The Passage of Power (71 page)

Standing up, Johnson moved to the center of the crowded little room (he was, as was the case in most rooms he was in, the tallest person in it), and through the recollections of people present in that room, there runs a common theme: a sense that, out of aimless confusion, order was quickly emerging.

If one reason for his insistence that the swearing-in take place at the earliest possible moment was to demonstrate, quickly, continuity and stability to the nation and the world, then it was important that the nation and the world
see
that a new President had taken office.

Luckily, White House photographer
Cecil Stoughton had come aboard, and almost as soon as Johnson had told Malcolm Kilduff to make sure a photographer was present at the ceremony, Kilduff bumped into him in the aisle.
“Thank
God you’re here,” Kilduff said. “The President’s going to take the oath.” And when Stoughton, carrying two cameras, entered the stateroom, seeing
“Johnson
in there,
standing
tall,” Johnson asked him, “Where do you want us, Cecil?” Stoughton told him that the room was so small that he would have to place his own back against a wall, and, to gain height for a better view, stand on the sofa, and that Johnson and the judge should be directly in front of him, but back a few feet; Johnson began moving people around, directing them to their places with jerks of his thumb—
“taking
command,” in Stoughton’s words. Witnesses were important; Kilduff asked Johnson whom he wanted present;
“as
many people as you can get in here,” he replied. Witnesses whose presence—whose photographed presence—would be testimony of continuity and legitimacy, of the Kennedy faction’s sanction of his assumption of Kennedy’s office, were particularly desirable; two of Jackie’s secretaries,
Mary Gallagher and
Pamela Turnure, were in the forward cabin, crying, and he dispatched Kilduff to get them, and they came in, and so did General Clifton.

And he wanted from the Kennedy people another, more durable, demonstration of continuity; Judge Hughes had not yet arrived; there were a few minutes to spare; he used them.

Sitting down again, he changed both his chair (to one at the conference table; the fact that he was not in the President’s chair
“in
itself did not go unnoticed” by the two men he beckoned over to sit with him) and his tone—in a change so abrupt and dramatic that it would have been startling to anyone who had not witnessed, over the years, Lyndon Johnson’s remarkable ability to alter tone completely and instantaneously to accomplish a purpose. Where, just a few minutes before, in his conversations with O’Donnell and O’Brien, there had been “adamancy,” in full measure, now—in a new conversation with the same two men—there was humility, and in the same measure.

He wanted them to remain in their White House posts, he told the two Irishmen, still in the first throes of grief for their dead leader, because the best tribute that could be paid to President Kennedy would be passage of the programs he had believed in; they and he should fight for them together, he said,
“shoulder
to shoulder.” And, he said, leaning across the table toward them and looking into their eyes, they should stay on because he needed them. He had so much to learn about his new responsibilities, he said, and he just didn’t absorb things as quickly as Jack had. Jack had had not only the experience but the education and understanding; he didn’t. “I need your help,” he said. “I need it badly. There is no one for me to turn to with as much experience as you have. I need you now more than President Kennedy needed you.”

He only had a few minutes to make the plea—hardly had he finished when Judge Hughes arrived. But although O’Donnell and O’Brien made no response at the time—
“We
can talk about all that later,” O’Brien said; O’Donnell was to describe himself as
“noncommittal
”—events were to prove that his plea had softened their feelings toward him.

J
UDGE
H
UGHES ARRIVED
, a tiny woman in a brown dress decorated with white polka dots, and Johnson showed her to the place Stoughton had selected, in front of the sofa on which the photographer was standing, and someone put a small Catholic missal in her hands. Then, a moment later, three reporters—
Newsweek
’s Roberts,
Merriman Smith of UPI and
Sid Davis of
Westinghouse Broadcasting—came on board after a wild trip to Love Field in a police car, with the uniformed officer who was driving them speeding through red lights, avoiding tie-ups by bumping over median strips and driving against oncoming traffic; despite their pleas, the driver had refused to notify their editors of their whereabouts, telling them, Davis recalls, that radio silence had to be maintained because
“They
don’t know whether there is a conspiracy or not.” “We were speculating on ‘Are they going to try for Johnson, and where have they taken him?’ ‘Are the Russians trying to take over Berlin?’ ” Roberts says. Seeing them enter the stateroom, Johnson said,
“We’ve
got the press here, so we can go ahead.”

H
E MADE HIS FINAL ARRANGEMENTS
. Crowded though the stateroom was, a few more witnesses could still be crammed in. Raising his voice so that he could be heard in the forward cabin, he said,
“Now
we’re going to have a swearing-in here, and I would like anyone who wants to see it to come on in to this compartment,” and, Judge Hughes says,
“in
they came, until there wasn’t another inch of space”—until twenty-seven people were wedged into the stateroom, among the desk and the table and the chairs.

The Kennedy presence was still not all he wanted it to be.
“Johnson
particularly wanted
Evelyn Lincoln,” Judge Hughes was to recall, but when she came, she stood in the midst of the crowd behind him, so that she was not sufficiently prominent; he made a gesture and she squeezed forward until she was standing directly behind him. He made sure his position in front of the judge was precisely where Stoughton wanted him, and placed Lady Bird on his right. He had Kilduff, who had obtained a Dictaphone machine, kneel on the floor next to the judge to record the ceremony.

O
NE WITNESS WAS STILL MISSING
, the most important one. He told Judge Hughes that, as the judge recalls his words,
“Mrs
. Kennedy wanted to be present and we would wait for her.”
“Do
you want to ask Mrs. Kennedy if she would like to stand with us?” he asked O’Donnell and O’Brien. When they didn’t respond at once, the glance he threw at them was the old Johnson glance, the eyes burning with impatience and anger.
“She
said she wants to be here when I take the oath,” he told O’Donnell. “Why don’t you see what’s keeping her?”

The scene was still eerie: the gloom, the heat, the whispering, the low insistent whine of the jet engine, the mass of dim faces crowded so close together. But one element had vanished: the confusion. Watching Lyndon Johnson arrange the crowd, give his orders, deal with O’Donnell and O’Brien,
Liz Carpenter, dazed by the rush of events, realized that there was at least one person in the room who wasn’t dazed, who was, however hectic the situation might be, in complete command of it.
“Your
mind was so dull, but one of the thoughts that went through my mind … was ‘Someone is in charge.’ … You had the feeling that things were well in hand.” Carpenter, like Valenti, was an idolater, but the journalists had the same feeling. On the ride out to the airport, Sid Davis, who, as he recalls,
“had
not known this man except as Majority Leader, and as someone who was … thought of by some … as ‘Colonel Cornpone,’ ” had said to his colleagues in the car: “It’s going to be hard to learn how to say
President Lyndon B. Johnson.
” As Davis watched Johnson in the stateroom now, it was, suddenly, no longer hard at all: “Soon—immediately—we started to see the measure of the guy and his leadership qualities.” Part of the feeling stemmed from his size. As he stood in front of Judge Hughes, towering over everyone in the room, Stoughton realized for the first time how big he was:
“Big
.
Big.
He loomed over everyone.” But part of it was something harder to define. As Lyndon Johnson
arranged the crowd, jerking his thumb to show people where he wanted them, glancing around with those piercing dark eyes, Valenti’s initial feeling that this was a different man was intensified; Johnson was suddenly
“something
larger, harder to fathom” than the man he had thought he knew. He looked, in fact, for the first time in three years, like the Lyndon Johnson of the Senate floor. Now he had suddenly come to the very pinnacle of power. However he had gotten there, whatever concatenation of circumstance and tragedy—whatever fate—had put him there, he was there, and he knew what to do there. When O’Donnell, obeying his order, went to her bedroom and asked Jacqueline Kennedy if she wanted to be present at the swearing-in, she said,
“I
think I ought to. In the light of history it would be better if I was there,” and followed O’Donnell out, to the door of the stateroom.

“A
hush, a hush—every whisper stopped,” Roberts recalls. She was still wearing the same suit, with the same bloodstains. Her eyes were
“cast
down,” in Judge Hughes’ phrase. She had apparently tried to comb her hair, but it fell down across the left side of her face. On her face was a glazed look, and she appeared to be crying, although no tears were coming out. Johnson placed her on his left side, and nodded to the judge, who held out the missal. He put his left hand on it—the hand, mottled and veined, was so large that it all but covered the little book—and raised his right hand, as the judge said, “I do solemnly swear …” Valenti, watching those hands, saw that they were
“absolutely
steady,” and Lyndon Johnson’s voice was steady, too—low and firm—as he spoke the words he had been waiting to speak all his life. In the back of the room, crowded against a wall,
Marie Fehmer wasn’t watching the ceremony because she was reading the oath to make sure it was given correctly. (“He taught you that, by George, you can do anything.”)

The oath was over. His hand came down.
“Now
let’s get airborne,” Lyndon Johnson said.

T
HE DEATH OF A
P
RESIDENT
—with the necessity for the sudden transfer of his enormous powers—is in many ways a supreme test for a democratic government.

For what if the transfer did not go smoothly? What if policies were changed—foreign policies: what if a détente was ended, new orders given; what if, along a border, the border between East and West Berlin, perhaps, tensions rose; what if tanks began to rumble forward, troops began to march; what if, in the harbors of naval bases, anchor chains began to rattle aboard so that fleets could sail? Or domestic policies: what if interest rates set by a government agency of which people had previously been only vaguely aware suddenly began to be raised, and raised too high—what if, as a result of that change, businesses that had planned to borrow money to expand suddenly found the cost of money too high, and had to contract instead, laying off employees? What if the rates were lowered—and lowered too far—and, as a result, inflation rose, and rose too far; what if currencies crumbled, life savings were eaten away, elderly couples suddenly facing impoverished old age? What if tax policies, or depreciation allowances, were changed, so that corporations abruptly found that expansions planned under the old policies would now be unfeasible, so they could no longer afford to add employees? What if previously announced government appropriations were suddenly rescinded or the schedule of their payments stretched out so that schools, hospitals, clinics, day-care centers, suddenly had bad news for students and patients; what if decisions were made not to build dams or roads on which people had been counting for employment? What if naval yards, aircraft factories were closed, their thousands of employees thrown out of work? What if adjustments were made in government health-care policies, so that families that had been struck by illness but had believed that at least their medical expenses were covered found all at once that in fact they weren’t?

And beyond institutions and policies, what of the man—the new President? The old President had been elected to that office, installed in it by the will of the people, by the hard, concrete totals of the ballots they cast, his place, his authority,
“legitimated
,” in the word used by
Richard Neustadt, perhaps the era’s leading analyst of the presidency, “by a national election after national campaigning.” The people he was governing had given him the authority, legal and moral, to govern them. Although his successor was of course entitled under the Constitution to the office to which he was succeeding, and the electorate was of course aware when it voted for the ticket of which he was a part that he would occupy that office should the President die, the possibility of the President doing so had not been prominent in its mind—it never is: voters focus on the candidate at the head of the ticket, not on his running mate, and they focus on the candidate, not on what would happen should the candidate, having been elected, suddenly die. The draping over a Vice President of the mantle of authority that had been conferred on the President is not guaranteed to be straightforward. For what if, because of the new President’s early actions in his new office, the people found that they did not have confidence in him? What if they felt that the government had abruptly altered course to a wrong course, or that the firm hand at the helm of state was not a firm hand, and that therefore the circumstances of their own lives, dependent in so many ways (they suddenly realized now that the President’s death had made them think of it) on presidential performance, were suddenly more uncertain than before? If there was no confidence in the continuity and stability of the new government, no feeling that, despite a President’s death, someone competent was in charge, what then might be the consequences for a democracy?