Next day Senator Mundt’s wheat bill was defeated by fifty-seven votes to thirty-six.

The headline on the day after read:

Wheat Bill—First Johnson Victory

• • •

The funeral was over. Kennedy was gone, and Johnson was president. The world had changed, but George did not know what that meant, and nor did anyone else. What kind of president would Johnson be? How would he be different? A man most people did not know had suddenly become leader of the free world and ruler of its most powerful country. What was he going to do?

He was about to say.

The chamber of the House of Representatives was packed full. Television lights glared on the assembled congressmen and senators. The justices of the Supreme Court wore their black robes, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff glittered with medals.

George was seated next to Skip Dickerson in the gallery, which was equally full, with people sitting on the steps in the aisles. George studied Bobby Kennedy, down below at one end of the cabinet row, head bent, staring at the floor. Bobby had got thinner in the five days since the assassination. Also, he had taken to wearing his dead brother’s clothes, which did not fit him, and added to the impression of a man who had shrunk.

In the presidential box sat Lady Bird Johnson with her two daughters, one plain, one pretty, all three women having old-fashioned hairstyles. With them in the box were several Democratic Party luminaries: Mayor Daley of Chicago, Governor Lawrence of Pennsylvania, and Arthur Schlesinger, the Kennedys’ in-house intellectual, who—George happened to know—was already conspiring to unseat Johnson in next year’s presidential race. Surprisingly, there were also two black faces in the box. George knew who they were: Zephyr and Sammy Wright, cook and chauffeur to the Johnson family. Was that a good sign?

The big double doors swung open. A doorkeeper with the comic name of Fishbait Miller shouted: “Mr. Speaker! The president of the United States!” Then Lyndon Johnson walked in, and everyone stood up and applauded.

George had two worrying questions about Lyndon Johnson, and both would be answered today. The first was: Would he abandon the troublesome civil rights bill? Pragmatists in the Democratic Party were urging him to do just that. Johnson would have a good excuse, if he wanted one: President Kennedy had failed to get congressional support for the bill and it was doomed to failure. The new president was entitled to give it up as a bad job. Johnson could say that legislation on the crippling, divisive issue of segregation must wait until after the election.

If he did say that, the civil rights movement would be set back years. The racists would celebrate victory, the Ku Klux Klan would feel that everything they had done was justified, and the corrupt white police, judges, church leaders, and politicians of the South would know they could carry on persecuting and beating and torturing and murdering Negroes with no fear of justice.