Epilogue

“The long, hard effort was over now, and I was glad to see it end.”¹ These were the words Lyndon Johnson used to describe his feelings upon his retirement from public life. The relief was both immense and genuine. Yet after thirty-two years of public service, with the end of his presidential responsibility, a terrible, perhaps impossible transition to the hill country awaited him.

In the final months of his Presidency, Johnson had laid the groundwork for his retirement. Preliminary plans for the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the LBJ Library had been made as well as a tentative schedule for a series of lectures at colleges and universities. Hundreds of thousands of file folders had been shipped to Austin to be sorted through for the library and for the work on the memoirs. A sketchy outline of the memoirs had been drawn up.

Almost immediately, however, it became apparent that none of these projects really engaged Johnson. The one he talked about the most was the memoirs, and at the start it seemed that after a few months rest he might turn his energies to the task. But he never did. Though he spent many hours thinking and talking about the book, he never concentrated his whole attention on it. His mind would wander, his conversations digress. In retrospect, given everything we know about his character, his mode of behavior, and, particularly, his feelings toward the written word, this evasion of the book was inevitable.

All his life Johnson had made a distinction between the doers and the thinkers, between the contemplative and activist life. The written word of the intellectual, of the contemplative mind, he connected with stillness, paralysis, and death. To devote himself to the task of writing the memoirs would have meant sitting alone and becoming what he had been running from all his life. And since the subject matter was a summary of his life, it seemed that he was being asked to do nothing less than construct his own coffin.

The more promising possibility was to talk out the memoirs, to have his assistants take down his spoken word and render it into written form. This is, in fact, what he decided to do. Plans were made for long conversations in which we’d take notes or record him on tape and then draft the chapters from these notes, at all times retaining the flavor and style of his own patterns of speech. But it didn’t work as we had hoped. Whenever Johnson sat down to talk in front of the tape machine, he froze; his language became artificial and he insisted on having sheaves of memos on his lap before he’d say a word. The audience was too far away, too abstract, too unknown. I later realized that the problem of speaking before unknown audiences had plagued Johnson all his life. When he first went to school, as we have seen, he spoke incomprehensibly in “a language all his own” until the teacher took him on her lap. When urged by his mother, who taught elocution and debate, to participate in public speaking classes, he was dismissed for mumbling too much. Yet over time, he did develop an extraordinary facility in conversation; he became perhaps the greatest storyteller of his age. The power of his tales lay always in the telling—in the gestures, tone, and timing. Inherited from his father and his grandfather, this facility drew its power from a long and rich Western tradition. But, for reasons connected perhaps with the relationship between his parents, he never accepted the validity of this mode of talk. It could only be used, he thought, in private; it was inappropriate for public meetings. Only when the setting afforded privacy—as did the cloakroom of the Senate or, in a peculiar way, the campaign stump so long as no one was there to record his words—was Johnson able to make use of his verbal skills, his mastery of words, gestures, imitation, and mimicry. Before a more formal gathering, or in front of the television screen, he feared that his audience would scorn his wild gesticulations and crude language. And in the Presidency these feelings were reinforced by his view that the office was a stately institution demanding decorous appearance at all times.

That this posturing would be as disastrous for the memoirs as Johnson’s public and TV appearances had been for his Presidency was clear from the time the first draft was completed. I had worked on two chapters. Neither one was very good. The chapters came to life only in the places where, against instruction, I quoted directly from the anecdotes and stories I had heard him tell informally about his dealings with men like Russell, Dirksen, Mills, King, Young, Mitchell, and others. I had hoped that when he read these colorful passages and saw the difference, he would finally change his mind and begin to open up. Instead, he had just the opposite reaction. “God damn it, I can’t say this”—pointing to a barbed comment on Wilbur Mills—“get it out right now, why he may be the speaker of the House someday. And for Christ’s sake, get that vulgar language of mine out of there. What do you think this is, the tale of an uneducated cowboy? It’s a presidential memoir, damn it, and I’ve got to come out looking like a statesman, not some backwoods politician.”²

Johnson’s concern with the future power Mills might hold illustrates another aspect of his relationship with words. It is in the nature of political life to view words as sticks for action, as tools for persuasion. The words themselves mean nothing divorced from the object of persuasion. In the absence of a goal, Johnson’s words became unmoored. It was only when the author was pushed by contemporary events or by early evaluations of his Presidency in the newspaper that the old persuasive power came through. Someone sent him clippings of a series of news stories which claimed that Johnson had been forced out of politics because after the Tet offensive his senior advisers—men like Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, and Douglas Dillon—informed him they could no longer support his policy in Vietnam. Johnson was enraged: “We must refute every word of these stories. Get out my diaries. Go through the files. Bring me all the memos leading up to my decision in March. I’ve never been forced by anyone to do anything in my life, and I can’t let this drivel stand on the record. It was my decision to withdraw, mine alone, and I’ve got to prove it.”

Thereupon he sat us down and in superb fashion related his story. There was something a bit unreal in his account of how he had never wanted to be President and had always wanted to withdraw, but he embellished the tale with such astonishingly vivid detail that it resonated with authenticity. It was as if he had made everyone in the room a testament to his version of the truth simply because we were there as he spoke. And it all made a kind of sense—if, that is, you accepted Johnson’s premises. If the critics said that Johnson’s failure at Tet had led to the de-escalation, Johnson now claimed precisely the opposite: it was his victory at Tet that had made the bombing halt possible. And if the Eastern press insisted on making Clifford a hero, Johnson would show that Dean Rusk was the real force behind the de-escalation.

The standard at this point was not the truth, but what Johnson wanted to believe and what he thought he could persuade others to believe. It had little to do with history. Still, the Lyndon Johnson who shows up in these efforts—captious, imaginative, brilliant, and impossible—was far closer to the real man than the peculiarly colorless figure who plods through the rest of his book.

Johnson’s insistence on distancing himself from the material made the book’s failure inevitable. Yet, ironically, it was in part the fear of failure that led to his lassitude and detachment. We have seen throughout our present study his tendency to withdraw from situations where failure was possible. And he believed that, no matter how good his memoirs were, no matter how hard he worked on them, it wouldn’t matter in the end. History was the real judge now, not the contemporaneous public, and he knew that there was no way for his memoirs to affect historical judgment. “History makes the judgment on decisions made and actions taken,” he wrote in his book. But history was, he knew, in the hands of the historians, none of whom could be trusted to handle his Presidency fairly.

At moments his concern came out peevishly, his voice filled with self-pity: “All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn’t fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd; nor did Andrew Johnson from Tennessee. Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn’t fair. Oh, well, why should I care about the future anyhow? I’ll be dead then. What matters is now. And I’ve got exactly what I want right now. A wonderful wife and two wonderful daughters and two beautiful grandchildren. I am happy, very happy.”

At times, Johnson did seem genuinely happy. His relationship with his wife was uncommonly close. Outward signs of deep affection and love were observable on a daily level—in the gentle touch of his hand on her knee as they rode in the car, in his kidding jests about her financial management as they entertained at dinner, in the warm, crinkly smile with which he greeted her after being separated for less than a day. Close, too, was his relationship with his married daughters, Lynda and Luci, who had both presented him with beautiful, healthy, and energetic grandchildren. In his play with his grandchildren, Johnson exhibited the wonderful childlike qualities he himself had never lost. He could entertain them for hours with the same repetitious game long after most other adults would have lost their patience. Yes, there were much love and warmth and pleasure in his final years, and, at times, there seemed some truth to Johnson’s claim of being happier in retirement than he had ever been.

But at other times, particularly in the process of writing the memoirs, the impression produced by his claims of happiness was immediately contradicted by one look at his face, which made it clear that he felt anything but happy. “They’ll get me anyhow, no matter how hard I try,” he said one day soon after work on the book had begun. “No matter what I say in this book the critics will pull it apart. The reviews are in the hands of my enemies—the New York Times and the Eastern magazines—so I don’t have a chance.” I tried to suggest that the reviews didn’t necessarily determine the fate of a book like this, that if he wrote his story in his own style, the people would read it no matter what the reviewers said, but he wouldn’t listen. Pain and contempt sounded in his voice as he spoke: “You just don’t understand the way things work in this country. You’re too young and too innocent. I know the power of that group. Believe me, I know.”

The savagery of his invective tapped the same circumstances we saw in the worst days of his Presidency. The tone was equally strident, and the web of conspiracy, if not so vast, could count among its number many of the same people and organizations. During his Presidency they had tried to destroy him by twisting the public’s true feelings about him (“Before I made a speech they’d go into the town ahead of me and sabotage me”). Now they were trying to twist future perceptions as well.

So, finally, he gave it up. “There’s nothing I can do about it any more. So I might as well give up and put my energies in the one thing they cannot take away from me—and that is my ranch.”

Just as it is no coincidence that the long harangues about conspiracy that went on for hours in the privacy of his office in the last years of the Presidency were mirrored in his reaction to writing the memoirs, so the operation of the ranch developed into a kind of parody of the protective framework he had evolved through the insulation of the White House. Here, as there, he surrounded himself with people who would tell him what he wanted to hear, do his bidding, and filter information according to their perception of his desires. His behavior was in sharp contrast to that of Truman and Eisenhower, who continued to be public figures in the months after they left office: Truman talked repeatedly with reporters, and Ike held three news conferences in three months; Truman visited Washington and received an honorary degree, Ike met with Kennedy at Camp David and attended a White House luncheon, and both of them made a number of speeches. But Johnson became a hermit. He granted only one interview, attended few public meetings, and rarely left the ranch. He made, as I understood it, a conscious decision to occupy a smaller space so long as everything in that space was completely under his control. So averse was he to any appearance of helplessness and weakness that he totally avoided situations where he was unable to assert himself.

Johnson’s decision to withdraw to a world he could control, no matter how diminished that world might be, was powerfully confirmed by what he endured during the first public ceremony he attended after his retirement—the launching of Apollo 11 on July 17, 1969. As Johnson described it to me, the day of the launch was scorching. Arriving early, he had been ushered into the bleachers, where he sat for over an hour, the sweat pouring through his shirt. The VIPs slowly arrived: Congressmen, Senators, foreign ministers. Lyndon Johnson was one of thousands, waiting “under the glaring sun,” as he put it, for President Nixon’s arrival.

A few people walked over to shake his hand. But the attention of the crowd was elsewhere that day, their binoculars directed toward the lunar module that would carry the first men to land on the moon. Minutes before the countdown, the President’s helicopter arrived, and as the band played “Hail to the Chief,” a cool and unwrinkled Richard Nixon approached the speaker’s podium. The crowd stood up.

“I remember that moment,” Johnson later told me. “My trousers stuck like cement to the back of my legs, the sweat from my hair kept dripping down my neck, and my stomach was upset. I knew right then I shouldn’t have come. I didn’t want to go in the first place, but I just didn’t feel right saying no to the President’s invitation. But it was worse than I thought it would be. I hated being there. I hated people taking pictures of me when I felt so miserable. And I hated shaking hands with all those people, pretending I remembered who they were when I’d never seen them before in my life. I hated their questions: What do you think of this? How do you feel about that? Each conversation was like a goddamn quiz. I hated every minute of it. All I kept thinking of was how much I wanted to be home, walking through my fields, and looking after my cattle.” The most extraordinary thing about Johnson’s rendering of this tale is that President Nixon was there only in the telling, not at the actual event. It was Vice President Agnew who came by helicopter and was treated royally; Nixon remained at the White House; and yet in Johnson’s memory, “Hail to the Chief” was played and Nixon was there.

The difference between this insulation, which was pathetic and sad, and the earlier one at the end of his Presidency, which was tragic, was obviously that if the structures were analogous, the power was not. Whatever vestiges of power went with the retiring President—the grant of $375,000, the office space, the mailing frank, the military helicopter, the Secret Service—the real power was gone. So the Secret Service men sat all day in a little shack in back of the ranch house, waiting for Johnson to call. They brought him his clothes in the morning and gave him a rubdown at night. When he went for a drive, they followed faithfully behind, supplying drinks and snacks upon command. If something went wrong with his boat or radio, they fixed it. However insignificant, these services were essential to Johnson’s psychic well-being; they served as props easing the transition, as vestiges of the presidential armor without which the feelings of dislocation might have been more stunning than they already were.

Deciding to spend his time on the ranch rather than on the memoirs or in public arenas, Johnson set about to master the ranch’s activities with the same energy he had previously put into everything else. All the skills, all the tools, shaped over decades of public life were now directed at four or five field hands. Control that had once spanned the world was now reduced to a small, rugged domain, as Johnson became the commander in chief of a vastly reduced Western world. As always, information, detail, and direction of staff were keys to a successful operation.

For hours every day, Johnson would drive around the fields checking up on his men, finding tasks undone, spotting problems, talking with them about the cattle or the tractors. “Look at that cow,” Johnson said one day, noticing a cow stalking the fence. “Look at the way she is moving against the fence and listen to her moo sound. Something’s wrong. I’m sure of it. And look at her bag. See how tight it is. That can mean only one thing, that she has gotten separated from her calf. Let’s go over to Pasture Three and I’ll bet we’ll see some calf over there standing against the fence looking for its mother. See, there it is—I knew it. God damn it. Some of Dale’s boys must have gotten the calves and cows mixed up this morning while Dale was in Laredo judging a cattle show. I simply can’t depend on these field hands when Dale isn’t around. I think I’m going to have to start my meetings with them at six in the morning from now on.”

At these morning meetings, Johnson delivered his instructions to his field hands with the same tone of voice and with the same urgency I had heard at early-morning staff meetings in the White House. “Now,” he began, talking with his hands, “I want each of you to make a solemn pledge that you will not go to bed tonight until you are sure that every steer has everything he needs. We’ve got a chance of producing some of the finest beef in this country if we work at it, if we dedicate ourselves to the job. And if we treat those hens with loving care, we should be able to produce the finest eggs in the country. Really fresh. But it’ll mean working every minute of every day. Now I want you to write down the following symbols. ‘HP’ means ‘high priority.’ ‘P’ means ‘priority.’ ‘S’ means ‘Hold for a slow day.’ Here goes. Fix the fence in Pasture Two—HP. Get itch medicine in town—P. Start the sprinklers in Pasture Three—HP. Fix the right wheel in the green tractor—HP. Check the price of feed at the county fair—S. Get some itch medicine for the sore eye on that big brown cow in Pasture One—HP.” So it went for ten minutes or more. “Any questions?” he asked. There were none, and he strode off.

“Night reading” in the White House days referred to the thick packet of memos and reports that Johnson read in his bedroom before he went to sleep. After retirement, the custom remained, though the subject matter of the memos was somewhat changed. Status reports on the administration’s legislative program on the Hill were replaced by reports on the number of eggs that had been laid that week by the 200 chickens Johnson owned. “From Jockey Wade to the President: Monday (162), Tuesday (144) … Thursday (158) … Saturday (104).” As before, Johnson initialed the memo and responded. “Only 104 on Saturday? Out of 200 hens? What do you reckon is the matter with those hens?”

Using the same phrases in which he had once discussed national issues, he would talk to me about his problems with the ranch. On one dry, hot day in the summer of 1969, Johnson returned from an inspection of his fields. I could see from his rigid posture and the jerky movement of his eyes that he was exceedingly tense. He asked me to join him for iced tea in a voice that I recognized—a tone that signaled the beginning of a monologue. As I sat beside him, he looked at me fixedly, and then, bending forward, he said: “It’s all been determined, you know. Once more I am going to fail. I know it. I simply know it. All my life I’ve wanted to enjoy this land. I bought it. I paid it off. I watched it improve. It’s all I have left now. And then this rotten spring comes along as dry as any we’ve had in fifty years. Everything that could go wrong goes wrong. First, the rains don’t come. Then the Ford motor pump breaks down. Then the parts we order to fix it are delayed. And still the rains don’t come. And if we don’t get our fields watered soon, everything will be spoiled. Everything. Why, those parts were ordered weeks ago. They should have been here long before now. I can’t depend on anyone any more.”

Next morning he sat at the table, tired and gray. After a long silence, he said: “I couldn’t sleep all night. Not a minute. I kept thinking about those pump parts and about the rain and about my fields. And I couldn’t stand it. I must have those parts before the end of the day. I simply must. If I don’t, everything’s going to fall apart. Everything. Now let’s see, it’s eight o’clock here, that means nine o’clock in Cincinnati. I must get started.” He picked up the phone in the kitchen and asked the operator to get a Mr. McDonald in Cincinnati. McDonald was the president of the company that made the parts for the water pump. “Hello, this is Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas, and I’m sorry to bother you so early, but it’s an emergency. About five weeks ago I ordered some parts for my pump and they’re still not here. We need them bad. Can you check up on this for me and call me back right away?” Twenty minutes later the phone rang. Johnson grabbed it before the first ring was completed. McDonald reported that the package had been sent the day before via Air Express, American Airlines, on a 3:20 plane from Cincinnati to St. Louis, with a connecting flight in St. Louis at 5:30, to reach Dallas by 8:00 and Austin by 10:00 P.M. Which meant the package should be sitting in Austin that very moment.

Evidently feeling that he would soon have his pumps, Johnson relaxed his shoulders and let out his stomach. He reached for a piece of toast and munching it heartily he thanked McDonald “for your help and support at this critical time.” But his feeling of well-being ended as quickly as it had come when, after breakfast, Johnson called the postmaster in Austin and discovered that, despite McDonald’s assurance, the package had not yet arrived. Johnson then called a Mr. Corcoran, the head of A.A. Air Freight. Here, too, without raising his voice he made it very clear that without these parts his water pump wouldn’t work and without the pump his fields and his cattle would die. Though he didn’t say it to Corcoran, his voice suggested that it would be the end for him, too. So it just better be there by nightfall. Fifteen minutes later Corcoran reported back that because of a traffic jam in Cincinnati the package had failed to reach the airport by 3:20. It had gone on the next plane to St. Louis but had missed the connecting flight to Dallas and was still in St. Louis. The best that could be done now was an 11:00 A.M. flight, to reach Dallas by 12:30, and then a Trans-Texas connection at 2:30, to reach Austin at 3:30. “No,” Johnson said. “That won’t do. That means it won’t get here till 4:30. Too late for installation tonight. Well, you let me worry about that. You just make sure it’s on that eleven-o’clock flight to Dallas and I’ll take care of the rest. Thank you.”

Johnson then called the head of American Airlines in Dallas, who offered to meet the 12:30 plane and fly the package straight to the ranch in his private plane. The package thus arrived at 2:00 P.M.; Johnson’s entire crew was standing by. It took five hours to assemble the parts. Johnson supervised, running from one field to another, testing each pump. The sweat poured from his face and arms. It was 90 degrees in the shade. Finally, the job was done. A triumphant Johnson came back to the house for a drink. Standing on the porch overlooking his land, he turned to me and said: “What a great day. Now for the first time I’ve got reasonable confidence I’m not going to fail. We will have two hundred head of cattle, well fed and ready to sell by October. It’s going to work. Thank God. I feel better tonight than I can remember feeling in a long time.”

If the memoirs had been evaded by this frenzied absorption in the operation of the ranch, history became comically reduced to a constant and watchful eye on the birthhouse. In afternoon walks to the birthhouse, Johnson liked to check the different license plates to see how many states were represented; he seemed to get a great deal of pleasure from the knowledge that people were coming from all over to see this memorial to his childhood. Sometimes he’d count the number of cars and then figure out how typical that figure was for that time of year and what could be expected at that rate for the annual number. He wanted more people to see his birthhouse than any other presidential home. Every week he required written reports from the people operating the birthhouse, which assumed a standard form: “The attendance this week was (2,828), average of 404 per day. Admission receipts (728), 100 per day; book receipts (223); postcards (213); total (1164). Expenses: Wages to 8 employees (481).”

On one of our frequent visits to the birthhouse down the road he confronted the woman in charge with the latest memo. “How do you explain the difference in attendance figures and admission receipts?” “Well, sir,” she said, “some people come in through the gate, walk up to the house, take a picture, and go away. And some send their children in while they wait outside.” “No good,” Johnson responded. “Why don’t you collect at the gate or say all children must be accompanied by an adult? We’ve got to make ends meet, you know.” Then, turning to me: “You see, I care about making money there because I want to take the money and raise the salary of the girls to two dollars an hour. I’d like to do it now, but I can’t, because I’ve got to build up a reserve in the summer, when attendance is good, to hold us through the lean months of winter.”

On the ranch, as in the White House, the people who worked for him learned to anticipate his desires. When the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library opened, Johnson repeatedly said that he wanted more people to come to it than had come to any other presidential library in the country. He pleaded with his staff to open the doors early in the morning and keep them open late at night. Asked to supply daily attendance figures, knowing that Johnson would be angry at them if the figures were low, the staff—in a painful similarity to another staff in another place—tended, gradually at first and then more and more regularly, to escalate the body count.

Through the license plates and the attendance reports, Johnson seemed to be searching for hints of his fate; the number of visitors serving as a finger in the wind, suggesting which way the historical breeze was going to blow.

I often accompanied him on the afternoon walks. Once we saw a young black boy at the gate, standing with his mother. Johnson went up to the boy and asked him how old he was and where he lived. He was seventeen and lived in Waco. The boy was thin, with short cropped hair and large ears. He had on a striped blue and white T shirt and dungarees. In his hand he was holding a little booklet describing the birthhouse. “Well,” Johnson said, waving his arms, “maybe someday all of us will be visiting your house in Waco.” The boy wasn’t quite sure what Johnson meant by this. Neither was I. But Johnson went on. “You see, we’ll all be visiting Waco someday because you’ll be the President and your home will be a national museum just as mine is. It’ll take a while, but it’ll happen, you’ll see. In fact, we might have seen it in my lifetime if it hadn’t been for all that crazy rioting which almost ruined everything. You got off on the wrong track. That’s the damn shame of it. The wrong track. But the progress we made will continue anyhow. You’ll see. And someday Waco will be a President’s home.”

The boy looked stunned through the whole harangue. One moment Johnson had elevated him to the Presidency, the next moment he was yelling at him for getting off on the wrong track. By the end of Johnson’s talk, the boy’s face, which had momentarily lighted up at the thought of being President, had absolutely no expression at all. Then Johnson turned to the mother: “Now you better get that home of yours cleaned up spick-and-span. There’ll be hundreds of thousands coming through it, you know, wanting to see the bedroom and the kitchen and the living room. Now I hope you get that dust rag of yours out the minute you get home.” At that point, the boy smiled faintly; it was now the mother who looked stunned.

The longer we stood there, the more uncomfortable I felt. I felt as if I were participating in a show rather than witnessing a conversation, a show in which the boy and his mother were the props and I was the audience. The conversation was a routine, almost a vaudeville act. The tone was abstract and silly, even dehumanizing. Yet so strong was Lyndon Johnson’s narcotic effect that I simply stood there and said absolutely nothing.

This scene was evocative of countless scenes of Johnson’s life. In an African hut he had found in an African mother the same determination and will he had seen in his own mother. In Cotulla he had told children whose parents could not vote that they, too, might rise to the top of the American system. To these poor Mexicans he had given foreign aid out of his own pocket, set the goals and engineered the means. As always, the intensity of his conviction and the understanding of his own capacities were his source of persuasive power. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he repeated again and again.

“All my life I built around a series of truisms from the Bible, folklore, honor your father and mother. The good Lord endowed me with a wonderful constitution, twenty hours a day; I was plenty sturdy and tough, I had reasonable perception and astuteness, I was not a temple of wisdom or a fountain of justice, but I could comprehend things. No one ever said I was a goddamn boob, no one from Bobby up or down ever said that. I felt I could comprehend things; I had enough organizing talents, awareness of history, tradition. But the real payoff, three chances on the slot machine, which contributed more to the successes I had was the belief that where there was a will there was a way. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. Pure will power and determination. Just like here at the ranch: be the first man all week on the pipe, carry the end pipe, the heavy one, in your slippers if necessary, with sheer guts, sheer will power, and finally you’ll get your own boots.”

Yet no amount of determined thought nor even the ranch—where his power was more absolute than ever before—could protect Johnson from the harsh judgments he received in his final years from the outside world. He agonized over reports in the papers about the course of the war in Vietnam and the fate of the Great Society. One of those days, as we have seen, he evoked the image of a starving woman to describe President Nixon’s devastating impact on his Great Society. “And when she dies,” he concluded, “I, too, will die.”

On January 20, 1973, Nixon was inaugurated for a second term. The next day a cease-fire was announced in Vietnam—the long war was finally coming to an end. Later that day a new Nixon plan was announced for the dismantling of the Great Society.

The following day, on January 22, 1973, Lyndon Johnson had what was diagnosed as a fatal heart attack. He had been alone in his bedroom taking his afternoon nap. Lady Bird was in Austin and his daughters were away. At 3:50 P.M. he had called the ranch switchboard and asked his Secret Service men to come at once. Before they reached his room, he had died.