Landslide (13 page)

A few of them were happy to become his men. McGeorge Bundy immediately attached himself to Johnson’s side, offering crisp tutorials on world affairs and confident advice on how to handle the extraordinary assemblage of foreign dignitaries descending on Washington for the funeral. Bundy had been a loyal aide and admirer
of President Kennedy.
The assassination, he told the columnist Joseph Alsop, had struck him harder than the death of his own father. But as a buttoned-up son of Brahmin Boston, he was out of place in the wistful Irish wake scene playing out in the White House. To serve the president, to remember that “
the show must go on,” to
work
—that was the best way Bundy knew to cope.

Others found this comforting as well. Robert McNamara, the dashing defense secretary whom Kennedy had lured away from the presidency of the Ford Motor Company, was known in the press for his superhuman work habits. Now was no exception. He was everywhere that first weekend, shuttling back and forth over the Kennedy-Johnson divide. One moment he was consoling Bobby and Jackie in the White House and trudging up a sodden hill at Arlington Cemetery in the pouring rain to select the Kennedy grave site. The next he was sitting attentively at a Johnson cabinet meeting, with no hint, save the water dripping from his suit, that he had anything on his mind beyond his ongoing responsibilities as secretary of defense.

Dean Rusk quickly made himself available as well. The secretary of state had been a marginal figure under Kennedy, a president who had preferred to run his own foreign policy. But Rusk’s stiff propriety and bureaucratspeak—qualities that had bored the Kennedys to death—were a comfort to Johnson. And it was a comfort and a happy coincidence that these three men—Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy—who were so ready to offer their allegiance happened to be the administration’s three senior civilian national security officials.

Meeting with these men, Johnson began to look like a president. On Sunday, they joined him to hear a report from Ambassador Lodge on the situation in South Vietnam. Few Americans were thinking much about Vietnam in November 1963, but Johnson was more than familiar with the dire situation there. It had been American policy since the Truman administration to oppose Communist-influenced nationalism in Indochina, a colonial holding of France. After the French were defeated by the Communist nationalist Viet Minh at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Vietnam had been partitioned
into two zones divided at the 17th Parallel with a Communist north, led by Ho Chi Minh, and a non-Communist south with a capital in Saigon. Worried that a Vietnamese peninsula united under Communist authority could lead to Communist domination of Asia and the Pacific, the United States had become the chief patron of the Saigon government, a nominally republican regime led by a devout Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem.

South Vietnam had been a canker throughout the Kennedy presidency. The Vietcong, a North Vietnamese–backed Communist insurgency, had waged a brutal and effective campaign against the Saigon government. They were supported by a growing number of peasants in the South Vietnamese countryside. As the situation deteriorated,
the Kennedy administration bankrolled an expansion of the South Vietnamese army and sent several thousand military personnel to serve as “advisers” in South Vietnam. The administration grew exasperated with its client, Diem, whom it considered a hapless defender of the regime who had needlessly antagonized his people by oppressing the country’s Buddhist majority. Three weeks before Kennedy’s death, a group of South Vietnamese generals had, with tacit U.S. approval, overthrown the Diem regime and gone on to assassinate Diem and his brother. The bloody conclusion had demoralized Kennedy. By the time he’d traveled to Dallas, he was deeply pessimistic about the chances of success for his administration’s policy in Indochina.

Now, though, Kennedy was gone and the policy remained. Johnson listened as his new advisers gave a grim report: the new, post-Diem regime in Saigon was incompetent, and there was little hope that
any
South Vietnamese government could withstand the Communists without direct U.S. military involvement. Johnson would have to make a decision about Vietnam policy in the not-too-distant future. None of this was startling news to him. Johnson had visited South Vietnam in 1961; he had shaken Diem’s hand. And he had been watching presidents face bad news from that part of the world for a decade, first as majority leader in the Eisenhower years, then as
Kennedy’s vice president. This was what American presidents did: receive grim reports about Vietnam and conclude that there was no choice, for the moment, but to stay the course. Here at last was a chance to really act like a president. With Lodge, Johnson was forceful: “
I am not going to lose Vietnam.”

There were other grim comforts in those first days. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, delivered breathless updates to the new president on the investigation into the crime in Dallas. Under Kennedy, Hoover had been in an open state of war with Bobby Kennedy, his nominal superior in the Department of Justice. A Hoover friend of long standing, Johnson knew that the director had been particularly enraged by Bobby’s insistence that the director’s communications with the White House go through him. Shortly after his first contretemps with Bobby, outside the Oval Office, Johnson received an update from Hoover on the investigation in Dallas. When the director had finished, Johnson signaled to Hoover that things had changed: “
I wonder if you will get me a little synopsis and let me have what developments come your way during the day.”

In Hoover, Johnson found allegiance and validation for the fear he still felt, both of which he’d struggled to find elsewhere. In the first moments after the assassination, when an international conspiracy seemed a very real possibility, Kennedy’s aides were in a state of shock, too dazed to process the potential danger. By the time they emerged from that daze, Oswald had been captured. By Saturday morning, the consensus in the press seemed to be that Kennedy’s killer was a crazed lunatic, not an international saboteur, part of a larger conspiracy.

But Johnson could remember the smell of gunpowder wafting over his limousine in Dealey Plaza. He had been roused from shock sooner than the others, jolted into reality by the fear that a nuclear war was coming and that he would have to stop it. He hadn’t quite let go of this fear. “
What would you think of the possibility a foreign government was involved in this?” he asked Kennedy’s counselor,
Ted Sorensen, on Saturday night. “Do you have any evidence?” Sorensen asked. Johnson showed him a classified memo that vaguely outlined a threat. Sorensen brushed it aside, dismissively: “Meaningless.”

And as the hours rolled by, that was how most of the Kennedy men seemed to Johnson: animated only in their contempt. On Saturday, Arthur M. Schlesinger, the young historian turned Kennedy aide, quickly penned a letter of resignation to the new president, which the new president just as quickly rejected. Schlesinger begrudgingly agreed to carry on, but he wrote in his diary, “
my heart is not in it.” Taking a phone call from Johnson that weekend, Sorensen replied, “
Yes, Mr. President,” and then broke into tears. Recounting his long journey with the body of the fallen president on Friday night, Kennedy’s loyal aide Dave Powers was defiant: “
I carried
my
president.”

When he looked at the Kennedy aides, Johnson would later say, “
the impact of Kennedy’s death was evident everywhere—in the looks on their faces and the sound of their voices.” This made sense enough. The Washington that Johnson knew was a kingdom ruled by various tribes, a place where the fortunes of lesser men and women were tied to the destinies of the politicians they served. Allegiance was everything: you were a Kennedy person or a Johnson person. That was what the Kennedy aides were struggling with, he thought—the fall from power. “
Suddenly they were outsiders,” he said, “outsiders on the inside. The White House is small but if you’re not at the center it seems enormous … So I determined to keep them informed, I determined to keep them busy.”

But Kennedy’s men were mourning more than just the loss of influence; they were mourning a part of themselves. Washington was “
littered with male widows” after the assassination, Joe Alsop later wrote, men who knew that “nothing would quite be the same.” The dead president, with his wit and his charm and his erudition and his good looks, had taken the grubby work of politics and infused it with glamour, taken the drudgery of policy work and made
it into the stuff of high purpose. Working for him, his aides felt like better, brighter versions of themselves.

And they felt young. Everyone longed to be invited to the Kennedys’ dinner dances, magical evenings in the East Room where the president and First Lady hosted an eclectic mix of accomplished artists and intellectuals along with glamorous jet-setters from New York and Europe. A guest at one of these occasions could see Jackie and her sister Lee cheering on Averell Harriman, the seventy-one-year-old undersecretary of state, as he enthusiastically danced the Twist. There was sumptuous French cuisine and there were easy French customs—few expressed surprise at the sight of a powerful administration official shamelessly flirting with a woman who wasn’t his wife. That sort of thing was expected of Kennedy courtiers, along with a fondness for poetry and rollicking games of touch football, and a willingness to be thrown into Ethel Kennedy’s pool. All together, it was another, more golden adolescence for men with gray hair.

Now it was gone. After the assassination, Mary McGrory, a reporter for
The Washington Star
and a White House favorite, mused “
We’ll never laugh again.” From Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the administration’s bright young intellectuals, came the instantly famous answer: “Oh, we’ll laugh again, Mary, but we’ll never be young again.”

And when they saw Johnson asking them to work with him,
determined
to make them feel included, the Kennedy men remembered how old they really were. The new president was only eight years Kennedy’s senior, but no one thought of them as peers. Johnson, said the
Times
two days after the assassination, “
is of a different generation … from the Kennedys and their friends, although he has said privately that he admires them for being so ‘hip.’ ” The Kennedys’ friends, in turn, saw him as anything but “hip,” and they loathed him for it. For when they looked at Lyndon Johnson—his hair thinning, his waist bulging, his face weathered from thirty years working the Washington system—they saw not a stranger, but themselves.

They sought escape from this sad reality in fantasies of the future.
Lunching with Daniel Moynihan and John Kenneth Galbraith the day after the assassination, Schlesinger imagined a new ticket for 1964 with Bobby Kennedy as the candidate and Senator Hubert Humphrey as his running mate. The others were skeptical. For that to happen, Galbraith observed, Lyndon Johnson would have to slip up in a bad way.

S
O THAT WAS
what he found in the White House—indifference and anger from Kennedy’s family, machinations from Kennedy’s men. And elsewhere in the city, there was what appeared to be the greatest threat of all: the fast-forming legend of John F. Kennedy himself. Everyone, it seemed, was reshaping the late president’s life and death into a mystical tale of immortal greatness met with inevitable fate.

In Washington that weekend, otherwise rational people spoke of omens and prophecy. Everyone noted the odd collusion of the weather with the national mood. For weeks there had been unseasonably warm temperatures and hardly a cloud in the sky. And then, the morning after the assassination, came gray skies, bitter winds, and buckets and buckets of rain. Ted Sorensen recalled a conversation he’d had with Kennedy just before the president left for Dallas about the “rule of twenty.” Since 1841, a president had died in office at least once every twenty years. Kennedy’s death, eighteen years after Roosevelt’s, continued the pattern. On Saturday afternoon, the Kennedy family announced that the president would be buried in Arlington Cemetery. As it happened, Kennedy had visited the cemetery just a few weeks earlier. A story spread that weekend of the president standing in the very spot that would become his final resting place, looking entranced. He wished, he was supposed to have said,
he “could stay here forever.”

Cultivating the image of urbane gentleman scholar, Kennedy and Sorensen had peppered his speeches with countless lines from poetry and scripture. Now people were poring through those lines for anything that prophesied his untimely end.
A favorite poem, it was said,
was Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” Everyone noted the words of the psalmist Kennedy had planned to include in the Dallas speech that he never gave: “
Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

The eager mythmakers were happy to alter Kennedy’s character in order to find the haunting hand of fate. “
All sorts of people are remembering all kind of things Jack Kennedy never said,” his friend Charlie Bartlett grumbled. “I never heard him say he’d ‘like to stay here forever.’ That was not like him.” (He was right—Kennedy hadn’t said that about Arlington—though he had stood on the gentle slope that would become his grave site and called it “
one of the really beautiful places on earth.”) But no one was remembering the complete Jack Kennedy anymore—the one who loved Shakespeare and the classics but also dirty jokes and childish limericks, the man who hosted Pablo Casals at the White House but who privately preferred corny standards like “You’re Part of My Heart,” the one who liked poems about death but also joked about it in the easy Irish Catholic way. When Johnson worried about safety on his vice presidential trip to Vietnam in 1961, Kennedy had reassured him: “
Don’t worry, Lyndon. If anything happens to you, Sam Rayburn and I will give you the biggest funeral Austin, Texas, ever saw.”

But that wasn’t the President Kennedy people needed anymore. They needed him to be the solemn prophet of his own doom. A constellation of omens made his death somehow easier to take: he was not the victim of a freak encounter with a madman; he was a noble hero who’d met his mystically ordained fate. And as such, he would have an ancient hero’s greatest reward: immortality.
Soon there would be plans to rename New York’s Idlewild Field as John F. Kennedy Airport, Florida’s Cape Canaveral as Cape Kennedy, and New Hampshire’s Mount Clay as Mount Kennedy. In the fallen president’s home state of Massachusetts, the state legislature would consider embossing “Land of Kennedy” on Bay State license plates. In West Virginia, one newspaper would propose changing the name of the state to “Kennediana.” Overseas, there would soon be Kennedy-Platzes
and rues J. F. Kennedy. A Bavarian mine would mint special gold and silver Kennedy medallions with the inscription
WE ALL HAVE LOST HIM
.