The Death of a President Page 2

  In larger part, however, his dilemma that week before what would be the third Thanksgiving of the Kennedy administration was an ironic consequence of the party’s national victory over Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge. Kennedy, who had been the junior Senator from Massachusetts, had stepped up to the Presidency. Johnson, formerly the mighty Majority Leader of the Senate, had become Vice President—which was also a step, but not up. The office he had inherited was but poorly understood. In the 174 years since the first inaugural the American people had displayed a monumental lack of interest in the Chief Executive’s backup; perhaps one in a million, for example, knew that between 1845 and 1849 the Vice President of the United States had been named Dallas. Everyone agreed that the second greatest gift the electorate could bestow was an empty honor, yet only those who had held it knew how hollow it really was. “A pitcher of warm spit,” John Nance Garner had called it, and an earlier wit had written, “Being Vice President isn’t exactly a crime, but it’s kind of a disgrace, like writing anonymous letters.”

  Anonymity was uncomfortably close to the truth. Johnson had found that he was a stand-by without a script. Politically he was nearly a cipher because he lacked a power base. Some Congressmen had more influence. Men with sole claim to constituencies have a few plums to distribute, but the only fruits a Vice President can grant are those the President grants him. The right to reward loyalty with jobs is an officeholder’s lifeblood. Johnson, formerly red-blooded, was now anemic. To pry loose a federal judgeship for one of his most faithful Texas supporters, Sarah T. Hughes, he had been obliged to wage a major battle against objections inside and outside the government—Sarah, having passed the age for judicial appointments, had been listed as unqualified by the American Bar Association. The Vice President had filed a claim for half of Ralph Yarborough’s Senatorial patronage, advancing the argument that his former constituents in Texas continued to regard Lyndon Johnson as their senior Senator. Kennedy had been understanding. Johnson had been told that he could pick up half the state’s patronage, naming Texas’ judges, customs offices, and border guards—subject to Yarborough’s veto. But Connally, his former protégé, was unimpressed. And Yarborough, of course, was furious.

  Thus the Vice President’s problems were not of his making. They were institutional; as any of his thirty-six predecessors in the office could have told him, they came with the territory. Unrealistically, Kennedy looked to him to take a strong hand on the Hill. This meant more than liaison. Larry O’Brien, the President’s Special Assistant in charge of legislative liaison, provided enough of it for the entire Afro-Asian bloc. What the Chief Executive really wanted was a Vice President who could act as though he were still a majority leader, and that was impossible; it couldn’t work. In the early Kennedy days Washington’s press corps had briefly assumed that the performance might be a success. It was a failure, though not of will, as the President came to conclude.

  Correspondents also swallowed the fable of an upgraded Vice Presidency, a carry-over from the previous administration, in which it had been equally bogus. The distance between the President’s lovely oval office in the West Wing of the White House and the Vice President’s across the street in Room 274 of the Executive Office Building could be covered in a few minutes’ brisk walk. Yet in a sense it was an unbridgeable chasm. Newspapermen were aware of every move the First Family made. The second family was largely disregarded. In the Dallas suburb of Irving a young Russian immigrant named Marina Oswald had never even heard the name of Lyndon Johnson, and in Washington his celebrity value was so small that his home telephone—he was entitled to only one White House extension—was listed in the public directory. Mrs. Johnson had never seen the inside of the famous Presidential plane, the Boeing 707 with the tail number 26000, the Secret Service code name “Angel,” and the popular designation of “Air Force One.” On Johnson’s own official flights newspapermen christened his plane “Air Force Two,” and the Secret Service encoded it as “Angel Two.” But there really was no such aircraft. Indeed, the Vice President lacked jurisdiction over any government plane. Aircraft 26000 was merely the flagship of a fleet, all of which belonged to the Chief Executive. Three additional 707’s bearing the tail numbers 86970, 86971, and 86972 were at his disposal for flights he deemed important. Should Johnson need one of them for official purposes, it would be assigned to him by the President’s Air Force Aide, Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, and sometimes the request was denied.

  Lyndon Johnson was, in short, a prisoner of his office, and John Kennedy, never having occupied that barren cell, had no concept of its barrenness. Yet while unfamiliar with the details, he knew that the Vice Presidency was, as he privately described it, “a miserable job,” and he went out of his way to honor Johnson and invent missions for him. He even revised White House protocol in his behalf. Convention, for example, required that when the two men attended ceremonial occasions together the President should slowly descend the executive mansion’s Grand Staircase alone while his Vice President sneaked down in an elevator. Kennedy ordered that Johnson accompany him, be photographed with him, greet guests with him. The Vice President, in other words, was to act as though he lived in the house. But the blunt truth was that he didn’t live there. Nothing could alter the fact that his real address was 4040 Fifty-second Street, NW. The chasm remained intractable.

  Johnson certainly wasn’t bitter. As he put it in a Texas idiom, he was resigned to “hunkering down,” playing second fiddle. He admired the President. Determined to give satisfaction, he never made a move or scheduled a speech without first checking with a Kennedy aide, and at meetings of the National Security Council he refrained from expressing himself on questions of policy unless the Chief Executive specifically requested him to do so. His real difficulty was that there was so little for him to do. Apart from presiding over the Senate his official tasks were busy work, and three years of relative inactivity seemed to have sapped his vitality. Prior to the Texas trip his chief duty was to prepare for it. Clearly he did not enjoy the desperate need for this fence-mending tour on his own home ground. He had nothing to gain from it and, should it fail, much to lose. If the President was a reluctant Texas tourist, his Vice President wasn’t far behind him.

  Early in the month Johnson spoke in Welch, West Virginia, and dedicated a California aircraft factory. Then he flew down to the ranch and spent most of his time selling tickets to political dinners over the telephone. On Tuesday, November 19, he took a Braniff flight to Dallas and spoke to the American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages, praising the efficacy of soft drinks and denouncing “people who bellyache about everything America does.” It is a measure of Vice Presidential status that the motorcade route which Kennedy and Johnson were to follow in that same city on Friday had received final approval the previous afternoon at a meeting in a private Dallas club. The participants—Secret Service agents and local businessmen—saw no need to consult the Vice President, and copies of the Dallas Times Herald describing the route appeared on the streets while he was addressing the bottlers.

  Two hours after he had landed at Love Field he was winging home on another Braniff flight. There, at least, was a challenge. The President would be spending Friday night and Saturday morning at the ranch. Johnson was still a thoughtful host, and lately his friends had become anxious over persistent reports that he might be dumped from the ticket next year. Lady Bird, who had come down a week early to supervise preparations, marshaled the staff. Bess Abell, her personal secretary, was dispatched to Austin, over sixty miles away, for fresh lettuce. Liz Carpenter, executive assistant to the Vice President, joined the servants in scrubbing windows. A list of Presidential tastes was drawn up. Poland water and Ballantine’s Scotch were acquired for the Chief Executive, champagne and Salem cigarettes—Jacqueline Kennedy switched back and forth between Newports and Salems—for the First Lady. There was considerable fuss about where the White House phones should go. They had to be available, but inconspicuous; this part of the trip was supp
osed to be a rest. Terry-cloth hand towels were laid out in Mrs. Kennedy’s room (she disliked smooth linen ones); note was made of the fact that the President wished a thermos in his room with tepid water (not iced). Lady Bird personally prepared a double bed for the President’s plywood board and horsehair mattress. Outside, a Tennessee walking horse was groomed, should the President or the First Lady decide to ride. After several conferences entertainers were hired for a forty-five-minute whip-cracking and sheep-herding show, to give the Kennedys some idea of what the West was really like.

  Johnson made the final inspection. The performers rehearsed to his satisfaction. The phones were properly placed by Signal Corps technicians from the White House Communications Agency. Furniture was rearranged (the President’s special bed made this necessary), cooks were engaged to bake a hundred pies, and there were flowers and fruit in every room. The Vice President had done everything a Vice President can do—unless, of course, the President dies. All that remained was to greet the Presidential party at San Antonio International Airport. Aircraft 26000 would reach the terminal there at 1:30 P.M., November 21, 1963. Since Johnson would be accompanying the President on the tour, government transportation had been authorized for him; the Presidential party’s backup plane, Aircraft 86970, would arrive at the same time and then serve as “Air Force Two” during the trip. Weather predictions were good; therefore the Johnsons arranged to fly the seventy miles to San Antonio in their private Queenaire Beechcraft. Johnson wanted to be sure they were early. He felt that it would be inexcusable for him to be elsewhere when the President of the United States came down the ramp, and he instructed his pilot to have them at the terminal well before 12:30. There would be time on his hands, but he had grown accustomed to that. The future promised a quick return to light duty: a synagogue dedication in Austin Sunday, a B’nai B’rith speech in New York Monday. The notes for both were ready, so he made other plans. At the San Antonio terminal Thursday he would have lunch with Lady Bird and spend the rest of the hour getting a leisurely haircut.

  “Oh, God,” read a tiny plaque on the President’s desk, “thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.” And now he would be obliged to spend three precious days on a tricky detour among the rocks and shoals of Texas politics. For Kennedy the excursion brought but one consolation: his wife was going to accompany him. Her decision had come as a surprise, for she had never been much of a company wife. “I really do not think of myself as First Lady,” she had said, “but of Jack as President.” Winning votes was his job, the home and children hers. His closest advisers had usually agreed, although their motives had been quite different. As Irish Yankees they tended to see the entire country as a macrocosm of the wards they had heeled. Jacqueline Kennedy spoke with a finishing-school accent and wore an aura of what they called the haut monde. That sort of background produced hardly any mileage in South Boston. It was John Connally who had pointed out that Kennedy’s ascension to the Presidency had changed everything. Elegance might be a liability for the wife of a minor politician, but it was an enormous asset to a First Lady. Voters, and especially women voters, admired beauty and style in the executive mansion. One of a President’s duties is to preside. It was exciting to know that a queenly figure stood by his side, and it would be even more exciting—and headier political medicine—if Texans could see her there.

  As late as October 4, 1963, when Connally had made his request, the possibility seemed remote. Undeniably Mrs. Kennedy had enjoyed her role in the White House. It had, in fact, come as an agreeable surprise to her. She had heard so much about the responsibilities of the Presidency that she had expected it would keep her husband from her. As it had turned out, she and the children had seen more of him than ever before. Previously he had been absent from them for weeks on end, arriving home groggy with fatigue. In the mansion he led a relatively normal family life, and later she would remember strolling rapturously through the south grounds that first spring, thinking, Let me stay as happy as this forever with Jack. But the summer of 1963 had dealt them a staggering blow. In August they had lost an infant son forty hours after birth, and only those who were close to the First Family knew how profoundly that loss had affected them.

  Patrick Bouvier Kennedy had died in the oxygen chamber of a Boston hospital. When the doctors announced that it was all over, Pierre Salinger had seen the stricken father weeping in an adjacent boiler room. Kennedy wept again when he told his wife and once more after the Mass of the Angels in Richard Cardinal Cushing’s residence on Commonwealth Avenue. Only the President and the prelate remained in the chapel; the others had left for the Brookline graveside. In his grief the father had put his arm around the little coffin. He could do it—it was that small—but he couldn’t carry it, and the old Cardinal had rasped, “Jack, you better go along. Death isn’t the end of all, but the beginning.” At the Brookline grave Kennedy had lingered again until nearly everyone had gone; Dave Powers had watched him lean over and touch the ground and say softly to himself, “It’s awful lonely here.” Then he returned to his wife, to comfort her after what had been the penultimate misfortune which can come to a woman. All fall her convalescence had been the chief concern of his private life. And afterward, after the total eclipse in Dallas, she would remember how she had told him, “There’s just one thing I couldn’t stand—if I ever lost you…” Her voice had drifted off, leaving the unthinkable unspoken, and he had murmured reassuringly, “I know, I know.”

  She had wanted to stay with him and the children. Normality, routine—it seemed the best way to cure her depression. He had a different plan: she should forget herself in other lands. Politically, she suggested, this was unwise. With the election a year away, a cruise on a Greek millionaire’s yacht was no prescription for votes, but his mind was made up. So she went, and the separation became a strange hiatus between tragedy and tragedy. It was a greater separation than either had expected. Despite modern communications, despite the highest priority in the world, they were almost as far apart as a Victorian couple. The telephone, she had thought, would bridge the distance. But the difference in time zones proved insuperable. She would wait three hours and then learn from the little local switchboard that they had “lost the connection.” Eventually she decided that calls might be indiscreet anyhow, since every word would be overheard, so she wrote him ten-page letters, punctuated with dashes like everything she wrote. She told him how much she missed him, of her sorrow that he could not, at the moment, share with her the tension-free atmosphere of the Mediterranean.

  To her astonishment, he had been right about the trip. The thing actually worked. Everywhere she was feted—her sister Lee, who accompanied her, wrote Kennedy in a feigned sulk, complaining that Jackie had been laden with presents, while Lee herself got only “3 dinky little bracelets that Caroline wouldn’t wear to her own birthday party.” For the First Lady those weeks were a diversion, which was precisely what the President had intended. Greece and Morocco had been so unreal, such a complete cutoff, that she returned on October 17 in far better spirits than she had thought possible. In the past she had been against magazine publicity for the children. Now there appeared a Look spread of pictures of young John. After two golden weekends at Atoka, their country home in Middleburg, Virginia, she resolved to look to the year ahead. At the time of Patrick’s death it had been announced that she would rest until January 1. Now Dr. John Walsh, her obstetrician, felt her recovery was already complete, so she decided to reappear sooner. Moreover, her activity wouldn’t be restricted to affairs which interested her; although she found football boring, for example, she was thinking of attending the Army-Navy game with the President after Thanksgiving. “We’ll just campaign,” she told him. “I’ll campaign with you anywhere you want.” And when he asked her whether that included the expedition with Lyndon, she flipped open her red leather appointment book and scrawled “Texas” across November 21, November 22, and November 23.

  The next day he informed Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien, his
two chief political advisers. Congressman Albert Thomas of Houston, who was present, recalled later that the three of them “fell over backward.” She had never been to Texas or the Southwest; hadn’t, indeed, been west of Middleburg since the election. When Salinger told the press on November 7 it was news everywhere. Lady Bird wrote her from the ranch, “The President’s on page five, Lyndon’s on the back page, but you’re on the front page,” and Charlie Bartlett, a newspaperman and family friend, phoned Kennedy that a St. Louis news dealer had informed him, “That girl’s got brains.” The President commented dryly, “As opposed to the rest of us, I suppose.” But to her he said, “It really shows, doesn’t it? When you aren’t around all the time, you’re so much more valuable when you do come.” Clearly he was delighted.

  It was equally clear—and struck her as odd—that he was nervous. He was afraid that later she would regret having gone. He wanted her to enjoy this trip so she would make others. And because of that fierce competitive spirit which was rooted in his childhood he was determined that his wife should look her best in Texas. Kennedy determination could be an awesome force, and in this case it carried him into an exotic land usually closed to husbands. For the first time in their marriage he asked his wife what she intended to wear. Dallas especially interested him. “There are going to be all these rich Republican women at that lunch, wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets,” he said, “and you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple—show these Texans what good taste really is.” So she tramped in and out of his room, holding dresses in front of her. The outfits finally chosen—weather permitting—were all veterans of her wardrobe: beige and white dresses, blue and yellow suits, and, for Dallas, a pink suit with a navy blue collar and a matching pink pillbox hat.