Landslide (5 page)

The shot switches to a wider camera angle. At the greater distance,
he is hard to make out—there is a glare off his glasses, and the camera picks up only dark circles where his eyes should be.

“For me it is a deep personal tragedy …”

An anonymous figure walks into the shot just behind Johnson, as though unaware he is even there.

“I will do my best. It is all I can do. I ask for your help. And God’s.”

Finally, the roaring airplanes have their way and the camera cuts away from this lonely old man.

Then the narration picks up again:

“It was about 4:30 this morning when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was returned to the White House.”

Now words and image and music are once again aligned. In place of the unsettled tarmac scene, we have a splendid tableau—a hearse approaching the north entrance of the White House, led by an honor guard, the great house lit up with lanterns, the president coming home.

It is a short but compelling montage, and Americans will watch it again and again this day. Broadcasters have suspended regular programming and advertising. Every second of airtime across three networks belongs to the news divisions.

This is how it works in America this weekend—the normal rituals and routines have been thrown out. Outside the NBC studios, midtown Manhattan, America’s mass media capital, has been transformed by the events of the past twenty-four hours.
The department stores have taken down their Christmas decorations and replaced them with black mourning scenes. From St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the sound of an organ playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” slips out onto the street. Most theaters, movie houses, and restaurants in the city have closed their doors. The Stork Club, a hub of café society, stays open but is mostly empty. “
The people here … are like the people out on Christmas Eve,” the headwaiter explains. “They have no home.”

The balance between cause and effect seems off, reason itself suspended.
Kennedy had led the West and harnessed the most terrible arsenal of weapons ever known to man. Now he has been shot down by an anonymous madman who stored his rifle in a suburban garage. Kennedy had invited the nation to join him on a thrilling journey toward the future. Now he has become the past.

No one seems to be in charge. The president is dead. His successor is out of sight.
Only a single White House photographer, snapping pictures in a hurry, has captured his swearing in.
For a while, the phones in Washington don’t even work.

Americans need to look for authority somewhere new. They know where to find it. Most turned on the television the moment they heard what happened in Dallas and they haven’t turned it off since.
On average this weekend, American households will watch 8.5 hours of television each day. Everyone is looking to the people on their screen for answers. NBC’s David Brinkley calls the White House to see if staffers there have any news. “No,” comes the reply, “
we were watching you to see if you had any.”

For the networks, this new authority is a daunting challenge. There are still few hard facts from Dallas, a meager diet for so many hours of airtime. TV programmers experiment with other ways to fill the time—broadcasts of memorial concerts or prayer vigils—but viewers at home aren’t interested. They prefer news, even the same, sad facts, even if they’ve heard them before. The repetition is comforting. TV anchors that weekend, one viewer will later write to NBC’s Chet Huntley, are like “
old friends … telling us about the tragedy until we could absorb it.”

So that’s what the anchors do: tell the country what they know, over and over again. This morning, NBC will replay the same montage, with the same background music, the same pictures, and roughly the same script, at least once every half hour.

This Saturday morning, when everything is uncertain, this is one thing Americans have. They do not have their president, they do not have normal life, they do not have faith that everything will be okay. All they have for certain is a story:

But that isn’t the point of the story. The point of the story is the first thing the news host told them, the one thing everyone knows for sure: the president of the United States is dead.

A
T 8:40 THAT
Saturday morning, two iron gates opened outside an imposing gray mansion in the Spring Valley section of Washington. A black limousine slid down a driveway scattered with dead leaves. Under police escort, the car turned south and sped swiftly through the capital’s near-deserted streets. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the living president of the United States, was en route to the White House.

Most Americans did not witness this procession. The networks had sent crews to stand outside the Johnson family home, where Johnson had spent the night after returning from Dallas. Earlier in the hour, a host had promised
Today
’s viewers that the program would show the new president leaving his home for the White House. But when the gates opened, NBC was in the midst of its montage, and the program’s producers chose to stick with their scripted story. By the time it was over, Johnson’s car had disappeared.

A day earlier, the man inside the limousine had been the vice president, touring his home state of Texas with Kennedy. He and his wife, Lady Bird, had planned to host the Kennedys at their ranch in the Hill Country, west of Austin, that Saturday morning.
To think of the things they’d been worried about just a day earlier—which champagne and cigarettes to procure for Mrs. Kennedy; how to accommodate the special plywood and horsehair mattress favored by the commander in chief.

How quickly it had all changed.
The Johnsons had been riding
several cars behind the Kennedys as the presidential motorcade made its way through Dallas. They were waving at the crowds when they heard a loud explosion. As the smell of gunpowder filled the air, Johnson looked up and saw a body hurtling toward him. It was Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service agent charged with protecting the vice president’s life. Youngblood ordered Johnson to get down and the vice president obeyed, pressing his face to the floor. Another shot echoed through Dealey Plaza. Johnson wouldn’t know it for another hour, but in that moment, John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s life ended. As he stared at the floor of the limousine and felt the weight of Youngblood digging into his back, Lyndon Johnson became the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

For a moment, all was silent, and then a ghostly voice came over the Secret Service radio: “
Let’s get out of here.” The limousines careened through the streets of Dallas until at last they reached Parkland Hospital. There, doctors worked over Kennedy’s body, still trying to save his life, but Jacqueline Kennedy, looking on, knew that these efforts were in vain. Her pink suit was covered in her husband’s blood and brain tissue, and she had held a piece of his skull in her hand. “
They’ve killed him,” she had repeated over and over again.

At the instruction of his security detail, Johnson took shelter in a warren of inner offices away from the operating table, where he and Lady Bird huddled and waited for news. Johnson stood six feet three inches, weighed more than two hundred pounds, and was, by long reputation, one of the most willful and powerful men Washington had ever seen. But under Parkland’s harsh lights, he was strangely passive, almost childlike, complying with Secret Service orders, refusing to make any decisions, asking repeatedly for direction from Kennedy’s staff. Finally came Kennedy’s stricken assistant, Kenneth O’Donnell, with the news: “
He’s gone.”

He was President Johnson now. All his adult life, Johnson had striven for the presidency—worked for it, obsessed over it, longed for it above all else. He had sought his party’s nomination twice—unofficially but aggressively in 1956, officially and even more aggressively
in 1960—but never managed to win it. The failure was the great disappointment of his life. Now, at last, it had happened—he had secured the office, but in a manner such as this.

The Secret Service was anxious to get him out of Texas, unsure what danger remained. Johnson needed little convincing.
He worried that Kennedy’s assassination might be the first step in a Communist plot that could also include his own murder and possibly even nuclear war. Hunkered down in the security of Air Force One, he waited at Love Field long enough to collect Kennedy’s widow and to see the dead president’s coffin loaded into the rear of the plane. And,
at his insistence, he recited the oath of office before the five-hour flight back to Washington. But no sooner had he spoken the words “so help me God” than he ordered the plane into the sky.

Greeted at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, he’d asked for any news of further crisis in the world. There was none, no wider threat.
Still, when, well after midnight, he finally climbed into his own bed, he asked several aides to stay with him. In the darkness, he made sure they understood: They were not to leave him alone.

Now, though, it was morning, and the fear was beginning to pass. He’d seen what they were broadcasting on television and sensed the crisis of authority.
Americans, he would later say, “were all spinning around and around, trying to come to grips with what had happened … like a bunch of cattle caught in the swamp.” He knew what was required: “There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp.… And that is for the man on the horse to take the lead, to assume command, to provide direction.”

He knew he could provide it. For things to feel certain again, America needed a different story. Not the story of John F. Kennedy’s life or the story of his death. It needed a new story with a new hero. And he was the one to give that story to the country. That was what he’d always wanted, to be the nation’s hero. He knew this was his best chance, and his last.

A
LL HIS LIFE
, Johnson had longed to be the central figure in a great drama. He came from a line of men who were expected to make their mark, and did. Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in 1908 in a remote farmhouse on the Pedernales River, not far from the town of Johnson City, named for his frontier forebears. Family lore had it that these forebears had settled that part of the Texas Hill Country through great feats of courage—fighting off hostile Indians, starving through droughts, stamping out prairie fires. Through the generations, their offspring gained a strong dose of self-assurance. “
Hell,” said a contemporary of Sam Ealy Johnson, Lyndon’s father, “the Johnsons could strut sitting down.”

From his earliest days, young Lyndon was encouraged to think of himself as the natural heir to these men. In 1965, his mother, Rebekah Baines Johnson, published
A Family Album
, a history of the Baines and Johnson families. Her description of her son’s birth went as follows: “
Now the light came in from the East, bringing a stillness so profound and so pervasive that it seemed as if the earth itself were listening. And then there came a sharp, compelling cry—the most awesome, happiest sound known to human ears—the cry of a newborn baby; the first child of Sam Ealy and Rebekah Baines Johnson was ‘discovering America.’ ”

A child raised by such a mother was clearly also discovering what the warm glow of adoring eyes upon him felt like; by the time he could walk and talk, he was determined to get as much of that feeling as he could. And from the men in his family, he saw how. Both of his grandfathers were Texas politicians—one was a state legislator and a Texas secretary of state. His father, Sam Jr., served in the Texas legislature, where he passionately fought for policies to improve and transform the life of the forgotten little people in the isolated backcountry. In his early years, Lyndon would watch with wonder as his father, the politician, would enter and conquer a room, turning every eye toward him. Politics, young Lyndon understood, was power, and with power came respect, admiration, even
love. He knew it could all be his. On the day of his birth, the family story had it, his grandfather had ridden a horse through the Hill Country, shouting: “
A United States Senator was born today!”

Soon, the future senator was demanding the world’s attention wherever he went. As a boy of only five or six years, at the Hill Country’s Junction School,
Johnson refused to read unless he was at the very front of the room, sitting in his teacher’s lap, with all of his classmates looking on. In
The Path to Power
, the first of his definitive volumes on the life of Lyndon Johnson, the historian Robert Caro describes that young student in “Miss Kate” Deadrich’s Junction School class: “
When Miss Kate excused one of her students to use the privy out back, the student had to write his name on one of the two blackboards that flanked the back door. The other students wrote their names small; whenever Lyndon left the room, he would reach up as high as he could and scrawl his name in capital letters so huge that they took up not one but both blackboards. His schoolmates can remember today—seventy years later—that huge LYNDON B. on the left blackboard and JOHNSON on the right.”