Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  “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 Ho
lmes 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 p
olitics. 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.