The Passage of Power (20 page)

James C. Wright, a third-term congressman from Fort Worth, had long been a true believer in Lyndon Johnson’s political acumen;
“I
was one of his eager disciples during the 1960 campaign,” he was to say. But now Johnson sent him to speak on his behalf at the state convention of the
Kansas Democratic Party. It had been agreed that each speaker would talk for about twenty minutes, and Wright had spoken for that length of time, as had Hubert Humphrey.

And then, Wright was to recall, he saw Jack Kennedy speak for the first time. “He spoke for about eight minutes,” and “that was all he needed. When he sat down he had that crowd in the palm of his hand. He had the gift of leaving them wanting more. I saw the Kennedy magic then that I had not really appreciated.” Feeling that Johnson had not sufficiently appreciated the impact that Kennedy was making, “when I got back to Washington, I asked to see Lyndon and I told him I thought he should get out on the hustings more.” But, Wright says, “he rejected my suggestion.” The reason Johnson gave, Wright says, was that “I’ve committed myself” to remain in Washington doing his Senate work, but the real reason was that “he just didn’t believe” Wright’s assessment of Kennedy’s effectiveness as a speaker. “He thought I had been overly impressed by Kennedy.” For the first time, the “eager disciple” began to doubt. “I wondered when I left [Johnson’s office] if Lyndon was taking that seriously enough.”

He refused to hear anything he didn’t want to hear. When his longtime ally
Richard Berlin, publisher of the Hearst newspapers, tried to tell him that he was losing his chance in
California, he
“just
pooh-poohed the idea,” as Berlin said in a telephone call to Jenkins.
“You
know Lyndon—he believes what he wants to believe.” At a meeting where he was receiving reports from his emissaries to the western states, the man responsible for
Wyoming began saying that “Jack Kennedy had Wyoming locked up.” Johnson cut him off. “Next!” he said curtly. Later, Johnson “told Walter Jenkins the man was ‘a defeatist,’ and soon he was no longer” on the payroll. “Consequently, fewer and fewer people who had Johnson’s ear told him the truth as they saw it.”

Men who did not know Johnson as well as Wright or Berlin—and who were aware of the steadily rising total of Kennedy delegates—were startled by the strength of his conviction. Johnson asked a young congressman, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. of Massachusetts, if he could come by O’Neill’s office; there was no more making men come to him now, not if they could help him at the convention, and although “Tip” O’Neill was only in his eighth year in the House, he was, as
a protégé of Majority Leader
John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, a rising figure there—he would one day be Speaker, and was already known as a congressman with connections beyond Massachusetts’ borders. O’Neill, a congressman from Kennedy’s own state, could not imagine what Johnson wanted—and when he found out what it was, he was astonished.

“After
some small talk,” O’Neill was to recall, Johnson said, “Now I realize you’re pledged to the boy, but you and I both know he can’t win. He’s just a flash in the pan, and he’s got no record of substance to run on. Will you be with me on the second ballot?”

O’Neill knew nothing of the sort, and since he had already tangled with the Kennedys in Massachusetts, he tried to explain the situation. “I said, ‘Mr. Leader, let me tell you something. Jack Kennedy is going to be the nominee for President. He’s going to win on the first ballot for several reasons—because of the innovative methods the Kennedys use, the untold wealth they have, and the long arm of Joseph Kennedy.’ ” But Johnson, O’Neill realized, “couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘You’re a professional,’ he said, ‘you
know
the boy can’t win.’ ”

“He can and he will,” O’Neill said. “When we get to the convention, there won’t even
be
a second ballot.” As it happened, at the moment of the conversation, O’Neill’s estimate of Kennedy’s strength was slightly exaggerated. But Johnson, he saw, was unwilling to concede even that Kennedy had a chance. “I could see that Johnson thought I was nuts,” O’Neill recalls. Shaking his head at O’Neill’s words, the Leader said, “Come on, Tip, you know better than that. That boy is going to die on the vine. I’m asking you for some aid and support in New England after he fails.” O’Neill saw that “he just couldn’t imagine that Jack Kennedy was going to win.”

A
ND THEN CAME
THE PRIMARIES. Johnson had been confident that the other candidates would kill each other off in those primaries: that Kennedy would win some, Symington perhaps one or two, Humphrey a few—including, certainly, the first one in which he took on Kennedy head to head, since it would be held, on April 5, in his neighboring state of
Wisconsin. Kennedy won Wisconsin, though his margin over Humphrey was not decisive, and, more important, had come from Wisconsin’s four predominantly Catholic congressional districts. Since Humphrey had won the state’s four Protestant districts, the vote, as Theodore White reported, was read
“as
a Catholic-Protestant split”; it
“would
convince none of the bosses who controlled the delegates of the East that [Kennedy] was a winner.” The religious issue was more alive than ever. When, on primary night, one of Kennedy’s sisters asked him, “What does it mean?” he replied, “quietly yet bitterly,” that “We have to do it all over again.” A Humphrey victory in the next significant primary—
West Virginia on May 10—would be taken as proof that Kennedy couldn’t carry a heavily Protestant state; it would, White said, “all
but end John F. Kennedy’s chance of nomination” because it would “throw the nominating decision into the back rooms,” exactly what Johnson had been hoping for; as
Roland Evans and
Robert Novak wrote in their widely syndicated “Inside Report” column, it would
“open
up the party to a whole series of new arrangements and deals, a fluid situation tailored to Johnson’s skills.” Johnson began helping Humphrey in West Virginia, working through Senator
Byrd, who put his organization behind the Minnesotan. (Kennedy, realizing what was happening, paid a call on Johnson in the Taj Mahal on April 8 and asked him, according to Johnson’s account, “to get Bob Byrd ‘out of West Virginia.’ ” Johnson said he had nothing to do with Byrd’s activities. “I reminded him that this is Byrd’s own state and I couldn’t get him out if I was foolish enough to try.”) A lot was riding on that state, and Johnson played the card that, thanks to
Brown & Root, had been the ace in his hand for all his political life. His first campaign for Congress had been the most heavily financed congressional campaign in the history of Texas; his two campaigns for the Senate had been the most lavishly financed senatorial campaigns in the state’s history; and now, in West Virginia, a state where politics was very much for sale, he played the money card again, pouring cash into the state on Humphrey’s behalf. But it was to no avail. It was after West Virginia that Johnson said to Jim Rowe,
“How
the hell does Joe Kennedy move money around like that?” And, like the rest of Johnson’s efforts, the money card was played too late. Television documentaries and telethons have to be produced in advance to be effective, local organizations require time to be set up and financed. A last-minute half-hour statewide telephone call-in telethon for Humphrey, staged with almost no preparation at all, was embarrassing: authentic, unscreened questions put the candidate on the defensive.

The Kennedys held other cards, too, and in West Virginia they were played in a manner that cast a revealing light on Jack Kennedy’s “cool rationality.” The ambassador had arranged for
Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. to campaign for his son—a masterstroke in itself since President Roosevelt was idolized in the state—but, as Doris Goodwin wrote, FDR Jr.
“did
not confine his role to nostalgia.” The Kennedy campaign had provided him with documents allegedly showing that Humphrey had sought draft deferments during
World War II—although, in fact, he had attempted to enlist in both the Army and the Navy but had been rejected because of physical disabilities. Although FDR Jr. was reluctant to use the documents, Bobby insisted, and Roosevelt displayed them to audiences, implying that Humphrey had been a draft dodger by saying, “I don’t know where he was in World War II.” Humphrey made what he was to call
“repeated
contacts with the Kennedys” proving the charge was untrue, but Roosevelt continued making it. Asked about this, Jack Kennedy said,
“Any
discussion of the war record of Senator Humphrey was done without my knowledge and consent, as I strongly disagree with the injection of this issue into the campaign”—a statement which, notes one of his biographers,
“did
not challenge the accuracy of what Roosevelt said”; Goodwin was to write that
“As
Kennedy perfectly
understood, the deed was already done.” And in fact FDR Jr. went on with the injections.
²

And they had the trump card: Jack Kennedy—his willingness to confront an issue, and his ability, his unique gifts as an orator, in doing so.

With the focus now, more than ever, on Kennedy’s religion, polls in West Virginia, where only 5 percent of the population was Catholic, showed that the tide had turned to Humphrey.

Kennedy’s advisers were split on how to handle the issue, with most of his Washington staff telling him to avoid it because it was too explosive. Kennedy decided to meet it head-on. Two days before the primary, on a paid telecast, he discussed in detail the importance of the separation of church and state. And then, looking directly into the camera as he spoke, he said, “so when any man stands on the steps of the Capitol and takes the oath of office of President, he is swearing to support the separation of church and state; he puts one hand on the Bible and raises the other hand to God as he takes the oath. And if he breaks his oath, he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution, for which the Congress can impeach him—and should impeach him—but he is committing a sin against God.” And at this point, as Theodore White describes it, John F. Kennedy “raised his hand from an imaginary Bible, as if lifting it to God, and, repeating softly, said, ‘A sin against God, for he has sworn on the Bible.’ ” It was, White wrote,
“the
finest TV broadcast I have ever heard any political candidate make.” During the remaining two days before the primary, every other card in the Kennedy deck was played as well: the money, the bands of brothers and sisters roving the state, the “handsome, open-faced candidate” on masterfully produced documentaries opening with a shot of a PT boat cutting through the waves. After the telecast in which Kennedy raised his hand to God,
“With
a rush, one could feel sentiment change,” White recounts, and he took more than 60 percent of the West Virginia vote. Flying off to
Maryland, where he had campaigning to do, for its primary was a week away, Kennedy said,
“I
think we have now buried the religious issue.”

H
E HAD BURIED
Lyndon Johnson’s hopes as well.

When Johnson picked up the next morning’s
New York Times,
he read that
“Washington
heard the unmistakable sound of a bandwagon calliope today.” There was a quote from New York City’s mayor
Robert F. Wagner, who said he “would do nothing which might interfere with Jack’s candidacy.” Johnson had been counting on support from New York, but, the
Times
reported, “West Virginia’s primary election victory appeared … to have all but guaranteed” Kennedy the bulk of that state’s 114 votes. “Mr. Kennedy is beginning to take on
an air of inevitability,” James Reston wrote.
“The
road to victory in Los Angeles suddenly seemed free and clear to him,”
W. H. Lawrence chimed in.

At a press conference, Johnson could not hide his dismay. In his hand was a statement George Reedy had prepared—“The West Virginia primary demonstrated that voters are not going to pick a candidate on the basis of an irrelevant issue such as how he worships his God”—but he couldn’t even look at it. To questions about the effect of Kennedy’s victory, he replied only “I don’t know” or “I have nothing to say.”
Sarah McClendon, who had covered him for many years, was shocked at what she saw in his face. He
“slumped
further in his seat,” she reported. “He had circles under his eyes and looked sad. He was much quieter” than usual. And when, a few minutes later, he went into the Senate’s Democratic cloakroom, the little knots of senators abruptly stopped talking; the senators had been saying that Kennedy had it locked up, that Lyndon Johnson had made a huge mistake by not campaigning. What he feared most was happening to him even in this room in which he had for years reigned supreme, in this room in which, of all the rooms in the world, he had been most assured of respect.

A
ND THEN
, when it was in effect too late, when his dream was all but dead, when his chances for the great prize were all but gone, Lyndon Johnson showed how much he had wanted it all along. By the morning after that sad press conference, he had pulled himself together, and during the two months remaining before the Democratic convention, he made a desperate lunge for the prize.

With Humphrey effectively out of contention, Jim Rowe no longer had a candidate. Johnson had refused Rowe’s offers of assistance for years. Now he telephoned Rowe, and Rowe said,
“If
you want some help, I will be delighted to help you.”

“Fine,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I need all the help I can get.”

And now that he was no longer trying to conceal his ambition, the effort that he was willing to make in its service became visible—and, although he was older now, the way he campaigned was a reminder of Ed Clark’s remark that “I never thought it was
possible
for anyone to work that hard.”

His days, as one reporter wrote, “were all 18-hour days.” As soon as the Senate adjourned on the Friday after the West Virginia primary, he flew to
Indianapolis, because the Indiana primary bound the state’s delegates only on the first ballot, and Senator
Vance Hartke had just assured him again that if only he could hold on through that ballot, many of the delegates would switch from Kennedy to him on the second round. As the plane was passing over the Alleghenies, on the way to Indiana, ten thousand feet up, Johnson tapped a reporter on the shoulder, and pointed to a cluster of toy-size houses in a bend of a river: Morgantown, West Virginia.
“See
those houses yonder?” he said. “In those houses—like all over the country—there are people who want what is good for America.
They are looking for leadership. They must have it.” And for half an hour, until the plane touched down, Johnson kept reminding the reporter that it was leadership that was needed, and that he was the Senate’s
Leader,
that he had proven he could
lead.
Leaving the plane, he held a press conference at the airport (“The American people are looking for leadership …”), then a second, because some local reporters had missed the first, then gave a speech at the Indianapolis Gridiron Club dinner, and met the delegates in a hotel suite afterwards. It was almost midnight before he stopped working on them, singly or in little groups, and climbed into a car to take him back to the plane.