Just after 8.50 on Tuesday morning, 26 November 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson sat down behind the desk in the Oval Office for the first time as President, four days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. According to Robert Caro, the new chief executive of the United States, now the most powerful person in the world, did not then make a call to his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev; nor did he confer with aides, or have his secretary place calls to the leaders of Congress, or issue an executive order. Instead, Johnson’s initial action was to phone, himself, the offices of the US Senate and order the desk he used as Senate Majority Leader to be delivered to the White House to replace the government-issue model installed the night before.
This was not merely an obsessive, self-absorbed act by a neurotic and insecure man, although LBJ was deeply neurotic and insecure. Commandeering his old desk signified two things: first, that Johnson would no longer live in the shadow of the hated and envied royal family called Kennedy — that he would not settle for the role of constitutionally dictated placeholder for the fallen king — and second, that he would henceforth run the government in the direct, hands-on manner that he ran the Senate from 1954 to 1960, ‘as if it were an obedient orchestra’. According to Caro, legislation that had languished while Kennedy tended to his own image, or because he too easily conceded defeat, would pass because Lyndon Johnson willed it to pass. The one-time ‘Master of the Senate’ would now master all of Washington and the country, if not the world.
Such details are what make The Passage of Power, the fourth volume in Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, such a great and occasionally astonishing biography.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in