The Passage of Power (84 page)

H
E HAD FOUR DAYS
—until Wednesday at noon—before he would have to stand before a joint session of Congress and deliver his first speech as President. He would want to emphasize continuity in the speech, of course—to make clear that he was carrying on Kennedy’s program—and he knew who he wanted to write it: Kennedy’s speechwriter. He gave Ted Sorensen credit for the ringing phrases in Kennedy’s speeches; perhaps Sorensen could give his own some of that magic. At the conclusion of Saturday’s Cabinet meeting, he had walked over to Sorensen, sitting against the wall, and asked him to begin working on it. But Sorensen was still dazed by the
“grief
and disbelief” that had gripped him since he first heard the news. He was to say forty-five years later that he had never been able to remember “the details of that awful weekend … unreal … unbelievable … a blur of pain and tears.” That evening Johnson tried again in the inner office in 274. “I do not recall much” of that meeting, Sorensen was to say, “but I was blunt and unsmiling.” Most of the meeting, Sorensen was to say, “was devoted to his request that I stay: ‘I need you more than he needed you,’ ” but, as best as he could recall, his response was, “I’ve given eleven years of my life to John Kennedy, and for those eleven years he was the only human being who mattered to
me.” Johnson may have intended to ask him again that evening to draft the joint session speech, but the request was not made.

And all the time, the calls kept pouring in.
“Gov
. [George] Romney [of Michigan] is at the airport. An aide is asking if he [the governor] could talk to you if he came over,” said a note Roberts handed him that Saturday. “Aide holding on 304,” said another note a few minutes later. Picking up 304, Johnson said a few words to Romney, who might be his opponent in a few months. “Governor Lawrence … would like to stop by at your convenience,” said a note from Jenkins.
“Harry
Provence is at the Washington [Hotel], Room 432, and is waiting.” Suddenly Jenkins was coming in to tell him that McCone was in the outer office; he motioned to Jenkins to show him right in; entering, McCone closed the door behind him before he spoke: Oswald, the
CIA had learned, had visited not only the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City but the Cuban Embassy as well. There was even a call from Ralph Yarborough; when, after a while, Johnson hadn’t returned it, the senator left a message with Jenkins:
“The
President will have my complete support in
Texas and in the Nation.… If the President had lived another day, he would have seen some harmony in Texas.” (Returning the call after he received that message, Johnson said,
“You’re
wonderful, and I’ll be in touch with you—I appreciate it more than you know.” “I have no ideological problem; I’m willing to give at least 90 percent—” Yarborough said. “That’s right. Always have,” Lyndon Johnson interrupted. “Always have. I know that. Thank you, my friend.”) There was, Reedy was to say,
“one
call after another, all day” from Hoover and
Bundy. There were the things to do that no one had thought of but that were essential. A presidential proclamation had to be issued to designate Monday, November 25, the day of the funeral, as an official
“day
of national mourning.” After it had been written and approved, a memo that Reedy stuck in front of him told him that something had been left out. The proclamation authorized the closing of all government offices, but no one had thought of the banks. “Apparently because of a legal quirk, we have not given the nation’s banks authority to close Monday. A bank can be sued if it is not opened during regular hours, and the only way in which they are safe from such suits on Monday is if the day is proclaimed a legal holiday.”

By the time Saturday was over, Johnson had, since his confrontation with Robert Kennedy that morning, met with his Cabinet as a group, and with three of its key members—Rusk, McNamara and Labor Secretary Wirtz—individually; with Eisenhower and Truman; with leaders of Congress; with the CIA director; with Supreme Court Justice Goldberg; and, over and over, with his national security advisor; had gone to church; paid his respects to the dead President and to the dead President’s widow in the White House; and had talked on the telephone with, and won firmly to his side, perhaps another forty people.

Arriving in the office on Sunday with a list of problems that must be faced immediately, he was handed the instructions for his participation in the day’s memorial ceremonies, which, he saw, would consume a substantial portion of the day. (
“The
President and Mrs. Johnson … will follow the casket through a cordon
of honor troops from the East Room to the North Portico entrance where the casket will be placed on the caisson.… The President should place his right hand over his left breast while the casket is being placed on the caisson.… The President and Mrs. Johnson will board vehicle No. 1 for procession to the Capitol.… At the conclusion of the last eulogy the President will move from his position to the base of the catafalque where the wreath bearer will assist him in placing a wreath.”) And then he was told that also riding in vehicle No. 1 would be the attorney general. Just a few minutes later, as he was waiting in the East Room to step on the portico, an usher told him that
Dean Rusk wanted to speak to him on the phone, and Rusk told him that Lee Harvey Oswald had just been shot “on television.” Shortly after the procession arrived at the Capitol, the assassin was pronounced dead, murdered by another assassin—and immediately the second murder, fostering as it did the impression that the assassination was part of a conspiracy, created a huge problem. Obviously some sort of major investigation was necessary—but what type of an investigation, and by whom?

O
NE PROBLEM
he dealt with that Sunday seemed somewhat less pressing than the others. After his return from the Capitol (faster coming back, with motorcycle outriders clearing the way, no Kennedys in the car with him) there was a meeting in his office—on
Vietnam.

Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had returned from Saigon to report on the effects of the coup that had, three weeks previously, resulted in the assassinations of South Vietnamese President
Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, secret police chief
Ngo Dinh Nhu, and the installation of a new government led by General
Duong Van (Big) Minh. Most of America’s major newspapers had welcomed the end of the repressive Diem regime, and there had been relatively few public statements about the coup from Capitol Hill; Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Fulbright would soon be telling Johnson that he saw no need for any immediate action on his part:
“I
think we ought to give this new man a chance to see what he can do for a little while.” And the meeting didn’t make Johnson, who, Valenti recalls, had
“talked
little of Vietnam that first night,” feel the need for immediate action. Lodge, who had not been at all opposed to the coup, said that it had improved prospects for victory. None of the others sitting around the conference table in 274—Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, McCone and
Ball—agreed with this prediction; McCone, in fact, said that the new military leaders were having difficulty organizing a government, that
Viet Cong activity seemed to have increased since the coup, and that he saw no reason for optimism. But there was no strong feeling from anyone but McCone that there had been substantial deterioration, either, and Johnson was to recall that he found the
“net
result modestly encouraging.” A preliminary plan for covert operations against North Vietnam had been approved at a conference in Honolulu two days before Kennedy’s assassination, and it was decided at the meeting in 274 that when the plan had been refined, it would be sent to the President for approval.

The “breathing space” in foreign affairs appeared to include Vietnam; of all the potential trouble spots in the world, Johnson would recall in his memoirs,
“Only
South Vietnam gave me real cause for concern.… But, compared with later periods, even the situation in Vietnam appeared to be relatively free from the pressure of immediate decisions.” The solution seemed the same as in domestic matters: continuity—the continuation of Kennedy policies. Reinforcing that conclusion, furthermore, was a simple political calculation; as Bundy was to say, a presidential election was less than a year away, and major decisions on Vietnam in an election year were something no President would want to make.
“It
was so under Johnson, and it would [have been] under Kennedy as well. Neither man wanted to go into the election as the one who either made war or lost Vietnam. If you could put it off, you did.”

With political calculations Johnson was at ease. While the range—from Lodge to McCone—of the assessments of the Vietnam situation may have been mixed, Johnson’s response wasn’t. When, at the end of the discussion, Lodge told the President that unfortunately hard decisions would be necessary on Vietnam, Johnson barely hesitated, and his instructions to Lodge, Wicker was to write, were
“firm
.” There had been, the President said, too much bickering among the various American agencies in South Vietnam—the Army, the
CIA, the
USIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department—over our aims there.
“We
had spent too much of our time and energy trying to shape other countries in our own image.” There would be time enough for broader objectives later, he said. At the moment,
“The
main objective” was to just “win the war—he didn’t want as much effort placed on so-called social concerns.” He told Lodge to return to Vietnam and assure its new government that his Administration would continue Kennedy’s policy of helping Saigon to fight the Communists.

“I
am not going to lose Vietnam,” he said. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way
China went.” Lodge raised a question about political support.
“I
don’t think Congress wants us to let the Communists take over South Vietnam,” Johnson said, noting that “strong voices” in Congress were urging the United States to take more forceful action in Vietnam.

A tentative step in a different direction had recently been announced by the Kennedy Administration. On October 2, McNamara and Taylor, returning from an inspection trip to Vietnam, had recommended stepping up the training of the Vietnamese army so that American military personnel could be withdrawn from Vietnam, and had said that if this was done, “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of US personnel” by the end of 1965. Their report concluded that a thousand Americans could be withdrawn by the end of 1963.
“We
need a way to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it,” McNamara said. At the close of Kennedy’s meeting with his two envoys, on October 2,
Pierre Salinger had publicly announced that the President had endorsed their recommendations, saying that the President accepted
“their
judgment that the major part of the US military task can be completed by the end of 1965 …. They reported that by the end of this year … 1,000 military personnel can be withdrawn.” The number of American
personnel in Vietnam at the time was 16,732, and it was forecast that by the end of the year, the number would be reduced to about 15,700. That had been before the coup. Whether Kennedy, despite the coup, would have kept the pledge to withdraw the thousand troops is unknown, but the pledge was on the public record. Johnson, calling in reporters after his meeting with Lodge and the others,
“reaffirmed
,” the
New York Times
said, “the policy objectives of his predecessor regarding South Vietnam.” The
Washington Post
reported that after the meeting
“White
House sources said the late President Kennedy’s statement” about the troop withdrawals “before the end of the year remains in force.”

Johnson’s statement said: “First, the central point of United States policy on South Vietnam remains: namely to assist the new government there in winning the war against the Communist Vietcong insurgents. The adoption of all measures should be determined by their potential contribution to this overriding objective. Second, the White House statement of Oct. 2 on the withdrawal of United States troops from South Vietnam remains in force. This statement … said the program for training of Vietnamese troops should have progressed by the end of this year to the point ‘where 1,000 United States military personnel’ can be withdrawn.”

Two days later, on November 26, the reaffirmation—all the conflicting parts of it—was given official status. On November 21, the day before Kennedy’s death, Bundy had drafted a National Security Action Memorandum, a formal notification to the heads of government agencies of a presidential decision, and directives to take steps required to implement it. On November 26, Johnson approved the memorandum,
NSAM 273. It emphasized that the Vietnam conflict was a war against Communism, and a war that had to be won, and that “It remains the central objective of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win” it.

The specific withdrawal goals enunciated under Kennedy—a thousand by the end of 1963, “the bulk” of the rest by the end of 1965—“remain as stated,” the NSAM declared. Among the directives included in the document, however, was one for the planning of “possible increased [military] activity,” a reference to the plan for covert military operations against North Vietnam (CINCPAC Operations Plan 34-A-64, or OPLAN 34-A) that had been discussed and approved at the November 20 Honolulu conference.

I
F
V
IETNAM SEEMED
—no matter how misleading the impression—“relatively free from the pressure of immediate decisions,” without deadlines by which specific actions had to be taken, little else was. All during those three days—
“days
filled with people, days filled with telephone calls,” in
Juanita Roberts’ recollection—the crises never stopped. She,
Marie Fehmer,
Cliff Carter and
Mildred Stegall would funnel the more important calls to the desk at which Walter Jenkins sat, taking notes on his legal pads, quiet, outwardly calm, the only sign of tension the steady reddening of his face as the day went on. A light on one of
the buttons on the telephone console on Jenkins’ desk showed when Johnson, in his private office, was talking on that line. Except when Johnson was talking to someone in person in his office, one of the buttons was almost always lit. When, for a moment, Johnson was alone in his office and the buttons were suddenly all dark, Jenkins would seize the opportunity, snatching up his pads and going in, to read Johnson the messages that required immediate attention. The buzzer from the inner office would sound on their desks. Johnson would tell them to set up an appointment with someone, or to get someone else on the phone. “Some
times he would buzz out and say, ‘What have you got?’ and we’d tell him,” Colonel Roberts says.
Sometimes he
would come out, into the two rooms with the desks crammed together and the phones ringing and people hurrying in and out, “and,” Roberts says, “if he’d pass our desks and we had something we thought he should see, we’d give it to him.”