The Passage of Power (76 page)

“Duplex
, Duplex, this is Watchman. Over,” Clifton said, his voice crackling over static on the radio.

“Go ahead, Watchman. This is Duplex. Over,” Behn replied.

“President Johnson wants to meet the White House staff, the leadership of Congress, and as many of the Cabinet members as possible at the White House as soon as we get there,” Clifton said. “The
key
members of the White House staff. That is, Sorensen,
Bundy, et cetera.”

Those instructions proved difficult to carry out.
“I
needed that White House staff,” Johnson was to recall. “Without them I would have lost my link to John Kennedy, and without that I would have had no chance of gaining the support of
the media or the Eastern intellectuals. And without that support I would have had absolutely no chance of governing the country.” The overtures he had made to the two key members of that staff who were aboard Air Force One, Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien, had already been rebuffed, however, and when he tried O’Donnell again, sending Moyers to ask him to come forward to the stateroom, and, when he came, asking him to stay on as appointments secretary, O’Donnell remained, he was to say,
“non-committal
.” Some time later, Johnson sent Moyers back again, this time to ask O’Donnell to come forward and discuss the mechanics of calling a meeting of the
National Security Council; O’Donnell refused to come, telling Moyers,
“Bill,
I don’t have the stomach for it.” For the rest of the flight, Johnson didn’t press him—or O’Brien—again, and before the flight was over, the staff meeting had been canceled. And much of the Cabinet, of course, was still over the Pacific on its return flight. The Cabinet meeting, too, was postponed until the next day. Only the congressional leadership would assemble that night.

But if “leadership” as he wrote it on the pad referred only to a meeting of congressional kingpins, the word also had broader connotations, and he showed not only that he knew what to do—but that he had the will to do it. Other arrangements (for Air Force One’s arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, presidential logistics for the rest of the evening) had to be made, and these arrangements—the impression they added up to: the country’s first impression of Lyndon Johnson as President—could not be postponed, for that impression was symbolically important, crucial in fact, to what Johnson wanted to accomplish. The arrival itself, a plane carrying a President and his just-murdered predecessor, would be unprecedented in its drama. And during the plane’s flight back to Washington, shock and uncertainties had been heightened by the news of the policeman’s murder and Oswald’s arrest and by the rumors about his Communist connections.
“None
of us had any idea whether this was a conspiracy, whether Johnson was the next victim,” O’Brien was to say. Reassurance was more necessary than ever. It was important that Lyndon Johnson show himself to an anxious, worried nation as a man in whom it could have confidence, as a man firmly in charge, in full command of presidential duties—that he demonstrate that under his command the nation’s government was continuing to function normally despite the terrible event that had occurred and the suspicions about the motives behind it.
Martin Van Buren had said in 1867, “The Presidency under our system like the king in a monarchy never dies.” The first moments at Andrews Air Force Base would be the moments to demonstrate that that statement was true in the twentieth century as well.

And it was not just America that had to be shown, Johnson felt. Sitting at the President’s desk in the stateroom, he said,
“It’s
the Kremlin that worries me. It can’t be allowed to detect a waver.… Khrushchev is asking himself right now what kind of a man I am. He’s got to know he’s dealing with a man of determination.”

The line between showing that he had assumed and was exercising the President’s duties and making the family and followers of the late President feel he was in too much of a hurry to assume those duties was a delicate one. Many decisions to be made about the arrival in Washington and his logistics were complicated by that fact. They were nonetheless decisions that had to be made—and they were made.

In the stateroom, General Clifton and Kilduff were called over to receive instructions to be relayed over the plane’s radio to the White House, and they hurried forward to the cockpit. Orders began to crackle out over the plane’s radio, orders in which a key word was “normal.” Before Johnson had boarded the plane in Dallas, Secret Service headquarters in Washington had instructed Swindal that, on landing at Andrews, he was to taxi to an isolated area of the base and park there, away from public and press, so that the plane could be more easily guarded. Now, from Air Force One, those orders were countermanded. The plane would park in its customary parking space directly in front of the terminal, where President Kennedy had always descended on his return from trips. “Next item, Duplex. Next item,” Clifton told
Behn. “The press, according to Lyndon Johnson, the press is to have its normal little corral at Andrews … a normal press arrangement.” Kilduff (“Warrior”) had been dispatched to the cockpit to call deputy press secretary
Andrew Hatcher at the White House.
“Winner
, Winner, this is Warrior. Will you please advise press that normal press coverage, including live TV, will be allowed at the base.” Continuity was important. As he had wanted his predecessor’s widow next to him at his swearing-in, so he wanted her next to him when he first appeared before the television cameras.
“According
to plan, once we landed the President would go immediately to the rear of the plane and depart the aircraft alongside Mrs. Kennedy and the coffin of President Kennedy,” Jack Valenti was to write. The Secret Service agents in Kennedy’s detail and O’Donnell, O’Brien and the other Kennedy men were to carry the coffin down the stairs from the rear door; most of the agents, Mrs. Lincoln, Mrs. Gallagher and other Kennedy aides were sitting in the front compartment, and Jackie sent General McHugh to tell them,
“I
want his friends to carry him down.” Johnson didn’t want to appear “all alone.” When he came down the stairs, he said,
“I
want my staff behind me and then the Texas members of Congress.”

“
Staff,
” he had written on the notepad. Continuity wasn’t the only reason he needed the Kennedy men to stay on. Almost no one on his staff had ever exercised any substantial governmental responsibility or authority, and no one on the plane at all:
Cliff Carter’s job had been setting up a political organization in Texas;
Liz Carpenter, also on board, was there to assist Lady Bird, and
Marie Fehmer, of course, was only a secretary. Almost no members of the staff from his senatorial days back in Washington, except for Jenkins and Reedy, were still with him.

Moyers was on the plane, however, and Johnson knew his abilities. And so was Valenti, the Houston advertising man, who had, he was to say, no idea why
he was aboard except that the President had wanted him to come to Washington with him; Johnson had only intermittent dealings with Valenti, but he had evidently seen something. There would have to be a statement from him when they landed at Andrews. Motioning over Moyers, Valenti and Liz Carpenter, he said,
“I
want you to put something down for me to say when we land. Nothing long. Make it brief. We’ll have plenty of time later to say more.”

Together the three Texans composed a draft, and Fehmer typed it and gave it to him. It was short, but Johnson could always improve a statement—and this one didn’t have to be cleared with anybody. He made it more personal, changing their line “The nation suffers a loss that cannot be weighed” to “We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed,” and more dramatic, reversing two phrases in the last sentence. The draft said, “I ask God’s help and yours”; he changed it to “I ask for your help—and God’s.”

The question of where the congressional leadership meeting would be held was important.
McGeorge Bundy seemed to feel that Johnson could hold it in—and indeed could immediately begin to work out of—a number of places in the West Wing. Over the radio he told Clifton,
“Tell
the Vice President the Cabinet Room is under rearrangement. But the Oval Room will be ready … both the Fish Room and the President’s study, and we will try to have the Cabinet Room. But that’s a detail. We can work that out.” Clifton had had very specific instructions from Johnson, however. No, he said, that was not merely a detail.
“He
[Johnson] does
not want
to go in the Mansion, or in the Oval Room, or the President’s study or the President’s office.” There was the question of where he was to live. Youngblood was sent to the cockpit.
“Dagger
to Duplex. Messages from Volunteer and Victoria.… Volunteer will reside at Valley for an indefinite time.” Of arrangements that had to be made there: The telephone lines there should be disconnected immediately, and secure lines installed.

There were telephone calls he had to make, to Jenkins telling him to arrange to have helicopters at Andrews for transportation to the White House, and who would ride in each of them; a brief call to McGeorge Bundy, who told him, he was to recall, “that he must get back to Washington where we were all shaky.” And calls that he had to make together with Lady Bird, to
Nellie Connally. “Nellie, do you hear me?” “Yes, Bird … the surgeon just got done operating on him. And John is going to be all right.”

And one that was harder to make. “Crown, [this is] Air Force One,” Swindal said. “Volunteer requesting a patch with Mrs.
Rose Kennedy.”

Mrs. Kennedy was patched in to the plane. Kennedy’s steward, Sergeant Joseph Ayres, holding the line in the stateroom, handed the phone to Johnson. Putting his hand over the phone, Johnson said, “What can I say to her?” He said, “I wish to God there was something that I could do, and I wanted to tell you that we were grieving with you. Here’s Lady Bird.”

There was a lot to do in two hours. But by the time Air Force One started its descent it had been done, and in a manner that, Liz Carpenter says, made her keep
recalling what Lady Bird had said about her husband in an emergency. In this emergency,
Charles Roberts was to say, Lyndon Johnson had been “masterful.” “After all,” the reporter was to say, since “he was the first President ever to” be on the scene at “the murder of his predecessor, he could have been forgiven if he hadn’t been too cool. But the fact is, he was cool.” Thornberry, who had known him for so many years, says he was
“as
calm and collected” as he had “ever seen him.” As Air Force One touched down, taxied toward the terminal, and came to a stop in its usual place, he stood up with Lady Bird, told his aides,
“Let’s
get everybody together,” and headed down the narrow aisle toward the rear until he was stopped, between the door to the President’s bedroom and the rear sitting area where the coffin was lying, by the jam of Secret Service men and Kennedy aides filling the aisle behind Jackie, waiting to carry the coffin off, and he stood there, just behind the Kennedy people, with his own entourage behind him.

A
ND THEN
B
OBBY
K
ENNEDY
came on board.

After his conversations with Johnson on the telephone, Bobby had walked, head down, hands in pockets, back and forth on Hickory Hill’s lawn, his huge Newfoundland, Brumus, trailing at his heels. Several aides had hurried out from the Justice Department, and he talked with them, telling
Ed Guthman,
“There’s
so much bitterness.… I thought they would get one of us, but Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it.… I thought it would be me.” He tried to comfort them—
“He
had the most wonderful life,” he said—as he did his children, who, brought back from school, came running across the lawn to him, and hugged him. But he wasn’t fooling his friends—or his wife; she handed him a pair of dark glasses to hide his red-rimmed eyes.

Arriving at Andrews about a half hour before Air Force One landed, and seeing the television cameras and floodlights being set up, he climbed into the back of an Army truck parked on the tarmac so he wouldn’t be seen, and sat there unnoticed even after the lights were turned on to illuminate the runway in a garish, almost eerie light. When the plane landed, and the floodlights were turned off so the pilot could see his way to his parking spot, he got out of the truck. The huge jet rolled like a shadow out of the darkness and came to a stop, and as a movable flight of stairs was rolled up beside its front door and the door was opened, he ran up the stairs and ducked inside the plane, just as the floodlights were turned on again, unseen by anyone on the ground, and rushed toward the rear of the plane, pushing past people in aisles.
“Where’s
Jackie?” he said. “I want to be with Jackie.” When he reached the Texas group behind Johnson, he pushed his way through them, too. He
“didn’t
look to the left or the right,” Liz Carpenter says—
“his
face looked streaked with tears and absolutely stricken,” she says—but simply pushed through the group, saying,
“Excuse
me. Excuse me.” He pushed past Lyndon Johnson, too, almost touching him, but saying nothing. Valenti felt he was so distraught that he didn’t even see Johnson; he
“couldn’t see anything or anybody.” Johnson was “impassive,” Valenti says. “No change in expression.” At the same time, the Secret Service agents and Kennedy aides who had been in the front of the plane were, in response to Jackie’s request, coming back to help carry off the coffin, and as Bobby pushed past Johnson they followed him. “Everyone,” as
William Manchester was to write, “seemed to have priority over the chief executive.” Johnson found himself, in Valenti’s word, “trapped” behind the agents and Kennedy aides, unable to move forward, jammed against the wall of the narrow plane corridor.

“Hi
, Jackie,” Bobby said when he reached her. “I’m here.” “Oh, Bobby,” she said. Was she thinking of how Bobby had driven through the night so that he could be with her when she had lost her child? She told Manchester that when she saw Bobby now, “She thought how like Bobby this was; he was always there when you needed him.”