The New Yorker

Annals of History The Transition Lyndon Johnson and the events in Dallas. By Robert A. Caro March 26, 2012 Johnson behind President Kennedy as they left the Hotel Texas, in Fort Worth, the day that Kennedy was assassinated. Photograph from Houston Chronicle / AP Friday, November 22, 1963, began for Lyndon Johnson in Fort Worth, with the headline he saw on the front page of the Dallas Morning News: “YARBOROUGH SNUBS LBJ.” Johnson, accompanying President Kennedy on a tour of Texas, had been given an assignment that the President considered vital: since a unified Democratic front in the state would be needed to carry it in 1964, the Vice-President had been made responsible for healing the bitter Democratic Party rift between Governor 1 John B. Connally, a former Johnson assistant, and Senator Ralph Yarborough, the leader of the Party’s liberal wing. The previous day, however, Yarborough had refused even to ride in the same car as Johnson. Assigned to accompany the Vice- President during a Presidential motorcade through San Antonio, the Senator had gotten into another car instead, and, in a procession in which the other vehicles behind the Presidential limousine were packed with people, Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, had had to sit conspicuously alone in the back seat of their convertible. Newspapers that day chronicled every detail of Johnson’s humiliation. “Twice at San Antonio . Johnson sent a Secret Service man to invite Yarborough to ride with him in his car. Both times the senator ignored the invitation and rode with somebody else,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The Chicago Tribune noted the “curt wave of his hand” with which Yarborough had sent the Vice-President’s emissary packing. The feud was the main story of Kennedy’s trip not just in Texas but across the country. On the morning of the twenty-second, Lyndon Johnson sat in his suite at Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas with newspapers in front of him— there were four separate stories in the Dallas paper alone; one was headlined “NIXON PREDICTS JFK MAY DROP JOHNSON”—and then he had to go downstairs for a rally of five thousand labor-union members, and join Kennedy, Yarborough, Connally, and some local congressmen, all of whom had, of course, seen those stories. As they walked across the street to the rally, a light drizzle was falling. Johnson was wearing a raincoat and a hat; Kennedy was bareheaded and lithe, in an elegant blue-gray suit. Johnson hastily snatched off his hat. His assignment was to introduce Kennedy, and, as he finished, the crowd roared for the young man beside him. Explaining why Jackie wasn’t there (“Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself; it takes longer—but, of course, she looks better than we do”), Kennedy was easy and charming. Johnson had had to ask the President for a favor: to be allowed to bring his youngest sister, Lucia, who lived in Fort Worth, to meet him. Shaking hands with Kennedy that morning, Lucia was thrilled; she had always wanted to shake hands with a President, she said. When he had gotten dressed early that morning, Kennedy had strapped a canvas brace with metal stays tightly around him and then wrapped over it and around his thighs, in a figure-eight pattern, an elastic bandage for extra support for his 2 bad back; it was going to be a long day. Now it was nine o’clock, time for him to deliver a breakfast speech to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce in the hotel’s ballroom. “All right, let’s go,” he said. Nine o’clock in Texas was ten o’clock back in Washington. At ten o’clock in Washington that Friday morning, at about the same time that Kennedy was entering the Fort Worth ballroom, a Maryland insurance broker named Don B. Reynolds, accompanied by his attorney, walked into Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building, on Capitol Hill, to begin answering questions from two staff members of the Senate Rules Committee: Burkett Van Kirk, the Republican minority counsel, and Lorin P. Drennan, an accountant from the General Accounting Office who had been assigned to assist the committee. Reynolds was there because the Rules Committee had begun investigating a scandal revolving around John-son’s protégé Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, whom Johnson, during his years as Senate Majority Leader, had made Secretary for the Majority. During the preceding two months, the scandal had been escalating week by week. In a desperate attempt to head off the investigation, Baker had resigned (he later said that if he had talked “Johnson might have incurred a mortal wound by these revelations. They could have . driven him from office”), but the resignation had only ignited a media firestorm that broke on newspaper front pages across the country and in sensational cover stories in major news magazines. The scandal had thus far concentrated on the man known in Washington as “Little Lyndon,” but the stories were beginning to focus more and more on Johnson himself. On the Monday of the week that Kennedy left for Texas, a lengthy and detailed article had appeared in Life—“SCANDAL GROWS AND GROWS IN WASHINGTON,” based on the work of a nine-member investigating team headed by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, William G. Lambert. It had gone beyond a recounting of Baker’s personal financial saga to make clear that, in distributing campaign contributions and in his other Senate activities, Baker had simply been “Lyndon’s bluntest instrument in running the show.” And the focus was about to sharpen that morning. Reynolds, who was Baker’s former business partner, had come to Room 312 to tell the Senate investigators about a number of Baker’s activities, one of which—the purchase of television advertising time and an expensive stereo set, in return for the writing 3 of an insurance policy—Baker himself later called “a kickback pure and simple,” to Johnson. On the advice of his attorney, Reynolds had brought with him documents—invoices and cancelled checks—that he said would prove that assertion. Another of Baker’s activities that Reynolds began describing that morning would also turn out to be related to Johnson: an overpayment by Matthew McCloskey, a contractor and major Democratic funder, for a performance bond—an overpayment of a hundred and nine thousand dollars for a bond that had cost only seventy-three thousand dollars, with twenty-five thousand dollars of that overpayment, Reynolds later said, going to “Mr. Johnson’s campaign.” In New York, there was also going to be a meeting that morning—of about a dozen reporters and editors in the offices of Life’s managing editor, George P. Hunt. During the past week, reporters who had been sent to Texas to investigate the Vice-President’s finances had found areas ripe for inquiry. For one thing, they had begun searching through deeds and other records of recent land sales and had found that the real-estate and banking transactions of the Johnson family’s L.B.J. Company were on a scale far greater than had previously been suspected. And other reporters were digging into the advertising sales and other activities of KTBC, the cornerstone of the Johnsons’ extensive radio and television interests, and they, too, were turning up one item after another that they felt merited looking into. “With every day that week,” the story “kept getting bigger and bigger,” Lambert said later, and it was no longer a Bobby Baker story but “a Lyndon Johnson story”: after thirty-two years “on the [government] payroll . he was a millionaire many times over.” But, Lambert said, so many reporters were working in Johnson City, Austin, and the Hill Country that “they were tripping all over each other.” An article laying out some of their new findings had already been written, by Keith Wheeler, a staff writer. A decision had to be made on whether to run his story in the magazine’s next issue or whether the material already in hand should be held until more was available, and combined into a multi-part series on “Lyndon Johnson’s Money”—what Lambert termed a “net worth job”—and a meeting to decide this, and to divide up the areas of investigation in Texas, had been scheduled for 11:30 A.M. on November 22nd. 4 As Don Reynolds was providing the Rules Committee staff with information that might shortly produce headlines, and as Life was mapping out assignments for an investigation that might produce even bigger headlines, the Presidential motorcade was pulling away from the hotel in Fort Worth for the airport, and the flight to Dallas. In Lyndon Johnson’s lapel was a white carnation that had been pinned on him at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast, and in his car was Ralph Yarborough. “I don’t care if you have to throw Yarborough into the car with Lyndon,” Kennedy had told his chief legislative aide, Larry O’Brien, that morning. “Get him in there.” He told Ken O’Donnell, his appointments secretary, to give Yarborough a message: “If he doesn’t ride with Lyndon today, he’ll have to walk.” The President himself had had a few words with the Senator that morning, telling him, in a quiet voice, that, if he valued his friendship, he would ride with Johnson. On the thirteen-minute flight to Dallas, the President took care of another public aspect of the feud. O’Donnell, taking Connally by the arm, pushed him into Kennedy’s cabin and closed the door. “Within three minutes,” he was to recall, the Governor had agreed to invite Yarborough to the reception at the Governor’s Mansion and to seat him at the head table at dinner.

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