The Passage of Power (123 page)

Protesting violently, Johnson replayed the theme that had worked before.
“You
and I know that he is up there looking down on us and wants us to work together, carrying out his ideals, and he would not want you to leave here,” he said, and went on, “his speech” growing, in Sorensen’s recollection, “only more saccharine”—until he went too far.

Once Sorensen got to know him better, Johnson said, Sorensen “would discover that he treated his staff as if they were his own children.”

“Yes, I know,” Sorensen replied. That was his only reply, and it was made in a quiet tone, but Johnson evidently understood. He accepted the resignation.

P
IERRE
S
ALINGER’S PLUMPNESS
, bushy eyebrows, ever-present cigar and good humor (all of which made people forget that he had once been an award-winning crime reporter and a very tough Rackets Committee investigator) had, together with an ability to take a joke, made “Plucky” the butt of a lot of kidding by many of his colleagues in the Kennedy White House. Jack Kennedy’s kidding always stopped at a line that left Salinger his dignity, however. With Lyndon Johnson, there was no such line—as became evident over Christmas at the ranch.

First, there was the new President’s insistence that Salinger wear that outfit notably unflattering to his portly physique, and then that he mount a horse and trot off on it in front of a battery of photographers despite the fact that he barely knew how to ride, a performance that moved reporters to dub him
“Hopalong
Salinger.” And there followed an incident at the dinner for Ludwig Erhard in the Stonewall gym.

Salinger was vulnerable because in his youth he had been a pianist so proficient that, for a brief time, he had considered a concert career. At Kennedy parties he sometimes played ditties he had composed himself, along with humorous lyrics. Van Cliburn was stepping off the stage after his masterful renditions of Beethoven and Brahms when a startled Salinger heard Johnson say, “Would Mr. Salinger please go to the piano?”

Turning red, Salinger tried to demur.
“Do
you think it’s fair to put me on after Van Cliburn?” he asked. But no demurral was accepted. Trying to make the best of the situation—not that any best was really possible—Salinger, trudging up to the stage, said he would play a piece he had written himself, the “Palm Beach Waltz,” so that no one would realize the wrong notes he was hitting. When he finished, there was a reward: a ten-gallon hat, which Johnson presented to him on stage. It was too big; the brim came down over Salinger’s eyes.

“Reporters
felt sorry for Pierre Salinger that day,” one of them was to recall. Those who were his friends felt sorry for him during the entire Texas trip.
“For
all his striped shirts and big cigars, Salinger is a literate and subtle man, and not disposed toward cornball humor and a folksy approach,” one of them says. “When I saw Lyndon having fun with Salinger and putting ten-gallon hats on him and so on, I just had a feeling Salinger wasn’t going to wear that hat very long.”

Back in Washington, Johnson pushed him further. Soon there was circulating what Schlesinger calls
“a
terrible story in which Johnson made Salinger eat a plate of bean soup at a White House luncheon out of pure delight in the exercise of authority.”

Prior to the ranch trip, during the first month after the assassination, Johnson and Salinger had seemed to have developed a rapport. “Of all the Kennedy people,” the easygoing press secretary “seemed to make the transition most easily,” Schlesinger was to write. And that, as some longtime Johnson observers understood, was the problem. Having
“adopted
” Salinger, Johnson “now treated him as if he were one of his veteran deputies,” James Wechsler was to write, “and with such men he does not worry about the amenities.” After hearing the bean soup story, Schlesinger wrote in his journal that
“There
is nothing more dangerous, so far as I can see, than being accepted by Johnson as one of his own. I think he has been meticulously polite to those in the White House whom he regards as Kennedy men. But, when he starts regarding them as Johnson men, their day is over. He begins to treat them like Johnson men, which means like servants. That is what happened to Pierre Salinger.”

The rapport was gone, as became apparent to the men and women in the
White House press lobby. “Reporters … every day saw numerous slight indications that he [Salinger] was not really as happy with the new regime as he said he was,” one said. That analysis was correct.
“It
was impossible for me to stay, and it was just a question of how I figured out how to get out of the White House,” Salinger was to recall. And when Johnson noticed the unhappiness, tensions rose on both sides.
“The
White House press operation … deteriorated badly,” as the
Los Angeles Times
put it. By February, Salinger was determined to resign. A Senate seat was opening in California, and the deadline for filing nominating petitions was March 20. Early in March, Salinger decided to run—if lawyers could assure him that he was eligible for the seat although he had been living in Virginia. He didn’t mention his plans to Johnson—didn’t give him any hint of them—even as the deadline approached. The lawyers’ definitive answer, that he was indeed eligible, came through on March 19, the very day before the deadline, while he was having lunch at the Sans Souci Restaurant near the White House. And then, needing to be in California the next day to file his petition, he quit—virtually on the spot—in a resignation (
“so
abrupt as to be rude,” one account called it) whose brusqueness made it one of the more startling in White House annals. Walking out of the restaurant (as he passed Ken O’Donnell, sitting at another table, he told him, “I’m on my way to the President’s office to resign”; O’Donnell recalls that he
“almost
fell out of [my] chair” in surprise), Salinger went to the White House, arriving shortly after three o’clock, and went upstairs, where Johnson was having a late lunch with a group of newspaper publishers and reporters in the Family Dining Room. Encountering Jenkins and Moyers outside in the corridor, he told them that he needed to see the President
“as
quickly as possible,” and told the two
“startled
” men why. Moyers rang Johnson in the dining room. Picking up the phone at the head of a table lined with journalists, the President was told that his press secretary was just outside the door waiting to offer his resignation—which was to take effect that very afternoon.

Johnson’s self-possession didn’t desert him for an instant. Not one of his luncheon guests, listening to his end of the conversation, had any idea what he was being told. Hanging up the phone, he resumed the lunch as if nothing had happened. And when, after the publishers left, he saw Salinger in the Oval Office at about 3:30, he was all graciousness, telling him he understood perfectly, and that if Salinger would write him a letter of resignation, he would answer it immediately.

Despite the haste with which they were composed, the letters, which were exchanged in the Oval Office at five o’clock, met the requirements of the genre. Salinger’s, telling the President “what an honor it has been to serve you,” offered his resignation “with sincere regret” and “warm gratitude for your many and repeated kindnesses,” and Johnson’s accepted the resignation “only with the greatest regret and with a reluctance that bows only to your strong personal desire to return to California.… I hate to see you go.” Then, in a gesture to reinforce the friendly tone, the President asked Salinger how much the California filing fee would be—$450 was the answer—and, pulling out a roll of bills, paid it (or at least part of it:
“He
must have heard $250,” Salinger was to say), saying, “Here’s your first campaign contribution.”

“I
had given LBJ very little time to consider my successor,” Salinger was to write in his memoirs, hardly an overstatement. When Johnson asked the press secretary who should succeed him, Salinger suggested Reedy, because of the “high regard” in which he “was held … by the Washington press corps.” Johnson told Jenkins to telephone Reedy and “tell him to get over here. He’s the new press secretary as of now.” The President was therefore able to have an obviously well-qualified successor in place when Salinger, having returned to his office, called in reporters and said he was resigning
“effective
immediately.” And when articles about the
“surprise
” and “startling” resignation appeared the next day, Johnson made a trip to the press room to assure reporters he was
“not
disturbed” about it. There was, however, no disguising the basic fact: that the press secretary to the President of the United States had resigned, giving the President less than two hours’ notice. Cleaning out his desk, Salinger drove to the airport, catching the seven o’clock flight to San Francisco. With him on the flight was deputy press secretary Andrew Hatcher, who, informed of the impending resignation, had told Salinger to announce his own
“at
the same time you announce yours. I’m going back to California with you.”
²

Writing in her diary that evening, Lady Bird was more frank.
A “bombshell
 … dropped into our lap late this afternoon,” she wrote. “Pierre Salinger walked into Lyndon’s office … and told him that he was going to resign.… Of all the people from the Kennedy Administration, I had felt that Salinger was one of the most professional, most committed to doing a job. Although he is very attached to the Kennedys, I thought we had established a certain simpatico relationship with him. So his sudden departure leaves a big uncertainty in my own thinking.”

B
UT THAT WAS
the last crack in the façade. None of John F. Kennedy’s other staff members would resign during 1964. The biggest remaining names on that staff—O’Donnell, O’Brien, Dutton, Dungan—would still be in their White House offices when Lyndon Johnson ran for re-election that year, and when he won the presidency in his own right that November. With the single exception of Robert Kennedy, the faces around the Cabinet table—McNamara, Rusk, Freeman, Udall—would be the same. Key advisers like McGeorge Bundy, Walter Heller and Kermit Gordon would still be at their desks. And even the loss of those three symbolic figures—Sorensen, Salinger and Schlesinger—would not,
in the event, have much significance. For in terms of the Johnson presidency, the crucial fact about the three men was that they, like Robert Kennedy, had stayed long enough. Lyndon Johnson had known that after the shock of his predecessor’s assassination America needed continuity, and that the key to continuity was that Kennedy men like Sorensen, Salinger and Schlesinger stay in their jobs. And they had stayed—until, for Johnson’s purpose, their leaving did little harm. By the time the three men left, short though that time was, the situation had changed. “Continuity”—keeping draped over the new Administration the mantle of its predecessor—was no longer nearly as essential as it had been.

By the time of Salinger’s resignation, Washington had been reassured not merely by the continuance in office of members of the old Administration, but by the performance in office of the new Administration—of the new President. Discussing Salinger’s resignation in the
New York Times
on March 20, the day after it occurred, James Reston said it did not have the significance it would once have had. While
“the
nostalgic pretense of the first three months [
sic
] of the Johnson Administration is vanishing” and “The elaborate effort to prove that Boston loves Austin, and vice versa, is less apparent,” he wrote, the pretense was no longer necessary because “people here are planning their lives on the assumption that the Johnson Administration is going to be around for quite a while.”

The new Administration wasn’t going to be the same as the old one, Reston wrote, but that didn’t mean that it would be less effective—nor, in fact, that it might not be more effective. “It is not clear who” among the Johnson staffers—Jenkins, Moyers, Valenti or Reedy—will “bring to the White House those useful commodities of vivid language, a sense of history, and, most important, a sense of humor, but Johnson himself will provide many other attributes,” Reston wrote. “He is effective precisely because he is so determined, industrious, personal and even humorless, particularly in dealing with Congress.” Kennedy, he wrote, “retained an inordinate respect for the … elders of the Congress. When they growled, he paused and often retreated,” and he had a “detached and even donnish … willingness to grant the merit in the other fellow’s argument.” Johnson, he said, “is not so inclined to retreat,” and “grants nothing in an argument, not even equal time.… Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him
lately.
This may not be the most attractive quality of the new Administration but it works.… The lovers of style are not too happy with the new Administration, but the lovers of substance are not complaining.”

By March 20, of course, tangible evidence of Johnson’s effectiveness was piling up: the passage of the tax cut, foreign aid, education, and
appropriations bills, the progress toward passage of the civil rights bill. And beyond these concrete successes was one less tangible but just as impressive: the confidence engendered not just in Washington but in the country as a whole by the aura of competence and determination that emanated from the White House.

The confidence and success were documented in public opinion polls. In March, the country’s most respected sampler of such opinion, the Gallup Poll,
asked Americans,
“Do
you approve or disapprove of the way Johnson is handling his job as President?” Seventy-three percent of the respondents said they approved—an overwhelming percentage. In April, the figure would be 77 percent. Even more eloquent was the fact that of the respondents who did not approve—a small enough percentage, in any case—the reason most gave for withholding their approval was not that they disapproved but that they were undecided. In both March and April, months in which over 70 percent of the American people approved of the way Lyndon Johnson was handling the presidency, the percentage that disapproved was 9. The figures for April were 77 percent approval, 9 percent disapproval, 14 percent undecided. Americans of every political persuasion were united in approval.
“Two
out of three Republicans say that he is doing a good job as President,” the poll reported. Seventy-seven percent to 9—disapproval in a single digit.
“Every
President, of course, enjoys a ‘honeymoon’ period of high popularity after taking office,” Gallup had noted. Still, after the May poll showed similar results, Gallup stated that Johnson’s approval ratings
“compare
favorably with the popularity ratings accorded any of Johnson’s predecessors” in a comparable pre-election period since scientific polling techniques were developed.