
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV

On November 21, the day before Kennedy’s death, Bundy had drafted a National Security Action Memorandum, a formal notification to the heads of government agencies of a presidential decision, and directives to take steps required to implement it. On November 26, Johnson approved the memorandum, NSAM 273. It emphasized that the Vietnam conflict was a
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he had often, as in the case of the “Armageddon” memo, given heavy weight to Rowe’s opinions. But this time, when Rowe gave his advice, Lyndon Johnson rejected it—all of it. He wasn’t going to enter any primaries, he told Rowe. He wasn’t going to run around the country giving speeches. He was going to make no overt move at all to get the
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When Jack told the group that “it looked as though Johnson would take it,” Lawrence, with a happy grin on his weathered old Irish face, reached out and grasped Kennedy’s hand in congratulation, to be met with a matching smile from the young candidate. Suddenly, in O’Donnell’s words, “all of them”—all the northern bosses who could count, and who had
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The wheat sale vote was going to be Congress’s first confrontation with the Johnson Administration—and therefore its result would be an indication of whether, under the new Administration, the situation would remain the same, or if power would shift. The result, Johnson saw in an instant, would be crucial. The feeling on Capitol Hill had to be
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Republican strategists saw its effect: the astute White House counsel Bryce Harlow told Nixon that he was “being religioned right out of this campaign. Lyndon is talking religion at every stop.… You’re just flat losing the campaign on religion.… It’s a calculated stance. Kennedy can’t talk it. Lyndon can and Lyndon’s talking it.” Southern
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Over and over again, Kennedy delayed a decision to take a step that would require force and might be met by force—and therefore might escalate into the war that would destroy mankind. Over and over again, he tried to give Khrushchev more time to think—until on Friday night, a cable clattered over the State Department teletype, a long, rambling
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Sitting at the President’s desk in the stateroom, he said, “It’s the Kremlin that worries me. It can’t be allowed to detect a waver.… Khrushchev is asking himself right now what kind of a man I am. He’s got to know he’s dealing with a man of determination.”
Robert A. Caro • The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV
For all John F. Kennedy’s remarkable ability—his eloquence on the podium, whether for a speech or a press conference—to inspire a nation, to rally it to its better, most humane, aspirations, and for all his triumphs in dealing with the rest of the world—the Peace Corps, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Cuban Missile Crisis—few of his domestic goals
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After these lines were installed, Clark says, Johnson wanted his dealings about his business interests conducted over these direct phone lines. All during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, he, either himself or through a press secretary, would insist that he had divorced himself completely from his business interests. “As the American people know,”
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