The Passage of Power (39 page)

Kennedy instructed his legislative assistant
Lee White that the Vice President was to be included in all major meetings—not only of the
National Security Council, of which he was of course a statutory member, but of the Cabinet and the regular Tuesday breakfasts with legislative leaders—and when, at a meeting during the first weeks of his presidency, Kennedy noticed that Johnson was not present because White had forgotten to notify him, he said, in an angry tone,
“Don’t
let this ever happen again. You know what my rules are, and we will not conduct meetings without the vice president being present.” And there is even a statement supporting that view from Reedy, who, during a conversation with Schlesinger, said,
“President
Kennedy was rather generous to Vice President Johnson.” (“But that didn’t mean that Vice President Johnson appreciated it in the slightest,” Reedy added. “Johnson was insatiable,” Schlesinger said in reporting this conversation. For him, “no amount of consideration would have been enough.”) And that view has been accepted by historians, both by historians who wrote about it first—
“The
President made of Johnson, as much as any President can make of his Vice President, a working participant in national affairs,”
Theodore H. White wrote in 1964—and by those who wrote about it decades later. Kennedy
“had
genuine regard for Johnson as a ‘political operator’ and even liked his ‘roguish qualities,’ ”
Robert Dallek wrote in 1998.
“More
important, he viewed him as someone who, despite the limitations of the vice presidency, could contribute to the national well-being in foreign and domestic affairs and, by so doing, make Kennedy a more effective President.”

A number of incidents that occurred during the next three years, however, raise the question of whether that setting of the lens was quite as precise as it might have been.

Some, at least in the early days of the Kennedy Administration, were the result of Johnson’s attempts to create an image of himself as one of its key players, a valued adviser (more than an adviser: in a way a partner of this younger, less
experienced man); of his attempts to push himself forward into that position; and of the fact that he was dealing with a man who didn’t like to be pushed—and who wasn’t going to be pushed, certainly not by someone he didn’t need anymore.

There was, for example, the scene that occurred just before the first weekly 9 a.m. breakfast meeting of the legislative leaders—Rayburn, McCormack and Majority Whip
Carl Albert of the House; Mansfield, Majority Whip Humphrey and Smathers from the Senate—in the Cabinet Room in the West Wing of the White House, just down the hall from the Oval Office, on Tuesday, January 24. On Monday, Johnson had telephoned Kennedy to suggest that he come to the Mansion (the central portion of the White House, in which the President’s living quarters are located) about a half hour before the meeting, so that he could discuss matters with the President, and that they then walk over to the meeting together, and Kennedy had agreed. Now, emerging from the rear of the Mansion just before nine, they walked along the colonnade behind the White House to the West Wing, Johnson, in
Evelyn Lincoln’s recollection, “talking and gesturing,” very much the man giving advice. Kennedy let him talk, but he didn’t let him walk into the Cabinet Room with him. Just as they reached its door, Mrs. Lincoln saw, Kennedy motioned to Johnson to go in. He himself walked past the door and into the Oval Office.

“Mr. Kennedy stopped by his desk, glanced at his schedule for the day, had a few words with … Kenny O’Donnell, looked at the clock, pushed back the hair from his forehead, seemed to wait a moment,” obviously killing time, Mrs. Lincoln was to recall. “And then he slowly walked through the door,” out through her office, and only then entered the Cabinet Room, where the legislative leaders—and Johnson—were standing waiting for him. He hadn’t wanted to walk into the meeting with Johnson beside him. And when he walked into the meeting, Johnson hadn’t
been
beside him.

Then, when the meeting ended, Mrs. Lincoln says, “Mr. Johnson followed Mr. Kennedy right into the President’s office.” During the next fifteen minutes or so, she came into the office several times with telephone messages for Kennedy. Each time she came in, Johnson, standing in front of Kennedy’s desk, was talking, his right arm raised and his forefinger jabbing at Kennedy. “In a loud voice he would preface his remarks with, ‘Now let me tell you, Jack.’ ” And each time she came in, Kennedy, saying “very little,” was shuffling through papers on his desk. Finally, he stood up, looked pointedly at his schedule and said, “That’s fine, Lyndon,” and Lyndon left.

That scene—Johnson lecturing and jabbing, Kennedy “fiddling with papers”—“was one that I was going to see many, many, many times whenever Johnson was in that office alone with Mr. Kennedy,” Mrs. Lincoln says. But, in fact, there weren’t all that many times. During the entire year of 1961, Mrs. Lincoln was to calculate from her diary entries, Johnson spent a total of ten hours and nineteen minutes alone with Kennedy—less than an hour per month. During that year, he had breakfast alone with the President twice. He had had
more breakfasts, many more breakfasts, alone with a President—President Roosevelt—when he had been a junior congressman twenty years before.

And if that incident was a response to Johnson’s pushing, there were others that couldn’t be laid at the Vice President’s door.

Kennedy’s instructions that Johnson be invited to the large formal meetings of the Cabinet, the
National Security Council and the legislative leaders were followed, at least for a while. In the Kennedy White House, however, as
Theodore Sorensen was to admit, it was not in such formal meetings but in
“the
smaller and more informal meetings” of presidential intimates that “the final decisions were often made”—and to such meetings, from the early days of the Kennedy presidency, Kennedy quite often
“did
not invite him.”

Johnson’s exclusion was particularly striking in the area in which he had expected to play his most significant role: guiding the Kennedy Administration’s program through Congress. Lawrence O’Brien was put in charge of that task, and Kennedy made it clear that O’Brien was, in fact, the man to see. When a senator or a congressman called the President, Kennedy would ask: “Have you talked to Larry O’Brien about this.… You should talk to Larry.” As O’Brien puts it:
“It
didn’t take long for them to recognize [that] Larry O’Brien spoke for the President.” Not long at all. Within a few days Johnson realized that he wasn’t the man whom senators and representatives were calling when they were negotiating about something with the Administration, or asking it for some favor.

There were, of course, some strategic explanations for Johnson’s exclusion. One was his reputation, the aura of legislative genius that surrounded him in the eyes of newsmen who had watched his mastery of the Senate. One of the new President’s characteristics was an affection for the spotlight—and a disinclination to share it. To the suggestion that the renowned poet
Robert Frost be given a role in the inauguration, he had responded with approval—and caution. The role should not be a speech, he said.
“Frost
is a master of words. His remarks will detract from my inaugural address if we’re not careful. Why not have him read a poem—something that won’t put him in competition with me?” Johnson was a master of something, too—legislative tactics—and, as one historian writes, Kennedy
“did
not want [Johnson] managing [the Administration’s] legislative program and creating the impression that the President was following the lead of his Vice President, a more experienced legislator.” Another explanation was Johnson’s ego, which, as O’Brien aide
Myer Feldman puts it, Kennedy felt
“was
so great it might handicap the Administration.” Once Lyndon Johnson was again roaming free on Capitol Hill, his native habitat, there would be no controlling him.
“If
he had been unleashed he would have found it hard to refrain from running the whole show,” his aide
Harry McPherson says.

Considerations of policy may also have played a role.
“If
Kennedy had allowed Johnson to conduct his congressional relations, he would in effect have made the Vice President the judge of what was legislatively feasible and therefore lost control over his own program,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote.
“This
was
something no sensible President would do. Kennedy therefore relied on his own congressional liaison staff under Lawrence O’Brien, calling on the Vice President only on particular occasions.”

Johnson’s exclusion from this area of political activity extended to advice as well as participation, however. “Never in about two years” had O’Brien so much as stopped by his office to ask for any, he would tell McPherson near the end of 1962. O’Brien, a tough Irish pol, had great admiration for Johnson, as it happened, and was always
“tactful
and courteous” with him, but there was a line he never permitted Johnson to cross. On Sundays, O’Brien and his wife, Elva, invited senators, representatives and journalists to mingle with Administration insiders at brunch at their house in Georgetown. At one time—during his twelve years in the Senate, in fact, and, indeed, even before that, during his later years in the House—Lyndon Johnson’s house had been the place to be on Sundays if you wanted to know what was really going on on Capitol Hill.

Not anymore.

A
ND ON THOSE OCCASIONS WHEN
, as at one of the Tuesday breakfasts, he offered his opinion on legislative matters, it was not treated with particular respect. “He was so resentful of being at the breakfasts with … Mansfield and
Hubert Humphrey, who was quite voluble, speaking on every issue,” says O’Donnell. “And they sort of all treated Lyndon like he was one of them and he didn’t want to be treated like he was one of them. If he did say something, they’d say, ‘I don’t think you’re right. You haven’t been up there lately.’ ” These were men who had once shown him deference, and more than deference. Once, after Johnson had given Hubert Humphrey an order on the Senate floor and he hadn’t moved fast enough to suit the Leader, Johnson, snarling “Get goin’ now!,” had kicked him—hard—in the shin to speed him on his way, and Humphrey had accepted the kick without complaint, had even pulled up his pant leg the next day to proudly show a reporter the scar. Now Humphrey talked back to him, told him he was wrong.

Estelle Harbin, the woman who had worked in the same office with Johnson when he first came to Washington, had observed that even as a new congressional aide, he
“couldn’t
stand being just one of a crowd—just could not
stand
it.” Congresswoman
Helen Gahagan Douglas, who had come to know him later (and who became his mistress), had noticed the same characteristic: watching him on the floor of the House when he had been just another representative, she had seen
“the
picture of boredom, slumped in his seat with his eyes half closed. Then suddenly he’d jump to his feet, nervous … as if he couldn’t bear it another minute.” That was the picture of Lyndon Johnson at social as well as political gatherings; at dinner parties, he wanted to monopolize the conversation; if other guests persisted in talking, he would close his eyes and go to sleep, or at least appear to, until a gap in the conversation let him start talking again.

And if the senators didn’t listen to him, certainly the bright young men of the Administration who attended the leaders’ breakfasts—O’Donnell, O’Brien and O’Brien’s aides Feldman and White—didn’t. Says an occasional attendee,
Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee,
“The
President had more or less shelved the Vice President, … turned him out to pasture.” The congressional leaders saw that the Administration’s men didn’t put much stock in his opinions. So why should they? No one listened to him. “The greatest legislative prestidigitator of his time” had been stripped of any opportunity to use his sleight of hand.

In status-conscious Washington, it did not take long for such a dramatic change to be noted. By March 19,
Tom Wicker of the
New York Times
was writing that
“Those
who have watched his giant strides about Washington this past decade” are “puzzled.” The Administration has kept this “proud and forceful figure … out of sight and out of print.”

Johnson’s response to the new position in which he found himself was to hardly talk at all at Cabinet, National Security Council and legislative leaders’ meetings—even when directly invited by the President. Kennedy would ask him for his recommendation on the particular issue at hand, or, if a decision was being taken, whether he approved of it. Johnson would answer in monosyllables—and in a voice so soft that sometimes it could not be heard, so that he would have to be asked to repeat himself. One of his tactics throughout his life—one of the techniques he employed to bend people to his will—had been to make them feel sorry for him, to pity him, until, moved at last by his distress and his sad state, they gave way, at which point he would promptly revert to his normal self, with a speed and thoroughness so dramatic that they made it obvious that this sad demeanor was indeed only a tactic. This technique had had success even with people as familiar with it as Jim Rowe. Having observed Johnson close up for more than twenty years, Rowe was aware, he says, that Johnson would always use “whatever he could” to “make people feel sorry for him” because “that helped him get what he wanted from them.” But that awareness didn’t help Rowe when, in 1956, the person from whom Johnson wanted something was
him.
Having observed also how Johnson treated people on his payroll, he had for years been rejecting Johnson’s offers to join his staff, and had been determined never to do so. But Johnson’s heart attack in 1955 gave him a new weapon—and in January, 1956, he deployed it, saying, in a low, earnest voice, “I wish you would come down to the Senate and help me.” And when Rowe refused, using his law practice as an excuse (“I said, ‘I can’t afford it, I’ll lose clients’ ”), Johnson began telling other members of their circle how cruel it was of Jim to refuse to take a little of the load off a man at death’s door. “People I knew were coming up to me on the street—on the
street
—and saying, ‘Why aren’t you helping Lyndon? Don’t you know how sick he is? How can you let him down when he needs you?’ ”