The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #4)

by Robert A. Caro

So smoothed over have their feelings been during the intervening decades that in recollections today they bear little resemblance to reality, which was that at the time Lyndon Johnson stepped into office, these men not only disliked and despised him—held him in contempt remarkable in its depth and intensity—but were aware also of what they considered indications of how President Kennedy himself had felt about him, feelings also not at all like those that have come down to us in history; it was a matter of common knowledge around the White House, for instance, that although the Vice President was a member of the group (ExComm, it was called) convened to advise John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vice President had been excluded from the meeting at which the final decision about the American response had been made.

But although the cliché says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said, but what is equally true, is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary: to hide traits that might make others reluctant to give him power, to hide also what he wants to do with that power; if men recognized the traits or realized the aims, they might refuse to give him what he wants. But as a man obtains more power, camouflage is less necessary. The curtain begins to rise. The revealing begins.

This is the fourth in a series of volumes that I call The Years of Lyndon Johnson because it attempts to portray not only his life but his years: the era in which he lived, rose to the presidency and finally abandoned the presidency—America in the middle decades of the twentieth century, in other words. It tries most particularly to focus on and examine a specific, determinative aspect of that era—political power; to explore, through the life of its protagonist, the acquisition and use of various forms of that power during that half century of American history, and to ascertain also the fundamental realities of that power; to learn what lay, beneath power’s trappings, at power’s core.

“Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both,” he said in that State of the Union address. “Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”

Almost always, he wound up declining—declining even invitations that a candidate (even an unannounced candidate) for the presidency would obviously be well advised to accept; among the seventeen invitations to deliver major speeches he received during March, 1958, were personal requests from the grande dame of his party, Eleanor Roosevelt, for a speech before the American Association for the United Nations, and from the governor of Iowa, Herschel C. Loveless, who had recently announced that he had not decided whom his state’s delegation would support in 1960. Sometimes, Johnson would accept one or another invitation—but then invariably would change his mind and refuse (as he did eventually with every one of the seventeen March requests), and then would regret that he had refused.

As John Hersey related in The New Yorker, after interviewing Kennedy and members of his crew some months later, there wasn’t room on the hull for all the men, and it was beginning to sink, so when daylight broke, Kennedy ordered the uninjured men into the water, and went in himself. All morning they clung to the hull, and finally Kennedy decided they would swim to a small island, one of a group of little islands about three miles away. Nine of the men made the swim hanging on to a large timber from the boat. Pappy McMahon was unable to do even that. Slicing loose one end of a long strap on McMahon’s life vest, Kennedy took the end in his teeth, and told McMahon to turn on his back. Then he towed him, swimming the breaststroke, his teeth clenched around the strap. The swim took five hours. After he pulled McMahon up on the beach, Kennedy lay on the sand, exhausted. “He had been in the sea, except for short intervals on the hull, for fifteen and a half hours,” Hersey relates. But he lay there only for a few minutes, and then he got up, and tied his life vest back on to go back into the water. He had realized that beyond the next small island was Ferguson Passage, where PT boats sometimes patrolled. His men tried to dissuade him from going, saying he was tired, and that the currents in the passage were treacherous. Tying his shoes around his neck,

the history of the United States, only one senator—Warren Gamaliel Harding in 1921—had ascended to the White House directly from the Senate, and Kennedy understood why: “No matter how you vote, somebody is made happy and somebody unhappy,” he explained. “If you vote against enough people, you are dead politically.”

“His Senate career,” concludes one of his biographers, Robert Dallek, “produced no major legislation that contributed substantially to the national well-being.” Misgivings about his lack of accomplishments were drowned out by the ubiquity and attractiveness of his media appearances, however. By May of 1957, the nationally syndicated columnist Marquis Childs would write, “Seldom in the annals of this political capital has anyone risen as rapidly and as steadily in a presidential sweepstakes as Jack Kennedy.” The effect of his celebrity was evident even in the enclave that was home to many of the capital’s political elite.

During the spring of 1958, Kennedy had a drink with the columnist Joseph Alsop at Alsop’s home on Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown.

Aslop from oppenheimer book !

And, six days later, with all the late returns supposedly counted and Johnson still behind by a few votes, a Parr-controlled precinct in adjoining Jim Wells County suddenly announced that its returns had somehow not been counted, and the two hundred new votes for Johnson from this precinct—votes cast by people who had all written their names in the same ink, in the same handwriting, and who had voted in alphabetical order—gave Johnson the lead in an election he won by eighty-seven votes.

The wind was fading, and as lunchtime approached, Kennedy realized that they might not make it ashore in time for lunch. Obsessed with his father’s insistence on punctuality, he simply dove overboard and swam for shore, leaving his helpless crewmate to fend for himself. After flailing about, the friend was rescued by a passing boat. Kennedy made no attempt to apologize. Bobby was not a boy at the time. The incident occurred in 1948, when he was twenty-two years old.

When he had asked his senatorial boss and patron, John McClellan, to give his brother Arkansas’ vote, McClellan had told him, “Just get one thing through your head.… Senators have no votes; I’m lucky to be a delegate; Orval Faubus is the Governor of Arkansas, and that’s it, and where he goes the Arkansas delegation goes.”

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. No one had canceled the order. All at once reporters were calling, and Johnson’s horrified staff learned that the signs were being hoisted into place at that very moment, and that television crews had arrived, along with newspaper photographers. Telephoning the sign company, Jenkins demanded that the signs be taken down immediately, but when workmen started to do so, it turned out that while the company had a permit to erect the signs, a different permit was required to remove them. A patrolman ordered the workmen to stop, and when they tried to go ahead anyway, the patrolman called for backup, and a patrol car arrived. It took two hours for that matter to be resolved, and for the signs to come down, and there were photographs in Washington newspapers the next day, and headlines like the one in the Post: PREMATURE BOOM A DUD—JOHNSON-FOR-PRESIDENT SIGNS GO UP, THEN DOWN IN TEXAS-SIZED FAUX PAS.

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” Marley’s ghost admits to Ebenezer Scrooge. “I made it link by link.” During the early months of 1960, Lyndon Johnson was forging, link by link, his own chain, and it was a heavy one. “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.

On June 29, without warning, the two Texans suddenly announced that rather than Congress adjourning for the year before the convention, as had been expected, it would instead immediately recess, and return to complete the session on August 8—after the convention. Longtime congressional observers could recall only one maneuver even faintly comparable: Harry Truman’s 1948 masterstroke, following the Republican convention, of calling the Republican-controlled Congress back into session, and challenging it to deliver on the convention’s campaign platform. Truman, however, had been challenging a Republican Congress, in which he had limited influence. Johnson and Rayburn were talking about a Congress they controlled. Rayburn’s “word is virtually law among Democrats in the House,” James Reston noted. Power over legislation senators and congressmen wanted—or needed, to satisfy demands of their constituents—was in the hands of the two Texans, and in the hands of the committee chairmen who wanted Johnson to get the nomination. With the new congressional schedule, Johnson and Rayburn would be holding this legislation over the heads of senators and representatives in Los Angeles; as James Reston wrote, “The theory … was that the two Texans would be able, by their influence over legislation in the recessed session, to induce forty or fifty delegates to support Mr. Johnson.” Evans and Novak were to call the “audacious” maneuver “blatant political blackmail.”

Then Lyndon Johnson came to Jim Rowe’s office again, pleading with him, crying real tears as he sat doubled over, his face in his hands. “He wept. ‘I’m going to die. You’re an old friend. I thought you were my friend and you don’t care that I’m going to die. It’s just selfish of you, typically selfish.’ ” Finally Rowe said, “Oh, goddamn it, all right”—and then “as soon as Lyndon got what he wanted,” Rowe was forcibly reminded why he had been determined not to join his staff. The moment the words were out of Rowe’s mouth, Johnson straightened up, and his tone changed instantly from one of pleading to one of cold command. “Just remember,” he said. “I make the decisions. You don’t.”

Saying he would have to let the President decide, O’Donnell ushered Johnson into the Oval Office, where the President, after listening to the dispute as if he’d never heard about it before, told Johnson, “Well, I’ll stick by my agreement.” Swiveling his chair, he stared out the window as if he had no further interest in the matter—and the scenario began to unfold. O’Donnell put his hand on the telephone on Kennedy’s desk. “Who are you calling?” Johnson asked. “The Speaker,” O’Donnell replied. Hurriedly stretching out his hand, Johnson put it on top of O’Donnell’s to prevent him from lifting the receiver. “What are you going to tell him?” he asked. O’Donnell said he was going to tell him that Johnson wouldn’t clear the appointment. “You can’t do that!” Johnson said. “You tell him that you don’t want him appointed.” O’Donnell said that was impossible, that he had no power over appointments.

Late one afternoon, while Sam Rayburn was still alive, Johnson walked into Rayburn’s Board of Education. Instead of walking over and kissing Rayburn, as he usually did, he sat down without a word in one of the dark leather easy chairs, and put his head in his hands. Then he sat there for long minutes, oblivious to the other men in the room. His head kept dropping lower, until it was barely above his knees. And then, in a very low voice, Lyndon Johnson said, “Being vice president is like being a cut dog.”

Over and over again, Kennedy delayed a decision to take a step that would require force and might be met by force—and therefore might escalate into the war that would destroy mankind. Over and over again, he tried to give Khrushchev more time to think—until on Friday night, a cable clattered over the State Department teletype, a long, rambling message from Nikita Khrushchev. It contained an offer to trade: in return for America’s pledge not to invade Cuba, the missiles and the Russian technicians and soldiers would be withdrawn. And it contained also “very personal” sentences about the Russian premier’s own fears that mankind was on the edge of the abyss of nuclear war, as well as a statement—“Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knots of war; because the more the two of us pull, the tighter this knot will be tied.” That message “for the first time,” Robert Kennedy said, gave his brother hope that he was not the only one of the two leaders who was trying to pull mankind back from the abyss.

The President kept postponing his decision. Leaving the Cabinet Room, he and his brother would walk down the hall to the Oval Office to talk privately there, occasionally calling in Sorensen: still hopeful that Khrushchev, despite his second letter, might be searching for a way out of the crisis, they were trying to find a way to help him do so, and finally they felt they had: that the President simply ignore the second letter, including the demand about the Jupiters in Turkey, and reply to the first, accepting the deal it had offered—to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a no-invasion pledge. Returning to the Cabinet Room, he left Sorensen drafting the reply.

The delight was soon to fade. Reynolds never spoke to Johnson again, but he did speak to Jenkins, because Jenkins called him in to tell him that in return for being allowed to write the policy and obtain the commission, about $2,500 per year, he would be required to purchase advertising time on the television station in Austin, KTBC-TV. When, Reynolds said, he protested that it made no sense for a Maryland insurance broker, unknown in Austin, to advertise on television there, Jenkins said that didn’t matter. Baker, Reynolds said, “prodded” him to buy the time. And after Reynolds made the purchase, buying $1,208 of airtime, another type of purchase was required. The Johnsons wanted a new stereo set, Baker told Reynolds, and Reynolds would have to supply it. Reynolds did, obtaining catalogs from various companies and giving them to Baker to give to the Johnsons; Lady Bird selected a Magnavox S-44 model in a cherrywood cabinet, an expensive set selling for about $900 in stores. Reynolds managed to buy it wholesale through a friend for $542.25; when Lady Bird wanted it delivered quickly for a party she was giving, he had it delivered airfreight, which cost an additional $42.50. Although Jenkins would later deny, again and again, the advertising time and stereo set demands, Baker would confirm them—“He [Johnson] took the stereo, and he required Don Reynolds to buy the … advertising.… It was a kickback pure and simple,” he was to say—as would Reynolds, who called the demands a “...

The amount of the premium had been $73,631, Reynolds said, but that hadn’t been the amount that McCloskey & Company had actually paid. McCloskey had paid $109,205, with the understanding that of the approximately $35,000 overpayment, Reynolds would receive a second $10,000 for being the “bag man” and the remaining $25,000 would be given to what Reynolds described as “Mr. Johnson’s campaign.” Reynolds said he was instructed to deliver the money to Baker in cash—in installments that were never to be more than $5,000 each. He said he made three such deliveries—each of fifty hundred-dollar bills—although, since the performance bond was not written until after the Democratic convention, McCloskey did not pay the $109,000 until October 17, 1960, and the cash was delivered not for Lyndon Johnson’s campaign but for the “Johnson-Kennedy campaign.”

Yet she was also eager to avoid playing the part of the rube.” And Lady Bird had an additional concern—indeed, horror. Because the paved path from the ranch’s airstrip led not to the front door of the ranch house but to the kitchen door in back, she had fallen into the habit of bringing visitors into the house by that entrance, so that they entered through a little room containing a washing machine and dryer, and then came into the kitchen, with its corkboard filled with scribbled messages, and she seemed unable to break herself of that habit. “The image of Jackie Kennedy, immaculately dressed …, being herded through the busy ranch kitchen seemed like a waking nightmare to Lady Bird,” Russell writes. “If you don’t do anything else for me, please be sure that I get the President and Mrs. Kennedy into the living room door and not the kitchen door,”

“The people I talked to tonight, out of a hundred nations, there are only six of them that have an income of as much as eighty dollars a month. We don’t really recognize how lucky and fortunate we are until something tragic like this happens to us. Here is our President shot in the head and his wife holds his skull in her lap as they drive down the street. Here is our Governor who looked around and said, ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ and because he turned a bullet just missed his heart. It went down through his lung into his leg and tore his left hand off. And, then, yesterday, they take the law into their own hands. We have to do something to stop that 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.”

The discussion had gone on, Fortas was to say, “for hours”—until about 2:30 in the morning—with Johnson sitting silently listening when, Fortas says, an “incident” occurred “which renewed my pride in him.” “One of the wise, practical people around the table” urged Johnson not to press for civil rights in his first speech, because there was no chance of passage, and a President shouldn’t waste his power on lost causes—no matter how worthy the cause might be. “The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” he said. “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Lyndon Johnson replied.

1949, more than ten million American families were still living in houses and apartments that didn’t meet even the lowest standards for decent housing. Congress grudgingly enacted legislation authorizing construction of eight hundred thousand housing units, far fewer than Truman had asked for. But it didn’t appropriate funds for the eight hundred thousand units in 1949—or during the rest of his term. The appropriation bills Congress passed were, in fact, so small that by 1955, six years later, only three hundred thousand units had been built, not even enough to keep up with the increase in population.

One of the eight unpassed appropriations bills, for example, was the measure that would fund the operating expenses of three departments—State, Justice and Commerce. Sent to Capitol Hill by the White House, like the other appropriations measures, early in the year, it had been passed by the House on June 18. Then it had been referred to the Senate Appropriations Committee, which referred it in turn to a subcommittee chaired by John McClellan of Arkansas, which referred it in turn to a subcommittee of McClellan’s subcommittee—the “Department of Commerce and Certain Related Agencies Subcommittee of the Subcommittee on Departments of State, Justice and Commerce,” as this final subcommittee was familiarly known—which was chaired by Spessard L. Holland of Florida, but with McClellan as its dominant member. McClellan was a tough, very shrewd, subtle legislator.

But the subcommittee of the subcommittee had been too busy to hold even a single hearing on the bill, and when, on November 21, an angry liberal, Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, introduced a resolution on the Senate floor that would have taken the bill away from Appropriations and brought it to the floor for debate, vote and, hopefully, passage, the presiding officer had asked if there were any objections, and Richard Russell, sitting at his desk, had raised his arm, and said calmly, “I object.” The two words meant that a vote would have to be taken first, not on Clark’s resolution, but on Clark’s motion to bring the resolution to the floor. There could be a debate on that motion—and the debate could continue as long as Russell’s southern senators wanted it to continue; there could, in other words, be a filibuster against the motion to bring the resolution to the floor. And if the filibuster was, by some chance, ended and the resolution made it to the floor, there could be a debate on the resolution itself, and then a filibuster against any attempt to bring the debate to an end and actually vote on the bill.

“The Byrd Machine is the most urbane and genteel dictatorship in America.”