Johnson Lyndon B.; Lyndon B. - Building the great society : inside Lyndon Johnsons White House

Why dont you pack a bag and fly with me to Fort Worth tonight? Lyndon Johnson suggested to his friend Jack Valenti. The date was November 21, 1963, and Valenti, who ran a successful advertising and public relations firm in Houston, could scarcely foretell the lasting effect that the invitation would have on his life.

The two men first met five years earlier at a luncheon that Johnson hosted for young, up-and-coming businessmen in Texas. Valenti subsequently volunteered as a floor aide at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, where LBJ vied unsuccessfully for his partys presidential nomination, and that fall directed the Kennedy-Johnson tickets advertising in Texas. I knew few people in the Johnson entourage, he later admitted, though I was a Johnson man and though I supported him vigorously and wholeheartedly and without reservation. I literally was on the darker edges of the last ring of the peripheral circle.

Texas had long been a sturdy brick in the Democratic Partys firewall. It remained critical to JFKs reelection prospects, but its electorate was drifting steadily rightward. Hoping to repair a widening breach between the state organizations liberal and conservative factions, Kennedy and Johnson scheduled a multiday political and fund-raising swing that would carry them from Houston to Fort Worth, to Dallas and then Austin, and finally to the LBJ Ranch deep in the Texas Hill Country, where the first and second families would break bread together over a weekend replete with political and symbolic importance. For Johnson, the stakes were high. He had never been especially close to the Kennedy clan, and in recent years his relationship with Attorney General Robert Kennedythe presidents brother and closest political adviserhad grown sharply discordant. Quietly beleaguered by a series of slow-percolating scandals involving his personal finances, and seemingly powerless to forge a truce between liberal and conservative Democrats in his own backyard, LBJ was no longer a certain asset to the president, either nationally or in Texas. He had legitimate reason to fear persistent, low whispers that Kennedy intended to drop him from the ticket the following year.

Facing these trials, the vice president called on trusted friends from Texas to ensure a successful presidential visit. Valenti had been charged with organizing a critical leg of the journeya dinner in honor of Representative Albert Thomas in Houston on November 21. Despite widespread concern that the citys conservative citizens would shun the president, over 350,000 cheering local residents lined the city streets to greet JFK and his wife, who had arrived at 4:23 p.m. in the lateness of a blue-skied day, Valenti later recalled, on the sleek, silver-bellied Boeing 707, Air Force One. Riding in the official motorcade, he noticed that his seatmate, Kenneth ODonnell, a principal White House aide, was dour, unsmiling, and visibly nervous. Only when he saw the crowdsthree, four, and five deepdid ODonnell relax. Theyre here, arent they? he muttered with satisfaction. They damn sure are, Valenti replied. Privately, he was equally relieved, and even more so when over 3,000 local business and civic leaders packed the Sam Houston Coliseum for the evenings dinner reception.

Short in stature but hard to miss in a crowdhis dress was natty, recalled one of his contemporaries, and he was imaginative, quick-thinking and fast-talking... a lively, friendly, sentimental human beingValenti was swept up in the moment. When LBJ pulled him backstage to meet the president, Kennedy warmly shook his hand and thanked him for producing so stellar a turnout.

He very much wanted to join the flight to the next stop, Fort Worth, and then on to Dallas and Austin the following day, but his wife, Mary Margareta former secretary in Johnsons Senate and vice presidential officeshad given birth to their first child just three weeks earlier. Is this trip necessary? she muttered with disapproval, even as she obligingly packed an overnight valise for Jack, complete with two changes of clothing.

After the president and the vice president finished their remarks at the Houston dinner, Valenti boarded the vice presidents Boeing 707a near, but not exact, replica of Air Force Onefor the journey to Fort Worth. The next morning, November 22, he flew with LBJs entourage to Dallas, where Kennedy and Johnson were scheduled to address a luncheon at the citys Trade Mart. At Love Field, around 12:00 p.m., Valenti stepped into a van with other vice presidential and White House aides, including Evelyn Lincoln, the presidents private secretary.

The motorcade went through Dallas, Valenti would remember, and... we were all remarking about how marvelous the reception was.... It was about as big as it was in Houston. There were no hostile faces, not even a hostile sign, which was amazing. At the head of the official column led an unmarked police car, flanked by uniformed officers on motorcycles. Next in line was the deep-blue presidential limousine, which carried John and Jacqueline Kennedy and Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie. They were followed in turn by a heavily fortified, open-topped limousinereporters called it the Queen Marypacked with eight Secret Service agents: four in the passenger seats and four others on running boards to either side, with ODonnell and his fellow White House aide David Powers installed in the jump seats. LBJs gray limousinea rentalwas next in line, trailing the Queen Mary at a distance of seventy-five feet. Behind LBJ traveled the vice presidential follow car, then a vehicle carrying three members of the press pool, a transport for other members of the news media, and vans and buses conveying news photographers, video men, and local elected officials. Valenti later estimated that his van was roughly twelfth in the motorcade. As the convoy turned onto Main Street, then right onto Houston Street and left onto Elm, he witnessed the impressive multitude of office workers who cheered from the windows of tall downtown buildings and saw the crowdsfive and more deephoisting homemade signs in the bright afternoon sun and waving with admiration at the procession. It was a beautiful day, beautiful weather, noted a reporter who was present that afternoon.

Too far back in line to hear the piercing crack of a rifle shot, followed by two more in close succession, Valenti first sensed trouble shortly after 12:30 p.m. when all of a sudden the motorcade began without reason to speed up, tripling the speed, maybe quadrupling it. We attempted to keep up. And we knew something was wrong because all of a sudden we got separated from the cars. Uncertain what to do, his driver steered a direct course to the Trade Mart.