Lyndon B. Johnson (right), shown shaking hands with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, circa 1936–37, shared the older man’s political acumen.
MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): When you decided you wanted to do a book on Robert Moses, did your publisher say, “That’s going to be a great-selling book”?
MR. ROBERT CARO (RC): My publisher said, “Nobody’s going to read a book on Robert Moses.”
DR: It’s still in print forty-five years later. Did you know instantly after Robert Moses that you wanted to do Lyndon Johnson?
RC: I never thought really that I was doing a biography of Robert Moses. I never had the slightest interest in writing a book just to tell the story of a famous man. I was interested in political power. And I looked at The Power Broker as being about a man who was never elected to anything.
In a democracy, of course, we think power comes from the ballot box, from being elected. Yet Robert Moses had more power than anyone who was elected—more than any mayor or any governor, more than really any mayor and governor combined. And he had it for forty-four years.
I wrote that book to try to figure out and explain how he got that power, what the power was. After that, I wanted to do national power, so I wanted to pick Lyndon Johnson.
DR: When you started on Lyndon Johnson, did you expect to spend thirty-nine years of your life so far on it?
RC: No.
DR: And did you expect initially it would be one volume?
RC: I wanted it to be three volumes. The reason is that, as long as The Power Broker is, the book as you read it is 700,000 words. The finished manuscript that I wrote—not a rough draft, but the finished book—was 1,050,000. I had to cut out one-third of the book. A lot of stuff was cut out that I’ve always regretted. When my publisher wanted me to do a book on Lyndon Johnson, I said, “I’ll only do it if I can do it in volumes.”
DR: Now that you’ve spent thirty-nine years so far on Lyndon Johnson, do you admire him more than you did before, or do you admire him less than you did before?
RC: When I think about Lyndon Johnson, I don’t think in terms of “admire,” or liking or disliking. I’m sort of in awe of him.
Because the books are really about political power. So when you see Johnson, how he gets political power and how he uses it in the House of Representatives and the Senate, even before he becomes president, you’re just in awe of him. Over and over again, you say to yourself, “Look what he’s doing now.”
DR: You never met Lyndon Johnson, is that correct?
RC: I shook his hand once when I was in the press corps.
DR: If you had a chance to have dinner with him, what one or two questions would you actually ask him after now spending forty years of your life reading about him?
RC: “What I really want to know is [what] you felt, President Johnson, when your father failed.”
His father, Texas businessman and rancher Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., was his idol. He was a member of the Texas House of Representatives and a very successful politician. Then he made one mistake financially and became the laughingstock of the Hill Country. And Lyndon Johnson’s life changed with that. The rest of their life they were very poor.
DR: You write these books on an old Smith-Corona typewriter. Since there are no more Smith-Corona typewriter manufacturers anymore, what happens when your typewriter breaks down?
RC: I try to collect as many typewriters as I can because if a key breaks or something, they don’t make spare parts anymore, so you have to cannibalize another typewriter.
Whenever a book of mine comes out, profiles on me all mention that I use this Smith-Corona Electra 210, so people write me letters and say, “I have one in my garage. I’d like you to have it. I’m sending it to you.” Some of them write me letters and say, “I have one in my garage. I’ll sell it to you for $14,000.”
DR: Let’s go back to Lyndon Johnson’s beginnings. He came from a family that had some prominence, but they lost their money. Was it clear as a young man he wanted to run for Congress or get involved in politics?
RC: He would follow his father around campaigning. He would stand in the back of the Texas State Capitol in the House of Representatives and watch his father. When his father would finish for the day, Lyndon never wanted to go home. What he wanted to do was watch how the Texas House worked.
DR: He runs for Congress in 1937, and he gets elected. So he goes to the House. How does he become so close to Sam Rayburn, then the forty-third Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and also so close to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a freshman congressman?
RC: Lyndon Johnson always had an instinct for power.
We can’t even imagine today someone like Sam Rayburn. He once lost a vote that he was interested in, and he simply said, “We’ll have another vote tomorrow.” He called twenty freshmen representatives to his office and said, “You will all vote for this bill tomorrow.” They all voted for it.
If someone rose and said, “Point of order, Mr. Speaker,” he would say, “I’m not interested in the point of order.”
Sam Rayburn was a fascinating figure. He was a very feared figure. He was a huge, massive man, with a tremendous bald head—very fierce, never smiled. He believed that he was socially inept. He once said, “I went to a party once and I tried to make a joke and I was the joke.” So he wouldn’t visit people.
Lyndon Johnson comes to Washington, and Rayburn had served in the Texas House with his father. Using that as an excuse, Lyndon Johnson invites Rayburn to dinner. Rayburn goes once. But—this was his fashion—he would never go again to someone’s house.
But he took pity on LBJ’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson. Sam Rayburn was a very shy man, and he saw in Lady Bird a very young woman who was as shy as he was. So when the Johnsons would invite him back, he would come. Lady Bird took to making his favorite foods—homemade peach ice cream, very hot Texas chili—and Rayburn started to come every Sunday to Lyndon Johnson’s home.
Lyndon Johnson develops pneumonia in 1938, his second year in Washington, and he’s really quite ill. Rayburn comes to the hospital and sits all night in a straight-backed chair next to Johnson’s bed.
When Johnson wakes up in the morning, he sees that Rayburn was so afraid that he would move and disturb him when he was sleeping that his vest is covered with cigarette ashes from the cigarettes he had smoked during the night, because he didn’t want to get up to brush it off. Johnson wakes up and Rayburn, who’s never shown any emotion for him at all, leans over him and says, as Johnson recalls, “Lyndon, never worry about anything. If you need anything, call on me.” That was the start of Lyndon Johnson’s rise in the House.
DR: They’re both from Texas. I can see some maybe simpatico feelings. Why would FDR have been close to Lyndon Johnson?
RC: James H. Rowe—a name which I’m afraid is getting forgotten in Washington—was a very close advisor to both Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. I asked him the very question you asked me.
He said, “You know, Franklin Roosevelt was a political genius. Most people didn’t understand what he was talking about when he started to talk to them about government and politics. But he saw that Lyndon Johnson understood it all from the beginning.” These were two political geniuses.
DR: When World War II breaks out, Lyndon Johnson says he wants to go in. [A lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, LBJ signed up for active duty immediately after Pearl Harbor and was stationed in Australia and New Zealand until July 1942.] How did he manage to stay in the House of Representatives while he was in the military?
RC: Well, at that time, congressmen could stay in the House and serve in the military. That’s the easiest answer.
Lyndon B. Johnson (right), shown shaking hands with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, circa 1936–37, shared the older man’s political acumen.
When he’s out in Australia, the senior senator from Texas dies—a man named Morris Sheppard. It’s 1942. Johnson has to decide whether to run again for the House of Representatives or whether to run for the Senate. And President Roosevelt has told him that he can call the White House if he needs any help with anything.
We know what Johnson decides. He decides to stay in the House.
DR: He finally decides to run for the Senate in 1948. Why is he called Landslide Lyndon after the ’48 election?
RC: Six days after the election, he’s still behind the governor of Texas, Coke Stevenson. And suddenly another ballot box is found, a ballot box for Precinct 13. They open it and, if I remember this correctly, two hundred ballots were cast for Johnson. They were all cast by someone using the same handwriting and the same pen, and these people actually voted in alphabetical order.
DR: Technically, he won by how many votes?
RC: Eighty-seven votes.
DR: Eighty-seven votes. So he comes to Washington and he becomes a senator. How does he get so close to Richard Russell? [Richard Russell Jr. was a conservative Democratic senator from Georgia who served from 1933 to 1971.]
RC: He gets close to Russell in sort of the same way he got close to Rayburn. Russell and Rayburn shared a number of characteristics. They were both bachelors. They were both lonely men.
When Johnson is elected to the Senate, the first interview he has is with the secretary of the Senate then, Bobby Baker. Baker said, “All the young senators came to me and they would ask, ‘What’s the best committee to be on? What’s the best place to have an office?’ Lyndon Johnson didn’t ask me any of those questions. He only asked one question. He said, ‘Who has the power in the Senate?’ I said, ‘There’s only one power in the Senate—Richard Russell.’ ”
Johnson was to recall that he realized the only way he could be close to Russell was to be on his committee, which was Armed Services. That was not one of the major committees. Foreign Relations, Appropriations, etc., were the major committees then.
But Johnson asks for Russell’s committee, and he starts to work late. Russell worked late every night because he had no one to go home to.
Often Russell would go to a hamburger place near the Capitol to get a hamburger, and Johnson would happen to be going to the same place to get a hamburger at the same time. And they start to sit next to each other at the counter.
Johnson is just wonderful with older men. And he says to Russell, as he said to Rayburn, “Come by the house for dinner tonight.” Russell also was a man who didn’t go out to dinner very much. Johnson would say to him, “You know, you have to eat somewhere. You might as well come and eat.”
And when Russell starts to go to Johnson’s home, Johnson and Lady Bird and their two daughters make Russell feel like an uncle in the family. That’s part of the reason Johnson became close to Russell.
The other reason is that Lyndon Johnson makes Richard Russell believe that he thinks the same way on segregation and civil rights as Russell did. Russell was the most ardent segregationist. He was the most racist of senators.
He was also a great senator in the area of foreign relations. But in domestic affairs, he really had a very low opinion of people who were not white. Johnson makes Russell, makes all the southern senators believe—there are twenty-two southern senators—that he feels the same way about blacks that they do.
I went to Atlanta to interview Senator Herman Talmadge in his retirement. So you drive down Herman Talmadge Highway and you get off at the Herman Talmadge exit and Herman Talmadge Boulevard, and you drive to Lake Talmadge, and you go to this house with a lot of pillars in front, and a servant in a waistcoat opens the door and says, “The senator is waiting for you in the library.”
I asked the senator, “What was Lyndon Johnson’s belief about the relationship of blacks and whites?” And Talmadge said to me—this is what Lyndon Johnson had made him believe—Talmadge said, “Servant and master.”
So Johnson had convinced the southerners that he was on their side. Russell really anoints him as his successor in the Senate.
DR: Two years after he’s elected to the Senate, he becomes the Senate majority whip. Two years after that, he becomes the minority leader. And two years after that—six years into the Senate—he’s the majority leader. How did he rise up that quickly?
RC: No one wanted to be leader then. Alben Barkley, who had been the Senate leader during the 1940s, had this quote which was famous around Washington. Barkley said, “Nobody can lead the Senate. I have nothing to promise them. I have nothing to threaten them with.”
That was the belief. The Senate was sort of in a mess at that time, had been in a mess for a long time. And nobody wants the leadership jobs. So when Johnson says to Russell, “I’d like to be assistant leader,” Russell just gives him the job.
Of course, Johnson made something out of every job. He becomes majority leader two years later. And he does something which is really worth discussing. No one ever picks this out of my book.
Johnson was a genius at political power. He saw things that nobody else saw. Up until then, seniority had governed everything in the Senate. It was a very rigid rule. It’s not seniority as we think of it today. You got whatever committee assignment your seniority made you eligible for. You got whatever office space your seniority dictated.
The Washington Post, the week before Lyndon Johnson became leader, has the sentence—if I remember it correctly—“The Senate would no more change the seniority system than it would change its name.”
Johnson says he wants to be leader, and he’s going to be leader. Russell has made sure of that.
If we look at Washington in January 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower has just been elected president. The inauguration stands are being hammered into place. All the bunting is going up. That’s the transfer of power from the Democrats in the White House to a Republican in the White House.
But there’s another transfer of power going on, which nobody writes about, which nobody understands, and it’s going on in Lyndon Johnson’s office, behind the closed door of his private office.
He’s in there all alone. But he’s talking on the telephone, and we know that because there are four buttons for his four lines on the desk of his assistant, Walter Jenkins. And one or another of those buttons is always lit hour after hour. Because over that telephone, Lyndon Johnson is trying to change the seniority system. And he does it with a lot of arguments.
The Democrats have controlled Congress for so long, and many of the Democrats have been chairmen of their committees for so long. But Eisenhower brought a Republican majority into the Senate with him, so all of a sudden, these senators are not chairmen anymore.
And Johnson is telling them that if they want to become chairmen again, they have to make a legislative record against Eisenhower strong enough to have a chance to take the Senate back in two years. He says, “We can’t do that by putting our best young senators on the worst committees. We have people like Hubert Humphrey [the Democratic senator from Minnesota] and Paul Douglas [the Democratic senator from Illinois] and Mike Mansfield [a Democratic senator from Montana who previously represented the state in the House]. We have to use them.”
As an example, I’ll take one thing that he does. He sees that Ohio senator Robert Taft, who is not only the Republican majority leader but a great debater and a great speaker, is moving to the Foreign Relations Committee so he can attack the Marshall Plan, our policy on China, all the Roosevelt–Truman initiatives in foreign policy.
We have two young senators. Mike Mansfield was a professor of Far Eastern history before he became a senator, before he became a representative. And Hubert Humphrey is, of course, the great orator.
Johnson says, “We have to put Humphrey and Mansfield on Foreign Relations.” He says, “Hubert can out-talk Taft and Mansfield can out-know him.”
There are two vacancies at the bottom of that committee. But there are senior senators—one is Harry Byrd, the Democratic senator from Virginia—who are entitled by seniority to those places.
Johnson goes to Byrd and makes this argument to him. Byrd wants his chairmanship of the Finance Committee back, so he agrees not to take his seat on Foreign Relations. Johnson does this with another senator, and all of a sudden you have two strong new Democratic voices on Foreign Relations.
He says to Humphrey, “I’ll put you on Foreign Relations”—which Humphrey wants because it’s the most prestigious committee—“I’ll put you on Foreign Relations if you give up both your seats on Agriculture and Labor.” Humphrey agrees to do that, and all of a sudden there is now a vacancy on Agriculture.
Earle Clements, the senator from Kentucky, has always wanted to go on Agriculture. Johnson says to Clements, “I’ll put you on Agriculture if you give up your seats on Public Works and Rules.”
Johnson looked at this as if it was a giant chessboard. There are 203 spaces on it—203 committee slots. And he uses those spaces, moving senators around on them, to create power—power for him. Because all of a sudden, he is making the decisions about who’s going where. It’s no longer seniority, it’s not just saying, “You automatically do this”; it’s who the leader says is going to be on the committee, and he is the leader.
At one stroke, Johnson does a lot to change power in Washington. He changes the nature of legislature power in Washington forever.
DR: One famous thing written about is the “Johnson treatment,” where Johnson basically persuades members to do what he wants. And I always had thought it meant he would curse at people and yell and scream at them. But when you listen to the Johnson tapes from his time in the White House, there are no curse words. What was the Johnson treatment?
RC: Johnson was not foul-mouthed in this respect. He didn’t get what he wanted many times. He often did.
But he would read a person. Lyndon Johnson did not like to read books. But he was a great reader of men, and he had rules for reading men.
When young staffers would come to work for him, one thing he would say to them was, “Read their eyes. Read their hands. What they’re telling you with their hands is more important than what they’re telling you with their lips.”
He would say, “Never let a conversation end. There’s always something that someone doesn’t want to tell you. And the longer the conversation goes on, the more likely you are to find out what that is.”
DR: While Johnson is the majority leader of the Senate, he has a heart attack in 1955. Did that incapacitate him?
RC: Yes, because it was a major heart attack. He was only given a fifty-fifty chance of living, although he was only forty-eight at the time. He went back to Texas for some months to recuperate.
DR: He decides in the latter part of the fifties that he would like to be president of the United States. He’s done the Senate, wants to be president—a not uncommon thing for some people in the Senate.
But there’s a young senator named John Kennedy. How did Lyndon Johnson view John Kennedy in those days?
RC: With absolute contempt. He used to say, “Kennedy doesn’t even know how to make a motion. He doesn’t know how to address the chair.”
DR: What was Johnson’s strategy to become the Democratic nominee in 1960? How did he think he was going to be nominated?
RC: I should say he also viewed Kennedy with contempt because Kennedy, of course, at this time was still very sick. He had Addison’s disease, and they had just discovered that cortisone might work for it. Kennedy was so thin and scrawny, and Johnson used to say, when Kennedy said he was going to run for president, “Look at his ankles. They’re only this big around. And he’s yellow all the time.” Kennedy had a yellow cast to his complexion then because of his illness.
So Johnson did not regard Kennedy as a serious opponent. Johnson thinks he doesn’t have to campaign. He’s the most powerful Democrat, and he expects to get the nomination.
DR: When it turns out that Kennedy does get the nomination, he calls Johnson and says, “Would you like to be vice president?” How did that come about, since Lyndon Johnson was not close to John Kennedy?
RC: John Kennedy was very good at not telling anybody what he was really thinking, including his brother Bobby Kennedy, who hated Lyndon Johnson. Nobody has any clue that Jack Kennedy is even considering Lyndon Johnson until the morning after he wins the nomination.
Jack Kennedy calls his brother Robert early in the morning—Robert is actually in the bathtub—and says, “Count up the electoral votes of all the northern states plus Texas.” And Robert Kennedy says, “You’re not thinking of nominating Lyndon Johnson, are you?” And Jack Kennedy says, “Yes.”
So he comes down to Johnson’s room. They’re both staying in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles [the site of the 1960 Democratic Convention]. Kennedy’s on the ninth floor. Johnson’s on the seventh floor. They both have corner suites, and there’s a back staircase between them. At ten o’clock in the morning, Jack Kennedy comes down and offers Johnson the vice presidency.
Johnson calls his closest advisors, Rayburn and John Connally and Bobby Baker. It’s decided he’s going to accept the nomination. And he does accept it. He thinks he’s accepted it.
That afternoon, Robert Kennedy comes down those back stairs three times to Johnson’s suite to ask him to withdraw from the ticket. When people would say he did this without his brother knowing, Robert Kennedy would say, basically, “What are you, crazy? You think my brother took a nap, so I went down to get his vice president to withdraw?”
However, he comes down three times. At one point he comes down and Lady Bird says, “Don’t let the two of them meet, because Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy really hate each other.”
The first time, Rayburn sees Robert Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy comes in and says they want Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the ticket, and Rayburn, this mighty figure—I wrote in the book he was old and he was blind, but he didn’t seem old or blind when he said to Robert Kennedy, “Are you authorized to speak for your brother?” Robert Kennedy says, “No.” And Rayburn says, “Come back and see the Speaker of the House of Representatives when you are.”
Robert Kennedy retreats back up the stairs. A little while later he comes down, and Lady Bird is still trying to keep them from meeting. John Connally sees them. And this time Robert Kennedy makes a firm offer. He says that if Johnson withdraws, the Kennedys will make him chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Goes back upstairs, and finally he comes down and the two of them meet alone in the room.
We don’t really know what happened in that room. Robert Kennedy says Lyndon Johnson started to cry. We don’t know if that’s true or not.
But we do know that Johnson was terribly upset until somebody says to him, “Call Jack Kennedy yourself.” He calls Jack Kennedy, who says, “No. I want you to be vice president. I’m announcing it. I’m going out this minute to announce.”
DR: So it happened. They get elected in 1960. Probably Texas helped. When Lyndon Johnson becomes vice president, what does he try to do with the Senate?
RC: Johnson thinks, at the beginning, that he’s going to continue to run the Senate as if he were still majority leader. It’s a total miscalculation because, of course, when he goes to the first caucus, they make clear to him that “you’re not in the Senate anymore and we’re not going to listen to you.”
DR: He wanted to run the Democratic caucus still.
RC: In fact, he tries to take the chairman’s chair at the first caucus.
DR: So that doesn’t work. What jobs did John Kennedy actually give Lyndon Johnson to do as vice president?
RC: Johnson is given nothing to do. He’s never consulted on legislation. This is the greatest legislator in American history, and the Kennedy legislative program has trouble from the very beginning.
In fact, when Kennedy is assassinated, none of his major legislation—civil rights, various other bills, his tax-cut bill—none of them were going to be passed. But nobody comes and asks Lyndon Johnson about legislation. No one asks for his help.
DR: John Kennedy took a trip to Texas in November of 1963. Why did he need to go to Texas when he had Lyndon Johnson as vice president? Why did he need to shore up Texas?
RC: The situation in Texas was that Lyndon Johnson’s protégé and longtime administrative aide, John Connally, had become governor. I spent several days with Governor Connally down on his ranch. He was a very conservative man. He really was philosophically opposed to Lyndon Johnson’s liberal philosophy. And he had taken over not only the Democratic political machine in Texas but the money-raising.
Texas was the major source of financing for the Democratic Party as a whole. Connally had brought that under his control, and he and Johnson were in a very tense situation.
Eisenhower had actually carried Texas in 1952 and 1956. And Jack Kennedy knows that he has to have Texas, the money and the vote, in 1964.
Was he planning to drop Lyndon Johnson from the ticket? If you talk to anyone who was close to Lyndon Johnson, it’s very important to them to say that Kennedy was not planning to drop him from the ticket, and of course Jack Kennedy would say in public, “No, of course I’m not going to do that.”
In fact, Kennedy said different things to other people. There’s enough reason to believe that Johnson might have been dropped.
DR: So President Kennedy is assassinated. Where is Lyndon Johnson at the time of the assassination?
RC: He’s three cars behind Kennedy’s car in the presidential motorcade in Dallas. In the motorcade there is, first, the open limousine with Jack Kennedy and Jackie. In front of them on the jump seats were John Connally, this tall, very handsome man with a leonine head of white hair, and his wife, Nellie Connally, who was once Sweetheart of the University at the University of Texas, still a very beautiful woman.
Behind them was the Secret Service car known as the Queen Mary because it was so heavily armored. In that car, there were four agents standing on the running boards, and inside there were four agents in the back with their automatic rifles concealed on the floor of the car.
Then there’s a seventy-five-foot space between the cars, because the Secret Service wants the president and vice president to be separated. And then comes Lyndon Johnson’s car. He’s sitting in the back seat on the right-hand side. Lady Bird’s in the center. On the left is the senator from Texas, Ralph Yarborough, and in the front seat next to the driver is a Secret Service agent named Rufus W. Youngblood, a tall, lanky Georgian.
They hear a sharp, cracking noise. Nobody knows what it is. It sounds like the backfire from a policeman’s motorcycle or someone popping a balloon. But when I interviewed John Connally, he said to me, “You know, Bob, I was a hunter. I knew the moment I heard it that it was the sound of a hunting rifle.”
Nobody quite knows what’s happening. Youngblood, in the front seat of Johnson’s car, hears this sound. He doesn’t know what it is.
Youngblood recalls, “I saw the president leaning to the left. All of a sudden, I saw the Secret Service agents in the Queen Mary jumping to their feet. One of them has a rifle in his hand and was looking around.”
And then they realize what’s happening, and Youngblood whirls around. Lady Bird Johnson, who recalled this very vividly, says, “He shouted in a voice I had never heard him use before, ‘Get down! Get down!’ ” And he grabs Lyndon by the right shoulder and pulls him down onto the floor of the back seat and jumps over the back of the front seat and lies on top of Lyndon Johnson to protect him with his own body.
Because it wasn’t just the president who was hit by a shot; so was the governor of Texas. Who knew if there were going to be more shots, if the vice president would be a target?
The Secret Service agents then all had radios, which they wore like a shoulder holster. As Youngblood is lying on top of Johnson, his radio is near Johnson’s ear, and Johnson hears all this jumble of voices and he hears someone saying, “He’s hit! He’s hit!”
Someone says, “Get out of here! Let’s get out of here!” Then he hears the word “hospital.”
Youngblood realizes that the place where he’ll have the most protection for Johnson is to be as close as possible to the Secret Service car. He tells the driver, a Texas highway patrolman named Herschel Jacks, “Close it up.”
If you look at films of this, Jacks puts the vice president’s car almost against the bumper of the Queen Mary. And the three cars squeal up onto the expressway, race along the expressway, squeal off the expressway and into the emergency bay at Parkland Hospital.
DR: Johnson is then put in a separate room and guarded by Youngblood and others. When they’re told that President Kennedy has died, what happens?
RC: Johnson is not told that President Kennedy is dead for forty-five minutes. He’s standing in this room. No one will give him any information. Twice he sends somebody out to try and find out, and both times that person comes back with the word, “The doctors say they’re still working on the president.”
So Lady Bird writes in her memoirs about one of Kennedy’s closest aides who had worked for him all his life, a man named Kenny O’Donnell. Lady Bird says, “Then Kenny O’Donnell came through the door and, seeing the stricken face of Kenny, who loved him, we knew.”
A moment later, another Kennedy aide comes in, goes over to Johnson, and addresses him as “Mr. President.” That’s the first Johnson knows that he’s president.
No one knows what Johnson is thinking during these forty-five minutes. I certainly don’t know. But when this word finally comes and the Secret Service starts to try to give him orders, he knows what he wants to do.
Remember, it’s the height of the Cold War, and they don’t know if the attack is part of a conspiracy. And they say, “The place we can protect you best is Washington. We have to get to Air Force One and get off the ground and get back to Washington.”
Johnson says, “I’m not leaving without Mrs. Kennedy.” They say, “Mrs. Kennedy won’t leave without her husband’s body.” He says, “Then we’ll go to the plane and wait for her there.”
DR: So they go to the plane. But the local police say, “We’re not giving you the body. We have to do an autopsy. A murder has been committed in the state.” But Kennedy’s aides got the casket to the plane. Mrs. Kennedy is on the plane and they’re getting ready to go, and Lyndon Johnson wants to be sworn in. How did that come about?
RC: He makes a call to Robert Kennedy. It’s a very sad scene. As I say, these two men really hated each other.
You want to know how historians get information? Robert Morgenthau was for many decades the U.S. attorney for New York, a very respected figure and a friend of mine. We always go to the same Hanukkah party every year, and he always comes over to me to tell me some wonderful story.
While I was writing this last book, he says to me, “Bob, I have something I really want to tell you now.” I said, “Let’s wait till after the service.” He says, “No. I really want to tell you this right away.” So we go into another room. And he says, “I was there when Lyndon Johnson called Robert Kennedy.”
Robert Kennedy was at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy family home in McLean, Virginia. J. Edgar Hoover calls him to tell him his brother’s dead. And ten minutes later, the man he truly hates, Lyndon Johnson, calls to ask the exact procedure by which he can take over his brother’s presidency.
He didn’t have to do that. The information on that happens to be in the Constitution.
DR: Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general, calls back and says, “The oath of office is in the Constitution.” Lyndon Johnson wants to get a judge that he likes, Sarah Hughes. She comes out [to Love Field]. She swears him in. Why does Lyndon Johnson insist that Mrs. Kennedy get in the picture of the swearing-in?
RC: What I’m saying now is what the Kennedy people believe. They believe that he was using Mrs. Kennedy, that he wanted to convey the feeling that the Kennedys were behind him in his new presidency. I do not know if that’s true or not.
DR: The plane ultimately takes off. It comes back to Washington. Lyndon Johnson is president. Does he go to the Oval Office right away?
RC: He goes to the Oval Office the next morning, and one of Kennedy’s secretaries is there and runs and gets Robert Kennedy and says, “He’s going into the Oval Office.” When Johnson sees the reaction, he goes back and he works out of his office in the Executive Office Building for the next four days.
DR: How did he decide to have a report on the Kennedy assassination, and how did he persuade Earl Warren and Richard Russell to be on the Warren Commission that prepared that report?
RC: These are two of the strongest-willed men in Washington. Earl Warren is the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and he has said to people, “I will never serve on any commission like this. The Supreme Court should stay aloof from things like this.”
Johnson comes in and says to him, “You were a private in World War I.” He says, “You put on our uniform for your country. Now your president is asking you to serve as head of this commission.” And Warren agreed.
With Richard Russell, he called Russell, who’s back in Winder, Georgia, his hometown. Johnson calls, and Russell says, “I will not be on this commission.” Among other things, Warren passed the Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared school segregation unconstitutional, so Russell truly hates Earl Warren and he doesn’t want to be on this commission anyway. He says, “No. I won’t do it.”
Johnson calls back a few hours later and says, “I want to read you the press release that I’ve just announced.” Russell says, “I’m on it?” And Johnson says, “Yes.” Russell says, “Take my name off.” Johnson says, “You know, we passed the deadline for the New York Times about ten minutes ago.”
DR: We’ve largely covered the four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson that you’ve written. With the beginning of the Johnson administration, you end the fourth volume. When is volume five coming out? Is it going to be one volume or two volumes?
RC: Well, you’re ruining this terrific interview. I’m about halfway through.
DR: You do all your research and then you write—or type—on your Smith-Corona?
RC: That’s in theory true, but when you get into each chapter, you suddenly realize that some file that you had thought wasn’t important at the Johnson Presidential Library is key. So you have to go back and look into it.
I want the last book to be in one volume. I’ll tell you why: because the arc of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency is one arc. He starts with the greatest victory in the history of American politics—to this day, still. Sixty-one-point-one percent over Barry Goldwater, his Republican opponent in the 1964 presidential election.
So he starts with the greatest triumph you can imagine. By the end of it, Vietnam has consumed his presidency, and he has to leave office and go back to his ranch. I want that all to be in one book because I see it as one story.
DR: One question that I’ve always wondered about is this. John Kennedy proposed belated civil rights legislation but didn’t get any of it anywhere. Lyndon Johnson bonded with members of Congress who were segregationists.
Why does Lyndon Johnson decide to be Mr. Civil Rights? Was it to prove that he could do something better than Kennedy, or did he really believe in the end that civil rights legislation was necessary?
RC: Lyndon Johnson really believed. How do I feel, anyway, that I know this?
The Vietnam War challenged Johnson’s legacy. LBJ with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (right) and Secretary of State Dean Rusk (left), July 21, 1965.
He was very poor when he went to college, and between his sophomore and junior years, he has to take a year off from college to make enough money to go on. What he does for that year is he teaches in a little town called Cotulla, Texas. He teaches in what was called the Mexican School, for the children of migrant workers.
Some of the students later gave oral histories, and as I wrote, “No teacher had ever cared if these children learned or not. This teacher cared.”
He thought it was desperately important that they learned to speak English. So he insisted they speak English, and if at recess he heard some boy shouting something in Spanish outside the window, he would run out and spank him. If it was a girl, he would yell at her.
You could say, if you want to be hard on him, that this was just an example of Lyndon Johnson doing the best job he could at whatever job he had, which was a characteristic of his. But I felt, I knew that he really believed in this because he didn’t just teach the children, he taught the janitor.
The janitor’s name was Tomas Gomez, and he said Johnson wanted him to learn English, so Johnson bought him a textbook. Before and after school each day, they would sit on the steps of the school and, if I remember the janitor’s words correctly, he would say, “Johnson would pronounce, I would repeat. Johnson would spell, I would repeat.”
So when Johnson becomes president and he’s given these great civil rights speeches to deliver, one of Kennedy’s speechwriters who was still working for him, Richard Goodwin, asked that question: “Do you really believe?” He asks it in a more polite way, although not much more polite. “Do you really believe in this?”
And Johnson said, “I swore when I was teaching those kids that if I ever had the power, I would help them. And now I have the power and I mean to use it.”
DR: Lyndon Johnson died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-four, relatively young. Would he have been able to survive with modern medical technology?
RC: I asked his cardiologist that very question. He said, “We could have fixed him in a half-hour angioplasty.”
