Landslide (16 page)

J
ACQUELINE
K
ENNEDY RETREATED
from public view after her husband’s funeral. She did not attend Johnson’s speech to the joint session. Thursday, November 28, was Thanksgiving. With her children, she spent the holiday at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod. Everything was eerily altered. The sprawling Kennedy family was there, but they were subdued and depressed rather than boisterous and irrepressible. They were in Hyannis Port, where her husband had
basked so happily in the sunshine. But now he was gone and the sunshine was, too, replaced by gray skies and a cold New England wind.

At the head of the table was her father-in-law, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. Joe Kennedy was the patriarch, the one who had dreamed it all: a public life for his children, a presidency for his son, a ruling dynasty for his family someday. He was the first one to see how the Kennedys’ unique mix of glamour, style, and power could be used to seduce the American public. Long before that November, before his son was turned into a martyr, he had invented a legend for the Kennedys.

The ambassador and Lyndon Johnson had never been close, but they had maintained a cordial friendship of convenience. As two powerful Democrats, each was happy to accept flattery and favors from the other, knowing fully that the time might come when one of them would have cause to put a knife to the other’s throat. In the 1960 presidential campaign, when Joe Kennedy’s grand ambitions for his son came up against Johnson’s ambitions for himself, the knives indeed came out. As the delegates gathered at the 1960 convention to select a nominee, Johnson, still in the running, had attacked the Kennedy patriarch for his infamous tour as Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in the late 1930s, when he’d counseled appeasement of Hitler’s Germany.

For Joe and Jack Kennedy that was politics, nothing more. But others in the Kennedy family were less forgiving. Jackie, who doted on her father-in-law, had watched in horror when, on a postconvention visit to Hyannis Port as Kennedy’s newly minted running mate, Johnson had appeared before the press sitting in Ambassador Kennedy’s chair. “I was just thinking,” she later told Arthur Schlesinger, “ ‘
Do you know what chair you’re sitting in after the things you said about that man?’ ”

Now, at the forlorn Thanksgiving table, the ambassador sat in his own chair, but he seemed hardly himself. Shortly after his son
became president, the elder Kennedy had suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed and largely unable to speak. In his house that holiday, Jackie saw a man who had lost everything.
Over and over he repeated the one word he could still say: “No.”

The next day, the acclaimed journalist
Theodore White was in the chair at his dentist’s office when he was brought an urgent message: President Kennedy’s widow was trying to reach him. He rushed home and called the former First Lady, who was still at Hyannis Port. On the phone, Jackie told White she had some things she wanted to tell the nation. She hoped he would be the journalist to help her. Might he be able to come up from New York to the Cape that afternoon? She would be happy to send a Secret Service limousine.

White called the editors of
Life
magazine, where he was a contract writer. The latest edition of the magazine was already being printed—a giant commemorative issue, with page after page of vivid photographs from the funeral ceremonies—and holding open the press run into Saturday would cost the magazine $30,000 an hour. But this was an incredible story—Jackie’s first interview since the assassination. The editors agreed to wait, and White hurried up to Massachusetts.

He arrived in Hyannis Port late in the evening, in a driving rainstorm. Ushered into the house, he found Jackie waiting for him in black slacks and a beige pullover sweater. She was “
without tears,” White would say, “drained white of face.” She looked at him plaintively: “What can I do for you?” she asked softly. “What shall I say?”

It was she, however, who had summoned White to the meeting. And it was she who would control the conversation and the story. Starting in, White recalled something she’d said to him earlier on the phone, a concern she’d expressed about how history would remember her husband. He wondered if she might expand on that. Instead, she launched into something else entirely—a graphic, detailed narrative of the events in Dallas and the moments after:

White listened in growing confusion and dread. Jackie clearly needed to get these details out of her, but they were too much for the grieving nation, too soon. Was this the reason she had summoned him? He looked at the clock. Midnight was fast approaching, and the editors of
Life
were waiting. Where was the story he was to write?

But the former First Lady knew what she was doing. “
There’s one thing I wanted to say,” she said, shifting away from the horrid assassination scene. “I keep thinking of a line from a musical comedy.… At night before we’d go to sleep … we had an old Victrola. Jack liked to play some records and the song he loved most came at the end of this record:

That word—
Camelot
—no one had attached it to the Kennedy administration before. But how perfectly it fit. Camelot, the mythical capital of King Arthur’s court, a place removed from constraints of time and geography, a place removed from the squalid ordinariness of mortal life itself. Camelot, home to the beautiful Queen Guinevere, fated to love King Arthur and to lose him and mourn him. Camelot, the poets’ symbol of the ancient bond between love
and predestined doom:
Oh brother, had you known our Camelot, built by old kings, age after age, so old the King himself had fears that it would fall
. Camelot, the city of lore, where knights of the Round Table dreamed of the Holy Grail and eternal life.

Camelot, not Dallas, was what Jackie wanted White to remember that night. When she’d finished talking, he stole away to a servant’s room and quickly pulled together a draft that had Camelot as its central theme. It was late when he’d finished, but Jackie was still awake, waiting. He handed her a copy of his story. Then he hurried to the kitchen, where he dictated the story to his editor over the telephone.

Soon it was two in the morning. In the kitchen, White haggled with his editor, who worried that he was overplaying the Camelot theme. As they spoke, Jackie entered the room. Listening to the argument, she shook her head—Camelot
had
to stay. White continued to resist the editor’s entreaties, and after a time he prevailed.

Jackie handed her draft to White. She’d marked it up heavily with her own edits and additions. After the mention of Camelot, she had amended her comments to make her meaning more explicit. Now there was an expanded quotation: “
There will be other great presidents and the Johnsons have been so kind to me but there will never be a Camelot again.” And at the end of the draft, White found an entirely new sentence the former First Lady had written in pencil in her own neat handwriting, her own end to the story: “
And all she could think was to tell people there will never be that Camelot again!”

The careful planner: Lady Bird at The Elms, November 1963.
©
Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library

Christmas Day 1963 dawned bright and clear in the Texas Hill Country. Lady Bird Johnson greeted the morning from her own bed at the LBJ Ranch. She’d had a long journey from Washington the day before and a long first month in the White House. Still, she rose early to set about her day, delivering poinsettias to Hill Country neighbors and pulling together a Christmas celebration for her family.

It had been only one month since she’d last been home. A month since she’d busily prepared for a post-Dallas visit from the Kennedys that would never come to pass. A month in which she’d seen her life altered beyond recognition. She found even the ranch transformed. Guardhouses dotted the perimeter and large searchlights surrounded the house. From now on, she supposed in her diary, “
we will never be quite settled into the anonymity of darkness.”

Christmas, at least, would bring some reprieve from the intrusions. The doormat at the LBJ ranch house read
ALL THE WORLD IS WELCOME HERE
, and over the years the Johnsons had hosted countless acquaintances from their Washington life. Christmas, though, had always been different, a retreat into another time. Typically, Lyndon and Lady Bird and their daughters would open presents and spend the day motoring through the hills of Lyndon’s boyhood on the Pedernales River delivering gifts to friends and relatives—a box
of candy here, a bottle of Scotch whisky there. The plan for Christmas dinner this year was much the same as it had been in years past—twenty-three family members gathered at the ranch house table.

But the old times were gone.
Just as the assembled kinfolk were about to sit down to their dinner that afternoon, a large bus appeared outside the ranch house. Out poured a pack of reporters and photographers who had come for a prearranged photo opportunity of the new president celebrating his holiday.

For President Johnson, these were the most important guests of the day. He greeted them eagerly and posed happily for the photos, dressed in a green plaid jacket. The whole thing was supposed to take a moment: the press pack would get its picture and then return whence it came so that the Johnsons could celebrate the holiday in private. But after posing, the president lingered with the press, introducing his relations. The reporters dutifully wrote down the names—Uncle Huffman Baines, Cousin Oriole Bailey. Lyndon sucked in the attention. Perhaps the reporters would like a tour of the house?

Lady Bird looked on warily. Already, she’d agreed to host the press corps for a barbecue in two days’ time. “Honey,” she reminded her husband, “
I promised to give them a wonderful tour when they come back on Friday. The turkey is ready and the dressing is not getting any better.”

The president would not be deterred. “
It’ll only take a minute,” he told her. He beamed at the reporters: “Come on in.”

And so, with the dinner guests waiting, some fifty journalists trailed along behind the president as he led the way through his ranch house. He walked quickly, sharing details of the house’s construction, pointing out the paintings of Texas landscapes hanging on the walls. He guided them through the collection of framed photographs, a window on Johnson family greatness. He proudly showed off a letter from Sam Houston, first president of the Republic of Texas, written to one of Lyndon’s great-grandfathers.

Meanwhile, Lady Bird dashed toward the master bedroom. She
knew her husband, and she knew what was coming next. She hurried to lock the door behind her and began preparing the room for outside eyes. Sure enough, in a moment came a knock at the door and the sound of someone fiddling determinedly with the knob. Then came the raised voice of the president: “
Mrs. Johnson’s locked the door on me!” She opened the door and smiled as the mob barreled in.

The next stop on the tour was the outdoors, where the president held forth on the habits of the four-hundred-acre working ranch and the modern conveniences with which he had equipped it. “
Lynda,” he called to his elder daughter, “do you know where to turn on the Muzak?” Soon, there was dance music blasting from a speaker in a large live oak tree. He was proud of his sophisticated system: “We used to dance a lot.”

Lady Bird watched as her smiling husband made his way through the pack of admiring observers. Her dinner was getting cold and her private peace had been disturbed. But here was her husband, showing off his ranch, talking of great Johnsons past and present. Watching Lyndon perform for a captive audience—this, more than anything, was what Lady Bird knew as home.