The Passage of Power (44 page)

In the little world of Washington, what’s more, everyone knew the situation: knew that Lyndon Johnson was no longer on the inside of anything. The discipline with which, during the early months of his vice presidency, he had imposed on himself a policy of silence with journalists who had previously known him as a master leaker of inside information was no longer necessary, since, as
Booth Mooney puts it, “he could no longer be regarded as an important news source.”

Where at one
time influential members of the Washington press corps had pleaded for a few moments of his time, the situation was reversed now. “He used to call me—he was very lonely,”
Time
’s Sidey recalls. “ ‘Hugh, you haven’t been to see me, you haven’t called me.’ Lonely. Pathetic.” But Sidey had no reason to call him now. “He wouldn’t know what the President was going to do. He couldn’t talk about things in detail like he used to do.”

Spotting
Russell Baker of the
New York Times
outside the Senate Chamber one day, he
“clapped
my back, mauled my hand, massaged my ribs … all the time hailing me as though I were a long lost friend and simultaneously hauling me into” the Taj Mahal, where he launched into a seemingly endless monologue. “Torrents of words poured out of him”—on a dozen subjects. Although Baker had covered him in the Senate for years, Johnson didn’t know his name. Sometime deep into the monologue, he scrawled a few words on a slip of paper, and called in a secretary to take it, and, Baker recalls, “a few minutes later his secretary brought him back a message” on another piece of paper, which Johnson looked at, and then crumpled up and threw into a wastepaper basket. When Baker was finally able to leave, he bumped into a friend who had been in Johnson’s outer office when the secretary came out with Johnson’s note. The friend told Baker that Johnson’s note asked the secretary: “Who is this I’m talking to?” Aware of Baker’s name or not, however, he had found a journalist willing to listen to him for a while, and the “torrent of words” went on. The monologue had a purpose. “Its central theme was his devotion to
John F. Kennedy.” He put on a front. “To hear him tell it, there had never been a happier second banana. Never mind that the Kennedys’ glittering young courtiers—the ‘Harvards,’ as Johnson called them—joked constantly and cruelly about him.… Never mind realities. On this day, playing to a nameless Capitol reporter, he spoke of the vice-presidential life as a friendship with a man he admired extravagantly.… He was making it plain what the headline should say: ‘Lyndon Johnson Utterly Devoted to John F. Kennedy!’ ” But Baker, of course, recognized the truth: that Johnson “knew he was the butt of cruel humor among many of President Kennedy’s people, and was trying to pretend it wasn’t so, that he still counted as he had counted back in the Fifties when he was Johnson the Genius Who Ran the Senate.… I felt sorry for him. If you had once been the great Lyndon Johnson … it was painful to be laughed at and called ‘Cornpone’ by people you thought of as arrogant, smart-ass Ivy League pipsqueaks. Here was greatness comically humbled.”

It wasn’t only newspapermen who had stopped calling. Washington was a Kennedy town now; it wasn’t a good idea for Lyndon Johnson to be able to say
he had been talking with you. A friend who visited him in EOB 274 says,
“I
couldn’t believe it. I sat there for an hour and the phone didn’t ring.” When old allies from Texas—who, not being familiar with vice presidential traditions, assumed that a Vice President would have an office in the White House—visited Washington, he was ashamed that he didn’t, so he would bring that fact up himself, as if doing so made it less bad. Charlie Herring came by, and Johnson said,
“You
know, I feel like I’ve got nothing to do. I don’t even have an office in the White House. Let’s go out for a while.” Supreme Court Justice
Tom Clark of Texas, an old ally, was at home, and they dropped in on him
“just
to have something to do.” Dropping by for another visit some months later, Herring found that nothing had changed. “He was completely at loose ends. He had nothing to do. He said, ‘We might as well get out and see the country,’ ” and in the middle of the day they drove down to Fairfax, Virginia, to see a facsimile of
George Washington’s will.

T
HE FORMAL MEETINGS
in the Cabinet Room—of the Cabinet or the
National Security Council—at which Johnson sat, in the center of one side of a long table, directly across from President Kennedy, were particularly terrible hours for Lyndon Johnson. Not just his desire, his
need,
to dominate, but also his need to decide—his will for decision, his will to
act,
what Theodore H. White was to call his “yearning” to act—were fundamental to his inner being. But if at first his reluctance during the Kennedy Administration to speak at such meetings had been a manifestation of sullenness or self-pity, or a bid for sympathy, or a desire to show his loyalty (“I agree with what the President said”), another consideration had now, with the increasingly open hostility of the New Frontiersmen, been added to the list of those that militated silence: any comment that he made in a meeting seemed to be quoted—or misquoted—to the press, in ways that made him seem southern, or militaristic, or uncouth.
“I
don’t want to debate these things around fifteen men and then have them all go out and talk about the Vice President and what he thinks,” he explained once. So while other men discussed, while another man decided, Lyndon Johnson sat silent, in a role that was, like so many aspects of the vice presidency, foreign to his very nature, sat so silent that people who had watched him at meetings in earlier years marveled at what they were seeing now, at what
Dean Rusk was to call the
“great
self-discipline and strength,” the “self-control,” that enabled Johnson “with all that volcanic force that was part of his very being … [to] fit into that new role.” Not even when the discussion turned to problems with Congress would he comment unless asked directly by the President, and then the answer would be brief.
“He
had to sit there … and observe controversies and frustrations which for years he had managed, and be totally passive,” his old friend
Elizabeth Wickenden points out.

His hands revealed how hard it was. Sometimes, as he sat at the long table in the Cabinet Room, listening to other men talk, those big hands would be
clasped together, the intertwined fingers working nervously, so hard that his knuckles were white with the effort he was making not to speak. Sometimes, as Kennedy, directly opposite him across seven feet of polished mahogany, ran the meetings with his easy air of command, he would look away from the President for long minutes, staring down the length of the table, a faraway expression on his face. Sometimes he would put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands and stare down at the mahogany. Then he might raise his head, and lean forward across the table, a hand shielding his eyes, as if from the sunlight streaming in the windows behind the President. At the weekly legislative leaders’ breakfasts now, he
“rarely
said a word,” wrote Doris Kearns, whose future husband,
Richard Goodwin, attended some of them. “His face appeared vacant and gray; he looked discontented and tired.” Even when, in response to a direct question from Kennedy, he offered an opinion, “he tended to mumble, his words barely audible to the person sitting beside him. On rare occasions, when he was particularly excited or perturbed, he would suddenly raise his voice for a few moments to its customary shout, only to let it sink again into an unintelligible murmur.”

And by the summer of 1962, his predicament was in the press; for this man who so dreaded public humiliation, the spectre had arrived at his front door—in the newspapers that were delivered to The Elms each morning. And waiting for him each morning at his desk in the Taj Mahal were articles that had been scissored out of other newspapers by his staff and placed in a folder for his perusal. By the end of the day, each would have scribbled across it the big
L
that signified that he had seen it.

WHERE’S LYNDON
? asked a headline over a syndicated article that asked, “Why has Lyndon Johnson gone into eclipse?”
LYNDON JOHNSON GUESSING GAME
was another headline; the article under it asked the question, “why Johnson does not make the headlines now that he did once,” and answered it: “It is John F. Kennedy who makes the decisions—and gets the headlines.” In a syndicated column that appeared in scores of Hearst newspapers
Marianne Means wrote, “He is usually so thoroughly ignored that it is hard to tell if he is here at all,” and, noting that, in conferences, “basically, Johnson remains an observer, not a participant,” mocked his “extraordinary efforts to keep himself in check.… None of these were Johnson traits before the vice presidency. His egotistical temper rarely has permitted him to share the credit for anything. Thus, Johnson appears to be working very hard at his tiny job.” One aspect to the mockery must have cut particularly deeply, to a man to whom it was so important to be thought of as shrewd, tough, always outsmarting other men, using them, and never being used himself.
“Now
that Johnson has served his purpose”—to get southern votes for Kennedy—“perhaps Kennedy was simply tossing him aside,” the
Chicago Tribune
speculated. And as the number of such articles increased, the headlines seemed to boil down to a single mocking question, repeated in a dozen newspapers:
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LYNDON JOHNSON
?

On one such article, Johnson, in his agony, scribbled a note to his aide
Charles Boatner:
“Chas
—Why? Not True.” But it
was
true, and he knew it.

I
T WASN’T ALL THAT HARD
to break Lyndon Johnson. What lay beneath that blustering, bullying exterior was too fragile—had been broken too many times in his youth. Ever since those terrible years growing up in the Hill Country, ever since those years whose shadow never left him, any disparagement, any criticism, had hurt so deeply because it was cutting into a wound too deep ever to have closed. “
It was most important to Lyndon not to be like Daddy
”—not to become what his father, once so respected, had become: the object of public ridicule, of public scorn. But the parallel was inescapable now. His father had become a laughingstock. Now, so had he.

His whole demeanor showed what had befallen him, showed that the effort he was making came at a very high price, that the self-discipline it took for him to act against his nature, the
“self-effacement
” that Arthur Schlesinger says “was for him the most unnatural of roles,” came at “a growing psychic cost.” The price was registered in his weight, which was dropping off him because he wasn’t eating much; although he ordered new suits, they were soon hanging loosely on his shoulders, his trousers, which he always liked cut full anyway, bagging around his shoes. It was registered in his face, which had become gaunt, haggard, so thin that the long lobes of his ears, the jut of his big nose, his heavy black eyebrows and the dark circles under his eyes—eyes sunk deep in his head now—were more prominent than ever, and the gauntness was accentuated by his expression, so gloomy, with the corners of his mouth pulled down and the jowls hanging down, that more than one journalist called it a “hangdog look.” It was registered in his stride: the old, long, imperious Texas lope was gone; he walked more deliberately, with shorter steps; his shoulders were slumped; when he was in the President’s presence, he seemed sometimes to be actually bending his knees a bit, as if he wanted to conceal the fact that he was the taller man.
Bill Moyers—who had, within a few weeks of the inauguration, become publicity director for Kennedy in-law
Sargent Shriver of the
Peace Corps—felt that Johnson’s self-confidence was gone, that he was
“a
man without a purpose … a great horse in a very small corral.”

Others described the cost in terms of an image—not a pleasant image when applied to a man to whom being “a man” was all-important.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was to recall looking into Lyndon Johnson’s eyes during his vice presidency and thinking,
“This
is a bull castrated very late in life.” Nor was it only other men who applied that image to Johnson. He applied it to himself. In later years, when the vice presidency was behind him, he would apply it jokingly. “A vice president is a steer,” he would say. “You know what a steer is? A steer is a bull who has lost his social standing.” But there was no joke in the way he used it now. Late one afternoon, while
Sam Rayburn was still alive, Johnson walked into
Rayburn’s Board of Education. Instead of walking over and kissing Rayburn, as he usually did, he sat down without a word in one of the dark leather easy chairs, and put his head in his hands. Then he sat there for long minutes, oblivious to the other men in the room. His head kept dropping lower, until it was barely above his knees. And then, in a very low voice, Lyndon Johnson said,
“Being
vice president is like being a cut dog.”

T
ALKING TO THE PRESS
was too hard. The big names had stopped interviewing him, but there were still requests, relayed to him through Reedy, from other Washington reporters, or from reporters from Texas and foreign papers. “I am too worn out,” he said to one request; on another, he scribbled a single word: “No.” He couldn’t bear to appear on television, turning down even the popular
Today
show; he told Reedy to simply reply to television requests by saying that he didn’t go on television. Reedy, reluctant to make this bare, almost unbelievable statement—that the Vice President of the United States doesn’t go on television—resorted to different excuses, but they wore thin. In March of 1962, Adlai Stevenson’s press secretary,
Clayton Fritchey, telephoned Reedy, an old friend, to say that the U.N. ambassador had agreed to host a program on outer space and international cooperation, and wanted Johnson to appear on the show, and Reedy pointed out to Johnson that, as chairman of the Space Council, it was only logical that he do so, and that if he didn’t, Fritchey would get someone else, perhaps one of Johnson’s space aides, like James Webb. Johnson told him to refuse, but instead Reedy sent Johnson a memo which he wrote and rewrote, trying to make Johnson see the folly of what he was doing.
“After
considering it from every angle I would like to suggest that you reconsider your refusal,” he wrote.
“This
program would definitely give you an opportunity to be associated with the space program, above and beyond almost anything else you could do.… The spotlight would be on you.” When Johnson told Reedy to say what he had been told to say, Fritchey’s response was curt.
“I
called Clayton Fritchey and told him that you do not go on TV shows,” Reedy reported. “His exact response was: ‘All right! I might invite Jim Webb then. We want someone from Washington. I appreciate your efforts, George. So long.’ ”