The Death of a President

  Awaiting the Chief Executive, the party upstairs sipped cocktails and exchanged light banter. Ethel Kennedy, startling in a pink chenille suit, was at her tart best. She and her husband had just left a surprise birthday party at Justice—he had been given a Monopoly Game, the spaces on which had been altered to read “Lyceum Avenue,” “Land on White House and get Camp David free,” etc.—and she was baiting William O. Douglas, the Richard Halliburton of the bench. “Why do you take such nutty trips?” she demanded. “Why not try something different? Like a cruise or a resort?” The First Lady raised a point of order about Tropic of Cancer; the Court politely deliberated. The wives of Byron White and Arthur Goldberg, Kennedy’s two Supreme Court appointees, acted as associate hostesses while Jacqueline Kennedy detached herself, moved over to Douglas’ blonde, twenty-four-year-old bride of three months and asked (as though it hadn’t been settled) what sort of clothes would be appropriate for her to wear in the Southwest.

  Joanie Douglas was grateful for the attention. This was her first judicial reception, her first evening in the White House, and although she had been raised as a Republican she regarded John Kennedy, in her words, “as a noble figure moving through the pages of history.” Nina Warren had noticed her nervousness. On the way over she had coached her, and now the eminent hostess was doing her best. Still Joanie was wretched. Why on earth, she wondered miserably, had she worn black? So drab. None of the other women were in it. And why was Bob Kennedy so stern? Could it have been something she had done? (It wasn’t. The Attorney General had just remembered that this reception was supposed to have three acts. The lesser judges, hurt because they had been swallowed up in the downstairs melees of 1961 and 1962, had objected, and he had directed that a special room be set aside for them. Apparently his order had miscarried. He pictured them down below, crimson with rage, and frowned.) The new Mrs. Douglas, watching him, bit her lip. And then the door opened, and she forgot him, her gown, everything. It was the President.

  Gliding across the thick rug, burnished black shoes glistening, broad shoulders slightly hunched, glowing with hospitality, he circled the room ceremoniously, starting with the Chief Justice. Justice Douglas introduced his bride: “I want you to meet the management.” Kennedy had anticipated this moment; he had read of her youth and had predicted that the older Court wives would be jealous of it. “Management has my sympathies,” he murmured, smiling broadly. “I appreciate the grave responsibilities of your office.” The Attorney General stepped over to talk to her, and his brother alighted on a sofa, conferring with three justices. Next week, he told Goldberg, he wanted to speak to him about a personal matter. Goldberg assumed this meant engaging union labor for Kennedy’s country house; as a former labor lawyer Goldberg had made such arrangements for him in the past. He nodded, and the President, waving away a daiquiri, transferred to the upholstered Northern Porch rocker under the gold mantel clock. Byron White—the perennial All-American, built like an oak, a Kennedy friend for twenty-four years and a fellow officer during the war—sat on his left. Then the ladies moved in, the wife of retired Justice Stanley Reed leading the pack.

  You couldn’t blame them. This chance came only once a year. On various pretexts they broke off conversations and advanced in little rushes, fussing merrily among themselves, edging chairs closer to the rocker. Potter Stewart’s wife had never talked to the President, and thanks to White she won the coveted spot in front. “You surely know Mrs. Stewart,” he said as he left; “she would like to chat with you for a few minutes, Mr. President.” The chat lasted nearly fifteen minutes. Nursing a ginger ale and feeling rather guilty because her husband was a junior justice, she thawed as the President spoke. It was a trick he had. He remembered amazing details about other people in the government. She confessed a crime: she had just stolen a matchbox labeled “The President’s House.” He pointed out that the back of it bore an AFL-CIO label. Yes, she remembered, such labels had to be on campaign literature when Mr. Stewart ran for city councilman years ago. He closed his eyes, opened them. Hadn’t that been in Cincinnati? he inquired. And hadn’t Stewart gone on to become Vice Mayor? Suddenly she found they were discussing the tangle of Ohio politics, city by city.

  A silent witness was Joanie Douglas. Normally loquacious, she was speechless here. Because Kennedy’s newspaper photographs were black-and-white, she had unconsciously (and, she realized, idiotically) expected him to be black-and-white here. Instead, he was tanned, vibrant; an outdoorsman like her husband. Peering up as he drew out “Andy” Stewart, Joanie reflected that he was rather like her own father: an aloof aristocrat viewing the company with a sardonic, perceptive eye.

  A third wife watched from across the room. Ethel Kennedy had been the President’s sister-in-law since 1950. Next to the First Lady she knew him better than any of the women present, and chatter about matchboxes and obscure Buckeye candidates didn’t deceive her. That was social instinct; it was no clue to what he was really thinking. And presently she realized that something very grave must be on his mind. He had leaned back in the rocker, his hand cupped under his chin, and was gazing out with hooded gray eyes. The Chief Justice called over jocularly that Texas would be rough. There was no reply; Kennedy had withdrawn into a private sanctuary of thought. Why, Ethel wondered, is Jack so preoccupied? Just before the group prepared to drift toward the stairs, she crossed over and greeted him herself. In the past, no matter how complex his problems, the President had always responded. Not now. For the first time in thirteen years he was looking right through her.

  Texas would be rough. In his heyday Earl Warren had been a great politician, the champion of California. But he had never encountered anything as cabalistic as the Democratic party in the Lone Star State. Here, as elsewhere, the national leadership did what it could to keep the peace. Politics was the art of the possible. But Texas scorned peace. Each county was an autonomous duchy, each was faction-ridden. The jinn lived in a state of constant anarchy, raiding one another’s castles and swatting innocent vassals. They were political cannibals, and a naïve outsider venturing among them could be eaten alive.

  John Kennedy was not naïve. Massachusetts politics was scarcely orderly, and he knew Texas just as he knew Ohio. At the Los Angeles convention of 1960, where Johnson had attempted to wrest the Presidential nomination from him, Kennedy himself had been smitten by partisans who had spread rumors that he would not live out his first term because he was “diseased.” (After Los Angeles they blandly explained that they had been referring to Addison’s disease.) On several occasions since then he had recrossed the state, most recently on June 5. Connally had consented to the coming trip at the Cortez Hotel in El Paso, and for the past two weeks guides from the Democratic National Committee had been scouting the most treacherous marshes. The President, however, hadn’t read their reports. His task was to govern. Advance planning was left to others, principally to O’Donnell, who had duties of his own. Thus the White House was only vaguely aware of details about the blazing feud between two of the major Texans.

  Actually it was an old feud, older than the feuders themselves. Its origins were ideological, and it had first come to a head in the volatile 1930’s. The rightist hegemony, then known as Jeffersonian Democrats and Texas Regulars, had bolted Roosevelt. As early as 1944 the rightists had sent a rival delegation to the national convention. Later, as Shivercrats and States’ Righters, they had deserted Adlai E. Stevenson; in 1952 both the Democratic Governor and the Democratic National Committeeman in Texas campaigned for the Republican national ticket. Four years later the moderates revolted. Encouraged by Sam Rayburn, Byron Skelton, a moderate Texas attorney, had accepted the post of National Committeeman. But the muddle had only grown worse. The Populist heirs had staged an uprising of their own, forming a liberal faction called the Democrats of Texas (DOT).

  DOT’s hero was Ralph Yarborough, who ran three unsuccessful campaigns before becoming a U.S. Senator in 1957. Yarborough had the manner of a river-boat confidence man. Voluble, flowery, wi
th an accent stickier than red-eye gravy, he was forever squabbling with other Democrats. Nevertheless he was the only Texas liberal to hold statewide office. Lacking powerful backers, lacking money—his campaign debts were huge—he refused to abandon his fidelity to what the Dallas Morning News defined as the “liberal-leftist axis.” Even the dissolution of DOT left him unshaken. In Los Angeles, when the rest of the state party rallied to Johnson’s favorite-son candidacy, he supported John Kennedy. They punished him by refusing him a seat in the Texas delegation; the Senator had to sit in the gallery as a spectator. Reprisals would have gone farther, but Rayburn intervened. Then a year later, the Speaker died. His calming influence vanished with him. The rightists were free to gang up on the Populist maverick. Mister Sam, as they put it in a quaint phrase, had “pissed on his last campfire.”

  Furthermore, they now had a leader cut from whipcord. Johnson had never won their complete trust. In John B. Connally, Jr., however, he had presented them with a priceless gift. Connally had been Johnson’s administrative assistant and Kennedy’s Secretary of the Navy, and now he was his own governor. Outsiders still thought of him as a Kennedy-Johnson man. They were mistaken. If he had any fugleman it was Sid Richardson, the Fort Worth oil millionaire for whom he had worked in the late 1950’s. Connally had become one of the most reliable links in the Texas gas-and-oil ring; in the dated rhetoric of the earlier Populists he might have been described as a Tool of the Interests. He looked the part—tall, heavily handsome, with gray curly hair and a ripe, almost feminine mouth—but there was nothing bogus about his convictions. He had sold out to no one. His conservatism, like Yarborough’s liberalism, was genuine.

  The Governor was a classic example of the poor boy who has risen above his origins and despises them. Those who have never endured poverty might judge him harshly for this. They would be unjust, for a man who has known squalor in childhood can only remember it with contempt. (How he uses his contempt is, of course, another matter; Lyndon Johnson’s background was much the same, but his politics were very different.) All that can be said for the Governor’s youth is that he had seen a lot of Texas. John B. Connally, Sr. had been a tenant farmer, a barber, a grocer, a bus driver on the San Antonio–Corpus Christi route—the family moved to San Antonio so they could see him between trips—and then he had returned to the soil, doubling as a freelance butcher to stave off disaster. When ranchers wanted steers slaughtered, old John did the dirty work. One of the son’s most graphic recollections was of helping with this carnage. The elder Connally would drive his scarred black Model T Ford; Carlos Estrada, his Mexican helper, sat alongside with the knives and saws; eight-year-old John, Jr. perched in the back, cradling in his arms a battered bucket. It was his task to carry water while the two men carved and chopped, and because “brains and eggs” were a rancher’s delicacy, he would always remember how carefully they had handled the brains, the precious light-blue brains.

  From such a youth the boy could go nowhere but up. After the Alamo, San Jacinto; after John B. Connally, Sr., John B. Connally, Jr. Life had to be better than this, he must get a handhold on that bottom rung and climb the golden gangway. And he did. At the University of Texas he became the biggest man on campus. He married the most popular coed, he acquired suavity and guile, he became the friend of wealthy men and then their staunch ally. Studying the hardship of the Texas poor had made Ralph Yarborough an adversary of those whom he regarded as responsible for it. Indigence itself was John Connally’s enemy. As Johnson said privately, Connally only felt comfortable in $300 suits and custom-made shoes and in the company of other men wearing them. The wall between him and his boyhood could never be thick enough. As Governor he had strengthened his alliances, carefully disassociating himself from the liberalism in Washington. Once more labor groups and “libs,” as liberals were locally known, had trouble getting seated at state conventions. Connally came out against federal spending, oil imports, and Medicare, and he appeared on statewide television to oppose Kennedy’s civil rights bill. Like the President, he had his eye on the coming election. There was a strong possibility that he might be opposed in the Texas primary. This was the time to shore up defenses. Barring primary upsets, Connally and Yarborough would be campaigning with Kennedy—and Johnson, if the President again picked Lyndon as his running mate—next fall. All would face re-election on November 3, 1964. The Governor candidly admitted that he wanted to run ahead of the ticket. In private he was greedier than that. He wanted Yarborough to lose, and with that in mind he planned to make political capital out of the forthcoming Presidential tour.

  His position was strong. As chief executive of the state, he would be host to the national Chief Executive, and the White House was taking a tolerant view of his independence. Larry O’Brien called Congressman Albert Thomas; when the caravan from Washington reached Houston for the Thomas testimonial dinner, Larry said, it would be nice if the Governor played a key role. The Congressman took the hint. He phoned Austin and asked Connally to introduce him. Word was passed to the rest of the state’s Congressional delegation that all local details were to be handled by Austin.

  In a show of scrupulosity the trip, at Connally’s request, was divided into “political” and “nonpolitical” phases. San Antonio, Fort Worth, and Dallas were nonpolitical; Houston and Austin were political. To avoid offending him, John Bailey, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, would not join the group until it reached Austin. He would fly there on a Delta Air Lines flight during the Dallas motorcade. The committee was even going to pay for the gas consumed by the Presidential aircraft, and Bailey engaged in complicated arithmetic based on the Air Force’s estimate that the plane cost $2,300 an hour while airborne.

  The Governor, as O’Brien and O’Donnell put it, was being “dealt a big hand.” The first inkling of how he intended to play that hand came early in October. Before flying east to discuss details of the trip he conferred in Dallas’ Adolphus Hotel with the city’s power elite—J. Eric Jonsson, chairman of the powerful Citizens Council; Robert Cullum, president of the Chamber of Commerce; R. L. Thornton, chairman of the Mercantile National Bank; Joe Dealey, son of Ted Dealey, publisher of the Dallas Morning News (Ted himself was absent in Washington); and Albert Jackson of the Dallas Times Herald. In effect, the Governor apologized for the President’s forthcoming visit. He himself was in a bind, he said. He compared his role to that of a captain; the admiral had asked permission to board his ship. He couldn’t tell the Chief Executive not to come. But he wanted them to know that he had no intention of becoming “Kennedy’s errand boy.” Indeed, if he used the occasion to humiliate Yarborough, there was a good possibility that Texas liberalism might be crushed. This was a superb opportunity to crowd the libs off stage. “I don’t intend to default to the liberals,” he explained. “I’ve got to have a nonpolitical body to represent Dallas, and you gentlemen are it by your associations.”

  In the capital on October 3 he called a meeting of Texans on the Hill—Yarborough was not asked—and told them that the President wanted to visit the state’s four major cities: San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, and Dallas. Kennedy’s strength in Texas, as Connally saw it, was among “Negroes and brass-collar Democrats.” Unfortunately they were poor, and the national leadership wanted the journey to be a fund-raising drive. “I think it is a mistake,” he said. “You know that the people who are for Kennedy are people without money. I’ve checked with businessmen and they aren’t about to contribute to his campaign.” At this point there was a brief flare-up. Henry B. Gonzalez, the San Antonio liberal, broke in. “What businessmen did you talk to?” he asked angrily. “If they’re the ones you’ve been appointing, I wouldn’t expect them to be for Kennedy, because they are a bunch of Republicans. I’ll get you businessmen. You may not like them, though, because they won’t support you.” Agitated, the Governor chain-lit one cigarette from the stub of another, but he stuck to his theme: the trip should be nonpartisan. The following day he took much the same line with Kennedy, add
ing a few choice words about Yarborough. Ultimately a compromise was reached. In San Antonio the President would dedicate six new buildings at an Air Force base (nonpolitical). In Houston he would attend the dinner for Albert Thomas (political, though of no advantage to anyone except Thomas). Civic leaders would greet the Chief Executive in Fort Worth and Dallas (nonpolitical), and the only fundraising would be in Austin, the state capital and the Governor’s home. Connally assigned each Congressman a quota of tickets to the Austin dinner; Yarborough’s quota was sent to him.

  Keep the Presidency above politics—that was the Governor’s plea. Of course, it was absurd. He wasn’t dealing with children. Both the Hill and the White House knew that the Presidency is politics. Kennedy’s difficulty was that he couldn’t alienate Connally; if a ceremonial tour would give the appearance of a united Democratic front in Texas, he would settle for that. The only man who could persuade the Governor to go farther was his old mentor, the Vice President, who was keeping mum. According to Johnson, he had not been consulted about the desirability of the expedition. His “first word from President Kennedy was that he was planning to make the trip. From this point, there was fairly intensive discussion of the details.” At first the Vice President was an enthusiastic advocate of fund-raising. Recently a Massachusetts banquet had raised $680,000 for the party. His pride in Texas had been challenged, and despite emphatic denials from the White House the rumor persisted that Kennedy would cut him from the ’64 ticket. Johnson’s own radar had picked up a few alarming blips. Determined to prove that his popularity was still strong, he had proposed four Texas banquets where the faithful would demonstrate their loyalty to Kennedy and Johnson by emptying their pockets into next year’s war chest.