The Passage of Power (85 page)

There was so much to do. “He was working as rapidly as he possibly could,” she recounts. And, of course, she says, “he was constantly having to leave for [the] ceremonies” for his predecessor. But, as had been the case Friday night, there was, during those next days in EOB 274, very little conversation, “no lost motion; it wasn’t necessary for us to talk.” To Marie Fehmer, her boss was
“a
changed man, transformed.” At first she couldn’t understand why he looked so different from the Lyndon Johnson for whom she had been working, but she came to realize, she says, that the very movements of his body were different; that instead of the awkward, almost lunging, strides and “flailing” movements of his arms that had previously often characterized Johnson under tension, now his stride was shorter, measured, and his arms were staying by his sides, hardly moving at all; that “there was no flailing,” that “only his head moved. It wasn’t just that there was no flailing emotionally. There was no flailing physically either. It was as if he was actively controlling his body.” Not only his movements but his voice was transformed, she says. It had none of the impatience in it that was often—usually—present, none of the anger and rage into which impatience so often morphed, none of any of the emotions with which it was generally filled. “His voice was not low so much as it was level—it didn’t fluctuate in tone. He was keeping it under control, calm.”

It was an iron control, a discipline that, during those three days, never slipped.
“I’ve
never seen him as controlled, as self-disciplined, as careful and as moderate as he’s been this week,” Bill Moyers told
Time
’s
Loye Miller.
“He’s
remained calmer … he’s been more careful to sort out and reason his feelings and his thoughts, and he’s been good to work with. You know very well how he used to thrash around and blow his top so often. It seemed like he had a clock inside him with an alarm that told him at least once an hour that it was time to go chew somebody out. But he hasn’t lost his temper once since two
PM
last Friday.”

“It is remarkable, really,” Miller reported to
Time
’s editors in New York. “Some of us who have seen Lyndon at his most cantankerous in times of lesser stress were wondering what sort of tantrums he must be having behind the office
doors as the immense pressures of his new job and necessity for seizing it quickly bore down on him. But … my every inquiry brings the reply” that there were no tantrums—none of the cursing, none of the glass-throwing, none of the vicious rages. And the replies Miller received were accurate. There was never a crack in the calmness, the aura of command, the sense of purpose. The few reporters who were allowed to spend time in 274 during those days saw it for themselves, and those of them who had known Johnson for years were startled by what they saw now. Hurrying from 274 to
Time
’s offices to describe Johnson in a wire to New York, John Steele used adjectives like “direct, calm, deliberate,” and nouns like “composure and sense of being collected.”
Hugh Sidey felt he was showing more of such qualities than he had
ever
demonstrated before.
“There
were questions, decisions to be made, just flooding in on him one after the other,” he says. “He just handled them, one after the other,” without a pause. Business in 274
“seems
to be progressing matter-of-factly,” another reporter wrote, “and actually quite well compared to the tumultuous office atmosphere which has often surrounded Johnson in the past.”

Conferring with Johnson on Saturday,
Abe Fortas was struck by his “studied calm.”
“Studied.”
Other aides also felt the calm was a mask, and they had reason to feel that way. On Saturday night, after a twelve-hour working day, Johnson was having dinner at The Elms with Busby and Thornberry. At dinner, he was rather quiet, in a mood Busby recognized.
“He
was thinking things through,” he says. “Very intense. You could smell wood burning.” Going upstairs after dinner, he asked Busby to sit in his bedroom until he had fallen asleep, and after the lights had been turned out, Busby did that, until, after about a half hour of silence, he thought it was safe to leave, and started tiptoeing toward the door.

“Buzz,” said Lyndon Johnson’s voice out of the darkness. “Buzz, is that you?” And when Buzz said that it was, the voice said, “Buzz, I’m not asleep yet.”

Returning to his chair, Buzz waited for a while longer, but again, when he tried to leave, Johnson asked, “Buzz, are you still there?” Busby assured him he was, and that he had just been walking over to the window to adjust a curtain. It took several more attempts, and several more “Buzz, are you still theres?” before he finally made it out of the room. Busby, who loved him, didn’t mind waiting, he was to say. He had done it before, when Lyndon Johnson found it hard to get to sleep. “Anything I could do to gentle him down,” he says. “His mind just wouldn’t stop working, working, working.”

A
LTHOUGH DURING THOSE
three days he didn’t have the use of the White House or adequate space for his staff while the Oval Office and its adjoining rooms stood empty across the narrow street, he had the telephone, and he used it—as only Lyndon Johnson could use it.

“I
knew I had to secure the cooperation of the … natural leaders of the nation,” he was to say, and it was over the telephone that he did it. For the sake of
the country, he wanted unity behind his presidency, and for the sake of his political future—the 1964 election, and the convention, and the string of primaries and deadlines that loomed so imminently—he wanted it within his party, wanted to forestall any liberal attempt to contest his nomination, and wanted it fast. The leaders who would (in addition to the Kennedy faction, of course) be most reluctant to support him were the leaders who had opposed him so violently when he ran for the presidency in 1960: the liberal leaders of the great labor unions and the major civil rights organizations, the leaders who had opposed him even for the vice presidency, and who had called the nomination a
“double-cross
,” and threatened to stage a floor fight, even to name a rival candidate, against him. Although the hostility of some of these men had softened during his vice presidency—some of them regarded themselves as his friends now—he couldn’t feel confident of their support, particularly if in 1964 a rival candidate for the nomination was supported by the Kennedy faction, or was, in fact,
named
Kennedy. The hostility of many of them—perhaps most of them—had not softened at all; despite the
St. Augustine tables and the Gettysburg speech, they still felt that at heart he was a Texas conservative, still felt that whatever he might have been saying for the last three years, Lyndon Johnson was still in reality what he had, in their opinion, always been: anti-union and not enthusiastic about civil rights, not a liberal at all. And among the union leaders whose hostility remained unabated was the most powerful of them, the man Lyndon Johnson called labor’s
“stud
duck” because other union chiefs followed his lead, the man who in 1960, calling him “the arch foe of labor,” had staged a “vendetta” against him, a vendetta in which, during the intervening three years, he had called no truce.

In dealing with these men now, however, Johnson possessed advantages he had never had before—not only the power of the presidency but what the presidency symbolized, and the desire, evoked by that symbol, of Americans to support their President, a President who had taken office at such a difficult moment. The first call Lyndon Johnson made when he arrived in EOB 274 on Saturday morning demonstrated how much that might mean. “George,” Lyndon Johnson began. “Mr. President,” George Meany replied.

“George,” Lyndon Johnson said, “you know how tragic this whole thing is. And I just called to tell you that you have been of inestimable help to this administration and to your country, and I need you as we’ve never needed you before.”

“I’m still in a state of shock,” Meany said. But if the President needed him, he would be there. “I can tell you, we’ll go down the line with you and you have got an awful job. But I’m sure you can do it!”

Johnson went on telling him how much he needed him. “I know I’m totally inadequate to it. But maybe with friends like you … and the phone’s always there … and you just let me know and come over.” He said it was time for enemies to unite. “Let’s try to pull our country … close ranks, and pull it out of this terrible situation in which we find ourselves.”

Meany tried to encourage him. “It’s a tough job but I’m sure you can do it,” he said. “I think you, with your training and everything else, Mr. President, you can do it. And you’ll have me and all of our gang back of you one thousand percent.”

“I want your counsel and I want your friendship,” Lyndon Johnson said.

“Well, you have it,” Meany replied.

By “our gang” Meany meant labor leaders like Reuther of the Autoworkers, McDonald of the Steelworkers, Rose and Dubinsky of the Garment Workers. Despite Meany’s assurance that Johnson would have them behind him, Johnson telephoned each of them himself, telling them that, as he said to Reuther, he would be loyal to the Kennedy program, the liberal program—that he wouldn’t “abandon the ship,” that “we’re going to turn our sails into the wind and we’re going places and we’re going to carry on,” telling McDonald, “I want to meet the needs of our people and there are many unfulfilled ones” so he would ask Congress to “do more good and less economizing.… We’ll just have to go after them, and we’ll need you then. You better stand ready and be armed.” He had the key line pretty well down now. When Reuther said, “Mr. President, [you have] my prayers, and my friendship, and
every
possible help that I can offer,” Johnson said, “Well, I need it all. I never needed it as much in my life.” And the line worked. “Anytime that you need me, you call and I’ll be there,” Reuther said.

Arthur Goldberg, now a Supreme Court Justice but once, as general counsel to the Steelworkers, at the heart of labor’s hierarchy, had telephoned Reedy that morning and advised him that, as Johnson was to put it, Meany “liked the visible signs of consultation,” public acknowledgment of his importance—and wanted also acknowledgment that he was labor’s leader. Reedy had typed up this advice and handed it to Johnson. The call to Meany, Reedy’s memo said,
“should
be told to the press.” The calls to Reuther, Rose and the others “should remain off the record”—so that Meany would believe he had been the only leader called. Johnson told Reedy to make sure reporters knew he had telephoned Meany—and to make sure reporters didn’t find out he had telephoned the others.

Then he turned to leaders of the civil rights movement. He told them his problems.
“It’s
just an
impossible
period,” he said to Martin Luther King Jr. “We got a budget coming up that’s—we got nothing to do with it, it’s practically already made. And we got a civil rights bill that hadn’t even passed the House, and it’s November, and
Hubert Humphrey told me yesterday everybody wanted to go home. We got a tax bill that they haven’t touched.” He went to considerable trouble for them, graciously, warmly. When, at the end of his conversation with Johnson Sunday evening,
Whitney Young of the
National Urban League mentioned that he had
“sort
of expected” tickets for himself and his family to the Kennedy funeral services, but hadn’t received them, Johnson said “Bobby,” not he, was handling the funeral arrangements, but “Let me inquire on it,” and added, “I’m taking my family and I’d almost take you as my guest if I can get an extra ticket.” He said he would get back to Young Monday morning, but then apparently realized that might be too late, arranged for the tickets with
Sargent Shriver,
and called Young back to tell him he had done so, and to tell him that if there was any problem with the tickets, he should call Moyers at once. (“God bless you,” Young said.) He made them laugh, using a Texas axiom to assure Young he wouldn’t stop fighting for civil rights. “We’ll keep coming,” he said. “Kind of like the fella who said, ‘What’s the difference between a Texas Ranger and a Texas sheriff? Well, when you hit a Ranger, he just keeps coming.’ ” Solemn though the day may have been, Young burst into laughter. He told them they could depend on him. When Dr. King mentioned Kennedy’s “great, progressive policies that he sought to initiate,” Johnson said, “Well, I’m gonna support them all, and you can count on that.” He told them he needed their support. “I’ll have to have you-all’s help—and I never needed it more than I do now,” he said. And they told him he would have it. “Just feel free to call on us for anything,” Dr. King said.

One of the most difficult problems that had faced Johnson when he was thrust into the presidency was the dislike and suspicion with which he was regarded by not a few leaders of the labor and the civil rights movements whose support was indispensable to him if he wanted to unite the Democratic Party, and if he wanted to secure its presidential nomination. He didn’t solve that problem—didn’t eradicate those hard feelings—during his first three days in the presidency but, by the end of those three days, he was on his way to a solution.

W
ANTING, NEEDING
to unify more than the party, from one telephone call to another he shifted from one tone to another, and back again. Had he told a liberal that he was going to ask Congress for “less economizing”?—to the conservative
Robert Anderson he said he was going to ask Congress for more: “to try to watch expenditures.” With Democrats, he invoked Truman’s name, telling
Carl Albert he wanted to speak to a joint session “similar to what President Truman had after President Roosevelt died”; with Republicans, it was Eisenhower’s name: he had just been in an “elevator with President Eisenhower,” he mentioned to
Everett Dirksen. “He had lunch with me and we were talking.… It might be a good thing … to have a Joint Session.… Ike thought I ought to.” Liberals he told that they should support him because he was going to reform the system, Republicans that he was going to preserve it, hinting to them that because of things that had not yet come to light about the assassination, the system (under which of course their wealth had been accumulated) might be under attack, telling his key link to Wall Street, Ed Weisl, that “your folks” should be given a hint that “this thing … this assassin may … have a lot more complications than you know about.… It may lay deeper than you think” (“Oh, no,” Weisl interjected), but that his folks shouldn’t be afraid because “we’re going to preserve this system”; therefore it was vital that the financial world show confidence in him. He himself called
Frederick Kappel, president of the country’s largest corporation,
American Telephone and Telegraph, and chairman of the influential
Business Council, to tell him,
“We’ve got to preserve this system, my friend. And there’s a good deal more.” The key to the financial world was Wall Street—it had panicked on Friday on news of the assassination; based on the experience with previous sudden presidential deaths, it would rebound when it reopened on Tuesday, as long as it had confidence in the President. Picking up the phone to call
Bundy, Johnson told him that Treasury Secretary Dillon and
Federal Reserve Chairman
William McChesney Martin should make “a statement about continuity, stability or something, and express their confidence” before the market opened. After letting Weisl know that “I’ve been visiting with President Eisenhower” and that “I was thinking of you and I never needed you as much as I do now,” he told him to “tell Bobbie [Robert Lehman of Lehman Brothers] and some of his group—you just say that it’s very tragic, but you have great confidence in me and my experience, so on and so forth.… We don’t want anybody to panic.”