Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  The next day, Saturday, July 2, Johnson was again to go to Huntlands for the weekend, and it had been arranged that Posh Oltorf would drive him down with George and Alice Brown on Saturday morning, but there turned out to be too many things to be done before he could leave, and he said Norman would drive him down later in the day.

  A score of urgent senatorial matters that he had not been able to attend to during the week had to be resolved (one, involving Senator Francis Case, resulted in four separate visits from Case to G-14 that morning), and during the course of the morning Johnson made seven other telephone calls on Senate business—and there was also a trip to his tailor, Sam Scogna, that in its own way was urgent, too, since thanks to the thirty-five or forty pounds he had put on in the last five months, his suits no longer fit, and he was being measured for two new ones—one dark blue, one brown, both double-breasted and cut very full. He had told Reedy to have reporters from the three wire services in G-14 at three o’clock for a briefing, out of which Johnson was hoping for articles summing up the Senate’s accomplishments thus far in the session and making it clear that there would be more accomplishments, as major bills still before the various committees began to emerge onto the floor. The beat of one of the reporters, John Chadwick of the Associated Press, included the Judiciary Committee, however, and Chadwick brought up a bill Johnson had been hoping the press would ignore: proposed liberal legislation to alter the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Johnson replied curtly. “Still in committee.”

  Chadwick, a soft-spoken, notably well-mannered journalist, waited until Johnson had finished discussing the status of other bills, and then returned to the subject, saying, as he was to recall, “Can’t you tell us anything about the immigration bill?” and when Johnson replied, “I told you I don’t know anything about that—it’s still in committee,” said, “Well, what’s the difference between that bill and all these other bills you’ve been telling us about? They’re still in committee, too.” With a violence that another journalist present, William Theis of International News Service, was to say “shocked” the reporters—“I’d never seen him lose his cool in public in a way like that”—Johnson shouted: “Goddamn you, don’t you ever tell me how to answer questions! You can get the hell out of here!”

  Theis, who felt Johnson was “obviously not well, out of control,” says he “just blew his stack completely.” The other reporters defended their colleague for a moment, saying there had been nothing improper about his question, and then, in Theis’ words, “broke the thing up right away,” and left Johnson’s office.

  Stalking out a few minutes later, Johnson went down to the senators’ private dining room. Seeing Mike Monroney having lunch there alone, he joined him, bolted down a plate of frankfurters and beans, and half a cantaloupe, and got into his limousine. There was one more stop to be made: at the Mayflower, for a visit to Walter George, who had been confined to his apartment with a respiratory infection—and it was a quarter to five before Johnson came out, climbed into the back seat of the big limousine, and told Edwards to head for Huntlands. He was alone except for the chauffeur: Lady Bird was later to say that she had remained behind because Saturday was Lucy’s birthday and was planning to come down on Sunday.

  “I remember it suddenly began to seem terribly close, and I told Norman to turn on the air conditioner,” Johnson was to say. “He said it was already on, and I said to turn it on full steam, and he said it was already on full steam, and was getting very cold.”

  He was late, Johnson was to say, “and I was trying to make it up, and there was this sense of pressure. My chest hurt.” At first, he was to say, “I thought to myself, if only I hadn’t eaten that cantaloupe at lunch,” and “I belched a little and felt better.” But as the car headed deeper into the Virginia hunt country, “my chest really began to hurt.” It felt, he was to say, “as though there were two hundred pounds on it.”

  By the time he arrived, George Brown was taking a nap, and Posh and Alice were leaving to take a swim in a neighbor’s pool. When they asked him to come with them, he said he didn’t feel well, that, Oltorf recalls, “he had terrible indigestion” and “heartburn.” They brought him some baking soda, and he said he felt better and would lie down on a couch in the living room and take a nap, too. As he was lying there, however, “I got this feeling that I couldn’t breathe,” he was to say. When Posh and Alice returned, George met them at the door. “Lyndon is sick,” he said. He had given him more baking soda, “but he says he’s got these pains, and I’m worried about him. It might be his heart.” At this time, Clinton Anderson, who was on his way to a friend’s house in Virginia, dropped by. Lyndon tried to tell Anderson he had indigestion, but Anderson had had a heart attack, and when Johnson mentioned the pressure on his chest and said that his arms felt “heavy,” he said “Lyndon, I think you may be having a coronary.” He should see a doctor at once, he said.

  Johnson’s reaction was rage. “He was furious about that,” Anderson was to say. “He didn’t want any doctor…. He knew there was a story coming out in the Washington Post about him as a possibility for the presidency. He didn’t want to knock it in the head, kill it right at the beginning.” When Anderson told Brown that a doctor should be called, Brown said, “Now, Clint, Lyndon doesn’t want us to do that.” As Anderson detailed the similarities between Johnson’s symptoms and those of a heart attack victim, Johnson became, in Oltorf’s words, “more and more frantic.” But Anderson insisted that a doctor be called, and Oltorf, who had of course spent a lot of time in the area, at Longlea, located one, James Gibson of Middleburg, and after Gibson had examined Johnson he told him that he had the symptoms of a heart attack, “and a bad one.” The doctor said that there were no local facilities to treat it properly. He knew Johnson was in a great deal of pain, he said, but he suggested that Johnson try to get back to Washington. “You’ll probably go into deep shock in about an hour and a half,” the doctor said, “which just gives us time to get you back into town.” That would be the best course, he said, “if you feel like you can do it.”

  AND THEN POSH OLTORF, who had known Lyndon Johnson so long, saw, for the first time, the true strength of Lyndon Johnson.

  Johnson’s usual reaction to physical danger, real or imagined, and to minor pain or illness, was dramatic; at San Marcos, he had had the reputation of being “an absolute physical coward,” and all during his life after college, whenever he had encountered minor physical problems—the only physical problems Oltorf had ever seen him encounter—he had become “frantic.”

  But there had been other episodes in his life, episodes that Oltorf had not witnessed. To avoid service in a combat zone during the war, Lyndon Johnson, a reserve officer, had spent months traveling up and down the West Coast on an ostensibly Navy-ordered tour on which the Navy often could not even find out where he was. But when inquiries from constituents and reporters made it imperative that he at least give the appearance of entering a combat zone, he persuaded President Roosevelt—“for the sake of political future,” as one of Roosevelt’s aides wrote—to send him to Australia as an “observer.” And when, in Australia, he realized that he could not, “for the sake of political future,” return without at least saying that he had witnessed combat, he flew as an observer on a bombing mission on which his bomber was attacked by Japanese Zeroes. It was only a single bombing mission; the next day he left the war zone as quickly as possible. But on that mission, while he was watching Zeroes heading straight at his plane, Lyndon Johnson had not been frantic but “cool as a cucumber.” Although he had avoided for as long as possible being at the scene of battle, once he was at it, his conduct had been calm and courageous, nonchalant in the face of danger. And, of course, when, during the 1937 and 1948 campaigns, there had been not minor sickness but grave illness, and great pain, Lyndon Johnson had not let it interfere with his work. All his life, whenever courage had been needed, it was there. This, now—the pain in his che
st, the heaviness in his arms, the words “heart attack”—was what he had always dreaded. But what was required now was calm. And, instantly, there was calm. Oltorf, who had seen Lyndon Johnson “complain so often, and so loudly” about indigestion, now saw a doctor tell Lyndon Johnson that this time the “indigestion” was a heart attack—and Oltorf saw Lyndon Johnson’s demeanor change.

  Yes, Johnson told Dr. Gibson, if it was best for him to get to Washington, he could do it. The place to take him, he said, was the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He wanted his people to be at the hospital to meet him, he said, and he told George Brown who they were, and to get them there: Lady Bird; Walter Jenkins; Earle Clements, so that he could give him instructions about the Senate’s upcoming work; George Reedy, to handle the press. He wanted someone he knew—someone responsible to him—with him at all times, and he asked Oltorf to accompany him in the ambulance. When it arrived—Middleburg’s “ambulance” was actually a hearse, with the undertaker driving—the doctor took a seat in front, Johnson lay on the floor in the rear, and Oltorf sat in the rear with him, on a sort of jump seat that pulled out from the wall, “so that I was sitting right over him.”

  From that vantage point, Oltorf saw not only calmness but courage. The chest pain would “come and go,” Oltorf recalls, and about halfway to Washington, it got worse. “I can’t stand this pain,” Lyndon Johnson told the doctor. “You’ve got to give me something for it.” The doctor said, “I can give you a shot if you want, but we’ll have to stop, and it’s going to take some time, and time means a lot to you.”

  “If time means a lot, don’t stop,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Keep going.”

  “It was a very hectic ride,” Oltorf was to say. “It hurt him desperately.” But between bouts of pain, he and Oltorf talked. “It was an amazing conversation,” Oltorf felt. “He was extremely courageous and brave. I always thought, you know, that if he had a toe ache, he’d complain about it…and expect a great deal of sympathy. He was just the opposite with this serious thing.”

  Oltorf watched him running over things in his mind. “I think he definitely felt there was a possibility that he’d die before he got there,” Oltorf says, and at one point, “he reached up to me,” and said, “Posh, if something happens, I want to tell you where I think my will is.” He said he thought it was in the bottom drawer of his desk at the radio station in Austin, that he had drawn it up when he went off to war and had not seen it in a long time, but thought that it was there. “If it’s not,” he said, “I just want to tell you what I want. I want Lady Bird to have everything I have…. She’s been a wonderful, wonderful wife, and she’s done so much for me. She just deserves everything I have. That’s what was in my will.”

  There was another matter Johnson mentioned, and Oltorf did not allude to it in the oral history he gave the Lyndon Johnson Library, although he included it—or at least part of it—in his interview with the author. “Then he asked me did I ever see Alice [Glass]. That was something he very seldom asked me. And I said [I saw her] off and on. He said, ‘How is she?’ and I said all right, and then he said something I didn’t tell you and I don’t think I’m going to.”

  And there was another important matter. “Doctor,” he said, “let me ask you something. Will I be able to smoke again if this is a heart attack?” The doctor said, “Well, Senator, frankly, no,” and Johnson, with what Oltorf recalls as “a great sigh,” said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.”

  At the emergency room entrance to Bethesda, attendants lifted Johnson onto a stretcher and carried him into an elevator, which took them up to the seventeenth-floor cardiac treatment section. Lady Bird, Walter Jenkins, and George Reedy were in a waiting room there (Clements had not been located), and they saw Johnson carried past its doorway into an examining room, and doctors took them to the private room he would have as a patient. After about a half hour he was brought in, and lifted onto the bed. “He looked very, very bad,” Walter Jenkins says. Johnson said the doctors had told him he had had a serious heart attack, and that they would be coming to “put him under” in a few minutes. Lady Bird was Lady Bird. “She didn’t break down or cry or carry on or anything of that nature, as some women do,” Jenkins says. “It’s not her nature to do that. She just said, ‘Honey, everything will be all right.’” Johnson told Reedy to notify the press about the attack, and not to minimize its seriousness, to tell them it was “a real bellybuster,” and that Clements would take over for him. He gave Reedy instructions for Clements. He told Jenkins “where his will was” and reminded him about the cash in the secret compartment in his desk, and told him to give it to Lady Bird. “I really felt that he did not think he would live through the night,” Jenkins would recall. “He was preparing himself for not being there anymore….”

  He told Lady Bird to stay with him in the hospital, not to leave him. He handed her his wallet and keys. He mentioned the two suits he had ordered that morning. “Tell him to go ahead with the blue,” he said. “We can use that no matter what happens.” He asked for a cigarette, and when Lady Bird said he couldn’t smoke anymore, he said if he could have one last cigarette, he would never have another. Someone handed him one. “It was very sensuous,” Mrs. Johnson recalls. “He looked at it like, ‘This is the dearest thing.’” Then he went into shock. Mrs. Johnson saw him turn gray, “just about the color of pavement.” He was “motionless as stone and cold to touch.” After a while, the doctors came to see her. They said her husband had had a very serious heart attack, that his chances were fairly good, but that only time would tell. The first twenty-four hours, they said, would be critical.

  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.”