The Passage of Power (88 page)

The conference table had been pushed back against the rear wall to make more room—three photographers were standing on it—and folding chairs had been brought in and placed in rows facing his desk, but there weren’t enough of those chairs for all the governors, and some were sitting in the green conference table chairs that were now flanking his desk and others were crammed onto a couch flanking the desk on the other side, and aides and a few reporters lined the walls; so overcrowded was the room that it wasn’t just the fluorescent lights that kept the setting from being dignified or impressive.

But the setting wasn’t going to matter.

Talking points for the meeting—mostly platitudes—had been hastily prepared by Valenti, and they were lying on the desk in front of him, but after a minute or two, the platitudes were forgotten, and Lyndon Johnson got to the point.

“We do have this problem tonight, and that is the business of the government going forward,” he said. “We live under a system of checks and balances,” he said, and “I will tell you the Congress has exercised its power to check the Executive all right.”

He told them how bad the problem was—in terms they could all understand, for they were chief executives, too, which meant they also had budgets to pass, and resistance against passing them from legislators.

“I have a budget that has to go to Congress December 15th,” he said. There were demands on him to increase the budget. “The Secretary of Defense told me last night that he would have to have close to a billion dollars extra to keep up our defense guard. The Space Administrator said that unless we want to cut back and abandon our trip to the moon he has to have three-quarters of a billion more than he had last year.” Congress had blocked passage of the budget. It had blocked passage of the civil rights bill. “We have a good education bill which has passed the House, and it is over in the Senate. We have one that has passed the Senate and is over in the House”—so an education bill was blocked, too. Other important bills were blocked. “Congress has gone a record ten months without finalizing action on many of these bills.… This is November, and this is the first time in thirty-two years that we have not passed an
appropriations bill.

“So,” he said, “I need your help.”

He explained what type of help he was thinking of. “I want to appeal to you … to get your delegations”—their congressional delegations: their states’ senators and representatives—“to help us break through this impasse.” He needed them to help influence public opinion back in their states. “I not only need your hands; I need your voice,” he said. He couldn’t “make Congress legislate” by himself, he said. “If there is anything you can do to help us get action in this period of time when we are faced with this tragic experience of ours, we will be grateful.”

The budget had to have enough money for defense, he said. “We have had hopes” of easing tensions with Russia, he said, “but that does not mean we have to lessen our strength. That means we have to maintain it. We have to lead from a position of strength, so we have to maintain that defense posture, because if we let down our guard, that is a written invitation for more trouble instead of less tension.”

He appealed to their pride in their country. “I am seeing fifteen leaders in the morning from foreign countries, and all of them have their doubts as to what is going to happen in America.… To hesitate the slightest, I think, would be a great risk in compromising our whole system as a leader of the world.”

And he explained to them why they should help regardless of their party affiliation. “You are great patriots and no single party has a single mortgage on patriotism. I have been a Democrat all my life. I cannot point to any members of my party who are more patriotic than members of the other party.” Ike understood this, he told them. “I sat here yesterday with the great President of this country who led our forces to victory.… He came in yesterday to offer his help. He spent two and a half hours here.… We did not discuss his party or politics. We just discussed what needed to be done in this country to save it.”

He was getting worked up now—“revved up.” His desk was up on blocks, so that he would appear bigger than he was, but he didn’t need the blocks to look bigger now; as he went on, emotions, passion, began to pour out of him so that he was again, for the first time in three years, the Lyndon Johnson who “got bigger
as he talked to you.” And suddenly his talk was on a different level—about larger issues than budgets or bipartisanship.

“We have hate abroad in the world, hate internationally, hate domestically where a President was assassinated and then they take the law into their own hands and kill the assassin,” he said. “That is not our system. We have to do something about that. We have to do something about this hate, and you have to get to the root of hate. The roots are poverty and disease and illiteracy.”

He had been sitting erect behind his desk, smiling, friendly, dignified, at the beginning of his talk; he wasn’t erect now but hunched forward over the desk, arms leaning on the pages that he had long since stopped reading from, and as he talked he leaned further and further forward toward the men sitting in front of him, his hands sometimes open in entreaty and sometimes clenched into fists.

He had noticed something in the State Department briefing cards, he said. “The people I talked to tonight, out of a hundred nations, there are only six of them that have an income of as much as eighty dollars a month. We don’t really recognize how lucky and fortunate we are until something tragic like this happens to us. Here is our President shot in the head and his wife holds his skull in her lap as they drive down the street. Here is our Governor who looked around and said, ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ and because he turned a bullet just missed his heart. It went down through his lung into his leg and tore his left hand off. And, then, yesterday, they take the law into their own hands. We have to do something to stop that hate, and the way we have to do it is to meet the problem of injustice that exists in this land, meet the problem of inequality that exists in this land, meet the problem of poverty that exists in this land, and the unemployment that exists in this land.”

“The best way” to meet those problems, Lyndon Johnson said, “is to pass the tax bill and get some more jobs and get some more investments and, incidentally, get more revenue and taxes, and pass the civil rights bill so that we can say to the Mexican in California or the Negro in Mississippi or the Oriental on the West Coast or the Johnsons in Johnson City that we are going to treat you all equally and fairly, and you are going to be judged on merit and not ancestry, not on how you spell your name.”

Forget your party for a moment, Lyndon Johnson told the men before him. “We are going to have plenty of time after the conventions to get out … and campaign and talk about ourselves and our merits. Let’s talk about the country until then.”

And “let’s not just talk about it,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Let’s get some action on it and do something.”

“Do something.”
Lyndon Johnson wasn’t smiling and friendly anymore. When he said the
Let’s do something,
“he
just snarled it,” Valenti was to say. There had been exaggeration in his description of the scene in Dallas. John Connally’s hand had not been torn off. But
there was a vividness in the description, too—not John Kennedy’s head in Jackie’s lap but
“his
skull in her lap”—the vividness of a great storyteller whose words caught men up in their grip. And there was a vividness in the part of his talk that wasn’t exaggerated that caught them up, too. “The only thing you could see moving in that room was the reporters’ pencils,” Valenti was to recall. “No one moved. No one budged. The room was absolutely still. No one took their eyes from his face.” Reedy was very proud; others were finally seeing what the Senate cloakroom had seen.

Johnson finished by talking for a moment about himself. “I am not the best man in the world at this job, and I was thrown into it through circumstances, but I am in it and I am not going to run from it,” he said. “I am going to be at it from daylight to midnight, and with your help and God’s help we are going to make not ourselves proud that we are Americans but we are going to make the rest of the world proud that there is an American in it.”

Some of the governors facing him had risen to their office through their capacity for leadership, and others had learned leadership since they were in the office, but one way or another many of them had learned to know leadership when they saw it. When Johnson finished, they stood and applauded him. A reporter asked
Pat Brown his reaction to the speech. This was the Pat Brown who, three years before, had been thoroughly repelled by Johnson’s manner.

“Astounded,” Brown said.

O
THERS SAW IT
, too—including men more accustomed to dealing with hard, cold numbers than with intangibles: the economists who had been preparing President Kennedy’s budget.

Six of them had been waiting outside during Johnson’s meeting with the governors: the Administration’s three top advisers on economic policy—Dillon of Treasury, Heller of the
Council of Economic Advisers and Gordon of the Bureau of the
Budget—who called themselves Kennedy’s “troika,” after a Russian sleigh that is pulled by three horses; and their top assistants, Treasury Undersecretary
Henry H. Fowler,
Gardner Ackley of the Council and Budget Deputy Director
Elmer Staats.

As soon as Johnson began talking to them, they realized that the sleigh had a very different driver now.

They were conscious, they were to say, of some of what Johnson had done that day: marching in the procession past a thousand windows after his predecessor had been shot from a window, attending the funeral, dealing with de Gaulle and Mikoyan and scores of foreign leaders, and then, as they sat waiting outside, with the governors, dealing with the investigation of the murders in Dallas—as well as, they were sure, carrying out a dozen other tasks of which they were not aware. They knew his day must have begun early that morning—actually it had begun at about 6:30 in the morning, and their meeting began at 9:15 that night, almost fifteen hours later—but, Ackley was to record in his notes on the meeting,
“The
President showed no signs of his tiring day, looked fit and vigorous, was affable and relaxed, but always in command.”

“In command.”
“The
most impressive thing,” Ackley wrote, “was the confident
way in which he approached the whole problem—not necessarily implying that he knew the answers, but that he knew the score, and that the problem could be solved. All we had to do was to decide how to tackle it.” And a moment later, they realized that he
had
decided: that he already knew how he was going to deal with the problem—of getting a tax reduction bill through Congress—that had stymied them for almost a year.

“What
about your tax bill?” he asked Dillon—and before Dillon could reply, Ackley wrote, “he answered his own question.” Dillon and the other members of Kennedy’s economic team had believed that getting the budget down to $101.5 or $102 billion—reasonably close to the $100 billion figure
Harry Byrd kept mentioning—would satisfy
Byrd and his fellow Finance Committee conservatives. The previous year’s budget had been $98.8 billion. Mandatory “built-in” increases would add $1.8 billion more, new expenses required under legislation already passed and signed an additional $1.6 billion. Even if no department or agency was given a raise, the total therefore currently stood at $102.2 billion. Dillon felt that figure might possibly be reduced to the $101.5 billion figure but no further. But Johnson told Dillon that he had been checking with senators on Finance (
“The
President indicating pretty clear knowledge of every vote,” Ackley noticed) and the team’s belief was wrong: the $100 billion wasn’t an estimate, a rough figure, but a hard one, not an approximation of what Byrd wanted but a limit, “a psychological barrier that should not be breached,” in the words of one senatorial observer, a “magic number” with a deep symbolic significance to the chairman; no peacetime budget had ever reached that figure, and he was determined that this budget wouldn’t reach it either; unless the budget was reduced below that figure, the tax bill, with its savings to taxpayers of $11 billion and the resultant three-to-one stimulus for the economy that would produce badly needed new jobs and programs, wasn’t going to be released by the committee and sent to the full Senate for a vote. There was no choice, Johnson told Dillon:
“We
won’t have the votes to get it to the floor unless we tell them the budget will be about one hundred billion.”

“It
was as simple as that,” Johnson said, according to Ackley’s notes. “If you want to get an $11 billion tax bill, you’re going to have to give up $1, 1½ billion of expenditures. Which would you rather have?”

The troika began to tug against the reins. To get the budget down to $101.5 or $102 billion, Kermit Gordon said, they had already had to cut from it so many items that shouldn’t have been cut, including every single new dam and irrigation project, and to drastically reduce expenditures for reclamation and rural electrification. Johnson interrupted Gordon.
“He
knew about what $101.5 meant,” he said. “He’d been hearing about it from Freeman, Wirtz and company—all of Heller’s liberal friends.” In a manner that Ackley described as “half-jokingly, but pointedly,” he told Heller,
“Tell
them to lay off, Walter. Tell them to quit lobbying. I’m for them.” He was a liberal, he said. “I want an expanding economy.” The budget should actually be far higher than the figures they were talking about, and he knew it. “They don’t need to waste my time and theirs with their memorandums
and their phone calls.” But if they didn’t get the budget down below $100 billion, Byrd was not going to allow the tax bill to get to the floor. Heller tried to argue that the $101.5 billion budget already represented such substantial economies that the President could defend it persuasively.
“
I
can defend one hundred and one point five,” Lyndon Johnson said. “
You
take on Senator Byrd.” He had talked with the conservatives and knew what they wanted. “Unless you get that budget down around one hundred billion,
you
won’t pee one drop.”