The Passage of Power (66 page)

In Lyndon Johnson’s lapel was a white carnation that had been pinned on him at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast, and in his car was Ralph Yarborough.
“I
don’t care if you have to throw Yarborough into the car with Lyndon,” Kennedy had told O’Brien that morning. “Get him in there.” He told O’Donnell to give Yarborough a message:
“If
he doesn’t ride with Lyndon today, he’ll have to walk.” And while these statements may have been a bit of presidential bravado, the President himself had had a few words with the senator that morning. When, after he asked Yarborough to ride in the car to which he had been assigned, the senator had remained evasive, Kennedy spoke another sentence in a quiet voice. If he valued his friendship, the President told him, he would ride with Lyndon. Yarborough took a good look at the President, and shortly thereafter spoke a few words to O’Brien, and when Johnson came out of the hotel for the motorcade, O’Brien was able to tell him,
“Yarborough’s
going to ride with you.” (“He is?” Johnson said. “Fine.”) On the thirteen-minute flight to Dallas, the President took care of the other public aspect of the feud. Taking Connally by the arm, O’Donnell pushed him into Kennedy’s cabin and closed the door. “Within three minutes,” he was to recall, the governor had agreed to invite Yarborough to the reception at the Governor’s Mansion and to seat him at the head table at the Austin dinner. Emerging, Connally asked, “How can anybody say no to that man?”

A
S
A
IR
F
ORCE
O
NE
was heading for Dallas, the last of the clouds cleared.
“Kennedy
weather,” O’Brien said.

It seemed as if it was going to be a Kennedy day. As Air Force One touched down at Dallas’ Love Field at 11:38—12:38 Washington time—everything seemed very bright under the brilliant Texas sun and the cloudless Texas sky: the huge plane gleaming as it taxied over closer to the crowd pressing against a
fence; the waiting open presidential limousine, so highly polished that the sunlight glittered on its long midnight-blue hood that stretched forward to the two small flags fluttering on the front bumpers. There was a moment’s expectant pause while steps were wheeled up to the plane, and then the door opened, and into the sunlight came the two figures the crowd had been waiting for: Jackie first (
“There
is Mrs. Kennedy, and the crowd yells!” the television commentator yelled), youthful, graceful, tanned, her wide smile, bright pink suit and pillbox hat radiant in the dazzling sun; behind her, the President, youthful, elegant (“I can see his suntan all the way from here!” the commentator shouted), with the mop of brown hair glowing, one hand checking the button on his jacket in the familiar gesture, coming down the steps just so slightly turned sideways to ease his back that it wasn’t noticeable unless you looked for it. A bouquet of bright red roses was handed to Jackie by the welcoming committee, and it set off the pink and the smile.

No time had been built into the schedule for the President and Jackie to work the crowd, but who could resist doing it, so adoring and excited were the faces turned toward them, so imploring the hands stretched out toward them, and they walked along the fence basking in the smiles and the sun, grinning—laughing, even—at things people shouted as they stretched out their hands, in the hope of a touch from theirs.
“There
never was a point in the public life of the Kennedys, in a way, that was as high as that moment in Dallas,” a reporter who had covered the entire presidency was to write.

Taking Lady Bird by the arm to bring her along, Lyndon Johnson walked over to the fence and started to follow the Kennedys, but the faces remained turned, and the arms remained stretched, toward the Kennedys even after they had passed, and Johnson quickly moved back to the gray convertible that had been rented for him. O’Brien made sure Yarborough got in. The senator sat on the left side of the back seat, behind the driver, a Texas state highway patrolman named
Herschel Jacks, the Vice President on the right side, behind Secret Service Agent Youngblood. Lady Bird, sitting between Yarborough and her husband, tried to make conversation but soon gave up. The two men weren’t speaking to or looking at each other—the only noises in the car came from the walkie-talkie radio that Youngblood was carrying on a shoulder strap—as the motorcade pulled out.

S
ENATE HEARINGS NORMALLY
break for lunch, but at 12:30, after two and a half hours of explaining his overall business relationship with
Bobby Baker, Reynolds had begun telling his two Rules Committee questioners—Van Kirk and Drennan—specifically about the pressures that had been brought on him to purchase advertising time on Lyndon Johnson’s television station, and they didn’t want him to stop. They sent a secretary out to bring back sandwiches and milk, and Reynolds continued talking.

T
HE FIRST FEW MILES
of the presidential procession were along an avenue flanked by low light-industrial factories, and relatively few people were watching as the motorcade swept past: an unmarked white police lead car, and helmeted motorcycle police outriders; then the Kennedys and Connallys in the presidential limousine with the flags fluttering from its bumpers and two motorcycle escorts flanking it at the rear; then the Queen Mary armored car with four agents erect on the running boards and Ken O’Donnell and
Dave Powers in the jump seats; then, after the careful seventy-five-foot gap, the gray vice presidential convertible and vice presidential follow-up car, the press cars and buses and the rest of the long caravan. But then the motorcade reached Dallas’ downtown, and turned onto Main Street. For a while, Main was lined on both sides by a row of tall buildings, so that as the cars drove between them, they might have been driving between the walls of a canyon, not a New York–height canyon, of course, but deep enough, and the windows of the buildings were filled, floor after floor, building after building, with people leaning out and cheering, and on the sidewalks the crowds were eight people, ten people deep. Overhead, every hundred yards or so, a row of flags hung vertically from wires stretched across the street, and at the end of the canyon, after the buildings ended, was a rectangle of open sky.

As the procession drove further into the canyon, the noise swelled and deepened, becoming louder and louder so that the motorcade was driving through a canyon of cheers. Every time the President waved, the crowd on the sidewalk surged toward him, pressing back the lines of policemen, so that the passage for the cars grew narrower, and the lead car was forced to reduce speed, from twenty miles an hour, to fifteen, to ten, to five. Every time Jackie waved a hand in its white glove, shrieks of “Jackie!” filled the air. As the tall governor with the leonine head of gray hair waved his big Stetson, the cheers swelled for him, too. The four passengers in the presidential limousine kept smiling at each other in delight.
“Mr
. President, you certainly can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you!”
Nellie Connally said; the President’s “eyes met mine and his smile got even wider,” Mrs. Connally was to recall.

T
RAILING THEM
in his rented car, driving between crowds of people cheering but not for him, sharing a seat with a man who had humiliated him, Lyndon Johnson was far enough behind the presidential limousine that the cheering for the Kennedys and Connallys—for John Connally, some of it, for his onetime assistant who had become his rival in Texas—had died down by the time his car passed, and most of the faces in the crowd were still turned to follow the presidential car as it drove away from them. So that, as Lyndon Johnson’s car made its slow way down the canyon, what lay ahead of him on that motorcade could, in a
way, have been seen by someone observing his life as a foretaste of what might lie ahead of him if he remained as Vice President for the next five years: five years of trailing behind another man, humiliated, almost ignored—most important, powerless. The vice presidency,
“filled with trips
 … 
chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping … in the end it is nothing.”
He had had three years of that nothing; to stay as Vice President might mean five years more of it.

And if there was nothing at the end of the Dallas canyon but empty sky, what, the observer might have asked, would there be for him at the end of that five-year-long canyon; what would there be at the end if he stayed on as Vice President? He had accepted the vice presidency because he had felt that at the end might be the presidency. Now there was another man who wanted the presidency. And in five years, Bobby Kennedy would have had five more years to build up a record. He would have had five years to hold other positions besides attorney general: secretary of Defense, perhaps—whatever positions he wanted, in the last analysis. And could Lyndon Johnson realistically believe, after watching the rapport between John Kennedy and his brother, that if President Kennedy had to choose between him and his brother to be his successor, he would choose Lyndon Johnson? Observing Lyndon Johnson’s life, one might have wondered if what was waiting for him at the end of the vice presidency, in that empty space at the end of it, was only that slight, hunched figure he had long hated and now had learned to fear?

And what if his vice presidency wasn’t five years longer, but only one? What if he was dropped from the ticket in 1964?

He had been saying for some time—had apparently convinced himself—that that was the probability. That belief—that fear—may, or may not, have been justified before the call to Copenhagen, before
Bobby Baker had been on magazine cover after magazine cover, before the name of Don
Reynolds had entered the picture; and before this trip to Texas. Given what the President was seeing for himself in Texas, given what was happening at that very moment in the Senate Office Building, the President’s assurances that he would be on the ticket might start to have a hollow ring indeed. Whether he had another term as Vice President or not, Lyndon Johnson’s prospects may indeed have justified the adjective he had been applying to them:
“finished.”

L
EAVING BEHIND
the deep crowds of Main Street, the motorcycle police, the lead car and the presidential limousine swung right onto Houston Street and then left onto Elm, which sloped slightly downhill toward a broad railroad overpass; on the right was a grassy open space, with scattered spectators standing in it, called “Dealey Plaza.” In Washington, at just about the same time, Don Reynolds was showing the Rules Committee investigators the papers—the invoices from the
Magnavox Company, the checks made out to KTBC—which he said proved his charges against Lyndon Johnson, pushing the documents, one by one, across
the witness table. In New York, the
Life
editors were assigning reporters from its task force to investigate specific areas of Lyndon Johnson’s finances while still debating whether the magazine should run a story on Johnson’s wealth in the magazine’s very next issue. Ahead of the vice presidential car, the spectators in Dealey Plaza began to applaud the Kennedys and the Connallys as Johnson followed in their wake.

There was a sharp, cracking sound.

It
“startled
” him, Lyndon Johnson was to say; it sounded like a
“report
or explosion,” and he didn’t know what it was. Others in the motorcade thought it was a backfire from one of the police motorcycles, or a firecracker someone in the crowd had set off, but John Connally, who had hunted all his life, knew in the instant he heard it that it was a shot from a high-powered rifle.

Rufus Youngblood didn’t know what it was, but he saw
“not
normal movements” in the presidential car ahead down the incline—President Kennedy seemed to be tilting toward his left—and in the Queen Mary immediately ahead of him, one of the agents was suddenly rising to his feet, with an automatic rifle in his hands. Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a
“voice
I had never heard him ever use,” Lady Bird says—“Get down! Get
down
!” and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leapt over the back of the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice President’s body, shouting again,
“Get down! Get down!”
By the time, a matter of only eight seconds later, that the next two sharp reports had cracked out—everyone knew what they were now—Lyndon Johnson was down on the floor in the back seat of the car, curled over on his right side. The sudden, loud, sharp sound, the hand suddenly grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down—now he was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him, pressing him down; Lyndon Johnson would never forget
“his
knees in my back and his elbows in my back.”

He couldn’t see anything other than Lady Bird’s shoes and legs in front of his face—she and Yarborough were ducking forward as far as they could. Above him, as he lay there, he heard Youngblood yelling to
Herschel Jacks to
“Close
it up! Close it up!”—the Secret Service agent still wasn’t sure what had happened, but he knew he would have the most protection if he stayed close to the car ahead of him that was packed with men and guns; and, lying on the floor with Youngblood on top of him, Lyndon Johnson felt the car beneath him leap forward as Jacks floored the gas pedal, and he felt the car speeding—
“terrifically
fast,” Lady Bird was to say,
“faster
and faster”; “I remember the way that car … zoomed,” Johnson was to say—and then the brakes were slammed on, and the tires screamed almost in his ear as the car took a right turn much too fast, squealing up the ramp to an expressway, and hurtled forward again.
“Stay
with them—keep close!” Youngblood was shouting above him. The shortwave radio was still strapped to Youngblood’s shoulder, so that it was almost in Johnson’s ear. The radio had been set to the Secret Service’s Baker frequency, which kept Youngblood in touch with
the vice presidential follow-up car, but now Johnson heard the agent’s voice above him say,
“I
am switching to Charlie”—the frequency that would connect him with the Queen Mary ahead of him. For a moment there was, from the radio, only crackling, and then Johnson heard someone saying,
“He’s
hit! Hurry, he’s hit!” and then
“Let’s
get out of here!”—and then in his ear a lot of almost unintelligible shouting, out of which one word emerged clearly:
“hospital
.”