The Passage of Power (45 page)

He couldn’t bear to stay in Washington. After Kennedy’s triumphant confrontation with Big Steel in April, during which, to battle inflation, the President forced the
United States Steel Corporation to rescind the price increases it had announced—a four-day-long episode in which Johnson played no part—he began spending more and more time on his ranch, leaving Washington on Thursday and not returning until Monday. But he couldn’t relax there. To while away the time, he played endless games of dominoes with his ranch foreman,
Dale Malechek. And he couldn’t sleep there, either. Malechek, milking cows at 4 a.m., suddenly felt a presence behind him, and, turning on his stool, saw Johnson standing behind him in his bathrobe.

With the weather turning warmer in Washington that summer, he would invite Texas allies over to The Elms to swim or sit around the pool and then have dinner, but, one of the frequent guests, Congressman Jim Wright, recalls, he kept “grabbing the phone impatiently and calling somebody. He couldn’t relax, you couldn’t keep his mind on one subject.”

And when he did sleep, his dreams—his nightmares—were of what
Doris Kearns Goodwin, to whom he was later to recall them, called the “utter powerlessness” of being trapped, and the trap in which he was caught in his dreams was, in fact, the one in which, in daylight hours, he lived. In the dream that particularly tormented him, he was seated at his desk in the Executive Office Building, so near, and yet so far, from the White House just beyond his window. “In the dream,” he told Goodwin, “I had finished signing one stack of letters and had turned my chair toward the window. The activity on the street below suggested to me that it was just past five o’clock. All of Washington, it seemed, was on the street, leaving work for the day, heading for home. Suddenly, I decided I’d pack up and go home, too. For once, I decided, it would be nice to join all those people on the street and have an early dinner with my family. I started to get up from my chair, but I couldn’t move. I looked down at my legs and saw they were manacled to the chair with a heavy chain. I tried to break the chain, but I couldn’t. I tried again, and failed again. Once more and I gave up: I reached for the second stack of mail. I placed it directly in front of me, and got back to work.”

In desperation he turned back to the staff member on whom he had relied for so many years, instructing George Reedy to draft one of his long memos laying out a strategy to deal with the predicament. But as always, he got from Reedy the truth: that there was, really, no way of dealing with it.
“The
question raised by so many newspapermen—‘What is the Vice President doing?’—is not going to be answered satisfactorily by more activity or by public relations moves,” Reedy told him in a memo.
“They
are accustomed to thinking of you as the man who for eight years was one of the dominant movers and shapers on the American scene and this does not accord in their thoughts with the picture of a man … meeting officials at the airport and going down to the White House to give advice but not to make decisions.… The question ‘What is the Vice President Doing?’ is going to persist with unfavorable undertones until they find some area in which you are actually making decisions.” And, Reedy went on,
“Because
of the inherent nature of the Vice Presidency, it is very difficult to put you in a decision-making role.… For the time being there is no conclusive answer to the ‘What is the Vice President Doing’ question. We have no choice other than to struggle along doing the best we can while laying our plans for the future.”

Reedy was telling him that there was no way out of the trap in which he had caught himself. If, during the vice presidency’s early days, a gloomy demeanor had been a pose Johnson adopted to elicit sympathy, it was no longer a pose. He began telling even his most trusted staff members that they should start looking
for other jobs.
John Connally, running for governor of
Texas, asked
Ken BeLieu to leave Washington and join his staff in Texas. When BeLieu reported this to Johnson, Johnson replied: “Go. I’m finished. You follow him.”

H
IS MANNER WAS PARTICULARLY NOTICEABLE
when John Kennedy was present, as
Evelyn Lincoln noticed. As the President’s “sureness and independence increased, the Vice President became more apprehensive and anxious to please,” she was to recall. Sometimes, on the increasingly rare occasions when he was in the Oval Office, with Kennedy leaning back, relaxed and at ease in his chair, Johnson, sitting facing him in a chair beside his desk, would be on the edge of his seat, leaning forward as he talked, his pose that of a schoolboy trying to win a teacher’s favor.

And, in the fall of 1962, in response to further humiliation from the Kennedys, he groveled even more deeply than before.

In September,
James Meredith’s attempt to become the first of Mississippi’s one million black residents to attend the state university was met by the defiance of Mississippi Governor
Ross Barnett, touching off two weeks of tense negotiations with the White House before, over the last weekend in the month, the tension erupted in violence that left two dead and scores injured, and in the dispatch of hundreds of United States marshals and the federalizing by Kennedy of the
Mississippi National Guard. Johnson was not involved in the negotiations; during the crucial weekend he was not even in Washington but down at the ranch. Unfortunately, that fact became known, and on Monday morning the
Houston Chronicle
asked its congressional correspondent,
Vernon Louviere, to ask the Vice President for comment. Strolling with an affectation of casualness up to the Senate Press Gallery,
Boatner managed to get a look at the story in Louviere’s typewriter.
“He
has written only one paragraph,” he reported to Johnson, “but it was to the effect that the man who carried the South for President Kennedy apparently had not been called in for discussion of the Mississippi situation.” Telephoning Louviere, Johnson tried frantically for thirty minutes to convince the reporter that his information was incorrect, that in fact the White House had been constantly consulting him that weekend, that even when he had been out boating on a lake near the ranch, he had had a ship-to-shore telephone with him. But the information was accurate, and the article, which ran on Tuesday, reported that “over the weekend—one of the tensest in the nation’s history—Johnson was not in … close personal contact with the White House. He was relaxing at his ranch in Texas.”

Johnson’s response to the story was panic—that it might offend the President. Telephoning
Dean Rusk, the Cabinet member friendliest to him, he asked him to get a message to Kennedy—which Rusk did by passing it on to White House aide Dungan. The message was that the information in Louviere’s article had not come from him or anyone on his staff—that he had never discussed the
Meredith situation with any journalist or leaked any information that would suggest discord within the Administration. And the message didn’t stop there. He wanted the President to know, it said, that “the situation in Mississippi had been handled better than he could ever have thought of handling it”—and that “He felt that he had been treated better than any other Vice President in history and knew it.”

T
HEN, A FEW MINUTES BEFORE NINE O’CLOCK
on Tuesday, October 16, 1962, as President Kennedy, still in his pajamas, was sitting in bed reading the morning newspapers, there was a knock on the door, and McGeorge Bundy came in, and under his arm was a sheaf of photographs—and the thirteen days of the
Cuban Missile Crisis had begun.

When, at 11:50 a.m. that Tuesday, the photographs—barely discernible lines and dots that were, a CIA analyst explained, missile sites that Russian technicians were assembling in Cuba for missiles, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, that would be able to reach targets in most of the United States and that would soon be operative—were shown to the group, mostly members of the National Security Council, that Kennedy had assembled in the Cabinet Room, Johnson, as a member of the NSC, was among them. The first reaction was shocked disbelief; for months the Russians had been assuring Kennedy that they would not put offensive weapons in Cuba. And when opinion in the group (which, during the Thirteen Days, would come to be known as “
ExComm,” for the executive committee of the National Security Council) came down in favor of quick action—an immediate air strike, delivered without warning against the missile sites, or a broader, more massive bombing campaign, or some other form of quick military action—Johnson was part of that hawkish majority. Prodded by Kennedy—
“You
have any thoughts, Mr. Vice President?”—after he had remained silent all afternoon, Johnson said he wanted to hear the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were meeting at the Pentagon. But, he said,
“the
question we face is whether we take it [the missile sites] out or whether we talk about it. And, of course, either alternative is a very distressing one. But of the two, I would take it out—assuming that the commanders felt that way.” He would not, Lyndon Johnson said, consult with America’s allies, or with its senators or congressmen. “I’m not much for circularizing it over the Hill or with our allies, even though I realize it’s a breach of faith, not to confer with them. We’re not going to get much help out of them.… Tell the alliance we’ve got to try to stop the planes, stop the ships, stop the submarines and everything else they’re [the Soviets] sending. Just not going to permit it.”

T
HE
J
OINT
C
HIEFS ADVOCATED
a surprise air strike, not just against the missile sites but against airfields and possibly other targets in Cuba, with a simultaneous
buildup for a possible invasion. Kennedy ordered ExComm’s members to drop whatever else they were doing and analyze his options. Action was imperative, Kennedy said—
“I
don’t think we’ve got much time on these missiles. We can’t wait.… We’re certainly going to do [option] number one. We’re going to take out those missiles”—but, he said, he wouldn’t act immediately. He ordered more photographic reconnaissance flights;
“We
had to be sure,” in Sorensen’s words, “of what we were facing, had to have the most convincing possible evidence” to present to the world, had to know “what else was taking place throughout the island.” The President made a plea to the group for secrecy, until the evidence—and our response—was determined.
“Any
premature disclosure,” in Sorensen’s words,
“could
precipitate a Soviet move or panic the American public.” And if negotiations were decided on, leaks would make them more difficult. He and the Vice President, Kennedy told ExComm, were both scheduled to campaign for congressional candidates that week, and, so that the press wouldn’t get wind of the crisis, they would both keep those commitments until the group united behind a recommendation. Johnson was scheduled to leave the next day for appearances in the Midwest and West, and then Hawaii, but Kennedy’s appearances were in the East until Friday, so he could sit in on at least some of the group’s meetings.

N
EAR THE END
of that evening meeting, at which Johnson had again sat silent, Kennedy had pressed him—“Mr. Vice President, do you have any thoughts?”—but Johnson this time declined to give any. His only response was,
“I
don’t think I can add anything that is essential.”

His silence at the meeting did not, however, mean he was silent everywhere. Despite his statement that “I’m not much for circularizing it over the Hill,” he evidently decided to circularize it to at least one man on the Hill. Telephoning Richard Russell, he told him about the photographs—
“The
first word about the existence of those missiles came [in a telephone call] from Johnson,” says
William H. Darden, chief clerk of Russell’s Senate Armed Services Committee. Kennedy had asked that that information be kept secret, and among those from whom he was undoubtedly most anxious it be kept secret were the members of the congressional hawks whom he called the “war party.” Johnson had given the information to the war party’s chief. (That during the next six days—before Kennedy made the information public in a television address—it remained secret was proof of the fact that coexisting with Russell’s monumental racism was what a friend called
“a
monumental sense of honor.” During the quarter of a century of Russell’s dominance in the Senate Armed Services Committee, he regarded his responsibility to America’s fighting men as a sacred trust: he never leaked confidential information to journalists, and members of his committee, even the most publicity hungry of them, were aware of what his attitude would be if
they
did. Once, after a closed committee hearing,
Wayne Morse of Oregon, looking for
headlines, leaked a piece of secret military information. Cornered for a comment by journalists the next day, Russell said he would give one not on the information but on the leak; the comment was a single word: “dishonorable.” He shared the information Johnson gave him about the Cuban Missile Crisis with no one, waiting for the time when he could discuss it with the President.)

D
URING A BREAK
in one of the meetings in the Cabinet Room that day, Kennedy inadvertently left the tape running, and it captured a private remark Johnson made to McNamara, not about the missile crisis but rather about the plane he had leased.
“I
have a Grumman Gulfstream that I’ve leased. I want you to lease it for MATS [the Military Air Transport Service] after the election,” he said, apparently asking for the Defense Department to pick up the cost of the plane. And he wanted better communications equipment installed on it. “I wonder if there’s any good reason why you shouldn’t go to somebody and put” better equipment on the plane, he said. McNamara appears to have had other things on his mind: “Oh, sure, sure,” he said to Johnson, brushing him off.

C
AMPAIGNING IN THE
W
EST
, Johnson was away from Washington during what Sorensen calls the first week’s
“blur
” of “the crucial meetings” at which “the basic decision was hammered out.”