The Passage of Power (78 page)

Foreign worries were
the
first priority—Johnson saw Fulbright and Harriman first, and fast—and then he started making his calls: to his three living predecessors (to Eisenhower Johnson said,
“I
have needed you for a long time, but I need you more than ever now”; according to Reedy, he used similar words to Truman;
Herbert Hoover’s son, Allen, said his father was too deaf to use the phone); to
J. Edgar Hoover to direct him to throw the FBI’s full resources into investigating the assassination (hanging up the phone, Hoover ordered thirty additional agents to Dallas); to
Sargent Shriver to express condolences. He called the treasurer of the
Democratic National Committee,
Richard Maguire, a Kennedy man. A lot of money had been raised on the fatal Texas trip; it had gone to the committee. He told Maguire how much he needed him (“I’ve got to rely on you more than he did”), and, in what might be an indication that he was thinking ahead to the 1964 election, said, “You be giving some thought to what needs to be done, and when we get these things behind us the next day or two, then we’ll get together”). And there were calls to two of the “damn smart men” who had given Jack Kennedy the brilliant concepts and the brilliant words that Johnson admired. “You’re going to have to do some heavy thinking for me,” he said to Supreme Court Justice
Arthur Goldberg. “I want you to be thinking about what I ought to do.… I want you to think … just
think
in capital letters, and
think, think, think.
And then—then talk to me tomorrow or the next day.… There’s nobody in town that I believe in more than you and I’ve just
got
to have your help.” Then he called the Kennedy aide he felt he needed more than any other; in explaining on the plane the importance of keeping the Kennedy team, he had said, over and over,
“especially
Sorensen.” Of all Kennedy’s men, none had been hit harder. McGrory had seen him, at Andrews,
“white-faced
and stricken, unseeing and unhearing”; as Johnson walked through the West Wing on the way to his
office, Ted Sorensen had been sitting alone at the Cabinet table, weeping.
“Kindly
, strongly, generously he told me how sorry he was, how deeply he felt for me, how well he knew what I had been to President Kennedy for eleven years, and that he, LBJ, now needed me even more.” Sorensen said, he was to recall, “Good-bye and thank you, Mr. President.” Hanging up the phone, he broke into tears again, “unable to face the fact that I had just addressed that title to someone other than John F. Kennedy.” Arriving at the White House, the congressional leaders had headed for the Oval Office, only to be directed across the street. Jenkins seated them at the conference table in 274’s outer office while Johnson, who had hurriedly gone into the inner office, made more calls until they were all present. His three years of sitting silent at leaders’ meetings was over. He knew what he wanted to say—that they couldn’t let other countries get “wrong ideas” that America’s foreign policies might be changed as a result of a “very abrupt and sudden transition,” that it was important to show that the country was unified, that he needed the support of both parties in Congress—and what he wanted them to say to waiting reporters at the conclusion of the meeting. He had, in fact, already had Reedy draw up a statement expressing the desired sentiments and had edited it, rewriting it heavily. Reading it to them now, he got their agreement to have Reedy issue it on their behalf; as they were filing out of 274, Reedy was typing it for distribution to the press.

Writing in later years about that Friday night,
Hugh Sidey said that it was in Johnson’s meeting with the congressional leaders
“that
perhaps more than in anything else lay the real clue to his flawless assumption of power.” “The meeting had no real purpose,” Sidey wrote—yet it was very important. “It was a kind of tribal ritual of those men who wielded the power in the legislative halls [where] meetings are a way of life and a sign of authority.” Once Johnson had called such meetings, summoning such men. He hadn’t called one for three years. But now he had called one again. And, Sidey wrote, “these men understood.”

T
HAT STATEMENT
for the press wasn’t the only thing Lyndon Johnson wrote that evening. Sitting at his desk in his inner office, door closed against the voices outside, he wrote two letters in longhand. “Dear John,” said the first, “It will be many years before you understand fully what a great man your father was. His loss is a deep personal tragedy for all of us, but I wanted you particularly to know that I share your grief—You can always be proud of him.” The second said, “Dearest Caroline, Your father’s death has been a great tragedy for the Nation, as well as for you, and I wanted you to know how much my thoughts are of you at this time. He was a wise and devoted man. You can always be proud of what he did for his country.” He signed them both, “Affectionately, Lyndon B. Johnson.” Even Manchester had to write, of those letters,
“He
would never be a simple man. He was capable of tactlessness and tenderness, cunning and passion.” Then he was almost done with his office work for the evening. He telephoned the
young man who had always been closer to him than any of his other aides, and to whom he talked in a kidding tone that he didn’t use often with the others.
“I’m
going to be leaving here soon,” he said without preamble when Buzz picked up the phone. “I’ll come by and pick you up—you wait at the curb.” And when Buzz, knowing that with the world watching on the evening of an assassination, the new President should not stop on Connecticut Avenue and pick someone up, said that he would drive to The Elms in his own car, Johnson asked, in the old kidding tone, “What’s the matter? Are you running from the press?”

I
T WAS 9:24 P.M
. Valenti, who had received an order to get on the plane, and then one to get on the helicopter, now received one to get in the car (
“Drive
home with me, Jack. You can stay at my house tonight and then we will have a chance to do some talking. Are you ready to leave now?”), still, he was to say, “not quite sure precisely why I was even here in the first place.” Gathering up
Carter and Moyers as well, Johnson led them out to his car, two Secret Service agents in front of them, two behind, Youngblood at his shoulder. Two agents were already sitting in the front seat, a convertible full of agents behind; as Johnson got into the car, two of the agents stood up, automatic rifles in their hands; then as the White House gates swung open ahead of them and the two cars pulled out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, a half dozen waiting police motorcycle outriders swung out in front of them, their sirens wailing. At the other gates—at The Elms—men were holding shotguns as well as pistols; the street around them was filled with reporters, television mobile units, telephone trucks and telephone linemen hooking up the new, secure lines, and a cluster (surprisingly small, in reporters’ memories) of neighbors and onlookers.

Busby, arriving at The Elms a few minutes earlier, had seen at once that
“the
aura of the office preceded” the man he had worked for for so long. No one wanted to be in the foyer when the new President came in; it was “conspicuously empty; when people crossed through it, they hurried their steps.” Yet they wanted to see him coming in; “whenever the front door opened to admit a Secret Service agent or a telephone installer, faces appeared” at the five other doorways that opened off the foyer, “peeking around doorframes to see if the sound meant that he had come.” When he did indeed come, Busby counted sixteen faces (including
“my
own”) at the doorways.

Walking through the hallway to the sunroom at the back of the house, Johnson sprawled down in the big green chair. Framed in each of the French doors, there was, suddenly, a Secret Service man, his back to the windows. Asking for a glass of orange juice, Johnson raised it in a toast toward the grim photograph on the wall.
“Hello
, Mr. Sam. Sure wish you were here tonight,” he said.

Dr.
J. Willis Hurst, Johnson’s cardiologist, was waiting in the sunroom; hearing the reports that Johnson had gone into Parkland Hospital rubbing his left arm, Dr. Travell had called him. Johnson told Hurst he had no pain in his arm,
and observing him, Hurst was reassured about his health.
Busby, observing him from a different perspective, was reassured in other ways; he saw in an instant that his calmness was only a façade: “he was
more
controlled than calm.” But he saw also that the control—the
“composure
and coolheadedness”—was complete.

After watching television for a few minutes, Johnson said,
“I
guess I know less than anybody about what’s happening in the United States.” Then the films on the screen were of Kennedy’s appearance in Fort Worth that morning. Raising his hand as if to shield his eyes from the screen, he said,
“I
don’t believe I can take that. It’s too fresh,” and the channel was changed to one showing, first, films of Kennedy’s early career and then films of his own. An announcer mentioned the plane bringing the Cabinet members back to Washington.
“That’s
the last damned time that the President, the Vice President, and six Cabinet members are going to be out of Washington at the same time, I can tell you that,” he said. Calling in the head of the Secret Service,
James J. Rowley, he told him about Youngblood protecting his body with his own.
“I
want you to do whatever you can, the best thing that can be done for that boy,” he said. He told Busby to get
Nellie Connally on the phone, and asked her about the governor’s condition.
“Take
care of Johnny,” he said at last. “I need him now.” He told Valenti, Moyers and Carter that they could sleep at The Elms, told Valenti he could stay there—or at the White House when he, Johnson, moved in—until he found a place to live in Washington. And in a low voice,
“almost
to himself,” he repeated, over and over, as if he was working himself up, preparing himself, the same sentence: “We really have a big job to do now.”

At about midnight, Busby left for his home, after a conversation in which Johnson said,
“You
know, almost all the issues now are just about the same as they were when I came here thirty years ago.” Those issues were still on the table, he said, and he intended to get action on some of them. He went upstairs, and directed Moyers, Valenti and Carter to the bedrooms they were to use, but they had only begun undressing when he called them on the intercom and told them to come to his room because
“I
want to think out my agenda.”

Johnson was in bed, in striped pajamas, propped up against a pillow, with memoranda and reports spread out around him; Mrs. Johnson was in bed in another room. The three men pulled chairs up next to the bed.

The men didn’t talk much; very little input from them was required. Lyndon Johnson just wanted, Carter was to say,
“a
sounding board.”

The “agenda” he was planning was his schedule for the next day—what he had to do, what people he should see, what he should say to them. There was the Cabinet meeting: What time should it be? What White House staffers should be invited to attend? What should he say there? He had to meet with Eisenhower: What did he want to accomplish at that meeting? What did he want to say to him? Buzz should be told to draft talking points. Pulling out a notebook, Valenti started scribbling frantically. What legislation was most urgent? What could he do to get it passed? Who in the House and Senate should he talk to about it—the
budget, and the tax bill that was tied in with it, in particular? How to deal with Harry Byrd? Harry Truman had given an address to a joint session of Congress the day after Roosevelt’s funeral; he wanted to give one, too—when should it be scheduled?; what should he say in it?; who should draft it?
“We
sat and talked so long, we were talking about the many, many details of things that needed to be done, the bases that needed to be touched with foreign governments, with governors, with senators, congressmen, mayors, certain things with the Cabinet members,” Cliff Carter was to say. Some of the things were sensitive, because if he appeared to be assuming power quickly he might offend the Kennedys, but if he didn’t, the public might not see that the government was in firm hands:
“Everything
was weighed out … to make sure that he was walking this chalk line not to overdo but yet where the people had confidence that he could do the job.” All this time the television set was on, and the newscasters’ words would remind him of other things: Harry Truman was mentioned;
“By
God, I’m going to pass Harry Truman’s medical insurance bill,” he said. The three men around the bed sat silently; the man in the bed talked, and talked—he didn’t want advice; he knew what should be done the next day; he just wanted to lay it out.
“That
whole night he seemed to have several chambers of his mind operating simultaneously,” Moyers was to say. “It was formidable, very formidable.” Valenti kept scribbling things to be done on his pad—ten pages were to be covered with notes; he gave them the next morning to a secretary to have them typed up, but they were lost;
“do
you realize how valuable they would be?” he was to moan to the author years later. There was the question of who was going to carry out the tasks listed on the pad. Johnson made clear that they were all on his staff now:
“He
told Moyers that he wanted him back from the
Peace Corps,” Carter says. He told Valenti to take a two-year leave of absence from his public relations firm because he would be working at the White House, and he told Carter “to move over to the
Democratic National Committee to represent his interests there.” Johnson started to firm things up, mapping out an hour-by-hour schedule of what he would be doing Saturday. He stopped talking at about three a.m. It was about twenty hours since he had woken up in Fort Worth that morning.
“Well
, good night, boys,” he said. “Get a lot of sleep fast. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”