The Passage of Power (38 page)

At the end of all his scheming and maneuvering, what he got—the only new responsibilities Kennedy gave him—were the chairmanships of two committees: the National Space Council and the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. The impressive ring to the assignments—the nine-member Space Council had been created as a central coordinating body for America’s growing involvement in space, and the CEEO to prevent racial discrimination by companies that received government contracts—was hollow to someone who understood them, and Johnson’s understanding was thorough, particularly about the Space Council, since it had been he who, leading the Senate’s investigation in 1957 of America’s space program following Russia’s launching of
Sputnik,
the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, had introduced the legislation setting it up, and had thereafter watched President Eisenhower rapidly reduce it from a coordinating to a purely advisory body,
“not
one that makes decisions.”

The limits on the amount of advice Kennedy was willing to receive from the
council became apparent with that body’s first task: to recommend an administrator for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Kennedy asked for the recommendation from his science adviser,
Jerome B. Wiesner, not from the Space Council or from Johnson himself. Only after Wiesner’s recommendations—nine in all—proved, one after another, unacceptable was Johnson’s opinion finally solicited. And the man selected on his recommendation,
James E. Webb, a former Budget Bureau director who had become an executive in Senator Kerr’s oil and gas empire, quickly learned, as he was to put it, that Kennedy
“wanted
to control the agenda of the Council, that he wanted to determine those items on which he would accept advice,” and, most crucially, that he wanted the all-important budget for space projects to be drawn up not by the council but by the Budget Director. Kennedy
“was
not about to abdicate those decisions to anyone,” Webb says.

The council’s other members included the secretaries of state and defense,
Dean Rusk and
Robert McNamara, and the atomic energy commissioner,
Glenn T. Seaborg, all of whom had staffs of technical experts to prepare their positions on issues that came before the council; Johnson didn’t. Attempting to obtain funds to hire some, he requested a doubling of the previous year’s half-million-dollar appropriation for the council—and the Senate rejected his request, a further rebuff from that body which left him “bitter and hurt.” The
Times
would soon be reporting that it was known at NASA that
“Mr
. Johnson’s hand, if it has been laid upon that organization at all, has been light, indeed.” Aside from Webb’s appointment, “Mr. Johnson’s activities and influence there are scarcely visible.”

If the first chairmanship was frustrating, the second—of the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity—carried with it a threat of damage to his ambitions. If you accept the post, Rowe wrote him in alarm,
“You
will become the target of … the ‘advanced’ liberals because you are not doing everything and also the target of the southerners every time you try to do something even minor.… It will be impossible to satisfy either group no matter what you do.” The warning was unnecessary; Johnson was well aware that no proposal had enraged southerners more than attempts to force employers to hire black men and women for jobs in which they would be working in proximity to white men and women; Richard Russell, outflanked by Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, when, after the Georgia Giant had blocked the creation of a Fair Employment Practices Commission in the Senate, the President had created it by executive order, had been hamstringing its activities ever since by slashing its appropriations, and by amendments limiting its jurisdiction and activities. Complaining to aides that as committee chairman
“I
don’t have any budget, and I don’t have any power, I don’t have anything,” Johnson tried to refuse the job by arguing that it exceeded a Vice President’s constitutional responsibilities, but found that refusal was not an option. Kennedy, he was to say, replied that “You’ve got to do it because Nixon had it before”; since the committee had been chaired by the Vice President in the previous administration, his own administration, to show its commitment to civil rights, could do no less
than have
its
Vice President take over the job. Johnson asked for an executive order that would assure him that the Vice President had authority to chair such a committee—thinking that the order would, incidentally, give him specific powers. Kennedy agreed to the request, and an order was drafted, by Robert Kennedy’s aide Nicholas Katzenbach; when Johnson read it, however, he found that it provided only the assurance, not the authority, reorganizing the committee in ways that made Johnson’s dilemma worse than before. While the order indeed enlarged the committee’s powers, they were to be exercised not by the chairman but by the vice chairman, Secretary of Labor
Arthur Goldberg, who shall have
“general
supervision and direction of [its] work … and of the execution and implementation of the policies and purposes of this order.” The vice chairman was empowered to appoint an executive vice chairman to run the committee’s day-to-day operations, and Goldberg appointed a man from Texas, not one of Johnson’s allies in the state but
Jerry R. Holleman, longtime president of the Texas
AFL-CIO and a key figure in the liberal—anti-Johnson—wing of the state’s Democratic Party.
“Under
the way in which the executive order was written, Jerry Holleman has control over the staff and the best we can do is review his proposals,” Reedy told Johnson. Was that not bad enough? Holleman appointed as his second-in-command—committee executive director—John G. Feild, an aggressive, militant official of the Michigan
Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) and the very epitome of an “advanced” liberal. Johnson tried to keep a measure of control over the committee by having its staff communicate with Holleman through Reedy. Johnson should insist on this, Reedy told him.
“Administration
is in the hands of Goldberg and Holleman. Nevertheless, in the public mind, the responsibility for this Committee inevitably falls upon the Vice President and therefore there should be the closest liaison in terms of … approving actions.” Holleman refused even this suggestion. The next memo from Reedy reported that
“Jerry
Holleman is going to insist [that] I contact the committee staff only through him.”

Frantic, Johnson asked Reedy and
Abe Fortas to find a way to get out of the chairmanship, only to be told there wasn’t one.
“It
is going to be somewhat difficult to drop the … committee without some form of achievement first,” Reedy wrote him on February 8. Johnson had insisted on an executive order—and he had gotten one.

By the time all these initial maneuvers were over—by the end, certainly, of the first month of the Kennedy presidency—the misreading of John F. Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson was over, too. He had read him now, all the way through: The younger man was a lot smarter than Johnson had thought he was—and a lot tougher, too. He was always, without exception, whatever the provocation, the gentleman—but a very tough gentleman. Nothing could have been more gracious than the way he had handled Johnson’s requests—and nothing could have been more unyielding. Some months afterward, Johnson would be talking off the record to
Russell Baker of the
New York Times,
and, Baker was to write years
later,
“there
was a tribute [from Johnson] to the steely strength with which President Kennedy dispatched his enemies”—a tribute couched in rather remarkable words: Johnson described Kennedy “when he looks you straight in the eye and puts that knife into you without flinching.”

T
HE INAUGURATION OF
J
OHN
F
ITZGERALD
K
ENNEDY
was one of the memorable days of American history, for a presidential inauguration is a day for inspiration. “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans”; “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty”—the phrases of Kennedy’s inaugural address were so gloriously inspiring even before the ringing voice said, “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” that they summoned up, and, in some ways, summed up, the best of the American spirit, igniting hopes so that, almost on the instant it seemed, they summoned up a new era for Americans, an era of ideals, of brightness, of hope.
“Oh
, Jack,” his wife said afterwards, her hand stroking his face, “Oh, Jack, what a day!”

It was a very different kind of a day for Lyndon Johnson. The stands erected for the inauguration were in front of the Capitol’s long eastern façade. During Johnson’s time as a young congressional aide, he had passed along the length of that façade every morning on his way to the House Office Building from his basement room, with its uncovered steam pipes running across the ceiling, in a shabby little hotel near Union Station. The young woman who worked in the same office with him, and who would sometimes see him coming to work, noticed that as he was passing the façade, he almost always broke excitedly into a run, as if the façade’s sheer majesty, with its towering white marble columns and its parapets and friezes jammed with heroic figures, all gleamingly, dazzlingly white as they were struck full by the early-morning sun, had, perhaps, in its symbolic evocation of what he was aiming for, and in its contrast with the shabby little houses of the Hill Country from which he had come, touched something deep within him. Perhaps Lyndon Johnson had dreamed on some of those mornings of a presidential Inauguration Day. But he certainly hadn’t dreamed of a day like this one; whatever he had dreamed, it had not been of sitting on the inaugural platform, squinting into the sun, listening to another, younger man speak. And as he sat there on this day, he knew that his plans to obtain some measure of independent power of his own, separate from the new President’s, had been thwarted. He was going to be completely dependent on whatever that younger man chose to give him—for years to come.

H
OW MUCH OF WHAT FOLLOWED
can be laid at that young man’s door is obscured by his manners, his graciousness and his opacity.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., whose books set the lens through which history has viewed the relationship between Kennedy and Johnson, wrote that Kennedy
“liked
Johnson personally, valued his counsel on questions of legislation and public opinion and was determined that, as Vice President, Johnson should experience the full respect and dignity of the office. He took every care to keep Johnson fully informed. He made sure he was at major meetings and ceremonies. Nor would he tolerate from his staff the slightest disparagement of the Vice President.” He
“always
had a certain fondness for Lyndon Johnson,” Schlesinger wrote.
“He
saw his Vice President, with perhaps the merest touch of condescension, as an American original, a figure out of Mark Twain, not as a threat but as a character.” Occasionally he called him, in that context, “Riverboat.” Theodore Sorensen, who did similar lens-setting himself in his first two books before a drastic, and very honorable, readjustment in his final book (and in interview after interview with the author of this book) was, in those first two books, equally effusive.
“The
President and Vice President, to the astonishment of many and somewhat to the surprise of them both, got along famously,” he wrote.
“Their
initial wariness gave way to genuine warmth. Johnson’s vast energies were enlisted in a wide range of undertakings.… The President … took pains to have him present at all the major meetings.…”

Certainly, many of Kennedy’s instructions to his aides—at least during his Administration’s early days—support this view.
“I
can’t afford to have my Vice President, who knows every reporter in Washington, going around saying we’re all screwed up,” he told his appointments secretary, Ken O’Donnell, “so we’re going to keep him happy.” Telling O’Donnell that that was
his
assignment—that he was, as O’Donnell puts it,
“in
charge of the care and feeding of Lyndon Johnson”—he told him to handle the job with sensitivity. “Lyndon Johnson was … the number one Democrat in the United States elected by us [Democratic
senators] to be our leader. I’m President of the United States. He doesn’t even like that. He thinks he’s ten times more important than I am, he happens to be that kind of a fellow. But he thinks you’re nothing but a clerk. Just keep that right in your mind. You have never been elected to anything by anybody, and you are dealing with a very insecure, sensitive man with a huge ego. I want you literally to kiss his fanny from one end of Washington to the other.” He told O’Donnell that he had given Johnson permission to enter the Oval Office unannounced, through the doors that led out into the Rose Garden, although it appears to be understood that this was a
pro forma
courtesy; if Johnson ever took advantage of it, no one in the White House can remember the occasion. Summoning his chief of protocol,
Angier Biddle Duke, the President said,
“I
want you to take care of the Vice President and Mrs. Johnson. I want you to watch over them and see that they’re not ignored.… Because I’m going to forget. My staff is going to forget. We’re all going to forget. We’ve got too much to do around here … and I want you to remember.”