Insight Editions · No. 263
The Passage of Power
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume IV
Robert A. Caro
Johnson's lost 1960 campaign, the humiliations of the vice-presidency, and the forty-seven days after Dallas in which he took hold of a shaken government and drove Kennedy's stalled programme into law.
A study guide to The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Power always reveals. Caro argues that when the presidency fell to Johnson he mastered his own fear of failure, used the office to its practical limits in a forty-seven-day transition, turned a stalled Kennedy program into law and launched the War on Poverty.
Washington, Los Angeles, Texas and Dallas, from 1958 to the State of the Union of January 8, 1964, with a coda running to the Civil Rights Act of July 1964. The book covers the 1960 race, the vice presidency, the Baker affair, the assassination and the transition.
806 to 409, Kennedy over Johnson on the first ballot of 1960; 10 hours 19 minutes alone with Kennedy in all of 1961; $97.9 billion, the budget that freed Byrd's $11 billion tax cut; 71 to 29, the cloture vote that broke the southern filibuster on June 10, 1964.
Readers who want to see how institutional power is lost, and then how it is seized and used in a crisis through telephone calls, budgets and committee rules. Anyone responsible for succession, transition or getting a stalled agenda moving will find a detailed case.
The Book on One Page
The prediction and the paralysis. From his teens Johnson said he would be President, and by 1958 he was the best-placed southerner in a century. Yet he would not declare, enter primaries or travel. Caro traces this to his father's ruin and a dread of public humiliation: "If he didn't try, he couldn't fail." Robert Kennedy, who had hated Johnson since a forced handshake in 1953, collected the western delegates first, and Kennedy won on the first ballot, 806 to 409.
The bargain. Johnson took the vice presidency because he had done the arithmetic: seven of thirty-three Presidents had died in office, and it was "the only chance I got." Jack Kennedy wanted him for Texas and the South and never wavered. Bobby's trips down the Biltmore back stairs to undo the offer sealed a lifelong hatred. The "LBJ Special" and George Parr's border votes carried Texas; without them, Caro argues, Nixon would have won.
Rufus Cornpone. Johnson tried to make the empty office powerful, as he had made every "nothing job" powerful, but the Senate caucus revolted and Kennedy answered his draft executive order with "charitable silence." He was excluded from real decisions: he spent 10 hours 19 minutes alone with Kennedy in 1961 and was left out of the secret Jupiter deal that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis. Johnson called himself "a cut dog."
The closing trap. By autumn 1963 polls showed Kennedy losing the South, John Connally controlled Texas money, and Bobby was tipped for 1968. The Bobby Baker scandal moved toward Johnson's hidden fortune: on the morning of November 22, Don Reynolds was handing Senate staff evidence of a kickback while Life planned a series on "Lyndon Johnson's Money."
Taking charge. In a Parkland cubicle the hangdog Vice President became the Majority Leader again. In seventy-eight minutes he staged legitimacy: the call to Robert Kennedy, Judge Sarah Hughes, Jacqueline Kennedy beside him at the oath. On the plane he wrote a three-line agenda (staff, Cabinet, leaders), and in EOB 274 he kept the Kennedy men with "I need you", won over labor and black leaders, routed the Mundt bill 57 to 36, and on November 27 told Congress, "Let us continue."
Breaking the deadlock. Johnson saw the stalemate as Richard Russell's hostage strategy, which he had helped run in 1949. He paid Harry Byrd's price with a $97.9 billion budget, broke Judge Smith's Rules Committee with a discharge petition and "the party of Lincoln," then went into the Senate with no hostages and no deals. Caro's verdict is that in forty-seven days Johnson turned a dead man's program into a martyr's cause and used the crisis to launch a crusade for social justice, conquering, for a time, the fear that had frozen him in 1960.
The shadow. On the ranch at Christmas the same man pressed newspapers through licences, a bank merger and air bases, ran a blind trust that was not blind, and concealed his first Vietnam decisions. The State of the Union of January 8, 1964 declared "unconditional war on poverty" and made the presidency his own. Johnson had held himself in check for only a short time, "but he had done it long enough."
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | Introduction | Two stories: five years of failure, seven weeks of mastery. |
| 1 | The Prediction | Lifelong presidential ambition paralysed by dread of humiliation; no campaign. |
| 2 | The Rich Man's Son | Kennedy's hidden pain, equal will; television and travel make him favourite. |
| 3 | Forging Chains | Refusing to declare, Johnson loses the West and nomination 806-409. |
| 4 | The Back Stairs | Jack wants Johnson; Bobby's back-stairs revolt breeds lasting hatred. |
| 5 | The "LBJ Special" | Whistle-stops, Adolphus mob and Parr's votes carry Texas and South. |
| 6 | "Power Is Where Power Goes" | Caucus chair and executive-order grabs both fail; Kennedy holds firm. |
| 7 | Genuine Warmth | Courtesy in form, exclusion in fact; loyalty buys nothing; Rayburn dies. |
| 8 | "Cut" | Excluded from the secret Cuba deal; Bobby emerges as 1968 rival. |
| 9 | Gestures and Tactics | St. Augustine revives him; civil rights advice; Bobby humiliates him. |
| 10 | The Protégé | Bobby Baker scandal and Reynolds' evidence reach toward Johnson's money. |
| 11 | The Cubicle | Snubbed in Dallas, investigated in Washington; fifty minutes later, President. |
| 12 | Taking Charge | The call to Bobby; Jackie beside him at the 2:38 oath. |
| 13 | Aboard Air Force One | Hardest transition ever; 126 minutes to plan staff, Cabinet, leaders. |
| 14 | Three Encounters | Three Saturday clashes with Bobby; Johnson yields each time. |
| 15 | The Drums | Television makes Kennedy a legend; Johnson works unseen. |
| 16 | EOB 274 | Phones, pleas, governors, Mundt rout; "Let us continue" speech. |
| 17 | The Warren Commission | Reversing his instinct, he presses Warren and Russell onto a commission. |
| 18 | The Southern Strategy | Russell's 1949 template: hold every bill hostage until civil rights dies. |
| 19 | "Old Harry" | Byrd holds the tax cut for a sub-$100 billion budget. |
| 20 | "The Johnsons in Johnson City" | A discharge petition and a week's pressure break Judge Smith. |
| 21 | Serenity | Ranch theatre masks press threats and Vietnam; War on Poverty declared. |
| 22 | "Old Harry" II | $97.9 billion budget wins Byrd; his vote saves the tax cut. |
| 23 | In the Books of Law | No hostages, no deals, get Dirksen: cloture 71-29, signed July 2. |
| 24 | Defeating Despair | Robert Kennedy's unending grief and change; his hatred of Johnson stays. |
| 25 | Hammer Blows | Kennedy men leave, having stayed long enough; approval hits 77 percent. |
| 26 | Long Enough | Forty-seven days of self-conquest: Johnson's finest, most overlooked moment. |
Introduction
Caro frames this volume as two stories that make one arc. The first runs five years, from late 1958 to November 22, 1963: a man who wanted the presidency all his life fails to win it and sinks into a humiliating vice presidency. The second runs seven weeks, from the flight out of Dallas to the State of the Union of January 8, 1964, and shows a master of power using the office to its practical limits.
From ridicule to Air Force One
As Vice President, Johnson no longer even asked to ride on Air Force One; the gibe "Whatever became of Lyndon Johnson?" had reached the headlines, and Kennedy aides called him "Uncle Cornpone." His boast that "Power is where power goes" collapsed when two grabs for new authority, from the Senate and from John F. Kennedy, exposed only desperation. He told aides to leave him: "My future is behind me." Kennedy privately admitted he might not have won in 1960 without him, yet Johnson got no credit. That story ended when Kenneth O'Donnell walked into a Parkland Hospital cubicle and said, "He's gone."
Why this transition was harder than any before
Seven Presidents had died in office, three by assassination, but 1963 was different:
| Problem | What made it acute |
|---|---|
| National shock | First assassination of the TV age; 92 percent knew within 2 hours 6 minutes; TV on Kennedy rites nearly 8 hours a day |
| Conspiracy fears | Oswald's rumoured Cuban and Soviet links; his murder on live TV |
| Kennedy men | Deep contempt, smoothed over in later memoirs; Johnson had been kept out of the decisive ExComm meeting |
| Robert Kennedy | A blood feud dating from a 1953 Senate cafeteria encounter and the 1960 hotel-room visits; a possible challenger |
| The calendar | Election within the year; Richard Neustadt calls it "unprecedented" |
| Scandal | Bobby Baker ("Little Lyndon") and a nine-reporter Life probe, "Lyndon Johnson's Money," both peaking on November 22 |
| Congress | The conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans had stalled civil rights and the tax cut |
How he broke the logjam
Johnson had a 100 percent southern voting record on civil rights from 1937 to 1956, as Richard Russell's lieutenant. The 1957 act (first since 1875) and the 1960 act were weak, and liberals read them as opportunism. Caro's answer is his central idea about power: although power is said to corrupt, power always reveals: as a man gains more of it, he needs less camouflage, and what he always wanted to do comes into view.
On November 26, advisers drafting his first address to Congress urged him to drop civil rights, a lost cause that would anger southern chairmen.
Well, what the hell's the presidency for?
— Lyndon Johnson
- The speech. On November 27 he made passing the civil rights bill the best memorial to Kennedy: "We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights."
- Tactics. Within a month a seldom-used procedural lever had pried the bill loose; the tax cut was moving too.
- Wheat sale to Russia. He made a conservative bill curbing his foreign-policy power a test of strength, kept phoning senators past a majority, then killed it with a risky manoeuvre. "At that moment the power of the federal government began flowing back to the White House."
Caro studies power under maximum stress, when every component is used to the full and so becomes visible. The transition shows the practical potential of the presidency.
Beyond pragmatism, and the shadow
In the State of the Union of January 8, 1964, forty-seven days after the assassination, Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty", aiming "not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it." The speech made the presidency his own, so Caro ends the transition there.
The full presidency brought the 1964 landslide, Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start, but also Vietnam and the credibility gap, and the war's cost helped lose the poverty war. Even his few Vietnam decisions in these weeks show the secrecy and deceit to come.
Two of Caro's framing figures need care. His war on poverty aimed at "one-fifth of America's 150 million citizens in 1964," but the 1964 population was about 192 million; at the official 19 percent poverty rate that meant roughly 36 million poor, not 30 million. His claim that the 1964 landslide is still "the greatest popular majority ever won" holds for share of the vote (61.1 percent), but Nixon's 1972 margin in raw votes (about 18 million) exceeded Johnson's (about 16 million).
The Prediction
From a teenage road gang onward, Lyndon Johnson told people "I'm going to be President." He built his life around a three-step path to that goal and by 1958 was better placed than any southerner in a century. Then, with the prize in reach, he refused to reach for it. Caro traces the paralysis to a dread of failure and public humiliation formed when his father went broke.
The prediction and the path
At seventeen and eighteen Johnson worked a road gang between Johnson City and Austin, pushing a mule-drawn "fresno" scoop with the reins tied around his back, "in harness with the mules." At lunch he told the older men he would be President. At home, neighbours brought covered dishes because there was no money for food, and the family feared losing the house.
The ambition never left. New Dealer James H. Rowe Jr.: "From the day he got here, he wanted to be President." The proof came in 1940 at the Greenbrier, when oilman-publisher Charles Marsh, with George R. Brown of Brown & Root, offered him an oil partnership share worth $750,000, payable from profits. Johnson, hungry for money, turned it down after a week: being an oilman "would kill me politically." Only one office fitted that answer, and the two men realised his hunger for money "was as nothing" beside his hunger for that office.
- 1937 Wins a House seat in a seemingly hopeless race.
- 1939 Refuses Roosevelt's offer to run the Rural Electrification Administration, at thirty, for fear of being "sidetracked."
- 1946 Refuses a near-certain Texas governorship: a "detour" that might become a "dead end."
- 1948 Nearing forty, tells Horace Busby to call him "LBJ" like "FDR"; wins the Senate by going beyond even Texas limits.
- 1951 Senate Assistant Leader.
- 1953 Democratic Leader, in his first term.
- 1955 Youngest Majority Leader in history.
- 1956 Grabs for the nomination at Chicago; loses 905 to 80 to Stevenson.
The path ran only through Washington: House, Senate, presidency. Johnson later told John Connally, who left for the governorship, "Here's where the power is."
A reader of men in a body "the right size"
Johnson taught his staff to read men: "Watch their hands, watch their eyes," and find out "what he's not telling you." Bobby Baker said he could "sense each man's individual price and the commodity he preferred as coin"; Thomas G. Corcoran said he could "get where [a mind] was going before the other fellow knew." Brown called him "the greatest salesman one on one who ever lived." Those gifts were wasted on the 435-member House. Entering the Senate, he muttered that it was "the right size": ninety-six members on six-year terms, with three-man subcommittees where one sale made a majority.
He turned a body that George B. Galloway thought might prove "not indispensable" into a centre of governmental energy. Yet it remained a rung. In 1956 he refused to withdraw against all pragmatic logic. Corcoran: "He wanted it so much he wasn't thinking straight." Connally promised, "We'll be back four years from now!"
The southern handicap and 1957
No southerner had been elected President since Zachary Taylor in 1848; the House gave Sam Rayburn a limousine plaque saying he "Would Have Been President If He Had Come from Any Place but the South." Johnson carried "the taint of magnolias": a 100 percent anti-civil-rights voting record and years as Richard Russell's strategist. In 1957, Caro argues, compassion and ambition aligned. Philip Graham warned he might end as "(another) Dick Russell"; Rowe's memo called the fight "Armageddon for Lyndon Johnson." He passed the first civil rights bill in 82 years, stripped to voting rights with weak enforcement, but in his words "only the first." George Reedy said it opened a branch of government "to a tenth of the population."
The South let it pass to make him electable. Russell: "We can never make him President unless the Senate first disposes of civil rights." That promised him 352 of the 761 votes needed. Eisenhower could not run again; the rivals (Hubert Humphrey, Stuart Symington, John F. Kennedy, Estes Kefauver) were senators who came to him for favours, and Adlai Stevenson had lost twice.
But he didn't
In 1958 he gathered veterans like Charles Herring and Joe Kilgore on the ranch lawn and gave "the sales pitch": "I was meant to be President," and "If we do everything, we'll win." Then nothing came: no state assignments, no orders, no midnight calls. "He just wasn't running yet."
| Rowe's plan | Johnson's plan | |
|---|---|---|
| Primaries | Enter some of the 16: Indiana, West Virginia | None |
| Travel | Meet bosses and delegates now | "Tend the store" in Washington |
| Allies | Win Daley, Lawrence, DiSalle, De Sapio, Prendergast, Bailey | Rayburn's House; Hayden, Mansfield, Anderson, Chavez |
| Endgame | Prove he can win outside the South | Deadlock, then the bosses turn to him |
Johnson also assumed the Catholic bosses would never nominate a Catholic, and dismissed Kennedy as "sickly" and a playboy who "never did a thing." His advisers saw the flaws. Governors, not senators, controlled delegations (W. H. Lawrence of the New York Times); Robert Taft had relied on senators in 1952 and failed; voters "haven't the slightest idea" what a Majority Leader does. The bosses would only turn to a southerner who had proved he could win in the North. Rowe's Truman memo of 1948 had won him "almost mystical" standing, but Johnson commissioned a 1960 version, then cancelled it in August. Reedy: "a man badly torn."
If he didn't try, he couldn't fail
Connally's explanation, echoed by Rowe, is the chapter's thesis: Johnson wanted the nomination desperately but did not want "the stigma" of having lost it, and "If he didn't try, he couldn't fail." Walter Jenkins warned Baker never to overcount votes; Baker: "Pyrrhic victories were not Lyndon Johnson's cup of tea," he was "petrified" of defeat. After his debate team lost a state final, he vomited.
The roots lay in the dog-run house where he lived from eleven to fourteen. His father, Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., a six-term Populist legislator who owned the town's first car, paid far too much for the family's 433-acre Pedernales land. Drought and the cotton collapse forced a sale in September 1922. Johnson City turned on him ("a mighty smart man. But he's got no sense"); he became a $2-a-day game warden and died in 1937 a penniless bus inspector. A neighbour said of Lyndon: "Too much like Sam."
- The broken bond. The boy who had copied his father's Stetson and his habit of clutching men by the lapel became cold and defiant. The prediction began now, at the Albert school: "I won't need your votes."
- Two lessons. His brother: "the most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy," so he would seem pragmatic, never idealistic, and treat failure as terror, ruin and humiliation.
- Precedent. In 1948 he vacillated so long that allies threatened to run Connally; in 6 a.m. Calls Ed Clark heard one word: "Humiliation."
Caro's diagnosis rests on later recollections by aides (Connally, Rowe, Baker, Reedy) and on an inner motive no document can prove. Caro himself grants the "tend the store" reasoning "a certain degree of validity": once declared, Johnson feared, rival senators would "chop me up as Leader." Readers should weigh calculation and fear together. Caro's "no southerner since Zachary Taylor" also sets aside Woodrow Wilson, born in Virginia and raised in Georgia and the Carolinas, though elected from New Jersey in 1912.
Commanding the floor, frozen on the prize
On the floor he was all decision: he knew every bill's calendar number and status, ran roll calls with "revving-up circles" like an "orchestra conductor" (Time), and seized the moment with a one-vote margin. Facing the nomination, he paced and jingled coins. He declined all seventeen major speaking invitations of March 1958, including Eleanor Roosevelt's and Iowa Governor Herschel Loveless's. On an October six-state tour he told leaders he was not running, then secretly had George Smathers send $10,000 raised in Tennessee to West Virginia to build influence for its 1960 primary.
Early in 1959 Rowe gave up ("I will not press you again") and joined Humphrey. Johnson's verdict: "Jim betrayed me!" The strategy might still have worked; every rival had a liability. But "this great reader of men" had read one man wrong.
The Rich Man’s Son
Johnson saw John F. Kennedy as a sickly, lazy rich man's son who "never did a thing" in the Senate. Caro agrees about the legislative record but shows what Johnson missed: a life of constant, hidden pain borne without complaint, a determination to reach the presidency equal to Johnson's own, and a sharper grasp of the new politics. By 1958 Kennedy had made himself the early favourite by staying out of the Senate and running on television and the road.
The image Washington saw
His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had made millions in the 1920s market and more selling short before the 1929 Crash, then chaired Roosevelt's new Securities and Exchange Commission, served as ambassador to Britain and built one of America's great fortunes. Washington knew he gave each of his nine children a $1 million trust fund, and believed he had bought Jack his House seat.
- The look. Arriving in January 1947 at twenty-nine, Kennedy weighed about 140 pounds on a six-foot frame; a lobbyist called him "laddie," a colleague took him for a page, and he wore khakis, sneakers and a hanging shirttail.
- The attitude. Secretary Mary Davis found him "lackadaisical"; he quit a two-day session with Boston constituents after one day. His Georgetown house was "a Hollywood hotel," and he dated Gene Tierney.
- The verdicts. From 1948 his absenteeism was among the highest in the House. George Smathers, his one close friend there, thought him the freshman "least likely" to become President; Sam Rayburn called him "one of the laziest men I ever talked to."
Washington discounted his war heroism because many war records were inflated: Joe McCarthy was no tail gunner, and Lyndon Johnson wore a Silver Star for one observer flight with thirteen minutes in action.
In 1952 Kennedy beat the favoured Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. with an organization run by Robert Kennedy, engraved invitations to tens of thousands of women, and his father's money, including a $500,000 loan that rescued the Boston Post, which then endorsed Jack. The Senate repeated the House pattern. In 1956 his sudden vice-presidential bid ran out of material so fast that Smathers, nominating him, "couldn't really think of anything he had done." He came thirty-eight votes short on the second ballot before Estes Kefauver won.
In January 1957 Johnson gave Kennedy a Foreign Relations seat over Kefauver at Joe Kennedy's plea. The real reason was 1960: Kefauver was the threat, and a northeastern running mate with a powerful father might be useful. Kennedy remained a "show horse," not a "work horse"; asked to chair an Africa subcommittee, he wanted to know if it would "ever have to meet." Ted Sorensen: Johnson "felt that he didn't have to take him seriously." Johnson's last word: Kennedy was "not a man's man."
The pain behind the smile
| Johnson's reading | What Caro shows |
|---|---|
| Lazy, always absent | Absences hid hospital stays, often timed to congressional recesses |
| "Sickly," "yellow" | Undiagnosed illness from age fourteen; Addison's disease found in 1947 |
| Soft rich boy | Fixed his way into combat and saved his crew |
| Not a man's man | Campaigned through agony without one complaint |
Born May 29, 1917, Kennedy was ill through his school years. At sixteen he spent nearly two months in a New Haven hospital; doctors guessed leukemia, then hepatitis, both wrong. Letters to his friend Lem Billings joked through Mayo Clinic tests and blood counts ("They call me '2000 to go Kennedy'"). At Harvard, ribs showing, he made the freshman football squad; captain Torbert Macdonald: "Guts is the word."
In 1940 his back gave way. Rejected by the Army and Navy, he spent five months on calisthenics, then had his father arrange a fixed Navy examination (October 1941). Told he needed a spinal fusion, he chose PT boats, "the bucking bronchos of the sea," the worst duty for a bad back, using his grandfather "Honey Fitz" and Senator David Walsh to get to the South Pacific.
PT-109, August 1, 1943. A Japanese destroyer cut the boat in half; two men died. Kennedy towed burned engineer Pat McMahon to the hulk, then three miles to an island, a strap clenched in his teeth, for five hours. He swam into Ferguson Passage with a lantern to signal, drifted all night without letting go of it, later found food and a canoe, and sent a message scratched on a coconut shell. The crew was rescued on the sixth day. Five survivors volunteered to follow him to PT-59.
After the rescue, told to the nation by John Hersey in The New Yorker, Kennedy came home with an ulcer crater; a June 1944 disk operation failed, and the pain needed "fairly large doses of narcotics."
The 1946 campaign: courage over a longer haul
His brother Joe Jr., the son meant for politics, was killed in the war. "My father wanted his eldest son in politics.… He demanded it." Yet Kennedy had talked politics with purpose to fellow officers in the Pacific. In Boston's working-class Eleventh District his father's money bought advertising but could not cure his shyness, his stiff speeches or his pain.
- Wit. Told every rival "came up the hard way," he said, "I seem to be the only person here tonight who didn't," and the issue died.
- Emotion. To Gold Star Mothers: "my mother is a Gold Star Mother, too." The Charlestown pol Dave Powers, who had refused to join him, said: "I'm already with you."
- Endurance. He climbed tenement stairs one step at a time, soaked in scalding baths, strapped on a corset and elastic bandage and went out again until midnight. "The guy was in agony." He never admitted it.
- Collapse. After the five-mile Bunker Hill Day parade he turned "yellow and blue"; his father called it malaria. He won the next day.
In 1947 in London he was finally diagnosed with Addison's disease, adrenal failure; a doctor told Pamela Churchill he hadn't "got a year to live." He was given last rites on the Queen Elizabeth. From 1949, cortisone (150-milligram pellets every three months plus 25 milligrams a day) gave him "a whole new lease on life."
- 70,737: his 1952 Senate margin, of 2,353,231 votes cast.
- 50-50: his odds of surviving the October 21, 1954 spinal fusion that the Lahey Clinic refused to perform.
- Two sets of last rites: on the ship in 1947 and after the 1954 infection.
- 8 inches: the incision that would not heal until the plate came out on February 15, 1955.
- Forty-seven states visited, with hundreds of speeches, by the end of 1957.
Joe Kennedy urged a wheelchair life ("look at Roosevelt"); Jack said he would "rather be dead." After the operation the father wept in Arthur Krock's office, sure his son was dying. Three days after a smiling return to the Senate in May 1955, Kennedy limped into Dr. Janet Travell's office; she saw calluses under his armpits from the crutches. Her procaine injections and a rocking chair ended the crutches. Billings: "instead of thinking he was doomed, he thought he was lucky."
The mirror Johnson missed
Johnson was "almost uniquely" qualified to read this. He too had collapsed at the end of his first campaign (1937, appendix about to rupture, forty pounds lost) and in 1948 fought a kidney stone with a fever over 104 degrees, refusing surgery that would end his race. The man Johnson did not take seriously "not only wanted the same thing he did, but was a man just as determined to get it."
Learning on the run
Kennedy drew a cold conclusion: "The Senate is not the place to run from." Every vote made enemies: a farm vote cost him the Midwest in 1956, and he was the only Democrat not recorded for McCarthy's censure. Only Warren Harding had gone straight from the Senate to the White House. So he would skip the job and accept the criticism.
- New men. Rising young veterans across the states "identified with him." To Sorensen: "Johnson thinks the campaign is in Washington. It's not. It's out here."
- Television. He narrated Dore Schary's convention film for forty million viewers and lost the vice presidency to Kefauver in a televised drama. Most biographies say he smiled conceding; Caro says he did not. He later told Jim Rowe he was the second best-known senator because of that "half hour on national television." Jack Gould called him "the most telegenic person in public life."
- Delivery. After cortisone his face filled out, his arm rose and his chin came up. Smathers: "a miracle transformation." Mary Davis had always found his dictated speeches brilliant.
Caro's harsh verdict on the Senate record is shared by Robert Dallek: it "produced no major legislation." His medical narrative, by his own notes, rests on Dallek's An Unfinished Life (2003), written with unprecedented access to Kennedy's medical records, on Nigel Hamilton and Richard Reeves, and on his own talks with Dr. Janet Travell. Caro openly departs from earlier biographies on the unsmiling concession. He tells PT-109 from Hersey and Robert Donovan, without engaging the later debate over how the idling boat came to be rammed, though most accounts do not fault Kennedy.
Critics called it celebrity politics. William V. Shannon asked what the magazine Kennedys had "to do with statesmanship?" Caro: "Nothing." But the polls moved: Georgetown neighbours applauded him on Joseph Alsop's stoop; against Kefauver he went from 11 points behind to 11 ahead; in March 1958 Time named him the "early-season favorite."
An inside post can be a liability for outside ambition. Kennedy saw that the record a legislature demands creates enemies, while Johnson mistook command of an institution for a constituency beyond it.
Delegates and officials still preferred Stevenson; Johnson held about four hundred southern and border votes; favourite sons like Robert Meyner and G. Mennen Williams remained. If the convention deadlocked, Sorensen admitted, "we'd never get out of the back rooms."
Forging Chains
This chapter runs from January 1959 to the first ballot in Los Angeles on July 13, 1960, and Caro's verdict is that Lyndon Johnson defeated himself. A man who understood exactly how nominations were won spent eighteen months refusing to admit he was running, so the western delegates his whole plan depended on were collected by the Kennedys, above all by Robert Kennedy, a brother who had hated Johnson since 1953. When Johnson finally lunged for the prize in late May 1960, every card he played came too late to take a trick.
1959: Running Without Admitting It
Jim Rowe's January 1959 letter had stated the rule plainly: Johnson had "no chance whatsoever" if he waited, meaning if he stayed in Washington being a superb Leader. Johnson agreed, but Caro's point is that the rational was not governing him. He was running, and in Texas he moved with a sure hand to clear two obstacles.
- The two-office law. Texas barred anyone from being a candidate for two offices in one election, and Johnson wanted to keep his Senate seat as insurance if he won the nomination and lost to Nixon. One call to Ed Clark, the state's "Secret Boss," produced a special act on April 20, 1959 exempting candidates for president or vice president; to defend it in court Johnson picked Leon Jaworski, who had "never been mixed up with Brown & Root."
- George Parr. Texas had gone for Eisenhower twice (by over 200,000 votes in 1956), so a nominee might need every vote, and the "Duke of Duval" had produced them before: Duval went 4,195 to 38 in 1948, and late Jim Wells County returns gave Johnson his 87-vote victory. Now Parr needed a Supreme Court appeal of his mail-fraud conviction and had no money. Johnson had Abe Fortas take it pro bono, a trade for Parr's silence in the view of Fortas's biographer Bruce Murphy, with nothing put in writing. "He was looking ahead to 1960," Clark said.
Outside Texas the picture was different. Part of Johnson's strategy rested on assumptions bred by life in Washington: that senators could deliver their state delegations, and that the country would admire him for staying at his desk. Another part was sound. A southerner could not win 761 of the 1,521 delegates, but he could gather enough to deny Kennedy a first-ballot victory, throwing the choice into the back rooms of the big-state bosses, where Johnson, the great one-on-one salesman, would bargain with men who talked only about winning. That plan had a sine qua non: he had to prove to northern bosses that he could carry states outside the South, which meant entering primaries such as Indiana and West Virginia.
What he could do in the North showed on May 7, 1959, at a $100-a-ticket dinner for six thousand Pennsylvania state employees in Harrisburg's Zembo Mosque, staged by Governor David Lawrence. Over NAACP protests, Lawrence introduced him as the man who had passed the first civil rights bill in 82 years; Johnson was interrupted by applause twenty-three times and got a standing ovation. Time's John Steele and George Reedy assumed he would now campaign in the North. A month later, handed another Pennsylvania invitation, Johnson said: "I don't want to get into a hostile audience." The Senate adjourned in August, leaving five open months, yet he accepted invitations and cancelled them at the last minute, often blaming his staff for having accepted. Rowe saw a man "tortured, almost" between wanting something and not wanting to be seen wanting it.
The western arithmetic
"The West" in 1960 meant ten states with 172 delegates: Oregon, Washington, the seven Mountain States and Arizona (California counted as too urban). It should have been Johnson's. He had backed the region on minerals, irrigation and reclamation, had pushed the Hells Canyon public-power dam through the Senate in 1957, and the region's small black population blunted the civil rights issue. Ted Kennedy, 27, sent west in September 1959, heard it directly: "This is Johnson Country." But winning the West meant courting delegates as individuals, finding the local men who held the "pieces of power" and learning what each wanted: a job, a contract, cash. That required travel, and travel meant admitting he was trying.
| Bloc | Johnson's plan | First ballot, July 13, 1960 |
|---|---|---|
| South (352) | Virtually solid | 281 (Mississippi's 23 and Florida's 29 defected) |
| Border: Oklahoma 29, Kentucky 31 | All 60 | 54½ |
| Scattered other states | Enough for 430–440 total | 40 |
| West (172) | "The bulk," for 550+ | 22½ (Kennedy 119) |
| Final total | Deadlock, then back rooms | Johnson 409, Kennedy 806 |
Instead he equivocated, even with intimates. To Bobby Baker he said his heart made running impossible; next he produced a laminated cardiogram proving recovery; then a laminated state-by-state delegate count showing how a first-ballot deadlock would become a later-ballot win ("I'm not running, but I'm gonna win"). In May he told Walter Jenkins to build state "Johnson for President" organizations and to keep them secret, and Baker watched Jenkins hand "wads of hundred-dollar bills" to loyalists heading into the states.
Bobby Kennedy had learned at the 1956 convention the rule Johnson never absorbed: senators have no votes; governors, bosses and local holders of the "pieces of power" do. Johnson's laminated delegate counts assumed the reverse, and the delegates went to whoever showed up in person and asked.
The Brother Who Hated Him
Caro dates the enmity to January 1953 in the Senate cafeteria. When Johnson passed Joe McCarthy's breakfast table, everyone rose for the new Leader except McCarthy's 27-year-old assistant counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, who sat glowering until Johnson stood over him with his hand half-raised and forced the handshake. "It's about Roosevelt and his father," Johnson told Horace Busby. Johnson had been in FDR's office in 1940 when Roosevelt lured Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy home in order to fire him, and had told the story at Washington dinners for years. Busby saw that Johnson enjoyed forcing the handshake on later mornings; Reedy compared the two men to dogs whose hackles rise on sight.
Caro's portrait of Bobby is severe. The family "runt," excluded from his father's political talk, seemed to have one ambition, to earn that father's respect, and showed from boyhood a streak Caro calls "mean," even cruel, alongside raw courage and a later tenderness.
- Harvard and after. A 155-pound player who kept hitting a 230-pound fullback head-on, he also broke a beer bottle over a stranger's head for singing "Happy Birthday" during Bobby's own celebration, and at twenty-two swam ashore to be on time for lunch, abandoning on a sailboat a friend who could not sail.
- McCarthy. He believed in the work and resigned in July 1953 over a feud with Roy Cohn, not over tactics; in 1957 he flew to Wisconsin for McCarthy's funeral.
- The Rackets Committee. As chief counsel he treated the Fifth Amendment as proof of guilt ("I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana") and hunted Jimmy Hoffa for seven years, finally, as attorney general with a "Get Hoffa" squad and at one point fourteen grand juries, winning a conviction in 1964 over ACLU protests. "When Bobby hates you, you stay hated," his father said.
Johnson returned the dislike ("Sonny Boy") but did not take a staffer seriously; in the Senate's world staffers were employees. Yet the staffer understood things about presidential politics that the Leader did not. At the 1956 convention his boss John McClellan had told him "Senators have no votes" (Governor Orval Faubus controlled Arkansas). He learned that friendships beat issues: delegates had gone to Kefauver because he sent Christmas cards and visited their homes. In September 1959, his book The Enemy Within finished, he took to the trail full-time. When Ohio's governor Mike DiSalle hedged, Bobby threatened to back DiSalle's rival Ray Miller with Kennedy money; "Those Kennedys play real rough," DiSalle said afterward. Newspapers began using one word for him: "ruthless."
Forging the Chain
Caro reads the rest of 1959 as farce that was really tragedy. Johnson hung a banner reading "Lyndon Johnson Será Presidente" over a ranch barbecue for Mexican president Adolfo López Mateos while assuring reporters he was not a candidate, then sulked when journalists who believed him left him out of a book on the contenders. On December 7, 1959, every other candidate spoke at New York's dinner for Eleanor Roosevelt; Johnson chose a $15 dinner in small-town Kansas and a sewing bee in Iowa.
His rages, normally reserved for people who could not answer back, now hit men he needed. California governor Pat Brown came to the "Taj Mahal" to size him up, sat through ninety minutes of monologue, and when he agreed that Johnson was not "electable," Johnson towered over him: "Don't you ever say I'm not electable!" Brown replied on Face the Nation that California would reject Johnson over "the South and the oil interests." Bobby, sent to the ranch late in the year, was knocked flat by a shotgun's recoil ("Son, you've got to learn to handle a gun like a man") and went home believing Johnson would not run.
By January 1960 the inner circle had a real campaign: John Connally, the one man "tough enough to handle Bobby Kennedy," ran a twelve-room Austin headquarters; clubs operated in 27 states; surrogates included India Edwards; and oilmen's cash arrived in "packets of a hundred hundred-dollar bills." But the West was already slipping. Irvin Hoff, sent out after a year-end strategy meeting at the ranch, found that "Wherever I went, Bobby Kennedy had been there"; delegates "had already had the halter and bridle." Montana and Idaho had no Johnson organization, and many westerners did not know what "LBJ" meant. At the Cheyenne airport, Wyoming's party chairman Teno Roncalio told Reedy his state was for Kennedy: "He's the only one who's been out here and asked us for our vote."
What Johnson still would not do was say, even privately, that he would run once the Senate adjourned. In Lewiston, Idaho, where state chairman Tom Boise and his leaders were ready to commit, Johnson, in pajamas with a drink, asked whether they thought he had come to catch butterflies, then offered only "You'll be the first to know." "He couldn't bring himself to get the words out," Hoff said; Baker diagnosed "LBJ's fear of being defeated." California's 81 votes were open (Judge Walter Ely: "he would own them like he does everybody he meets"), but Johnson accepted and cancelled visits in January, February and at Easter, and refused even to take Ely's call. One cannot "keep fighting for a phantom," Ely told Jenkins.
Civil rights, again
The 1958 elections gave liberals a 64–34 Senate majority, yet in 1959 Johnson blocked their attempt to amend Rule 22, the filibuster rule, trading committee assignments for votes. In 1960 liberals demanded Part III, the desegregation section stripped from the 1957 act. Richard Russell would protect the South before he protected Johnson, and Johnson's procedural bypass of the Judiciary Committee caused the first rupture in their eleven-year alliance. Johnson repaired it: a "jolly" mock filibuster, cloture defeated 55–42, and a bill watered down with Attorney General William Rogers until little remained but a near-worthless voting provision. Javits called it "a victory for the Old South." The payoff was a Gallup lead in the old Confederacy (35 percent to Kennedy's 20). The price was the North: Joseph Rauh called the bill "a pile of rubbish," the ADA World headlined JOHNSON REJECTED, and on May 29 the NAACP's Roy Wilkins praised every senator-candidate's record "except Senator Lyndon B. Johnson."
Caro argues that Johnson could have sold his record in person, and no one could sell it for him. Texan surrogates got nowhere with black leaders in Detroit. David Broder wrote that Michigan's coolness rested "not on what he has done, but on what he has not done." The proof came aboard Johnson's Convair, when Howard B. Woods, editor of the St. Louis Argus, called the bill "watered down." Johnson leaned across the table: "When we say every man has a right to vote, that is not watered down." Then he took Woods's hand and stroked it, "as if to rub its color off." Woods came away convinced.
The farce continued. When a secret headquarters at Washington's Ambassador Hotel leaked, Johnson pinned Baker to a wall; five days later uncancelled signs went up anyway (PREMATURE BOOM A DUD, said the Post). He would meet Israel's David Ben-Gurion only in secret, at Fortas's house. "He is his own principal source of defeat," economist Eliot Janeway told Jenkins. Caro's emblem is Marley's ghost: "I wear the chain I forged in life." What Johnson had always feared most was humiliation, and through these months, by refusing to try openly, he was forging that humiliation for himself link by link.
A second trait compounded the first: the "revving up," Johnson's capacity to make himself believe whatever argument served him ("What convinces is conviction"). He was certain Kennedy could not win on the first ballot. When Representative Jim Wright returned from Kansas dazzled by an eight-minute Kennedy speech, Johnson decided Wright had been "overly impressed." He cut off a scout reporting Wyoming lost ("Next!"). He asked Tip O'Neill for help "on the second ballot," since "that boy is going to die on the vine"; O'Neill told him there would be no second ballot.
West Virginia and the Late Lunge
Kennedy won Wisconsin on April 5, but through its Catholic districts, so West Virginia on May 10, a state about 5 percent Catholic, became the test that could still throw the decision into the back rooms. Johnson worked through Senator Robert Byrd for Humphrey and poured in money, his ace since Brown & Root financed his first race, but too late to buy organization. The Kennedys played harder cards. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., at Bobby's insistence, implied Humphrey had dodged the draft, though Humphrey had been rejected for physical reasons; JFK's statement that he had not authorized it, one biographer notes, did not challenge its accuracy. Then Kennedy met the religion issue head-on in a paid telecast on the presidential oath: breaking it would be "a sin against God." He took more than 60 percent.
West Virginia buried Johnson's hopes. New York's 114 votes swung toward Kennedy; at his press conference Johnson "slumped," and senators in the Democratic cloakroom fell silent when he entered. Then, too late, he showed how much he had wanted it all along. He took Rowe on ("I need all the help I can get") and worked 18-hour days: Indiana, then a five-day, six-state western swing over Memorial Day. In the Idaho Falls suite where he had stonewalled Boise, Lieutenant Governor William Drevlow asked if he was a candidate: "You're damn right I am." The U-2 crisis gave him an issue (Kennedy had said he would have sent Khrushchev "regrets"; "I am not prepared to apologize to Mr. Khrushchev. Are you?"). Freed from a text, he was again the flatbed-truck campaigner of his first race, preaching western grievances in Populist terms: "The West needs a champion in Washington." Doris Fleeson called him "a lion on the platform."
But the Kennedys, having sown for two years, now reaped. Montana was quietly dropped from the itinerary, and in June Rowe reported, with Mike Mansfield neutral, "Don't come. We are going to get badly licked." Senator Frank Church, whom Johnson had promoted over half a dozen senior colleagues, had been bought with the convention keynote: "The little sonofabitch has already sold out." New Mexico gave Kennedy 7 of 17; Arizona, under the unit rule, all 17; Colorado denied former governor Big Ed Johnson a delegate seat. By the end of June the West was gone, though in May and June Johnson flew 31,250 miles, made 36 speeches and held 27 press conferences. "He put it off too long," Hoff said.
Johnson's late cards (Caro: "None of his cards took a trick"):
- Money poured into West Virginia for Humphrey through Robert Byrd's organization.
- A Stevenson stalking horse: urging Adlai to "hang loose" and stay available to block a first-ballot win.
- Senate campaign funds rationed to candidates such as Thorn Lord and Lee Metcalf in inverse proportion to their support for Kennedy.
- Committee assignments, made to depend on convention behavior (Iowa's Governor Loveless).
- The recess: on June 29 he and Rayburn kept Congress in session until after the convention, holding bills over delegates ("blatant political blackmail," Evans and Novak).
- Kennedy's health: the Addison's disease leak.
- The debate challenge in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles
Johnson finally declared on July 5, six days before the convention, "before the barn door," as Mary McGrory put it; his voice broke on the sentence. His statement hit Kennedy's absences, inexperience and silence on McCarthy. George Meany of the AFL-CIO marked him "an arch foe of labor"; at an NAACP rally Oscar Chapman, speaking in his place, was jeered down. Over the weekend New York (104 or 105 of 114), Kansas, Iowa and Richard Daley's Illinois came down for Kennedy.
The last hope was Pennsylvania's 81 votes, held by Lawrence. A Catholic scarred by Al Smith's 1928 defeat and by his own near-loss in 1958, he believed a Catholic would drag the whole ticket down, and his heart was with Adlai Stevenson. He was no Johnson man either: after the "full treatment" he concluded "the man has sold himself" on being nominated. On Sunday night Lawrence offered Stevenson 85 percent of the delegation if he would declare at once. Stevenson said, "Do what you have to, Dave." Monday's caucus gave Kennedy 64 and Johnson 4. That night Johnson told Rowe softly, "I don't see how we can stop this fellow."
The Texas caucus debate, Tuesday, July 12. Johnson turned a Kennedy form telegram into a televised challenge ("I'll destroy him"). Jack accepted against his father's advice and came almost alone into a ballroom packed with Texans, joking that he backed Johnson "for Majority Leader." Johnson shouted that he had answered all fifty quorum calls during the civil rights fight while "some men who would be President answered none." Kennedy, grinning, assumed Johnson meant "some other candidate" and commended his "wonderful record answering those quorum calls." The hall laughed. Jim Wright thought of the lone Texas Ranger sent to quell a riot. "He got cured once and for all" of debating Kennedy, Hoff said.
The last hours were bitter. Johnson called Joe Kennedy a "Chamberlain umbrella man" and Jack a man who would "throw crutches at their doctor." The health charge had come from a former investigator, Donald Cook, who traced Kennedy's Addison's disease through a pharmaceutical executive; India Edwards made it public, Robert Kennedy and Ted Sorensen issued artfully worded denials, and Johnson had to disavow it. When Baker mildly called the Kennedy attacks "a little rough," Bobby went crimson: Johnson had "compared my father to the Nazis," Connally had lied "in saying my brother is dying," and "you're gonna get yours when the time comes!"
On Wednesday, July 13, Rayburn nominated "a poor boy who dreamed great dreams," while Johnson, watching in his Biltmore suite, carried a count showing Kennedy would just win. At Wyoming, the state Johnson had not bothered to visit, chairman Tracy McCracken, a Johnson man, kept a promise Ted Kennedy had extracted that morning and cast all 15 votes, putting Kennedy at 763. Rayburn wept. Kennedy finished with 806, Johnson 409, all others 306. It was western votes that decided the nomination: of the West's 172, Kennedy took 119 and Johnson, once its champion, 22½. Johnson watched in pajamas and slippers, sipping Scotch.
Caro's severe Bobby Kennedy of 1953–60 draws on Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978), Evan Thomas's Robert Kennedy: His Life (2000) and Jeff Shesol's Mutual Contempt (1997), but favours the harshest anecdotes, several from Johnson aides; Shesol treats the feud as two-sided. Whether holding the West would have forced a deadlock Caro leaves as a question. Two slips: his bloc figures (281 + 54½ + 40 + 22½) sum to 398, not Johnson's 409; and the dams rising in Idaho in 1960 were Idaho Power's private Brownlee and Oxbow, since the federal Hells Canyon dam Johnson carried through the Senate in 1957 died in a House subcommittee in 1958. On Addison's, Dallek's An Unfinished Life (2003) backs Caro.
The Back Stairs
On Thursday, July 14, 1960, the morning after losing the nomination, Lyndon Johnson accepted the vice presidency that everyone in Washington thought he would scorn. Caro shows that Johnson had calculated the odds of succession months earlier and wanted the job, that John Kennedy wanted him on the ticket for Texas and the South and never wavered, and that Robert Kennedy's frantic trips down the Biltmore's back stairs to undo the offer created a hatred between the two men that would shape the next eight years.
Why the Leader would take "a gavel"
The vice presidency was a Washington joke. John Adams called it "the most insignificant office"; John Nance Garner said it was not worth "a bucket of warm piss"; the Gershwins' musical Of Thee I Sing turned its holder, Alexander Throttlebottom, into a man who could enter the White House only on a guided tour. Johnson had said for years, "I wouldn't trade a vote for a gavel," and in spring 1960 shouted at Hugh Sidey, nose an inch away, that he would never take it. Yet in 1956 he had sent Jim Rowe to tell Adlai Stevenson "I want it," withdrawing only when Sam Rayburn flushed red.
Caro lays out the calculation in layers:
- Tactical. Johnson's Senate power was secure: a liberal motion to strip him of naming the Policy Committee got 12 caucus votes to his 51. But under a Democratic President the agenda would come from the White House, and he would stop being the voice of the party.
- Age. Johnson men died young. His father Sam Ealy Johnson died in 1937, twelve days after turning sixty; an uncle died at fifty-seven; Johnson himself had a massive heart attack in 1955 at forty-six. Waiting eight years would make him sixty. His reply when George Reedy offered 1968 as consolation: "Too long. Too long."
- The magnolia scent. As Leader he would be trapped between southern demands to kill civil rights bills and northern anger when he obliged. No southerner had been elected since Zachary Taylor in 1848; "I don't think anybody from the South will be nominated in my lifetime."
- The other route. His staff found that ten Vice Presidents had become President, and that seven of thirty-three Presidents had died in office; in the past century five of eighteen (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt), roughly one every twenty years. Only Warren Harding had gone straight from the Senate to the White House.
He said it aloud only once during his vice presidency, to Clare Boothe Luce on inauguration night: "I'm a gamblin' man, darlin', and this is the only chance I got." To Texas friends he said, "six of them didn't have to get elected." Truman's sudden summons in 1945 and Eisenhower's three illnesses in twenty-six months kept the possibility vivid. Adams's other line fitted: "I am nothing, but I may be everything."
After May 10 Johnson's denials softened to "a very 'iffy' question." Bobby Baker told Ted Sorensen in June, "Don't be too sure." In late June, before Governor David Lawrence and fund-raiser Matt McCloskey, Johnson contradicted Rayburn to his face: "I am going to do anything my party wants me to do." Lawrence would later "guarantee" to Kennedy that Johnson would accept. These signals were missed because the Kennedy camp kept promising the opposite: Ken O'Donnell assured labor, "with [Jack] Kennedy's knowledge," and Kennedy told Joseph Rauh in person, "It will not be Johnson."
The morning: an offer made and understood
At about 8 a.m. Kennedy phoned and asked to come down at ten. John Connally guessed the purpose at once. Rowe, half asleep, asked why Johnson would want it; Johnson answered, "Power is where power goes."
Connally, Rowe and Baker then framed the choice as risk, not glory: "Your risk lies in declining to accept it."
| Kennedy loses | Kennedy wins | |
|---|---|---|
| Decline | Liberals and Kennedy blame Johnson; a 1964 or 1968 bid harder | White House sets the agenda; "The Kennedys play for keeps" and might unseat him |
| Accept | Still senator, still Leader: "you can't really be hurt" | "Totally at his command," but Rayburn still in the House and "a heartbeat away" |
Rowe could not say the last phrase aloud; years later he told Caro only, "And that one heartbeat …" Johnson, quiet through the session, said, "I don't disagree with that," and talked Homer Thornberry round in a phone call. Caro's verdict: "He wanted it." One obstacle remained. Rayburn had watched Garner go "back to Texas a bitter man for life" after serving under Roosevelt, and Johnson "couldn't defy him." He sent Earle Clements down the hall to work on the Speaker.
The drama ran on two floors of the Biltmore Hotel: Kennedy's 9333, Johnson's 7333, with Robert Kennedy's 8315 in between and the press massed at the elevator. At about 10:15 Kennedy slipped down a broad, dim back staircase unseen. In half an hour on a couch Johnson said he was available but that Kennedy must win over Rayburn and his own angry liberals. Kennedy told a reporter they had discussed "nothing specific." Johnson told his men, "He offered me the vice presidency."
The news enraged Kennedy-haters in Johnson's own camp. Oklahoma's Robert Kerr burst in shouting "Get me my .38" and, taken into the bathroom to calm down, slapped Bobby Baker so hard Baker "saw stars." Baker's argument (national exposure if they lose, a conduit between White House and Hill if they win) brought Kerr round to hugging the Johnsons.
The evidence that Jack wanted him
Robert Kennedy later insisted the offer was pro forma: "He never dreamt that there was a chance in the world that he would accept it." Jack told columnist Charles Bartlett he had "just held it out like this … and he grabbed at it." Arthur Schlesinger was still repeating this in 1984. Caro sets four actions of that day against it:
- 6:30 a.m. Jack had Bobby count electoral votes in the northern industrial states "plus Texas." From his bathtub Bobby told a horrified Pierre Salinger and O'Donnell, "Yes, we are."
- The bathroom guarantee. Before going down, Jack took Lawrence and McCloskey into 9333's bathroom to confirm Johnson would accept. Afterwards Mayor Richard Daley, Robert Wagner, Carmine De Sapio and the other "old pros from the North" congratulated him.
- No back talk. To a furious O'Donnell he gave thin reasons (he would rather have Mike Mansfield as Leader) and one bitterly ironic one: "I'm the healthiest candidate for President." Then: "tell them this is the way it has got to be."
- No list. Larry O'Brien was summoned expecting a list of candidates: "there would be no list. It would be Lyndon Johnson." Without Texas's 24 electoral votes and some of the South, Kennedy could not beat Richard Nixon.
The clincher was Kennedy's visit to Rayburn. After Clements and Tommy Corcoran failed, Hale Boggs argued that without Johnson Nixon would win, which moved the Speaker. Rayburn set conditions: say Johnson is necessary to win, insist on him publicly, and use him in the National Security Council "to keep him busy and keep him happy." Kennedy said, "I tell you all those things," and left "positively exuberant." Rayburn told Johnson: "I don't like it. But I don't think you do have any choice."
Bobby on the stairs
Then Robert Kennedy appeared, and for three hours nothing was settled. Caro warns that no two accounts agree, quoting Theodore White: eyewitnesses do not "remember accurately what they have lived through." There were probably four trips down.
- ~1:30 Johnson refuses to see Bobby. Bobby tells Rayburn and Connally of a floor revolt and offers the Democratic National Committee chairmanship. Rayburn: "Shit." Johnson will run only if "drafted."
- Second trip Rayburn asks, "Are you authorized to speak for your brother?" Bobby says no. "Come back and see the Speaker of the House when you are."
- Third trip Connally: if the offer is withdrawn, Jack must withdraw it himself. "He can't do that."
- ~3:30 Jack phones and reads Johnson the press release. "Do you really want me?" "Yes, I do."
- Fourth trip Alone with Johnson, Bobby says Jack "doesn't want" him. Johnson, in tears: "I want to be Vice President."
Johnson paced his rooms "about to jump out of his skin." Rayburn cut through: "Phil, call Jack." Philip Graham reached Kennedy, who said calmly, "Bobby's been out of touch," and that he had already announced Johnson. Bobby, white and "dead tired," took the phone: "Well, it's too late now." Graham pushed the Johnsons out to stand on chairs before the cameras. Bobby, head against a wall, told Rowe: "this wouldn't have happened except that we were all too tired last night."
- Robert Kennedy's account: he and Jack alone decided, "vacillated back and forth," and agreed to try to "get rid of him" with the DNC offer; Jack switched only after an unnamed caller told him to stop vacillating.
- Caro's reading: Jack's every act points the other way. O'Donnell heard Jack say only, "Maybe you better go downstairs and tell him" about a possible floor fight, and O'Brien never saw him waver. Bobby, shaken by labor's fury at the Statler Hilton, may have acted on his own or heard what his hatred wanted.
Caro's judgment is that Jack Kennedy wanted Lyndon Johnson and never wavered, and that the "pro forma" story was a cover for broken promises to liberals and labor. He offers a colder possibility: Jack may have planned the choice for months and told no one, even Bobby. Evan Thomas concludes Jack "didn't always tell him everything"; Fred Dutton agrees.
Caro's case leans on O'Donnell's and O'Brien's recollections, set down years later by men loyal to Jack and estranged from Bobby's version. Jeff Shesol (Mutual Contempt, 1997) also finds Bobby's case "not persuasive" but reads it as sincere memory, not duplicity. Caro concedes his own explanation "is not definitive," so the question of Jack's intent stays open. One slip: Caro calls Hale Boggs "Majority Whip" at the convention, but Boggs took that post only in January 1962; Carl Albert held it in 1960.
The cost was permanent. Johnson never blamed Jack; he blamed Bobby, who "came to my room three times." Back in his suite he called him "that little shitass" and worse; Connally refused to repeat it. In Texas he would draw his hand across his throat: "I'll cut his throat if it's the last thing I do."
Nominated by acclaim
James Farley's jaw dropped. Michigan's UAW bloc, the District of Columbia delegation (for Orville Freeman) and members from California, New York and Wisconsin threatened a televised floor fight. A haggard Johnson climbed the back stairs to plan with O'Brien; CBS's Bill Downs taunted him at the Coliseum, "We expected you to come out in a different role." But the numbers ruled. Thirteen-year-old Lucy Baines: "Kennedy couldn't win without Daddy." John Kenneth Galbraith cited Roosevelt's choice of Garner. Joseph P. Kennedy told his despondent sons, "in two weeks they'll be saying it's the smartest thing you ever did."
- The liberals fold. David Dubinsky called it "a political masterstroke"; Arthur Goldberg said labor "had no choice"; Rauh: "What can I do, work for Nixon?" Meany and Reuther called off the fight at 7:30.
- Rayburn closes the door. John McCormack moved to suspend the rules and nominate by acclamation, which needed two-thirds. The voice vote sounded even; Rayburn bellowed "Say 'aye'!"; parliamentarian Clarence Cannon whispered to Chairman LeRoy Collins, who declared Johnson nominated "by acclaim."
Johnson, who Murrow said looked "considerably older," raised both arms in the V for Victory sign.
The “LBJ Special”
Kennedy chose Johnson to win back Texas and the South, and Caro shows that he did it: by threat in private, by stump oratory from the back of a train, by a Dallas mob he turned to advantage, and by George Parr's border votes. The legend of 1960 written by Theodore White left him out, but without Johnson, Caro argues, Nixon would have won.
Winning back the South
Eisenhower had carried five of the eleven Confederate states in 1956, and Kennedy's Catholicism was being preached against from Baptist pulpits; a late-September Gallup poll showed the South tied, 46 to 46. In a private Miami meeting Johnson told Florida's leaders that if Kennedy won without them, "you bastards are going to be dead" in the next Congress. Drew Pearson reported that they then "really began to work."
In mid-October the thirteen-car "LBJ Special" left Union Station for five days through eight southern states. Johnson designed each stop:
- The entrance. "The Yellow Rose of Texas" swelled as the train reached town; a blue curtain parted; Johnson appeared waving a Stetson. Governor Buford Ellington: "The main thing is to have a Southerner on the ticket."
- The message. Short, shouted "stemwinders": "What has Dick Nixon ever done for Culpepper?" His dying father's line, "they care when he dies," became the difference between the parties.
- The religion answer. Kennedy reasoned with the Houston ministers; Johnson told how Joe Kennedy Jr. flew a suicide mission and "nobody asked him what church he went to," and the crowds fell silent.
- The parlor car. Local officials boarded one stop early for drinks, "Official Party" badges and a talk on political realities, then stepped out on the rear platform with him in their home town. 1,247 dignitaries passed through. Mary McGrory: "In explaining the political realities, he remains peerless."
Northern reporters sneered at the "Cornpone Special," but southern crowds grew from 2,000 in Clemson to 100,000 in New Orleans. Bryce Harlow warned Nixon he was "being religioned right out of this campaign."
Texas: the Adolphus and the Valley
Conservatives waved "Judas" signs; Johnson feared losing Texas would discredit him. On November 4 in Dallas, a mob of Nixon supporters led by Congressman Bruce Alger jostled and spat at the Johnsons in the Adolphus Hotel.
Johnson sent the police and General Carl Phinney away and took thirty minutes to cross seventy-five feet of lobby before the cameras. Rayburn's aide D. B. Hardeman said he "played it for all it was worth"; Bill Moyers: "the moment it happened, he knew." Statewide editorials condemned the mob; Houston greeted him with "WE APOLOGIZE." The incident turned the tide.
The other factor was George Parr, repaying the legal help after 1948 that ended in Justice Hugo Black's order. Ed Clark: "Our old friends stood by us."
- 46,233: Kennedy's Texas margin, out of 2,311,670 votes.
- 31,000: the 1956-to-1960 swing in San Antonio, driven by Sheriff Owen Kilday's West Side (17,017 to 2,982).
- 3,803 to 808 in Duval; 4,051 to 284 in Starr; 1,144 to 45 in Box 13.
- 21,691: plurality from nine Parr-allied counties, against 7,432 in 1956.
- $1.75: price of poll tax receipts allegedly bought in blocks of 300 to 3,000.
No investigation followed: the state canvassing board (Governor Price Daniel, Attorney General Will Wilson, Secretary of State Zollie Steakly, all Johnson campaigners) claimed no authority and delayed until the Electoral College met on December 19. Republicans also charged that a new law requiring paper-ballot voters to strike out rival candidates was used to void 59,000 ballots in pro-Nixon precincts.
Caro sets the San Antonio 31,000 "reversal" and the Valley 21,000 plurality against a 46,000 margin, but they are different measures: a swing from 1956 is not net fraud, and the Valley's gain over 1956 was about 14,000. Caro admits the weight of these votes cannot now be measured; his inference is strong but not proved. Two slips: the 14 southern electors Caro gives to "Mississippi's independent slate" were Mississippi's 8 plus 6 unpledged Alabamians; and the Virginia town in Johnson's refrain is Culpeper, not "Culpepper."
The arithmetic of the South
Without Johnson, Caro argues, Kennedy would have lost: Texas, Louisiana and the two Carolinas gave him 56 electoral votes, and without them Nixon wins 275 to 247.
| Before Johnson's nomination | Result | |
|---|---|---|
| GOP expected | Hold Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, Virginia; add both Carolinas | Nixon won only Florida, Tennessee, Virginia |
| Electoral votes | Kennedy 303, Nixon 219 | Swing 56 and Nixon leads 275–247 |
| Southern total | 128 electoral votes | 81 Kennedy-Johnson, 33 Nixon |
Evans and Novak: could Kennedy have won the South without him? "Probably not." Yet in White's 173 pages on the campaign Johnson's name appears seven times. Only Ted Sorensen credited him: "That gamble paid off." Kennedy told O'Donnell in 1962, "We couldn't have won without him." On election night Johnson phoned: "we are doing fine in Pennsylvania." Kennedy smiled: "We?"
“Power Is Where Power Goes”
All his life Johnson had taken "nothing jobs" and made them powerful. Within weeks of his election he tried it on the nearly empty vice presidency, on two fronts: keeping control of the Senate Democratic caucus and building a power base inside the White House. Both failed, the first in public humiliation, the second in Kennedy's "charitable silence." By Inauguration Day Johnson knew he would depend entirely on what the younger man chose to give him.
The gift
"I do understand power," Johnson once told an aide. "I know where to look for it, and how to use it." Caro defines the gift: seeing political potential in a powerless organization, taking a post in it and transforming it, with ruthlessness in grabbing and using what he found.
| Organization | Before Johnson | What he made of it |
|---|---|---|
| White Stars (college) | Small social club | Secret machine; stolen election; control of campus jobs |
| Little Congress (1933) | Moribund aides' debating club | Prized platform; its "Boss" had access to senators |
| Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (1940) | Two employees, little cash | Conduit for Texas money (Herman Brown) to northern liberals |
| Senate whip / Leader (1951, 1953) | "Nothing jobs," figures of ridicule | "Running the world!"; "second most powerful man in the country" |
An office with nothing in it
The Constitution gives the Vice President two things: presiding over the Senate with a tie-breaking vote, and succession. Article I vests legislative power in senators only; the Senate's own rules bar him from debate, so a freshman senator in the chair had as much power. Article II vests "the executive power" in the President alone, with no provision to delegate it, and Congress's statutes bound the departments. The one experiment, Henry Wallace's Economic Defense Board (1941), set off open war with the Cabinet. And a President cannot fire a Vice President.
Johnson held only an advisory seat on the National Security Council. George Reedy: he discovered "that none of the power was his."
Front one: the Senate caucus
Johnson persuaded Mike Mansfield, his accommodating successor as Leader, to let him keep chairing the Democratic Conference as a supposedly "honorary" post, keep the "Taj Mahal" office, and keep Bobby Baker as secretary for the majority. He also planned to "sit in" on the Policy and Steering Committees. Ken O'Donnell: "He was going to be vice president and Majority Leader."
At a private December dinner at the Sheraton-Carlton with Robert Kerr, Hubert Humphrey, George Smathers and Richard Russell, misgivings were voiced and ignored. Baker found him "excessively manic." Caro's diagnosis is that fear of failure had eroded the gift. Intoxicated by power, he fawned on the Old Bulls but bullied junior senators, and liberals such as Paul Douglas and Albert Gore resented him. Above all, the Bulls loved the Senate more than they loved Johnson.
January 3, 1961, 9:45 a.m. Johnson gaveled the caucus, Mansfield was elected, and Mansfield moved that "the Vice President-elect preside over future conferences." Douglas, Gore and Joseph Clark denounced it to his face; then the Bulls did too. Clinton Anderson: it would "shatter the principle of separation of powers." The motion passed on Mansfield's plea, but Johnson had been rebuffed, and a second vote was threatened. After Russell spoke to him, Johnson never appeared. "Those bastards sandbagged me."
Front two: the White House
Johnson asked for an office next to the Oval Office, a staff (he had had about fifty) inside the Executive Office of the President, and a "little Joint Chiefs of Staff," for which Kenneth BeLieu began interviewing officers. Then came a draft executive order, kept from Reedy. Jim Rowe called it "the most presumptuous document any Vice President had ever sent to his President."
- Johnson's draft. "General supervision," then "continuing surveillance and review," of national security; access to all information from State, Defense, the CIA, the Budget Bureau and civil defense; use of their personnel; "all elements" to "cooperate fully."
- Kennedy's reply, January 28. No order at all; a letter "requesting you to review policies," with no staff, no use of personnel, and cooperation only "in providing information."
A White House official told columnist Marquis Childs (February 9) the episode had no parallel since Seward's bid to make himself prime minister under Lincoln. Like Lincoln, Kennedy buried it. Nothing could have been more gracious than Kennedy's handling of Johnson's requests, and nothing could have been more unyielding.
Caro admits the original draft order is lost: no copy exists in the LBJ or JFK libraries. The "general supervision" wording rests on witnesses and on Doris Kearns Goodwin, via Richard Neustadt; only the revised draft survives. The caucus story leans heavily on Bobby Baker, whose memoir (Wheeling and Dealing, 1978) was written after his own conviction, and the theme of a gift eroded by desperation is Caro's interpretation rather than a documented finding. A Caro footnote dates the Twelfth Amendment to 1794; Congress proposed it in December 1803 and it was ratified in 1804.
What he actually got
- An office across the street in the Executive Office Building. Kennedy, "flabbergasted," said: "I have never heard of such a thing."
- Sixteen staff posts, attached to the Department of Defense, not the White House.
- The National Space Council, advisory since Eisenhower gutted it. Johnson was asked for a NASA chief only after Jerome Wiesner's nine candidates failed (producing James Webb); the Senate refused to double the council's $500,000 budget.
- The Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a trap Rowe foresaw. Katzenbach's order handed real authority to vice chairman Arthur Goldberg, who named Jerry Holleman of the anti-Johnson Texas AFL-CIO; Holleman named militant John Feild. There was no way out.
Delegated authority is only as good as the delegator's will. Kennedy beat the grab by editing verbs ("directing" became "requesting") and withholding staff. Any oversight role should be tested for resources and decision rights, not title.
Johnson now read Kennedy correctly: smarter and tougher than he had thought, a man who "looks you straight in the eye and puts that knife into you without flinching." On January 20 he sat squinting below the Capitol façade he had once run past as a poor aide, dependent "for years to come."
Genuine Warmth
Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen set the lens: Kennedy treated his Vice President with "genuine warmth." Caro shows a different record: Johnson shut out of decisions, legislation and the inner circle, humiliated in small ways and large, and, once Sam Rayburn died, left with no one behind him in Washington. Johnson answered with flawless loyalty and silence, which bought him nothing, while Georgetown laughed at "Rufus Cornpone."
The official lens and the record
Kennedy's instructions were generous. He told Ken O'Donnell, put "in charge of the care and feeding of Lyndon Johnson," to "kiss his fanny from one end of Washington to the other," because a resentful Johnson "knows every reporter in Washington." He told protocol chief Angier Biddle Duke to see the Johnsons were not ignored, and scolded Lee White when Johnson missed a meeting. Theodore H. White (1964) and Robert Dallek (1998) accepted the warm view. Even George Reedy called Kennedy "rather generous," adding that Johnson did not appreciate it "in the slightest."
| The lens (Schlesinger, Sorensen) | The record Caro assembles |
|---|---|
| Present "at all the major meetings" | Real decisions made in small informal meetings he was not invited to |
| Valued counsel on legislation | Larry O'Brien ran Congress; "Never in about two years" asked Johnson's advice |
| Full "respect and dignity" | Speeches, press releases and plane trips needed White House clearance |
| Close partnership | 10 hours 19 minutes alone with Kennedy in all of 1961 |
January 24, 1961: Johnson walked to the first leaders' breakfast at Kennedy's side, "talking and gesturing." At the door Kennedy sent him in, stepped into the Oval Office, killed time, and entered alone. Afterwards Johnson jabbed a finger, "Now let me tell you, Jack," while Kennedy shuffled papers. In 1961 Johnson breakfasted alone with the President twice, fewer times than he had with Roosevelt as a junior congressman.
The reasons were partly strategic. Kennedy disliked sharing the spotlight; he had Robert Frost read a poem rather than speak, to avoid "competition with me." Schlesinger: letting Johnson handle Congress would make him "the judge of what was legislatively feasible." At the breakfasts Hubert Humphrey, whom Johnson had once kicked in the shin on the Senate floor, now told him, "You haven't been up there lately." Wilbur Mills: Kennedy had "turned him out to pasture." By March 19 the New York Times' Tom Wicker noted Johnson kept "out of sight and out of print."
Johnson replied with his old pity tactic, the sad face and inaudible monosyllables that had once broken Jim Rowe, who was wept at in 1956 and then told, "I make the decisions. You don't." Kennedy was unmoved: "I cannot stand Johnson's damn long face." On Smathers' advice he sent him to Senegal.
The Bay of Pigs weekend, April 15–17, 1961. Systematically excluded from the planning, Johnson flew to Norfolk to crown daughter Lynda Bird Azalea Queen while B-26s bombed Cuba, then hosted Konrad Adenauer at the ranch, in Fredericksburg and in Austin as the 1,400-man brigade landed and was crushed. Kennedy had arranged for him to be out of Washington. At his first Cuba meeting, the postmortem, Johnson criticized the CIA and was rebuked in front of the table: "no sort of passing of the buck."
Suspicion, control, insult
Kennedy's men feared him. Aides still said Johnson had tried "to pull a William Seward"; he might leak, so he was told little. His tactics confirmed their fears: he kept asking to fly on Air Force One (always refused, on security grounds), and parked his Cadillac, plate "111," outside the West Wing while he loitered in Evelyn Lincoln's office to look like an insider.
- "Salesman." Asked Johnson's role, Sorensen said "Salesman for the President's program," and cut off officials who wanted Johnson working on their bills. Horace Busby called it "a summit conference, held on an iceberg."
- Clearance. O'Donnell required White House approval of every statement. "Imagine if you had been king," said Ashton Gonella.
- Planes. Johnson often got a ten-seat Lockheed JetStar marked "United States Air Force," without Air Force One's communications. Trips needed approval from Ralph Dungan; McNamara's office refused "United States of America" lettering; a leased Gulfstream was vetoed.
- "Lyndon." Staffers' first-name familiarity he took as deliberate humiliation.
Sarah T. Hughes, a Dallas ally, was refused a judgeship by Robert Kennedy as too old, and Johnson told her so. Then Rayburn stalled a Justice Department bill: "That bill of yours will pass when Sarah Hughes gets appointed." ("Sonny, everybody seems old to you.") She was named the next day, proving the Speaker had power and Johnson had none.
Some insults were staged. When Rayburn demanded an Agriculture commission post for a friend Johnson called an alcoholic, Kennedy "stuck by" his clearance agreement, and O'Donnell reached for the phone to tell the Speaker Johnson was the obstacle. Johnson pinned O'Donnell's hand to the receiver, then withdrew his objection, while Kennedy stared out the window "enjoying the whole scene."
Caro asks what lay behind this personal edge. Kennedy had been close to death too often: "You think I want Lyndon listening across the park for my heartbeat?" There were Johnson's "Sonny Boy" stories, India Edwards' cortisone attack ("as low as anyone could go," said Sorensen), and eight years of having to "beg" Leader Johnson. Whatever its reasons, the edge, "no matter how many historians and Kennedy aides deny its existence, was definitely there."
Rayburn's death
In July 1961 Rayburn, seventy-nine, felt pain in his back: probably pancreatic cancer. On August 16 he told the House he was going home. Days later Lady Bird, meeting Johnson's plane from Berlin at Andrews, found the shrunken, nearly blind Speaker standing behind her, as he had stood behind her at Union Station in 1942. Connally had said, "You'll still have the Speaker." Asked if things got worse after Rayburn died, Connally answered: "Yes."
The loyal Vice President
Powerless, Johnson turned obsequious to the one man he needed.
- 4 Hereford heifers (two with calves) for Glen Ora; 11 cows by 1962, when Jacqueline Kennedy asked to be rid of them; Johnson sold them and bought a Lincoln manuscript for the White House.
- 1 pony, "Tex," for Caroline, who never called him "Uncle Lyndon."
- Pearl cufflinks and a black pearl at Christmas 1961.
- 3-hour monologue to bureau chiefs, summer 1961, on having no power.
- 9 months of memos on his own committee's executive order, none sent to him.
His hand-copied Christmas letter ended: "Where you lead, I will follow." To Time's John Steele he called himself a messenger boy who had Kennedy write his communiqués. He held no press conferences, leaked nothing, and told a former aide, Mary Fish, who repeated a Kennedy joke at The Elms, to "quit talking that way or quit your job!" Charles Bartlett: "not one word" of disloyalty reached Kennedy. Historian Jeff Shesol called the restraint "a personal power few had ever seen."
Loyalty earned nothing. Johnson sat waiting in O'Donnell's office while others went in; Robert Kennedy and even Schlesinger walked in on his meetings. Pleas through Liz Carpenter brought a lame excuse: Johnson "hasn't read the cables." Kennedy could simply have sent them.
Camelot's joke
Johnson reached the intimate dinners mainly when Duke reminded the White House late. At the November 11 dinner-dance he slipped doing the twist and fell on Helen Chavchavadze; the line "He lay on her like a lox" spread by noon. When he phoned to ask whether his omission from a dinner for friends was a mistake, Kennedy said to tell him "there was no mistake."
In Georgetown the New Frontiersmen mocked his accent, "whore doves" for hors d'oeuvres, and a gray Neiman-Marcus tailcoat. They asked "Whatever happened to Lyndon Johnson?", called him "Judge Crater," and settled on "Uncle Cornpone" or "Rufus Cornpone," with Lady Bird as "his Little Pork Chop." Elizabeth Gatov: "Really, it was brutal."
Caro openly sets his account against Schlesinger's and Sorensen's early books (Sorensen later revised his view) and Dallek's 1998 judgment. Many of his sharpest scenes come from Evelyn Lincoln, whose 1968 memoir Kennedy and Johnson was hostile to Johnson, and from O'Donnell, a Robert Kennedy loyalist; both are partisan witnesses, though Caro corroborates many scenes from several sources. One slip: Caro places Judge Crater's disappearance, source of the nickname, in "the 1920s"; Joseph Force Crater vanished on August 6, 1930.
“Cut”
Caro's chapter title comes from Johnson's own words to Sam Rayburn: "Being vice president is like being a cut dog." By 1962 the former Master of the Senate had no work, no information and no audience, and the press was asking "Whatever happened to Lyndon Johnson?" The Cuban Missile Crisis finished him with the Kennedys: silent at the table, hawkish behind their backs, he was shut out of the decisive meeting. Meanwhile Robert Kennedy grew into a formidable figure, held the leash on Johnson, and by 1963 was being tipped for the 1968 nomination that Johnson had taken the vice presidency to win.
The Vice President in eclipse
Kennedy found big formal meetings "a waste of time," so the Cabinet soon met less than once a month, and these were the only meetings Johnson attended. With the Space Council running itself and the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity run by Labor Department officials, he had almost nothing to do. In the Senate cloakroom, where he had been the centre of attention for eight years, he once stood for minutes while no one rose or asked him to sit.
His office, EOB 274 in the Executive Office Building, looked straight down at the West Wing entrance. He would swivel to the window and stare, then walk over and wait beside Kenneth O'Donnell's desk for a few minutes of the President's time. George Reedy compared him to "a precinct captain sitting in the anteroom of a ward leader."
- The staff's pain. Horace Busby, seeing his chief ignored in the West Wing corridors, went back to the EOB and vomited. Sam Houston Johnson stopped visiting to avoid witnessing "my brother's day-to-day humiliation."
- The phone that stopped ringing. Hugh Sidey of Time found him "Lonely. Pathetic," but had no reason to call: Johnson no longer knew what the President would do. A friend sat in EOB 274 for an hour without one call.
- The Russell Baker monologue. Johnson hauled the New York Times's Russell Baker into the Taj Mahal for a torrent on his devotion to Kennedy, then passed a note to a secretary asking "Who is this I'm talking to?" Baker saw "greatness comically humbled": a man the Ivy League "Harvards" mocked as "Cornpone."
- Killing time. With Texas friend Charlie Herring he dropped in on Justice Tom Clark "just to have something to do."
At Cabinet and NSC meetings he sat opposite Kennedy, silent, partly because anything he said was leaked to make him look southern, militaristic or uncouth. Dean Rusk admired the "self-control"; others saw white knuckles and a mumble.
By summer 1962 the eclipse was news. Headlines ran WHERE'S LYNDON? and LYNDON JOHNSON GUESSING GAME; Marianne Means (Hearst) wrote he was "so thoroughly ignored that it is hard to tell if he is here at all"; the Chicago Tribune suggested Kennedy had tossed him aside once he had delivered the South. The refrain became WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LYNDON JOHNSON? On one clipping Johnson scrawled to aide Charles Boatner: "Chas, Why? Not True." Caro: "But it was true, and he knew it."
The psychic cost
Caro's diagnosis is that the wound was old. It was "most important to Lyndon not to be like Daddy," the public laughingstock of Johnson City, and now he was one too. Arthur Schlesinger saw "a growing psychic cost." His weight fell, his suits hung loose, his face went gaunt with a "hangdog look," and his Texas lope shortened; near Kennedy he seemed to bend his knees to hide his height. Bill Moyers saw "a great horse in a very small corral"; Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw "a bull castrated very late in life."
Being vice president is like being a cut dog.
— Lyndon Johnson, in Sam Rayburn's Board of Education
- Retreat from the press. He refused even the Today show. In March 1962 he turned down an Adlai Stevenson television programme on space, though he chaired the Space Council; press aide Clayton Fritchey said he would invite James Webb instead.
- Retreat from Washington. After Kennedy's Big Steel confrontation in April 1962, in which he had no part, he spent Thursday to Monday at the ranch, sleepless, playing dominoes with foreman Dale Malechek.
- The dream. He told Doris Kearns Goodwin of a nightmare: at his EOB desk, deciding to go home early, he found his legs chained to the chair, gave up, and reached for the next stack of mail.
- No exit. Reedy's memo said more activity or public relations would not answer "What is the Vice President doing?"; only real decision-making would, and the office did not allow it. When John Connally asked aide Ken BeLieu to join his Texas campaign, Johnson said: "Go. I'm finished."
Humiliation produced grovelling. During the Ole Miss crisis over James Meredith in September 1962 (two dead, marshals and a federalized Guard), Johnson was at the ranch and uninvolved. The Houston Chronicle's Vernon Louviere was about to report it. Johnson spent thirty minutes insisting he had been consulted constantly, even by ship-to-shore phone from a boat. When the story ran, he panicked that Kennedy would think he had leaked it and sent word through Rusk and Ralph Dungan: the crisis had been "handled better than he could ever have thought of," and he had been treated "better than any other Vice President in history."
Thirteen days: Johnson in ExComm
On Tuesday, October 16, 1962, McGeorge Bundy brought Kennedy U-2 photographs of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. At the 11:50 a.m. meeting Johnson, as an NSC member, joined the hawkish majority: asked for his thoughts, he said that of "take it out" or "talk about it," "I would take it out," and he would not consult allies or Congress. Kennedy asked for secrecy, and both men kept campaign dates to avoid tipping off the press.
- The leak to Russell. Despite saying he was "not much for circularizing it over the Hill," Johnson phoned Richard Russell, chief of the congressional "war party," the first word Russell had, according to his committee clerk William H. Darden. Russell, whose racism coexisted with "a monumental sense of honor," told no one.
- The Gulfstream. A tape caught Johnson asking Robert McNamara to have MATS lease his Gulfstream; McNamara brushed him off.
Johnson spent the first week campaigning in the West and Hawaii, missing the "blur" of meetings in which, prodded by Robert Kennedy, ExComm turned from a surprise air strike. Bobby passed his brother a note ("I now know how Tojo felt") and argued a Sunday strike would be "a Pearl Harbor in reverse"; "A sneak attack is not in our traditions." Douglas Dillon felt "a real turning point in history"; Dean Acheson sneered at emotion over legal analysis. On Saturday, October 20, ExComm recommended a naval "quarantine" and the President accepted.
Briefed by CIA director John McCone at The Elms on October 21, Johnson rejected the blockade as "locking the barn after the horse was gone" and gradual escalation as "telegraphing our punch," wanting an unannounced air strike. He agreed only reluctantly, partly because Eisenhower backed the plan. Caro allows that he had missed the debate and that Maxwell Taylor, McCone and Dillon were hawks too.
- Oct 16 U-2 photos shown; Johnson: "I would take it out."
- Oct 20 ExComm recommends quarantine; Johnson in transit to Hawaii.
- Oct 22 Kennedy meets 20 congressional leaders, then speaks on TV; Johnson silent for the hour.
- Oct 24 Soviet ships stop at the line; Kennedy holds the Essex an hour on the Kimovsk.
- Oct 26 Khrushchev's first letter: missiles out for a no-invasion pledge.
- Oct 27 Second letter adds the Turkish Jupiters; U-2 shot down; Johnson rallies hawks; secret Oval Office meeting excludes him.
- Oct 28 Khrushchev accepts the first-letter terms.
Kennedy's method: buy time, avoid miscalculation
Having read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, Kennedy feared "a miscalculation, a mistake in judgment." On October 24, with a Soviet submarine near the line and the carrier Essex on station, he ordered: "Check first," wait an hour on the Kimovsk. By Thursday sixteen of twenty-five Soviet ships had stopped or turned back. He let the tanker Bucharest through against the advice of many advisers: "I don't want to push him into a corner."
At the October 22 meeting with congressional leaders, the "war party" spoke with one voice. Russell, who had had a week to think thanks to Johnson, demanded immediate invasion: "We're either a first-class power or we're not." J. William Fulbright wanted "an all-out one." Robert Kennedy called it "the most difficult meeting." Johnson, whose allies these were, said nothing for the full hour. Afterwards, Robert Kennedy and Ted Sorensen say, he would "circulate and whine and complain about our being weak" once the President had left and the tape was off, yet never offer a plan.
Saturday, October 27
Khrushchev's second, public letter added the Jupiters in Turkey. The missiles were nearly obsolete and Washington had already considered removing them, but a public trade would look like appeasement; Harold Macmillan warned that "all credibility in the American protection of Europe would have gone." Then a U-2 was shot down, its pilot killed. Bundy, Dillon and even McNamara wanted the agreed retaliation against a SAM site. Kennedy feared "the fourth and fifth step," with no one left to take the sixth, and had Sorensen draft a reply ignoring the second letter.
With both Kennedys out of the room, Johnson took over the meeting. Caro shows his case from the tapes:
- "We're backing down." A Turkish trade would look like retreat, and the retreat had been going on "gradually from the President's speech." When Bobby walked in and challenged him, Johnson insisted the ships were "coming through"; Bobby replied that ninety percent had turned back.
- The domino of trades. A Jupiter deal would leave Soviet bombers and troops in Cuba, forcing a second trade of US planes and 20,000 men from Turkey: "your whole foreign policy is gone... And crumble."
- The mad dog. Give up Turkey for one plane, Berlin for the next: "like a mad dog, he tastes a little blood." Only force would impress Khrushchev, "an expert on that palaver."
- The public. The wires would soon ask, "The President made a fine speech. What else have you done?"
(A Caro footnote: earlier that evening Johnson had seemed to endorse a trade, before he understood Khrushchev's terms.) When Kennedy returned at 7:20, Dillon and Llewellyn Thompson had swung to Johnson's line, and Bundy reported "a very substantial difference between us." Kennedy asked: "How else are we going to get those missiles out of there?"
Then came the exclusion. Kennedy called eight men to the Oval Office: Robert Kennedy, Sorensen, Bundy, Rusk, McNamara, Ball, Thompson and Roswell Gilpatric, hawks included. "Lyndon Johnson was not invited to that meeting," Sorensen says; he ate in the White House mess. Rusk proposed that Bobby tell Anatoly Dobrynin privately that the Jupiters would go in "4 or 5 months", with no public deal. The nine swore themselves to secrecy, and the deal stayed secret for years. The most important decision of the Kennedy Administration was made without Lyndon Johnson's knowledge.
At the 9 p.m. session, before the brothers arrived, Johnson slapped the table: a Texas boy facing a rattlesnake would "take a stick and chop its head off." Sorensen felt "chilled": Johnson could persuade men, and these men were listening. Kennedy held out to "keep tomorrow clean," and on Bobby's quiet urging gave the Grozny "that last chance." On Sunday, October 28, Khrushchev accepted the first-letter terms, signing off "With respect for you."
Caro's portrait of a hawkish, sulking Johnson rests heavily on Robert Kennedy's and Sorensen's later recollections, both hostile, and his Bobby as ExComm's moral dove draws on Kennedy's own Thirteen Days. Sheldon Stern, the JFK Library historian who studied the tapes (Averting "The Final Failure", 2003), found Bobby more hawkish on the tapes than in his memoir, and in a 2012 critique of this book judged his October 27 stance close to Johnson's. Johnson's October 27 arguments are quoted from the tapes and are solid. Caro's "still the religious teenager" heckling Father Feeney cannot be right: Kennedy, born in 1925, was past twenty when Feeney's Boston Common preaching began.
After Cuba: fading out, 1963
Robert Kennedy said he would follow his brother to the theatre, Lincoln-style, having seen "the inability of Johnson to make any contribution of any kind," and that if any of half a dozen hawks had been President the world would "very likely" have had catastrophic war. Charles Bartlett heard JFK name the three ExComm men he would be glad to see succeed him: McNamara, Dillon and Bobby. Jacqueline Kennedy later wrote Sorensen that her husband was "truly frightened" at the prospect of LBJ as President.
The ExComm silver calendar completed the insult. Bobby's note implied Johnson would attend the presentation; Bundy's secretary told Winnie Coates it was unnecessary for "everybody" to come at 8:15 a.m. Johnson stayed away, then promptly paid his $200 assessment.
- 10 hours 19 minutes: Johnson alone with Kennedy in 1961 (Evelyn Lincoln's diaries).
- 1 hour 53 minutes: the same figure for 1963.
- 16 of 25: Soviet ships stopped or turned back by October 25, 1962.
- $200: Johnson's share of a gift whose presentation he was steered away from.
- 0: passers-by on Candid Camera who knew who Lyndon B. Johnson was.
- Fewer assignments. Evelyn Lincoln says Kennedy now "let Mr. Johnson seek his own place"; Johnson praised every speech ("That was a fine speech, Jack"), but flattery that worked on elderly senators did not work here. Lincoln forgot to invite him to the President's May 29 birthday party, "and no one reminded me."
- Leashed abroad. In Finland in September 1963, Ambassador Carl Rowan says the White House vetoed a side trip to an Iranian earthquake; after Johnson boasted he could read Soviet leaders' hearts, a back-channel order came to stop him visiting the Soviet Union.
- A spectral presence. Schlesinger saw "almost a spectral presence." At a Fifth Avenue fund-raiser he stood alone at a window until Jeanne Murray Vanderbilt was sent to talk to him.
- The taunt. The Miami Herald: "Few men in American history have given up so much for so little." Ward Just in The Reporter and Time in January 1963 turned his boast "Power is where power goes" against him: "He was wrong."
Robert Kennedy: the portrait repainted
Johnson's hatred of Bobby dated from the Los Angeles convention and never faded: "He came to my room three times." Bobby had his Cabinet seat moved away from Johnson's; Richard Goodwin saw that "they literally couldn't look at each other." Johnson told Bobby Baker that Jack was considerate, "But I know his snot-nosed brother's after my ass." Kearns Goodwin's reading, which Caro adopts: Johnson could not afford to blame Jack, so he projected his anger onto Bobby, though Bobby did nothing his brother would have disapproved of.
Johnson read the signs of power: who entered with the President, who stayed behind, whose view became the decision. "Bobby is first in, last out. And Bobby is the boy he listens to." Life, U.S. News and Time all called Bobby "No. 2", the title Johnson had claimed for himself. So he sued for peace. Walter Jenkins told John Seigenthaler Johnson would come to Bobby at any time convenient. After a January 1963 dinner-dance, in a White House upstairs kitchen, Johnson pressed: "Why don't you like me?" He blamed press misquotes of his 1960 attack on Joseph Kennedy as a "Chamberlain umbrella man". Seigenthaler had heard that speech and sent Bobby the microfilm; Bobby concluded Johnson "lies even when he doesn't have to lie."
Caro then repaints Bobby, who had grown since the 1950s:
- Early hints. As a young man he challenged the anti-Semitic Father Feeney on Boston Common despite his father's anti-Semitism. His 1948 dispatches for the Boston Post praised the Jews of Palestine. At Virginia law school (56th of 124) he forced an integrated audience for Ralph Bunche.
- Tenderness. He was gentle with his seven children, with orphans touring Justice, with his father after his December 1961 stroke, and with Jacqueline in 1956, burying her stillborn child while Jack cruised.
- From Manichean to diplomat. The man who on a 1955 Soviet trip with William O. Douglas refused caviar and said "No communist is going to doctor me" made Soviet diplomat Georgy Bolshakov his back channel to Khrushchev; Moscow even signalled it would welcome him as ambassador.
- A great Justice Department. A lawyer who had never tried a case hired men above his stature: Byron White, Nicholas Katzenbach, Archibald Cox, Burke Marshall. He inspired a "band of brothers", took on juvenile delinquency and civil rights, and began reading seriously. Budd Schulberg heard his "human outcry" for Meredith.
The dark colours stayed. Rudeness and bullying had uses, as when he humiliated Averell Harriman at his own table and, with the President silently watching, savaged Chester Bowles until Bowles was eased out. His Castro obsession ran through Operation Mongoose. The CIA made eight assassination attempts on Castro into 1965; whether the Kennedys authorized them, Evan Thomas says, "is unknowable." The "Get Hoffa" squad used IRS and FBI, fourteen grand juries and a planted Life article, until even the ACLU filed for Hoffa, who was convicted in 1964. Joe Kennedy: "Bobby hates like me."
Two men, one prize
Bobby hated Johnson ("mean, bitter, vicious, an animal in many ways"), and he tightened the leash: late, small MATS planes; every public utterance, even introductory remarks, cleared by the Attorney General; contempt toward Johnson's staff ("We just dreaded having to call over there," said Ashton Gonella). Caro offers three explanations: Bobby may have been his brother's instrument, as with Bowles; he feared Johnson's power ("the most formidable human being I've ever met"; "He just eats up strong men"); and temperament, "southwestern exaggeration against Yankee understatement."
Caro rejects the standard "opposites" reading of Schlesinger and of Mutual Contempt (Jeff Shesol, 1997). Bobby's private words show fear, not contempt, and on two fundamentals the men were alike.
| Political art | Johnson | Robert Kennedy |
|---|---|---|
| Counting votes | "Thinking isn't good enough. I need to know!" | Demanded "the cold facts"; predicted the Wyoming finish in 1960 |
| Holding votes | "I'm going to ruin you" | Kept the 1960 delegates in "the halter and the bridle" |
| Smearing rivals | Without scruple | Behind FDR Jr.'s "draft dodger" smear of Humphrey: "That's Bobby" |
| Judgment of the other | "Always afraid of Bobby... It was fear" (Goodwin) | "The most formidable human being I've ever met" |
Something deeper than politics was at work. Hickory Hill excluded the Johnsons or seated them at Ethel's "losers' table"; at one party Bobby was given a voodoo doll of Johnson. To Caro this replayed his youth: the Johnson City merchants who wrote "Please!" on the family bills, Kitty Clyde Ross's parents ending their romance, the "Black Stars" club that voted him down at San Marcos. The Hickory Hill seminars, with Isaiah Berlin, Schlesinger and the "Harvards," reminded him of Southwest Texas State Teachers College, "the poor boys' school," with one doctorate among fifty-six faculty. "They're trying to make a hick out of me." Joseph Califano described "an internal class struggle"; Eric Goldman found his response to Bobby "hugely disproportionate to the political realities."
By 1963 the symbol was also a concrete threat. Johnson had endured the vice presidency as his best chance at the 1968 nomination. In the March Esquire, Gore Vidal wrote that "time is no friend to Johnson's candidacy," while Bobby would have "the Kennedy political machine." Roscoe Drummond headlined LBJ MAY FACE BOBBY IN 1968. On March 1 Bobby said he was "emphatically not" running; three days later it was "no plans to run at this time." Reedy confirmed the press really believed in a move "to groom Bobby Kennedy for the Presidency in 1968 and shove you aside." The office Johnson had taken as a bridge to 1968 had become a cage, and the man holding the key wanted the same prize. Johnson told Busby: "My future is behind me."
Gestures and Tactics
A small fight over a segregated banquet in St. Augustine, Florida, in March 1963 pulled Johnson out of his vice-presidential depression and back into civil rights, the one cause in which his compassion and his political gifts pulled the same way. He gave the Kennedys the shrewdest advice they received on their civil rights bill, on tactics and on moral commitment, and was rewarded with public humiliation by Robert Kennedy. By autumn, polls and a rising John Connally were quietly removing the reasons for keeping him on the 1964 ticket.
St. Augustine
On February 24, 1963, Fannie Fullerwood, a cleaning woman who led the local NAACP branch, wrote that no blacks would be admitted to the banquet opening the city's 400th-anniversary celebration, where Johnson had agreed, as a favour to George Smathers, to speak on March 11. Smathers' aide Scott Peek called the letter "nothing to get excited about"; the banquet chairman, banker Herbert E. Wolfe, was treasurer of Smathers' next campaign. Johnson's answer was immediate: "I cannot go unless we get this worked out." George Reedy learned that the branch planned pickets, and that the Fairchild Stratos aircraft plant, Johnson's other stop, had 62 black employees out of 1,000, none of them executives.
Johnson came alive, as aides had seen him do before: the instant "By God, we'll bury him in Arlington!" for a Mexican-American war hero refused burial in a whites-only Texas cemetery; the near-tears anger at his black cook having to "squat in the road to pee" on drives across the South. A single "Negro table" at the back would not do. He demanded at least two, close to the front, and no segregation at any event he attended, and the city commission agreed to meet the NAACP at 9:30 a.m. the next day. At Fairchild a black man sat on the platform, apparently a first for the county. Johnson flew home "happier than he had been for months."
The tape recorder. Reedy hailed "a major breakthrough on the color line." Next morning the nine-member NAACP delegation found no commissioners at City Hall, only a tape recorder on a bare table. A carpenter told it how his family had to stand outside in the rain to register his sister's death. No answer ever came; officials felt they had gone "further than they should have." Reedy's consolation: whites had dined with blacks in the city's finest hall and "the roof did not fall in."
Revved up again
The depression lifted. Johnson gave interviews again, including his first on television since early 1961: "I have never felt that the vice presidency was a comedown from anything except the presidency." He knew the gestures that meant respect to people starved of it. He invited Marian Anderson to stay at the ranch when Austin's establishment snubbed her, and he became the first high federal official to accept the black press club's invitation, telling it "we are well past the stage where half a loaf will do." On Memorial Day 1963 at Gettysburg he read an eight-minute speech that Horace Busby had transcribed almost verbatim from Johnson's own poolside talk: "The Negro says, 'Now.' Others say, 'Never.'" The Washington Post ran it as its lead story and praised its "political courage."
Caro uses the moment to restate his thesis on Johnson and race. Ed Clark described a "working up" in which Johnson could convince himself of any cause, but on race the motive was "very pure": the young teacher at Cotulla had tutored the janitor Thomas Coronado in English on the school steps. Johnson's compassion for people of color was real, but for twenty years it stayed hidden because it conflicted with his ambition; it was released only when the two coincided, in 1957 and again in 1963.
Through Birmingham in May 1963 (the fire hoses, Bull Connor's dogs) he was shut out of every deliberation. On May 12, as limousines carried Kennedy's advisers to crisis meetings, Johnson was at Hale Boggs' garden party, visibly not part of it. This time he did not sulk; he kept asking for "fifteen minutes alone with the President." On June 3 Kennedy asked his view and sent him to Ted Sorensen.
The advice to Sorensen
Johnson had never seen the bill ("I got it from the New York Times"), but he was the only man in Washington who had actually passed a civil rights bill.
Johnson's advice on the civil rights bill (June 3, 1963)
- Sequence the bills. Pass the tax cut and other must-pass measures first: "get them down in the storm cellar," then attack.
- Count the hidden votes. Southerners chaired 9 of 16 Senate committees and ran Appropriations under Richard Russell; senators needing dams and contracts would defect on cloture without any explicit deal.
- Line up the chairmen first. Write their objections in before introduction; "What the hell is Humphrey?"
- Commit the President morally. Black Americans wanted "a moral commitment that he's behind them," in his own voice: "The President is the cannon."
The next day Kennedy brought him to an East Room meeting with a hundred retail executives. Arthur Schlesinger watched "a Southern preacher," evangelical where Kennedy was reasonable, and decided Johnson was "a true believer." Johnson attended all seven such meetings; Kennedy spoke of him almost as a partner. "For a couple of weeks there, he started to look almost like the old Lyndon," Reedy says; once, raging that black soldiers could not buy coffee on their way to die for the flag, he seized and shook the flagpole beside his desk.
Bobby's revenge
- June 22. Presiding over twenty-nine civil rights leaders, Johnson was interrupted when Bobby, who had "a date," made publisher Louis Martin tell the Vice President to "shut up." Johnson kept talking.
- The same day. An executive order widened the jurisdiction of Johnson's CEEO to all federally financed construction, without adding power. Its chairman was neither consulted nor told; Lee White called it "a mackerel in the face."
- Two CEEO meetings. Bobby grilled executive director Hobart Taylor about missing statistics and walked out without a word. On July 18 he savaged NASA's James Webb, then, while Johnson was still answering him, chatted with Jack Conway and left. Conway: he had made "the Vice President look like a fraud."
By late summer Johnson was fat, flushed and idle. He read the public humiliation as a signal: Bobby would not make a running mate look incompetent unless the Kennedys meant to drop him in 1964.
Off the ticket?
- The record says no. John Kennedy denied it to reporters, to Ben Bradlee ("preposterous") and to Smathers ("he helps me"); Robert Kennedy, Schlesinger ("total fantasy") and later Johnson himself agreed. Reedy and Bobby Baker called Johnson's fear near-paranoid.
- Caro says the question was open. Kennedy's assurances were "as unequivocal as his assurances in 1960" that Johnson would not be on the ticket. "Not paranoia but only polls were required to explain Lyndon Johnson's fears."
Kennedy's moral stand, his outmanoeuvring of George Wallace and his televised civil rights address of June 1963, was costing him the South, and Johnson's own new liberalism cost him there too: "I wouldn't give two cents for his winning an election in my state," a southern senator said. Strategists talked of writing off the South and finding a western running mate such as Pat Brown to help carry California.
- DNC poll, September 1963: Kennedy would lose Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas and both Carolinas.
- Gallup, 13 southern and border states: Goldwater 59%, Kennedy 41%.
- Belden Poll, Texas: Kennedy approval 59% (May) to 50% (September); Johnson the same; Governor Connally 61%.
- Oil depletion allowance: nominally 27½%, cut in effect to 17½% by Kennedy's tax plan.
- Prize in the West: California's 32 electoral votes.
Texas itself was slipping from Johnson. John Tower had won a Senate seat in 1961, the first Texas Republican since Reconstruction. The oilmen and contractors of the Petroleum Club felt doubly betrayed: by his civil rights talk and, worse, because he had promised to restrain Kennedy's tax reforms and "couldn't deliver!" (Ed Clark). Their money now moved at Connally's direction: "John controlled the money in the state now," said Congressman Joe Kilgore. Connally, who also had to manage the bitter feud with Senator Ralph Yarborough, stalled Kennedy's requests for a fundraising trip. In a June meeting at El Paso Johnson conceded the decision was the governor's. On October 4, without Johnson present or told, Connally and Kennedy fixed the trip for November 21–22: five cities but one $100-a-plate dinner in Austin, lest Texans think Kennedy wanted "the financial rape of the state." That evening Johnson was not irritated but, Connally said, "hurt." Even a Hyannis Port send-off before his September Scandinavian trip went badly: Kennedy refused him a visit to Poland and edited his speeches like a speechwriter's drafts.
Two slips in Caro. He places Kennedy's televised "moral issue" address on June 13; it was delivered on June 11, 1963, the night of the Alabama integration standoff. In St. Augustine he has Johnson view the casket of "the Spanish explorer who had said the first Mass" there; that explorer, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (1519–1574), founded the city, but the 1565 Mass was said by his chaplain, Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales.
The Protégé
From September 1963 the scandal around Bobby Baker, Johnson's Senate aide and "protégé," moved steadily from Baker's private deals toward Johnson himself. An insurance broker, Don B. Reynolds, gave Senator John J. Williams documents showing a kickback demanded for Johnson, and the trail led toward the LBJ Company and a hidden fortune. On November 22, 1963, while Reynolds testified to Senate staff and Life editors met to plan an exposé of "Lyndon Johnson's money," Johnson was riding in a motorcade in Dallas.
Copenhagen: the panic
On Friday, September 13, in Copenhagen, after lunch with the Danish king, Johnson took a call from Walter Jenkins and vanished into his hotel suite. Greenland was cancelled, a naval review scrapped, a whole Sunday spent behind a closed door on the telephone; he emerged only to march, "as grim as a pallbearer," with the Tivoli Gardens band, and flew home a day early. Reporters were told only "the press of business."
The call was about a lawsuit filed on September 9 by vending-machine operator Ralph Hill. It alleged that Baker took $5,600 to use his influence with North American Aviation, then double-crossed Hill and steered the contract to Serv-U Corporation. The trade journal Vend was about to show that Baker was a Serv-U stockholder and that the firm, founded in December 1961, grossed $3.5 million a year entirely from aerospace defense contractors, while Baker's Senate salary was $19,611.
"He absolutely panicked," Reedy said, and when he panicked he had "this animal instinct: cover up." Abe Fortas supplied the line: Johnson hardly knew Baker, and all the Democratic senators had elected him. "For the love of God, they all elected him because LBJ told them to," said Reedy.
"Lyndon's Boy"
Jenkins learned that Sarah McClendon, a combative one-woman Texas news bureau, had filed a factual story calling Baker Johnson's "protégé and close personal friend," a dispenser of "lush Democratic campaign funds" and owner of the Carousel motel in Ocean City. Jenkins summoned her, called the story untrue, and told her that every outlet had been closed. Every Texas paper did reject it. But Jenkins had forgotten the North American Newspaper Alliance, which had already put it on the wire.
- Sept 12 Washington Post buries the suit in its city section: SENATE OFFICIAL IS NAMED IN INFLUENCE SUIT.
- Sept 18 The Des Moines Register prints McClendon's story on page one.
- Sept 23 The Chicago Tribune uses "Lyndon's protégé"; Vend sells out on Washington newsstands.
- Sept 30 Newsweek: "THE SERV-U MAN," known as "Lyndon's Boy."
- Oct 7 Baker resigns hours before facing Mansfield, Dirksen and Williams.
There was no proven link between Johnson and Serv-U; the only senator tied to it was the late Robert Kerr, whose bank had lent it money. Writers noted only that the contracts were with aerospace firms and that Johnson chaired the Space Council. Johnson cut Baker off completely, after years of near-daily calls. Only Lady Bird telephoned ("we love you"), and Baker was sure Johnson lay listening beside her, silent so he could say he had not spoken to him. They did not speak for nine years, through Baker's 1967 conviction for larceny, fraud and tax evasion. Baker's net worth had risen from $11,025 (1954) to $1,791,186 (1963).
Whispering Willie and Don Reynolds
On October 6 Johnson, now reading the Post's city section every morning, saw the name Don B. Reynolds on a list of people Williams had interviewed. John J. Williams of Delaware, a former feed dealer elected in 1946, was "Whispering Willie" on the floor and "the conscience of the Senate" in the press. Working alone, without subpoena or staff, he had produced 125 convictions in the Wilmington IRS office, exposed the underworld ties around Truman's crony Harry Vaughan (of the "deep freeze") and pressed for the ouster of Eisenhower's chief of staff Sherman Adams (the vicuña coat). Johnson had watched both scandals from a front-row seat.
| Transaction | What Reynolds said happened | Proof he gave Williams |
|---|---|---|
| Johnson's life insurance, 1957 | $100,000 policy (later $200,000), premiums paid by the LBJ Company; commission about $2,500 a year | None for the policy itself |
| KTBC-TV advertising | Jenkins required him to buy $1,208 of Austin airtime he had no use for | Checks for $1,000 and $208, deposited by "THE LBJ COMPANY" |
| Magnavox stereo | Lady Bird chose a $900 set; he paid $542.25 wholesale plus $42.50 airfreight | Invoice to "Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson," billed to Reynolds |
| D.C. Stadium bond, 1960 | McCloskey paid $109,205 on a $73,631 premium; $4,000 to Baker, cash for "Mr. Johnson's campaign" | $4,000 check endorsed by "Robert G. Baker"; photostat of the overpayment check |
Baker later called the stereo "a kickback pure and simple"; Reynolds called it a "shakedown." Such rebates were illegal under D.C. And Maryland insurance law. The sums were small, but Johnson knew that a freezer and a coat had wrecked two careers, and the papers proved that dealing with "Little Lyndon" had meant dealing with "Big Lyndon."
The danger went beyond a stereo. Lady Bird had bought one radio station in 1943 for $17,500; helped by twenty years of favourable FCC rulings (Austin was left with a single commercial TV station), the company owned a chain of stations, 11,000 acres and stakes in nine Texas banks. Johnson had always said it was entirely his wife's. But Texas was a community-property state, and a man whose salary had never exceeded $35,000 was a millionaire many times over. KTBC's manager Earl Deathe described advertisers "trading out": TV sets, tractors and cars given for influence. Johnson "lived in fear" of exposure.
The scandal spreads
- Campaign cash. New senator Thomas McIntyre revealed that Baker had offered to cover his $17,000 campaign debts; an elder warned him he would be "in the bag to the oil interests." Those funds had been raised and dispensed at Johnson's direction.
- A friendly committee. Mansfield, Humphrey and Wayne Morse defended Baker. Williams forced an inquiry, but it went to the Rules Committee under B. Everett Jordan, a "Bobby Baker Man" whose committee's weightiest duty was approving press passes.
- Sex. Reporters found Baker's townhouse for Carole Tyler, the "party house," and his Quorum Club at the Carroll Arms, where Ellen Rometsch, suspected of being an East German spy, had worked before her August deportation. The rumoured partner was John Kennedy, not Johnson. On October 28, Robert Kennedy had J. Edgar Hoover persuade Mansfield and Dirksen to keep sex out of the hearings.
- Life's bombshell. The early-November Life put Baker on the cover beside a photo of Bobby and Lyndon: "Legman and Leader."
On October 30, at Tom Connally's funeral in Marlin, no member of Congress came. Johnson told Posh Oltorf that had Connally died in office, "you wouldn't have been able to get into Waco for all the airplanes." Oltorf had never seen him "that low": powerful senators are forgotten, and he now thought he would never be President.
The ticket, again
On November 13 Kennedy held his first 1964 strategy meeting, on the South, Johnson's 1960 responsibility; neither he nor his staff was there. Kennedy loyalists insist the ticket was "a given."
Caro's main evidence that Kennedy meant to drop Johnson is the 1968 memoir of secretary Evelyn Lincoln, who says Kennedy told her a week after that meeting that his 1964 running mate "will not be Lyndon" and named Terry Sanford. But hers is a single, uncorroborated source, written after Kennedy's death, against what Caro himself calls an accepted "historical axiom" (Schlesinger: "total fantasy"). Caro shows a question was open; he does not prove a decision. Two slips: Jenkins' invitation to Baker is dated 1973, after Johnson's death on January 22, 1973, though the visit was in October 1972; and Macmillan resigned in October 1963 (Profumo in June), not within a week of a July FBI report.
Meanwhile Reynolds told Williams about the D.C. Stadium bond: Matt McCloskey, contractor and Democratic fund-raiser, had overpaid by about $35,000, from which Reynolds said he carried $15,000 in hundred-dollar bills, in installments of $5,000, to Baker for the "Johnson-Kennedy campaign." If true, it broke at least three federal laws. McCloskey called it a clerical "goof"; Baker later confirmed Reynolds "told the truth" on this deal.
On November 15, senators Stephen Young and Quentin Burdick said Baker had lied to keep them off Judiciary in 1961 to benefit Johnson allies. The New York Daily News asked whether the Vice President himself should testify. Life's November 18 issue called the Senate Establishment "the personal creation of Lyndon Baines Johnson" and Baker "Lyndon's bluntest instrument," and it used the word Johnson dreaded: "millionaire." Associate editor William Lambert told managing editor George Hunt, "This guy looks like a bandit to me," and got a nine-reporter team for "the story of Lyndon Johnson's money." On the morning of November 22, 1963, as Life's editors met to review that story and Don Reynolds began testifying at ten o'clock, the Bobby Baker case was becoming the Lyndon Johnson case.
Texas, November 21
The ranch staff scrambled to prepare for the Kennedys: eight of Wesley West's thoroughbreds, Ballantine's Scotch, champagne on the rocks, smooth towels, and Lady Bird's plea to bring the guests in through the living-room door, not the kitchen. In San Antonio, Ralph Yarborough, furious at being excluded by Connally, refused his assigned seat in Johnson's car and rode with Henry Gonzalez. The Johnsons sat alone through an hour-long motorcade in full view of reporters who had the seating list; in Houston it happened again. At the Rice Hotel, Kennedy and Johnson had what was perhaps their first shouting match. Johnson called it "an active discussion"; he left the suite "like a pistol." To Jackie, Kennedy said only: "That's just Lyndon. He's in trouble."
The Cubicle
Caro cuts between three rooms on November 22, 1963: a Dallas motorcade, a Senate office where Don Reynolds was handing over evidence against Johnson, and a Life conference planning a series on "Lyndon Johnson's Money." At 12:30 Central time the Vice President was riding at the bottom of his career, trailing a President who might drop him. Fifty minutes later, in a curtained hospital cubicle, he was President of the United States.
A morning of humiliation
- The headline. The Dallas News ran YARBOROUGH SNUBS LBJ, beside NIXON PREDICTS JFK MAY DROP JOHNSON. Nationally, the feud, not Kennedy's triumph, was the story.
- The warm-up act. At a Fort Worth union rally Johnson introduced Kennedy, and the crowd roared for the younger man. He had to ask leave for his sister Lucia to shake a President's hand.
- The fix. Kennedy told Larry O'Brien to get Ralph Yarborough into Johnson's car ("If he doesn't ride with Lyndon today, he'll have to walk") and quietly told the senator that if he valued his friendship, he would. On the flight, Ken O'Donnell pushed John Connally into Kennedy's cabin; within three minutes the governor agreed to seat Yarborough at the Austin head table.
| Dallas time | Dallas | Washington, Room 312 | New York, Life |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9:00 a.m. | Fort Worth breakfast speech | Reynolds, unsworn, begins with Burkett Van Kirk (GOP counsel) and GAO accountant Lorin Drennan | |
| 10:30 | Motorcade to airport | Baker dealings | George Hunt's meeting opens; LBJ Company land deals found in four counties |
| 11:30 | Love Field, 11:38 | Sandwiches sent in; Reynolds keeps talking about KTBC ads | Debate: rush a second Wheeler story or build a "net worth job" series? |
| 12:30 | Shots in Dealey Plaza | Magnavox invoices and KTBC checks pushed across the table | Reporters assigned to Johnson's finances |
| 1:20–1:30 | "He's gone" | Secretary bursts in, sobbing | Meeting breaks up |
The canyon
On Main Street crowds stood eight to ten deep and the lead car slowed from twenty miles an hour to five. Johnson, in a rented convertible beside a silent Yarborough, passed only faces still turned toward the Kennedys. Caro reads the ride as a foretaste of five more years trailing another man: "in the end it is nothing." Meanwhile Robert Kennedy would build his record, and Johnson might be dropped in 1964. His prospects may indeed have justified his own word: "finished."
At the moment of the shots, the machinery assembling the case against Johnson was running in two cities at once; the assassination stopped both. Life killed Keith Wheeler's second article, and a week later William Lambert and executive editor Ralph Graves shelved the inquiry: "give the guy a chance."
Under fire
Rufus Youngblood saw "not normal movements" ahead, yanked Johnson to the floor and lay on him ("his knees in my back") before the next two shots, eight seconds later. Johnson heard the radio: "He's hit!" then "hospital." He answered "All right, Rufus," in a tone the agent called "calm."
A good man in a tight spot. Known at college as "an absolute physical coward," Johnson was cool under real danger: on a 1942 bomber attacked by Zeroes he stood in the navigator's bubble "as if he were on a sight-seeing tour"; during his 1955 heart attack, riding in a hearse at fifty-fifty odds, he refused a pain injection: "If time means a lot, don't stop."
The cubicle
At Parkland, agents put him in a Minor Medicine cubicle walled with muslin. Youngblood ordered guards for Lynda and Lucy; Johnson had Homer Thornberry, Jack Brooks and Cliff Carter brought in: loyal men around him, as in every crisis. Emory Roberts urged flight to Air Force One; Johnson refused to move without official word from O'Donnell. He stood about thirty-five minutes against the wall. At 1:20 O'Donnell said: "He's gone."
Reynolds, told the news as he finished, said "you won't need those"; Van Kirk kept the documents. Bobby Baker released Abe Fortas as his lawyer, sure Johnson would want him.
The "finished" reading is Caro's speculation, staged through an imagined "observer." Kennedy had assured Johnson of a 1964 place; Evelyn Lincoln's later claim that he planned another running mate is unproven. The Life series never ran, so its weight rests on Lambert's recollections.
Taking Charge
In the seventy-eight minutes between "He's gone" (1:20) and the oath (2:38), the restless, hangdog Vice President vanished and the Senate Majority Leader came back: quiet, quick and "adamant." Caro shows Johnson turning every arrangement into a proof of legitimacy, above all the widow's presence at his swearing-in. He also shows the "other components": the Kennedy bedroom commandeered, and a call to a grieving Robert Kennedy that Kennedy's circle never forgave.
The deciding expression
Homer Thornberry: "right then, he took charge." His secretary Mary Rather knew that in crisis he became "quiet and still"; Jack Brooks called his face "set"; Horace Busby knew it as his "deciding expression." Caro's judgment: whatever he thought in those minutes against the cubicle wall, by the time Ken O'Donnell spoke, the decisions had been made.
- The fear. Six Cabinet members, including Dean Rusk and Douglas Dillon, and Pierre Salinger were together on a plane west of Hawaii. Reporters thought of Lincoln's murder, when several Cabinet officers were also targets; Johnson himself cited the attack on Seward.
- The widow. Pressed to fly at once, he asked, "Well, what about Mrs. Kennedy?" He would leave the hospital but not Dallas without her and the coffin. Youngblood: "adamant."
- Secrecy. Different corridors, unmarked cars, Lady Bird in a separate car, backstreet routes ready.
- First command. Called "Mr. President" for the first time by Malcolm Kilduff, he forbade announcing the death until he reached the plane: "We don't know whether this is a worldwide conspiracy." He also ordered the Cabinet plane turned back (it already had been).
- Loyalists. Thornberry and Brooks rode with him; Cliff Carter was to round up Liz Carpenter, Marie Fehmer and the Houston PR man Jack Valenti.
No reporter followed him out. "We weren't thinking about succession," said Charles Roberts of Newsweek. In the car, Youngblood sat in the Vice President's usual seat as a decoy; after Congressman Albert Thomas was picked up, Thornberry climbed into the back and Johnson had a human shield on both sides. "Let's don't have the sirens."
The oath and the call to Hickory Hill
On Air Force One, in a sixteen-foot-square stateroom without air-conditioning, Thornberry argued for a Washington ceremony like Truman's in 1945; Thomas and Brooks argued for Dallas, now. A Wall Street panic was erasing more than $10 billion in an hour, and the Russians must have no doubt who commanded. Legally the oath was symbolic, but to Johnson it was everything: "I took the oath. I became President."
Then the "other components." Having ordered the bedroom kept "strictly for the use of Mrs. Kennedy," he took Fehmer and Youngblood into it, shed his jacket and sprawled on one of the beds to telephone. The call, at 2:56 Washington time, went to Robert Kennedy, about half an hour after J. Edgar Hoover and a White House aide had told him his brother was dead. The questions (could he be sworn in Dallas, what was the wording, who could administer it) could have been answered by a hundred officials, among them Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, whom Johnson trusted. Caro's reading: Johnson wanted his ascent sanctioned by the dead President's family.
- Johnson's version. He called "to comfort him"; Kennedy was "very businesslike," looked into it, and advised that the oath be given immediately.
- Kennedy's version. Johnson said people urged a quick swearing-in and pressed, "Do you have any objections?" Kennedy, too stunned to answer, thought "what's the rush?" and wanted his brother flown home as President. Silence was taken as assent.
Katzenbach told Kennedy an immediate oath was "not necessary": "You become President when the President dies." He told Caro he was "absolutely stunned" and "frankly appalled": "He could have called me. I was in my office.… Calling Bobby was really wrong." On a second call he dictated the thirty-seven words of Article II, Section 1, and Fehmer read them back. William Manchester: "a dispassionate observer cannot choose." Johnson had what he needed: Kennedy had been asked, and had not objected.
Staging legitimacy
- The judge. He chose Sarah Hughes, whose federal judgeship had needed Sam Rayburn's intervention, leaving Johnson feeling "the biggest liar and fool in the State." When her clerk could not find her: "This is Lyndon Johnson. Find her."
- The widow. Nothing would legitimize the transfer more than Jacqueline Kennedy's presence. O'Donnell suspected he was "using Mrs. Kennedy and the Kennedy aura"; Caro says history cannot know. When Jackie opened her bedroom door she found Johnson there (Manchester: on the bed; Fehmer: leaving it). In the rear cabin, her suit caked with blood, she told Lady Bird: "I want them to see what they have done to Jack." Johnson raised "the swearing-in" twice before she assented.
- The confusion. Kennedy aides had shoved past the Dallas medical examiner to remove the body; General Godfrey McHugh twice ordered takeoff and Kilduff countermanded him, a misunderstanding more than the feud later pictured.
When Johnson filled the stateroom doorway, everyone rose. Thomas: "We are ready to carry out any orders you have, Mr. President." He told Kilduff, "Put the pool on board," hired Valenti, and told O'Donnell and Larry O'Brien that "Bobby" had told him to wait for Hughes. O'Donnell did not believe it. Then, at the conference table, Johnson switched from adamancy to humility: "I need you now more than President Kennedy needed you." They stayed noncommittal, but the plea softened them.
He was back where he belonged. He was back in command.
— Horace Busby
He directed photographer Cecil Stoughton onto the sofa, packed in twenty-seven people, brought Evelyn Lincoln to stand directly behind him and had Kilduff record on a Dictaphone. Liz Carpenter felt "Someone is in charge." Sid Davis, who had thought of "Colonel Cornpone," now "started to see the measure of the guy." Jackie came: "In the light of history it would be better if I was there." Johnson's hand on the missal was "absolutely steady," he spoke the words he had waited all his life to speak, and then: "Now let's get airborne."
Caro's scene rests on rival partisan memories: Manchester's The Death of a President (1967), written with the Kennedys' cooperation and resented by Johnson; O'Donnell's memoir; Johnson's The Vantage Point; and Fehmer's later effort "to clear up the bedroom thing." Caro marks motive questions as unknowable, yet his framing ("unless, perhaps, they did") leans against Johnson on the call and the bedroom. Caro's aside that Truman waited "two hours and twenty-four minutes" is ten minutes short: Roosevelt died at 4:35 p.m. Eastern War Time and Truman took the oath at 7:09, about 2 hours 34 minutes later.
Aboard Air Force One
Caro argues that the presidential transition of 1963 was the hardest in American history: a murder broadcast into every home in the nuclear age, a deadlocked Congress, under a year to the next election, a Cabinet and staff that despised the new President, and a dead king's brother who hated him. Inside Johnson were terrors of illegitimacy and inadequacy. Against all of it he brought instinct and will, and in the 126 minutes of the flight and the hours that followed he laid out, almost alone, the first acts of a presidency.
A supreme test
The death of a President is "a supreme test for a democratic government": a wrong turn in foreign policy, interest rates, taxes or appropriations could cost jobs, savings or peace. A President is legitimated, in Richard Neustadt's phrase, "by a national election after national campaigning"; his successor is not. Seven of the first thirty-five Presidents had died in office, and every transfer had been smooth; Truman, sworn in after FDR's death in 1945, noticed only two uniforms in the Cabinet Room and saw in that how firmly civil authority was accepted. Yet 1963 was uncharted water, for reasons of its age and reasons of its own.
| Pressure | Why 1963 was unprecedented |
|---|---|
| Television | A murder, not a natural death, watched live by a nation; FDR's death came by radio |
| The Bomb | First unelected President holding nuclear weapons, a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis |
| Kennedy men | Continuity needed men who had mocked him as "Rufus Cornpone" |
| Congress | Total stalemate, rooted in civil rights |
| The clock | Under two hours to prepare; nine months to the convention |
| The brother | A rival faction with a leader: Robert Kennedy |
- 79% felt they had lost "someone very close and dear" (first study of the reaction).
- 92% of Americans had heard the news by the time Air Force One landed.
- 166 million Americans in 51 million homes watched the four days of coverage; families averaged 31.6 hours, nearly eight a day, with no commercials.
- 88% had listened to radio after FDR's death, by comparison.
- 39 million Americans: the Atomic Energy Commission's estimate of deaths in the first hours of a nuclear exchange.
- Almost half were still deeply "worried" a week later (National Opinion Research Center).
Television magnified shock and grief; two days later Lee Harvey Oswald was himself murdered on live television. The Bomb meant a snap misjudgment could be irreversible; Jonathan Schell called the President "the hinge of human existence." Historian Henry Graff: Johnson's ascent "came at the most traumatic moment in American political history."
The men who sneered, the Congress that stalled
Evans and Novak saw that Johnson had to prevent "even the appearance of an exodus." But these were men who had called him "Lyndon" to his face and stuck pins in his voodoo effigy; many had come to work for John Kennedy, not for a President. Legislative aide Mike Manatos wondered if they "ought to leave." Johnson also faced the "Eastern intellectuals" of the press, and the fact that "a Texas murder had put a Texan in power."
On the Hill, Senator Thomas Dodd had just attacked Mike Mansfield for "dribbling" through the session. The deadlock was the one Johnson had warned Ted Sorensen about in June: send civil rights first and every other bill becomes a hostage.
- The tax cut. Kennedy's $11 billion annual cut, which economists thought might stimulate about three times that, with unemployment near 6 percent, sat with Finance Committee chairman Harry Byrd. He opened hearings only on October 15, let witnesses repeat House testimony, tolerated missing quorums and faced thirty amendments.
- Civil rights. Out of House Judiciary, the bill lay with Rules Committee chairman Judge Howard Smith of Virginia, who would not set a hearing date. Behind both stood Richard Russell's filibuster.
- The verdicts. James MacGregor Burns's The Deadlock of Democracy called the system "designed for deadlock"; Walter Lippmann saw "a grave danger to the Republic"; Life called the Eighty-eighth Congress "a scandal of drift." Kennedy, at his last press conference on November 14, spoke of an "eighteen-month delivery."
Civil rights made the problem personal. Liberals still saw the Stetson and the accent, Russell's protégé, a man trying (in Joseph Rauh's words) "to be all things to all people." Only concrete achievement would do. The big northern states would hold the balance at the 1964 convention, and Vincent Burke of the Los Angeles Times found observers agreed that Johnson needed a civil rights bill "much more" than Kennedy had; William V. Shannon called it "an absolute necessity."
The clock and the brother
- Preparation. The Twentieth Amendment (1933) gave a President-elect ten or eleven weeks, which Neustadt called "hazardous because they are so few." Johnson had slightly under two hours.
- The election. Five earlier successors had more than three years before facing voters; Fillmore more than two; even Coolidge over fifteen months. Johnson had until November 3, 1964, and "faced the unprecedented challenge of assuming office and then running for election in the same first year."
- Nearer deadlines. The convention opened August 24, 1964; the State of the Union was six weeks off; the budget was due by law (Budget and Accounting Act of 1921) in eight weeks; a railroad featherbedding arbitration ruling and wage-price guideline decisions fell within days, on issues he had been kept out of.
- The brother. If the King's faction contested him, the date that mattered was the New Hampshire primary, March 10, under four months away. Neustadt: even Truman's transition had been "easier"; "Johnson's situation was extreme."
Within: the terrors and the instinct
Johnson later described himself as "illegitimate," "naked," "a pretender," "an illegal usurper," and said, "I simply couldn't let the country think that I was all alone." He joked that his advisers included Rhodes Scholars "and one from Southwest Texas State Teachers College," laughing "too loudly" (Hugh Sidey); Sidey also overheard: "I'm not sure I can lead this country and keep it together, with my background." When Busby contradicted Kennedy economists Kermit Gordon and Walter Heller, Johnson told him they were "ipso facto a hell of a lot smarter than you are"; Busby's key word was "embarrass." Caro says the belief that he lacked smart men was untrue: George Reedy was a first-rate strategist and Busby was his Sorensen. Caro's verdict: "Nothing the Kennedys felt about Lyndon Johnson could be any worse than what Lyndon Johnson felt about himself." The same fear of failure had "immobilized" him in 1960.
But he had the craft of governance and the instinct beyond it. Caro states that nothing in the Johnson or Kennedy libraries, or in his interviews, supports any theory that Johnson knew of the assassination in advance. Johnson's own image: "cattle caught in the swamp," which only "the man on the horse" can lead out. "I was that man." And he had the will: "I knew I could not allow the tide of grief to overwhelm me."
Johnson's self-portraits here (usurper, cattle in the swamp, "I was that man") are retrospective, from his talks with Doris Kearns Goodwin (Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, 1976) and The Vantage Point (1971), and shaped to his advantage. Caro's ranking of 1963 as the hardest transition rests on these and on Neustadt, not on comparative measurement. Slips: Martin Van Buren, quoted as speaking "in 1867," died in 1862 (his posthumous Inquiry on parties appeared in 1867); the Rules chairman was Howard W. Smith, not "Howard J."; Byrd's witnesses had testified before House Ways and Means, since the House has no Finance Committee; and Congress reconvened on Tuesday, January 7, 1964, not Monday the 6th.
126 minutes
Colonel Jim Swindal climbed to 41,000 feet over Arkansas tornadoes at more than 600 miles an hour while fighters waited on runways and the Mexican border was sealed. Below, Los Angeles freeways stopped, Broadway and Times Square went dark, Saks put Kennedy's photograph in a window, St. Patrick's tolled. For about an hour after the death was announced America did not know where its President was, amid rumors that he had been hit or had a heart attack; definite word came only at 2:49, after takeoff. Then came news of officer J. D. Tippit's murder, Oswald's arrest, his time in Russia, a German troop alert. A Chicagoan: "It all depends on how Johnson handle[s] it."
The front cabin held sobbing Kennedy staff; the rear held Jackie, the coffin, O'Donnell, O'Brien, Dave Powers and General McHugh, and her first Scotch ("Let them see what they've done"). The stateroom held decision.
Johnson's notepad, "Aboard Air Force One":
- Staff: meet the White House staff on landing.
- Cabinet: meet as many members as possible.
- Leadership: meet the congressional leaders.
- Rebuffs. Asked again via Bill Moyers, O'Donnell stayed "noncommittal," then refused: "Bill, I don't have the stomach for it." The staff meeting was cancelled and the Cabinet, still over the Pacific, put off; only the leaders met that night.
- "Normal." He countermanded orders to park in an isolated spot: the plane would stop in its usual place, with the press's "normal little corral" and live TV. "It's the Kremlin that worries me.… Khrushchev is asking himself right now what kind of a man I am."
- Not alone. He planned to descend beside the widow and coffin, with "my staff behind me and then the Texas members of Congress."
- Words. Moyers, Valenti and Carpenter drafted his statement; he made it personal ("We have suffered a loss") and turned "I ask God's help and yours" into "I ask for your help, and God's."
- Space. He would not enter the Mansion or the Oval Office, and would stay at his home, The Elms. He phoned Nellie Connally and Rose Kennedy ("What can I say to her?"). Roberts called his performance "masterful."
Andrews: the doorway
Robert Kennedy had hidden in an Army truck, then ran up the front stairs and pushed down the aisle ("Where's Jackie?") past Johnson without a word. Manchester: "Everyone seemed to have priority over the chief executive." Johnson stood "trapped" while the coffin went onto a catering lift with Jackie and Bobby, then into a Navy hearse. The Johnsons, reaching the rear door, found no steps, and the cameras did not turn to them until the hearse was gone.
Next day he told a Cabinet member (apparently Orville Freeman) he had "turned the other cheek": "the aura of Kennedy is important to us." Later he called it "a deliberate snub." At the microphones, deafened by helicopter rotors and blinded by lights, he read slowly: "I will do my best. That is all I can do." On the eleven-minute helicopter flight he told McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and George Ball that Kennedy had gathered "the ablest people I've ever seen.… I need you." All three stayed. At the White House he veered away from the Oval Office: "I'll use my office."
Room 274 and The Elms
In his Executive Office Building suite, where Lieutenant Richard Nelson had hung a presidential flag, chaos reigned, but the staff saw "total command." He saw J. William Fulbright and Averell Harriman first, then called Eisenhower ("I need you more than ever now"), Truman, J. Edgar Hoover (thirty more agents to Dallas), DNC treasurer Richard Maguire, Arthur Goldberg ("think, think, think") and Sorensen, who wept after saying "Mr. President" to someone else. The congressional leaders approved a unity statement he had rewritten; to Sidey the meeting was "a kind of tribal ritual," and "these men understood." He wrote by hand to John Jr. and Caroline.
At The Elms he toasted Rayburn's portrait ("Hello, Mr. Sam"); Busby judged him "more controlled than calm." Never again, he said, would President, Vice President and six Cabinet members be away at once. In bed until three a.m., he dictated the next day's agenda to Moyers, Valenti and Carter: Cabinet, Eisenhower, Byrd, a joint-session speech. He conscripted all three onto his staff. "By God, I'm going to pass Harry Truman's medical insurance bill." Moyers: "very formidable."
Caro's transition is a study in succession under shock: authority passes instantly by rule, but confidence must be built by retaining the predecessor's team, insisting that routines look "normal," and fixing a short agenda (staff, Cabinet, leadership) before the first public appearance.
Three Encounters
On Saturday, November 23, 1963, his first full day as President, Johnson collided with Robert Kennedy three times and lost all three. Caro reads the day as a reprise of the vice presidency: constant conflict with the Kennedys and constant defeat, swallowed because Johnson could not afford to lose the Kennedy faction.
At 4:30 a.m. the coffin reached the East Room, draped to resemble Lincoln's lying-in-state. Bobby settled whether it should be open, looking at his brother's face alone and saying "Close it." Upstairs, Charles Spalding heard him sob, "Why, God?"
- The Oval Office. McGeorge Bundy left a note at 8:05 asking Johnson to work from the Executive Office Building until Monday, but Johnson never got it. At 8:55 he walked in on Evelyn Lincoln packing Kennedy's belongings and asked for the room by 9:30. Bobby, told by the weeping secretary, asked him to wait until noon. Johnson agreed, went to EOB Room 274, and did not return for three days.
- The Cabinet meeting. At 2:30, with Kennedy's rocking chair upside down on a mover's dolly outside, Bobby came late; Bundy said he had "virtually to drag" him in. Several members stood for him; Johnson did not, and later told Orville Freeman the lateness was meant to ruin his statement.
- The speech date. Johnson wanted to address Congress on Tuesday, the day after the funeral, as Harry Truman had after Roosevelt's. Bobby wanted a day's gap. When two emissaries, Bundy and Sargent Shriver, drew angry refusals, Johnson phoned aide after aide: "It will be on Wednesday."
Between these two men, Caro writes, the blackest interpretation was placed on every action; Bundy's "mix-up" became, in Johnson's memory, a plot to keep him from the presidency.
Johnson yielded every time because continuity required the Kennedy aura. Speaker John McCormack told him to "respect the delicacy"; Johnson said he was walking "a very delicate wire."
Johnson's charge that Bobby "seriously considered whether he would let me be president" is a recollection from years later. Of the earlier slight at Andrews, when Bobby pushed past him on the plane, Arthur Schlesinger, the family's loyal chronicler, answers that a more secure man would have understood a brother's haste. Caro himself calls the Oval Office scene a misunderstanding. Jeff Shesol's Mutual Contempt (1997) traces the feud at book length.
The Drums
For three days, November 23–25, 1963, television held the nation on the Kennedy funeral, and the new President was, in one newscaster's words, "a little bit in the background." Caro's point is double: live television turned John Kennedy into legend, while the work of taking power went on unwatched in EOB 274.
Saturday: the screen belongs to the dead
Through a hard rain, limousines delivered the mourners to the black-draped North Portico: Truman, Eisenhower, John McCormack (71), Carl Hayden (86, on a cane), Ambassador Dobrynin; Mrs. Warren wept on the steps. Television replayed the 4:30 a.m. arrival of the coffin, two workmen kneeling at the prie-dieux, documentaries of Kennedy's smile and wit, and his relaxed interview in the rocking chair, then showed the rocker being trundled out on a dolly. David Brinkley bit his lip.
Johnson appeared grim in his car, at church, and reading his day-of-mourning proclamation in a minute and a half. Newspapers gave him banner headlines, but as the second lead.
| Paper | Saturday banner on Johnson | Monday banners |
|---|---|---|
| New York Times | JOHNSON AT HELM WITH WIDE BACKING | Assassin shot; grieving throngs; no Johnson |
| Washington Post | JOHNSON MOVES TO CARRY ON POLICIES | One story, bottom of page one |
Sunday and Monday: the pageant
On Sunday a caisson drawn by six grays took the coffin to the Capitol behind muffled drums, with Black Jack, the riderless horse, boots reversed in the stirrups. In car No. 1, Lady Bird sat in a jump seat beside Robert Kennedy, the man her husband hated; passing the Old Senate Office Building, he said, "That was where it all began." She called the ride "interminable." In the Rotunda, on Lincoln's own catafalque, Mike Mansfield, McCormack and Earl Warren spoke; Johnson laid a wreath behind a sergeant walking backward, "an odd dance"; Caroline slipped her hand under the flag to touch the coffin, and the Joint Chiefs wept.
- ~100,000 people filed past the coffin by midnight Sunday.
- 3 miles: the line, five abreast, at midnight, in temperatures in the low thirties.
- 8 hours: the wait for those admitted at 2:30 a.m.
- 85,000 more, a policeman said at 5:45 a.m., was all that could enter before the 8:30 closing.
- 100+ heads of state and world leaders walked behind the coffin Monday.
On Monday, close to half a mile of bands and troops (the Marine Band, the Black Watch pipers, West Point, Annapolis and Air Force cadets) escorted the coffin. Jackie walked between Robert and Edward Kennedy; Johnson, advised to ride, refused and walked, Secret Service heads swiveling toward the windows. Behind him came a king, a queen, a prince, presidents, de Gaulle in plain khaki and Haile Selassie aglow in braid. Outside St. Matthew's, three-year-old John Jr. saluted; at Arlington, Air Force One dipped its wings.
Caro's judgment: never in American history had the passage of power been marked by such pageantry, and because it was seen live, television transmuted Kennedy into a figure of legend and myth. Jack Gould wrote that TV gave "a new dimension to grief"; the shooting of Oswald was the first real-life homicide on live cameras; Louis Heren: "No man, living or dead, had ever been given such concentrated exposure."
The man on the edge
- The Kennedy stage. East Room candles, the Rotunda, the cathedral, a hundred dignitaries, the nation watching live.
- The Johnson stage. A crowded, fluorescent-lit office suite; posed still photographs of him with Dean Rusk or Robert McNamara; no cameras inside. Johnson called it "a strange counterpoint."
Hugh Sidey: "Johnson could not compete"; de Gaulle was more fascinating, and Johnson "had less glamour than any of them." He kept living at The Elms, where few onlookers gathered. Lady Bird said she could "at least serve [Mrs. Kennedy's] convenience"; Jackie would leave the White House on December 6, the Johnsons move in on December 7.
Caro ends by turning the camera around: for anyone who cared about assuming and employing power in a sudden crisis, what happened in EOB 274 during those three days was as memorable as the pageant.
EOB 274
In three days, Saturday, November 23 to Monday, November 25, 1963, working from a cramped suite in the Executive Office Building while the nation watched the funeral, Johnson took hold of the government with no script. He won over labor and civil rights leaders, kept the Kennedy men, recruited the governors, found the price that would free the tax bill, and routed the Mundt bill. Then, on November 27, a man who had never been able to give a formal speech gave the address of his life. Caro's verdict, borrowed from Hugh Sidey: the assumption of power was "flawless."
The list and the unscripted
Some items on the list Jack Valenti had scribbled Friday night were ceremonial and easily scripted: a ten-minute service at St. John's Episcopal, "the Church of Presidents"; face-to-face meetings with Truman and Eisenhower; a call to Marie Tippit, widow of the policeman Oswald had killed ("you're a brave and a great lady"); photographed meetings with Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara. In the Situation Room McGeorge Bundy and CIA director John McCone reported that no foreign power was exploiting the assassination, "a breathing space," Johnson called it. McCone noted that Johnson was "not familiar" with the CIA's daily President's Checklist. McCone and Rusk both agreed to stay.
Everything else was unscripted. J. Edgar Hoover and McCone called all day with "developments": Oswald had visited the Soviet and then the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. Bundy's list of foreign leaders coming to the funeral kept growing (de Gaulle, Ludwig Erhard, Alec Douglas-Home, Anastas Mikoyan), and each meeting would be a first impression; Caro recalls what Khrushchev took from his first sight of Kennedy at Vienna. Johnson scrawled: "Need to do. De Gaulle, Hume [sic], Mikoyan." Even the mourning proclamation had a hole: no one had thought to let the banks close Monday.
Counting Congress
Excluded from Kennedy's legislative work, Johnson knew much of what he knew "from the New York Times." So he called not Mike Mansfield but a senator who could count, George Smathers, at 2:10 p.m. Saturday, and for ten minutes said nothing but grunts: "you don't learn anything when you're talking." The news was worse than the columnists knew.
- Byrd's real aim. Harry Byrd was holding the $11 billion tax cut in his Finance Committee until he saw whether Kennedy's budget would top $100 billion. Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon thought $101.5–102 billion would do.
- No way around him. Two committee Democrats pledged to bypass Byrd; each withdrew after a private meeting with "Old Harry."
- No leadership. Mansfield did not know the count, and Kennedy "wasn't pushing it too hard."
- No time. Thanksgiving week meant no quorum; then came December and the Christmas recess. Smathers advised passing the appropriations bills and adjourning.
Johnson refused: abandoning "this fella's program" would "destroy the Democratic Party," and "we've got to keep the Kennedy aura around us through this election."
Budget Director Kermit Gordon's memo the same day set the clock for the fiscal 1965 budget, a 439-page document. Decisions on agency programs ran December 2–20 (defense and space by December 10); legislation by December 26; the message locked up January 9; submission January 20 (Gordon wrote January 19, Caro notes, wrongly). The economic team's decision meetings with Kennedy had been set for the coming Wednesday. Walter Heller added that Kennedy had been briefed regularly; Johnson never had.
The budget was also the battlefield between liberals and conservatives, and a fight began "for his mind," in Willard Wirtz's phrase. Eisenhower's financial general Robert Anderson urged cuts; Stewart Udall, Wirtz and Orville Freeman urged the opposite. Johnson pulled Heller back through the door to tell him: "I'm no budget slasher.… John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste." But the liberals lacked the nine of seventeen Finance votes; the economy bloc had them, and had Byrd.
Then Mansfield and Hubert Humphrey mentioned the Mundt bill. In October Kennedy had offered the Soviet Union surplus wheat on Export-Import Bank credit; Senator Karl Mundt moved to bar the credit. On November 14 the Administration mustered only forty votes against him, and Mansfield had promised Mundt a separate vote on Tuesday, November 26. Johnson saw in an instant what the senators had not: it would be Congress's first confrontation with the new President. "If those legislators had tasted blood then, they would have run over us like a steamroller." Mansfield refused to delay; nobody knew the count; Larry O'Brien was "tied up" with the funeral.
Iron control
In the outer rooms Walter Jenkins watched the lights on the phone console; one was almost always lit. Marie Fehmer saw "a changed man": no lunging stride, no flailing arms; "only his head moved," and the voice was level. Bill Moyers: "he hasn't lost his temper once since two PM last Friday." Reporters who had known Johnson for years found him "direct, calm, deliberate." Abe Fortas called it a "studied calm." At The Elms on Saturday night, Horace Busby sat in the dark bedroom while Johnson tried to sleep; each time he tiptoed toward the door, the voice came: "Buzz, are you still there?"
The telephone: unity on every front
Caro's central picture is of a man who, denied the Oval Office, used the telephone as only Lyndon Johnson could, and in three days bound to himself the very leaders who had fought him hardest in 1960.
His first call was to George Meany, labor's "stud duck," whose vendetta had never paused: "I need you as we've never needed you before." Meany answered "Mr. President" and promised "one thousand percent." Johnson then called Walter Reuther, David McDonald, Alex Rose and David Dubinsky himself, but on Arthur Goldberg's advice, relayed by George Reedy, only the Meany call was given to the press, so Meany would think himself the only one called. To Martin Luther King Jr. he laid out the stalled budget, civil rights and tax bills and promised, "I'm gonna support them all." For Whitney Young he found funeral tickets through Sargent Shriver and told a Texas joke: hit a Ranger and "he just keeps coming."
How Johnson shifted tone, call by call:
- To liberals: "less economizing"; reform of the system.
- To conservatives (Anderson): "watch expenditures."
- To Democrats (Carl Albert): a joint session like Truman's after Roosevelt.
- To Republicans (Everett Dirksen): "Ike thought I ought to."
- To Wall Street (Ed Weisl, AT&T's Frederick Kappel): the assassination "may lay deeper than you think," but "we're going to preserve this system"; Dillon and Fed chairman William McChesney Martin to vouch for continuity before Tuesday's opening.
- To everyone: "I never needed it as much in my life."
Keeping the Kennedy men
The hardest task, and to Johnson the most urgent, was holding Kennedy's people. Friday's plea had held McNamara, Rusk and Bundy, but not O'Brien, Ken O'Donnell or Ted Sorensen. Press Secretary Pierre Salinger would stay only through Monday. On Saturday Arthur Schlesinger hosted a lunch at the Occidental Restaurant (Heller, John Kenneth Galbraith, Sam Beer, Paul Samuelson, William Walton, Richard Goodwin) to discuss denying Johnson the 1964 nomination with a Robert Kennedy–Humphrey ticket.
The obstacles were loyalty to a dead leader ("We came with him, we should leave with him," said Walton), hatred of the state where he died (aide Ted Reardon wanted to bomb Texas "off the map"), and knowledge of how Johnson treated staff: Ralph Dungan said he sucked out a man's substance "like a vampire." The Kennedy men mimicked his line, "Ahhh need you," but Caro shows it was tailored to each man by "this great reader of men."
| Man | What Johnson played on | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Galbraith | Shared New Deal youth and ideals; ambition to be an insider | Asked to draft the speech |
| Schlesinger | Intellectual pride: "He had the knowledge … I need you" | Stayed until end of January |
| Adlai Stevenson | Thwarted ambition: "you should be sitting behind this desk"; no consultation | "Ten times better for me now" |
| Sorensen | Loyalty to Kennedy's program; "draw the threads together" | Drafted the joint-session speech |
| O'Brien | Duty to Kennedy's memory, pro to pro | Went to work on the Mundt bill |
The delivery mattered as much. He abased himself: he was not as smart as Kennedy, needed them to "think, think, think," read until two in the morning and still could not keep up; "Please stay. I don't know anybody." When Bundy, bringing cables, replied to Johnson's deference with "you let me know when you need me," Harry McPherson heard a professor chiding a student; Johnson showed no sign of noticing. Kennedy aides lectured the master of the Senate on legislative strategy; he listened as if about to take notes. Doris Kearns Goodwin: "Never once" did he imply this was now his White House. Evans and Novak called the restraint "magnificent." By Sunday night the word was out that the Cabinet would stay intact through the 1964 election; Salinger was still briefing on Tuesday; Schlesinger, told "If you act on [your resignation], I will have you arrested," found disengagement "impossible."
How long "all of them" stayed. Caro says Johnson persuaded all of them to stay, and for the transition he did, but only for a time: Schlesinger resigned in January 1964, Sorensen on February 29, 1964, and Salinger left on March 19, 1964 to run for the Senate in California. On Vietnam, Caro reports without resolving the dispute over NSAM 273 (approved November 26): John Newman (JFK and Vietnam, 1992) reads it as a reversal of Kennedy's withdrawal plan, while Fredrik Logevall doubts Kennedy had ever decided to withdraw. Caro later calls the price for Byrd "that billion and one hundred and fifty million," but Johnson's "$1, 1½ billion" and the gap from Dillon's $101.5 billion to $100 billion point to about $1.5 billion.
Vietnam: continuity, for now
Sunday, after the procession, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge reported on the coup that had killed Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu. Lodge was optimistic; McCone was not. Johnson found the "net result modestly encouraging" and told Lodge firmly to stop the inter-agency bickering and "win the war": "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went." He reaffirmed Kennedy's October 2 pledge to withdraw 1,000 of 16,732 U.S. Personnel by year's end. NSAM 273 kept the withdrawal goals "as stated" but also directed planning for "possible increased activity," the covert OPLAN 34-A approved at Honolulu on November 20. Bundy's gloss: in an election year, "If you could put it off, you did."
Monday night: the curtain rises
Kennedy was buried at 3:34 p.m. At 4:40 Johnson called O'Brien, who sat with a drinking, weeping O'Donnell. The "need" line drew a sigh. Then Johnson switched registers: it would be "a terrible thing to Kennedy's memory to have this wheat sale thing repudiated.… Do you know anything about it?" "I'll check that," said O'Brien, and changed out of his funeral clothes and went to Capitol Hill.
Johnson approved Stevenson's rewritten U.N. Speech ("there will be no 'Johnson policy'"), squeezed in California chairman Jesse Unruh, and went to the State Department reception, where diplomats who had winced at his foreign travels watched the world "take the measure" of him. Executive secretary Benjamin Read slipped him five-by-eight cards seconds before each greeting (for Cambodia's Prince Kantol: "firm, no nonsense, though kindly"); Johnson absorbed each at a glance. His held handshake, unchanged since the Hill Country, worked on prime ministers as on farmers. With Mikoyan, ninety seconds and no smiles; with de Gaulle, who had once lectured him, "I suppressed a smile." Protocol chief Angier Biddle Duke: "He was marvelous." Read felt "the greatest feeling of admiration."
Walking down the hill at Arlington, Johnson had spotted governors in the crowd and seen a lever: governors could pressure their congressional delegations. His staff stopped William Scranton in line for his plane and gathered thirty-five in Room 274 at 8:30, three photographers standing on the conference table. Valenti's platitudes were soon abandoned.
- The problem. Congress had "exercised its power to check the Executive all right." Defense wanted nearly $1 billion more, space $750 million more; civil rights and education bills were stuck; for the first time in thirty-two years no appropriations bill had passed by November.
- The ask. "I not only need your hands; I need your voice."
- The turn. Hunched over the desk, fists clenched, he spoke of hate, whose roots were "poverty and disease and illiteracy," and of nations where incomes were under eighty dollars a month. He exaggerated Dallas (Governor John Connally's hand was not torn off) but the vividness gripped the room.
- The close. "Let's not just talk about it.… Let's get some action." Valenti: "he just snarled it."
The governors stood and applauded. Pat Brown, repelled by Johnson in 1960, was "Astounded."
At 9:15, fifteen hours into his day, he met the economists who called themselves Kennedy's troika (Dillon, Heller, Gordon) and their deputies Henry Fowler, Gardner Ackley and Elmer Staats. Ackley noted he was "affable and relaxed, but always in command." Johnson asked Dillon about the tax bill and answered himself. He had checked with the Finance senators ("pretty clear knowledge of every vote"), and $100 billion was not an estimate but a psychological barrier: no peacetime budget had ever reached it.
- $98.8 billion: previous year's budget.
- +$1.8 billion built-in increases; +$1.6 billion under laws already passed.
- $102.2 billion: the floor with no new raises. Dillon thought $101.5 billion the limit.
- Under $100 billion: Byrd's price for releasing the $11 billion tax cut.
- "$1, 1½ billion": Johnson's figure for what had to be given up. "Which would you rather have?"
When Gordon protested the cuts already made (every new dam, reclamation, rural electrification), Johnson said he was for those programs: "Tell them to quit lobbying. I'm for them." But "I can defend one hundred and one point five. You take on Senator Byrd." Without a budget near $100 billion, "you won't pee one drop." He gave them a lesson in realities: FDR's 1938 purge of southern senators "got licked"; on civil rights, Richard Russell had simply ordered a stall. Dillon agreed the price was worth paying ("then when you have it, you can do what you want"; Johnson: "Like Ike did"), and so did Heller. The economists left believing the bill would pass.
From 10:15 p.m. Johnson worked the phones on the Mundt bill, recasting it as "a posthumous repudiation of John F. Kennedy and a slap in the face of Lyndon Johnson." By eleven he had won, turning Democrats Russell Long and Thomas McIntyre among others, but he wanted a rout: "I hope that gets murdered." Tuesday's vote was 57 to 36: WHEAT BILL: FIRST JOHNSON VICTORY. The Senate leader's gifts, intuition for a bill's larger meaning and decisiveness in seizing the moment, had survived three idle years.
"Let us continue"
On Wednesday he faced the audience he handled worst. Newsweek warned he seemed "corny and tedious in public address"; television had always magnified his bellowing; and he followed onto the screen the greatest political performer it had known. Time's Loye Miller called it "the most important speech of his political life." Moyers said Johnson knew viewers were asking, "Who is this man?" and wanted to show that his would not be "government by accident." Congressman Joe Kilgore begged him not to wave his arms or rush, then left his Stetson at home and took a taxi, so as not to be seen as a Texas crony.
Busby drafted a passage playing on Kennedy's inaugural "let us begin"; Johnson scribbled "Get rid of Hate." Sorensen became chief drafter, kept Busby's passage, and lost his own line "I who cannot fill his shoes must occupy his desk." Fortas and Humphrey added "a little corning up" at The Elms, and a debate ran until 2:30 a.m. over whether to press civil rights at all. One "wise, practical" adviser said the presidency had only so much coinage to spend.
Well, what the hell's the presidency for?
— Lyndon Johnson, at The Elms, the night before the speech
Alone in the Oval Office the next morning, Johnson had the text retyped in one-sentence paragraphs, wrote "Pause Pause" between them, underlined words to stress, and sharpened phrases: "youth" became "children"; the tax bill "for which he fought" gained "all this long year."
Then the delivery. "All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today." He spoke slowly, hands flat on the lectern, head thrusting forward on "determination." "Let us begin," Kennedy had said; "let us continue," said Johnson. The first task was civil rights: "no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill." Recalling 1957 and 1960, he asked for a law to end "every trace of discrimination." It drew the longest applause of the speech. Two rows of southern senators sat silent: Russell, Byrd, James Eastland, Herman Talmadge, Strom Thurmond. Asked years later whether his view of Johnson changed that day, Talmadge told Caro, "Not then, no." Russell never again called him "Lyndon." Then the tax bill, education, foreign aid, and "I cannot bear this burden alone," closing softly on "America, America."
Interrupted thirty-one times in twenty-seven minutes, he ended to a standing ovation; Sidey saw people crying everywhere. James Reston said he "sounded for all the world like Mr. Sam Rayburn," invoked Woodrow Wilson's "presence of fire," and wrote that Congress "never trifled with him." Even Mary McGrory believed his grief. Kilgore had "never seen him speak in public like this." Time's verdict: "The formidable and elusive Majority Leader … sounded like a President."
The discipline Johnson imposed on himself in EOB 274 held in the setting he had always failed in. By the end of the three days, Caro concludes, those who had dealt with him face to face knew that America had a leader; the speech told the nation, and the Herald Tribune put it in a phrase: "Not a fluke of history, but a President."
The Warren Commission
Johnson's first instinct on investigating the assassination was the old one: keep it in Texas hands and under his control. Within days he reversed himself and created a national bipartisan commission, then used his one-on-one salesmanship to force two men who had flatly refused, Earl Warren and Richard Russell, to serve on it. Caro's judgment is that the decision went against Johnson's nature and calmed a frightened country at a dangerous moment.
The room and the problem
On Tuesday, November 26, 1963, at 8:50 a.m., Johnson took over the Oval Office, the room Franklin Roosevelt had designed in 1934. Kennedy's Resolute desk and ship models were gone. Caro dwells on the room's light and history, and on a phone console whose red button reached the Pentagon war room, Strategic Air Command and allied leaders. Johnson had always sat on the other side of that desk.
The assassination inquiry was the problem he had left unaddressed. Johnson feared rumours of Soviet or Cuban involvement, fed by false reports about Oswald, could escalate toward war; Jack Ruby's shot had turned outrage into "skepticism and doubt." Meanwhile HUAC and James Eastland's Senate Judiciary Committee announced investigations, with cameras, leaks and innuendo to follow.
The wrong first move
Here Johnson lacked his usual sure-footedness. On November 25, advised by Abe Fortas, he proposed leaving it to the FBI or a Texas Court of Inquiry under state attorney general Waggoner Carr. Murder was a state crime, Fortas thought a special body would suggest "there was more" to the killings, and Johnson resented any slight to Texas. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach called it a "ghastly mistake": Texas justice was tainted, and liberals distrusted the FBI.
| Texas Court + FBI | National commission | |
|---|---|---|
| Legal basis | Murder a state crime | Executive Order 11130 |
| Control | Under Johnson's thumb, FBI under ally Hoover | Independent, superseded all inquiries |
| Credibility | "Generally scathing" press | Overwhelming praise |
His response was the pre-November 22 Johnson: anger, stubbornness and secrecy. He quietly approved Carr's court ("Can't say President asked for it"), and tried to kill a Washington Post editorial by calling J. Edgar Hoover, publisher Katharine Graham and columnist Joseph Alsop. With Alsop his voice rose for the first time on record, railing at Robert Kennedy's Justice Department and refusing "a bunch of carpetbaggers." The Post still demanded a federal inquiry. On Friday, November 29, Johnson reversed course and created a seven-member commission, five of them Republicans.
- Earl Warren: Chief Justice and chairman, "the personification of justice and fairness" to Johnson, though they had "never spent ten minutes alone together."
- Richard Russell: Georgia senator, the indispensable Hill member and Johnson's "man" on the panel.
- Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy: Republicans, both nominated by Robert Kennedy.
- John Sherman Cooper, Hale Boggs, Gerald R. Ford Jr.: respected congressional figures from both parties.
Selling Warren
Russell mattered because of 1951, when Johnson watched him calm the MacArthur hearings with "firmness, fairness and dignity" (Life). He also led the Southern Caucus, and as Johnson's ally would ease every non-racial fight.
Both men refused. Warren held that justices should never sit on "extrajudicial bodies", citing the Hayes-Tilden commission of 1876 and Owen Roberts' Pearl Harbor inquiry, and told Katzenbach and Archibald Cox so. Johnson summoned him alone and invoked his World War I service: rumours that Khrushchev or Castro killed Kennedy could start a war that would "kill 39 million in an hour." Warren said, "my personal views do not count. I will do it." It took 22 minutes at most.
Trapping Russell
Russell, weakened by emphysema, said no by phone from Winder. Johnson concealed both Warren and Robert Kennedy's role, flatly lying that Kennedy would not nominate anyone and reading Russell only six of the seven names. Then Pierre Salinger released the full list, and Johnson waited until presses were rolling to call again at 8:55 p.m.
Russell protested: "I don't like that man.… I don't have any confidence in him." Johnson cycled through every lever: patriotism ("You never turned your country down"), command ("you're goddamned sure going to serve"), personal debt ("you made me"), a hint of a job for nephew Bobby Russell, and the Carlton Hotel breakfast of November 9, 1952, when Russell made him Leader. The real clincher was the announcement itself: refusal would be a public slap at the presidency. "If you hadn't announced it, I would absolutely" have refused, Russell said. Johnson finished: "I haven't got any daddy, and you're going to be it."
What the commission did
Praise was overwhelming, and talk of congressional inquiries died away. The report, ten months later, found Oswald acted alone. Belief in a lone gunman rose from 29% to 87%; by 1983, 75% saw a conspiracy, and the 1979 House Select Committee said one was "probable." A 2003 Gallup poll found 18% thought Johnson involved; Caro states he found nothing to support that.
Caro measures the commission by its short-term calming effect, and on that ground the judgment holds. Its work had real gaps: the CIA did not tell it about the anti-Castro assassination plots later exposed by the Church Committee (1975). Warren's tears come only from Johnson's memoir; Warren's own account omits them.
Caro's verdict is that the commission "brought us through a very critical time," and that Johnson achieved it by sacrificing the control and secrecy his nature demanded. Like his speech to Congress, it showed he was "not a fluke of history, but a President."
The Southern Strategy
Congress was substance, not symbol, and Johnson inherited a legislative deadlock 26 years old. Caro shows that behind the apparent drift lay a deliberate southern strategy: hold every other bill hostage until the White House abandons civil rights, and let time do the rest. Johnson recognized it at a glance because in 1949 he had helped Richard Russell run it.
A quarter-century of stalemate
The logjam began with FDR's 1937 Court-packing defeat, which fused Republicans and southern Democrats into a conservative coalition. After it, Roosevelt never passed another major social reform bill; his 1938 "purge" of southern senators failed. Truman's Fair Deal died the same way: national health insurance, aid to education and expanded unemployment insurance all failed. Of 800,000 housing units authorized in 1949, only 300,000 were built by 1955, and the minimum wage stayed at 75 cents. Only as Majority Leader (1955–1960) did Johnson open the Senate "dam" from inside, passing the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction.
Under Kennedy the gates shut harder. His diplomatic gifts did not carry over to Congress.
| Kennedy measure | Status, November 1963 |
|---|---|
| Medicare | Ways and Means had not even agreed to hearings until November |
| Education aid | House and Senate versions irreconcilable |
| Tax cut | Stuck in Harry Byrd's Finance Committee since January |
| Civil rights | Bottled up in Judge Smith's Rules Committee |
| Foreign aid | $4.5 billion cut to $3.6 billion, more cuts coming |
| Area Redevelopment | Passed 1961; renewal refused 1963 |
Even routine appropriations stalled. Of twelve bills, only four had been enacted; four more were stuck in conference and four had passed only the House, so eight departments ran on continuing resolutions at the previous year's level. Roughly $2 billion in spending was lost for good. Appropriations chairman Clarence Cannon: the longer the delay, the "less of a drain on the Treasury." Walter Lippmann saw "delay and stultification."
The 1949 template
Most observers blamed absenteeism, "archaic rules" or seniority. Johnson saw a plan. In 1949 Russell had listed every law due to expire, found rent control (lapsing March 31), and stalled it in southern-run committees while filibustering the motion to take up civil rights. Majority Leader Scott Lucas warned rent control "would go out the window"; northern liberals withdrew their own bill. Harry Byrd credited "our great leader, Dick Russell." Freshman Johnson stood floor "guard duty" and gave a 35-page speech for unlimited debate.
Why time was the South's ally:
- Two exits only. A filibuster ended by cloture (67 votes), which had failed in all eleven civil rights attempts since 1938, or by voluntary withdrawal.
- The clock. A bill not passed by the end of a two-year Congress dies and starts over.
- Hostages. While civil rights held the floor, nothing else could move, including senators' own public works money.
- Coordination. House and Senate southerners acted in step; "Things were understood without any words."
The strategy already working
The State-Justice-Commerce appropriation passed the House on June 18, then went to John McClellan's subcommittee and a sub-subcommittee nominally chaired by Spessard Holland. McClellan stayed visibly busy with the TFX contract and Mafia hearings and held no hearing in five months. When Joseph Clark moved on November 21 to pry it loose, Russell said two words: "I object." Appropriations chairman Carl Hayden sided with the South, and Republican Karl Mundt, on six of the twelve subcommittees, was content to wait "until next March."
The prize hostage was the tax cut. Byrd, who feared integration would lead to "intermarriage", had let slip to a Richmond Times-Dispatch friend in June that civil rights would delay tax hearings. Howard Smith told Speaker John McCormack on November 22 that Rules hearings must wait until January, and would not even set a date.
Johnson spelled out the timetable to Katharine Graham: hearings to March, then Russell "will screw them to death, because he is so much smarter than they are." George Smathers: a tax markup before Christmas "would be a miracle." Richard Rovere wrote that "the two Virginians" had thwarted Presidents "since time began."
Caro's picture of a Kennedy program going nowhere is contested. Irving Bernstein's Promises Kept (1991) argues Kennedy's domestic record was stronger than critics allowed, and that the tax cut had already passed the House in September 1963. Kennedy's defenders see a program ripening, not a dead end. Caro also gives Roosevelt "a fifty-six-seat plurality in the House" in 1937; the 75th Congress opened with 333 Democrats to 89 Republicans, a lead of some 244 seats.
Russell's prophecy
One senator disagreed with the gloom. Russell told Orville Freeman that Johnson would "twist your arm off at the shoulder and beat your head in with it." "We could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights," Russell said, "but not Lyndon Johnson." He may have been reflecting that he had raised to power the man who would end his way of life.
“Old Harry”
The tax cut could not pass without Harry Flood Byrd, and nobody could go around him. Caro portrays Byrd as a courtly fiscal fanatic who measured success by what he stopped and who held the tax bill hostage for a budget under $100 billion. Johnson, who had spent a decade "reading" Byrd, won him by accepting his terms, slashing the budget and appealing to his life's aim.
The man and his barony
At 76, Byrd was short, soft-voiced and apple-cheeked (he owned the world's largest privately held apple orchards), with "twinkling" blue eyes. Behind them lay two hatreds. One was of Black Americans: he once shook his fist at Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell in the gallery and shouted "the Gold Dust twins!" The other was of debt and big government; he would jab his finger at a figure, his face reddening.
His power rested on two domains:
- Virginia. Governor from 1926, he ran "the Organization", which John Gunther called "the most urbane and genteel dictatorship in America." No candidate won without the Byrd "nod": not the last nine governors, not Howard Smith. The poll tax kept Black and new suburban voters out; only 17% of voting-age Virginians voted for governor in 1961.
- Senate Finance. He was unfailingly polite and utterly unyielding. He told Norris Cotton "Sorry, boy, you can't have a hearing," with a laugh and a slap on the back.
Byrd's creed came from hardship. In 1902, at fifteen, he left school to run his father's debt-ridden newspaper, raising $6 a day in coins for newsprint, then built orchards yielding a million bushels a year. "Blind to charts," he trusted a column of figures. Deficits were "sinful"; the dollar was "holding the world together." He boasted he had voted against the Wagner Act and the TVA and blamed Keynes for corrupting FDR.
Russell Long: Byrd "measured his success as a senator not by what he passed, but what he stopped from passing." Kennedy, doodling during one session, wrote: "Pillow fight in the dark with Harry Byrd."
Why no one could go around him
Byrd delayed by courtesy. He would not open hearings until the House passed the bill; when they began in October they moved slowly, members could file unlimited "special provisions" (thirty so far), and some days he "couldn't get a quorum." Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon called him absolute yet insisted Byrd "did not oppose" the bill, which Caro reads as missing the point: Byrd did not oppose, he delayed.
The committee could not be challenged from within: with seven Republicans and five of the nine other Democrats, Byrd had a safe majority; only Douglas, Gore, Hartke and Ribicoff usually opposed him. A rebel's bills would simply stall in Russell's, Robertson's, McClellan's, Eastland's, Ellender's or Hill's committees. Nor could he be challenged from outside. FDR funnelled patronage to his foes in 1934; Byrd won anyway, and the Senate rejected FDR's Virginia judicial nominee 72 to 9. Truman's attacks "helped me get re-elected." Kennedy's flanking alliance with Robert Kerr died with Kerr in January 1963. Chalmers Roberts wrote that Byrd was now "all-powerful." Horace Busby: "You couldn't go around Harry Byrd."
Reading the Byrd text
Byrd was cool to Johnson for three years. Then in 1952 his daughter Westwood, 35, died after a hunting fall. In heavy rain Johnson and Warren Magnuson were the only senators at the graveside, and Byrd's look told Johnson it was "a very important look."
How Johnson worked Byrd:
- Deference. He waited for aide Jake Carlton to open Byrd's door rather than walk in.
- Counting for him. He had Bobby Baker poll votes Byrd was too proud to ask about, and passed them on casually.
- Labour for an ageing man. Aides George Reedy and Gerry Siegel drafted reports Byrd's thin staff could not.
- "Wisdom." "Can I have a little bit of your wisdom?"; he even kissed Byrd's hand.
- Service as Leader. No Finance seat filled without Byrd's approval; his bills moved first; Russell Long managed bills as Byrd tired.
The affection was real (Byrd promised him Virginia's delegates in 1956), but Johnson read one line clearly: nothing could soften Byrd on spending. "See and prove" meant Byrd wanted the budget in writing, analyzed by staff. The tax bill was his first real bargaining chip for spending cuts.
The lunch and the meat cleaver
Johnson wanted Byrd to ask for the meeting, but Robert Anderson and Mike Mansfield could not arrange it. On December 4 he called himself: "I want to get some of your wisdom." Byrd told Time's Neil MacNeil, eyes twinkling, "He wants to work on me a little bit."
- Valenti's version. Jack Valenti described the December 5 lunch (potato soup, a White House tour) as a triumph: "maybe we can do some business."
- Caro's version. Byrd did not budge. The bill would move only after he and ranking Republican John J. Williams saw a sub-$100 billion budget in writing. No tax bill in 1963; and the $101.5–102 billion draft relied on gimmicks the committee "knows how to spot."
"Kermit, get in here, and bring your meat cleaver," Johnson told Budget Director Kermit Gordon. Johnson saw everything he wanted to do as "hinged to the tax cut." He wanted a symbol: fewer federal employees than the year before.
- McNamara. Cooperative; Defense cut $1.5 billion more on December 7.
- Orville Freeman. Kept lobbying; on December 11 Johnson jabbed his chest over Agriculture's staff increase, then refused even an audience over a memo still asking for 3,500 new jobs: "I know the difference between adding 3,500 and subtracting 3,500."
- John Gronouski. The Post Office held 5,000 of the 7,000 projected new jobs. Johnson offered a secret post-election supplemental, then warned, "I don't think you want to be explaining that." Ten days later the jobs vanished.
Byrd turns
Byrd ended general hearings on December 10, as promised, but slow-walked the thirty amendments, spending ninety minutes on whether to admit a stenotypist. Johnson chided Dillon for Treasury's letter backing Long's oil amendment: "You'll have thirty more of them." If the tax bill fell behind civil rights, "it's Good night, Grace."
On December 13 he pleaded with Byrd as an ally, offering the line that worked: "You can tell your grandchildren you were the senator who finally got a President to cut his budget." Told he was "tired of this talking," Byrd answered "Right." Long: Johnson "promised to cut spending, and Harry changed." The amendments began to move.
Caro's correction of Valenti rests on Byrd's own remarks to reporters after the lunch and on Johnson's taped calls the next day; the account of Byrd's later turn leans on Russell Long's recollection. Johnson's offer of a secret post-election supplemental to the Post Office ("there's some bookkeeping here") shows the cut was partly accounting, which Caro records but does not dwell on.
“The Johnsons in Johnson City”
With the tax bill moving, Johnson turned to civil rights, where compassion and ambition finally pointed the same way. The bill was trapped in Judge Howard Smith's Rules Committee, and the only lever was a discharge petition. In one week Johnson mobilized civil rights leaders, labour, churches and Texas congressmen, framed the vote as a test for "the party of Lincoln", and forced Smith to surrender.
One lever
"I'd move my children on through the line and get them down in the storm cellar" before attacking, Johnson had told Ted Sorensen in June. Now the attack was due. O'Brien aide Henry Wilson saw civil rights as "the total touch point": pass it with the tax bill and the year was good.
The House options were thin:
- Overrule Smith in Rules. Of 15 members, 10 were Democrats, but four were southerners, so at least two Republicans were needed; Minority Leader Charles Halleck recoiled.
- Discharge petition. It needed 218 signatures. In 1960, with Sam Rayburn behind it, a petition reaching 209 had made Smith yield. Liberal Richard Bolling had filed a new one, but Larry O'Brien's memo of November 29 said House rules (a seven-day wait, votes only on second or fourth Mondays) made a floor vote before the recess impossible.
The arithmetic was grim. Of 257 House Democrats, 90 were southern; at most about 160 would sign, so roughly 60 Republicans were needed. Midwestern Republicans favoured civil rights "more on their lips than in their hearts," and liked an issue that split Democrats. Halleck had "never signed one yet"; even the bill's GOP architect William McCulloch attacked the petition.
The source of the passion
Caro answers commentators who doubt Johnson's sincerity by pointing to a phrase he used with the governors: equal treatment for "the Mexican in California or the Negro in Mississippi or the Oriental on the West Coast or the Johnsons in Johnson City." Caro reads it as self-identification: he was one of the scorned, from boyhood "nigger work" to the taunt "Too much like Sam." He had sworn at Cotulla to help such children. "I'll let you in on a secret. I have the power." If there was only one lever, Johnson was going to push it.
On December 2 he called Bolling, first asking secrecy so House leaders would not see interference, then coaching him: "the humblest man anywhere has the right to a hearing," and Republicans "can't pretend to be for civil rights" and refuse to sign. "Don't hide behind a procedural thing."
The leaders on the couch
The heads of the five main civil rights organizations asked for a group meeting; Johnson insisted on one each. Roy Wilkins (NAACP) came on November 29, then Whitney Young (Urban League), Martin Luther King Jr. (SCLC), James Farmer (CORE) and A. Philip Randolph (Sleeping Car Porters). Johnson sat in his higher rocking chair a few inches from their knees.
- Wilkins. Once wary ("lift your heart or your wallet"), he felt "those mesmerizing eyes of Texas" and heard: "I want that bill passed." He judged Kennedy "very green" with Congress; "Johnson knew exactly what was possible."
- Farmer. Johnson called public accommodations "the heart of the bill," telling how his cook Zephyr Wright, a college graduate, could not find food or a toilet on southern highways.
- King. Johnson showed him the list of Republican non-signers to work on. King privately called him a man of "pragmatic compassion" who "may go where John Kennedy couldn't."
- Young. "A magnolia accent doesn't always mean bigotry."
On December 23 Johnson phoned Wilkins late at night about hiring a Black secretary, Gerri Whittington; Wilkins closed: "Please take care of yourself. We need you." Caro's conclusion: these men were "very hard to fool."
Leaning into the lever
On Tuesday, December 3, Johnson drove AFL-CIO chief George Meany downtown with the car window down for photographers and seated him at the leaders' breakfast; Andrew Biemiller: "This cemented Johnson with Meany." He then swung the leaders behind the petition ("you have a great moral issue"), and Speaker John McCormack got the "definite word" he had wanted. Majority Leader Carl Albert promised 165 signatures, then conceded "150 would be more like it." Johnson demanded a whip-by-whip poll: "Thinking isn't good enough. I need to know!"
The Steelworkers' Dave McDonald put 33 lobbyists across 45 states under Frank "Nordy" Hoffman. For Texas, Johnson worked Albert Thomas, assuring him on the Brown & Root "Mohole" appropriation and his say over the National Science Foundation; Thomas, though opposed, delivered six Texas signatures. The New York Times' Anthony Lewis reported a "dramatic impact" within hours.
On December 4 House Republicans denounced the petition and Gerald Ford said none had spoken for it. But Johnson told 89 business leaders, "I am the only President you have," and the AFL-CIO council, "I need you," hammering one phrase: "the party of Lincoln." About 200 more union lobbyists ("big stomachs and big watches") filled the halls; the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights recruited from 4,000 clergy at Philadelphia. "We'll play it for keeps," Johnson told O'Brien.
That evening Rules ranking Republican Clarence Brown told Smith "the heat was getting so great." Two GOP votes could overrule him, or Republican names could complete the petition. On December 5 Smith promised hearings "reasonably soon"; Brown fixed them for January 9, lasting 7–12 days, with Halleck promising House passage "by the end of January." Lewis: "a compromise that gave the President all he could reasonably have hoped for."
The petition was filed on December 9 by Emanuel Celler and reached only 131 names (just 24 Republicans), but many more had pledged to sign if Smith dragged. The same day as Smith's surrender, Byrd pledged tax action. The order was right: tax bill first, civil rights after, about two months gained for the Senate fight.
- 218 signatures needed; 209 in 1960.
- 257 House Democrats, 90 southern.
- 131 signatures on December 9, including 24 Republicans and 10 Texans.
- 189 to 158: the December 24 vote killing the Mundt amendment.
Coda: in residence, and in command
Life's John Steele saw "an inner calm" as Johnson thumbed his jammed in-box: "Texan Sits Tall in a New Saddle." On December 7 the family moved into the White House; Lady Bird carried only Sam Rayburn's photograph, told Chief Usher J. B. West "I want you to run the White House," and set the rule: "my husband comes first, the girls second." The Mundt wheat amendment revived in the House on December 16. Johnson recalled members from recess, stood on a gilt chair at a Christmas party, and won a 7 a.m. vote on December 24. "The power of the federal government," he wrote, "began flowing back to the White House."
Caro credits Johnson heavily for breaking the Rules blockade. Later House-centred histories, such as Clay Risen's The Bill of the Century (2014) and Todd Purdum's An Idea Whose Time Has Come (2014), give more weight to McCulloch, Brown and the bipartisan coalition. Caro's case for Johnson's sincerity rests largely on his own words and later recollections. Caro has Jacqueline Kennedy leave the White House on the morning of December 7; contemporary accounts date her move to the Harriman house to December 6, 1963, the day before the Johnsons moved in.
Serenity
For thirteen days over Christmas 1963 Johnson staged a show at the LBJ Ranch: a relaxed, folksy rancher who looked nothing like the Washington wheeler-dealer or the Kennedy of Hyannis Port. Caro shows that the show was a performance. Behind closed doors the same man was using presidential power to silence newspapers, running a "blind" trust that was not blind, and concealing his first Vietnam decisions. Yet the same vacation produced the War on Poverty, announced on January 8, 1964, which ended the transition and made the presidency his own.
From continuity to contrast
Johnson flew into Austin on December 24 and took a helicopter west over the Hill Country to the ranch, where the presidential flag now flew. He was in one of his "highs." That first evening he took four pool reporters deer hunting with Judge A. W. Moursund, lowered his rifle at a grazing doe ("I haven't got the heart to kill her"), and announced, "I've only been here an hour and I feel better already." On Christmas Day a short photo session became a marathon: he paraded twenty-seven relatives before about fifty photographers, gave an unplanned house tour while the turkey went cold, handed out souvenir ashtrays, and was last seen stooping to pick up the reporters' cellophane off his lawn.
The purpose was strategic. At a Sunday dinner in Washington he had told old friends: "I have to carry out the Kennedy legacy," but "I've got to put my own stamp on this administration in order to run for office on my own." The first month's theme had been continuity. With 1964, an election year, about to begin, Caro writes, the theme had to become contrast, and the state visit of West German chancellor Ludwig Erhard on December 28 announced it.
The Sparerib Summit, Stonewall, Texas. After talks at the ranch (Herefords nosing up to the car mid-negotiation; 33 guests squeezed into eight bedrooms), Johnson took Erhard to Fredericksburg, settled by German pioneers in 1846, where hymns are still sung in German. The state dinner was in the Stonewall High School gym: 500 lb of brisket and 300 lb of spareribs from caterer Walter Jetton, beer in paper cups, cowgirl choirs singing "Deep in the Heart of Texas" in German, then Van Cliburn playing Beethoven and Brahms on a concert grand before hay bales. Erhard lit a cigar and beamed; Johnson raised his hand like a winning boxer. Erhard went home speaking of "friendship." Newsweek: "somehow it all worked."
The press drew the contrast Johnson wanted. Kennedy had taken guests by boat to Mount Vernon for candlelit dinner with violins; Erhard, wrote Douglas Kiker of the Herald Tribune, got "somebody named Cactus Pryor." Caro's point: the Stonewall dinner was a deliberate announcement that the new presidency would differ in style.
The show and its reviews
Real business ran alongside the theatre. The Joint Chiefs and Robert McNamara came for budget talks; ambassadors Chip Bohlen and David Bruce on de Gaulle's strains on NATO; Cabinet secretaries Rusk, Freeman and Wirtz; economists Walter Heller and Kermit Gordon; McGeorge Bundy; and CIA director John McCone, who reported the 1,700 Americans on strife-torn Cyprus safe and Khrushchev quiet. Ted Sorensen, twenty miles away at the Lewis Ranch, wrote the State of the Union.
- Thrift as news. On the lawn Johnson read aloud an executive order capping federal employment below the level when he took office, with quarterly reports to him from April 1: a signal to Harry Byrd that he would govern frugally.
- The haystack press conference. At a Jetton barbecue a lectern with the presidential seal was set on a hay bale; Orville Freeman announced 4,000 fewer jobs at Agriculture, and Johnson defended closing thirty-eight defense bases and promised more. Then he mounted a tall black horse and "rode off into the sunset," press secretary Pierre Salinger clinging to a shaggy piebald behind him. A French correspondent: "It is not to be believed."
- Courting the reviewers. He nudged Herefords with his Lincoln and its bull-moan horn, raced speedboats on Lake Travis, timed outings for the six o'clock news, gave out Stetsons, did imitations, traded off-the-record anecdotes and once phoned a reporter's editor to praise him.
- Set pieces. Nightly visits to Cousin Oreole, who read him a horoscope: "a good President, but won't be reelected." The Joint Chiefs, "these warmongers," were made to sing "Happy Birthday" to Marine commandant David Shoup in a freezing wind.
Dissent was rare (one European recalled Pablo Casals in the East Room; "cornball" still circulated). The raves ran coast to coast: "relaxed" in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, "the very picture of relaxation" in Time, which said he had put "his own brand" on the presidency. Peter Lisagor, formerly hostile, found him "old-shoe." Tom Wicker wrote that on the ranch "LBJ is all wool and a yard wide," "serene as a restless Westerner can be." Reporters concluded this was the real Johnson.
What the reviewers did not see
Caro's verdict is flat: it was a performance, an act. No change of scene could change Lyndon Johnson, and the Pedernales Valley, where "humiliation had been heaped on heredity," was the one place least suited to his peace of mind. The Bunton strain of huge ambition and fierce pragmatism, hardened by a grim youth, was unaltered. Lady Bird showed reporters where "a ditch deep enough to walk elephants in" had run; her husband never mentioned it, because it was the gully his father Sam Ealy Johnson had filled again and again only to watch the rain wash it out. At cousin Ava's house hung a row of family portraits of men who looked like him and had failed. "Daddy and Mother were there, too," his brother said of every return.
Behind closed doors, in the den rocker or the office recliner, Johnson worked the telephone, receiver in his left hand if the call was going his way, the right if it was not. All his life he had used every weapon he could find "with a ruthlessness startling even to men who had believed themselves inured" to it. A President had many weapons, and on the ranch he began using them.
Weapons against the press
| Target | Pressure applied | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Margaret Mayer, Dallas Times-Herald | Hinted FCC scrutiny of the paper's KRLD stations and tax records | Investigation of KTBC killed within a day |
| Houston Chronicle | Withheld approval of publisher's bank merger | Written pledge of support; endorsement in 1964 |
| Shreveport Times and Journal | Threatened Barksdale AFB (15,000 personnel) | Persuaded to wait; base untouched |
| Bascom Timmons, Fort Worth Star-Telegram | Linked Carswell AFB and the Trinity River project to a better reporter | Timmons phased out, 1964–65 |
Margaret Mayer, 41, of the Times-Herald's Austin bureau, had been asking how KTBC attracted advertisers. Her mild written questions of December 17 reached the ranch, and at 8:45 p.m. On January 4 Johnson called managing editor Albert Jackson. He named the paper's owners and Clyde Rembert of its stations, recalled that KRLD had been "98 percent" commercial "when I was helping him" (a figure that could imperil a licence at the FCC), and hinted at reviewing "some of yours, or some of our, records," which could mean personal tax records. "A President oughtn't be calling about chickenshit stuff like this," he said. By 11 a.m. Next day Jackson promised it would be stopped, with Mayer never told why.
The Houston Chronicle (circulation 259,000) had endorsed Nixon in 1960. Its president, John T. Jones Jr., also headed the National Bank of Commerce, which wanted to merge with Texas National; the Federal Reserve and the Justice Department's Antitrust Division opposed it, and Jones's Houston Endowment held 2.75 million shares. Johnson's price, relayed through Jack Valenti: "their lung as long as I'm in public life." When a December 27 meeting (with Gus Wortham and Congressman Albert Thomas) yielded only a vague promise, Johnson told George Brown, in hospital with an ulcer, on January 2: no letter, no merger.
Brown warned the deal was "too much of a cash-and-carry thing." Johnson's answer was the mechanism: the letter would carry the quo but not the quid. "They don't have to be mentioning the goddamned bank." Jones wrote on January 3, pledging help "while you have your capable hand on the reins," plus a Washington posting for Johnson acolyte Everett Collier. On January 8 the merger was cleared. "From here on out, we're partners." The Chronicle endorsed Johnson in 1964 and no other Democrat until 2008.
Johnson claimed Kennedy had planned the same squeeze; Caro found no confirmation. With Shreveport's segregationist papers he mused about giving them "both barrels" via Barksdale. With Amon Carter Jr. on Christmas Day he mentioned the just-closed Fort Worth Army Depot (2,600 soldiers), Carswell's SAC squadrons and the billion-dollar, 365-mile Trinity River barge canal, then asked for "the best damn person" to replace the 73-year-old Timmons, a Washington reporter since 1912. Timmons never knew. Carswell survived; the canal was authorized in 1965 and eventually abandoned.
A trust that was not blind
On seven of the thirteen days Johnson drove the ranch with Moursund, trustee of the blind trust that supposedly kept the Johnsons ignorant of their business. Secretary Vicky McCammon: "a whole lot of discussion on different money matters." That Christmas, private lines were installed: in Moursund's kitchen, an unlabeled button at Moursund & Ferguson in Johnson City, desks at Ed Clark's law firm, KTBC's Earl Deathe's office and home. Jesse Kellam's beeper summoned him to his office phone. Back in Washington, Johnson had an outside line put in his bedroom so calls bypassed the switchboard log. "Every night he told Moursund what to do," partner Thomas Ferguson told Caro; "it wasn't very blind." Meanwhile press secretary George Reedy issued statements, approved word for word, that the President "is not engaged in any private enterprise."
Vietnam by the political calendar
Reports showed the war "deteriorating." McNamara's December 21 report: unless trends reversed in "2–3 months," the result would be "neutralization at best." Mike Mansfield, a former East Asian history professor, urged a political rather than military course on December 7; Johnson asked aide Francis Valeo for a new memo framed by "Do you want that to be another China?" When Mansfield warned of "another Korea," Johnson solicited counter-memos from McNamara, Rusk and Bundy. He approved more advisers for the Mekong Delta and a committee under Lt. Gen. Victor Krulak on OPLAN 34-A covert raids against the North, chosen for "plausibility of denial." Caro identifies two clear features of these decisions: they were concealed, and their unifying aim was domestic, even personal, politics.
- 1,000 advisers were to leave Vietnam by end-1963 under the Kennedy plan.
- 16,732 was peak U.S. Strength; 15,914 the year-end figure, a drop of only 818.
- Replacements were slowed in December and sped up in January; strength was soon back at peak (Pentagon Papers: "essentially an accounting exercise").
- March 7, 1964: Johnson: "We have called back approximately 1,000 people."
- January 2 Krulak report arrives; approved January 16; raids begin February 1, with no NSAM signed and nothing disclosed to the public.
Fredrik Logevall (Choosing War): "The president judged all options on the war in terms of what they meant for November." On March 2, 1964, Johnson told Bundy he wanted to "maintain the status quo for six months": short of Election Day, but just about the time to the August 24 Democratic convention, and Bobby Kennedy.
Caro explicitly defers the great Vietnam questions (whether Johnson had other feasible options; whether Kennedy would have acted differently) to his next volume. His motive reading follows Logevall and William Gibbons; Johnson framed his choices as credibility and containment, and the Kennedy counterfactual remains one of the most contested in the field (John Newman's JFK and Vietnam, 1992, argued Kennedy meant to withdraw; Logevall and others are sceptical).
A gesture of compassion
Ruthlessness and deceit were never the only traits. On New Year's Eve Johnson walked into Horace Busby's birthday party at Austin's segregated Forty Acres Club with his new Black secretary, Gerri Whittington, on his arm. No one gasped. Asked whether the President knew what he was doing, Bill Moyers said, "He always knows what he's doing." Next day law professor Ernest Goldstein asked to bring Black guests and was told: "The President of the United States integrated us on New Year's Eve."
Making the presidency his: the War on Poverty
The anti-poverty idea began under Kennedy, after Michael Harrington's The Other America (1962), Dwight Macdonald's New Yorker review and Homer Bigart's 1963 Appalachia reports. Heller got leave for "a quiet investigation," but the task force produced, in aide William Capron's words, "perhaps predictably disastrous" warmed-over proposals. On November 13 Census director Richard Scammon told Kennedy, "You can't get a single vote more by doing anything for poor people," and on November 19 Kennedy told Heller, "Come back to me in a couple of weeks." Public awareness was "virtually nonexistent," so poverty was an issue Johnson could own.
His reply to Heller on November 23 was instant: "That's my kind of program.… I'll take money away from things to get money for people." When Heller and Gordon reached the ranch on December 29, he had reserved $500 million from McNamara's defense savings, doubling the $500 million scraped from existing programs to $1 billion: about 1 percent of spending for the poorest 20 percent, but a symbolic figure. Their plan for pilot "demonstration" cities was dead.
- Demand for specifics. He "hounded" them for concrete, "bedrock" programs, citing his National Youth Administration experience, and threatened to withdraw the money unless they found workable ideas; joking about Gordon's borrowed khaki shirt led him to insist on rural as well as urban poor.
- Community action. He accepted this vague idea from David Hackett's juvenile delinquency committee, partly (Busby says) because rejecting a "Kennedy committee" idea would undercut continuity.
- Politics. Liberal columnist William Shannon called him a "broker" concerned with "means rather than ends," weak in the urban north; an anti-poverty crusade answered that, ten months before the election.
- Memory. His father twisting his toe at 4:30 a.m. For the highway gang; cotton-picking with Ava ("There's got to be a better way"); his insistence that patched clothes were not "rags."
Deadlines were set: agency recommendations by January 6, Cabinet reactions by January 9. Sorensen's first draft, finished December 30, already declared "unconditional war on poverty." Sorensen later said the phrase did not sound like Kennedy, though Kennedy had used it in a 1960 speech. It caught Johnson's feelings: he knew what to do with enemies.
The State of the Union, January 8, 1964
The 43-minute speech opened with the "stunner": a budget of $97.9 billion, below Byrd's $100 billion and $500 million under the previous $98.4 billion, with fewer federal employees. Kennedy was invoked only three times. Then, thirteen minutes in, came the "outskirts of hope," and Johnson added four words of his own to Sorensen's line: "This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America." The aim was "not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it." He tied in hospital insurance under Social Security, and on civil rights, with columnist Marquis Childs counting barely 43–44 of 67 Democrats for cloture, he killed rumours of a watered-down bill: "Surely they can work and eat and travel side by side in their own country." Foreign policy got the last quarter; Vietnam appeared twice.
Republicans could only grumble ("a cut-rate Utopia"); a Democrat told the Washington Post, "It's the Sermon on the Mount." Headlines first said "economy," not poverty; Douglass Cater soon saw "social planning on a scale never before attempted." Walter Lippmann granted the policy was Kennedy's but "its translation into a program is Johnson's." Newsweek: "His own Administration had clearly begun." The transition that began when Ken O'Donnell said "He's gone" lasted forty-seven days and ended on January 8, 1964, with a program so ambitious that only the New Deal offered a comparison.
“Old Harry” II
Johnson's budget was built for one listener: Finance chairman Harry Byrd. By letting the old man believe he had forced a President to bow, Johnson turned Byrd into his "secret ally," and Byrd's single vote rescued the tax cut from a last-minute collapse.
On January 7, 1964, honouring his promise of written proof, Johnson showed Byrd and ranking Republican John Williams the budget galleys: "97.9 billion. Now you can tell your friends that you forced the President of the United States to reduce the budget." Caro notes the sacrifice for a man who felt any defeat as "humiliation": Johnson admitted losing, face to face, in words chosen to touch Byrd's pride and affection. Byrd praised the speech, and his committee went into "high gear."
January 23. Everett Dirksen's amendment repealing luxury excise taxes passed 12–5, costing $450 million a year, and Democrats Clinton Anderson, Vance Hartke and Abraham Ribicoff revived their own amendments. George Smathers phoned at 12:34: "The goddamned thing came unglued." Johnson's fix:
- One motion lumping Dirksen's amendment with every pending amendment, so a single defeat ended the markup.
- Three Democrats flipped, in calls totalling nine minutes ("You save my face this afternoon, and I'll save your face tomorrow," he told Ribicoff).
- Byrd's ruling and vote, the fourth switch: "Help me, Harry."
It failed 9–8. Byrd excitedly told the switchboard operator, "My vote."
You've learned to count since I left up there.
— Lyndon Johnson to Harry Byrd
Johnson then pushed the committee staff and the Government Printing Office to produce the report by January 28, in "record time." The Senate passed the tax bill on February 7, three days before the House passed civil rights, preserving his sequence. The cut fed one of the longest expansions in American history, and it passed because Johnson grasped that Byrd had to be given what he wanted and used an old man's trust to "get" the ungettable.
In the Books of Law
Caro carries the civil rights bill from Judge Smith's Rules Committee to Johnson's signature on July 2, 1964. The House stall broke under a discharge petition and a NASA contract for Purdue; the Senate fell to three Johnson rules: no hostages, no compromise, get Dirksen. Caro's verdict: Johnson broke the South's power in the Senate.
Prying the bill out of Rules
Howard Smith opened hearings on January 9 and stalled: after seven days only eight of thirty witnesses had testified. By January 18 the petition had 178 signatures, forty short, and Charles Halleck was telling Republicans not to sign. Johnson warned Halleck that a Lincoln's Birthday speech would "laugh you out of the goddamned park" with Smith's "foot on Lincoln's neck," then phoned NASA's James Webb about Purdue University, in Halleck's district.
Webb offered a $750,000 building and research grants paid in installments: "the minute he kicks over the traces, we stop the installment." Johnson: "Sounds good." On January 23 Smith gave up ("I have been here long enough to know the facts of life"); the bill cleared Rules on January 30 and passed the House on February 10. Caro adds: "whether or not the contracts for Purdue had anything to do with it."
Three rules for the Senate
- No hostages. Tax cut and appropriations were already passed; Johnson sent no new bills. "They can filibuster until hell freezes over."
- No compromise. "There will be no wheels and no deals," honouring the promise William McCulloch had extracted in the House.
- Get Dirksen. Only Everett Dirksen could deliver Republican cloture votes. "He's got to look good all the time."
Compromise had always been the southern weapon, since each deal ate calendar time and sent bills to a conference committee to die. Johnson told Doris Kearns Goodwin he needed a bill "even stronger" than Kennedy's or the liberals "would get me," and told Richard Goodwin: "Now I have it. And I'm going to use it."
He put Robert Kennedy out front and made Hubert Humphrey floor manager, goading him ("you liberals will never deliver") and then pledging full support.
- Quorum platoons. Rotating liberal teams kept fifty-one senators on call; they failed to raise a quorum only once.
- Floor captains. Each section had a defender with four or five senators, who got publicity in return.
- The arithmetic. At most forty-four Democrats plus liberal Republicans made fifty-six or fifty-seven; ten or eleven had to come from conservative midwestern Republicans.
Clergy, dams and Dirksen
In Mississippi the movement paid in blood: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered after a deputy released them to the Klan. In Washington, clergy worked the Republican Midwest, where unions and the NAACP were weak. Joseph Rauh: "like getting an army with new fresh guns." Karl Mundt hoped his vote "satisfies those two goddamned bishops."
Publicly Johnson said, "All I know is what I read in the papers." Privately Stewart Udall offered western senators water projects; Carl Hayden, eighty-seven, traded his vote for the Central Arizona Project; Alaska's Ernest Gruening came round after $50 million in earthquake relief. Dirksen arrived on April 29 demanding compromise and left saying they had "barely touched" civil rights. Johnson on his cosmetic amendments: "I'm going to be against them right up until I sign them."
- 57 days: the longest filibuster in Senate history.
- 71–29: cloture on June 10; 27 Republicans for, six (Goldwater among them) against.
- 73–27: Senate passage on June 19; signed July 2.
Todd Purdum (An Idea Whose Time Has Come, 2014) and Clay Risen (The Bill of the Century, 2014) give more credit to Humphrey, Dirksen, McCulloch and the movement, and Risen argues Johnson's 1964 role was smaller than legend holds. Caro admits the Purdue link is unproven. Some of his dates slip: Dirksen's amendments were agreed around May 13 and introduced as the Dirksen-Mansfield substitute on May 26, not added on May 12; the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, told within his spring narrative, took place on June 21; and the July 2 signing came eleven days, not eight, before the Republican convention opened on July 13.
Lincoln struck off the chains, Caro writes, but Lyndon Johnson led black Americans into the voting booths and wrote "mercy and justice into the statute books." That began with one December 1963 decision: to throw his full weight behind the discharge petition.
Defeating Despair
The New York Times headline after the State of the Union, ROBERT KENNEDY DEFEATS DESPAIR, was wrong. Caro traces a grief that never lifted, a man who "changed" toward compassion and away from the hunt for criminals, and one hatred that did not change: for Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, freed of the need to placate him, began to slip the leash: the Mann, Indonesia and Corbin rounds, and finally the cruellest remark of all.
The grief
At the funeral Robert Kennedy was still as a statue; within weeks his collars gaped and he wore his brother's tweed overcoat and bomber jacket with the presidential seal. At Douglas Dillon's Hobe Sound house at Thanksgiving, Pierre Salinger found him "the most shattered man I had ever seen." At night he drove to Arlington, scaled the wall with John Seigenthaler and knelt at the grave "sometimes for hours."
After skiing in Aspen he returned in January tanned, and reporters declared him his "old self." Friends knew better. Murray Kempton in February saw him staring at his hands, "a face horribly lonely." "I can't sleep," he told Seigenthaler. On St. Patrick's Day he wept on Mary McGrory's shoulder. Half a century later Jean Kennedy Smith, asked when he came out of it: "I don't think he ever came out of that."
Why so deep
- A shared life. He had subordinated every ambition to his brother's; he told a reporter he "had no goal that was not his brother's."
- Lost power. "It's strange to think that you can't just pick up the phone."
- Possible guilt. He asked CIA chief John McCone whether the agency was involved. Operation Mongoose was still running, with eight CIA-backed attempts on Castro since 1961. He told Arthur Schlesinger the question was whether Oswald acted alone or for "Castro or by gangsters," and told Frank Mankiewicz about Garrison, "I think there is something." Yet he never raised it with the Warren Commission; Nicholas Katzenbach: he "never really wanted any investigation."
Caro refuses to convict: the clues "may, however, be clues to nothing at all." What the speculation proves is the depth and duration of the grief.
The change
The softening had begun in the Missile Crisis. Now it showed. When four Cuban fishing boats strayed into Florida waters, he treated it like "a speeding, parking ticket" while hawks wanted a show of force.
The orphanage, December 1963. At a Christmas party, a six- or seven-year-old black boy ran up crying "Your brother's dead!" and then burst into tears at the silence. Kennedy scooped him up: "That's all right. I have another brother." (Peter Maas)
In Kansas City, after the cameras left, Ben Bradlee watched him sit nearly an hour stroking the hand of a dying woman. When Jimmy Hoffa got eight years in March 1964, Kennedy sat silent at the celebration; Robert Morgenthau says he never mentioned organized crime again. His explanation: "I'm tired of chasing people." Bradlee came to see "his building rage at the persistent inequalities."
| Before Dallas | After Dallas |
|---|---|
| "Black and white" prosecutor | Grasped "the gray areas" |
| Get Hoffa, the Mafia | "Tired of chasing people" |
| Tenderness kept for family | Open compassion for the powerless |
| Hated on father's and brother's behalf | "Unskilled at hating on his own" (Kempton) |
He framed his new aims as his brother's legacy, telling Schlesinger and Goodwin the Kennedy wing's power "will last for just eleven months." His men's lasting mantra, that JFK's program would have passed in a second term, Caro leaves for his final volume.
The one hatred that stayed
Kennedy never called Johnson "the President." In spring 1964 oral histories he poured it out: Johnson lied, mistreated Jackie on the plane, made men beg for appointments and reduced McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara to nothing. "Our President was a gentleman and a human being.… This man is not.… He's mean, bitter, vicious, an animal in many ways."
Johnson's side was fear as well as hatred: Bobby's 1968 candidacy was "the thing I feared from the first day of my presidency." Ken O'Donnell: on Kennedy, "Ninety-nine percent of the things were untrue."
- Mid-Dec 1963 Thomas Mann put over Latin America; Kennedy's protest letter goes unheard. Schlesinger: "We have underestimated the power of the Presidency."
- Jan 1964 Johnson sends Kennedy to mediate Sukarno and Malaysia, hoping he fails; Tokyo's Waseda University students cheer him instead, and he decides to stay in public life. Johnson then "used" him at a staged briefing.
- Feb 11, 1964 Over Paul Corbin's New Hampshire write-in drive: "I'm President, and I don't want him." Corbin is fired.
Johnson boasted that he could "see the jugular in any man" yet kept himself on a leash. The leash came off. He told Salinger, knowing it would reach Kennedy, that the assassination might be "divine retribution" for the deaths of Trujillo and Diem. Kennedy called it "the worst thing Johnson has said." Johnson, Kennedy concluded, "knows how to ferret out and use people's weaknesses." The new adjective was "dangerous."
Caro's portrait leans on Kennedy loyalists (Guthman, Seigenthaler, Schlesinger) and on Evan Thomas's Robert Kennedy: His Life (2000) for the guilt theme. Johnson's version of the Corbin clash survives in his taped call to DNC treasurer Richard Maguire, which Caro uses to check Bobby's account.
Hammer Blows
The Johnson–Kennedy feud would poison the Democratic Party through the 1960s, but its first rounds all went to Johnson. The three symbolic Kennedy men, Schlesinger, Sorensen and Salinger, left in early 1964, yet like Robert Kennedy they had stayed long enough. By March the press was in awe, Gallup showed 77 percent approval, and no one doubted who the Democratic nominee would be.
A feud past the grave
As Robert Kennedy lay dying in June 1968, Johnson kept asking Joe Califano, "Is he dead yet?"; Califano could not tell whether he hoped or feared it. Next morning he asked Defense Secretary Clark Clifford whether Kennedy had "the right to be buried in Arlington." Clifford, "dumbfounded," said the regulations were irrelevant, and Johnson yielded. For now, though, Johnson had won the Mann, Indonesia and Corbin rounds and kept Kennedy in the Cabinet, his overriding aim of continuity.
The three departures
| Aide | How Johnson handled him | Exit |
|---|---|---|
| Arthur Schlesinger | Frozen out; Eric Goldman of Princeton recruited to replace him | Resignation "accepted with alacrity," Jan 27 |
| Ted Sorensen | Wooed: chatted with his sons, called him "my trusted counselor" | Left Feb 29 to write the Kennedy book |
| Pierre Salinger | Treated as "one of his own," i.e. As a servant | Quit with under two hours' notice, Mar 19 |
Schlesinger thought Johnson had "never... Had to concentrate on substance" and was soon advising Bobby. (By 1978 he called Johnson a man of "brilliant intelligence, authentic social passion.") Sorensen gave nothing back. Told the November 27 speech was "90 percent Sorensen," he said "not more than 50"; asked "Are you with me?" he answered "I'm still here, Mr. President." When Johnson said he treated his staff "as if they were his own children," Sorensen replied, quietly, "Yes, I know." Johnson accepted the resignation.
Salinger was made to ride a horse for photographers ("Hopalong Salinger"), play the piano right after Van Cliburn at the Ludwig Erhard dinner, and eat bean soup on command. Schlesinger: once Johnson regards Kennedy men as Johnson men, "their day is over." Salinger filed for a California Senate seat; Johnson heard of it at a lunch with publishers, showed nothing, peeled off cash toward the $450 filing fee ("Here's your first campaign contribution") and installed George Reedy within hours. Salinger was later appointed to the seat but lost in November to George Murphy.
For any successor, the incumbent's team buys legitimacy for a season. Johnson needed them to stay only until his own record could carry the mantle; after that, departures cost him little.
The verdict of March
None of JFK's other staff left in 1964: O'Donnell, O'Brien, Dungan, and Cabinet members McNamara, Rusk and Udall stayed. James Reston wrote that Johnson "grants nothing in an argument, not even equal time," and concluded: "President Kennedy's eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson's hammer blows are designed to make men act."
Richard Rovere called the tax and civil rights bills "beyond the reach of John F. Kennedy." Eric Sevareid said Johnson had stamped the administration in days and Congress in weeks. Tom Wicker found "ol' Cornpone" now said with awe.
- 73% approval in March; 77% in April, with disapproval only 9%.
- Two out of three Republicans approved.
- 78–13 over Goldwater, 77–16 over Rockefeller, 68–24 over Nixon (Gallup, March 13–17).
Rovere's "beyond the reach" is the counterfactual Kennedy loyalists reject: they hold JFK's program would have passed in a second term. Caro defers that judgment to his final volume. The Arlington call rests on Clifford's account alone.
Long Enough
Caro's closing argument: the forty-seven days from November 22, 1963 to the State of the Union on January 8, 1964 were Johnson's finest moment, a feat of political genius and of will that history has filed away as the Constitution working on its own. He did more than steady the country. He used the crisis to launch a crusade for social justice, and he did it by conquering himself.
Overlooked by history
Scholars treat the transition as routine, like the seven earlier successions of a Vice President. The camera agrees: the only iconic Johnson image is the oath aboard Air Force One, where the eye drifts to Jackie. Caro names what is forgotten: the PRISONER LINKED TO CASTRO headlines, the fear of war with Cuba or Russia, which the Warren Commission helped quiet (flawed as its report proved), and the chance that liberals, labor and black leaders might rally to Robert Kennedy's banner.
Catching the crest
"I had to take the dead man's program and turn it into a martyr's cause," Johnson told Doris Kearns Goodwin. The crest of feeling came in the transition weeks; moving at once, Johnson caught it, and the 1964 Senate fight needed every ounce. He then rode it past Kennedy's agenda to the War on Poverty.
Momentum is not a mysterious mistress. It is a controllable fact of political life.
— Lyndon Johnson
The conquest of self
The fear of failure that froze his 1960 bid vanished. So did the arm-waving, the tantrums and the gloating; aides said "composed," "calm." George Reedy: "The situation brought out the finest that was in him." "I am" President slipped out, as far as is known, only to Robert Kennedy.
He needed the restraint: Kennedy men would bolt at the first bullying (Salinger did), and threats meant little before his power was consolidated.
The rest of the presidency, Caro warns, will read differently: Vietnam, with 58,000 American dead, 300,000 wounded and perhaps two million Vietnamese casualties, and lasting damage to reverence for the office.
For a brief moment Johnson conquered himself; he could not do it for long, "but he had done it long enough."
Master Takeaways
- Power reveals. As a man gains power he needs less camouflage, so his real aims come into view. Johnson's civil rights drive in 1957 and 1963–64 exposed a compassion that ambition had kept hidden for twenty years.
- Fear of failure can defeat a sound strategy. Johnson knew how nominations were won but would not declare, travel or enter primaries: "If he didn't try, he couldn't fail." The West went to the Kennedys, who asked first.
- Delegated power belongs to the delegator. Johnson's draft order claimed "general supervision" of national security. Kennedy answered with a letter "requesting" reviews and no staff. A title without staff, information or decision rights is empty.
- Succession is legal at once and political afterwards. Johnson was President the moment Kennedy died, yet he staged legitimacy: the widow at the oath, the press pool on board, the Kennedy men kept with "I need you."
- Find the gatekeeper's price and pay it. Byrd would release the $11 billion tax cut only for a budget under $100 billion. Johnson cut to $97.9 billion and let Byrd say he had forced a President to bow.
- Free the hostages before the fight. Russell's strategy held must-pass bills captive while civil rights was filibustered. Johnson passed the tax cut and appropriations first, then refused every deal, and cloture carried 71 to 29.
- Turn a small vote into a test of strength. Johnson saw that the Mundt wheat-credit vote would be Congress's first confrontation with the new President, framed it as a slap at Kennedy's memory, and won 57 to 36.
- Exclusion feeds on itself. Shut out, Johnson had no news to trade, so reporters and senators stopped calling, so he looked useless, so he was excluded further, including from the secret Jupiter deal of October 27, 1962.
- Loyalty without use buys nothing. Johnson's perfect public silence as Vice President earned him 10 hours 19 minutes alone with Kennedy in 1961 and 1 hour 53 minutes in 1963.
- The rival you dismiss may want it as much as you do. Johnson saw a sickly, lazy rich man's son. He missed Addison's disease and back pain borne without complaint, and a determination equal to his own.
- Command of an institution is not a constituency. Kennedy judged that "the Senate is not the place to run from" and campaigned on television and the road. Johnson mistook mastery of ninety-six senators for a national following.
- Tailor one plea to each listener. Kennedy aides mocked "Ahhh need you," but Johnson aimed it at Galbraith's New Deal past, Schlesinger's pride, Stevenson's thwarted ambition and Sorensen's loyalty to the program, and they stayed.
- Credibility can require giving up control. Johnson's instinct was a Texas inquiry under his thumb. He reversed himself, created the Warren Commission, and talked Warren into serving in at most twenty-two minutes.
- Bring outside pressure to bear on an inside bottleneck. Judge Smith's Rules Committee gave way to a discharge petition backed by civil rights leaders, labor lobbyists, clergy and Texas signatures, and to the "party of Lincoln" charge aimed at Republicans.
- Make a program big enough to carry a coalition. Heller's pilot cities would give few congressmen a stake. Johnson's $1 billion nationwide War on Poverty gave most districts one, and so a reason to vote for it.
- Momentum is a resource with a short life. Johnson moved in the first weeks, while grief was at its crest. "Momentum is not a mysterious mistress. It is a controllable fact of political life."
- The ruthless side never left. At the ranch Johnson pressed newspapers through FCC licences, a bank merger and air bases, ran his "blind" trust by private telephone lines, and had Reedy deny he was in business.
- The Vietnam pattern began in the transition. The promised 1,000-man withdrawal was "essentially an accounting exercise," and OPLAN 34-A raids began with no NSAM signed. Caro finds the decisions concealed and timed to the election calendar.
- Personal hatred shapes institutions. The Johnson-Robert Kennedy feud, begun with a forced handshake in 1953 and sealed on the Biltmore stairs, put the blackest reading on every act for the rest of the decade.
Frameworks & mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Power reveals | More power means less need for disguise, so a leader's true aims show. | Predicting what a newly unconstrained leader will do. |
| The nothing job transformed | See the potential in a powerless post, take it, and build it up. It fails where the post's power is borrowed by design, as with the vice presidency. | Deciding whether a role can be built or is capped by its charter. |
| If you don't try, you can't fail | Fear of public humiliation produces non-decision that looks like strategy. | A strong candidate keeps finding reasons not to commit. |
| Senators have no votes | Delegates go to whoever shows up and asks; governors and local holders of "pieces of power" decide. | Mapping who actually controls a decision. |
| The hostage strategy | Filibuster the hard bill and stall must-pass bills until the majority surrenders; time is the minority's ally. | A determined minority faces a clock and a majority. |
| Storm cellar sequencing | Pass the must-pass measures first so nothing is left to hold hostage, then attack. | Ordering a contentious programme of change. |
| Delegation is the delegator's will | Verbs and resources decide: "directing" became "requesting," and no staff came with it. | Accepting an oversight or chair role. |
| The tailored plea | One request ("I need you"), varied to each person's pride, ambition or loyalty. | Retaining a predecessor's team after a sudden change. |
| Give the baron his win | Concede face, in words chosen for his pride, to get the substance. | A gatekeeper cannot be bypassed. |
| Make it the first test | Recast a minor vote as a confrontation with the new authority, then win by a margin. | Establishing authority early in a new role. |
| Quo without quid | The written pledge mentions only support, never the favour given in return. | Auditing exchanges that leave a clean paper trail. |
| One at a time | Meet leaders singly, knee to knee, never as a bloc. | Winning over a coalition whose members could combine against you. |
| First in, last out | Read power from who enters with the principal, who stays behind, and whose view becomes the decision. | Working out who really has the leader's ear. |
Caro builds many decisive scenes on partisan recollection. The Kennedy side comes through Kenneth O'Donnell, Larry O'Brien and Evelyn Lincoln, whose 1968 memoir was hostile to Johnson and is the single, uncorroborated source for the claim that Kennedy meant to drop him in 1964. The Johnson side comes through his aides and Bobby Baker's post-conviction memoir. Sheldon Stern, who studied the ExComm tapes, found Robert Kennedy more hawkish than Thirteen Days shows, and Jeff Shesol's Mutual Contempt treats the feud as two-sided where Caro's Bobby is severe. Johnson's own self-portraits come from Kearns Goodwin and The Vantage Point, and Johnson shaped them. Irving Bernstein's Promises Kept questions Caro's picture of a dead Kennedy program; Clay Risen and Todd Purdum give McCulloch, Dirksen, Humphrey and the movement more of the credit for the 1964 Act. The Warren Commission was never told of the CIA's Castro plots. Caro defers Vietnam and the Kennedy counterfactual to his next volume, and a few slips remain, such as bloc figures that sum to 398, not 409.
Who's who
| Person | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Bobby Baker | Secretary to the Senate majority, "Little Lyndon" | His Serv-U dealings and Reynolds' evidence turned the Baker case toward Johnson's money. |
| Harry F. Byrd | Senate Finance chairman, boss of Virginia | Held the $11 billion tax cut until the budget fell below $100 billion; his vote saved it 9 to 8. |
| John Connally | Johnson's 1960 manager, then Governor of Texas | Explained the paralysis ("If he didn't try, he couldn't fail") and by 1963 controlled Texas money. |
| Everett Dirksen | Senate Republican leader | The only man who could deliver Republican cloture votes; 27 came in June 1964. |
| Abe Fortas | Johnson's lawyer and adviser | Took Parr's appeal free, scripted the Baker denial, and first urged a Texas inquiry. |
| Sarah T. Hughes | Federal judge in Dallas | Johnson could not get her appointed and Rayburn could; she swore Johnson in. |
| Hubert Humphrey | Senator, 1960 rival, 1964 floor manager | Lost West Virginia to Kennedy; managed the civil rights bill to cloture. |
| Lady Bird Johnson | Johnson's wife | Bought KTBC in 1943; carried only Rayburn's photograph into the White House. |
| Lyndon B. Johnson | Majority Leader, Vice President, President | Frozen by fear in 1960, humiliated in office, masterful in the transition. |
| Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. | Johnson's father | His ruin and the town's ridicule rooted Lyndon's dread of humiliation. |
| Jacqueline Kennedy | The President's widow | Her presence at the oath was the strongest proof of a legitimate succession. |
| John F. Kennedy | President, 1961–63 | Wanted Johnson on the ticket, then shut him out of power with "charitable silence." |
| Robert F. Kennedy | Campaign manager, Attorney General | Won the West, fought Johnson on the stairs, held the leash, and was the threat for 1968. |
| Martin Luther King Jr. | SCLC leader | Met Johnson one to one and called him a man of "pragmatic compassion." |
| Evelyn Lincoln | Kennedy's secretary | Her diaries timed Johnson's access; her memoir claims Kennedy would drop him. |
| Mike Mansfield | Johnson's successor as Senate Leader | Proposed Johnson chair the caucus; urged a political course in Vietnam. |
| George Meany | AFL-CIO president | Called Johnson "an arch foe of labor" in 1960; Johnson's first call as President won him over. |
| Larry O'Brien | Kennedy's congressional liaison | Stayed on and went to the Hill on the Mundt bill the night of the funeral. |
| Kenneth O'Donnell | Kennedy's appointments secretary | Said "He's gone"; gatekeeper of Johnson's access and a hostile witness. |
| George Parr | "Duke of Duval," South Texas boss | Delivered border votes in 1948 and again in 1960. |
| Sam Rayburn | Speaker of the House | Johnson's mentor and protector; his death in 1961 left Johnson alone in Washington. |
| Don B. Reynolds | Insurance broker | Was testifying about a stereo kickback and KTBC ads as Kennedy was shot. |
| James H. Rowe Jr. | New Deal lawyer and adviser | Urged primaries in 1960, gave up and joined Humphrey: "Jim betrayed me!" |
| Richard Russell | Georgia senator, leader of the Southern Caucus | Author of the hostage strategy; forced onto the Warren Commission; "but not Lyndon Johnson." |
| Arthur Schlesinger Jr. | Kennedy aide and historian | Wrote the "genuine warmth" account that Caro disputes; left in January 1964. |
| Howard W. Smith | House Rules Committee chairman | Bottled up civil rights until a discharge petition forced hearings. |
| Ted Sorensen | Kennedy's speechwriter | Heard Johnson's civil rights advice in June 1963; chief drafter of the November 27 speech. |
| Earl Warren | Chief Justice | Refused, then chaired the commission after Johnson's appeal to his war service. |
| John J. Williams | Delaware senator, "Whispering Willie" | Gathered Reynolds' evidence; later ranking Republican on Finance for the budget deal. |
Connect it
- Succession plans should cover confidence, not only authority. Authority passed to Johnson by rule; confidence he had to build by keeping the predecessor's team, insisting the routines look "normal," and fixing a three-item agenda before he spoke. Bank succession and operational-resilience plans for key-person loss should script the same steps.
- Test oversight roles for decision rights. Johnson chaired the Space Council and the equal employment committee, and neither gave him real power. An AI governance or model-risk committee with a grand title but no staff, no information rights and no veto is in the same position.
- Sequence a change portfolio so nothing can be held hostage. Johnson cleared the must-pass items before the contested one reached the floor. Enterprise programmes that bundle mandatory regulatory work with a disputed initiative give opponents the hostage strategy for free.
- Independent review buys credibility only with full information. The Warren Commission calmed the country because Johnson gave up control, but the CIA withheld the Castro plots from it. Independent validation of models and incidents needs unrestricted access to evidence as well as independence.
- Check conflicts of interest by how information actually flows. Johnson's "blind" trust ran on private telephone lines that bypassed the switchboard log. Conduct controls should test real communication channels, not the arrangement on paper.
About this book
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume IV by Robert A. Caro, 2012. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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