The Passage of Power (22 page)

Then there was
Carl Hayden’s
Arizona. That state had a unit rule, and suddenly Kennedy had all seventeen of its votes. In
Colorado, Edwin (Big Ed) Johnson was denied even a seat on the delegation.
Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado,
Wyoming—by the end of June, the West was gone. For so many months, Irv Hoff had urged Lyndon Johnson to campaign in the West. “He had put it off, and put it off, and put it off as long as he could,” Hoff would say. “And he put it off too long.”

T
HE DESPERATION WITH WHICH
Lyndon Johnson was trying for the nomination now was visible not only in public but behind closed doors—Rowe and Corcoran and Connally and Clark saw that they had been right all along: that because “he wanted it
so much,
” “eventually he was going to do it,” was eventually “going to get in—get in all the way.”

Having finally accepted Rowe’s offer of help, he asked him for advice, and when Rowe told him bluntly,
“Kennedy
has got this. There’s only one way to stop him that I can see. That’s for Adlai to give a signal [that he was willing to be drafted],” he acted on it.

If the two-time nominee could attract enough votes, Rowe was saying, they might, combined with Johnson’s and a few from Symington and the favorite sons, be enough to deny Kennedy a first-ballot victory. Long though that shot may have been, Johnson tried it, suggesting, in a number of conversations with Stevenson, that Adlai “let his people be more active.” Johnson’s argument, according to a Stevenson aide, was,
“Now
listen, Adlai, just hang loose here. Don’t make any commitments. You may still get it. Don’t help that kid, Kennedy. Just stay neutral.” And the argument may have been persuasive: “I believe that Governor Stevenson … made a commitment to him that he would do that,” the aide says. At the end of the month, when
Arthur Krock told Kennedy that Adlai had started making a real effort for the nomination, Kennedy said,
“And
how!”

O
N
C
APITOL
H
ILL
, Johnson held a lot of cards, and now he was playing them. In several states crucial to his presidential hopes, Senate seats were becoming vacant in 1960, and some of the Democrats running for them—Thorn Lord of New Jersey and Representative
Lee Metcalf of Montana, for example—had been
promised financial support by the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee. Now these candidates were told that that support would be rationed out in inverse proportion to their support of Kennedy. And not only cash but committee assignments were in Johnson’s hand. What had he said to Governor Loveless in that brief meeting aboard his plane? Loveless was to tell an Iowa politician that his Senate assignments were going to depend on his convention activities. To all these men, it was becoming apparent, Johnson was saying, in effect, Vote for me if you can, but if you can’t, just don’t vote for Kennedy. And to all these men the message had been delivered in firm terms. After talking to Loveless, the Iowa politician said, “Rough stuff. These boys aren’t playing for peanuts.” “I’m not what you call a Kennedy fan,” one unidentified governor told the
Wall Street Journal,
“but these Johnson tactics almost have me mad enough to become one.”

One card in Johnson’s hand could be played only if
Sam Rayburn, who held the same card, agreed to play his. The Speaker had been reluctant to play it, telling Johnson its use would be
“too
raw,” but Representative
Richard Bolling, a witness to some of their discussions, says that at seventy-eight
“Sam
was just old now; Lyndon finally wore him down.” On June 29, without warning, the two Texans suddenly announced that rather than Congress adjourning for the year before the convention, as had been expected, it would instead immediately recess, and return to complete the session on August 8—after the convention.

Longtime congressional observers could recall only one maneuver even faintly comparable: Harry Truman’s 1948 masterstroke, following the Republican convention, of calling the Republican-controlled Congress back into session, and challenging it to deliver on the convention’s campaign platform. Truman, however, had been challenging a Republican Congress, in which he had limited influence. Johnson and Rayburn were talking about a Congress
they
controlled. Rayburn’s
“word
is virtually law among Democrats in the House,”
James Reston noted. Power over legislation senators and congressmen wanted—or needed, to satisfy demands of their constituents—was in the hands of the two Texans, and in the hands of the committee chairmen who wanted Johnson to get the nomination. With the new congressional schedule, Johnson and Rayburn would be holding this legislation over the heads of senators and representatives in Los Angeles; as James Reston wrote,
“The
theory … was that the two Texans would be able, by their influence over legislation in the recessed session, to induce forty or fifty delegates to support Mr. Johnson.”

Evans and Novak were to call the
“audacious
” maneuver
“blatant
political blackmail.” As the Senate, in previous years so efficient under Johnson, had dawdled through the year, there had indeed been speculation that the Majority Leader had, as the
New York Times
was to put it,
“engineered
a Senate slowdown to keep control of the fate of major bills during the Democratic convention.” (The speculation had been discounted because the maneuver would be “too extreme [an] exercise of power.”) There was, in reality, not much chance it would succeed—for the same reason that Johnson’s reliance on senators wasn’t succeeding. While
he had power over them, they didn’t have power over their delegations. His use of it made clear, however, the lengths to which he was going in his last-ditch effort to get the nomination.

“W
ORKED UP
,” “revved up” now, Lyndon Johnson had convinced himself he was going to defeat Kennedy. He believed that thoroughly now. It was, after all, his destiny. “I was
meant
to be President.” Governor Lawrence had seen it.
“The
man has sold himself.” Now Johnson, meeting with a group of senators in the Taj Mahal, waved a copy of a newspaper article predicting a Kennedy win, and laughed at it. The winner was going to be
him,
he said.
“The
bandwagon is rolling, boys. You might as well get on board.”

A
ND HE WAS WORKED UP
about his opponent. While he had begun deriding Kennedy as soon as the Massachusetts senator began running for the presidency, calling him “the boy,” or, in a contemptuous tone,
“Sonny
Boy,” or “Johnny” or “Little Johnny,” saying that he was just a rich kid whose daddy was trying to buy him the nomination, in public, for a time, he confined himself to the age issue (
“He’s
a nice, attractive
young
man,” he would say, heavily underlining the final adjective) and the absenteeism issue (
“Jack
was out kissing babies while I was passing bills, including his bills”), and the contrast between their roles in the Senate. Johnson
“likes
to portray himself as the man who made Senator Kennedy what he is today by securing him choice committee assignments,”
David Broder reported. “He looks with paternal pride on the accomplishments of Kennedy, Symington and all the others … who flourished so well under his care.”

As it became apparent that Kennedy’s bid was serious, however, in public the paternalistic note faded, and the jabs became sharper. To a press conference question about Kennedy, he responded that with the
Cold War in such a serious phase, the United States shouldn’t be represented in world councils by someone “second-class.” After Kennedy said he would have expressed regret to Khrushchev, the word “guts” became a standard word in Johnson’s platform rhetoric, and the jabs started to be thrown in combination. “It is up to the American people in their wisdom to judge whether a man of that age can lead the country.… The next President should have a little gray in his hair, wisdom in his heart, and guts under his belt.” A full-page newspaper ad which his campaign took out in May in eighteen cities across the country said, “We cannot afford to gamble with inexperience, immaturity.” Jack Kennedy’s father had been an appeaser, Lyndon was to say. “I wasn’t any Chamberlain umbrella man. I never thought Hitler was right.”

In private he was funnier. Riding in an elevator in the Capitol with a Republican congressman,
Walter Judd of Minnesota, Johnson asked him,
“Have
you heard the news?”
“What
news?” Judd responded. “Jack’s pediatricians have just
given him a clean bill of health!” Johnson said. And not so funny. Although Humphrey and Symington would make
“small
cracks” about Kennedy,
Hugh Sidey would observe, “they were never bitter. They knew the game, and the closest they’d get to being bitter was that he was a rich, spoiled kid who had never had to make it.… The most vicious evaluation of Senator Kennedy was from Johnson, and that got quite violent at times.” After a campaign trip to
Oklahoma in June, he offered
Peter Lisagor of the
Chicago Daily News
a ride back to Washington on the Convair, and, Lisagor was to recount,
“all
of the enmity and hostility that he held for the Kennedys came out. He called Kennedy
a
‘little scrawny fellow with rickets’ and God knows what other kind of diseases. He said, ‘Have you ever seen his ankles? They’re about so round.’ ” And Johnson made a tiny circle with his fingers.

There were other flights with Lyndon Johnson, jacket and tie off, sitting beside other reporters pouring out his feelings about “the boy,” the Texas twang clear and sharp through the hum of the engines. Even reporters who had covered Johnson for years were startled by the depth of his feelings.
“It
is amazing to note the changes that have come over the man,”
Robert G. Spivack wrote on June 27. “One day he is the ingratiating, let’s-all-be-friends … political gladhander; the next day he is a rough-tough, kick-and-gouge fighter who will destroy anyone who gets in the way. Johnson seems determined that no matter what happens to his presidential ambitions, the one who must not become President of the United States is the man he contemptuously calls ‘Johnny’ Kennedy.”

One issue he had stayed away from was health: for a candidate who had suffered a major heart attack, health wasn’t a sure winner. But now any card he held had to be played. A decade before, as the chief counsel of Johnson’s Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee,
Donald Cook had impressed Johnson as a very sharp lawyer and investigator. Now he was president of the
American Power Company, but at the end of June Johnson drafted him to investigate Jack Kennedy’s health.

Going directly to
Frank Brough, who, as president of a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, “has,” as Cook was to tell
Walter Jenkins, “a great many doctor contacts around the country,” Cook quickly struck pay dirt. “Brough told me about this Addison’s Disease,” he told Jenkins. “Kennedy … was treated for it in the Lahey Clinic in Boston.… I am told he not only
had
it but
has
it now and is receiving treatment for it.”

By the next day, Cook had the name of a doctor,
Lewis Hurxthal, who he said had treated Kennedy for Addison’s disease at Lahey, and the fact that “the records of [the] case are not kept in the general clinic files, but in Hurxthal’s personal records.” He told a Johnson aide,
Arthur Perry, to tell Johnson that Kennedy was under Hurxthal’s “care … right down to the present time” and that the medication given for Addison’s “creates what the doctors call a psychic problem,” including “a split personality and … very neurotic behavior patterns.” Cook suggested that the story be leaked to “some newshound … without involving
the Senator,” but Johnson took a role himself, telephoning a California internist who had once worked at Lahey in an attempt to confirm that Kennedy had the disease. Despite the doctor’s refusal to provide this confirmation, however, Johnson decided to make the issue public—not himself, of course; publicly he stayed above the fray, refusing to get into the health issue at all, but having
John Connally and
India Edwards hold a press conference in which Mrs. Edwards said that Kennedy did indeed have Addison’s disease, which she defined as “something to do with lymph glands.” She added that “Doctors have told me he would not be alive if not for cortisone.”

But the Kennedys deflected the attack with their usual skill. Seizing on the fact that the classic cause of Addison’s was tuberculosis, which Jack Kennedy did not have (his Addison’s was caused by other factors), Robert Kennedy said that his brother
“does
not now nor has he ever had an ailment described classically as Addison’s Disease, which is a turberculose destruction of the adrenal gland”; that his brother had only “some adrenal insufficiency” which “is not in any way a dangerous condition”; and that “any statement to the contrary is malicious and false … despicable tactics … a sure sign of the desperation of the opposition. Evidently there are those within the Democratic Party who would prefer that if they cannot win the nomination themselves they want the Democrat who does win to lose in November.” Sorensen went further. Evidently feeling himself justified by the fact that Kennedy was taking not cortisone but a cortisone derivative, he told a reporter flatly, “He is not on cortisone.” And when the reporter asked him what other drugs Kennedy might be using, he said, “I don’t know that he is on anything—any more than you and I are on.” So successful were the Kennedys that the next day New York’s
Carmine De Sapio, friendly to Johnson, had an intermediary relay a message to the candidate: that Mrs. Edwards’ statement had backfired “and was going to hurt badly” not Kennedy but Johnson, and that
“Johnson
should disavow” it—which Johnson did.

None of his cards took a trick. It was just too late. On July 5, with the convention just six days away—standing, as
Mary McGrory sarcastically put it,
“before
the barn door” and “declaring that the horse has not been stolen”—Lyndon Johnson said the words he had never said before: “I am, as of this moment, a candidate for the office of President of the United States.” His voice suddenly broke as he was reading that sentence;
“I
had never heard him do that before,”
Horace Busby says. (The announcement, delivered in the auditorium of the new Senate Office Building, packed with reporters and cheering Senate staffers, and with Rayburn’s bald head shining in the front row, was filled with jabs at his leading opponent’s failure to condemn McCarthy—he himself, he said, had been “a working liberal when Joe McCarthy had been at the height”; at his absences from the Senate—he himself had stayed on the job while “those who have engaged in active campaigns have missed hundreds of votes.… The next President is not going to be a talking President or a traveling President. He is going to be a working President”; and at his inexperience: the “forces of evil in
this world … will have no mercy for innocence.” If the next President “is inexperienced in making government work, he becomes a weak link in the whole chain of the free world.”) Then, after a last visit to the White House with Rayburn to try and persuade Eisenhower to publicly criticize Kennedy—the President was to recount that the two Texans felt he was “a mediocrity in the Senate … a nobody who had a rich father.… And they’d tell some of the God-damndest stories”—on Friday, July 8, he flew to Los Angeles. Excoriating his top campaign workers (
“He
got mad,” Herring says. “He felt we hadn’t done our job. He didn’t feel we had done enough with the delegates. ‘If you’d done the job you were supposed to have done, I wouldn’t be in this situation’ ”), he told them he was going to win despite their incompetence. Listing the states that were going to switch to him after the first ballot, he said, “It was going to be nip and tuck but he still felt he would win.” But an article on the front page of Saturday’s
New York Times
showed how unrealistic it was for him to hope for the support of any substantial number of northern liberals.
“Top-level
labor leaders passed the word to union delegates to the Democratic National Convention today to give no aid to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson for nomination to any office,” it said. At a meeting of union leaders, one after the other had denounced what they called the “Johnson operation” to “hold liberal and labor legislation hostage to his candidacy,” it said. While the article contained no direct quotes from the meeting—that was evidently the condition on which a description of it had been given to reporter
Joseph Loftus—Loftus got the wording across nonetheless: the most powerful leader, gruff old
George Meany, president of the fifteen-million-member-strong
AFL-CIO, had, the article said, “left no doubt … that Senator Johnson should be regarded by all union delegates as an arch foe of labor.”