The Passage of Power (87 page)

Johnson was aware of the significance of his accomplishment.
“By
remaining on the job, they helped give the government and the nation a sense of continuity during critical times—a sense of continuity which in turn strengthened my hand as Chief Executive,” he was to write in his memoirs. Washington insiders were aware of it, too—and were aware also of how difficult that accomplishment had been. Familiar with the feelings of the Kennedy men toward the new President, many insiders had considered it simply impossible that Johnson would be able to persuade more than a few of them to stay. He had persuaded all of them to stay. And he had done it so fast! Johnson’s
“intensity
and persistence … in carrying out this job was … extraordinary,” Evans and Novak wrote. “There was no hesitation, no ceremony, no delay.” Almost the entire job had been carried out in three days—Saturday, Sunday and Monday—those three days during which the nation had paid little attention to what Lyndon Johnson was doing. By the time on Monday afternoon that their beloved leader’s body had been laid to rest, his men had agreed to stay and serve under his successor’s flag.

“T
HE END OF THE SERVICE
at
Arlington,” to
McGeorge Bundy, “was like the fall of a curtain, or the snapping of taut strings”—and when the curtain came up again, it came up on Lyndon Johnson.

After Kennedy’s body was lowered into the ground at 3:34 p.m. that Monday, Johnson was driven back to the Executive Office Building. The vote on the Mundt bill was less than twenty-four hours away. Larry O’Brien had had enough time to mourn. When Johnson telephoned him, at 4:40 p.m., he was sitting in his office with Ken O’Donnell, who was drinking, and, intermittently, crying, and when the President called, O’Brien was reluctant even to talk to him. When Johnson used the same line he had used with him on Air Force One—“I’m most anxious for you to continue just like you have been, because I need you a lot more than he did”—O’Brien sighed audibly into the receiver and said, “Mr. President, did you—Ken is here with me. Did you—do you have any immediate problem?” Johnson said “no,” that he “just wanted you to know … how strongly I felt about you.… I think you know … the admiration I have for you, and—” O’Brien interrupted him. “I know that, Mr. President,” he said in a very flat voice. Johnson said, “I don’t expect you to love me as much as you did him, but I expect you will, after we’ve been around awhile.” “Right,” O’Brien replied.

But the time for that line—the time for begging—was over. If O’Brien truly cared about Kennedy’s memory, he had a duty to it—and Johnson summoned him to his post. “I think it would be a terrible thing to Kennedy’s memory to have this wheat sale thing repudiated,” he said. O’Brien had to agree. “Yeah,” he said. And Johnson’s next words to Kennedy’s congressional vote-counter were less emotional than professional: one pro speaking to another. “I hope they got the votes in the Senate,” he said. “Do you know anything about it?”

How could O’Brien respond to a summons like that but obey? “I’ll check
that,” he said, and with those words became, whatever his feelings about Johnson at that moment, effectively a member of his team. “Now, what’s important is that we check those votes pretty carefully,” Johnson said. “Right,” O’Brien replied.

“I want somebody to give it a little attention … and then you let me know any suggestions you have because we’re in this thing, right up to our ears,” Johnson said. “I did tell Mansfield that I thought it would be a terrible thing to Kennedy’s memory and a helluva way to launch a new administration,” Johnson said. “I agree,” O’Brien said; “I agree.” Changing out of the formal striped trousers and black tailcoat he had worn for the funeral and into a business suit, he had himself driven to Capitol Hill and went to work.

Then Johnson had to meet with Adlai Stevenson on a problem that was, Theodore White wrote (after talking to Stevenson),
“abrupt
, urgent, unpostponable.” Stevenson had been scheduled to address the United Nations on Tuesday—in less than twenty-four hours—on America’s policy on orbiting armed spacecraft; he felt the speech could not be canceled, lest that arouse suspicions of disarray in the American government. Instead of spacecraft, he felt, the subject should be the strongest possible reassurance to U.N. delegates, who were worried about Johnson’s views, that the new President supported the international organization. Johnson approved the change in topic, and the text.
“President
Johnson has directed me to affirm to this Assembly that there will be no ‘Johnson policy’ toward the United Nations—any more than there was a ‘Kennedy policy,’ ” Stevenson told the U.N. the next day.
“There
was—and is—only a United States policy.” Then it was time for the State Department reception for the foreign leaders who had come to Washington—except that the Democratic chairman of California,
Jesse Unruh, whose support he might need in a few months, accompanied by two other key California Democrats, had been waiting at Cliff Carter’s desk “hoping,” as Carter’s note to Johnson said, for “a quick visit with you.” The visit was held (“as quick as possible,” noted one of Johnson’s secretaries)—and then he was at the State Department.

This appearance, his first public appearance since the funeral, was before a small but very select audience, about as select an audience as could be found on the face of the earth, and there was, as one account put it,
“electricity
”—the glamour and glitter of this
“unprecedented
gathering of world power under one roof”—in State’s three brilliantly lit top-floor reception rooms with their view of the Potomac and, beyond it,
Arlington Cemetery. The rooms were filled with sashes and turbans and medals; Queen Frederika of Greece led Emperor Haile Selassie to a couch, while, nearby, Mikoyan of Russia fenced with de Gaulle of France; everywhere one turned there was a world-famous face. And as Johnson stood before a fireplace receiving heads of state, with Secretary of State
Dean Rusk standing at his shoulder, two of Rusk’s aides—his executive secretary,
Benjamin H. Read, and State’s chief of protocol,
Angier Biddle Duke—watching nearby, were apprehensive. These leaders were there, Duke was to say, to
“take
the measure” of Lyndon Johnson, and the State Department officials were anxious
about how the measuring would go. If there was a focal point—in addition to the Kennedy circle, of course—for uncertainty about the new President, it was at State, not in Dean Rusk’s office but among the officials below Rusk, the officials who, rightly or wrongly, had quailed at Johnson’s openness and exuberance on his foreign travels, embarrassed at the impression of America that they felt he was conveying to the world, and who, aware of Kennedy’s orders that he not be allowed to visit Russia, felt that their embarrassment had been shared by the late President. Read was to recall that State’s attempts to keep Johnson informed on foreign policy
“had
never worked out terribly successfully.… I think it would be foolish to pretend that it was otherwise because it wasn’t.” Whatever their feelings about Johnson, furthermore, State’s diplomats knew that one wrong word could bring international complications, and knew also that there had been no time for them to give Johnson any but the most cursory briefing on the right words. Looking at the big Texan (he towered over everyone in the room but de Gaulle), who he felt had done such a poor job representing the United States in the past, Read didn’t know, he was to say, what to expect at this reception.

But, he was to say, he certainly didn’t expect what he got.

“The
President had had a terribly busy day,” he was to say, “doing the thousand-and-one things that he needed to do in those desperate early days. And the briefing time was just non-existent.” Read had typed notes on five-by-eight white cards, and “we would put these little cards into his hand just moments before he would be greeting these people.” Carrying out the instructions on some of the cards required delicacy: for Prince Kantol, prime minister of
Cambodia, a country with whom American relations were in an advanced state of deterioration, the card read: “Tone—firm, no nonsense, though kindly.… President Kennedy had a high regard for
Prince Sihanouk; you share that regard. President Kennedy personally investigated the charges of U.S. complicity in the
Khmer Serei plots and gave Prince Sihanouk his categorical assurances that they were false.… The U.S. respects Cambodia’s desire for neutrality and supports it, but if international guarantees are wanted, the right way to get them is not to begin by continuing to accuse the U.S. of complicity in plots.” Watching Johnson now, however, Read started to relax. Glancing at each card for a moment, the moment that was all he had,
“grasping
the essence of it” in an instant, “he would work into the conversation points which we had suggested.”

Nor was it just with talking points that Johnson was making an impression. As each minister or prime minister or prince came up to him, Johnson would shake his hand. But then that hand wasn’t released. Still holding it, Johnson would grin—and in almost every case, the prince or prime minister would grin back. From his earliest days campaigning in the Texas Hill Country as a gawky, awkward young politician, Johnson had displayed a remarkable gift for making an immediate connection with people he had never met before. Part of his technique was a handshake, which he turned into more than a handshake.
Max Frankel of the
New York Times,
watching nearby, wrote,
“The
average dignitary
received a firm handclasp that was held for minutes, if necessary, until condolences and wishes had been expressed. Older acquaintances received not only the prolonged handshake but also the covering clasp of the left hand; they were held there through longer remarks and, usually, broad smiles.” Held firmly—but also in a friendly way. It was a technique that had worked with farmers and their wives, and it worked now with prime ministers. The State Department men saw, as Duke put it, that Johnson
“understood
 … how he was being measured by them.” And they saw that the foreign leaders were impressed. “He was marvelous,” Duke says. “He came away with a good … deal of respect.”

Mikoyan approached, flanked by Ambassador Dobrynin and an interpreter. A private meeting had been scheduled for the following morning with
“the
shrewdest man of the Russian leadership,” but this tonight was a first impression. State wanted Johnson to project willingness to continue his predecessor’s efforts to ease tensions between the two superpowers—together with firmness in protecting America’s interests. Taking Mikoyan’s hand, Johnson chatted with him for about ninety seconds and posed for a photograph,
“without
smiles.” Although the expression on Johnson’s face was not unpleasant, the photographs showed a very shrewd man squinting up at a very tough one.

And then came the one-on-one meetings, in Rusk’s office on the seventh floor, with Ikeda of Japan and Pearson of Canada—after, of course, de Gaulle.

Johnson had met with the French President once before, and it had been an unpleasant occasion as de Gaulle, with his customary haughtiness, had lectured Johnson on America’s role in the world. The unpleasantness had been rekindled in Johnson’s mind by a report
Bundy had handed to him that morning: at a recent meeting between de Gaulle and “an allied Ambassador,” the report said, de Gaulle had indicated that despite America’s NATO commitments, Western Europe would not be able to rely on the United States in the event of a Soviet invasion; in both world wars, he had said, America had arrived late—only Pearl Harbor had brought us into the second one. When, shortly before the reception, Bundy had told him that his first private meeting would be with Le Grand Charles, Johnson had for a moment reacted with a lack of enthusiasm so noticeable that Bundy asked,
“Does
that bother you?”

“Naw—a little,” Johnson had said. He had been hoping his talk with de Gaulle could be brief. “I thought I’d sandwich him in … disagreeable. See, he had urged that we—” But then he caught himself. He was President now. “All right,” he told Bundy. “I’ll follow your judgment.” When de Gaulle now asserted, in Johnson’s recollection, that differences between the two countries had been exaggerated and that Frenchmen knew they could always count on the support of the United States, “I suppressed a smile,” Johnson was to recall—and he evidently suppress[ed] it successfully. No one watching the two men talk would have suspected there had ever been anything “disagreeable” in their relationship. Watching from across the room as Johnson met one on one
with “the
real heavyweights” was, Read says, “quite a sight.… It was done with real skill by him
under the maximum of difficulties.” What were his feelings about Johnson by
the
end of the reception? “The greatest feeling of admiration.… It was quite a show.”

Then he had to rush back to the Executive Office Building.

As he had been walking down the hill at Arlington that afternoon, he had noticed a number of state governors in the crowd, and “their presence,” as one account gives it, “had suddenly registered on him,” and he had realized that, trying as he was to meet with the nation’s leaders to build rapport with them and to build their confidence in him, here, in the governors, were whole handfuls of key leaders, chief executives of the states of the Union, all in Washington at the same time, ready to hand. And he had thought, moreover, thought in an instant—biographies of a writer or an artist would call such a moment an “epiphany”—of a way to make use of governors. To break the logjam on Capitol Hill, he needed to influence senators and representatives—needed levers outside Congress to put pressure on it—and he had learned during the 1960 campaign that governors could put quite a bit of pressure on senators and representatives. Immediately after his return to 274 after the funeral, he had told his staff to invite the governors to a meeting in his office at eight o’clock that evening; with the funeral over, some of them would probably be leaving already, he said: stop them.
William Scranton of Pennsylvania was, in fact, waiting in line to board an airplane back to Philadelphia when he was asked to return. It wasn’t possible to get them all, but the staff got thirty-five, and they were waiting in 274’s conference room when he hurried in at 8:30, apologizing for being late, saying he had just been talking with General de Gaulle and the talk had lasted longer than expected.