1963: The Hinge of the Sixties David Shribman

Chautauqua Lecture Series - July 18, 2013

Welcome to a lecture about one of the fateful hinges of history. We are speaking, of course, about 1963, and if you were alive that year, then surely those four digits are freighted with memory, and tragedy. Those digits are chiseled into history because of what happened during a split second in Dallas, Texas, on an afternoon that delivered November 22 into infamy. That is not only the principal event of the year 1963, but it is surely the pivotal event of the entire decade of the 1960s and, for many of us of a certain age, and many who followed, that may be the pivotal event of the half century, or more. It marked us like no other until the year 2001 and perhaps more deeply.

There is, in truth, some debate about history and its hinges, especially in the 1960s. A distinguished historian, James T. Patterson of Brown University, has just written a book called, evocatively, “Eve of Destruction,” wherein he argues that the hinge is 1965, not 1963. He argues that 1965 was “the time when America’s social cohesion began to unravel and when the turbulent phenomenon that would be called ‘The Sixties’ broke into view.” He says, moreover, that it spawned “exceptionally rapid and widespread change,” and it is hard to argue with that.

But in fact I will argue with that. All of those things that happened in 1965—the rapid buildup in Vietnam and the growing distrust of the war and of the leaders who planned it, the Civil Rights ferment culminating in the confrontation at Selma, the growth of the Great Society—were very important, indispensable even, to our understanding of the period. But all of that really has roots in 1963. It seems a tautology to say that 1965 couldn’t have happened without 1963—we can say that of any pair of years—but I think there are persuasive reasons to think that the real hinge was earlier— 50 years ago, in 1963.

There are real reasons to pause and remark upon our year of 1963. The year Patsy Kline died in a plane crash and Sylvia Plath died in an oven. The year Martin Luther King wrote his letter from a Birmingham jail and delivered a speech from a Washington monument. The year the James Bond movies began and Project Mercury—and the Studebaker line of cars—ended. The year Lester Pearson, Alec Douglas Home and Jomo Kenyatta became prime ministers, the year Giovanni Battista Montini became Pope Paul VI. The year “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was released and ZIP codes were introduced. In that year, a Buddhist monk set himself afire in Vietnam, Medgar Evers was murdered, Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped, and an American nuclear submarine carrying 129 crewmen sank. The first diet drink—the Coca Cola Co. called it TAB—was introduced. Sandy Koufax struck out 15 in Game One of the World Series against the Yankees. Christine Keeler was arrested for perjury in the Profumo scandal, and Kim Philby was given asylum in Soviet Russia after a British spy scandal. And here in Ohio, the Buckeyes went 5-3-1; the Browns, led by Frank Ryan at quarterback, Jim Brown in the backfield and Lou Groza at kicker, went 10-4; and the Indians, with Max Alvis at third, Vic Davalillo in center field and Mudcat Grant and Sam McDowell on the mound, finished in fifth. Stephen Young and Frank Louche were in the Senate, and Del Latta and John Ashbrook were in the House. Jacqueline Mayer, graduate of Sandusky High School, was Miss America. She, like so many of those who strode across the stage of 1963, is a heroic figure—a stroke survivor whose seven years of rehabilitation, followed by decades of public speaking, has inspired and helped so many to walk, speak—and dream. - 2 -

In 1963, the United States was more powerful than it had ever been, more powerful than any nation had ever been. Everything about it was big—its nuclear arms, its popular culture, its colorful eccentricities, its peculiar weaknesses. It was a huge, diverse, powerful nation: It was sending men to explore the new frontier of outer space. It was exploring its interior soul, wondering whether a nation conceived in liberty for all could continue to deny its blessings to some. It was involved in a cold struggle in Europe, especially in Berlin, and in hot struggles around the globe, especially in Congo, Laos and, ominously, Vietnam. Its power was symbolized by the troops that sat at the ready a rifle shot across tense borders in Eastern Europe and on the Korean peninsula. Its weakness was symbolized by the missiles that, only a year earlier, had been assembled a brief trajectory away in Cuba. Its promise was symbolized by great wealth assembled in its cities and suburbs and harvested on its farms, but its great problems were symbolized by those in city, suburb and farm who were clawing to be invited in—a toxic mixture that would, in the decade to come, produce the sort of domestic turmoil and national introspection that the nation had not known since the Great Depression.

And so, amid all this turmoil, it should not be surprising to learn that this was a year of new rights and great wrongs.

The new rights became apparent early in the year, when Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique” and then, in June, the first woman travelled into space. Back here on earth, the Supreme Court handed down its famous “Gideon v. Wainwright” decision, assuring that all those accused be provided lawyers. The country would never be the same again. But much of that was in the future. Let’s take a look for a moment at America in 1963.

As the year began, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Ernie Davis, Pope John XXIII, Homerun Baker, Estes Kefauver, Edith Piaf, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Lehman, Dinah Washington, Paul Hindenmuth, J.D. Tipett, Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy, and Jack Ruby were alive. By year’s end they were all dead.

As the year began, the following had not yet been born: Charles Barkley, Michael Chabon, Johnny Depp, Michael Jordan, Karl Malone, Brad Pitt, Vanessa Williams. By the end of the year every one of them would be alive, not walking on this earth but preparing, in the way infants do, to change the world. They would be among the 189,241,798 Americans on this continent, only about 60 percent of the number who live here today. And it was a very different country. The entire US gross domestic product was $599.2 billion. The president’s budget proposal for this year was $106.5 billion. The budget deficit for fiscal 2012 was 1.089 trillion. The average cost of a new home was $12,600. Today the average cost in the Midwest is about $150,000. You could buy two gallons of gasoline for about the same price as one gallon of milk. A loaf of bread in 1963 cost half what a postage stamp costs today. And if you’re wondering, you could mail a first-class letter for four cents when the year began, five when it ended. A Hershey bar was a nickel, and a whole generation of us will always think that a Hershey bar should be a nickel. The average wage was $4,397, and I can imagine a lot of you are thinking that that would be a lot of money in today’s dollars. You’re wrong. The equivalent today is $31,420. The average household income today is at least 33% more than that—a reflection of our relative prosperity and, of course, of the movement of women into the workplace. And by the way, 1963 was the year the Equal Pay Act was signed into law by President Kennedy.

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While you are figuring your relative economic status to 1963, let me remind you that your Internet service fee, your cable fee and your cell-phone bill were a lot lower in 1963. Then again, the Dow was around 700. I haven’t checked this afternoon, but I can say reliably that it is higher today. You could buy a blast shelter to save your family from a nuclear attack in 1963. Those are harder to find today. Apples were 16 cents a pound in 1963. They’re more than a dollar now. A pound of Colby cheese cost 39 cents. It would set you back $5.69 today. Ground beef was 49 cents a pound, and probably was organic. Today regular old ground chuck goes for $3.48 a pound. You could get a dozen sugared doughnuts for 49 cents in 1963. Your kids and grandkids would think you were crazy if you walked into the house today with a dozen sugared doughnuts at any price.

A Motorola car radio would cost you about $40 in 1963, and if you bought one, you could hear it play “Sugar Shack,” “Surfin’ USA,” “He’s So Fine,” “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Walk Like a Man.” Everyone in this audience still knows those songs, along with “I Will Follow Him,” “It’s My Party,” and “Blame it on the Bossa Nova.” All of them were released in 1963. None of them is out of style, or ever will be.

Television was in its heyday. You could buy a set for about $100, which is pretty expensive when you think that a Swanson chicken TV dinner went for 39 cents. If you sat at your TV table and tucked into one of those TV dinners—the salisbury steak, for example, a favorite in our house—you might have watched “General Hospital” and “Doctors,” both of which premiered that year, or “American Bandstand” or “Outer Limits”—that began that year, too—or even seen Donny Osmond sing on the “Andy Williams Show.” The “Patty Duke Show” and “Petticoat Junction” began that year. Johnny Carson was in his second year. Mister Ed, Mike Douglas, Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” and the “Fulton Sheen Program” in their third.

The rest of our cultural life? You could hear Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and the Drifters. At the movies was “Lawrence of Arabia” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In bookstores, and there still were neighborhood and downtown bookstores, were John Le Carre’s “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” “The Bell Jar,” “The Shoes of the Fisherman,” and E.P. Thompson’s landmark “Making of the English Working Class.” I didn’t read the latter until another 14 years had passed. Edward Hopper and Roy Lichenstein were painting, and Andy Warhol created his painting of eight Elvises. Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravingsky were producing important classical music works. “Oliver,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” were in the theatre. It was a rich time.

It was also a remarkable year for that disappearing art form, the speech. In fact in the year 1963 there were five remarkable speeches, perhaps a record for a peacetime year, especially when you consider that the first three were delivered within the space of one month. They were Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s Memorial Day speech in Gettysburg, by far the least well known of the five; John Kennedy’s American University “peace” speech; the president’s speech in Berlin; Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; and finally President Johnson’s address to a joint meeting of Congress shortly after President Kennedy’s assassination. They are worth examining in depth, though not in order, for we will deal with the two Johnson speeches out of sequence.

First let’s take up the American University speech. In the last six months of his life, President Kennedy delivered an address that did not possess the soaring sentiments of his Inaugural Address, when he accepted the torch of leadership from an earlier generation, nor the drama of his speech in Berlin, when in the shadow of the Wall he identified himself with the forces of freedom.

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And yet there was something about Kennedy's American University speech, delivered 50 Junes ago, that lingered in the minds of historians. Indeed, in his biography of the 35th president, “An Unfinished Life,” Robert Dallek describes the speech as “one of the great state papers of any 20th- century American presidency.” And in the definitive American biography of Nikita S. Khrushchev, William Taubman quotes the Soviet leader calling his rival’s address “the best speech by any president since Roosevelt.” - 5 -

This year, so different from 1963, is a good time to re-examine the speech that would not be forgotten, the one that the president rushed into delivering so as to have it on the record before a critical Sino-Soviet summit in July 1963—the speech that, in an extraordinary break from custom, the Communist government actually allowed to be published in translation for distribution in the Soviet Union. Here are some excerpts, annotated for our time:

What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.

The speech was an examination of the nature of peace, but it also stands as a remarkable period piece. At that time, not even a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the notion of a Pax Americana was inconceivable. But then, as now, when talk of a Pax Americana is not unknown, worries about weapons of mass destruction—a threat known to Kennedy but a phrase unfamiliar to him—dominated the worries of Washington. And then, as now, freedom was the dominant ideology, and the dominating rhetoric, of American politics.

I speak of peace . . . as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war—and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

Just a few years ago the historian James MacGregor Burns, the author of a JFK biography prepared before the 1960 election, wrote a book arguing in part that few leaders achieve greatness without taking their people into war. In this excerpt, the president elevates the challenge posed by peace to that posed by war. A note on an ironic antiquarianism: The use of the word “men” as a shorthand for “humankind” was common throughout the decade that launched the contemporary women's movement.

Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable—that mankind is doomed—that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade—therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants.

These remarks speak to Kennedy’s time, to be sure, but also to our time, when leaders and commentators remark easily that massive new terrorist attacks on the United States are “inevitable.” In an age where the frontlines and the home front are one and the same, homeland security has justly become the nation's top domestic and national-security priority. But the nation cannot undermine its values in its zeal to protect its values—the heart of the conflict between civil liberties and what Americans in this age called civil defense. This excerpt adumbrates the only memorable line in Bill Clinton's first inauguration, the notion that, as he put it in January 1993, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process—a way of solving problems.

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This is a far more profound passage in 2012 than it was in 1963, for it is no longer certain that the way of assuring peace that prevailed throughout the 20th century—the stockpiling of arms of overwhelming power—will prevail at the beginning of the 21st century. The United States possessed overwhelming power in September 2001 and yet was stunningly vulnerable to attacks of unconven- tional weapons by unconventional means by unconventional opponents.

Let us examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here at home. The quality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad.

This is the moral heart of the speech. In Kennedy’s time, it referred to the civil rights move- ment and to the awkwardness the president felt in speaking of freedom abroad while there was oppression at home. In our own time, it is evocative of the freedoms being denied to some in the hope that freedom might be preserved for all.

The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.

Thus begins the last paragraph of the speech—and the one that provides the most arresting marker of the distance the United States has traveled in these five decades.

Kennedy lived in a world where no president risked preemptive strikes. This is not an idle thought about an idyllic world; he was handed, but rejected, proposals for a preemptive strike on the Soviet missiles in Cuba in October 1962. This one sentence reminds us how dramatic a departure from American tradition is President George W. Bush's national-security doctrine of preemptive action against mortal threats to Americans—and suggests that the short Persian Gulf war of 2003 is as important an event in the history of the United States as it is in the history of Iraq.

It is hard today to recall how much strife and tension grew out of Berlin 40 years ago. It was the last remaining physical remnant of the end of World War II, a divided city, East and West, two competing systems eyeing each other warily and dangerously, across a concrete wall that itself was a powerful symbol. This was not what Frost would have called a “mending wall.” It was, instead, a menacing wall, and before it fell, in 1989, it would be the backdrop to two stirring speeches, one by Ronald Reagan and the first by John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy stopped in Germany on the first leg of a European trip, and his reception there was nothing short of tumultuous and joyful, “almost,” as Time reported, “beyond the bounds of reality.” George Ball had written him a secret briefing paper that called Berlin “a Soviet hostage,” arguing that “the German people know that their only defense is the American strength and commitment.” And they reacted with wild enthusiasm. As Richard Reeves put it memorably:

“Here, after the Cuban missile crisis, after the peace speech at American University, after finally taking the side of the Negroes, it was as if he were being crowned Prince of the World.”

Then we went to Berlin. Standing before the Wall itself, and speaking to 150,000 people, Kennedy was moved to improvise his remarks. Today the qualms of his advisers, who didn’t like presidential improvisation and who worried that his remarks were at odds with his American University speech, are all but forgotten. But what is unforgettable is what the president said to that huge crowd.

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Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was Civis Romanus sum. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner.

Sure, the president, who was no wiz at languages, messed up the German. Hardly anybody remembers that anymore either. What follows are words for the ages:

There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress...Let them come to Berlin.

When Kennedy left for Ireland he had a quick word with Theodore Sorensen, his close aide and one of those troubled by the president’s remarks. “We’ll never have another day like this one, as long as we live,” he said. Sadly, he was right.

The soaring rhetoric of the administration that was prompted by the growing disquiet of the civil-rights movement came not from the president but from the vice president. This is not the time to retell the stirring story of the drive for dignity, the right to vote and equality for the African-American. Let it suffice to say that while slavery was one of the darkest stains on American life, the civil-rights movements was one of the great moments of light and enlightenment. And that 1963 was one of the important markers in that struggle.

So let us set the scene for the March on Washington of August. In truth Martin Luther King shared the 1963 stage with Gov. George C. Wallace, who became governor early this year and in his inaugural address made his own famous speech: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!” Four months later he would stand in the door of the University of Alabama, his personal protest against integrating the university.

But in April, over there on the right side of history, the Rev. King was arrested in Birmingham, and there in jail he wrote one of the seminal works of American democracy, his letter from the Birmingham jail. In it he says:

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was “well timed,” according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This “wait” has almost always meant “never.”

Birmingham was the center of the ferment, and the reaction to it created even more outrage. Here we introduce the name Eugene Connor, known to history as Bull Connor. He was the commissioner of public safety, or police chief of Birmingham, and when he turned dogs and fire hoses on civil-rights activists, the entire momentum of this struggle shifted. This was a shocking sight, and completely discordant with the heritage of a nation whose president who would soon travel to Berlin to speak of freedom. Pictures of vicious dogs attacking students were flashed around the world, helpfully provided to Africa by the Soviet Union, which was fighting a battle with the West for the - 8 -

hearts and minds of that continent. It is safe to say that almost nothing that happened in the entire decade of the 1960s was as embarrassing to the United States as these images from Birmingham. But that wasn’t the end of it. In September, a bomb blast went off at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama that took the lives of four young girls attending Sunday School.

You’ll remember that a few moments ago we quoted the Letter from Birmingham Jail and its argument that waiting for justice was in effect denying justice. That letter was written on April 16. On Memorial Day, only six weeks later—and, though no one could know it, only two weeks before Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary, was gunned down at his home in Jackson, Mississippi— Vice President Johnson travelled to Gettysburg, Pa., to mark the 100th anniversary of the battle there. Great words had been spoken at Gettysburg before and great words would be spoken there again, a century later. Let’s listen to the vice president:

One hundred years ago, the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin. The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking, “Patience.”

These words did not sit well with the Kennedy administration. In fact, you might think of them as the 1963 equivalent of Vice President Joe Biden’s remarks on gay marriage, which were way out ahead of what his president, Barack Obama, had said and thought. Nonetheless, Johnson’s remarks showed attention to the complaints of Rev. King and in fact expanded on his theme:

It is empty to plead that the solution to the dilemmas of the present rests on the hands of the clock. The solution is in our hands. Unless we are willing to yield up our destiny of greatness among the civilizations of history, Americans—white and Negro together— must be about the business of resolving the challenge which confronts us now.

That summer President Kennedy, who had introduced a relatively weak civil-rights bill earlier in the year, submitted legislation to ban discrimination in public accommodations and to allow Washington to intervene in cases of discrimination. The president had dispatched 3,000 federal troops to Birmingham to show a federal presence there. But he was something of a reluctant warrior, and the March on Washington which followed in August was in part a gesture of support for the Kennedy bill and in part an effort to push the Kennedy administration farther. But the administration was queasy—really uneasy about the march—even though the president met with many of the leaders after the event.

But it isn’t the president, or even the picture of him surrounded by civil-rights leaders, that we remember from that day. It is the remarks of Rev. King and the dream he had. Now in truth, King had given versions of this speech before, particularly one in Detroit, but this is the one we remember:

Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

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I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

He went on with five more statements about that dream. And ended with the greatest coda in American history, set to the strains of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”:

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

This speech changed America. It altered its view of itself and, more important, it altered the American horizon. So, too, would the events of November 22.

That story is well known and to someone of my age too horrible to speak of, even in this lovely sylvan setting. Let’s say simply that a young president and his pretty wife flew to Texas on a political trip. And on that Friday afternoon the very cars that had brought one president to Parkland Memorial Hospital soon were taking another president to Love Field. It was at once the most memorable, most emotional and most searing motorcade ride in American history, a journey that would come to be recalled as part of the presidential transition itself. John F. Kennedy was being rushed to Parkland. Slumped in the back seat of a separate black limousine was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a son of Texas, - 10 -

a man on whom, as Harry Truman had said at another time of national loss, the sun and the stars and the moon had fallen. And in this chaos of flashing lights and sirens and grief and the most awful awkwardness, Elizabeth Carpenter realized that, among those hurtling along the streets of Dallas, she was the only writer and that someone, which meant Liz Carpenter herself, had better start thinking about what the Vice President, as she still thought of Lyndon Johnson, would say to the American people.

It was at this moment—between Parkland and Love, between the Kennedy years and the Johnson era—that Carpenter reached into her purse and pressed her fingers around a little white card (a gold lady bird on the corner) that she had brought along to be autographed by Mrs. Johnson. She started writing out, in pencil, a statement. It concluded: “I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask God’s help and yours.” The motorcade pulled up at Air Force One, and the Johnson entourage clambered up through the rear door. She wanted to work on the statement, but she and Marie Fehner, Johnson’s secretary, agreed: They couldn’t start typing. The typewriters belonged to the Kennedy staff, not to the Johnson staff.

There were many such moments. On the plane were Johnson, Bill Moyers and some Texas congressmen who had flown down from Washington. They didn’t know what to do, what to say, where to sit. In the hospital it had been no better. The Johnsons had been shoved into a small three- room suite just inside and to the right of the hospital entrance, sitting among tables and stools, the drapes pulled shut. Secret Service agents had wanted to get Johnson back to Washington as soon as possible—the better to protect him, they said with remarkable urgency and unanimity—but Johnson wanted the opinions of Lawrence O’Brien and Kenneth P. O’Donnell, charter members of Kennedy’s inner circle. They agreed: Get back, and soon. At 1:22 Johnson asked O’Donnell about the president’s condition. O’Donnell replied briefly but unforgettably: “He’s gone.”

So Johnson was president. Everything about him was big, supersized even. The ears that drooped, or so it seemed, all the way to his shoulders. The hands, which enveloped pure mortals’ digits in an iron grip on the second floor of the Capitol. The passions, which first were about mere power and later were about pure possibility. The emotions, which washed over his life and shaped a war on poverty and another one in Vietnam. And the hurts, about the slights of his youth, the insecurities about his education, the deep wounds when the kids and the blacks and the liberals turned against him and transformed him into an ugly cartoon character that he didn’t recognize and couldn’t comprehend.

But with stunning suddenness everything changed. The Johnsons had planned a weekend with the Kennedys at the ranch. All the arrangements had been made. Even the demonstration of ranch roping, herding and pistol shooting was set. The ranch staff knew, for example, that Mrs. Kennedy smoked Salems; that the president liked creamed soups for lunch; that the water in the president’s room should be tepid, not iced; that Mrs. Kennedy preferred terrycloth hand towels, not smooth linen ones; that the president favored bloody Marys or daiquiris for lunch, maybe Scotch for dinner, and that Mrs. Kennedy liked champagne on the rocks before dinner. In an instant, all of the sure things that fragile people clung to—especially the principals, swept up in the aftershock of the midday bullets—were suddenly not sure at all. Yet Johnson was sure of two things. He had to show calm, even if he was roiling inside; his new presidency demanded it, the country demanded it. And he would not, could not, leave Texas on John Kennedy’s plane without John Kennedy’s widow and John Kennedy’s body.

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The terrible questions accumulated. On Air Force One, Johnson swallowed a bowl of vegetable soup with crackers. He called Robert F. Kennedy, and the man who played the dual roles of chief law-enforcement officer of the United States and oldest surviving Kennedy brother was asked the most difficult question on earth: Where, Johnson wondered aloud, should he be sworn in? Johnson later said that he was worried about a Communist takeover of the United States. Kennedy advised that the oath could be performed by anyone empowered by the state of Texas to administer an oath. But even that was difficult. There wasn’t a copy of the oath anywhere; in one of the small incidents that underlined the tragic caprice of history, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, Robert Kennedy’s deputy at the Justice Department, would have to dictate the oath over the phone, which would be typed out on a single sheet bearing the letterhead ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE. Meanwhile, a call went out to Sarah Hughes. She wasn’t at her desk; like scores of Texas grandees, she had been at the Trade Mart awaiting the speech Kennedy would never make. Impatiently, Johnson grabbed the phone and asked the clerk at her office to find her. Moments later, Judge Hughes called back. She could get to Air Force One in 10 minutes to swear in the 36th president of the United States.

Johnson called Rose Kennedy. “I wish to God there was something that I could do and that we were grieving with you,” he said. He couldn’t say anymore, it was too hard to say anymore. Instead he handed the telephone to his wife. Over the Pacific, Air Force plane 58-6972, flying Secretary Dean Rusk and a group of top administration officials to the Far East, turned around 910 statute miles outside of Honolulu. The White House Signal Switchboard worried that there was only one telephone line to Johnson’s house on 52nd Street in Northwest Washington. By 10 that night, five additional lines would be added, and Johnson’s commercial line would be cancelled.

Before long, George Ball was examining the way the nation buried Franklin Delano Roosevelt and was preparing a memo for Johnson urging the issuance of a proclamation calling the Monday of Kennedy’s funeral a day of national mourning, sending telegrams asking governors whether they would attend the funeral, issuing instructions to close all departments and agencies on the day of the funeral, and to have military commands and vessels at sea fly their flags at half mast for 30 days.

But all that seemed a million miles away. There, in the blue and silver jet on the tarmac, the new president was sworn in. The Bible came from Mrs. Johnson’s purse. It looked new. There was no inscription. Johnson noticed that it was a Catholic Bible. Through it all Liz Carpenter’s mind raced to a remark that Lady Bird had made earlier, when the world seemed quiet and understandable: “Lyndon’s a good man in an emergency.”

This was an emergency like no other—so grave that Congress, which ordinarily is eager to skip out of Washington, stayed in session for 356 days that year.

Now the Kennedy reign and his era were over, the sense of majesty and grace not merely stilled but bloodied. The new president lacked the polish of Kennedy and, worse yet, knew it, felt it; years later, Joseph A. Califano Jr., who served as Johnson’s secretary of health, education and welfare, would say that Johnson’s “envy for the glamour that surrounded the Kennedys in life and the adulation that attended them in death was Shakespearean.”

Kennedy possessed the outer moral bearing of an Ivy League president, able to talk fluently about values and Voltaire. Johnson had that of a rural Southern courthouse pol, able to understand how to abuse and use worried men. But where there was surface elegance to Kennedy, there was inner depth to Johnson. He knew politics from its grittiest, gravelly roots; he knew how to motivate men and to scare them into action. He knew Washington, not so much its shiny monuments but the - 12 -

hidden, darker corners. He knew the secrets the most powerful chairmen harbored on Capitol Hill; he knew the secret levers of power that existed beyond the Constitution—indeed that sometimes existed beyond the conscience of most of the respectables in the capital. Kennedy and Johnson both served in the House and Senate, but Johnson’s relationships on Capitol Hill were far deeper than Kennedy’s. Lawmakers like Richard Russell of Georgia and Harry Byrd of Virginia—both of whom had opposed the Civil Rights Bill in 1957—had little in common with Kennedy, but had an affinity and a sense of understanding with Johnson, who could fairly be described as one of their cronies. Of both men, and of a score of others, chairmen and powerbrokers and keepers of the faith and keepers of dark secrets, Johnson would ask more than Kennedy could and would get more.

Kennedy seemed a romantic figure, but in truth, Johnson was the more romantic. He was the most romantic of the romantics. He had a romance with Washington, with power, with the idea that it was possible to harness the tax revenues and regulatory power of the federal government and use them to transform the nation, whether by diverting mere money, or by diverting great rivers or by diverting ancient human purposes. For him, the New Deal didn’t end with the Roosevelt years. For Lyndon B. Johnson, the New Deal was a process, not a program. It was an idea, and the idea was as alive in Lyndon Johnson on the Friday that John Kennedy was killed as it had been in the years when Johnson ran the National Youth Administration.

In the next hours, days and weeks, Lyndon Johnson would take power by intuition. He knew, though no one needed to tell him, that a gentle hand was necessary. But he also knew, from his youth in Johnson City and his college days at San Marcos and his early days in the House, that a gentle hand could be a strong one, and that in this case it had to be strong, very strong. In his first day as president, in the very first memos he received from a terrified staff (“To: The President,” they said, and even now the difficulty of thinking of Johnson that way is apparent on the page), the people around Johnson made it clear that he would symbolize change even as he sought to show continuity. “I don’t know how many deals have been made up at the Capitol,” Orville Freeman, the secretary of agriculture, told Walter Jenkins the day after the assassination, a message that Jenkins dutifully passed on to Johnson, “but I am sure that President Johnson is not bound by any of them.”

President Johnson was, to be sure, a different sort of president than his predecessor. He understood the complexities, totems and taboos of Congress far better than Kennedy; in his address to Congress on November 27—we’ll speak more of that later—he would say, “For 32 years, Capitol Hill has been my home.” He knew where the power came from, where the hidden weaknesses were in men and institutions. He lacked the easy lyricism of Kennedy, but he had a gritty sense of reality, and he understood, intuitively, struggle—and though Kennedy spoke of long twilight struggles, Johnson had lived struggle.

The nation at this time was peculiarly vulnerable to Johnson’s strengths—and to his weaknesses. Though the term did not yet exist, there did exist an American underclass, and Johnson understood the heartbreak of the striving. Though the term was not yet widely employed, there did exist a minority consciousness, and Johnson knew the agony of the life of the black and the brown. He wanted to ease their way, to open windows and doors, to think big the way Roosevelt did.

Because the need was so great—no longer a third of a nation ill-housed or ill fed, to be sure, but giant chunks still living in poverty, still prevented from reaching the big horizon, or even from seeing it, still fettered by lack of opportunity. The civil-rights movement of bus strikes and lunch counter sit-ins had, by 1963, matured, its various elements more united, more willing to move from demonstration to confrontation. These confrontations began in the fateful year of 1963, particularly in - 13 -

Birmingham, and they spread, through word of mouth and the pulpit and television and the power of conscience. Johnson understood that this movement had moral authority even if local authorities did not, and he thought government should be its ally.

Then there were the weaknesses. They grew from his sense of insecurity and insularity. He didn’t know the world, and he knew that was a weakness in a job where it was important to know DeGaulle and Adenauer and understand the impulses of Ho Chi Minh and Castro and Mao. The realities and rhetoric of real politics were foreign to him, and while he relied on his instincts in domestic affairs, he didn’t dare do so abroad. Vietnam was a faraway country of which he knew nothing. Worse yet, everything he knew was processed and distilled into an American model. Hence the notion, not entirely fanciful, of a New Deal for the Mekong Delta. He would show his strength in Vietnam—his fortitude, his toughness—but in determining to show his strength, he would in fact underline his weakness. He would not be defeated in Vietnam; he feared Republicans, impeach- ment, the verdict of history. He would press on, farther and farther into the swamp, though his instincts—and this is evident in his first day of office—were skeptical to the core.

From the very start, Johnson was an old man in a hurry. Later, his aides would develop what they called “the LBJ trot,” a way of walking through the White House with an air of intensity and urgency, a metaphor for the intensity and urgency Johnson brought to his job and for the intensity and urgency with which he infected his aides. But in the early days he knew intuitively that the nation’s wound was the nation’s opening, believing that if he could only move deftly and quickly enough, he might move the country. Time and again he would admonish his staff: We have a very limited window to make a difference. “He knew,” Luci Johnson told me in a conversation one time, “the beginning was when he had the best chance.” He spoke of continuing, but in truth he wanted to go far.

Johnson entered office in the most strained of circumstances, taking the oath in Air Force One while the blood-stained widow of his predecessor looked on and as the shocked world trembled. Within hours his advisers, a mix of Johnson loyalists and Kennedy holdovers, told him that Kennedy’s commitment to civil-rights legislation was a threat to his presidency, then regarded as fragile and temporary. They counseled him that as a Southern president who hadn’t even been elected he had every excuse to put the legislation aside for a year, or forever. He asked what the presidency was for if not for urgent national priorities such as civil rights. To Gaibraith he said: “I want to come down very hard on civil rights, not because Kennedy was for it but because I am for it. Keep in mind that I want a liberal policy because I’m a Roosevelt Democrat.”

On his first day in the White House, Johnson was a whirlwind, doing himself what White House staffs had been accustomed to do for the president. He called 214-CA4-2294 to speak with the widow of J.D. Tippitt, the Dallas police officer killed by Lee Harvey Oswald after the assassination. He made sure a general was dispatched to greet President Truman on his arrival in Washington. He contacted John Ochs at The New York Times to talk about the paper’s editorial stance toward the new administration. He asked Rusk and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara to stay on, telling McNamara: “We must have both strength and the appearance of strength. There must be no move that would ever remotely lead others to think that our policies of strength are changing.” He wrote the Kennedy children separate handwritten notes, thinking first—as no political figure today would—of Kennedy’s young son and only later of his older daughter. He opened his first cabinet meeting by saying: “The president is dead. The president must keep the business of this government moving.”

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Which is what he did. Before November was out he appeared before Congress. It was a solemn, sad moment, but it was also a moment of high drama—and high generosity. This is how President Johnson opened:

“All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.”

He continued: “The greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time. Today John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works that he left behind. He lives on in the mind and memories of mankind. He lives on in the hearts of his countrymen.”

But the heart of this address to Congress—the thing we remember even today—is Johnson’s riff off of Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, when Kennedy said that our national work would not be finished “in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.” “But,” he said, “let us begin.”

This is how Johnson answered the trumpet call sounded by his predecessor: “Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue.”

Let us continue. That is what Johnson vowed he would do, and in fact he would do more than continue. He would break his own path, on civil rights, on Vietnam, on a conception of a new America he called the Great Society. All that we have and all that we are, to paraphrase President Johnson, was set in motion by what happened in 1963. It is, for all of us of every age, the hinge of history—in some ways the most vital year of our time. In its sadness and in its promise we live still.