Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

Seated behind his desk in the Oval Office, Lyndon Johnson appeared pensive and subdued when, on the evening of November 28, 1963, he delivered brief remarks to the nation. It was 6:15 p.m., and LBJ was only in the sixth full day of his presidency.

“Tonight, on this Thanksgiving, I come before you to ask your help, to ask your strength, to ask your prayers that God may guard this Republic and guide my every labor,” he began. “All of us have lived through seven days that none of us will ever forget. We are not given the divine wisdom to answer why this has been, but we are given the human duty of determining what is to be, what is to be for America, for the world, for the cause we lead, for all the hopes that live in our hearts.”


Reading with deliberate care from a text prepared by Horace Busby, a former wire reporter from Texas who had served as his chief wordsmith since joining LBJ’s House staff in 1948, the president acknowledged what was surely on every American’s mind: “A great leader is dead; a great nation must move on. Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or to lose.”

For most Americans, then and now, Thanksgiving is a time to relax, to enjoy time with family and friends, and to usher in the holiday season. Even presidents pause for a little relaxation. But for Lyndon Johnson, Thanksgiving 1963 was a personal and political inflection point. Over the long holiday weekend and in the days that preceded it, in an unrelenting string of phone calls and in-person meetings, LBJ set in motion one of the most important strategies of his presidency—a strategy that enabled him to channel the nation’s grief over Kennedy’s assassination to build a strong, lasting legacy, rather than allow popular affection for the slain president to overshadow his presidency. It would turn out to be one of the most significant weekends in presidential history.

The day before his Thanksgiving remarks, LBJ had delivered his first speech before a joint session of Congress—a solemn and universally acclaimed address in which the new president pledged to pick up the mantle from John F. Kennedy and secure passage of the New Frontier’s sweeping but stalled policy agenda. Dozens of LBJ’s former colleagues from Dixie sat in stone-cold silence as Johnson affirmed to stirring applause that “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”

***

Johnson had tactfully opted to work out of his suite at the Old Executive Office Building until after JFK’s funeral. It wasn’t until Tuesday, November 26 that he officially occupied the Oval Office (though he wouldn’t move into the White House until December). In a story that appeared over Thanksgiving weekend, Tom Wicker, the celebrated New York Times reporter, noted the palpable change in the West Wing. “Well,” a Kennedy aide told him, “I just saw my first ten-gallon hat on a hatrack outside the President’s office. It was an enormous one, too.”

In the small room off the Oval Office where Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, previously kept watch, a large oil painting of LBJ now hung prominently. Bill Moyers, a young Peace Corps official and former Johnson aide (and soon-to-be Washington powerhouse), now occupied the coveted room. The door to the president’s office, which Lincoln normally kept open, and through which White House aides recently enjoyed free access to the slain president, was now swung shut.

Wicker noted that Kennedy aides and Johnson aides seemed to share space and responsibilities as amiably as could be expected, particularly given the bad blood between both camps. The familiar characters from Camelot—press secretary Pierre Salinger, legislative liaison Larry O’Brien, speechwriter Ted Sorensen—mingled freely with Busby and Moyers, and with LBJ’s chief of staff, Walter Jenkins. Also on hand were George Reedy, Johnson’s longtime press secretary, and Jack Valenti, an advertising man from Texas whose relationship to the president (to say nothing of his new role) remained a mystery in these early days. Abe Fortas, an influential attorney whom LBJ had known since they both came to Washington as ambitious, young New Dealers, was also ubiquitous in those early days.

Johnson spent much of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving calling through a phalanx of journalists and media elites, including Joseph Alsop, David Sarnoff and Samuel Newhouse, soliciting their advice and receiving their congratulations on his speech before Congress. J. Russell Wiggins, the editor of the Washington Post, offered that “nobody could have delivered that speech any better, nobody could have said things that are more right, correct and proper,” while Roscoe Drummond, a syndicated columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, thought that “the hand of God was in it. And Mr. President, I—you’re my President and I’m very proud of the way you’re doing it.”

By 5:00 p.m., with William White of the New York Times on the line, Johnson was swept up in his own grandeur. “Homer Thornberry”—a federal judge and former Texas congressman who was close to LBJ—“came in crying, and [the] poor boy from the Cleveland Press … called me up and he was crying, said he’d been home with his wife, and … 35 years he has been listening to speeches … 34 applauses in 24 minutes.”

But there was also real business to attend to. Lyndon Johnson, who cut his political teeth as a congressional aide during the high water mark of the New Deal, was determined to surpass even his greatest hero, Franklin Roosevelt, in transforming and uplifting a nation.

***

A year before his death, John Kennedy observed that “Congress looks more powerful sitting here than it did when I was there in the Congress.”

For well over two decades, a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and northern Republicans had stymied the expansion of domestic policies first established during the New Deal era. In the Senate, an institution that William White once dubbed “the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg,” conservatives made frequent use of the filibuster to prevent welfare and civil rights legislation from coming to a vote, while in the House, powerful Southerners like Virginia’s Howard W. Smith kept such bills forever bottled up in committee.

If Congress had long been a moribund institution, by the eve of Kennedy’s death, it had become a national embarrassment. Not only had the House and Senate refused to take up key New Frontier measures, including a major tax cut that Kennedy’s advisers believed would stimulate the economy, aid to primary and secondary education, hospital care for seniors and a civil rights bill; they also failed to pass eight of 12 routine appropriations bills, thus leaving whole parts of the government unfunded and operating on a continuing resolution that set spending at the previous year’s levels. Congressional Quarterly deemed the state of affairs “unprecedented,” while Walter Lippmann, the dean of American journalism, bemoaned the “scandal of drift and inefficiency” that had beset Washington.

There was method to congressional madness. Just as they had in years past, the Southern delegation was wilfully manufacturing a bottleneck of important legislation as a bulwark against Kennedy’s civil rights bill. Only when liberals capitulated and withdrew the civil rights act would the conservative bloc consent to bring Kennedy’s tax stimulus to a vote and fund the many government initiatives—including bridges, highways, post offices and defense projects—that their colleagues hoped to deliver to hometown constituents.

Johnson understood perfectly well the dynamic at play; as a freshman senator in 1949, he had sat around the table with his mentor, Richard Russell of Georgia, and read from the very same script. As long as conservatives could hold the government hostage, they could forestall consideration of the civil rights act. In a series of phone calls before and after Thanksgiving, the president highlighted the imperative of using his newfound political capital first to clear the logjam; then, and only then, would members of Congress feel at liberty to bring civil rights to a vote. In the meantime, however, he would keep up the pressure.

On Saturday of the holiday weekend, LBJ asked former Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, a Republican and outspoken fiscal conservative, to intervene with Howard Smith, the chairman of the Rules Committee. “[H]e won’t even give us a hearing,” the president complained. “[H]is idea, of course, is that he’ll run [the civil rights bill] over until January. And then January they’ll be late coming back, and he’ll piddle along and get into February, and then maybe they won’t get it out until March. And then in March, the Senate [will] be able to filibuster it until it goes home, and there’ll be nothing.” Johnson reminded Anderson that “this country is not in any condition to take that kind of stuff … and that’s going to hurt our people. And it’s going to hurt the conservatives.”

Anderson agreed to speak with Smith and to convey the president’s willingness to support a seldom-used measure—a discharge petition—to bypass Smith’s committee altogether and bring the legislation directly to the House floor.

Playing the other side just as artfully, Johnson placed a call to Dave McDonald, the president of the United Steel Workers of America and a member in good standing of the liberal coalition. “They’ve got to petition it out,” the president instructed. “That means we got to get 219. We’ll start at about 150 Democrats; that means we got to get 60, 70 Republicans.” The president spoke with the passion of a true believer (“we’ve been talking about this for 100 years. And they won’t give us a hearing on this thing, so we got to do something about it”) and implored McDonald to fire up his union’s formidable lobbying operation—not only to support the discharge petition in the House, but also to move the tax and appropriations bills through committee.

“OK, Mr. President,” the union leader agreed. “I’ll have all my legislative people report … immediately.”

Anderson and McDonald may very well have wondered why the president turned to them, of all people, for political firepower. Or, as public figures with deep connections in government and the private sector, they may have realized that Johnson was having the same conversation, over and over again, with any number of influential men and women. In the week between Kennedy’s death and the Thanksgiving holiday, Johnson reached out to scores of union leaders, civil rights activists, current and former legislators, public intellectuals and D.C. insiders, at once lining up support for a discharge petition in the House while affirming the need to clear the logjam of tax and spending bills before making a final push on civil rights in the Senate.

Among those who best understood the president’s strategy was Sen. George Smathers (D-Florida), a conservative Democrat who ultimately opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but who represented a faction of the Southern caucus that was disinclined to grind all government to a halt indefinitely over civil rights. The “sooner we can get a civil rights bill over with,” he told Johnson, “get that part of it ended and out of the way, the better off the South’s going to be, and the better off the North’s going to be, and the better off everybody’s going to be. And they wouldn’t hide behind the tax bill—and hide behind a lot of other bills, just on the pretense of being against them when the real fact is they’re against the civil rights bill.”

Without prompting—and without the knowledge that LBJ had been making a similar case to his economic advisers for several days—Smathers suggested that the president make a concerted effort to woo Sen. Harry F. Byrd (D-Virginia), the deeply conservative chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. If Johnson were willing to indulge Byrd’s obsession with fiscal discipline and bring the 1964-1965 federal budget under $100 billion, then the chairman might allow the tax cut to clear through his committee.

“Wish you’d feel Byrd out,” LBJ agreed, “and give me a pretty good, full report.”

Unknowingly, George Smathers would help set in motion a chain of events whose consequences would be far reaching.

***

“You know, when I went into that office tonight and they came in and started briefing me on what I have to do,” LBJ told Moyers and Valenti late in the evening on November 22, “do you realize that every issue that is on my desk tonight was on my desk when I came to Congress in 1937?” Civil rights. Health insurance for the elderly and poor. Federal aid to education. Anti-poverty programs. It was in these late-night hours, at The Elms—his palatial home in Northwest D.C., where Johnson and his family would remain until relocating to the White House on December 7—that the first cornerstone was laid for the Great Society.

The strategy that Lyndon Johnson developed in the first week of his presidency had a profound but highly calculated effect. The pressure that Johnson’s supporters placed on Howard Smith—and the chairman’s realization that a discharge petition, if successful, would permanently undermine his authority—convinced the cantankerous Virginian to allow the Civil Rights Act to reach the House floor. Beginning with outreach from Smathers, LBJ simultaneously courted Harry Byrd until the patrician senator effectively agreed to swap budget cuts for a tax stimulus. With major economic legislation now cleared through Congress, the president had cleared the way for passage of long-awaited civil rights legislation, and for a more far-reaching domestic policy that included many longstanding liberal ambitions.

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, some of Johnson’s advisers cautioned him that presidents should not spend valuable capital on hopeless causes. “Well,” he purportedly replied, “what the hell’s the presidency for?”