The Presidency: The Government Still Lives

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And even as the presidential jet, Air Force One, winged over the sere plains of Texas and the jagged peaks of the Ozarks, over the Mississippi and the Alleghenies, bearing not only the new President but the body of the one just past, the machinery of government was still working.

In the West Wing of the White House, Presidential Aide McGeorge Bundy began drafting briefing papers for the new President. Hurrying to the capital after a flight from Hawaii, Secretary of State Dean Rusk paused just long enough to say, "We have much unfinished business."

In his office, House Speaker John W. McCormack conferred with Democratic leaders. For a time rumors had whipped wildly through the city that Lyndon Johnson had also been shot, that he had suffered a heart attack, that he was dying. That would have made McCormack, a 71-year-old Massachusetts Irishman who never set his sights higher than the House, the new President. And until the 1964 election, McCormack remains first in the line of succession, with 86-year-old Arizona Democrat Carl Hayden, president pro tempore of the Senate, right behind him.* A Sense of Continuity. At Andrews Air Force Base, television cameras captured the sense of change, and the sense of continuity, that are part of the nation's strength. First, the bronze casket bearing John F. Kennedy's body was placed aboard a U.S. Navy ambulance. Then, as it drove out of range, the cameras panned to the ramp of Air Force One as the new President stepped into view for his first public statement. As he did so, the U.S. and the world could reasonably, and indeed necessarily, look to the future.

Johnson seems sure to retain, at least for a while, most of the men around Kennedy. Eventually Bobby Kennedy may resign as Attorney General; he and his brother were blood-close, and Bobby's heart can hardly stay in the job. But Johnson is close to both Rusk and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, will probably lean on both for some time. Kennedy's White House staff, an even more personal instrument than the Cabinet, will probably break up after a decent interval, but Johnson needs it at least until he can assemble one of his own.

In domestic and foreign policy some changes of emphasis can be expected, but Johnson is not about to disown his predecessor's program. He will fight harder for space appropriations, perhaps less hard for a tax cut. He is solidly behind the Administration's civil rights bill, medicare and job retraining programs. A superior congressional strategist, he may have more success in getting them through than did Kennedy. He has supported the nuclear test ban treaty and the wheat deal with Russia, and he said in Manhattan only last month, "It is possible to lower world tensions without lowering our guard." He is committed to NATO and the multilateral nuclear force, but as the newest head of state among the allied Big Four and the third to take the helm in the last month, he may be in for some rough times with the senior partner, France's Charles de Gaulle.