When Kamala Harris announced her
candidacy for president, in 2019, she had had, at that point, a brief,
but notable tenure (since the start of 2017) as a United States
Senator.
Many may recall the sense of command she conveyed, during
Senate committee hearings, when she was questioning such figures as Brett Kavanaugh, William Barr, and Jeff Sessions.
Her background, as a prosecutor in California (District Attorney in San Francisco, and then Attorney General of the state), served her well in the Senate.
It is not news that her
presidential campaign, which began and ended in 2019, was not a
success. Senator Harris--up against a wide field of opponents, including Mr. Biden--did not seem,
at the time, to have had a sure-enough footing as a candidate.
Then, Ms. Harris became Vice President--a position which she
has filled admirably, and loyally--but it has of course been the fate of so
many Vice Presidents, because of the confinements of the role, to
remain, so often (at least publicly) in the background.
My
guess, however, is that her time as Vice President has in fact, for her,
been a period of great significance.
A Vice President can obviously be called upon--at
any moment--to assume the presidency, and while it has not happened
frequently, in our history, I don't doubt that serving in the role transforms one's thinking. Perhaps, because of Joe Biden's age,
Ms. Harris was forced to think about her role with a greater intensity than is typical for Vice Presidents--that she may have, appropriately, been preparing herself (perhaps, to a large degree, in an emotional sense) for the possibility of having to step into the job.
Yet whatever the cause might be, Vice President Harris has been transformed, in a rather stunning way.
I watched her Georgia speech on TV last Tuesday, and the transformation could not have been more clear.
Ms. Harris has become--in a way I believe we have not seen since she became Vice President--a riveting presence.
Actually, I think that evidence of the transformation may in fact have become apparent the night of the Biden/Trump debate in June.
It
was Ms. Harris, who, immediately after the debate, went on television,
and defended the President. She responded impressively--with composure, candor, and a forceful loyalty--in the indisputably difficult moment.
Yet
the transformation has been most apparent since she replaced President Biden on the Democratic ticket.
She has, since taking the baton from the President,
exhibited a compelling sense
of command, confidence, wit, ease, and eloquence; she has conveyed a warm and appealing sense of self.
She has also been pleasingly, witheringly sharp, in her challenges directed at Mr. Trump.
In
short, the Vice President, in the brief time she has been in the presidential race, has not simply appeared to be a strong and
worthy candidate. She has looked and felt, decidedly,
like a President.
Watching the Vice President, recently, has reminded me of a brief book I read in 2016.
The book--a Kindle "Vintage Short"--is titled Dallas: November 22, 1963, and is by the acclaimed Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert A. Caro. The book is made up, simply, of two chapters from the fourth volume of Mr. Caro's work about Mr. Johnson, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2012.
https://www.amazon.com/Dallas-November-1963-Vintage-Short-ebook/dp/B00EMXBZMS/ref
Mr. Caro's portrait of Lyndon Johnson, on November 22nd, is superb, and revelatory.
In Dallas: November 22, 1963, Mr. Caro wrote, for example, of the moment after the first shot was fired at President Kennedy's limousine.
Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, stationed in Mr. Johnson's car in the motorcade, immediately threw himself on top of Mr. Johnson, and then pinned the Vice President down, his face on the floor of the car.
Mr. Caro wrote that Mr. Youngblood told everyone in the back seat of the car (including Lady Bird Johnson) to get down, and told the Vice President he had to remain on the floor of the car. As Mr. Caro wrote:
"All right, Rufus, " Lyndon Johnson said. A reporter who later asked Youngblood to describe the tone of Johnson's voice as he said this summarized the agent's answer in a single word: "calm."
After arriving at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Secret Service agents quickly found a room at the hospital for Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson; the room, part of a larger room at Parkland, was known as the Parkland Minor Medicine section. The Johnsons were placed in one of three cubicles in the room.
"Someone brought two folding chairs into the cubicle," Mr. Caro wrote. Mrs. Johnson sat in one of them, but Mr Johnson remained standing. He would remain standing, his back against the wall of the cubicle, waiting for news about President Kennedy, and Governor John Connally.
Mr. Caro wrote:
"Lyndon and I didn't speak," Lady Bird Johnson says. "We just looked
at each other, exchanging messages with our eyes. We knew what it might be." Johnson said very little to anyone, moved around very little, just stood there. Asked to describe him in the hospital, [Texas Congressman Homer] Thornberry uses the same word Youngblood used to describe him in the car: "Very calm. All through the time he was...very calm."Then Mr. Caro wrote of the moment that the Vice President learned of President Kennedy's death, in the hospital cubicle. He was told by Kenneth O'Donnell, one of Mr. Kennedy's closest aides.
Wrote Mr. Caro:
“He's gone,” Ken O’Donnell said—“and right then,” Homer
Thornberry later said of Johnson, “he took charge.”
Even before O’Donnell came in, as Lyndon Johnson had been
standing against the back wall of that curtained cubicle in Parkland Memorial Hospital,
there had been something striking in his bearing, something that had first
shown itself that day in the tone of his voice as he lay on the floor of a
speeding car, with a heavy body on top of him and the frantic voices on the
shortwave radio crackling in his ears. Johnson’s aides and allies knew that for
all his rages and bellowing, his gloating and groaning, his endless monologues,
his demeanor was very different in moments of crisis, in moments when there
were decisions—tough decisions, crucial decisions—to be made; that in those
moments he became, as his secretary Mary Rather says, “quiet and still.” He had
been very quiet during the long minutes he stood there in the cubicle—“very
little passed between us,” Homer Thornberry says; no words even to Lady Bird;
as he stood in front of that blank wall, the carnation still in his buttonhole,
there was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been
seen very much during the previous three years [as Vice President].
Mr. Caro continued:
And the hangdog look was gone, replaced by an expression—the
lines on the face no longer drooping but hard—that [Texas Congressman] Jack Brooks describes 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 long-time aide Horace Busby says, 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.”
What was going through Lyndon Johnson’s mind as he stood
there history will never know. The only thing that is clear is that if, during
those long minutes of waiting, he was making decisions—this man with the
instinct to decide, the will to decide—by the time O’Donnell spoke and the
waiting was over, the decisions had been made.
In other words: this was not simply about Lyndon Johnson becoming aware of the possibility that he was to become--and followed by the knowledge that he had become--the President of the United States.
It was clearly about Mr. Johnson becoming--in an internal way--transformed. He was becoming, from the time he was thrown to the floor of the Vice Presidential car, to the time he was informed of the president's death, the deliberative and determined man that those close to him knew was always beneath the surface.
And while the circumstances, today, are entirely different--there has not been the killing of a president, but a president voluntarily dropping out of his re-election race--one makes note of how the Vice Presidents, in Dallas, 1963, and in Washington, DC, 2024, responded. Lyndon Johnson, then, and Kamala Harris, today (at least as of this writing, in the latter instance), stepped up, and moved ahead--determined, calm, and purposeful.
