When Everything Changed

Part Five

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was in a Pentagon budget meeting with senior military and civilian leaders about the upcoming budget and congressional debates at 2 P.M. on Friday, November 22, 1963.

McNamara’s intention was to go to Hyannis Port a few days later, to brief President Kennedy on the results after the president returned from his trip to Texas.

“In the midst of a discussion,” McNamara wrote in a draft chapter for his memoir In Retrospect, “my secretary reported a personal phone call….”in which he learned from Attorney General Robert Kennedy that the president had been shot.

In the transcripts of a recorded session in 1993 with his editors for his book In Retrospect, this exchange followed:

Editor: How could you have gone on with your meeting?

McNamara: Well – well, in the first place he wasn’t killed -- the first point. Well, I stopped the meeting the moment I got the second call he was dead.

Editor: Yes, but even…..

McNamara: But in the first one…

Editor: The president had been shot. You were the secretary of defense. How come you didn’t go instantly…I mean, what if this was the beginning of an international coup?…

McNamara: Well, it didn’t appear that way. In any case, the simple fact is that I didn’t, the meeting did continue…

Editor: But maybe you were in shock?

McNamara: No, no, definitely not that. Now what it was, we didn’t think that it was serious, or we didn’t think there was anything we could do about it other than go ahead with the meeting…

In the book, after some consideration, McNamara wrote this about the meeting and the aftermath:

“My secretary informed me of an urgent, personal telephone call. I left the conference room and took it alone in my office. It was Bobby Kennedy, even more lonely and distant than usual. He told me simply and quietly that the president had been shot.

“I was stunned. Slowly, I walked back to the conference room and, barely controlling my voice, reported the news to the group. Strange as it may sound, we did not disperse: we were in such shock that we simply did not know what to do. So, as best we could, we resumed our deliberations.

“A second call from Bobby came about forty-five minutes later. The president was dead. Our meeting was immediately adjourned amid tears and stunned silence.”

McNamara gathered the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ordered U.S. military forces worldwide to be placed on alert. When the attorney general called again, it was to ask McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, the president’s top military adviser, to accompany him to Andrews Air Force Base to meet the returning casket.

“Shortly after we arrived at Andrews, the blue and white presidential jet slowly taxied up to the terminal, its landing lights still on. Bobby turned and asked me to board the plane with him. It so clearly seemed a moment of intimacy and privacy for a family in sorrow that I refused.…

“The Kennedys and I had started as strangers but had grown very close. Unlike many subsequent administrations, they drew in some of their associates, transforming them from colleagues to friends. We could laugh with one another. And we could cry with one another. It had been that way with me, and that made the president’s death even more devastating.”

Bobby now called to say that Jackie Kennedy wanted McNamara to join her at Bethesda Naval Hospital while she awaited the outcome of the autopsy.

“I drove immediately to the hospital and sat with Jackie, Bobby, and other family members and friends. In the early morning hours, we accompanied the president’s body back to the White House, where the casket was placed in the elegant East Room, draped by the flag he had served and loved and lit softly by candles.”

In the transcript, the closeness of McNamara to the Kennedys, and especially to Bobby, is especially vivid.

Editor: Under those circumstances would you be the person that they would turn to?

McNamara: Well, among the cabinet…But you see [Bobby] called me to go out [to Andrews] with him. And then, after we got there, he wanted me to board the plane. It was a very poignant moment. Here’s Johnson [also on Air Force One after being sworn in], and he didn’t give a damn about Johnson. I wasn’t there because of Johnson. Bobby just wanted me to go up with him, up the stairs and meet Jackie…

Editor: I mean Dean Rusk wasn’t there…

McNamara: Oh, hell no.

Editor: Mac Bundy wasn’t there.

McNamara: No, no.

Editor: So that, in today’s jargon, it would be correct to say that you had bonded…

McNamara: Oh, absolutely. No question about it...We bonded because we had shared values, number one, and [with Bobby] a shared sense of loyalty to the president. Bobby knew that I was loyal to the president. And he also, in a sense, knew that I was loyal to him.

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November 22, 1963, was the day that everything changed.

William Manchester’s intricately detailed account of that day, The Death of a President, provides names, places, and reactions to the news as word spread of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Most people, wrote Manchester, simply could not believe what had happened, even after his death was confirmed at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.

The tenor of the country was suddenly transformed. The indelible images of that weekend were of the widow and children attending the burial at Arlington; John Jr. saluting his father’s casket; and Lee Harvey Oswald being shot to death in a Dallas police station by Jack Ruby. Those moments were especially powerful because they were shown live on television. Tens of millions of Americans shared the drama and for all, very young to very old, they were never to be forgotten. Quite literally for the first time, every American could be present at the same historical moments.

Something else was happening that weekend. The presidency was being transferred from the New Frontier of John F. Kennedy and his cohort to Lyndon Johnson, who as an American political figure was from an entirely different culture, not by generation but in every other way. As a personality, Kennedy was elegant and cool. Johnson was intense and physically awesome. He came from the hardscrabble Texas hinterland, and his political trajectory was rough and tumble, whereas Kennedy’s was, at least as seen by the public at that time, smooth.

When LBJ ascended to majority leader of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, he was brilliant in the handling of power; his biographer Robert Caro’s volume on those years is titled Master of the Senate. In 1960, his bid for his party’s presidential nomination was clumsy and ended at the Democratic National Convention, where in a fraught process leaving bruises on all involved he was named to the ticket as vice president, ostensibly to make Kennedy more palatable to southern states.

Biographers’ accounts of Johnson as vice president describe a time of indignity and mishap. Kennedy himself did not turn on Johnson but used him sparingly on any matters of consequence. Bobby Kennedy, on the other hand, pursued a personal animus for LBJ, and the overall sense in Washington was that Johnson had been humiliated.

After Kennedy’s day in Dallas, he had been scheduled to fly to the LBJ Ranch for an evening with Johnson and Lady Bird. All the preparations for the presidential stopover were complete.

As the historian Max Holland writes in the introduction to his book Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B. Johnson:

“Lyndon Johnson rarely got to spend an extended amount of time with the President under such casual circumstances and intended to use the occasion to discuss his most pressing concern: his place on the November 3 ballot, less than a year away. Within political circles and the media, rumors abounded that Johnson would be unceremoniously dumped from the Democratic ticket…

“The Vice President’s pride was deeply wounded, for he had taken great pains to be loyal to the administration and did not deserve to be treated this way. Such rumors did not arise on their own in Washington; someone credible in the administration had to be generating speculation or doing something. Consequently, the Vice President intended to use the evening of November 22 to deliver a stunning message of his own.

“Lyndon Johnson did not want to be on the Democratic ticket in 1964.”

This revelation also appears in Kenneth W. Thompson’s book, The Johnson Presidency: Twenty Intimate Perspectives of Lyndon B. Johnson. Another version has Johnson stepping down to become president of his alma mater, the Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos.

Whatever the case may have been, by the evening of November 22, 1963, the world had changed. Lyndon Johnson was now the president of the United States and had flown to Washington to assume the office and its responsibilities.

Next Week: Part Six: The Accidental President

To read previous installments in this series go to www.platformbooksllc.net. There is an archive of earlier pieces and a link to sources, acknowledgements and the audio of McNamara working with his editors on his memoir.