman, George Ball, and U. Alexis Johnson had begun work on a seven- or eight-minute speech to be broadcast over all networks during the evening; the President was to deplore “hysteria” and urge support for the United Nations, peace, and continuity. He had vetoed the Under Secretaries’ plan on the ground that he didn’t want “to push myself forward.” He was still holding back, feeling his way. At 2:30 P.M., however, he would have a matchless opportunity to take a real sounding. That was the time set for the Cabinet meeting. Thick yellow pads and sharpened pencils had been laid out at each place along the perimeter of the long table in the Cabinet Room, the Vice President’s chair had been moved around to the President’s spot, and one of the men present would be the new head of the Kennedy family, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

  “Gentlemen, the President of the United States!” Rusk said at the outset, and they all rose. The meeting was not a triumph. Its prospects were dim from the beginning; the ministers, like the barometer, were in a state of abnormal depression. Johnson had a few things going for him: Bundy had prepared a discreet memorandum on what he “might want to say,” and everyone present was anxious to pull the country together. But the catastrophe had been too recent. They couldn’t forget that the corpse of the man who had appointed them all rested in a wooden coffin on the other side of this same building. The new President was further hampered by his own bearing. A total stranger might have imposed his personality upon them. But Lyndon, as they still thought of him, was a familiar figure who had attended their previous sessions as a subordinate, and who now presided in his meekest manner. Recalling the President’s treatment of his memo, Bundy wrote ten days later that it was “typical of him that he made it his own in action.” Johnson opened with a silent prayer, begged their guidance in the perilous times ahead, and added a short appeal which several of them by now could have recited from memory: he told them that he needed them more than President Kennedy had.

  The Attorney General’s participation in the twenty-five-minute meeting must be treated scrupulously, for the friction between the two men may easily be distorted by partisans. Each was under unprecedented pressure. If Johnson’s discomfort seems ungenerous, it should be remembered that to the new Chief Executive Bob Kennedy represented a problem which was unique in the history of Presidential succession. Here was a Cabinet member who looked like, sounded like, and thought like the slain leader; who had been his second self; who was one of his two chief mourners; and who, at times, had—as everyone around this table knew—exercised executive power in his brother’s name. It was as though Edwin Stanton had been Abraham Lincoln’s twin. Historians would be obliged to sympathize with Andrew Johnson, for his contemporaries would have made few allowances, and it is unlikely that Stanton would have been as forbearing as Kennedy.

  The Attorney General, for his part, had been preoccupied with the coming funeral. His very presence in the Cabinet Room was something of an accident. After the Mass he had walked over from the mansion with McNamara, Walton, Reed, Spalding, and Lem Billings to see whether all his brother’s belongings had been removed. He had noticed that Giordano had neglected to take President Kennedy’s Cabinet chair, and early in the afternoon he decided to check again. The Cabinet had already convened. Bundy, glimpsing him, persuaded him to enter and sit in his own chair. In Mac’s words of eleven days later, “Bobby was late and perhaps would not have attended if I had not told him he must; his condition was that there should be no pictures—which I now know was as hard for the President as a ban against smoking for a thirty-year addict—though he accepted it readily in the interest of harmony.” Mac’s version that afternoon was more tart. To a colleague he said that he was “worried about Bobby,” that “Bobby was reluctant to face the new reality,” and that he had “had virtually to drag Bobby into the Cabinet meeting.” Kennedy’s own recollection was merely that “I went by and Mac Bundy said it was very important that I come in. So I went.”

  His appearance evoked a dramatic response. Several members leaped to their feet, and one clasped his hand and clapped him on the back. Others, including Johnson, did not move. The Attorney General sat back brooding, his heavy eyes hooded. Yet for a man in his position silence itself can be significant. A half-hour earlier one television network had openly speculated that he might resign. His immediate future was being debated in millions of offices and homes, and his laconism was noted and remembered by everyone around the long table—by President Johnson, perhaps, most of all.

  After the President had finished, two men spoke: Adlai Stevenson, because of his seniority in the party, a
nd Dean Rusk, as leader of the Cabinet. Their motives were identical; they wanted the record to show that they intended to keep faith with the new administration. Stevenson was surprisingly awkward. The most experienced and eloquent orator there, he had written a five-paragraph testimonial, which he proceeded to read word for word. He reminded them that he had pledged his support at President Kennedy’s first Cabinet meeting, repeated that pledge now, said that “there can only be a moment’s pause in the nation’s business,” and declared to Johnson, “Your unique qualities of character, wisdom and experience are a blessing to our country in this critical hour, and our confidence in your leadership is total.” Rusk was equally generous in his praise of Johnson.

  After the Johnson-Rusk colloquy over letters of resignation, the President asked that they all submit departmental recommendations by Monday. They then dispersed. Nothing had been accomplished, and it was impossible for any of them to leave with a feeling of achievement. Even Johnson, who had been delighted by Rusk and Stevenson, appeared to be disappointed; his subsequent remarks that afternoon indicate that he had hoped for more. To Bundy it had been a “drab little meeting.” Willard Wirtz thought it was “awful” and “almost mechanical”; another Secretary, who had expected the President to be “strong and affirmative,” concluded that it was “highly unsatisfactory”; and one member of the Cabinet decided to speak to him about it. Cliff Carter led him into the EOB office, where the Secretary emphatically recommended to the President that he speak first to the people and then to the Congress. To the astonishment of his caller, Johnson’s style had been completely altered in the few minutes since they had adjourned. It was another of those quick-change miracles; sitting in the Cabinet Room he had been hesitant, but now, as the Secretary noted in his journal, “the frustration seemed gone, he seemed relaxed… the power, the confidence, the assurance of Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson seemed to be there.”