Judgment Days
From Chapter 1—The Cataclysm
Eighteen hours earlier, Johnson had begun the day having breakfast with Jack Kennedy in Fort Worth. Now, with Moyers sitting on one side of his bed and Valenti and Carter in chairs on the other, the new president began ticking off assignments to be carried out the next morning: calls to members of the Kennedy family, arrangements for the funeral, and meetings with members of Congress, with former president Eisenhower, with national security advisers, and with the Cabinet.
As Johnson weighed and made decisions about the coming days, Cliff Carter, his chief political aide, was struck by how carefully he was walking a “chalk line.” On the one hand, Johnson wanted the country to have “confidence that he could do the job.” On the other, he wanted to avoid giving the impression that he was rushing to take power. Johnson had to demonstrate leadership while showing sensitivity to the bereaved Kennedys and their devoted followers, whose help he would need immediately.
In a telephone conversation earlier that night with Arthur Goldberg, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Johnson revealed just how aware he was of having to balance many sensitivities and concerns as he took his first steps as president. “I want you to be thinking about what I ought to do,” he told Goldberg, “to try to bring all these elements together< and unite the country to maintain and preserve our system in the world, because — if it starts falling to pieces — why, we could deteriorate pretty quickly.”
Johnson asked Goldberg whether he should speak to a joint session of Congress soon after Kennedy’s funeral. Goldberg thought that he should, and Johnson asked him to help prepare the speech. Johnson wanted to address the nation “with dignity and reserve and without being down on my knees but, at the same time, letting them know of my respect and con- fidence.”
As Johnson talked through the early-morning hours, Jack Valenti observed that he already seemed to know what he wanted to accomplish with his presidency. Valenti listened with surprise as Johnson spelled out ambitions that added up to a sweeping agenda for social change in the United States.
“Well, I’m going to tell you,” Johnson said, “I’m going to pass the civil rights bill and not change one word of it. I’m not going to cavil, and I’m not going to compromise. I’m going to fix it so everyone can vote, so everyone can get all the education they can get. I’m going to pass Harry Truman’s health care bill.”
Valenti, a Houston advertising man by profession, had helped Johnson organize political events in Texas, but he had never heard him talk so expansively about how he would run the country. It seemed to Valenti tha Lyndon Johnson, president of the United States for little more than twelve hours, already had resolved “to radically change the social environment of the nation” so that the “poor, the aged, the blacks, those denied an education . . .would have a new opportunity . . . absolutely essential to an equitable America.”
No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s had attempted such a broad assault on social and economic inequality. Now Lyndon Johnson, in his first hours as president, apparently aspired to match FDR, his hero and mentor when Johnson first came to Washington thirty years earlier. In the past Johnson had demonstrated gargantuan ambition, a populist philosophy about government helping those with the least, and a shrewd ability to wield political power. Thrust into the presidency, Johnson faced formidable immediate challenges: to reassure a shocked nation and to move a paralyzed and deadlocked federal government to action at a time of crisis.
Copyright © 2005 by Nick Kotz. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company
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