The Passage of Power (40 page)

Johnson had spoken to Rowe’s law partner, Rowe found. “To my amazement, Corcoran was saying, ‘You just can’t do this to Lyndon Johnson!’ I said,
‘What do you mean I can’t do it?’ He said, ‘Never mind the clients. We’ll hold down the law firm.’ ” Johnson had spoken to Rowe’s wife. “One night, Elizabeth turned on me: ‘Why are you doing this to poor Lyndon?’ ”

Then Lyndon Johnson came to Jim Rowe’s office again, pleading with him, crying real tears as he sat doubled over, his face in his hands. “He wept. ‘I’m going to die. You’re an old friend. I thought you were my friend and you don’t care that I’m going to die. It’s just selfish of you, typically selfish.’ ”

Finally Rowe said, “Oh, goddamn it, all right”—and then “as soon as Lyndon got what he wanted,” Rowe was forcibly reminded why he had been determined not to join his staff. The moment the words were out of Rowe’s mouth, Johnson straightened up, and his tone changed instantly from one of pleading to one of cold command.

“Just remember,” he said. “I make the decisions. You don’t.”

Now this technique was used with Jack Kennedy. At meetings, the soft voice was coupled with a face that varied between sullen and sorrowful—the look of a very sad man. And if pressed particularly pointedly by the President for an explanation or a recommendation, he would say,
“I’m
not competent to advise you on this,” sometimes adding that he didn’t have enough information on the subject, statements that Kennedy viewed, in Sorensen’s phrase, as being Johnson’s “own subtle way of complaining to the President” about his treatment.

With Kennedy, however, the tactic had no success at all.
“I
cannot stand Johnson’s damn long face,” the President told his buddy Smathers. “He just comes in, sits at the Cabinet meetings with his face all screwed up, never says anything. He looks so sad.… You’ve seen him, George, you know him, he doesn’t even open his mouth.” Smathers suggested foreign travel. “You ought to send him on a trip so that he can get all of the fanfare and all of the attention … build up his ego again, let him have a great time”—and also, although Smathers didn’t say it, get him out of Kennedy’s hair. “You know, that’s a damn good idea,” Kennedy replied—and at the beginning of April sent him to Senegal, which was celebrating the first anniversary of its independence.

O
NE EARLY INCIDENT
is difficult indeed to reconcile with statements that Lyndon Johnson was being included “at all the major meetings,” that he was being made “a working participant in national affairs.”

On Saturday morning, April 15, he flew to Norfolk on a Military Air Transport Service plane, to crown his daughter Lynda Bird as Virginia’s Azalea Queen. As it happened, other military planes were in the air that morning: eight old B-26 bombers were bombing and strafing airfields in
Cuba as a prelude to the
Bay of Pigs invasion, which would take place in two days. Johnson did not know the bombing was taking place—or that the invasion was imminent. He may not have known that there was going to
be
an invasion. Shortly after the inauguration, he had attended a few meetings on the general Cuban situation, but from the
moment serious planning began, he was, in Dallek’s words,
“systematically
excluded” from any part in it. During the month before April 15, meeting after meeting had been held at the White House and State Department to plan for the attempt to overthrow Cuban dictator
Fidel Castro. Johnson had participated in none of them. Kennedy had, in fact, made sure that he wouldn’t even be in Washington on the weekend of the invasion. He had asked the Vice President to entertain German Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer that weekend—on his ranch in Texas.

Flying there directly from Norfolk, Johnson was waiting at the ranch when the chancellor arrived. On Sunday, with the fourteen-hundred-man
Cuban Exile Brigade at sea and heading for Cuba, Johnson was introducing Adenauer at the Gillespie County Fair in Fredricksburg, the German town near his ranch. And on Monday, the day the Brigade landed, to be pinned down on the beach and eventually forced to surrender—those of them who survived—to Castro’s forces, Johnson was introducing the chancellor before his speech to the Texas Legislature in Austin. Only that evening did he return to Washington.

The next day Johnson was invited to attend a meeting on Cuba—a
postmortem
on what had gone wrong. Whatever mistakes the President had made in authorizing the invasion (which had left more than one hundred members of the Brigade dead, with an additional twelve hundred taken prisoner, and the strengthening of Fidel Castro’s position; it was, the historian
Theodore Draper said,
“one
of those rare events in history—a perfect failure”)—an invasion in which, in an attempt to conceal American involvement, Kennedy refused to send air cover even when the men on the beach, encircled by thousands of Fidel Castro’s troops and being strafed by Soviet-made MIG-15 fighters, were asking for the American air support they thought they had been promised—the President accepted the blame for them. Misled though he had been by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (
“Those
sons-of-bitches with all the fruit salad” who “just sat there nodding, saying it would work”) about the invasion’s chances of success, he took every bit of the blame.
“There’s
an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” he said; not this defeat. “President Kennedy has stated from the beginning that as President he bears sole responsibility,” a White House release declared. “He has stated it on all occasions and he restates it now.… The President is strongly opposed to anyone within or without the administration attempting to shift the responsibility.” No matter how upset he was by having had to leave men on the beach (Salinger found the President crying in his bedroom the morning after the invasion; when he came downstairs later, he looked a little disheveled, his hair not combed right, the knot of his necktie slightly askew; more than once in the days that followed the
Bay of Pigs, friends saw John Kennedy talking to himself; sometimes he would blurt out, in the midst of conversations on other topics:
“How
could I have been so stupid?”), no matter how the realization of the cost of his miscalculations tormented him (walking into Ken O’Donnell’s office one morning, he told him he had had a sleepless night: “I was thinking of those poor guys in prison down there”; when
he was arranging the ransom of the prisoners the next year,
“It
was,”
Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston said, “the first
time I ever saw tears in his eyes”), no one was taking the blame but him. During the
postmortem
meeting on the catastrophe, however, Johnson launched into what has been described as
“a
general criticism of” the CIA. Kennedy said,
“Lyndon,
you’ve got to remember we’re all in this, and that, when I accepted responsibility for this operation, I took the entire responsibility on myself, and I think we should have no sort of passing of the buck or backbiting, however justified.” At the first meeting on the
Bay of Pigs to which Johnson was invited, he had been rebuked by the President in front of the other men at the table.

P
ART OF THE EXPLANATION
for the attitude of President Kennedy and many members of the Kennedy Administration toward Lyndon Johnson was suspicion and fear—of this figure who for so long had loomed so large over their lives, as the Leader, as their most feared opponent in the fight for the presidential nomination: of what he might do, this master of politics, if they gave him the slightest opening. All but unmentioned though the “Seward” episode may have been in the press, it wasn’t forgotten by the men who knew about it—White House aides were still repeating around Washington that Lyndon Johnson had tried “to
pull
a William Seward”—and it proved to them that the
Vice President would grab power at the slightest opportunity; “newspapermen” were still telling Reedy and Busby, as Busby reported to Johnson, “that the
White
House is unhappy over the Vice President seizing power.” One journalist,
Time
’s Sidey, was later to write that
“At
least part of the problem in Johnson’s vice presidency was LBJ’s personality and lust for power. The more restless he got, the more suspicious of him Kennedy’s people became.” Part of the explanation was the fact that Johnson, as Kennedy put it,
“knows
every newspaperman in Washington,” and could, and probably would, leak to journalists any information they let him have. So they made sure he had as little as possible.

Another part of the explanation was Johnson’s natural aggressiveness—which manifested itself to them in ways that confirmed their feelings that he was still trying to grab a bigger role in the Administration than they wanted him to have; that, as
Evelyn Lincoln was to say, his
“immediate
thought was of his image,” not of the President’s. A constant reminder of this was Johnson’s unending appeals, when the two men were traveling to the same city, to be allowed to fly with Kennedy on
Air Force One, appeals that Mrs. Lincoln felt were being made so that he would be photographed getting out of the plane with the President, share in his spotlight. This
“constant
argument,” as Lincoln calls it, “cropped up every time the two men were going to make a joint appearance.” “You don’t mean to say that Mr. Johnson is again insisting on riding with me,” Kennedy would say. “How many times must I tell him that the President and Vice President, as a matter of security, should never ride on the same plane.” (The requests were always refused, and the refusal to be allowed to ride on Air
Force One “bothered the Vice President more than anything else,” Lincoln says.)

After he moved into his office in the Executive Office Building, Johnson unveiled a new strategy to demonstrate how close to the President he was, how much an insider in the Administration. His car, a long black Cadillac, with its impressive license plate, “111,” familiar to Washington journalists, would pull onto West Executive Avenue, the narrow street between the White House and the Executive Office Building, and Johnson would get out and walk, not into the EOB, but along the rear of the White House on a concrete sidewalk, past the doors to the Oval Office, until he came to the next door, that opened into Evelyn Lincoln’s office, and walk inside. After glancing into the Oval Office—which was almost invariably empty; Johnson arrived rather early, before the President—he would stand in Mrs. Lincoln’s office, chatting with the Administration staffers and officials who were coming in and out. After a while, he would leave by the other door in her office, on a route which took him by the press room, where a group of journalists would be sitting, before walking across to the EOB. Mrs. Lincoln felt she understood why Johnson was doing this. “By coming into my office, Mr. Johnson was creating the image of working closely with Mr. Kennedy,” she was to write, especially if he was in her office “when any of the Cabinet men or other officials came in.” And by emerging from the President’s part of the White House when he walked by the journalists, he would give them the same impression. And she felt she understood why Johnson’s car would remain standing outside the West Wing all the time he was inside—as an advertisement that he was inside.

Part of the explanation for the Kennedy attitude, however, was more personal. If there exists copious documentation of the President’s remarks demonstrating “genuine warmth” toward the
Vice President, there were nonetheless other remarks.
“Kennedy
is funny about LBJ,”
Ben Bradlee was to write.
“He
really likes his roguish qualities, respects him enormously as a political operator, a politician who can get things done, and he thinks Lady Bird is ‘neat.’ But there are times … when LBJ’s simple presence seems to bug him. It’s not noble to watch, but there it is.” Sometimes in the President’s descriptions of his Vice President an adjective would slip in that wasn’t all that funny. “The President used to say he wasn’t like anyone he’d ever known … somewhat monstrous … larger than life … with a comic side,”
Joseph Alsop recalls.

And if Kennedy had given instructions to his aides to avoid “the slightest disparagement of the Vice President,” to let him “experience the full respect and dignity of the office,” they were not always being followed to the letter. Not long after the denouement of the “Seward” episode, Johnson dispatched Horace Busby on what amounted to a peacemaking expedition to Ted Sorensen. Busby began by asking Sorensen to spell out what role he thought Johnson should play in the Administration. Sorensen, always determined to find
les mots justes,
paused, and then found
mots
that could not have been more disparaging. Johnson’s role, he said, should be “Salesman for the President’s program.” During the conversation that followed, it became clear to Busby, as he reported in a memo to Johnson, that
the Administration was determined that that role would not include a leading part on Capitol Hill. “In and out, during the conversation, various assistant secretaries from HEW and Budget” would be coming into Sorensen’s office, conferring about legislation about to be introduced. When Sorensen introduced Busby to them (“perfunctorily,” in Busby’s account, saying only “Mr. Busby, with the Vice President”), their reaction was “invariably the same—with transparent impact on Sorensen. They would say—two of them, separately, used virtually identical words—‘Oh, gee, I wish we could get the Vice President to work on our bill—that is what would make the difference.’ ” (And in each case “Sorensen hastened to prevent my direct response.”) Summing up the conversation in the memo to Johnson, Busby said, “I felt, as I left, that I had been to a summit conference, held on an iceberg, between two [men] who, while members of the same political faith at the moment, each brought—and left with—his own God.”

As for Ken O’Donnell, if indeed he had, as he maintains, been put in charge of keeping Johnson happy, he was not fulfilling his responsibility. Feeling that “Johnson was
a
liability who would say or do things that would reflect badly on the Administration, he wanted to keep close reins on him”—and he did. He informed Johnson’s staff that all vice presidential speeches and statements had to be approved in advance by the White House.
“He
couldn’t issue a press release without it being cleared,” says
Ashton Gonella. “Imagine if you had been king and then you had to clear everything you said.”