CHAPTER 20

INTERREGNUM: DEATH AND RESURRECTION

LITTLE DIDJOHNSON KNOW THAT FATE, ANDTEXAS,would change his plans. For some time, Jack Kennedy had been pressing Governor John Connally and LBJ to arrange a Texas speaking tour for him. The Kennedy-Johnson ticket had carried Texas in 1960, but only by forty-five thousand votes. John Tower had captured one of the state’s two Senate seats, and Connally had barely won the governorship.¹

Officials of the Democratic National Committee advised the White House that little or no money had come into party coffers during 1961-1962. Yet, neither Connally nor Johnson was enthusiastic about a Kennedy visit. “Many of the people who were Mr. Kennedy’s most active supporters in Texas also tended to support my opponents [Ralph and Don Yarborough],” Connally said. “Many of my most active supporters did not lean toward JFK. To rally new support for him and to raise funds, therefore, I would have to appeal to my supporters—literally, to spend my political capital—while knowing that in the election of 1964, in which I too had to run again [for governor], many of Kennedy’s backers would be fighting me.”²

At the time, Johnson was feuding with both John Connally and Senator Ralph Yarborough. As a condition for accepting the vice presidency, LBJ had insisted that all federal patronage appointments for Texas be cleared through him, an arrangement that caused no end of friction between him and Yarborough. More fundamentally, LBJ’s explicit speeches in behalf of civil rights had alienated many of Connally’s conservative supporters.

JFK refused to take no for an answer. In June 1963, the president delivered the commencement address at the Air Force Academy, while Johnson did the same at Annapolis. Afterward, Kennedy had LBJ and Connally meet him in El Paso. All three stayed at the Cortez Hotel, where they gathered in Connally’s suite. He was going to tour Texas whether they liked it or not, Kennedy said. If we carry only two states in 1964, he exclaimed, they are going to be Massachusetts and Texas. And so it was that a presidential swing through the Lone Star State was arranged for late November 1963. The trip would include visits to Fort Worth, Dallas, and Houston.³

As the date for the Texas trip approached, apprehension increased among some of those close to President Kennedy, especially concerning the stopover in Dallas. “And then there was Dallas,” Willie Morris had written, “always a cavernous city for me, claustrophobic, full of thundering certitudes and obsessed with its image … There was no other city remotely its size in America, except in the Deep South on the one issue of race, where … intolerance and the closed mind were so inclusive, and where violence could be so manifestly political.”⁴

In late October, Adlai Stevenson had gone to Dallas to attend a meeting on United Nations Day. The radical right decided to counter this visit by holding a “United States Day,” with General Edwin A. Walker as the speaker, just prior to Stevenson’s arrival. A decorated veteran of World War II, Walker had been forced to retire from the army for distributing John Birch material among his troops. In his yard in Dallas he flew the American flag upside down to indicate where he thought the country was headed.

The day following Walker’s appearance, handbills with photographs of the president of the United States, full-face and profile, appeared on the streets of the city captioned “Wanted for Treason.” That evening many of Walker’s partisans had appeared at the UN meeting to curse and spit on Stevenson. Talking with Arthur Schlesinger shortly thereafter, Stevenson remarked, “There was something very ugly and frightening about the atmosphere. Later I talked with some of the leading people out there. They wondered whether the President should go to Dallas and so do I.”⁵But Kennedy was not to be deterred. He and the Democratic party needed the Lone Star State.

With plans for the trip set, Lyndon and Lady Bird decided to show President and Mrs. Kennedy real Texas hospitality. The schedule called for the first couple to spend the night of Friday, November 23, at the ranch. Lady Bird went down a week early to prepare. Lyndon arrived on the 19th. Lady Bird had to walk a fine line: she did not want to appear the rube, but she intended to be true to the mores of her beloved Hill Country—there would be a traditional barbeque. A special bed was shipped in to accommodate JFK’s ailing back. The Johnsons knew that Jackie (who had just recently buried her third child, Patrick Bouvier, born prematurely) liked horses and champagne. They arranged to have a thoroughly trained walking horse on hand and plenty of France’s finest.⁶

Johnson was at the head of a large crowd at the San Antonio airport when Air Force One set down on November 21. Though public opinion polls at the time indicated that only 35 percent of Texans approved of the way JFK was handling national affairs, the welcome was warm and enthusiastic. To facilitate his reception, JFK had brought along Congressman Henry Gonzalez and Senator Ralph Yarborough, whose popularity far exceeded his.

Yarborough was boiling mad. He had learned that at a fund-raising dinner scheduled for Austin Friday night, Connally intended to slight him by keeping him from the head table. He was not even invited to a reception following at the governor’s mansion.⁷Yarborough retaliated by refusing to ride in LBJ’s car into the city. He repeated the performance that afternoon in Houston.⁸

Late that afternoon, JFK summoned the vice president to his hotel suite. The two had a heated exchange that could be heard several doors down. Lyndon had better get hold of the situation. Open feuding between two Democrats was playing right into the hands of the GOP. Heal the breach or be responsible for losing the state. LBJ became defensive and left in a huff. What was that all about? Jackie asked, coming into the room. Texas politics, the president replied.⁹Yarborough got his head table seat and invitation to the reception.

The president and his entourage arrived in Fort Worth in a steady drizzle and settled into their hotel. A reporter noted that LBJ seemed dour and disconsolate. What the journalist did not know was that Johnson had decided to tell Kennedy that very evening that he would not run for the vice presidency in 1964.¹⁰Donald Reynolds was scheduled to testify before the Senate Rules Committee in the Bobby Baker case the next day, and Johnson feared the worst.

The next morning, Lyndon and Lady Bird flew on to Dallas ahead of Air Force One to head the delegation that would greet the first couple. Remembering their experience at the Adolphus Hotel, Lady Bird was a bit apprehensive. And in fact, H. L. Hunt and a number of other wealthy reactionaries had taken out a full-page, black-bordered ad in theDallas Morning News , accusing JFK and virtually everyone in his administration of being a communist. But her and her husband’s mood brightened as the sun came out and the motorcade set off in the midst of a glorious fall day. The route selected was circuitous, taking the president and his party through several residential areas and then downtown to the Trade Mart, where he was scheduled to give a luncheon address. To ensure a large turnout, the advance team had had the route published in the previous day’s edition of theNews. In the first car were the Kennedys in back, the Connallys seated in the jump seat, and the driver and Secret Service personnel in front. The Johnsons rode with Yarborough in the back seat of an open convertible, the fourth car behind the president’s and two Secret Service vehicles. Originally, the president’s car was to be covered with a bulletproof Plexiglas bubble, but at his insistence it was removed.¹¹

The crowds lining the motorcade route were large and welcoming. At Houston Street, on the east edge of Dealy Plaza, the president’s vehicle slowed nearly to a stop to make a right turn in front of the courthouse. Nellie Connally turned in her seat, full of pride, and said to JFK, “Well, Mr. President, you can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you.” “No, you certainly can’t,” he replied with a smile.¹²

On the edge of the plaza, on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, a lone employee positioned himself with rifle and scope at a window. Lee Harvey Oswald, raised in a dysfunctional family, was a deeply disturbed child and adolescent who wound up in the marines. While stationed in Japan, he read Karl Marx’sDas Kapital and became a self-proclaimed communist. He lived in the Soviet Union for a time and married a Russian woman. He subsequently returned to the United States, where he joined an organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He attempted to contact the Cubans directly, but they would have nothing to do with him, fearing he was a CIA agent. To further complicate matters, Oswald had family ties to a member of the Mafia who had spoken of his wish to kill Kennedy to stop the ongoing investigation of organized crime.¹³These bare facts have fueled an endless line of conspiracy theories, despite a consensus view that Oswald acted alone on November 22.

As the motorcade turned onto Elm Street, a shot rang out. Connally remembered being covered with a fine mist of blood and tissue. The president’s head had been partially blown off. The second shot hit Connally in the back, passed through his body, through his hand, and into his thigh. A third shot rang out, but by that time pandemonium had broken loose. Jackie Kennedy, her pink suit splattered with her husband’s brains and blood, cried, “Oh, my God, they have killed my husband—Jack, Jack.”¹⁴She tried to crawl out of the car over the trunk but was pushed back in by Secret Service officers. They pulled the presidential vehicle out of line, and it sped off. It was 12:30P.M.

 

WHENRUFUSYOUNGBLOOD,the Secret Service agent assigned to the vice president, heard three explosive sounds and saw the president’s car swerve, he immediately recognized that an assassination attempt was under way. He turned in his seat and grabbed LBJ. “Get down! Get down!” he yelled. Lyndon, Yarborough, and Lady Bird fell to the floorboard. Youngblood vaulted over the seat to cover Johnson’s body with his own. LBJ remembered it vividly: “He got on top of me and he put his body between me and the crowd. He had his knees in my back and his elbows in my back and a good two hundred pounds all over me. And the car was speeded up. He had a microphone from the front seat that he’d pulled over with him, a two-way radio and there was a lot of traffic on the radio and you could hear them talking back and forth, and one of them said: ‘Let’s get out of here quick.’”¹⁵

On the floor, Lady Bird remembered the automobile accelerating faster and faster. Finally it slowed, wheeled around a corner, and braked. At last she and LBJ were allowed to raise their heads. A neon sign read “Parkland Hospital.”¹⁶

Secret Service agents led Lyndon and Lady Bird into a small trauma room lined with sheets to block the windows. If there was a general conspiracy to wipe out the top echelon of the federal government, the vice president had to be kept secluded. Both Lady Bird and Lyndon sat quietly, erect. In one corner, Ralph Yarborough was hunched over, weeping. Men entered and exited—Congressman Homer Thornberry, Kenney McDonnell, Cliff Carter, various hospital personnel. Lyndon began conferring in whispers with Secret Service agents Rufus Youngblood, Lem Johns, and Emory Roberts. Lady Bird remembered their being concerned about the whereabouts of the “black bag,” the briefcase containing the secret codes the president could use to authorize a nuclear strike.

Lady Bird went off to try to find Jackie Kennedy and Nellie Connally to console them. The first lady was standing outside Trauma Room No. 1, where doctors were working feverishly over JFK. Jackie seemed in shock and did not respond when Lady Bird hugged her. Lady Bird and Nellie embraced and cried. Back in the waiting room Secret Service agent Emory Roberts came in around 1:20 and informed LBJ that Kennedy was dead.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was president of the United States.

The situation was extremely confused. No one knew if there was a lone shooter, if Dallas was the sole seat of violence, if the attack was communist-inspired or the product of a right-wing conspiracy. The immediate object was to protect the life of the new president, who now embodied the hopes and fears, the very identity of the nation. Continuity was everything.

The Secret Service agents advised LBJ that he should get back to Washington as quickly as possible. Not only was it the seat of power, but it would be much easier for the Secret Service, police, and military to protect him there. LBJ agreed. He reminded Youngblood, Johns, and Roberts that Lucy, then sixteen and a student at the National Cathedral School for girls in Washington, and Lynda, nineteen, then a sophomore at the University of Texas, would need Secret Service protection.

Throughout, LBJ was decisive, undemonstrative, self-contained. The agents rounded up Lady Bird and loaded her and Lyndon into unmarked police cars. The vice president’s entourage and several journalists, including Charles Roberts, followed in similarly unmarked cars. “The Secret Service had ordered the sirens off on all cars going to Dallas Love Field,” Roberts remembered, “because they didn’t want to attract attention to the airport. So we went out there at about seventy miles an hour, with no police escort, in an unmarked car and actually, when traffic would get too heavy, we crossed the median strip and went down against the traffic, we went through red lights.”¹⁷

For symbolic reasons and because of its communication equipment, Air Force One rather than Air Force Two was selected to transport LBJ and his party back to Washington. Before leaving Parkland, LBJ had conferred with Kenny O’Donnell. He would not return to Washington without the president’s body and the first lady, LBJ said.¹⁸That would pose some difficulty, O’Donnell replied, because the Dallas coroner would insist on an autopsy before releasing the body. A homicide had been committed. The two agreed to do whatever was necessary to get the body aboard, however.¹⁹

At Love Field LBJ boarded Air Force One and began making phone calls from the stateroom. In his party were Lady Bird, of course; Jack Valenti, the Houston advertising executive who had been advancing the trip; Cliff Carter; Liz Carpenter; Marie Fehmer; and Congressmen Thomas, Thornberry, and Brooks. Bill Moyers, then an officer in the Peace Corps, arrived from Austin later and boarded the plane. While LBJ was talking on the phone, Kenny O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, and Dave Powers, another Kennedy aide, arrived with the casket containing the dead president’s body. Members of LBJ’s staff could hear workers knocking out seats in the rear cabin to make room for the coffin.²⁰

Jackie was startled to find Lyndon sprawled across the bed in the living compartment. Sensing her discomfort, he moved back into the stateroom, leaving the bedroom and rear compartment to the Kennedy entourage. As soon as the president’s body was secured, O’Donnell sent Kennedy’s air force aide General Godfrey McHugh forward to order the plane to take off. LBJ had him intercepted and reminded him that there was a new president, and he would decide when the plane should depart.²¹

Johnson instructed his staff to summon Federal Judge Sarah T. Hughes, an old Dallas friend, to the plane to administer the oath of office.²²While he wolfed down a bowl of vegetable soup and saltines, Johnson conferred with O’Donnell and Powers. “It’s been a week since I got up,” LBJ remarked.²³

Shortly after two o’clock, Judge Hughes arrived. By this time, the plane, which had been sitting on the ground without air conditioning for half an hour, was sweltering. The Johnson and Kennedy people convened in the stateroom. Four journalists from the press pool were summoned to witness the occasion. LBJ had O’Donnell go into the bedroom and ask Jackie if she would please come out and stand by as he was sworn in. He found her brushing her hair at the dresser. “Yes, I think I ought to,” she said. “At least I owe that much to the country … . I should do it for the country.”²⁴

With Lady Bird on his right and Jackie, still wearing her blood-spattered suit, on his left, LBJ repeated the oath of office for president of the United States. Hughes’s voice cracked several times; Jackie’s face was “a mask of passive grief,” as one onlooker described it. LBJ was somber, composed. After the swearing in, he turned and kissed Lady Bird, and then Jackie, whom he had repeatedly referred to as “Honey,” on the cheek. The former first lady retired to the bedroom, and Air Force One took off for the two-hour-and-twenty-minute flight to Washington.²⁵

The atmosphere aboard the presidential jet during the trip back was tense. Jackie, still in shock, brooded in the bedroom. Increasingly, she blamed Johnson and Connally for drawing her and her husband into a totally unnecessary and now disastrous trip to Texas. She had never liked Connally. “I can’t stand being around him all day,” she had told Jack in Fort Worth. “I just can’t bear him sitting there saying all those great things about himself.”²⁶

O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Powers sat in the forward compartment and drank. “I thought they were just wine heads,” LBJ later said in a closed oral history. “They were just drinkers, just one drink after another coming to them trying to drown out their sorrow and we weren’t drinking, of course.”²⁷

The Irish Mafia began dredging up LBJ stories and contemplating with horror the future with Johnson as president. They became increasingly belligerent. When Marie Fehmer tried to wait on them, they angrily refused and made fun of her Texas accent. By the time the plane arrived in Washington, the Kennedy people were already casting LBJ in the role of crude usurper. Lyndon decided to put in a call to Rose Kennedy at Hyannis Port. “I wish to God there was something that I could do and I wanted to tell you that we were grieving with you,” the new president said. Between sobs, the matriarch of the Kennedy clan thanked him: “I know you loved Jack and he loved you.”²⁸

As soon as the plane landed, Bobby Kennedy boarded through the forward door. He rushed straight down the aisle past the Johnsons without saying a word until he reached the back of the plane. “He didn’t look to the left or the right,” Liz Carpenter said, “and his face looked streaked with tears and absolutely stricken. He said, ‘Where’s Jackie? I want to be with Jackie.’”²⁹

Johnson was prevented from coming aft, and another group of staffers blocked his departure by the forward gangway. In essence, he and Lady Bird were trapped in the stateroom until the Kennedys could make their getaway. One of the dead president’s aides later confided to a reporter that “they felt Johnson wanted to use Kennedy’s body for his own purposes.”³⁰“It was almost as if they were angry at Johnson,” journalist Charles Roberts later recalled. There was absolutely no “appreciation of how important continuity was.”³¹

Finally, LBJ was able to deplane. As he made his way to the microphones that had been set up for him, he conferred with several White House personnel, most notably National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, who reassured him that there were no major military movements around the world, and the assassination did not appear to be a prelude to an attack on the United States.³²“We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed,” he told the assembled and those listening on radio and television. “For me it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”³³

At 6:41P.M. Lyndon, Lady Bird, McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Undersecretary of State George Ball, staffers Reedy and Jenkins, and Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorenson boarded an army helicopter for the ride to the White House. LBJ spent most of the time conferring with the three cabinet officers; the other department heads were aboard a jet over the Pacific returning from a trip to Japan. As he had with O’Donnell and O’Brien aboard Air Force One, the president asked them not to resign, telling each that he needed him more than Kennedy ever would. All assured Johnson that they would serve at his pleasure.³⁴

The huge machine roared onto the White House lawn, blowing foam from the fountain over the group of officials, reporters, and photographers who waited near the swings and the seesaw that had been set up for Caroline Kennedy and her brother, John Jr. Johnson did not stop to address those who had gathered, but strode across the lawn.³⁵He paused briefly in the Oval Office, surveying the seat of power, and then moved on to the cabinet room. There, conferring with Bundy, Ball, and others, the new president decided on meetings of the cabinet and National Security Council for the next day. He then proceeded to his suite on the second floor of the Executive Office Building and immersed himself in telephone calls.

After conferring briefly with Bill Fulbright and Averell Harriman, LBJ received a stream of congressional leaders who, like mafiosi to a godfather, pledged him their fealty. Just prior to his meetings with the leadership, LBJ had taken time to compose brief notes to each of the two Kennedy children. “Dearest Caroline,” he wrote, “Your father’s death has been a great tragedy for the nation, as well as for you, and I wanted you to know how much my thoughts are with you at this time … He was a wise and devoted man. You can always be proud of what he did for his country.”³⁶Finally, the new president retired to The Elms, where his family and a handful of friends awaited him.

 

LADYBIRD ANDLIZCARPENTERhad arrived at the house earlier in the evening to find Lucy and Willie Day Taylor, who had picked Lucy up from school, waiting for them. The assassination meant that her father was now president, Lady Bird told her daughter. “Don’t tell me that,” she screamed. Lady Bird reassured her that though their lives would change, relationships would not; Lucy’s and Lynda’s would change the least. They called Lynda in Austin and Lady Bird asked her to fly up. “If there was something of a gulf between me and him [LBJ],” Lady Bird noted in her diary, “there never was anything of a gulf between Lynda Bird and him, and so I wanted her to be here.”⁶⁷Johnson and his entourage arrived. While he sipped an orange soda, he looked wistfully at a portrait of Sam Rayburn and said, “Mr. Speaker, I wish you were here tonight.”³⁸

The troubled souls gathered at The Elms ate a light supper at eleven o’clock, but Johnson still could not sleep. He insisted on watching televised reports of the day’s events, but then the pictures, especially those of JFK moving about Fort Worth and Dallas just prior to his murder, began to bother him. “Turn it off,” he told Horace Busby, his old friend and speechwriter. Then Busby and his wife, Mary, sat by LBJ and held his hand until he was calm enough to go to bed.

But he did not sleep. He had Cliff Carter, Bill Moyers, and Jack Valenti come into the bedroom to plan for the funeral, discuss staffing, and rough out a schedule. He asked Valenti to take two years off from his business to assist him in the Oval Office.³⁹Bill Moyers recalled, as he mounted the stairs to one of the guest bedrooms, that he could see shadowy figures on the lawn: “The Secret Service had on a heavy guard.”⁴⁰

Then, around 3A.M., Johnson summoned Busby, to talk long-range planning. When they began discussing an LBJ run for the presidency not only in 1964 but 1968, Lady Bird put in her earplugs, put on her eyeshades, and pulled the covers over her head.⁴¹Before he drifted off, Johnson recalled a conversation he had had withWashington Post publisher Phil Graham a year earlier. LBJ and Bobby were feuding, and communication had broken down entirely between the White House and the vice president. “No, just face it,” Graham had said to Johnson, “you’ve got to face it: you’re never going to be President.”⁴²

As he was dressing the next morning, LBJ summoned Busby again. “Buzz,” he said, “do you realize that when I came back to Washington tonight as President there were on my desk the same things that were on my desk when I came to Congress in 1937?” It would be his duty and pleasure, he said, to remove the roadblocks that had been preventing the enactment of federal aid to education, Medicare, and a comprehensive civil rights bill.⁴³“That whole [time],” Moyers recalled, “he seemed to have several chambers of his mind operating simultaneously. It was formidable, very formidable.”⁴⁴

Lyndon Johnson’s first days as president were dense with activity, apprehension, tragedy, and hope. The new president knew that everything he did would be subjected to intense public scrutiny. “I took the oath,” Johnson later said, a bit melodramatically, “I became President. But for millions of Americans I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper … The whole thing was almost unbearable.”⁴⁵

Unbearable or not, LBJ managed quite nicely. “Visiting with the new president in his office a few days ago,” journalist John Steele wrote a week after the assassination, “provided a striking contrast with the fidgety, irascible, short-tempered, vain man we sat with only a few weeks ago in his capitol hill vice presidential office … . His voice in conversation these days is low and moderate; his demeanor almost a studied calm. His deliberation over every step he is about to take is apparent.”⁴⁶

For a variety of reasons, LBJ was determined to ingratiate himself with the Kennedys, Jackie in particular. He was aware that until the 1964 election at least, he would be viewed as the caretaker of the dead president’s legacy, and he decided to embrace that role. He would mobilize the emotion and the tendency of Congress and the people to rally to a fallen martyr, to push the stalled New Frontier through the House and Senate. In international relations, he would hold fast to the commitments that he had inherited. And, in fact, a part of Johnson relished the role of caretaker, comforter of the afflicted, as well as guardian of the disadvantaged. That this strategy would enable him to push through Congress measures of social and economic justice that he had long dreamed of made the stratagem of dutiful heir even more appealing. The symbol of this approach would be his courtship of the bereaved widow.

During his first five weeks in office, Johnson called Jackie numerous times. Instinctively, awkwardly, he attempted to make what Hubert Humphrey referred to as “cowboy love” to her. A conversation the first week in December was typical: “Your picture was gorgeous. Now you had that chin up and that chest out and you looked so pretty marching in the front page of theNew York Daily News … well,” LBJ said, “I just came, sat in my desk and started signing a log of long things, and I decided I wanted to flirt with you a little bit … Darling, you know what I said to the Congress—I’d give anything in the world if I wasn’t here today … Tell Caroline and JohnJohn I’d like to be their daddy!”⁴⁷

Rather than being offended, Jackie played the coquette and seemed to enjoy it. She giggled at his intimacy. “ ‘She ran around with two Presidents,’ that’s what they’ll say about me,” the former first lady told Johnson, who quietly chortled. She advised LBJ to make an afternoon nap part of his daily routine and not to sleep alone in the White House, at least at first.⁴⁸

Nonetheless, Jackie would increasingly consider Johnson a graceless lout and a usurper. Robert had told her to put on her “widow’s weeds,” go down to the White House, and get all she could while the getting was good. The family wanted, for example, Cape Canaveral renamed Cape Kennedy. The widow found LBJ more than accommodating. Following this initial burst of intimacy, however, Jacqueline Kennedy ignored Lyndon and Lady Bird as well as the Johnson presidency.⁴⁹

Some of the transition issues were utterly predictable, but no less delicate for that. The first was when and how LBJ and his staff would occupy the Oval Office and its environs. Johnson was worried about the appearance of rushing the Kennedy family and the dead president’s staff, but McNamara, Bundy, and Ball emphasized the need to assure the world that there had not been and would not be a break in leadership.

Early on the morning of November 24, Bundy conferred with Robert Kennedy and Evelyn Lincoln, JFK’s personal secretary, who asked for more time. Bundy left a note for LBJ to this effect, but he never got it. When Johnson arrived, he indicated politely but firmly to Lincoln that he would expect his secretaries and staff to settle themselves in the West Wing later that day. Lincoln rushed to RFK in tears. Learning of her distress, LBJ told Lincoln and her assistants to take all the time they needed to collect their boss’s papers and belongings. But the damage had been done. Bobby recalled in a 1964 oral history that Johnson had been rude, preemptive, and totally insensitive during those first days.⁵⁰

Lyndon, with Lady Bird in tow, took time off from a steady stream of briefings and visitors to pay tribute to President Kennedy, whose body lay in state in the East Room of the White House. “Lyndon walked slowly past the President’s body,” Lady Bird noted in her diary. “The catafalque was in the center and on it the casket, draped with the American flag. At each corner there was a large candle and a very rigid military man, representing each of the four services.”⁵¹

From there, the president and first lady crossed Lafayette Square to attend a memorial service at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Harry McPherson, who was a vestryman, was in attendance and remembered that the rector, William Baxter, delivered a brief but powerful sermon on the triumph and tragedy of the American experiment. In that moment of crisis, the country, in all its diversity, had come together and felt with one heart, breathed with one breath, he declared. That sense of unity should be treasured, preserved, because it was the key to the nation’s future. “I remember Lyndon Johnson was weeping,” McPherson said. “It was overwhelming.”⁵²

Following the service, Johnson asked McPherson to walk with him to his car. As they emerged from the church, a Secret Service agent stomped on McPherson’s foot and elbowed him in the stomach. As he and another agent, presumably Rufus Youngblood, hustled Johnson to his waiting limousine, McPherson lay on the ground, gasping for air. He managed to get to his feet and return to the parish hall. Just then somebody rushed in and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, they’ve shot Oswald.”⁵³

It was true; Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, a shadowy figure with close ties to both the Dallas police force and the Mafia, had fatally shot Oswald in front of television cameras as he was being transported. He did it, Ruby said, to spare Jacqueline Kennedy and her children the excruciating experience of an assassination trial.

 

AT2:30IN THE AFTERNOON, LBJ convened his first cabinet meeting. McGeorge Bundy had presumed to prepare some remarks for him to deliver. “A number of them … are quite numb with personal grief,” he advised, “and in keeping with your own instinct of last night you will wish to avoid any suggestion of overassertiveness.” After opening the meeting with a prayer, Johnson paid tribute to his fallen predecessor and appealed to those present to help him and help the nation to realize a sense of continuity and then to implement the program that had meant so much to President Kennedy. “I want you all to stay on,” he concluded. “I need you.”⁵⁴

Claiming his role as senior official present, Adlai Stevenson, U.S. ambassador to the UN, rose to praise LBJ’s character and competence and to pledge the allegiance of all those present. Dean Rusk followed and gave a brief seconding statement. Toward the end of the meeting, Robert Kennedy entered. He would claim that he had not intended to come but that McGeorge Bundy had collared him in the Oval Office while he was looking after his brother’s effects. Most of the cabinet rose and rushed to the still obviously grief-stricken attorney general. Johnson did not rise, and Bobby never acknowledged the new president. The meeting broke up awkwardly, the room suddenly filled with tension.

Shortly thereafter, Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, a liberal and great friend of Jack if not Robert Kennedy, went in to see his new boss. He was going to have great problems with the family, Johnson observed. Jackie was all right, but Bobby and his group of loyalists were going out of their way to humiliate him. Witness the events at Andrews and the just concluded cabinet meeting. “There was bitterness in Lyndon’s voice on this one,” Freeman noted in his diary, “and he said, what can I do, I do not want to get into a fight with the family and the aura of Kennedy is important to all of us.”⁵⁵

Later, intimates of Johnson and some historians would argue that it had been a huge mistake to keep the Kennedy people on. At the time, however, a number of influential individuals, including former President Eisenhower and Clark Clifford, had urged LBJ to keep Kennedy’s cabinet in place. For the sake of continuity such a move was necessary, argued Clifford, who had been Truman’s secretary of defense. “I outlined the key elements of the transfer of power in 1945 from Roosevelt to Truman—the rapid departure of the FDR loyalists, the condescending attitude of some of the Roosevelt holdovers, the unfortunate decision to make James Byrnes secretary of state, and the Henry Wallace fiasco.”⁵⁶Then there was the already burgeoning Kennedy legend. “It was very clear that after the assassination, President Kennedy’s popularity grew all the time,” Clifford observed. “He was revered in a manner after his death that perhaps didn’t exist before his death. He had become a martyr president.”⁵⁷

Unlike a duly elected president, Johnson did not have the benefit of an interregnum during which to conduct a talent search. The justification that LBJ gave for retaining Kennedy’s entourage was the obvious one: “I needed that White House staff. Without them I would have lost my link to John Kennedy, and without that I would have had absolutely no chance of gaining the support of the media or the Easterners or the intellectuals. And without that support I would have had absolutely no chance of governing the country.”⁵⁸

Kennedy’s cabinet was distinguished, but not uniformly so. Not surprisingly, the stars were to be found mostly in the field of foreign affairs. The most impressive was Robert McNamara, the General Motors executive and sometime Republican whom Kennedy had convinced to take over the Department of Defense. A graduate of Berkeley and Harvard Business School, McNamara was the epitome of cool rationality. Repelled by the very thought of using nuclear weapons, he had presided over an immense strategic arms buildup so that nuclear war would never appear to be feasible.

If McNamara had an equal in the cabinet, it was McGeorge Bundy. The national security adviser was the product of an environment very similar to that in which the Kennedys has been raised: intellectual stimulation, physical competition, and so much confidence in family and status that snobbishness seemed absurd. Bundy was a Republican of the Theodore Roosevelt?Henry Stimson type. In fact, while a junior fellow at Harvard, Mac had helped Stimson, an old Bull Mooser and FDR’s secretary of war, write his memoirs,On Active Service in Peace and War.

The third member of the Kennedy foreign policy triumvirate was Dean Rusk, a self-made intellectual with a deep, spiritually based sense of right and wrong. The son of a Scots Irish Presbyterian minister, Rusk was raised in the red clay hills of Georgia. One of twelve children, he worked his way through Davidson College and then attended Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He served in the China-India-Burma theater during World War II and then worked for George Marshall, whom he worshipped, in the State Department. During the Eisenhower years, Rusk taught political science for a time and then went on to become head of the Ford Foundation. An intensely private, dignified, yet unpretentious man, Rusk abhorred public displays of emotion and tended to avoid controversy. Whereas McNamara and Bundy were bureaucratic aggressors, Rusk was a survivor.⁵⁹

Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon bridged the gap between international and domestic affairs. Like Kennedy, Dillon was a strong supporter of measures to facilitate the growth of international trade, but he was also determined to hold down wages, prices, and inflation. A member of the Wall Street banking firm of Dillon Reade, the secretary of the treasury, was a card-carrying Republican. To succeed Arthur Goldberg as secretary of labor, JFK had picked Northwestern University Law School professor Willard Wirtz. A veteran of the War Labor Board and National Wage Stabilization Board, Wirtz was an expert at solving labor-management problems. Heading up Interior was Stewart Udall. The son of a prominent Arizona family, Udall, a Mormon, had graduated from the University of Arizona School of Law, served in the air force during World War II, and been elected to Congress as a Democrat from one of the state’s two congressional districts. He quickly associated himself with the liberal wing of the party, and as a member of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs became an expert on land, water, and conservation matters. Udall transformed the Interior Department into a national force for conservation in all its forms: preservation of natural resources, creation and protection of wilderness areas, construction of recreational facilities, and pollution control.⁶⁰

Secretary of agriculture was former Minnesota governor Orville Freeman. A sometime protégé of Hubert Humphrey, Freeman was bright, liberal, and socially adept. He was able to champion the cause of the small farmer and still maintain a relationship with agribusiness and its mouthpiece, the Farm Bureau. To head Commerce, Kennedy had selected Luther Hodges, former governor of North Carolina. During the 1950s, Hodges had been a champion of the New South; he posed as a racial moderate but had provided more drag than sail to the civil rights movement within his state.

The Kennedy team entertained varying perceptions of the new president. At the instant of John F. Kennedy’s death, Rusk, Freeman, Hodges, Wirtz, Udall, and Dillon were on a plane high above the Pacific returning from a trip to Japan. The party learned, to their horror, first that the president and John Connally had been shot, and then that JFK had died. Rusk came over the intercom: “Ladies and gentlemen this is the Secretary of State. I deeply regret to inform you that the president is dead. May God help our country.” Cabinet members, wives, and staff sat in stunned silence. There were tears, memories—all agreed that the nation and the world had suffered a great loss, that had he lived, JFK would have been successful in combating poverty at home and tyranny abroad.⁶¹

Then the topic turned to LBJ. Somewhat surprisingly, his strongest supporter was Stewart Udall. Like Clinton Anderson, Udall was a western liberal who considered Johnson a member of the club. Freeman and his wife, Jane, recalled their conversation with JFK when, at Los Angeles, he had decided on Johnson as vice president; that it was better to have the son of a bitch in that innocuous office than as majority leader. But both paid tribute to Lyndon and Lady Bird’s fundamental humanitarianism. “I do like him,” Freeman said, but noted that he had often said of LBJ, “I wouldn’t like to work too closely to him because he’d suck your guts out.” Wirtz, who was close to Walter Reuther and Soapy Williams, the liberal governor of Michigan, had opposed LBJ’s selection as Kennedy’s running mate, but admitted he really did not know him. Dillon was dismissive, observing that Johnson was bound to be ignorant of balance-of-payment matters and other issues of international finance. Hodges, who spent most of his time with southern businessmen, observed with some feeling that the people of the South regarded Johnson as a traitor for his recent strong stand in behalf of civil rights.⁶²

By far and away the most difficult of the cabinet members Johnson had inherited was his attorney general, Robert Francis Kennedy. Bobby was the third of nine children, behind Joseph Jr. and John Fitzgerald. Small, socially and physically clumsy, he lived for the approval of his brothers, who generally ignored him. Jack, funny, ironic, handsome, and easygoing, spent much of his time fighting with Joe, a muscular, overbearing bully of a boy. To please his mother, Bobby became a devout Catholic. To please his father, that ruthless, generally absent patriarch, he tried football at Milton Academy.⁶³At Harvard, the younger brother continued to concentrate on football, at 155 pounds virtually willing himself onto the varsity. At age twenty-one, Bobby struck even his brothers and sisters as humorless and moralistic. After graduation, he married Ethel, and the couple moved to Washington to be near Jack. Bobby made the rounds as a staffer first for Joe McCarthy’s Government Operations Subcommittee and then for Arkansas Senator John McClellan’s Senate Committee on Labor Racketeering. Joe Sr. was adamantly opposed to the latter undertaking, thinking that it was both dangerous and impolitic.⁶⁴

After 1948, Robert gave himself, his affection, his attention, his ambition, and his formidable will to Jack and his career. It was his role in the family, and it gained him, finally, the acceptance and approval of his father. The younger brother melded with the elder. Both Bobby and Jack fell in love with and had affairs with Marilyn Monroe.

The assassination did more than take away a beloved brother; it destroyed Bobby’s purpose in life. “You couldn’t get to him,” Ethel Kennedy recalled. “His whole life was wrapped up in the President … He was just another part of his brother—sort of an added arm.” He wandered around in a daze, turning the Justice Department over to Undersecretary Nicholas B. Katzenbach. “It was as though someone had turned off his switch,” said college chum David Hackett.⁶⁵

Bobby began to display all the signs of clinical depression: sleeplessness, moodiness, detachment, despair, and melancholy. He would take long nighttime rides in freezing weather in his convertible with the top down. What made his slough of despond particularly deep was that he feared that he might have been indirectly responsible for his brother’s death. As counsel to the McClellan Committee, he had pursued the Mafia with relentless energy and had continued that crusade as attorney general. Could the mob have hired Oswald? And then there was the possibility that Castro had had Jack killed in retaliation for Operation Mongoose.⁶⁶Lyndon Johnson believed that that was in fact the case. He commented to a staffer that the CIA and FBI, under Bobby Kennedy’s overall supervision, was running a kind of “Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”

Several days after the president’s death, Johnson related a story to Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary and a Kennedy family friend. It got back to Bobby, who was convinced that the story was intended for him. As he later told it, Johnson had said to Salinger, “When I was young in Texas, I used to know a crosseyed boy. His eyes were crossed, and so was his character … That was God’s retribution for people who were bad and so you should be careful of crosseyed people because God put his mark on them … Sometimes I think that, when you remember the assassination of Trujillo [Dominican dictator Rafael, killed in 1961 supposedly with CIA complicity] and the assassination of Diem, what happened to Kennedy may have been divine retribution.”³⁷

The presidency would have been infinitely more comfortable with Robert Kennedy out of the administration, but LBJ did not believe it was in his or the nation’s interest for the dead president’s brother to leave. On December 4, LBJ asked Clark Clifford to meet with Bobby and persuade him to stay on. “We really had it out,” Clifford reported, “and we covered it all. I think there are some arguments that he found unanswerable and I’m just authorized to say now that he’s going to stay.”⁶⁸

Over the next few months, Johnson worked hard at a reconciliation. Through journalist Jimmy Weschler and labor leader Alex Rose, Johnson sent a message to the attorney general in early 1964: “President Johnson loves you, wants to be friends with you … The door at the White House is always open to you, and … there is nothing more important to him than to have a close working partnership with you.”⁶⁹“I know how hard the past six weeks have been for you,” Lyndon wrote Bobby on New Year’s Day 1964. “Under the most trying circumstances your first thoughts have been for your country. Your brother would have been very proud of the strength you have shown. As the new year begins, I resolve to do my best to fulfill his trust in me. I will need your counsel and support.”⁷⁰RFK would have none of it. What finally righted Bobby emotionally was his sense of duty to the Kennedy clan and to the legacy of his dead brother. And his hatred of his brother’s usurper.

 

LBJMAY HAVE KEPT Kennedy’s cabinet on, but he had his own brain trust, a group he had assembled over the years, a collection of men whose pragmatic liberalism, tinged with the theological realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, he had both evoked and absorbed. There was George Reedy, who would become LBJ’s first press secretary. Since 1952 Reedy had been Johnson’s policy intellectual. He was the only member of the inner circle who was not a Texan. The son of aChicago Tribune crime reporter, Reedy was blessed with a phenomenal mind. As a student at the University of Chicago, he had consumed books by day and lived the Bohemian life by night, drinking, arguing, and fornicating. Following a stint in the air force as an intelligence officer during World War II, Reedy went to work for UPI covering Capitol Hill, where LBJ discovered him. No one had done more to shape and reflect LBJ’s pragmatic liberalism than Reedy, though Johnson at times found the portly, shaggy-haired Reedy too ponderous, too philosophical. “You ask him what time it is,” LBJ complained, “and he discusses the significance of time before he tells you it’s eleven-thirty.”⁷¹

More important than Reedy, especially during these early months, was Horace Busby. Buzz had grown up in Fort Worth, the son of a Church of Christ minister. As a student at the University of Texas, Busby had fallen in love with the written word, and he, like Reedy, decided to focus on journalism. During his editorship of theDaily Texan , Busby’s commitment to reform, to the social gospel, to freedom of inquiry and expression, to public figures committed to the welfare of the common man rather than special interests, became evident. Running as a New Dealer against Coke Stevenson in 1948, LBJ had hired the twenty-five-year-old as his speechwriter. Thus began an on-again, off-again relationship that would last the rest of their lives.

Like LBJ, Busby was not antibusiness; indeed, he established and directed the American International Business Research Corporation. But he believed that government existed mainly to be an agent of social justice. He had a sharp political eye, especially when it came to LBJ’s future. But he was a sensitive, dignified man, and unlike Reedy, Jenkins, and Valenti, would not put up with Johnson’s tongue-lashings. Moreover, Johnson’s occasional coarseness repelled him.

LBJ needed men like Reedy and Busby; he exploited them, and frequently did not give them the respect they felt they were due. “Buzz is a very sound, solid, able, good boy,” Johnson once remarked. The condescension was infuriating. As a result, he moved in and out of the Johnson orbit, but he was a crucial figure during the early days of the presidency. The author of Johnson’s powerful 1963 civil rights address at Gettysburg, Busby focused on domestic affairs and he wrote most of LBJ’s Rose Garden speeches.⁷²

The individual who held things together throughout the transition was Walter Jenkins, LBJ’s friend, confidante, and loyal factotum. Jenkins was far from the simple, one-dimensional man that he seemed. Born on a hardscrabble farm near Wichita Falls, Texas, he managed two years at the University of Texas before he ran out of money and went to work for Lyndon. From 1952 to 1964, Jenkins left the extended Johnson family only twice, to serve in the army in North Africa and Italy during World War II and to run unsuccessfully for Congress in 1951.

Jenkins knew everything there was to know about Lyndon Johnson and his family—their dalliances, their business dealings, their friends, and their increasingly complicated social and political network. Jenkins was a quietly intense, mild-mannered man, but would harden instantly when anyone threatened his boss’s reputation or interests. Like Bobby Baker, he was a great gatherer of information, and like George Reedy, he was a liberal, but that is where the resemblance ended. Jenkins was not ideological, was not well-read, and did not have a philosophical bent of mind. He was, as Eric Goldman, the Princeton historian who served for a time as White House intellectual, put it, “an enormously decent human being … who sought fair play and kindliness in the dealings between men.”⁷³A devout Catholic, he believed that to whom much was given, much was expected. It was incumbent upon America, a land blessed with genius and abundance, to help those who could not help themselves and to provide for average hardworking people a degree of physical comfort and security and the means to provide food, shelter, health care, and education to their children. Moreover, for a “provincial,” Jenkins was remarkably broad-minded, an important characteristic for the person who would determine who should have access to the president of the United States. Jenkins made sure that LBJ was exposed to persons and points of view that ranged across the political spectrum, even those Jenkins found personally abhorrent.⁷⁴

Observers expected Jenkins, Reedy, and Busby to assume the prominent roles they did in Johnson’s White House, but Jack Valenti was a total surprise. Valenti’s father was the son of a Sicilian immigrant who had earned $150 a month as a court clerk in Houston. Jack, a short, handsome, energetic youth with well-developed social skills, worked his way through the University of Houston as an office boy for Humble Oil. During World War II he became a decorated bomber pilot who flew fifty-one missions over Germany and Italy. Following V-E Day, Valenti realized a life-long dream by graduating from Harvard Business School. Back in Houston, he and a friend established a successful public relations business. Like Busby, Valenti became a devoted wordsmith. He was an avid reader, but his education was uneven. He liked popular nonfiction and the nineteenth-century English historian Thomas Macaulay. He was also given to perusing anthologies of famous quotes. Valenti caught Johnson’s eye when he penned a worshipful portrait of him for theHouston Post. He worked in the 1960 election for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket and advanced the 1963 Texas trip. After the assassination, LBJ asked the sharp-dressing, ever accommodating Valenti to accompany him on Air Force One to Washington. He subsequently lived at The Elms and then at the White House until he could move his wife, the former Mary Margaret Wiley of LBJ’s vice presidential staff, to Washington.

Until he departed the White House in April 1966, Valenti was LBJ’s chief of staff and constant companion. He arrived at the White House at 6:30 every morning, and the two would begin discussing the day’s schedule. Unless dispatched as ambassador to some discontented legislator, or as emissary to an interest group that was being courted by the White House, Valenti was at the president’s elbow, frequently staying up with him until the wee hours of the morning as LBJ unwound. Intelligent, sensitive, and diplomatic, he proved skilled at assuaging hurt feelings and communicating the president’s wishes. He was an uncritical admirer of LBJ. That and his belief in the efficacy of public relations sometimes worked to the detriment of his boss. During the early years, LBJ seemed an overly exposed headline seeker rather than a thoughtful statesman.⁷⁵

Then there was Billy Don Moyers, the man who more than any other, until his departure in 1966, was perceived as the lieutenant who could truly speak for the president. He had grown up during the Depression in Hugo, Oklahoma. In search of a better life, the elder Moyers had moved the family to Marshall, an oil and gas town in East Texas that was heavily Baptist, featuring no fewer than four faith-based colleges. Bill was a star student at Marshall High and then earned degrees from North Texas State and UT. During the years that followed, he worked part time for the Johnsons at KTBC and attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. At Southwestern he studied under the liberal theologian Thomas Buford Matson, an outspoken advocate of racial justice and a champion of labor unions. He and young Moyers talked politics as much as they did theology. After working in the 1960 presidential campaign for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket, Moyers was selected to assist Sargent Shriver in directing the Peace Corps. He was the youngest person ever to be confirmed by the Senate.

Moyers proved to be the perfect New Frontiersman: a hardnosed idealist. He would point with pride to the Jeffersonian quotation hanging on his office wall: “The care of human life and happiness … is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”⁷⁶At the same time, he appreciated power and aspired to it. He was an instinctive bureaucratic politician. Johnson named him appointments secretary, but he quickly became much more than that. Exuding confidence and the promise of influence, Moyers was able to attract other young men to him, and by 1965 could command a network of supporters that spread throughout the top echelons of the federal government. The constituency Moyers selected to represent was American youth. He addressed conventions of young people as if they were labor gatherings, posing to them and to the outside world as the representative of the 1960s generation.

Moyers proved to be loyal, but he could also be diplomatically critical. He was an independent voice in White House counsels. There was reputedly a father-son relationship between LBJ and Moyers, but that was an overstatement. Johnson trusted Moyers to carry out his instructions and, increasingly, to make decisions, but the two held each other at emotional arm’s length. Moyers had received a Rotary scholarship and studied at Edinburgh University in Scotland. He fell in love with Europe, with literature, with social sophistication. The crew from Camelot fascinated him, and he managed to worm his way into its good graces. LBJ knew this and counted on Moyers to act as liaison with the Kennedys and the Georgetown cocktail circuit, but although Johnson found this role useful, he increasingly resented his aide for playing it.

To the extent that LBJ accepted Moyers as representative of America’s youth, he erred. He was representative of the youth Johnson wanted America to produce: educated and idealistic but conventional and committed to existing institutions and processes. When the New Left and counterculture burst on the scene, Moyers was caught as unawares as LBJ.⁷⁷

 

THE DAY FOLLOWINGJohn F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, the new president told an aide, “I am a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a matter of fact … Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.”⁷⁸

In response to a genuine commitment to help the poor of all colors and ages, as well as with an eye to the 1964 election, Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty” and embraced a program that was rooted in the New Frontier but that vastly transcended it. Instead of sleeping, Johnson spent most of his first few nights as president sitting up with Valenti, Reedy, Busby, McPherson, Moyers, and others filling yellow legal tablets with legislative proposals that would make a kindergarten through college education available to all; eradicate poverty in the nation’s urban and rural slums; cleanse the environment of pollutants; enhance government benefits for the aged; guarantee equality under the law and equal opportunity for all Americans regardless of race, color, or national origin; change the nation’s discriminatory immigration policy; provide federal support to enhance the arts and humanities; and launch a hundred other initiatives.⁷⁹

On November 25, the day of JFK’s funeral, Johnson delivered off-the-record remarks to the governors of several states: “We have to do something to stop … hate and the way we have to do it is to meet the problem of injustice that exists in this land, meet the problem of inequality that exists in this land, meet the problem of poverty that exists in this land, and the unemployment that exists in this land ...I am going to be at it from daylight to midnight, and with your help and God’s help we are going to make not only ourselves proud that we are Americans but we are going to make the rest of the world proud that there is an America in it.”⁸⁰

Anyone familiar with the mind-set and track record of those LBJ gathered around him during the closing days of 1963 could have predicted the administration’s ensuing commitment to social justice, but he and his closest associates were largely a mystery, and LBJ knew it. He wanted there to be no mistake, in Congress’s or the public’s mind, that he intended to take up not where JFK but where FDR had left off.

A week after the assassination, LBJ met with Jim Rowe and Tommy Corcoran. He and Rowe had barely spoken since 1960, when the New Dealer had taken him to task for his rudeness and irascibility. “I’ve been thinking back over 1960 and thinking of where I am now,” LBJ said, “and I need friends. I need help and you have been a friend to me and one of the wisest advisors I know. And I let you and I drift apart and it was my fault and I was foolish and short-sighted and I’m sorry and I hope that you’ll forgive me and be my friend and supporter.” With tears in his eyes, Rowe said, “My God, Mr. President, it wasn’t your fault.” Johnson said, “Yes, it was. Don’t argue with me. Just be content to be the first man to whom the 36th President of the United States has offered his apologies.”⁸¹

Abe Fortas and Clark Clifford, New Dealer and Fair Dealer, respectively, were a part of LBJ’s inner circle from the very beginning.⁸²Both were prominent attorneys and Washington insiders, but there was no comparison between LBJ’s relationship with the two. Clifford was loyal to no one but himself. He would keep his star hitched to the LBJ wagon only so long as it suited his interests to do so. But for Johnson, he was a valuable tie to the Truman crowd. Fortas was Johnson’s lawyer, but also a person whom Johnson trusted to advise him on any and every issue.

The son of middle-class Jewish parents from Memphis, Abe had attended Yale Law School, where he found himself in the midst of the great debate between “conceptualists,” whose home base was Harvard, and “functionalists,” increasingly centered at Yale. The famous dialogue among legal scholars grew out of the Progressive Era and the dissent of jurists such as Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes. They had rebelled against the notion that the practice of constitutional law lay in discovering and abiding by a set of unchanging principles that had sprung from the minds of the Founding Fathers and were embedded in the Constitution. Brandeis, one of the fathers of functionalism, argued that America had changed dramatically since the eighteenth century and that practitioners of jurisprudence ought to factor in current social and economic conditions in handing down their decisions. The law was something organic and changing, to be interpreted always with an eye to the common good.

As editor of theYale Law Journal , Fortas had embraced functionalism, and after graduation had moved on to take advantage of the opportunities New Deal Washington offered young Catholic and Jewish lawyers. He spent his New Deal years justifying government regulation of big business and promoting the cause of economic justice. He was the ultimate pragmatist, who agreed with the New Deal official who told his aides, “I want to assure you that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”⁸³

Following the war, Fortas made a fortune representing the very corporations that he had once attacked.⁸⁴In short, Abe Fortas was the perfect counselor to a pragmatic liberal like Lyndon Johnson.

 

ALL OFJOHNSON’S ADVISERSagreed that it was imperative that the new president address Congress and, through it, the nation and the world. For two days Johnson met with individuals in and out of government to gather ideas and to gauge the impact that his words would have on the immediate future.

LBJ ordered Valenti, Busby, and Theodore Sorenson (Kennedy’s intense house intellectual, speechwriter, and political adviser) to work on the speech drafts. Meanwhile, he consulted with John Kenneth Galbraith, who had already been lobbying Democratic liberals to forget the past and work to ensure Johnson’s election in 1964. Galbraith emphasized civil rights and the need not to become overextended in Indochina. Later in the day, Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, lobbied for a massive $11 million tax cut that the Kennedy administration had been considering.⁸⁵

On Tuesday evening, before the Wednesday speech, Johnson met at The Elms for more than six hours with Abe Fortas, Hubert Humphrey, and others to go over drafts of the speech. Fortas remembered that one of those present urged Johnson not to give civil rights a high priority. Passage of the omnibus bill then before Congress looked pretty hopeless; the issue was as divisive as any faced by the nation; it would be suicide to wage and lose such a battle. LBJ looked at the man and then said, “Well, what the hell is the presidency for?”⁸⁶

As Johnson stepped to the podium, Congress, the nation, and the world held its breath. Who was this man who was now president of the most powerful nation in history? Would he be a frontman for southern segregationists, as many northern liberals believed, or a turncoat integrationist, as many white southerners suspected? Where would he stand on foreign policy? Many at home and abroad feared that he would turn out to be a simple Texas jingo, crying “Remember the Alamo,” willing to bring the world to the brink of nuclear destruction at the drop of a hat. Most important, was LBJ a simple political fixer, or was he a man of principle, with a value system that would advance the interests of peace, freedom, and social justice?

LBJ began quietly, so quietly that senators and congressmen in the back rows had to strain to hear. To no one’s surprise, he paid tribute to John F. Kennedy—“The greatest leader of our time”—and emphasized continuity. JFK had had a dream “of conquering the vastness of space … the dream of a Peace Corps in less developed nations … the dream of education for all of our children—the dream of jobs for all who seek them and need them—the dream of care for our elderly—the dream of an all out attack on mental illness.” President Kennedy had called to the nation, “Let us begin … I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue.”⁸⁷

After each dream was enunciated, Congress, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, foreign dignitaries, and the packed gallery broke into thunderous applause. Sensing that Johnson was about to address the issue of civil rights, southerners sat forward in their seats. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”⁸⁸

But civil rights was not only John F. Kennedy’s cause, it was Lyndon Johnson’s as well. “I urge you again, as I did in 1957 and again in 1960, to enact a civil rights law so that we can move forward to eliminate from this Nation every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race or color.” Again applause, although Russell and his followers were conspicuous by their silence. There was in their posture a mood more of resignation than defiance, however. Among black Americans there rose a collective sigh of relief. “You could hear 20,000 people unpacking their bags,” comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory later joked.⁸⁹

As to foreign affairs, there was to be peace through strength. “The Nation will keep its commitments from South VietNam to Berlin,” Johnson said, making a most significant linkage. And finally to the nation and the world’s most immediate concern: “Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law, and those who pour venom into our Nation’s bloodstream.” The speech ended with the first stanza of “America the Beautiful”—maudlin for most, under most circumstances, but somehow fitting coming from Lyndon Johnson’s lips on November 27, 1963.⁹⁰

The speech to the joint session of Congress was meant to evoke memories of JFK, but it was pure LBJ military preparedness, peace through strength, holding the line against international communism, and social justice at home. The phrase to which Johnson’s auditors should have paid most attention was “We will carry on the fight against poverty and misery, and disease and ignorance, in other lands and in our own.”⁹¹

Johnson’s ascendancy to the presidency made demands and presented opportunities that enabled him to transcend mere pragmatism. It was at this point that LBJ’s value system and larger ambition came into play. “I do not accept Government as just the ‘art of the practicable.’ It is the business of deciding what is right and then finding the way to do it,” he would declare in 1964.⁹²

And there was a value system. Consider Johnson’s self-acknowledged mentors: Huey Long; Maury Maverick; Charles Marsh, the Texas newspaper publisher who wrote speeches for Henry Wallace in 1948; Samuel Ealy Johnson, Lyndon’s ardently populist father, and Rebekah Baines Johnson, his mother and a Christian social activist. “I am not a theologian. I am not a philosopher. I am just a public servant that is doing the very best I know how,” LBJ would say to a group of southern Baptists in 1964.

But in more than three decades of public life, I have seen firsthand how basic spiritual beliefs and deeds can shatter barriers of politics and bigotry. I have seen those barriers crumble in the presence of faith and hope, and from this experience I have drawn new hope that the seemingly insurmountable moral issues that we face at home and abroad today can be resolved by men of strong faith and men of brave deeds … Great questions of war and peace, of civil rights and education, the elimination of poverty at home and abroad, are the concern of millions who see no difference in this regard between their beliefs and their social obligations. This principle, the identity of private morality and public conscience, is as deeply rooted in our tradition and Constitution as the principle of legal separation. Washington in his first inaugural said that the roots of national policy lay in private morality.⁹³

“You are using the ‘moral imperatives of the times,’” John Roche, president of the Americans for Democratic Action, would write LBJ admiringly later that same year, “on the consciousness of the American people.”⁹⁴

 

BEFORE HE COULD GET ONwith the job of improving the lot of humanity and containing communism, the new president had to lay to rest some burning issues left over from the assassination: Who had in fact killed John F. Kennedy? Was his death the product of a right-wing conspiracy, or an international plot hatched by the KGB, or perhaps Castro’s intelligence service? If, God forbid, the communists had killed Kennedy, what should be America’s response? That question would have to be thoroughly explored before the details of the plot were revealed.

To further complicate matters, there were those in the United States who wanted the communists to be found responsible, and even if they were not, to make it appear so in order to provoke a confrontation. Moreover, who should investigate and who should decide these issues? The FBI, which hungered for control, was suspect in the minds of many. The homicide had been committed in Texas, and Attorney General Waggoner Carr would claim jurisdiction. For many Americans, however, that would smack of trusting the investigation to a culture and political system that had been responsible for the deed itself. But if the inquiry into Kennedy’s death were removed from the hands of Texas authorities, the Lone Star State, along with other former members of the Confederacy, would scream states’ rights.

Contributing to the stress of the situation was Johnson’s understandable fears for his own safety. “The President, after the Kennedy assassination, was very fearful of his own life,” said Cartha “Deke” DeLoach of the FBI. “He was a man of courage, but also he didn’t want to take any chances.” Though he knew that he risked violating jurisdictional lines, LBJ had the FBI put an armed agent aboard Air Force One on almost every trip.⁹⁵“There were times [during the 1964 presidential campaign] when he did not want to step off the plane in front of that crowd. It took a lot of guts. And once he did, he was exuberant; he felt liberated.” Following one plunge into a Denver throng, Johnson, safely back aboard the plane, exclaimed, “No one shot at me.”⁹⁶

 

ON THE MORNING OFNOVEMBER23, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had called Johnson to report on what the Bureau knew of the assassination. By that time, Oswald had been taken into custody, and his rifle and three spent shells had been recovered. It was also known that Oswald or a person fitting his description had visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City the previous September.⁹⁷

The Soviets went out of their way to dissociate themselves from Oswald and the assassination. Horace Busby recalled that shortly after the return flight from Dallas, the State Department delivered a thick folder from the Russian Embassy. It was a day-by-day, hour-by-hour log of Oswald’s movements. According to Busby, LBJ grinned and said, That’s the Russian ‘me no Alamo.’ The soldiers in Santa Anna’s army when they were captured at San Jacinto would raise the hands and say, ‘me no Alamo.’”⁹⁸

LBJ’s initial reaction was to leave the investigation to Texas Attorney General Carr, who would convene a board of inquiry and rely on evidence collected by the FBI. Immediately, however, he came under pressure from a variety of sources to impanel a blue ribbon national commission to investigate. On November 26, theWashington Post ran an editorial to this effect. Figures from Yale Law School Dean Eugene Rostow to columnist Joe Alsop lobbied the White House. Johnson continued to resist. “We don’t want to be in the position of saying that we have come into a state, other than the FBI [and] told them that their integrity is no good and that we’re going to have some carpetbag trials,” he told Alsop. Showing the stress he was under, Johnson deluged Alsop with a flood of rhetoric, his voice shrill, verging at times on hysteria.⁹⁹

Within hours, however, Johnson began to come around to the idea of a national commission. He received word that the assistant district attorney in Dallas intended to file a complaint against Oswald, charging that he had murdered Kennedy as part of an international communist conspiracy.¹⁰⁰Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, a rabid anticommunist, was lobbying the congressional leadership to allow him to conduct his own investigation.¹⁰¹At the same time, Johnson received information from the CIA, FBI, and USIA that the Soviet military had gone on full alert. “According to our source,” read the FBI report, “officials of the Communist party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultra right’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup.’ They seemed convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man, but that it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part. They felt that those elements interested in utilizing the assassination and playing on anticommunist sentiment in the United States would then utilize this act to stop negotiations with the Soviet Union, attack Cuba and thereafter spread the war … Our source added that … it was indicated that ‘now’ the KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President.”¹⁰²

This intelligence came at the very time Hoover was breaking the news to Johnson that Oswald was tied in with the Cuban Fair Play Committee, “which is pro-Castro, and dominated by Communism and financed, to some extent, by the Castro government.”¹⁰³It seemed as if the anticommunists and communists were determined to have a war out of the assassination. “Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off,” Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach told Moyers, “and we should have some basis for rebutting the thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists … We can scarcely let the world see us totally in the image of the Dallas police when our President is murdered.”¹⁰⁴

LBJ agreed. “Some fellow will be testifying … comin’ up from Dallas,” he told Speaker John McCormack. “[He will say] I think Khrushchev planned this whole thing and he got our President assassinated … You can see what that’ll lead us to right quick.”¹⁰⁵

On November 29, LBJ appointed a bipartisan panel headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate the circumstances surrounding President Kennedy’s death. It included Democratic Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, Democratic Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana, Republican Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, and former U.S. High Commissioner of Germany John J. McCloy. Neither Warren nor Russell wanted to serve, the former because he did not think that such a role was appropriate for the chief justice, and the latter because he would have to serve with the author ofBrown v. Board of Education. That Johnson was able to get these two men together was a testament to his persuasive power and relentless will. Russell required several conversations. “You’ve never turned your country down,” he yelled at Russell. “This is not me … this is your country … and don’t tell me what you can do and what you can’t … because I can’t arrest you and I’m not going to put the FBI on you but you’re goddamned sure going to serve.” Russell protested again, but in the end he caved in: “If it is for the good [of the] country, you know damned well I’ll do it … and I’ll do it for you, for that matter … I can serve with a Communist … and I can serve with a Negro … I can serve with a Chinaman.”¹⁰⁶

For the next ten months, the Warren Commission dug, sifted, and deliberated. “The White House never gave us any instruction,” Warren later said, “never even looked at our work until I took it to the president. The president never once in any way, shape or form, made any suggestions; no limitations of any kind were put on us.”¹⁰⁷

In the end, the Warren Commission reported findings that LBJ and virtually everyone else with the national interest at heart hoped it would: President Kennedy had been killed by shots fired from a single gun at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, who was acting entirely alone. His murderer, Jack Rubenstein (Ruby), also acted alone, responding to motives that were entirely personal. The president “rambled about somewhat as to who may have caused it,” Deke DeLoach later observed. “ ‘Could it have been the CIA?’ And I said, ‘No, sir.’ And he didn’t think so himself, he was just rambling in his conversation. ‘Could it have been Castro? Could it have been the Soviet Union?’ And I told him no, that the investigation had been very thorough … that there was no conspiracy involved and that Lee Harvey Oswald—and Oswald alone did it … He never really felt that the CIA did it; he never felt that anything was wrong with the FBI report, but he just wanted to make sure there was further confirming evidence and that’s why he established the Warren Commission.”¹⁰⁸

It was time to move on.