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IF SECRET SERVICE agents found Kennedy to be reckless, Lyndon B. Johnson was uncouth, nasty, and often drunk. Agent Taylor recalls driving Johnson, who was then vice president, with another agent from the U.S. Capitol to the White House for a four P.M.appointment with Kennedy. Johnson—code-named Volunteer—was not ready to leave until three forty-five P.M. Because of traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue, they were going to be late.
“Johnson said to jump the curb and drive on the sidewalk,” Taylor says. “There were people on the sidewalk getting out of work. I told him, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I told you to jump the curb.’ He took a newspaper and hit the other agent, who was driving, on the head. He said, ‘You’re both fired.’”
When they arrived at the White House, Taylor told Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy’s secretary, “I’ve been fired.”
Lincoln shook her head in exasperation. Taylor was not fired.
After becoming president on November 22, 1963, Johnson had affairs with several of his young, fetching secretaries. When his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, was away, the Secret Service would take him to the home of one secretary. He would insist that the agents depart while he spent time with her.
“We took him to the house, and then he dismissed us,” Taylor says.
At one point, Lady Bird Johnson—code-named Victoria—caught him having sex on a sofa in the Oval Office with one of his secretaries. Johnson became furious at the Secret Service for not warning him.
“He said, ‘You should have done something,’” recalls a supervisory Secret Service agent.
After the incident, which occurred just months after he took office, Johnson ordered the Secret Service to install a buzzer system so that agents stationed in the residence part of the White House could warn him when his wife was approaching.
“The alarm system was put in because Lady Bird had caught him screwing a secretary in the Oval Office,” a former Secret Service agent says. “He got so goddamned mad. A buzzer was put in from the quarters upstairs at the elevator to the Oval Office. If we saw Lady Bird heading for the elevator or stairs, we were to ring the bell.”
Johnson did not limit himself to the women he hired for his personal staff. He had “a stable” of women with whom he had sex, including some who stayed at the ranch when Lady Bird was home, another former agent says.
“He and Lady Bird would be in their bedroom, and he’d get up in the middle of the night and go to the other room,” the former agent says. “Lady Bird knew what he was doing. One woman was a well-endowed blonde. Another was the wife of a friend of his. He had permission from her husband to have sex with her. It was amazing.”
“We had gals on my staff he screwed,” says Bill Gulley who headed Johnson’s military office. “One … showed up [for work] when she wanted to show up. I couldn’t tell her to do anything.”
Johnson “would screw anything that would crawl, basically,” says William F. Cuff, Gulley’s executive assistant in the military office. “He was a horny old man. But he had a totally loyal White House staff. There was one common enemy everyone in the White House had, and that was him [Johnson]. Therefore, everyone got along fine because they were afraid of him.”
Asked in a 1987 TV interview about her husband’s rumored infidelities, Lady Bird Johnson said, “You have to understand, my husband loved people. All people. And half the people in the world were women.”
Air Force One crew members say Johnson often closed the door to his stateroom and spent hours alone locked up with pretty secretaries, even when his wife was on board.
“Johnson would come on the plane [Air Force One], and the minute he got out of sight of the crowds, he would stand in the doorway and grin from ear to ear, and say, ‘You dumb sons of bitches. I piss on all of you,’” recalls Robert M. MacMillan, an Air Force One steward. “Then he stepped out of sight and began taking off his clothes. By the time he was in the stateroom, he was down to his shorts and socks. It was not uncommon for him to peel off his shorts, regardless of who was in the stateroom.”
Johnson did not care if women were around.
“He was totally naked with his daughters, Lady Bird, and female secretaries,” MacMillan says. “He was quite well endowed in his testicles. So everyone started calling him bull nuts. He found out about it. He was really upset.”
Johnson was often inebriated. He kept bottles of whiskey in his car at the ranch. One evening when Johnson was president, he came back to the White House drunk, screaming that the lights were on, wasting electricity.
“He is the only person [president] I have seen who was drunk,” says Frederick H. Walzel, a former chief of the White House branch of the Secret Service Uniformed Division.
“He had episodes of getting drunk,” George Reedy, his press secretary, told me. “There were times where he would drink day after day. You would think, ‘This guy is an alcoholic’ Then all of a sudden, it would stop. We could always see the signs when he called for a Scotch and a soda, and he would belt it down and call for another one, instead of sipping it.”
Johnson’s drinking only fueled his outbursts.
“We were serving roast beef one time,” says MacMillan. “He [Johnson] came back in the cabin. Jack Valenti [Johnson’s aide] was sitting there. He had just gotten his dinner tray. On it was a beautiful slice of rare roast beef.”
Johnson grabbed the tray and said, “You dumb son of a bitch. You are eating raw meat.”
Johnson then brought the food back to the galley and said, “You two sons of bitches, look at this. This is raw. You gotta cook the meat on my airplane. Don’t you serve my people raw meat. Goddamn, if you two boys serve raw meat on my airplane again, you’ll both end up in Vietnam.”
Johnson threw the tray upside down onto the floor and stormed off.
A few minutes later, Valenti went back to the galley.
“Sorry about your dinner, Mr. Valenti,” MacMillan said.
“Do we have any more rare?” Valenti asked.
“We have plenty of rare,” MacMillan said.
“Well, he won’t be back. He’s done his thing. Don’t serve me any fully cooked meat.”
Gerald F. Pisha, another Air Force One steward, says that on one occasion when Johnson didn’t like the way a steward had mixed a drink for him, he threw it onto the floor.
“Get somebody who knows how to make a drink for me,” Johnson said.
At his ranch in Texas, Johnson was even more raunchy than at the White House. At a press conference at his ranch, Johnson “whips his thing out and takes a leak, facing them [the reporters] sideways,” says D. Patrick O’Donnell, an Air Force One flight engineer. “You could see the stream. It was embarrassing. I couldn’t believe it. Here was a man who is the president of the U.S., and he is taking a whiz out on the front lawn in front of a bunch of people.”
A Secret Service agent posted to his ranch recalls that Johnson would take celebrities on a tour of the ranch in a car that—unknown to them—was amphibious. As he approached the Pedernales River, he would drive the vehicle into the river, terrifying his guests.
At six one morning, the agent was posted outside a door that led directly to Johnson’s bedroom.
“I’m looking at the sun coming up and listening to the birds, and I hear this noise,” the former agent says. “I turn around, and here’s the most powerful man in the world taking a leak off the back porch. And I remembered a saying down in Texas that I heard when I first got on that detail: When LBJ goes to the ranch, the bulls hang their heads in shame. This guy had a tool you wouldn’t believe.”
The former agent was present when LBJ held a press conference with White House pool reporters as he sat on a toilet, moving his bowels. He had discarded his girdle, which he wore to hide his girth.
“I just couldn’t believe that this stuff was going on,” the former agent says. “But this was an everyday thing to the guys that were with him all the time.”
After Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, an agent was told to wake Johnson in the morning so he could meet with his press secretary.
“I tapped on his bedroom door,” the former agent says. “Lady Bird said to come in.”
“He’s in the bathroom,” she said.
“I tapped on the bathroom door,” the former agent says. “Johnson was sitting on the can. Toilet paper was everywhere. It was bizarre.”
“If Johnson weren’t president, he’d be in an insane asylum,” former agent Richard Roth says he thought to himself when he was occasionally on Johnson’s detail.
Johnson kept dozens of peacocks at his ranch.
“One night at midnight, one of these peacocks was walking around,” says David Curtis, who was temporarily assigned to Johnson’s Secret Service detail at his ranch. “It was a moonlit night, and an agent picked up a rock just intending to scare the darn thing. He lobbed it over in the direction of the peacock and hit him right in the head. The peacock went down like a ton of bricks.”
After an agent relieved him at his post, the agent told other agents, “Oh, my God, I’ve killed a peacock. What do you think we should do?”
“The consensus was, there were so damn many of them around, no one would miss one,” Curtis says. “Just drag him down to the Pedernales River and throw him in. So that’s what they did.”
At the break of dawn, the day shift relieved the midnight people. One of the day shift agents called the command post on the radio.
“My God, you’ve got to get out here!” the agent said. “Looks like a drunken peacock. He’s all wet. He’s staggering from one foot to the other, feathers askew. He’s walking back up toward the house.”
Somehow, the peacock had recovered and managed to drag itself out of the river. Johnson never found out about the incident.
“Johnson was the grand thief,” Gulley his White House military aide, says. “He knew where the money was. He had us set up a fund code-named Green Ball. It was a Defense Department fund supposedly to assist the Secret Service to purchase weapons. They used it for whatever Johnson wanted to use it for. Fancy hunting guns were bought. Johnson and his friends kept them.”
All the while, Johnson fostered the image of a penny-pincher who was saving taxpayer money. As part of an economy drive, Johnson announced he had ordered the lights turned off inside the ladies’ room in the press area.
When Johnson left office, Gulley says he arranged for at least ten flights to fly government property to Johnson’s ranch. O’Donnell, the Air Force One flight engineer, says he flew three of the missions, shipping what he understood were White House items back to the Johnson ranch.
“We flew White House furniture back,” O’Donnell says. “I was on some of the missions. The flights back were at seven-fifty or eight-fifty P.M. and early in the morning. … I think he even took the electric bed out of Walter Reed army hospital. That was a disgrace.”
Johnson’s greatest achievement was overcoming Southern resistance to passage of civil rights legislation, yet in private, he regularly referred to blacks as “niggers.”
After Johnson died, Secret Service agents guarding Lady Bird were amazed to find that even though their home was crammed with photos of Johnson with famous people, not one photo pictured him with JFK.