Best of the Decade: #10 Robert A. Caro's "The Transition"

Photo from Robert A. Caro's "The Transition"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #10 pick – Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” (April 2, 2012). It’s a riveting account of the events of November 22, 1963 – the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson became President. 

Caro puts us squarely there in the car with Johnson when Kennedy is shot:

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.”

I read that passage back in 2012, when the piece first appeared; I’ve never forgotten it. Its thereness is mesmerizing. The same is true of at least two other scenes in this transfixing piece: LBJ and Lady Bird waiting in “a small white room” at Parkland Memorial Hospital, communicating only with their eyes as they wait for news of Kennedy’s 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’ ”), and – another reference to eyes – LBJ aboard Air Force One, in the President’s stateroom, about to be sworn in as President, requesting Jacqueline Kennedy’s presence: 

One witness was still missing, the most important one. As Judge Hughes recalled, he told her that “Mrs. Kennedy wanted to be present and we would wait for her.” To O’Donnell and O’Brien he said, “Do you want to ask Mrs. Kennedy if she would like to stand with us?” When they didn’t respond at once, the glance he threw at them was the old Johnson glance, the eyes burning with impatience and anger. “She said she wants to be here when I take the oath,” he told O’Donnell. “Why don’t you see what’s keeping her?”

The old Johnson glance – right there is Caro’s theme: the return of Johnson’s old self. The piece’s title has a double meaning: the transition of power from Kennedy to Johnson; and the immediate transformation of Johnson – from the despondency he felt about his powerlessness as Vice-President (“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”) to a “man with the instinct to decide, the will to decide.” Caro writes,

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.”

Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” is one of the most absorbing New Yorker pieces I’ve ever read.