The Passage of Power (90 page)

Sorensen’s final draft was very much a tribute to Kennedy from Johnson; it included the line
“I
who cannot fill his shoes must occupy his desk.” That sentence, not surprisingly, didn’t survive, as was the case with the most extravagant of Sorensen’s other tributes to Kennedy: “No man has ever done so much for so many in so little time,” for example. Johnson liked the rest of the draft, although, feeling it needed what
Abe Fortas called
“a
little corning up,” he had Fortas and the master of corn, Hubert Humphrey, come to The Elms that evening.

After dinner Fortas, Humphrey and several other Johnson allies worked on the speech at the dining room table. While the corning was completed rather quickly, a fierce debate then erupted—over the emphasis to be given in the speech to civil rights. “A great issue was whether he would recommend congressional action” on rights, Fortas was to recall, “and, if so, whether he should put that as a number one item.” Several of the men at the table said that pressing for passage of a civil rights bill would jeopardize the tax cut, and the appropriations bills, and would shatter Johnson’s relationship with the southerners who had always been the base of his strength in Congress, and whose support he would need there now. The discussion had gone on, Fortas was to say, “for hours”—until about 2:30 in the morning—with Johnson sitting silently listening when, Fortas says, an “incident” occurred “which renewed my pride in him.”

“One of the wise, practical people around the table” urged Johnson not to press for civil rights in his first speech, because there was no chance of passage, and a President shouldn’t waste his power on lost causes—no matter how worthy the cause might be. “The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” he said.

“Well
, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Lyndon Johnson replied.

T
HEN THE SPEECH WAS FINISHED
. It was sent off to the White House to be typed, in large type, and placed in the black loose-leaf notebook Johnson would take to Capitol Hill with him. The next morning, at about eleven o’clock, he closed the door to the Oval Office, and worked alone editing the speech. Moyers had
“never
seen him do [that] before.”

His edits were small, but they added drama. The text in front of Lyndon Johnson included the phrase “the dream of education for our youth.” Johnson changed it to “the dream of education for our
children.
” The text spoke of “the dream of jobs for all who seek them.” “For all who seek them—
and need them,
” Johnson wrote in. The text urged the passage of Kennedy’s tax bill “for which he fought.” “For which he fought—
all this long year,
” Johnson added. It urged the passage of Kennedy’s civil rights bill “for which he fought.” “For which he fought
so long,
” Johnson added.

And the text wasn’t being edited just for drama.

It was being edited—by this man who knew he had never been able to speak effectively before large audiences—to help him speak effectively this time, the most important time. To try to keep himself from rushing through it, blurring its meaning and its force—as, for thirty years, despite every effort, he had almost invariably done—he had it retyped in one-sentence paragraphs in an attempt to make himself pause between the sentences. Then, because he had used that device before and it hadn’t worked, he reinforced it by writing in, in hand, between many paragraphs a reminder to himself:
“Pause.”
And then, as if he was afraid that he would nevertheless still speak too fast, he wrote in
“Pause—Pause.”
Before a one-line paragraph he wrote in
“Pause Pause.”
Then, after the paragraph, he wrote again,
“Pause Pause.”
For thirty years, talking too fast, he had almost invariably rushed through key words he should have emphasized. When he finished editing this text, it was filled with underlining of words he wanted to emphasize.

Then he was in the car with Sorensen, O’Brien and Salinger, motorcycle outriders in front, Secret Service and staff cars behind, driving—fast—past a hundred flags flying at half-mast from the government fortresses along Pennsylvania Avenue, with above them, on the buildings’ roofs, policemen with rifles outlined black against the sky; spectators, however, were “sparse,” Tom Wicker noticed. “Even in the East Plaza of the Capitol, as he got out of his car, only a few people watched and applauded.” Then he was standing in a corridor outside the House Chamber, behind Doorkeeper
Fishbait Miller, and then the tall double doors swung open and Fishbait stepped through and announced, “Mr. Speaker—the President of the United States,” and started to walk up the center aisle to the dais, and Johnson walked in behind him.

The Chamber, bright in the glare of television lights, was jammed—every seat taken, in the galleries above people jammed even on the steps in the aisles: in the presidential box, Lady Bird and his daughters; the family retainers, Zephyr and
Sammy Wright; and the others he had placed there: Mayors Wagner and Daley and Governors Lawrence and Sanders and liberal symbol Schlesinger; in the press gallery, photographers elbowing each other for a better angle for their bulky cameras. Sitting in the front rows below the dais were the black-robed Supreme Court Justices, the bemedaled Joint Chiefs, ambassadors of foreign nations, and the Cabinet (Robert Kennedy, gaunt and wan, was sitting at the end of the Cabinet row, staring at the floor) as Johnson walked down the center aisle, his face set and unsmiling, and went up to the dais and opened the notebook for the speech on which so much depended.

“A
LL
I
HAVE
I would have given gladly not to be standing here today,” he began.

The sentence was eloquent, sorrowful. A hush fell over the Chamber, the hush of hundreds of men and women so intent on a speaker’s words that they barely moved.

“The greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time,” he said. “Today John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works that he left behind. He lives on in the mind and memories of mankind. He lives on in the hearts of his countrymen.”

The next lines on the page in front of Lyndon Johnson were “No words are sad enough to express our sense of loss. No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the forward thrust of America that he began.” But the words as Johnson spoke them
did
express that sense and that determination—because of the way he spoke them: so slowly, with a deep, grave
dignity behind them, that they seemed to reverberate across the rows of listeners before him and above him. He stood erect behind the rostrum, in dark blue suit and tie, a tall, strong figure, and there was an air of command in the way his big head turned from side to side as he spoke, taking in the Chamber, his dark eyes intense behind the rimless glasses. And when he spoke of “determination” and the need to thrust forward, so caught up was he in what he was saying that his head and shoulders thrust forward as if his entire body was pounding home the words, his eyes narrowing, his jaw jutting, and his lips tightening into a straight, grim line in an expression the senators below him remembered from another time: the expression of a Lyndon Johnson determined to win. The audience broke into applause.

He defined the dreams that Kennedy had “vitalized by his drive and by his dedication”—“The dream of conquering … space—the dream of partnership across the Atlantic—and across the Pacific as well—the dream of a
Peace Corps … the dream of education for all of our children.” He would carry on the fight for those dreams, he said: “now the ideas and the ideals which he so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action.” America “will keep its commitments from South Viet-Nam to West Berlin,” he said.

And then he arrived at the paragraphs that picked up on Kennedy’s inaugural phrase.

“On the 20th day of January, in 1961, John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished ‘in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But,’ he said, ‘let us begin.’ ”

Johnson paused, and there was the thrust of his head again and the narrowed eyes, narrowed almost into slits, and the stern hard mouth and the jaw jabbing out as he said, “Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue.

“This is our challenge,” Johnson said, “not to hesitate, not to pause, not to turn about and linger over this evil moment, but to continue on our course so that we may fulfill the destiny that history has set for us.”

“Pause Pause,”
Johnson had written at that point. He would have had to do that anyway—because of the applause.

W
HEN HE RESUMED
, he said that “Our most immediate tasks are here on this Hill”—and then he told the senators and representatives before him what the first task was.

He had not, it now turned out, accepted the “wise, practical” advice tendered at The Elms. “First,” he said, “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the
civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”

“Write it in the books of law.”
He had written civil rights into the books of law, written it twice, and his next words were a reminder of that. “I urge you again, as I did in 1957 and again in 1960, to enact a
civil rights law.” The legislation he had been forced to settle for then, in those years, had been inadequate, and he admitted that, urging the legislators before him to enact this time a law that would “eliminate from this Nation every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race or color.”

Later, in another speech, he would explain that if he hadn’t been able to do more for civil rights before, the situation was different now. Referring to the brown-skinned children he had taught in Cotulla, he would say,
“I
never thought that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students … and people like them all over the country. But now I do have that chance. And I’ll let you in on a secret. I mean to use it.” Although he didn’t make that personal explanation now, in this first speech, he nonetheless got the point across. Before he had finished with his sentences on civil rights, the House Chamber erupted in applause, the longest and loudest of his entire speech.

Not everyone was applauding, of course. Sitting in the second and third rows of seats, directly behind the Cabinet, since, as senior members of the Senate, they had led the procession of senators into the Chamber and had been seated first in the Senate section, were two rows of southern senators: Russell,
Byrd, Eastland, Talmadge, Thurmond, and the rest, the men who had raised Lyndon Johnson to power in the Senate and had supported him for President, who had swallowed the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills because (in addition, of course, to the fact that they were weak bills) of their belief that
“he’d
be with them forever,” that the civil rights bills he had passed and the civil rights speeches he had made were merely gestures he had had to make because of his presidential aspirations, that
“he
was with us in his heart,” and that the interests of the South—of segregation—could best be served by making him President. St. Augustine and Gettysburg had been, they believed, merely similar gestures, and they clung to that belief now.
Herman Talmadge of Georgia, whom Johnson had spent “hours and hours” cultivating, who felt that Johnson viewed the relationship between whites and Negroes as
“master
and slave,” Talmadge, whom Johnson had assured so earnestly “I’m one of you,” felt that Johnson still was one of them; asked by the author of this book years later if his opinion had changed during that joint address on November 27, he replied,
“Not
then, no.” As for Russell, monumental as was his racism, it was no more monumental than his patriotism; an aura surrounded the presidency, and the occupant of that office; Johnson had asked him the previous day to continue calling him “Lyndon”; Russell never again called him anything but “Mr. President.” With Russell, what’s more, there was something harder to define, more poignant, something that had to do with the small apartment Richard Russell lived in alone, and the long evenings where his only companions were his books, something that had to do with the companionship of the younger man, and the dinners after work (“You’re gonna have to eat somewhere, you know”) at the Johnsons’, and the brunches with the gentle wife and
the two girls who called him “Uncle Dick.” And it had to do also with what it would mean to face the fact that he had raised to power a man who was committing himself to the destruction of the way of life he treasured. Nonetheless, they did not of course applaud, but while from those two rows, and from the clusters of southern representatives around the Chamber, there was no applause, these were islands of silence in a sea of cheers.

He went on to the other tasks. “Second, no act of ours could more fittingly continue the work of President Kennedy than the early passage of the tax bill for which he fought all this long year,” he said. And, he said, there were “the pending education bills … the pending foreign aid bill … the remaining appropriation[s] bills.”

These were the tasks of Congress, he told them. He was a child of Congress, he told them. “For 32 years Capitol Hill has been my home,” he said. He knew the right words to use with Congress. He couldn’t do what he had to do without their help, he told them. “An assassin’s bullet has thrust upon me the awesome burden of the Presidency. I am here today to say I need your help; I cannot bear this burden alone.” What was needed from them was action. “This Nation has experienced a profound shock, and in this critical moment, it is our duty, yours and mine, as the Government of the United States, to do away with uncertainty and doubt and delay, and to show that we are capable of decisive action; that from the brutal loss of our leader we will derive not weakness, but strength; that we can and will act and act now.… I firmly believe in the independence and the integrity of the legislative branch. And I promise you that I shall always respect this. It is deep in the marrow of my bones.” But it was necessary for Congress to act, and to act quickly. “The need is here. The need is now. I ask your help.”