The Kennedy Half-Century (52 page)

Maybe all this is unfair to Kennedy’s successors. Andrew Johnson also struggled in the White House in part because he was not Abraham Lincoln. It is impossible to compete with a political martyr, and both Johnsons learned this to their dismay.
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But as JFK famously said in one of his press conferences, “Life isn’t fair.” Presidents always discover that politics is one of the least fair parts of life.

As we move on from the shock and sorrow of the Kennedy assassination, and the long-term effects of its flawed investigation, we will explore how LBJ and eight other White House occupants interpreted, capitalized upon, and lived with the semi-saintly ghost of John F. Kennedy.

^s
The highly technical study commissioned for this book, and conducted by the internationally recognized firm of Sonalysts, is voluminous. It will be published separately in a Kindle version and will be presented on this book’s website,
TheKennedyHalfCentury.com
. The Dictabelt sounds, and a complete transcript that we have compiled, will accompany the Sonalysts report.

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Telephone interview with police dispatcher James C. Bowles, May 23, 2013. Bowles had direct knowledge of all emergency vehicles operating in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He stressed to me that: “All emergency vehicles operated through the Dallas Police dispatcher’s office. I’ve checked our transcript on emergency runs. We logged no fire calls, no analyst calls, no Dallas Power and Light Company power line calls, no Lone Star Gas leak calls, and we had nothing else that was running.”

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His exact location was about halfway down Industrial Boulevard (today called Market Center Boulevard) between Stemmons Freeway and Harry Hines Boulevard.

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Technically, the Dictabelt was used only to record channel one. Channel two was recorded using a separate machine called a Gray Audograph. This device recorded onto a plastic disk resembling a phonograph record.

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One of Tippit’s fellow officers, Paul McCaghren, told me about a September 1956 incident that he thinks may have caused Tippit to hesitate when Oswald drew his pistol. “It was about three o’clock in the morning,” McCaghren recalled. “I was [at police headquarters] with my partner, working on an accident report, and Tippit and his partner were down at the other end of the hall … Tippit was sitting there not saying anything, and I got his partner over to one side and I said, ‘What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘Tippit just had to shoot a guy.’ The guy [had] tried to draw on him at a bar. [After Parkland Hospital called to say the suspect had expired], “I told Tippit, ‘your suspect died.’ Well, Tippit almost collapsed. He put his head in his hands—it really shook him up. [During the November 22, 1963, altercation with Oswald], “I think it crossed Tippit’s mind that here’s the same situation [that happened] years ago. And I just think that Tippit was thinking about that, and not protecting himself.” Telephone interview with Paul McCaghren, February 26, 2013. See also Dale K. Myers, “J. D. Tippit, Biography: 1952-1963,” J. D. Tippit Official Home Page,
http://jdtippit.com/
 [accessed February 27, 2013].

13
“Let Us Continue”: Lyndon Johnson—Pretender to the Throne

Lyndon Johnson had wanted to be president for a long time. As majority leader of the Senate in the 1950s, he saw the job up close and felt certain he could handle it. At his first real opportunity to chase the presidency, Johnson ran, albeit at the last moment, against Kennedy in 1960, and very probably would have run again in 1968 to succeed JFK, possibly against brother Bobby in the Democratic primaries. In November 1963 Johnson got his White House wish, but in the worst way. For over five years he would be haunted by the memory of the man whose death had delivered unto him the Oval Office.

Kennedy’s murder did more for Johnson than put him in the White House. On the very day Kennedy was gunned down, a Maryland insurance broker, Don Reynolds, told a Senate investigative committee that he had bribed LBJ in return for business favors and knew about illegal contributions made to Johnson’s campaign fund. Reynolds was able to produce invoices and canceled checks that partially backed up his claims. At the same time, the editors of
Life
magazine were deciding what to do with a muckraking story by one of their staff writers on Johnson’s business operations in Texas, which had the odor of corruption about them. Either bad headline could have taken Johnson off the 1964 ticket, ending his hopes of being president. Both the Reynolds scandal and the
Life
magazine story disappeared on account of November 22. The new president was given a clean slate, his old sins wiped away by the tears from an assassination. In practical terms, the Senate committee dropped the investigation and
Life’s
editors spiked the story.
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Partly because of all Johnson had gained—and avoided—as a result of the events in Dallas, unfair suspicions about his involvement in his predecessor’s murder dogged him from the start, but they were mainly whispered privately in the immediate wake of the assassination. By all firsthand accounts, Johnson was personally shocked as the events of November 22 unfolded, and genuinely concerned about Mrs. Kennedy and her children. Johnson understood the
powerful symbolism of having Jackie Kennedy at his side for the swearing-in on Air Force One, and he could not help but be moved by the sight of the former First Lady in her bloodstained outfit.
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One of his first calls on the flight back to Washington was to JFK’s mother, Rose; Lady Bird also participated in the call. At 7:20 P.M., shortly after arriving back in his vice presidential office, he penned affectionate notes to Caroline and John Jr., as well as to their mother.
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The new president put every foot right in the tear-drenched hours and days after the assassination. His statement upon landing at Andrews Air Force Base was affecting and appropriately brief. Johnson met with congressional leaders, reached out to the living former presidents and key heads of state around the world, and reassured the country that he was in charge without overstepping delicate boundaries during a period of intense mourning. Disregarding (perhaps unwisely) the urgent advice of the Secret Service, he walked openly in Kennedy’s funeral procession. Jackie wrote Johnson the day after the funeral, “Thank you for walking yesterday—behind Jack. You did not have to do that—I am sure many people [forbade] you to take such a risk but you did it anyway.”
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The new president was also solicitous of the feelings of President Kennedy’s appointees and understood that he was viewed by many of them as an interloper and usurper. Whatever his personal attitude toward some JFK associates, Johnson did not push them out of office, as was his right. He asked them to stay and help, for he needed them “more than John Kennedy ever did.”
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Of course, Johnson also understood that the Kennedy staffers and cabinet officers were part of his link to JFK’s legacy and a key to his legitimacy as Kennedy’s successor. Better to keep them in the tent than have them undermine him from outside. And instinctively, Johnson knew some of them would transfer their allegiance to him quickly. Sure enough, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, in particular, became close to LBJ over time. It did not hurt that Rusk and Bobby Kennedy were not close.
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At least at first, the wishes of all the Kennedy family members, not just Jackie, were granted almost without question. When JFK press secretary Pierre Salinger advised Johnson to let Ethel Kennedy and other Kennedy associates fly on Air Force One with him to a deceased congressman’s funeral, LBJ answered, “Damn sure is better to ride with me than a separate plane … Wherever I go, [they] go and anybody else named Kennedy—or anybody that’s ever smelled the Kennedys.”
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But the other side of Lyndon Johnson was in motion from the start, out of public sight. The striving politician was delighted to be president and determined from his first hours in office to make his mark. No vice president is without ambition for the top job, whatever he may pretend in public. Johnson
was no average vice president. He was big, Texas big, and he realized sometime in the afternoon or evening of November 22: Potentially and constitutionally, he could serve longer as president than anyone except his hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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Late that night, in the bedroom of his home, The Elms, on Fifty-second Street NW in D.C.,
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an exhausted Lady Bird Johnson attempted to go to sleep while her husband was already discussing with aides his plans for what would become the Great Society. “At least this is only for nine months,” until the Democratic National Convention would presumably select someone else to carry on, Lady Bird commented. An LBJ aide quickly corrected her: “It is more likely to be nine years.” “I’m afraid [he’s] right,” added LBJ. “At least it’s for five years,” he said.
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Mrs. Johnson groaned, pushed earplugs into her ears, put on black shades to block out the light, and pulled the bedcovers up.

Just two days after John Kennedy’s burial, on the eve of the nation’s shell-shocked Thanksgiving, President Johnson went before a joint session of Congress that was televised to the nation. He knew precisely what he wanted to do, and he expected the Democratic Congress to act quickly. Reminding his audience of JFK’s inaugural address mandate, “Let us begin,” Johnson declared, “Let us continue … Let us here highly resolve that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not live—or die—in vain.” LBJ outlined the breathtaking scope he intended for his new administration, calling for the urgent passage of bills concerning civil rights, education, tax cuts, youth employment, medical care for the elderly, foreign aid, and more. Having served in the House and Senate, Johnson knew that legislative emotions could dissipate quickly. Despite the danger of overloading Congress, he was determined to press hard for everything, labeling it all a memorial to JFK. This was the same Congress, dominated by a conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and some right-leaning Republicans, that had thwarted most of Kennedy’s agenda. Johnson knew he could combine his legislative skills with overwhelming public grief to break the logjam and produce a cornucopia’s plenty from Capitol Hill. LBJ revealingly couched Kennedy’s unfulfilled goals as “dreams.” Johnson knew he could never match the late president’s eloquence, so his legacy would be achievement, the translation of JFK’s lofty objectives into concrete action. “And now the ideas and the ideals which [Kennedy] so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action,” Johnson told Congress.
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All this Johnson had shrewdly processed and gamed out barely a hundred hours after taking the oath of office.

Quietly, Johnson and his staff went to work almost immediately to orchestrate what would become one of the most productive congressional legislative sessions in history. This was all the more remarkable because the session was the 88th Congress’s second, held in the presidential and congressional
election year of 1964. Throughout American history, election year sessions have often been little more than empty shells, marking time until November, with legislators avoiding controversial topics lest they alienate voters just before ballots are cast. Prodded by LBJ and public opinion, this unusual Congress would throw caution to the wind in the rush to memorialize JFK and to please the insistent White House occupant.

The press and public did not directly see much of this work in the remaining days of 1963, a period of mourning that was devoted to finding ways to etch John Kennedy’s name everywhere. President Johnson kicked off the efforts on Thanksgiving Day. In a special proclamation, Johnson renamed the NASA Launch Operation Center in Florida the John F. Kennedy Space Center, which had been requested by Mrs. Kennedy.
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In a companion move not sought by Mrs. Kennedy, LBJ struck the centuries-old geographic name Cape Canaveral from the surrounding area, substituting Cape Kennedy.
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Locals were furious and protested loudly; Cape Canaveral was finally restored to the map in 1973 after a decade of dissent in the Sunshine State. The Kennedy family released a letter saying they “understood” why JFK’s name was removed. It is a small but telling example of LBJ’s “Texas big” philosophy from the earliest days of his presidency; he would do even Jackie Kennedy one better. Johnson also offered the ambassadorship to Mexico to the Spanish-fluent Jackie. She declined. “Hell, I’d make her pope if I could,” Johnson said, as reported by JFK aide Kenneth O’Donnell.
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President Johnson also wasted no time in adopting another, more private part of the Kennedy legacy. During a trip to Austin on the final day of 1963, Johnson announced to top members of the White House press corps, “One more thing, boys. You may see me coming in and out of a few women’s bedrooms while I am in the White House, but just remember, that is none of your business.” Given the rules of the day about coverage of a politician’s personal life, and the precedent set by JFK and others, Johnson had little to worry about. LBJ did his best to continue the sexually predatory practices of his predecessor, and he had a number of affairs while living in the White House.
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