The Passage of Power (83 page)

Johnson told Smathers why he couldn’t do that (or at least one of the reasons why he couldn’t do that).

“No, no,” he said, “I can’t do that. That would destroy the Democratic Party and destroy the election—destroy everything. We’ve got to carry on. We can’t abandon this fella’s [Kennedy’s] program because he’s a national hero and … these people [the Kennedy Cabinet and aides] want his program passed, and we’ve got to keep the Kennedy aura around us through this election.”

But when he himself, during the same call, got down to another count—of the days remaining before adjournment—he learned how hard passing the
tax bill, much less the rest of Kennedy’s program, was going to be. “Where are your holidays? … What are you planning for Thanksgiving?” he asked, and Smathers replied that because of the imminent holiday, the Senate wouldn’t be doing much work that week; “Byrd doesn’t plan any hearings—he couldn’t get a quorum, he told me.” And, Smathers said, “that puts us into December”—and the Christmas recess.

“I tell you, Mr. President, I’d hate to see you make that [the tax bill] a big issue because I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to do it.”

D
ISCOURAGING AS WAS
the news on the tax bill, that same day—his first full day as President—he also got the news on the budget that was tied in with it. It came in an urgent memo on that budget—the so-called
“1965 budget” that covered the fiscal year between July 1, 1964, and June 30, 1965—from
Budget Bureau Director
Kermit Gordon.
“We
stand at a critical stage in the 1965 budget process,” Gordon wrote. “Every agency has submitted its budget requests, and we are now about half-way through our intensive review of these submissions,” after which Kennedy’s economic team had been scheduled to meet with the President “to present our recommendations,” and explain the conflicts between these recommendations and the higher amounts requested by individual departments and agencies so that he could resolve them.

The budget determined many government actions and policies. “Despite the fact that the time is late, I know that you will want to make this budget
your
budget,” Gordon wrote. “Accordingly, I hope we can sit down with you very soon.” And the memo closed with a list of dates—“the time schedule against which we must work”—that showed what “very soon” meant.

As it happens, Gordon had the date at the top of the list incorrect. His memo said that January 19 was the date by which, under law, the “Budget [must be] submitted to Congress.” The correct date was January 20. January 20 was almost two months off. But that was the end date on the list. The line underneath it said “January 9—Budget message locked up.” By that date, all decisions on the message—on the final budget that would be submitted to Congress on January 20—had to be finalized, because it would take eight days for the final figures
for expenditures to be calculated, and totaled, and measured against tax revenues, and for the message, the huge 439-page document, to be prepared and printed. And underneath January 9 were other dates: “December 26—Final day for decisions on proposed legislation”: on the bills, complicated bills that had to be drafted with care, that would authorize the creation of new federal programs that the President wanted funded in the budget. But before this legislation could be drafted—before
any
legislation for programs, either new or existing, could be drafted—decisions would have to be made on the individual requests from the departments and agencies: whether to approve or reduce them; which programs to continue or reduce or eliminate. Those decisions had to be made by the President—had to be made by
him
—after meetings in which, as Gordon’s memo said, we “present the major policy issues involved in the budget and obtain your guidance on how we should proceed.” Three weeks had been allowed for such meetings, so the final dates in the memo were “December 2–20—Final decisions on agency programs under existing legislation. (Defense and space decisions must be virtually complete by December 10.)” December 2 was a week from Monday, the day of Kennedy’s funeral. But, Gordon’s memo said, “very soon” meant even sooner than that. The economic team’s crucial meetings with President Kennedy “to present our recommendations [and] obtain his decisions” had actually been scheduled “to begin next Wednesday,” a day four days off.

At 7:40 Saturday evening, another member of the economic team,
Walter W. Heller, chairman of the President’s
Council of Economic Advisers, was shown into 274’s inner office, and while underlining to Johnson Gordon’s urgency—
“I
told him [Johnson] we were pretty deeply in the process already, and that sometime in December or early January he would have to make final decisions,” Heller was to recall—he added an additional point: that Kennedy had received budget briefings and
“a
coordinated budget, revenue and economic picture” from the economic team on a regular basis, so that he had been familiar with many of the considerations that would be involved in making the impending budgetary decisions. Johnson had never received any such briefing.

And tight as the time schedule was, it wasn’t the hardest problem confronting Johnson on the budget. The document, with its setting of governmental priorities, was a key battlefield in the war between liberals and conservatives. Liberals wanted a larger role for government, wanted bigger, and new, government social welfare programs and therefore a larger budget. They believed the $11 billion tax cut would, by putting more money into people’s pockets, stimulate the economy and thereby increase tax revenues, and the money the government would have available for these programs. Conservatives, uneasy about an expansion in government’s role and about the proposed new programs, were opposed to the deficits that would be produced by the higher spending, and believed the deficits would be increased by the tax cuts. So Johnson, in starting to deal with the budget, would immediately find himself plunged into the middle of the intense ideological warfare between conservatives and liberals.

That very Saturday began a battle to influence the new President’s thinking on the
budget–tax cut issue—a battle,
Willard Wirtz said, “for his mind.” The militant conservative and former Treasury Secretary
Robert Anderson, whom Eisenhower had urged him to see, was Ike’s crack general on financial issues, and, in a long telephone conversation somehow crammed into Johnson’s schedule that Saturday, Anderson told him that the surest way to restore confidence was to cut the budget and reduce the deficit. The Cabinet’s most aggressive liberals, Udall, Wirtz and Freeman, had all urged Johnson in the opposite direction, Freeman in a note which, mindful of what he knew about Johnson, he was careful to keep to one page.

Anyone who thought Johnson’s mind could be captured didn’t know it. He knew what his most important priority was. Leaving 274 that evening, Heller had opened the door—only to find it shut again, by Johnson’s big hand. Drawing him back into the room, Johnson said,
“Now
I want to say something about all this talk that I’m a conservative who is likely to go back to the Eisenhower ways or give in to the economy bloc in Congress. It’s not so, and I want you to tell your friends—Arthur Schlesinger, Galbraith, and other liberals—that it is not so. I’m no budget slasher.… If you looked at my record, you would know that I am a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a matter of fact, to tell the truth, John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.” But the liberals didn’t have the votes in Congress, didn’t have the nine votes necessary to get the tax cut bill out of the seventeen-member Senate Finance Committee. The economy bloc had the votes, and they had
Harry Byrd. Smathers had summed up the prospects for passing the tax cut bill: “We’re not going to be able to do it.”

T
HE PROBLEMS WITH
Congress that he was aware of—not only the intertwined tax cut and budget bills and the eleven unpassed appropriations bills that were also tied in with them, but civil rights, foreign aid and school construction—were difficult enough, particularly because the deadlines for solving them were so close, but on Saturday, talking with Mansfield and Humphrey, he was suddenly made aware of another problem on Capitol Hill, one on which, to his surprise, the deadline was much closer.

As part of his attempts to ease tensions with the Soviet Union, President Kennedy had, in October, offered to help alleviate its serious food shortage by selling it wheat from America’s surplus, and by allowing Russia, short of foreign exchange reserves, to finance the purchase on credit from the United States
Export-Import Bank.

Helping Russia out of a jam was anathema to Capitol Hill hard-liners. Calling Kennedy’s plan “indefensible,” one of the hardest, Republican Senator
Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota, had attached an amendment to the
foreign aid bill prohibiting the Export-Import Bank from extending the credit.

The amendment would probably kill the wheat deal. It would certainly
infringe on the President’s authority in foreign affairs. On November 14, a week before the President left for Texas, the
Kennedy Administration had tried to defeat Mundt’s prohibition in the Senate—and had failed, mustering only forty votes. Mundt was then persuaded to withdraw it, so that the foreign aid bill could proceed—not that it
did
proceed—but only by Mansfield’s promise that he would be allowed to submit it as a separate bill and to have a vote on it on an early date, which had been set for Tuesday, November 26. At the legislative leaders’ breakfast on November 21, the day Kennedy left for Texas, Kennedy had insisted that the Mundt bill must be defeated. From the report Mansfield and Humphrey now gave Johnson, however, the former President’s words had little relation to reality: the bill, they reported, was probably going to be passed.

In reporting this to Johnson, Mansfield and Humphrey seemed to feel that they were talking only about a vote on a wheat sale, and Smathers hadn’t considered the Mundt bill important enough to mention it, but none of these senators were Lyndon Johnson, who as master of the Senate had demonstrated a gift, an intuition, for seeing, in a vote on some individual bill, larger implications seen by no one else. In the instant the wheat sale vote was mentioned to him—
“just
the moment he heard about it,” George Reedy says—he knew that because of Kennedy’s death and the resultant change in Presidents, the vote was now about more than the wheat sale, that it now possessed a far broader significance.

In confrontations with the former President during the past three years, Congress, and in particular the Senate, had won so often, had blocked so many Kennedy legislative proposals, that Congress now felt that in such confrontations, power rested on Capitol Hill, not in the White House. And the confidence among congressmen that they could win battles with the President had made them more willing to fight them, had emboldened them to contest the Kennedy program.
“They’ve
got the bit in their teeth,” Johnson was to explain to his aides.

That was under the former President. A vote on the Mundt bill on November 26, the day after Kennedy’s funeral, would make that measure the first bill to be considered by Congress under the new President. The wheat sale vote was going to be Congress’s first confrontation with the
Johnson Administration—and therefore its result would be an indication of whether, under the new Administration, the situation would remain the same, or if power would shift. The result, Johnson saw in an instant, would be crucial. The feeling on Capitol Hill had to be changed. If Congress won, its confidence that it could still defeat the President would make subsequent battles—over civil rights, for example, or the tax cut—much more difficult for him.
“We
could not afford to lose a vote like that, after only four days in office,” he was to explain in his memoirs. “If those legislators had tasted blood then, they would have run over us like a steamroller [on future votes], when much more than foreign aid would depend on their actions.” The Mundt bill had to be defeated; the issue, as a journalist was later to report after Johnson’s aides had explained it to him, “was simply” whether “presidential dominion over Congress” would be “reasserted”—or not.

Since Johnson, at his ranch in Texas preparing for Kennedy’s visit, had
missed the last leadership breakfast, he hadn’t been aware of the bill’s status. Learning it from Mansfield and Humphrey sometime on Saturday, he tried to rescue the situation, but when he gave the two leaders the instructions that to him were so elementary—not to schedule the vote on the bill until they were certain they had the votes to defeat it—he was informed that the vote had already been scheduled, for Tuesday. And when he told them to delay it—there was a perfectly good excuse for a brief delay, he said: the President’s assassination, and the resultant need for a new Administration to get its bearings—the answer from Mansfield was that he wasn’t willing to do that: he had promised Mundt the vote would be on Tuesday, he said, and he wouldn’t go back on his word. The leaders weren’t sure if they had the votes to defeat the bill. Johnson couldn’t even find out what the vote count
was.
“They
don’t know how many votes they have,” he told Reedy in a tone of disbelief.

Humphrey of course said he was sure they would have the votes, but Johnson, having had experience with Humphrey’s counts in the past, had no confidence in them, and the lack of confidence proved justified.
“They
told me that the Mundt bill’s pretty close,” he was to say, “but when [we] checked it down, why they [the bill’s supporters] had a good many votes to spare.” He had three days—the vote would be held Tuesday afternoon—to turn the vote around, and not only did the leaders not know what the count was or which senators had to be turned around, the man who might know, Larry O’Brien, had made it clear that, at least for the moment, he didn’t even want to discuss working for Lyndon Johnson. When Johnson tried to reach O’Brien that Saturday, he was told that he was tied up—and would remain tied up for the next couple of days, helping with preparations for the funeral.