The Passage of Power (43 page)

H
IS LOYALTY DIDN’T
do him any good, however. Walking across West Executive Avenue and into the White House, he would enter Ken O’Donnell’s office
and say he would like a minute or two of the President’s time when he was free, and sit by O’Donnell’s desk waiting for an opportunity.

But others would also be waiting. They would be put in the Cabinet Room or the Fish Room to wait, and sometimes the appointments were so closely stacked that, O’Donnell recalls, both rooms “would be filled with callers,” and others would be put in other aides’ offices, “or any place in the West Wing where a few feet of empty space happened to be available.” And these callers had specific business, often urgent, with the President—matters on which he had asked to see them. He would buzz out to O’Donnell or
Evelyn Lincoln to bring one of them in; the visitor would be ushered into the Oval Office as Lyndon Johnson still sat outside. Or there would be emergencies, and “Dean Rusk or another State Department officer would want thirty minutes of the President’s time for an urgent discussion involving top-priority national security matters”—audiences “that could not be denied.” Sometimes Lyndon Johnson had to wait quite a long time to see the President.

And sometimes, after he finally
did
get in to see him, the meetings weren’t that satisfactory. More than once, when Johnson was in the Oval Office with the President, Robert Kennedy simply walked in and interrupted to discuss some new matter, “without,” as one account puts it,
“so
much as a nod of apology toward LBJ.” Nor was it only the President’s brother who was permitted to interrupt. Once, for example, Arthur Schlesinger, sticking his head through the open door behind Mrs. Lincoln, saw Johnson sitting next to Kennedy’s desk, and “began to retreat,” but the President beckoned him to come in. Johnson was being treated as if he were simply another member of Kennedy’s staff.

He was reduced to begging—although he did it, at least mostly, through aides. “Charlie,”
Liz Carpenter asked Charles Bartlett, “could you get the President to check with Lyndon once in a while on matters of foreign policy that he’s considering?” She said, in Bartlett’s recollection, that “the Vice President was very frustrated by the fact that he was out of these deliberations; he felt a little bit sort of out of it, and perhaps if the President would just call up once in a while and ask his opinion, it would be a great help.” Bartlett did bring the matter up with Kennedy, asking him, “Why don’t you call Lyndon more often and ask his opinion?” Replying that he really should have done so more often, Kennedy said, “You know, it’s awfully hard because once you get into one of these crunches you don’t really think of calling Lyndon because he hasn’t read the cables. When you get into one of these things you want to talk to the people who are most involved, and your mind doesn’t turn to Lyndon because he isn’t following the flow of cables.” That explanation might have been valid except that Kennedy, had he wanted to, could simply have included Lyndon as one of the people who got the cables.

In any case, the begging didn’t help. It wasn’t simply foreign policy from which Johnson was being excluded. Consideration was being given to changing the jurisdiction and procedures of the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity,
of which he was the chairman, by an executive order. “For nine months,” Shesol was to report, “memos [about the changes] circulated between the White House and the Justice Department.… At no point did a copy reach the vice president.”

D
URING THE
A
DMINISTRATION
of John F. Kennedy, Washington was
Camelot, and in Camelot, the political world included parties. Johnson was always invited to formal state dinners; he and Lady Bird would be escorted upstairs to the family quarters in the White House with the evening’s other honored guests, so that they could come down the staircase with the President, a careful several steps behind him, taking their pace from him, and they would be part of the receiving line. And they were invited to some smaller dinners in the White House, too, including some of the black-tie, candlelit dinners—the “dazzling mixture of ‘beautiful people’ from New York, jet-setters from Europe, politicians, reporters who are friends and Kennedy relatives,” at which “the crowd is always young, the women are always gorgeous,” described by
Ben Bradlee—to which invitations were highly prized; they were invited, that is, if Kennedy was directly asked about including them. Recalls
Angier Biddle Duke: “I would get the list pretty late and see that the Vice President wasn’t on it, and call the White House—it was often in the afternoon of the day of the party—and remind—usually it was Kenny O’Donnell, that [since it was so late] the President himself would have to invite the Johnsons,” and “he would, and they would come.”

But Johnson felt just as out of place at the parties as in the West Wing. Everyone—Schlesinger, the Galbraiths, the Bundys—seemed to know everyone else so well. He didn’t. And in Washington, parties are a place for conducting business; after dinner, two or three men would be holding a quiet conversation. None of the business was with him. “Nobody was terribly interested in him,” Duke says. Things got worse. At the third White House dinner-dance, on November 11, a particularly dazzling affair which lasted until 4 a.m. and at which the champagne flowed quite freely,
Lester Lanin’s society orchestra played, and many of the eighty guests began doing a new, hip-swiveling dance called the twist. Johnson asked the scintillating
Helen Chavchavadze (who, as it happened, was one of the President’s mistresses) to dance—and slipped and fell on her, knocking her to the floor. It took a minute or two for him to be helped to his feet. By noon the next day, word of Johnson’s fall, couched in vivid phrases (“He lay on her like a lox,” one of the other guests reported), had reached Camelot’s most distant frontiers—as Johnson was well aware.

And sometimes he
wasn’t
invited—and he seemed simply unable to accept that.
Evelyn Lincoln picked up her phone one day to find the Vice President on the line; “Mrs. Lincoln,” he said, “I’ve just looked over some of the lists of dinners to be given by Mr. Kennedy and on one of them I don’t find my name. I wonder if you would check and see if there has been a mistake.” The dinner in
question was one for the President’s personal friends, she was to recall. When she told Kennedy about Johnson’s call, Kennedy asked, “You mean he called and wanted to be invited?” Mrs. Lincoln said that was correct. “Call and tell him that you have checked and you found that there was no mistake,” Kennedy said.

W
ASHINGTON HAD IN MANY WAYS
always been a small town, and in small towns gossip can be cruel, and the
New Frontiersmen—casual, elegant, understated, in love with their own sophistication (“Such an in-group, and they let you know they were in, and you were not,” recalls
Ashton Gonella)—were a witty bunch, and wit does better when it has a target to aim at, and the huge, lumbering figure of Lyndon Johnson, with his carefully buttoned-up suits and slicked-down hair, his bellowing speeches and extravagant, awkward gestures, made an inviting target. “One can feel the hot breath of the crowd at the bullfight exulting as the sword flashes into the bull,” one historian wrote. In the Georgetown townhouses that were the New Frontier’s social stronghold “there were a lot of small parties, informal kinds, dinners that were given by Kennedy people for other Kennedy people. You know, twelve people in for dinner, all part of the Administration,” says United States Treasurer
Elizabeth Gatov. “Really, it was brutal, the stories that they were passing, and the jokes, and the inside nasty stuff about Lyndon.” When he mispronounced “hors d’oeuvres” as “whore doves,” the mistake was all over Georgetown in what seemed an instant.

His accent—his pronunciation of the personal pronoun (“Ah reckon,” “Ah believe,” “Well, ahm just an ol’ country boy”); the way he slipped into saying “nigrah” instead of “Negro” no matter how hard he tried—his clothes (for one white-tie dinner-dance, he wore, to the Kennedy people’s endless amusement, not the customary black tailcoat but a slate-gray model specially sent up by Dallas’ Neiman-Marcus department store): all were grist for the Georgetown mill, as were his loquacity and his endless, corny stories. Any lull in the conversation could be filled with a question based on his rapid descent from power to obscurity: “Say, whatever happened to Lyndon Johnson?” Nicknames—shorthand for that fall—were coined for him: “Judge Crater,” for example, after a New York City judge who, during the 1920s, had disappeared one day, never to be seen or heard from again. Some of the New Frontiersmen had a gift for words, and the terms that finally became the accepted nicknames for Lyndon Johnson in their social gatherings—“Uncle Cornpone” or “Rufus Cornpone”—were, in their opinion, so funny. They had a nickname for Lady Bird, too, so when the New Frontiersmen referred to the Johnsons as a couple, it might be as “Uncle Cornpone and his Little Pork Chop.” The journalists who, as members of the in-group, were at the parties would hear a West Winger laughingly refer to “Lyndon? Lyndon Who?” and references to the situation would creep into print.

T
HE LARGE, FORMAL MEETINGS
that were the only ones to which the Vice President was invited were becoming more and more infrequent. Regarding them as “a waste of time,” Kennedy cut back on sessions of the Cabinet and the
National Security Council; soon the Cabinet was meeting less than once a month. And with the Space Council running itself and the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity being run by Labor Department officials, Lyndon Johnson had very little to do. He spent a lot of time at the Capitol, in the Taj Mahal and, sometimes, presiding over the Senate, sitting on that dais on which, even as a freshman senator years before, he “couldn’t bear” to sit, so removed was it from the action; presiding often over a Chamber in which a senator would be giving a speech to rows of desks empty except for two or three colleagues. During the early weeks of his vice presidency, he would sometimes, during a speech, step down from the dais to the Chamber floor and begin to make conversation with a senator. The senator would be polite, but often he would have to break away after a bit—he had other things to do. After a while, Lyndon Johnson stopped coming down to the floor. And once he came into the Democratic cloakroom, where, for eight years, he had been the cynosure of senators’ attention, where he had stood dispatching senators to the floor for a speech or a parliamentary maneuver, leaning over to hear as
Bobby Baker or some senator whispered in his ear, senators clustered around him, trying to catch his eye. This time, when he came in, a few senators were in the cloakroom, sitting in armchairs or on the sofas, reading newspapers or chatting. He greeted them. They greeted him back. Then Lyndon Johnson stood in the center of the cloakroom for a few minutes. No one stood up to talk to him. No one invited him to sit down. One of the men who was there that day says,
“I
don’t think he ever came into the cloakroom again.”

His big car would take him the mile and a half back up Pennsylvania Avenue. He had a suite, EOB 274, of three rooms on the second floor of the Executive Office Building, and his private office was high-ceilinged with ornate moldings, a marble fireplace and tall windows—which looked almost directly down,
across the narrow pavement of West Executive Avenue, at the entrance to the West Wing of the White House, with the cars pulling up at it and the men getting out of them to hurry inside to important business.

It was so close. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off it. His chair faced away from the window, but it was a swivel chair. In the midst of talking to someone—usually an aide: Buzz or Reedy or his Air Force aide,
Colonel Howard Burris; he had few other visitors—talking across a desk that was all too empty of anything that mattered, he would swing the chair around so that he was facing the window, and then jump up and stare out so that he could get a better look, a tall figure silhouetted against a tall window, looking out at the place he had always wanted to be. He couldn’t stay away from it. Suddenly he would stride out of the office, without a word of explanation, and
“you
knew where he was gone to,”
Horace Busby says. He had no reason to be in the White House, of course—no assignment from the President required his presence. He might give O’Donnell some reason he wanted to see the President, and sit there beside O’Donnell’s desk, waiting for a few minutes of another man’s time. The door would open; a group of men would come out, chatting, perhaps laughing, with one another. He wouldn’t know what they had been talking about. He might be told to go in then—or he might not. Or he would walk around the halls.
“This
was a period in which he proceeded to ‘hang around’ the outer offices of the White House—something like a precinct captain sitting in the anteroom of a ward leader hoping to be recognized,”
George Reedy was to write. “It was not a very prepossessing sight and certainly not worthy of a man of his stature.” And in so many rooms in the White House, it seemed, there would be meetings going on: the smaller, informal conferences through which much of the business of the Kennedy Administration was conducted. The halls were filled with men walking and talking together, or standing in little groups, having come out of one of the offices, and continuing their discussion in the corridors.
“The
White House is small,” Lyndon Johnson was to recall years later,
“but
if you’re not at the center, it seems enormous. You get the feeling that there are all sorts of meetings going on without you, all sorts of people clustered in small groups, whispering, always whispering. I felt that way as Vice President.”

Among Johnson’s assistants were men who loved him, and they could hardly bear to watch the way their Chief was being treated. The adoring Horace Busby, to whom Johnson would have been a father figure had Busby loved and revered his father, was, in fact, physically unable to bear it. Going across to the West Wing one day on some errand, he saw Johnson
“wandering
around, kind of your obedient servant just waiting for somebody to say, ‘Lyndon, would you run down and get the President an apple or something,’ … just kind of exposing himself so they would notice that he was on call.” And he saw what the Kennedy staffers were doing to Johnson: ignoring him. Returning to the Executive Office Building, he went into a bathroom and vomited. Lyndon’s brother couldn’t bear it. His visits to Washington became increasingly infrequent, Sam Houston was to say, “because I didn’t want to be a firsthand witness to my brother’s day-to-day humiliation.”