The Passage of Power (74 page)

A
ND THEN THERE WAS
the element of time—in a number of permutations.

The most obvious was in itself daunting. Taking over the machinery of government—selecting a Cabinet, a White House staff, filling as many as possible of the seven hundred high-level governmental posts within a President’s discretion, drafting a legislative program, preparing for decisions on urgent foreign policy and defense questions left unresolved by the previous Administration, writing an inaugural address that would be measured against the great inaugural speeches of the past—is, even under normal circumstances, difficult enough. Prior to passage of the
Twentieth Amendment in 1933, a President-elect had had four months—from Election Day in November to March 4 of the following year—to prepare to be President; after the amendment, he had between ten and eleven weeks.
“The
eleven weeks,” wrote Neustadt, who advised Kennedy on his transition, “are hazardous because they are so few. They leave but little time to turn a campaign into an Administration.”
John F. Kennedy, assigning men to begin analyzing the “problems in the executive branch” because
“If
I am elected, I don’t want to wake up [the next morning] and have to ask myself, ’What in the world do I do now?,” had found those weeks to be barely enough time. Lyndon Johnson had less time than that. One moment he was not President—and the next moment he was. The interval between the moment he arrived in the cubicle at
Parkland Hospital and the moment he took the oath on Air Force One—the time he had in which to prepare himself—was slightly less than two hours.

Then there were, looming dead ahead, startlingly close, various dates.

One was the date of the next presidential election: November 3, 1964—less than a year away. Of the seven Vice Presidents who had previously succeeded to the presidency due to the death of the President, five—John Tyler,
Andrew Johnson,
Chester Arthur,
Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman—had done so with more than three years remaining before the next presidential election; one,
Millard Fillmore, had done so with more than two years remaining; only one,
Calvin Coolidge, had come to the office with less time remaining than that, and even Coolidge had had well over a year—more than fifteen months.

And Lyndon Johnson was facing deadlines that were even closer.

While the election would be in November, 1964, the Democratic National Convention, at which it would be decided whether he would receive the nomination to run in the election, would begin on August 24, 1964, a date only nine months away.

Like so many other aspects of Lyndon Johnson’s assumption of the presidency—the presidential transition of 1963—the imminence of those dates made it a transition unlike any other in American history. No Vice President had ever come to office with so little time in which to establish a record on which he could run in his own right. Johnson, Neustadt was to write,
“faced
the unprecedented challenge of assuming office and then running for election in the same first year.” Needing a record on which to run, he had very little time to create one.

Those were political deadlines. Other deadlines were governmental. The President had to deliver the State of the Union address when Congress reconvened, and in 1964 Congress was scheduled to reconvene on Monday, January 6—in six weeks. By law—an unbreakable deadline, the
Budget and Accounting Act of 1921—the President was required to submit his budget for the next fiscal year to Congress fourteen days after that Monday, on January 20: in eight weeks.

During the very next week in this November—the week in which President Kennedy was to be buried—an arbitrator’s decision on railroad featherbedding was scheduled to be filed with a United States District Court. The decision, fraught with implications both for railroad labor unions and for presidential relations with them, was being warily awaited both by the unions and by the railroad companies, and it had been warily awaited by the White House, too, because of the presidential actions that might be required as a result of it. A few days after the arbitrator’s decision, a presidential decision was supposed to be made on the wage-price guidelines vital to the economy. Now, suddenly, the decision on these issues would not be Kennedy’s but Johnson’s. And, excluded as he had been from Administration discussions, he was only vaguely familiar with the issues involved.

And tangled with and complicating the time factor—and every other factor
associated with the transition; looming over every aspect of Johnson’s ascension to the presidency—was one that made that ascension uniquely difficult, a complication that wasn’t out of the new age but seemed rather as if it were out of an age long past, a complication that required to plumb its depths not a Reston but a Shakespeare. The President, the King, was dead, murdered, but the King had a brother, a brother who hated the new King. The dead King’s men—the Kennedy men, the Camelot men—made up, in Shakespearean terms, a faction. And it was a faction that had a leader. An election was coming in less than a year, and a convention in nine months, but due to the faction and the brother, these were not the crucial dates. Because if the King’s faction, and the King’s brother, decided to contest Lyndon Johnson’s right to the nomination, the crucial date would be the first of the party primaries which preceded the convention—the
New Hampshire primary, on March 10, less than four months off. Unprecedented shock and grief and anxiety; unprecedented danger to America and the human race. Unprecedented time pressure, and problems with staff and Cabinet made uniquely difficult by the brother factor. Even Truman’s transition problems, Neustadt was to conclude, had been “easier” than Johnson’s. “Johnson’s situation was extreme.” Although seven Vice Presidents before him had suddenly been thrust into the White House by the President’s death, Johnson’s situation—the problems that confronted him, and that would confront America should he fail to solve them—were indeed in many ways without parallel in the transitions that had come before his.

A
ND AS WAS ALWAYS
the case with Lyndon Johnson, in addition to the obstacles before him there were the obstacles within, the emotions inside him that had been rubbed raw by that terrible youth in the Hill Country, the scars so deep that they raised the question of whether they would ever be healed—of whether anything could make him feel secure.

When he looked back on his ascension to the presidency in later years, these feelings were still vivid in his memory. The fact that he hadn’t been elected to the office was an objective consideration. But the words in which he described that aspect of his ascension went beyond the objective.
“Illegitimate
,” “naked,” “pretender,” “illegal.” And
“the
bigots and the dividers and the Eastern intellectuals, who were waiting to knock me down before I could even begin to stand up.… The whole thing was almost unbearable.” Fears, doubts, almost unbearable fears and doubts.

The need for continuity in personnel—the need to keep the Kennedy men from resigning, to keep Cabinet and staff in place—was a genuine need, an objective, rational, political consideration. But in describing that need, Johnson went beyond the political.
“I
simply couldn’t let the country think that I was all alone,” he was to say.

His education—his lack of a good one, of even an adequate one—added
fuel to those emotions, because of the way he felt about that education. During his presidency he would often say that when he convened a meeting of his top advisers, at the table would be men with Harvard degrees, Rhodes Scholars, Phi Beta Kappas—
“and
one from Southwest Texas State Teachers College.” The story was supposed to be funny, but when at the end, he laughed, he “always laughed loudly—too loudly,” says the reporter
Hugh Sidey, who heard it many times. “He obviously was only half joking.” And once, during the very early days of his presidency, Sidey, walking out of the Oval Office after an interview, heard behind him words from Lyndon Johnson that were not spoken loudly but very quietly, as if he was speaking to himself:
“I’m
not sure I can lead this country and keep it together, with my background.” His staff heard many similar remarks.
“He
felt a lack of sort of erudition,”
Walter Jenkins says. It wasn’t just that he was not well educated. It was that he knew he wasn’t—and that that knowledge hurt.

The Kennedy men, the “Harvards,” in his term, were so brilliant—
“a
lot of damn smart men,” he would call them—and his men weren’t. That was how he saw it. At a meeting on economic policy a few weeks after he became President, Horace Busby found himself disagreeing with two key economic advisers who had been appointed by Kennedy,
Kermit Gordon and Walter Heller. Sneaking a glance at Johnson, Busby saw that he was very disturbed, and after the meeting the President, taking him aside, told him angrily, “You just came here to embarrass me. Here you’ve got Rhodes Scholars and you’ve got Ph.D.s and all like that and … you’re telling them that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t you understand? These are the people that Kennedy had in there. They’re
ipso facto
a hell of a lot smarter than
you
are.” And the key word that let him understand Johnson’s feelings, Busby says, was “embarrass”—“He was embarrassed.”

Not only were the men on his staff not smart enough, he believed, he also felt that his personal acquaintance didn’t include as many “smart” men as he was going to need to bring into the Administration.
Among the “things
he envied about the Kennedys most of all was that their old school ties go back so many years and so when Kennedy became President, he had people he could really trust because he’d gone to prep school with them, college with them and all that. Johnson didn’t have these old school ties and friendships,” says his aide
James Jones. However unjustified Johnson’s statement about his lack of “smart” men—and it was quite untrue; it would have been hard to find a political strategist more astute than
George Reedy, who had, after all, been at Johnson’s right hand during all the years of his ascent to power in the Senate; Busby, forgotten though he may be by history today, was to Lyndon Johnson what Ted Sorensen was to Jack Kennedy, a wordsmith with a rare gift for turning his principal’s thoughts into memorable prose—that was nonetheless how Johnson felt. In an indication of his feelings, Lady Bird would say,
“Our
pool of high-calibre brains … is not too deep and wide.” Nothing the Kennedys felt about Lyndon Johnson could be any worse than what Lyndon Johnson felt about himself.

The strength of these feelings, these insecurities—these terrors from his youth that combined to create a fear of failure so strong that, in words he frequently used to describe himself, they “immobilized” and “paralyzed” him—had been dramatically apparent in the effectiveness with which they had kept him from entering the race for President until it was too late.

And now, stepping into the presidency, if he failed, the failure would be on a gigantic scale, on the largest scale of all, under the brightest lights of all, before an audience that would be the entire nation.

W
HILE SOME COMPONENTS
of Lyndon Johnson’s character added to the difficulties of his ascension to the presidency, there were, however, within that complex persona, other components.

One was the fact that in addition to his knowledge of governing, his understanding of the craft of governance—and no one understood that craft better than Lyndon Johnson—he possessed something that was beyond knowledge and understanding, that was instinct. It is possible—probable, in fact—that he had thought through long before November 22 what he would do if he suddenly became President. But unless one believes that he planned or in some way was aware in advance of the assassination (and nowhere in the letters, memoranda and other written documents in the
Lyndon B. Johnson Library, the John F. Kennedy Library and the other public and private collections the author has reviewed—and nowhere in the interviews that the author has conducted—has he found facts to support such a theory), he couldn’t have foreseen the unprecedented circumstances under which it actually happened. Nonetheless, he seems to have known instantly—or at least by the end of those minutes in the Parkland cubicle—what had to be done.

“Everything was in chaos,” he was to recall years later. “We were all spinning around and around, trying to come to grips with what had happened, but the more we tried to understand it, the more confused we got. We were like a bunch of cattle caught in the swamp, unable to move in either direction, simply circling ’round and ’round. I understood that; I knew what had to be done. There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp. And that is for the man on the horse to take the lead, to assume command, to provide direction. In the period of confusion after the assassination, I was that man.”

And there was his willingness to do it—his will to decide, his will to
act,
to use power. During the last three years, the ability to use power had been taken from him, but with the crack of that gunshot in Dallas, he had power again, had again the ability to act. Fears had to be overcome for him to do so, for him not only to act but to act firmly and decisively; there was more reason than ever before—far greater possibilities for failure—for him to be
“immobilized
,”
“paralyzed
” now. His memories of that time reveal how clearly he understood the possibility of failure before him. Recalling for his memoirs how he felt after O’Donnell told him “He’s gone,” he said,
“I
was a man in trouble, in a world that is never more than minutes away from catastrophe”; “I realized that ready or not,
new and immeasurable duties had been thrust upon me. There were tasks to perform that only I had the authority to perform.… I knew that not only the nation but the whole world would be anxiously following every move I made—watching, judging, weighing, balancing.

“I was catapulted without preparation into the most difficult job any mortal man could hold. My duties would not wait a week, or a day, or even an hour.”