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  I need you more than he needed you: Johnson was the one who spoke the words, but from Bobby’s lips they would have been equally true.

  Bobby didn’t let Johnson finish making his case for the importance of showing unity in the transition. He didn’t want to talk about any of that right now. What mattered in that instant was the Oval Office. President Kennedy’s things were still inside and would require time to pack up. Could Johnson wait awhile before moving in?

  Immediately, Johnson saw a warning. “Well, of course,” he replied. Soon, he was back to his familiar pattern with Bobby, pleading his case: It wasn’t he who’d wanted to come to the Oval Office. It was others who had said it was necessary. President Kennedy’s men had said so. Mac Bundy, the national security adviser, had insisted. He was only doing his best to assure continuity of government.

  Bobby did not respond. He looked at the large man standing in front of him with glazed uninterest. After a few more moments of Johnson’s pleading, they parted ways.

  Now Johnson had reason to worry. On television, the anchors and correspondents were already saying that Kennedy’s decision on whether to stay on as attorney general would prove a key test for Johnson. He could not afford to alienate the Kennedy family. He needed them too much.

  Johnson the heroic rancher was stuck in the mud. He was in John Kennedy’s White House, surrounded by John Kennedy’s people and John Kennedy’s things, trying desperately to win John Kennedy’s brother over to his side. He was the president now, but the story was still the same.

  THE ANCHORS ON television were unaware of what had just taken place between the new president and the attorney general in the West Wing. Their focus was on the East Room, where, a few minutes after nine o’clock, the press was allowed in to view Kennedy’s funeral bier. Under Jacqueline Kennedy’s instruction, the catafalque had been constructed in replica of the one used after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Black crape covered the chandeliers.

  And then, at 9:30, Johnson finally appeared before the cameras. Surrounded by men in dark suits, he emerged from the West Wing to the gray day outside. It was his first appearance on live television that morning, his first real chance to be the leader he knew the nation needed him to be. But his eyes were lowered and his shoulders were hunched. “Morning, Mr. President,” the press shouted. But Johnson ignored them and did not say a word.

  Flanked by advisers, Johnson crossed West Executive Avenue and headed toward the Executive Office Building. For nearly three years, the street had been the great divide in his life, the river that separated his isolated vice presidential island from the White House, the center of power, the place he longed to be. Now he was crossing back over, back to the place that had brought him low. He was giving in to Bobby’s request and surrendering the Oval Office. “Mr. Johnson,” said NBC’s Ray Scherer diplomatically, “prefers to hold his appointments in his vice presidential office.”

  Inside that vice presidential office, Johnson’s bewildered assistants tried to absorb what had just happened. Had the president of the United States really just been chased from the Oval Office? Johnson’s military aide, Colonel William Jackson, insisted that Johnson retake the White House and continue the transition of power. “It will give the people confidence,” he said. Johnson knew it was a lost cause: “Stop this. Our first concern is Mrs. Kennedy and her family.” It was clear: the day, the mansion, the nation—all were still in the Kennedys’ hands.

  And the story was, too. All morning, the networks showed majestic shots of the White House, its white columns stark against the sky, a flag at half-mast, flapping in the bitter November wind. From time to time, the networks would attempt to show the exterior of the Executive Office Building, where Johnson was busily at work. But the cameras were not used to photographing this building, and it appeared onscreen as a nondescript mass of gray bricks. It was hard to look at, and the networks quickly moved on to other things. The eyes of the world would not rest on Lyndon Johnson. Not yet.

  The work he could get: In late 1963, Ronald Reagan was at work on the movie The Killers, in which he played a conniving gangster.

  © Universal Pictures/Getty Images

  CHAPTER TWO

  Watching

  November 22–24, 1963

  There was nothing to do but watch.

  Workers in the East and Midwest had been on their lunch hour when news of the shooting in Dallas first broke. In the big cities, customers poured out of restaurants, leaving large sums on the table, unwilling to wait for the bill. The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading. Strangers heading home from work wept with one another on subway cars. Schools closed. The American Football League suspended play for the weekend, and the Harvard-Yale game was called off. Disneyland closed its gates that weekend. Parties, dances, even weddings were canceled. That weekend, most Americans stayed inside, watching the newscasters, horrified by what they were seeing, but still unable to turn off the TV.

  In Hollywood it was the same as everywhere else. It had been morning on the West Coast when President Kennedy began his fateful car trip into Dallas. In Los Angeles, a crew was setting to work on a new Universal Pictures film, Johnny North, a remake of a movie from the 1940s, which was in turn an adaptation of a Hemingway short story called “The Killers.” Universal’s powerful studio boss, Lew Wasserman, had revived the old title to remake and sell the film to NBC. His plan was to produce Johnny North as the first full-length feature made specifically for TV.

  Wasserman hired a respected film director, Don Siegel, to pull together a strong story and cast. Siegel threw out most of the 1946 picture’s story line. His movie would instead focus on a pair of contract killers who are hired to murder a former race car driver named Johnny North. The title character would be played by John Cassavetes, a young actor who’d played dark, sexy leading roles on TV and film. The lead villain and the elder of the two killers, Charlie Strom, would be played by Lee Marvin, a talented, if difficult, old pro. Strom’s coconspirator would be played by Clu Gulager, a young television actor. Angie Dickinson, the blazing sex symbol rumored to be a special friend of President Kennedy’s, would play the leading lady, a femme fatale named Sheila Farr.

  Only one supporting role remained unfilled: Jack Browning, an older gangster who plans the heist at the center of the film’s plot. Wasserman told his director he had an actor in mind for the part: Why not Ronald Reagan?

  Ronald Reagan? Siegel was skeptical. He had known and liked the old B-movie star for years. But Reagan was a squeaky-clean actor who’d had a squeaky-clean career in Hollywood playing squeaky-clean parts. Would he be willing to play a villain, a dirty gangster in a dark suit? So far he’d resisted all entreaties, Wasserman said, but the part would be good for him. Maybe Siegel could be the one to finally talk him into it.

  Here the studio boss was probably stroking his director’s ego. Wasserman, who’d built his career in Hollywood as a talent agent, had represented Reagan for decades and taken a special interest in his career. He knew as well as anyone that since Reagan had lost his regular gig as the host of General Electric Theater a year earlier, there hadn’t been many parts on offer to him, villain or otherwise. Still, he gave Siegel the impression that Reagan would be a hard fish to catch. “I want you to talk him into playing that role,” he instructed his director.

  Siegel invited Reagan for lunch at the Universal commissary. It had been a while since the director had last seen the actor. The face was still familiar, of course—not just to Siegel, but to everyone in Hollywood. Since arriving in the film colony in the late 1930s, Reagan had been a kind of student body president for the movie business—never the most famous or the most successful, but always well liked. Arriving at the commissary, Reagan smiled and lit up the room, greeting old friends. He still looked like a movie star, he was still handsome, still broad and muscular, still somehow larger than his six feet one inch.

  But he hadn’t been in many movies since he’d taken the GE Theater job in 1954. To Siegel, this Reagan
looked different, more mature. And he looked tan: in recent years, he’d been spending more and more of his time working at his ranch, where he raised thoroughbred jumpers and hunters. “Horses are like people,” Reagan told Siegel that day at lunch. “Treat them with respect and love, and they’ll do their best to give you what you want.”

  Over Cobb salad, Siegel made his pitch for Johnny North. Think of all the big-shot actors you know who’ve played villains onscreen, he told Reagan—Peter Lorre, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart! It didn’t exactly hurt their careers. This character, Browning, was “the boss … well educated, charming, yet rugged when necessary.”

  “What kind of money are they talking about?” Reagan asked Siegel. The director demurred. “That’s up to you, your agent, and Lew Wasserman. But I know they want you badly. I’m certain the deal can be worked out to your satisfaction.” By the time the check came, it seemed that Reagan was coming around to the idea. “Surely you have no objection to Universal paying for our lunch, do you?” Reagan smiled and said no. Siegel knew the part of Browning was filled.

  The film went into production on Thursday, November 21. The next morning, Siegel went to visit his leading lady at a costume fitting. It was a happy scene. There was country music on the radio. Dickinson twirled to show her director a stunning red dress. “You’ll steal the show,” Siegel said. “I’ve ninety more dresses to show you,” the actress said before turning happily back toward her dressing room. Later, she was to shoot the film’s one truly romantic scene, in which she would wear a shimmering white gown and dance with Cassavetes to a slow, sad song called “Too Little Time.”

  Indeed. As she walked away, the country station, like radio stations everywhere, cut to a news bulletin. Years later, Siegel would still recall the announcer’s words—“We shockingly regret to inform you that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy has just been assassinated in Dallas, Texas …”—and then, from Dickinson, “a loud, piercing scream.” The actress crumpled in the director’s arms.

  Production on Johnny North came immediately to a halt. The film was on a tight production schedule, but the movie studios were shutting down, just like everything else. Wasserman made it known that there would be no more work on the film that Friday, and Monday would be a day of mourning as well.

  Ronald Reagan spent that evening at home. He had never been a supporter of John F. Kennedy. He had been a staunch anticommunist and a true believer in conservative principles since the 1950s, and in recent years he had become active in Republican politics. He traveled the country giving speeches extolling the virtue of the free market, warning against the Soviet threat, and worrying over a turn toward statist policies in America. Three years earlier, in the 1960 presidential campaign, he had made numerous appearances on behalf of Kennedy’s opponent, Richard Nixon, and he planned to do the same for the conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign. Kennedy, he’d once implied, was a Marxist with a pretty face.

  A day earlier, that sort of talk would have been unpopular but acceptable. In the wake of Kennedy’s death, it was tantamount to treason. The newscasts that Friday afternoon still had little information on Oswald, the apparent shooter, or his politics. But Dallas was a well-known hotbed of right-wing extremism. It didn’t take much imagination to see some way that leaders of the conservative movement might be culpable in Kennedy’s death. Walter Cronkite didn’t help matters when he erroneously reported that Goldwater, asked for a response to the news of Kennedy’s death, had offered nothing more than a cold “No comment.” A mob was forming outside National Draft Goldwater Committee headquarters screaming “Murderers!”

  In Southern California, Reagan’s eleven-year-old daughter Patti watched her school’s flag being lowered to half-mast that Friday. School was canceled, the principal announced, and it was time for the children to go home. Waiting for her mother, Patti was confronted by a fellow student: “Well, your parents will probably be happy!”

  They weren’t, but there was little use in arguing the point. Any kind of political discussion was suddenly in bad taste. For the moment, politics—Reagan’s greatest passion in recent years—had become an unspeakable subject. Like everyone else in America, he spent time that weekend with his family, watching the unbelievable events on TV.

  And waiting. For Reagan, the delay in filming would mean more days off camera. He had had plenty of those in recent years. And it would mean a revised schedule for shooting, stretching past Christmas. Which meant more time until this movie was over. This movie, which was beginning to look like a mistake.

  The signs of trouble were obvious. Reagan had arrived the previous morning to shoot a scene at a location in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Thanks to the oddities of a studio schedule, the first scene to be shot in official production would be the last scene of the movie. The plan for the day was to shoot the exterior portions of the film’s climactic confrontation in which Lee Marvin’s character, Charlie Strom, tracks Reagan’s Browning and Dickinson’s Sheila Farr to an upscale suburban house. Despite suffering from a gunshot wound himself, Strom nonetheless manages to capture them both at gunpoint. Farr begs for mercy, but Strom won’t hear it; he shoots Browning and Farr dead and then lurches outside, where he stumbles in extended agony and dies. It was mostly Marvin’s scene, and mostly Marvin’s day.

  But when it came time to start shooting, Marvin wasn’t there. Reagan stepped in to fill the time, filming a simple exterior shot in which a nervous Browning hurries into the house, clutching a long case in which he’s stored a large gun. They got it on film without incident.

  The hours went by with no sign of Marvin. Morning turned to afternoon. Finally, a car came into view, careening back and forth across the street before coming to a stop on the lawn in front of the house. Out staggered Marvin, seriously drunk.

  Siegel set to work, instructing the actor on the choreography of the death stumble. Marvin, clutching a 7-Up bottle filled with vodka, nodded along silently. “Lee had a theory about drinking,” Siegel said later. “If you didn’t talk, no one could smell you.”

  Then a funny thing happened. The camera started rolling and Marvin began to resemble his character. Sure, he could be difficult to work with, but it was hard to argue with his theatrical talents. And for an actor tasked with staggering around like he’s bleeding to death, a 7-Up bottle’s worth of vodka can come in handy.

  The performance required multiple takes and reshoots. But the version that made it onscreen, cut with the interior shots to form the final scene of the film, was a tour de force. It begins with a close-up of Charlie Strom’s feet. First, viewers see blood fall onto his shoes, then his gun drops into the frame. He is steps away from death, but he’s determined to send Farr and Browning there first. Inside the house, he moves with agonized urgency, falling to the floor and yet, somehow, still managing to pull a gun on Farr and Browning. Each pleads for their life, but Marvin promptly shoots them both dead anyway. Next, he emerges back into the daylight, his white shirt soaked with blood. He wants to escape but as he struggles to get into his car, he sees a police cruiser pulling up. He points his finger as if to shoot at the cop in a final act of defiance. Then he falls straight backward. Dead. “An actor likes a death scene,” Marvin’s costar Clu Gulager would later say, and Marvin’s was “the greatest death onscreen I think I’ve ever seen.”

  Indeed, Marvin’s performance was so captivating to watch, it was easy to forget that the film’s final sequence included two other actors’ death scenes as well. Angie Dickinson didn’t even get to die on camera. Reagan at least got to portray Browning’s final moments of life. In a five-second shot, viewers see him clutch the gunshot wound in his abdomen, raise his head in agony, and fall dead on the floor. Altogether it was a serviceable, believable performance. And an utterly forgettable one compared with the long, engrossing struggle of Marvin’s Charlie Strom, the one and only star in the scene.

  So that would be the payoff for the long weeks of work ahead of
him, to be a minor character in another man’s death scene. For Reagan, too, this would be an agonizing part to play.

  AFTER ALL, RONALD Reagan liked to be the star as well.

  For Americans in the twenty-first century, who know how the story of Reagan’s life turned out, the role of hero seems a natural fit. His presidency was filled with dramatic triumphs: the “morning in America” economic boom that followed years of economic hardship, the two landslide elections, the hard-line challenge to the Soviets that climaxed in America’s triumph in the Cold War. And he was always careful to look as much like a hero as he could. He was more attractive than anyone else in Washington, his lighting was better, and his timing and his set pieces were superior, too. His adversaries were always appropriately evil, and he dealt with them with satisfyingly quick dispatch. And, most important, there was his remarkable journey from the B-movie ranks to the top echelon of revered presidents. The improbability of this progression suggested America was either a ridiculous country or a great one. Most Americans have chosen the latter interpretation. Only in their great country could an individual make such a lucky and heroic rise.

  Over time, Reagan’s admirers have created a familiar account of that rise, with mutually agreed-upon dramatic contours. In that story, a child of the small-town Midwest works his way from a local lifeguarding job to regional radio announcer to movie idol in late 1930s and ’40s Hollywood. He finds early success playing wholesome characters in pleasant, if inconsequential, films. His onscreen persona matches his offscreen life; he has a beautiful movie star wife and children, and he’s so well liked and respected in the film colony that, in 1947, his peers elect him president of the Screen Actors Guild.