It is more than eighteen years since Lyndon Johnson died, and yet my last conversation with him, two days before his fatal heart attack, turns in my mind as if that formidable, frustrating, fascinating character were still alive. When the phone rang in my Cambridge apartment that raw January morning at 6 A.M., I knew before I answered it that it was he. He would often call before dawn, following a pattern set at the ranch when he would come into my room to wake me up so we could talk before the day’s activities began. His voice on these occasions was soft, so soft it was sometimes hard to understand but on this morning the pain and sadness in his tone was so striking that I forced myself to comprehend every word.
“Listen,” he began. “I’ve been reading Carl Sandburg’s biography on Lincoln and no matter how great the book’s supposed to be, I can’t bring Lincoln to life. And if that’s true for me, one President reading about another, then there’s no chance the ordinary person in the future will ever remember me. No chance. I’d have been better off looking for immortality through my wife and children and their children in turn instead of seeking all that love and affection from the American people. They’re just too fickle.”
I tried at first to cajole him from his morose mood by teasing him that from this day forward I would promise to include a question on Lyndon Johnson on every final exam I gave at Harvard so that at least for the length of my teaching career, the students at Harvard would never forget him. But he cut my banter short with an unusual abruptness. “You’re not listening. I’m telling you something important. Get married. Have children. Spend time with them.”1*
I first met Lyndon Johnson in the spring of 1967 when I was nominated for the White House Fellows program. I was twenty-four years old. The program was designed to allow young people to work as special assistants to the President and members of his cabinet. In a conference house in Virginia, a committee of Cabinet members, government officials, and journalists interviewed the finalists. At the time, I was a candidate for a Harvard Ph.D. in Government preparing for an academic career and I wanted some opportunity for actual experience in government. And yet, at best, my desire to join the Johnson administration was equivocal. So during the interviews I made no effort to conceal my antiwar activities and made it clear I could not work on anything to do with the war, but believed strongly in the domestic programs of the Great Society, particularly in the area of civil rights. These admissions did not seem to perturb the committee, many of whom, like John Oakes, editorial page editor of The New York Times, and John Gardner, Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, were themselves opposed to the war.
My selection was to be announced in a White House ceremony the first week of May. A month before, I had coauthored an article for the New Republic. This essay, “How to Remove LBJ in 1968,”—the New Republic chose the title—argued for a new political party to be formed from an alliance of blacks, poor, the lower middle class, and women—a party that might give a voice to the presently unrepresented and, at the very least, bring about “the removal of Johnson, Rusk, and Rostow from power in the American government” by splitting the normal Democratic vote and ensuring victory for a Republican party which, we assumed, “scenting victory, will avoid their urge to nominate Nixon or Reagan.”2 The reasoning is a clear demonstration that purity of intention is no substitute for political knowledge.
A week before the article was to appear, on May 7, 1967, I went to the White House for the ceremony and the dance that would follow. There, I first met Lyndon Johnson. He was already in the ball-room when I entered. His appearance startled me. The picture in my mind had been a caricature: the sly televised politician, his features locked into virtual immobility, eyes squinting, ears that seemed to dangle like thick pendants affixed to the sides of his head. Now I saw a ruddy giant of a man with a strong mobile face, and a presence whose manifest energy dominated an entire room filled with Senators, Representatives, Cabinet officials, White House staff members, and reporters. Beginning each dance with a different woman, he moved gracefully across the floor.
My turn to dance with the President came in the middle of the evening. He walked up to me and began to talk. “Do your men ever dance at Harvard?” he teased. “Of course they do,” I said. “Bull,” he responded. “I know what goes on up there. And I bet they can’t dance like I’m dancing right now.” With that, he started to move me in wide circles around the floor. “I have one question,” he asked suddenly. “Do you have a lot of energy? It’s important for me to know.” “Well,” I replied, surprised at how easy it seemed to make small talk with him, “I hear you only need five hours of sleep, but I need only four so it stands to reason that I’ve got even more energy than you. In fact,” I continued, even more surprised to find myself confiding in him, “I hate going to bed at night and I love waking up in the morning.”3
Abruptly, Johnson interrupted to say that at my age he had also hated to sleep, but now his burdens with the war were such that sleep represented a welcome escape.
The dance ended, but as Johnson moved away, he said in a loud whisper that he had already decided that I should be the White House Fellow assigned to work for him on the White House staff.
It was not to be that simple. The next week the issue of the New Republic containing my article appeared in Washington. There was a flurry in the press, which was evidently amused at the idea that Lyndon Johnson had tried to waltz the New Left and had been spurned. A commentator on the 6P.M. news even speculated that I might be an agent from the New Left who had been infiltrated into the Fellow program to get close to the President in order to change his mind about the war. The articles were light in tone, but I found the publicity embarrassing. The media were trying to turn me into a heroine of the peace movement, while, in fact, I was going to work in an administration against which my friends and colleagues were protesting and beginning to organize. My sense of guilt at going to work in Washington returned, intensified by the fact that the publicity threatened to make trouble for the entire staff of the White House Fellows program who had helped select me; who were dedicated people, sincere believers in the value of their work and whom I had come to like and respect. I had heard of the President’s reaction to earlier, more trivial public embarrassments. I could easily imagine his punishing, or even canceling, the entire White House Fellow program for its error in selecting me. He had already abolished the annual Medal of Freedom award because he did not approve of some who had been selected to receive it, among them critics of his Vietnam policies. I considered, and discussed with friends, the advisability of resigning. But then, a few days later, I received a phone call from Postmaster General Larry O’Brien, who told me that, despite the rumors, the President still wanted me to come to Washington and participate in the program. There was no further talk of me working for the President directly.
I was assigned to the Labor Department, where, to my great satisfaction, I was put to work on skill-training and education projects for young city blacks. Shortly after the Fellows assembled in the fall, we were invited to an informal discussion with the President, which became—as did so many of his meetings in that last year and a half—a monologue on the importance of our war effort in Vietnam. After finishing, he said he had time for only one question, swiveled abruptly, and pointed directly at me. “You,” he commanded. Startled, mentally immobilized by my surprise, I found my lips forming the words I had been thinking the moment before: “Don’t you understand—how can you possibly not understand—how deep and serious the country’s opposition to the war in Vietnam is?” Neither I nor my colleagues could hear his mumbled reply, but his veiled look of anger was unmistakable. The session was closed. Once again I left the White House for what was surely the last time, shaken by the unintended encounter.
Through my work in the Labor Department, I began to feel that some steps, however gradual, were being taken to improve the lives of black Americans. But on April 4, 1968, four days after Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race, civil rights leader Martin Luther King was shot and killed and all progress came to a halt as large-scale riots broke out in more than twelve major cities.
The next morning I was at work in the Labor Department when we were told that Johnson was planning a major speech to a joint session of Congress. He had asked Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz—who had written speeches for Adlai Stevenson—to help prepare a draft. For three days, while entire blocks of Washington were aflame, a small group of us, designated by Secretary Wirtz, worked late into the night, driving home exhausted through uncanny, deserted streets, halted periodically at barricades where armed soldiers looked inside the car. Finally, we finished a draft that called for a “massive effort” to improve ghetto life, to be paid for by transferring money from the defense budget and Highway Trust Fund, and by raising taxes on the affluent. We had convinced ourselves that King’s martyrdom had created a moment of opportunity equal to that of his march on Selma, that the President could speak now as he had spoken then, and that Congress and the country would respond—this time to the denial of economic justice—as they had then to the denial of legal equality. We were undoubtedly wrong. Too much had changed since 1965—for Johnson and, even more, for the country. At the last minute Johnson canceled plans for the speech. A canvass of opinion in Congress had convinced him that the riots had destroyed whatever sense of injustice, compassion, or guilt King’s death had produced; that the country was in no mood for progressive words on race.
His decision depressed me, and I was still disturbed when, a few weeks later, I met the President at a White House dinner. Shaking my hand, he politely asked how I was, and what I’d been doing. To my surprise, I found myself not simply responding, but launching into a speech of my own about the speech he should have given. He started to reply, but was interrupted by a photographer, who hurried him off to pose with ice-skating star Peggy Fleming. We didn’t talk again that evening.
The next day, however, the President’s appointments secretary called to say that President Johnson wanted to see me at the White House at 5 P.M. When I walked into the Oval Office, the President was in the midst of signing documents and his back was turned. I stood there silently, looking across the great office at the figure intently bent over his desk, the man suddenly appearing like a symbol out of one of my high school textbooks. I cleared my throat to let him know I was there.
He swiveled in his chair and, without a greeting, in strong, almost accusing tones, said, “First you say I should be dumped from the ticket. Then you criticize me for not making a speech. I’ve got nine months left in office without another election. I want to use those months to do and say all the things that should be done and said simply because they’re right. And you can help me. You should be happy now that you’ve had your way, and now that I’ve removed myself from the race, it is time for you to remove yourself from the Department of Labor and come to work for me until I have to leave. Anyway,” he added, “I’ve decided to do some teaching when I leave office. I’ve always liked teaching. I should have been a teacher, and I want to practice on you. I want to do everything I can,” he concluded, “to make the young people of America, especially you Harvards, understand what this political system is all about.”4
So I became a member of the White House staff, my office two doors away from that of the President. Through my windows as well as his appeared the swiftly intensifying beauties of Washington’s half-Southern spring. His last there. Most of my work in the White House concerned itself with the development of manpower projects—my specialty from the Department of Labor—and I worked with Joe Califano and Larry Levinson, the chief staff members for domestic affairs, rather than with the President. With Johnson himself, my main role was to listen as he talked. At around 9 or 10 P.M., one or two evenings a week, I sat for an hour or two in the little sitting room next to the Oval Office while Johnson recounted his activities of the day, reading to me from the stack of memos and letters on his desk. As I sat and listened to Johnson describe the details of his day, what he had done and how he had felt, the scene struck me as bewilderingly familiar. I could only think of my own childhood memory of my mother patiently listening to me, perched on a high stool in our kitchen, tell her in excruciating detail everything I had done that day in school.
My perceptions of him during those last nine months in the White House were as complicated and contradictory as he was himself. At one moment, he could be the statesman, grappling with the full range of responsibilities and executing his office with skill and intelligence. And since Lyndon Johnson’s White House completely resonated with his personal moods and activities, it seemed to me at such times that I was at the center of government and power, of history itself. Moments later, the ambience could tilt toward absurdity when personal idiosyncrasy sent the very staff that had just been hard at work on matters of high policy off on a desperate search for huge quantities of a specific brand of peanut brittle which Lyndon Johnson needed within half an hour.
As President, Johnson could command detailed reports from any of his agencies and departments on almost any difficult question of state, and receive them within hours. But he also extended these prerogatives, and with the same urgency, to the most personal desires. If he expressed a preference for a felt-tipped pen or a particular style of shirt, the manufacturer would be called upon to deliver three dozen within the hour. When he told his staff that he liked to read his reports in three-ring binders, 180 loose-leaf notebooks appeared almost immediately. The White House seemed to be a colossal warehouse, open twenty-four hours a day to accommodate the ever-shifting tastes of Lyndon Johnson.
Typically, when one morning he announced a campaign to lose ten pounds, by late afternoon the White House was stocked with 150 pounds of cottage cheese, 275 containers of yoghurt, 40 loaves of diet bread, 15 boxes of Melba toast, and 10 pounds of his favorite diet candy, flown in by courier from his favorite store in San Antonio, Texas. The night the diet came to an end, gallons of ice cream and platters of homemade cookies suddenly found their way into the gleaming white refrigerators and stainless steel kitchens. Aware that the slightest mishap could send Johnson into a fury, the domestic staff spent hours anticipating his most trifling whims. Informed of his preference for low-calorie drinks, the staff installed a special tap for Fresca in the cubbyhole immediately outside the Oval Office. Lyndon Johnson had only to push a button on the arm of his chair and within seconds a glass of Fresca would appear.
The contradictions extended into everything. As Commander in Chief, there was no doubt that he had to be able to be in immediate contact with the Pentagon, congressional leaders, foreign diplomats, and others in case an emergency should arise. But Johnson had embraced the possibilities offered by his presidential communications network with the unqualified excitement of an eleven-year-old who’d been given the world’s biggest walkie-talkie. He had pushbutton phones installed in every place he might conceivably be—in his bathroom, in his bedroom, in his sitting-room, in his dining room, in his theatre, in his cars, on his motorboats, and on his planes. The pool at the White House and the pool at the ranch were both equipped with a special raft for a floating phone. The short-wave communications system enabled Johnson to reach any guest who was in a Lyndon B. Johnson car within twenty miles of his ranch. His voice could be heard simultaneously on all of the thirteen loudspeakers installed around his Texas property. Buzzers buzzing, lights flashing, beepers whining—Johnson delighted in receiving and sending signals testifying to his existence at the center of the nation.
Television and radio were his constant companions. Hugging a transistor radio to his ear as he walked through the fields of his ranch or around the grounds of the White House, Johnson was a presidential teenager, listening not for music but for news. The transistor gave Johnson an exclusive beat, allowing him to play newscaster, dispensing bits and pieces of the latest news to his staff and guests. Since he liked to watch the evening news on all three networks at once, Johnson had the famous three screen console built into the cabinet beside his desk in the Oval Office, and a duplicate installed in his bedroom. He had it equipped with an automatic control so he could tune in the sound of whichever network was, at that particular moment, commenting on him or his activities. To the left of the console stood the wire tickers—AP, UP, and Reuters—the keys steadily imprinting the bulletins across the unrolling papers. “Those tickers,” Johnson later said, “were like friends tapping at my door for attention. I loved having them around. They kept me in touch with the outside world. They made me feel that I was truly in the center of things. I could stand beside the tickers for hours on end and never get lonely.”5
Many dread loneliness, but “loneliness” for Johnson was not a state of mind. He could not bear to be by himself, not for an evening or for an hour. Always there were people, in his office, at his house, in the swimming pool, even in the bathroom. At the Senate, as in the rooming house he first occupied when, at twenty-three, he came to Washington, he would roam the corridors looking for people to talk to, persuade, and learn from. But in the Oval Office there were moments when privacy was necessary; thus the news tickers were installed to create a continuing presence.
Not only companions, the tickers were an additional source of control—or a sense of control—over events. Immediately after reading an inaccurate or displeasing story on the AP ticker, Johnson would call newspaper editors, present them with his version of the facts, and insist upon a corrected story in the late city edition. Similarly, by carefully watching the coverage of a political event on the 6 P.M. news, Johnson could get the news director on the phone, and demand a correction before the same story appeared on the 11P.M. news.
Johnson’s often baffling and contradictory but always dazzling display of energy extended to every aspect of his life. It seemed that, except when he slept, he was in constant motion. When he got hungry, he often invited whomever was with him at the time, whether it was the Secretary of the Treasury discussing the balance of payments or his personal secretary taking dictation, to join him at the family table. At night, after dinner, he would gather guests, staff, and family around. Then he sat and talked about anything he pleased until one or two in the morning. For long periods, conversation would lapse into monologue. To leave was unthinkable.
If Johnson was in high spirits, then an unmistakable air of life and vitality characterized his entire staff. Conversations were easy and pleasurable, luncheons stretched out, relations were cordial. Johnson, relaxed, was a superb storyteller. He could meet with any group and pick up something from the topic of conversation that reminded him of a story, which he would then proceed to tell in great detail, accompanied by mimicry and gestures and uproarious laughter. Johnson filled his anecdotes with inflated words and feeling. He could, to great effect, convincingly appear to recreate the look and the feel of any person in almost any situation, whether he himself had been there or not. But most of the stories had a point—one simple idea. Ribbing and teasing—usually associated with the details of another person’s private personal life—were central to all Johnson’s stories. By directing his ridicule toward someone outside the assembled group, he created an atmosphere of intimacy inside, a feeling of camaraderie. And when Johnson told a story, he expected enthusiastic listeners, seeing his humor as a gift to his audiences. The ritual telling demanded a ritual response even if, as often happened, the same story had been heard a dozen times before.
Visitors were sometimes surprised to find out later that narrative details, even entire stories, were untrue; a revelation which, when communicated to others, added to Johnson’s reputation for duplicity. Admittedly, Johnson was often duplicitous, both in private and in public. But in these simple and intimate gatherings he usually had no practical purpose or motive for deception. He was simply a highly skilled practitioner of a very old Texas tradition. “The tall tale spread West,” Marcus Cunliffe writes in his history of American literature, “to reach heights of mendacity. It required a narrator and an audience—fittingly among a people who liked nothing better than to be lectured at.… Political oratory was a variant of the tall tale. Was it true? The question had little meaning. What mattered was the story itself.”6
I was told that Johnson had always been a generous and demanding giver, but before his White House days he had never been able to distribute so dazzling an assortment of presents. Every White House budget includes an allocation for gifts. Numberless trinkets—ranging from booklets, bracelets, and bowls to charms and certificates—are distributed in the name of the President. At no time before, however, had the budget been as large or as personally managed as it was under Lyndon Johnson. For most Presidents, the distribution of gifts is a routine function handled mechanically by the staff. For Johnson, the giving of gifts was a personal task, “a great opportunity,” he said, “for engraving my spirit on the minds and hearts of my people.” In the first year of his Presidency, the stock of presidential gifts more than tripled. To the traditional bowls, lighters, tie clasps, and cufflinks he added electric toothbrushes, engraved with the presidential seal; waterproof watches, inscribed with the initials of Lyndon B. Johnson and the Biblical injunction: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”; and orange and yellow scarves with a special border design—a chain of initials: 526 LBJ’s.
There was a hierarchy of gifts, beginning with certificates delivered to all those who came within the presidential presence. Each time a person flew on Air Force One or on a presidential helicopter, he received a certificate attesting to that fact. If he flew with President Johnson eleven times in the course of a year, he received eleven certificates. Every person attending a White House dinner received two mementos—a place card lettered by a White House calligrapher and a printed menu, with the presidential seal in gold at the top, describing the food and the wines, the occasion and the date. To the members of his staff, Johnson personally delivered “CARE” boxes filled with all the foods he loved the most—10 slabs of peanut brittle, 30 ounces of fudge cake, 6 pounds of chocolate. And, of course, the countless pictures of the man himself. In the distribution of these photos, Johnson’s enthusiasm seemed strangely disproportionate; he treated pictures of himself with unabashed pride, the way a grandfather treats pictures of his grandchildren.
There was often a ritual connected with the giving of the gifts. Johnson often gave the same person the same gift again and again; the giver decided what he wanted to give, not what the recipient wanted to receive. “I give these toothbrushes to friends,” Johnson explained to me, “for then I know that from now until the end of their days they will think of me the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night.” In the last month of Johnson’s presidency, I received my first electric toothbrush. “Open it,” Johnson said as I awkwardly held the gift unopened in my hands, “open it and tell me, have you ever seen anything like that in your entire life? Tell me now, what do you think?” I didn’t tell him what I thought, for, in truth, I didn’t know what to think. But I had to thank him, so I did. Several weeks later he handed me another package, still another toothbrush. When he noticed that I was perplexed, he glowered and said, “Why the hell should I give anything to anyone who is not grateful for my gift?”7 There was, as Johnson saw it, an ethic to the charitable act, an expectation of gratefulness, a ritual that demanded the proper completion. So it happened that over time I was given, and with a measure of good grace accepted, no fewer than twelve electric toothbrushes!
Johnson’s generosity was real. But I did not see then that it offered an insight into an important part of his nature. The giving and receiving meant something more than a simple token of feeling or gratitude; it was as if the exchange somehow created a magic bond that linked the recipient to the giver, a bond compounded, in Johnson’s mind, of dependence, interest, even love; as if, somehow, those clashing states were aspects of a single condition, one state of mind. It reflected attitudes which, as we shall see, influenced his use of office and power through a long political career. “How is it possible,” Johnson asked me, angrily, “that all these people [meaning the American people] could be ungrateful to me after I had given them so much?”
More than anger was involved here; Johnson was deeply hurt—almost desperate—at the recognition that his generosity had not been appreciated. Of course, I was seeing him at a time of failure. We shall examine other times, when things were going well and the public was on his side. Then Lyndon Johnson was ebullient and could accept occasional displays of what he thought was ingratitude with relatively good humor. In addition, the experience of a long political career had confirmed him in the belief that there were not differences that could not be settled by upping the ante. That conviction was part of his character, and had shaped his mode of conduct throughout a long and successful political career. Now it seemed no longer to work, and he could not understand it.
A month before Johnson left office he asked me to go back to Texas with him to work full-time on his memoirs and the establishment of his presidential library and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. One evening he insisted on an answer. “Now I want to know,” Johnson began, sitting up in his chair, “why you fidget and weave whenever I talk about your coming to Texas with me when we’re done. I just don’t understand it. Ten times, maybe more, I’ve taken you with me. I’ve tried my best to make you love it. And I’ve outlined again and again all the work that has to be done on the memoirs, the library, and the school. Still, you won’t say yes. What are your objections?”
“I want to get back to teaching,” I replied. “I just started before coming to Washington, and it’s important to me.”
“It’s done,” Johnson interrupted. “I’ve got you a position at the University of Texas. You can teach all you want. Hell, you teach about the Presidency, don’t you? You can teach me, and I can teach you. Now what could be better than that?”
Without answering directly, I explained that I had also made plans to work part-time on a manpower project in the black Roxbury section of Boston. “Oh, hell,” Johnson said, leaning closer, “I can get you all the poor people you want. I can get them from Austin and San Antonio. If you go to Roxbury with no money and lots of goodwill, you’ll accomplish absolutely nothing … so if you really want to help poor people, you’d better come to Texas.
“Now, what’s your next objection?”
Losing ground by the moment, I said that all my liberal beliefs had been shaken by working in Washington, that I need time to myself to re-examine my ideas, to study and think.
“Think!” he interjected. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you a little cabin on the lake, Lake LBJ. It’ll be perfect for thinking. I’ll get you a blue sky and some rippling water and some old trees, all the things you thinkers need to produce big thoughts. And you can go there whenever you want, except when you’re working with me. Now what else could you possibly need?”
“All the people I care about are in Washington or Cambridge,” I replied, beginning to feel, as had so many who had preceded me in this office, a little overwhelmed.
“No problem,” Johnson replied. “I’ll invite a millionaire to the ranch every weekend, and I’ll buy you pretty clothes, and I’ll put you on a diet and give you a fabulous salary so you can look beautiful all the time. And I’ll take you on trips with me—to Russia, where you’ve always wanted to go” (I had studied the Russian language for three years), “and to Africa and South America. And then you’ll have lots of interesting stories to tell your handsome young millionaires.
“Now,” Johnson summarized, “what girl in her right mind wouldn’t come and work with the President of the United States under these conditions?”
I felt hopeless. But, as he talked, I suddenly saw myself wearing a Lyndon B. Johnson outfit, sitting by the Lyndon B. Johnson Lake, making conversation with a Lyndon B. Johnson millionaire. Nothing would be mine, perhaps not even myself. “I wouldn’t be comfortable,” I managed to say. “It’s not possible. I don’t belong there. It’s your home and I know you love it … but I need to be with my friends.” Then, hopefully, in search of extrication: “Maybe we can work something out on a part-time basis.”
“No,” Johnson said, moving back. “Either you come or you don’t. And I’ll tell you, you’re dead wrong if you think that money and travel and nice clothes don’t matter. They do matter, to you and every other American.”8
The subject had not come up again. Then on Sunday afternoon, January 19—the President’s last full day in office—Johnson called me at home and asked me to come to the White House immediately and talk about my plans. A light snow, almost rain, was falling; the walk from my apartment in southwest Washington to the White House took nearly an hour. By the time I reached the gate I was prepared for my talk with the President, but not for what I saw when I entered. Overnight, everything had been dismantled. Empty chairs and desks stood up in the middle of vacant offices, surrounded by rolled-up rugs and stacked-up pictures. The elevator was out of operation; canvas and ladders littered the stairs; dozens of painters and other workmen were moving through the corridors. The next day’s transition was being prepared.
The President was sitting by himself in the Oval Office. It alone remained untouched; painters and furniture movers would not enter until the President had departed. I thought of a hundred repetitious news items, the sentimental classic of every urban-renewal project; the aging man who held out and refused to be relocated, staying on as long as he could while the neighborhood was being demolished around him.
As I entered, President Johnson looked up at me across the mahogany vastness of the presidential desk. “I need help,” he said gently, the voice barely audible above the steady clicking of the news tickers, “part-time as you wish, on weekends, during vacations, whatever you can give. As soon as I get settled at home, I’m going to write my memoirs. Those memoirs are the last chance I’ve got with the history books, and I’ve got to do it right. I’ve got to get my story out from beginning to end. We’ve got to go through my papers, and diaries, and ask hard questions to jog my memory. I want you all to be like vultures with me, picking out my eyes and my ears, tearing the memories and experience out of my guts, putting all my insides into your sacks so you can help me write my story. Then I’ll go over your drafts again and again until I remember everything I want to say. Will you do it? Will you help me?”
He stopped. This time he made no fancy promises. “Of course I will,” I said. There was a long pause and then: “Thanks. Thanks a lot. Now you take care of yourself up there at Harvard. Don’t let them get at you, for God’s sake, don’t let their hatred for Lyndon Johnson poison your feelings about me.”
I turned to go, but he called me back to say one more thing. “It’s not easy to get the help you need when you’re no longer on top of the world. I know that and I won’t forget what you’re doing for me.”9 Even at this moment of helplessness, his ambitions shattered, reduced to asking the help of a twenty-five-year-old girl, the greatest political bargainer of them all had not wholly lost his touch.
And probably I had wanted to do it all along—to understand the man who had so influenced national life, how President and Presidency shaped each other and influenced the nation. Seeing Johnson vulnerable, without the armor of his office, might have made me aware that I would now have an opportunity to learn these things. But, of course, Johnson couldn’t have known that—or could he?
So for the next four years, while teaching at Harvard, I spent long weekends, parts of summer vacations, and winter holidays with the President and his wife at the ranch. The work on the memoirs was fascinating but difficult. There was no shortage of material—there were 31 million papers in storage in Austin and a dedicated staff in the process of sorting them out so we could use what we needed for the memoirs. Harry Middleton and Bob Hardesty, two former speech-writers, were in charge of the project. I was assigned to cover the chapters on civil rights, economics, and the congress, but we all worked together reading through hundreds of files, memos, and transcripts, preparing questions for the President.
The publishers had recommended a trilogy: the presidential years first, the Senate years second, the boyhood years third. The order seemed to make economic sense; the volume on the Presidency would create a momentum for the other two. But it failed to account for the anxiety Johnson experienced in reliving the frustrations of those painful presidential years. Indeed, it soon became clear that he would rather be doing anything else than working on his memoirs. The moment a formal interview began, he stiffened; the moment it was over, he relaxed, had Lady Bird join him, and expanded colorfully on the subject he had just discussed with dull rhetoric. Yet, if we ever tried to incorporate our notes from these informal sessions into the draft, he took them out, insisting that his was a presidential memoir and had to be written in a stately fashion. So the man who talked for the memoirs was the man Lyndon Johnson thought he should be—the statesman above the fray, a soft-spoken observer of events whose opinions were offered with uncharacteristic deference and humility. Whereas Lyndon Johnson was filled with powerful emotions, with anger, rage, and sympathy, the image he projected was that of a calm, almost cold man, a sober fellow, with pinched energy: humble, earnest, and crashingly dull.
Once in the course of working on the memoirs, I told Johnson of an incident described in a book by reporter Hugh Sidey. Sidey had written that when Johnson was talking to the troops in Korea in 1966, he falsely claimed that his great-great-grandfather had died at the Alamo. Sidey interpreted Johnson’s statement to mean that the President wanted to have some blood connection to these heroes, so he simply voiced his desire as fact.10 Before I finished retelling the story, Johnson interrupted: “God damn it, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they’d hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows. That’s exactly what happened here. The fact is that my great-great-grandfather died at the Battle of San Jacinto, not the Alamo. When I said the Alamo, it was just a slip of the tongue. Anyway, the point is that the Battle of San Jacinto was far more important to Texas history than the Alamo. Why, the men who fought there were as brave as any men who have walked the face of the earth.”11
He went on to describe the battle for another fifteen minutes. By the end of our conversation, I had heard not only that San Jacinto was the most important event in the history of Texas but that his great-great-grandfather had been the hero of that great and courageous moment. Later, I learned that Johnson’s great-great-grandfather had not died at San Jacinto, or even been there, just as he had not been at the Alamo. He was a real estate trader and he died at home, in bed.
Johnson was never to write a Volume Two on the Senate or a Volume Three on the boyhood years. Though he talked with me about helping him on the Senate book it was clear that he wanted nothing more to do with any formal writing about his life. Moreover, his physical condition was deteriorating. In the early spring of 1970, I flew to the Army’s Brooke General Hospital in San Antonio, where Johnson had suddenly been hospitalized for chest pains. This attack was not serious, but from then on he would suffer continual pain, and from then on he seemed increasingly anxious to talk about his past. More and more he asked me to accompany him as he went about his daily errands—his staff meetings with the field hands in the morning, his work in the office, endless rides over his property to check up on things undone, afternoon walks to the birthhouse—and all the time he talked, recounting stories from his past.
No longer anxious to explain the policies of his Presidency or expand on the mistakes and misdeeds of his opponents, he spoke, rather, of his motives, of why he wanted what he did; beginning slowly, ever so tentatively, to reveal glimpses of the personal anxieties which underlay his political decisions. Moving backward from his stormy Presidency, he found comfort in recreating earlier days: the Senate leadership, his beginning years in Congress and as Texas Director of the National Youth Administration. He would get up from his chair, stride around the room, his mind accelerating to that familiar agility, voice and gestures shifting, taking on all the varied roles of the master storyteller. Those were good years, exciting; years of ambition continually renewed by a steady upward rise, of desires fulfilled through mastery and control over the men and events that concerned him. Increasingly, as he came to dwell within these more pleasant memories, Johnson’s compulsion to run every detail of the ranch lessened.
Nevertheless, at the age of sixty-two, his physical strength was gradually ebbing away. His hair whitened; wrinkles appeared on his skin; hollows deepened beneath his eyes; the backs of his hands flecked with spots of brown. His intestinal system was in continuous turmoil. The chest pains returned; it was often difficult to breathe. “I feel a bad pain in my angina these days,” he said to me one summer afternoon, interrupting himself in the middle of a story about his first race for Congress. “I went to a doctor in Mexico, and he said my blood pressure was perfect, and he wished it would shoot up so he could get me worried. But I have an instinct something is wrong. Last night’s drink was the first in ten days. I’ve lost ten pounds and been exercising each day. But I’m still worried. I’ve got an instinct.”12 More than two and a half years remained. But he was beginning to die, and he knew it.
It was then that he began to talk more and more about his childhood. Though my visits were shorter and less frequent in the last two years, his conversations became more focused and more intense, covering in one day or one afternoon material that had previously stretched over weeks of rambling talk. Encroaching, unmastered death chipped away at the defenses of a lifetime, and, bit by bit, a story I had never heard before began to unfold—a painful story of an unhappy boy trapped in a divided home, relentlessly tumbled among the impossible demands of an unyielding mother, love offered and then denied in seeming punishment; contempt for a father who had failed, admiration for a father who was a model for a Texas manhood, commanded to be what he could not be, forced to become what he was not. How different from his earlier public descriptions—the rags-to-riches rise from a happy childhood, guided by an adoring mother and the example of a manly, principled father. Sometimes he said more than he could accept and, after recounting some terribly revealing story, the old defense re-emerged and he would disclaim the obvious meaning of what had just been said. But something seemed to drive him on as far as his reach and memory would permit.
We talked mostly in the early hours of the morning. Johnson slept poorly these days, waking up at 5:30. Terrified at lying alone in the dark, he came into my room to talk. Gradually, a curious ritual developed. I would awaken at five and get dressed. Half an hour later Johnson would knock on my door, dressed in his robe and pajamas. As I sat in a chair by the window, he climbed into the bed, pulling the sheets up to his neck, looking like a cold and frightened child.
In those dawn talks, I saw him as perhaps few others, except his wife and close friends, had seen him: crumpled, ragged, and defenseless. He spoke of the beginnings and ends of things, of dreams and fantasies. His words seemed to flow from some deep well of sadness, nostalgia, and longing. It is, of course, impossible for me to sort out dream or memory from fantasy. After all, I was listening to a man who had always had a peculiar relationship with words. If there were inconsistencies with facts—his grandfather at the Alamo—how much more treacherous were memories and dreams and yet how much more revealing. For what a man like Johnson chose to remember may be as important to understand as what really happened.
Other biographers and members of the family, with the benefit of additional information, will help us to understand whether, for example, Johnson’s family relationships were as he described them to me. At an earlier stage in his own life, Johnson portrayed these relationships quite differently. What I can offer here is simply my account and my interpretation of what Johnson told me in the last stage of his life.
I often took notes as we talked, and Johnson rarely objected. A few times he interrupted a story to admonish: “Now I don’t want you to tell this to anyone in the world, not even to your great-grandchildren.” None of these passages has been recorded here. But he never asked me to stop taking down his words. More often he would look over, see that I was simply listening, and demand, “Hey, why aren’t you writing all this down? Someday, someone may want to read it.”13
On the surface, when he settled back on his ranch, Lyndon Johnson should have had much to be grateful for. His rich political career had taken him from the House of Representatives to the Senate to the Presidency. His years in the nation’s capital had spanned the depression, the New Deal, World War II, the cold war, the Eisenhower years, the New Frontier, the Great Society, and Vietnam. A millionaire, he had all the money he needed to pursue any leisure activity he wanted. He owned a spacious ranch in the Texas hill country, a penthouse in Austin, a half-dozen cars fully equipped with telephones and traveling bars, a sailboat and speedboat, a movie theater on the grounds of his ranch and servants to answer his every whim. He had the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world and the love of an extraordinary woman and two spirited daughters.
Yet the man I saw in his retirement had spent so many years in pursuit of work, power, and individual success that he had no inner resources left to commit himself to anything once the Presidency was gone. So dominant had politics been, consuming all his energies, constricting his horizons in every sphere, that once the realm of high power was taken from him he was drained of all vitality. Retirement became for him a form of little death.
On the ranch, Johnson’s family and friends tried to surround him with their love but while he had been the absolute center of their lives, they had never been at the center of his. So many times I saw Lady Bird reach over to take his hand or pat his knee and at her touch the anxiety instantly drained from his face but in the end, the need for the applause of millions signified a hole in his heart far too big for family or friends to fill.
Nor could he find solace in recreation, hobbies or play. Never in his life had he enjoyed a game or a sport for its own sake. At baseball or football games he would wait impatiently for the action to end so that he could talk politics; at dances, his eye trained to spot richness of power not beauty, he would seek out the wives of leading politicians so he could persuade them to persuade their husbands to support him; at movies he would invariably fall asleep. Never having developed the interest in reading or traveling, he could not call for comfort on the ageless pleasure of learning for its own sake.
Always in the past he could shake hundreds of hands and still plunge into the crowd for more. Always in the past he could summon the extra energy needed to deliver that last campaign speech in the middle of the night. But once he was removed from office and the handshakes no longer presaged an accumulating power, his palms would break out in blisters even as he reached to shake his sixth or seventh hand. And suddenly the prospect of public speaking became so frightening that at the last minute he canceled almost every engagement he had made.
This was the Lyndon Johnson I came to know—an aging lion whose need for companionship allowed him to reach out to a twenty-five-year-old graduate student at Harvard. Now, when I am nearly twice that age, I still wonder why he let himself be known, why he trusted me not simply to help with his memoirs but to share his good moments and to witness his sorrow. But I understand more now than I did then.
At the time, when, with great fanfare, he revealed to me that all along I had reminded him of his dead mother, that in talking to me he was also talking to her, unravelling the story of his life, I did not believe a word he was saying. Knowing all too well his legendary ability to pitch his tale to fit his audience, I figured he simply assumed this was the best approach to reach me. Waking in good spirits, he put together a picnic lunch, complete with checkered tablecloth and a bottle of wine and drove me to a nearby lake—Lake LBJ. On the way there he was in masterful form, his mind focused on his favorite years in the Senate, sharing with me incomparable stories about his mentor, Richard Russell.
When we finished our sandwiches he took my hand in his. “More than any woman I have ever known,” he began and then paused dramatically, “you remind me of my mother.”14 My relief was so great that I had to keep myself from laughing. No way, I thought, as the image of Johnson’s large-boned buxom mother floated in my mind. No way, I thought, as I contrasted my Irish Catholic background with her Southern Baptist roots. In the arrogance of youth, I failed to appreciate that perhaps, being young and from Harvard, the two constituencies whose approval he desperately wanted, I had indeed been collapsed into some fanciful version of the mother whose love he had sought from the day he was born.
Or perhaps, I realize now, he talked to me simply because I was a good listener and because I was there, present, as he moved, knowingly, toward death. So I listened through long hours of recollection to this immense personality, victor in a thousand conquests, now defeated and dying, but still exerting his indomitable will in order to master, no longer the action, but some understanding of what had happened to his life and of who he was.
One summer a suggestive story appeared in a magazine about my frequent trips to the ranch, implying that more was going on than the writing of the President’s memoirs. The President called me as soon as he read the piece and told me not to worry. But the next time I went to Texas, where I was supposed to meet him at a large reception in Austin, I felt tense and nervous. Peering into the room, certain that everyone was staring at me, I could not find the President. I was turning to leave when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Lady Bird’s and she was smiling. “Don’t worry about those silly newspaper reports,” she whispered as she took my arm and guided me to her husband. “You give comfort to my husband and that is all that matters.”15
As a symbol of my increasing closeness to him, the President placed me in the front seat of his car whenever he took visiting dignitaries for the celebrated tour of his ranch—encompassing the blue-bonnet fields, the jumping antelopes and the small farmhouse in which he was born. No matter who was sitting in the back seat—it could be the Prime Minister of Germany or of Australia—he directed the entire tour through me. “Look, Doris, look at the way those antelopes jump,” he would say, making me feel as if I were the center of his world. Then one afternoon, after I had failed to join him at the ranch the weekend before because I wanted to be with a friend on his birthday, the President took revenge by gruffly directing me to the back of the car while Dean Rusk sat in front. As I heard him say “Look, Dean, look at the way those antelopes jump,” I felt as if I’d been exiled to Siberia.
Little matter that I didn’t even want to be in the car in the first place or that I’d seen that same jumping antelope a hundred times. There I was only one foot from the President and I felt I’d lost him forever. When I got out of the car, without his even once acknowledging my presence in the course of the two-hour drive, I vowed to myself I’d never let him get to me this way again. If he could turn such a small encounter into a means of exercising power, making me feel so bad over something so trivial, I knew I was no match for him.
From that moment on, regressing to the conduct of my high school days when the game was never to let a boy know how you feel, always playing hard to get, I managed to keep Lyndon Johnson slightly off balance. Sensing that with him the enjoyment was in the chase more than the conquest, I let him open up to me more than I opened up to him. It was a juvenile reaction to the fear of being hurt, but it succeeded. In the end I was comforted to know that Lady Bird Johnson’s trust in me was safely placed.
Work was the center of my life during these years. Everything else was secondary just as it had been for Lyndon Johnson. Between teaching at Harvard during the weeks and traveling weekends and vacations to Texas, there was little room for serious romance. It’s all right, I kept telling myself, this chance to spend time with a President may never come again. My personal life will always be there. I remember attending a seminar with the psychologist Erik Erikson. The theme was the critical importance of finding balance in life. The richest and fullest lives, Erikson argued, attain an inner balance composed of work, love, and play in equal order. To pursue one sphere to the disregard of the others is to open oneself to sadness as the years go by, whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication is to make possible an older age capable of serenity and fulfillment. I listened to these words of wisdom—I saw their relevance to Lyndon Johnson’s life—but I did not take them to heart.
It was not until after Lyndon Johnson died and after I was married and had children, that I began to understand the importance of balance. I tried at first to do it all: to keep teaching, to write a book and to bring up three sons. Yet, despite elaborate lists of “things to do” as the only constraint on my internal panic, I felt I was cheating everyone and everything—my work, my friends, and my family. After much thought, I decided to give up teaching. It was hard at first because the University had been my surrogate family and source of identity for many years. And I knew I was a good teacher while I was less sure of my potential for writing. But the moment I stopped teaching to concentrate on writing and my family, I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted.
To be sure, there were times when acquaintances wondered what had happened to me—as if without producing a book or a course I was no longer alive. And there were times when I myself wondered whether, with my schedule of writing only in the mornings, I would ever finish my second book, on the Kennedy family. It was supposed to be completed in three years; it took ten. When asked why I was taking so long I would always cite the fascinating new batches of papers I had discovered, but the truth was that I wanted to be home when my children came home from school and to read to them when they fell asleep at night and lengthening the time spent on the book was a price I was willing to pay.
When my boys were still toddlers I was asked to consider the position of Peace Corps director, a job I would have jumped at a decade before. But there was no way at this juncture I could commit myself to the traveling entailed. When I declined to consider the job and gave my family as the reason, that was perfectly understood. But when I added in that we were Red Sox season ticket holders and that I couldn’t miss the fifty or so games I attended each year, there was a puzzled silence at the other end of the phone, as if to say, “Thank God she didn’t take this job. She sounds a bit irrational!”
Perhaps there is something a bit irrational about waking up happy or depressed depending on whether the Red Sox win or lose. But surely it is not coincidental that my childhood love of baseball—fostered by my father and lost when he died—returned with a passion when I had children of my own. Several times I tried to share this old interest with Lyndon Johnson but he was, I now realize, constitutionally incapable of enjoying a spectator sport.
Yet it is Lyndon Johnson’s musings about immortality that come back to me when I sit at the ballpark with my sons, following many of the same rituals I followed with my father years ago. Sometimes, if I close my eyes against the sun, I can see my father in the place where my sons now sit, linking the boys to the grandfather whose face they never had a chance to see, but whose person they have come to know through this crazy wonderful game.
In such moments, I believe I finally understand what Lyndon Johnson meant just before he died when, with great wistfulness, he yearned for a different form of immortality through one’s children and their children and their children in turn.
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
JANUARY 12, 1991
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS