One weekend last June, I drove down to my sister Betsy's house in Encinitas, California, to do something I had long resisted - sort through my father's papers and memorabilia. My sisters and I had moved our father, Horace Busby, from Washington DC to Los Angeles in 1997 because of his failing health. It was not an easy move to make for a man who had been a close aide to Lyndon Johnson and who, after LBJ left the White House in 1969, stayed for nearly 30 years in the nation's capital, where he built a career as a political consultant and publisher.He died in May 2000 in Santa Monica. Betsy's garage became the repository for his remaining possessions.
I had avoided making the journey to Encinitas for many reasons. The thought of spending hours in a hot, dusty garage digging through 30-odd boxes of old papers wasn't a drawing card. I knew Betsy, the most organised member of our family, would want to look at - and discuss - every piece of paper and photo. Things might, God forbid, get emotional. And I suppose what I dreaded most was what this process would mean: bidding a final farewell to my father.
My procrastinations ended when Betsy called to say that Johnson's biographer Robert Caro had contacted her, asking to see my father's papers. We agreed the time had come to get his writings and documents organised so we could donate them to the LBJ library in Austin, Texas. We foraged through two long file boxes that first morning, sipping coffee, reminiscing. Then, at the bottom of a storage container, I found an unmarked blue stationery box. I opened it. Betsy looked up and saw my expression.
"You found it," she said, smiling.
It was a manuscript my father had worked on for many years about his long and extraordinary relationship with LBJ. For reasons his family and friends have never understood, he didn't publish it. When we moved him to Los Angeles, we asked about the memoir. He told us he never finished it and had thrown away its various drafts. This saddened me, because no one in Washington or Texas had known Lyndon Johnson in quite the same way as my father.
Horace Busby went to work for Congressman Johnson in 1948 at the age of 24. He served on LBJ's staff in congress and the senate and at the White House, where he was secretary of the cabinet from 1963-65. He wrote many of the president's important speeches, including his civil rights orations, his announcement of the end to US bombing of Vietnam and his decision not to run for re-election. He also had a hand in drafting much of Johnson's legislation.
My father's relationship with Lyndon Johnson was often tumultuous. Tempers would flare and he would abruptly leave Johnson's service - only to be asked to return. But a powerful bond existed between the two men. "More than any other member of his staff, Lyndon Johnson believed, Horace Busby thought and felt like him," wrote Eric Goldman in The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson. The hundreds of neatly typewritten manuscript pages my father left behind were clearly of historical value. In time, I also came to see the work as a gift to his family, one that allowed us to rediscover him. Far from saying goodbye to him on the trip to Encinitas, I was given a chance to know him better.
The defining moment in Lyndon Johnson's life was the assassination of President Kennedy, shot in Dallas on 22nd November 1963 - 40 years ago. It is an event seared into the consciousness of every American who lived through it, but it had a very particular impact on my family. I was 12 years old, a seventh grader at a public school in suburban Maryland, just outside Washington DC. I remember the confusion and fear on the faces of my classmates when we were called back to our homeroom that morning. I remember many of the girls bursting into tears when the principal told us that Kennedy had been shot. And I remember the stares of hatred and words of anger that were directed at me, because I was from Texas.
Betsy and my youngest sister Leslie were called into an emergency assembly at National Cathedral school for girls in Washington DC, where many government officials and diplomats sent their daughters. They watched a phalanx of secret service agents enter the auditorium and quickly remove one of their fellow students - Luci Johnson, the vice-president's youngest daughter.
My mother, Mary V Busby, was at The Elms, the vice-president's residence in northwest Washington DC, doing research for LBJ's wife Lady Bird, when news of the assassination broke. She spent several desperate hours on the phone with my father, who was at his office in downtown DC monitoring the news from Dallas on a wire service teletype machine; and with telephone company operators in Austin, trying to locate the Johnsons' eldest daughter, Lynda, who was a freshman at the University of Texas. Later that afternoon, my father joined her at The Elms. They stayed late into the night, awaiting the arrival of the newly sworn-in president, knowing their lives - and the lives of their children - would never be the same.
My sisters and I were watched over that night by our neighbours - Congressman Joe Kilgore of Texas and his wife Jane. It was a night when a 12-year-old boy and his younger sisters would have liked to be with their father. There was so much we didn't understand. But for the next week we hardly saw him. I grew up resenting my father's absence during those traumatic days.
The discovery of my father's manuscript, and his first-hand account of events surrounding the tragedy in Dallas and its aftermath, stirred up all those old emotions again - then laid them to rest. Reading his story, I learned many things I hadn't known, but two stand out: during those nights and days in November 1963, his wife and children were constantly on his mind; and his hands were very full, counselling the new, troubled president of the United States.
The manuscript
The following are verbatim excerpts from my father's journal, edited together into a single narrative. The piece also includes a few paragraphs from a Christmas letter my father sent to close friends in Austin several weeks after the assassination.
Forebodings filled the middle weeks of November in 1963. In Texas, the rancorous feud between partisans of Senator Ralph Yarborough and Texas governor John Connally burned hotter and hotter as time for President Kennedy's visit neared. Arguments flamed over trivialities: who would stand where in the receiving lines; who should sit next to whom at banquet tables; who would ride in which automobile in the parades at Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. Neither side would consider concessions, even for the sake of appearances.
Even more ominously, both sides were holding back on purchase of tickets to the fundraising dinner in Austin on the final night of the tour - the main purpose of Kennedy's visit. Unless that banquet were a financial success, Republicans nationally would be emboldened, the president would be embarrassed, the vice-president would be humiliated and, quite possibly, politically ruined. At the ranch, he laboured day and night, trying to sell $100-a-plate tickets, and even took to calling me in Washington seeking help.
"You must know some fat cat somewhere in Texas who will help us out," he told me plaintively. But I did not know any Texas "fat cats." Eight telephone calls to friends in Dallas and Fort Worth yielded the sale of exactly one ticket to the Austin dinner.
In Washington, where I remained, rumours ran amuck. Each day newsmen were calling to check out stories - always on "good authority" - that President Kennedy's purpose in planning to spend the night at the LBJ ranch was to break the news that Lyndon Johnson would not be on the ticket in 1964. When we traced these stories back to their sources, the origins lay not at the White House or among Kennedy intimates, but among Texans in Washington friendly to Senator Yarborough. Repetition, nonetheless, had its effect, intensifying tensions and magnifying worries about what might go wrong on the Texas journey.
One night during this period, I came home to find my wife reading the Dallas Morning News. Mary V handed me the front page. "Read this," she said. "Someone has lost his mind."
It was a story announcing that on his visit to Dallas, Kennedy would ride in an open car motorcade from Love Field to the site of his luncheon address. "I can't imagine your friends in the secret service letting the president do that," she said. I agreed with her. The thought of serious danger to the president did not occur. Our memories were still fresh, though, of 1960 when the vice-president and Mrs Johnson were mobbed in a Dallas hotel lobby. An ugliness had crept into Dallas politics that perplexed many Texans. In October, there had been a nasty attack on Ambassador Adlai Stevenson when he spoke there. An open car motorcade was an invitation for more episodes - ugly signs, jeering chants or, perhaps, an egg tossed at the presidential limousine.
The next day I voiced my concern to Walter Jenkins, and learned that he shared it, too. In fact, he told me, Governor Connally, Cliff Carter and all the Johnson men were counselling against the Dallas motorcade. But our interests and the interests of the Kennedy people were hopelessly at odds. We were thinking, selfishly perhaps, of avoiding street incidents that would embarrass Johnson. The Kennedy advance men in charge of the visit were considering a far larger picture. It would be of considerable political value, nationally, to turn out a friendly parade route crowd for the president in the city that had been most hostile to him at the polls in 1960. The politics of John F Kennedy overruled the politics of Lyndon B Johnson in the decision to send the young president through the streets of downtown Dallas.
On Friday, all these concerns would come together - the president's ride through Dallas, the ticket sales for the fundraising dinner in Austin, the final climax at the LBJ ranch after the politicking was done. November 22nd was a day we faced with dread.
President Kennedy, Vice-President Johnson and all the accompanying retinue had spent the night of 21st November in my hometown, Fort Worth, and the following morning I kept watch on the wire service news ticker in our offices [in Washington] for an account of the visit.
Then it came; the longest, the most unreal, the most terrible minute I had ever known.
Thirty feet away, in the empty reception room, the bells of the teletype machine began ringing, four short, rapid rings, repeating over and over. This is the least-heard signal on teletypes but anyone who has worked for a wire service knows what it means: a "flash," a terse, one line report of a major news development.
It could not have taken more than two or three seconds for me to reach my secretary's side and begin reading the incredible message on the teletype. At first, I did not believe the news; I was absolutely, positively, unquestionably certain that there must be some mistake - "shot at," the message should read, not "shot." The president of the United States could not be shot, not with the secret service, not with the security, the protection, the caution I knew accompanied every presidential step. The reporter was confused; the next bulletin would surely correct his error.
Mary V was at The Elms, the Johnson family residence in Washington DC. When I called, the telephone rang for a long time before she answered. "Turn on the television," I said and gave her a quick account of what had happened. She did not believe it until the television warmed up and she saw Walter Cronkite delivering the bulletins from New York.
"Don't hang up," I told her. "If it hasn't started already, everybody will be trying to call and we'll never get through to you again." As I spoke, the other lines on the Johnson telephone system began flashing.
The reports from Dallas continued. It had become apparent that Kennedy's wounds were grave - and so were Connally's. I read the teletype bulletins to Mary V. She, by now, had no more conversation in her; like a woman obsessed, she began repeating, "He won't die, he won't die, I know he won't die, he can't die." George Reedy called back, then Walter Jenkins, then I called each of them again. The three of us were to pass the next hours of the afternoon reaching for each other, all of us sharing the same sense of horror and terror, for we each had one thought. I put it to Reedy bluntly.
"If the president dies," I said, barely able to get out the words, "can the vice-president govern?"
This exposed the raw edge of the afternoon. Whatever had happened, had happened in Texas, the home state of the vice-president. Any responsible person, aware of the intensity of national feelings about Texas, could not avoid a sense of dread at the realisation that first the nation, then the world, would become consumed with the notion that this was somehow, in some remote, unreasoned way, a conspiracy. It was unthinkable, unimaginable, yet horribly real. I could feel a terrible wind beginning to rise and blow about us.
Then the death message came. We did not know what would be next. As is not generally realised, the fear of all the security forces, both civilian and military, was that this might be a signal for a massive planned outbreak of civil disorder - or the start of world war three. It was that latter possibility that led to Johnson taking the oath as president, and commander in chief, before Air Force One departed Dallas.
I had known Lyndon Baines Johnson for 16 years: as congressman, senator, majority leader and vice-president. Over that span, I had liked him and disliked him; respected him and disrespected him; thought his public performances, at times, to be magnificent and, at other times, thought his private preoccupations to be monumentally boring. I had campaigned with him, laughed with him, worried with him, shared with him moments of great consequence and complete unimportance. I knew him better than I wanted to know any man. But on the night of 22nd November 1963, waiting for him at The Elms, I was not waiting for any man I had known; I was waiting for the president of the United States.
The aura of the office preceded him. The handsome rooms of The Elms were hushed. The entryway and front hall remained conspicuously empty; when people crossed through it, they hurried their steps, not wanting to be in sight when he opened the door; yet whenever the door opened to admit a secret service agent or a telephone installer, faces appeared peeking around door frames to see if the sound meant he had come. Mary V and I sat in the sun room, adjacent to the front hall; here we had last sat with him on the Sunday night, 12 days earlier, before he left for Texas. J Willis Hurst of Atlanta, the brilliant young heart specialist who had saved the man's life after the heart attack in 1955, sat with us. Nothing seemed appropriate to say. In the silence, a sort of dread grew of the meeting that was to come.
But then it came and the meeting was easy. Mrs Johnson hurried down the curving stairway to greet him as he entered; they embraced and talked quietly for a moment. At the five doorways opening into the hall, I counted 16 faces, including my own, watching. The Johnsons were not just people any more.
He glanced around impatiently, seeing the faces; I knew what he must be thinking. Quickly, with long strides, he stepped across the hall to the sun room, seeking his solitude. Mary V gave him a kiss. Hurst ran a practised eye over his features and seemed to be relieved. Lyndon Johnson was more controlled than calm. His words of greeting were barely audible. But as he bent to sit in his usual chair, he stood erect again looking at the wall above the single television set. Hanging there was a portrait of Speaker Sam Rayburn, who had died just two years before. The old man's pupil raised his hand in a friendly salute. "How I wish you were here," he said.
"Turn on the television," he said to me. "I guess I am the only person in the United States who doesn't know what has happened today."
A report came in from Dallas: an indictment was being drawn there against Lee Harvey Oswald, so the report went, that the accused assassin had acted as part of a communist conspiracy. Much of the language was inflammatory. Lyndon Johnson sat forward in his chair. "No," he said, "we must not have that. We must not start making accusations without evidence. It could tear this country apart." He asked me then to call Waggoner Carr, the attorney general of Texas. "Tell him the country needs the most responsible, the most thorough investigation, and I seem to remember that there is some law in Texas permitting the attorney general to take over in a situation like this." Carr, when I reached him, confirmed that he did have powers to establish a "court of inquiry," and he agreed to proceed at once. It was a reminder that even the murder of a president was not a federal offence; jurisdiction rested with local and state authorities.
For more than an hour, around midnight, I sat in the bedroom listening when he wanted to speak. The silences were long. His thoughts were of what he had now to do. Mostly he emphasised the legislation that had been stalled in congress. He thought there was a chance that it could be gotten through early in the coming year. But as he went down a mental list of the pending measures, he observed: "You know, almost all the issues now are just about the same as they were when I came here in congress nearly 30 years ago."
That night cannot be described easily. We sat in his favourite small parlour - Mary V, myself, his favourite doctor from Atlanta who happened to be in Washington, the president and, intermittently, Lady Bird. His composure and cool-headedness were what I anticipated. His mellowness and gentleness were not. I had said, over and over, Lyndon Johnson was qualified for only one job - the presidency. Short of that, he was always a man making important the unimportant to occupy his vast energies and abilities. That night, he was in every subtle sense the president.
Thirteen months before, I had met there in eerie similarity - during the Cuban missile crisis. The news that night in 1962 was bad - and it grew worse. Just before dawn, I left to drive the few blocks to our house through lifeless streets, convinced that by late afternoon, these houses and the people sleeping in them would almost surely be destroyed. It was an agonising memory, made all the more unforgettable by arriving at home, seeing the children asleep, finding Mary V awake searching my eyes for what I could not tell her. This time, on 22nd November, Mary V and I were together as we drove those same blocks through the late still night. How different the feeling - although no less awesome - to sense the responsibility toward all those people.
There was one considerable difference. In October, 1962, I went home and slept - there seemed nothing else to do. This time, I believe, it may have been Wednesday before I went to bed again.
Saturday and Sunday [23rd-24th November] are blurs. Chiefly, I remember being with former President Eisenhower - and then with former President Truman - talking with them while President Johnson made telephone calls and received intelligence briefings. Late that night, as he was to do again each night until Thanksgiving, the president called for me to come at bedtime and asked explicitly that I remain at the bedside until he was asleep. This, I might explain, I have done before, especially abroad - we call it "hand-holding," or, sometimes, "gentling down" as with a thoroughbred race horse. In the darkness of the bedroom, I am sure the scene would have brought smiles - if not laughter - as I, after suitably long silences, would rise and tiptoe toward the door, only to be snapped back just as I was slipping through the exit: "Buzz, are you still there?"
On Monday 25th November, they buried John Fitzgerald Kennedy beneath the green of Arlington, on the slope across the Potomac. The drums beat slowly as tens of millions the world around watched as the 35th president of the United States was laid to rest. On Wednesday 27th November, at 12.30pm, the 36th president of the United States stood in the chambers of the House of Representatives before a joint session of congress.
"All I have," he began, "I would have given gladly not to be standing here today."
The power had passed. A nation so close to the abyss one week before now stood again on solid ground. The system had functioned as it was designed to function. On Thanksgiving day 1963, America had more than it knew to be thankful for.
The power had passed, but there was poison in the power. The taste of it was to run through all the days of Lyndon Johnson's five year presidency. And it began during the first seven days.
The first day - Saturday 23rd November - had been free of it. In Washington, I could sense the tragedy unifying Americans. Telegrams by the hundreds were arriving every few minutes, some from men of prominence, most from Americans who only wanted to pledge their support.
After attending a prayer service at St John's, across Lafayette Square, and going with Mrs Johnson to call on Mrs Kennedy, the new president returned to the executive office building, conferred at length with Eisenhower then retreated to the smallest room among the offices. There he worked through the afternoon, making his own plans, even placing his own telephone calls. Once, while I was sitting beside his desk, he handed me a report from the government of the Soviet Union: a dossier of all the information that the Soviets had on Lee Harvey Oswald and his activities during his period of residence in the Soviet Union. The Russian ambassador had presented it less than 24 hours after Oswald's arrest in Dallas. When I finished looking through the remarkably detailed information, Johnson turned an old Texas expression into a question: "Me no Alamo?"
"That's right," I replied, "Me no Alamo." [In 1836, Mexican troops overrun by Sam Houston's Republic of Texas army pleaded for mercy by saying "Me no Alamo," a reference to the Texans' battle cry "Remember the Alamo."] Clearly the Russian government recognised the ominous potential of American suspicions about Oswald's stay in Russia, and the Soviets were co-operating to the fullest to dispel any question of their culpability.
Other reports on the desk, however, were far less reassuring. Intelligence agencies were feeding in largely undigested rumours about Oswald's contacts during his journeys around the US and Mexico in the weeks before Dallas. Sober as America appeared to be on this solemn Saturday, its new president appreciated how irrational public opinion might become if an objective investigation was immediately undertaken into the facts about the assassination.
The next day [Sunday], the president and Mrs Johnson asked us to attend church services with them. I believe he always thinks of me when there is a church service involved, because my father was a preacher. That day was for us the climax, emotionally. The crowds were held far back as we proceeded from house to church with agents riding before and behind us carrying submachine guns. There was no cheering, only a clutching sort of fear among the crowds, sympathy and prayers.
Reluctantly, Lyndon Johnson went before the television cameras to read a proclamation eulogising President Kennedy and declaring Monday to be a national day of mourning. I questioned whether the text of the proclamation was appropriate to the objective: "Now don't question it," he said sharply. "Schlesinger and Sorenson probably wrote it and Kennedy's people want it done just this way."
That night, at The Elms, I heard more of this. After dinner, the new president called me upstairs, he obviously had good news that he wanted to share: "I talked with each of the cabinet officers this afternoon," he said, "and they are all going to stay on." It was his assessment, with which I entirely concurred, that passage of the long-pending legislation in congress had first priority; and valuable time would be lost, perhaps fatally, if the first months of the new year were lost on wholesale changes in the top command of the executive branch. Now, he beamed, "I think we have a chance to make it with our bills." He began urging me to guess what else had been accomplished before he left the office. When my first effort was wide of the mark, he announced proudly: "All the Kennedy men are staying on. I told them that I needed them more than Jack did. Not one hesitated. Isn't that wonderful?" I could not quite believe this.
"Even Arthur Schlesinger?" I asked.
"Yes sir, Schlesinger is staying, too," he said. "I told him that I had never had any success building a really good staff like President Kennedy's. When I told him I needed him more than Jack did, he seemed to be moved, and he is staying with us."
But it was also on that Sunday, 24th November, that the taste of poison began to appear in the new power. In the morning, tens of millions of Americans sat in their homes and watched a man murdered before their eyes on television. No one could ever evaluate the impact upon the American psyche of that incredible scene when Jack Ruby stepped from the crowd in Dallas and fired his revolver at the chest of Lee Harvey Oswald. A weekend of sombre tragedy became a time of stark trauma. In the mind of even the most reasonable men, reality began slipping away. A choking panic seemed to take command. What is happening to America?
My perspective on this was small but revealing. During the afternoon, I drove downtown to my office on Connecticut Avenue. Telephone calls began coming, first from Washington, then from people and places around the nation; in most instances, I had never met, or even heard of, the callers. Most wanted to communicate with someone close to the new president: my name had appeared in weekend news stories about the new president's associates.
The calls took two lines. First, the safety of the new president at the funeral ceremonies the next day. It was known that Kennedy's widow and brothers would lead a march from the White House to St Matthew's Cathedral; walking with them would be the visiting heads of state and, it was presumed, President Johnson. But the Ruby-Oswald episode, following the events of Friday, had touched off a sort of hysteria. "You must not let President Johnson go on the streets tomorrow," the early callers said.
But as Sunday progressed, the callers became more strident: some virtually screamed into the telephone, several wept, a few were incoherent. From within the small universe of my afternoon, it seemed clear that a precariously balanced nation was beginning to sway. What might be brought on by another provocation, I did not know, but the signs were alarming. And along with the calls on this theme came another line of messages, not so numerous, but more unnerving.
After seeing the horror of the second Dallas murder in the morning, the nation watched that Sunday afternoon the haunting ritual in Washington as President Kennedy's body was borne to the Rotunda of the Capitol; there, the beautiful young widow knelt and kissed the flag-draped coffin. No one could watch without being affected. But the effects were not all sympathetic. The second line taken by the callers who reached me was venomous, directed against Mrs Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, all the Kennedys. I was not prepared for it, I could not comprehend it, and I am sure I did not cope well with it. Profane and vulgar, the words were, in many instances, alarming. But the most memorable of such calls came near nightfall.
The caller identified himself carefully; he was an industrialist from upstate New York of some national standing and he also took an active interest in politics. With the identification out of the way, he proceeded to his blunt message: "I just want to say that you poor dumb Texas sons of bitches are letting them take it away from you." He proceeded with an explicit denunciation of the new president for going into hiding, and of the Kennedys for playing on the national emotions with "a royal funeral." "Mark my words," he ended bitterly, "you Texans will look like the bottom of a bird cage by the time this is over."
I was not the only member of the Johnson world receiving such calls. Liz Carpenter [Lady Bird's spokeswoman] telephoned. She, too, had been besieged by calls about the president's participation in the funeral march the following day. Her instinct had been to go to The Elms where the president and Mrs Johnson were spending Sunday; from her visit there, however, she had a still more disturbing story to report: "It's started happening," Liz said with anger. "They are slicing at him." Who are "they," I wanted to know. "Bobby, Bobby's people," Liz replied tersely.
That reminded me of my anger the previous Friday when, alone among the news agencies, the Voice of America - a part, I could only think at the time, of the Kennedy administration - put out the report that Lyndon Johnson had suffered a heart attack. It was, of course, nonsense; and for the government's own news agency to broadcast this around the world seemed to me inexcusable. The same old theme, that Johnson was ill - which we had heard so much in 1960 - was being replayed. Word had come from within the Kennedy family that the attorney general and the widow fully understood the new president's health problem. Accordingly, they were planning for him to ride in his limousine, rather than to walk in the procession with members of the family. Liz Carpenter, like myself, had been influenced by the influx of telephone calls and we both thought that he should not be exposed to the streets. But I knew before Liz told me what his reaction would be now. "There is not a chance in the world that he will ride tomorrow," she said. The poison had begun to flow. [He walked]
On Monday morning, the Johnsons received ten tickets of admission to President Kennedy's funeral at St Matthew's Cathedral. Mrs Johnson selected several close associates, including myself, to attend. When I went to The Elms to pick up the ticket, Liz Carpenter was there again, also planning to attend, and asked if I would accompany her. A secret service agent advised that access to the area of the cathedral would be difficult unless we were riding in an official car. Liz requested a White House automobile, and this lead to a sharp and ugly dispute. The White House cars, someone advised, were for the Kennedys.
At the funeral itself, we [the LBJ group] all sat, huddled together it seemed, in a corner of the cathedral. At no time in my life did I ever feel so out of place, or so miserable: the inadvertent encounters with members of the Kennedy world were unpleasant in a way one tries for years to put out of mind.
Late in the afternoon, after the funeral, the new president himself telephoned. He said nothing about the day. His thoughts were of the meetings that had been planned at the state department between himself and the visiting heads of state. But his principal question was revealing. "Is it your judgement," he asked, "that it would be all right for me to go into the presidential office in the West Wing tonight?"
