The Passage of Power (92 page)

T
HE ORNAMENTATION OF THE ROOM
—an oval thirty-five feet, ten inches long and twenty-nine wide at its widest point, with a ceiling rising in a gentle arch from a cornice sixteen feet high—was restrained. The symbols of power in it—on the ceiling, in plaster, the presidential seal; above French doors classical pediments and representations of “fasces,” bundles of bound rods with an ax protruding, that in ancient Rome symbolized a magistrate’s authority—were muted, subtle, in low relief and painted to blend in with the ceiling and walls. The room was gracious and serene, the four doors leading out of it to other parts of the White House set flush into the walls, so that, closed, they didn’t interrupt the walls’ long, graceful curves, which were broken otherwise only by bookshelves set into them and topped by graceful seashell designs. Through the French doors one could glimpse a garden with a row of rosebushes along one side. Yet despite the restraint in its decoration, there was something about the room that made it seem special, somehow larger and more imposing than its dimensions, something dramatic, memorable—unforgettable, in fact.

Its shape had something to do with that. So rare in America were oval rooms that on entering this one you felt immediately that you were in a place that was out of the ordinary. And with the four doors set flush into its walls, those walls curve in an unbroken sweep, imposing, powerful; the shape of the room somehow imprints itself on the consciousness. From the time it was first built, newspapers and magazines started referring to it not simply as “the President’s office” but, more often, as “the oval White House office” or “the President’s oval office in the White House.” The silence inside it had something to do with it, too. With the glass in the windows and French doors layered three inches thick, thick enough in 1963 to stop an assassin’s bullet, few noises penetrated from outside; there is a particular intensity to the quietness in that oval room. And it is special because of the light that suffuses it. The artificial lighting set invisibly behind the cornice that rims the room is very bright, but artificial light is the least of it. At one end of the room, filling its southern curve, behind the President’s desk, are three great windows, each eleven and a half feet tall. In its eastern wall are the three tall French doors. On clear days, the room was bathed in light, sunshine pouring in through all this glass in a flood of light so brilliant that, together with the expanse of white walls—during the twenty-nine years since the office had been built, the walls had always been white—it seemed as luminous and dramatic as a stage set. Because the room is an oval, furthermore, there are no corners in it, no shadows, no darker areas. Day or night, there was nothing to dim the brightness of the Oval Office of the White House.

But the room seemed special mostly because of what had happened in it.

History had happened in it. Franklin Roosevelt had sat at that desk in front of the flags and windows bantering with reporters as he guided a nation through a great depression and a great war; hidden below the desk, his paralyzed legs. Harry Truman had stood behind the desk to announce Japan’s surrender, had
later placed on it the plaque that said “The Buck Stops Here.” Television had made the nation familiar with the setting—the President at the desk, flags flanking him—as a grim-faced Eisenhower announced in 1957 that he was sending troops into Little Rock or, smiling his wonderful smile, stood behind the desk, bantering with the press corps, or as Kennedy, sitting at the desk, told the nation about the missiles in Cuba, or leafed through papers while his little son peeked out of the desk’s cubbyhole. The room had an aura of great events. And since the desks of all of the four Presidents who had occupied it—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—had been placed at one end of the oval in front of the tall windows and the tall flags, over three decades the setting had become emblematic of the presidency. So familiar was it becoming by November, 1963, thanks to Kennedy and television, that journalistic references to the office were changing, and, as with all things involving Kennedy and television, they were changing fast. The room was, in fact, well along the road to becoming simply the capitalized, iconic “Oval Office,” perhaps the most famous room on earth.

T
HE AURA WASN’T
misleading. In that room, history was just a button away. The telephone consoles on the desk and coffee table resembled ordinary telephone consoles, albeit with an unusually large number of buttons: twenty-seven. While twenty-five of the buttons were the customary transparent, whitish buttons of the ordinary console, two, however, were not. One was amber in color, the other red. Both were linked directly to the “war room” in the Pentagon and to the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Both were linked also to an army switchboard, and through it to the Secretaries of Defense and State, to the directors of certain crucial government agencies, and to key members of the White House staff. And when a President pushed the red button, he would also be connected through the war room to
Strategic Air Command bomber bases, to other military commanders, and to the heads of government of America’s allies. When the red button was pushed, moreover, the President’s telephone line would be scrambled electronically so that he could be understood only by men with a similar line on their desks. And on a late November day, like the day Lyndon Johnson took possession of the Oval Office, when the leaves were off the trees beyond the three tall windows, visible through the windows and the bare branches beyond was a reminder of history’s ultimate prize, for beyond the windows and the branches was the great, shining white marble pillar, the
Washington Monument, towering over the capital as a symbol of a President who achieved immortality, as a reminder of what the man behind the desk can become, of what the stakes are for him now, of the prize he can win in history’s great game for which he has at last a seat at the table.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON HAD BEEN
in that room many times before, of course, many times with Roosevelt as a young congressman, two or three times with Truman, often with Eisenhower, and then with Kennedy, but always on the other side of
the desk. He wasn’t on the other side now. Sitting down behind it, he telephoned the Senate offices to order the desk he had used in his Majority Leader’s office delivered, and then directed his secretaries to start placing calls.

T
HAT FIRST DAY
, and the next, were devoted mostly to preparing his Wednesday speech to the joint session, but there was a major problem he hadn’t addressed, and on Thursday he turned his attention to the investigation into his predecessor’s murder.

T
HE PROBLEM OF
who was going to investigate the assassination, and the assassin’s murder, had to be addressed, he knew—
“The
atmosphere was poisonous and had to be cleared”—for he was aware of the directions in which the poison might spread.
“Russia
was not immune,” he was to write in his memoirs. “Neither was
Cuba. Neither was the State of
Texas. Neither was the new President of the United States.” The rumors about Russian or Cuban involvement in a conspiracy, rumors being kept fresh every day with new reports, mostly false, of Oswald’s connections to the two Communist countries, had
“very
dangerous implications,” he felt, since “if they got a headstart”—if suspicions mounted that Khrushchev or
Castro was responsible for Kennedy’s death, or if, in Russia, fears about America’s suspicions, and about the possibility that they might cause America to retaliate, created a feeling that perhaps Russia should move first—they contained the seeds of escalation, in an age in which escalation could mean annihilation.
Jack Ruby had added fuel to the fire, he was to write.
“With
that single shot the outrage of a nation turned to skepticism and doubt”—to heightened fears of conspiracy, international or not, that further unsettled a country to which he was trying to bring a feeling of calm and stability.

Intensifying the sense of urgency was the fact that Congress was already busily circling around the bright lights in which any assassination investigation would be bathed. The House Un-American Activities Committee, which saw a Communist under every bush, had already announced it would hold an investigation, as had the Senate Judiciary Committee, chairman
James Eastland, whose obsession with Communists might, in other circumstances, have been a joke: If the Mississippi River flooded, Johnson himself had said, Eastland would say “the niggers” had caused it, “helped out by Communists.” “Vying for the limelight,” as one account was to put it, other committees, in both the Senate and the House, were proposing their own investigations—investigations with their inevitable attendant television cameras, leaks, baseless speculation, half-truths and innuendo. More anxiety, more danger.

In his attempts before Thursday to deal with this problem, however, Johnson had shown none of the sure-footedness with which he had dealt with the other problems that had confronted him since November 22. To cut off the congressional
publicity hunt (“a lot of television show,” as he put it) in its infancy, he wanted the investigation carried out by some other entity, but his first suggestion, made, after consultation with
Abe Fortas, on the evening of November 25, the day of Kennedy’s funeral, was that the entity be either the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which of course was already investigating, or a special “Texas State Court of Inquiry,” staffed only by Texans, that would be convened by the state’s attorney general,
Waggoner Carr.

There were legal, jurisdictional, rationales for his suggestion. The murder of a President, or of the President’s murderer, was, under criminal justice law, no different from other murders; they were not federal but state crimes, and prosecutable only under state, not federal, law. And there were political rationales as well. Fortas was later to explain that he had advised Johnson against the formation of any special new national investigating body such as a presidential commission on the grounds that its formation would be counterproductive to the aim of tamping down suspicions of a broader conspiracy since “people would gather there was more to” the two murders “than appeared on the surface”; therefore, he said, “ordinary procedures”—like the Texas court of inquiry and the FBI investigation—should be followed. Fortas was also “leery” of having Johnson appoint the investigating body, since that might raise suspicions among those who believed the President himself might have had a role in the conspiracy. Personal, subjective considerations figured in the decision as well: the state with the legal authority to investigate the murders was Texas,
his
state, its name already blackened by November 22 and November 24. To turn over that authority to an outside body would, Johnson felt, be an admission of the state’s lack of competence to conduct the investigation. The reaction to Fortas’ suggestion was predictably unenthusiastic. Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach told Fortas it would be
a “ghastly
mistake”; explains one account,
“Texas
justice was so tainted that any purely state verdict on what happened would not be credible”; as for the FBI, liberals’ distrust of that agency “would undermine the credibility of any report it issued”; only a special national commission composed of men of national prominence and respect, and endowed with broad investigating latitude, would command the necessary credibility.

Johnson’s first responses to that reaction were ones that would have been expected from the pre–November 22 Lyndon Johnson: anger, a refusal to change his mind, and a secretive move designed to ensure that his solution would be the one adopted. He quietly gave Carr his approval of the state Court of Inquiry proposal—“Good idea, but purely a state matter. Can’t say President asked for it,” was the word
Cliff Carter passed to the Texas attorney general—and after Kennedy’s funeral on Monday, Carr announced its formation. So were his next responses. Learning that the
Washington Post
was planning to run an editorial on Tuesday calling for the creation of a national commission, he had Fortas telephone its two top editors to try to kill it, and he himself made three calls for the same purpose: to
J. Edgar Hoover, asking him to use his contacts on the
Post
to explain that an investigation by a commission might expose FBI sources and
methods; to the paper’s publisher,
Katharine Graham; and to
Post
columnist
Joseph Alsop. During his conversation with Alsop, the calm cracked—for the first time in any call during this period that has been recorded, Johnson’s voice rose as he railed against Bobby Kennedy’s lawyers: “they thought of the blue-ribbon commission first at Justice. And we just can’t have them lobbying against the President, when he makes these decisions.” He was yelling into the phone as he said, “They lobbied
me
last night! … I spent the day on it.… I spent most of my day on this thing yesterday,” and in describing the proposed commission he used the term that, to any Texan, was particularly pejorative. “We don’t send in a bunch of carpetbaggers,” he told Alsop. “It’s the worst thing you could do right now.… We don’t want to be in a position of saying we have come into a state … with some outsiders, and have told them that their integrity is no good, and that we’re going to have some carpetbagger trials.… We can’t haul off people from Dallas and try them in New York. It’s their constitutional right.” But while, after those calls, the
Post
did tone down its editorial—it no longer mentioned a presidential commission—it nonetheless still said that “No state or local inquiry will meet the situation, in view of the dreadful record of justice miscarried that already has been made,” and that the inquiry must be prosecuted by “the Federal Government.” And outside Texas, almost no one was buying the Texas Court of Inquiry proposal; the reaction of newspapers across the country to its formation was “generally scathing.”

Two days later, Johnson reversed his course. On Friday, November 29, he created, by
Executive Order No. 11130, a “Special President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” a seven-member bipartisan body (five of its members, in fact, were Republicans), “to satisfy itself that the truth is known as far as it can be discovered,” and to report its findings and conclusions to him, the American people and the world. His order gave the commission powers so broad that they superseded all other inquiries, including those by the FBI or any state agency.