The Passage of Power (89 page)

They seemed to feel there were alternatives to giving Byrd what he wanted, he told the six economic advisers; there weren’t, and he gave them a lesson in political realities.

You couldn’t get around the Senate, he said, telling them about a President, a President at the very height of his popularity, who had tried it, attempting in 1938 to unseat southern conservative senators by going into their states to campaign against them. “Of course, you could try to take it to the country. FDR tried that, with his tremendous majority, and got licked,” he said. “It wouldn’t work” if they tried it now, either. He gave them a lesson in parliamentary tactics—a master class in Senate tactics. As
Ackley recorded, “The civil rights bill came up. The President said he [had] told President Kennedy not to send it up at least until after the appropriations [bills] were passed. Once it was sent up, Russell gave the orders to stall, to do nothing, and that’s what happened.” And that’s what was going to continue to happen on the tax bill, and the budget, and the appropriations bills unless the conservatives got what they wanted. Economists could talk all they wanted, he told the economists; the reality was the Senate, the Senate Finance Committee—and Harry Byrd. “You had to give up something to buy off Byrd,” he told them, and what they had to give up was that billion and one hundred and fifty million.

His message hadn’t gotten through to the Administration before. But it was his Administration now, and they heard what he was saying. “Dillon agreed that you had to pay the price to get the tax bill, but it was worth it,” Ackley’s notes say. (“Then when you have it, you can do what you want,” Dillon added, and Johnson agreed: “Like Ike did … talked economy and then spent.”) And “at the end Heller agreed that if it were a real choice between a tax bill right away and one and a half billion of expenditure … it was worth the price.” The deal would be made, Johnson indicated. “It might take a week to work [it] out.”

The troika and their deputies filed out. They had been meeting with Johnson for about an hour. When the meeting had started, they had felt the tax bill was stalled. Now they saw a way it could be passed. They felt it
would
be passed. Had the governors been impressed with Lyndon Johnson? So were they. The budget–tax bill situation contained so many complexities. They had been grasped so quickly. Decisions had had to be made. They had been made—so quickly. When the economic advisers had entered his office, their tax bill and budget had been trapped, the government still operating, as it had been operating for months, under a makeshift budget, with the budget for the year to come still in limbo. If, to use Lyndon Johnson’s terms, they had been mired in a congressional swamp,
“caught … unable to move … simply circling ’round and ’round,” needing someone “to assume command, to provide direction,” needing, in other words, a leader, by the
time they left, an hour later, they felt they had one, “affable and relaxed, but always in command … confident … that the problem could be solved,” a leader who might, in fact, have found at last a way out of the swamp.

As for America as a whole, during the past three days the country, its eyes riveted on the memorial ceremonies for John F. Kennedy, had paid little attention to Lyndon Johnson, and there was widespread uneasiness about what lay ahead—a nation’s need to feel that, its leader dead, it had a new leader. But by the end of those three days, while America as a whole had not yet paid much attention to Lyndon Johnson, people who had, during those days, dealt with him in person, face-to-face or over the telephone—the troika, the governors, the princes and prime ministers, the worried young State Department aides, his own ministers:
Bundy, Rusk, McNamara—those who had watched him up close as he wrestled with problems that had to be resolved, that could not wait, knew, by the end of those three days, that America did in fact have one.

The drama into which Lyndon Johnson had been plunged was a drama that had begun with the transfer of power—great power—in an instant, without warning. It had continued with the assumption and use of that power in its very early stages—in its first three days, in what is called the “transition” between the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, the passage of power from one Administration to the other. And in these early stages, already perilous because of circumstances that made it difficult for him to create an impression of continuity and confidence, it was a passage through uncharted waters, a passage that in significant ways was without parallel in American history. No precedents existed to guide Lyndon Johnson through some of the problems that confronted him. He had had to create his own precedents, and had done so with such success that
Time
’s Sidey, writing years later, said,
“Even
now … one must marvel at Johnson’s total grasp of the machinery of government.” There was “no script” for what he had done, Sidey said, and yet “his assumption of power” was “flawless.”

A
ND BY THE END
of the third day—or, to be more precise, by early the next morning, Tuesday morning—America had a leader who had assured himself of victory in his first battle.

“I want somebody to give it a little attention,” Lyndon Johnson had told Larry O’Brien about the Mundt bill, and O’Brien had gone to work—and no sooner had Johnson finished with the troika at about 10:15 Monday night than he gave it a little attention himself, working to defeat the bill by telephoning not only senators who were undecided about it, but senators who had announced unequivocally that they would support it. There was no time to lose. The vote was only a few hours away.
“All
of us worked far into the night on that,” Johnson was to write. He had a strong argument to use: that a vote for Mundt would be a
repudiation of Jack Kennedy—and of him.
“He
came hard to the point,” reported Evans and Novak, who spoke to several of the recipients of his calls, transforming the issue
“from
a question of foreign policy toward Moscow … into a vote of confidence in the new President. In essence, he said: Do you want the first action of the United States Senate to be a posthumous repudiation of John F. Kennedy and a slap in the face of Lyndon Johnson.”

Framing the issue that way changed votes, and by about eleven o’clock that night, he had enough so that he knew he had won.
³
But for his purpose—to show he was in charge—he wanted not just a victory, but a rout. “That wheat thing—I hope that gets
murdered,
” he said. He kept making calls. And the vote against the bill the next day would be 57 to 36. “
WHEAT BILL—FIRST JOHNSON VICTORY,
” the headlines said.

During his years in the Senate as, year by year, during his time as Assistant Leader and then Leader and Majority Leader, the legend of Lyndon Johnson had grown, one element that had contributed to his mastery of the Senate had been his intuition, his rare gift for seeing the larger implications in an individual bill. Another element had been his decisiveness: his gift, equally rare, not only for sensing in an instant, in the midst of the cut and thrust and parry of debate on the Senate floor, which way the Senate’s mood was running on a bill, and not only, if the mood was running in the wrong direction, for sensing the moment at which the tide might be turned, but a gift as well not only for sensing the moment, but for seizing it—for launching, on the instant, maneuvers that turned the tide.

Three years though it had been since he had had an opportunity to use those gifts, he hadn’t forgotten how.

T
HOUGH THE SCENES
Lyndon Johnson had played that day—with the hundred heads of state, the thirty-five governors, the troika—had been crucial, they had been played before small audiences, and before such audiences, the smaller the better, he had usually performed well throughout his career. But on Wednesday, in his address to the joint session of Congress, he was going to have to appear before the entire country.

He was well aware that, as
Newsweek
warned its readers that week, while he could be “charming, informed and persuasive in man-to-man talk, he often seems corny and tedious in public address”—in prepared, full-length speeches to large audiences. With very rare exceptions, such as the talks at the Zembo Mosque, in formal addresses before large audiences he had, all his life, been unable to conquer his tendency to talk too fast, to rush over—and blur—the points he wanted to make. And the audience for this address would be not merely the thousand or so people seated before him and in the galleries above
but the tens of millions who would be watching him on television—the medium that had always been particularly unkind to him, the medium in which the impression he made with his bellowing, hectoring, vigorously gesticulating style had almost invariably merited the “corny” and “tedious” adjectives, and other adjectives as well: ponderous, dogmatic, loud, overbearing, irritating, off-putting. On Wednesday, in addition, he would be following onto the television screen a very hard act for anyone to follow: the greatest political performer who had ever appeared on television, one whose grace and wit, handsome face and boyish smile had been made newly vivid to America by the replays of his speeches and press conferences that had been on that screen, hour after hour, for three days.

A lot was riding on this speech for Lyndon Johnson. The country wasn’t familiar with him, didn’t feel it knew him. This address would, to a great extent, be its first impression of him—and first impressions can be lasting. As
Time
’s
Loye Miller put it,
“Overshadowing
everything else” Johnson had done since taking office, “it would be beyond doubt the most important speech of his political life, because from it a very shaken citizenry would form judgments” of him, “take away impressions and opinions which it would” be hard to change. The American people, Miller wrote, “are anxious to size up their new President, anxious to believe that he has what it takes.” But if, at the end of the speech, they didn’t believe that, everything he had accomplished in the past three days wouldn’t matter very much.
“If
it failed, all the doubts, oh, more than doubts, all the suspicion of him would only be fortified, and nothing he said in the future would erase that original mistake,” another Miller, the author
Merle Miller, was to write. Johnson himself was aware of the stakes. As
Bill Moyers told Loye Miller, “He knew that the people watching it were burning with the question, ‘Who is this man?’ He felt that it would be setting off a chain reaction of opinion about the President. And he felt that since he was in office by accident, it was very important to show people right now that his Administration would not be government by accident.” But what if he didn’t show them that? He had understood from the first moments after the assassination the importance of instilling confidence in him in the American people. After the speech, they would either have confidence in him—or not. And if they didn’t, all the assumptions about the inevitability of renomination for a sitting President would be meaningless. Speculation about rival candidates would begin immediately.

A lot riding for him—and a lot riding for America. Should the speech fail to instill confidence in him, the anxiety and unease would still be there, and John Kennedy’s programs—civil rights, the tax cut, education, foreign aid, all the legislation that had been stalled for so long in Congress—would still be stalled.

M
EN WHO REGARDED
themselves as his friends, who had known him or worked with him for a long time and had heard him make many speeches, were very worried. Congressman Kilgore, who had, over the years, sat in on many
coaching sessions in which Johnson was told not to wave his arms and bellow and talk too fast and who had, many times, watched Johnson try to follow that advice, and fail, telephoned
Liz Carpenter to tell her he must follow it this time, that this was “the most important speech he would ever give,” and that “he must not wave his arms from the rostrum of the House, he must not shout or speak too fast … and he must say the right things.” Having worked with Johnson for a long time, Kilgore expected the response to such advice to be rage; instead, on Tuesday, Johnson invited him to the White House to review drafts of the speech, and also to ride in his limousine when he went to Capitol Hill to deliver it. (When he went to the White House that Tuesday, Kilgore didn’t wear his customary pearl-gray Texas Stetson. The Texas image was more infuriating than ever to some people at that moment, he was to explain. “The worst service his friends could perform for Johnson would be to strut in and out of the White House wearing Stetson hats.” And he told Johnson he wouldn’t ride to the Capitol with him. “The best help he could give his old friend, he told the President, was to stay away from him in public.… The President must” not “convey the impression that his closest friends were conservative Texas politicians.” He went to the speech in a taxi.)

J
OHNSON KNEW SOME
of what he wanted to say. Telling
Busby on Sunday morning to begin drafting the speech, he mentioned a phrase Kennedy had used in his inaugural address; he wanted to play on that phrase. Also, on a notepad on his desk in 274, he had begun scrawling words among the doodles, and one of the words was “hate.” “[Assassination] product of hate,” he scribbled. “Get rid of Hate.” And he knew who he wanted as the speech’s principal drafter: the man he felt was the finest speechwriter of them all. When, on Saturday, he had asked Ted Sorensen to begin putting some thoughts together, the young Nebraskan had been too dazed with grief to respond, but when Johnson telephoned him again on Sunday, he agreed, because of his love for and loyalty to his dead leader—and to what he had stood for to
“commit
LBJ to carrying on Kennedy’s program.” Although drafts had been solicited from State and Treasury and from individuals like
John Kenneth Galbraith, following Sorensen’s agreement, all drafts were submitted to him, even Busby’s; Sorensen gave them short shrift, except for one three-paragraph segment from Busby—the segment that made use of Kennedy’s inaugural phrase—that was so good (and that dovetailed so perfectly with Sorensen’s purposes) that it stayed in through every draft.