CHAPTER 19

HANGING ON

THROUGHOUT LATE 1961 AND 1962, THE LOVE AFFAIRbetween Jack Kennedy and the media flourished; out of the liaison came the myth of Camelot. JFK was the young, idealistic king, self-deprecating, brave, inspiring. He was surrounded by the best and the brightest, charismatic intellectuals and dedicated public servants committed to their leader and his cause, all the while sharing his zeal for the good life. Following a state dinner at the White House in October 1961, actors performed scenes from several Shakespearean plays. Not since Lincoln, Jefferson, and Adams had a president publicly embraced the Bard, applauded theNew York Times. For the first time since 1904, when he appeared before Theodore Roosevelt, Pablo Casals performed for an American president and his guests. Ballets, poetry readings, string quartets followed in profusion, and the press swooned.¹

Meanwhile, “Whatever happened to Lyndon Johnson?” stories began to pop up in papers from coast to coast.²When the popular television programCandid Camera asked unsuspecting interviewees who Lyndon Johnson was, they guessed a baseball player, an astronaut, anything but vice president of the United States.³

The White House staff fairly dripped with contempt for LBJ. Despite JFK’s directive to kiss the vice presidential behind from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other, Kenny O’Donnell “wouldn’t give him the time of day,” recalled another presidential aide. He deliberately failed to notify the vice president’s office of cabinet and National Security Council meetings until the last minute, if at all.⁴

In mid-1962, at LBJ’s direction, George Reedy took stock of the Johnson vice presidency. Things were not going well, the rotund house intellectual reported. The reasons were clear: “We lack goals; We haven’t set our sights sufficiently high; We haven’t organized ourselves properly to take advantage of the opportunities that are open to us.”⁵The achievements of the CEEO were significant but obviously not sufficient. The space program was flourishing, but no one seemed to be willing to give LBJ credit for the vital role he was playing in it. Indeed, Johnson later recalled an incident that occurred just after Alan Shepard’s successful sojourn in suborbital space. He, JFK, Shepard, and FCC head Newton Minnow were riding together to a meeting of the National Convention of Broadcasters. “You know, Lyndon,” said Kennedy, poking him in the ribs, “nobody knows that the Vice President is the Chairman of the Space Council. But if that flight had been a flop, I guarantee you that everybody would have known that you were the Chairman.”⁶Writing from Austin, Horace Busby argued that a conspiracy was afoot: “Today your activities are largely lost on the public because, in my judgment, both the Palace Guard and the jealous wing of the Senate are as fearful now as a year ago of your potential.”⁷

Johnson was convinced that all could be made right if only he could establish a good relationship with Bobby. One night in 1962, after a social event at the White House, LBJ approached his nemesis. “Bobby,” he said, “you do not like me. Your brother likes me. Your sister-in-law likes me. Your daddy likes me but you don’t like me. Now, why?” The younger Kennedy would not answer directly, of course, but he had no intention of being reconciled. When LBJ denied that he had attacked Joe Sr. and cast aspersions on Jack’s health at the 1960 convention, Bobby refused to believe him. Later he complaned that Johnson “lies all the time … In every conversation I have with him, he lies … He lies even when he doesn’t have to.”⁸

LBJ would reach out again during the course of his public life, but the result would always be the same. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued that the barrier between the two men was cultural. Bobby was a reserved New Englander; LBJ was an expansive Texan who could not converse with another human being without touching him or her in some fashion. Bobby was cold-blooded, ironic; LBJ impulsive and overly earnest.⁹

But there was far more to it than that. Bobby was a unique combination of Irish clan chieftain, Catholic social worker, and prosecuting attorney. For him, things were black and white. He was intensely loyal to those he trusted and relentlessly antagonistic toward those he did not. “You have to admit, you have to face the fact that with all his generous heartedness and largeness, Bobby was just an awful hater,” Joe Alsop later observed during an interview.¹⁰RFK refused to observe the dictum that in democratic politics one has no permanent enemies, that a person who opposes you one day may be your ally the next. Incredibly, during a 1962 trip to Indonesia, Bobby apologized for the Mexican War of 1848, implying that it was nothing more or less than an imperial escapade fomented by Texans and their American sympathizers.¹¹

At a luncheon in New York a month before JFK was assassinated, LBJ shocked his listeners by making a striking comparison. Asked his views on the situation in South Vietnam, LBJ replied that actually Saigon and Washington were quite similar. Both places had chief executives in trouble because of the activities of “very strong” brothers, Bobby Kennedy and Ngo Dinh Nhu.¹²

For the most part, however, Johnson tried hard to get along. An inveterate leaker to the press as majority leader and subsequently as president, Johnson steadfastly refused to undercut either JFK or his policies. His feud was with Bobby, and it was competitive. “The Washington press corps is convinced that there is a well organized move afoot to groom Bobby Kennedy for the Presidency in 1968 and to shove you aside,” George Reedy reported to him in January 1963.¹³

The stress of suppressing his combative instincts and remaining loyal to those who showed him nothing but contempt began to take its toll on Johnson. Periods of frenetic activity were punctuated with long spells of depression. “I was out at his house, The Elms … swimming one afternoon with him and with Abe Fortas,” Harry McPherson recalled. “And he looked absolutely gross. His belly was enormous and his face looked bad, flushed, maybe he had been drinking a good deal. But he looked like a man who was not trimmed down for anything. His life was not causing him to come together physically, morally, intellectually, any way.”¹⁴“I detested every minute of it,” Johnson later told an interviewer.¹⁵

 

AT LEASTLYNDON ANDLADYBIRDhad plenty of time to expand their business empire. Lady Bird employed real estate agents to add to the thirty-eight hundred acres in Alabama she had inherited from her Aunt Effie and Uncle Claude. With the help of his business partner, A. W. Moursund, LBJ acquired three additional ranches adjacent to the original 438-acre spread purchased from Aunt Frank Martin. First was the eighteen-hundred acre Scharnhorst place, which included some of the best deer hunting land in Texas. Indeed, the inside of the red-painted frame ranch house that went with the property was festooned with the heads of deer killed by Lady Bird and Lynda. The vice president next paid $65 an acre for the Lewis farm. It comprised eight hundred acres and featured a fieldstone house that Lady Bird remodeled. The jewel in the Johnson empire, however, was the Haywood Ranch, a forty-eight-hundred acre spread acquired from Texas Christian University for $500,000. LBJ and Judge Moursund subsequently sold 242 acres of the Haywood place to the Comanche Cattle Corporation for $326,660. The owners of the Comanche Cattle Company were none other than Johnson and Moursund. Most of the land fronted Lake Granite Shoals, subsequently renamed Lake LBJ, and was divided up into some one hundred “ranchettes,” which the partners sold.

Johnson, suddenly taken with water sports, built a boathouse on Granite Shoals near Lake LBJ to house his recently purchased speedboat and ninety-foot cabin cruiser. These acquisitions were made possible by profits from the Johnson broadcasting empire, which by 1961 amounted to more than half a million dollars annually.¹⁶

 

WHILELBJ and the New Frontier languished, communist revolution and Soviet aggression were threatening America on its very doorstep. In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s revolution had turned sharply leftward, and the Kennedy administration became involved in various schemes to overthrow it. LBJ had no influence on the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and only a modest consulting role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet his views on the latter were revealing.

The Soviets began a massive arms buildup in Cuba during the summer of 1962, triggered by not only the Bay of Pigs invasion but also Operation Mongoose, a CIA covert operation designed to either oust Castro or assassinate him. The twenty-four medium-range (one thousand miles) and eighteen intermediate-range (two thousand miles) missiles gave the Soviet Union and its ally more than a defensive capability in the Western Hemisphere. Most likely, Khrushchev’s gamble was the result of pressure from his generals, who were alarmed at the massive expansion of America’s nuclear arsenal. The communists tried to keep construction of the missile sites secret, repeatedly lying to JFK.

Tipped off either by the CIA or Cuban exiles as to the existence of the missile sites, GOP congressional leaders demanded an investigation. U-2 spy plane photos taken on October 14 revealed the alarming truth. American intelligence indicated that if the sites were completed and armed, the Soviets and÷or Cubans would be able to rain nuclear destruction down on as many as eighty U.S. cities.

Huddling with his advisers on an almost continuous basis throughout the next two weeks, Kennedy considered a variety of options, ranging from an immediate air strike and invasion to acquiescence in the buildup. Gradually, the White House settled on a naval blockade, or quarantine, of Cuba to prevent the arrival of additional missiles and warheads. U.S. diplomats would then demand the removal of existing weapons; if the communists refused, the military would invade and dismantle the sites forcibly.

On the evening of October 22, the president revealed the existence of the bases to the American people, denouncing their construction as “a clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.”¹⁷He announced the blockade, demanded the removal of the missile bases, and made it clear that if warheads were launched from Cuba, the United States would retaliate against the Soviet Union.

For the next six days, the world teetered on the brink of Armageddon. Castro mobilized his armed forces, the United States began assembling an invasion force of a quarter of a million men, and Soviet missile transports headed toward the gauntlet of ships set up by the U.S. Navy around Cuba. On Wednesday, October 24, the Soviet ships cut their engines and waited. Over the next seventy-two hours, the White House and the Kremlin exchanged a flurry of communications.

LBJ was an ex officio member of the National Security Council and participated in the meetings of “ExComm,” its executive committee. He was with the president on October 16, when knowledge of the Soviet deployment first circulated among top officials. From October 17 through October 20, he was out of Washington campaigning in the West, but he returned for all of the crucial meetings during the week of October 21 to 28.¹⁸

Johnson sided with the hawks: “I would like to hear what the responsible commanders have to say. I think the question with the base is whether we take it out or whether we talk about it, and both alternatives are very distressing. But of the two, I would take it out.”¹⁹On the crucial question of consulting Congress, LBJ was negative. “I realize it’s a breach of faith,” he said with regret, “but we’re not going to get much help out of them.”²⁰For a brief period, ExComm considered offering to get out of Berlin if the Soviets would evacuate Cuba. Johnson was dead set against it. “I guess what he [Khrushchev] is really saying: ‘I’m going to dismantle the foreign policy of the United States for the last 15 years in order to let you get these missiles out of Cuba.’ Then we say: ‘We’re glad, and we appreciate it and we want to discuss it with you.’”²¹

On October 26, the Kremlin made two separate and distinct proposals to Kennedy. The first offered to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba in return for an American pledge never to invade the Ever Faithful Isle. The second, seemingly drafted by hard-liners in the defense and foreign ministries, suggested a trade-off. Russian missiles in Cuba for U.S. Jupiter missiles stationed in Turkey. Johnson argued strongly for accepting the second proposal. Although it was not generally known, the United States was already planning to replace the land-based Jupiters with submarine-based Polaris missiles.²²

JFK agreed with the vice president. “We can’t very well invade Cuba,” he observed, “when we could have gotten them out by making a deal on the same missiles in Turkey. If that’s part of the record, I don’t see how we’ll have a good war.”²³

But Kennedy refused to make an explicit deal, missiles for missiles. The crisis was resolved when JFK accepted the Kremlin’s first offer and simply ignored the second—publicly at least. Privately, Robert Kennedy assured Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that after the Soviets pulled their missiles out of Cuba, the Jupiters would simply disappear; the president could not, however, link the two explicitly as a quid pro quo.²⁴

The Kennedy administration, including LBJ, saw the Cuban Missile Crisis as a major cold war victory for the United States. The communist initiative in the Western Hemisphere had been blunted, Johnson told Joe Alsop. It should be clear to the American republics flirting with Marxism-Leninism that the Soviet Union would use little more than rhetoric in defending them.²⁵

 

DURING HIS TENUREas vice president, LBJ added two more attractive young women to his staff, Vicky McCammon and Marie Fehmer. They continued a tradition. According to Juanita Roberts, the former WAC colonel who would hold the title of personal secretary to the president after Johnson succeeded to the presidency, there were always two secretarial staffs: the group that stayed on the ground and staffed the phones and the coterie that flew with LBJ when he was on his travels.²⁶

First among the flight crew was Mary Margaret Wiley, the vivacious, attractive blonde who had gone to work for the Johnsons in 1951. She was widely rumored to have had an affair with LBJ and continued to enjoy a close relationship with him even after she married Houston advertising executive Jack Valenti in 1962.²⁷Vicky McCammon, a striking coed from San Angelo, made friends with Susan Taylor, Lady Bird’s niece, while both were attending George Washington University in Washington. McCammon caught Johnson’s eye when Susan began inviting her to parties at The Elms. A political science major, she intrigued Johnson with her knowledge and self-confidence during an informal discussion of the dynamics of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. “And when I would be in Austin and he would come down to the ranch,” she recalled, “he would call and he would talk and talk and talk. [He would] want to know how my courses were going and what I was studying and this and that … I think I was so young that it was almost like a teacher-student kind of thing.”²⁸

In the summer of 1962, LBJ hired Marie Fehmer, a slender brunette from Dallas, to replace Wiley, who would marry in June. She had just graduated from Texas with a degree in journalism and was planning to go to graduate school. The Johnsons had learned of Fehmer from the brother of journalist William S. White, for whom the young woman had done some work. In typical fashion, Lyndon summoned her to the offices of KTBC for an extended interview, including a hamburger lunch and a wide-ranging discussion that covered everything from typing speed to religion to politics. She went to work that afternoon and remained on the job until Lyndon Johnson’s last day in the White House.

The vice president, fifty-four years old and unhappy, quickly fell in love with Fehmer. She went everywhere with Johnson and soon became accustomed to summonses at any and all hours. “I protested one time at the ranch,” she recalled, “where a speaker phone went through the house and he would wake up about 8:00 in the morning and he would yell over the speaker phone, Marie do you want to go swimming? Well, no, I am in bed but I go, and we go swimming.”²⁹

One of the reasons Johnson found Marie so fascinating was that though she was obviously taken with him and his attentions, she refused to sleep with him. It provoked his curiosity. He believed that any meaningful relationship between a man and woman ought to end in sex. One day, when they were floating in the pool, he asked why she resisted him. I’m a Catholic, it’s against my religion, she replied. Charmed, he had her explain at length. Lady Bird sensed the growing depth of the relationship and kept a close eye on the newcomer. In November 1962, Johnson made an astounding proposal to Marie. If she would agree to have his son, he would set her up in an apartment in New York. Fehmer refused, but their relationship only seemed to deepen.³⁰

Some on LBJ’s staff believed that Lady Bird not only knew about her husband’s affairs, but condoned them. Fehmer remembered a trip to California with Mrs. Johnson shortly after she was hired. LBJ and Mary Margaret Wiley were already there, and when Lady Bird and Marie arrived, a woman’s underwear was strewn all over the hotel room. Instead of being angry, Lady Bird seemed to go out of her way to be nice to Mary Margaret.³¹

Horace Busby recalled one weekend while LBJ was vice president. Johnson invited former congresswoman Helen Douglas to spend the weekend with him. Lady Bird conveniently arranged to leave on a shopping trip to New York shortly before Helen arrived. Busby recalled that Johnson and Douglas lounged around the pool holding hands and showing obvious affection for each other.³²

 

VIETNAM WAS ONEof the issues that would define Johnson’s presidency, but as vice president, he could do little but observe the White House’s and State Department’s maneuverings. One, in particular, was fateful. In August 1963, a group of South Vietnamese generals headed by Major General Tran Van Don, commander of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, and Major General Nguyen Khanh opened secret talks with CIA and U.S. Embassy personnel concerning a possible coup against Diem and Nhu. What ensued was a deep split within the Kennedy foreign policy establishment. Roger Hilsman, the State Department’s director of intelligence, Michael Forrestal, an aide to NSC Director McGeorge Bundy, and Undersecretary of State Averell Harriman were committed to a coup; Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, CIA Director John McCone, and chair of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor were opposed to a forced regime change. From August 28 to September 2, the NSC met on almost a daily basis.

On August 26, Kennedy reluctantly approved a cable authorizing the agents in contact with the South Vietnamese generals to give them the go-ahead. Although Johnson had hitherto not been consulted, he was suddenly brought into the loop on August 28. McGeorge Bundy told Samuel Gammons, the State Department officer detailed to brief the vice president during the crisis, that there were some things JFK did not want Johnson to see but others were all right. Johnson was furious at having been excluded. “They don’t pay any attention to my opinion (i.e. JFK),” he told Gammons “I went to SVN [South Vietnam] two years ago and they ignored my ideas; General Taylor a year later brought the same ones back and they carried them out!”³³

When asked at an NSC meeting how he felt about the United States encouraging a coup, Johnson expressed his opposition. “Quit playing cops and robbers … put down your cap pistols,” he said. On Sunday, September 1, 1963, Mike Forrestal came out to The Elms and briefed LBJ further on the coup plottings. Forrestal, who was up to his ears in the coup machinations, attempted to place all of the blame on Hilsman and Harriman.³⁴Johnson seemed resigned. Two months later, the generals pulled off their coup. After being captured hiding in a Catholic church, Diem and Nhu were shot to death. LBJ would continue to believe that getting rid of Diem was a crucial mistake.

 

IT WAS THE OTHER MAJOR ISSUEof the Kennedy administration, civil rights, that drew Johnson into his most active role as vice president. By the end of 1962, Martin Luther King of the SCLC, James Forman of SNCC, and James Farmer of CORE had come to the conclusion that the Kennedy administration needed to be pressured. The president had expressed concern while avoiding action in deference to southern Democrats. Eight years after theBrown decision, in 1962, two thousand southern school districts remained strictly segregated; only 8 percent of black children in the South attended school with whites. At that rate, it would take fifty years for blacks to gain access to public facilities and a hundred years to achieve equality in job training and employment.

Adding to King’s sense of urgency was his vulnerability to attack by Malcom X, leader of the Nation of Islam, and other black nationalists who charged that the SCLC’s approach was too soft and gradualist. Malcolm ridiculed nonviolence and rejected the virtues of integration. Confrontation in all of its forms, militant self-defense, and black chauvinism were necessary to preserve both the physical and psychological well-being of African Americans, he argued. If King and his colleagues did not compel white America, including Jack and Bobby Kennedy, to act instead of talk, they would lose control of the movement to the radicals.

The staging ground that King and his advisers selected for the next act in the civil rights drama was Birmingham, Alabama, the most pervasively and rigidly segregated big city in America. Municipal authorities had closed down parks and other public facilities rather than integrate them. Fewer than ten thousand of the city’s eighty thousand registered voters were black, although African Americans constituted 40 percent of the population. Between 1957 and 1967 Birmingham—local blacks nicknamed it “Bombingham” and their neighborhood “Dynamite Hill”—would be the scene of eighteen racial bombings and fifty cross burnings, all of which had been tacitly or expressly condoned by city authorities, including Police Commissioner Eugene T. “Bull” Connor. Stout, jowly, bigoted, Connor had devoted himself to “keeping the niggers in their place.”³⁵King believed that an assault on segregation in Birmingham would reveal southern “brutality openly—in the light of day—with the rest of the world looking on.”³⁶

King and his staff arrived in Birmingham in early April and immediately put into operation their secret Plan C—“C” for confrontation. They issued a public call for an immediate end to discriminatory employment practices and segregation of public facilities. In the days that followed, small groups of mainly black protesters staged lunch counter sit-ins and marched on city hall. During one of these protests, King was arrested and imprisoned. While incarcerated, he penned his famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” Written on a newspaper smuggled in to him, the nineteen-page missive was subsequently reprinted in scores of newspapers across the nation. The letter was an eloquent defense of civil disobedience; it argued persuasively that the protesters rather than the forces of law and order in Birmingham represented the Judeo-Christian ethic and the spirit as well as the letter of the Constitution. Hitler’s laws were legal but manifestly unjust. It was profoundly immoral to continue to acquiesce in the oppression of black Americans.

Out of jail, King embarked on the greatest gamble of his career. On May 2, one thousand black children, some as young as six, set out from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham headed for City Hall. Connor arrested them. When another thousand gathered in the church for a second march, he attempted to seal the building exits. As some escaped, he loosed police dogs and turned fire hoses on the children. Panicked black parents hurled rocks and bricks at the police, who in turn assaulted everyone in their path. A national television audience was horrified by the water hoses, which spewed streams strong enough to take bark off trees, by the snarling German shepherds, and by the truncheon-wielding police.

Timemagazine painted a vivid picture: “There was the Negro youth, sprawled on his back and spinning across the pavement, while firemen battered him with streams of water … There was the Negro woman, pinned to the ground by cops, one of them with his knee dug into her throat … The blaze of bombs, the flash of blades, the eerie glow of fire, the keening cries of hatred, the wild dance of terror in the night—all this was Birmingham, Ala.”³⁷

The demonstrations continued throughout the first week in May, peaking on the seventh. With their city portrayed daily as a hotbed of racial violence, fearing even wider bloodshed, and under pressure from federal authorities, the Senior Citizens’ Committee, a group of whites secretly selected by the Chamber of Commerce to negotiate with the black protesters, came to terms with King and his cohorts. The SCLC won its demand for desegregation of lunch counters and other public facilities and for “the upgrading and hiring of Negroes on a non-discriminatory basis,” albeit in planned stages.

Birmingham galvanized even the poorest and most disorganized southern blacks, swelling the ranks of the SCLC, CORE, SNCC, and the NAACP. If Birmingham could be forced to accept integration, so could every other community in America. The descendents of those freed by the Civil War agreed with King, who, in his Birmingham Jail manifesto, had equated “wait” with “never.” The major civil rights organizations became more militant, competing with each other in sponsoring protests, demonstrations, sit-ins, and law suits.

The Kennedys sympathized with the cause. The Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department under John Doar and John Siegenthaler filed forty-two lawsuits in behalf of black voting rights and helped push through Congress the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution outlawing the poll tax. The administration appointed a number of blacks to high-level government positions, including NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall to the New York Circuit Court of Appeals. Following the bloody freedom rides of 1961, the White House pressured the Interstate Commerce Commission to outlaw segregation in interstate bus terminals.³⁸

Yet civil rights leaders criticized the White House for not introducing legislation outlawing discrimination in hiring, public accommodations, and all modes of interstate transportation. For all of the attorney general’s bullying of the CEEO and his hard-nosed rhetoric, it all seemed for him a matter of political expediency. He saw civil rights as a problem to be managed in a manner that would ensure his brother’s reelection in 1964.³⁹

But then, in the wake of Birmingham, Jack and Bobby decided that justice and expediency had at last coincided, and the attorney general’s office drafted an omnibus civil rights bill. But how could the administration get it through Congress? The Dixie Association seemed stronger than ever, and Republicans were more than willing to play both sides of the street to keep the Democrats divided. The administration had not even been able to get through Congress a literacy bill guaranteeing voter registration for anyone with a sixth-grade education. As RFK biographer James Hilty observed, “Throughout their careers, the Kennedys, and Robert in particular, had lacked a feel for coalitional politics and a willingness to bargain and compromise. It was highly improbable, then, at such a late date in their development (the summer of 1963), that either Kennedy would suddenly gain an appreciation for such skills.”⁴⁰Reluctantly Jack ordered Bobby and White House speech writer Theodore Sorensen to consult the vice president.

 

AS THE CONGRESSIONAL DEADLOCK CONTINUEDthrough 1962 and 1963, Johnson had looked on helplessly from his seat as presiding officer in the Senate. Larry O’Brien, Kennedy’s congressional liaison, was “out of his element,” Bobby Baker observed. Not once in two years had O’Brien ever stopped by his office, LBJ complained to Harry McPherson.⁴¹

Consequently, when RFK and Sorenson called, Johnson was both gratified and contemptuous. He peppered the attorney general with suggestions and concluded, “Well, Bob, I think you’ve still got a lot of homework to do.” Juanita Roberts, who listened in on the conversation, recalled that the attorney general’s resentment was almost palpable. With Sorenson, Johnson was even more pointed. “Now, I want to make it clear,” he told Jack’s chief speechwriter and adviser, “I’m as strong for this program as you are, my friend. But you want my judgment now, and I don’t want to debate these things around fifteen men and then have them all go out and talk about the vice president and [what he thinks].” If he were going to be of any use to the president, moreover, he would have to be privy to the deliberations of his inner circle. “I don’t know who drafted it; I’ve never seen it,” he said of the bill. “Hell … I got it from theNew York Times.”⁴² He then proceeded with a torrent of practical advice: whom to consult, in what order they should be consulted, legislative chits that could be given out and called in.

In reality, LBJ and his brain trust of George Reedy, Harry McPherson, Horace Busby, and Abe Fortas were not sure that introducing a comprehensive bill was the right move. All were dubious that the Kennedy team could get it through Congress. Black Americans were out of patience, Reedy observed: “From here on out, they will regard any measure which does not pass as a cynical gesture … The country will be likely to come to no conclusion—thus disillusioning the Negroes and strengthening the bigots in their conclusion that the country is ‘really with’ them. The Republicans will have a field day. And in addition to the civil rights cause, the President’s whole program will go down the drain.”⁴³After reading the bill, which included a long list of “findings of fact”—specific instances of discrimination—Fortas observed, “It must have been written by children … This is embarrassing. It makes me cringe to think that my government could produce a document like this.”⁴⁴In the end, of course, Johnson and his staff decided to do all in their power to help.

Johnson’s brain trust wrote an analysis of the state of race relations that showed more idealism and more political sense than was reflected in the bill. The longer the nation delayed guaranteeing full rights and nondiscrimination, they noted, the more radical the civil rights movement would become. “A number of stereotypes have gone by the boards. The NAACP is now the moderate, right-wing of the Negro protest movement. CORE is actually in the center. The various student groups are really to the left. And the role of the Black Muslims has been enhanced immeasurably.” The only real choices facing the nation were integration or apartheid, and “the concept of apartheid is so repugnant and ridiculous that it would not require comment except for the fact that one branch of the Negro movement—the Black Muslims—has proposed it seriously.”

Nevertheless, if the Union were to survive, the federal government could not compel equal rights and nondiscrimination through force of arms. The only means with any chance of success, as Martin Luther King had recognized, was moral compulsion.⁴⁵“Strangely enough,” LBJ’s advisers told him, “both the Southern whites and the Negroes share one point of view in common—they are not certain that the government is on the side of the Negroes. The Southern whites feel that the civil rights issue is a matter of ward politics and the Negroes have an uneasy suspicion that they are receiving only token gestures of good will.”⁴⁶

Meanwhile, Johnson delivered stirring speeches in Detroit and Gettysburg. “Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unaware of the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact,” he had declared to the crowd gathered at the nation’s most famous Civil War battlefield.⁴⁷Nor was the vice president bashful about carrying the message to the Kennedys. “Very serious consideration should be given to the President going into the South,” he told the White House “not in a belligerent, bellicose mood but representing the conscience of the nation … The risks of such a course are great and could well amount to losing a number of Southern states in 1964. But those states will probably be lost anyway because of the action the President must take to enforce court decrees … If he states the moral issue face-to-face as their President—Southerners will at least respect his courage and will feel that they were on the losing side of an issue of conscience.”⁴⁸

JFK did not go to the South, but in June, after announcing that he was sending his historic civil rights bill to Congress, he went on television and delivered a stirring call to the nation to do the right thing by its black citizens. In the days that followed, the White House scheduled scores of meetings with journalists, union and business leaders, southerners and northerners to generate support for the measure. Arthur Schlesinger, who was present at these gatherings, termed the vice president’s tone “evangelical.” “Johnson was extremely effective,” he later wrote, “I thought more effective than the President or the Attorney General.”⁴⁹

In the drama that followed, LBJ typically angered segregationists by ardently advocating the merits of the civil rights bill itself while refusing to alienate the South by backing yet another move to modify Rule 22. That provision required a two-thirds vote of the Senate to shut off discussion of a bill. It guaranteed virtually unlimited debate, and southern Senators continued to use it as a weapon to obstruct the passage of civil rights legislation. “Anxious as I am to choke off debate at times, this vice president is not going to choke off rules for a few people who ask the chair to do something they can’t do themselves.”⁵⁰

There could be no question about Johnson’s position on the issues addressed in the bill. It had several sections, but one in particular struck southern businessmen as an intolerable intrusion into their property rights. “Title II which prohibited discrimination in places of public accommodation was just as obnoxious as hell to the Southerners,” Harry McPherson recalled.

It was telling people what they could do with their private property and who they could associate with. The South was up in arms about the sit-ins. I was sitting up with Johnson at the chair of the vice president in the Senate. [Mississippi Senator John] Stennis walked by and LBJ motions him to come up. “How do you like that Title II of the Civil Rights Bill, John?” Stennis said, “Oh Lyndon, well you know, our people just can’t take that kind of thing. It’s just impossible. I mean I believe that a man ought to have the right to—if he owns a store or runs a café, he ought to have the right to serve who he wants to serve” … LBJ said, “Well, you know, John, the other day a sad thing happened. My cook, Zephyr Wright, who had been working for me for many years—she’s a college graduate—and her husband drove my official car from Washington down to Texas … They drove through your state and when they got hungry, they stopped at grocery stores on the edge of town in colored areas and bought Vienna sausage and beans and ate them with a plastic spoon. And when they had to go to the bathroom they would stop, pull off on a side road, and Zephyr Wright, the cook of the vice president of the United States, would squat in the road to pee. And you know, John, that’s just bad. That’s wrong. And there ought to be something to change that. And it seems to me that if people in Mississippi don’t change it voluntarily, that it’s just going to be necessary to change it by law.” Stennis said, “Well, Lyndon, I’m sure that there are nice places where your cook and—.” Then the vice president just said. “Uh-huh, Uh-huh,” and just sort of looked away vacantly and said, “Well, thank you, John.”⁵¹

 

DESPITEJOHNSON’S LABORSin the vineyard of civil rights, by 1963 rumors were circulating that the Kennedys were going to drop him from the ticket in 1964. When the vice president’s name was linked with two highly publicized fraud cases, the speculation intensified. The leading citizen of Pecos, Texas, was a short, portly, bespectacled young man named Billie Sol Estes. A Jaycee Outstanding Young Man of 1953, Estes managed to make a fortune from the federal farm program. He collected millions in acreage allotments on land he bought on the slimmest of margins and then quickly sold. He collected additional monies on empty grain storage facilities. He sold nonexistent fertilizer tanks to farmers and then sold their mortgages to banks and lending institutions. So tangled was the Estes web of double-dealing that when he was arrested in 1962, no fewer than seventy-five FBI agents were working on his case.

News accounts reported that the Johnsons were sometime business partners of the West Texas tycoon, that LBJ had lobbied the Agriculture Department in behalf of Estes, and that Estes had given Lyndon and Lady Bird an airplane. Only the second was true; LBJ had lobbied for Estes. Yet, when Henry Marshall, an Agriculture Department official investigating the case, was found dead in Texas, public interest crested. Despite the fact that Marshall had bruises on his face and had been shot five times with a single-shot, bolt-action rifle, his death was ruled a suicide.

Twenty-two years later, during a grand jury investigation into Marshall’s death, Billie Sol claimed that he, Lyndon, and Cliff Carter, an aide and old friend of the vice president, had hired a convicted murderer to kill the agent.⁵²Although the grand jury ruled Marshall’s death a murder, they uncovered no evidence linking LBJ to the incident. Moreover, although Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department took an active interest in the case at the time, the FBI found nothing to substantiate charges that Lyndon and Lady Bird were part of the Estes scandal.⁵³

Far more politically damaging to LBJ was the fall of his Senate protégé, Bobby Baker. By 1963, Baker had been working in the Senate twenty-one years, although he was then only thirty-four years old. Known as the “the 101st Senator,” his stature was almost legendary. But Baker was thinly educated and narrowly focused. “To him the Senate was a mechanism that cranked out good things for Bobby Baker if he played it right,” George Reedy said. “He had two major ambitions. He wanted to be a millionaire and he wanted to be the governor of South Carolina.”⁵⁴“Strangely enough,” recalled journalist Leslie Carpenter, “there are some people who like to look crooked when they aren’t. And Bobby was one of those characters. He would always do the simplest thing in such a way to make it look like a deep dark plot that had been hatched in a back room with thousands of dollars laid on the table.”⁵⁵

During the 1950s, Baker’s name had become inextricably intertwined with that of LBJ, so much so that he was known to some as “Little Lyndon.” In 1962, the FBI launched an investigation into the funding and operation of a luxury motel in Ocean City, Maryland, of which Bobby was part owner. The other partners were apparently organized crime figures. Then, in October 1963, a vending machine company under contract to the federal government filed suit against Baker for having forced it out of a defense plant in a dispute over a kickback scheme. Baker resigned his post in the Senate.⁵⁶

As Baker’s shady past came to light, LBJ’s name was increasingly mentioned in connection with his. News reporters dug up every favorable thing Lyndon had said about Baker and noted that the latter’s two children were named Lynda and Lyndon Baines.⁵⁷

On November 22, the day of the Kennedy assassination, Don B. Reynolds, an insurance executive in Silver Spring, Maryland, testified before the Senate Rules Committee, which had been assigned the task of investigating Baker, that after arranging for him to sell $200,000 in life insurance to the Johnsons, Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins had advised Reynolds to buy $1,200 worth of advertising on KTBC. He also admitted giving the Johnsons a Magnavox stereo set worth $585.⁵⁸

There was, however, no concrete evidence of wrongdoing. Nearly every crime Baker was accused of committing had occured after Johnson left the Senate.⁵⁹Bob Kerr, Bobby’s real patron, told Harry McPherson, “Johnson literally did not know a damned thing about the operations that Bobby got himself tied up in and I know that to be the case.”⁶⁰As vice president, Johnson continued to value Baker highly, but primarily as a devoted supporter and an unending and reliable source of information. During his troubles, LBJ expressed sympathy for the young man and persuaded Abe Fortas to look after his legal affairs.⁶¹

Of one thing LBJ was certain: the Baker scandal was Bobby Kennedy’s doing. His informants told him that leaks concerning his connections with Baker were coming out of the Justice Department, not the Senate Rules Committee. Johnson believed that the attorney general had had his phones tapped. Hubert Humphrey later told the FBI that the “Kennedy crowd” at the Justice Department had plotted to use the Baker scandal to get LBJ off the ticket.⁶²

 

THROUGHOUT THE SPRING AND SUMMER,both Kennedys vehemently and repeatedly denied that Jack was giving any thought to dumping LBJ.⁶³When George Smathers repeated the rumors he had heard to the effect that Bobby was maneuvering to get rid of Lyndon, Jack Kennedy exploded: “George, you have some intelligence, I presume. Now who’s Bobby going to put on the ticket, himself? … Lyndon’s going to be my vice president because he helps me.”⁶⁴

Perhaps. But denying any intent to dump Johnson was good politics. There is no doubt that if scandal sank the vice president, not a tear would have been shed in the White House. More important, Johnson believed that the Kennedys wanted him off the ticket. Shortly after the Baker scandal broke, Johnson had dinner with friends, including Liz and Leslie Carpenter. Johnson’s car took the couple home and Johnson rode with them. “Park in the driveway and let’s talk a few minutes,” Johnson said. “I think I’m going to announce that I’m not going to run again for vice president so that I can get off that ticket before they try to knock me off. What I would like to do is go back to Texas and be president of Southwest Texas State Teachers College.”⁶⁵