Landslide Page 5

  Swiftly, devastatingly, Johnson’s carefully cultivated image as a man of action disappeared. Most difficult for him to bear was his altered status on Capitol Hill. Johnson’s former Senate colleagues—the men who had praised him and pleaded with him and revered him for the better part of a decade—quickly made it clear that he no longer had the power to make them do what he wanted. Harry McPherson, a Democratic Senate aide who would work in the Johnson White House, recalled watching Johnson enter the Senate Democratic cloakroom about a month after he assumed the vice presidency. The cloakroom had once been the very epicenter of Johnson’s power, the place where it was easiest to keep everyone’s eyes on him. As majority leader, Johnson would walk in and “it was like the teacher walks into the room and says ‘Now, we’re going to teach the class. You kids have had a nice social hour here, but we’re going to start learning some history.’ ” But when he walked in that day as the new vice president, the senators barely turned their heads. The change was final and total. “It was a very subtle thing,” said McPherson, “but you could feel it.”

  As the vice presidential years wore on, Johnson would spend more and more days lying in bed, just looking at the ceiling. He drank heavily. He had suffered a serious heart attack at the age of forty-six and had tried since then to stick to a careful diet. But as vice president, he gave up, and his weight ballooned. A few months before the Kennedy assassination, McPherson visited Johnson at The Elms. “He looked absolutely gross,” McPherson would later say. “His belly was enormous and his face looked bad, flushed, maybe he had been drinking a good deal. But he looked like a man who was not trimmed down for anything. His life was not causing him to come together physically, morally, intellectually, any way.” In the last months of Kennedy’s presidency, as corruption charges swirled around an old Johnson lieutenant, Senate aide Bobby Baker, Johnson fretted over rumors that Kennedy planned to dump him from the ticket when he ran for reelection in 1964. The people close to Johnson, meanwhile, worried that he would not even live to see that year out.

  And so the confidence with which President Lyndon Johnson was now walking from his limousine into the west entrance of the White House had a double significance. Taking command, he was starting a new story not just for the country, but for himself. Walking into the White House, his White House, he was bringing himself back to life. He could be the hero, calming the country as it faced the crushing anxiety of its suddenly uncertain future. For the first time in a very long time, his own future held the possibility of something other than decline.

  BUT IT WAS not his White House, as he was about to discover in the most public fashion. His assistants had not relayed Mac Bundy’s urgent subtext—stay out of the Oval Office. Walking into the Executive Mansion that morning, Johnson was entering a building full of Kennedy staffers who had gathered there that morning, if they’d left at all the night before. There was nowhere else for them to go. None of them had slept much. Most of them had been drinking heavily for well over twelve hours. Now, in the sickly gray daylight, they were looking for a new release. As happens to mourners when the shock of grief starts to subside, they found themselves overtaken with anger. And the most obvious target for their rage was the large, obtrusive Texan making his way through the hallways, acting as if he owned the place.

  As the Kennedy people saw it, there were many grievous offenses of which Johnson—for that was what they all still called him, or maybe “Lyndon” but never “the president”—had been guilty the previous day. He’d commandeered Air Force One after the shooting. He’d insisted that, as president, he should take the president’s plane back to Washington, not the Boeing 707 that functioned as the vice president’s plane. Poor Jackie, arriving on Air Force One from the hospital, the president’s blood still streaked across her skirt, had found Johnson sprawled on her bed. Then he’d kept her waiting, sitting on a sweltering tarmac, for some Texas crony judge of his to arrive and deliver the oath of office. And when that judge did arrive, Johnson had insisted that President Kennedy’s widow stand beside him for the oath. Mrs. Kennedy had to stand and look on, silently, as that Texan assumed her dead husband’s responsibilities.

  Most of this talk was unfair. The Secret Service had ordered Johnson onto Air Force One. Desperate to get in touch with Washington to find out if the country was under broader attack, he had gone to the presidential bedroom in search of a working telephone. He had vacated the room in a fearsome hurry the moment that the president’s widow appeared. His insistence that he take the oath before leaving Dallas was understandable, and indeed necessary, to assure the nation that the transfer of power, as provided by the Constitution, had in fact taken place. As vice president, his most important responsibility was to be prepared to assume the presidency at a moment’s notice. That was all he had tried to do.

  But to Kennedy’s aides, every presidential act Johnson undertook was by definition reprehensible. On arrival back in Washington he’d asked for two pieces of presidential stationery. “He can’t even let the body get cold before he starts using his stationery,” a Kennedy aide remarked in disgust. They didn’t bother to ask what he needed the stationery for: letters of condolence to President Kennedy’s two small children.

  The nasty account of the events in Dallas spread quickly. Soon it was the Kennedy loyalists’ gospel truth. It was the beginning of a pattern that would shape Johnson’s presidency: the contest between the Kennedy men’s story and his own.

  But Johnson couldn’t yet see that. To be sure, he could sense the blazing resentment as he made his way through the West Wing that morning. He had already decided he would do everything he could to placate these people and persuade them to stay. That would be a crucial part of the story he was going to tell. If he was to appear to the world as John F. Kennedy’s strong successor, he needed the support of John F. Kennedy’s staff. He’d worked out a line he would use on many of them in the days ahead: I know how you’re hurting … I need you more than he needed you. The Kennedy people, too, were stuck in a swamp, the toxic mud of their own grief. He would lead them out of it. So he moved through the West Wing determined to act confidently as the president.

  And for that he needed a phone. For Johnson, a phone—or, really, several phones, with dozens of specially programmed buttons and at least two secretaries specially trained to work those buttons to reach anyone in the world at a moment’s notice—was the essential tool of any powerful man. Truly important people, he believed, could reach anyone, at any time. Johnson aides learned to keep their phones close to their beds, ready for the inevitable postmidnight command. In the modern world, a phone determined the difference between the impotent men, who pondered, and the powerful men, who could act. He was the president now, he had to act, and he needed the president’s phone.

  But the president’s phone was in the President’s Office, and the President’s Office was still guarded by Evelyn Lincoln. Lincoln had been Kennedy’s personal secretary since he’d entered the Senate in 1953. She was fiercely protective of her boss and felt that she and she alone knew who were his real friends and who were the phony pretenders. Johnson, she told anyone who would listen in the days after the assassination, fell in the latter camp. She had clocked the amount of time Johnson spent in private consultation with Kennedy: In the year 1961, it had been ten hours and nineteen minutes. In 1963, it was down to one hour and fifty-three minutes. On the flight back from Dallas she’d led a group of female Kennedy aides as they walked by Lady Bird Johnson, refusing to offer a smile or extend a hand.

  Now Johnson marched into the Oval Office, beckoning Lincoln to join him for a word. “I need you more than you need me,” he said. “But … I also need a transition. Can I have my girls in your office by 9:30?” Tight faced, Lincoln acquiesced: “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Johnson pushed forward. That was all he needed. Kennedy’s secretary quietly excused herself. As he entered the Oval Office, the scope of his new power must have struck him, the way it strikes so many presidents when they stand
alone for the first time in the solemn majesty of that space. The story of his presidency had begun.

  But it would last for only a moment. Sitting outside the office, Lincoln seethed. A day ago she’d been the eyes and ears of the most powerful man in the world. Now this crass Texan with his girls was throwing her out on her ear. And she, the sainted president’s trusted guardian, could not do a thing about it.

  There was someone else, however, who could, and as it happened, that person was walking by her desk at precisely that moment. She caught his eye, and when he entered her small office outside the Oval Office, Lincoln burst into tears. She signaled toward Johnson. “Do you know he asked me to be out by 9:30?”

  Her visitor’s face filled with fury. He could not let that happen. And he wouldn’t. He was Robert Kennedy, attorney general of the United States, brother of the late president. He knew how to keep Lyndon Johnson out of the Oval Office. He had been doing it for years.

  Bobby Kennedy had been enjoying lunch by the pool at Hickory Hill when he learned of his brother’s death. He had retreated instantly into shock and grief, pacing back and forth over the green lawns. He emerged long enough to take a call from Johnson on the tarmac in Dallas. “First he expressed his condolences,” Kennedy would later say. “Then he said … this might be part of a worldwide plot, which I didn’t understand, and he said a lot of people down here think I should be sworn in right away. Do you have any objection to it? And—well, I was sort of taken aback at the moment because it was just an hour after … the President had been shot and I didn’t think—see what the rush was. And … at the time, at least, I thought it would be nice if the President came back to Washington—President Kennedy.”

  Bobby had waited anxiously for the flight from Dallas to arrive at Andrews. Rushing onboard, he breezed past the new president, muttering, “Where’s Jackie?” He escorted the widow through the long night, riding with her and Kennedy’s body in an ambulance to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where they sat vigil with friends and family members as doctors performed the autopsy. He’d stayed by her side when they returned to the White House and the coffin was laid in the East Room.

  A small, slight, younger son, Bobby had struggled to distinguish himself in the crowded Kennedy family. Eventually, he’d found the role of enforcer—the fierce attack dog who barked off any threat to his older siblings. In his brother’s presidency he’d played the part to perfection, ruthlessly seeking out any disloyalty or disservice to President Kennedy. Now, though, he had been shoved into a new role: the leader, the oldest surviving brother, the protector of all the Kennedys, living and dead. He knew how to play the part—he was a Kennedy, after all—and he seized it with confidence, impressing everyone with his sureness and strength. But in private, Bobby felt the weight of unspeakable pain. Just before dawn he stole away from the crowds of aides and family members and shut himself inside the quiet of the Lincoln Bedroom. Alone at last, he cried out: “Why, God?”

  God wasn’t there that Saturday morning, and neither was the president. Of that Bobby Kennedy was sure. He’d personally inspected his brother’s corpse, taking in the distorted face, rendered clownlike by the undertaker’s attempt to obscure the bullet wound with makeup. That wasn’t the president. And the man calling himself the president, the man wending his way around the West Wing and throwing poor Evelyn Lincoln out of her office, the man whose portrait was already sitting outside the Oval Office waiting to be hung up—that wasn’t the president either. That was Lyndon Johnson. The president was dead.

  But now that man, Johnson, spotted Bobby at the edge of the Oval Office and moved toward him. He extended a strong handshake and tried to grope Bobby’s back. “I want to talk to you,” he said.

  Kennedy bristled under Johnson’s embrace. Okay, he said, but he would prefer not to speak in the Oval Office. Johnson acceded to his wish. They shuffled awkwardly into the little anteroom across from the presidential lavatory.

  If Johnson sensed a coldness in Bobby, it wouldn’t have been surprising. In the course of their decadelong acquaintance, coldness—if not overt hostility—from Bobby had been the norm. In the 1950s, when Johnson ruled Capitol Hill, Bobby had been a young lawyer for the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee for Investigations. Smaller, scrappier, and far less polished than his older brother Jack, Bobby was acutely sensitive to any slight or gesture that seemed to diminish his stature. Johnson, the majority leader, didn’t think much about Bobby in those years, except as an extension of his older brother or his powerful father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. But he could nonetheless sense Bobby’s insecurity and was not above poking at it. “Hey, Sonny,” he would say as he passed Bobby in the Capitol’s halls.

  Officially they were friendly, in the way that a political party’s power brokers always are, and in 1959, Johnson had even hosted Bobby at the LBJ Ranch. There, Bobby had given in to Johnson’s entreaties to join him on a deer hunt. Raising his shotgun for a target, he pulled the trigger and was knocked over by the force of the gun. For Bobby, obsessed with displays of toughness, the fall was mortifying. Johnson saw Bobby’s shame and went right for it: “Son, you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.”

  He ought to have known better, for Bobby would have his payback a thousand times over. In 1960, Bobby fought hard to persuade his brother not to offer the vice presidency to Johnson. When Kennedy picked the majority leader anyway, Bobby spread the story that Johnson had only been offered the VP spot as a courtesy. In the Kennedy administration, the attorney general was a clearinghouse for stories of the pathetic vice president’s crassness and vanity. Bobby made sure that all of Washington knew just how insignificant to the work of the Kennedy administration Lyndon Johnson was. Johnson suspected, with some good reason, that Bobby was the source for rumors that Kennedy planned to dump him from the presidential ticket in 1964.

  Bobby became the human face of Johnson’s torment in the vice presidency. He was the runt of an aide who had the king’s ear. He was the old enemy whose torture Johnson had no choice but to take. But even worse, Bobby was a symbol of Johnson’s failure. In Johnson’s career in the capital, he’d always used the same simple formula for advancement: find the most powerful man, flatter him and ingratiate yourself, become indispensable. In the House, he’d done it with the Speaker, his fellow Texan, Sam Rayburn. In the Senate, there had been Dick Russell, the colossus from Georgia, who’d come to think of Lyndon Johnson as a son. There was no doubt that the most powerful man in the Kennedy administration, after Kennedy himself, was Bobby. But with Bobby, Johnson could never find a way in. It drove him mad. At one White House dinner dance, he’d followed Bobby into the family quarters. “Now, you don’t like me, Bobby,” the pitiful vice president had said. “Your brother likes me, your sister-in-law likes me, and your Daddy likes me, but you do not like me. Now why?”

  Now, though, things had changed. He was the president and he could not be ignored. Johnson’s new story would include an overture to his old nemesis. He started into the script he had worked out: I need you more than he needed you …

  It would be a hard sell, persuading Bobby Kennedy to be a supporting character in the grand new adventure of Lyndon Johnson. The two seemed opposites in every way. Johnson, with his great, hulking physical presence, could take possession of a room just by entering it, while Bobby, small and wiry, grew up fighting for every morsel of attention he could get. And their differences went deeper. Bobby seemed to experience sorrow and joy more intensely than most people; he hated harder, loved deeper, felt more. Johnson could manufacture a feeling to suit his interests, could lie so easily, and so effectively, that it was often impossible to tell what his true feelings were.

  But, as is often the case, similarity, not difference, was what drove these men apart. In the darker parts of their natures, Johnson and Bobby shared a great deal. Each had spent much of the time in his rise to power through service to someone else—Johnson to Rayburn and Russell, Bobby to his father and older brothers. Over time, a strong-willed
man who plays this subservient role can develop the qualities of a caged animal. In each, there was something primitive—the obsession with loyalty, the carefully curated lists of enemies and friends. Each was capable of extravagant cruelty, the kind of public meanness that was embarrassing to watch and excruciating to bear. Unlike John F. Kennedy, whose great gift was to see the world as it was, each had a talent for convincing himself that what served his interest was also what was good and right, even when it wasn’t. Each viewed politics as a bloody business in which opponents needed to be destroyed totally and unmercifully. Bobby was “a very, very ambitious young man,” said Johnson. “It’s just unbelievable how ambitious he is.”

  “I thought they’d get one of us,” Bobby said on the phone with his aide Ed Guthman moments after learning of his brother’s death, but “I thought it would be me.” In the months ahead, Bobby would take on a vacant, ghostly quality, as though he felt that by simply going on living he was committing an act of betrayal. Bobby, the attack dog, had been his brother’s crusader in the world’s dark places—chasing down the bosses of organized crime, nurturing plots to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba. He’d created powerful enemies, all of whom would have been happy to see a Kennedy brother dead. “Without question,” writes Bobby’s biographer Evan Thomas, “he worried that his own aggressive pursuit of evil men had brought evil upon his own house.”

  These were deeply unsettling thoughts, and Bobby desperately needed release. He found it in Johnson. For if it was unfair that Bobby should live when his brother had to die, it was a travesty of history that Johnson should now stand in the center of his brother’s office. Johnson, whom his brother had mistrusted and kept at arm’s length, who his brother had determined should never be allowed to win the presidency in his own right. Johnson was the guilty one.