The Passage of Power (70 page)

Then there was a second call—the return call from Robert Kennedy to Lyndon
Johnson—about which, as
William Manchester writes,
“the
facts are unclear and a dispassionate observer cannot choose.” Johnson was to say that on this call Kennedy advised him “that the oath should be administered to me, immediately, before taking off for Washington, and that it could be administered by any judicial officer.” During the call, however, it became clear that the questions of when and where the oath should be administered were in fact now moot, and that all Johnson wanted from Kennedy was the oath’s precise wording. Kennedy said he would have Katzenbach dictate it; telephoning his deputy again, he said,
“They’re
going to swear him in down there, and he needs the oath.” Katzenbach pulled a copy of the Constitution off his bookshelf, and read the thirty-seven-word declaration that is in Article II, Section 1: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Johnson had told
Marie Fehmer to go out to the staff section of the plane and take down the wording.
“Bobby
started it and turned the phone to Katzenbach,” she recalls. (Katzenbach apparently patched in to this second call.) What was Katzenbach’s voice like at that time? she is asked. “It was controlled; he was like steel,” she replies. “Bobby’s was not when he started. I kept thinking, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this.’ ” When Katzenbach finished, she says, she asked him, “ ‘May I read it back to you?’ Which I afterward thought may have been a little cruel, but yet I wanted to check it.” As for her own emotional state at the time, she says,
“I
was all right. I broke up later that night, but I was all right. You get that feeling from him [Johnson]. He taught you that, by George, you can do anything.… There was a job to be done.”

Whatever the disputes over the telephone calls, the oath was dictated, and typed out, and if the desired assent by Bobby Kennedy to its immediate administration was not obtained, at least he had been asked whether he objected to that, and had not replied, so it would be difficult for him to criticize it later; the possibility of public criticism from the President’s brother had been muted (as it would turn out, only for a time). The call to Hickory Hill had achieved its purpose. Whatever the details of the conversation between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, when Johnson hung up the phone he had gotten enough of what he wanted so that he could go ahead.

H
ANGING UP THE PHONE
, he began giving orders. Any federal judge could swear him in, he had been told. He knew what judge he wanted—and she was right in Dallas.

“As
much as any single person possibly could,” an historian has written, this judge had “personified Johnson’s utter powerlessness” during his vice presidency. He had been unable to secure her appointment; she had been named to the Federal District Court in Dallas only after
Sam Rayburn had intervened, a fact which had made Johnson feel like “the biggest liar and fool in the State.”

“Get
Sarah Hughes,” he told Marie Fehmer.

Judge Hughes’ law clerk told Ms. Fehmer he didn’t know the judge’s whereabouts—the last he knew, he said, she had been at the Trade Mart luncheon waiting for the President to arrive—and Fehmer told Johnson that.

He told her to call the clerk back, and picked up the receiver himself. “This is Lyndon Johnson,” he said. “Find her.”

She was found, and she hurried to Love Field.

H
E WANTED SOMETHING MORE
from the Kennedys, and he got that, too.

No single gesture would do more to demonstrate continuity and stability—to show that the government of the United States would continue to function without interruption despite the assassination of the man who sat at its head—and to legitimize the transition: to prove that the transfer of power had been orderly, proper, in accordance with the Constitution; to remove, in the eyes of the world, any taint of usurpation; to dampen, so far as possible, suspicion of complicity by him in the deed; to show that the family of the man he was succeeding bore him no ill will and supported him, than the attendance at his swearing-in ceremony of the late President’s widow.

Was this consideration part of the reason—in addition to the humanitarian consideration that he didn’t want her left behind in Dallas—that when the Secret Service and Ken O’Donnell had told him that Jacqueline Kennedy would follow in another plane, he had refused to leave Dallas without her? Certainly some of the Kennedy loyalists harbored that suspicion.
“Some
of us did feel that he was using Mrs. Kennedy and the Kennedy aura when he stage[d] his oath-taking ceremony … with her present, and so he could arrive in Washington with her and President Kennedy’s casket,” O’Donnell was to write. History will never know the answer to that question. All history can know for certain is that now, on
Air Force One, he moved with determination to obtain her presence.

H
IS EFFORTS WERE
almost derailed at their very start by a moment of awkwardness.

While he was making phone calls—not only to Bobby Kennedy but to
Walter Jenkins and
McGeorge Bundy—in the plane’s bedroom, hammering began on the other side of the bulkhead that separated the bedroom from the rear seating compartment, and when Fehmer went out into the corridor and asked what it was, crew members told her that four of the six seats in the compartment were being removed to make room for Kennedy’s heavy bronze coffin, which was about to be brought on board through the plane’s rear door, followed by Jackie and Kennedy’s aides.

Kennedy’s aides were to say later that they weren’t aware at that moment that Johnson and his party were aboard the plane, that they had assumed that he had returned to
Air Force Two, and in fact had already taken off for Washington.
In the confusion, they hadn’t noticed that Air Force Two was still parked nearby. As soon as the Kennedy party was on board, while the coffin was being lashed to the floor, Jackie, seeking a few moments alone, walked past it and opened the door to the bedroom, thinking it would be empty—and instead encountered Lyndon Johnson. Whether, when she opened the door, Johnson was, as Manchester wrote after talking to her,
“reclining
on the bed” in his shirtsleeves, or whether, as Fehmer later stated (
“in
an effort to clear up the bedroom thing”), he had already risen from the bed and was about to leave the bedroom when, “as he opened the door, there was Mrs. Kennedy,” she was evidently shocked; hastily retreating to the rear compartment, she told O’Donnell, he relates,
“something
that left me stunned: When she opened the door of her cabin, she found Lyndon Johnson.” She wasn’t the only one who retreated.
“She
was entering her private bedroom,” Fehmer says. “She … saw a stranger, in his shirtsleeves yet … in the hallowed ground.… We, of course, scurried out of that bedroom. It was really embarrassing.”

Returning to the rear compartment, Jackie sat down in one of the two remaining seats, across the aisle from the coffin. In a moment, Lyndon, having collected Lady Bird from the stateroom, came back to see her.
“It
was a very, very hard thing to do,”
Lady Bird Johnson was to recall.
“Mrs
. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was
caked
—that
immaculate
woman—it was caked with blood, her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them; I never could. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights … [Mrs. Kennedy] exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.” Shocked though she was at Jackie’s appearance, Lady Bird found the right things to say: “Dear God, it’s come to this …,” and Jackie responded, making “it as easy as possible. She said things like ‘Oh, Lady Bird … we’ve always liked the two of you so much.’ She said … ‘Oh,
what
if I had not been there. Oh, I’m so glad I was there.’ ” Only once did Jackie’s voice change: when Lady Bird asked her if she wanted to change clothes. Not right then, Jackie said. “And then … if with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have
done
to Jack.’ ” And Lyndon finally raised the subject. “Well—about the swearing-in,” he said—according to Manchester, he had to use the phrase twice before Jackie responded, “Oh, yes, I know, I know.”
“She
understood the symbols of authority, the need for some semblance of national majesty after the disaster,” Manchester was to write; whether she agreed explicitly or not, there was an understanding that when Johnson took the oath, she would be present.

A
ND WITH HIS WORK
with the Kennedys done, Lyndon Johnson headed back to the stateroom.

It was crammed now with people—Secret Service agents; the three Texas
congressmen; Kennedy’s aides and secretaries who had come aboard with the coffin; two uniformed generals, Kennedy’s military aides Clifton and Brigadier General
Godfrey McHugh; Johnson aides
Carter, Valenti, Fehmer,
Liz Carpenter;
Bill Moyers, who, hearing of the assassination while in Austin on a trip for the
Peace Corps, had chartered a plane, flown to Dallas and come aboard Air Force One; two presidential valets, Kennedy’s Thomas and Johnson’s Glynn—all crowded together in a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot square that was so dimly lit (with the shades still drawn across the windows, the only lighting came from dim fluorescent bulbs overhead) that the generals’ gold braid glinted only faintly in the gloom, and that, with no air-conditioning, had grown so hot and stuffy that, one man says,
“It
was suffocating in there; it was hard to think.” The low, penetrating whine of the single jet engine that was operating never stopped. There was weeping in the room, and whispering—and confusion. Kennedy’s aides had been able to remove the dead President’s coffin from the hospital only after an angry confrontation with the Dallas County medical examiner, who, insisting that an autopsy had to be performed first, had stood in a hospital doorway to block them, backed by a policeman. They had literally shoved the examiner and the policeman aside to get out of the building, and now, on the plane, O’Donnell says, he
“kept
looking out the window, expecting to see the flashing red lights” of police cars, “coming with a court order to stop our takeoff.” Not knowing when they came aboard that Johnson had decided to wait for Judge Hughes and take the oath on the ground (not knowing for some minutes, in fact, that Johnson was even on board; he was at that time behind the closed door of Kennedy’s bedroom), General McHugh had gone forward to the cockpit and ordered Colonel Swindal to take off immediately. Swindal couldn’t—the plane’s forward door was still open, with the ramp still pushed up against it—and by the time the door was closed,
Malcolm Kilduff had come to the cockpit to tell him that the plane wouldn’t be taking off until after the swearing-in ceremony. When McHugh, who had apparently passed Kilduff in the aisle without knowing what message the press secretary was bearing, realized the plane wasn’t taking off, he rushed back to the cockpit to repeat his order, and Kilduff countermanded it. Not until O’Donnell,
“in
a highly desperate strait,” he says, headed for the cockpit himself did he learn of Johnson’s plans. The conflicting orders were less the bitter series of confrontations between Kennedy and Johnson aides that would be later pictured than a misunderstanding, but they added to the confusion. McHugh and other Kennedy aides were still pushing back and forth down the crowded aisle in the passenger portion of the plane, and in the stateroom men and women were asking each other what was happening, what was going to happen, without anyone really knowing.

And then, in the narrow doorway that led back toward the presidential bedroom, there suddenly appeared, in Jack Valenti’s words,
“the
huge figure of Lyndon Johnson.”

The carnation was gone; the dark gray of his suit, which appeared black in
the dim light, was relieved only by the tiny Silver Star bar in his lapel and a corner of a white handkerchief peeking out from the breast pocket. His thinning hair was slicked down smooth, so that as his head turned from side to side as he surveyed the cabin, checking on who was there, there was nothing to soften that massive skull, or the sharp jut of the big jaw and the big nose, and his mouth was set in that grim, tough line.

Seeing him standing there, Valenti, whose acquaintance with Lyndon Johnson had taken place mainly during his vice presidency, was startled.
“Even
in that instant, there was a new
demeanor in him,” he was to say. “He looked graver.” The restless movements were gone. “Whatever emotions or passions he had in him, he had put them under a strict discipline” so that “he was very quiet and seemingly very much in command of himself.” There had, Valenti says, been “a transformation.… [He] was
in
a strange way another man, not the man I had known.”

Other Johnson aides, who had known him longer, saw, after he had returned to Washington that night, the same transformation, but found nothing strange in it. The Lyndon Johnson that Horace Busby saw in Washington that night was a Lyndon Johnson he hadn’t seen for three years, but it was a Lyndon Johnson he remembered very well. The Johnson he saw—and that
George Reedy and
Walter Jenkins and other longtime aides saw—was simply the old Lyndon Johnson, the pre–vice presidential Lyndon Johnson. And Busby understood why he had changed back, and why he had been able to change back so quickly.
“You
see, it was just that he was coming back
to himself,
” he says. “He was back where he belonged. He was back in command.”

As the people in the stateroom noticed Johnson standing in the doorway, the ones who had been sitting rose to their feet. The whispering stopped—even, for a moment, the weeping.

“When
I walked in, everyone stood up,” Johnson would write in his memoirs. “Here were close friends like
Homer
Thornberry and
Jack Brooks; here were aides.… All of them were on their feet.… I realized nothing would ever be the same again.… To old friends who had never called me anything but Lyndon, I would now be ‘Mr. President.’ ” In the memoir, he says that this “was a frightening, disturbing prospect.” But if it was, he gave no sign of that at the time. In the silence, Congressman Thomas said,
“We
are ready to carry out any orders you have, Mr. President.” Walking into the stateroom, as the people made way before him, he sat down in the high-backed President’s chair. Beckoning Kilduff over, he told him to make sure a photographer and reporters were aboard to record the swearing-in ceremony.
“Put
the pool on board,” he told him. He beckoned over Valenti.
“I
want you on my staff,” he said. “You’ll fly back with me to Washington.” And when an order was challenged, no challenge was entertained. When O’Donnell and O’Brien came up to him and asked if the plane could take off immediately, he said:
“We
can’t leave here until we take the oath of office. I just talked on the phone with Bobby. He told me to wait here until
Sarah Hughes gives me the oath.” (Then he added a line with connotations.
“You
must remember Sarah Hughes,” he said.) O’Donnell didn’t believe him—
“I
could not imagine Bobby telling him to stay”; Johnson had become President the moment Kennedy died; “the oath is just a symbolic formality”; “there is no need to hurry about it.” (And later that night, at Hickory Hill, his skepticism would be confirmed.
“Bobby
gave me an entirely different version of his conversation with Johnson.”) Whether O’Donnell believed him or not no longer signified, however. Johnson’s expression hardly changed as he spoke; his voice was so low that, one observer says, “he was
almost
whispering.” But if the voice was soft, that was not the case with the message.
“Johnson
was adamant that the oath be administered by Judge Hughes,” Larry O’Brien was to say. “There was adamancy. It became clear that the oath was going to be administered on the ground.” General McHugh was still pushing up and down the aisle, trying to get the plane to take off, not having talked to Johnson directly, but O’Brien and O’Donnell stopped arguing.