The Passage of Power (124 page)

And the confidence and success were the theme in scores of newspaper columns in addition to Reston’s.
“In
the few short months since last Nov. 22,” America has watched “Lyndon B. Johnson making Washington and the government his own,” Joseph Alsop wrote. “Acid tests” still lay ahead, he wrote, “but even the Kennedy men whom Mr. Johnson had not quite won over … have no doubt that the acid tests will be successfully met when they come.” Alsop, Johnson’s Washington acquaintance of many years, had always been kindly disposed toward him. Marquis Childs had often, over the years, been extremely critical of him. Now Childs wrote that Lyndon Johnson is
“the
most energetic and the most ambitious President to occupy the office in a very long time. His ambition … is on a heroic scale. It is to unify the country—to resolve the fundamental differences between black and white, capital and labor, rich and poor, North and South.” And, Childs said, “he believes he can do just this and his confidence carries with it an added measure of strength. Strength attracts strength, and this is surely one explanation for his extraordinary standing in every indicator of public opinion.”

The public persona that had once made him an object of mockery had not disappeared, far from it. He was, at Georgetown dinner parties at least,
“the
same Lyndon Johnson,” Tom Wicker wrote. “Once again he is being referred to as ‘ol Cornpone.’ ” But now, suddenly, the corniness wasn’t a drawback, Wicker said. Now “there is usually in the phrase a touch of awe and not infrequently a tone of respect. To paraphrase Lincoln on Grant, a good many people seem to believe it would be wise to find out what brand of corn he uses and send some to the other politicians.… Cornpone it may be … but so long as Lyndon Johnson’s evangelism comes from the heart, the nation is likely to get the message more often
than not.” Said Roscoe Drummond:
“The
Johnson Administration is getting more Johnsonian every day. He is just doing what comes naturally. The country likes it. [He] is throwing away most of the old rules about how to be President of the United States—and making his own.”

In some of the columns, in fact, there was more than a touch of the awe Wicker mentioned.

“Lyndon Johnson resembles an elemental natural force of some hitherto undiscovered sort—an amiable force, to be sure, not destructive like an earthquake, but still a very powerful force that is only subject to its own natural rules,” wrote Alsop. Awe particularly when talking about the new President’s legislative accomplishments. Johnson was managing,
“in
a good deal less than a year, to get through Congress the two most important pieces of domestic legislation to be adopted in a quarter of a century—in a sense, the
only
important pieces of domestic legislation in that long period,” Richard Rovere wrote in
The New Yorker.
“It has been an astonishing performance, and one, it seems clear, that was beyond the reach of
John F. Kennedy.” Part of the explanation for Johnson’s legislative success was the momentum generated behind Kennedy’s proposals by his assassination, Rovere wrote. “It … seems necessary to believe that the gods of history are not above arranging things in such a way that a man may contribute more to the fulfillment of his ideals by being the victim of a senseless murder than by living and working for them.” But part was something more, Rovere had to admit, grudging as were the words with which he acknowledged it. “It is hardly possible to believe that a Texas drawl, a strategic display of frugality, and some soft-soaping of Senator Byrd can replace domestic discord with harmony. It seems necessary, though, to believe that such things can—for a time—at least—go quite a long way toward promoting this sort of change, for a change has in fact occurred. The change, Rovere wrote, “is reflected” not only “in the opinion polls” but “in the graciousness and ease with which” Senator Byrd and Representative Smith, the pair of Virginians “who had been thwarting Presidents almost, it seems, since time began,” have been “lending themselves to the designs of President Johnson.” Awe at the speed with which the accomplishments, accomplishments that went beyond the legislative, had been achieved. Recalling the “people who, in December, were worried that Mr. Johnson would not have time enough before the election to put his own stamp on the country,” Eric Sevareid said that the new President had had to accomplish three objectives to put the stamp there. “He had to stamp his own leadership on his predecessor’s administration, and this he did in a matter of days; he had to impress and beguile the Congress into a bill-passing frame of mind, and this he did in a matter of weeks; he had to imprint his own personality on the country at large, on a people just getting used to Mr. Kennedy’s far different nature, and this Mr. Johnson began to do the moment propriety permitted.”

The tone of columnistic comparisons with his predecessor no longer contained even a touch of condescension. In fact, many of them conveyed a journalistic
evaluation that the influential Reston put in a single succinct sentence: “President Kennedy’s eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson’s hammer blows are designed to make men act.”

T
HE MAGNITUDE OF
the success was apparent also in discussions about politics. By March, 1964, speculation about the identity of the Republican nominee for President—about the merits and chances of Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater—was the hot topic in political circles. By March—by the time Pierre Salinger quit—there was no speculation about the identity of the Democratic nominee. The last of that speculation was over. The Democratic nominee for President would be the man who was now President; there may have been doubts about that in December, but even among Robert Kennedy’s most ardent supporters, there was no longer any doubt about that at all.

And the President was going to be a hard man to beat in November’s general election. Between March 13 and March 17 Gallup polled Americans about Lyndon Johnson’s chances against each of the most likely Republican nominees. “If Barry Goldwater were the Republican candidate and Lyndon Johnson were the Democratic candidate, which would you like to see win?” Gallup asked. Thirteen percent of the respondents said they would like to see Goldwater win. Seventy-eight percent said they would like Lyndon Johnson. (The remaining 9 percent were undecided.) For Goldwater’s leading opponent for the nomination, the figures were similar: 16 percent for Nelson Rockefeller and 77 percent for Johnson. Richard Nixon, who had taken himself out of the running, would do better against the President, Gallup found, but not that much better: 24 percent to 68 for Johnson.
Time
magazine said the identity of the Republican nominee didn’t really matter.
“President
Johnson’s rising popularity” had made “the whole show academic.”

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S SUCCESSION
to the presidency, the transition in which he assumed the power that had once been John Kennedy’s, had been so successful, gone so smoothly, that by March, as was apparent from the contemporary journalistic evaluation, it was becoming simply a
fait accompli,
an accepted fact of American political life. And as more time passed, that would turn out to be its fate over a longer term as well.

Some of those who witnessed the succession up close, appreciating the magnitude of his accomplishment, were certain that eventually it would be given the credit it deserved.
“History
will record the great contribution Lyndon Johnson made in taking us through the transition,”
Hugh Sidey wrote in 1969.

That has not happened, however. The success, the smoothness of Johnson’s succession has come to be viewed—to the extent it is viewed at all—as simply yet another example of the efficacy of the American Constitution’s provisions for the orderly transfer of presidential power in a democracy, of the efficacy, as one of the most detailed studies of vice presidential succession puts it, of the
“recognized
rule which made him President upon the death of the President.” The “smooth manner in which presidential power changed hands upon the death of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was not entirely unlike what had happened on seven other occasions in American history,” this study states. “Each time a Vice-President became President and led the country safely through the tragedy and crisis of losing its leader.”

Not that history has forgotten the assassination of President Kennedy and the three subsequent days of his funeral ceremonies, of course. The very opposite is the case. Those four days have become enshrined as among the most memorable days in American history. But the achievements of Lyndon Johnson during those four days and the rest of the transition period—the period, forty-seven days, just short of seven weeks, between the moment on November 22, 1963, when Ken O’Donnell said “He’s gone” and the State of the Union speech on January 8, 1964—have been afforded so little attention that his succession to the
presidency has become, to considerable extent, an episode if not lost to, then overlooked by, history.

There are photographs and moving pictures of the assassination day and the funeral ceremonies whose inherent drama and constant reiteration on television, in movies, in books, in newspapers and magazines—in every form of media, really, in which the reiteration of images is possible—have engraved them so deeply in the American consciousness that they have become iconic images in the nation’s history. Jack and Jackie, tanned and radiant, coming off
Air Force One in Dallas, pink suit and red roses bright in the sun, and sitting smiling, basking in the cheers, in the back seat of the open car; the President suddenly slumping in Zapruder’s lens; Bobby and Jackie, hand in hand in sorrow, coming off the plane, dark blotches on the suit; Jackie coming out of the White House holding her children’s hands—black mantilla, little sky-blue coats; the caisson with its six matched grays; prancing
Black Jack with boots reversed; Caroline putting her hand under the flag; John-John’s salute; Oswald, his mouth open in shock and agony, the Stetsoned Dallas detective aghast as the menacing figure lunges in from the right, revolver in hand; the great procession up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol; the great procession on foot to the cathedral: the three Kennedys, the two brothers and the veiled widow, behind them the world leaders massed and marching.

A single photograph from those four days, and a simple photograph only, in which Lyndon Johnson is prominent has become iconic. It is perhaps the most famous photograph of them all—the picture of the new President taking the oath aboard Air Force One. But although his face is the focus of the camera’s eye, it is a face that is only stern and sad and composed, certainly not handsome, and the viewer’s eye moves quickly to the face beside his, the very mask of beauty in grief. And that photograph is the only image of Lyndon Johnson during those four days that has become a part of history, although, during those days, he was becoming the most powerful man on earth. When he appears in other photographs, it is not at the center; he is there behind the Kennedy family coming down the steps of the Capitol after the service in the Rotunda, but as the faces of the grieving Kennedys fill the lens, who looks to see who is behind them? What the world saw on television the day of the procession of Kennedys and world leaders following the casket to the cathedral—and what the world has seen over and over during the intervening half century—is, behind the Kennedys, Selassie’s medals and towering de Gaulle and
Baudouin’s sword. Johnson is marching, too, right behind the family and in front of the leaders, marching, windows all along the route, with gunshots from a window fresh in his mind, but, thanks to the vagaries of camera angles, he is barely visible in most photographs of the procession.

But the succession of Lyndon Johnson deserves a better fate in history. For had it not been for his accomplishments during the transition, history might have been different. Because the headlines in that first blizzard of news—
PRISONER
LINKED TO CASTRO GROUP; SUSPECT LIVED IN
SOVIET UNION
—have long been proven false or exaggerated, it has been easy to forget that for several days after the assassination America was reading those headlines, easy to forget the extent of the suspicions that existed during those days not only about a conspiracy but about a conspiracy hatched in
Cuba or Russia, two nations with whom, barely a year before, America had been on the brink of nuclear war. If Johnson had not moved as quickly as he did to appoint the Warren Commission and quiet the suspicions, would suspicions have escalated into an international crisis? Perhaps not, and certainly the commission’s investigation, which would in its turn be rushed, has been proven inadequate, its report flawed. The answer to that question is not simple, however. International misunderstandings have escalated into war because of folly and illogic before. Guns of August? In weighing the motivations, mixed as always with Johnson, for establishing the Warren Commission, the possibility of November bombs should be allowed at least a small place on the scales.

Nor should other aspects of the transition be passed over as lightly as they have been. Because he moved so swiftly and successfully to create the image of continuity that reassured the nation, it has been easy to overlook how the Kennedy men might simply have resigned. It has been easy to overlook the obstacles—the shock and mystery of the assassination, the mushroom cloud fears, the deep divisions in the country over his predecessor’s policies—that stood in the way of unifying America behind his Administration; easy to overlook how difficult to unify even his own party: to rally into line behind his Administration’s banner labor leaders, black leaders, liberals, many of whom had, for years, been deeply suspicious of him and who would have needed little excuse to fall irrevocably into line behind another, more familiar banner, the brother’s banner, that could so readily have been raised within party ranks; to fall into line behind a leader they knew, and were quickly beginning to love.