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Lyndon Johnson and the events in Dallas.

By Robert A. Caro

March 26, 2012

Friday, November 22, 1963, began for Lyndon Johnson in Fort Worth, with the headline he saw on the front page of the Dallas Morning News: “yarborough snubs lbj.”

Johnson, accompanying President Kennedy on a tour of Texas, had been given an assignment that the President considered vital: since a unified Democratic front in the state would be needed to carry it in 1964, the Vice-President had been made responsible for healing the bitter Democratic Party rift between Governor John B. Connally, a former Johnson assistant, and Senator Ralph Yarborough, the leader of the Party’s liberal wing. The previous day, however, Yarborough had refused even to ride in the same car as Johnson. Assigned to accompany the Vice-President during a Presidential motorcade through San Antonio, the Senator had gotten into another car instead, and, in a procession in which the other vehicles behind the Presidential limousine were packed with people, Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, had had to sit conspicuously alone in the back seat of their convertible.

Newspapers that day chronicled every detail of Johnson’s humiliation. “Twice at San Antonio . . . Johnson sent a Secret Service man to invite Yarborough to ride with him in his car. Both times the senator ignored the invitation and rode with somebody else,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The Chicago Tribune noted the “curt wave of his hand” with which Yarborough had sent the Vice-President’s emissary packing. The feud was the main story of Kennedy’s trip not just in Texas but across the country. On the morning of the twenty-second, Lyndon Johnson sat in his suite at Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas with newspapers in front of him—there were four separate stories in the Dallas paper alone; one was headlined “nixon predicts jfk may drop johnson”—and then he had to go downstairs for a rally of five thousand labor-union members, and join Kennedy, Yarborough, Connally, and some local congressmen, all of whom had, of course, seen those stories. As they walked across the street to the rally, a light drizzle was falling. Johnson was wearing a raincoat and a hat; Kennedy was bareheaded and lithe, in an elegant blue-gray suit. Johnson hastily snatched off his hat. His assignment was to introduce Kennedy, and, as he finished, the crowd roared for the young man beside him. Explaining why Jackie wasn’t there (“Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself; it takes longer—but, of course, she looks better than we do”), Kennedy was easy and charming. Johnson had had to ask the President for a favor: to be allowed to bring his youngest sister, Lucia, who lived in Fort Worth, to meet him. Shaking hands with Kennedy that morning, Lucia was thrilled; she had always wanted to shake hands with a President, she said.

When he had gotten dressed early that morning, Kennedy had strapped a canvas brace with metal stays tightly around him and then wrapped over it and around his thighs, in a figure-eight pattern, an elastic bandage for extra support for his bad back; it was going to be a long day. Now it was nine o’clock, time for him to deliver a breakfast speech to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce in the hotel’s ballroom. “All right, let’s go,” he said.

Nine o’clock in Texas was ten o’clock back in Washington. At ten o’clock in Washington that Friday morning, at about the same time that Kennedy was entering the Fort Worth ballroom, a Maryland insurance broker named Don B. Reynolds, accompanied by his attorney, walked into Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building, on Capitol Hill, to begin answering questions from two staff members of the Senate Rules Committee: Burkett Van Kirk, the Republican minority counsel, and Lorin P. Drennan, an accountant from the General Accounting Office who had been assigned to assist the committee.

Reynolds was there because the Rules Committee had begun investigating a scandal revolving around John-son’s protégé Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, whom Johnson, during his years as Senate Majority Leader, had made Secretary for the Majority. During the preceding two months, the scandal had been escalating week by week. In a desperate attempt to head off the investigation, Baker had resigned (he later said that if he had talked “Johnson might have incurred a mortal wound by these revelations. They could have . . . driven him from office”), but the resignation had only ignited a media firestorm that broke on newspaper front pages across the country and in sensational cover stories in major news magazines. The scandal had thus far concentrated on the man known in Washington as “Little Lyndon,” but the stories were beginning to focus more and more on Johnson himself. On the Monday of the week that Kennedy left for Texas, a lengthy and detailed article had appeared in Life—“scandal grows and grows in washington,” based on the work of a nine-member investigating team headed by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, William G. Lambert. It had gone beyond a recounting of Baker’s personal financial saga to make clear that, in distributing campaign contributions and in his other Senate activities, Baker had simply been “Lyndon’s bluntest instrument in running the show.” And the focus was about to sharpen that morning. Reynolds, who was Baker’s former business partner, had come to Room 312 to tell the Senate investigators about a number of Baker’s activities, one of which—the purchase of television advertising time and an expensive stereo set, in return for the writing of an insurance policy—Baker himself later called “a kickback pure and simple,” to Johnson. On the advice of his attorney, Reynolds had brought with him documents—invoices and cancelled checks—that he said would prove that assertion. Another of Baker’s activities that Reynolds began describing that morning would also turn out to be related to Johnson: an overpayment by Matthew McCloskey, a contractor and major Democratic funder, for a performance bond—an overpayment of a hundred and nine thousand dollars for a bond that had cost only seventy-three thousand dollars, with twenty-five thousand dollars of that overpayment, Reynolds later said, going to “Mr. Johnson’s campaign.”

In New York, there was also going to be a meeting that morning—of about a dozen reporters and editors in the offices of Life’s managing editor, George P. Hunt. During the past week, reporters who had been sent to Texas to investigate the Vice-President’s finances had found areas ripe for inquiry. For one thing, they had begun searching through deeds and other records of recent land sales and had found that the real-estate and banking transactions of the Johnson family’s L.B.J. Company were on a scale far greater than had previously been suspected. And other reporters were digging into the advertising sales and other activities of KTBC, the cornerstone of the Johnsons’ extensive radio and television interests, and they, too, were turning up one item after another that they felt merited looking into. “With every day that week,” the story “kept getting bigger and bigger,” Lambert said later, and it was no longer a Bobby Baker story but “a Lyndon Johnson story”: after thirty-two years “on the [government] payroll . . . he was a millionaire many times over.” But, Lambert said, so many reporters were working in Johnson City, Austin, and the Hill Country that “they were tripping all over each other.” An article laying out some of their new findings had already been written, by Keith Wheeler, a staff writer. A decision had to be made on whether to run his story in the magazine’s next issue or whether the material already in hand should be held until more was available, and combined into a multi-part series on “Lyndon Johnson’s Money”—what Lambert termed a “net worth job”—and a meeting to decide this, and to divide up the areas of investigation in Texas, had been scheduled for 11:30 a.m. on November 22nd.

As Don Reynolds was providing the Rules Committee staff with information that might shortly produce headlines, and as Life was mapping out assignments for an investigation that might produce even bigger headlines, the Presidential motorcade was pulling away from the hotel in Fort Worth for the airport, and the flight to Dallas.

In Lyndon Johnson’s lapel was a white carnation that had been pinned on him at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast, and in his car was Ralph Yarborough. “I don’t care if you have to throw Yarborough into the car with Lyndon,” Kennedy had told his chief legislative aide, Larry O’Brien, that morning. “Get him in there.” He told Ken O’Donnell, his appointments secretary, to give Yarborough a message: “If he doesn’t ride with Lyndon today, he’ll have to walk.” The President himself had had a few words with the Senator that morning, telling him, in a quiet voice, that, if he valued his friendship, he would ride with Johnson. 

On the thirteen-minute flight to Dallas, the President took care of another public aspect of the feud. O’Donnell, taking Connally by the arm, pushed him into Kennedy’s cabin and closed the door. “Within three minutes,” he was to recall, the Governor had agreed to invite Yarborough to the reception at the Governor’s Mansion and to seat him at the head table at dinner. Emerging, Connally said, “How can anybody say no to that man!”

As Air Force One was heading for Dallas, the last of the clouds cleared. “Kennedy weather,” O’Brien called it.

It seemed as if it was going to be a Kennedy day. As Air Force One touched down at Dallas’s Love Field, at 11:38 a.m., everything seemed very bright under the brilliant Texas sun and the cloudless Texas sky: the huge plane gleaming as it taxied over closer to the crowd pressing against a fence; the waiting, open Presidential limousine, so highly polished that the sunlight glittered on its long midnight-blue hood, which stretched forward to two small flags on the front fenders. There was a moment’s expectant pause while steps were wheeled up to the plane, and then the door opened and into the sunlight came the two figures the crowd had been waiting for: Jackie first (“There’s Mrs. Kennedy, and the crowd yells!” a television commentator shouted), youthful, graceful, her wide smile, bright-pink suit, and pillbox hat radiant in the dazzling sun; behind her the President, youthful, graceful (“I can see his suntan all the way from here!” the commentator announced), the mop of brown hair glowing, one hand checking the button on his jacket in the familiar gesture, coming down the steps turned sideways just so slightly, to ease his back. A bouquet of bright-red roses was handed to Jackie by the welcoming committee, and it set off the pink and the smile.

No time had been built into the schedule for the President and the First Lady to work the crowd, but who could have resisted, so adoring and excited were the faces turned toward them, so imploring the hands reaching out toward them, and they walked along the fence basking in the smiles and the sun, grinning, laughing, even, at things people shouted as they stretched out their hands, in the hope of a touch from theirs. “There was never a point in the public life of the Kennedys, in a way, that was as high as that moment in Dallas,” a reporter who covered the Kennedy Presidency said later.

Taking his wife, Lady Bird, by the arm to bring her along, Lyndon Johnson walked over to the fence and started to follow the Kennedys, but the faces remained turned, and the arms remained stretched, toward the Kennedys, even after they had passed, and Johnson quickly moved back to the gray convertible that had been rented for him. Yarborough sat on the left side in the back seat, behind the driver, a Texas state highway patrolman named Hurchel Jacks, the Vice-President on the right side, behind Rufus Youngblood, a Secret Service agent assigned to him. Lady Bird, sitting between Yarborough and her husband, tried to make conversation but soon gave up. The two men weren’t speaking to each other or looking at each other—the only noises in the car came from the walkie-talkie radio that Youngblood was carrying on a shoulder strap—as the motorcade pulled out.

Senate hearings normally break for lunch, but at 12:30 p.m. Washington time Reynolds, after two and a half hours of explaining his over-all business relationship with Bobby Baker, had begun telling his Rules Committee questioners, Van Kirk and Drennan, specifically about the pressures that he said had been brought on him to purchase advertising time on Lyndon Johnson’s television station, and they didn’t want him to stop. “Don presented a good case,” Van Kirk said later. “He could back it up. Everything he said, he had a receipt for. It’s hard to argue with a receipt. Or a cancelled check. Or an invoice. It’s hard to argue with documentation.” The committee staffers sent a secretary out for sandwiches and milk, and Reynolds continued talking. The first few miles of the Presidential procession followed an avenue lined with small light-industrial factories, and relatively few people were watching as the motorcade swept past: in the lead an unmarked white police car, and helmeted motorcycle-police outriders; then the Kennedys and Governor and Mrs. Connally, in the Presidential limousine with the flags fluttering from its fenders and four motorcycle escorts flanking it at the rear; then a heavily armored car that the Secret Service agents referred to as the Queen Mary, with four agents standing on the running boards, and Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers, a White House special assistant, sitting on the jump seats; then, after a careful, seventy-five-foot gap, came the gray Vice-Presidential convertible and the Vice-Presidential follow-up car, the press cars and buses, and the rest of the long caravan. But then the motorcade reached Dallas’s downtown, and turned onto Main Street. For a while, Main was lined on both sides by tall buildings, so that the cars, driving between them, might have been driving between the walls of a canyon, and the windows of the buildings were filled, floor after floor, building after building, with people leaning out and cheering, and on the sidewalks the crowds were eight people, ten people deep. Overhead, every fifty yards or so, a row of flags hung from wires stretched across the street, and at the end of the canyon, where the buildings stopped, was a rectangle of open sky.

As the procession drove farther into the canyon, the noise swelled and deepened, becoming louder and louder, so that the motorcade was driving through a canyon of cheers. Every time the President waved, the crowd on the sidewalk surged toward him, pressing back the lines of policemen, so that the passage for the cars grew narrower, and the lead car was forced to reduce its speed, from twenty miles an hour to fifteen, to ten, to five. Every time Jackie waved a white-gloved hand, shrieks of “Jackie!” filled the air. As Governor Connally waved his big Stetson, revealing a leonine head of gray hair, the cheers swelled for him, too. The four passengers in the Presidential limousine kept smiling at one another in delight. “Mr. President, you certainly can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you!” Nellie Connally said. The President’s “eyes met mine and his smile got even wider,” she later recalled.

Trailing them in the rented car, driving between crowds of people cheering but not for him, sharing a seat with a man who had humiliated him, Lyndon Johnson was far enough behind the Presidential limousine that the cheering for the Kennedys and the Connallys—for John Connally, some of it, for his onetime assistant, who had become his rival in Texas—was dying down by the time his car passed, and most of the faces in the crowd were still turned to follow the Presidential car as it drove away from them. So that, as Lyndon Johnson’s car made its slow way down the canyon, what lay ahead of him in that motorcade could, in a way, have been seen by someone observing his life as a foretaste of what might lie ahead if he remained Vice-President: five years of trailing behind another man, humiliated, almost ignored, and powerless. The Vice-Presidency, “filled with trips . . . chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping . . . in the end it is nothing,” as he later put it. He had traded in the power of the Senate Majority Leader, the most powerful Majority Leader in history, for the limbo of the Vice-Presidency—“what ever happened to lyndon johnson?,” a mocking headline in The Reporter had asked—because he had felt that at the end might be the Presidency. Now there was another man who might want the Presidency: the younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General, whose dislike and contempt—“hatred” is not too strong a term—for him was well known in Washington. And in five years Bobby Kennedy would have had time to build up a record, to hold other positions besides Attorney General: Secretary of Defense, perhaps—whatever positions he wanted, in the last analysis. For more than a year now, the desolation Lyndon Johnson felt about his position had shown in his posture—in the slump of his shoulders—and in his gait, the slow steps that had replaced the old long Texas stride with which he had walked the corridors of Capitol Hill, and in his face, on which all the lines ran downward, his jowls sagging, so that reporters mocked in print his “hangdog” look. His former aide Bill Moyers, who had become the publicity director for the Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver’s Peace Corps, felt that Johnson had become “a man without purpose . . . a great horse in a very small corral.”

And what if his Vice-Presidency wasn’t five years longer but only one? What if he was dropped from the ticket in 1964?

He had been saying for some time—had apparently convinced himself—that that was the probability. In recent months, he had begun advising aides he would have wanted to keep with him were he to run for or become President to leave his staff. “My future is behind me,” he told one staffer. “Go,” he said to another. “I’m finished.” That belief—that fear—may or may not have been justified before Bobby Baker appeared on magazine cover after magazine cover, before Don Reynolds entered the picture, and before this trip to Texas. Given what the President was seeing for himself in Texas—that Johnson was no longer a viable mediator between factions of his party in his own state—and what was happening at that very moment in the Old Senate Office Building, the President’s assurances that he would be on the ticket might start to have a hollow ring. “Finished ”: whether or not he was given another term as Vice-President, it was beginning to seem, more and more, as if there might be some justification for the adjective that he had been applying to his prospects.

Leaving behind the crowds on Main Street, the lead car, the motorcycle police, and the Presidential limousine swung right onto Houston Street and then left onto Elm, which sloped slightly downhill toward a broad railroad overpass through a grassy open space, with scattered spectators standing in it, called Dealey Plaza. In Washington, Don Reynolds was showing the Rules Committee investigators the papers that he said proved his charges about Lyndon Johnson, pushing the documents, one by one, across the witness table. In New York, the Life editors were assigning reporters to investigate specific areas of Johnson’s finances while still debating whether the magazine should run a story on Johnson’s wealth in its next issue. Ahead of the Vice-Presidential car, the spectators in Dealey Plaza began to applaud the Kennedys and the Connallys as Johnson followed in their wake.

There was a sharp, cracking sound. It “startled” him, Lyndon Johnson later said; it sounded like a “report or explosion,” and he didn’t know what it was. Others in the motorcade thought it was a backfire from one of the police motorcycles, or a firecracker someone in the crowd had set off, but John Connally, who had hunted all his life, knew the instant he heard it that it was a shot from a high-powered rifle.

Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service agent in Johnson’s car, didn’t know what it was, but he saw “not normal” movements in the Presidential car ahead—President Kennedy seemed to be tilting toward his left—and in the Queen Mary, immediately ahead of him, one of the agents was suddenly rising to his feet, with an automatic rifle in his hands. Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a “voice I had never heard him ever use,” Lady Bird recalled—“Get down! Get down! ” and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, “Get down! Get down! ” By the time the next two sharp reports had cracked out—it was a matter of only eight seconds, but everyone knew what they were now—Lyndon Johnson was down on the floor of the back seat of the car. The loud, sharp sound, the hand suddenly grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down: now he was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him, pressing him down—Lyndon Johnson would never forget “his knees in my back and his elbows in my back.”

He couldn’t see anything other than Lady Bird’s shoes and legs in front of his face—she and Yarborough were ducking forward as far as they could. Above him, as he lay there, he heard Youngblood yelling to Hurchel Jacks, “Close it up! Close it up!” The Secret Service agent still wasn’t sure what had happened, but he knew that the best hope of protection was to stay close to the car ahead of him, which was packed with men and guns. Lying on the floor with Youngblood on top of him, Lyndon Johnson felt the car beneath him leap forward as Jacks floored the gas pedal, and he felt the car speeding—“terrifically fast,” Lady Bird later said, “faster and faster”; “I remember the way that car . . . zoomed,” Johnson recalled—and then the brakes were slammed on, and the tires screamed almost in his ear as the car took a right turn much too fast, squealing up the ramp to an expressway, and hurtled forward again. “Stay with them, and keep close!” Youngblood was shouting above him. The shortwave radio was still strapped to Youngblood’s shoulder, so that it was almost in Johnson’s ear. The radio had been set to the Secret Service’s Baker frequency, which kept Youngblood in touch with the Vice-Presidential follow-up car, but now Johnson heard the agent’s voice above him say, “I am switching to Charlie”—the frequency that would connect him with the Queen Mary, ahead of him. For a moment there was, from the radio, only crackling, and then Johnson heard someone say, “He’s hit! Hurry, he’s hit!,” and then “Let’s get out of here!”—and then a lot of almost unintelligible shouting, out of which one word emerged clearly: “hospital.”

He still couldn’t see what Youngblood was seeing. As the third shot rang out, a little bit of something gray had seemed to fly up out of Jack Kennedy’s head. Then his wife, in her pink pillbox hat and pink suit, which seemed suddenly to have patches of something dark on it, was trying to climb onto the long trunk of the limousine, and then clambering back into the car, where her head was bent over something Youngblood couldn’t see. A moment after the first shot, one of the agents on the Queen Mary’s running board, Clint Hill, had sprinted after the limousine as it was accelerating, leaped onto its trunk, and grabbed one of its handholds. He was now lying spread-eagled across the trunk of the speeding vehicle, but he managed to raise his head and look down into the rear seat. Turning to the follow-up car, he made a thumbs-down gesture.

The agents in the Queen Mary were waving at Jacks to stay close. The patrolman, a laconic Texan—“tight-lipped and cool,” Youngblood called him—pulled up within a few feet of the armored car’s rear bumper, and kept his car there as the two vehicles, with the Presidential limousine not many feet ahead of them, roared along the expressway and then swung right onto an exit ramp.

The man underneath Rufus Youngblood was lying very quietly, except when his body was jolted forward or back as the car braked or accelerated or swerved. His composure would have surprised most people who knew him, but not the few who had seen him in other moments of physical danger, including moments when he was under gunfire. Johnson’s customary reaction to physical danger, real or imagined, was so dramatic, almost panicky, that in college he had had the reputation of being “an absolute physical coward.” During the Second World War, he had done everything he could to avoid combat. Realizing, however, that, “for the sake of political future,” as one of Franklin Roosevelt’s aides wrote, he had to be able to say he had at least been in a combat zone, he went to the South Pacific and flew as an observer on a bomber that was attacked by Japanese Zeroes. And as the Zeroes were heading straight for the bomber, firing as they came, its crew saw Lyndon Johnson climb into the navigator’s bubble so that he could get a better view, and stand there staring right at the oncoming planes, “just as calm,” in the words of one crew member, “as if we were on a sightseeing tour.” Although his customary reaction to minor pain or illness was “frantic,” “hysterical”—he would, the Texas lobbyist Frank (Posh) Oltorf said, “complain so often, and so loudly,” about indigestion that “you thought he might be dying”—when, in 1955, in Middleburg, Virginia, a doctor told Johnson that this time the “indigestion” was a heart attack, which he had always feared, because his father and uncle had died young of heart attacks, Johnson’s demeanor changed. Lying on the floor of Middleburg’s “ambulance”—it was actually a hearse—as it was speeding to Washington, he was composed and cool as he made decisions: telling the doctor and Oltorf, who were riding in the ambulance, what hospital he was to be taken to, which members of his staff should be there when he arrived; telling Oltorf where he thought his will was, and how he wanted its provisions carried out. It was a major heart attack—when he arrived at the hospital, doctors gave him only a fifty-fifty chance of survival—and at one point during the trip Johnson told the doctor that he couldn’t stand the pain. But when the doctor said that giving him an injection to dull it would require stopping for a few minutes, and “time means a lot to you,” Johnson said, “If time means a lot, don’t stop.” There were even wry remarks; when the doctor told him that if he recovered he would never be able to smoke again, Johnson said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.” Lady Bird was always saying that her husband was “a good man in a tight spot.” Oltorf had never believed her—until that ambulance ride. He had thought he knew Johnson so well, he recalled; he realized on that ride that he didn’t know him at all.

Lying on the floor of the back seat with Youngblood still on top of him, Johnson asked what had happened. Youngblood said that “the President must have been shot or wounded,” that they were heading for a hospital, that he didn’t know anything, and that he wanted everyone to stay down—Johnson down on the floor—until he found out.

“All right, Rufus,” Johnson said. A reporter who asked Youngblood later to describe the tone of Johnson’s voice as he said this summarized the agent’s answer in a single word: “calm.”

A moment later, the voice on the shortwave radio told Youngblood that they were heading to Parkland Memorial Hospital, and the agent, shouting, he later recalled, against the noise of the wind and the wail of police sirens, told Johnson what to do when they arrived: he was to get out of the car and into some area that the Secret Service could make secure, without stopping for anything, even to find out what had happened to the President. “I want you and Mrs. Johnson to stick with me and the other agents as close as you can,” he said. “We are going into the hospital and we aren’t gonna stop for anything or anybody. Do you understand?”

“O.K., pardner, I understand,” Lyndon Johnson said.

There was another squealing turn—left onto the entrance ramp to the Parkland Emergency Room; the car skidded so hard that “I wondered if they were going to make it,” Lady Bird said—and then the brakes were jammed on so hard that Johnson and Youngblood were slammed against the back of the front seat. Then Youngblood’s weight was off him: hands were grabbing his arms and pulling him roughly up out of the car and onto his feet. The white carnation was still in his lapel, somehow untouched, but his left arm and shoulder, which had taken the brunt of Youngblood’s weight, hurt. There were Secret Service men all around; police all around; guns all around. Then Youngblood and four other agents were surrounding him, the hands were on his arms again, and he was being hustled—almost run—through the hospital entrance and along corridors; close behind him was another agent, George Hickey, holding an AR-15 automatic rifle at the ready. Johnson said later that he was rushed into the hospital so fast, his view blocked by the men around him, that he hadn’t even seen the President’s car, or what was in it. Lady Bird, rushed along right behind him by her own cordon of agents, had seen, in “one last look over my shoulder,” “a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat. I think it was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”

Lyndon Johnson was being hustled, agents’ hands on his arms, down one hospital corridor after another, turning left, turning right; his protectors were looking for a room that could be made secure. Then he was in what seemed like a small white room—it was actually one of three cubicles, in the Parkland Minor Medicine section, that had been carved out of a larger room by hanging white muslin curtains from ceiling to floor. Two of the cubicles were unoccupied; in the third, a nurse was treating a patient. The agents were pushing nurse and patient out the door; they were pulling down the shades and blinds over the windows. Then he and Lady Bird were standing against a blank, uncurtained wall at the back of the cubicle farthest from the door. Youngblood was standing in front of them, telling another agent to station himself outside the door to the corridor, and not to let anyone in—not anyone—unless he knew his face. Two other agents were stationed in the cubicle between this one and the corridor. Someone was saying that Youngblood should get to a telephone and report to his superiors, in Washington; Youngblood was saying, “Look here, I’m not leaving this man to phone anyone.” Remembering that a Vice-President’s children did not normally receive Secret Service protection, he asked Lady Bird where the Johnson daughters were (Lynda Bird was at the University of Texas, Lucy at her high school, in Washington), and told one of the agents to call headquarters, have guards assigned to them immediately, and then get back to the cubicle as fast as possible.

Someone brought two folding chairs into the cubicle, and Lady Bird sat down in one. Lyndon Johnson remained standing, his back against the far wall. As had been the case in every crisis in his life, a first consideration was to have people loyal to him around him, aides and allies who could be counted on to take his orders without question. He knew that the Texas congressmen who had been in the motorcade must be nearby, and he asked Youngblood to have them found, and Homer Thornberry was brought in and, after a while, Jack Brooks. Johnson’s aide Cliff Carter came in, and handed him a container of coffee.

And then, for long minutes, no one came in. Lyndon Johnson stood with his back against the wall. It was very quiet in the little curtained space. “We didn’t know what was happening,” Thornberry recalled later. “We did not know about the condition of the President. . . . I walked out once to try to see if I could find out what was going on, but either nobody knew or they didn’t tell me.” Johnson asked Youngblood to send an agent to get some news, and he returned with Roy Kellerman, the acting chief of the White House Secret Service detail, but Kellerman didn’t provide much information. “Mr. Johnson asked me the condition of the President and the Governor,” he recalled. “I advised him that the Governor was taken up to surgery, that the doctors were still working on the President. He asked me to keep him informed of his condition.”

There was more waiting. “Lyndon and I didn’t speak,” Lady Bird Johnson recalled. “We just looked at each other, exchanging messages with our eyes. We knew what it might be.” Johnson said very little to anyone, moved around very little, just stood there. Asked to describe him in the hospital, Thornberry used the same word that Youngblood used to describe him in the car: “Very calm. All through the time he was just as calm.” Kellerman’s deputy Emory Roberts came in and said that he had seen Kennedy, and, as he later recalled, that he “did not think the President could make it”—and that Johnson should leave the hospital, get to Air Force One, and take off for Washington. Youngblood agreed. “We should leave here immediately,” he said. The word “conspiracy” was in the air. Not merely the President but the Governor had been shot; who knew if Johnson might himself have been the next target had not Youngblood so quickly covered his body with his own? The Secret Service wanted to get Johnson out of Dallas or, at least, onto the plane, which would, in their view, be the most secure place in the city.

But Johnson did not agree. No one had yet given him any definite word on the President’s condition; no one had yet made, in that little curtained room, any explicit statement. In Brooks’s recollection, Johnson said, “Well, we want to get the official report on that rather than [from] some individual.” He wouldn’t leave without permission from the President’s staff, he said, preferably from the staff member who was, among the White House staffers in Dallas, the closest to the President: Ken O’Donnell. Youngblood and Roberts continued, in Youngblood’s phrase, to “press Johnson” to leave the hospital “immediately”—they “suggested that he think it over, as he would have to be sworn in”—but Johnson didn’t change his mind “about staying put until there was some definite word on the President.”

And there was still, for minutes that seemed very long, no definite word. “Every face that came in, you searched for the answers you must know,” Lady Bird Johnson said later. Lyndon Johnson still stood against the wall in that small, curtained space, his wife sitting beside him, two or three men off to one side, standing silent or occasionally whispering among themselves; standing in front of him “always there was Rufe,” Mrs. Johnson said. Johnson stood there for about forty minutes. Then, at 1:20 p.m., O’Donnell appeared at the door and crossed the room to Lyndon Johnson, and, seeing the stricken “face of Kenny O’Donnell, who loved him so much,” Lady Bird knew.

“He’s gone,” O’Donnell said, to the thirty-sixth President of the United States.

When the first calls came into George Hunt’s office at Life reporting “that Kennedy had been shot—at first, that’s all: just that he had been shot,” Russell Sackett, an associate editor, recalled, the meeting broke up immediately, with editors and reporters running back to their offices.

During the next few minutes, while the news was trickling in from Dallas, one decision was made quickly: Keith Wheeler’s article on Lyndon Johnson would not run in the next issue of the magazine: there would be no room for it. About a week later, William Lambert went in to see the magazine’s assistant managing editor, Ralph Graves, and told him that any further investigation into Johnson’s finances should be postponed. “I told him I thought we ought to give the guy a chance,” he said. Graves agreed, saying, in Lambert’s recollection, “If you hadn’t said that, I was going to tell you that.” (When the Life series finally ran, in August, 1964, it put the Johnson family’s “total accumulation of wealth” at approximately fourteen million dollars. Johnson associates hotly disputed this, putting the figure at about four million.)

No one thought to notify the four men meeting behind closed doors in Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building about what was happening in Dallas, and Don Reynolds continued giving his account, and pushing his checks and invoices across the table to Van Kirk and Drennan. According to the most definitive account of the Bobby Baker case, it was shortly after 2:30 p.m. Washington time—about ten minutes after O’Donnell told Lyndon Johnson, “He’s gone”—when Reynolds finished, and, just as he did, a secretary “burst into the room . . . sobbing almost hysterically” and shouting that President Kennedy had been killed. Reynolds, saying that, since Johnson was now President, “you won’t need these,” reached for his documents, but Van Kirk refused to let him take them, saying that they now belonged to the Rules Committee.

(The committee’s investigation would drag on for nineteen months of bitter partisan wrangling. During this time, Reynolds made other charges against Johnson and Bobby Baker that, unlike his charges about the insurance kickback and the McCloskey performance bond, were not supported by documentation, and the committee’s majority report, vehemently disputed in the minority report, stated that Reynolds’s “credibility” had been “destroyed.” But, while Baker disputed Reynolds’s later allegations, he said that Reynolds had “told the truth with respect to the LBJ insurance policy” and the performance bond. “I was the man who had put Reynolds and McCloskey together”—on the bond—“so I know what the understandings were,” Baker said. In 1967, Baker himself was convicted of larceny, fraud, and tax evasion in an unrelated campaign-funds case and served sixteen months in prison.)

At the moment the news from Dallas reached the office of Abe Fortas, Johnson’s chief legal adviser, he was conferring with Bobby Baker, who had retained him as his attorney in the Rules Committee investigation, and in any criminal prosecutions that might follow.

“As soon as” the news came, Baker recalled, he realized that, if Fortas continued to represent him, the attorney might find himself in “a conflict-of-interest situation.” Telling Fortas, “I know Lyndon Johnson will be calling on you for many services,” he released him as his attorney.

“He’s gone,” Ken O’Donnell said. And “right then,” Homer Thornberry later said of Johnson, “he took charge.”

Even before O’Donnell came in, as Johnson was standing against the back wall of that curtained cubicle in Parkland Hospital, there had been something striking in his bearing, something that had first shown itself that day in the tone of his voice as he lay on the floor of a speeding car, with a heavy body on top of him and frantic voices on a shortwave radio crackling in his ears. Johnson’s aides and allies knew that, for all his rages and his bellowing, his gloating and his groaning, his endless monologues, his demeanor was very different in moments of crisis, in moments when there were decisions—tough decisions, crucial decisions—to be made; that in those moments he became, as his secretary Mary Rather recalled, “quiet and still.” He had been very quiet during the long minutes he stood there in the cubicle. “Very little passed between us,” Homer Thornberry recalled; no words from Johnson even to Lady Bird. As he stood in front of that blank wall, the carnation still in his buttonhole, there was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been seen very much during the previous three years.

And the hangdog look was gone, replaced by an expression—the lines on the face no longer drooping but hard—that Jack Brooks described as “set.” Lyndon Johnson’s oldest aides and allies, the men who had known him longest, knew that expression: the big jaw jutting, the lips above it pulled into a tight, grim line, the corners turned down in a hint of a snarl, the dark-brown eyes, under the long black eyebrows, narrowed, hard, piercing. It was an expression of determination and fierce concentration; when Lyndon Johnson wore that expression, a problem was being thought through with an intensity that was almost palpable, a problem was being thought through—and a decision made. That expression, set and hard, was, his aide Horace Busby said, Lyndon Johnson’s “deciding expression,” and that was his expression now. To Lady Bird Johnson, looking up at her husband, his face had become “almost a graven image of a face carved in bronze.”

What was going through Lyndon Johnson’s mind as he stood there history will never know. The only thing that is clear is that if, during those long minutes of waiting, he was making decisions—this man with the instinct to decide, the will to decide—by the time O’Donnell spoke and the waiting was over, the decisions had been made.

O’Donnell and the Secret Service agents were still urging him to leave the hospital and fly back to Washington at once. The possibility of “conspiracy” was looming larger, because, Johnson learned, six members of the Cabinet—including Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon—together with the White House press secretary, Pierre Salinger, were not in Washington but on a plane, en route to a conference in Japan. Johnson, as one account puts it, was “disturbed to learn that more than half the cabinet [was] five time zones away, somewhere over the vast Pacific Ocean,” and all together on the same plane. The Dallas motorcade was one of the rare occasions when President and Vice-President were not only both out of Washington but both in the same motorcade: with so many other officials away from Washington at the same time, and bunched together on the same plane, the shots at the President had been fired at a moment when the government of the United States was unusually vulnerable. Was that fact only a coincidence, or was it the reason the moment had been chosen? The possibility that the shooting was “part of a far-ranging conspiracy that had not yet run its course” was “in the thoughts of everyone,” Youngblood recalled. Among the reporters being herded into a nurses’ classroom at the other end of Parkland Hospital, which was going to serve as the press briefing room, there was, as Charles Roberts, Newsweek’s longtime White House correspondent, recalled, “a fear that—perhaps a lot of people thought, as I did, of Lincoln’s assassination, where not only Lincoln but four or five of his Cabinet were marked for assassination, that it might be, just might be, an attempt to literally wipe out the top echelon of government. We certainly had no way of knowing that it was a lone . . . gunman.” The urging from the three men standing in front of Johnson intensified. “Sir,” Youngblood said, “we must leave here immediately.” O’Donnell told him “that in my opinion he ought to get out of there as fast as he could.” “We’ve got to get in the air,” Emory Roberts said.

But Johnson reached a different decision—and he announced it as quickly as if he had already thought through all the options and decided what he would do. When O’Donnell kept pressing him to leave Dallas, he asked him, “Well, what about Mrs. Kennedy?,” and when O’Donnell said that she was determined not to leave her husband’s body (at that moment, she was standing, shocked and silent, in a corridor outside the room in which the body was lying), and that Johnson should fly back without her, while she and her husband’s body and his aides followed in another plane, Johnson said that he wasn’t going to do that—that he would take her back on the same plane with him. O’Donnell said that she would never leave the hospital without the body. Johnson said that in that case he would leave the hospital but not Dallas; he would go to the plane, but he would wait aboard it for the coffin, and the widow, to arrive. A contrary course continued to be urged. A new adjective entered the descriptions of Lyndon Johnson. He was, Youngblood said, “adamant.”

He wasn’t ignoring the conspiracy possibility; in fact, he “mentioned . . . the attempt on the life of the Secretary of State, Seward, at the time of Lincoln’s assassination,” Malcolm Kilduff, the press secretary on the Texas trip, recalled. Therefore, Johnson said, since they were going to leave the hospital, they should leave immediately. Exchanging quick sentences, he and Youngblood agreed that, because of the possibility of another assassination attempt, the trip back to Love Field should be made in as much secrecy as possible: by different hospital corridors from the ones they had run through on the way in; in different cars from the ones they had arrived in; by a different route from the one the motorcade had taken into the city. Youngblood said that when they started moving they should move fast, and should use unmarked cars, with Johnson and Lady Bird in separate cars, and Johnson told him to get the cars ready, and Youngblood sent an agent to do so, telling him to have the cars waiting, with their motors running, in the ambulance bays at the emergency-room entrance, and to make sure the drivers knew back-street routes to the airport, so that they could use them if necessary. “Quick plans were made about how to get to the car. Who to ride in what,” Lady Bird said later. Her husband “was the most decisive person around us. Not that he wasn’t willing to listen . . . but he was quick to decide.”

Amoment later, another decision had to be made. Kilduff came into the curtained room to ask Johnson’s permission to announce Kennedy’s death to the press corps, waiting in the nurses’ classroom.

“Mr. President,” he began. It was the first time anyone had ever called Lyndon Johnson that, but, when he answered Kilduff, it was a President answering, firm and in command. “He reacted immediately,” Kilduff recalled. Immediately, and unequivocally. “No,” he said, “I think I had better get out of here and get back to the plane before you announce it. We don’t know whether this is a worldwide conspiracy, whether they are after me as well. . . . We just don’t know.” And get in touch with that plane carrying the Cabinet, he said. Get that plane turned around. The Cabinet plane, notified of the assassination by a news bulletin, which was confirmed by the White House, had already turned around, but neither Johnson nor anyone in the room with him was aware of it.

 

He made his dispositions. There hadn’t been many allies in the motorcade; three whose loyalty he could count on were the Texas congressmen, and he told the two who were in the room, Homer Thornberry and Jack Brooks, to ride back to the plane with him. He wanted every one of the few aides who had accompanied him to Dallas rounded up; he told Cliff Carter to find his executive assistant Liz Carpenter and his secretary Marie Fehmer and bring them to the plane. That still wasn’t much staff. Among the handful of people in his party was a Houston public-relations man, Jack Valenti, who had caught Johnson’s attention a few years earlier by writing favorable newspaper columns about him, and who had worked with him on arrangements for a dinner tribute to the Houston congressman Albert Thomas. He told Carter to find Valenti, and bring him along. Carter and his crew would need a driver, he told Youngblood, and Youngblood assigned an agent to wait at the ambulance bays until they arrived. Then he was ready. “Homer, you go with me,” he said. “Jack, you go with Bird.”

In a rush—not running, because that would call attention to them, but walking as fast as they could—they left the cubicle, through hospital corridors, following a red stripe on the floor, to the emergency-room exit, where the cars were waiting: Youngblood first, his head turning ceaselessly from side to side as he searched for danger; Johnson second, his eyes down as if he didn’t want to catch the eye of anyone who might be watching; then the two congressmen, and then two more Secret Service agents, and Lady Bird, who kept breaking into a trot as she tried to keep up. “Getting out of the hospital into the cars was one of the swiftest walks I have ever made,” she recalled.

The White House press corps was gathered in the nurses’ classroom at the other end of Parkland Hospital, waiting for word on Kennedy’s condition. As the new President of the United States headed out of the hospital, Robert Pierpoint, of CBS News, caught a glimpse of him, but didn’t follow. No other reporter followed him, or, apparently, even knew that he was leaving. “We weren’t thinking about succession,” Newsweek’s Charles Roberts explained later. “I don’t remember anybody saying, ‘My God, Johnson is President. . . . There was almost no focus of attention on him, and this was true as they left the hospital. . . . Nobody made any attempt to follow him, although he was then President of the United States.” A single photographer, the official White House photographer, Captain Cecil Stoughton, of the Army Signal Corps, happened to be standing by the emergency-room reception desk at the moment the little procession hurried by. Suspecting that Kennedy was dead, he decided to follow and caught a ride a few minutes later with Carter and Valenti.

Getting into the back seat of the first car, Johnson sat behind the driver, with Youngblood by the window on the other side of the back seat, in the place where the Vice-President normally sat, so that if someone fired at the person in that seat, thinking it was the Vice-President, the bullet would hit him instead of Johnson. Thornberry sat in front. Youngblood told Johnson to keep below window level, and he slouched down on his shoulder blades.

As they were pulling away from the hospital, another piece of protection was added. Albert Thomas, the Houston congressman, standing near the ambulance bays, saw the cars and motioned for them to stop for him. Youngblood told the driver to keep going, but Johnson said, “Stop and let him get in.” Thomas got in the front seat, beside Thornberry. As the car started moving again, Johnson told Thornberry to climb across the back of the front seat and get in the rear. Thornberry did, but did not wind up sitting in the vacant space between Johnson and Youngblood. Instead, Youngblood reported later, he “took a position on the window side” behind the driver, where Johnson had been sitting. Johnson was now in the middle. Whether he had changed seats by accident or by design, he now had a human shield on both sides.

One of the motorcycle policemen in front of them began to sound his siren. “Let’s don’t have the sirens,” Johnson said. As they sped through the Dallas streets, Lady Bird, following in the second car, saw, atop a building, a flag at half mast: “I think that is when the enormity of what had happened first struck me.” And then they were on the Love Field tarmac, and, Youngblood recalled, “suddenly there before us was one of the most welcome sights I had ever seen”—Air Force One. The staircase to the rear door and the Presidential quarters was in place, and he and Lyndon Johnson “practically ran up” the steps.

Entering the plane, Johnson walked forward down a narrow aisle, past a sitting area with six first-class-type plane seats, and then past a small bedroom that contained beds for the President and his wife—“I want this kept strictly for the use of Mrs. Kennedy, Rufus,” Johnson said; “see to that”—and into the President’s stateroom, a compartment sixteen feet square with a small sofa attached to a wall; a small desk, with a high-backed armchair, for the President; and a small conference table with four chairs. A handful of crew members and White House staff, including two secretaries, were watching the television. Back at Parkland Hospital, Kilduff had announced Kennedy’s death, and Walter Cronkite, of CBS News, was reporting it to the country. Youngblood was shouting to everyone to pull down the window shades; the possibility of a conspiracy, and of snipers at the airport, still seemed “very real indeed,” the agent said later. From the secretaries came the sound of weeping.

The stateroom was already warm. Having been alerted to prepare for an immediate takeoff, Air Force One’s pilot, Colonel Jim Swindal, had disconnected the air-conditioning unit, mounted on a mobile cart, that kept the plane cool on the ground. The plane’s own air-conditioning functioned only when the engines were running. Swindal had only one engine running, at a low speed that provided electricity for lights in the cabins but not air-conditioning.

For a few minutes, there was a hurried conference between Johnson and the three Texas congressmen. There were more decisions to be made: when and where to take the oath of office, whether here, in Dallas, or in Washington, where there could be a formal ceremony, in an appropriate setting, with the oath administered by Chief Justice Earl Warren, as Warren had administered it to John F. Kennedy at his Inauguration. Harry Truman, another Vice-President brought to the Presidency by the sudden death of his predecessor, was not sworn in until two hours and twenty-five minutes after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death (and almost two hours after he had been notified of it), waiting until most of the Cabinet, congressional leaders, and several other key government officials could be assembled in the Cabinet Room, at the White House, to watch Chief Justice Harlan Stone swear him in. Thornberry argued for Washington, Thomas and Brooks for Dallas, so that the country would immediately see that the succession had taken place: “Suppose the plane is delayed?” Thomas asked. But the discussion lasted only a few minutes. There were reasons for the swearing in to take place quickly: the fact that the President had been assassinated, and that a wider conspiracy might be involved, made the need to establish a sense of continuity, of stability, more urgent; if the Russians tried to take advantage of the situation, there should not be the slightest doubt about who was in command. On Wall Street, a panic was already under way. It wiped out more than ten billion dollars in stock values within slightly more than an hour. Although the taking of the oath was a merely symbolic gesture—no one but a Vice-President had ever ascended to the Presidency when a President died, so precedent had established that a Vice-President became President automatically, immediately upon a President’s death—it was a powerful symbol. To Johnson, it seemed particularly meaningful, as if, despite the fact that he had actually been President since the moment Kennedy died, it was the taking of the oath that would truly make him President; later, recalling November 22nd, he said, “I took the oath. I became President.” During the discussion, a crew member saw that Johnson was “very much in command,” and, as soon as Thomas finished arguing for taking the oath in Dallas, Johnson said, “I agree.”

If coolness and decisiveness under pressure were components of Lyndon Johnson’s character, however, there were, as always with Johnson, other, contrasting components.

Aware though he was of considerations that militated against anyone’s entering the Presidential bedroom, that it should be kept “strictly for the use of Mrs. Kennedy,” as he had instructed Youngblood, there now arose another consideration. He had telephone calls to make, including one of a particularly delicate nature, and he wanted privacy while he made them. 

Privacy was available in the stateroom where he was standing (as it happened, he was standing right beside a telephone); doors on either side of the room could close it off completely from the rest of the plane; he could have asked the people in the room to leave and closed the doors. But he had in mind greater privacy than that. Leading Marie Fehmer—and Youngblood, who had said that he would not leave his side until the plane was in the air—into the Kennedys’ bedroom, he closed the door, pulled off the jacket of his suit, and sprawled on one of the beds.

And these other components were demonstrated also by the identity of the person to whom the delicate phone call was made, and by the questions Lyndon Johnson asked during the call.

Objective, rational reasons can explain why Lyndon Johnson called Robert Kennedy. One of the purposes of the call was to obtain a legal opinion on a matter of governmental policy, and Kennedy was the country’s chief legal officer. And, the decision to take the oath having been made, the wording of the oath was needed, and there was also the question of who was legally empowered to administer it, and these pieces of information could be obtained most authoritatively from the same source.

And there were strategic reasons for him to call Bobby. Even in this first hour after John F. Kennedy’s death, Lyndon Johnson seems to have had feelings that would torment him for the rest of his life—feelings understandable in any man placed in the Presidency not through an election but through an assassin’s bullet, and feelings exacerbated, in his case, by the contrast, and what he felt was the world’s view of the contrast, between him and the President he was replacing; by the contempt in which he had been held by the people around the President; and by the stark geographical fact of where the act elevating him to office had taken place. Recalling his feelings years later, in retirement, he said that, even after he had taken the oath, “for millions of Americans I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper. And then there was Texas, my home, the home of . . . the murder. . . . And then there were the bigots and the dividers and the Eastern intellectuals, who were waiting to knock me down before I could even begin to stand up.” He seems to have felt even in this first hour that the best way to legitimatize his ascent to the throne, to make himself seem less like a usurper, would be to demonstrate that his ascent had the support of his predecessor’s family. The decision to be sworn in immediately, in Dallas, instead of waiting until he returned to Washington, had been made, but he wanted that decision to be approved by the man whose approval would carry the most weight.

There were, of course, reasons for him not to call Robert Kennedy, reasons for him to obtain the information he wanted from someone else—from anyone else. The questions he asked—could the swearing in take place in Dallas? what was the wording of the oath? who could administer it?—were not complicated questions, and could have been answered by any one of a hundred government officials. One of them, in fact, was an official he had already dealt with extensively on questions of Vice-Presidential procedure, and whom he trusted and even felt a rapport with: the No. 2 man in the Justice Department, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

And there were other—non-governmental—considerations that might have led him to telephone Katzenbach or some other official rather than the one he called, considerations of humanity rather than of politics. But, whatever the reasons, not long after Robert Kennedy had been told that the brother he loved so deeply was dead his telephone rang again, and when Kennedy picked it up he found himself talking to a man he hated—who was asking him to provide details of the precise procedure by which he could, without delay, formally assume his brother’s office.

Robert Kennedy had been having lunch with his wife, Ethel; Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. Attorney in New York; and Morgenthau’s deputy Silvio Mollo beside the swimming pool at Hickory Hill, his home in Virginia. It was a bright, sunny day, warm for November. At the top of the lawn sloping up from the pool, workmen were painting a new wing that had been added to the rambling white house. Suddenly, Morgenthau saw one of the workmen start running toward them. He was holding a transistor radio in his hand, and he was shouting something that no one could understand. Just then, a telephone rang on the other side of the pool, and Ethel walked around the pool to answer it, and said it was J. Edgar Hoover. Bobby walked over to take the call, and Morgenthau saw him clap his hand to his mouth and turn away with a look of “shock and horror” on his face. “Jack’s been shot,” he said. “It may be fatal.” He walked back to the house and tried to get more news, and about twenty minutes later he got it, from a White House aide, and a few minutes after that it was confirmed by Hoover, and then, at 2:56 p.m., Lyndon Johnson was on the phone.

This call—and a second one between Johnson and Robert Kennedy, six minutes later—was not recorded, and their recollections differ. The only witnesses—Rufus Youngblood and Marie Fehmer—heard just one side of the calls, and their impressions of what occurred differ markedly from those of Katzenbach, to whom Robert Kennedy spoke both between the two calls and immediately afterward. But, whatever the differences, there emerges from the recollections and impressions a picture of two conversations between a man who knew exactly what he wanted and what to say in order to get it and a man so stunned by grief and shock that he hardly knew what he was saying, or even, to some extent, what he was hearing.

Johnson gave accounts of the telephone calls several times, both in the months immediately following the assassination and in 1967, when the dispute over the conversations grew so public and so bitter that it became a crucial element in the great blood feud between him and Robert Kennedy, perhaps the greatest blood feud of American politics in the twentieth century, and one that played a role, small but not insignificant, in decisions that shaped the course of American history. By Johnson’s account, he telephoned Kennedy because “I wanted to say something that would comfort him.” And, by his account, he succeeded in this purpose, bringing Kennedy’s mind around to practical matters. “In spite of his shock and sorrow,” Johnson said, Kennedy “discussed the practical problems at hand with dispatch”; he was “very businesslike.” They discussed “the matter of my taking the oath of office,” and “the possibility of a conspiracy,” Johnson asserted. Kennedy, he asserted, “said that he would like to look into the matter of” when and where the oath should be administered, and “call back,” and when Kennedy called back “he said that the oath should be administered to me immediately.” Kennedy’s accounts of the conversations, including one he gave that evening to Ken O’Donnell after O’Donnell arrived back in Washington, were different. Johnson, Bobby said, had told him that “a lot of people down here had advised him to be sworn in right away.” When there was no immediate reply, Johnson pressed him, asking, “Do you have any objection to that?” Bobby said he hadn’t replied to the question. “I was too surprised to say anything about it. I said to myself, ‘What’s the rush? Couldn’t he wait until he got the President’s body out of there and back to Washington?’ ” Johnson, in this account, took—or used—silence as assent. “He began to ask me a lot of questions about who should swear him in. I was too confused and upset to talk about it.” In a later conversation, which Bobby taped for posterity, he said that he had never told Johnson that the oath should be administered immediately. “I was sort of taken aback at the moment because . . . I didn’t think—see what the rush was.” In fact, he said, his wishes were the opposite of what Johnson portrayed: “I thought, I suppose, at the time, at least, I thought it would be nice if the President came back to Washington [as] President Kennedy.” The only aspect of the conversation that is agreed on is that Kennedy said he would look into the matter and call Johnson back.

Kennedy called Katzenbach, saying, “They want to swear him in right away, in Texas. That’s not necessary, is it?” “No, not necessary,” Katzenbach replied. And when Kennedy asked who could swear him in, Katzenbach said, “Anyone who can administer an oath,” a category that included any federal judge or hundreds of other government officials; the place or the exact time of the swearing in didn’t matter. “You become President when the President dies—that’s accepted. It’s not a question.”

Katzenbach later said that he agreed that an immediate swearing in, while not necessary, was desirable, “given its symbolic significance.” But he was “absolutely stunned” that Johnson had made the call to Bobby Kennedy so soon after his brother’s death. Any number of federal officials could have given Johnson the information he was seeking, he said. “He could have called me. I was in my office.” He felt that Johnson might have made the call because “he may have wanted to be absolutely sure that there wouldn’t be an explosion from Bobby’s end”—wanted to insure that Bobby would not later say that the immediate swearing in showed a lack of respect for the dead President. But, he said, given Bobby’s “feelings about Johnson, and about his brother,” the fact that Johnson called Bobby so soon after his brother’s death “frankly appalled” him. “Calling Bobby was really wrong.”

Then there was a second call—the return call from Robert Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson—about which, as William Manchester writes, “the facts are unclear, and a dispassionate observer cannot choose.” Johnson said later that during this call Kennedy advised him “that the oath should be administered to me immediately, before taking off for Washington, and that it could be administered by a judicial officer.” During the call, however, it became clear that the questions of when and where the oath should be administered were in fact now moot, and that all Johnson wanted from Kennedy was the oath’s precise wording. Kennedy said he would have Katzenbach dictate it; telephoning his deputy again, he said, “They’re going to swear him in down there, and he needs the oath.” Katzenbach pulled a copy of the Constitution off his bookshelf, and read the thirty-seven-word declaration in Article II, Section 1:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Johnson had told Marie Fehmer to go out to the staff section of the plane and take down the wording. “Bobby started it and turned the phone to Katzenbach,” she recalled. (Katzenbach apparently patched in to this second call.) What was Katzenbach’s voice like at that time? “It was controlled; he was like steel,” Fehmer said. “Bobby’s was not when he started. I kept thinking, You shouldn’t be doing this.” When Katzenbach finished, she asked him, “ ‘May I read it back to you?’ Which I afterward thought may have been a little cruel, but yet I wanted to check it.” As for her own emotional state at the time, “I was all right. I broke up later that night, but I was all right. You got that feeling from him”—Johnson. “He taught you that, by George, you can do anything. . . . There was a job to be done.”

Whatever the disputes over the telephone calls, the oath was dictated, and typed out, and if the desired assent by Bobby Kennedy to its immediate administering was not obtained, at least he had been asked whether he objected to it, and had not replied, so it would be difficult for him to criticize it later; the possibility of public criticism from the President’s brother had been muted (only for a short time, as it turned out). The call to Hickory Hill had achieved its purpose. Whatever the details of the conversation between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, when Johnson hung up the phone he had gotten enough of what he wanted so that he could go ahead.

Hanging up the phone, he began giving orders. Any federal judge could swear him in, he had been told. He knew what judge he wanted—and she was right in Dallas.

“As much as any single person possibly could,” a historian has written, this judge “personified Johnson’s utter powerlessness” during his Vice-Presidency. He had proposed Sarah Hughes, a long-time political ally from Dallas, for a judgeship on the Federal District Court in that city, but had been unable as Vice-President to secure her appointment; she had been named to the bench only after the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, intervened, a fact that had made Johnson feel, he said, like “the biggest liar and fool in the history of the State of Texas.” “Get Sarah Hughes,” he told Marie Fehmer.

Judge Hughes’s law clerk told Fehmer that he didn’t know the Judge’s whereabouts—the last he knew, he said, she had been at the Trade Mart luncheon waiting for the President to arrive—and Fehmer told Johnson that.

He told her to call the clerk back, and he picked up the receiver himself. “This is Lyndon Johnson,” he said. “Find her.”

She was found, and she hurried to Love Field.

He wanted something more from the Kennedys, and he got that, too.

No single gesture would do more to legitimatize the transition in the eyes of the world—to demonstrate that the transfer of power had been orderly, proper, in accordance with the Constitution; to remove any taint of usurpation; to dampen, as far as possible, suspicion of complicity by him in the deed; to show that the family of the man he was succeeding bore him no ill will and supported him—than the attendance at his swearing-in ceremony of the late President’s widow. It would demonstrate, as well, continuity and stability: show that the government of the United States would function without interruption despite the assassination of the man who sat at its head.

Were these considerations part of the reason—in addition to the humanitarian consideration that he didn’t want her left behind in Dallas—that when the Secret Service and Ken O’Donnell told him that Jacqueline Kennedy would follow in another plane he had refused to leave Dallas without her? Certainly some of the Kennedy loyalists harbored that suspicion. “Some of us did feel that he was using Mrs. Kennedy and the Kennedy aura when he [staged] his oath-taking ceremony . . . with her present, and so he could arrive in Washington with her and President Kennedy’s casket,” O’Donnell wrote later. History will never know the answer to that question. All history can know for certain is that now, on Air Force One, Johnson moved with determination to obtain her presence.

His efforts were almost derailed at the start by a moment of awkwardness.

While he was making phone calls—not only to Bobby Kennedy but to his administrative assistant, Walter Jenkins, and to the national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy—in the plane’s bedroom, hammering began on the other side of the bulkhead that separated the bedroom from the rear seating compartment, and when Fehmer went out into the corridor and asked what it was, a crew member told her that four of the six seats in the compartment were being removed to make room for Kennedy’s heavy bronze coffin, which was about to be brought on board through the rear door, followed by Jackie and Kennedy’s aides.

Kennedy’s aides said later that they weren’t aware at that moment that Johnson and his party were aboard the plane, that they had assumed he had returned to Air Force Two and, in fact, had already taken off for Washington.

In the confusion, they hadn’t noticed that Air Force Two was still parked nearby. As soon as the Kennedy party was on board, Jackie, seeking a few moments alone while the coffin was being lashed to the floor, walked past it and opened the door to the bedroom, thinking that it would be empty—and, instead, encountered Lyndon Johnson. Whether, when she opened the door, Johnson was, as Manchester wrote after talking to her, “reclining on the bed,” in his shirtsleeves, or whether, as Fehmer later stated (in an effort to “clear up the bedroom thing”), he had already risen from the bed and was about to leave the bedroom and, “as he opened the door, there was Mrs. Kennedy,” she was evidently shocked; hastily retreating to the rear compartment, she told O’Donnell, he relates, “something that left me stunned: when she opened the door of her cabin, she found Lyndon Johnson.” She wasn’t the only one who retreated. “She was entering her private bedroom,” Fehmer recalled. “She . . . saw a stranger, in his shirtsleeves yet . . . in the hallowed ground. . . . We, of course, scurried out of that bedroom. It was really embarrassing.”

Returning to the rear compartment, Jackie sat down in one of the two remaining seats, across the aisle from the coffin. In a moment, Lyndon, having collected Lady Bird from the stateroom, came back to see her. “It was a very, very hard thing to do,” Lady Bird Johnson recalled. “Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked—that immaculate woman—it was caked with blood, her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them; I never could. And that was somehow one of the most poignant sights . . . exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.” Shocked though she was at Jackie’s appearance, Lady Bird found the right things to say: “Dear God, it’s come to this . . . ,” and Jackie responded, making “it as easy as possible. She said things like, ‘Oh, Lady Bird . . . we’ve always liked you two so much.’ She said, ‘Oh, what if I had not been there. I’m so glad I was there.’ ” Only once did Jackie’s voice change: when Lady Bird asked her if she wanted to change clothes. Not right then, Jackie said. “And then . . . if with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’ ”

And Lyndon finally raised the subject. “Well—about the swearing in,” he said. According to Manchester, he had to use the phrase twice before Jackie responded, “Oh, yes, I know, I know.” “She understood the symbols of authority, the need for some semblance of national majesty after the disaster,” Manchester wrote; whether she agreed explicitly or not, there was an understanding that when Johnson took the oath she would be present.

His work with the Kennedys done, Lyndon Johnson headed back to the stateroom. 

It was crammed now with people: Secret Service agents; the three Texas congressmen; Kennedy’s aides and secretaries who had come aboard with the coffin; a Kennedy military aide, Major General Chester V. Clifton; Johnson’s aides Carter, Valenti, Fehmer, and Liz Carpenter; Moyers, who, hearing of the assassination while in Austin to advance the President’s Texas trip, had chartered a plane, flown to Dallas, and come aboard Air Force One; two Presidential valets, Kennedy’s George Thomas and Johnson’s Paul Glynn—all crowded together in a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot square that was so dimly lit (with the shades still drawn across the windows, the only lighting came from dim fluorescent bulbs overhead) that the General’s gold braid glinted only faintly in the gloom, and that, with no air-conditioning, had become so hot and stuffy that, one man said, “it was suffocating in there; it was hard to think.” The low, penetrating whine of the single jet engine that was operating never stopped. There was weeping in the room, and whispering—and confusion. Kennedy’s aides had been able to remove the dead President’s coffin from the hospital only after an angry confrontation with the Dallas County medical examiner, who, insisting that an autopsy had to be performed first, had stood in a hospital doorway to block them, backed by policemen. They had literally shoved the examiner aside to get out of the building, and now, on the plane, O’Donnell recalled, he “kept looking out the window, expecting to see the flashing red lights” of police cars, “coming with a court order to stop our takeoff.”

Not knowing when they came aboard that Johnson had decided to wait for Judge Hughes and take the oath on the ground (not knowing for some minutes, in fact, that Johnson was even on board; he was at that time behind the closed door of Kennedy’s bedroom), Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, another Kennedy military aide, had gone to the cockpit and ordered Colonel Swindal to take off immediately. Swindal couldn’t—the plane’s forward door was still open, with the ramp still pushed up against it—and by the time the door was closed Malcolm Kilduff had come to the cockpit to tell him that the plane wouldn’t be taking off until after the swearing-in ceremony. When McHugh realized that the plane wasn’t taking off, he rushed back to the cockpit to repeat his order, and Kilduff countermanded it. O’Donnell, “in a highly desperate strait,” he said, headed for the cockpit himself, and only then learned of Johnson’s plans. The conflicting orders were less the bitter series of confrontations between Kennedy and Johnson aides that were later pictured than a misunderstanding, but they added to the confusion. McHugh and other Kennedy aides were still pushing back and forth down the crowded aisle in the passenger portion of the plane, and in the stateroom men and women were asking one another what was happening, what was going to happen. No one really knew. 

And then, in the narrow doorway that led back toward the Presidential bedroom, there suddenly appeared, in Jack Valenti’s words, “the huge figure of Lyndon Johnson.”

The carnation was gone; the dark gray of his suit, which appeared black in the dim light, was relieved only by the tiny Silver Star bar in his lapel and a corner of a white handkerchief peeking out from the breast pocket. His thinning hair was slicked down smooth, so that as he turned his head from side to side, surveying the cabin, checking on who was there, there was nothing to soften that massive skull, or the sharp jut of the big jaw and the big nose, and his mouth was set in that grim, tough line.

Seeing him standing there, Valenti, who had known Lyndon Johnson mainly during his Vice-Presidency, was startled. “Even in that instant, there was a new demeanor” in him, he recalled. “He looked graver.” The restless movements were gone. “Whatever emotions or passions he had in him, he had put them under a strict discipline,” so that “he was very quiet and seemingly very much in command of himself.” There had been “a transformation,” Valenti said. “He was in a strange way another man, not the same man I had known.”

Other Johnson aides, who had known him longer, saw, after he returned to Washington that night, the same transformation, but found nothing strange in it. The Lyndon Johnson whom Horace Busby, having worked for him since 1947, saw in Washington that night was a Lyndon Johnson he hadn’t seen for three years, but it was a Lyndon Johnson he remembered very well. The Johnson he saw—and whom George Reedy and Walter Jenkins and other longtime aides saw—was simply the old Lyndon Johnson, the pre-Vice-Presidential Lyndon Johnson. And Busby understood why he had changed back, and why he had been able to change back so quickly. “You see, it was just that he was coming back to himself,” he explained. “He was back where he belonged. He was back in command.”

As the people in the stateroom noticed Johnson standing in the doorway, the ones who had been sitting rose to their feet. The whispering stopped—even, for a moment, the weeping.

“When I walked in, everyone stood up,” Johnson wrote in his memoir. “Here were close friends like Homer Thornberry and Jack Brooks; here were aides. . . . All of them were on their feet. . . . I realized nothing would ever be the same again. . . . To old friends who had never called me anything but Lyndon, I would now be ‘Mr. President.’ ” In the memoir, he said that this “was a frightening, disturbing prospect.” But if it was he gave no sign of that at the time. In the silence, Albert Thomas said, “We are ready to carry out any orders you have, Mr. President.” Walking into the stateroom, as people made way before him, he sat down in the high-backed President’s chair. Beckoning over Kilduff, he told him to make sure a photographer and reporters were aboard to record the swearing-in ceremony. “Put the pool on board,” he told him. He beckoned over Valenti. “I want you on my staff,” he said. “You’ll fly back with me to Washington.” And when an order was challenged, no challenge was entertained. When O’Donnell and O’Brien came over to him and asked if the plane could take off immediately, he said, “We can’t leave here until I take the oath of office. I just talked on the phone with Bobby. He told me to wait here until Sarah Hughes gives me the oath.” (Then he added a line with connotations. “You must remember Sarah Hughes,” he said.) O’Donnell didn’t believe him—“I could not imagine Bobby telling him to stay”; Johnson had become President the moment Kennedy died; “the oath is just a symbolic formality”; “there is no need to hurry about it.” (And later that night his skepticism was confirmed: “Bobby gave me an entirely different version of his conversation with Johnson.”) Whether O’Donnell believed him or not no longer signified, however. Johnson’s expression hardly changed as he spoke; his voice was so low that, one observer said, “he was almost whispering.” But if the voice was soft, that was not the case with the message. “Johnson was adamant that the oath be administered by Judge Hughes,” Larry O’Brien recalled. “There was adamancy. It became clear that the oath was going to be administered on the ground.” General McHugh was still pushing up and down the aisle, trying to get the plane to take off, not having talked to Johnson directly, but O’Brien and O’Donnell stopped arguing.

Standing up, Johnson moved to the center of the crowded little room (as was the case in most rooms he was in, he was the tallest person in it), and through the recollections of people present in that room there runs a common theme: a sense that, out of aimless confusion, order was quickly emerging.

If one reason for his insistence that the swearing in take place at the earliest possible moment was to demonstrate, quickly, continuity and stability to the nation and the world, then it was important that the nation and the world see that a new President had taken office. Luckily, Cecil Stoughton, the White House photographer, had come aboard, and, almost as soon as Johnson told Malcolm Kilduff to make sure a photographer was present at the ceremony, Kilduff bumped into him in the aisle. “Thank God you’re here,” Kilduff said. “The President’s going to take the oath.” And when Stoughton, carrying two cameras, entered the stateroom, seeing “Johnson in there, standing tall,” Johnson asked him, “Where do you want us, Cecil?” Stoughton told him that the room was so small that he would have to place his own back against a wall, and, to gain height for a better view, stand on the sofa, and that Johnson and the Judge should be directly in front of him but back a few feet: Johnson began moving people around, directing them to their places with jerks of his thumb—“taking command,” in Stoughton’s words. Witnesses were important; Kilduff asked Johnson whom he wanted present. “As many people as you can get in here,” he replied. Witnesses whose presence—whose photographed presence—would be testimony of continuity and legitimacy, of the Kennedy faction’s sanction of his assumption of Kennedy’s office, were particularly desirable; two of Jackie’s secretaries, Mary Gallagher and Pamela Turnure, were in the forward cabin, crying. He dispatched Kilduff to get them, and they came in, and so did General Clifton.

And he wanted from the Kennedy people another, more durable demonstration of continuity. Judge Hughes had not yet arrived; there were a few minutes to spare; he used them.

Sitting down again, he changed both his chair (to one at the conference table; the fact that he was not in the President’s chair “in itself did not go unnoticed” by the two men he beckoned over to sit with him) and his tone—a change so abrupt and dramatic that it would have been startling to anyone who had not witnessed, over the years, Lyndon Johnson’s remarkable ability to alter tone completely and instantaneously to accomplish a purpose. Where, just a few minutes before, in his conversations with O’Donnell and O’Brien, there had been “adamancy,” in full measure, now—in a new conversation with the same two men—there was humility, and in the same measure.

He wanted them to remain in their White House posts, he told the two Irishmen, still in the first throes of grief for their dead leader, because the best tribute that could be paid to President Kennedy would be passage of the programs he had believed in. They and he should fight for them together, he said, “shoulder to shoulder.” And, he said, leaning across the table and looking into their eyes, they should stay on because he needed them. He had so much to learn about his new responsibilities, and he just didn’t absorb things as quickly as Jack had. Jack had had not only the experience but the education and the understanding; he didn’t. “I need your help,” he said. “I need it badly. There is no one for me to turn to with as much experience as you have. I need you now more than President Kennedy needed you.”

He had only a few minutes to make the plea—he had hardly finished when Judge Hughes arrived. O’Donnell and O’Brien made no response at the time—“We can talk about that later,” O’Brien said; O’Donnell later described himself as “noncommittal”—but events were to prove that his plea had softened their feelings toward him. 

Judge Hughes arrived, a tiny woman in a brown dress decorated with white polka dots, and Johnson showed her to the place Stoughton had selected, in front of the sofa on which the photographer was standing. O’Brien put a small Catholic missal in her hands. Three reporters—Newsweek’s Roberts; Merriman Smith, of U.P.I.; and Sid Davis, of Westinghouse Broadcasting—also came on board, after a wild ride to Love Field in an unmarked police car, with the uniformed officer who was driving them speeding through red lights, avoiding tie-ups by bumping over median strips and driving against oncoming traffic. Despite their pleas, the driver had refused to notify their editors of their whereabouts, telling them, Davis recalled, that radio silence had to be maintained, because “they don’t know whether this is a conspiracy or not.” “We were speculating on . . . ‘Are they going to try for Johnson, and where have they taken him?’ ” Roberts recalled. “ ‘Are the Russians trying to take over Berlin?’ ” Seeing them enter the stateroom, Johnson said, “We’ve got the press here, so we can go ahead.” He made his final arrangements. Crowded though the stateroom was, a few more witnesses could still he crammed in. Raising his voice so that he could be heard in the forward cabin, he said, “Now we’re going to have a swearing in here, and I would like anyone who wants to see it to come on in to this compartment,” and, Judge Hughes recalled, “in they came until there wasn’t another inch of space”—until twenty-seven people were wedged into the stateroom, among the desk and the table and the chairs.

The Kennedy presence was still not all he wanted it to be. Johnson “particularly asked that . . . Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy’s secretary, be present,” Judge Hughes recalled, but when she came in she stood in the midst of the crowd behind him, so that she was not sufficiently prominent; he made a gesture and she squeezed forward until she was standing directly behind him. He made sure his position in front of the Judge was precisely where Stoughton wanted him, and placed Lady Bird on his right. He had Kilduff, who had obtained a Dictaphone machine, kneel on the floor next to the Judge to record the ceremony.

One witness was still missing, the most important one. As Judge Hughes recalled, he told her that “Mrs. Kennedy wanted to be present and we would wait for her.” To O’Donnell and O’Brien he said, “Do you want to ask Mrs. Kennedy if she would like to stand with us?” When they didn’t respond at once, the glance he threw at them was the old Johnson glance, the eyes burning with impatience and anger. “She said she wants to be here when I take the oath,” he told O’Donnell. “Why don’t you see what’s keeping her?”

The scene was still eerie: the gloom, the heat, the whispering, the low, insistent whine of the jet engine, the mass of dim faces crowded so close together. But one element had vanished: the confusion. Watching Lyndon Johnson arrange the crowd, give orders, deal with O’Donnell and O’Brien, Liz Carpenter, dazed by the rush of events, realized that there was at least one person in the room who wasn’t dazed, who was, however hectic the situation might be, in complete command of it. “Your mind was so dull, but one of the thoughts that went through my mind . . . was ‘Someone is in charge.’ . . . You had the feeling when you went into that cabin that things were well in hand.” Carpenter, like Valenti, was an idolater, but the journalists had the same feeling. On the ride out to the airport, Sid Davis, who, as he recalled, “had not known this man except as Majority Leader, and as someone who was . . . thought of by some . . . as ‘Colonel Cornpone,’ ” had said to his colleagues in the car, “It’s going to be hard to learn how to say President Lyndon B. Johnson.” As Davis watched Johnson in the stateroom now, it was, suddenly, no longer hard at all: “Soon—immediately . . . we started to see the measure of the guy and his leadership qualities.” Part of the feeling stemmed from his size. As Johnson stood in front of Judge Hughes, towering over everyone in the room, Stoughton realized for the first time how big he was: “Big. Big. He loomed over everyone.” But part of it was something harder to define. As Lyndon Johnson arranged the crowd, jerking his thumb to show people where he wanted them, glancing around with those piercing dark eyes, Valenti’s initial feeling that this was a different man intensified; Johnson was suddenly “something larger, harder to fathom” than the man he had thought he knew. In fact, for the first time in three years, he looked like the Lyndon Johnson of the Senate floor. Now he had suddenly come to the very pinnacle of power. However he had got there, whatever concatenation of circumstance and tragedy—whatever fate—had put him there, he was there, and he knew what to do there. When O’Donnell, obeying his order, went to Mrs. Kennedy’s bedroom and asked her if she wanted to be present at the swearing in, she said, “I think I ought to. In the light of history, it would be better if I was there,” and followed O’Donnell out, to the door of the stateroom.

“A hush, a hush—every whisper stopped,” Stoughton recalled. She was still wearing the same suit, with the same bloodstains. Her eyes were “cast down,” in Judge Hughes’s phrase. She had apparently tried to comb her hair, but it fell down across the left side of her face. On her face was a glazed look, and she appeared to be crying, although no tears could be seen. Johnson placed her on his left side. The Judge held out the missal. He put his left hand on it—the hand, mottled and veined, was so large that it all but covered the little book—and raised his right hand, as the Judge said, “I do solemnly swear . . .”

Valenti, watching those hands, saw that they were “absolutely steady,” and Lyndon Johnson’s voice was steady, too—low and firm—as he spoke the words he had been waiting to speak all his life. At the back of the room, crowded against a wall, Marie Fehmer wasn’t watching the ceremony, because she was reading the oath to make sure it was given correctly. (“He taught you that, by George, you can do anything.”)

The oath was over. His hand came down. “Now let’s get airborne,” Lyndon Johnson said. ♦

Published in the print edition of the New Yorker April 2, 2012, issue.