The Passage of Power (77 page)

A truck lift, a large yellow-painted metal container, almost the size of a small room, that was used to transport the meals served to passengers on a plane, drove up, and was raised so that its floor was level with the rear door; standing atop it was a young Navy lieutenant, in dress blues, hand to cap in a rigid salute; he was to say that the sight of the long red-bronze coffin had disturbed him, because, in Manchester’s words, he felt that
“a
fallen chieftain should be shielded by a flag; he wished he had brought one with him.” The agents and the aides got the coffin into the lift. Watching on television, Americans saw them carrying what looked at first only like a long box, glinting in the glare of the floodlights. Then they realized what it was. Jackie and Bobby stepped in beside it; he was holding her hand. That was the first time America saw the stains on Jackie’s suit. The agents and aides stepped in, too. The crowd was so silent that Theodore White
“yearned
for a cry, a sob, a wail, any human sound.”

The lift was lowered. Since only the lift, not a stair ramp, had been placed at the plane’s rear door, there was now nothing between the door and the ground. A gray Navy hearse was backed up to the lift, and the coffin was put in it. As it was being put in, Lyndon and Lady Bird came to the rear door, expecting to descend to the ground. But there were no steps there. Jackie and Bobby got into the hearse and drove off, leaving the President and First Lady in the doorway.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, according to a diary kept by a Cabinet member—apparently Orville Freeman—who spoke to Johnson,
“He
[Johnson] said that when the plane came in … [they] paid no attention to him whatsoever, but they took the body off the plane, put it in the car, … and departed, and only then did he leave the plane without any attention directed or any courtesy toward him, then the President of the United States. But he said he just turned the other cheek … he said, what can I do? I do not want to get in a fight with the family and the aura of Kennedy is important to us.”

Turning the other cheek must have been hard, as was evidenced by remarks
he made in a television interview during his retirement. Asked about the incident, he said at first that he couldn’t recall it. Even if such a thing had occurred, he said,
“I
would not have felt any offense in a critical period like that and carrying the burden and troubles that he [Bobby] was carrying.” But then, when asked whether the manner of “the removal of President Kennedy’s body” had been “a surprise to you,” he replied, “Yes … it didn’t occur to me that the ramp would be removed and we would not be privileged to go down the same ramp with the body.” He had never asked why that had been done, he said.
“I
just observed it, as I did a good many things.” He was to call Bobby’s actions, in the words of one writer,
“a
deliberate snub.” “He ran so that he would not have to pause and recognize the new President,” he said to another.

T
HE TELEVISION CAMERAS
at Andrews had shown America—an America that had been out of touch with its President for more than two hours—the darkened runways at the air base, and then the plane’s long shape gliding out of the shadows, taxiing toward the spectators and a group of Cabinet officials, and then turning so that its whole length was in front of them, still in the dark. And then the floodlights were switched on, and for a moment, as one observer wrote,
“the
scene, the waiting for Air Force One beneath the glare of television klieg lights,” seemed to be one that “had been enacted many times in the past when the President was returning from a triumphant tour of Europe or a ‘non-political’ jaunt” across America. But this time a truck, with atop it an hydraulic lift holding the room-size metal container, brightly lit inside and open at both ends so the watchers could see into it—in a way, it was a giant picture frame—was wheeled up to the plane’s door, and when the door was opened, “there was,” as
Mary McGrory wrote, “no familiar, graceful figure, fingering a button of his jacket, waiting to smile, waiting to wave.” Instead, what appeared in the frame were the backs of a little group of men, bent over, holding something heavy and tugging it into the container—and then the viewers could see what they were tugging: the reddish-bronze box, glistening in the light as it lay on the floor of that brightly lit yellow frame. Then the men straightened up, and “there in the frame” was what McGrory called “the old guard of the dead President”—and his wife and brother.

The container—the tableau inside: of the box, and the men standing beside it, and the widow and the brother—was lowered to the truck bed. The gray ambulance-hearse backed into position near it, and a ten-man Marine honor guard marched up beside it, and the coffin was lifted into the hearse, and then Jackie and Bobby got in, and the ambulance pulled away, followed by a line of limousines. The television cameras swung to follow the ambulance as it left the airport, driving past another honor guard, rifles at the salute. As it was leaving, a television reporter said, “President Lyndon B. Johnson and Mrs. Johnson are standing in the door of the plane,” but the cameras did not swing to show the new President and his wife until the ambulance had disappeared out of the airport. Then there was the pause while the white presidential stairs were wheeled up to replace the truck
lift. It wasn’t long—less than two minutes—but it was a pause, a gap during which, after the hearse pulled away, the Johnsons were kept waiting in the door.

And after they came down, Youngblood behind them, the agent’s eyes flickering constantly around the figures in the darkness beyond the floodlights, there was another delay. About a dozen microphones for radio and television stations, poles with speakers on them at which Johnson was supposed to give his statement, had been set up on a broad expanse of the tarmac. There was no podium, no presidential seal, only the cluster of poles. When he walked over to them, after getting a report from Bundy (“that there was no indication of a [foreign] plot” since no country—including the
Soviet Union—was doing anything to exploit the situation), the roar of the engines of the two Army helicopters waiting to take him and his party to the White House, and the
thump-thump
of their whirling rotors, was so loud that he realized no one would be able to hear him. He sent Youngblood to speak to the pilots, but the noise didn’t abate noticeably, and he motioned the agent over to him again, and said, “Are we ready? Ask them if they’re ready,” and Youngblood went over again. The noise remained deafening, and the lights were glaring blindingly into the Johnsons’ eyes. He and Lady Bird had to stand alone before the little group of microphones on the bare, garishly lit concrete, in a setting with no dignity about it at all, for a long, awkward, few minutes—until the engines were throttled back a bit; despite Youngblood’s requests, the pilots didn’t turn them off, saying they needed to keep them warm for a quick takeoff.

Although it was a situation in which it was difficult for a person to keep his poise, Johnson kept his. He showed not a trace of irritation. The command he had imposed on himself did not slip for an instant; his face remained expressionless as he and his wife stood alone in the harsh lights. He read his few words, with their poignant ending—“I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s”—slowly and solemnly.
“He
was very reassuring, and I think for the country to hear the new President was a reassuring thing,” said one TV newsman, even though, as another said,
“Because
of the noise in the place it was hard to hear his words.” He assigned people to the helicopters (making himself heard was so difficult that he cupped his hand around Valenti’s ear as he shouted,
“Get
in the second chopper and come to my office as soon as you can”), climbed into the first one, and they lifted off and wheeled toward Washington, their blinking red lights disappearing into the darkness. The flight was only eleven minutes long, but before it was over, sitting in the front compartment with Lady Bird, McNamara, Bundy and
Ball, he asked the right questions—
“Any
important matters pending?” to McNamara: what was the impact of the assassination on foreign governments—to determine that the foreign situation was, indeed, stable, and found the right words, eloquent words. He had to keep these men in his Administration. Leaning toward the three Kennedy men, hunched forward in his intensity, he said, “President Kennedy did something I could never have done. He gathered around him the ablest people I’ve ever seen—not his friends, not even the best in public service, but the best
anywhere.
I want you to stay. I need you. I want you to stand with me.”

The job had been done.
“No
other words could have better appealed to
Bundy’s sense of himself and his duty to the Presidency,” his biographer said; the shakiness he had felt when he spoke to Johnson in Dallas was, suddenly, gone now; Ball, who found Johnson
“surprisingly
stable—more so than I would have been,” felt that his words were “especially moving”; McNamara was, as always, McNamara: cold, efficient, focusing on the task to be done. All three remained in their posts. Then, all at once, the windows of the helicopter were filled with a huge, shining white shape—the floodlit Washington Monument—and, swerving close around it, the helicopter began to descend. The reporters gathered on the South Lawn of the White House had seen red lights blinking far out beyond the monument, and heard a faint
pop-pop
sound from the whirling rotors; then, seemingly in an instant, the
pop-pop
had become a deafening roar, the helicopter was hovering over the lawn, a second copter in view now right behind it, the wind from the big blades shook the trees around the lawn as if there was a storm, and cut through the tall spraying waters of the fountain beyond the lawn, one reporter wrote,
“like
an invisible knife.”

Following Youngblood down its steps, holding Lady Bird’s arm, Johnson told
Liz Carpenter,
“Stay
with Lady Bird and help her all you can,” and the two women headed for a limousine that would take them to The Elms. (In the car, after rolling up the glass that separated them from the driver “so we could talk,” Ms. Carpenter said,
“It’s
a terrible thing to say but the salvation of Texas is that the Governor was hit.”
“Don’t
think I haven’t thought of that,” Lady Bird Johnson replied. “I only wish it could have been me”—her words revealing the depth of both Texas defensiveness, and of her love for her husband; Secret Service agents speak of being willing “to take the shot for the President,” of an agent being willing to sacrifice his own life for his leader’s; Lady Bird Johnson was saying that if by being shot, she could have removed the tarnish that she feared would attach to her husband because the assassination that had elevated him to the presidency had occurred in his state, she would have willingly accepted the bullet.) Johnson, with Moyers and several other men behind him, and Youngblood walking stride for stride next to him, so close that their shoulders kept touching, headed for the White House. The doors of the Oval Office were open, so that the President’s desk, on a new red carpet Jackie had had installed while he was away in Texas, was visible, but before he reached those doors, he veered to the right, so abruptly that his right shoulder banged into Moyers.
“Don’t
you want to go in?” someone asked. “I’ll use my office,” he said, and, entering the White House through the doors to Mrs. Lincoln’s office, walked through her office, into the corridor outside, down the stairs, and across West Executive Avenue to the Executive Office Building.

T
HE WHITE VICE PRESIDENTIAL FLAG
behind his desk in 274’s ceremonial office had been replaced with the blue presidential flag, and the vice presidential seals above the outer doors with presidential seals. As soon as his junior military
assistant, twenty-four-year-old Army Lieutenant
Richard H. Nelson, had heard the news from Dallas, there had flashed into his mind something he had been taught as a political science major at Princeton, and how it related to his boss’s return to Washington:
“He
had to come back not as the Vice President and not as the acting president, [but] as the President of the United States. Because this was always drummed into us in everything, the continuity of government, that the American people will carry on, will survive.” Dragooning a White House guard to help, Nelson ran down to the basement, found an old presidential flag and some seals, and installed them in 274—“just the symbols, that when he walked into the Executive Office Building office, he was walking into the office of the President, not the Vice President.”

But that was the only aspect of 274 that was presidential. It was still the same undistinguished, fluorescent-lit three-room office. He would still need the large room, the ceremonial room, for meetings, and while previously there had been two desks in the secretaries’ office, there would have to be a lot more people working in the suite now: not only the staff he had left in the Capitol offices, Jenkins, Reedy and their secretaries, but the three additions, Moyers, Valenti and
Carter, he had made on Air Force One. No one knew where they would sit, or what their assignments would be.

Already in the EOB elevator when he, Jenkins, Bundy and Moyers stepped in was Colonel
Juanita Roberts. They shook hands “with a sort of
reassuring
pat,” and when they got out on the second floor, and he was going into 274’s conference room, he said,
“Walter,
let’s have Marie take the phone calls; Juanita can take care of the people who are coming, and make my appointments. You and Bill come in here.” He went into the large room.

“Nothing
worked,” Nelson was to recall. “Government officials [were] competing with telephone men” laying new wires. Among the people crowding in were Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman
J. William Fulbright and veteran Democratic foreign policy adviser Averell Harriman. The Secret Service blocked off the corridor outside, so no one else could enter, but every phone in the three rooms seemed to be ringing.
Marie Fehmer wouldn’t get there for a while—having landed in the second helicopter, she had been separated from the rest of the group, and not knowing where Johnson was, went home, where she found messages telling her to come to 274—and Carter and Jenkins were answering the phones, Carter “just inundated by calls,” Jenkins, an oasis of calm, sitting with his yellow pad in front of him, taking notes in Gregg shorthand. The staff was crowding in:
Mildred Stegall,
Dorothy Territo, Valenti, Nelson,
Ivan Sinclair. There was no place for them all to sit, so Nelson and Sinclair pushed in more desks and chairs. More telephone men arrived, trying to set up a hotline to Moscow and enough regular lines for all the people who were going to need them. Every few minutes a man Colonel Roberts had never seen before rushed in and handed her wire-service copy from the White House pressroom tickers for her to give Johnson—
“I
didn’t know him; he didn’t know me,” she recalls; it was
Mac Kilduff.
“Much
chaos, and a lot of people running helter-skelter,” Fehmer says. But, she says, at the center of the storm, there was a calm: her boss. Young Nelson, when Johnson had come in, saw the same thing in this man he had known only as Vice President:
“Total
command—I mean, just his bearing. He somehow appeared to me to have grown about seven, eight inches in the course of the day. He seemed bigger than when I saw him off on the plane to Texas.” Fehmer saw the change—
“almost
a different person,” she says. “Many, many phone calls,” she says, “both coming in and going out,” but “there was no more of that hurrying. We may have all been hurried and flurried inside, but he set the pace,” and the pace was “deliberate.” “There was
no
lost motion; it wasn’t necessary for us to talk,” Colonel Roberts says. “He would say, ‘I want such and such,’ and we would … do it. We knew his ways. And we had always known that when there was a difficult problem, this would be the time when you would work fastest and with very little conversation.”
Bundy “was in and out, and the President was” giving him “instructions” about one matter after another; “a person who wouldn’t know either one” of the two men would “have assumed that they had … worked with each other forever.”