Landslide (12 page)

Monday, November 25, was the day of mourning. Virtually all businesses were closed, and those who had to work were never far from a television. The sounds and images shown that day would endure perpetually in the nation’s memory:
Black Jack, the riderless horse trotting fitfully through the streets of Washington; the din of fifty fighter jets—one for each state—and Air Force One flying in tribute over the caisson as it reached Arlington Cemetery, the fallen president’s final resting place; harsh, haunting tones flowing from the bagpipes of the Black Watch of the Scottish Highlands; the hushed crowd of more than a million watching the cortege pass by on Pennsylvania Avenue; little John F. Kennedy, Jr., raising his three-year-old hand in salute.

A collection of world leaders gathered to pay their respects in an assemblage not seen since the funeral of Great Britain’s King Edward VII in 1910. It included President Charles de Gaulle of France, Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home of Great Britain, President Eamon de Valera of Ireland, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, King Baudouin of Belgium, Queen Frederica of Greece, and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II. Former presidents Truman and Eisenhower—old enemies—shared a pew in St. Matthew’s Cathedral and a bite to eat after the burial.

But the center of the story was Jacqueline Kennedy, walking serene
and stoic through the cold, clear day. Every move she made that long weekend was part of an exquisite pageant of agony. Her timing was eerie. On Sunday, around 12:30
P.M.
, she stepped in front of the cameras with her children at the North Portico of the White House to drive to a memorial service for her husband in the Capitol Rotunda. Mere minutes earlier, the nation had witnessed the shooting of Oswald on TV. Yet so powerful was the scene of Jackie in black with her children in blue coats and white gloves that the memory of the terrible scene in Dallas simply slipped away.

A new hero: Johnson in the Oval Office, November 29, 1963.
©
Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library

The funeral and burial scenes on Monday were much the same—Jackie seemed to have the power to stop time. Partway through the funeral procession from the Capitol to her husband’s funeral mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, she emerged from her car and walked the remainder of the journey in full view of the cameras. The visiting dignitaries, accustomed to traveling in grand processions, followed as an ordinary mob behind her, transfixed. At the funeral mass, she watched with studied concentration, her black veil framing her face. At the burial, she grasped the hands of her dead husband’s brothers and knelt on the Arlington sod in prayer. That evening, Nicole Alphand, wife of the French ambassador, watched Jackie conduct a reception for the visiting dignitaries at the White House. She looked, said Alphand, “
like a Roman Queen, a stone statue.” London’s
Evening Standard
was especially generous: “
Jacqueline Kennedy has given the American people from this day on one thing they have always lacked—majesty.”

Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson kept a respectful distance from Jackie as they all moved through the events of the day. They were around her always, even walking behind her in the procession to St. Matthew’s, despite the objections of the Secret Service. But they were careful to allow a few feet of space between themselves and the widow, her children, and her husband’s family.

Still, it was awkward at times—hovering over another family in its hour of suffering. The Johnsons had never spent much private time with Jackie despite both Lyndon’s and Lady Bird’s best efforts.
Johnson, who was powerfully drawn to vivacious and beautiful women, had feverishly sought the favor of the First Lady during his time as vice president. But his Texan courtship rituals sometimes didn’t translate.
In one extravagant gesture early in Kennedy’s term, he’d presented Jackie with two Hereford heifers and a pony named Tex. Jackie accepted the gifts warmly but returned them two years later, saying she had no place to keep them. Undeterred, Johnson took back the animals, sold them at market, and used the proceeds to purchase the appointment book used by Abraham Lincoln in the White House. He donated the book to Jackie’s White House restoration project. When Jackie wrote Johnson to thank him, Johnson penned a provocative response: “
Never before has Texas beef found a market of such quality in winding up on Mrs. Kennedy’s bookshelves between the covers of Mr. Lincoln’s records. Too bad it couldn’t be on Mr. Lincoln’s bookshelves between the … well, never mind.” As Lady Bird’s biographer Jan Jarboe Russell notes, “the tantalizing ellipses were LBJ’s.” Liz Carpenter, a clear-eyed Johnson aide, quashed the letter before it could be delivered to Jackie, noting diplomatically in the margins that the letter was “
too flip.”

Now, though, the gap between the Johnsons and Jackie was greater than the differences of region or taste; it was the gap between the living and the dead. In the first moments of unexpected widowhood, Jackie could not imagine life without her husband, could not imagine life at all. Accepting staffers’ condolences that weekend, she had a standard response:
Poor thing, what will become of you?
She might have been speaking to herself. Paying his respects the night of the assassination, Ben Bradlee found Jackie to be a “
totally doomed child” who looked as though she had been “
burned alive.” She would write to Bradlee a few weeks later: “
I consider that my life is over and I will spend the rest of it waiting for it really to be over.”

When Franklin Roosevelt died in office in 1945, his successor, Harry Truman, had rushed to the White House to call upon the dead president’s widow. Finding Eleanor Roosevelt in her sitting room in the residence, an emotional Truman asked if there was anything he
could do for her. Mrs. Roosevelt was composed and correct. “
Is there anything
we
can do for
you
?” she replied. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

That was too much to expect of Jackie, the doomed child. The most she could do for Johnson, her husband’s constitutional successor, was to include him, briefly, in her despair. On Sunday, riding to a memorial service for her husband in the Capitol, she turned toward Johnson, sitting beside her in the limousine. “Oh, Lyndon,” she said, “
what an awful way for you to come in.”

Her first concern was the part she had to play. She was the president’s widow, a public figure, and she was determined to execute her performance flawlessly. She had personally selected many of the details of the two-day funeral ceremonies—the arrangement of the caisson, the officiant at the low funeral mass, the Irish cadets who would perform a mourning drill.
A black lace mantilla would be fine for her to wear to the ceremony at the Capitol, she told her White House staff, but for the funeral, only a regular mourning veil would do.

She knew that the nation would be watching. Bradlee that weekend noticed how Jackie grew distracted by the television, the images “
of the country grieving, of people, including herself and her children and the other Kennedys, filing silently, prayerfully past the presidential casket on view in the halls of Congress.”

Not only did she see the nation’s grief, she intuited its power. The tragic spectacle she created offered catharsis to the grieving nation—and made a resounding case for her husband’s greatness. It was Jackie who insisted that, to the extent good taste allowed, President Kennedy’s caisson should be fashioned in the form of President Lincoln’s; Jackie who took a special interest in the account of Lincoln’s funeral procession; Jackie who gave America majesty because she understood majesty’s special value to history. She made her husband’s greatness self-evident: Only a great president could provoke such a reaction from his people. Only a figure destined for history could earn such a day.

And this case for Kennedy was, inevitably, made at the expense of his successor. What made her spectacle tragic was the unspoken belief that Kennedy’s kind of grace and greatness would not, could not, be seen again. However unconsciously, the story Kennedy’s widow told that day directly refuted the story Johnson was trying to tell. He believed the country desperately needed a new leader to follow, a man on a horse to guide everyone out of the mud. She gave the country Black Jack, the willful steed with empty boots reversed in its stirrups and no rider at all.

And so as the hours passed, Johnson’s aides and advisers worried more and more about how he could possibly start his new story for the country. They suspected Kennedy loyalists when rumors spread through the press corps that Johnson had been afraid to walk in the procession behind Mrs. Kennedy on account of security threats. On Sunday afternoon, Johnson spoke with Jack Brooks, a Texas congressman and a close friend. “
We’ve got to start being—not to be cold-blooded, but I mean, to be realistic,” said Brooks. “We ought to be pointing out that we’ve got a fine president that can do the job and
is
because it’s good for the … continuity of the country.”

But Johnson did not take the bait. He simply changed the subject: “Where are you eating dinner?”

His voice was calm and measured for a man who had endured three days of strain. By then, he had stopped trying to make the cameras turn toward him. Patience and restraint had never been Johnson virtues—“Lyndon wants it yesterday” was the saying among his staff—but there was one circumstance in which he was capable of not just patience but monkish discipline and self-denial, when he was capable of putting off all pleasure and gratification, of turning away from even the things he wanted most. He could deny himself anything when he had set his mind on a plan.

And that was how he kept himself contained as the Kennedys had their days—Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. In those days they took the nation’s story further and further from him, into the realm
of timeless drama, the realm of myth. He did not object; he mostly stood by and watched.

In public, he would say nothing, because in private, he had come up with a strategy. He had a plan to take the emerging myth of John F. Kennedy and make it work for him.

O
N SATURDAY AFTERNOON
, there’d been another unfortunate scene with Bobby Kennedy at the first cabinet meeting of Johnson’s presidency. After the various department heads had gathered in the Cabinet Room, Johnson, sitting in the president’s place at the table, started the meeting, taking the lead in the most formal setting he’d yet attempted. But something wasn’t right. The attorney general’s chair was conspicuously empty.

Its occupant was no farther away than the hallway. Tending a growing crop of resentment toward Johnson, Bobby Kennedy had thought about skipping the meeting, and entered only after some strong pleading from Mac Bundy. The other cabinet members, seeing the fallen president’s brother walk in, rose in respect. Johnson made a point of staying seated. Bobby looked at him in stunned disbelief. “
It was quite clear,” Orville Freeman, the agriculture secretary, later said, “that he could hardly countenance Lyndon Johnson sitting in his brother’s seat.”

What followed seemed like a scene out of
Hamlet
. The new president, in the old president’s place, spoke coldly of the constitutional succession.
Then Adlai Stevenson, the UN ambassador, rose to read a lengthy statement he had prepared ahead of time, praising Johnson’s performance since the shooting. Stevenson, twice the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency, had long been disdained by the Kennedys, who saw him as weak—the most unpardonable sin. To Bobby, Adlai’s words were “
a few paragraphs on how nice Lyndon Johnson was,” he would later say. “I felt it was fine. It just struck me that he had to read the damn thing.”

Then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the senior cabinet member
and another old target of Bobby’s disdain, stood to offer tribute and support. “
A nice little statement,” Bobby would later say. “Afterwards, somebody told me how impressed Lyndon was with Dean Rusk because he’s the only one who spoke up at the Cabinet meeting. So I thought … what he wanted is declarations of loyalty, fidelity from all of us.”

Given the circumstances, loyalty and fidelity were hardly unreasonable requests. But Bobby—sleep-deprived, transformed by grief—was not inclined to be reasonable. As the meeting progressed, he said nary a word, and his silent, sullen presence took hold of the president. Johnson’s own words grew uncertain and hollow. After twenty or so minutes the meeting broke up and the cabinet officers departed, unsettled.

Johnson walked out of the meeting enraged, convinced that Bobby had deliberately come in late in order to humiliate him and thwart his efforts to take control. After the meeting, Johnson called House Speaker John McCormack. “
I can’t sit still. I’ve got to keep the government going,” he told the Speaker. “But I don’t want the family to feel that I am having any lack of respect, so I have a very delicate wire to walk there.”

And it wasn’t just the Kennedy family working against him—it was almost every member of the Kennedy court. By midday on Saturday, he had announced his intention to keep all of President Kennedy’s cabinet. Nor would letters of resignation, he made it known, be accepted from any of the Kennedy White House staff. To a succession of bleary-eyed Kennedy men (for they were almost exclusively men) he’d offered the same “I need you more than he needed you” line. Sometimes he would add a hopeful corollary: “I consider you one of
my
men now.”