28

Memories

LYNDON JOHNSON HAD SUFFERED a myocardial infarction, the death or damage (infarction) of part of the muscular substance of the heart (myocardium) because the flow of blood to the heart had been interrupted by a blockage of an artery.

He was kept sedated for forty-eight hours, but there were intervals of consciousness, during one of which it became apparent that sedation had not dulled his ability to obtain information that someone did not want to give him. Lady Bird may have been determined not to let him know the doctors’ estimate of his chances of survival during this initial period following the attack, but he got the information from her anyway. She had been sitting almost constantly at his bedside, but she left the room for a few minutes, and when she returned, he spoke as if doctors had visited him during her absence.

“I’ve just heard the bad news,” he said.

“What news? What do you mean?” she said.

“I know the doctors feel I only have one chance in ten of pulling through.”

“Nonsense!” she blurted out. “They say it’s fifty-fifty.”

With this type of heart attack, however, the patient’s chance of survival increases dramatically with each day he survives without another attack and without increased damage to the heart from the first attack, and by the fourth day, although he was still permitted no visitors other than his wife, doctors told the press that while the Majority Leader had suffered “a myocardial infarction of a moderately severe character,” X-rays had shown no further damage to the heart, “his condition is stabilized,” and “he is resting comfortably.” “He was quite critically ill following the attack, but his recovery has been satisfactory,” they said. Any immediate return to work was out of the question, the statement said. “He cannot undertake any business whatsoever for a period of months. However, if there are no further attacks of a severe character and his recovery continues to be satisfactory, he should be able to return to the Senate in January.”

The damage to his chances of reaching his great goal appeared for some time, however, to be as severe as he had feared it would be when Clinton Anderson had first told him he was having a coronary.

“The immediate political casualty of the Majority Leader’s heart attack is the Johnson boom for President,” which previously “had been coming along on schedule,” Doris Fleeson wrote, and in the days following the Fourth of July weekend, the prevailing view in newspaper articles and columns was that the damage might well be permanent. A headline over an Associated Press analysis said “HEART ATTACK DROPS JOHNSON FROM WHITE HOUSE HOPEFULS,” and in an era before the later dramatic advances in the understanding and treatment of heart disease, that analysis did not apply merely to 1956. “Although when he recovers he may have a long and useful life as a senator, uncertainty is the greatest certainty about the life of a man who has had an attack,” the article declared. “Anyone who has had an attack and seeks the presidency starts under a political handicap: the voters are conscious of the risk in picking him over an opponent who has never had his first heart attack.” Johnson’s attack therefore “just about eliminates the 46-year-old Texan” permanently “from consideration as a presidential candidate.” Some journalists speculated that the attack might eliminate him from the leadership as well. While the doctors had said Johnson should be able to return to the Senate, they had declined to express such optimism about a return to the leadership; “It might be six months before it would be possible to say whether he could resume the leadership,” one of his physicians said. The AP said it is “questionable that when he returns his doctors will let him resume as Senate leader, preferring he go back to the less demanding role of senator.”

Lyndon Johnson fell into a depression. The doctors had told Walter Jenkins and George Reedy that depression was common among heart attack victims, but they also told the two aides that this one seemed unusually severe. Jenkins says he understood why: “He felt… if he had any chance to be President or Vice President or something, that this had ended it…. He became quite despondent at times.” Neither antidepressant medication nor the arrival of his mother (whose trip to Washington was her first airplane flight) seemed to help. For some days, he lay in his bed—“just wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t have anything to do with [anyone],” in Jenkins’ words—while his centrality in his assistants’ lives was dramatized. Bobby Baker got the news over the telephone at the New Jersey seashore, where he was vacationing with friends. Returning from the telephone, he was, recalls one friend, “white as a sheet. ‘The Leader’s had a heart attack,’” he said. Rushing to Bethesda, he was told that Johnson was allowed no visitors except Lady Bird. He went down to the lobby and waited—day after day. “For almost ten days I stayed at the hospital almost around the clock, leaving only to grab a few random hours of sleep and to take showers,” he was to recall. “Though there was little I could do, I felt it my duty to be there.” Once he went down to the Capitol to see Sam Rayburn, seeking solace, but didn’t get any: “Speaker Rayburn was disconsolate and near tears.” And when, finally, some days after Baker had returned to work at the Capitol, Lady Bird telephoned to say that Lyndon wanted to see him, Baker found “a quiet and sober man who talked of how close he’d come to death, of how he would be forced to curtail his activities, and of how he might no longer be able to act as Senate Majority Leader.” Saying he might resign from the Senate, he asked Baker if he would resign, too, and manage a radio station in Brownsville he was thinking of buying. “You’re my Leader, and I’ll follow where you lead,” Baker replied.

And then, one day, Reedy’s telephone rang and it was Jenkins. “For the love of God, do you know what’s happening?” Walter asked him, and told him to go to the hospital, and Reedy recalls, “When I got to the hospital, I couldn’t believe it!”

Letters—almost four thousand of them—had been pouring into Johnson’s office from friends and the public, and Lady Bird had been reading them to him. For days, Johnson had shown little response. And then one morning, immediately upon awakening, he had told Lady Bird that he wanted the letters answered—all of them, each answered not with a form letter but with a personalized note. Lady Bird should send handwritten notes to personal friends, he said, and as for the rest—he told her to have Booth Mooney come to the hospital, and when Mooney arrived, “he had a project for me,” a project Mooney was to call “Project Impossible.”

“We’re going to answer all of them,” Johnson said. “Every one has to have a personal reply.” And when Mooney, “aghast—four thousand letters”—tried to protest, saying that “all the newspaper people know you’re not up to dictating letters; it would look fake,” Johnson said he had figured out a way around that problem. The letters would be signed by Lady Bird, he said; Mooney would dictate them at the office, and after they had been typed, would bring them out to the hospital for her to sign. “Make ’em short, just a few lines, but tender and grateful,” Johnson said. And, Johnson said, he had a few letters he wanted to dictate himself; a stenographer should be sent out from his office. By the time Reedy arrived at the hospital, a desk had been set up in Lady Bird’s room next to Lyndon’s, and she was writing at it as fast as she could. “Two or three stenographers” were sitting at the physicians’ station in the corridor, and they were “out there with those typewriters going full blast. He took over the corridor, installed a couple of typewriters there, he was dictating letters, he was just going full speed.”

His physicians, J. C. Cain of the Mayo Clinic and cardiologist Willis Hurst, had prescribed complete rest, with absolutely no excitement, and had banned radio, television, and newspapers from his room. That morning Johnson had told Hurst that he missed country music, and had asked for a radio so he could listen to some. Hurst agreed, on condition that Johnson not listen to any news broadcasts. Once he had the radio, of course, Johnson listened only to the news, switching from station to station. One radio was not enough; he got a second, a small transistor with earphones, so that he could listen to two newscasts at once. And when a newscaster’s wording did not please him, he shouted back at the radio, and, as Reedy put it, “his nurses reported that they almost immediately acquired larger vocabularies.” A television set was installed in his room; a visitor found him “simultaneously watching TV, listening to the news through an earphone receiver on a tiny transistor radio, and carrying on a lively conversation with a nurse.” Visitors from the political world had also been banned, but Johnson insisted that Reedy and Jenkins be constantly on call, and then Rayburn was sent for, and Russell, and Earle Clements. The Senate wasn’t doing much in his absence, but, Jenkins says, “he really kept his oar in in the sense of being certain that he understood what was going on.” (Not that, as Reedy explains, Clements was trying to make the Senate do much; “By that time the Lyndon Johnson legend had become so overpowering that I pity anybody that had to step into his shoes.”) Baker was sent for again, and this time when he arrived his Leader was the Leader again, “demanding that I bring him all the news and gossip. Who was absent from roll calls? Who’d been drunk recently? Tell Senator Kerr this. Tell Speaker Rayburn that. Bring me a copy of this committee report or that Congressional Record. Johnson seemed pleased when I told him that not much was happening in the Senate, that it was conducting a mere holding action until he could return to work.” One day, Baker was rushing down the seventeenth-floor corridor toward Johnson’s room, his arms filled with papers he had demanded, when he encountered Rayburn, who had just been in to visit the patient. “His old face split into a rare grin,” Baker recalls. “I’m happy to see you taking him all that work,” the Speaker said. “It would kill him if he relaxed. I know he’s getting better because he fussed at me.” And “Project Impossible” had proved possible after all. On July 18, a Jenkins memo told Johnson: “We in the office know that having all your mail answered means more to you than any gift which we would give you. Therefore we have stayed here tonight to see that every letter is answered and filed. I am glad to report all of the letters about your illness—almost 4,000 to date—have now been answered.” Johnson had also decided to have letters written to the publishers of every newspaper that had carried a complimentary editorial about him during his illness, and to have those editorials inserted in theCongressional Record. That also had been done. More and more visitors came—including some from the GOP, like Knowland and Bridges. Dr. Hurst had tried to set a limit on the number of visitors per day, but when he told Johnson that the limit had been exceeded, Johnson replied, “Oh, now, look, Doctor, you’re not going to count Republicans, are you?” One day, the door opened, and the President was standing there, his great smile beaming into the room. “Why, Lyndon,” Ike said, “you look a lot better than I thought you would.” The Vice President came, for what had been intended as a brief visit but which lasted for more than an hour, as Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson fell into a serious conversation, one that was to mark the beginning of a close relationship between the two future presidents which is only now beginning to be glimpsed by historians. One rule on which Hurst had insisted was that no more than two visitors be in Johnson’s room at a time, and one day Harry Byrd sat patiently on a bench in the seventeenth-floor corridor for more than thirty minutes while Sid Richardson and Richardson’s lobbyist, Bill Kittrell, were talking inside.

Hurst and Cain did not object to Johnson’s activity because, alarmed by the depth of his depression, they had had a long discussion with Lady Bird, and as a result they had a better understanding of their patient, and of his inability to do anything in moderation. “If he was sitting on the porch at the LBJ Ranch whittling toothpicks, he’d have to whittle more than anybody else in the country,” Dr. Cain was to say. They explained to Reedy that, in Reedy’s words, “to cut down his schedule would be worse than adding to it” because “his psychology was such” that the “frustrations” of idleness would be more likely than work to lead to “another heart attack.” And for a while, as he turned the seventeenth floor of the Bethesda Medical Center into an uproar, Lyndon Johnson was his old self. As Jenkins wrote to Mary Rather on July 23: “Mary, you would be real happy if you could see how well the Senator is getting along. He is just as cheerful and chipper as he can be.”

LYNDON JOHNSON’S OLD SELF had been characterized by violent mood swings, however, and they persisted in the hospital, so that from day to day Jenkins and others on his staff would not know whether they would find Johnson cheerful and chipper or lying flat on his back in his bed, speaking only in monosyllables and monotone, unwilling to take an interest in anything anyone told him. One antidote to his depression was the letters and editorials. Sitting next to his bed, Lady Bird read them to him. She put the best of them into acetate sheets in gold-tooled leather scrapbooks, and left them beside the bed. And Lyndon Johnson read them.

He spent hours reading them, reading them, in Reedy’s words, “over and over and over again,” putting his fingers on them as if he needed to touch them, becoming, in Reedy’s words, “absolutely obsessive about them.” In a way, Reedy and Jenkins and Mooney felt, his illness had deepened his lifelong need for reassurance that he was loved, and the letters and editorials seemed to assuage that longing. “There was sort of an unspoken yearning of his that could be felt all the way down to the Senate for that kind of reassurance, and he got it,” Reedy says. “Oh, he was just basking in those letters.”

The Senate had stood for a moment of silent prayer for him on the first day it met following his attack—Herbert Lehman had asked it to do so—and then there had been one laudatory speech about him after another. Lady Bird had told him about these eulogies at the time, but he hadn’t seemed interested. She had put the pages of the Congressional Record containing the speeches in a scrapbook, and now he read them, slowly, carefully, devouring every word. And there were letters from senators. “Give Lyndon my best,” Harry Byrd wrote to Lady Bird. “Tell him the Senate is not the same without him.” The longest letter was from Humphrey, of course; it said in part: “I miss having you get after me; I miss your good humor. Yes, we’re just lonesome for you.” One day, Johnson said with a grin, “Everybody loves Lyndon, I found out.” And then, in a lower, very serious, almost unbelieving tone: “Nobody run out and left me.”

THE OTHER ANTIDOTE was the woman who read him the letters and editorials.

When he had arrived at the hospital that first night, and the doctors were about to put him under, he had said to his wife, in a voice that Walter Jenkins says was the “pleading” voice of “a small boy”: “Stay with me, Bird.” When, the next day, he emerged for a moment from the sedation, he said it again: “Stay with me, Bird.”

She did. She was there, sitting by the bed, when he woke—every time he woke. “Lyndon wanted me around him twenty-four hours a day,” she was to recall, and that was how many hours she was there. “At first,” her friend Ruth Montgomery was to write, “Bird would not leave him even long enough to go out for a meal.” It was a week before her friends Eugene and Ann Worley persuaded her to go out to a restaurant; Ann Worley would never forget how, when Lady Bird first saw them, she said, “optimistically,” as if to convince herself, “Everything’s going to be fine”; she would never forget “how determinedly gay and cheerful Bird was” all that evening; she would never forget the smile that never left her face.

Her husband would remain at Bethesda for five weeks, periodically falling back into that terrible depression, a pit of despair so dark that at times Jenkins “did fear that he would kind of give up, maybe wouldn’t make the effort to [recover]. I thought maybe he would just say, ‘This is it. I’ve had it.’” For a few days, Jenkins says, Johnson would be “all right, but then he’d have these periods.” The doses of “despondency medicine” would resume, “and then he’d be all right for a while, and then he’d have another period of despondency.” During those five weeks, Lady Bird Johnson left the hospital to go to her home—where, of course, there were an eleven-year-old and an eight-year-old daughter living—exactly twice.

DURING THOSE FIVE WEEKS in the hospital, Lyndon Johnson was displaying other characteristics that had been prominent features of his old life.

One was that incredible will. Cigarettes—sixty cigarettes or more each day, lit one from the end of another—had been so desperately important to him for so long. Now Cain and Hurst confirmed what Dr. Gibson had told him in the ambulance: the smoking must stop immediately and completely. Lyndon Johnson tore the wrapper off a pack of cigarettes, opened the pack and pulled one cigarette halfway out of it. Then he put the pack on the night table next to his hospital bed, and the pack stayed there, open but untouched, the cigarette sticking out, for the rest of his hospital stay. When he got home, he put a pack on his night table there, and there would be another one next to his bed on the ranch, and they all remained untouched. Once, in 1958, one of his secretaries, Ashton Gonella, asked him if he didn’t miss smoking. “Every minute of every day,” he replied. But except for occasional lapses—all seem to have involved no more than a cigarette or two—Lyndon Johnson did not smoke another cigarette for fifteen years, not until, in 1970, he had retired from the presidency and was back permanently on his ranch, when he began smoking copiously again.

If there was another substance that had been as important to him as nicotine, it was caffeine. From breakfast, which had often consisted of several cigarettes and several cups of black coffee, through the rest of his day, “he had seemed,” in Jenkins’ words, “to live on cigarettes and coffee.” Now, since caffeine was dangerous for heart attack victims, he was told to cut out caffeinated coffee, too, and he did—completely, drinking only decaffeinated.

He had to cut out a lot more. Excess weight is a burden on the heart, and doctors told him he should weigh about 185, which would mean losing about forty pounds. So he went on a diet—with Johnsonian thoroughness, the thoroughness of a man who believed in doing “everything.” He announced he would lose even more weight than the doctors wanted, saying he would get down below 180, by reducing his daily intake of calories not to the 2,000 the doctors had recommended but to 1,500, and, Reedy says, “he became the god-damnedest diet fanatic that ever lived.” To make sure he kept the calories below that figure, he insisted that on every tray brought to him at the hospital there be a list of the calories in each dish on it. And since studies had begun showing that, as one article put it, “a fatty substance known as cholesterol is suspect in connection with heart disease,” the list must, he said, include a count not only of the calories but of the fat grams in each dish.

The responsibility for the list was assigned to Lady Bird (who for years thereafter would be referred to by some irreverent members of the Johnson staff as “the keeper of the weight”), and her husband tolerated no mistakes. Since he couldn’t seem to make himself eat small portions—although the portions were notably smaller than before—it was important that he eat foods very low in calories, and since a slice of cantaloupe contains only 45 calories, he became, Jenkins says, “a cantaloupe nut.” Once his tray arrived with a slice of watermelon instead, and he asked how many calories it contained, and, as Reedy recalls, “Bird incautiously said 65, and he insisted they look it up,” and when it turned out to contain 145, “you would have thought that the world had come to an end or he’d been betrayed.” Sometimes, determining the fat grams was difficult; “I’m either going to have to turn registered chemist or jump out the window,” Lady Bird said. But his methods worked. “I’ve given up eating and smoking at the same time,” he said, “and if any of you all have tried giving up just one of them, you’ll know how hard [giving up] both could be.” But by the time he left the hospital and returned to Thirtieth Place on August 7—to be greeted by a group of neighbors standing on his front lawn, a “WELCOME HOME” telegram from J. Edgar Hoover, who was out of town, and an enthusiastic welcome from Little Beagle Johnson—he weighed 179.

FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE YEAR, as he rested at his Washington home until August 25, and then, two days before his forty-seventh birthday, went back to the ranch in Texas for a four-month stay, reporters were told that Lyndon Johnson was resting, concentrating on regaining his health, and that he had learned to relax—that he had changed his philosophy of life.

His illness was dramatized with the customary Johnson flair—reporters who interviewed him in Washington and then at the ranch found him talking in slow, calm phrases interrupted by frequent pauses and walking, as one article reported, with “agonizingly slow steps”—but so was the fact that, he said, doctors had assured him that if he took care of himself, he would recover from the illness and be able to return to his duties, to all his duties, “as good as new.” He wanted therefore to create the image of a prudent man taking care of himself, and he made sure reporters understood that he was doing so. He told them how much he had weighed when he had stepped on the scale that morning, emphasized that he was getting his weight down even lower than the doctors had ordered. The doctors had told him to take a nap every day; he took two naps, he said. The doctors had told him to get plenty of sleep at night; “even here,” as one article reported, “he tried to beat par. When the doctor told him to get eight hours sleep a night, Lyndon insisted on getting nine.” And he said he had resolved never to go back to his old driving ways; “I’ve thrown out the whip.” In fact, he said, he had developed a whole new philosophy of life, which was codified in an article, “My Heart Attack Taught Me How to Live” (written by Horace Busby), which appeared over his byline in The American magazine, and in dozens of interviews with reporters.

“During nearly 25 years of political life I drove myself and others at headlong pace,” the article said. “I never learned how to relax.” “Now,” he said, “I’ve got something I never had before in my life—something I always wanted, too—and that is time.” And, he said, he had learned to use that time. “It took a heart attack to make me cut my cloth to the pattern of contentment God has given me, but now I know the lesson well,” he said. “I began consciously looking for some of the good things I had been missing.”

One of those good things, he said, was nature. He loved to walk in plowed fields, “just to feel the dirt under my feet,” he said. He loved to “walk down the road with a view of my fat cows grazing on the one side and my beautiful river flowing on the other.”

Another of the good things—“high on the list of those good things,” he said—“was getting acquainted with my two daughters. They had come to be 11 and 8 years of age, and I hardly knew them at all.” For example, “I had always been too busy to join with the girls in observing their birthdays.” Now, he said, there was time to get to know them, and “I found myself falling into a happy relationship with Lynda Bird and Lucy Baines.” They played dominoes together, “took turns reading aloud from their books,” and he found, he said, “Why, they liked me!” On Sunday mornings, he said, “after a leisurely, chatty breakfast, little Lucy suddenly threw her arms around my neck and hugged me hard. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘it sure is nice to have you around the house so much.’”

He portrayed his new life as one of reading and thoughtful contemplation. Although in truth his refusal to read books was as adamant as ever, plenty were scattered about, some of them open as if he had just put them down, when reporters arrived for interviews. Booth Mooney recalls that “stories began to appear which I scanned in utter disbelief. The Johnson who once had admitted or even boasted that he doubted if he had read as many as half a dozen books all the way through since leaving college was said now to be deep into Plato, not to mention innumerable volumes of American history.” After interviewing Johnson in his bedroom at Thirtieth Place, Mary McGrory reported that “There are books all over the room,” including Plato’s Republic and Machiavelli’s The Prince—“and the Senator is taking the unusual opportunity to do a little reading.” As the months passed, his thirst for the arts appeared to broaden. Arriving at the ranch for an interview in October, Newsweek’s Sam Shaffer found Johnson “sprawled in a hammock, a book on his lap. Strauss waltzes floated into the air from a record player.” As he talked to Shaffer, “He touched the book on his lap, and recalled that he’d always been too busy to read books before; he probably hadn’t read more than six all the way through from the day he left college until the day of the heart attack, and now he was reading that many a week. He listened to the music and said: ‘You know, until the attack, I just never listened to music. I don’t know why. I just didn’t.’” Lady Bird chimed in, telling another reporter that Lyndon was reading “innumerable history and biographies.” He certainly was, Lyndon said: at the moment, he was deep into Douglas Southall Freeman’s massive, three-volume Lee’s Lieutenants and “enjoying it immensely.” And it was wonderful, he said, with a deeply thoughtful expression, to “have time at last just to sit and think.”

The image he wanted was the image he got. Sarah McClendon wrote of his new, “easy-going, relaxed peace.” Mary McGrory, noting that “a man who has been ‘in a hurry all my life’ is learning to slow down,” and that he is “something of a model patient,” added: “It would perhaps be too much to say that the Senator is finding sweet the uses of adversity, but there have been advantages.”

But in reality he wasn’t resting, and he wasn’t relaxing, and he wasn’t at peace. He couldn’t be—particularly not back on the ranch.

He took off, on Wesley West’s private jet (“whose owner he declined to name”), from bustling National Airport outside Washington, but he landed at the tiny Fredericksburg airport, which consisted only of a landing strip, a wind sock, and a shed that was used as an office. There “representatives of both local newspapers and the United Press were on hand to chronicle in story and picture the return home of the famous native son,” and also present was a shocked Mary Rather, who was to recall that, as she watched him come off the plane, “He was the thinnest thing you have ever seen, and his clothes were just hanging on him. And of course Mrs. Johnson looked bad too.” Ranch hands had a station wagon there, and they drove him along the Pedernales Valley, with the houses further and further apart, to the ranch. And there, on the first morning, he was awakened at dawn by the mooing of a cow demanding to be milked, the same sound that had awakened him on the ranch as a boy—and instantly Lyndon Johnson was back in his first home, back ill on the ranch where his father had been ill, and where his father, who had had such great dreams, had failed; back on the ranch where his grandfather, whose saddlebags had once been filled with gold, had come to live out his life in poverty after his great dreams had been brought to nothing; back on the ranch where the heroine Eliza Bunton Johnson, who had dared to ride out ahead of the herd to scout, had come back to live when she was old—old and poor and paralyzed, with a stroke-twisted face that lived in Lyndon’s nightmares. Sometimes in the morning, he would walk along the river to the Johnson family graveyard, and there, under the spreading branches of a big live oak, inside a rickety little fence, were the tombstones: of Eliza Bunton Johnson, Sam Ealy Johnson Sr., and Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. He would stand there for long minutes, staring at the names. And one morning, thinking that no one was watching him, Lyndon Johnson drew with his shoe an X in the ground in that graveyard: the spot for his own grave.

His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, had come back from Washington to live at the ranch that summer, so Lyndon was back with that broken, wretched man. Josefa was living in Fredericksburg, so he was back with the sister who had brought the family into even deeper disgrace. He was back with his mother, who kept telling people how much like his father he was. If he walked past the graveyard, he soon came to the site of the house in which he had been born—on which another battered, ramshackle dog-run cabin now stood. Lyndon Johnson painted, and journalists repainted, a picture of a relaxed, almost idyllic existence on the tranquil banks of the Pedernales, but the reality was far different. “It was way out in the country and it was so quiet and still,” Mary Rather was to recall, and during the first few weeks, “it was a real quiet, long, lonesome, sad kind of a fall.” His nightmares came back, worse than ever.* And not long after his arrival, he fell into a despair deeper even than his despair in the hospital.

FOR A WEEK, Lyndon Johnson sat in the big recliner in the ranch’s rock-walled living room, the chair tilted all the way back so that as he slouched down in it, he was lying almost flat, with his feet at the level of his head. He would sit there for hours, staring at nothing, and saying nothing. When someone—his wife or daughters—attempted to engage him in conversation, he would reply in monosyllables or not at all. Little Beagle Johnson would jump up, and lie in his lap. From time to time, he would lick Lyndon Johnson’s face, wagging his tail frenziedly and barking. There would be no response. As the dog licked his face, his master wouldn’t even move. Dr. Hurst, who had begun to understand his patient, had warned Mary Rather that, in her words, “some days he might want to see the mail that came in, and the next day I might have it all ready for him, and he wouldn’t look at it.” Ms. Rather, who knew the talismanic significance that the mail held for her boss, had not taken Hurst seriously, but the doctor’s prediction turned out to be correct. For a day or two, Johnson refused even to pick up the telephone when Walter Jenkins called to give him the news from Washington. She told Sam Houston, “He’s going into a very deep depression, and we don’t know what it is.”

Sam Houston, who knew his brother so well, knew what it was. “I said, ‘Well, if you had one office you aspired to all your life, and …’” And he knew what the cure was—the only cure. Telephoning the nationally syndicated political columnist Holmes Alexander, a close friend, he asked him to write a column saying that the heart attack would not prevent Lyndon Johnson from becoming President. When Alexander demurred, Sam Houston recalls, “I said, ‘Here I’ve been giving you scoops for years. If you can’t take a chance on helping me save my brother, then the hell with you.’”

Alexander agreed to write it, and on September I, there in the Austin American-Statesman were the magic words: “The Senator is now almost restored in health. He is a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination, either in 1956 or 1960, depending on which is more propitious. It’s hard to see how the party so united in praising him when he was ill, can divide against him now that he’s bushy-tailed and ambitious once more. This may be the first time in history that a man was virtually nominated by his press clippings.” Sam Houston gave the column to his brother as he lay on the recliner, and not long thereafter the beagle jumped up on Lyndon’s lap and went into one of his face-licking, tail-wagging, barking frenzies. And after a while, Lyndon Johnson laughed—the first laugh Mary Rather had heard him utter since he arrived at the ranch—and went for a walk.

And that same day brought another development. At Jim Rowe’s suggestion, Johnson had decided before the heart attack to put on his staff a new assistant, one who would be a living reminder of his early link with Franklin Roosevelt, which Johnson considered essential to mending his fences with liberals. Now that assistant would be a reminder also that Roosevelt had suffered a serious illness but had become President nonetheless. And when Grace Tully arrived in Texas, she knew just what to say. “Many things about the senator reminded her of FDR,” one article reported; for example, Roosevelt had been deeply interested “in conservation and natural resources,” and Johnson’s improvements to his ranch show that he, too, “takes a great interest in the land.” “JOHNSON AIDE SAYS TEXAN is like FDR,” proclaimed a headline in the San Antonio Express.

There would be other spells of depression while Johnson was in Texas, but none as serious as the first one.

DURING LYNDON JOHNSON’S REMAINING MONTHS on the ranch in 1955, there was no recurrence of the heart problem, no pain or any other symptom. The bottle of digitalis, a heart stimulant that doctors had given him in case of another attack, remained unopened next to the pack of cigarettes on his night table. For the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s life, however, he lived in terror of another heart attack. He never wanted to sleep alone, so that there would always be someone to help him if he suffered an attack during the night, and if Lady Bird was away, he would dragoon an aide or a friend into sleeping in the same room with him. Years later, in the White House, asking an assistant, Vicky McCammon, and her husband to stay overnight, he would insist that they sleep in Lady Bird’s dressing room next door to his bedroom; “The only deal is you’ve got to leave your door open a crack so that if I holler someone will hear me.” But that fear wasn’t as strong as the fears, born of his boyhood insecurities and humiliations, that haunted him throughout his life. Now he was back on the ranch that was a constant reminder of those boyhood fears, and he fled from them as desperately as ever—more desperately, in fact.

During the rest of his months on the ranch, the “sad, quiet” spells of depression alternated with periods of frantic activity. During these frenzied periods, he poured himself into recovering his health. Following doctors’ orders to get plenty of rest was easy on the isolated ranch. The Johnsons and their staff kept farm hours, going to sleep at nine and rising early, when the cows started to moo; the rural mail carrier left the mail and the morning newspapers in the box across the Pedernales around 6 a.m., and Mary Rather would walk across the concrete bridge to bring them back. Every afternoon there was the long nap, and Johnson spent a lot of additional time lying in the recliner.

The doctors had told him to relax. Massages relaxed him, so his favorite masseur from the Senate gymnasium, Olaf Anderson, was dispatched to Texas, and installed at the ranch for the duration. The sun relaxed him, so he would spend hours lying in the sun with his shirt off, his pale skin gradually turning bronze. The doctors had told him to get plenty of exercise, and specifically to walk a mile each evening after dinner. Using a pedometer, he measured various walks he might take. The little home of his elderly spinster cousin, Oreole Bunton Bailey, he determined, was just over a half mile away, so if he visited her each evening, he would be doing more than the doctor ordered. Those walks became a legend among Johnson’s staff. “Oh, he loved to talk to Cousin Oreole about old times and kid her about her boyfriends, which she didn’t have, just tease her.” This pastime was less enjoyable to his staffers than to him, but he insisted that everyone accompany him on the walks, and stand around while he shouted at the elderly lady in the faded Mother Hubbard—she appeared to be, Jenkins recalls, “about as stone deaf as you could be”—and then walk back.

For additional exercise, a kidney-shaped swimming pool was built in the front yard of the ranch house. It was a Johnsonian pool—large, nine feet deep at the deep end, expensive, personally supervised (“Every shovelful,” George Reedy says. “That swimming pool became one of the great construction projects of history”), equipped with every technological innovation, including a huge, elaborate heater, kept constantly at full blast, that kept the pool as warm as a bathtub because he did not like cold water (“I myself hated that pool,” Reedy says. “I didn’t go into it unless he absolutely forced me into it, because I want water to be cold”), and surrounded by a lawn of grass as smooth and lush as a carpet. “Telephone outlets make it possible for Johnson … to conduct business neck-deep in the warm water, while piped-in music [from speakers placed in the live oaks] soothes his nerves and those of his guests; and while secretaries and assistants scurry about the pool, obeying an endless stream of instructions,” one visiting journalist reported. Strauss waltzes were played only when journalists were present; at other times the repertoire was strictly “elevator music.” How much exercise the pool gave him is doubtful (aside from a few sidestroke laps every day, he spent most of his time in it in a floating reclining chair, a drink in his hand), but it did give him a new means of control: Reedy at least was tall, other assistants were shorter, and when Johnson was swimming with a shorter assistant, he would wait until the assistant was at the deep end of the pool, and then stop and stand still while he was between the assistant and the shallower water. Years later, five-foot ten-inch Joseph Califano, newly attached to the White House staff, would describe how President Johnson outlined a multi-part domestic program in the pool with “his finger poking my shoulder as though it were punctuating a series of exclamation points.” (“I nodded, treading. He was so close to me, almost nose to nose, that I couldn’t move around him so I could stand on the bottom of the pool. [I was] breathless from treading water as his finger against my shoulder kept pushing me down. Not until months later, as I got to know him, did I realize that for this early exchange Lyndon Johnson had instinctively and intentionally picked a depth of the pool where he could stand and I had to tread water.”) Johnson spent hours lying on an immense chaise lounge that had been placed beside the pool, sipping lemonade made with sugarless sweeteners, and yelling “Bird! Bird!” into an intercom, in a voice that one visitor likened to a “hog call,” whenever he wanted something.

Then there was the diet, and as time passed, it grew increasingly difficult to keep Johnson on it. A dietitian, Juanita Roberts, was brought to the ranch, and installed there, and she devised dishes—a low-fat tapioca pudding made with Sucaryl, for example—with which Johnson could cram himself without ingesting many calories; his weight stayed between 175 and 180. Lady Bird had to supervise this area of his activity, too. “When this is over,” she told a friend, “I want to go off by myself and cry for about two hours.” Lyndon might “get along all right,” she wrote another friend. “I don’t know whether I’ll make it or not.”

And he poured himself into the recovery of his career. Part of the day was rest, but the remainder was politics as usual—the Lyndon Johnson brand of politics. Wanting, in Reedy’s words, to “generate attention—keep people aware of his presence,” he began dictating letters to Lady Bird and Mary Rather, dictating so many that they couldn’t keep up with him, and they were joined by a recent addition to the staff, Mary Margaret Wiley, a twenty-six-year-old University of Texas graduate, dictating so many that the three women, working at card tables set up in the rock-walled living room, couldn’t type them up in the perfect style he wanted fast enough, or to cross-index them for the files, and the letters were sent off for typing (“On new stationery with pretty typewriter—Hurry Please!”) in big packages to the larger staff in the Washington office, which also couldn’t keep up. (The letters were to foes as well as allies, and all were written with the Johnson touch: “Dear John: I have been sitting here on my Ranch looking over the Country in which I was born and just relaxing and enjoying myself thoroughly. Every prospect pleases except one—the distance from my close personal friends in the Senate. One of the reasons that I am so very anxious to recover completely is so I can return to Washington in January as good as new and thank all of my friends on both sides of the aisle. One of the first hands I want to shake is that of John W. Bricker.”) He began telephoning, and was soon demanding that the calls be stacked up waiting for him; so many new telephone lines had to be installed that the long cords grew tangled on the living room floor. To the clatter of typewriters, a clatter which, a visitor says, “never seemed to stop,” that drifted out of the open windows of the living room and down across the lawn and the meadow to the placid Pedernales was added the ringing of telephones, a ringing that also “never seemed to stop.” The stacks of letters and telegrams on the card tables grew higher. A former secretary, Dorothy Palmie of Austin, who had been reading in the newspapers about the calm, restful atmosphere at the ranch, drove out for a visit and found him “going full-blast. Mary Rather and Lady Bird were beating their brains out with all these little details and tasks and chores.” A team headed by Reedy set up an office in the United States Courthouse in Austin, Jenkins remained in Washington with the rest of the staff, and the three offices were in constant communication. By mid-September, the reports from the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee began to flow again, as did the glowing promises of future reports (“Watch for the SPSC to try to make headlines this fall with a searching probe of undue cuts in the Defense Department’s aircraft and missile programs,” Newsweek’s “Periscope” declared. “Senator Lyndon Johnson is personally laying out the agenda for this while recuperating in Texas”) and the leaks (Reedy, in Austin, to Siegel, in Washington: “I had another talk with the Senator about [reporter] Jack Anderson and I think we should do something for him as soon as possible. Can you find anything in the Preparedness Committee files that I could slip to Jack in a hurry and that would make him a pretty good story? … I think that we could make some real ‘hay’ with Jack”), and other means of influencing the press, including the orchestration of a “spontaneous” letter-writing campaign to try (unsuccessfully) to persuade Time magazine that Lyndon Johnson should be its “Man of the Year.” The planted stories began again (“Dear Senator, All right! I have followed your instructions. I have just finished and mailed to Texas a five-page story on Grace Tully—Affectionately, Liz”), as did the pressures on government officials for favors for Johnson’s friends.

With the loneliness becoming unbearable to him, Johnson began to invite visitors to the ranch—senators and journalists, and others important to him; the first visitors would be Adlai Stevenson, still the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, who was going to speak at the University of Texas on September 29, and Sam Rayburn, who would introduce him—the two men had agreed to drive out to the Johnson Ranch after the speech and spend the night. So many people were invited that the five upstairs bedrooms, several of which were already occupied by staff members, would not be sufficient; while the pool was still being built, another construction project was begun: a four-room guest house.

Johnson had, furthermore, resumed, as avidly as ever, his quest for money. He did it with his customary circumspection. When E. L. Kurth gave him a prize Brahma bull, named “Johnson’s Manso,” the papers were sent not to him but to A. W. Moursund, and Moursund was at the ranch almost every day. And he did it with his customary energy. During this period, while he was publicly proclaiming—over and over—his devotion to rest and relaxation, he was working at a headlong pace to add new advertising revenues for his radio and television stations, calling Edwin Weisl Sr., Hearst Newspapers counsel, in New York to bring pressure on some advertisers, using Jenkins to bring pressure on others (“I don’t want to leave the impression that we muscled people to come [as advertisers], but we did try to call it to their attention that we had the space available or the time available and could use the programming,” Jenkins would say). And he was adding new stations. “That summer he had a little time on his hands, of course, and we decided that we wanted to go and buy another station or perhaps two stations,” Jenkins recalls. The station Johnson decided to buy was KANG in Waco, and he conducted the negotiations for that property with the old Johnson touch, bargaining with the owners for a favorable price while gently obtaining from compliant FCC Chairman Bartley advance knowledge of upcoming FCC decisions that would make KANG much more profitable for him than it would ever have been for them, and keeping that knowledge secret so that they would sell to him at a lower price. “Lyndon made a lot of money that summer,” Arthur Stehling says. And he was entering new fields as well, buying up stock in the Johnson City Bank and other little Hill Country banks. He took his naps religiously, but woke up from them running—as fast as before. His pace, in fact, seemed to be even faster now. Asked years later, “Did the heart attack slow down Johnson?” George Reedy replied: “It speeded him up if anything.”

THEN, IN SEPTEMBER, the political landscape changed—dramatically. Dwight Eisenhower was at the very peak of his enormous popularity. In July, at a top-level conference in Geneva with British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, French Premier Edgar Faure, and the two Russian leaders, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin (Winston Churchill had coined a word for such a meeting; he called it a “summit”), Ike’s broad, open grin and his apparent candor and earnest desire for peace had won the hearts of Europeans, and his proposal for an “Open Skies” aerial inspection treaty to reduce the threat of nuclear war had captured the world’s imagination. As he was flying home in triumph aboard the Columbine, Gallup pollsters were finding that no less than four out of five Americans approved of his performance as President. And then, on September 24, he suffered a heart attack while on a golfing vacation in Denver.

Ike’s attack, a coronary thrombosis, was more serious than Johnson’s, and Eisenhower, just three weeks short of his sixty-fifth birthday, was almost eighteen years older. The Democratic National Convention was less than a year away, and the general assumption in Washington, an assumption that endured for months, was that the President would not run for another term. Lyndon Johnson, who during the next three days would telephone Eisenhower’s press secretary, Jim Hagerty, two or three times a day to express concern and ask how the President was doing (thereafter, he would be given daily reports by Jerry Persons), was almost instantly running for the prize he had always sought.

The strategy he evolved—in talks with no one, lying deep in thought on the recliner or walking deep in thought along the path next to the Pedernales—was the strategy Richard Russell had used in 1952, but with a crucial difference. With Russell having removed himself from the picture, Johnson believed he would be the candidate of a solid South, with its 262 votes in the 1,200-vote convention. And he believed that because of the firm ties he had forged with western and border-state senators, he could do what Russell had not been able to do—collect enough votes from these states to give him a substantial bloc at the convention.

At the moment, Stevenson had most of the southern votes, as the least of three evils, the others being Kefauver and the New York liberal Harriman. If none of these three men could get a majority of the convention, it would be stalemated, and the nomination could well go to a fourth, “compromise,” candidate, if this candidate had a substantial, solid bloc of votes behind him.

The first requirement was that southern support be stripped away from Stevenson. That would be accomplished by Johnson’s entry into the race. The second was that both Stevenson and Kefauver be stopped—preferably that they kill each other off. The third was that Johnson position himself to be a candidate. And there was an additional, urgent, requirement: that Johnson do so without becoming a candidate openly. An announcement that he was running would rouse northeastern Democrats and liberals across the country, distrustful of him because of his past pro-southern positions, to organize a “Stop Johnson” movement and effectively destroy his candidacy before the convention so that he would not be able to become a compromise choice there. His effectiveness as the Democratic Senate Leader would be undermined as well; as Tommy Corcoran was to explain, “If his colleagues thought he was pushing all those programs to get a track record for a presidential race, they’d scatter every time he called a caucus.” He should go to the convention, he decided, as Texas’ favorite-son candidate. That way, his name would be placed before the convention—but in such a fashion that he could claim he was not a serious candidate but was only trying to hold his state’s vote until its delegation determined which of the other candidates to support. And to make sure he held the delegation’s vote, he decided, he should also be its chairman.

BY COINCIDENCE, the perfect opportunity to implement this strategy was immediately to hand: that already scheduled visit, just five days after Eisenhower’s heart attack, by Adlai Stevenson and Sam Rayburn.

The visit had originally been thought of—by both Johnson and Stevenson—as little more than a courtesy call. Now, however, there were consequential matters to discuss. Johnson wanted them discussed in secret, but someone in Austin learned that Stevenson and Rayburn would be going out to the Johnson Ranch after the speech, and George Reedy had to telephone Johnson from Austin to inform him that a large contingent of reporters could be expected the following morning.

Johnson’s reaction was rage: an old-time explosion that “could be felt all the way to Austin,” that was so violent that Reedy “started being afraid that he was going to bring on another heart attack and die,” and that didn’t subside for hours; at midnight, Reedy got another call—from Lady Bird, “just begging me to keep the press from going out to [the ranch].” “She was just crying, just crying. Apparently the people out at the ranch were like a family would be during the Black Death in Europe.” Explaining that while reporters could be barred from the ranch itself—“That’s private property”—nobody could keep them from standing on the public highway right outside the gates “and talking to people going in and out,” he advised her to allow them on the ranch instead of letting them “use their imaginations as to what happened.”

Rayburn, Grace Tully (along for symbolism), Stevenson, and Stevenson’s aide Newton Minow arrived about eleven o’clock at night, expecting to find a man recuperating from a heart attack already asleep. Instead he was waiting for them in front of his house. And the discussion among the three leading figures in the Democratic Party, held on the porch, under a huge Hill Country moon and a sky filled with stars, lasted until well past midnight.

Among the subjects of discussion was how to handle the press the next day. The reporters, Johnson said with his usual hyperbole, “think that you, Adlai, and you, Mr. Sam, and I are here plotting to take over the government while Ike is dying. We’re not going to let them do that.” And the next morning was, to Reedy, who had spent a very worried night, another “Lyndon Johnson paradox,” with his boss the most gracious of hosts. Coming out onto the front porch at 6:30 a.m., while his guests were still asleep, Johnson found a crowd of newsreel, newspaper and radio reporters on his front lawn. “Are you going to throw me off, Senator?” Dave Cheavens asked. “Of course not,” Lyndon Johnson said, with a laugh and a broad smile. Walking over to his station wagon and saying, “Hop in,” he took a half dozen reporters, with the others following in their own cars, on a forty-minute tour of the ranch. When they returned, Stevenson was outside, and Johnson beckoned him to come over to the barn, then walked ahead of him, noticeably faster than usual with his long strides so that Stevenson was forced to trot to keep up. He loaded Stevenson into an electric golf cart, in which the two men zoomed along the concrete walk past the herd of white-faced Herefords near the river, and when Rayburn emerged from the house, the three men had a Texas ranch breakfast: orange juice, Pecos cantaloupe, scrambled eggs, bacon, venison sausage, hominy grits, popovers, and coffee. “Please,” said Stevenson after the meal. “Let’s skip lunch.” Then they sat down on three chairs on the lawn, the journalists crowded around, and a press conference was held.

Rayburn didn’t do much talking, sitting with no expression at all on his face, declining to smile for the cameras, and Stevenson wasn’t required to do much, either. When, asked if he thought Texas would return to the Democratic column in 1956, he started to reply, Johnson cut him off. “I think Mr. Rayburn and myself are in a better position to answer that question,” he said. “Texas will be in the Democratic column.” “Who am I to contradict?” Adlai said with a smile. When, at the end of the conference, a reporter asked Stevenson if he was planning to return to Texas, he said, “I’d like to come back to Texas and either talk or listen—whatever they’ll permit me to do.” All three men said that they had agreed not to take advantage of President Eisenhower’s illness. Johnson and Stevenson said the visit had been just a purely social call. Stevenson had the grace to make the statement with a slight smile, which seemed to suggest that everyone there knew he was saying what had to be said, and when pressed on whether any politics had been discussed, he said, “I am in the presence of politicians, and it is possible the talk may have reverted to politics.” Johnson, however, insisted that his statement be believed. “It was purely a social visit with an old friend,” he said firmly, and his elaboration on this point was summed up by Time: “No politics had been discussed, said Johnson, and as far as he was concerned none were going to be. The visit had absolutely no relationship to any political situation arising from Eisenhower’s illness.”

The visit had not been purely social, naturally. Stevenson had been “pointedly advised by Senator Johnson,” as William White was later to report, that he must contest Kefauver in at least one or two state primaries in order to prove he was more popular. This course might well lead Stevenson into a trap “in the light of [Kefauver’s] demonstrated skill in that type of campaigning,” White noted; should Stevenson “fail to score heavily in the primaries, he then would be only one of several candidates” and “no longer the odds-on favorite at the convention.” Aware of that danger, Stevenson told Minow on the flight back to Chicago that “I’m not going to do it. If the party wants me, I’ll run again, but I’m not going to run around like I did before to all those shopping centers like I’m running for sheriff. The hell with it.” Johnson’s “advice,” however, had been accompanied by a subtly worded warning about what might happen if it was not followed: in White’s phrase, if Adlai entered the primaries, “no all-out ‘Stop Stevenson’ movement would be likely to arise at the Convention.” And in the event, the advice was followed.

Texas’ powerful and reactionary governor, Allan Shivers, had expected to be chairman of the state’s delegation, but Johnson had on his side the only man in Texas capable of breaking Shivers’ hold on the state, and Sam Rayburn was willing to do so because, he believed, Shivers had in 1952 committed the sin that was unpardonable to this man to whom “there are no degrees in honorableness—you are or you aren’t”: he had broken his word to him, promising to support Stevenson and then throwing the state to Eisenhower. After Stevenson left the ranch, Johnson apparently told Rayburn—Rayburn was shortly to repeat the conversation to Tommy Corcoran and Jim Rowe when they visited him on his ranch in Bonham—that he knew he couldn’t win the Democratic presidential nomination, but that he wanted to try for it at the convention so that he would be in a stronger position to get the vice presidential nomination—which would put him ahead of the field for the top spot in 1960.

Feeling that Stevenson had the nomination sewn up, and aware of the depth of liberal antipathy to Johnson, Rayburn was not enthusiastic about Johnson’s candidacy, believing it would split his beloved party after fate—Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack—had handed it a chance to retake the White House. Although he had little more respect for Stevenson than Johnson did, he wanted a short, harmonious convention. In addition, loving Johnson, he didn’t want him running so soon after his heart attack.

But, loving Johnson, Sam Rayburn knew what Lyndon really wanted (not for a minute, Corcoran and Rowe understood, did Mr. Sam believe that what Johnson was aiming for was the second spot on the ticket), and he knew how much he wanted it. He agreed to help. Rowe was to write Johnson in a very confidential letter that at Bonham “he spoke of you, as he often does to me, with a certain amount of pride in you and also with some hedging, like an over-fond uncle who thinks his favorite nephew should get a lot more spankings than he does.” Rayburn told the two Washington insiders that he had “regretted agreeing” to Johnson’s proposals “as soon as he left” the LBJ Ranch. “He made it clear that… he wants a quick convention giving the nomination to Stevenson, so that the Democrats don’t get themselves in a first-class row…. He felt that you were making a serious error in forming the Southern coalition because it meant that you would become the prime target of the Northerners.” And Rayburn told the two Washingtonians that if what Johnson wanted was really the second spot, “he, Rayburn, could get it for you by himself and without any trouble.” (Tommy Corcoran asked him how he would do that. Years later, Tommy the Cork would recall Rayburn’s reply. “Sam just looked at me, for a long time, and said, ‘I will go to him [Stevenson] and ask him for it.’ But it wasn’t what he said, but the way he looked when he said it. That was the end of that conversation. I thought, ‘God help Adlai if he tries to take on Mr. Sam.’”) In his contemporaneous letter reporting the conversation with Rayburn, Rowe, who was not given to reporting facial expressions, wrote Johnson that Rayburn had said “he would go to Stevenson and demand it and he knew he would get it.” But he hadagreed to Johnson’s proposals, had given his word. Shivers was loudly vowing to fight for the delegation chairmanship; Sam Rayburn simply said to reporters, “Lyndon will be Texas’s ‘favorite son’ for President at this year’s convention and he will also serve as chairman of the Texas delegation to that convention.” And that was the way that, after a brutal fight, it turned out.

THE REACTION TO Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack emphasized to Lyndon Johnson the gulf between where he was and where he wanted to be: the fact that while a Senate Leader might be big news in Washington, and to some extent in New York, he was decidedly less big—indeed, not even particularly well known, compared to the President—in the rest of the country. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted, in its most disastrous day since the Crash of 1929; losses were estimated at more than $12 billion. There had not been a tremor in the stock market on the news of his own attack. He had been so proud that the number of letters and telegrams he had received had eventually risen to seven thousand. The White House received tens of thousands of letters and telegrams every day. Bulletins about the President’s condition were on newspaper front pages day after day; his cardiologist, Paul Dudley White, of Boston, became the most famous physician in the country, his every pronouncement analyzed and reanalyzed by columnists for clues as to whether Ike could run again. (Question: “Is your answer yes?” Dr. White: “I would say that it is up to him.” Question: “Did you say he would be physically able to do it?” Dr. White: “Oh yes…. But many things are possible that may not be advisable. If I were in his shoes I wouldn’t want to run again, having seen the strain.”) After an Eisenhower press conference on January 8, 1956, newsmen would conclude by four to one that Ike would not stand for re-election; not until later that month did the President begin to hint that he would run again.

And all during that fall and winter of 1955, the jangle of telephones and the clatter of typewriters were not the only additions to that still, quiet Pedernales landscape; there were plumes of dust in the air, fast-moving plumes from cars carrying visitors from the Austin and Fredericksburg airports to the LBJ Ranch along unpaved Hill Country roads. The flow of visitors increased: Russell, Clements, Symington, Fulbright, Price Daniel, George Smathers, John Connally, Bobby Baker—so many that Reedy could tell Johnson that his ranch had become his party’s “political capital.” Polls were telling Johnson one story, Gallup’s reporting that Stevenson was the favorite of 39 percent of Democratic voters, Kefauver of 33 percent, Harriman of 6 percent, and Johnson of only 3 percent, several other polls listing him only among the “other candidates” favored by less than 1 percent of the respondents. A survey of Democratic county chairmen showed him far behind Stevenson and Kefauver even among the 573 chairmen in the South. In the rest of the country he was the favorite of hardly any county chairmen at all: of only four out of 567 in the Midwest, of only six out of 214 in the West. And of the 142 chairmen in the East, not one preferred Lyndon Johnson for President. But he was telling himself another story. “The backing and filling around the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson … is by this time not merely obvious but blatant,” Doris Fleeson wrote. “Its basic cause, of course, is that Democrats now think they can win,” but not with Stevenson as the candidate. If the South’s county chairmen were not solidly behind Johnson, the South’s senators were, and other elements of a southern-border-state-western coalition seemed to be falling into place. Asked during a visit to the LBJ Ranch if Oklahoma might join Texas in making Johnson a favorite son, Senator Bob Kerr replied that “Outside of football, there is no state Oklahoma would rather go along with than Texas and no subject on which it would be easier to reach agreement.” Montana’s Mansfield said it was a “reasonable assumption” that Johnson “might become a figure around whom Southern and Western Democrats could rally.” “Here [on the Johnson Ranch] is where the southern bloc is being organized,” Richard Strout wrote in The New Republic. “Before the Roosevelt Revolution, the South had a two-thirds convention rule that gave Dixie something of a veto power over the candidate. Now the effort is being made to organize the same device, in effect, through the offices of Senator Johnson.” White wrote in theTimes that “Some of the Democratic professionals are maneuvering to gain for the South and conservatives generally an extraordinary and conceivably even a decisive influence on the Democratic national convention next year. The unofficial and unlabelled headquarters for this effort is the LBJ Ranch on the Pedernales River.”

THE REACTION OF DEMOCRATIC LIBERALS—“growing resentment,” in a Times phrase—to these reports reinforced Johnson’s conviction that they would organize against him if he became an open candidate, and his denials were piously emphatic. Attacking “unjustified presumptions” in the press, he declared that his ranch “has not been a meeting place for discussions or evaluations or planning the strategy of any Democratic nominee,” and added that “It would be unfair and improper for a trustee of the party to set himself up as a kingmaker.”

Corcoran had come to the ranch bearing the offer of a substantial gift—from a man who had the power to make one: Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. In a meeting in New York, the Ambassador instructed Corcoran to tell Johnson that if he would publicly enter the race for the nomination, and would privately promise that if he won, he would select Jack Kennedy as his running mate, Joe Kennedy would arrange the financing for the ticket. If Johnson was not running, the Ambassador said, he would support Stevenson.

This offer revealed at least two drastic underestimations on the Ambassador’s part: first, about the extent of Johnson’s own financing, and, second, about Johnson’s political acumen. No sooner were the words of the offer out of his mouth, Corcoran saw, than Johnson understood the reasoning behind it: old Joe Kennedy was betting that Eisenhower would run again (in which case he would, of course, win again). The Democratic vice presidential nomination would give young, relatively unknown Jack Kennedy the national recognition he needed to give him a running start at the 1960 presidential nomination. And it would be more desirable for that candidacy to be on a Johnson rather than on a Stevenson ticket; Adlai, old Joe felt, would lose in a landslide, and an overwhelming defeat would be attributed partly to the Catholicism of his running mate, a belief which would damage Kennedy’s chances in 1960. Johnson, the Ambassador believed, would lose, but in a much closer race.

Johnson didn’t believe that Jack Kennedy would have a serious chance in 1960. “He never said a word of importance in the Senate and he never did a thing,” he was to recall later. And the young senator was also, in Johnson’s words, obviously seriously ill, “malaria-ridden and yellah, sickly, sickly.” But there was no point in improving Kennedy’s chances—and it was important that his own candidacy in 1956 not be made public. “Lyndon told me he wasn’t running, and I told Joe,” Corcoran recalls. Joe then telephoned Lyndon himself, making the same offer, and was turned down; Johnson was to recall telling the Ambassador that “I did not wish to be a candidate.”

“Young Bobby [Robert F. Kennedy] was infuriated,” Corcoran was to recall. “He believed it was unforgivably discourteous to turn down his father’s generous offer.” Jack, Corcoran was to recall, was more circumspect. He called me down to his office…. ‘Listen, Tommy,’ Jack said, ‘we made an honest offer to Lyndon Johnson through you. He turned us down. Can you tell us this: Is Lyndon Johnson running without us? … Is he running?’” “‘Of course he is,’” Corcoran replied. “‘He may not think he is. And certainly he’s saying he isn’t. But I know goddamned well he is. I’m sorry that he doesn’t know it.’”

He did know it, of course. He was running harder than ever—so hard, in fact, that his doctors, worried, tried to slow him down. When Dr. Cain did not hear from Johnson for “three or four weeks,” he understood why—“I am sure his reluctance to write is related to the fact that he knows I might fuss at him for doing too much…. He is doing too much and thinking too much”—and, finally, on November 19, he wrote him. “Lyndon, you have come along very well following this heart attack and, as I have said all along, I have every hope that you are going to be completely all right.” But, he said, “I just want to offer a word of warning and a suggestion that you slow down some.”

But they couldn’t slow him down. One of Reedy’s memos had spoken of a need for Johnson to demonstrate that he was “back in the saddle again.” The phrase caught Johnson’s fancy, and he provided the demonstration by returning to the national stage with a speech, his first since his heart attack, in the little Texas town of Whitney (as he appeared on stage, a band struck up the song “Back in the Saddle Again”). The speech announced his program—he called it “A Program with a Heart” (get it?)—for the upcoming congressional session, a list of thirteen proposals which he said would be submitted to the Democratic Policy Committee “in the hope that they can be brought before the Senate, considered and acted upon by the Senate.” Twelve of the proposals were acceptable to liberals—broadening of Social Security coverage, increased federal funding of medical research, school construction, highways and housing, for example—including the one civil rights proposal that southerners would tolerate: a constitutional amendment to eliminate the poll tax. The thirteenth, listed as Number 7 because Johnson believed that if it was buried smack in the middle of the list it had its best chance to escape notice, was the price he was paying for the Texas conservatives’ support: “A natural gas bill that will preserve free enterprise.” (Johnson said that “of course” the bill would also provide protection to consumers.) A number of editorials noted that, as the Baltimore Sun pointed out, “on a good many of the issues the Republicans have already been there,” and somehow liberals managed to find, and understand, even Number 7: “Senator Johnson’s ‘of course’ will not be accepted by many of his colleagues in the Senate who feel that the 1955 Johnson natural gas bill… was just a gimmick to make Texas gas millionaires richer at the expense of northern consumers,” the Washington Star commented. On the whole, however, his return from death’s door was greeted so enthusiastically that Dorothy Nichols, mailing a packet of press clippings to the ranch, wrote, “It looks like in the eyes of the press and the nation you have reached a spot where you can do no wrong. How fine!”

Johnson had said repeatedly that he would defer a decision on resuming the majority leadership until after a complete checkup by Dr. Hurst at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta on December 14 and then by a team of doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. But he couldn’t wait. More and more senators—Kerr Scott of North Carolina, Humphrey, Styles Bridges—were coming to the ranch, as were television executives and lobbyists like Scoop Russell of NBC, and when they returned to Washington, they reported, as Robert Albright wrote in the Washington Post on November 27, that Johnson “is talking in terms of the same personally run floor show he successfully conducted last year…. Delegations of authority will be few. To friends who inquire if he is well enough, Johnson retorts that he would ‘rather wear out than rust out.’” And the private meetings grew only more numerous: day after day, pilot Reg Robbins would put down on Wesley West’s landing strip, where no unwanted eye could see, and keep the engines idling. The big white Lincoln Continental would pull up, and the tall, gangling figure of the Majority Leader of the United States Senate would climb out and climb aboard, and the Brown & Root DC-3 would take off, for the quiet conferences in 8-F in Houston or in the messy suite at the Fort Worth Club, or for Fort Clark or St. Joe. And at least once, on November 29, Robbins headed west to California, where Lyndon Johnson gave a speech before the American Hotel Association (“The Democrats will take everything from the courthouse to the White House,” he predicted), then met in the Beverly Hills Hotel with a representative of Howard Hughes, with whom he was on a “hard cash, adult basis,” and who had to be made to understand that five thousand a year wasn’t what was needed now—that “real money” was going to be required in 1956—and on the way back the DC-3 made a stop in Las Vegas, to see Hughes himself.

The private maneuvering behind the Senate scenes intensified, too. In late November, Estes Kefauver arrived at the ranch, where, on a hunting trip with Johnson, the Tennessean got a ten-point buck “right through the heart” at about three hundred paces with a rifle with a telescopic lens. Outwardly, all was friendliness but, unknown to Kefauver, Johnson was taking steps to deny him the position from which he was hoping to garner publicity during the upcoming Senate session. Judiciary Chairman Harley Kilgore had promised Kefauver the chairmanship of the subcommittee to investigate monopolies, which Kefauver could use to investigate the Dixon-Yates contract. But now, Drew Pearson reported, Johnson “laid down the law to Kilgore”: if Kefauver was given the subcommittee chairmanship, Judiciary’s budget would be cut to the bone.

So caught up was Johnson in the race he was running now that, once again, as for most of his life, dates meant nothing to him; trying to set up a conference with Adlai Stevenson or his campaign manager, Tom Finnegan, he scribbled a note to Stevenson: “I’d like to see you or Finnegan [on] Dec. 25th.” If there was a reason that the December 25 page in his appointment book had been blank, the reason didn’t seem to cross Lyndon Johnson’s mind.

THERE WAS ONE ADDITIONAL REMINDER of his youth that autumn. The 1955 Homecoming Day celebration of Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos had been named “Lyndon Johnson Day” and the college’s “most illustrious graduate” gave the principal address in Cecil E. Evans Auditorium, and afterwards sat on a reviewing stand as floats, decorated by fraternities and sororities, chronicling his triumphant political career passed by. Johnson’s feelings on that day may not have been solely of triumph, however. On the platform with him were the two former deans, Tom Nichols and H. E. Speck, who had with razor blades cut out of every copy of the 1930 college yearbook, The Pedagog, they could find the pages that referred to “Bull” (for Bullshit) Johnson, and that set down in print other aspects of his fellow students’ disdain for him. Also on the platform were several fellow members of the Class of 1930 who had used that nickname freely to Johnson’s face—and whose feelings, in some cases, had not been blunted by time; the member of the class selected to give a talk about Johnson was Vernon Whiteside, who took delight, every time he met Johnson, in reminding him of mean tricks he had played or elections he had stolen during his student days. Also on the platform was the college’s librarian, Ethel Davis. She was the sister of Carol Davis, daughter of the richest man in San Marcos, whom Lyndon Johnson had courted avidly, with a determination to marry for money so unconcealed that The Pedagog had mocked it in print, but whose father had held the Johnson clan in contempt—Carol Davis who had broken with Lyndon because “I knew I couldn’t go against my father’s wishes.”

ON DECEMBER 11, three days before the “definitive” medical checkups, the DC-3 took off from the Wesley West airstrip, but not to either Atlanta or Rochester. Lyndon Johnson, accompanied by his wife, cook, masseur, dietitian, and chauffeur, was flying to Washington. He had dinner at Thirtieth Place with Richard Russell. The next day, Gene Williams drove him down to Capitol Hill, the first time he had returned there since his heart attack, and he held a standing-room-only press conference attended by 125 reporters. The reporters were astonished by the transformation in Johnson’s physical appearance. Tanned, trim (he weighed “about 170 pounds”—about fifty-five pounds less than he had weighed the last time they had seen him) and handsome, he seemed bursting with energy and confidence. Edward J. Milne of the Providence Bulletin, who interviewed him in G-14, described how Johnson sat “with his feet crossed on the desk top as if to prove how relaxed he is, but with a frequent tapping of fingers on chair arm hinting at all the old, restless tension.” Before the press conference, he had met with Senators Murray, Mansfield, Hayden, and Anderson, with lobbyists Clark Clifford, Corcoran, and Rowe, and with columnist Fleeson. After the press conference he met with Justice Douglas, then had dinner with Averell Harriman. Only then did he fly to see his doctors, accompanied by Reedy and Russell and talking presidential strategy all the way. After examining Johnson, the doctors reported that he had fully recovered. “Senator Johnson is now active, and his reactions to activity are normal,” they said. “His blood pressure is normal, his heart size is normal, and his electrocardiogram has returned to normal.” They said that they had advised Johnson that “extraordinary pressures and abnormal tensions should be kept to a minimum,” but that so long as he maintained “carefully regulated hours of work and rest,” the Senator could resume the leadership.

TWO ASPECTS of Lyndon Johnson’s life changed during the six months he spent recovering from his heart attack.

One was his relationship with his wife.

He had asked her never to leave his bedside until he was out of danger, and she hadn’t left. “Every time I lifted my hand, she would be there,” he was to recall. After he left the hospital, Ruth Montgomery was to write, “Lyndon could scarcely bear to have Bird out of his sight.” On the ranch, Mary Rather says, “whatever Lyndon did, Lady Bird did with him. How she managed to run the house, attend to her children, talk to visitors and still take care of her husband, I sometimes wondered.” Chores that took her away from him were done while he was sleeping. Whenever he woke and asked, “Where’s Bird?” she “was always near enough at hand to answer for herself: ‘Here I am, darling.’” Their daughters, Ms. Montgomery was to write, “sensed a subtle change in their parents…. They seemed closer to each other than ever before.” “Of course, what happened, it deprived the girls even more of her presence and her motherhood,” George Reedy was to say. “I think they spent almost all of that time with Willie Day.” (Wherever they spent their time, Ms. Rather says, “They weren’t there at the ranch a great deal.”) An exception was the trip to California, on which the Johnsons took Lynda and Lucy along, and where they spent a day with them at Disneyland; the girls “had the time of their lives,” Ms. Rather says.

And as Lyndon recovered on the ranch, Lady Bird was happy, happier than anyone could remember her being.

“I never saw a woman more obviously in love with a man and more obviously grateful that he had been rescued,” George Reedy says. “In her face, you could see it. I remember once when we were walking down the path, she just reached over and gave him a quick hug. You could almost feel the joy bubbling in her veins that he was still alive. I think she forgot and forgave all the times that he’d made life miserable for her, which he did very often.” Among the hundreds of letters from strangers to Lady Bird was one from a woman who wrote that “Some of the happiest days of our lives were after my husband’s heart attack.” At the time she first read the letter, Lady Bird was to recall, she was “puzzled” by what the woman had written. But later, she was to recall, “I came to understand.”

Her every thought seemed to be for his comfort and peace of mind; she would tell guests at the ranch to laugh as much as possible—Lyndon liked people to laugh, she would say—and to be careful not to say anything about how loosely Lyndon’s clothes hung on him; “she knew how susceptible he was to the dispositions of those around him.” There was no longer any resistance to his suggestions about her own clothes. “I begrudge making a career out of clothes, but Lyndon likes bright colors and dramatic styles that do the most for one’s figure, and I try to please him,” she was to say. “I’ve really tried to learn the art of clothes, because you don’t sell for what you’re worth unless you look well.” Accompanying him on his diet, keeping him on it with soft-voiced diplomacy (to his demand for a banana one afternoon, she said, “Let’s each have half a banana”), she herself reduced her weight from 132 to 114. The only task she undertook without success was the one Lyndon’s mother had failed in when he was a boy: to get him to read books. She was finally reduced to doing what Lyndon’s mother had done so many years before: find a portion of a book she felt would be helpful to Lyndon, and read it to him, in the very small doses which were all he would tolerate. (Jim Rowe, familiar with Lyndon’s reading tolerance, sent Benjamin Thomas’ new biography of Abraham Lincoln to Lady Bird with a note: because “Lyndon has a lot to learn from Lincoln,” he wrote, “I am sending it to you, not Lyndon, with instructions that you should read it to him for one-half hour a day and no more.” Lady Bird replied that “I promise to siphon as much of the most significant parts as I can to Lyndon, choosing the opportunities whenever they come along.”) She collaborated with her husband in concealing what he wanted to conceal: because her first excuse for her absence at Middleburg—the fact that she had stayed in Washington for Lucy’s birthday party—emphasized that Lucy’s father had not stayed, she changed the excuse, telling journalists now that she had stayed because Lucy had a slight fever. She helped him to create the image he wanted, telling journalists that Lyndon’s illness had given him time to read and that “he has been rediscovering the printed word in magazines and books”; that he had no presidential ambitions (“I firmly believe that he does not,” she told journalist Irwin Ross. “If he does have such ambitions, they are so subterranean that I don’t know about them”).

And now, gradually, Lyndon Johnson’s treatment of Lady Bird began to change. Not that it became, by normal standards, considerate or even polite, but he began to allow her a role in his life, the life from which he had so largely excluded her ever since, in 1942, she had proven she could be effective in it. (“Politics was Lyndon’s life, not mine.”) The “See you later, Bird” dismissals continued, but, now, only when the politics under discussion was very pragmatic. More and more, for other discussions—of issues and strategy—she was allowed to remain. So long as other politicians were in the room, she sat quietly, concealing her thoughts. After they had left, however, and she was alone with her husband and perhaps an assistant, he began to ask for her opinion, and Booth Mooney noticed that, more and more, when she gave it, “He listened to her.” He was particularly observant of her opinion on how a speech or issue would “play” to the general public. “Somebody else can have Madison Avenue. I’ll take Bird,” he was to say. He began to praise her publicly. During interviews with journalists, he would, more and more often, point to her picture on his office wall and, as Irwin Ross put it, “deliver some tribute to her wit or wisdom.” Even at home, although he still ordered her in the old bullying tone of the past, to run the most menial errands, more and more his orders to her would have at least a veneer of courtesy.

And in response, Lady Bird changed—in a change that was slow but sure and would eventually be so complete that it would amount to a transformation from the shy young woman who had once been terrified of speaking in public to the poised, dignified, gracious Lady Bird Johnson whom the American people were to come to admire in later years. “If ever a woman transformed herself—deliberately, knowingly, painstakingly—it was she,” Mooney was to say. “A modest, introspective girl gradually became a figure of steel cloaked in velvet. Both metal and fabric were genuine.” When she was seated on a dais, her face, while her husband was speaking, would still be tilted upward and toward him as unmovingly as ever, and her expression would be approving. But it was not long after their return to Washington in December, 1955, that she began, when her husband had been haranguing an audience for a long time, to slip him little notes as he stood speaking. And once, Mooney, picking up a note after a speech, read, with astonishment, the words she had written: “That’s enough.” Then Mooney began to notice that the notes appeared to have an effect; sometimes, after receiving one and glancing at it, Johnson, about to launch into another area of discourse, would visibly check himself, thank the audience for its attention, and sit down. And once, when a Lady Bird note had had no effect, Mooney, from his vantage point on the dais, saw something even more astonishing: Lady Bird reached out, took the tail of Lyndon’s jacket, and tugged at it, and “soon afterward he stopped talking and sat down.” And there were other signs of the transformation. When, at cocktail parties, Johnson began pouring down Scotch and sodas at his old methodically intensifying rate, she would say a quiet word to him. Once Lyndon replied that “My doctor says Scotch keeps my arteries open.” “They don’t have to be that wide open,” she said with a smile.

Her encouragement and reassurance were constant and extravagant. Once, not seeing her at a public function, he demanded, with something of his old snarl, “Where’s Lady Bird?” and she replied, “Right behind you, darling. Where I’ve always been.” At a conference at which he became agitated, she slipped him a note. “Don’t let anybody upset you. You’ll do the right thing. You’re a good man.”

THE CHANGE IN LYNDON JOHNSON’S TREATMENT of Lady Bird did not extend to sexual fidelity.

Until the guest house at the Johnson Ranch was completed near the end of 1955, Lyndon’s guests and his secretaries and assistants stayed in the five bedrooms on the second floor of the main house. Johnson made frequent nocturnal visits to that floor. During one visit, Corcoran and Rowe were sharing one of those bedrooms, and, both men recall that, in Rowe’s words, “Next to us was a [bed]room in which a good-looking girl was sleeping.” As the two men were preparing to turn in for the night, they heard footsteps—“clearly identifiable as Lyndon’s”—coming up the stairs and going past their door to that bedroom. They heard the door to that room open and shut. Later, Johnson “barged” into their room, exchanged a few sentences of idle conversation, and left. The next day, Rowe, Lyndon, and Lady Bird happened to be swimming in the new heated pool together, and Rowe without thinking said jokingly, “You know, a guy with a heart attack isn’t supposed to be climbing so many stairs.”

“Lady Bird asked Lyndon, ‘Were you up on the second floor last night?’” Rowe recalls, and, suddenly realizing his mistake, “I almost sunk under the water with mortification at what I had said.” As he was sinking, however, Rowe heard Johnson say, “I just went up to see that Tommy and Jim had everything they needed.”

Rowe then understood, he says, why Johnson had barged in on them: “So that he could say, ‘I just went up to see that Tommy and Jim….’” His feelings were confirmed after Johnson had returned to Washington in January, 1956, and his affair with the “good-looking girl” became, in Corcoran’s phrase, “common knowledge” around the capital.

But Lady Bird had, years before, at Longlea, learned to reconcile herself to this aspect of her husband’s behavior, and she hadn’t forgotten that lesson, as was proven during a conference among his physicians down at the ranch. Lady Bird was present, as was a single staff member, George Reedy, when the doctors again advised Johnson that he had to relax more, to do things he enjoyed, and Johnson told the doctors that “he enjoyed nothing but whiskey, sunshine and sex.” Reedy found the moment “poignant,” he was to recall. “Without realizing what he was doing, he had outlined succinctly the tragedy of his life. The only way he could get away from himself was sensation: sun, booze, sex.” It was “quite clear,” Reedy was to say, that Johnson was not talking merely about sex with his wife, and there was an “embarrassed silence.” It was broken by his wife, speaking to the doctors in a calm voice. “Well, I think Lyndon has described it to you very well,” she said. In later years, when more details of her husband’s sexual affairs emerged, she would sometimes be asked about them. She finally evolved a stock reply: “Lyndon loved people” she would say. “It would be unnatural for him to withhold love from half the people.” And the reply was always delivered with a smile.

THE OTHER ASPECT of Lyndon Johnson’s life that changed after his heart attack was his relationship with his staff, or at least the rages that had been a centerpiece of that relationship. Tension and anger were among the gravest threats to a heart attack victim, his doctors had warned him. Some causes of tension and anger would, to Lyndon Johnson, still be unavoidable, as would become apparent quite soon after his return to Washington. But anger at subordinates was not one of them. Some of his obscenity-laced tirades at his assistants and secretaries had been rages into which he deliberately worked himself as a means of control; there were other methods—simple ones—of controlling subordinates, and more and more he used these instead. Other tirades, not planned, had simply reflected a refusal to control himself. Now, with anger at subordinates a luxury he could no longer afford, indulgence in that luxury was reduced, quickly and effectively. “He became…less hard to get along with,” Walter Jenkins says. “Up to that time, when things didn’t go just to suit him, he had a tendency to fly off the handle, at little things…. It seemed to me that he was able to ignore these things more after the heart attack.”

Not that the rages ended. There were, at intervals, still the sudden, vicious, obscenity-filled explosions. Men and women who had not known the pre-heart attack Lyndon Johnson would still, witnessing one of these explosions, say they had “never seen anything like it.”

Fearsome though they were, however, they were not the rages of old. There was a reduction in frequency, in duration—and in intensity. While they had lost nothing of their viciousness and ability to hurt, their relative quietness made them less emotionally draining. “Now he had to control himself, and he did,” John Connally says. “In those early days, he would be just wild, wild!, raging, ranting, screaming, totally out of control. Now, you could almost see him sometimes checking himself, reining himself in, as if he was saying, ‘I’m not going to have a heart attack over George Reedy.’”

*“They got worse after my heart attack,” he was to tell Doris Kearns Goodwin.