Landslide Page 4

  How quickly it had all changed. The Johnsons had been riding several cars behind the Kennedys as the presidential motorcade made its way through Dallas. They were waving at the crowds when they heard a loud explosion. As the smell of gunpowder filled the air, Johnson looked up and saw a body hurtling toward him. It was Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service agent charged with protecting the vice president’s life. Youngblood ordered Johnson to get down and the vice president obeyed, pressing his face to the floor. Another shot echoed through Dealey Plaza. Johnson wouldn’t know it for another hour, but in that moment, John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s life ended. As he stared at the floor of the limousine and felt the weight of Youngblood digging into his back, Lyndon Johnson became the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

  For a moment, all was silent, and then a ghostly voice came over the Secret Service radio: “Let’s get out of here.” The limousines careened through the streets of Dallas until at last they reached Parkland Hospital. There, doctors worked over Kennedy’s body, still trying to save his life, but Jacqueline Kennedy, looking on, knew that these efforts were in vain. Her pink suit was covered in her husband’s blood and brain tissue, and she had held a piece of his skull in her hand. “They’ve killed him,” she had repeated over and over again.

  At the instruction of his security detail, Johnson took shelter in a warren of inner offices away from the operating table, where he and Lady Bird huddled and waited for news. Johnson stood six feet three inches, weighed more than two hundred pounds, and was, by long reputation, one of the most willful and powerful men Washington had ever seen. But under Parkland’s harsh lights, he was strangely passive, almost childlike, complying with Secret Service orders, refusing to make any decisions, asking repeatedly for direction from Kennedy’s staff. Finally came Kennedy’s stricken assistant, Kenneth O’Donnell, with the news: “He’s gone.”

  He was President Johnson now. All his adult life, Johnson had striven for the presidency—worked for it, obsessed over it, longed for it above all else. He had sought his party’s nomination twice—unofficially but aggressively in 1956, officially and even more aggressively in 1960—but never managed to win it. The failure was the great disappointment of his life. Now, at last, it had happened—he had secured the office, but in a manner such as this.

  The Secret Service was anxious to get him out of Texas, unsure what danger remained. Johnson needed little convincing. He worried that Kennedy’s assassination might be the first step in a Communist plot that could also include his own murder and possibly even nuclear war. Hunkered down in the security of Air Force One, he waited at Love Field long enough to collect Kennedy’s widow and to see the dead president’s coffin loaded into the rear of the plane. And, at his insistence, he recited the oath of office before the five-hour flight back to Washington. But no sooner had he spoken the words “so help me God” than he ordered the plane into the sky.

  Greeted at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, he’d asked for any news of further crisis in the world. There was none, no wider threat. Still, when, well after midnight, he finally climbed into his own bed, he asked several aides to stay with him. In the darkness, he made sure they understood: They were not to leave him alone.

  Now, though, it was morning, and the fear was beginning to pass. He’d seen what they were broadcasting on television and sensed the crisis of authority. Americans, he would later say, “were all spinning around and around, trying to come to grips with what had happened … like a bunch of cattle caught in the swamp.” He knew what was required: “There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp.… And that is for the man on the horse to take the lead, to assume command, to provide direction.”

  He knew he could provide it. For things to feel certain again, America needed a different story. Not the story of John F. Kennedy’s life or the story of his death. It needed a new story with a new hero. And he was the one to give that story to the country. That was what he’d always wanted, to be the nation’s hero. He knew this was his best chance, and his last.

  ALL HIS LIFE, Johnson had longed to be the central figure in a great drama. He came from a line of men who were expected to make their mark, and did. Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in 1908 in a remote farmhouse on the Pedernales River, not far from the town of Johnson City, named for his frontier forebears. Family lore had it that these forebears had settled that part of the Texas Hill Country through great feats of courage—fighting off hostile Indians, starving through droughts, stamping out prairie fires. Through the generations, their offspring gained a strong dose of self-assurance. “Hell,” said a contemporary of Sam Ealy Johnson, Lyndon’s father, “the Johnsons could strut sitting down.”

  From his earliest days, young Lyndon was encouraged to think of himself as the natural heir to these men. In 1965, his mother, Rebekah Baines Johnson, published A Family Album, a history of the Baines and Johnson families. Her description of her son’s birth went as follows: “Now the light came in from the East, bringing a stillness so profound and so pervasive that it seemed as if the earth itself were listening. And then there came a sharp, compelling cry—the most awesome, happiest sound known to human ears—the cry of a newborn baby; the first child of Sam Ealy and Rebekah Baines Johnson was ‘discovering America.’ ”

  A child raised by such a mother was clearly also discovering what the warm glow of adoring eyes upon him felt like; by the time he could walk and talk, he was determined to get as much of that feeling as he could. And from the men in his family, he saw how. Both of his grandfathers were Texas politicians—one was a state legislator and a Texas secretary of state. His father, Sam Jr., served in the Texas legislature, where he passionately fought for policies to improve and transform the life of the forgotten little people in the isolated backcountry. In his early years, Lyndon would watch with wonder as his father, the politician, would enter and conquer a room, turning every eye toward him. Politics, young Lyndon understood, was power, and with power came respect, admiration, even love. He knew it could all be his. On the day of his birth, the family story had it, his grandfather had ridden a horse through the Hill Country, shouting: “A United States Senator was born today!”

  Soon, the future senator was demanding the world’s attention wherever he went. As a boy of only five or six years, at the Hill Country’s Junction School, Johnson refused to read unless he was at the very front of the room, sitting in his teacher’s lap, with all of his classmates looking on. In The Path to Power, the first of his definitive volumes on the life of Lyndon Johnson, the historian Robert Caro describes that young student in “Miss Kate” Deadrich’s Junction School class: “When Miss Kate excused one of her students to use the privy out back, the student had to write his name on one of the two blackboards that flanked the back door. The other students wrote their names small; whenever Lyndon left the room, he would reach up as high as he could and scrawl his name in capital letters so huge that they took up not one but both blackboards. His schoolmates can remember today—seventy years later—that huge LYNDON B. on the left blackboard and JOHNSON on the right.”

  He did not grow subtler with age. In August 1934, just shy of his twenty-sixth birthday, Johnson met a recent graduate of the University of Texas, Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Taylor, and was certain he had found his future wife. On their first official date, Lady Bird would later say, “he told me all sorts of things that I thought were extraordinarily direct for a first conversation … about how many years he had been teaching, his salary as a secretary to a Congressman, his ambitions, even about all the members of his family, and how much insurance he carried.” The date turned into a four-day visit to the Johnson family ranch, an interview with his mother, even a trip to the Johnson family cemetery. The goal, Johnson later said, was “to keep her mind completely on me.” It paid off. In two months’ time, Lyndon and Lady Bird Taylor were married.

  And it paid off in Washington, where Jo
hnson labored hard—as hard as the old-timers had ever seen a man work—to keep everyone’s mind completely on him. Even in a town of strivers, Johnson’s string of prodigious successes was legendary: as a twenty-three-year-old clerk to a Texas congressman, he joined the fraternity of congressional aides known as the “Little Congress” and quickly became the group’s “boss.” Then he himself was elected to the real Congress from Texas’s Tenth District at the age of twenty-eight. He was such an audibly enthusiastic New Dealer, he earned the favor of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who let a thirty-two-year-old Johnson announce his campaign for a Texas Senate seat from the White House lawn. He lost that race, but he won seven years later in 1948, when he beat a beloved former governor, Coke Stevenson, by a margin of 87 votes in the Democratic primary. (This victory earned him the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.”) And then, incredibly, just four years later, his colleagues voted him in to the position that would define his life: Democratic leader in the United States Senate.

  The Senate was not, by most lights, the right place for a young man who longed to make his name quickly. By custom, senators shunned the use of first and last names in favor of “the senator from Texas” or, better yet, “the distinguished junior senator from Texas.” But the upper chamber of Congress was the perfect setting for the grand story of Lyndon Johnson. It was, Johnson said on arrival, “the right size”—small enough, with only a hundred members, for Johnson to know each member personally, to watch a man at close enough range to see the opportunities he presented—and the dangers. Johnson triumphed in the Senate, Caro writes in his third volume, Master of the Senate, by practicing his “genius for studying a man and learning his strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears … what it was that the man wanted—not what he said he wanted but what he really wanted—and what it was that the man feared, really feared.”

  He took a calcified, cautious Senate and made it into a pulsating power center, with Lyndon Johnson as its heart. Other senators observed the way the majority leader moved down the Capitol’s corridors, the way he communicated disapproval with a single drop of his pen, the way he could turn a simple handshake into a full-body massage for a senator who had something he wanted, or turn a pat on the shoulder into a choking death grip. It had a name: “the Johnson treatment”—Lyndon’s stamp, pressed hard on the greatest deliberative body known to man. When the old bulls of the Senate saw him in the hallways they genuflected and called him by his honorific title: Mr. Leader!

  A leader he was—perhaps the most effective party boss in the Senate’s history and, after President Eisenhower, the most powerful man in Washington at the time. For Johnson, though, the point of power was not just having it, but making sure the world knew you had it. He quickly discovered that the reporters who covered the Senate struggled to find ways to make the byzantine legislative process accessible to their readers. But give them a good story—with good human details and a compelling character at the center—and they’d write what you wanted, even if nine times out of ten, the compelling character was you. As a consequence, he was not only the most effective majority leader of the modern era, but the most famous, too.

  His ultimate ambition, though, remained as big as the letters he had scrawled across Miss Kate’s blackboards at the Junction School. As a young congressman, Johnson instructed aide Horace Busby to refer to him by his initials in press releases. “FDR-LBJ, FDR-LBJ—do you get it? What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials.”

  Now, as his car sped forward, he could see the White House. FDR, his idol, had lived in that house for twelve years, longer than any man before him, and now, thanks to the Twenty-second Amendment limiting presidents to two elected terms, longer than any president ever would again. Under the provisions of that amendment, a vice president who succeeded to the presidency of another person with less than two years left in that president’s term could run for up to two additional terms of his own. Kennedy’s term had only fourteen months left. Altogether, Johnson’s presidency could last nine years, longer than anyone’s but Roosevelt’s.

  It was enough time to be as great as Roosevelt, too. Enough time to get great things done, to do what Johnson men were supposed to do—make life better for the common man. Then, in glory, he could go back to Texas and die.

  First, though, he had to do what he had always done—make the story about him. He had to take the White House and make it his White House so that even a child passing by on Pennsylvania Avenue would see the great white columns and remember who lived inside: not “the president,” but “LBJ.”

  AS THE NEW president’s car pulled through the gates of the White House complex that morning, his small coterie of aides and assistants were already hard at work. On any given day, Johnson expected his staffers to be present and ready to execute his orders the moment he walked through the door. Today of all days, they knew Johnson would want everything to go exactly as he wished.

  So Mildred Stegall, a veteran Johnson aide, had been in the Vice President’s Office, suite 272-76 of the Executive Office Building, when the National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, came by earlier that morning. Greeting Johnson at Andrews the night before, Bundy had urged him to send strong signals to the world that the work of the government continued. To that end, he felt that Johnson should move into the Oval Office as soon as the next morning. Now, though, he had a different message for the new president, which he asked Stegall to relay: “When you and I talked last night about when the President’s office in the West Wing would be ready, I thought possibly it would be immediately. However, I find they are working on President Kennedy’s papers and his personal belongings and my suggestion would be that—if you could work here in the Executive Office Building today and tomorrow, everything will be ready and clear by tomorrow.”

  Leaving these instructions, Bundy returned to the West Wing himself. Johnson’s aides proceeded with their work. The Vice President’s Office was lovely, with high ceilings and sweeping vistas of the National Mall. But for most of the Johnson staff, it was unknown territory. Almost all of them worked out of another office Johnson kept in the Capitol, the office where he spent nearly all his time. His young secretary, Marie Fehmer, had been to the White House campus—which included the Executive Office Building on the other side of West Executive Avenue from the West Wing—only a handful of times. The night before, after getting off the helicopter from Andrews, Fehmer had gotten separated from Johnson’s other aides. She stumbled around the basement of the West Wing, lost in a strange new place.

  Johnson’s staff was hardly more familiar with the people who worked in the West Wing. Had they been they might have known how to interpret Bundy’s polite Yankee understatement—that beneath his “my suggestion” and “if you could” lay a simple message: It’s a bad idea for you to go into the Oval Office. They might have thought to relay this message to Johnson, at the time still at home.

  But Johnson’s staff was not accustomed to close communication with Bundy or any of the other Kennedy aides. Johnson’s office had a special phone line for calls from the White House, but in his nearly three years as vice president, it almost never had rung. No one from the Kennedy White House was calling Lyndon Johnson. No one from the Kennedy White House was thinking about Lyndon Johnson much at all.

  Johnson’s decision to accept Kennedy’s offer of the vice presidency had shocked Washington. After defeating Johnson for the Democratic nomination in 1960, Kennedy offered Johnson the bottom half of the ticket out of courtesy. Like everyone else, Kennedy assumed that Johnson would turn it down. Johnson had made no secret of the fact he considered Kennedy a lightweight, almost a nonentity in the caucus he controlled. It was hard to imagine Johnson playing second fiddle to anyone, let alone a young upstart.

  And yet when Kennedy made the offer, Johnson said yes. He had several good reasons for doing so. He knew that with a president from his own party, his power as majority leader of the Senate would be dramatically curtailed. He also harbored hopes that
he could make the vice president’s ceremonial powers as president of the Senate more than ceremonial—remaining the leader of the Democratic caucus, a kind of prime minister to Kennedy’s head of state. (These hopes were quickly quashed.) And he had been in the Congress at the time of Harry Truman’s ascension to the presidency after the death of FDR. Though he would never say it after Dallas, he knew that the vice presidency was not a job without the possibility of promotion.

  Still, considering Johnson’s lifelong desire to be at the center of things, it is hard not to see his acceptance of Kennedy’s offer as an act of willful self-harm. If there is one thing the vice president is not supposed to do, after all, it is to keep everyone’s eyes on him. In losing the nomination to Kennedy in 1960, he was losing his best shot at ever being president, the defining goal of his life. When Johnson looked to the future, he tended to see two possibilities: the grandest of glory, or catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. Robbed of his chance at glory, he said yes to Kennedy, and brought the catastrophe on.

  For, whatever his reasons for taking the job, the effect was utter misery. Worried that Johnson would use his deep ties to conservative Southern senators and form an independent power base, Kennedy’s aides excluded him from all decisions of any consequence. President Kennedy himself warned his staff not to antagonize Johnson. “You are dealing with a very insecure, sensitive man with a huge ego,” he told them. “I want you literally to kiss his fanny from one end of Washington to the other.” But in his new position, Johnson seemed to have transformed into a different person: quiet in meetings, fawning to the president, “a spectral presence,” in the words of one Kennedy lieutenant. The Kennedy aides, at first puzzled by the transformation, eventually delighted in it. When they spoke of Johnson at all, it was usually to make an unflattering joke.

  The wounds to Johnson’s ego were small but constant. Embracing the vice president’s traditional role as a stand-in host for the president, the Johnsons bought a grand mansion, The Elms, to live in, hoping it would be a second social center of Kennedy-era Washington. But the parties everyone in Washington really wanted to be invited to were on the other side of the Potomac River, at Hickory Hill, the home of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. On the rare occasions when the Johnsons were invited to Hickory Hill parties, Ethel seated them at the “losers’ table.”