The Passage of Power (59 page)

O
N
S
EPTEMBER 2, 1963
, Johnson was to leave for Stockholm and a fifteen-day tour of five Scandinavian nations, and about a week before the trip he told Ken O’Donnell that, as
Charles Bartlett relates,
“He’d
like to see the President before he went and have a little bit of a send-off from the President to boost his own role.”

“One of the weaknesses of the Kennedy White House staff was that individuals became rather arrogant,” Bartlett was to recall. “O’Donnell said it was impossible.” Reedy went hat in hand to Kennedy’s military aide, Major General
Ted Clifton, who went directly to the President, and Kennedy said that Johnson’s plane could touch down at Hyannis Port on its way to Stockholm and the Vice President could have a brief talk. Kennedy had asked a houseguest, his old friend Red Fay, if he’d like to sit in on the talk, and Fay was
“strongly
conscious,” as he was to write,
“of
the contrasts in the room,” the President in a sport shirt and blazer, the Vice President too formal in both appearance—overdressed, as someone overdresses out of insecurity,
“in
a double-breasted blue suit that seemed unusually somber in contrast to Kennedy’s casual attire”—and manner, sitting “forward uncomfortably on the edge of his chair,” very “deferential, … very grateful” to have been granted the audience. “The apparent uneasiness and unsureness of the Vice President surprised me,” Fay was to write.

The conversation couldn’t have done much to boost his confidence. After discussing his Scandinavian itinerary, he said he would like permission to add a visit to
Poland, saying, as Fay recalls, that “it would be a dramatic sign of our desire to be friendly with the countries behind the Iron Curtain … that have shown a desire for freedom.”

Permission was refused. “Has this been cleared by the State Department?” Kennedy asked, and when Johnson said it hadn’t because he wanted to get Kennedy’s reaction first, Kennedy said he didn’t think it was a good idea “at this time.” “Maybe some time later,” he said.

Then Kennedy asked to see the prepared speeches for the trip, and when Reedy provided him copies, not only read them, but edited them, turning the pages rapidly, crossing out paragraphs and lines. When he finished he simply handed Johnson the pages. They were “very good,” he said. “I have crossed out a few short sections which won’t hurt the speech[es] but which are better left unsaid.” A few minutes later, the visit was over; Johnson and Reedy were out the door. Johnson hadn’t been asked for comment on Kennedy’s changes; he had been treated like a speechwriter, and not a particularly respected one at that.

O
N
O
CTOBER 4
, John Connally flew up to Washington to participate in a number of meetings on Texas problems, including one with President Kennedy to make definite plans for the President’s trip to the state. He had told Johnson he was coming to Washington, and Johnson had invited him for dinner that evening at The Elms. But he hadn’t told Johnson he was meeting with the President—and neither had the President.

Connally was to say that when he entered the Oval Office he “frankly was a bit surprised that the Vice President wasn’t there. But he wasn’t.” The meeting was very cordial. Connally proposed that Kennedy’s visit, for which the dates of November 21 and November 22 had been tentatively set, include visits to five cities, as Kennedy wanted, but only one fund-raising affair: a hundred-dollar-per-plate dinner in Austin, on the 22nd. Otherwise, Connally said, “ ‘people down there are going to think that all you are interested in is the financial rape of the state,’ and I used those words,” and Kennedy said he would accept Connally’s judgment.

When Connally arrived at The Elms that evening, Johnson “already knew that I had been with the President.” His first words were: “Well, did
you all
get the trip worked out?” The Vice President, he was to say, “was considerably irritated with me.” “Irritated,” Connally said, wasn’t quite the right word. “Hurt” was the right word. But what could Connally say? “I suppose you think I don’t have any interest in what is happening in Texas,” Johnson said. “No,” Connally said, “I know you are extremely interested in what is happening in Texas.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Johnson asked. Connally said he had assumed he knew about the appointment, “trying to alibi any way I could because I recognized
that he was really irritated about it.” But Johnson kept pressing him. Connally didn’t want to hurt him any more than he had already been hurt, but he finally had to give him the only answer he could: “I assumed if the President wanted you there, you would be there.” But he and Lyndon Johnson had had so many years together. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have talked to you before I went in to see the President.” While he had apologized, however, the fact remained that the President hadn’t wanted Johnson there. The arrangements for a major political event that the Administration was holding in his state had been made—and he hadn’t been told about them.

I
N
O
CTOBER, 1963
, also, there was gathering, over the darkened landscape of Lyndon Johnson’s life, a thundercloud even more threatening than those already overhead.

The first faint rumble of the approaching storm had come on that Scandinavian trip—on Friday, September 13, in Copenhagen, just after he had returned to the Royal Hotel from luncheon at the palace with the Danish king and queen.

It came in a telephone call from
Walter Jenkins. Reporters didn’t know about the call. All they saw was that, as
Bart McDowell of the
Associated Press was to put it, on that day in Copenhagen
“there
was a change in” Lyndon Johnson’s “personality … a great change.” There were changes in his schedule, too. “Whatever plans that were on the docket for him, he scratched and spent the entire day locked up in his room.” Several times that afternoon, Reedy emerged to deliver announcements: the trip was being shortened;
“The
press of business in the United States made it impossible” for Johnson to visit
Greenland on Monday, as had been planned; the Greenland trip was canceled; the Vice President would be returning to the United States a day earlier than had been scheduled.

Those would not be Reedy’s last announcements of schedule changes. A full-dress inspection of the Danish Navy scheduled for Saturday was canceled, as were other events for Sunday, so that, as a Danish newspaper put it,
“An
official guest could hardly see less of
Denmark.” On Sunday, in fact, the Vice President didn’t emerge from his suite the entire day. Reedy told newsmen that, as one of them recalls, Johnson had remained in his bedroom,
“closed
the door, and spent the day on the telephone.”

“We assumed that it was—heaven knows what,” McDowell says. Reedy tried to scotch rumors that the Vice President was ill, or exhausted from the trip, but “the press of business” was the only explanation he had been authorized to give. “We were just in the dark … totally,” McDowell says.

Sunday evening, at 8:25, Johnson finally emerged from his suite with Lady Bird, his entourage behind him, for the lone event that day that had not been canceled:
a visit to Copenhagen’s famous Tivoli Gardens amusement park, where he was to appear with the Tivoli Marching Band. His lips were pressed into a thin line, and his eyes were narrow and hard. “He had spent the whole day on the phone, and when he finally emerged to march in this lighthearted parade, he was obviously very grim and preoccupied,” McDowell says. The mood of the people walking behind him reflected his.
“You
could sense a change in the whole party.” No one in the group said a word as they walked downstairs to the waiting limousines.

His expression hardly changed during the parade. It would have been a festive scene as the band, colorful in white trousers, red jackets and tall black bearskin shakos, its tubas and trombones glinting in the light of bright lanterns, marched through the park’s gaily colored thrill rides and turreted mock castles, playing lively tunes—except that the tall man in an overcoat striding with it was
“as
grim as a pallbearer.”

Though the Greenland visit had been canceled, there was still a visit to
Iceland scheduled for Monday, and a formal state dinner given by Iceland’s prime minister, and Johnson had been scheduled to fly back to Washington on Tuesday, arriving in the evening. But he told the State Department aides who had been rescheduling and rescheduling the trip that it was very important that he get back to Washington earlier than that, and he left the dinner early and took off Monday night, setting down at Andrews at one o’clock in the morning.

T
HE CALL HAD BEEN
about Bobby Baker.

On September 9,
Ralph Hill, the president of a firm that installed vending machines for coffee, candy and cigarettes in factories and collected the profits from them, had filed a lawsuit in United States District Court in Washington against another vending machine company, the
Serv-U Corporation—and against Baker. The suit alleged that Baker had taken $5,600 from Hill to use his influence with the defense contractor
North American Aviation Corporation so that one of its subcontractors would allow Hill to place his vending machines in its plant—and that Baker had then turned around and persuaded the subcontractor to oust Hill, and replace his company’s machines with Serv-U’s machines; that Baker had thus, as one writer later put it,
“taken
money to use his influence with a defense contractor and had then double-crossed the man who bought him.”
Jack Landau, a reporter for the
Washington Post
who covered the District Court, was given a tip that there might be something interesting in the suit. The matter seemed minor—a dispute over a contract between businessmen—and Baker, an official of Serv-U assured Landau, had no connection with the company, and, it was later to be recalled, there was
“considerable
initial soul-searching by the
Post
’s editors” over whether to run a story about it, but it had finally been decided to do so, and on Thursday, September 12, while Johnson was in Scandinavia, the story was published, buried inside the newspaper’s city
section, but with the headline
SENATE OFFICIAL IS NAMED IN INFLUENCE SUIT
. A couple of
Post
reporters were assigned to look further into the matter, as were a reporter or two from other papers—and by Friday morning, reporters had started calling Jenkins, which is when he telephoned Johnson in Copenhagen. And by Sunday—the day Johnson spent the entire day in his room, the day he became so “grim” and “preoccupied”—Jenkins had other news to report. The reporters had come across the fact that the
vending industry’s trade journal,
Vend
magazine, had been looking into Serv-U for some time and, in fact, was about to run an article on the company in its next issue. And the article’s author,
G. R. Schreiber, had allowed the
Post
to see the article, on condition that the newspaper not print any of its material before the magazine appeared—and the reporters, having seen it, had begun calling Jenkins with more serious questions because,
Vend
’s article said, with detailed documentation, that Baker, whom the article identified as
the “protégé
of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson,” was, despite all the assurances, not only connected with Serv-U but was in fact one of its stockholders, and in addition had substantial business dealings with the company; that the company, which had been founded in December, 1961, had enjoyed “remarkable” growth in the less than two years it had been in business; that in fact its annual gross income (the income of this firm intimately connected with a Senate employee whose salary was $19,611 per year) was “at or in excess of” $3.5 million—and that every cent of that amount came from companies that were in the aerospace industry and that were all “sizable contractors with Uncle Sam.” And
Vend
reported that Ralph Hill’s suit alleged that Baker had obtained the vending machine contracts for Serv-U because, “as Secretary of the [Senate] Majority, [he] was able to, and did, represent … that he was in a position to assist in securing defense contracts.” “In view of the phenomenal growth of Serv-U over a 20-month period in a handful of plants owned by corporations who do billions of dollars in business for Uncle Sam,”
Vend
said, “the question of any relationship between Serv-U and [Baker] needs an answer.”

W
HAT
J
OHNSON WAS DOING
behind the closed door of his suite in Copenhagen was telephoning—and panicking.
“He
panicked on Bobby,” George Reedy was to say. He “absolutely panicked.” He was scared—“timorous,” in Reedy’s word.
“The
way that man could panic. And when he panicked, he had this animal instinct: cover up.” With reporters badgering him for an explanation for the Vice President’s day-long seclusion in his suite, Reedy tried to tell Johnson he had to give them some explanation, but the response was a shout: “Don’t say a thing!” When Reedy, as always, tried to reason with him, Johnson said, “Don’t tell them a
thing
!” and went into his bedroom, slamming the door in Reedy’s face.

Johnson telephoned
Abe Fortas, who had gotten him out of some of the tightest spots in his career—the federal judge’s decision to hold hearings on the vote-counting in the 1948 election, for example. But those had been legal difficulties.
Fortas was indeed what Johnson considered him, one of the sharpest of lawyers, but this new problem was at the moment a public relations problem, and public relations was not the area of Fortas’ expertise. When, however, he gave Johnson advice that fit in with the “cover-up” instinct, Johnson followed it. Fortas suggested that reporters should be told that he, Johnson, really wasn’t all that close to Bobby Baker, and never had been—that Baker had been selected as Senate secretary not by Johnson but by vote of all the Democratic senators; that, in fact, he had hardly seen Baker since he had left the Senate.