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Lyndon would, in the words of another member of the gang, “talk big” to the older men. “He had big ideas.… He wanted to do something big with his life.” And he was quite specific about what he wanted to do: “I’m going to be President of the United States one day,” he predicted.
unlike others—the many, many others—in Washington who wanted the same thing he did, who had set their sights on the same goal, Lyndon Baines Johnson, born August 27, 1908, had mapped out a path to that goal, and he refused to be diverted from it.
“One so often thinks of Mr. Johnson as being a decisive man,” George Reedy was to say. “On most issues he is. On this one he was not.… That was a confused period, extremely confused, in which I believe he was a man badly torn.”
“Pyrrhic victories were not Lyndon Johnson’s cup of tea.… He saw no value in glorious defeats.”
They felt those roots lay in the little house—a shanty, really, a typical Texas Hill Country “dog run”: two box-like rooms, each about twelve feet square, on either side of a breezeway, two smaller “shed rooms” and a kitchen, all connected by a sagging roof—where Lyndon Johnson had lived from the age of eleven until just after his fourteenth birthday, for it was there that his father had failed.
In September, 1922, when Lyndon was fourteen, Sam had to sell the ranch for whatever he could get—which wasn’t nearly enough to cover his debts.
Sam Johnson became, in a remarkably short time, a figure of ridicule, as if Johnson City had been eager to turn against a man whose views—on Darwin, on Prohibition—violated deeply held beliefs.
A remark made by the Johnson City druggist soon gained wide circulation: “Sam Johnson,” the druggist said, “is too smart to work, and not smart enough to make a living without working.”
One of Lyndon’s classmates at Johnson City High School, Truman Fawcett, was sitting on his uncle’s porch one day when Lyndon walked by. “He’ll never amount to anything,” the uncle said, loud enough for Lyndon to hear. “Too much like Sam.” The Johnsons were, for the rest of Lyndon’s boyhood, the laughingstocks of Johnson City.
It was at this time, too—the time during which his father was failing on the ranch—that Lyndon began making the prediction; it was at the school he attended when he was thirteen, the tiny school in the little village of Albert, four miles away, that he first began making it: a classmate, Anna Itz, remembers that during a recess, when a group of children were sitting under a hackberry tree near the school, “All of a sudden, Lyndon looked up at the blue sky and said, ‘Someday, I’m going to be President of the United States.’
Sam Rayburn called him “a good boy” but “one of the laziest men I ever talked to.”
The man Lyndon Johnson was running against—this man he didn’t take seriously—not only wanted the same thing he did, but was a man just as determined to get it as he was.
Lyndon Johnson might still be clinging to the image of a frail, ineffectual Jack Kennedy, but, month by month, as Kennedy crisscrossed the country in 1957 and 1958, speech following speech, that picture was changing:
Baker had indeed closed the office, the furniture and telephones had been removed, but someone had forgotten that large signs—one for the K Street side of the Ambassador, one for the Fourteenth Street side, each proclaiming in huge letters, NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS—LYNDON B. JOHNSON FOR PRESIDENT CITIZENS COMMITTEE, had been ordered.
“Humiliation” had always been what he most feared; during these months, again and again, through his own actions, he was bringing upon himself what he most feared.
“He got cured once and for all of getting into a debate with Jack Kennedy,”
Johnson had changed into pajamas and bedroom slippers as he saw how the vote was going, and was sitting on a couch sipping a Scotch and soda, and that’s how Lyndon Johnson was watching when he lost his chance at the prize he had yearned for all his life.
“Clare, I looked it up: one out of every four Presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin,’ and this is the only chance I got.”
Johnson opened it. The corridor outside was empty. Reporters and photographers had been stationed outside the rooms of the men considered likely vice presidential nominees, but Johnson was not one of them.
Oklahoma’s burly senator Robert Kerr came “barreling into” the Johnson suite, livid with rage, shouting at Johnson, Lady Bird and Baker, “Get me my .38, I’m gonna kill every damn one of you. I can’t believe that my three best friends would betray me.”
“As Robert Kennedy’s oral history makes clear, the offer of the vice-presidential nomination was pro forma; the Kennedys never dreamed Johnson would accept.” Those accounts are not, however, supported by a number of actions that John F. Kennedy actually took that day.
“I’m forty-three years old, and I’m the healthiest candidate for President in the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to know that I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn’t mean anything.”
If these were the actions of a man who had made a pro forma offer, and was hoping it would not be accepted, they were strange ones. Rather, they were the actions of a man who very much wanted Lyndon Johnson on the ticket—and who was determined, despite opposition, to persuade him to accept his offer.
“I’ll cut his throat if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Good-bye, Greer. God bless you, Greer. Bobby, turn off that ‘Yeller Rose.’ God bless you, Greer. Vote Democratic. Bobby, turn off that fuckin’ ‘Yeller Rose.
Imagine a blend of Harry Truman and Marshal Dillon dealing a hand of poker in the railroad yard near midnight and you’ve got a picture of Lyndon Johnson’s visit to Atlanta.”
“I think Lyndon was put in the United States Senate with a stolen election.”
All his life Lyndon Johnson had been taking “nothing jobs” and making them into something—something big.
By the time all these initial maneuvers were over—by the end, certainly, of the first month of the Kennedy presidency—the misreading of John F. Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson was over, too.
“I can’t afford to have my Vice President, who knows every reporter in Washington, going around saying we’re all screwed up,” he told his appointments secretary, Ken O’Donnell, “so we’re going to keep him happy.”
With livestock failing to produce the desired effect, there was an escalation—to pearls.
When she told Kennedy about Johnson’s call, Kennedy asked, “You mean he called and wanted to be invited?” Mrs. Lincoln said that was correct. “Call and tell him that you have checked and you found that there was no mistake,” Kennedy said.
When he mispronounced “hors d’oeuvres” as “whore doves,” the mistake was all over Georgetown in what seemed an instant.
“It was most important to Lyndon not to be like Daddy”—not to become what his father, once so respected, had become: the object of public ridicule, of public scorn. But the parallel was inescapable now. His father had become a laughingstock. Now, so had he.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was to recall looking into Lyndon Johnson’s eyes during his vice presidency and thinking, “This is a bull castrated very late in life.”
The most important decision of the Kennedy Administration was made without Lyndon Johnson’s knowledge.
The hatred that Lyndon Johnson felt for Robert Kennedy on that terrible afternoon in Los Angeles had never faded. It would never fade; he would talk about that afternoon for the rest of his life.
“Bobby hates like me,” Joe Kennedy said. “When I hate some sonofabitch, I hate him until I die.”
But when Robert Kennedy was talking to men close to him, very different feelings emerged. “I can’t stand the bastard,” he once said to Richard Goodwin, “but he’s the most formidable human being I’ve ever met.”
So many of Bobby Kennedy’s pet hates were embodied in Lyndon Johnson.
Lyndon Johnson had not accomplished nothing, in George Reedy’s opinion. The mere fact that blacks had been in the banquet hall had not been meaningless, he said.
And the incident in St. Augustine had an effect also on that official. Fighting on a civil rights issue—taking a step, however small, against racial injustice; trying to do something for people of color—had always roused something in Lyndon Johnson.
And in the case of helping people of color, there had always been something very pure about Lyndon Johnson’s motives. Definitive though his twenty-year record of voting against and carrying out southern strategy against every civil rights bill might seem, it was not in fact the whole story.
Then, at 1:20, O’Donnell appeared at the door and crossed the room to Lyndon Johnson, and seeing the stricken “face of Kenny O’Donnell who loved him so much,” Lady Bird knew. “He’s gone,” O’Donnell said, to the thirty-sixth President of the United States.
“Mr. President,” he began. It was the first time that anyone had ever called Lyndon Johnson that, but when he answered Kilduff, it was a President answering, firm and in command.
Although the taking of the oath was a merely symbolic gesture—no one but a Vice President had ever ascended to the presidency when a President died, so precedent had established that a Vice President became President automatically, immediately upon a President’s death—it was a powerful symbol.
Just then a telephone rang on the other side of the pool, and Ethel walked around the pool to answer it, and said it was J. Edgar Hoover, and Bobby walked over to take the call, and Morgenthau saw him clap his hand to his mouth and turn away with a look of “shock and horror” on his face. “Jack’s been shot,” he said. “It may be fatal.”
“You become President when the President dies—that’s accepted. It’s not a question.”
On the ride out to the airport, Sid Davis, who, as he recalls, “had not known this man except as Majority Leader, and as someone who was … thought of by some … as ‘Colonel Cornpone,’ ” had said to his colleagues in the car: “It’s going to be hard to learn how to say President Lyndon B. Johnson.”
Lyndon Johnson’s voice was steady, too—low and firm—as he spoke the words he had been waiting to speak all his life.
