The Day L.B.J. Took Charge (2024)

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. Emerging, Connally said, “How can anybody say no to that man!”

As Air Force One was heading for Dallas, the last of the clouds cleared. “Kennedy weather,” O’Brien called it.

It seemed as if it was going to be a Kennedy day. As Air Force One touched down at Dallas’s Love Field, at 11:38 A.M., everything seemed very bright under the brilliant Texas sun and the cloudless Texas sky: the huge plane gleaming as it taxied over closer to the crowd pressing against a fence; the waiting, open Presidential limousine, so highly polished that the sunlight glittered on its long midnight-blue hood, which stretched forward to two small flags on the front fenders. There was a moment’s expectant pause while steps were wheeled up to the plane, and then the door opened and into the sunlight came the two figures the crowd had been waiting for: Jackie first (“There’s Mrs. Kennedy, and the crowd yells!” a television commentator shouted), youthful, graceful, her wide smile, bright-pink suit, and pillbox hat radiant in the dazzling sun; behind her the President, youthful, graceful (“I can see his suntan all the way from here!” the commentator announced), the mop of brown hair glowing, one hand checking the button on his jacket in the familiar gesture, coming down the steps turned sideways just so slightly, to ease his back. A bouquet of bright-red roses was handed to Jackie by the welcoming committee, and it set off the pink and the smile.

No time had been built into the schedule for the President and the First Lady to work the crowd, but who could have resisted, so adoring and excited were the faces turned toward them, so imploring the hands reaching out toward them, and they walked along the fence basking in the smiles and the sun, grinning, laughing, even, at things people shouted as they stretched out their hands, in the hope of a touch from theirs. “There was never a point in the public life of the Kennedys, in a way, that was as high as that moment in Dallas,” a reporter who covered the Kennedy Presidency said later.

Taking his wife, Lady Bird, by the arm to bring her along, Lyndon Johnson walked over to the fence and started to follow the Kennedys, but the faces remained turned, and the arms remained stretched, toward the Kennedys, even after they had passed, and Johnson quickly moved back to the gray convertible that had been rented for him. Yarborough sat on the left side in the back seat, behind the driver, a Texas state highway patrolman named Hurchel Jacks, the Vice-President on the right side, behind Rufus Youngblood, a Secret Service agent assigned to him. Lady Bird, sitting between Yarborough and her husband, tried to make conversation but soon gave up. The two men weren’t speaking to each other or looking at each other—the only noises in the car came from the walkie-talkie radio that Youngblood was carrying on a shoulder strap—as the motorcade pulled out.

Senate hearings normally break for lunch, but at 12:30 P.M. Washington time Reynolds, after two and a half hours of explaining his over-all business relationship with Bobby Baker, had begun telling his Rules Committee questioners, Van Kirk and Drennan, specifically about the pressures that he said had been brought on him to purchase advertising time on Lyndon Johnson’s television station, and they didn’t want him to stop. “Don presented a good case,” Van Kirk said later. “He could back it up. Everything he said, he had a receipt for. It’s hard to argue with a receipt. Or a cancelled check. Or an invoice. It’s hard to argue with documentation.” The committee staffers sent a secretary out for sandwiches and milk, and Reynolds continued talking. The first few miles of the Presidential procession followed an avenue lined with small light-industrial factories, and relatively few people were watching as the motorcade swept past: in the lead an unmarked white police car, and helmeted motorcycle-police outriders; then the Kennedys and Governor and Mrs. Connally, in the Presidential limousine with the flags fluttering from its fenders and four motorcycle escorts flanking it at the rear; then a heavily armored car that the Secret Service agents referred to as the Queen Mary, with four agents standing on the running boards, and Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers, a White House special assistant, sitting on the jump seats; then, after a careful, seventy-five-foot gap, came the gray Vice-Presidential convertible and the Vice-Presidential follow-up car, the press cars and buses, and the rest of the long caravan. But then the motorcade reached Dallas’s downtown, and turned onto Main Street. For a while, Main was lined on both sides by tall buildings, so that the cars, driving between them, might have been driving between the walls of a canyon, and the windows of the buildings were filled, floor after floor, building after building, with people leaning out and cheering, and on the sidewalks the crowds were eight people, ten people deep. Overhead, every fifty yards or so, a row of flags hung from wires stretched across the street, and at the end of the canyon, where the buildings stopped, was a rectangle of open sky.

As the procession drove farther into the canyon, the noise swelled and deepened, becoming louder and louder, so that the motorcade was driving through a canyon of cheers. Every time the President waved, the crowd on the sidewalk surged toward him, pressing back the lines of policemen, so that the passage for the cars grew narrower, and the lead car was forced to reduce its speed, from twenty miles an hour to fifteen, to ten, to five. Every time Jackie waved a white-gloved hand, shrieks of “Jackie!” filled the air. As Governor Connally waved his big Stetson, revealing a leonine head of gray hair, the cheers swelled for him, too. The four passengers in the Presidential limousine kept smiling at one another in delight. “Mr. President, you certainly can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you!” Nellie Connally said. The President’s “eyes met mine and his smile got even wider,” she later recalled.

Trailing them in the rented car, driving between crowds of people cheering but not for him, sharing a seat with a man who had humiliated him, Lyndon Johnson was far enough behind the Presidential limousine that the cheering for the Kennedys and the Connallys—for John Connally, some of it, for his onetime assistant, who had become his rival in Texas—was dying down by the time his car passed, and most of the faces in the crowd were still turned to follow the Presidential car as it drove away from them. So that, as Lyndon Johnson’s car made its slow way down the canyon, what lay ahead of him in that motorcade could, in a way, have been seen by someone observing his life as a foretaste of what might lie ahead if he remained Vice-President: five years of trailing behind another man, humiliated, almost ignored, and powerless. The Vice-Presidency, “filled with trips... chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping... in the end it is nothing,” as he later put it. He had traded in the power of the Senate Majority Leader, the most powerful Majority Leader in history, for the limbo of the Vice-Presidency—“WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO LYNDON JOHNSON?,” a mocking headline in The Reporter had asked—because he had felt that at the end might be the Presidency. Now there was another man who might want the Presidency: the younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General, whose dislike and contempt—“hatred” is not too strong a term—for him was well known in Washington. And in five years Bobby Kennedy would have had time to build up a record, to hold other positions besides Attorney General: Secretary of Defense, perhaps—whatever positions he wanted, in the last analysis. For more than a year now, the desolation Lyndon Johnson felt about his position had shown in his posture—in the slump of his shoulders—and in his gait, the slow steps that had replaced the old long Texas stride with which he had walked the corridors of Capitol Hill, and in his face, on which all the lines ran downward, his jowls sagging, so that reporters mocked in print his “hangdog” look. His former aide Bill Moyers, who had become the publicity director for the Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver’s Peace Corps, felt that Johnson had become “a man without purpose... a great horse in a very small corral.”

And what if his Vice-Presidency wasn’t five years longer but only one? What if he was dropped from the ticket in 1964?

He had been saying for some time—had apparently convinced himself—that that was the probability. In recent months, he had begun advising aides he would have wanted to keep with him were he to run for or become President to leave his staff. “My future is behind me,” he told one staffer. “Go,” he said to another. “I’m finished.” That belief—that fear—may or may not have been justified before Bobby Baker appeared on magazine cover after magazine cover, before Don Reynolds entered the picture, and before this trip to Texas. Given what the President was seeing for himself in Texas—that Johnson was no longer a viable mediator between factions of his party in his own state—and what was happening at that very moment in the Old Senate Office Building, the President’s assurances that he would be on the ticket might start to have a hollow ring. “Finished ”: whether or not he was given another term as Vice-President, it was beginning to seem, more and more, as if there might be some justification for the adjective that he had been applying to his prospects.

Leaving behind the crowds on Main Street, the lead car, the motorcycle police, and the Presidential limousine swung right onto Houston Street and then left onto Elm, which sloped slightly downhill toward a broad railroad overpass through a grassy open space, with scattered spectators standing in it, called Dealey Plaza. In Washington, Don Reynolds was showing the Rules Committee investigators the papers that he said proved his charges about Lyndon Johnson, pushing the documents, one by one, across the witness table. In New York, the Life editors were assigning reporters to investigate specific areas of Johnson’s finances while still debating whether the magazine should run a story on Johnson’s wealth in its next issue. Ahead of the Vice-Presidential car, the spectators in Dealey Plaza began to applaud the Kennedys and the Connallys as Johnson followed in their wake.

There was a sharp, cracking sound. It “startled” him, Lyndon Johnson later said; it sounded like a “report or explosion,” and he didn’t know what it was. Others in the motorcade thought it was a backfire from one of the police motorcycles, or a firecracker someone in the crowd had set off, but John Connally, who had hunted all his life, knew the instant he heard it that it was a shot from a high-powered rifle.

Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service agent in Johnson’s car, didn’t know what it was, but he saw “not normal” movements in the Presidential car ahead—President Kennedy seemed to be tilting toward his left—and in the Queen Mary, immediately ahead of him, one of the agents was suddenly rising to his feet, with an automatic rifle in his hands. Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a “voice I had never heard him ever use,” Lady Bird recalled—“Get down! Get down! ” and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, “Get down! Get down! ” By the time the next two sharp reports had cracked out—it was a matter of only eight seconds, but everyone knew what they were now—Lyndon Johnson was down on the floor of the back seat of the car. The loud, sharp sound, the hand suddenly grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down: now he was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him, pressing him down—Lyndon Johnson would never forget “his knees in my back and his elbows in my back.”

He couldn’t see anything other than Lady Bird’s shoes and legs in front of his face—she and Yarborough were ducking forward as far as they could. Above him, as he lay there, he heard Youngblood yelling to Hurchel Jacks, “Close it up! Close it up!” The Secret Service agent still wasn’t sure what had happened, but he knew that the best hope of protection was to stay close to the car ahead of him, which was packed with men and guns. Lying on the floor with Youngblood on top of him, Lyndon Johnson felt the car beneath him leap forward as Jacks floored the gas pedal, and he felt the car speeding—“terrifically fast,” Lady Bird later said, “faster and faster”; “I remember the way that car... zoomed,” Johnson recalled—and then the brakes were slammed on, and the tires screamed almost in his ear as the car took a right turn much too fast, squealing up the ramp to an expressway, and hurtled forward again. “Stay with them, and keep close!” Youngblood was shouting above him. The shortwave radio was still strapped to Youngblood’s shoulder, so that it was almost in Johnson’s ear. The radio had been set to the Secret Service’s Baker frequency, which kept Youngblood in touch with the Vice-Presidential follow-up car, but now Johnson heard the agent’s voice above him say, “I am switching to Charlie”—the frequency that would connect him with the Queen Mary, ahead of him. For a moment there was, from the radio, only crackling, and then Johnson heard someone say, “He’s hit! Hurry, he’s hit!,” and then “Let’s get out of here!”—and then a lot of almost unintelligible shouting, out of which one word emerged clearly: “hospital.”

He still couldn’t see what Youngblood was seeing. As the third shot rang out, a little bit of something gray had seemed to fly up out of Jack Kennedy’s head. Then his wife, in her pink pillbox hat and pink suit, which seemed suddenly to have patches of something dark on it, was trying to climb onto the long trunk of the limousine, and then clambering back into the car, where her head was bent over something Youngblood couldn’t see. A moment after the first shot, one of the agents on the Queen Mary’s running board, Clint Hill, had sprinted after the limousine as it was accelerating, leaped onto its trunk, and grabbed one of its handholds. He was now lying spread-eagled across the trunk of the speeding vehicle, but he managed to raise his head and look down into the rear seat. Turning to the follow-up car, he made a thumbs-down gesture.

The agents in the Queen Mary were waving at Jacks to stay close. The patrolman, a laconic Texan—“tight-lipped and cool,” Youngblood called him—pulled up within a few feet of the armored car’s rear bumper, and kept his car there as the two vehicles, with the Presidential limousine not many feet ahead of them, roared along the expressway and then swung right onto an exit ramp.

The man underneath Rufus Youngblood was lying very quietly, except when his body was jolted forward or back as the car braked or accelerated or swerved. His composure would have surprised most people who knew him, but not the few who had seen him in other moments of physical danger, including moments when he was under gunfire. Johnson’s customary reaction to physical danger, real or imagined, was so dramatic, almost panicky, that in college he had had the reputation of being “an absolute physical coward.” During the Second World War, he had done everything he could to avoid combat. Realizing, however, that, “for the sake of political future,” as one of Franklin Roosevelt’s aides wrote, he had to be able to say he had at least been in a combat zone, he went to the South Pacific and flew as an observer on a bomber that was attacked by Japanese Zeroes. And as the Zeroes were heading straight for the bomber, firing as they came, its crew saw Lyndon Johnson climb into the navigator’s bubble so that he could get a better view, and stand there staring right at the oncoming planes, “just as calm,” in the words of one crew member, “as if we were on a sightseeing tour.” Although his customary reaction to minor pain or illness was “frantic,” “hysterical”—he would, the Texas lobbyist Frank (Posh) Oltorf said, “complain so often, and so loudly,” about indigestion that “you thought he might be dying”—when, in 1955, in Middleburg, Virginia, a doctor told Johnson that this time the “indigestion” was a heart attack, which he had always feared, because his father and uncle had died young of heart attacks, Johnson’s demeanor changed. Lying on the floor of Middleburg’s “ambulance”—it was actually a hearse—as it was speeding to Washington, he was composed and cool as he made decisions: telling the doctor and Oltorf, who were riding in the ambulance, what hospital he was to be taken to, which members of his staff should be there when he arrived; telling Oltorf where he thought his will was, and how he wanted its provisions carried out. It was a major heart attack—when he arrived at the hospital, doctors gave him only a fifty-fifty chance of survival—and at one point during the trip Johnson told the doctor that he couldn’t stand the pain. But when the doctor said that giving him an injection to dull it would require stopping for a few minutes, and “time means a lot to you,” Johnson said, “If time means a lot, don’t stop.” There were even wry remarks; when the doctor told him that if he recovered he would never be able to smoke again, Johnson said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.” Lady Bird was always saying that her husband was “a good man in a tight spot.” Oltorf had never believed her—until that ambulance ride. He had thought he knew Johnson so well, he recalled; he realized on that ride that he didn’t know him at all.

Lying on the floor of the back seat with Youngblood still on top of him, Johnson asked what had happened. Youngblood said that “the President must have been shot or wounded,” that they were heading for a hospital, that he didn’t know anything, and that he wanted everyone to stay down—Johnson down on the floor—until he found out.

“All right, Rufus,” Johnson said. A reporter who asked Youngblood later to describe the tone of Johnson’s voice as he said this summarized the agent’s answer in a single word: “calm.”

A moment later, the voice on the shortwave radio told Youngblood that they were heading to Parkland Memorial Hospital, and the agent, shouting, he later recalled, against the noise of the wind and the wail of police sirens, told Johnson what to do when they arrived: he was to get out of the car and into some area that the Secret Service could make secure, without stopping for anything, even to find out what had happened to the President. “I want you and Mrs. Johnson to stick with me and the other agents as close as you can,” he said. “We are going into the hospital and we aren’t gonna stop for anything or anybody. Do you understand?”

“O.K., pardner, I understand,” Lyndon Johnson said.

There was another squealing turn—left onto the entrance ramp to the Parkland Emergency Room; the car skidded so hard that “I wondered if they were going to make it,” Lady Bird said—and then the brakes were jammed on so hard that Johnson and Youngblood were slammed against the back of the front seat. Then Youngblood’s weight was off him: hands were grabbing his arms and pulling him roughly up out of the car and onto his feet. The white carnation was still in his lapel, somehow untouched, but his left arm and shoulder, which had taken the brunt of Youngblood’s weight, hurt. There were Secret Service men all around; police all around; guns all around. Then Youngblood and four other agents were surrounding him, the hands were on his arms again, and he was being hustled—almost run—through the hospital entrance and along corridors; close behind him was another agent, George Hickey, holding an AR-15 automatic rifle at the ready. Johnson said later that he was rushed into the hospital so fast, his view blocked by the men around him, that he hadn’t even seen the President’s car, or what was in it. Lady Bird, rushed along right behind him by her own cordon of agents, had seen, in “one last look over my shoulder,” “a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat. I think it was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”

Lyndon Johnson was being hustled, agents’ hands on his arms, down one hospital corridor after another, turning left, turning right; his protectors were looking for a room that could be made secure. Then he was in what seemed like a small white room—it was actually one of three cubicles, in the Parkland Minor Medicine section, that had been carved out of a larger room by hanging white muslin curtains from ceiling to floor. Two of the cubicles were unoccupied; in the third, a nurse was treating a patient. The agents were pushing nurse and patient out the door; they were pulling down the shades and blinds over the windows. Then he and Lady Bird were standing against a blank, uncurtained wall at the back of the cubicle farthest from the door. Youngblood was standing in front of them, telling another agent to station himself outside the door to the corridor, and not to let anyone in—not anyone—unless he knew his face. Two other agents were stationed in the cubicle between this one and the corridor. Someone was saying that Youngblood should get to a telephone and report to his superiors, in Washington; Youngblood was saying, “Look here, I’m not leaving this man to phone anyone.” Remembering that a Vice-President’s children did not normally receive Secret Service protection, he asked Lady Bird where the Johnson daughters were (Lynda Bird was at the University of Texas, Lucy at her high school, in Washington), and told one of the agents to call headquarters, have guards assigned to them immediately, and then get back to the cubicle as fast as possible.

Someone brought two folding chairs into the cubicle, and Lady Bird sat down in one. Lyndon Johnson remained standing, his back against the far wall. As had been the case in every crisis in his life, a first consideration was to have people loyal to him around him, aides and allies who could be counted on to take his orders without question. He knew that the Texas congressmen who had been in the motorcade must be nearby, and he asked Youngblood to have them found, and Homer Thornberry was brought in and, after a while, Jack Brooks. Johnson’s aide Cliff Carter came in, and handed him a container of coffee.

And then, for long minutes, no one came in. Lyndon Johnson stood with his back against the wall. It was very quiet in the little curtained space. “We didn’t know what was happening,” Thornberry recalled later. “We did not know about the condition of the President.... I walked out once to try to see if I could find out what was going on, but either nobody knew or they didn’t tell me.” Johnson asked Youngblood to send an agent to get some news, and he returned with Roy Kellerman, the acting chief of the White House Secret Service detail, but Kellerman didn’t provide much information. “Mr. Johnson asked me the condition of the President and the Governor,” he recalled. “I advised him that the Governor was taken up to surgery, that the doctors were still working on the President. He asked me to keep him informed of his condition.”

There was more waiting. “Lyndon and I didn’t speak,” Lady Bird Johnson recalled. “We just looked at each other, exchanging messages with our eyes. We knew what it might be.” Johnson said very little to anyone, moved around very little, just stood there. Asked to describe him in the hospital, Thornberry used the same word that Youngblood used to describe him in the car: “Very calm. All through the time he was just as calm.” Kellerman’s deputy Emory Roberts came in and said that he had seen Kennedy, and, as he later recalled, that he “did not think the President could make it”—and that Johnson should leave the hospital, get to Air Force One, and take off for Washington. Youngblood agreed. “We should leave here immediately,” he said. The word “conspiracy” was in the air. Not merely the President but the Governor had been shot; who knew if Johnson might himself have been the next target had not Youngblood so quickly covered his body with his own? The Secret Service wanted to get Johnson out of Dallas or, at least, onto the plane, which would, in their view, be the most secure place in the city.

But Johnson did not agree. No one had yet given him any definite word on the President’s condition; no one had yet made, in that little curtained room, any explicit statement. In Brooks’s recollection, Johnson said, “Well, we want to get the official report on that rather than [from] some individual.” He wouldn’t leave without permission from the President’s staff, he said, preferably from the staff member who was, among the White House staffers in Dallas, the closest to the President: Ken O’Donnell. Youngblood and Roberts continued, in Youngblood’s phrase, to “press Johnson” to leave the hospital “immediately”—they “suggested that he think it over, as he would have to be sworn in”—but Johnson didn’t change his mind “about staying put until there was some definite word on the President.”

And there was still, for minutes that seemed very long, no definite word. “Every face that came in, you searched for the answers you must know,” Lady Bird Johnson said later. Lyndon Johnson still stood against the wall in that small, curtained space, his wife sitting beside him, two or three men off to one side, standing silent or occasionally whispering among themselves; standing in front of him “always there was Rufe,” Mrs. Johnson said. Johnson stood there for about forty minutes. Then, at 1:20 P.M., O’Donnell appeared at the door and crossed the room to Lyndon Johnson, and, seeing the stricken “face of Kenny O’Donnell, who loved him so much,” Lady Bird knew.

“He’s gone,” O’Donnell said, to the thirty-sixth President of the United States.

When the first calls came into George Hunt’s office at Life reporting “that Kennedy had been shot—at first, that’s all: just that he had been shot,” Russell Sackett, an associate editor, recalled, the meeting broke up immediately, with editors and reporters running back to their offices.

During the next few minutes, while the news was trickling in from Dallas, one decision was made quickly: Keith Wheeler’s article on Lyndon Johnson would not run in the next issue of the magazine: there would be no room for it. About a week later, William Lambert went in to see the magazine’s assistant managing editor, Ralph Graves, and told him that any further investigation into Johnson’s finances should be postponed. “I told him I thought we ought to give the guy a chance,” he said. Graves agreed, saying, in Lambert’s recollection, “If you hadn’t said that, I was going to tell you that.” (When the Life series finally ran, in August, 1964, it put the Johnson family’s “total accumulation of wealth” at approximately fourteen million dollars. Johnson associates hotly disputed this, putting the figure at about four million.)

No one thought to notify the four men meeting behind closed doors in Room 312 of the Old Senate Office Building about what was happening in Dallas, and Don Reynolds continued giving his account, and pushing his checks and invoices across the table to Van Kirk and Drennan. According to the most definitive account of the Bobby Baker case, it was shortly after 2:30 P.M. Washington time—about ten minutes after O’Donnell told Lyndon Johnson, “He’s gone”—when Reynolds finished, and, just as he did, a secretary “burst into the room... sobbing almost hysterically” and shouting that President Kennedy had been killed. Reynolds, saying that, since Johnson was now President, “you won’t need these,” reached for his documents, but Van Kirk refused to let him take them, saying that they now belonged to the Rules Committee.

(The committee’s investigation would drag on for nineteen months of bitter partisan wrangling. During this time, Reynolds made other charges against Johnson and Bobby Baker that, unlike his charges about the insurance kickback and the McCloskey performance bond, were not supported by documentation, and the committee’s majority report, vehemently disputed in the minority report, stated that Reynolds’s “credibility” had been “destroyed.” But, while Baker disputed Reynolds’s later allegations, he said that Reynolds had “told the truth with respect to the LBJ insurance policy” and the performance bond. “I was the man who had put Reynolds and McCloskey together”—on the bond—“so I know what the understandings were,” Baker said. In 1967, Baker himself was convicted of larceny, fraud, and tax evasion in an unrelated campaign-funds case and served sixteen months in prison.)

At the moment the news from Dallas reached the office of Abe Fortas, Johnson’s chief legal adviser, he was conferring with Bobby Baker, who had retained him as his attorney in the Rules Committee investigation, and in any criminal prosecutions that might follow.

“As soon as” the news came, Baker recalled, he realized that, if Fortas continued to represent him, the attorney might find himself in “a conflict-of-interest situation.” Telling Fortas, “I know Lyndon Johnson will be calling on you for many services,” he released him as his attorney.

“He’s gone,” Ken O’Donnell said. And “right then,” Homer Thornberry later said of Johnson, “he took charge.”

Even before O’Donnell came in, as Johnson was standing against the back wall of that curtained cubicle in Parkland Hospital, there had been something striking in his bearing, something that had first shown itself that day in the tone of his voice as he lay on the floor of a speeding car, with a heavy body on top of him and frantic voices on a shortwave radio crackling in his ears. Johnson’s aides and allies knew that, for all his rages and his bellowing, his gloating and his groaning, his endless monologues, his demeanor was very different in moments of crisis, in moments when there were decisions—tough decisions, crucial decisions—to be made; that in those moments he became, as his secretary Mary Rather recalled, “quiet and still.” He had been very quiet during the long minutes he stood there in the cubicle. “Very little passed between us,” Homer Thornberry recalled; no words from Johnson even to Lady Bird. As he stood in front of that blank wall, the carnation still in his buttonhole, there was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been seen very much during the previous three years.

And the hangdog look was gone, replaced by an expression—the lines on the face no longer drooping but hard—that Jack Brooks described as “set.” Lyndon Johnson’s oldest aides and allies, the men who had known him longest, knew that expression: the big jaw jutting, the lips above it pulled into a tight, grim line, the corners turned down in a hint of a snarl, the dark-brown eyes, under the long black eyebrows, narrowed, hard, piercing. It was an expression of determination and fierce concentration; when Lyndon Johnson wore that expression, a problem was being thought through with an intensity that was almost palpable, a problem was being thought through—and a decision made. That expression, set and hard, was, his aide Horace Busby said, Lyndon Johnson’s “deciding expression,” and that was his expression now. To Lady Bird Johnson, looking up at her husband, his face had become “almost a graven image of a face carved in bronze.”