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 wa
y 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.
29
The Program
with a Heart
ON THE OPENING DAY of the 1956 session of Congress, ninety-one senators were at their desks when, after the chaplain’s prayer, the Majority Leader rose to ask for recognition so that he could request a quorum call. Before Vice President Nixon gave him the floor, however, he said, “The Chair knows that he expresses the heartfelt sentiments of all the members of this body when he says that we are most happy to see the senator from Texas back in his accustomed seat.” All along the four arcs of desks, senators stood and applauded. “You don’t know how glad I am to stand at this desk again,” Lyndon Johnson said quietly. After the quorum call had begun, he walked out to the lobby to pose for photographers. Nixon came out and put his arm around him. Walter George and Harry Byrd crowded up to him, not to get into the picture but to say hello, and Theodore Francis Green was not far behind. As they talked to Lyndon, the old men’s faces lit up and their eyes were warm behind their thick glasses. Hubert Humphrey bustled over to shake his hand, with a broad, warm smile on his face, and it was no broader than Bill Knowland’s. When, later that week, the Democratic Policy Committee held its first meeting, Johnson began by expressing his “everlasting gratitude” to Earle Clements and all the committee members for “carrying on so admirably” during his illness. “It was a labor of love for all of us,” Clements replied, and the heads around the table—Jim Murray’s and Lister Hill’s and Bob Kerr’s and Carl Hayden’s as well as Dick Russell’s—nodded vigorously in agreement. Lyndon Johnson, who had spent his life searching for affection and a sense of security, was back in a place where he had found as much of those commodities as he was ever likely to find anywhere. He had just spent five months in the valley in which he had been born and raised, but he was back in a place, on a hill, that was much more a home to him than the Pedernales had ever been.
• • •
SPEAKING AT THE WOMEN’S NATIONAL PRESS CLUB “Welcome to Congress” dinner in the Hotel Statler that evening, tall and rangy, his deeply bronzed face dramatic above the black and white of his evening clothes, Johnson said that his heart attack had been “a wonderful way to gain a little perspective. I think I learned lessons of humility and of proportions—when to put forth the maximum effort and when to let troubles go by.” Assuring reporter John D. Morris of the New York Times that he was going to follow his doctors’ orders, he said, “I’m going to be sensible. I’m not going to try to do everything.”
James H. Rowe, the highly respected lawyer and political insider, who had known Lyndon Johnson for almost twenty years, was aware that, as he was to say, Johnson would always use “whatever he could” to “make people feel sorry for him” because “that helped him get what he wanted from them.” But that awareness didn’t help Rowe when the person from whom Johnson wanted something was him. Johnson had been trying for years to acquire Rowe’s full-time services. He was aware of something known to very few people in Washington. Capital legend had bestowed much of the credit for Harry Truman’s 1948 victory on a memorandum written to the President before the campaign, at a time when his chances appeared hopeless. The memo proposed a campaign strategy, and it did so with great specificity and pragmatism; every one of its recommendations was based not on ideology but on what the memo called “the politically advantageous thing to do.” Truman had reputedly kept the document—thirty-two single-spaced typewritten pages—in the bottom drawer of his desk all during the campaign, using it as a blueprint for his come-from-behind victory. The memo, which had acquired an almost talismanic significance in the capital’s political circles, had been presented to the President by Clark Clifford, his legal counsel, and its authorship was publicly attributed to him, but Johnson knew that except for some editing changes the author was actually Rowe. Having read the memo—and having observed how closely Truman adhered to its strategy—Johnson believed that the President had relied on it heavily, and that its brilliance had been proven by Truman’s victory. He felt that Rowe could do the same for him: could give him, too, a blueprint for reaching the goal that flickered always before him. He had, George Reedy was to say with more than a touch of envy, “an almost mystical belief in Jim’s powers. He thought Jim might make him Pope or God knows what.” But while Rowe had always been available to help Johnson with advice, having observed how Johnson treated people on his payroll, he had always rejected Johnson’s offers to join his staff. During that first week in January, however, Johnson renewed his overtures—with a new argument—and when Rowe refused this time, he wouldn’t let it drop. “I wish you would come down to the Senate and help me,” he said in a low, earnest voice. And when Rowe continued to refuse, using his law practice as an excuse (“I said, ‘I can’t afford it, I’ll lose clients’”), he found that Johnson was telling other members of their circle how cruel it was of Jim to refuse to help to take a little of the load off a man at death’s door. “People I knew were coming up to me on the street—on the street—and saying, ‘Why aren’t you helping Lyndon? Don’t you know how sick he is? How can you let him down when he needs you?’”
Johnson had spoken to Rowe’s law partner, Rowe found. “To my amazement, Corcoran was saying, ‘You just can’t do this to Lyndon Johnson!’ I said, ‘What do you mean I can’t do it?’ He said, ‘Never mind the clients. We’ll hold down the law firm.’” Johnson had spoken to Rowe’s
wife. “One night, Elizabeth turned on me: ‘Why are you doing this to poor Lyndon?’”
Then Lyndon Johnson came to Jim Rowe’s office again, to plead with him, crying real tears as he sat doubled over, his face in his hands. “He wept. ‘I’m going to die. You’re an old friend. I thought you were my friend and you don’t care that I’m going to die. It’s just selfish of you, typically selfish.’”
Finally Rowe said, “‘Oh, goddamn it, all right’”—and then “as soon as Lyndon got what he wanted,” Rowe was forcibly reminded why he had been determined not to join his staff. The moment the words were out of Rowe’s mouth, Johnson straightened up, and his tone changed instantly from one of pleading to one of cold command.
“Just remember,” he said. “I make the decisions. You don’t.”
THROUGHOUT THE 1956 SESSION, Johnson used his heart attack to get what he wanted from senators, too. Bobby Baker would remind senators recalcitrant on one issue or another that they shouldn’t upset the Leader, that he was a sick man, that they should try to make things easier for him—arguments that had particular resonance in 1956 for a group in which, that year, the shadow of death was particularly dark. In February, Harley Kilgore died of a stroke, and in April, Alben Barkley, giving a speech at a college in Virginia, had just proclaimed, in one of his trademark religious references, “I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than sit in the seats of the mighty,” when he clutched his chest, collapsed, and died of a heart attack. And all through that year, Eugene Millikin, once tall and vigorous but now pale and gaunt, was forced to attend Senate sessions in a wheelchair because of an illness that he called arthritis but that his colleagues suspected was something worse; in July, Millikin announced that he would not seek reelection that November.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 104
