The Passage of Power (94 page)

He used the arguments he had used with Warren—in very much the same words, because Russell, too, had served in the armed forces: “We’ve got to take this out of the arena when they’re testifying that Khrushchev and
Castro did this and did that, and that—kicking us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour. And … you’d put on your uniform in a minute”—and when at first they proved less effective than they had with the chief justice, he appealed to the motivation that always worked most effectively with Russell: his patriotism and sense of duty, telling him that he might not want to serve with Warren, but “you can do anything for your country. And don’t go to giving me that kind of stuff about you can’t serve with anybody. You can do anything.

“You never turned your country down,” Lyndon Johnson told Richard Russell. “This is not for
me,
this is your country.”

There was, furthermore, a new tone, a tone of command, as if to remind Russell that it was not just Lyndon Johnson talking now but the President. When Russell continued to protest, the Texas twang rode over the Georgia drawl. “You’re
my man
on that commission. And you are going to do it! And don’t tell me what you can do and what you can’t, because … I can’t arrest you. And I’m not going to put the FBI on you. But you’re goddamned sure going to serve, I’ll tell you that!” And when Russell continued to balk—“I think you’re sort of taking advantage of me, Mr. President”—the attack switched from the patriotic to the personal. “I’m gonna take a helluva lot of advantage of you, my friend, because you—you
made
me and I know it, and I don’t ever forget.… I’ll be taking advantage of you a good deal,” Johnson said. “I’m a Russell protégé, and I don’t forget my friends.” The childless Russell was paternally fond of his nephew Robert E. Lee Russell Jr., and Johnson had, over the years, invested time in making a friend of Bobby Russell, and he brought his name in. “You are going to do what’s right, and if you can’t do it, you get that damned little Bobby up there, and let him twist your tail and put a cocklebur under it.” There was a hint of the possibility of a federal appointment. “Where is he?” Johnson asked. “You just tell him to get ready, because I’m going to need him.”

The conversation continued, for the senator received a much harder sell
than the chief justice, and although there were signs that Russell was weakening, Johnson still didn’t have him. “I don’t know when I’ve been as unhappy about a thing as I am
this
”—“This is awful,” Russell said. “I
can’t
do it,” he said. “I haven’t got the
time.
” When Johnson said, “I don’t want to beg you, by God, to serve,” Russell replied, “I know, but this is a sort of rough one now.”

It had been essential to stop the other investigations, Johnson said to Russell, and his use of Russell’s name had done that. “Jim Eastland, he said this is the best thing that ever happened.” Before Russell’s name was invoked, “they had a full-scale investigation going, Dick, with the TV up there.” He had had no choice but to appoint him, Lyndon Johnson said, and his voice dropped to the earnest deferential tone of a protégé talking to “the Old Master.” How else could he have stopped the congressional circus that would have been so harmful to America, Lyndon Johnson asked Richard Russell. “How do I
stop
it? How do I
stop
it, Dick? Now don’t tell me that I’ve worked all day and done wrong!”

And that last twist did the trick. “I didn’t say you’d done wrong!” Richard Russell said. “If it is for the good of the country you know damned well I’ll do it. And I’ll do it for you, for that matter.” And when, despite this remark, an instant later Russell was still expressing reservations so that Johnson still could not be certain that his acceptance was final, Johnson resumed the tone, reminding Russell of a very intimate—and significant—moment in their relationship.

“Dick,” he said, “do you remember when you met me at the Carlton Hotel for breakfast in 1952? When we had breakfast there one morning, and I became Leader?”

“Yes, I think I do,” Russell said. No one can be certain of what was said at the breakfast, but it had occurred on November 9, 1952, a week after the elections in which the Senate Democratic Leader,
Ernest McFarland of Arizona, had lost his Senate seat.

Russell could have had the leadership for the asking, but as had always been the case, he didn’t want it, and during that week he had several conversations with Johnson, who did, and in one of them, reported Evans and Novak, who interviewed both men that month, Russell suggested that Johnson should take the job, and Johnson’s reply was that he would do so—on condition that Russell would change his desk in the Senate Chamber so that he would be sitting directly behind the Leader’s desk; he needed Russell close to him, Johnson said, because he would be constantly asking for his guidance. Now, in this November, 1963, call, he was saying that he still needed Russell, that that was why he had appointed him to the commission. “Do you think I’m kidding you?” Lyndon Johnson asked.

Over the telephone line from Winder—heard clearly in the recording of this conversation—came a chuckle from the old senator, amused, fond. “No, I don’t think you’re kidding me,” Richard Russell said.

And the bottom line was the ineluctable fact: the announcement of Russell’s appointment to the commission had already been made, was already public knowledge—and therefore Russell’s refusal to accept it would be not merely a
quiet refusal but a public rejection of an assignment that the President considered important to the country, a slap in the President’s face from a man who revered the institution of the presidency, and a public slap as well in the face of a man with whom he had worked for many years, and who was, indeed, his protégé, a slap in the face of a man with whose wife and family he had spent so much time. “If you hadn’t announced it, I would absolutely” have refused it, Russell said, quite firmly. “Yes, I would.” But Johnson’s announcement had left him no choice, and he knew it. “I’m not going to say any more, Mr. President, because I’m at your command, and I’ll do anything you want,” he said. “I hope to God you’ll be just a
little
bit more … deliberate and considerate next time. But this time, of course, if you’ve done this, I’m going to do it and go through with it, and say I think it’s a wonderful idea.”

“Well, you are damned sure going to be at my command—you are going to be at my command as long as I’m here,” Johnson said, and, “worked up,” “revved up” by this time, he didn’t stop escalating his appeals even after Russell’s surrender. “I don’t give a damn if you have to serve with a
Republican,
if you have to serve with a
Communist,
if you have to serve with a
Negro,
if you have to serve with a
thug,
you’re going to serve,” he said, and then switched abruptly to the personal again. “No one has ever been more to me than you have, Dick—except my mother,” he said. “I bothered you more and made you spend more hours with me telling me what was right and wrong than anybody except my mother.” Was “mother” insufficient? A man had, after all, two parents. “I haven’t got any daddy, and you’re going to be it,” he said. Richard Russell laughed—although the man who hated the “Warren Court” was now a member of the Warren Commission.

T
HE FORMATION
of the commission was greeted with an overwhelming chorus of praise—for both its mandate and its membership. The huge headlines in the Republican
Herald Tribune
might have been written by Johnson himself:
WARREN HEADS PRESIDENT’S PANEL,
they said.
ITS PURPOSE—TO REVEAL EVERY FACT.

The commission’s membership “represents a broad power structure, cutting across party and executive lines,” the
Herald Tribune
said. “It includes leading figures ranging from Mr. McCloy” to Ford, “a leading congressional Republican.… In Mr. Dulles, the President has selected one of the most famous intelligence experts in U.S. espionage history.” And the inclusion of the two men Johnson considered key had the effect he wanted; almost immediately the body became known as the Warren Commission, and with the announcement that Russell was on the investigating panel, talk of other congressional investigations quickly died away. Although it had taken a few days for Johnson to understand that the Texas course on which he had originally been insisting was misdirected, when he did, he demonstrated on the new course the same sureness of touch he had been exhibiting in other areas. He had come to the presidency with an understanding of the need to build confidence, and of the need, as a crucial element in
accomplishing that end, to end “skepticism and doubt” about the assassination, particularly because of the possibility—in that
Cold War era—of doubts escalating into disaster. Far-fetched? No more so than a Balkan bullet leading to a world conflagration. And, with the appointment of the Warren Commission, he may have felt—and, for a time, the country felt—he had accomplished that end. The widespread praise for its creation was echoed, ten months later, by the reaction when it issued its report, which found that a single gunman, Oswald, was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that no conspiracy was involved, either by the
Soviet Union or
Cuba or anyone else. Before the Warren Commission’s report, only 29 percent of the American public had believed Oswald had acted alone; a poll taken shortly after the report’s release showed that that percentage had risen to 87. That confidence would not last for long, in part because of the discovery of gaps in the commission’s work, in part because of a flood of books—a flood that has continued to this day—that claimed to have discovered evidence of conspiracies, involving, among others, the
CIA, the
Mafia, and Lyndon Johnson himself. A House of Representatives Select Committee that was established in 1976 to restudy the assassination did little to resolve the controversies; its report, released in 1979, concluded that John Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, but while it ruled out the Soviet Union or Cuba as the origin of this conspiracy, it said it was unable to identify who had been involved in it. By 1983, 75 percent of Americans disbelieved the lone gunman theory, and felt a conspiracy was involved, and the percentage has held relatively steady in polls taken since. In no poll was there consensus about the conspiracy’s origin or members; in a 2003 Gallup Poll 18 percent of Americans felt Lyndon Johnson was indeed involved. Since that time, more books, as well as television programs, have put that theory forward. However, as I’ve said earlier, nothing that I have found in my research leads me to believe that whatever the full story of the assassination may be, Lyndon Johnson had anything to do with it. At the time, the crucial weeks and months following the assassination, the formation of the commission accomplished its purpose. The fact that the crime was being investigated by a commission of men with reputations for integrity, that its chairman was a public figure with a uniquely high reputation for integrity, and that its report initially was greeted with respect, helped calm America’s unease over the assassination of its President. The Warren Commission
“brought
us through a very critical time in our history,” Lyndon Johnson would write in his memoirs. “I believe it is fair to say that the Commission was dispassionate and just.” The second sentence in that statement would not, if evaluated at the time this book is published, enjoy universal acceptance. But the first sentence should. And the country had been brought through that “critical time”—that crisis in the national history, those initial days and weeks after the assassination in which anxiety about conspiracies could have escalated—because of Lyndon Johnson’s decision to create the Warren Commission. It was a difficult decision for him to make. It went against his nature—against his
desire, his need, for control, and for the secrecy which is a form of control—control and secrecy that he would have had had he insisted that the investigation into the assassination be made by a Texas court of inquiry that was under his thumb and by an FBI headed by a longtime ally. But he made that decision, sacrificed control and secrecy, and, moreover, turned over the investigation to a man he hardly knew and whose independence was already a legend, when, that Friday afternoon, he asked
Earl Warren to come to the Oval Office. It was not his speech to Congress alone that had demonstrated, in these early days, that Lyndon Johnson was “not a fluke of history, but a President.”

T
HEN HE HAD
to turn back to Capitol Hill—to Congress.

Much of Lyndon Johnson’s accomplishment thus far in his presidency—creating an impression of continuity by holding the Kennedy men and of competence by his first speech—had been, while important, symbolic in nature. Dealing with Congress wouldn’t be symbol but substance, indispensable substance, the very essence of governing in a democracy, for in dealing with Congress a President was dealing with a democracy’s very heart: the creation
of the laws by which it was governed.

The creation of the laws most needed if America were to fulfill the ideals on which it had been founded had proven to be very difficult for Presidents—for a very long time.

The stalemate between the White House and Capitol Hill had begun not a few years but a quarter of a century before, under not JFK but FDR, because it was Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1937, exuberant over his landslide re-election and with unprecedented Democratic majorities in Congress (seventy-six of the ninety-six senators, a fifty-six-seat plurality in the House), had attempted to pack the Supreme Court, and, in a titanic struggle with the Senate, had been
defeated.

The defeat had repercussions beyond the Court. For almost a century before Roosevelt, the Senate, with its unbreakable filibuster and its six-year terms—staggered, moreover, so that public opinion could never touch more than one-third of the body at any one election—had stood like a mighty dam, towering and impregnable, against social-reform legislation, no matter how strong the tide of public opinion the legislation might have behind it. During the first
term of his presidency, not just during its first hundred days but during the almost four years thereafter, Roosevelt had broken through the dam, stripping Congress of its power. The Court-packing proposal had brought together in opposition Republicans and conservative Democratic senators, particularly from southern and border states—and Roosevelt had thereby inadvertently handed the Senate back its power. For four years, uneasy though those senators had been over the New
Deal’s agenda of social reform, they had been awed by Roosevelt’s seemingly unchallengeable popularity into going along with it. Their victory over the President on Court-packing reminded Republicans and conservative Democrats of their strength if they stayed together, and made them realize also the similarity in their philosophies, uniting them against the New Deal, as an historian has written,
“in
a way they
would have been completely incapable of achieving on their own.”