Building the Great Society Read online

  ALSO BY JOSHUA ZEITZ

  Lincoln’s Boys

  White Ethnic New York

  Flapper

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House llc

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

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  Copyright © 2018 by Joshua Zeitz

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  ISBN 9780525428787 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780698191594 (ebook)

  Version_1

  For Angela, Lillian, and Naomi

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY JOSHUA ZEITZ

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE

  Introduction

  PART I

  Chapter 1: Put the Ball Through the Hoop

  Chapter 2: Participation in Prosperity

  Chapter 3: Second Day

  Chapter 4: Revolutionary Activity

  Chapter 5: Frontlash

  PART II

  Chapter 6: A Frustrating Paradox

  Chapter 7: Completing the Fair Deal

  Chapter 8: Get ’Em! Get the Last Ones!

  Chapter 9: The Fabulous Eighty-Ninth

  PART III

  Chapter 10: Guns and Butter

  Chapter 11: Backlash

  Chapter 12: You Aren’t a Man in Your Own Right

  Chapter 13: The Thirty-first of March

  Conclusion

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  November 22, 1963

  Why don’t you pack a bag and fly with me to Fort Worth tonight?” Lyndon Johnson suggested to his friend Jack Valenti. The date was November 21, 1963, and Valenti, who ran a successful advertising and public relations firm in Houston, could scarcely foretell the lasting effect that the invitation would have on his life.

  The two men first met five years earlier at a luncheon that Johnson hosted for young, up-and-coming businessmen in Texas. Valenti subsequently volunteered as a floor aide at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, where LBJ vied unsuccessfully for his party’s presidential nomination, and that fall directed the Kennedy-Johnson ticket’s advertising in Texas. “I knew few people in the Johnson entourage,” he later admitted, “though I was a Johnson man and though I supported him vigorously and wholeheartedly and without reservation. I literally was on the darker edges of the last ring of the peripheral circle.”

  Texas had long been a sturdy brick in the Democratic Party’s firewall. It remained critical to JFK’s reelection prospects, but its electorate was drifting steadily rightward. Hoping to repair a widening breach between the state organization’s liberal and conservative factions, Kennedy and Johnson scheduled a multiday political and fund-raising swing that would carry them from Houston to Fort Worth, to Dallas and then Austin, and finally to the LBJ Ranch deep in the Texas Hill Country, where the first and second families would break bread together over a weekend replete with political and symbolic importance. For Johnson, the stakes were high. He had never been especially close to the Kennedy clan, and in recent years his relationship with Attorney General Robert Kennedy—the president’s brother and closest political adviser—had grown sharply discordant. Quietly beleaguered by a series of slow-percolating scandals involving his personal finances, and seemingly powerless to forge a truce between liberal and conservative Democrats in his own backyard, LBJ was no longer a certain asset to the president, either nationally or in Texas. He had legitimate reason to fear persistent, low whispers that Kennedy intended to drop him from the ticket the following year.

  Facing these trials, the vice president called on trusted friends from Texas to ensure a successful presidential visit. Valenti had been charged with organizing a critical leg of the journey—a dinner in honor of Representative Albert Thomas in Houston on November 21. Despite widespread concern that the city’s conservative citizens would shun the president, over 350,000 cheering local residents lined the city streets to greet JFK and his wife, who had arrived at 4:23 p.m. in “the lateness of a blue-skied day,” Valenti later recalled, on “the sleek, silver-bellied Boeing 707, Air Force One.” Riding in the official motorcade, he noticed that his seatmate, Kenneth O’Donnell, a principal White House aide, was “dour, unsmiling,” and “visibly nervous.” Only when he saw the crowds—“three, four, and five deep”—did O’Donnell relax. “They’re here, aren’t they?” he muttered with satisfaction. “They damn sure are,” Valenti replied. Privately, he was equally relieved, and even more so when over 3,000 local business and civic leaders packed the Sam Houston Coliseum for the evening’s dinner reception.

  Short in stature but hard to miss in a crowd—“his dress was natty,” recalled one of his contemporaries, and he was “imaginative, quick-thinking and fast-talking . . . a lively, friendly, sentimental human being”—Valenti was swept up in the moment. When LBJ pulled him backstage to meet the president, Kennedy warmly shook his hand and thanked him for producing so stellar a turnout.

  He very much wanted to join the flight to the next stop, Fort Worth, and then on to Dallas and Austin the following day, but his wife, Mary Margaret—a former secretary in Johnson’s Senate and vice presidential offices—had given birth to their first child just three weeks earlier. “Is this trip necessary?” she muttered with disapproval, even as she obligingly packed an overnight valise for Jack, complete with two changes of clothing.

  After the president and the vice president finished their remarks at the Houston dinner, Valenti boarded the vice president’s Boeing 707—a near, but not exact, replica of Air Force One—for the journey to Fort Worth. The next morning, November 22, he flew with LBJ’s entourage to Dallas, where Kennedy and Johnson were scheduled to address a luncheon at the city’s Trade Mart. At Love Field, around 12:00 p.m., Valenti stepped into a van with other vice presidential and White House aides, including Evelyn Lincoln, the president’s private secretary.

  “The motorcade went through Dallas,” Valenti would remember, “and . . . we were all remarking about how marvelous the reception was. . . . It was about as big as it was in Houston. There were no hostile faces, not even a hostile sign, which was amazing.” At the head of the official column led an unmarked police car, flanked by uniformed officers on motorcycles. Next in line was the deep-blue presidential limousine, which carried John and Jacqueline Kennedy and Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie. They were followed in turn by a heavily fortified, open-topped limousine—reporters called it the “Queen Mary”—packed with eight Secret Service agents: four in the passenger seats and four others on running boards to either side, with O’Donnell and his fellow White House aide David Powers installed in the jump seats. LBJ’s gray limousine—a rental—was next in line, trailing the Queen Mary at a distance of seventy-five feet. Behind LBJ traveled the vice presidential follow car, then a vehicle carrying three members of the press pool, a transport for other members of the news media, and vans and buses conveying news photographers, video men, and local elected officials. Valenti later estimated that his van was roughly twelfth in the motorcade. As the convoy turned onto Main Street, then right onto Houston Street and left onto Elm, he witness
ed the impressive multitude of office workers who cheered from the windows of tall downtown buildings and saw the crowds—five and more deep—hoisting homemade signs in the bright afternoon sun and waving with admiration at the procession. “It was a beautiful day, beautiful weather,” noted a reporter who was present that afternoon.

  Too far back in line to hear the piercing crack of a rifle shot, followed by two more in close succession, Valenti first sensed trouble shortly after 12:30 p.m. when “all of a sudden the motorcade began without reason to speed up, tripling the speed, maybe quadrupling it. We attempted to keep up. And we knew something was wrong because all of a sudden we got separated from the cars.” Uncertain what to do, his driver steered a direct course to the Trade Mart.

  • • • • •

  Around the time that Valenti was marveling at the warm embrace that the citizens of Dallas had extended to the president, Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s White House press secretary, was traveling aboard SAM 86972—the tail number of a Boeing 707 jet identical to the vice president’s plane—en route to an economic forum in Tokyo. Also on the flight were half of the president’s cabinet, including the secretaries of the Departments of State, Treasury, Commerce, Labor, Agriculture, and Interior, and the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). Flying at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet, with nothing but blue sky around them, the men and their wives were already nine hundred miles west of Honolulu. Salinger quietly leafed through a dense briefing book on Japanese economics, while inside the plane’s cramped communications shack two news tickers—one for the Associated Press (AP), another for United Press International (UPI)—rested silent.

  He was deep in study when, shortly after 12:34 p.m. central time, a disconcerting bulletin crossed the UPI wire: “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.” From inside the communications shack, Salinger placed a call to the White House Situation Room. After a delay of several minutes, operators were able to establish a patch with the navy commander Oliver Hallett. “All available information on President follows,” Hallett began, before drawing a deep breath. “[The president] and Governor Connally of Texas have been hit in the car in which they were riding. We do not know how serious the situation is. We have no information. . . . We are getting our information over the tickers. Over.”

  Moments later, Hallett dictated a new AP dispatch: “Kennedy apparently shot in head. He fell face down in back seat of his car. Blood was on his head. Mrs. Kennedy cried, ‘Oh no,’ and tried to hold up his head. Connally remained half-seated, slumped to the left. There was blood on his face and forehead. The President and the Governor were rushed to Parkland Hospital near the Dallas Trade Mart where Kennedy was to have made a speech. Over.”

  Salinger moved between the communications shack and the main cabin, relaying updates on the president’s status. At 1:10 p.m., just forty minutes after Kennedy was struck by the assassin’s bullet, the Situation Room relayed instructions from Malcolm Kilduff—the deputy press secretary who was on the ground in Dallas and unaware that SAM 86972 was already speeding a course back to Hawaii—that the cabinet return to American soil. Soon thereafter, Hallett confirmed the cabinet members’ worst fear. “Ah, this is [the] Situation Room following to WAYSIDE,” he began in a slow and halting voice. “We have report quoting Mr. Kilduff that the President is dead. . . . Do you have that? Over.”

  Salinger repeated the dispatch in a hurried tone. “The President is dead. Is that correct?”

  “That is correct,” Hallett confirmed haltingly. “That is correct. New subject. Front office desires plane return [to] Washington, with no stop [in] Dallas. Over.”

  • • • • •

  Horace Busby first intuited trouble when he heard the UPI news ticker in his office sound four staccato-like bells. This was a rare signal on Teletypes, but Busby, a former wire service reporter who now ran a private business consultancy based in Washington, D.C., knew what it meant: “a ‘flash,’ a terse, one-line report of a major news development. Only matters of earthshaking moment received the priority of a flash.” A native Texan and longtime friend and associate of Lyndon Johnson’s, Busby was deeply familiar with the political climate in Dallas and had feared that no good could come of the presidential visit. After pausing to read the initial UPI report, he placed an urgent call to his former colleague George Reedy, who was a member of LBJ’s vice presidential staff. “Quick,” Busby instructed. “Read your ticker—Kennedy’s shot.” Jolted, Reedy dropped the phone back on its hook without responding.

  Busby’s next call was to the Elms, the Johnson family’s stately residence in northwest Washington, D.C., where his wife, Mary, was culling through photographs and memorabilia to fashion a montage as a Christmas present for her friend Lady Bird. Such was the relationship between the two families that Mary enjoyed access to the house, even when the Johnsons were out of town. “Don’t hang up,” her husband instructed. “If it hasn’t already started yet, everybody will be trying to call . . . and we’ll never get through to you again.” As they spoke, a swarm of Secret Service agents descended upon the building and grounds. “Then came the telephone men,” Busby recalled, “hurrying to install the communications required for a president, not required for a vice president.” As Mary remained at her post, waiting for Lady Bird to return, Busby listened in horror to radio news reports relating the details of LBJ’s swearing-in ceremony aboard Air Force One and imminent return to Washington. Shortly after 6:00 p.m., the new president telephoned from his office suite in the Old Executive Office Building and instructed Busby to meet him at the Elms. “When I arrived,” Busby remembered, “a large crowd already had formed around the gate, but they were being held back by the police.” Busby drove up to the entrance and rolled down his window to identify himself to the Secret Service agents posted around the perimeter. As they waved him in, he heard a reporter call out to the guard, “Who’s this one? What’s his name? What does he do?”

  • • • • •

  Upon reaching the Trade Mart, Jack Valenti ascertained that the motorcade had proceeded directly to Parkland Memorial Hospital. He flagged down a deputy sheriff, explained that his party included the president’s secretary, and secured an escort. When he arrived, the scene outside the emergency room doors was pure chaos: cars were parked at all angles, abandoned by their drivers. Uniformed and plainclothes officers stood around the perimeter of the building. Unbeknownst to the bystanders, moments earlier the Secret Service had whisked LBJ out a side door to his limousine. The new president was en route to Air Force One.

  Valenti delicately handed off Evelyn Lincoln to a policeman and talked his way inside the building, where he spied the Texas congressmen Jack Brooks, Henry Gonzalez, and Homer Thornberry out of the corner of his eye. Though at the time he did not realize it, he was standing outside the doors to the operating room where John F. Kennedy had expired just moments before. Entering an empty stairwell, Valenti encountered Cliff Carter, a longtime political aide to LBJ. “The President is dead,” Carter began, “and the Vice President has me looking for you. He wants you to come out to Love Field and get aboard the airplane.” The two men walked at a brisk pace to the holding room that Johnson had departed only moments earlier. From there, a Secret Service agent, Lem Johns, escorted them to a waiting police car. “The vice president wants you aboard the plane now,” the agent confirmed with tight, clipped speech.

  • • • • •

  “Am I going to shoot this in color or black and white?” Cecil Stoughton wondered silently. Unlike Jack Valenti, Stoughton did hear the three rifle shots that rang out from the Texas School Book Depository. A captain in the U.S. Army Signal Corps who since 1961 had served as the official White House photographer, he would now capture the transfer of power from John Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson. Knowing that the wire services could not process Kodacolor or Ektachrome, Stoughton loaded the magazine of his new Hasselblad camera, and t
hat of an older 35-millimeter job, with black-and-white Tri-X film and strapped both devices around his neck. Inside Air Force One, all the window shades were drawn shut by order of the Secret Service. The main cabin was dim and growing warmer by the minute, because the plane’s air-conditioning unit only functioned when its engines operated in flight. In addition to the original Kennedy staff contingent, on board were LBJ and his wife; three Texas congressmen whom Johnson had summoned to his side; Valenti, who was “not quite sure precisely why I was even here in the first place”; Bill Moyers, a former Johnson aide who, upon learning of JFK’s death, chartered a flight from Austin, where he was advancing the next leg of the trip, to make certain that he was among the president’s party; and a multitude of Secret Service agents, military advisers, valets, and secretaries. In later years, Kennedy and Johnson partisans would revisit any number of slights and rebuffs—both real and imagined—exchanged by both sides during that tense hour on the tarmac. Asked about his personal recollection of the occasion, Valenti admitted that he “never saw any of the so-called friction. . . . If it was there, I was not aware of it. Of course, you must understand that I didn’t know the names and faces of the players.”

  Stoughton considered how to stage the scene. The Boeing airliner was narrowly constructed, leaving him little means to capture the principals—“the judge holding the Bible, and Mrs. Kennedy, and Mrs. Johnson, and the President, all things being equal”—in one frame. Fortunate to be carrying a wide-angle lens, he leaned back against the wall of the compartment and “just sort of sprayed the room with my 35, so that I got pictures of everybody in there.”

  The fruit of Stoughton’s labor was an iconic photograph displaying Lyndon B. Johnson’s formal assumption of the presidency. To the far left of the frame, Valenti can be seen pushed up against one of the plane’s windows in a half-crouched position, his eyes fixed in a bewildered stare. The memory of that flight back to Washington, and of the helicopter ride from Andrews Air Force Base to the White House, would forever remain etched in his mind.