Landslide (8 page)

“
I thought they’d get one of us,” Bobby said on the phone with his aide Ed Guthman moments after learning of his brother’s death, but “I thought it would be me.” In the months ahead, Bobby would take on a vacant, ghostly quality, as though he felt that by simply going on living he was committing an act of betrayal. Bobby, the attack dog, had been his brother’s crusader in the world’s dark places—chasing down the bosses of organized crime, nurturing plots to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba. He’d created powerful enemies, all of whom would have been happy to see a Kennedy brother dead. “
Without question,” writes Bobby’s biographer Evan Thomas, “he worried that his own aggressive pursuit of evil men had brought evil upon his own house.”

These were deeply unsettling thoughts, and Bobby desperately needed release. He found it in Johnson. For if it was unfair that
Bobby should live when his brother had to die, it was a travesty of history that Johnson should now stand in the center of his brother’s office. Johnson, whom his brother had mistrusted and kept at arm’s length, who his brother had determined should never be allowed to win the presidency in his own right.
Johnson
was the guilty one.

I need you more than he needed you:
Johnson was the one who spoke the words, but from Bobby’s lips they would have been equally true.

Bobby didn’t let Johnson finish making his case for the importance of showing unity in the transition. He didn’t want to talk about any of that right now. What mattered in that instant was the Oval Office. President Kennedy’s things were still inside and would require time to pack up.
Could Johnson wait awhile before moving in?

Immediately, Johnson saw a warning. “
Well, of course,” he replied. Soon, he was back to his familiar pattern with Bobby, pleading his case: It wasn’t he who’d wanted to come to the Oval Office. It was others who had said it was necessary. President Kennedy’s men had said so. Mac Bundy, the national security adviser, had
insisted
. He was only doing his best to assure continuity of government.

Bobby did not respond. He looked at the large man standing in front of him with glazed uninterest. After a few more moments of Johnson’s pleading, they parted ways.

Now Johnson had reason to worry. On television, the anchors and correspondents were already saying that Kennedy’s decision on whether to stay on as attorney general would prove a key test for Johnson. He could not afford to alienate the Kennedy family. He needed them too much.

Johnson the heroic rancher was stuck in the mud. He was in John Kennedy’s White House, surrounded by John Kennedy’s people and John Kennedy’s things, trying desperately to win John Kennedy’s brother over to his side. He was the president now, but the story was still the same.

T
HE ANCHORS ON
television were unaware of what had just taken place between the new president and the attorney general in the West Wing. Their focus was on the East Room, where, a few minutes after nine o’clock, the press was allowed in to view Kennedy’s funeral bier.
Under Jacqueline Kennedy’s instruction, the catafalque had been constructed in replica of the one used after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Black crape covered the chandeliers.

And then, at 9:30, Johnson finally appeared before the cameras. Surrounded by men in dark suits, he emerged from the West Wing to the gray day outside. It was his first appearance on live television that morning, his first real chance to be the leader he knew the nation needed him to be. But his eyes were lowered and his shoulders were hunched. “
Morning, Mr. President,” the press shouted. But Johnson ignored them and did not say a word.

Flanked by advisers, Johnson crossed West Executive Avenue and headed toward the Executive Office Building. For nearly three years, the street had been the great divide in his life, the river that separated his isolated vice presidential island from the White House, the center of power, the place he longed to be. Now he was crossing back over, back to the place that had brought him low. He was giving in to Bobby’s request and surrendering the Oval Office. “
Mr. Johnson,” said NBC’s Ray Scherer diplomatically, “prefers to hold his appointments in his vice presidential office.”

Inside that vice presidential office, Johnson’s bewildered assistants tried to absorb what had just happened. Had the president of the United States really just been chased from the Oval Office? Johnson’s military aide, Colonel William Jackson, insisted that Johnson retake the White House and continue the transition of power. “
It will give the people confidence,” he said. Johnson knew it was a lost cause: “Stop this. Our first concern is Mrs. Kennedy and her family.” It was clear: the day, the mansion, the nation—all were still in the Kennedys’ hands.

And the story was, too. All morning, the networks showed majestic shots of the White House, its white columns stark against the
sky, a flag at half-mast, flapping in the bitter November wind. From time to time, the networks would attempt to show the exterior of the Executive Office Building, where Johnson was busily at work. But the cameras were not used to photographing this building, and it appeared onscreen as a nondescript mass of gray bricks. It was hard to look at, and the networks quickly moved on to other things. The eyes of the world would not rest on Lyndon Johnson. Not yet.

The work he could get: In late 1963, Ronald Reagan was at work on the movie
The Killers
, in which he played a conniving gangster.
©
Universal Pictures/Getty Images

There was nothing to do but watch.

Workers in the East and Midwest had been on their lunch hour when news of the shooting in Dallas first broke. In the big cities, customers poured out of restaurants, leaving large sums on the table, unwilling to wait for the bill. The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading. Strangers heading home from work wept with one another on subway cars. Schools closed. The American Football League suspended play for the weekend, and the Harvard-Yale game was called off. Disneyland closed its gates that weekend. Parties, dances, even weddings were canceled. That weekend, most Americans stayed inside, watching the newscasters, horrified by what they were seeing, but still unable to turn off the TV.

In Hollywood it was the same as everywhere else. It had been morning on the West Coast when President Kennedy began his fateful car trip into Dallas. In Los Angeles, a crew was setting to work on a new Universal Pictures film,
Johnny North
, a remake of a movie from the 1940s, which was in turn an adaptation of a Hemingway short story called “The Killers.” Universal’s powerful studio boss, Lew Wasserman, had revived the old title to remake and sell the film to NBC. His plan was to produce
Johnny North
as the first full-length feature made specifically for TV.

Wasserman hired a respected film director, Don Siegel, to pull together a strong story and cast. Siegel threw out most of the 1946 picture’s story line. His movie would instead focus on a pair of contract killers who are hired to murder a former race car driver named Johnny North. The title character would be played by John Cassavetes, a young actor who’d played dark, sexy leading roles on TV and film. The lead villain and the elder of the two killers, Charlie Strom, would be played by Lee Marvin, a talented, if difficult, old pro. Strom’s coconspirator would be played by Clu Gulager, a young television actor. Angie Dickinson, the blazing sex symbol rumored to be a special friend of President Kennedy’s, would play the leading lady, a femme fatale named Sheila Farr.

Only one supporting role remained unfilled: Jack Browning, an older gangster who plans the heist at the center of the film’s plot. Wasserman told his director he had an actor in mind for the part: Why not Ronald Reagan?

Ronald Reagan?
Siegel was skeptical. He had known and liked the old B-movie star for years. But Reagan was a squeaky-clean actor who’d had a squeaky-clean career in Hollywood playing squeaky-clean parts. Would he be willing to play a villain, a dirty gangster in a dark suit? So far he’d resisted all entreaties, Wasserman said, but the part would be good for him. Maybe Siegel could be the one to finally talk him into it.

Here the studio boss was probably stroking his director’s ego. Wasserman, who’d built his career in Hollywood as a talent agent, had represented Reagan for decades and taken a special interest in his career. He knew as well as anyone that since Reagan had lost his regular gig as the host of
General Electric Theater
a year earlier, there hadn’t been many parts on offer to him, villain or otherwise. Still, he gave Siegel the impression that Reagan would be a hard fish to catch. “
I want you to talk him into playing that role,” he instructed his director.

Siegel invited Reagan for lunch at the Universal commissary. It had been a while since the director had last seen the actor. The face
was still familiar, of course—not just to Siegel, but to everyone in Hollywood. Since arriving in the film colony in the late 1930s, Reagan had been a kind of student body president for the movie business—never the most famous or the most successful, but always well liked. Arriving at the commissary, Reagan smiled and lit up the room, greeting old friends. He still looked like a movie star, he was still handsome, still broad and muscular, still somehow larger than his six feet one inch.

But he hadn’t been in many movies since he’d taken the
GE Theater
job in 1954. To Siegel, this Reagan looked different, more mature. And he looked tan: in recent years, he’d been spending more and more of his time working at his ranch, where he raised thoroughbred jumpers and hunters. “
Horses are like people,” Reagan told Siegel that day at lunch. “Treat them with respect and love, and they’ll do their best to give you what you want.”

Over Cobb salad, Siegel made his pitch for
Johnny North
. Think of all the big-shot actors you know who’ve played villains onscreen, he told Reagan—Peter Lorre, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart! It didn’t exactly hurt their careers. This character, Browning, was “
the boss … well educated, charming, yet rugged when necessary.”

“What kind of money are they talking about?” Reagan asked Siegel. The director demurred. “That’s up to you, your agent, and Lew Wasserman. But I know they want you badly. I’m certain the deal can be worked out to your satisfaction.” By the time the check came, it seemed that Reagan was coming around to the idea. “Surely you have no objection to Universal paying for our lunch, do you?” Reagan smiled and said no. Siegel knew the part of Browning was filled.

The film went into production on Thursday, November 21. The next morning, Siegel went to visit his leading lady at a costume fitting. It was a happy scene. There was country music on the radio. Dickinson twirled to show her director a stunning red dress. “
You’ll steal the show,” Siegel said. “I’ve ninety more dresses to show you,” the actress said before turning happily back toward her dressing room. Later, she was to shoot the film’s one truly romantic scene, in
which she would wear a shimmering white gown and dance with Cassavetes to a slow, sad song called “Too Little Time.”