27
AS THE PACE OF THE 1955 session had accelerated and, with the increased press and public focus on Lyndon Johnson’s role as Leader, the stakes had grown larger (and, with each success, the expectations for further successes—and the danger of resultant disappointment and criticism—had become greater), the frantic quality to Johnson’s efforts had intensified. His days grew longer. His alarm was set for 7:30 a.m., but he was almost always awake when it went off; it wasn’t an alarm that was jerking Lyndon Johnson out of sleep. Often the long black limousine would be pulling away from Thirtieth Place by eight o’clock, with Johnson in the back seat dictating to Mary Rather and leafing through the morning newspapers at the same time. And no matter how early he arrived in 231, the morning was never long enough for all the private meetings that senators had requested, for all the telephone calls that had to be made or answered. Every time Walter Jenkins appeared in the doorway of the inner office, more pages of the yellow legal pad he held in his hand would be filled with urgent requests for a moment of the Leader’s time. There were committee meetings at which he had to put in appearances. Afternoons were spent in the unremitting tension of the Chamber and the cloakroom, every minute seemingly filled with a task that couldn’t be postponed. Lunch would often be a hamburger, placed on his office desk by Mary or Ashton as he was talking to someone in person or on the telephone. He would gobble a bite or two, put it down, resume talking—sometime later, cold now, the rest of the hamburger might be eaten, or it might not. Or Jenkins would bring a hamburger to the cloakroom and hand it to him, and as he talked Johnson would absentmindedly put it down on the little desk along the wall. An hour or two later, the Leader’s hamburger would still be sitting there. One day, Johnson ordered his staff to set aside an hour for a late lunch at the conference table in his private office with Arthur Krock. The Times columnist was very important to him, but as he was leaving the Senate floor, a matter unexpectedly arose that required him to stay to resolve it, and he arrived a half hour late. He had instructed Jenkins that he was not to be interrupted except for calls that simply could not wait. During the lunch, there were eight such calls, three of them on matters sufficiently complicated so that, as Krock put it, “it was essential to talk at length.” Johnson would return to the table, resume talking to Krock. Suddenly, he would remember something he had forgotten to say—some instruction he had forgotten to give, some instruction he had given that might be misunderstood without further explanation. In the middle of a sentence, or a bite, he would jump up, grab the phone, make sure everything was clear, every base covered. And then Jenkins was buzzing in to say that the important delegation he had agreed to see had already been waiting in the outer office for some time, and the lunch had to be ended, half the meal uneaten.
Trying to cram everything in, he would run from place to place. “More than once I saw him literally run the few steps from a doorway in the Senate Office Building to his car waiting at the curb,” Ashton Gonella would recall. As he was managing a Senate debate, the car would be waiting outside in the portico beneath the Senate steps, and his driver, Norman Edwards, would often have the motor running, for there was no time: “for a 3:30 plane, he left at 3:30,” with Ashton or Mary Margaret Wiley or Jenkins on the phone to the airport to ask them to hold the flight until he got there—“Senator Johnson is on his way.”
When the Senate recessed, at 6 p.m. or later, it was across the Capitol—often at a dogtrot—to the Board of Education, and then back to G-14, to put on the day’s events the spin he wanted for the voracious journalists waiting there. And before he went home, there would be the next day’s session to arrange. “It has become almost a commonplace for friends to receive telephone calls from him as late as ten o’clock at night and to find that he was still at his Capitol Office,” Robert Albright was to write. One evening in June, he didn’t arrive home until after midnight. So ashen was he with fatigue that Lady Bird took one look at him, told him to get into bed, and brought dinner to him on a tray. And the nights were not for sleeping; in Walter Jenkins’ recollection, there was hardly one now during which his telephone did not ring at least once. And in other houses in quiet Washington neighborhoods, too, in the homes of senators as well as staffers, a phone would ring in the early-morning darkness and a man, jolted out of sleep, would reach groggily for the phone, to hear the Leader’s voice on the line.
The antidotes with which he tried to relieve the tension he took with a frenzied compulsiveness. His secretaries were still mixing his drinks weak, but, coming back to G-14 after the Senate recessed for the day, sinking into the big chair and having a glass placed in his hand, he would throw back his head, empty the glass in a single gulp, immediately hold it out and rattle the ice cubes for another Cutty Sark and soda, and another and another. More and more, the man who wanted never to be “out of control” because of drinking was out of control. Nicotine was, as always, the antidote he relied on most. His fingers were stained yellow with it; no matter how often Ashton and Mary Margaret emptied the ashtrays in his office, they were soon filled again; there was a feverish impatience in the way in which, in the middle of a tense conversation, he would reach for the open pack on his desk, pull out a cigarette, and fumble to light it; sometimes, sitting in one of the soft armchairs in the cloakroom, he would light a fresh cigarette and bend low over it, inhaling deeply as he took the first, long drag. Smoking was not allowed in the Senate Chamber: if Johnson had to be present, but didn’t have to be at his desk, he would stand in the rear of the Chamber, just in front of the cloakroom doors, with his hand cupped around a hidden cigarette.
He was too wound up to stop talking, and, at dinner parties at which the drinks were not mixed weak, all inhibition was gone. Russell Baker was to describe him at one party—four or five tables, guests of the Dean Acheson and Abe Fortas caliber—in the garden of William White’s home, “chain-smoking one cigarette on top of another and pouring down Scotch whiskey like a man who had a date with a firing squad. During the drinking hour before dinner, I watched him taking in rivers of smoke and whiskey and waving his hands and weaving his long, skinny torso this way and that, all the while talking nonstop to a group of four or five who seemed enthralled by the performance.”
Baker, who had recently returned from a stint with the Baltimore Sun’s London bureau, was seated next to Johnson at dinner. “As food arrived, he stubbed out a cigarette, lit another, finished his Scotch, called for another, and asked how the House of Commons compared” with the Senate. When Baker replied that he had been “surprised” at the lack of “debates in the Senate,” Johnson, who “had taken only two or three mouthfuls of food…shoved his plate aside, stubbed out his cigarette in the food, lit another smoke, drained his whiskey, and called for another.” He gave Baker a lecture. “Speechmaking didn’t count for anything when it came to passing bills, he said. What mattered was who had the votes…. ‘You want to hear a speech? I can get somebody to make any kind of speech you want to hear. What kind of speech do you want?…You want to hear a great speech about suffering humanity? I’ve got Hubert Humphrey back in the cloakroom. I’ve got Herbert Lehman. I’ve got Paul Douglas…. You want to hear about government waste? I can give you Harry Byrd….’” And all the time Lyndon Johnson was talking, Baker was to say, he never stopped smoking and drinking, ignoring the rest of his dinner, waving away dessert, stubbing out cigarette after cigarette in his food, motioning for another drink again and again. “I had seen people smoke and drink dinner before,” Baker was to say, but Lyndon Johnson “did it like a man trying to kill himself.”
When he ate at home, Johnson’s dinners were usually the heavy southern staples he preferred, and he insisted that the portions be big—huge heaps of black-eyed peas and tapioca pudding—and he shoveled the food into his mouth, head bent low over his plate, so greedily that even the adoring Bobby Baker said he ate “like a starving dog.” While he may have been “skinny” at White’s dinner party, during the 1955 session his weight rose with almost incredible rapidity—from the 185 pounds it had been when he returned from his annual checkup at the Mayo Clinic in February to 195, to 200, to 210, 220, 225.
EVERY PREVIOUS CRISIS in Lyndon Johnson’s career had been accompanied by a crisis in his health—and in every crisis he had refused to allow the illness to interfere, had refused so successfully that colleagues and friends and assistants had scarcely believed in the illnesses, had felt he must be exaggerating them, since if they were genuine, how could he possibly keep working so hard, keep driving himself so mercilessly: how could a man have such energy if there was something seriously wrong with him?
For weeks during his first, desperate campaign as an unknown candidate for Congress in 1937, he had complained of severe stomach cramps, often doubling over in pain. He couldn’t eat; every time he tried, he gagged or vomited. But he refused to cancel a single speech, drove every day for hours over bumpy Hill Country roads—had kept campaigning at the pace that made tough Ed Clark say, “I never thought it was possible for anyone to work that hard”—and his aides had stopped taking the complaints seriously. And then, during a speech two days before the election, he could no longer, even by holding on to a railing in front of him, stay on his feet, and he consented at last to be taken to a hospital, where doctors, rushing him to an operating table, found his appendix on the point of rupturing.
During his second desperate campaign—the “last chance,” “all or nothing” gamble he had taken against the seemingly invincible Coke Stevenson in 1948—the depth of Lyndon Johnson’s need to succeed, and of his determination to do so, had once again been illuminated by the way he dealt with illness. He began that campaign suffering from an infected kidney stone. Not only did it produce a 104-degree fever and make it impossible for him to eat, forcing him to vomit over and over until finally he could only retch because there was nothing left in his stomach, but it also caused pain—gripping, radiating cramps in the back, groin, and testicles—that physicians describe as “agonizing” and “unbearable,” classifying it as one of the most intense pains a human being can suffer. One of his doctors would say that he “didn’t know how in the world a man could keep functioning in the pain that he was in.” But Lyndon Johnson, bearing the unbearable, not only kept functioning, he kept campaigning, day after day driving hundreds of miles between Texas towns and cities, walking the streets for hours shaking hands, making speech after speech, and although, while lying on the back seat of his car, racked with fever and chills, he would gasp in agony, and in bathrooms he would double over, clutching his groin and panting for breath, he never cut a line out of a speech or left a hall afterwards without shaking, with a smile, the hand of every person who wanted to shake his hand. And when, finally forced into a hospital, he was told by doctors that the danger of permanent damage to his kidneys was very real, that an immediate operation was imperative—that postponing the operation in the hope that the stone might pass naturally could prove fatal—Lyndon Johnson nonetheless insisted on postponing it because the operation, and the six-week recovery period, would have brought his campaign, and perhaps his career, to an end, costing him his last chance. He waited for three days, each day the doctors warning him he must wait no longer, and finally insisted, against their advice and against prevailing medical practice because of the great risks involved, that they attempt a still-experimental procedure to avoid the operation—insisted with an implacability that raises inescapably questions whose answers lie buried within Lyndon Johnson’s labyrinthine personality: whether, if he didn’t attain his goal, he didn’t care what happened to him; which choice he would make, if the choice lay between death and failure.
And now, in 1955, as the stakes grew higher, there were again warnings of illness—this time of illness even more serious than an infected kidney stone. And again Lyndon Johnson refused to let them interfere.
LOOKING BACK LATER, colleagues could see how clear the warnings had been. But at the time, the warnings were ignored, ignored not only by other men but by Lyndon Johnson himself—although fear of a heart attack had been one of the great constants in Lyndon Johnson’s life.
In May, while managing a foreign affairs bill on the Senate floor, he suddenly clutched his chest for a moment, but when he was asked if anything was wrong, he said impatiently that he merely had a touch of indigestion. Then on Saturday, June 18, he and George Smathers were scheduled to drive down to Brown & Root’s Virginia estate, Huntlands. They had lunch in the Senate Dining Room, where, Smathers was to recall, “he ate his usual double meal and gulped the food,” and got into the big limousine which Norman Edwards was driving. They had just crossed the Memorial Bridge into Virginia when Johnson clutched his chest, and “gasped out, ‘It’s killing me. I’ve got indigestion.’” He had Edwards pull over at a gas station and bring him a Coca-Cola, Smathers says, “but even after he drank it, he didn’t feel better,” and Smathers says, he was still complaining about the pain during a dominoes game at the Brown estate.
“Finally, he went to bed, and the next morning he said he was better,” Smathers recalls. “But he didn’t look better.” When Smathers asked him to see a doctor, however, “he kept saying, ‘No—no,’ as though I was looking for trouble.” He did, in fact, submit to a cursory examination by the Capitol physician, Dr. George Calver, on Monday, but nothing wrong was found, and Johnson’s pace only intensified, although several times each day he would say he felt very tired, statements discounted by whoever heard them because the pace of his activities never slackened. Sometime in late June, telling two or three reporters about his fatigue, he said that he had had a bad pain and “a flutter” in his chest the last time he had had sexual intercourse with Lady Bird. “All I could think was, Who the hell would say something like that,” one of the reporters recalls. “Nobody took it [the symptoms] seriously.” On Friday, July i, the eve of the Fourth of July weekend, George Reedy told John Steele that he felt Johnson was “near the edge of sheer exhaustion,” and that evening, when Johnson went out to dinner with Sam Rayburn and Stuart Symington (Rayburn was trying to effect a rapprochement between the two men), Rayburn became worried. “He [Johnson] seemed very tense, seemed to want to talk politics all during dinner,” Symington was to say. “He was uptight.” Rayburn took the two senators home in his limousine, and after they dropped Johnson off, said to Symington, “He just can’t think, eat or drink anything except the problems he has as Majority Leader. He won’t relax.”
The next day, Saturday, July 2, Johnson was again to go to Huntlands for the weekend, and it had been arranged that Posh Oltorf would drive him down with George and Alice Brown on Saturday morning, but there turned out to be too many things to be done before he could leave, and he said Norman would drive him down later in the day.
A score of urgent senatorial matters that he had not been able to attend to during the week had to be resolved (one, involving Senator Francis Case, resulted in four separate visits from Case to G-14 that morning), and during the course of the morning Johnson made seven other telephone calls on Senate business—and there was also a trip to his tailor, Sam Scogna, that in its own way was urgent, too, since thanks to the thirty-five or forty pounds he had put on in the last five months, his suits no longer fit, and he was being measured for two new ones—one dark blue, one brown, both double-breasted and cut very full. He had told Reedy to have reporters from the three wire services in G-14 at three o’clock for a briefing, out of which Johnson was hoping for articles summing up the Senate’s accomplishments thus far in the session and making it clear that there would be more accomplishments, as major bills still before the various committees began to emerge onto the floor. The beat of one of the reporters, John Chadwick of the Associated Press, included the Judiciary Committee, however, and Chadwick brought up a bill Johnson had been hoping the press would ignore: proposed liberal legislation to alter the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Johnson replied curtly. “Still in committee.”
Chadwick, a soft-spoken, notably well-mannered journalist, waited until Johnson had finished discussing the status of other bills, and then returned to the subject, saying, as he was to recall, “Can’t you tell us anything about the immigration bill?” and when Johnson replied, “I told you I don’t know anything about that—it’s still in committee,” said, “Well, what’s the difference between that bill and all these other bills you’ve been telling us about? They’re still in committee, too.” With a violence that another journalist present, William Theis of International News Service, was to say “shocked” the reporters—“I’d never seen him lose his cool in public in a way like that”—Johnson shouted: “Goddamn you, don’t you ever tell me how to answer questions! You can get the hell out of here!”
Theis, who felt Johnson was “obviously not well, out of control,” says he “just blew his stack completely.” The other reporters defended their colleague for a moment, saying there had been nothing improper about his question, and then, in Theis’ words, “broke the thing up right away,” and left Johnson’s office.
Stalking out a few minutes later, Johnson went down to the senators’ private dining room. Seeing Mike Monroney having lunch there alone, he joined him, bolted down a plate of frankfurters and beans, and half a cantaloupe, and got into his limousine. There was one more stop to be made: at the Mayflower, for a visit to Walter George, who had been confined to his apartment with a respiratory infection—and it was a quarter to five before Johnson came out, climbed into the back seat of the big limousine, and told Edwards to head for Huntlands. He was alone except for the chauffeur: Lady Bird was later to say that she had remained behind because Saturday was Lucy’s birthday and was planning to come down on Sunday.
“I remember it suddenly began to seem terribly close, and I told Norman to turn on the air conditioner,” Johnson was to say. “He said it was already on, and I said to turn it on full steam, and he said it was already on full steam, and was getting very cold.”
He was late, Johnson was to say, “and I was trying to make it up, and there was this sense of pressure. My chest hurt.” At first, he was to say, “I thought to myself, if only I hadn’t eaten that cantaloupe at lunch,” and “I belched a little and felt better.” But as the car headed deeper into the Virginia hunt country, “my chest really began to hurt.” It felt, he was to say, “as though there were two hundred pounds on it.”
By the time he arrived, George Brown was taking a nap, and Posh and Alice were leaving to take a swim in a neighbor’s pool. When they asked him to come with them, he said he didn’t feel well, that, Oltorf recalls, “he had terrible indigestion” and “heartburn.” They brought him some baking soda, and he said he felt better and would lie down on a couch in the living room and take a nap, too. As he was lying there, however, “I got this feeling that I couldn’t breathe,” he was to say. When Posh and Alice returned, George met them at the door. “Lyndon is sick,” he said. He had given him more baking soda, “but he says he’s got these pains, and I’m worried about him. It might be his heart.” At this time, Clinton Anderson, who was on his way to a friend’s house in Virginia, dropped by. Lyndon tried to tell Anderson he had indigestion, but Anderson had had a heart attack, and when Johnson mentioned the pressure on his chest and said that his arms felt “heavy,” he said “Lyndon, I think you may be having a coronary.” He should see a doctor at once, he said.
Johnson’s reaction was rage. “He was furious about that,” Anderson was to say. “He didn’t want any doctor…. He knew there was a story coming out in the Washington Post about him as a possibility for the presidency. He didn’t want to knock it in the head, kill it right at the beginning.” When Anderson told Brown that a doctor should be called, Brown said, “Now, Clint, Lyndon doesn’t want us to do that.” As Anderson detailed the similarities between Johnson’s symptoms and those of a heart attack victim, Johnson became, in Oltorf’s words, “more and more frantic.” But Anderson insisted that a doctor be called, and Oltorf, who had of course spent a lot of time in the area, at Longlea, located one, James Gibson of Middleburg, and after Gibson had examined Johnson he told him that he had the symptoms of a heart attack, “and a bad one.” The doctor said that there were no local facilities to treat it properly. He knew Johnson was in a great deal of pain, he said, but he suggested that Johnson try to get back to Washington. “You’ll probably go into deep shock in about an hour and a half,” the doctor said, “which just gives us time to get you back into town.” That would be the best course, he said, “if you feel like you can do it.”
AND THEN POSH OLTORF, who had known Lyndon Johnson so long, saw, for the first time, the true strength of Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson’s usual reaction to physical danger, real or imagined, and to minor pain or illness, was dramatic; at San Marcos, he had had the reputation of being “an absolute physical coward,” and all during his life after college, whenever he had encountered minor physical problems—the only physical problems Oltorf had ever seen him encounter—he had become “frantic.”
But there had been other episodes in his life, episodes that Oltorf had not witnessed. To avoid service in a combat zone during the war, Lyndon Johnson, a reserve officer, had spent months traveling up and down the West Coast on an ostensibly Navy-ordered tour on which the Navy often could not even find out where he was. But when inquiries from constituents and reporters made it imperative that he at least give the appearance of entering a combat zone, he persuaded President Roosevelt—“for the sake of political future,” as one of Roosevelt’s aides wrote—to send him to Australia as an “observer.” And when, in Australia, he realized that he could not, “for the sake of political future,” return without at least saying that he had witnessed combat, he flew as an observer on a bombing mission on which his bomber was attacked by Japanese Zeroes. It was only a single bombing mission; the next day he left the war zone as quickly as possible. But on that mission, while he was watching Zeroes heading straight at his plane, Lyndon Johnson had not been frantic but “cool as a cucumber.” Although he had avoided for as long as possible being at the scene of battle, once he was at it, his conduct had been calm and courageous, nonchalant in the face of danger. And, of course, when, during the 1937 and 1948 campaigns, there had been not minor sickness but grave illness, and great pain, Lyndon Johnson had not let it interfere with his work. All his life, whenever courage had been needed, it was there. This, now—the pain in his chest, the heaviness in his arms, the words “heart attack”—was what he had always dreaded. But what was required now was calm. And, instantly, there was calm. Oltorf, who had seen Lyndon Johnson “complain so often, and so loudly” about indigestion, now saw a doctor tell Lyndon Johnson that this time the “indigestion” was a heart attack—and Oltorf saw Lyndon Johnson’s demeanor change.
Yes, Johnson told Dr. Gibson, if it was best for him to get to Washington, he could do it. The place to take him, he said, was the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He wanted his people to be at the hospital to meet him, he said, and he told George Brown who they were, and to get them there: Lady Bird; Walter Jenkins; Earle Clements, so that he could give him instructions about the Senate’s upcoming work; George Reedy, to handle the press. He wanted someone he knew—someone responsible to him—with him at all times, and he asked Oltorf to accompany him in the ambulance. When it arrived—Middleburg’s “ambulance” was actually a hearse, with the undertaker driving—the doctor took a seat in front, Johnson lay on the floor in the rear, and Oltorf sat in the rear with him, on a sort of jump seat that pulled out from the wall, “so that I was sitting right over him.”
From that vantage point, Oltorf saw not only calmness but courage. The chest pain would “come and go,” Oltorf recalls, and about halfway to Washington, it got worse. “I can’t stand this pain,” Lyndon Johnson told the doctor. “You’ve got to give me something for it.” The doctor said, “I can give you a shot if you want, but we’ll have to stop, and it’s going to take some time, and time means a lot to you.”
“If time means a lot, don’t stop,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Keep going.”
“It was a very hectic ride,” Oltorf was to say. “It hurt him desperately.” But between bouts of pain, he and Oltorf talked. “It was an amazing conversation,” Oltorf felt. “He was extremely courageous and brave. I always thought, you know, that if he had a toe ache, he’d complain about it…and expect a great deal of sympathy. He was just the opposite with this serious thing.”
Oltorf watched him running over things in his mind. “I think he definitely felt there was a possibility that he’d die before he got there,” Oltorf says, and at one point, “he reached up to me,” and said, “Posh, if something happens, I want to tell you where I think my will is.” He said he thought it was in the bottom drawer of his desk at the radio station in Austin, that he had drawn it up when he went off to war and had not seen it in a long time, but thought that it was there. “If it’s not,” he said, “I just want to tell you what I want. I want Lady Bird to have everything I have…. She’s been a wonderful, wonderful wife, and she’s done so much for me. She just deserves everything I have. That’s what was in my will.”
There was another matter Johnson mentioned, and Oltorf did not allude to it in the oral history he gave the Lyndon Johnson Library, although he included it—or at least part of it—in his interview with the author. “Then he asked me did I ever see Alice [Glass]. That was something he very seldom asked me. And I said [I saw her] off and on. He said, ‘How is she?’ and I said all right, and then he said something I didn’t tell you and I don’t think I’m going to.”
And there was another important matter. “Doctor,” he said, “let me ask you something. Will I be able to smoke again if this is a heart attack?” The doctor said, “Well, Senator, frankly, no,” and Johnson, with what Oltorf recalls as “a great sigh,” said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.”
At the emergency room entrance to Bethesda, attendants lifted Johnson onto a stretcher and carried him into an elevator, which took them up to the seventeenth-floor cardiac treatment section. Lady Bird, Walter Jenkins, and George Reedy were in a waiting room there (Clements had not been located), and they saw Johnson carried past its doorway into an examining room, and doctors took them to the private room he would have as a patient. After about a half hour he was brought in, and lifted onto the bed. “He looked very, very bad,” Walter Jenkins says. Johnson said the doctors had told him he had had a serious heart attack, and that they would be coming to “put him under” in a few minutes. Lady Bird was Lady Bird. “She didn’t break down or cry or carry on or anything of that nature, as some women do,” Jenkins says. “It’s not her nature to do that. She just said, ‘Honey, everything will be all right.’” Johnson told Reedy to notify the press about the attack, and not to minimize its seriousness, to tell them it was “a real bellybuster,” and that Clements would take over for him. He gave Reedy instructions for Clements. He told Jenkins “where his will was” and reminded him about the cash in the secret compartment in his desk, and told him to give it to Lady Bird. “I really felt that he did not think he would live through the night,” Jenkins would recall. “He was preparing himself for not being there anymore….”
He told Lady Bird to stay with him in the hospital, not to leave him. He handed her his wallet and keys. He mentioned the two suits he had ordered that morning. “Tell him to go ahead with the blue,” he said. “We can use that no matter what happens.” He asked for a cigarette, and when Lady Bird said he couldn’t smoke anymore, he said if he could have one last cigarette, he would never have another. Someone handed him one. “It was very sensuous,” Mrs. Johnson recalls. “He looked at it like, ‘This is the dearest thing.’” Then he went into shock. Mrs. Johnson saw him turn gray, “just about the color of pavement.” He was “motionless as stone and cold to touch.” After a while, the doctors came to see her. They said her husband had had a very serious heart attack, that his chances were fairly good, but that only time would tell. The first twenty-four hours, they said, would be critical.