The Passage of Power (79 page)

A
T ABOUT 4:30 A.M
., while Johnson was sleeping, the autopsy was finally completed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and the coffin was brought by that gray Navy ambulance to the White House, Bobby and Jackie sitting in the back beside it—Jackie was still wearing the pink suit—and was carried into the East Room by a Marine honor guard. Jackie had sent word that she wanted the room to look
“as
it did when Lincoln’s body lay there,” Dick Goodwin recalls, and sketches from 1865 had been located, and black crepe had been draped in folds over the long gold curtains and the three crystal chandeliers. A catafalque, similar to Lincoln’s, a black stand on a black base, had been found, and set up in the center of the room. A group of Kennedy aides was standing in a far corner of the room when the coffin was carried in. Jackie followed it, Bobby beside her, Kenny and Larry behind.
“Her
face was fixed straight ahead, lovely, painful to see,” Dick Goodwin says. Walking over to the coffin, she knelt on the floor, turned her face away so that the watching group could not see, and rested her cheek on the flag that draped the long box. Then she put her arms around it. Anyone who hadn’t been crying before was crying now. After a while, she got up; the aides followed the Kennedys out of the room. There was still a decision to be made—Jackie wanted the coffin closed, so that the world would remember her husband as he had been; McNamara said it must be open, because the world would demand to see the body of a head of state—a hard decision, so it was made by the man who made those decisions. Going back into the East Room alone, he had the casket opened so he could see his brother’s face. After a while, he came out, and asked Arthur Schlesinger to go in and look.
“For
a moment, I was shattered,” Schlesinger recalls; “It was not a good job.”
“Close
it,” Robert Kennedy said. Tall candles stood flickering at each corner of the catafalque, and at each corner, also, was a man in uniform with his rifle at parade rest, guarding it; at the head of the coffin stood the honor guard’s commander, a Navy lieutenant, of course, rigidly at attention. At two wooden prie-dieux knelt two priests in cassocks, praying.

R
OBERT
K
ENNEDY’S FACE
had remained pale and sad, but set, resolute, and, apparently, calm. He went up to the Lincoln Bedroom, still seemingly so “controlled,” says
Charles Spalding, who went upstairs with him. “There’s a sleeping pill around here somewhere,” Spalding said, found one, gave it to him, and then closed the door. “Then I just heard him break down.… I heard him sob and say,
‘Why
, God?’ ”

F
OR
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
, Saturday could hardly have gotten off to a worse start.

Arising after only a few hours’ sleep, he breakfasted and left for the White House at 8:40, planning to begin working on the agenda he had outlined during the night. Instead, he began with a confrontation with Robert Kennedy.

McGeorge Bundy had told Johnson Friday evening that he would be able to move into the Oval Office Saturday morning, but subsequently the national security advisor had learned that that would not be a good idea, and, going to the Executive Office Building early Saturday morning—8:05 a.m.—he left a note for Johnson there, telling
Mildred Stegall to give it to him as soon as he came in. “When you and I talked last night about when the President’s office in the West Wing would be ready, I thought possibly it would be immediately,” the note said. “However, I find they are working on President Kennedy’s papers and his personal belongings and my suggestion would be that—if you could work here in the EOB today and tomorrow, everything will be ready and clear by Monday morning.” Johnson, unfortunately, didn’t get the message. Emerging from his limousine at about 8:55, he didn’t go to the EOB, but walked into the West Wing instead—to the Oval Office—and walked in on
Evelyn Lincoln as she was beginning to pack up Jack Kennedy’s belongings.
“I
have an appointment at 9:30,” he said. “Can I have my girls in your office by 9:30?”

That would give her a half hour to pack. “I don’t know, Mr. President,” she said. “Grief-stricken and appalled,” in a friend’s words, she walked out of the office and began to cry—just as Bobby walked in. Sobbing, she said, “Do you know he asked me to be out by 9:30?”

At Bethesda Hospital the previous evening Bobby had been,
Evan Thomas says, “a commanding figure,” making funeral arrangements, giving orders “in Jackie’s name, just as he had in Jack’s.” He had kept telling little jokes, trying to keep everyone’s spirits up. “Composed, withdrawn, resolute,” was how Arthur Schlesinger saw him; he was “clearly emerging as the strongest of the stricken,”
Ben Bradlee said. But, Schlesinger says, “within, he was demolished.… He didn’t know where he was.… Everything was just pulled out from under him.” Only the two words Spalding heard because Bobby Kennedy didn’t know anyone would hear had revealed the depth of his anguish. But when Mrs. Lincoln told him what Johnson had asked her, he blurted out, “Oh, no!” Not wanting to
talk to Johnson in the office that had been his brother’s, he went with him into the small adjoining private office and told him that crating his brother’s possessions would take time, and asked him if he could wait until noon. Johnson said he could, that the only reason he had wanted to move in was that his advisers had insisted that he should. He quickly walked downstairs to the Situation Room for a briefing from
Bundy and CIA Director McCone, and then went across the street to Room 274. He didn’t return to the Oval Office at noon; he didn’t return to it for three days.

The confrontation had been due to a misunderstanding—
“a
mix-up,” Bundy called it—and he explained that to both Kennedy and Johnson later that day, but between these two men the blackest interpretation was placed on every action; a misunderstanding was only a new cause for rage. Johnson felt that in pushing past him on the plane at Andrews Bobby
“ran
so that he would not have to pause and recognize the new President.”
“Perhaps
some such thought contributed to Robert Kennedy’s haste,” Schlesinger commented. “But a man more secure than Johnson would have sympathized with the terrible urgency carrying him to his murdered brother’s wife.” And he saw not only personal but political motives in the Oval Office scene. To Johnson, it was part of a plot. “During all of that period,” he was to say years later, “I think [Bobby] seriously considered whether he would let me be president, whether he should really take the position [that] the vice president didn’t automatically move in. I thought that was on his mind every time I saw him in the first few days.… I think he was seriously considering what steps to take. For several days he really kept me out of the President’s office. I operated from the Executive Office Building because [the Oval Office] was not made available to me. It was quite a problem.” And that afternoon, at 2:30, was the Cabinet meeting, and the attorney general was a member of the Cabinet.

It couldn’t have been an easy meeting for the Kennedy men, who had sat at the Cabinet table or, like Ted Sorensen, against the wall behind the man who had presided over past meetings, his personality dominating the room. Now Jack Kennedy was lying in a coffin not far away; several of the Cabinet members and White House staffers had come to the meeting directly from the East Room with its catafalque; as they entered the Cabinet Room, they could see, in the hallway beyond it, by the Oval Office door, Jack Kennedy’s rocking chair sitting, upside down, on a mover’s dolly. Bundy had written a note to Johnson, advising him to keep the meeting
“very
short.… A number of them and perhaps still more of the others who regularly attend the Cabinet are still numb with personal grief.” It couldn’t have been an easy meeting for Lyndon Johnson. It had been in the Cabinet Room that he had had to sit, powerless and silent, through so many meetings; in the Cabinet Room that, during the
Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy’s hostility to him had been so vividly displayed. The men sitting around the long table knew who had thereafter been invited to the final decision-making meeting on Cuba—and who hadn’t.

As Johnson, sitting now in the President’s place, opened the meeting with a
prepared statement, one chair at the table was empty—the attorney general’s. Robert Kennedy had agreed that the meeting should be held, his only request was that there be
“
no
pictures.” At the last minute, however, he may have been unable to bring himself to attend it—
“I
was upset” by the conversations he had had with Johnson in Dallas and by the morning’s confrontation, he was to explain, “so by this time I was rather fed up by him.… But I went by and Mac Bundy said it was very important that I come in. So I went.” Bundy himself said that
“Bobby
was late and perhaps would not have attended if I had not told him he must”; he had “virtually to drag” him into the room, he was to say—if those statements are correct, the national security advisor may have made another mistake.

When Bobby entered the room, his face so racked with grief that men who hadn’t seen him since the assassination were shocked, Johnson was speaking, but several of the Cabinet members stood up and remained standing as the attorney general walked to his chair. Johnson didn’t stand up, and as soon as Kennedy sat down, continued his statement. To Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, watching Robert Kennedy, it was
“quite
clear that he could hardly countenance Lyndon Johnson sitting in his brother’s seat.” When Johnson finished—“The President is dead. The President must keep the business of this government moving. None of us in this room can really express the sadness we all feel. Yet we have work to do. And must do it.… I want you all to stay on. I need you”—Dean Rusk and Adlai Stevenson spoke, pledging their support to the new President, and the meeting quickly ended.

“Awful
” was how
Willard Wirtz described it—“almost mechanical”; “a drab little meeting,” Bundy said. Back in EOB 274, Johnson raged about Kennedy. When Orville Freeman, who was taking every opportunity to be in Johnson’s presence, walked over to the EOB to discuss the meeting with him, Johnson said that Kennedy had arrived late on purpose to ruin the effect of his statement; he had already learned, he said, that Kennedy had told “an aide” that
“We
won’t go in until he has already sat down.”
“There
was real bitterness in Lyndon’s voice on this one,” Freeman wrote in his diary. (When Manchester later passed on this story, Arthur Schlesinger wrote,
“Kennedy
expressed amazement at first, then amusement.”)

Bitter or not, however, Lyndon Johnson had to deal with Robert Kennedy again that afternoon, for there was still the question of when he should address Congress. Harry Truman had delivered his speech to the joint session on the day following
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s funeral, believing that to reinforce the aura of continuity it was important that the nation hear the new President in a formal setting “as soon as possible.” Another argument to support Johnson’s feelings that his speech should be given the day after Kennedy’s funeral—on Tuesday, in other words—was that Thursday was Thanksgiving, and, wanting to be home for the holiday, many congressmen might be leaving Washington on Wednesday.
“I’ll
make it Tuesday if I can,” Johnson told House Speaker McCormack. “I can’t sit still. I’ve got to keep the government going.” But there was the matter of keeping
“the
Kennedy aura.” “I don’t want the family to feel I have any lack of respect … so I have a very delicate wire to walk here.” (If Johnson had any doubts about which of the two considerations—continuity or aura—was more important, McCormack, a very shrewd politician, helped dispel them, if tactfully. “On the question of Tuesday or Wednesday,” he said, “don’t you let that disturb you at all.… It’s a delicate field for all. You should
respect
the delicacy.… That’s all I say, and this is of paramount importance and gravity.”) A Tuesday speech, Johnson told a visitor that day,
“might
be resented by the family.”

When Johnson suggested Tuesday, he found out how deep that resentment might be.
“I
didn’t like that,” Robert Kennedy was to recall. “I thought we should just wait one day—at least one day after the funeral.” He communicated his feelings to
Bundy, but Johnson sent Bundy back to him to say that “they [the ‘they’ was unidentified] want it on Tuesday.” Kennedy’s response was an angry “Well, the hell with it. Why do you ask me about it? Don’t ask me what you want done. You’ll tell me what it’s going to be anyway. Just go ahead and do it.” Johnson didn’t give up, sending a Kennedy relative—Sargent Shriver—as an emissary, but Kennedy’s response was even angrier: “Why does he tell you to ask me? Now he’s hacking at you. He knows I want him to wait until Wednesday.” Shriver reported this response to Johnson. Without a word, the President picked up his telephone, and, angrily, punching one button after another, said a single terse sentence to each person he was calling:
“It
will be on Wednesday.”

Lyndon had had to deal with Robert Kennedy three times Saturday. After the first of those encounters, he had had to retreat from the Oval Office, the second had resulted in his Cabinet meeting being “ruined,” in the third he had had to give in on the scheduling of his speech. In some ways, that Saturday was a reprise of his three years as Vice President: constant conflict with Robert Kennedy—and constant defeat. Given the importance of keeping the support of the Kennedy faction, there was nothing he could do about it. He told Reedy to announce that he would not move into the Oval Office until Tuesday, the day after the funeral. For three days—Saturday, Sunday and Monday—he would work out of Room 274.

A
HARD RAIN
had begun to fall just before daybreak on Saturday; through it, on the
television cameras shooting with long-range lenses from Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House looked gray, the November-bare limbs of the trees in front of it black from the rain, the remaining leaves sodden and dark. Through the rain, all that day, black limousines pulled up to the North Portico, with its familiar lantern and its black-draped doorway, one after the other, in an endless line, and as the car doors opened, Marines snapping to attention with their heels hitting the pavement so loudly that the click was picked up by television microphones, out stepped senators and ambassadors (Dobrynin clasping his hands together and trying to keep his composure), generals and admirals, in uniforms stiff with medals and braid; men who had to be identified by the newscasters (seventy-one-year-old John McCormack, with his shock of snow-white hair, eighty-six-year-old
Carl Hayden, laboriously climbing the stairs with a cane supporting him on one side and a policeman on the other), and men with faces everyone knew: Truman, Eisenhower. One by one, or couple by couple, they walked up the steps between rigid men in dress uniforms with rifles held high. The chief justice and his wife; when they emerged after viewing the casket, Mrs. Warren could no longer maintain her composure, and, during the long minutes while the Warrens waited on the portico for their car to pull up, she stood weeping.