The Passage of Power (17 page)

“S
ILLY
.”
A
LL THROUGH 1959
, he wavered back and forth, until his wavering, his circling about the prize, this vacillation by a man usually so single-minded, tough and decisive, contained elements not of failure alone, but of farce.

A celebration he staged that year at the LBJ Ranch in honor of the President of Mexico,
Adolfo López Mateos, was quite a spectacle: a fleet of eight helicopters, bearing, among others, Rayburn, Truman, Secretary of the Treasury
Robert B. Anderson and Texas Governor
Price Daniel, circled the ranch. When Mateos’ helicopter touched down on the runway, a red carpet was rolled out to it, and the visitors were greeted by a large mariachi band; at lunch, as the 450 guests ate barbecue on the front lawn, the band played and there was a lasso-twirling exhibition by the gaily costumed Mexican Charro Association of San Antonio, while all during lunch, on the far side of the little river, mounted cowboys herded longhorn cattle back and forth; the
Dallas Morning News
called the luncheon “one of the most dramatic outdoor shows since they produced
Aida
with live elephants.” And the most prominent decoration, looming over the guests while they ate, was a large, brightly colored banner that had been hung from a branch of the big live oak tree in the ranch’s front yard. Newsmen who had been assured by the ranch’s owner—assured by him over and over, in the most earnest of tones—that he was not a candidate for President, that he was not running for the job and didn’t want it, arrived at the ranch to find the banner the owner had had hung at his front door: “Lyndon Johnson Será Presidente.”

Despite his insistence that he wasn’t a candidate, when someone took him at his word his reaction was pique. Convinced by his assurances, six Washington journalists, writing a book of profiles on major candidates, hadn’t included one on him. Although Johnson had accepted an invitation to the book party, when, on the day of the party, he learned of his omission, he let it be known that he took it as a personal insult, and refused to attend. Or the reaction was sulking. Asked by someone at his table at a White House dinner to list the leading Democratic candidates, President Eisenhower treated the matter as a joke, naming Rayburn and a number of Democratic senators who were obviously not candidates. Johnson, reading about this exchange in
Drew Pearson’s column, didn’t take it as a joke at all. The next time he was in the White House (at another social gathering), he sat pouting, as the President’s diary was to relate, “in almost complete silence.” When Eisenhower, attempting to draw him out, asked him direct questions, he “answered only in monosyllables.” And when the next day Eisenhower telephoned with an apology (
“Just
kidding. This was all in the most laughing kind of thing”), it took a while for Johnson to accept it. “I have no ambitions,” he assured the President. “I’m not even going to the Convention. At an appropriate time, I will tell them that. [But] I was distressed that the one whom I had admired and had attempted to cooperate with as much as I have …”

Farce—unless Lyndon Johnson in 1959 was viewed as a man throwing away his chance at the thing he had wanted all his life, in which case there were elements in the performance that might more aptly be fitted into a different theatrical genre: tragedy.

On the evening of December 7, 1959, in New York City, the Democratic Party was turning out in force for a lavish dinner in honor of the idolized and influential
Eleanor Roosevelt. Johnson, who had refused invitations to every other major Democratic event in this state he was counting on as a keystone in his presidential bid, was invited to give a short speech at this one, as were all the other leading candidates. Kennedy, Humphrey, Symington—even Adlai Stevenson—of course accepted. Johnson declined. And then he accepted two other speaking invitations for the same date: one before a fifteen-dollar-per-plate fund-raising dinner sponsored by a Democratic club in a small town in Kansas, the other to a sewing bee in a small town in Iowa.

“As
usual,”
James Reston wrote in the
New York Times,
“these moves by the Democratic majority leader are a mystery to friend and foe alike.… Even his enthusiastic supporters cannot make sense out of these decisions.” (What made them even more senseless, to those rooting for Lyndon Johnson, was another demonstration of what might have been: following his speech in Kansas, a
Times
reporter asked one of the guests, Would you vote for a southerner?
“I
didn’t think of him that way when he was speaking,” the man replied.)

The targets of his fearsome rages had always been men and women at whom they could be directed with impunity: subordinates who had no choice, if they wanted to keep their jobs, but to accept his tongue-lashings; junior senators who, needing his favor, also had no choice. With men
he
needed, there was not rage but only humility, deference; with
Herman Brown of
Brown & Root, or the Old Senate Bulls whose support was still essential to him, he had always been as obsequious as he was overbearing with others. Now, so intense was the conflict within him that it exploded as well against men he needed, at least once in a way very damaging to his hopes.

Trying to decide whom to support, California governor
Pat Brown, whose state was very much up for grabs, flew across the country to Washington in 1959 to evaluate the candidates and, accompanied by his aide,
Fred Dutton, met with Johnson in the Taj Mahal.

The meeting went on far longer than Brown had expected, ninety minutes, and, as Brown later related, “Senator Johnson did all the talking,” explaining, among other things—many other things—why he was not electable. “For the first half hour,” Brown was to say, he was “rather impressed”; during the second half hour, “he was not so impressed.” And then, as the meeting entered its third half hour, Brown, perhaps trying merely to get in a word or two, used the wrong one, saying that he agreed that northern hostility made Johnson not
“electable
.”

Johnson’s reaction “astonished” Dutton. “Brown was a Governor, and here Johnson was just
tongue-lashing
him,” he says. “He towered … his desk was higher; it was on a platform. ‘Don’t you ever say I’m not electable! What do
you
know about national politics?’ ”

The reaction cost Johnson any chance of Brown’s support. The governor, who was to tell a friend that during the third half hour he became
“downright
angry,” didn’t respond at the
time. “It just wasn’t in Pat Brown’s nature to answer back,” Dutton says. He responded on national television—in a particularly effective way, using an appearance on
Face the Nation
to spotlight the issues most damaging to Johnson, saying that
California “probably would not vote for him because of his associations with the South and the oil interests.”

Late in the year, trying to solve what
Look
magazine called “The Number One enigma of United States politics,” Jack Kennedy dispatched Robert to the Johnson Ranch to decipher his intentions face-to-face.

The trip did little to ease the tension between the two men. There was a deer-hunting trip—Bobby didn’t want to go but Johnson insisted—and when Bobby fired the powerful shotgun he had been given, instead of the rifle customary on deer hunts, the unexpected force of its recoil knocked him to the ground. Helping him to his feet, Johnson said, “Son, you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.” Nor did it do much to solve the enigma. Assuring Bobby that he had decided not to run and to stay neutral as the other candidates fought it out, Johnson made these statements so convincingly that Bobby returned north to tell his brother that Johnson probably
wasn’t
running. While Bobby had been in Texas, however, an interview with Johnson had appeared in the
Christian Science Monitor.
To the interviewer’s inquiry about the burgeoning number of “Johnson for President” clubs, he had replied, “I hear what some of my friends are doing, and I see what they are doing. The people usually have a way of selecting the person they think best qualified”—the strongest public indication he had yet given that he was running. Then there was an interview in
Time
magazine.
“I
am not a candidate and I do not intend to be,” Lyndon Johnson said. Soon thereafter, Jack Kennedy found himself on a train from New York to Washington with Texas reporter
Leslie Carpenter, and, Carpenter was to say, Kennedy “spent the whole time trying to find out what I knew about whether Lyndon Johnson was actually going to be more than a favorite son candidate.” Kennedy remained puzzled. He was sure that Lyndon Johnson was running—but how could he be running if he was acting like this?

T
HEN IT WAS 1960
—if he wanted to reach for the prize, he couldn’t wait any longer. Within Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle there was no longer any pretense that he wasn’t running. He had persuaded
Sid Richardson to lend
John Connally to him for the campaign—he considered that very important; he felt,
Busby says, “that Connally was the only man tough enough to handle Bobby Kennedy”—and John was directing the work of a full-scale national campaign headquarters: a twelve-room operation in an Austin hotel with fourteen paid staff members and scores of volunteer workers. Walter Jenkins was organizing new “Johnson for President” clubs every day; by the end of January, they would be operating in twenty-seven states. Speechwriters were being hired;
Theodore H. White was one of those recommended, but White said he was going to be working on a book
in 1960. A score of surrogates were fanning out across the country talking up his candidacy before local Democratic groups, and thanks to Rayburn, they were very well-connected surrogates:
Oscar Chapman, former secretary of the Interior, for example, and
India Edwards, a onetime vice chairman of the
Democratic National Committee. In 1959, Jack Kennedy had sent an emissary to ask Mrs. Edwards, in her words, “what it would take to get me on his bandwagon,” and she had refused, feeling he was “too young and inexperienced.” But when
Sam Rayburn asked her to work for Johnson, of course she accepted. And all these operations were funded with a lavishness awesome to anyone not familiar with the scale, and casualness, of campaign financing Texas-style. “I have some money that I want to know what to do with,”
George Brown said in a call to Johnson’s office on January 5. “I … will be collecting more from time to time.” He collected a lot more. Envelopes stuffed with cash cascaded up to Washington, for the other Texas oilmen were aboard.
Booth Mooney had left Johnson’s staff to work for oilman
H. L. Hunt, and, he was to relate,
“Twice
I personally carried packets of a hundred hundred-dollar bills, the common currency of politics, to Jenkins.”

O
N THE EVE
of the New Year, at the end of December, 1959, Lyndon Johnson convened a meeting at the ranch to begin a drive to capture those ten western states that were the key to his plan.

There was a lot of power at that meeting:
Mike Kirwan, a senior member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that approved (or disapproved) western public works projects; Governor
Buford Ellington of Tennessee; a couple of western senators;
Bobby Baker, “the man who knew where all the bodies were buried”; as well as the right guy to scout the western political landscape—Irvin Hoff, Washington senator
Warren Magnuson’s administrative assistant, who had been loaned to Johnson because of the expertise he had demonstrated while running senatorial campaigns in several western states. When, however, just after the first of the year, Hoff headed into the West, he found that
“Wherever
I went, Bobby Kennedy had been there.”

“He was easy to track—and the tracks were everywhere,” Hoff says. And whatever Bobby had done to tie delegates to the Kennedys, he had been very effective. “People who would normally have been with Johnson had been approached six months earlier, and had already had the halter and bridle. By the time I got there, it was already too late.” In every state that Hoff visited, a smoothly functioning Kennedy organization had been in place for some time. When Hoff asked
Larry Jones in Johnson’s Austin headquarters about their own western organizations, the report was clear:
“We
have no organization in the state of
Montana, either contacting potential delegates or delegates; nor do we have an organization building popular support.… We have no organization in the state of
Idaho.” Even as Hoff was traveling, Johnson organizations were being set up, but it was too late. Rowe’s warning two years earlier that ignoring western delegates
could be “disastrous” had been borne out. Johnson’s headquarters was sending the new organizations crates of buttons bearing the legend “All the Way with LBJ.” Hoff telephoned Austin to say it would be necessary to design a different button:
“Many
people do not know what LBJ means.”

The accuracy of Rowe’s prediction struck George Reedy at about the same time. While Johnson was still refusing to leave Washington on days when the Senate was actually meeting, “quick weekend trips”—in a specially equipped twin-engine Convair that Johnson had leased for campaigning—were possible, and the first of those trips was to
Wyoming, a state Reedy (and Johnson) had believed bore the “LBJ” brand.

That belief didn’t last even as long as it took Reedy to get out of the Cheyenne airport. Piling into a car along with several Washington newsmen to follow Johnson to the hotel at which he was to speak, Reedy found himself sitting next to a man he didn’t know. One of the reporters asked the man whom Wyoming would be supporting at the convention.
“Oh
, Kennedy,” the man replied matter-of-factly. Startled, Reedy asked the reason. “He’s the only one who’s been out here and asked us for our vote,” the man said. The man turned out to be
Teno Roncalio, chairman of Wyoming’s Democratic Party. Reedy had never heard his name, but learned that his preference was quite firm. “Wyoming was a state that Lyndon Johnson should have had; and we would have had if we had merely done some organization work in it a few months earlier,” Reedy was to say. Johnson’s fear of trying had held him back until now—and now it was too late.