Henry Hall Wilson Oral History Interview –JFK #2, 4/20/1979 Administrative Information
Creator: Henry Hall Wilson Interviewer: Sheldon M. Stern Date of Interview: April 20, 1979 Place of Interview: Monroe, North Carolina Length: 51 pp.
Biographical Note Wilson, Henry Hall; Administrative Assistant to the President (1961-1967); Member, Democratic National Committee (1953-1961). Wilson discusses his role as a member of John F. Kennedy’s [JFK] staff, including descriptions of other staff members and his interactions with them. He also covers JFK’s relationship with Congress, various legislative bills, and his thoughts on Lyndon B. Johnson, among other issues.
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Transcript of Oral History Interview These electronic documents were created from transcripts available in the research room of the John F. Kennedy Library. The transcripts were scanned using optical character recognition and the resulting text files were proofread against the original transcripts. Some formatting changes were made. Page numbers are noted where they would have occurred at the bottoms of the pages of the original transcripts. If researchers have any concerns about accuracy, they are encouraged to visit the library and consult the transcripts and the interview recordings.
Suggested Citation Henry Hall Wilson, recorded interview by Sheldon M. Stern, April 20, 1979, (page number), John F. Kennedy Oral History Program.
Gift of Papers and Other Historical Materials of Henry Hall Wilson to the John F. Kennedy Library
1. In accordance with the provisions of chapter 21 of title 44, United States Code, and subject to the terms, conditions, and restrictions hereinafter set forth, I, Abraham Holtzman (hereinafter referred to as the Donor), hereby give, donate, and convey to the United States of America, for eventual deposit in the John F. Kennedy Library, the papers of Henry Hall Wilson and other historical materials (here inafter referred to as the Materials) which are described in Appendix A, attached hereto.
2. Title to the Materials shall pass to the Unte d States of America upon their delivery to the Archivist of the United States or his delegate (hereinafter referred to as the Archivist).
3. Following delivery, the Materials shall be maintained by the United States of America in the John F. Kennedy Library, administered by the National Archives and Records Administration in accordance with the pertinent provisions of chapter 21 of title 44, United States Code, and provided that at any time after delivery and subject to the provisions of paragraph 5, the Donor shall be permitted freely to examine any of the Materials during the regular working hours of the depository where they are preserved.
4. It is the Donor's wish that the Materials be made available for research as soon as possible, and to the fullest extent possible, following their deposit in the John F. Kennedy Library. At the same time, he recognizes that the Materials may include information about others the disclosure of which would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy and information the protection of which is essential to the nation's secuirity. Accordingly, the Archivist shall have the Materials reviewed and for the present shall restrict from public access the following classes of material:
a. Papers and other historical materials the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy or a libel of a living person.
b. Papers and other historical materials that are specifically authorized under criteria established by statute or executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy, and are in fact properly classified pursuant to such statute or executive order.
5. Following the completion of the review provided for above, material restricted from public access shall not be made available for inspection, reading, or use by anyone, except regular employees of the National Archives and Records Administration in the performance of normal archival work on such materials, and the Donor or persons authorized by him in writing to have access to such materials; provided that information which is security-classified pursuant to statute or executive order shall be made available only in accordance with procedures established to govern the availability of such information.
6. Materials which have been restricted from public access as herein provided shall be reviewed by the Archivist from time to time and papers which, because of the passage of time or other circumstances, no longer require such restrictions shall be opened to public access.
7. Subject to the restrictions imposed herein, the Archivist may dispose of any of the Materials which he determines to have no permanent value or historical interest, or when he determines that it is in the interest of the library or the National Archives and Records Administration to do so, provided that prior to any such disposal reasonable efforts are made to notify the Donor and offer return of the materials.
8. The Donor hereby gives and assigns to the United States of America all copyrights of Henry Hall Wilson which he has in (a} such of the Materials as are unpublished and (b) in such of his unpublished writings as may be among these papers and other historical materials which are described in Appendix A.
9. The Archivist may enter into agreements for the temporary deposit of the Materials under his custody and control in a depository administered by the National Archives and Records Administration or other qualified depository.
10. In the event that the Donor may from time to time hereafter give, donate, and convey to the United States of America, for deposit in the John F. Kennedy Library, additional papers and other historical materials, title to such additional papers and other historical materials shall pass to the United States of America upon their delivery to the Archivist, and all of the foregoing provisions of this instrument of gift shall be applicable to such additional papers and other historical materials. A description of the additional papers and other historical materials so donated and delivered shall be prepared and attached hereto.
Date
Pursuant to the authority of chapter 21 of title 44, United States Code, the foregoing gift of the papers and other historical materials of the Donor is accepted on behalf of the United States of America, subject to the terms, conditions, and restrictions heretofore set forth.
~~Archivist of the United' ~ Sta4t'es '
Date -·
APPENDIX A
(Attached to and forming part of instrument of gift of
papers and other historical materials, executed by:
Abraham HoljhJM ~ Donor
on 6-@g ffl
and accepted by the Archivist of the United States
on
Subject file created as White House liaison to the U.S. House of Representatives, 1960- 1964. 5 cubic feet. (5 FRC) APPENDIX B
The following additional papers and other historical materials are donated to and accepted by the United States of America pursuant to paragraph 10 of the instrument of gift of papers and other historical materials, executed by Henry Hall Wilson, Donor, on May 8, 1988; and accepted by the Archivist of the United States on June 14, 1988.
Two (2) Oral History Interviews (November 27, 1968 and April 20, 1979) created by Henry Hall Wilson, interviewed by Lany Hackman and Sheldon Stem, respectively. 16pp. and 52pp. Henry Hall Wilson – JFK #2
Table of Contents
Page Topic 17, 22, 39 Wilson on joining Lawrence F. O’Brien’s staff 20, 23, 25, 42, 64 Kennedy Administration staff 21 Patronage 26, 49 Rules Committee and the rules fight, early 1961 28 Wilson’s relationships with staff members 31, 36, 43, 63 Wilson’s thoughts and interactions regarding Lyndon B. Johnson 33 Wilson’s lobbying responsibilies and what his work entailed 39 Wilson’s life outside the office 40 Wilson’s relationship with the press 43, 53, 56, 61 John F. Kennedy [JFK] and Congressional relationships 48, 53, 58 Legislation 52, 56 JFK and civil rights 57 Robert F. Kennedy’s impact as Attorney General 61 Medicare meeting the morning of JFK’s assassination Addendum I Name Index Addendum II “The Prince”
Second Oral History Interview
with
HENRY H. WILSON, JR.
April 20, 1979 Monroe, North Carolina
by Sheldon Stem
For the John F. Kennedy Library
STERN: Let me begin by dividing this roughly into two pa1ts, but it's not by any means going to be a rigid division. I'd like to start with procedural kinds of questions, organizational questions, questions on how things operated; and once we've gone through those, then I'd like to switch to specific discussions of specific events, specific bills, specific people. In other words, talk at the beginning roughly, at least, about the way things operated and then the second part, the specific cases, specific examples. As long as that's okay with you.
WILSON: It's just fine, and I'll be happy to answer anything you have. This chapter that I've shown you on the White House Congressional Relations staff is, I think, fairly complete on the subject of organization ...
STERN: All right, I'm sure it is.
WILSON: ... with names.
STERN: Right. I guess one thing, just for the record, which is useful to have is how did you join O'Brien's [Lawrence F. O'B1ien] staff? When did you first get an inkling that he was interested in asking you to join, how did that all come about? Do you know who suggested you for the appointment? Or ....
WILSON: Well, I was in charge of President Kennedy's campaign in North Carolina during the fall of 1960. And we canied the state 52% which was not bad considering the fact we had the smallest Catholic population in the country. I
17 had no intention of leaving Monroe, either for state or federal government. I had built a house there a year and a half earlier. And so my wife and I went to the inauguration January '61 for a four-day party, which indeed it was snow, new frontier, and all. And we were staying at the Shorem Hotel, and the day before the inauguration came a heavy snow, and I got a call requesting me to come to the Mayflower [Mayflower Hotel] which was the temporary headquarters of the president-elect and his staff. There I met Lan-y O'Brien for the first time.
STERN: You had no contact during the campaign at all then?
WILSON: I'd never seen him. I'd made contact, I'd made several trips to Washington. I worked with Dick Donahue [Richard K. Donahue], I'd worked with Ralph Dungan, I'd worked with Dick Maguire [Richard V. Maguire] on schedule, not the president, but other figures. I knew Bob [Robe1i F. Kennedy], I knew the president, or I knew Jack, but I'd never met O'Brien. Who every, just happened to be out of town every time I came up. So, he asked me if I'd be interested in joining the White House staff, and I said what would I do? He said it would be your job to get the president's legislative program through the House of Representatives. And I said I have two questions: One, what is the president's legislative program and two, what is the House of Representatives? [Laughter]
STERN: What was his answer to that?
STERN: [Laughter] What was his answer to that?
WILSON: "So, what does it pay?" and he said, "it pays $20,000 a year." I said, "You 're jesting," and he said, "naw." I said, "Look, I've been practicing law in Monroe, North Carolina at least half my time in politics, and I couldn't begin to live on twenty thousand dollars a year, and I got kids coming on to college." He said, "You know what the cabinet makes?" And I said, "Nope." He said, "They make $25,000." And he says, "Let me tell you," he says, "I've worked for this guy through the senate election of 1952 and then in 1958. I was his chairman of organization through all the primaries, every one of which we won, through the convention, which we took on the first ballot, through the election, which was so tight you've got to believe organization had a little something to do with winning; and I never took a dime, either in expense or pay." And he says, "What do you think I'm going to get?" I said, "How much?" and he says, "twenty one." I said, "Well, I can't argue with that." So I went to the bank, and indeed it did seek sound pretty. And it was interesting, but it was never, it was exhausting, but it was never dull.
STERN: Did he at that point give you a more specific sense of what he expected the job to be like? As I recall, at that point he told you because of the commitment that the President had made during the campaign about cutting the White House staff, that you would be the only one in the House. Is that correct?
WILSON: Well, I was the only one in the House.
18 STERN: Until later, when Donahue and....
WILSON: Until a year later.
STERN: Right. So you were alone for that first year.
WILSON: Yeah.
STERN: And did he give you what your specific expectations were?
WILSON: We didn't know, we were both finding out. I never spent any time in Washington. Larry hadn't spent any time there except two years in '49 and '50 on the staff of Foster Furculo, who was the first congressman. And certainly not remotely anywhere near decisions were being made. We just had to find our way. He didn't know.
STERN: Did you get any help at all from the Eisenhower people?
WILSON: The Eisenhower people? None of them were cooperative. We met with Bryce Harlow who headed the Eisenhower congressional relations staff after Sherman Adams had left and had been replaced by General Persons [Wilton B. Persons] who had been congressional legislative man. Harlow and I today remain warm friends. We see each other occasionally; I understand he's retired now. And Bryce could not have been more cooperative, but he was completely useless for the reason that the tasks were entirely different. He was working with a congress, the majority of which was of the opposite party.
STERN: Sure.
WILSON: And the task of a Republican White House is to stop Democratic legislation and the task of a Democratic president is to pass it. So it was a completely obverse thing. We changed his practices drastically. One of the most sporadic areas was that of our method and use of announced purposes of the congressional relations staffs within the departments and agencies.
STERN: Right. Now that's, I'd like to ask you a question about that. It seems to me from the documents I've seen that a very specific effort was made to place people in the departments and agencies as liaison people, legislative people, who were clearly Kennedy people.
WILSON: Yes.
STERN: As opposed to departmental people.
WILSON: Oh, absolutely.
19 STERN: Absolutely. Ok, can you give me any examples of people you worked with effectively?
WILSON: All of them. All of them.
STERN: Who? Some specific ones?
WILSON: Oh, sure. From the beginning of the administration our secretary, our fellow treasurer was Joe Barr [Joseph M. Barr] who had served one term in the congress from Indianapolis and had lost in 1960, but he was very much a political animal. And very successful. He later briefly became secretary to the treasurer.
STERN: Right.
WILSON: One of our real stars was Ken Birkhead [Kenneth M. Birkhead], who was the head of congressional relations for the Department of Agriculture. Another remarkable man was Wilbur Cohen [Wilbur J. Cohen] of the HEW [Health, Education and Welfare] who later became secretary of HEW. And I don't want to leave the impression that those three people I mentioned were specifically pro-Kennedy and in the early days of the jousting around for nomination because that wasn't the criterion. The criterion was that we wanted people who had responded to the same kind of political vibrations that the congressman did. And we got them, and we had to make some changes. But the State [State Department] never did become politicized even though we put Fred Dutton [Frederick G. Dutton] on there, who had been an aide to Governor Brown [Edmund G. Brown]. But it's hard to politicize things. Does that respond to your question?
STERN: Yes, very much, although I'd like to pursue it. Were there ever times when you found that the needs of the department or the way a department saw a particular kind of legislation would tend to override its loyalty to the President's overall program? In other words, was there a conflict between ....
WILSON: Frequently.
STERN: Yeah? Can you cite any examples of the way, the ways in which that caused problems for you? I imagine that must have been a regular problem.
WILSON: Oh, well, yeah, we had, I get into that so thoroughly in this book, and it's so complex I'm going to leave that to the book. I really get quite clear on the formulation of the program and the handling of the program once it's set up. It is long and complicated, and I do deal with it in those chapters you read, and I will some more in other chapters.
STERN: You prefer not to discuss it in any detail at this point?
20 WILSON: I'll discuss it, I think it's a waste of time. I don't think it will be as valuable to you as it will be .... Let me get the phone. I think you're going to have a more effective interview if you .. .. I deal with that question in both the JFK chapter and in the White House congressional relations and I can show you pages. If you would read that, and after you read it, if you want to pick up and go, I believe that would be the most prudent use of time.
STERN: Ok. Then why don't we move on, and then we'll do that.
WILSON: Ok.
STERN: Ok, I think that's fine. What about the whole question of patronage. I know that, at least technically, O'Brien claimed, although I don't think anybody believed him, that patronage was in Bailey's [John M. Bailey] hands, and that that was not his area. But to what degree was patronage a weapon that you were able to use effectively? And ....
WILSON: Well, it was a weapon that we used where it would seem useful to use it. What Bailey was for was to give word when either we didn't want to fool with it or if we could get nothing but bad answers Bailey could cover it D and C ....
STERN: He would say no in other words. But you and O'Brien certainly had the capacity to say yes when it was necessary to say yes.
WILSON: Yeah, then you get into the definition of what is patronage. Some congressmen were in such position that they had rights to put forward the claims of constituents for say jobs to the assistant secretary level. We never gave into that unless it just happened to be the best person for it. But we'd always look at them. When you get down to questions of say, regional Post Office administrators, now that was a real can of worms because those people brought along with them such day to day privileges over the di spensation of patronage.
STERN: Right.
WILSON: Same is true of Veterans Administration. Routine appointments such as, you can't believe how much conversation goes on about this kind of thing, but such as mailmen and rural mail caniers cause a lot of problems. We always, the congressman choose them, but they had to choose them within the law and the law had examinations and it also had reference points. And congressmen dreaded it because they always said out of eight candidates, they'd have seven enemies and one ingrate. And finally of course they'd strip themselves of it. But there was, we were involved to the extent of making determinations around comers about which congressman would be saddled with this.
STERN: I see.
21 WILSON: And I deal with that in the book. An example I'd give is, well, all right, we would give, except in the case of Mississippi, completely off the track, we would give democratic congressmen control over this and then came the question of what about in Republican districts who gets control? Well, if we had one or both United States Senators they would have control. What if you didn't have them? Well, maybe you've got a Democratic Governor. What if you don't have him? Well, you've got the party organization. Can you believe that in the beginning of the administration there was a major study? There were no Democratic Senators, no Democratic Governors, and a party organization that the President was bound and determined he wasn't going to give any scrap about it. Can you believe that? From New York State.
STERN: Right.
WILSON: [Inaudible]
STERN: As a matter of fact, I'd intended to ask you about this later, but does this relate at all to the problems he had in his very first bill, the one in which he hit a lot of dissent over not appointing Italo - Americans? Most of that came from New York. The bill almost failed, I believe? The very first piece of legislation.
WILSON: The bill was important and the, I'm hardly aware of it being a bill.
STERN: But, I know ....
WILSON: Oh, well, they screamed a lot, you know, you've got to make your judgments about whether a congressman is real when he says I'll go against you if you don't do this.
STERN: But the bill barely passed, it was very close, 209 to 202 I believe it was.
WILSON: Yeah, it was a bill if it passed or not. We considered it first to be the bill of substance [inaudible] march of '61.
STERN: Right, the minimum wage bill, in.... WelJ, I'm going to get to that a little later. Let me get to another point relating to the origins of the whole congressional operation. Many of the people who have written about it commented on the fact that it was very imp01tant for the President to pruticipate in establishing the credibility of O'Brien's operation. And that he made a distinct effort to say, "Have you cleared that with Larry O'Brien?"
WILSON: Very important.
STERN: Yeah. Can you cite any examples in which you personally could see that he had made a difference in establishing credibility?
22 WILSON: Oh, yeah. He would call O'Brien, they'd say I've talked with the President, these were usually Senators. He told me to talk with O'Brien and O'Brien is out and I need to get this done so just. I can't call names right now, but repeatedly you'd hear this. And it was on the assumption we couldn't be run around by the President or by the other members of the White House staff.
STERN: Right.
WILSON: You got to focus the access.
STERN: What about your own access?
WILSON: Which has been a major, I think a major mistake of the Carter administration.
STERN: Yes, I fully agree with you. What about the question of access, your own, for example, did you have to go through O'Donnell to get to the president, or were you able to get to him directly?
WILSON: It was a problem to get to the president.
STERN: Right from the start? Now gradually, within that period ....
WILSON: Couldn't operate in any other way. Go ahead.
STERN: Within that period of a year, you added these additional people, particularly Daly [Charles U. Daly] and Donahue.
WILSON: Right.
STERN: What. ...
WILSON: Daly and Donahue, yeah.
STERN: Right, I am particularly interested in how, well, one, why they were selected particularly, and two, what had happened to make it necessary to add them? I mean how had your expectations about the daily operation of the job changed to the point where you realized you needed additional people?
WILSON: Well, there were several areas. To start, that first year was, in a way, a nightmare, in the sense that all these contracts had to be telephoned in to give the Democratic congressman at least a twenty-four hour jump on announcements of defense department contracts and every other kind of contract. And I did it. And that was a full day's work, every day. It was ridiculous. In addition to Daly and to Donahue, we added a secretary to whom this work was assigned. I'm not totally sure who was the first one, but I think it was Jerry Rogis, R-o-g-i-s [Jerry Rodis]. I don't know just
23 what his title is, but he's at GSA [General Services Administration]. I think he's maybe assistant to the administrator. And before I could get, do not make the mistake of omitting, do you understand the importance of Jean Lewis?
STERN: Yes, as a matter of fact, I was going to ask you about that.
WILSON: Well, for your information she is leading AID [Agency for International Development] as of now, and as of the first of May will pick up the same duties at SBA [Small Business Administration]. I don' t have her new number, she didn't, I mean I had to talk to her once before. But here she was, without any college, and she was entrusted with handling all presidential mail to the president and getting some kind of response out in twenty-four hours. Even if it were nothing more than an acknowledgement and determining where the letters ought to go, and then bird-dogging it and keeping us out of political trouble. And she never got us in any trouble whatever. It's incredible what you'd have to know. Of course, she'd read the papers constantly, Congressional Record, to keep abreast of what was afoot. And then she'd come and get our advice on something. But it was critically important work, and she's a remarkable woman.
STERN: She had spoken briefly with Pauline Fluet [Pauline Fluet] recently and she suggested. Pauline mentioned that I was going to be seeing you, that I ask you about the first call you ever took from Wayne Hays [Wayne L. Hays].
WILSON: I'm putting that in the book.
STERN: Ok.
WILSON: Should I go through it?
STERN: If you want to, yeah.
WILSON: I was, I'd been there about two days and was called I was in this wild office with a man with a mid-western voice. "This is Congressman Wayne Hays." He says, "I made a recommendation for a man to be appointed to this job at the State Department three days ago and it ain't been done yet. [Laughter] And it'll pay such and such and here's a description of the job. And so I wrote it down. Then he also in ten or fifteen minutes of absolutely undefinable, I'd never heard anything like, he used words I'd never heard before. [Laughter]
STERN: Directed against?
WILSON: Anybody listening. I had let him talk himself out, and I said, "Congressman," -!' d never heard of him before--! said, "Congressman, I don't know you, but it's my job to get along with members of Congress, and I should think that you would have some interest in getting alon g with the new Kennedy White House staff." I said, "Now, I've never been talked to like that before, and I don't intend to be again by you
24 or anybody else." And I said, "I have down the name of your man, and I have down the position and I'll make you an unequivocal promjse that as long as I sit in this place, he will never get that or any other job in the federal government." Slammed down the telephone. He called back the next day, just as smooth and sweet as anyone could be and said, "Let's have lunch." Well, fine, so we had lunch, and I never had a call from him again.
STERN: That's fascinating. Well, it certainly fits his public image.
WILSON: He's a bully, and a bully is a coward.
STERN: That's fascinating. I can see why she asked about that. Once you got Daly and Donahue on your staff, how exactly did you divide your responsibilities?
WILSON: Well, you asked me earlier, and I didn 't get around to answering how we chose them. Donahue was there before I was, long before. He had been involved back in that 1952 ....
STERN: Back with Kennedy.
WILSON: Right. . .. thing, in parts of Lowell, Massachusetts, and he probably hadn't even grown a beard in that campaign. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and I'll just start with how, I don't think it's been in p1int. I try not to put anything here that's been in print. But Teddy White [Theodore H. White] in his Making of the President, 1960, which is the best of the books, referred to Donahue as being b1i11iant. It came out in the Spring of '6 1 and of course JFK was utterly furious, hit the buzzer, got Donahue down there, and he said, "Dick, I owe people one thing." Dick Daley [Richard J. Daley] had stolen those 8,000 votes in Cook County. He'd come out with McCarsky and he was stupid. [Laughter] And O 'Brien initially designated Daly to fulfill the personnel portion of O' Brien's title and that's what he did. It was really dog work at first here in this placement office. O'Brien's schedule to see people all over Washignton and then makfog the party organization happen. He came across as somebody that didn 't pass muster on what the FBI required of the Democratic National Committee, but he did it awful well. Particular the transpost office was with Bill Brawley [Hiram W. Brawley]. He was deputy postmaster general, then chief of staff for Johnson's senate committee. And Brawley, the next year in '62 [inaudible] postmaster general president say, [inaudible] bye. But Donahue had superb political instincts and Larry had a very remarkable mind, although a very different mind but a very fine political instinct. I think he educated himself primarily to be a writer. Though he had spent two, I'm not sure, he'd spent two, naw, maybe I think six months each on some kjnd of a scholarship, he could choose a House member and he chose for you to organize [inaudible]. And he had been born in Ireland, he'd left the country, yeah, I think Ireland, 1961 or '60. He was gone all during the campaign. But he was remembered and, as I recall, Ted Sorensen [Theodore C. Sorensen] recommended him and Lan-y looked him over and decided he had the kind of talent we needed. He was entirely right just both of them first rate. And our personal objective with the domestic program was to, well, all of it really, was to pick up about 55 Southerners who were [inaudible] to win and that's a terrible number of
25 congressmen to change around. Southerners are bored people, and I had to get me some depth about distinguishing this, and ....
STERN: How rigid were the distinctions that were the division between you, Daly and Donahue?
WILSON: Well, let me talk.
STERN: Ok, fine.
WILSON: So that was where the real work had to be done. So, about the same time we have a terrible amount of servicing to do for Democrats who favored the president's programs from the North and West and it couldn't be taken for granted. And your response as to, you know, some of them were quite disgruntled anyway that we weren't paying any attention to them. They had a program though, we hadn't, but usually unrealistic. They required a lot of handling. Those were up to doing [inaudiable] but I took over other former Confederate states and border states and the committee chairman and principal members of Congress elected to put Donahue with the big city Irishmen ...
STERN: Right.
WILSON: ... and he had everything else. The biggest piece of which was California. And he picked up Democratic seats with the '62 election in California. So it was, it could have been because of our backgrounds, nevertheless I did the leadership, Donahue and Daly depending on an issue.
STERN: Right. What were particular ex-, what this is, is an early example when it was essentially your job alone, but for example in the rules fight, in January, early February of 1961, could you describe exactly what you did. Obviously at that point you wouldn't have been working just with the board of Southern congressmen.
WILSON: I wasn't at all. Not in the rules fight.
STERN: Explain the Rules Committee, that's what I'm talking about.
WILSON: Yeah, I know. It was a judgment, I wouldn't call it an enoneous judgment, of Lany and Preston I don't know whether he discussed this with the presidential leadership or not, to keep us as much service as possible and which was not a presidential sponsored piece of legislation, but an internal matter in the House. Keep the White House out of sight as much as possible and to downplay the degree of the portended White House involvement with legislation bills and enacted legislation. And here I was, the twentieth of, or nineteenth of January just hearing about these things. The next, I think the inauguration was on a Friday. On a Saturday we had a meeting with the Democratic ·~ National Committee in which we .... I took off for, my wife and I took off for New Jersey to vi sit my sister who was then pregnant with child. Came back in on, things still unverified at
26 this point. Came back in on Sunday night, and then, to a motel room in Alexander, we were ready to drive home, and I said, "There's a shot at the White House, and General Donahue says, "Come on in. To get to work. Come on in." I believe that right rules final choosing was on the thirty-first of January.
STERN: That's right.
WILSON: So this was around the, about the twenty-third or fourth that I showed up over there for the first time. And when I see my commission assigned January twenty-eighth, obviously I'd be somewhat rearranging bank bits and worrying about the family and schools and all that most of the break. So I left. They didn 't want me inside anyway and I didn' t know what to do. So I came on home and I stayed out of sight till that was over, that's my take on the whole.
STERN: Do you have any views at all on many of the pub[jshed accounts of the whole euphoria or that Rayburn [Samuel R. Rayburn] made a mistake in changing it from a purely party matter, in other words, say kicking Colmer [William M . Colmer] out of the committee and changing to an issue that would affect the entire House by moving Lo expand the committee and thus almost lost. Do you think that' s an accurate description of what happened?
WILSON: Yeah, I think indeed it was a mistake. I think Rayburn, in his latter years, got very cautious and very concerned about taking the House and knew he wasn't too far when he shouldn't, and the other side was ruthless. And it was fail-, it stated a purpose. They performed. But, yeah, I think it was a bad mi stake. I think there was a, it could have been done different. Howard Smith should have been committee chainnan. He would be now. But that was a slow, painful death, the way it was done. We still had big problems, but they weren't unsinkable problems as they would have been had we lost that fight. We may as well put another shot.
STERN: You feel then if Ingram [O. W. Ingram] were to view the issue as solely a Democratic Party issue that it probably could have been one more less risk.
WILSON: Oh, I don't think there's any question.
STERN: Yeah, I think so, too. Do you have any intuitions as to why he did that? I mean, there are those who say ....
WILSON: I think he probably could get an agreement of Smith to accept, but I shouldn't speculate on that. I wasn't the first to
STERN: I see.
WILSON: Just the type of thing that once its done, it's done. You don' t go harking back and asking why did you do this
27 STERN: Ok. I'd like to move on to this meeting you had with Bolling [Richard W. Bolling], Frank Thompson [Frank Thompson, Jr,], Dick Bolling, Frank Thompson, and Carl Elliot. I believe it was in early ...
WILSON: And[?] Miller.
STERN: ... and[?] Miller. Right.. .
WILSON: O'Brien and Donahue.
STERN: .. .in which you were viewed, essentially the list of members of the House. Precisely what did you get out of that meeting? What did you expect to get out of it. How satisfied were you with what they gave you?
WILSON: I don't remember this the day it must have been probably mid-February. I know we were in heavy, there was heavy snow.
STERN: Right, around the tenth, something like that.
WILSON: We, oh hell, excuse me, yeah.
STERN: February of ' 61.
WILSON: Yeah, my impression is that I've had an opportunity to move around pretty well. I had a couple of weeks, and what was at square with what I wanted. Also I mentioned some people I had not yet met and I'm sure that was true of O'Brien. And it saved you something if you changed it around our picture, which was an accurate picture.
STERN: In terms of the .. ..
WILSON: Difficulties of the legislation. Tells you it was a useful meeting, thing has been helped by several books, you know. It wasn't all that important, and I don't intend to mention it in my book. Thing was more important to the congressmen than it was to us.
STERN: What about your relationship with people like [?] Miller and the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations] in other words. The lobbyists who were essentially on your side, just how expensive were those relations and how much cooperation did you get from them?
28 WILSON: A great deal of cooperation. They brought some experience politically, and they had some muscle and they could shovel when they wanted but very seldom doing that. For example, minimum wage was so important to them they wound up getting two Republicans. We weren't always together. Sometimes they were opposed to us. They were with us certainly more frequentl y than they weren't. Sometbjng like j ust didn't get into it.
STERN: Obviously they had their own interests.
WILSON: We had our own extensions, our own [inaudi ble] frequently had meetings of outside lobbyists in different areas such as [inaudible] how to whatever, and they, the labor people, mi ght be settled to it as they were with minimum wage, or they might be another part of the group. But we liked them, and we could talk frankly with them, and they were our kind of people.
STERN: What about the, paiticularly in the eai·Jy pe1iod, your relationship first wi th Rayburn and with McCormack as majority leader and then, of course, as speaker. Let me just preface that with saying, there's been a lot written, of course, about McCormack and Kennedy, some claiming that there was a lot of bad blood between them, and then on the other hand, including some of the people I've interviewed, claiming th at they were really quite close while Kennedy was in the White House. I have some doubts about that relationship. I think there was more to it than what appeai·s on the surface, but obviously I'd very much like to have your point of view on it. Did you ever see them together? Did you think ....
WILSON: Oh, yeah. Well, I would, I just fi nished a chapter on leadership in whi ch I deal with both McC01mack and Hebert [Feljx Edward Hebe1i] and their relationships with the president, with Kennedy and then McCormack later with Johnson. I don't think there's any question about it or much written that McCormack in effect didn't do in the old crowd in that Massachusetts politics and then Kennedy people had their own younger group. [Inaudible] not a question of policy, just a question of who's in control. McCormack couldn' t understand Congress, although he professed to be a Democrat. He wasn't in all respects what he regarded as a right man. And it's been passed reference to about the Purple Shamrock. James Curley [James M. Curley] and Kennedy were accused of signing petitions for President Truman granting clemency on Curl ey and McCormack's offensive of that. Further, there was resentment on the part of the McCormack people that Kennedy and his people didn' t work hard for the re-election for Governor Dever [Paul A. Dever] in 1952 when Kennedy was running for senate. And again, it was either '56 or '60 when Foster Furculo was running for it. Kennedy wasn't enthusiastic about Foster Furcolo. He had worked for the e lection and had worked on his staff. Then there was the 1956 brawl over the selection of the state Democratic chairman and I guess that really is what pierced his paw ...
STERN: Yes, it was.
29 WILSON: ... which the Kennedy people wound up winning.
STERN: I wasn't able to get anything from McCormack on that. He just claimed it was great! y exaggerated.
WILSON: Well, it was over, O'Brien didn't feel, O'Brien and O'Donnell made the judgment, but Kennedy questioned the judgment, but they prevailed. And he knew better than to make trouble and he never understood why it was important to win it. But I was with McCormack constantly throughout that very troublesome period in '52, troublesome relationships, McCormack was running his campaign.
STERN: '52, Yeah.
WILSON: Then of course, McCormack's being childless, foster son really of the Speaker who felt very emotionaJly involved with his son, he never flinched on backing the kid into legislation. I knew he made very few trips to Boston. I don't know whether he made a statement or telling not to make a statement. It doesn't matter, everybody knew already. And I happened to be with him on other business on the day I called in the primary and he never mentioned it. He had to have been suffering. I think that was very classy. Aside from the one issue, and that was the 1961 version of the Federal Ladies Secretary Convention of Education, I never saw McCormack in any way deviate from the Kennedy program. And I think that anyone who, and I was with him everyday, I think anyone who will maintain a period and nor talk.
STERN: Do you feel that the one major deviation on nothing more than a religious issue? In te1ms of...
WILSON: Yeah. Yeah.
STERN: And of course Kennedy was in a hopeless, political position ...
WILSON: He was.
STERN: He could not support it...
WILSON: He was. Period. But McCormack, to both Kennedy and Johnson, was what Rayburn was to Roosevelt and Truman, he was critically important. He was luke warm on this quaITel and the issue and the rest. He never, thankfully, broke that leadership. Incredible that thing to do.
STERN : How about for example, I remember seeing an account of the televote on minimum wage which lost by one vote, there were claims that there were a couple of Democratic Congressmen in the cafeteria, McCormack failed to get them onto the floor.
30 WILSON: I never heard that, I never heard of in the cafeteria. The story I heard was that they were playing gin rummy on the House Office building. I never believed that story, and I don't believe it now. So I confess I didn't personally count it.
END OF SIDE 1
STERN: ... the president heard the story on the failure to round up a couple of extra congressmen, very upset about .it.
WILSON: Sulfurous.
STERN: I would think he would be. So you feel generally then that the relationship of McCormack in terms of the President's program was a very good one, whatever the personal political problems.
WILSON: Excellent. Excellent. I never use from that one.
STERN: How about Rayburn? Although obviously there wasn't that much time with Rayburn only roughly a year ...
WILSON: Had a year there, a crucial year.
STERN: About eight months? Something like that, nine months .. ..
WILSON: He died in November after the recession, after the Congress was recessed.
STERN: All right, is this in a, sort of just to introduce my point, I came across a remark by Lyndon Johnson, early in the administration in which he said that the President had all the minnows, but didn't have the whales. And what he was referring to was the fact that the President did not, in Johnson's view, have the real authority of Rayburn or McCormack or Coerr [Wymberley Coerr].
WILSON: What time, what period, what year' was that att1ibuted to?
STERN: It was said early in '61. That was going to be the source of the legislative difficulties.
WILSON: Well he, Johnson, aside from Rayburn or a handful of House members, he really knew nothing whatsoever about the operation of the House. As we learned to our sorrow when he became President. He was much less well equipped to deal with the Congress as a whole, in particular the House which was the cockpit of the action than Kennedy was.
31 STERN: Now that of course goes very much against the standard view, as I'm sure you're fully aware.
WILSON: That's what my check was about.
STERN: The standard view of course is that Johnson was the legislative master.
WILSON: Well, I deal with it very, very deeply.
STERN: Well, I'm anxious to read it. So you don't think ...
WILSON: I think that if Johnson had become President in 1961 rather than Kennedy, I think he would have done a far Jess as well in Congress as Kennedy. I'll say that.
STERN: Let me just, one point about Johnson since we're talking about him, now I realize of course that he had been in the Senate obviously. That was where he had whatever major influence that remained for him in '61 when he became Vice President, would've been in the Senate, which is not your area. But I'm curious as to whether you have any sense of why Johnson turned out to be so minor a factor in supporting the President's legislative program. I've seen evidence that the President expected that Johnson would be important for him on the hill. He realJy turned out to be a, not very important to him. By contrast for example, to Hubert Humphrey, who was very significant for Johnson in Johnson's second term.
WILSON: In the Senate?
STERN: In the Senate, right.
WILSON: I deal with that in considerable depth. I think that the first place where Johnson's image sharply diminished was by the tremendous influx of the seventy two new Democratic Senators in '58. Because it didn't fit his operating style and he was corning up now against the much more liberally oriented Senate. Second, I think he was shaken to his very roots by the challenge to hi s effort to name himself. Named hi s Chairman of the policy Committee.
STERN: Of the caucus, yeah.
WILSON: In January ...
STERN: In January of '61, yeah. Which did pass by a large majority, but nevertheless .. ..
32 WILSON: It did, but there was outspoken, outspoken opposition to it. He was getting from people like Clinton Anderson [Clinton P. Anderson] about it. And they were voting for him, but they didn't like it.
STERN: I understand of course they even supported him for the nomination.
WILSON: Oh yeah.
STERN: Yeah, Right.
WILSON: Come into the Senate at the same ti me, were very close. Now, and I think that from that focus as far as the Senate is concerned Johnson just sunk it all. Early in the Kennedy administration, I went to see John son and I had never met him before except briefly once that I told you about. When Ken nedy brought the news to Washington. But I asked him about he lp in the House. He said, well I'll do everything I can, but he says I don't know much of anybody in the House. He says a few of the old timers and a couple of committee chairmen but except for that I don't know anybody except the Texans. Ok, so we buckled down on the Texans and I forget what the issue was, I think it was probably the minimum wage bill. And by the time we had eliminated the people that were for us, and the people who could not be changed, who were against us, and the people who were targets but who were personall y on for, personally on political outs with Johnson ....
STERN: There wasn't anybody left. . ..
WILSON: We're talking about nothing. We're down to the people regularly pi ck up, is what you were down to. And I don't, I stress that I think that he was bei ng completely honest he wasn't giving me any double talk, just what he could contribute was nothing. And after a couple of passes like that he just wasn't worth the time of venture in.
STERN: I see. Did you ever have any knowledge of this executive order that Johnson had one of his staff people prepared in one of the very first days of the administration ....
WILSON: Right. I didn't know about it then, I read about it smce. I didn't have firsthand ....
STERN: No firsth and knowledge about it at all. O.K. How did you begin to structure your ability to establish, let's put it this way, loyalty to the President's program. How did you working on head counts, on getti ng agencies to report to you, on getting stuff back to Desautels at the White House for the meetings with the President, etc. If you could describe that whole operation.
33 WILSON: Well, the starting point of course was to get good people in the departments. And we had to instruct them on what we expected of them. We expected them to follow of course, we assigned every White House labeled bill to a department usually emanating from that department. And as to the committee action, the department was expected to through its count, first to the committee, to keep us informed, not to call for help unJess they really needed it but if they needed it don't wait too late. And then to join an alliance and if they needed it we jumped in. Some of them were so important, so definitely we jumped in at the very beginning of it, and I myself would pull the Ways and Means Committee. And of course we were running about two hundred bills at a time and just so far you could spread yourself. So far as floor action is concerned, if there were a tough bill the departmental people were supposed to get together with the interested, the lobbyists on that bill. And they shifted from bill to bill, worked out a head check. And we always started behind because if we started ahead we'd just wrap it up and it wouldn't be tough, but the tough ones we always started behind. And we'd look over their findings, we had to train them, we had to teach them not to accept commjtrnents that weren't really commitments, not to take things for granted about say who was going to be in town. A very important thing was the physicaJ whereabouts of the members because if they were in Washington, even if they were in Washington whether they were across the street. Literally across the street.
STERN: I imagine after a while it began, you began to know that promises from certain people were worth a lot more than promises ...
WILSON: Oh yeah .
STERN: . . . from others . ...
WILSON: Yeah, so we had to judge, we had to make our own judgements on these depa1tmentaJ people and cross check them. Whip them out ourselves and then we put that in conjunction with what our leaders had, our whip checks which were mi serable.
STERN: Really?
WILSON: Awful, just terrible.
STERN: Why was that? Do you have any ....
WILSON: Well, because the members didn't want to answer. There wasn't a way to make them answer through the system, and the system was that you'd call once the whip question was put and the whip secretary would call the regional zone whips designated secretaries and they in tum would call designated secretaries of the members in a zone and they theoretically would ask their bosses how they intended to vote, and their boss would either say question mark or don't know the answer. You 'd wind up
34 with maybe forty-five yes and fifty-three no and the rest either question mark or no answer which is worthless.
STERN: Sure.
WILSON: When you add the additional disadvantage of a southern states which had these young whips who were opposed to the programs. The purpose of a whip call is one, to convey to the zone whips and to the members that the leadership is interested in the bill. Two, to get a reading on where he stands. And three, to aJert the zone whips to get busy sh01ing up the backsliders. Well, in North Carolina at that time the whip was Paul Kitchin [Paul A. Kitchin]. Lives thirty miles from here. He was the chief Lieutenant of Aaron Smith, if he found a member that was leaning toward the leadership, toward the administration position he'd work on changing off. So you really had to, we had to build a whip. Our own whip system. And it was from our system, and it was from our ports that we worked. And then we had a meeting of the leadership of the President. They, the leaders, would find one name I talked, you got this about right, I talked with him and he's shaky, and you rejoice in that, but at least he had something to bang against and we had a full check in. And there were still a lot of question marks. But that's fine and what you work on.
STERN: Right. How about non-congressional sources in terms of checks? People like [?]Miller for example, or Clarence Mitchell or .. ..
WILSON: Yeah. We assigned ....
STERN: the NAACP ....
WILSON: We assigned names too and they'd cross check peopJe, they'd cross check members. We'd also learn which outside people were good and who were not skilled at this kind of thing. Or diligent.
STERN: Now the President himself, for obvious reasons, would not be involved in any major way, in terms of for example making telephone caJls things of that sort.
WILSON: Absolutely.
STERN: Although he did, I see he did on a couple of occasions call people in critical cases, he didn't do that very much ...
WILSON: One, two .... Are you talking about Kennedy?
STERN: Kennedy, yeah.
WILSON: One case that he was most involved in was in the cutting back of the civil rights bill from the subcommittee version to a very, the original administration version. He, we pulled in liberal Democrats two occasions for him to talk
35 with that was the big one. Now and then there would be a call, but we djd our best to keep him off the telephone. President's got no business lobbying members, again a ten-ible mistake Carter's making.
STERN: Yeah.
WILSON: And Johnson. Johnson thought he was going to run the pocketbook of Congress from the White House on the telephone. And did nothing but screw us up, because the members would confront him with somethjng and there wasn't any way he knew all we knew about every member and where we were with every project every member had.
STERN: Right.
WILSON: And then there's calling a member. You got four hundred and thirty-four members who are going to hold out till they get a call, it's ridiculous.
STERN: llight. It's simply impossible. And yet O'Brien claims in his book as I'm sure you know, that Kennedy did have literally hundreds of contacts with Congressmen during, let's say, the first year. He divided them ...
WILSON: That's a different kind. That's totally different.
STERN: That's totally different. Yeah.
WILSON: Yeah, we encouraged all possible social contact with the Congress. We wanted them to feel they knew the President. They, we wanted them to feel they were welcome to widdle in and out of the lines. But the President asking for a vote? Entirely disadvised.
STERN: Right. I fully understand.
WILSON: Johnson had been in office, I don't know, just a few months. One day I talked with him and I said, "You called three members of the House of Representatives this morning and wished them Happy Birthday?" I recall the Washington Post at that time carried a daily rundown on bi11hdays. He happened to see that and he thought it would be pleasant to call. Well it was, wasn't asking for a vote. But he said, "Who on my staff leaked that to you?" I said, "Nobody on your staff leaked that to me." I said this was an hour call, I even knew what time he called. "It's all over the hill that's where I got it. Where else do you think I'd find three names out of, three needles out of that haystack?" I said, "That's what happens when a President calls the hill." And I said, "It was a mjstake because what about the 432 you didn't call? They're going to expect to be called. If you want to set up a regular service of sending out birthday cards to everybody that would be simple to do however I don't think it makes any sense whatever, just another wheel spinner. But the big lesson out of thi s Mr. President is that if you call somebody for a vote,
36 then it's really going to be all over the hjJl that you just called another one and unmitigated trouble." He listened pretty carefully. He stayed out of my way in the House anyway. Obviously he had more contacts or conversations with Senators. How's your coffee corning?
STERN: Oh that's fine, just fine. I wonder, one question that intrigues me and I know a lot of students particularly are interested in this kind of thing, I wonder if you could try and construct a sort of a model for what your daily schedule and method of operation was. In other words, how much time you would spend in your office, how much time on the hill, how much time in White House meetings with agency lobbyists, etc. Just what was, if there is such a thing, as an average day, from when you an-ived on the hill. ...
WILSON: [inaudible] One, I've dealt with thi s in the book. Two, is there's not such a thing. Three, I'll make a pass at it.
STERN: O.K.
WILSON: Going in a Congressman's office takes a lot of time. If you're in his office you've got at least the advantage of being able to get up and walk out which you don't have if he comes to your office.
STERN: I see.
WILSON: When you cover that much territory, you got to do it mostly by telephone. Nevertheless there are some particular things that would involve more than one Congressman. Have them out to the White House but then again getting them out there was another problem. So these obv-, these usually would be morning sessions unless the committee's meeting is more important than their House sessions in the afternoon but they were mainly in the afternoon hours in the Speaker's office for three of four hours, three or four days a week.
STERN: Wow. T hree or four hours three or four days a week?
WILSON: Mm-hmm. When it was a, the full swinging session.
STERN: Right off that little office off the floor...
WILSON: Mm-hmm, Yeah. And I don't mean I was using that as an office, I mean with the Speaker confening on things you had the leadership schedujjng, head counting worry about putting pressure on a committee this whole gambit of what you discussed. So I really could work more actively on the telephone in my office than I could work any other way. If there was a big bill on the floor, I usually used Washington power, particularly if there was a bill you could see. I never attended a committee meeting the whole time I was in Washington.
37 STERN: Really?
WILSON: Yeah, closed or open, though I was frequently invited to closed meetings, but I didn't think there was, or that it was wise to do that nor fruitful. I had no second thought. Now so when I was out going I'd sit there and take a full day and be on the hill. I'd check in at the office three or four times during the day because they wouldn't know what the President had to hear. Something I'd better find out or and then I'd come back to the office and there would be six or seven pages of telephone calls.
STERN: Just after a few hours?
WILSON: Yeah.
STERN: Yeah.
WILSON: And they weren't delegable telephone calls, but nobody was calling me obviously wasn't going to get me and I wasn't going to take the call unless it was a member, or a cabinet officer or a major reporter or one of our outside lobbyists like [?] Miller, and not very many were. There just wasn't time that's the critical thing you always got to consider trying to convey to the public what life is like in that kind of atmosphere. It was conditional decision time.
STERN: How long was an average day through such a time?
WILSON: Well, I would sit down there, both of the secretaries who were there, none of the secretaries ever left until after seven o'clock. It was infrequent that I would, I could let one out the secretary out at seven.
STERN: And when did they generally start?
WILSON: About eight thirty. None of us were morning persons. Congress, now that's just the way you work. Kennedy tried, Johnson tried too. A mix of people got up at the crack of dawn. They acted like it. Can you imagine going home at five o'clock? Now I buckled down to returning those telephone calls. And it was amazing these people were still there, they were working those hours. And whoever I needed there until ten thirty, eleven, eleven thirty at night. And calls were coming in most of the evening I would just sit at the desk and work alone, got to allow the secretary to get some sleep you see wash some cloths, whatever. And I was, I never knew the White House limousine to commute to my house which was about ten miles due west of the White House and in Fairfax county Virginia. Because the only time of day I could be alone I didn't even want a chauffeur in the car there with me. I sat there and driving and figuring out what I was going to do.
STERN: No phone in the car?
38 WILSON: No phone. Took about a half hour or so. I'd get in about eight thirty I dropped the kids off at school about eight. I'd head on home. I began it at first, I called Mary before I left the office tell her I was coming and then I discovered there wasn't any point in doing that because the minute I left that office, the phone started ringing at home. So she knew when I walked out of the office ....
STERN: You mean if people couldn't get you at the office they'd call. .. .
WILSON: Just call home, house. Yeah. Come home have a stack of phone calls. And I usually worked al l day Saturday at the office. Took off Saturday evening and worked half day Sunday. That was my pattern. I took a total of four weeks vacation in the total of six and a half years at the White House. I was free to take a vacation but even if Congress was out there was so much to do that you just did it.
STERN: Did you go to those O'Brien lunches for Congressmen on Sundays?
WILSON: What?
STERN: Larry O'Brien's brunches for Congressmen on well those were on Sunday.
WILSON: They weren't very, yeah. Good idea though.
STERN: Good shot.
WILSON: Now and then we spent the evening with a batch of Congressmen on the Sequoyah river plus made a mistake to jump in the Sequoyah. That's a 1idiculous symbol.
STERN: How was this, was this routine altered in any substantial way by getting Donahue and Daly?
WILSON: Naw.
STERN: No?
WILSON: No. He really wished, massive multiply on O'Brien I had his work to do and mine too. That was the most severe intellectual strain I ever went through figuring out how to cover both those places and then with the post office department. Not only did I have his work to do, but I had to help him worry about the Post Office Department. Anyway, Larry and I, in a desperate effort to find some variety of exercise and the only thing we could find at that time in the night was bowling. We managed if we got there before midnight to find a lane or two, it would have helped to be there sooner anyway. All those leagues we were never very good at it but at least it was some variety of armswing. Golf and that kind of thing I don't know what, I remember the few hours I had on weekends I'd try to get reacquainted with the children. They were teenagers then. There
39 being five of us we decided to have a woodwind quintet and it wouldn't be fair for any of us to play an instrument we already knew so I got a bassoon and fiddled with it enough to get along and I think Tu got the oboe, Pete played the French horn, Nancy the clarinet, and Mary took up the flute. And we played a little Beethoven and Mozart and we got more involved into fights than we did into the music. It didn't take very much to set things on end very well.
STERN: Incredible killing routine. Descrjbe ... .
WILSON: You need to be young. And I wasn't all that young, I was thirty-nine when I went in.
STERN: What about the press, your relationship wi th the press in general? Were there people you, I mean how much pressure did you get from the press .. ..
WILSON: Came in spurts.
STERN: Which people did you trust, which were the people that you quickly realized you couldn't trust?
WILSON: Hemp. Human beings too. Very able human beings. I always made it a point to say to the person, "I don't want anything out of you." I don't care what you print about me, you're not going to, my name never got in the paper, I didn't want it in the paper. Joe Califano was there about half the time I was and he was in the paper every day. It depends the way you run them. See. But my basic premise with the reporters was I say look, I'm going to give you the time, and valuable time, to give you useful information, I want something in return and what's valuable to me is information. And when you come with me, at me for questioning, now and then I could have one go on for hours, you bring a tidbit, you get me some information about what's happening on the hill. They didn't like that, nobody else had ever told them that, but what the hell, why shouldn't I get some advantage from it. Could be useful.
STERN: Can you recall any reporters who were valuable in that specific thing?
WILSON: Yeah, one in particular was Vince Burke [Vincent J. Burke]. Vincent Burke who was at that time with a U with UPI, and I guess now is with the Los Angeles. Come in. (interruption) Now and then I would get a call from a press member who would ask a question and I'd give an answer and I'd get an argument about the answer. Well, I said you call me for news and you're trying to sell me something. Then I realized that what had happened is that they started the column being printed and they were trying to change the news to fit the column.
STERN: That's not unusual. Yeah. Did you, were there specific reporters that you had a better rapport with, how about Roberts [Charles W. R oberts] for example, just any ....
40 WILSON: No I think he, I think he fiddled with ....
STERN: He was most for international affairs. Right. He's got, he's had a lot of opinions on ea--on his book on Kennedy and Congress and how effectjve Kennedy was although he takes pretty much the standard view, the Tom Wicker view. Of course I want to get to that later. Was the job changed at any, oh, excuse me, there was another point I meant to .... I talked to Wilbur Cohen last week and he made a very interesting distinction and I wondered about your response to that. He said that although there was obviously a lot of cooperation between people in the White House and the legislative liaison people he said that he always felt that there was a distinction between what he called process people vs. policy people. By process people he meant himself, you, O'Brien etc. and by policy people he meant people like Sorensen, Lee White, Mike Feldman [Myer "Mjke" Feldman], etc in the White House. And he said there were often a lot of cross signals and difficulty in commurucation between the process and the policy people and he felt that that was better under Johnson than under Kennedy. That there was more understanding between these two dimensions of the issue. It was better under Johnson than under Kennedy. How do you respond to that?
WILSON: Well Sheldon, I think it adds some validity, it's an oversimplification. Again, one which I explore in great depth in these chapters.
STERN: I wish I'd seen them beforehand. Yeah.
WILSON: Well, you're here now, you can read them.
STERN: You don't fe--
WILSON: I'll sit here and tear up the same stuff if you want me to, I won't do it as well or in as much depth as I have in the work [inaudible.]
STERN: Well, it's important I think in and of itself it's worth getting a lot of this stuff on tape for the purpose like for example, college students or high school students who aren't going to read your book. So, whatever detail you could, that's just reality they just won't.
WILSON: Right.
STERN: And, and if they can read a transc1ipt and get at least a sense of what that your.. ..
WILSON: You mean I'm cutting sales of my book?
STERN: Well, they wouldn't buy it anyway.
41 WILSON: O.K. What was the question? I don't, we had a lot of input into, we meaning personal relations people, had a lot of input into the Presidential messages. Far more than the your calling policy people were even aware. Because if we disagreed with them about something we'd send a select congressman to at least get a quote or humor them to relate to the President and that would have a great deal more beating on something. I, somebody would have a staff member who was undecided whose opinion was divine will. And then once the message was out, we made those drop over the side.
STERN: How much discretion did you have in decision ma-.. . ?
WILSON: Whatever we decided to take that we thought was congruent with the President's directives. See we had to decide what do you do to get the big ones through. Instead of worrying about the commas and the periods on a pet project, the President might be here and then we can up to agree to inc lude in a message to the congress a fateful reference to some fool pet project, to a cabinet officer or some national society. And the committee decides to pass it, and we just let it flow , or sink usually.
STERN: Do you recall Mike Kerwin's aquaiium?
WILSON: Very totally.
STERN: What was the President's reaction to that?
WILSON: He was incredulous.
STERN: I would think he would be.
WILSON: As a matter of fact I reminded O'Brien of that story, when he didn't tell it very well.
STERN: Oh that's right, it is in O'Brien's book.
WILSON: Yeah.
STERN: And I fancy documentatio n about that at the library was very clear that the President wasn't all the way happy about that. What was your own rel ationship with the Sorensen people out there? Did you see them often or. ...
WILSON: No. We had these meetings each around November, these summation meetings pulling the cabinet officer and one or two of the people, the policy person in charge which was first, well in the Kennedy years it was Sorensen. Maybe there would be another White House Staff person. Donahue took, O'Brien put it on Donahue the first couple of years in '63 he left and had a new president and so I began to ....
STERN: He left, what October was it or just before or around?
42 WILSON: Yeah. About a month, nine children he had to support. So, cat you want out? If you want to go out I'm going to let you out. Now .... (Intenuption) We had our input into that. Sometimes we'd challenge the president, usually being trouble stuff to go through.
STERN: Did you have any trouble with O'Donnell getting, I mean just getting to the President?
WILSON: No.
STERN: No.
WILSON: Never.
STERN: How about these legislatio-...
WILSON: Because O'Donnell knew what the President was focusing on.
STERN: That was hi s job. Did your job change significantly when Donahue left? Or still, pretty much stayed the same ....
WJLSON: No. No it didn't change between Johnson, Kennedy and Johnson. Same thing, same methods, we simply adopted what we were doing. Didn't even have a suggestion on a single point of procedural operation we just coached him on what we were about and he agreed. Never had a cross word with Johnson.
STERN: What about these weekly legislative breakfasts that Kennedy had? How much input did you have in te1ms of the kinds of information that he got?
WILSON: I didn't attend those meetings during Kennedy's presidency, I attended them when O'Brien left the White House and it was the fall of '65. I did help prepare agenda backup papers for the President.
STERN: Did you work closely with Claude Desautel in terms of. ...
WILSON: Oh Claude was doing the same, collecting the studi es Kennedy, just a collection point. But he exercised his judgement.
STERN: What would your assessment be of the Kennedy's understanding of Congress, do you think it changed significantly in hi s roughly three years as President or. ...
WILSON: No. I think he knew what the game was to start with. And knew far more about the House than Johnson did.
43 STERN: Now of course I think when your book comes out, I think that's going to be the most controversial conclusion since it's ....
WILSON: I not only state the conclusion, I state the reasons for it and I also state how history is trying to write itself in the wrong fashion. It's just outrageous. It's outrageous the [inaudible.]
STERN: Are you talking now about judging Kennedy's legislative record in terms of si mply bills enacted and signed as opposed ...
WILSON: And in the context of the difficulty of the Congress he's working.
STERN: Congress ....
STERN: Now of course reporters li ke Neil McNeil and others who certainly I think understand the Congress, Torn Wicker have pretty well, especially Wicker, have taken the position use the term that Kennedy lost Congress ...
WILSON: Is that 1ight?
STERN: ... with the defeat of the minimum wage and the defeat of the education ....
WILSON: Well, wait a minute. (interruption)
STERN: What about the question of committee assignments, things of that sort. Did your operation get into that all? Did you try and influence . ...
WILSON: We got into it. We did tried to influence it, we did influence it. We tried to keep out of sight as much as possible.
STERN: I would think [inaudible] area to get into.
WILSON: Occunence. Yeah.
STERN: Can you think of any examples of where it made a difference?
WILSON: Yeah. Particularly important thing was there had been an agreement made decades before, I suppose by Rayburn and Martin [Joseph W. Martin]. That the Ways and Means Committee would remain at fifteen ten in favor of the majority party. Regardless of the size of the majority. In other words, a party could carry the House by one vote and still have a Five vote advantage on the Ways and Means Committee.
STERN: Right.
44 WILSON: Some logic in that because Ways and Means Committee has got to function. After the '64 Democratic Congressional landslide, we didn't want to put up with that anymore because we had a larger figure than that. As a matter of fact we were entitled to a seventeen to eighteen.
STERN: You wanted a, a majority proportionate to the Democratic ...
WILSON: . .. to the Democratic [inaudible] which would be seventeen eight. And that is a tremendous difference as opposed to fifteen to ten especially regarding the cure book. And so that had to be done by pressing the leadership into a showdown of Republicans who fought it bitterly of course. But they had no ground for it. And another was after the '64 election there was an enormous turnover in the appropriations committee and with its bearing on the makeup of the subcommittees. I know when I first came to Washington in '61 I was told by everyone, I discussed it that Dan Flood had less than six months to live, he was dying of cancer.
STERN: Yeah that's .. ..
WILSON: This was in '61.
STERN: Didn't turn out did it?
WILSON: After the 1964 election, which was of course heavi ly Democratic, nevertheless Flood was left as he was the only remaining incumbent Democrat on the sub commjttee on HEW and Labor whlch was critica11y important to what we were doing. So it made a very great deal of difference which members were to replace him. By that time Clarence Connon had died. He'd died I guess March of '64. George Mohan [George H. Mahon] was Chairman. We had some beating on that. That's a couple of examples.
STERN: Could you give me an example of the kinds of things you would do to influence the chair committee to change?
WILSON: Well, it would depend on what you were changing. If you were changing the make up of the committee as such, I'd usually c hange Lhe make up, you had bearing on which new members were to go to which committee.
STERN: Right.
WILSON: Then in the case of all but the Ways and Means Committee, the Committee on Committees was the Democrats on Ways and Means. Except Rules Committee and that also was in the same committee on committees except the speaker was
TAPE 2 STARTS
45 by caucus rules accorded more of a voice in the choice of rules committee members. So, you had to maneuver the thing to work out the votes in the Ways and Means Democrats to influence who was going to what committee.
STERN: Right.
WILSON: And when you fill the vacancy on Ways and Means that was done by Caucus vote. And that involves pretty heavy action too. I full checked every Democrat in the House to work it out.
STERN: How about leadership struggles, for example, when Rayburn died, did you, were you involved at all in the question of McCormack' s succession? I know that Bowling considered changing ...
WILSON: Bowling considered, let it be known that he was considering challenging Albert [Carl Bert Albert].
STERN: Right, for majority whip.
WILSON: Only on the ground that there had been a precedent set for the (lntenupti on)
STERN: 0.K., we're all set now.
WILSON: The majority is elected by the Congress. The whip however, is appointed by the Speaker. And it's the whip who orders to see the majority leader is a matter of tradition not opposition. This would mean that there would be self-perpetuating leadership and that each Speaker would be choosing each subsequent one. Nevertheless, that has come to be the habit. The only challenge within the leadership in the Democratic leadership in my entire time. Bolton really never got off ground. Catter worked harder.
STERN: Did the White House pretty much keep its hands off the ....
WILSON: Yeah, we were off that. And the other change on the Republican side was [inaudible] which we had nothing to do with. We were aware of it, we listened for it, but we could not have done anything, there wasn't. ... It wouldn't have worked.
STERN: What about your relationship with the Republican leadership, particularly Halleck [Charles A. Halleck] generally?
WILSON: There is a chapter on that.
46 STERN: He was, I gather, not the most cooperative of, I mean, even given the fact that he was opposition, he was a difficult person.
WILSON: Yeah, he figured everything would be a my-my promptly. I think it would have been smarter if he'd had those minority specialists working on all terms of the program. He could certainly have found some valid rules and broken all so1t s of grounds. But he practiced law for ten years and every one of the years as a solicitor until the prosecuting attorney basically ran the minority leadership. He was extremely able for General [inaudjble] competition a mjllion strategies he strategized. He was with us on nothing except the Civil Rights Bill, which was critically important to us.
STERN: Kennedy [inaudible], didn 't he?
WILSON: Yeah, and on the one the legisl--the support bi ll.
STERN: The what?
WILSON: The war. In support of the war.
STERN: Vietnam?
WILSON: Yeah. The Korean war.
STERN: What was your feeling of the effectiveness of Albert as Majority leader as opposed to the job McCormack had done?
WILSON: Wel l, I think it was an adjustment between what you had with McCormack and when Rayburn died there was a break up of team that had served together for a long time in American History. Rayburn and McC01mack were number 1 and number 2 in the Democratic Party for twenty years.
STERN: They'd been there since FDR, huh?
WILSON: Yeah. And twenty-one years. And McCormack of course as majo1ity leader fulfilled his role of being a fiery challenger of the party. He also understood the role of the speaker which was to be a statesmen. And he didn't even have any in te1ms of procedure, only in terms of policy. Carl was good at everything he did. He has a fine mind into which job is impossible, and he knew what he could do with the impossible. And he was more than adequate as a majority leader. It was a good team throughout.
STERN: Was Albert's relationship with Kennedy as good as McCormack's was?
47 WILSON: Kennedy's relationship with all of the people quite cordial. We never had any problems. I think he could handle a relationship with the leaders as well as could be handled, though leaders could make or break a President.
STERN: I think I would like to tum at this point to specific legislation and specific examples. There're quite a number and they won't necessarily be in a chronological order but then I organized them more in tenns of subj ect. O.K.? Why don't we start with the minimum wage bill. O.K.
WILSON: All right.
STERN: In 1961, and of course that has gotten a great deal of publicity which makes it really the corps of his argument that Kennedy lost to Congress. Now of course there's an irony to it, there are a number of ironies to it. One is that in the end the President pretty much got what he wanted. Although he went, it took a secure group for that to happen. But nevertheless, why did he lose that vote, by one vote? And could the leadership have acted more decisively? What was your, that must have been a hell of a thing to go through, seeing that. ...
WILSON: Well, it was of course, our first experience with a tie vote. We had to have those bodies there and we had to have the margin right and there wasn't a way to record who was first seeing before it. I called Tom Wicker's attention in advance to the fact that we had a commitment from John Lyndsey [John V. Lyndsey] who walked along, but watch him. He did report it the next morning and Lyndsey went up in smoke. And I think that probably Lyndsey's bust betraying the labor movement that may have made a commitment. It had a lot of bearing on hi s citizen's fears between here and New York. Which in tum ce1tainly had a bearing on the cuITent financial condition in New York.
STERN: Did you have any sense exactly why Lindsey did not live up to his promise?
WILSON: No, I don't know why it was, it was a conspicuous pressure, of course. He represented the [inaudible] district in Manhattan. I don't know the specifics of it, I knew labor.
STERN: Did you expect to lose?
WILSON: No.
STERN: You didn't.
WILSON: We knew it was tight. You know, when you are talking about in that case, it was something like 187 to 186, talking about that many votes, the difference of one or two is difficult to pin down, particularly who is going to be there. So we retain, and Albert substitute and as much as a substitute could probably get away with and we were wronged by one vote and then they got it back.
48 STERN: Now is it, would this be an example in your point of view of the way in which various commentators on Kennedy in the congress have emphasized the negati ve? The fact that he did get in the end, seems to me, every bit as important as the fact that he lost it in the beginning. And ...
WILSON: I think the people lobbying votes about the House, and there aren't many of them, I assume the bills were important to choose one or two dramatic examples and milk it all the way through the Rules fight.
STERN: Certainly Wicker makes the Rules fight.
WILSON: Yeah.
STERN: Showdown at high noon.
WILSON: Well, you know, it's just not that way. Life goes one and you got forty other things going, and this is one that you either, you're done with most fights.
STERN: Do you recall any specific reaction from the President? Did you have any contact with him at the time of the minimum wage bill was set out?
WILSON: O'B1ien, O'Brien was with him. He told him. And Larry points in his book, picks up a letter opener and plunges it into his desk. I wasn't there.
STERN: I was curious if you had been there. What about the . ...
WILSON: I think I was in the House Gallery and I called Larry. He was in the West Wing. That's my recollection of it. Practically dwelt on it.
STERN: How much truth is there to Neil McNeil's claim that O'Brien was so careful about even being present on the, in the Gallery where everybody votes, that he felt it would be a problem, Congressional problem.
WILSON: I think Larry mentions it. I don't recall being aware of it at the time, it makes no difference at a11. I was there. I was talked to. I don't know what the difference was.
STERN: Do you think.... You don't think that Congressman cared one way or the other? How about on some of the other major bills, particularly 1961?
WILSON: Wait a minute, if you were, now let me get back to one thing. Earlier you were saying that Neil was talking about Kennedy's failures. Let me put that in context because Johnson's success is Neil McNeil's book which is an excellent book, For the Democracy, was written before Dallas.
49 STERN: Yes, as a matter of fact we have the copy at the Library that he inscribed to the President.
WILSON: Yeah. And as a matter of fact, as I recall it we can look at it pretty quickly, it runs only through '61.
STERN: Yes, that's absolutely true.
WILSON: And I don't think Neil's view of thjngs on this are any different from mine. He was a councilman. And the weekly accounts in TIME magazine. I'm sure if you read the cover story on O'Brien just one time magazine covered ....
STERN: You apparently, in this rough draft chapter that I did read, said that you felt McNeil's account of the Rules Committee was bad, inaccurate. But you didn't elaborate on why. Can you recall now what you thought was wrong with his account?
WILSON: I don't recall ever having written such a thjng. I don't think there is any account of it that is inaccurate.
STERN: Now I came across that someplace.
WILSON: Well, either you or I are just remembering what I put in that draft.
STERN: It could be my mistake too.
WILSON: I'm afraid that was one of the reasons why I redid it. But I think that is one of the reasons why.
STERN: I remember other examples of the, let's take the example with well most imp011antly the school aid bill. To what degree were you involved in tryi ng to get the ladies vote on the rules committee, and if you weren't involved, do you know who was?
WILSON: No. Well, Wyatt was really working the cabinet, fortunately. And I left that to him. Dealt with some great length was Jacqueline Kennedy, you remember that? There were three primary problems connected with the bill. One was the breach of federalism and that was a threat to more than people opposed to high taxes. It was a threat to people who feared the eventual abolitionist state government. And to very many businesses it's important to feel that the state continues to exercise dominion over, prostrate over utilities and insurance laws, labor Jaws, as they relate to being shot and the fourteen vehicle [inaudible] we had trucking regulations, this kind of stuff. They were terrified that if the largest portion of state jurisdiction in government, which is education, were breached that the others would fall and their fears were unfounded because they would not fall.
50 STERN: That's right.
WILSON: But that those were their fears and so you had to have people, in addition to the general busi ness of opposition opening a new door to the governmental spending of money. You had that fear about control, what it is that the federal concept. You had the obvious racial problems. At that time, there was virtually no integration in the south, none in '61 , seven years much since the Brown case and it was obvious that nothing was going to be done. The courts could not administer individual integration, that would have to be done by the Congress, and the fear was that though the bill said nothing about integration, once the local communities became dependent upon federal money, then when the screw was applied about integrators giving up the federal money that they would integrate.
STERN: Now, Ribicoff [Abraham A. Ribicoff] peddled on this bill?
WILSON: Ribicoff said he would not do it without subsequent Congressional such. But that's still not how Ribicoff got the HEW secretary to resign the exterior...
STERN: '62 right.
WILSON: .. . to run for the Senate. I had even saw you did not have a southern majority in the Congress. So that's some southern votes we would have had otherwise. Though not as many votes as you had on the bill which was explicitly pro civil rights than the civil rights bill itself. So we had a little bit of elbow room on the southerners thanks in large part to the Teacher's Association. And thanks too to the formula built into the bill which the agreer helped to di st1icts and their greater needs. But the federalism thing knocked off a lot of Republicans in mind from coming along, the race thing knocked off a lot the southerners in mind from coming along, and if you eliminated them, a batch of Northern Catholic votes , there's no way you could put it together.
STERN: What about Adam Clayton Powell's role in the whole thing?
WILSON: He just got through particularly that Powell amendment various bills who said the money couldn't be spent unless there was a direct form of integration. He, as chairman of the committee, refrained from appending it to this bill. Both by his nature and by his color, it went questioned whether he was chairman of the committee on education or labor, which had jurisdiction over the bill. There was no question whether he raised some havoc, not only among southerners. But he really wasn't up front, this was Frank Johnson's [Frank Thompson, Jr.] bill.
STERN: Right.
WILSON: And Thompson rather is a Catholic from New Jersey. Even though he attended college in North Carolina.
51 STERN: I didn't know that.
WILSON: Well, he was a football player. And he bolted to the Appalachia in North Carolina. Either I've answered your question or I've Jost track of it.
STERN: Well, you were talking about the fact-, you said there were three factors . ...
WILSON: Those were the three: race, religion, and federalism.
STERN: And you felt that.. ..
WILSON: Well, federalism and race cut us back to the point where it would be impossible to pass the bill unless we had our solid Northern Democratic vote, and then we could not spill our numbers of Catholics. Now when Delaney [James J. Delaney], as a member of the Rules Committee, rebelled this, left us with the one vote minority on the Rules Committee, even though we were getting all three southern votes.
STERN: Since the expansion, right.
WILSON: However, it was possible to get around the Rules committee as was done with the Civil Rights bill but it was not in any way possible to get around the Rul es Committee unless you have a substantial majority for a bi ll Rules Commi ttee is all you got. And we not only didn't have a substantial majority. We didn't have a majority at all wi thout the city catholic vote.
STERN: Wilbur Cohen gave me a marvelous anecdote about that, he saw the President shortly after the bill had failed and the President said, "Damn it Wilbur, why couldn't you get one more Republican?" and Cohen said, "Mr. President, why couldn't you get one more Catholic?" [Laughter]
WILSON: I never heard that before!
STERN: Kennedy flew up hi s hand and agreed. Matter of fact, I would like you in the issue of ci vil rights , do you think that Kennedy strategically in terms of his position with the House, was right in pushing the civi l rights. Obviously there were lots of pressures on him in that area and he ce11ainly alienated a lot of the civil lights leaders in '61 by saying he would not push for a civil rights bill. T hen there was also the business about the housing order and a number of other things. Do you think hi s program, Wicker is one and there are others who say substantiall y the same thing, that had he moved more aggressively on civil rights it would have strengthened the general position in Congress, specifically on the liberals. And that by deferring on civi l rights he made himself appear to be weak, to be indecisive.
52 WILSON: No, I do not agree with that position. I don't think he could have strengthened hi s position with the liberals, where else would they have to go? He was going to pass the program or not pass the program depending on whether you picked up fifty plus southerners. There wasn't a prayer in the world for the civil rights bill could not have passed un61 1963 and four. No way at all. And the best indication of that is there had been one other bill during the Kennedy administration that had been in effect racial vote and th at was the biJI on whether or not to accept the President's reorganization pl an and the creation of the Department of Health, Housing, and Urban Development. ..
STERN: Housing Development, Right.
WILSON: He was having announced that he would, when it passed, announced that Robert Weaver would be the first black cabinet officer. And when that came to a vote, he lost by more than a hundred votes. And th ere was only thirteen RepubUcans. So it would have been foolish to send up the Civil Rights bill earlier and just throwing it so that you could get set back many more years. I think it was done as quickly as it could have been done, I think we would have achieved, we would have failed to achieve al l the things that were achieved had it been sent earlier than '63.
STERN: You think that Kennedy would have been strategically better off not to have unmasked beforehand that he intended to appoint Weaver? Didn't that sort of serve as a red flag?
WILSON: Yeah, he was politicking then. He already lost the fools on the regul ar bill. Set it up purposely as a regular bill. That was lost. Do he set up a reorganization plan which had less chances for success because of the very mechanism set out. He decided he wanted to woll op them one up the side of the head there, and let us get some Republican on the record, being anti-black. He got them pretty good. I don't regret it. Of course, he took couple of years before the King walk, Dr. King wal k.
STERN: How about some of the other examples in which Kennedy tried personall y to woo, if that's the right word, members of Congress like there's the one in whi ch Fogarty of Rhode Island was not in favor of a farm subsidy bi ll , and the President tried, and apparently succeeded in getting him to ....
WILSON: He did not succeed.
STERN: He, well he got Fogarty's support but the bill failed.
WILSON: I don't think he got Fogarty. If we're talking about the same bill, there were a lot of farm bills.
STERN: This is the '62 farm bill.
53 WILSON: If you're talking about the '62 bill, I don't think he got Fogarty's. Excuse me. (Interruption) He really loved JFK, I put in my book a story about their relationship. Fogarty had been in the Congress about twenty-five years. He'd been a bricklayer and, Chairman of the Subcommittee on HEW labor and the appropriations committee and had considered to be the expert on medical research in the Congress. Talked barely ....
STERN: Cohen talked a lot about having to win Fogarty on many things .. ..
WILSON: Yeah, yeah. I thought he was a, I thought he was just great. Great loss to the country when he died. Great buddy with the Kennedys. Had been over the house. So, we're near the first formal White House reception for the Congress, and Frank Thompson and some other friends of Fogarty got all nervous about him not having been sufficiently house broken to go through this, preached him about it. Now John, you can't go to that reception and say "hi Jack," you've got to say "Good Evening Mr. President." I know, I know. All right, comes the big night and I watch from the side! ine and Mr. Fogarty comes and comes up and he says "Good Evening Mr. President, you been getting much lately?" [Laughter]
STERN: I bet Kennedy must have enjoyed that.
WILSON: He loved it. Yeah.
STERN: You say on the fa1m bill, you recall in '62 then he didn't get Fogarty to vote for it?
WILSON: Oh I, that's my recollection. I could be wrong.
STERN: Well, I could be wrong too. I know the bill lost 215 to 205, but I thought Fogarty had gone along. There's another example on, Seldon, Arrnister Seldon [Armistead Seldon] of the House Foreign Affairs committee who had been opposed to long term Joans, and he got Seldon to come along but then the bill got out of the committee, with his help, but failed in the House. See ....
WILSON: Oh, the bill, I don't think Sorensen knew what he was doing when he was putting that thing up. I asked him about it but he never would say what the purpose of it was. Purpose of the long-term loan arrangement on the foreign aid bill was to bypass the appropriations committee. You simply did not have an appropriation board needs some fonns of housing.
STERN: Right.
WILSON: Which was a sta1tling and needing dramatic concept that we were tackling with our very faces hanging out taking on the whole appropriations committee. And everything else on this. And we threw the kitchen sink and
54 everything else to get it done and came within six votes of intending on winning. When I turned to that thing, which was just after the House passed the big housing bill, about a month before this thing was on the floor I'd get into looking into it, I just think we had one vote in committee. For the foreign aid borrowing card concept and that was Danny [Canella Flora????]. I don't know, the President may have talked with Seldon about it, but we got even the majority on the committee on it and almost carried the House. It's astonishing to think of in retrospect. Of course, it still didn't pass. It's not likely to be anytime soon either. Matter of fact, the Appropriations Committee is continuously priced to cutting back on what we were borrowing. That's a bitter bylaw about the party that now has, always the authority of the Appropriations Committee which of course is the biggest committee in the House.
STERN: To what degree do you feel that Kennedy's effectiveness, and I know from the chapter that I read you're initial chapter that you feel he was effective with the House. To what degree was his effectiveness related to his role as head of the Democratic party?
WILSON: Quite important.
STERN: I think that's something that is generally overlooked.
WILSON: I haven't overlook it. And I definitely deal with it at length in the book, and I dealt with the failure in that sense of Johnson. And I think it's a serious lack today and I think it's got a lot to do with the falls of Congress, the party's are deteriorating into nothing.
WILSON: Yeah.
STERN: ... in terms of the present administration ...
WILSON: That's right.
STERN: .. .I think that it's st1iking that Carter ran in seventy, I don't want to get into a long discussion of Carter, but surely one of his major points in seventy six was elect me because I'm an outsider. I think that ironically that it's one of his greatest weaknesses.
WILSON: It is indeed.
STERN: The fact that he, in addition, is not exercising much of a role as the head of the Democratic Party.
WILSON: That's right.
STERN: And so you feel that Kennedy then, there's no question from the material I've seen that Kennedy took very seriously.
55 WILSON: You bet he did. [Inaudible] Extremely helpful in the Congress. It was helpful, but it wasn't particularly helpful we had to have a turn of votes which was the South because at that time the party had even less than the Dem-, the Republicans were proper channels, even are today. And therefore, you have in the primaries instead of the general election, but in terms of binding the two of the non-southern Democrats in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, that was a very real ingredient.
STERN: All right. In that initial chapter you commented on Kennedy's very successful attempts to woo Carl Vinson. And I was curious about whether or not, to what degree you feel that effort was successful because of Kennedy's deferring of civil rights legislation and whether or not the relationship with Vinson substantially changed once civil lights did become a major issue in '63.
WILSON: Well I, again that version of the chapter you read, I know I wrote it badly and certainly if I gave the impression that President Kennedy went to great lengths to woo Carl Vinson, it's mistaken. That's not what I thought I wrote. I told Vinson about how he saw Vinson out to his car and closed the door, out of inane courtesy. So much respected and much older man.
STERN: I think, I may be confusing your account with some others.
WILSON: Yeah.
STERN: But a number of people said that he called Vinson frequently, that he in vited him to various social occasions, that he was making, that Vinson was regarded as ...
WILSON: Well he was an important man. There was no question.
STERN: .. . he was regarded as vital, especially after Ray bum's death for the . ...
WILSON: Yeah, th at is what was frequently said on the hill. Carl Vinson was always the President's man, it doesn't matter who the President is or what party.
STERN: Did it change though, did Kennedy's relationship with Vinson change substantiall y once Kennedy did endorse the Civil Rights Bill in '64?
WILSON: I don't think it had any bearing at all. Knowing Vinson, he'd be too sophisticated for that. He had too many problems to won-y about their edge.
STERN: One question I just realized ....
WILSON: As a matter of fact, he was in his last tetm then.
56 STERN: But I didn't bring up at all. What about the Attorney General? Did he have any role in this at all? Was he ever helpful to you, RFK?
WILSON: He was quite unpopular in the House generaJJy. He and Dick Katzenbach, his Deputy, did first rate work on the Civil Rights Bill. AJJ they could possibly do, but Bob was regarded by the Congress as being an extremely aggressive, disrespectful, a young charger who had no homage paid to tradition, ruthless, and indeed he gave out that image at that time.
STERN: Was that your sense of him, at that time?
WILSON: Pardon?
STERN: Was that your personal sense of him at that time? Did you have that much contact with him?
WILSON: Well, I always thoroughly enjoyed Bob and liked him. I was in question of whether he was a hard charger, I don't think there's a question he moved fast. He went to the extreme lengths to keep political type people out of the justice department. That was a problem. But he was interested in both the [inaudible] of the department and the detective of the department, he was charged as being put in there as political hatchet man to Kennedy. And it had traditionally been a political hatchet job. Hebert L. Brown had been the manager for Eisenhower [inaudible]. Bob himself, in terms of the President's popularity with the Congress, was a mild deterrent not only the big item within the jurisdiction of the department, the Civil Rights bill, he did awfully well in running his end of the ship. (Interruption)
STERN: And his role in the Congress?
WILSON: What was the question again?
STERN: Well, I asked you whether or not he had a significant role, and you were talking about the fact that he was regarded pretty much as a heavy, that he was not highly regarded or regarded with suspicion ....
WILSON: Well there were very few Justice department bills other than the civil rights bill that were critical to his operation just the way it hit. He later, he'd been Attorney General with the run in Constitutional Amendments and succession, the Voting Rights bill and several other things of that nature, but this, this was about all he was involved in. There was one item I give in the book which is as I recall, and I don't have this, I don't have a note on this. In about March of '61, Bob came to my office and said he's just been in a talk with the President. And that he was quite eager to have a bill enacted by the Congress authorizing an increase in pay of some young attorneys he wanted to bring in and couldn't make it on what they were paying. And he wanted my help in getting it done. I said, well all right let me know what you want, he said I'll get back with you. He called the
57 next day, and he said, I had quite forgotten about it, and figured JFK was trying to get him out of his hair and was dumping him on me, and called the next day and he says forget about it, he's got it solved. I said how did you get it solved? He says I got Charlie Abbot [Charles G. Abbot] helping me. So I forgot about it, then the bill came up for a vote, and he got Charles Abbot's vote, the only Republican vote he got. And it was murdered we learned. [Laughter]
STERN: O.K. There's one point that Bolling, Richard Bolling made in hi s interview which I thought was really strilcing and I wanted to get your opinion on it, particularly since your own experience crossed over from the Kennedy to the Johnson years. And he said that, I'll quote it to you, he said "One of the things that was really interesting about the Kennedy administration, and I'm not sure that Mr. Johnson really understands it," Let me just make a note of the fact that while he was doing this Johnson was still President, he may, O'Brien keeps saying he does, but what the Kennedy administration did that was Unique in its relations with the hill, was that it put Presidenbal peoplists in departments as Congressional liaison officers and he cites as an example his wife, in HEW, says "she wasn't a Ribicoff person or a Cohen person, she was Kennedy."
WILSON: Right.
STERN: "And we had people like that in al l of the departments." And then goes on to say that Johnson ctid not understand that as well as Kennedy ctid.
WILSON: He probably ctid it, he kept the same people.
STERN: Well, that's exactly what I was curious about. Was there any substantial change?
WILSON: No.
STERN: Or did you pretty much just continue to run it your way?
WILSON: Same thing. There was no change in operations whatever when he came, Johnson I think if it hadn't been for Dallas we would have had the same outcome we would have the same important bills in '64, which were the tax bill and the Civil Rights bill. You would have seen Kennedy elected over overwhelmingly in '64, you would have seen the same size Congress coming in, Democratic Congress. And you would have seen the same results after he was President with the Congress. I raised that to O'Brien once after we were both out of government, and I asked him what he thought of that premise. He said, "Here's the limit. That he agreed said except the one bill and that was the Federal Pay Increase Bill of 1964 and he thought John-, he thought Kennedy would not have pressed for that as hard as Johnson did. He thought he didn't realize what a difference a little bit of additional money would mean to the average person in government and the need to increase the pay in the order to hold them in. I think that's probably true of Johnson, indeed it would never have happened if he hadn't been. Even though involved the mechanics of the
58 thing it was such that couldn't be done unless the Congress raised its own pay. That's where the hell it was bust.
STERN: And you think the point you're making is that Kennedy's, I suppose, his background was such that he just didn't empathize with the ...
WILSON: Not as much as Johnson did.
STERN: ... as Johnson did. I think there's truth to that too.
WILSON: Well, that's a very minor footnote.
STERN: One other point on the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the President departed from all routine and all normal operations on this by establishing his ad hoc White House group bringing in this Republican Howard Petersen [Howard C. Petersen]. Which took over most of the work of the departmental liaison officers on this particular bill. What's your sense of one: why he did it; two: how effective would it work; and three: to what degree did it help or hurt your efforts on the bill?
WILSON: Well, I think the, let me back up on that bill.
STERN: O.K.
WILSON: We had to have a renewal of some sort to.... We had to have a renewal of some sort to suit Petersen. The bill had been eroded by conditions appended to the extensions in all the years dating back to '46, I think it was. And we saw that it ceased to be export minded when it was as it had been when it was relying on the export of raw cotton. Cotton had fled the Southeast, and in its place cotton textile salt protection needs from cheap labor from Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It was a major kind of problem and it looked grim. So George Ball came over with a proposal that we sent out to several one year extension groups for '62 and to pay a larger bill for '63. Point presumed that the Congress would be more amenable to it. Can't imagine how he thought the Congress would be more amenable to it, in Congress was ...
STERN: . . . loosest since its election ...
WILSON: .. . since its election. But, anyway that's what George Ball said. So I did a rough check through over at my house, and I came back and I said a second extension would be utter murder to pass, even a simple extension. And in '62 it will probably be worse. And I recommend that we go for
END TAPE 2 SIDE 1 ...... a great big bill for '62, just load everything on it, make it just a total wipe out of the isolation protectionist. A hole in the ground no matter how big you make it, it will be, it can't be any
59 tougher than a simple extension will be and we're going to go through all the hell we're going to have to go through to get a simple extension we may as well have something for it.
STERN: Right.
WILSON: And the President bought this. And he got busy on it. In December on one day he made his speech in Miami to the AFL-CIO, and on the next day in New York to the National Convention of the NAM advocating it still. And he pulled in George Meany and Walt Reuther and made them testify for it and he set up eight cabinet officers to testify for it. I think it was [inaudible]. And useless really, except it showed he agreed with the President's concern. Meanwhile, sometime during '61, I don't know, Mike Feldman, who didn't know beans about the House, had persuaded the President to set up this group, and as Larry and I understood it, they were going to be a supplementary force in working out the technical wording of the bill. And we could care less how many bodies they had around to do that and then it developed that some of them just thought they were going to get on the hill and lobby the bill , which we were very much objected to. They didn't know what they were doing, they were iJTitating congressmen, they were doubling back on their tracks. At one point, Senator Mansfield [Michael J. Mansfield] ordered that none of them ever come within shouting distance of his office, which is a ten-ible situation to have. And one of them had ... . (intetTuption) the Ways and Means Committee in government with trade and I asked Wilbur Mills about it and Mills said that that's entirely true, that he had personally fired him. So they were in terms of dealing with the hill, they were a severe detriment. And it would never have happened that way if we had known that that's what they were intending to do, I don't th.ink that was the purpose. Well it certainly wasn't what the President regarded as the purpose of the group to be, but people get carried away on two subjects in Washington, for some reason seem to look glamorous, one is dealing with foreign affairs and the other is dealing with the Congress from the executive side. They'll go plunging in there and doing things that would say don't and it's not the type of thing you plunge into, if you know anything about it.
STERN: Had there been any consultation with O'Brien or with you about setting up this group in the White House, this ad hoc group?
WILSON: Oh we understood there was a group to be set up there that was an expertise in state and commerce and treasure to write a bill , they wanted a kind of White House gathering point for information And we had no real objection to that. Being on the hill is an entirely different matter. That's certainly [Inaudjble].
STERN: You made a very interesting point in that chapter which the first draft about committee chairmen who might have been opposed to the President's program in general, not necessarily being opposed to the legislation which came before their committee's.
WILSON: There were only two.
60 STERN: Well I wonder if you could elaborate on that? I found it a very interesting point.
WILSON: Well, the two were Howard Smith [Howard W. Smith] and Chairman Williams, Clarence Cannon chairman of Appropriations. And they were, well I'll give you a couple of examples of members who voted against us on everything except what was before their committee's.
STERN: That's exactly what I mean, yeah.
WILSON: And they were, Congress- Tom Murray of Southeastern Tennessee, Chairman of Post Office and Civil Service Committee. Our purpose there, after we had gotten the catch up in '64, our purpose was to hold down because of inflationary problems, see pay increases and he was in agreement with th at. Another was Tiger T [Olin Earl Teague] of Texas, who was chairman of the House Veterans Committee. And there was a constant veteran question in every district in the country, for outrageous sums of money, for non-disabled veterans. And he was himself a disabled veteran. I think he lost a leg or a foot and he held the fort there as well as could be held. And both of these gentlemen had loose capacities, did important work for us and owe that budget to them, small deficit to which it was.
STERN: That strikes me as a very important point in te1ms of understanding the whole argument you make about Kennedy's success in Congress. One can very easily make misleading generalizations based on it.
WILSON: Yeah, and make generalizations about Mills too. And there was no more ardent supporter of Kennedy than Mills. He couldn't get along with Johnson.
STERN: I was absolutely fascinated by your account of the meeting the morning of the assassination and that whole questioning of medicare.
WILSON: Did you ask McCormack about it?
STERN: Yes I did, as a matter of fact. And he made a very interesting observation and I had intended to ask you about his observation. He said that he was, he said that he thought your account was perfectly accurate, but he wondered about how trustworthy Mills was?
WILSON: Really?
STERN: He said that in his experience, Mills, to use his words, was a double crosser. And that he personally was skeptical that Mills would put hi s reputation on the line with a one vote majority in hi s committee.
WILSON: He did it repeatedly.
61 STERN: Well , that's what... .
WILSON: Yeah. Well , I had a long experience with Mills in that area especiall y and with the welfare area. But I had much more broader experience with things such as tax and he in fact, he had never mislead me in any respect.
STERN: So, excuse me, you feel that he would have lived up to the agreement he made though?
WILSON: I do indeed.
STERN: Can you recall any, you mention in the brief account in your chapter, that each of you had come to the meeting with new information and that the new information tended to compliment, that yours tended to compliment his etc. Can you recall some of what that new information was?
WILSON: Details about members, about what pressure about which one was getting from which lobbyist from which direction, developments back in their districts, attitudes of local newspaper people. It's the nitty gritty that makes the difference in winning or losing the Congress.
STERN: And how about the agreement that you brought to Cohen's office later in that day, can you remember what kinds of, the substance of what he had agreed to?
WILSON: Well, the general substance was that there was, I wish I had that paper, Wilbur got it and I think he lost it. I would have had it, except for the assassination got into it. But the general motion was that you would have medical benefits for those over sixty-five, financed by a payroll tax and half by the employers, half by the employees, and it would be run by the Socia] Security system, that it was administered by at least in each, state by state through the direction in part of Blue Cross, Blue Shield, or any insurance company.
STERN: Hmm-Hmm.
WILSON: And some of the terms of coverage.
STERN: You used a fascinating term. You said that in those months in '63 when you were trying to get Mills' support by getting that majority on the Ways and Means Committee, you used a phrase that would work with quote "such pick axes as we could devise" unquote and I was cmious to what exactly that meant, what were those pick axes exactly, what sort of things did you do?
WILSON: Well, we chose the people that were marginal and addicted to, get their attention either by being pleasant or unpleasant to them.
62 STERN: Would you care to elaborate on how you were unpleasant through example? What sorts of...
WILSON: Unpleasant by cutting by a member would be after a project or maybe a Post office building or a dam or something of the sort, and we'd just st1ike it in te1ms of a delay. There's nothing they could do about it. You know those bureaucrats, they get all those little papers and now wait a minute. Bureaucrats didn't handle those papers that way and we went after them. And they knew it. Message was get it straight and by the way, how are you going to vote on medicare?
STERN: How often when you were doing a thing like that ....
WILSON: You never make a direct deal.
STERN: That's what I was about to a ....
WILSON: Not ever. It would have been insulting to them, it would have been degrading to us, and it would have drained us in all our cruTots in the fi rst month we were in office. You don't play that way, you play in generalities. You help fiiends, either before or after they help you.
STERN: I can see that. I felt that it could work like that. ..
WILSON: There ain't no other way.
STERN: So you feel that Mills would have li ved up to that agreement?
WILSON: Yeah. He made the agreement.
STERN: Did you ever talk to him about it during the days or weeks after?
WILSON: There was no reason to.
STERN: Never?
WILSON: Well, I was three or four hours at a stretch, you see. Get that kind of pressure you just, you don't look back. Pass by on you, you go on to the next.
STERN: Did he have any kind of special sessions of any type with Johnson in the days immediately after he assumed office? Did he call you in, did he tell you that he wanted you to contin ue ...
WILSON: Oh very much so.
63 STERN: What sorts of things did he, can you recall about those?
WILSON: Well, he said things like "I don't know how to run this country, you've got to help me." And I thjnk the whole, keep them all lined up. Keep hitting you with them, if you don't li ke me, do it for your country. You'll never love me as you loved him but, give me a chance.
STERN: That one I find fascinating.
WISLON: That's tough. It's tough.
STERN: It's hard to say no to that. But, to what degree do you think he was, I mean, was that something you think he really meant?
WILSON: Yeah.
STERN: Yeah.
WILSON: Obviously he did. He never shoved any single Kennedy man out of office. Unless, there was a general nudge for McNamara, [inaudible].
STERN: Well, there were special circumstances.
WILSON: November '67. And that was because he, that Oral Bank job was open and what McNamara wanted which was going to be closed pretty quickly, maybe with a person from another country. It had to be done then.
STERN: Right.
WILSON: Took a little headbusting to do it then. Of course, done great work there. That's the only example I can think of, where he either, he ever remotely fired anyone or made them uncomfortable. And you heard about all the terrible things he said to his staff, al l which is true, but not to Kennedy people. For one thing, we were the tape.
STERN: You think he made it a definite distinction in his own operational ...
WILSON: Yeah, I think so.
STERN: . .. routine, in terms of the way he treated Kennedy people and the way he treated his own ...
WILSON: Yeah, and also the way we handled ourselves, it was as if we expected to be treated respectful I y.
64 STERN: What was your sense of the relationship between Johnson when he was Vice President and Kennedy? Did you ever see them together and .... ?
WILSON: Yeah. Of course, I didn't get into any of their intimate conversations. What I could pick up, what I heard Kennedy talk about Johnson, you know, hi s reaction was "Poor Lyndon, I'm doing the best I know how to make him comfortable and he's coming out of that cloud nine that he's the most important Democrat in Washington. And there's something where he really has no job, and I'm trying to make all the jobs for him I can. Made him head of space counsel, named him head of. . .
STERN: Equal employment.
WILSON: Yeah, equal employment. Sent him on various foreign m1ss10ns, most important was his t1ip to Berlin, immediately after the wall was being brought up. And Johnson agreed, he never made trouble for him and he never did any whispering campaigns or undercut him, which he would have known how to do, he wouldn't have gotten caught. And I don't think there's any question what Kennedy would have retained him as Vice President. I don't think there's any need for it, Kennedy would have failed in the election in '60 if Johnson hadn't been on that ticket.
STERN: I don't think there's any doubt about that at all.
WILSON: And the Bobby Baker disclosure, I don't really remember what became, what had become public by the time of Dallas or whether we just knew about it.
STERN: It pretty much broke in January of 1964. It's conceivable th at it could have given Johnson some problems.
WILSON: Well, we ....
STERN: As a runn1 ng mate.
WILSON: We knew about it before Dallas, because JFK talked about him. His deep concern was that it was going to give Johnson the deep six. He wasn't going to be able to go with Johnson again, but he didn't know how far he was going to carry Johnson. Had no way of knowing. The development didn't caiTy him anywhere. Baker never got off the mark. Johnson, Johnson was ....
STERN: Was Johnson conspicuously absent in terms of the work on the Civil Rights Bill in '63? I know he was in a very difficult situation, and there are those who claim that that Bobby Kennedy delighted in that fact that he had become too closely identified with the administration on civil rights, he would by implication have destroyed his usefulness on the ticket and thus, almost create the very reason for dropping him. You see my d1ift.
65 WILSON: Oh, I see your drift, I don't agree with it.
STERN: You don't.
WILSON: Not at all. He had made a speech, sometime during '63, I'm inclined to think it was in the summer, and I can't remember now where it was, but a very remarkable speech, pro-civil rights speech. And he prided himself on having gotten that '57 Civil Rights bill through the Senate. And he also was painfully aware of the necessity of his, of establishing himself as a national, rather than a regional figure. And he figured, and I think rightly, that hell, Kennedy wasn't going to have any trouble in '64 regardless. With the election of Congress and that everything he could do to get himself out front on that issue was a plus for him and a plus for the administration.
STERN: You are suggesting ....
WILSON: He wasn't going to scrounge around, Kennedy wasn't going to scrounge around for Southern votes. As a matter of fact, he wound up, the only state he lost was outside the South, was Arizona by about five hundred votes. Kennedy took more Southern votes, more Southern electoral votes than states.
STERN: T han Johnson ...
WILSON: In '64, than Johnson did in '64 and Johnson took more northern, than Kennedy did in '60.
STERN: Right. But of course the situation was very different in '64.
WILSON: Sure it was.
STERN: And the Republican candidate was very different, there were a lot of factors that ended up changing dramaticall y obviously. But Johnson was clearly concerned in the last months of '63, with these increasing rumors in Washington that he might be dropped from the ticket.
WILSON: He was concerned about the Baker thing.
STERN: Yes, I know.
WILSON: That's the one thing that sunk him. Interesting, the guy who was going after him was his best friend. And he and Pierce Acheson were close friends. Pierce hated Kennedy. I don't know what that stemmed from. Pierce was a very hard Quaker, but he had close ties to Johnson, all three years, Johnson's right hand man in the Senate was Earl Clements [Earl C. Clements] of Kentucky. And Earl's daughter, Bess [Sara Blue Clements], married Tyler Able, who was his stepson of Pierce. Bess was Mrs. Johnson's general secretary, and Johnson made Tyler Abel, gave him the job he wanted for
66 whatever reason, which was Director of Protocol in the State Department. And Pierce was almost part of the entourage of it, some of the Kennedy people instead of.... There is no question of what came actually despite his relationships with Johnson, he used Johnson as a means of sinking Kennedy. I don't know why. Total speculation.
STERN: Are there any general points you might want to raise about the difference in terms of working for each of these two Presidents?
WILSON: Well, I think it was a blessed opportunity to work for the White House. [inaudible] With both of them, we of course were two of the great congressional expe1ts. As somebody on the Atomic Energy Commission, they start talking about isotopes and you got a pretty glassy eyed President pretty quickly. When you start talking about Congressional strategy, they're right there with it. They know if you're, if you don't know what you're talking about. Johnson was a far more emotional person than Kennedy. He was far more insecure than Kennedy, most of it unjustified. And a tremendous storyteller, he could be fascinating at a dinner such as one I attended when he was Vice-President. He held forth for three hours without notes, kept everybody in the room fascinated. But he had insecurities about how he looked on television, he had insecurities about his education, which were ill-founded because he was a very well educated man. He had a brilliant mind. He was a genius of his own sort. He was a different kind of genius than Kennedy. Johnson was a fabulous storyteller. Just fabulous. -~ And I make reference in this book to a thing I heard second or third hand. One slow, Saturday afternoon during the Nixon years, a young Ziegler [Steve Ziegler] heard loud guffaws roaring on and on and on from the Press room. He goes to the security now and asks what they're doing? Said telling LBJ stories. I'm sure some of them about the mimicry that Johnson brought to stories, which was a large part of his telling a successful one. So Ziegler says, why don't you tell a Richard Nixon story? Fine, tell us some. And he scratched his head and said I'll be back in a minute, said he came back after a while and he told them one and that wasn't funny. [Laughter]
STERN: Do you have anything else you want to add? Other than the rest of your book? [Laughter]
WILSON: I'm really not trying to peddle the book, I'm trying to make the interview more efficient. I will be trying to peddle the book
STERN: All right. O.K.
(END OF TAPE 2 SIDE 2)
67 Elliot, Carl A., 28 A Ervin, Sam J., Jr, 6, 12 Abbot, Charles G., 12, 58 F Able, Tyler, 66 Acheson, Pierce, 66 Feldman, Myer, 41, 60 Adams, Sherman, 13, 19 Flood, Daniel J. , 45 Albert, Carl Bert, 3, 46, 47, 48 Fluit, Pauline T., 24 Anderson, Clinton P., 33 Fogarty, John E., 53, 54 Folsom, James E., 3 B Furcolo, Foster, 13, 29 Bailey, John M., 21 G Baker, John A., 12, 65, 66 Baker, Robert G., 12, 65, 66 Graham, William F., 6 Ball, George W., 59 Barr, Joseph M., 20 H Bennett, Bertram W, 3 Bolling, Barbara, 15, 28, 58 Halleck, Charles A., 46 Brawley, Hiram W., 7 Harlow, Bryce, 13, 19 Brawley, Hiram W., 7 Harriman, W. Averill, 2, 3 Brawley, Hiram W. , 7 Harris, Louis, 4 Brawley, Hiram W., 25 Hays, Wayne L., 24 Brawley, Hiram W., 25 Hebert, Felix E., 29, 57 Brawley, Hiram W., 25 Hodges, Luther H.. I, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, I2 Brown, Edmund G., 20, 51 , 57 Hollings, Ernest F., 7, 8 Burke, VincentJ., 40 c I Ingram, O.W., 27 Caldwell, Harry B, 12 Califano, Joseph A. , Jr., 40 Clements, Earle C., 66 J Clements, Sara Blue, 66 John F. Kennedy, I, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9 Cochrane, Willard W., 7 Johnson, Lyndon B., 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, IO, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, Coerr, Wymberley, 31 33, 36,38,41,43,49, 51, 55, 58, 59,61,63, 65,66, Cohen, Wilbur, 15 67 Cohen, Wilbur J., 15, 20, 41 , 52, 54, 58, 62 Jordan, Everett B, 4, 7, IO, 12 Colmer, William M., 27 Cooley, Harold D., 6, 7 Curley, James M, 29 K Kefauver, Estes, 3, 9, 10 D Kennedy, Jacqueline B., 50 Kennedy, Robert F., 3, 4. 5. 7, 18, 57 Daley, Richard J., 25 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 53 Daly, Charles U., 16, 23, 25, 26, 39 Kirwan, Michael J., 42 Delaney, James A., 52 Kitchin, Paul A, 35 Desautels, Claude, 33 Dever, Paul A., 29 Donahue, Richard K, 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, L 39,42, 43 Lake, Isaac Beverly, 1 I Donahue, Richard K., 15, 16 Lyndsey, John V., 48 Dungan, Ralph A., 18 Dutton, Frederick G. , 20 M E Maguire, Richard V., 18 Mahon, George H., 45 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 6, 13, 19, 57 Mansfield, Michael J., 60
68 Martin, Joseph W., 44 Semer, Milton P., 14, 15 McCormack, John W., 9, 29, 30, 31, 46, 47, 61 Smith, Aaron, 27, 35, 61 McNeil, Neil V., 44, 49, 50 Smith, Howard W., 27, 35, 61 Meany, George, 60 Sorensen, Theodore C., 25, 41 , 42, 54 Mields, Hugh, 14 Sparkman, James E., 3 Miller, ?, 28, 35, 38 Mi tchell, Clarence V, 35 Murphy, Charles S, 12 T Teague, Ol in Earl, 61 N Thompson, Frank, Jr, 8 Thompson, Frank, Jr. , 8, 28, 5 1, 54 Nixon, Richard M., 5, 6, 67 Tillett, Gladys A., 12 p u Pearson, Drew, 8 Umstead, Will iam B., 2 Persons, Wilton B., 13, 19 Peterson, Howard C. Powell, Adam Clayton Jr., 51 v Vinson, Carl, 56 Q Quigley, James M., 15 w Weaver, Robert C., 53 R White, Lee C., 13, 14, 17, 18, 19. 21 , 23, 24, 25, 26, 29. 33, 34,36,37, 38,39,41, 42,43, 46,54, 59, 60, 67 Rayburn, Samuel T., 3, 9, 27, 29, 30, 31, 44, 46, 47, 56 White, Theodore H., 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 2 1, 23, 24, 25, Reese, Mallhew A., Jr, 6, 10, 11 26, 29, 33, 34, 36,37,38,39, 41 , 42, 43, 46, 54,59, Reuther, Walter P., 60 60, 67 Ribicoff, Abraham A., 51, 58 Wicker, Thomas G., 41, 44, 48, 49, 52 Riddle, H.L., Jr, 8, 13 Wilson, Henry Hall , Tll , 40 Roberts, Chalmers M., 40 Wilson, Mary Jean, 39, 40 Rodis, Jerry, 23 Wilson, Nancy Ellen, 40 Wilson, Pete, 40 s Wyatt, Joseph L. Jr., 50 Sanford, Terry, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11 , 12, 13 z Scott, William Kerr, 2, 4 Seldon, Armister, 54, 55 Ziegler, Steve, 67
69 '.
THE PRINCE
" . . . when he shall die take him and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will love the night and pay no worship to the garish sun."
- Romeo and Juliet, Act.III, Scene II. quoted by Robert F. Kennedy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
John F. Kennedy in his brief career had one calling and one calling
only - the c~nduct of public business. He beca me a polished political
professional in the best sense of that much maligned term. He was a
prince in several senses, including the Machiavellian ~ and I don't
mean that as criticism. When he was elected President he was no
neophyte to the ways of Washington. He had served eight years · in the
Senate - only four less than Johnson had - and six years in the House.
It's not easy to assess why JFK succeeded so spectacularl y. Surely one
reason was his personal charisma. He had a star quality that was immeasurably
useful to his political goals. The central ingredient of this was his
~ self- assurance. His good looks and his family wealth were h e lpful to
his coHfidence, but only in minor ways. There are a number of extre mely
handsome and wealthy men about, but none of them is a JFK. The difference
is that the heart of JFK 's assurance was his confidence in his own abilities,
and h i s abilities were formidable. '
Kennedy was forty-three years old when he was e lected President.
He was at the peak of his physical and intellectual powers, and he could
electrify an audience simply by walking into a room.
He had an insatiable curiosity about any subject that engaged his
interest. In his political campaigns he devoured the detail of every 2
cog and flywheel of t he electoral machine ry. If a subje ct bored him he
would ignore i t entirely. Whe n he was Pre sident he knew both instinctively
and intellectually which subje ct must engage his ful l attention and wh ich
s hould b e d elegated. He avidly studied the various forces within the
national and i nternational economies and t h e means tha t were at his c onunand
to set the m ai l ght, and he acted on his findings forcefully . His savage
attack on the steel price increase of 1962 and his espousal of the Trade
Expansion bill and the big Tax Cut bill all were successfully executed a s
were many other changes he ad vocated. The results amply justified this
Presidential attention. The performance of the economy during the Ke nnedy
Administration is a mod el of achievement t hat has not since bee n emulated.
The formulation of a gricultural policy was a subject he chose t o
delegate . He had compassion for the proble ms of farmers and he was aware
of their importance to the economy and to this country's bala nce of payments.
But he was not deeply f amiliar with the subject and he decided that he
could not afford the t i me necessary to master it, a nd so he l eft the detail s
to Orville Freeman, Secr etary of Agricultu re.
~,ut the two s ubjects t hat h e determined from t h e outse t must c ommand
~\,. the bulk of his attention we re , on the one hand, diplomatic and military p olicy and, on the other, his relations with the Congress. He succeeded with both superbly - not per fectly, but superbly.
JFK's success with the Congress has been little unde r stood even by many top officials of his own Administ ration. The public doesn't know how much he accomplished because t h e public hasn't been told. The public hasn't been told because of one of those quirks that develop now and then i n the Washington press. The press , as a whole , a t that time at l east, did not understand the House of Representatives. Reporters tended, the refore, 3
timidly to judge a President's success only by the bills that had been
formally presented by the Congress to the President for signature. That
is not the way to report Congressional achievement. Most important bills
go through some of the mill in the first year of a Congress and are enacted
into law only i n the second year. Nin e t een Sixty- three was the first year
of the 88th Congress.
The two big issues in that Congress were the Tax Cut bill and the
Civil Rights bill. Upon their fate depended the respect of the Congress
qnd the country for the effectiveness of Presidential leadership. Thus
much other legislation hung in t he balance. At the time JFK was murdered
in November both bills had substantially surmounted their worst troubles.
The principal hurdle for the Tax Cut bill was acceptance on the floor of
the House. In September we had d efeated the Republican motion to recommit
by a narrow margin and cleared the bill through the House on final passage
by a satisfactory margin. Senate prospects portended an easy victory, and
this proved to be the case. The Civil Rights bill was not yet through the
House but the critical battle there also h ad been won, and by one vote.
~ This was the decision of the ful l House Judiciary Committee concerning the size and ~ shape of the bill to be r eported. There was much yet to be done. A path
around the House Rules Committee had to be hacked out. Lengthy and passion ate
debate on the House floor had to be suffered through. A Senate f i libuster
had to be worn down. But a massi ve tide of public indignati on was rising
across the country and non-southern Republicans as well as northern and
western Democrats were compelled to ride its crest. The passage of the
civil Rights bill hpd become inevitable. The only way for us to have lost
the bill was to have failed to get that one ne c e ssary vote in the House 4
Judiciary Committee. Both the Tax Cut bill and the Civil Rights bill, each
in beautiful shape, were signed into law in 1964 , and Medicare probably would
have been also had it not been for the assassination of the President. If
Medicare had passed it would have meant that Kennedy during his first
term would have gott en through the Congress every one of his major proposals
except.Federal Aid to Education, and this remarkable record would have b een
chalked up despite the fact that a heavy majority of the House of Representatives
was opposed philosophically to his program. His would have been a remarkable
feat even had Medicare not been passed. In addition, h e had developed concepts
of dealing with the Congress and had constructed and e n couraged a White House
congressional Relations staff that later was to be inva~uable in implementing
the Congressional initiatives of LBJ. Also Kennedy 's aggressiveness forced
Republi~an members of the Congress into foolish and intransigent postures that·
made the 1964 Democratic Congressional landslide inevitable. A Congressional
landslide does not necessarily accompany a Presidential landslide.
It becan. ...! a fad among the Washington press during 1963 to describe
JFK as being ineffectual with the Congress. Worse yet, this canard bore
the connotation that Kennedy was at best a charming lightweight who in the
long p~i1 would be adjudged to have made only a ripple on the waters of
the broad American seascape. This was odd-numbered year talk. By odd- r numbered year I mean the first year of a Congress .. Also reporters and
columnists in part were reacting, however subliminally, to criticism that
the press until then h ad subjectively joined i n the fun of the New Frontier.
But by the time the House had passed the Tax Cut bill intact on September 25th
the more thoughtful reporters, columnists and editorial writers were, as reflected in their writing, beginning to have doubts about the accuracy of their forecasts. However, it was a difficult turnaround for t hem to 5
make, and essentially, rather than face up to confessing errors of judgment
in such basic matters, they settled back to see how things worked out.
From their points of view things worked out ' well. Dallas permitted
t h em to portray Kennedy's Congressional prowess unfairly and to attribute
successes that Kennedy would have scored anyway to that legislative miracle-
worker, Lyndon B. Johnson. This theory had the merit of getting e v erybody off
the hook - except the memory of John F . Kennedy·. I raise the i ssue now
only because this spurious myth has gained such universal acceptance I fear
it may be re~orded in the permanent and accepted histories of the period.
It is high time that myth is exploded, along with several other l esser myths
that fed it. This i s no put-down of LBJ. His contributions were so major
that his admirers, amoDg whom I count myself, have no need to assert for
Johnson credit for achievements appropriately attributable to Kennedy. LBJ
would not have had it otherwise. But if Johnson had been elected President
in 1960 he would have done far less well with the Congress than Kennedy in
fact did.
In my opinion, if JFK had l ived to serve two full terms he would have won
the 1964 e l ection as decisivel y as Johnson did, and he would have racked up
~-.r a legislative record fully as impressive as Johnson's was. After Larry O'Brien and I both we"e out of government we were having lunch one day, and I asked him what he thought of this hypothesis. His respon se was i nteresting, as usual.
He said he agreed, with one exception . Kennedy would not have put forth the effort necessary to pass the Federal Empl oyees' Pay Increase Act of 1964.
Johnson knew how much the enactment of this bill meant to the quality of government service. He hiwself had served as a Congressional staff member.
Kennedy, because of his more sheltered upbringing, couldn't quite imagine 6
what a few more dollars per week mean t to the average person.
By· 1952, while Kennedy was serving his third term in the House, he
had become so bored with the seamy low level assignments which were all
his minor level of seniority afforded him, that he d ecided not to offer
for re-election to the House but to file for the Senate . This meant that if he
lost the Senate race he woul d be out of the Congress . That same year
Henry Cabot Lodge, the famous Massachusetts Republican, was running for
re-election to the Senate seat he three times had won. Nineteen fifty-two
clearly was to be a Republican year because of the public reaction against
the Democrats' h aving held power for twenty years, and because of t h e
presence of General Eisenhower at the head of the Republican ticket. Lodge
was heavily involved with the candidacy of Eisenhower, and he ran Eisen-
hower's successful pre- convention maneuvers to secure the Republican Presidential
nomination.
Kennedy, despite the i ntensity of the Eisenhower sweep that unhorsed
veteran Democrats all across the country, defeated Lodge impressivel y , and
Tip O'Neill took the Kennedy House seat.
~~esident Eisenhower in 1953 named Lodge to be his Ambassador to the
United Nations and Richard Nixon in 1960 chose him to b e his Vice Presidential nominee.
In 1963, JFK wci.s casting about for a prominent Republican to name as
Ambassador in Saigon so as to shift some of t he onus for Southeastern Asia troubles to the other Party. One day in high glee he told Larry O'Brien he had conned Lodge into. doing it. Larry said, "Well, if h e's that dumb we didn't do as well in 1952 as we thought we did." 7
I am told that during JFK' s eight years in the Senate he was somewhat
l ess than diligent to t he run of the mill i nstitutional responsibilities that
all new Senators are expected to discharge. Now and then, however , an issue
would attract his attention or stir his ire, and he would spring forth like
an unleashed tiger. He would mobilize his staff and they would work with
him day and night to make h im an instant expert on the issue at hand. Then
he would blaze forth with logic, wit and information so brilliantly assembled
and so eloquently presented as to overwhelm any opponent who dared confront
him.
Johnson also could be overwheiming, but in a nifferent way from Kennedy.
There were important differences between the spirit in which the
congress received Kennedy as President and later Johnson. At the time each man
became President he personally knew all, or nearly all, of the one hundred
Senators and their spouses . But neither of them was acquainted with even a
majority of the four hundred thirty- five members of the House of Representative~, I
however, Kennedy knew more Representatives than Johnson. Kennedy had been
a member of the House four years more recently than Johnson, and so he knew more of the members who remained in office . Four years may seem to be a very short time. But a lot happens in the House during a four-year period.
In those years the post-War generation of young veterans was beginning to take control of national po~itics and of the House of Representatives particularly. Kennedy was a younger member of this generation; Johnson was nine years older. Since in the House there's a high rate of turnover even in election years when there's no general sweep by either political party, many Representatives who had served with Johnson as recently as his last year in the House (1948) were, by 1961, dead or retired or defeated. 8
In Kennedy's case many of the younger members who had entered the House with him
following the 1946 election, or who had been first elected in 1948 or 1950, while
he still was in the House, had by 1961 become powerful members. Kennedy knew them
and liked them and they liked him.
Johnson, to most of these younger members, was a remote figure. He
had no claim on them. They knew about him onl y through the newspapers and
television news programs. In Johnson's life as . Senate Majority Leader he was
able to save precious time by discussing House matters not with dozens of
committee and subcommittee ch airmen, but alone with his political godfather,
Speaker Sam Rayburn, who in turn talked with the House spokesmen in charge
of the subject at hand. This p rocedure served Johnson's immediate purposes,
but the eventual effect was to insulate the House grandees not only from
Johnson but, to a lesser degree, even from their Senate counterparts , who in
turn were taking their cues, however reluctantly, fLom Johnson. Each House
of the Congress is extremely touchy about aggressions by the other House upon
its prerogatives. J ohnson's role was resented by Representatives because
they feared that Johnson eas exploiting his relationship with Rayburn to
promot~ the dominance o f the Senate over the House and that Rayburn, given
his advanced age and his obvious affection for Johnson, was permitting it to
happen.
Kennedy, l acking a Rayburn, travelled the more traditional avenues
of communication, and the relationships he built that way served those of us
on his staff well when he became President. Johnson's lack of such relationships
were handicaps that we ·had to help him overcome. Here ' s an example of the
kind of rapport Kennedy had established with many Representatives :
- John Fogarty of Rhode Island was a tough, rough- spoken senior member
of the full House Appropriations Committee, and he was Chairman of the 9
Appropriations Subcommittee that controlled the budgets of the Department
of Health, Education and Welfare and of the Department of Labor. He drew
a lot of water on the Hill.
In early 1961, as JFK's first formal White House reception for t h e
Congress neared, Fogarty's friends, led by Frank Thompson of New Jersey,
became apprehensive that Fogar ty wasn't sufficiently house- broken for the
occasion, and so they spent some time at coaching him.
"Now, John, you can' t call h i m Jack. He's'Mr. President. " '
"I know. I know . "
came the reception. All went well, and there was a sigh of relief
when Fogarty respectfully intoned:
" Good evening, Mr. President."
Then, "Yo u been getting much lately?"
Kennedy loved it.
Anoth er myth was that the Kennedy program was becoming t hrottl ed
because many of the House Committees were chaired by conservative southern ., Democrats who crippled those White House bills that iell within the juris-
diction"' of their- committees . This was not generally true. It was true
that these c h airmen were opposed to most of our domestic l egisl ation, but this did not warrant the assumption that most of them opposed those portions ( of our program considered by their Committees. There were only two ch airmen
who gave us problems regularly in this respect. They were Cl arence Cannon
of Missouri, who had been Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations forever,
and Howard Smith of Virginia, Chairman of the Committee on Rules. It was
-- fortunate for us that the other chairmen did not follow their examples.
These two gave us as many problems as we could say grace over . 10
On the contrary, Tom Murray of Tennessee, Chairman of the Conunittee
on Post Office and Civil Service, and Olin Teague of Texas, Chairman of
the Veterans Committee, were against practically all .our domestic proposals.
But the committees they chaired were admittedly not major committees.
our principal concerns with those committees were to hold down authorizations
for expenditures on veterans matters and increases in federal employees'
pay. Only by these means could we avoid the breaking of the budget and
incre asing inflation. The lobbyists representing s u c h interests had to
be resisted. These chairmen agreed with our objectives, and they cooperated
effectively.
The major legislative disappointment for Kennedy -during his entire
term of office was the failure of the House to e nact the Medicare bill and
the Federal Aid to Education bill. The Medicare bill had to emerge from
the Ways and Means Committee that was c haired by Wilbur Mills of Arkansas.
Mills, despite his public announcements that he would not press for the consideration o f Medicare by his Committee, did not personally oppose the concept of Medicare. He just didn't have the votes either to roll . it out of his Committee or to get it through the House.
&.-he Federal Aid to Education bill was the responsibility of the
Committee on Education and Labor. The Chairman of the Committee, Adam
Clayton Powell, who represented the Harlem district in New York City, and a respectable majority of his Committee were strongly for the bill. rt was torpedoed in the Rules Committee not by a Southerner but by
James J. Delaney, a crusty old Democrat from the Borough of Queens in
New York City. Delaney was abetted in this mayhem by John r;lcCormack of
Massachusetts, then the Democratic Majority Leader. Both Delaney and
MfcCorrnack were responding to pressure from the Catholic hierachy, that opposed any bill which did not provide grants for parochial schools. 11
Delaney was a p retty conservative fellow, anyway. A few years later I
sought his support for one of our more free- swinging bills, and he exploded
with anger and frustration.
"Damn you people_ Just look at what you've m<..de me do. "
He dramatically shove d his voting record in front of me , which revealed
that he had voted with us on nearly every issue . He roared on: "I'll tell
you one thing. If I were one of my constituents I'd n ever support a Congress-
man with a voting record like mine!"
Another myth h e ld that Johnson, because of his south ern background,.
got along better than Kenne dy with south ern Congressmen . Legend s of this
n ature were perpetrated by reporters not cognizant of southern ways. One of
the sources of this impression was the geographical split in the votes cast for
the Presidential nomi natio n in the 1960 Democratic National Convention. Within
the Democratic Party, Johnson seemed clearly to be the leader of the southern
states and some of the border states while Kennedy led the rest of the country.
That probably was an accurate snapshot of opinion at the begi nning o f 1961 -
·:F both within the Congress and without - but public impressions rapidly changed.
The major proposals, which had been in the proc ess of development for a
quarter of a century, came to b e rega rded as moderate and necessary to the
progress of the country . Examples were Federal Aid t o Education, Medicare,
civil Righ ts a11d expan sion o f the c overage of the Minimum Wage . In 1964,
however, Johnson hasti ly devised proposals that were new and s tartling to many
conservative voters. Examples of the latter were the Anti-Poverty bil l, the
Model Cities bill, and the Rent Supplements bill . Public p erceptions of bot h
Kennedy and Johns on altered, and so Congressiona l perceptions s hifted, too.
In t he 1964 e lection Johnson carried more northern states and fewer southern 12
than Kennedy in 1960.
Senior southeastern Congressmen were uncomfortabl e with Johnson.
He was just too raw for their tastes. Kennedy , on the other hand, obviously
was not. His lla~vard accent, his good looks, and his patrician manners
made southern aristocrats feel at home with him.
Kennedy knew instinctively how to ingratiate himself with southerners .
consider this scene with Carl Vinson of Milledgeville , Georgia. (Milledge-
ville h ad been the capitol of Georgia when Atlanta was onl y a backwoods
village. ) Vinson was Chairman of the Committee on Armed Services. He had
been first elected to the House of Representatives in 1914, three years
before Kennedy was born, and he had been Chairman of the. Committee on Naval
Affairs when Johnson joined the Committee as a freshman member in 1937.
Vinson is a refreshing and del ightful gentleman, but when occasion demands
he can be tough as a black jack pine knot.
Once, at Vinson's request, I took him to see President Kennedy
to discuss some piece of business Vinson had in mind. When the conversation
ended, Kennedy personally escorted Vinson from the Oval Office, through the
··:t Press Room and out to the driveway north of the West Wing. There the President
;:,: opened the door of the waiting limousine for Vinson and then closed it behind
him.
It was an instinctively graceful gesture. It was a gesture appropriate
to one of Vinson's age and eminence, but a gesture seldom extended to anyone
by a busy President. I heard much favorable comment about it on Capitol Hill
in the days that followed.
Once I tri.ed to illustrate to Larry 0' Brien - I fear not very
successfully - the nuances of speech that have so much bearing upon personal 13
relationships among southerners. When I was a member of the North Carolina
General Assembly during the 'fifties, we c ould determine from a person's
accent just where he had been raised withih rthe state - giv€ or take ab1'ut
seventy- five miles. Aside from such regional nuances there were also clear distinctions of class and education. Twenty years ago during the crass
adolescence of movie-making, southern audiences would express great merri ment while watching a Hollywood film with a southern setting. . G.ales of derisive
laughter would .·all across the audience wh en an actor cast in the role of a banker or a doctor or a corporate lawyer would speak in the accents of a field harid, and the laughter would be even more derisive when the field hand spoke in the accents of the aristocrats.
In practical national political terms Kennedy came across to the southern leaders of the Congress as a fellow aristocrat. Johnson came across as a field hand. An example is in order.
Wilbur Mills of Arkansas was Chairman of the Committee on Ways and
Means and he was probably the most powerful figure in either House of the
Congress. The Committee he chaired had jurisdiction in enormous areas of legi~. lation. Moreover, the Democrats on his Committee constituted the
Democratic Committee on Committees. This meant they had the authority to determine whicb Democrats would be assigned or reassigned to all Committees other t han Ways and Means. The implications of this authority were so breathtaking in scope that it takes the mind a while to absorb them. Mills, of c ourse, was the dominant figure in the determination of these assignments, and it was not in his nature to shirk from the exercise of thorny responsibilities.
Mills also dominated the Ways and Means Committee in substantive matters by the full application of h is formidable intel lectual and political talents to the subject at hand. When he arose upon the floor of the House 14
to advocate the positions of his Committee he commanded respectful attention
from all me mbers of both parties. He knew what he was talking about, and
no member dared chall enge him except afte r h aving equipped hims elf with
extensive preparation.
Mills was born and raised in Kensett, Arkansas, and he is a graduate
of Harvard Law School. When I f irst came to Washington I was warned f rom
all sides that Mil l s was the qui ntessential conservative a nd t hat he was
•$, /f '_:?,<'~ a Republican in Democratic c lothing. I soon learned t hat nothing could ~,,rH h ave b een further from t he truth . Mills was e ntranced with JFK, and his
support and advice were of critical i mportance t o the President in the
broad areas th1:.ough which Mills s wept . !Us affection a nd a dmiratio n for
the President extended to the entire Ken nedy family . In early 1972 for
instance Mills ann ounced that h e was a candidate for the Democratic Pres-
idential nomination. (This was a repeat o f the mistake J ohnson had made
in 1960 when he equated his wallop in Wash ington with his standing across
the cou ntryside.) In the Spring of 1972 a r eporter asked Mills whether
he would accept t he Vice Presidential nomination .
"No, I would consider that a demotion from my pre sent status." '<.";: "What a bout the Presidency?"
"I wouid consider that a l ateral move . "
But as 1972 wore on, i t bec ame apparen t that Mills had no chance
to become the Democratic Preside ntial nominee . He called me in Chicago
one Thurs d ay.
":)'.'ve got to be on one of these question and answer television shows
on Sunday," he said , "and I know I' 11 be asked wh ether I will accept the
Vice Presidential nominat ion . I i nt end to answer that I will do so only
if Ted Kennedy is the Presidential nominee. Now, my question to you is ."
15
whether, as a matter of protocol, I should feel compelled to advise Ted
in advance of my i ntentions?"
I said, "No. My response is based not on ceremonial grounds because
I know of no book of protocol that contro ls this kind of thing. But r say
no on practical grounds. If you tell Ted what you intend to do he will
diplomatically virtually order you not to do it, and if he does that with
reference to the use of h is name, you will be forced to respect it. However,
if you make your statement without prior consultation with him, ~ am sure
that he will deeply appreciate the gesture." Mills did as I suggested.
The Kennedys had impressed him mightily.
Many senior sou thern Democrats regarded John F. Kennedy, and, to a
lesser extent, his brothers, with the s a me kind of affection.
But Mills just did not like Johnson. Perhaps the two of them were too
much alike . During my years with LBJ, one of the principal demands on my
time was to keep the two of the m from each other's throats. I had the uncanny
feeling that ;· )hnson always regarded Mills as a t hreat - a threat not to his
-~ position but to his authority. I personally handled a l l of Mills' needs
for help from the Government, . and I saw to it that no Ways and Means bill
was ever defeated on the floor of the House so long as I was in Washington,
although there were some uncomfortably close votes. But tough court cases
tend to make bad l aw~ legislation that is tough to p ass tends to make
good law.
In any event, there was no need for Mills and LBJ to see each other
except on ceremonial and social occasions, and the relationship I had
established with Mills was extremely fruitful. But all of t he machinery we
had built came to a screeching halt within two weeks after my departure 16
for Chicago at the end of May, 1967. A Mills-sponsored bill to increase
the debt limit at the request of the Administration was lost on the floor
of the House, and I cringed from afar in antici pati on of the long range
consequences of this loss. To make things worse, we had passed an earlier
debt limit bill in February that proved it was possible to pass one of these
troublesome creatures in the 90th Congress.
The relationship between Mills and t he White House became sulphurous,
and there was nothing I could do about it from Chicago. The resulting
venom began to focus on the President's b elatedly submitted tax increase
proposal, which wasn't enacted until a year and a half after he had sent it
to the Hill. This bill was the legislation that finally confronted the
Congress with the guns and butter issue. Mills insisted t hat the budget
be .sharply cut_ as the price of increasing taxes. The struggle involved LBJ ·....--...,. so much emotionally that h e devoted to it an entire chapter of h is auto-
biography, The Vantage Point.· Mills, of course, was portrayed by LBJ
as having been the villian. I think I could have avoided this. I have gone
through the relationship of Mills with LBJ only to contrast it with the
relationship of Mills with JFK. I hope this contributes to proving a point.
Among the great d ocuments of American his tory are th~ film clips of
the JFK press conferences . They were the fir st Presidential press conferences
ever televised' live and without benefit of White House editing. They come
across now almost as freshly a s they did when they took p lace .
But valuable and interesting as these film clips are, a person who
never personally attended one of these conferences and who was not then
immersed in the issues of the time can't appreciate their electricity-
With extraordinary grace and force and wit Kennedy seized all the nettles
and dominated the scene. He appeared to everybody who observed him to
be a leader fully i n command of the problems of the nation, and, indeed, of
the world. 17
Presidential press conferences are the American equivalent of the
British Prime Ministe r ' s question time in t he House of Commons, and far
more faithfully than prepared speeches, t hey reveal the depth of the
Presiden t ' s person a l compreh e n sion of national a nd international issu e s .
They also reveal the q uality o f h is mi nd and o f h is reflexive reacti o ns,
b ecause he i s cer tain to be confronted wi t h questions he has no way of
anticipating. Reflexive reactions tell much about how a President makes
decisions.
On the da y before each press conference Pierre Salinger, then Pres s
Secretary, would ask the staff to s ubmit q uesti o ns the President might be
asked so t hat h e coul d h ave a littl e time to mull over ·a respon se , a nd
so he wouldn ' t be blindsided by t he press . Nothi ng was t o be gaine d from
ou r raising the obviou s i ssues of t h e d ay , and so we' d concoct t h e me anest
trickiest ques tion s our admittedl y perverted i maginations could fabri c ate .
Quite o ften these wou ld infuriate the Pr esident. An example is one
I sent: "Why have you been unable, after all this time, to persuade Jackie
to return f rom the Onassis yacht in the Medi terr anean and perform her duties
1 as First Lady o f the land?"
His"' privat e responses to s uch q uesti on s a r e, unfortunately, unprintable .
Suffice i t t ? s a y that h is comma nd of t h e p ung ent , earthy l ower reach es
of Anglo- Saxon Engl i sh were at least the equal of his loftier fli ghts of
ph rase. Bu t r egardless of his instant ire , t hese practice questions s t ood
him in good stead, and he knew it, which is why he kept coming back at us
for more . Some reporters had minds as evil and devious as ours were, and
preparation for their irreverenca was essenti al to the impact of Kennedy's
responses . JFK made no more t han a perfunctory pass at identifying himself as a
connoisseur of the visua l arts, nor of music, nor of t h e ballet. He only
knew that such matters were of enduring importance a nd that continuous
interest e xpr essed publicly by the Pre sident would be helpful to their
growth.
But literature was a different matter, f or h e took the l a nguage
seriously. Arn" ng the Presid e n ts, his h andling of English ranked h i m
b e hind only Lincoln, Jefferson and Wilson. And no o ne who s t udies the White
House r e lease s of that t i me can q u estion whic h of them we r e fashioned
by speech wr iters, and which were written by the President himself.
His spelli ng, howe ver, was a different matt er. There is a story
-that is possibly apochryphal, r egarding the introduction of the phrase
"O .K. " into American u sage. When Andrew Jackson first became Pr esident
in 1 8 29, he would indic ate approval o f a memorandum from a cabinet
melllber by wr i ting upon i t , "All c orrect. " I n J ackson ' s c urious personal
orthograp hy, t h is came o ut as "011 Korreck." As t he years went b y and
the memoranda came along thicker and faster, Jackson is alleged to have
~-:;. reduced the comment to its initials .
Be that as it may, and it has the ring o f truth, in July 1960, shortly
after t h e Los 'Angeles convention, I went to Washington t o talk with JFK
about his campaign in North Carolina. I wanted only _one day of his time
in the state but I wanted it to be a very full day . I told him we wouldn't
insist that it be late in the campaign b e cause we assumed h e would wish to
use that more effe ctive period in the more populous states. We decided on
September 13th and planned five stops across the 600-mile length of this
beautiful state.
I went to Washington the night before the trip, and we left at dawn 19
fqr Greenville , N. C. , on the Caroline, a family - owne d turbo-jet aircraf t
with plenty of seats for the candidate, his staff, the press and local political
figures s uch as me.
Shortly a f ter takeoff, JFK motioned me over to sit beside him, and he
asked who had b een scheduled t o introduce him at t he various events we had
prep are d for his a ppearance s . I told him that at each of the five stops we
ha d a different p erson whose strength in his own region, we felt, would
bring new adherents to t he ticket.
JFK said, "That's sensible . Let each of t h e m say a nything about me
he thinks will do u s good, but I will ask that e ach of the m also incor porate
in his r emarks t h ree points, which I will give you. "
For a few mi nutes h e scribble d on a yellow legal pad, t hen h e ripped
off the sheet and handed it to me ~ It read :
"l- Fourteen years experience in the House and the Se nate.
"2- Combat veteran o f Wor ld War IL
"3- winner of the Pulitzer Prize for t he book Profiles in Courage . "
This quotation is exact with one exception. He spelled Pulitzer with
two l's.
Kennedy' brought a new generation to p ower . Fr a nkli n Roosevelt had been born in 1882 , Tr uman in 1884 a nd Eisenhower in 1890. Kennedy was born twen ty- seven years after Eisenhower - 1917. He was the first of t he
President s to g row up almost e ntirely after World Wa r One.
His outlook a nd his s t y le captured the i maginati o n of this country and of the world . His thought was fraught with a n authoritative intellectual sweep t hat befitted the President of the United St ates.
Larry O'Brien and I could bring him a problem and a solution and 20
listen with amazement as h e reflected aloud upon their implications for the
national economy and for the international role of the United States as
he viewed them.
He had, for good reason , supreme confidence in his pol itical i nstincts .
Adlai Stevenson had aspired to be Kenn~dy's Secretary of State , but Kennedy
decide d that anyone with so little common sense as to have refused to endorse
Kennedy in the 1960 Democratic National Convention after Stevenson had falle n
hopeless ly out of the running, wasn't equipped to be Kennedy's Secretary of
state. Of course , after the convention Stevenson c amp a i gned valiantly and
effectively for the Kennedy- Johnson ticket, and he had only contempt for
Nixon. He had a n impressive nationa l f ollowing , great· tal ent, much inter-
national experience , a nd an interest in s erving in the Administration in a
capacity corrunensurate with his standing . And so he was tendered, and he
a c cepted, the nomination as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
But Stevenson c h afed under the restraints of the assi g nment, and he
continued to feel that he would be a more distinguis h ed and effecti ve Secretary
of State than Dean Rusk. In an effort to bring pressure on the President
·:>- with a subtle threat to leave the Administration , and - by implication - to :·r take his suppor ters with him, h e told Kennedy in 1962 that he wa s considering
resigning h ~s position to r e t u rn to Illinois and to r un against Everett Dirksen
for the Dirksen seat in the United States Senate.
JFK saw right through h i m. "Adlai, resign or not as you see fit, and I
can' t make that decision for you . But if you're asking my political j udgment,
I ' ll tell you, Eve rett Dirksen will frazzle your ass. "
Stevenson didn't resign .
The first session of the Eightieth Congress in 1963 seemed almost 21
endless. There was a lot of partisan bickering, but the Congress, never-
theless, was continuing to make real progress on the President's proposals,
especially the big Civil Rights bill and the Tax Cut bill. We saw nothing
to be gained by our cooperating to afford members the luxury of an early
recess, especially since 1963 was an odd- numbe r ed year rather than an
election year. The session droned on long past its usual time for recess,
and the ill-tempered grumbling rose in volume each d ay. The troops we re
nearing outright revol t, and it was uncertain how long we would b e able
to hold them in town.
Two big items in the President' s original program seemed impossible
of enactment until the election of much larger Democrati c majorities, which
we hoped would happen in 1964. One of trese items was Federal Aid to Education .
But this bill was tied· down by the quadruple anchors of i ncreased expenditures,
the shift of authority from State to Federal governments that it portended,
racial prejudice in the south among those who feared integration of the schools,
and religious prejudice of Protestants who opposed the rescue of Catholic
·!!- parochial schools. These problems made early action unfeasible.
~edicare, the most cherished of Kennedy's objectives, seemed almost
e qually hope.less. It is hard to imagine now that until a mere thirteen
years ago Americans were not permitted to ensure by taxes on their payrolls
that they could recei ve medical assistance in the years when their i ncomes
declined and their physical illnesses multiplied . But Medicare was fought
to the bitter end by doctors, b y e mployers , who were resisting paying their
portion of the payroll tax, and even by lobbies that were not on the surface ------r! directly concerned with the issue. ----·------· -· .. -- ··-- ·-· An example of an unrelated lobby that was active against Medicare was
the American Farm Bureau (despite t he obvious benefits the act would furnish 22
its members) because the Bureau was building alliances to secure support from
the likes of tne American Medical Association on agricultural l egislation.
But the spearhead of the opposition was the American Medical Association.
The AMA fervently mobilize d n early every doctor in the country into political
action and levied upon them heavy assessments to finance the national effort.
The AMA's opposition stemmed from its fear that Medicare was the forerunner
of the system of socialized medicine that recently had been installed in
Great Britain.
Because doctors of the various communities seriously addressed themselves
to a single political issue upon which they were regarded to be experts; and
because they lectured each patient against Medicare and handed h i m AMA
literature graphically depicting the socialist tendencies of Medicare and
told him to express himself to his Congressman and Senators, large t hings happened. The Congress panicked.
This was not a new effort by the AMA . Opposition to National Health
Insurance had been started early in the Administration of Harry Truman, and so a large majority of the members of the House of Representatives had regularly pledged themselves to the defeat of Medicare for as long as fifteen years w before 1963. Toda y probably as large a ma jority of doctors favor Medicare as then were opposed to it. But at that time there were o nly about 160 votes for it in the House, and there was only a bare, shaky majority for it in the senate. This meant we had to get 58 more votes in the House to win by one vote - a dubious prospect at best.
But there yet was a faint glimmer of hope. People across the country, under the prodding of the President, finally were beginning to become restive about the inaction of the Congress on Medicare. I f we could get the bill through the House Ways and Means Committee in the waning days of 1963 23
there might build up in the public sector sufficient pressure to enable us
to squeak the bill through the House in 1954. According to our plan this pressure would be appli ed to the various Congressmen as they sped to the s wift compl etion of their appointed politicking amongst their constituents during the holiday period.
However, this was a big "if." Way s and Means members were, on balance, no more sympathetic to the legislation than were Representatives generall y, and they had been ,1iuch more heavily lobbied than had other members . Moreover, they could count the House as well as could we, and they had no intention of bringing forth a bill that would be defeated . A defeat on a matter of this importance would seriously erode the regal aura in which the Committee l ong had prided itself.
For many months we had pecked away at the t wenty-five Committee members with such pickaxes as we could devise. They were rather an impervious lot, and each -----knew what the --·-other was going through . There was no point in my going to Mills about it until I was satisfied that we had on the Committee a one vote majority consisting of a combination of enough votes solidly with us and enough votes that, though not committed to us, had been softened suffici?ntly to be responsive to a hard push from Mills. Mills also had to be " satisfied that we had done our homework across t he House membership as a whole thoroughl y enough so that our efforts, when coupled with the game plan en- visioned, and with the prestige of Mills and his committee, would give us at least a reasonable chance for s uccess on the House floor. Mills needed this assurance not only for purposes of being convinced that he could by winning retain and enhance his own authority as a major leader of the House of Representatives, but also that he could be able honestly to persuade his Committee members that he was not leading them down the path to defeat. It was evident to us, since we had by then become fairly well experienced in such matters , that if 24
Mills agreed to present t he bill to his Committee the bill would emerge
as we wished, because he would have made no s u ch committment to us if he
were not confident he could deliver the Committee vote . He was never wrong
about where every member of his Committee stood on every issue.
The timing was delicate. We needed every day we cou ld get in which
to do our homework as thoroughly as possible, but we coul dn't hold off too
long lest a recess suddenly make shambles of our p lan . On t h e afternoon
of November 21st I decided we had to make our move, and I secure d an appointment
with Mills for the next morning at n i ne o'clock.
Friday, November 22 , 1963, began a s a wa rm, dark day. Most leaves had
deserte d the deciduous trees, and I suppose it would have been regarded
to be a foreboding day if one we r e inclined to me ditate on s uch matters.
I had other con cerns.
I arrived timely in Mills ' unpretentious office in the Longworth House
Office Building, and we immediately launched into a detailed review of the
position of each of the 435 members of the House on the issue of Medicare.
This review had to take into account all of the nuances that ought properl y
to be appraise d in preparation for an historic legislative battle. Mills
had some new facts I didn't know about, and I had some new facts he didn't know
about, but, i nterestingly, .as always, the new facts each o f us produced were not in ·cvnfl ict w~th each uther.
we then reviewed i n much greater detail the postures of the members
of the Ways and Means Conunittee. His knowledge and judgments about the
committee m'embers were under standably more detailed and valuable than mine were. However, our people had worked so hard on the Committee members t hat
I was able here and there to throw in data which illuminated for Mills why a given member had said what or done what. The whole exercise was 25
thoroughly enjoyable for me, and I ' m sure it was for Mills, too. This was
constructive government at its best. Genuine creativity is a gruelling process
but its reward justifies the effort that renders it possibl e.
I said, "Why don't we , in the interest of time, work out a bare
bones paper, rather than a full- fledged bill, that wi ll contain all the
elements of a bill, and that may be regarded as a 'Declaration of Purpose'?
This, then could be ratified by a majori ty of the Commi ttee, and we could
move on from there."
"All right. "
This approach was unusual but not unprecedented, and it would serve
our immediate purposes as well as a formal bill would. I t h e n sketched
out in pencil on a yellow pad the e l ements the President would consider
to be essential to an acceptable bill. Mills scribbled several ite ms on the
paper - adding here, subtracting there. We discussed the points of difference, I r1~i resolved them, and I wrote a new two pages in the interest of legibility . f &»{ r ' !f [/ ~ ;,rt We both then did some interlineation on that paper.
·.1· Mills then said, "Get that staffed out, get it back to me this afternoon, ."
and I will put it to the Committee on Monday, but you'll have to get it back
today because the Congress is more nearly ready to recess than may you ~nay think, ar
I'll have to give the Committee at least some semblance of notice about what
we're going to do."
I was, of course, completely elate.a. This was the objective we had
sought.
I ripped f .rom the pad the two hand-s cribbled·, frequently amended, unsigned
yellow.pages and walked downhil l a few blocks westward on Constitution Avenue
to the new Health, Education and Welfare building and into the office of
Wilbur Cohen, then Assistant Secretary of HEW for Congressional Relations, 26
and later Secretary of HEW. Cohen had a hand in drc.1£ting the original Social
security Act of 1935. He was at l east as much delighted as I was with the
dramatic new development. We agreed that he would have a p a per ready by
l ~te afternoon and that I then would pick it up and return it t o Mills.
I went back to my office, secure in the knowledge that we had pulled
off an event of compelling importance . I had held my other formal appointments
for the day down to a meeting in mid-afternoon with Adam Clayton Powell,
Chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor and the late
afternoon round with Mills .
I thought the President should know about the developments of the
morning, and that he might even want to telephone Mills to express his
appreciation . The President, however, was on a tour of Texas. Ken O'Donnell
and Dave Powers almost always accompanied him on his trips. Larry O'Brien because of the press of Congressional duties, seldom did. However, it is an
indication of the political significance of this trip that Larry went also.
I said to my secretary, Maura Hurley, "See if you can get Larry for me . " She reported back, "The switchboard says that the Presidential party has left for Dallas. They'll have Larry call you as soon as he can get to a telephon e." I went downstairs for lunch in the White House Mess.
The White House Mess then consisted of one medium sized room cluttered with a number of small tabl es and a larger round table in the corner that could seat about a dozen people . Staff members sat at the larger t able when they did not have guests. Thus those who happened l o be at the round table changed from day to day . Telephones with long extension cords were scattered about the room. When a call came in for a staff member a messboy would place a telephone beside him on the table . Or a member could call for a telephone no place a call. 27
The White House Mess tradition isn' t very lengthy. Until after
World War II staff members had to leave the building for lunch or send
their secretaries out for hamburge rs . Even now, staff officials fre quentl y
don't want to take t h e time to walk downstair s and wait for a meal, and
for those there i s a s mall room adjoining the Mess fille d with machines
vending soup, sandwiches , milk and the like. Presioent Truman was per-
suaded that staff time would be saved if dining facilities within t h e
West Wing furnished breakfast a nd lunch and that the y s hould b e operated
by one of the military services. Spokesmen for the Army, Ai r Force, and
Navy were called in, and t he Navy lost. Hence t h e name "Mess ." The
Navy saw fit to select Filipinos as messboys a nd kitc hen crew, and this
tradition has gone unbroken through t h e years even t hough t h e Re public
of t h e Philippines h as b een an independe nt nation s ince 1946 . The
Filipinos also cooked and serve d the meals on the yacht trips down the
Potomac on warm eveni ngs .
Meals in the Mess were excellent and c h eap. Only one soup was
available, but it was a different soup every day of the year. This must ha...ve strained the ch ef ' s imagination somewh at and h e had to come up with the likes of peanut butter s oup and cream of lettuce s oup. But
they we r e al~ays interesting a nd the y were always good.
The me n us were printed daily and were done in good taste . Visitors were encouraged to take their menus a nd White House-inscri bed match covers as s ouvenirs . Staff me mbers cou ld invite who they wishe d with the sol e exception of n ews people. Too ma ny matters of high secrecy were bandied about in that room to risk eavesdropping . Mess privileges necessarily were limited to senior staff. Each of us l1ad a silver napkin r i.ng with
"White House Mess" and his name inscribed. We were expected to take 28
these with us when we retired from the White House .
On November 22nd the Mess Room was f i lled, as usual. I sat down
at the big table eager to divulge my news about Medicare. But before
I could describe it or eve n place an order for food, somebody said to
me, "Tell tht: alligator shoe story."
This story had brought waves of ribald laughter a week earlier.
chuck Daly of our Congressional Relations staff who talked faster than I
could listen, said: "Let me tell it, you'll take all day." He whipped
through it in record time, and when he finished, not only nobody laugh ed,
nobody even knew he was through . I said , " We l l , Chuck , at l east you told
it fast." In the ensuing laughter the waiter put a tel ephone beside me, a nd I noticed that , olddly, other phones were ringing, too. It was Maura ,
"The Presiden t's been shot. I don ' t know a nything more, and that came over television. " In shock I hung up the telephone and turned to go upstairs to my office. The Mess was completely d e serted. I was the last one there. Telephones on the vari ous tables bore mute testimony to the fact that everybody else had gotten the message in the same way and at the same time I had.
we sat through that long terribl e afternoon watching the televisi on set in Larry' o'Brien's office, which was the only one on the second floor of the West Wing. Except for the clatter of the television, there was an eerie silence in the offi c e s that ordinarily so bustled with activity .
No one had anything to say. On the rare occasions when one person spoke to another it was i n hushed, whispered tones as in a church service .
When it was officially announce d that the President was dead an 29
involuntary universal gasp went up . And s till we sat and watched and
occasionally whispered. Most of the secretarie s were openly weeping .
Late that night it occurred to me that Y hadn't had anything to eat
since an early breakfast, but I didn't want anything, and I'm not sure
I could have held it down.
Meanwhile, my wife, Mary, a nd her parents had been visiting a
seriously ill relative in Coatsville, Pennsylvania, which was about a
hundred and fifty miles from our home in Virginia. As they were getting
into the car to depart Coatsvi lle, a neighbor came over and told them
that the President had been shot. So they moved ahead with the radio on.
Down the road Lhey stopped for gas at a small fi l ling st;ation i n Kennett
square in- the heart of the charming Amish countryside. Th ey waited for
a while and finally an attendant appeared, tears streaming down h is
furrowed face. Mary said that during the three hour drive, that included
a portion of the Wash ington beltway, s he didn't meet more than half a dozen vehi cles. Our children were dismissed early . from school a nd were attended to by a thoughtful neighbor.
Meanwhile, in the White House we saw Air Force One alight at Andrews
Air Force Base at sunset, and we watched the d eparture of the new
President by helicopter to travel several mi l es to t he South lawn of the
White House in the gathering dusk.
As we walked downstairs to meet President Johnson we wen t past the open door of the Oval Office. The famili ar light green carpet had turned blood red . It was almost more t h a n I could b ear . But it was no halluci nation. I later learned that President Kennedy had ordered t he change to be made during his trip to Tex as. 30
We sat togethe r numbly throughout the evening as if for mutual support,
but also to be available to give President Johnson such help as he might
need. Larry O'Brien and Ken O'Donnell fina l ly came in , exhausted and
grief-stricken, h aving accompanied the body of the slain President to
Bethesda Hospital for the autopsy. After they had settled down somewhat
I told Larry about the arrangement that had been made with Mills that
morning about Medicare. We agreed that it was so important it should be
related to the new President even on that tragic night.
We got Wilbur Cohen at home. He hastily put together a memorandum
and brought it to the West Wing . We got it to LBJ , and he was appropriatel y
impressed. He d id all he could to move the bill along, but the magic
moment was gon e, a nd we got no Medicare bill until two years later .
The day w 11ich had begun on a note of s u ch high expectancy had ended
in horror. I got home that night between eleven and twelve o'clock and
immediately was subjected by my children and my concerned and sympathetic
in-laws to a barrage of quesLions for which I had no answers.
Finally I suggested that they all get some sleep. Mary and I got ..•. into a car, and drove around and talked for a while. I told her about
the arrangement with Mills on the Medicare bill, and I mentioned that a
procedural step had to be taken the first of the week to kee p the Civil
Rights bill alive. I suppose I raised these to her in an effort to
divert her grief. Her predictable reaction was to reproach me for
thinking of mundane matters at such a time . However, I had by then,
during those long hours of listless waiting, decided that life had to go
on and that somebody had to mind the store. This impression was buttressed
by my recollection of my reaction upon learning of the death of FDR on 31
April 12, 1945. I was a twenty-three-year-old Army Lieutenant in a
convoy in the mid-Atlantic. I couldn't imagine life without Franklin D.
Roosevelt. I was ten years old when he was elected President, and I
didn't really know about any other President. Nearly everyone, including many
who regularly voted against him leaned upon his strength. He had seen us
through the terribl e Depression and through the War, and we knew that he
was big enough to cope wlth whatever had to be coped with. I suppose we
thought he was inunortal, too, because we couldn't imagine life without him.
When he died, it was as if the whole bottom dropped out. But it didn't.
He had chosen his Vice Presiden t well, just as JFK had c hosen his Vice President well.
Roosevelt had become e verybody 's father. Kennedy was a comrade in arms of my generation.
When Kennedy was killed the legislative machinery slowed but it didn't stop. One could not just throw up one's hands and let Medicare and Civil
Rights be left to the tcnd~r mercies of the wolves who continued to snap at our heels even as the funeral arrangements proceeded. JFK would not have had it that way . ~ The Kennedy family and the Kennedy White House staff never got emotionally involved nor even very c urious about whether there had been a conspiracy to slay the President. After the funeral I never heard it mentioned except when it was raised by outsiders. So far as we were concerned , JFK was gone, and no amount of retribution could restore him.
we s hall never know just how deeply Kennedy's brief tenure as the leader of the free world embedded his image and example into the hearts 32
and minds of billio ns of peopl e around the globe. We do know of t he astonishing outpo uring of grief that everywhere gr eeted t he ne ws of his assassination, and we do know that hundreds of millions of humble homes ranging from straw shacks in the jungles along the Amazon to igloos on the Siberian tundra bear his picture on their walls t o this day. No doubt some of this rea ction was a r esponse t o martyrdom, but not all of it. He was a special man .
We can never know, either, how JFK might have translated his standing into the achievement of peaceful, world-wide progress. We won't see his like again soon.