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a piece of his skull in her hand. “They’ve killed him,” she had repeated over and over again.
    At the instruction of his security detail, Johnson took shelter in a warren of inner offices away from the operating table, where he and Lady Bird huddled and waited for news. Johnson stood six feet three inches, weighed more than two hundred pounds, and was, by long reputation, one of the most willful and powerful men Washington had ever seen. But under Parkland’s harsh lights, he was strangely passive, almost childlike, complying with Secret Service orders, refusing to make any decisions, asking repeatedly for direction from Kennedy’s staff. Finally came Kennedy’s stricken assistant, Kenneth O’Donnell, with the news: “He’s gone.”
    He was President Johnson now. All his adult life, Johnson had striven for the presidency—worked for it, obsessed over it, longed for it above all else. He had sought his party’s nomination twice—unofficially but aggressively in 1956, officially and even more aggressivelyin 1960—but never managed to win it. The failure was the great disappointment of his life. Now, at last, it had happened—he had secured the office, but in a manner such as this.
    The Secret Service was anxious to get him out of Texas, unsure what danger remained. Johnson needed little convincing.He worried that Kennedy’s assassination might be the first step in a Communist plot that could also include his own murder and possibly even nuclear war. Hunkered down in the security of Air Force One, he waited at Love Field long enough to collect Kennedy’s widow and to see the dead president’s coffin loaded into the rear of the plane. And,at his insistence, he recited the oath of office before the five-hour flight back to Washington. But no sooner had he spoken the words “so help me God” than he ordered the plane into the sky.
    Greeted at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, he’d asked for any news of further crisis in the world. There was none, no wider threat.Still, when, well after midnight, he finally climbed into his own bed, he asked several aides to stay with him. In the darkness, he made sure they understood: They were not to leave him alone.
    Now, though, it was morning, and the fear was beginning to pass. He’d seen what they were broadcasting on television and sensed the crisis of authority.Americans, he would later say, “were all spinning around and around, trying to come to grips with what had happened … like a bunch of cattle caught in the swamp.” He knew what was required: “There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp.… And that is for the man on the horse to take the lead, to assume command, to provide direction.”
    He knew he could provide it. For things to feel certain again, America needed a different story. Not the story of John F. Kennedy’s life or the story of his death. It needed a new story with a new hero. And he was the one to give that story to the country. That was what he’d always wanted, to be the nation’s hero. He knew this was his best chance, and his last.

    A LL HIS LIFE , Johnson had longed to be the central figure in a great drama. He came from a line of men who were expected to make their mark, and did. Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in 1908 in a remote farmhouse on the Pedernales River, not far from the town of Johnson City, named for his frontier forebears. Family lore had it that these forebears had settled that part of the Texas Hill Country through great feats of courage—fighting off hostile Indians, starving through droughts, stamping out prairie fires. Through the generations, their offspring gained a strong dose of self-assurance. “Hell,” said a contemporary of Sam Ealy Johnson, Lyndon’s father, “the Johnsons could strut sitting down.”
    From his earliest days, young Lyndon was encouraged to think of himself as the natural heir to