THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright © 2012 by Robert A. Caro, Inc. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. A portion of this work was previously published in The New Yorker. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress eISBN: 978-0-30796046-7 Cover design by R. D. Scudellari, adapted by Carol Devine Carson First Edition v3.1_r1 For Ina and For Chase and Carla and For Barry, Shana and Jesse With love Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction: “What the hell’s the presidency for?” PART I JOHNSON VS. KENNEDY: 1960 1 The Prediction 2 The Rich Man’s Son 3 Forging Chains 4 The Back Stairs 5 The “LBJ Special” PART II “RUFUS CORNPONE” 6 “Power Is Where Power Goes” 7 Genuine Warmth 8 “Cut” 9 Gestures and Tactics 10 The Protégé PART III DALLAS 11 The Cubicle 12 Taking Charge PART IV TAKING COMMAND 13 Aboard Air Force One 14 Three Encounters 15 The Drums PART V TO BECOME A PRESIDENT 16 EOB 274 17 The Warren Commission 18 The Southern Strategy 19 “Old Harry” 20 “The Johnsons in Johnson City” 21 Serenity 22 “Old Harry” II 23 In the Books of Law 24 Defeating Despair 25 Hammer Blows 26 Long Enough Debts, Sources, Notes, Index Debts Sources Notes Index Illustration Credits Illustrations A Note About the Author Other Books by This Author Introduction “What the hell’s the presidency for?” AIR FORCE ONE, the President’s plane, is divided, behind the crew’s cockpit, into three compartments. In the first of them, just behind the cockpit, women sat weeping and Secret Service agents were trying to hold back tears (“You’ve heard of strong men crying; well, we had it there that day,” recalls a reporter) as the pilot lifted the big jet off the Dallas runway in a climb so steep that to a man standing on the ground it seemed “almost vertical,” leveled off for a few minutes, and then, warned that there were tornadoes between him and Washington, put the plane into another climb to get above them. In the rear compartment the widow, her suit stained with blood, was sitting next to the coffin of the dead President. And in the center compartment was the new President. Lyndon Johnson hadn’t been aboard Air Force One on the trip down to Texas. He had long since given up asking John F. Kennedy if he could accompany him on the presidential plane when they were flying to the same destination (“You don’t mean to say that Mr. Johnson is again insisting on riding with me?” Kennedy had once asked his secretary in an exasperated tone), as he had given up on all his attempts to obtain some measure of recognition, or at least dignity, as Vice President. Once, as Senate Majority Leader, he had been a mighty figure—“the second most powerful man in the country”—but that seemed a long time ago now. Although initially he had been favored to win the Democratic nomination for President, he had been outmaneuvered by the younger man, and, having accepted the vice presidency, had, in that post, become not just powerless but a figure of ridicule. The gibe (“Whatever became of Lyndon Johnson?”) that had started over Georgetown dinner tables was now in headlines over articles about his predicament. He himself was worried about whether or not he would be retained on the 1964 Democratic ticket, and was convinced that whether he was or not, his dreams of becoming President one day were over. He had advised more than one aide whom he would have wanted with him were he to run for or become President to leave his staff. “My future is behind me,” he told one member of his staff. “Go,” he said to another. “I’m finished.” But he was on Air Force One now. IN PART, this book is the story of the five years—from late 1958, when Johnson began campaigning for the presidency, to November 22, 1963— before that flight from Dallas to Washington: a story of how a man who all his life had yearned for the presidency failed in his great chance to attain that goal, of how, to a large degree because of aspects of his character that crippled him in his efforts to attain it, he allowed the prize for which he had planned and schemed and worked (worked with a tirelessness that made an ally say “I never thought it was possible for anyone to work that hard”) to be snatched away from him. It is a story of not only failure but humiliation, of how, after he had lost the presidential nomination in 1960, he had taken a gamble—giving up the Senate leadership to accept the vice presidential nomination—because he felt that was his only remaining chance to achieve his goal, and of what followed after he became Vice President. Although Kennedy might not have won in 1960 without his presence on the ticket and his old- fashioned, whistle-stop campaigning—a fact that Kennedy himself privately acknowledged—he received no credit for that. “Power is where power goes,” he had boasted in explaining why he had traded in the Senate leadership: he would be able, through his political gifts, to transform the traditionally powerless vice presidency. But when, not long after the election, he had made two attempts—one with the Senate, one with Kennedy himself—to grab powers no previous Vice President had enjoyed, both were carried out in ways so clumsy and embarrassing that it was obvious that not his old skills but only desperation was behind them. And during the three years since Kennedy had turned aside, with contemptuous ease, Johnson’s attempt to maneuver him into ceding a portion of presidential power, Vice President Johnson had become among Kennedy’s White House aides the object of dislike and distrust, and of derision embodied in the mocking nicknames by which they often referred to him: “Uncle Cornpone” or “Rufus Cornpone.” These nicknames, and a hundred other slights, make this part of the book also a story about what being without power can mean in a city in which power is the name of the game; in a city as cruel as Washington. That part of the story—the five-year part—had ended when Kennedy’s aide Kenneth O’Donnell had walked into the cubicle in Dallas’ Parkland Hospital in which Lyndon Johnson, standing all but motionless against a wall, had been waiting for long minutes for definitive word on the President’s fate. Seeing the stricken “face of Kenny O’Donnell who loved him so much,” I knew, Lady Bird Johnson was to say, even before O’Donnell said, “He’s gone.” And in part this book is the story of a period that began during that flight, for it was on Air Force One, after he had sworn the oath of office with Jacqueline Kennedy standing beside him in a sweltering, dimly lit cabin, its window shades closed to foil would-be assassins, that his first presidential decisions were made: that the transition between the Kennedy Administration and that of Lyndon Baines Johnson began. THAT STORY—the transition story, a story just seven weeks long: its end came, as will be seen, on January 8, 1964—is a story of a period in Lyndon Johnson’s life very unlike that of the preceding five years. Although seven times previously in the history of the American republic a presidential transition had come about not through election but through death, the death of a President in office, and in three of those seven instances, death had come by assassination rather than through natural causes, the Johnson transition took place in circumstances that made it in some ways different from—and in some ways more difficult than—any of its predecessors. The very jolt of the news was different. As the first assassination to take place in the age of television, it was the first an entire nation learned about almost at the same moment: by the time Air Force One touched down in Washington, after a flight of two hours and six minutes, 92 percent of the American people had heard the news, which crossed the country, Newsweek said, “like a shock wave.” Tens of millions of Americans saw the coffin, escorted by Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy, descend from the plane on an hydraulic lift. And hard on the first shock came others. Forty minutes into Air Force One’s flight, it was announced that a Dallas policeman had been shot, and, a few minutes later, that a twenty-four-year-old man had been arrested for questioning, and a half hour later that he was “a definitive suspect in the assassination,” and on the heels of Lee Harvey Oswald’s name came rumors that seemed to link him to both Cuba and the Soviet Union. With America barely a year past the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fears that had accompanied the realization in October, 1962, that the country was on the very brink of a nuclear confrontation with those two countries were still fresh in America’s mind. And then, two days later, the assassin was assassinated—on live television. The shadowy figure lunging onto the screen from the right; glimpses of a pistol; “He’s been shot! He’s been shot! Lee Harvey Oswald has been shot!” “For one moment of total horror,” the New York Times said, “nothing could quite compare with the killing of … Oswald … before the live cameras of the National Broadcasting Company.” Concern that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the work not of a lone gunman but of a conspiracy escalated—as did concern about where (in Russia? in Cuba?) the conspiracy might have originated. “Lyndon Johnson’s ascent to the presidency,” says presidential historian Henry Graff, “came at the most traumatic moment in American political history.” And the assassination’s impact was magnified by television during the next three days, days of funeral ceremonies for the dead President unrivaled in American history for their pageantry and poignance. During the day of the assassination and the three days following, television in the average American home was tuned to the Kennedy funeral ceremonies for almost eight hours a day. The events in modern American history most comparable in their impact on the public, social scientists found, were Pearl Harbor and Franklin Roosevelt’s death, but, the scientists also found that because these events had occurred before the television age, they were not in fact comparable. The pervasiveness as well as the immediacy of television coverage—“There were times during those days when a majority of all Americans were apparently looking at the same events and hearing the same words … participating together … in a great national event,” the scientists concluded; “Nothing like this on such a scale had ever occurred before”—made the assassination and the ceremonies following it an event “probably without parallel in history.” Adding to the difficulties was the attitude toward the new President among many—most, in fact—of the late President’s advisers, the men on whom Johnson would have to rely for advice and for the operation of the government. So smoothed over have their feelings been during the intervening decades that in recollections today they bear little