The Passage of Power (27 page)

But now, after Kennedy called, Johnson said to Rowe, “Power is where power goes,” and Rowe knew “He was really thinking about it.”

H
E HAD TWO HOURS
before Kennedy came down to his suite at ten o’clock, two hours not to decide what he was going to do, because he knew what he was going to do—but to check to see if there was anything he had overlooked. This was no time for the second string, or for anyone who, like Reedy, was intelligent but sometimes flinched from looking harsh realities in the face, for the realities now were very harsh, the choice very tough. Three men were called to the Johnson suite: “the man who knew where all the bodies were buried”; the man who had written the Truman memo; and the man who was the most pragmatic of all his aides—not his confidant, for Lyndon Johnson had no confidant, but the man who would “do
anything
for him,” and who was also “the only man who was tough enough to handle Bobby Kennedy.” And when Bobby Baker, Jim Rowe and John Connally had arrived, Johnson told them to lay out the reasons why he should or shouldn’t accept the
vice presidency, should Kennedy offer it. He told Connally to start off, but the three men found themselves in agreement on all the key points, pro and con.

“We
were not trying to persuade him of the virtues and glories of the vice presidency,” Connally was to recall. “We were looking at it more from a negative point of view: where does your risk lie?” And he and Rowe both concluded that, in Connally’s words,
“Your
risk lies in declining to accept it.”

Johnson had a lot to lose by not accepting, they agreed. If he didn’t accept, Kennedy would probably lose the election.
“He’ll
never beat Nixon in Texas unless you’re on the ticket,” Connally said. “Texas was discussed at considerable length.” Without Johnson on the ticket, in fact, Kennedy might not, against Nixon, a conservative and heir to Eisenhower, be able to win back the Solid South Eisenhower had broken so decisively. And if Kennedy lost the election, Johnson would be blamed for the loss by northern liberals who already, in Baker’s phrase,
“hate
your guts”—they already felt he was
“not
a fully committed Democrat,” Baker said; Johnson’s refusal to join the ticket would confirm them in that belief. And, the three men agreed, he would be blamed by Kennedy; “it could make Kennedy angry and bitter,” Baker recalls saying. Connally recalls telling Johnson that if Kennedy lost,
“you’re
going to be blamed—because they’ll try to ensure that you’ll be blamed. And [therefore] you’ll have a large segment of the party against you.” If Johnson ever wanted to try for the nomination again, that would make it
even harder than it otherwise would be. And if he didn’t accept and Kennedy won, the situation might be even worse. As Baker recalls saying,
“A
strong Democratic President will send his own programs up from the White House,” would create a legislative agenda that the Majority Leader would have no choice but to follow.
“He
would have to carry that program unless he wanted to have an open break with the President,” Connally explains. Even if he carried it, moreover, an
“angry
and bitter” President could make life difficult for a Senate Leader; if he didn’t accept, and Kennedy won, Lyndon Johnson would still be Leader, but the leadership might not be nearly as desirable a job to have. And, Connally recalls,
“I
even expressed the thought that he might not
be
Majority Leader. The Kennedys play for keeps. I said, ‘You assume that you’re still going to be Majority Leader, but why do you assume that? The Kennedys play for keeps. Bobby plays for keeps. They might say: We won without him. What the hell do we need him for? We don’t need him.’ I told him, ‘I’d hate to see you try to hold on to it [the leadership] in the face of opposition from the President.’ ”

By accepting, they felt, Johnson ran far less risk. In fact, Baker said,
“I
don’t think you have a thing in the world to lose by running with Kennedy.” Connally told Johnson that the arguments on that side—that Johnson had no choice but to accept—were overwhelming. For one thing, Kennedy might lose. There were few downsides to
that.
“Suppose
you take it, and he’s defeated—you’ll still be Senator. And you’ll still be Majority Leader.” If Kennedy lost, “you can’t really be hurt.”

And what if he took it, and Kennedy won? There were definitely downsides to that, as Connally pointed out:
“You’re
totally at his command. You almost can’t leave town without his permission. You’re going to have to listen more than you’ve ever done.” But, the three advisers said, there might be upsides, too, even if these could only be touched upon delicately, in oblique phrases. One had to do with Sam Rayburn. Even if Kennedy won, and Johnson was only his Vice President,
“You’ll
still have the Speaker,” is how Connally remembers putting it. He meant that as long as Johnson had Rayburn on his side, he would have power behind him. “No one thought he could be forced out as Speaker, or that the President could do much trying to go around him in the House,” he would remember years later. As long as a Vice President had Sam Rayburn behind him, the Vice President couldn’t be ignored. (Connally, tough though he was, was careful to look around before he said even “You’ll still have the Speaker”—to make sure that the Speaker hadn’t somehow entered the room. “We didn’t [want to] make that argument when the Speaker was there, because we would be presuming,” he explains.)

And then there was another possible upside—one that was in the minds of all three advisers even though, pragmatic and tough though they were, they mentioned it only in another oblique phrase, in part because, perhaps, they were not able to think about it other than obliquely, for thinking about another man’s mortality often leads to thoughts of one’s own mortality, and these are thoughts difficult to confront directly.

The phrase was
“a heartbeat away.”
“I felt—you’re a heartbeat away from
the presidency,” John Connally says. Asked if he had actually used even that direct a phrase during the conference that morning, he says he can’t remember, but Bobby Baker, brasher—and younger—says that
he
used it; he recalls reminding “Mr. Leader” that as Vice President, he would be
“one
heartbeat away from the presidency.” Rowe couldn’t bring himself to say those words. He stayed mostly silent during the conference, and after Johnson had dismissed them, saying Kennedy would be arriving in a few minutes, and Rowe had returned to his own room, he telephoned Johnson, and said only,
“On
balance, I would take it. I want to see you President one day.” Asked by the author almost a quarter of a century later for his reasons, he listed many, in his careful, lawyerly manner. Then there was a pause, quite a long one.

“And
that one heartbeat …,” Jim Rowe said.

D
URING THE CONFERENCE
with the three men, Johnson was
“quiet
, sober, reflective—obviously analyzing all of it,” Connally was to recall. He didn’t say much. But what he did say gave them a clue as to what his thinking was. Near the end of the discussion, after he had been, in Baker’s word,
“passive
” for a long time, he said, perhaps thinking of the intense dislike of many Texans for the Kennedys,
“Well,
I’ll probably have some trouble with my Texas friends if I decide to run.” And when Connally had finished his argument that Johnson had no choice but to accept the vice presidency, Johnson said quietly,
“Well
, I don’t disagree with that.” And during the conference there was a call from Texas congressman
Homer Thornberry, who was phoning to offer condolences for losing the presidential nomination. When Johnson told him that there might be a vice presidential offer, and Thornberry blurted out,
“Oh
, you can’t do that,” Johnson said, “Well, here’s my problem,” and listed all the reasons why he had no choice but to accept, listed them so persuasively that Thornberry changed his thinking, and, a few minutes later, telephoned back to tell him,
“I
was wrong”: that if the nomination was offered, he should accept. Lyndon Johnson wasn’t merely thinking about it. He wanted it.

O
NE GREAT OBSTACLE
stood in his way.
John Nance Garner had been
Sam Rayburn’s friend, his mentor in many ways, and Rayburn had seen what happened after Cactus Jack—a mighty figure on Capitol Hill, with the power he wielded as Speaker of the House spilling over to the other side of the Capitol (
“No
man was more influential in the Senate than Garner,” one observer noted)—accepted the vice presidential nomination from Franklin Roosevelt in 1932; had seen how the President increasingly ignored his advice to end what that Texas conservative came to call, privately at first but only at first,
“This
New Deal spending orgy.” Garner came to regard Roosevelt as a power-hungry “dictator,” Roosevelt saw him as an ignorant reactionary, and after Garner split with him for
good over Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court (it was he whom the Senate chose to deliver the news—“Cap’n, you are beat”—to the President), Garner’s expectations of succeeding the President were over, as was his career. When Roosevelt sought a third term, he enlisted in a “Stop Roosevelt” movement, and on Roosevelt’s third inaugural day, in 1941, Garner was back in the little Texas town of Uvalde, where he was to live out the rest of a long life as a pecan farmer.
“I
saw Jack Garner agree to run twice with Roosevelt … and go back to Texas a bitter man for life,” Rayburn told a friend. Loving Lyndon Johnson as the son he never had, Mr. Sam was firmly opposed to him even considering the
vice presidential nomination. The night before he left for Los Angeles, the Speaker told his friends Gene and
Ann Worley,
“The
first thing I’m going to do when I get off that airplane tomorrow is to announce to the world that Lyndon Johnson ain’t interested in second spot on a ticket with Kennedy.” And after Wyoming’s votes had ended Lyndon’s dream, and Rayburn had cried, he had squared his shoulders and sat up—and then had picked up the telephone in the Texas delegation’s section and called Johnson, because, as one observer put it, “He had had
a
premonition.”
“They
are going to try to get you to go on the ticket,” he said. “You mustn’t do it. It would be a terrible thing to do. Turn it down.”
“Power is where power goes.”
Whatever the equation of power that Lyndon Johnson was using as the basis for his calculations, Sam Rayburn was a major factor in it. Lyndon Johnson couldn’t defy him. Whether he wanted the vice presidential nomination or not, he couldn’t take it if Rayburn didn’t want him to. So after his conference with Connally, Rowe and Baker had ended, he telephoned
Earle Clements, with whom Rayburn was comfortable, and asked him to come to the suite, and when he arrived, told him about the vice presidential offer he expected—told him in such a way that, Clements was to say, it was
“obvious
he wants it.” And when Clements advised him to accept, Johnson said, “Then I wish you’d go down and convince Rayburn. He’s right down the hall.”

T
HE DRAMA THAT WAS
to consume the rest of the day—Thursday, July 14, 1960—would play out on two sets in Los Angeles’ Biltmore Hotel.

One was on the hotel’s ninth floor. It consisted of a large three-room suite in one corner of the floor, together with a series of individual standard hotel bedrooms that stretched along a rather dimly lit corridor. All the inner-connecting doors had been unlocked so that the suite and bedrooms comprised a single unit. During the hectic days earlier that week, this “Kennedy suite” had become known by the number on the door of the big corner suite: 9333. The candidate himself slept every night in a hideaway apartment his father had rented for him, but during the day 9333 was his headquarters.

The other set, two floors below and in the corresponding corner and corridor, also with a large suite and adjoining bedrooms stretching down the corridor, was 7333, the Johnson suite. (Johnson and Lady Bird slept there during the convention,
as did their daughters.) John Connally was in the first of the bedrooms, 7331,
Walter Jenkins in 7330, and the rest of the staff had bedrooms further down the hall. Separating the two sets was the eighth floor, on which Robert Kennedy had a suite, 8315. Governer Lawrence had the big suite on the tenth floor,
Stuart Symington on the sixth. Rayburn’s suite was on the seventh floor with Johnson’s, but at the opposite end of the corridor.

The elevator in this section of the hotel was located near the far end of the line of bedrooms at the end of the corridor furthest from the corner suite. That morning what one reporter referred to as the “pushy, sweaty mass” of the press—newspaper and magazine reporters and photographers, television cameras, cameramen and correspondents—was clustered around the elevator’s doors. Kennedy had arrived at his suite very early, before any reporters had arrived, and it was assumed he was still at his apartment and would come up in the elevator, and might emerge and provide them with a clue as to the identity of the vice presidential nominee.

There was another connection between the two sets, however: a back staircase almost directly across from the 9333 door in the floor’s corner, not a narrow back stairway but a broad one, with a broad open landing on each floor, as dimly lit as the corridors. If someone stepped out of the 9333 door of the Kennedy suite and walked almost straight across the hall and down the stairs, he had a good chance of avoiding the press, and that was what Jack Kennedy did, successfully, at about 10:15 that morning. Descending down the two flights of stairs, he knocked on the door of 7333.

Johnson opened it. The corridor outside was empty. Reporters and photographers had been stationed outside the rooms of the men considered likely vice presidential nominees, but Johnson was not one of them. Johnson led Kennedy into the living room, and they sat down on a couch, each at an end, half turned to face each other, two very tough, very smart men. Someone closed the door to the living room.