by Carson, Tom
Recall, Hopsie was sitting right next to me. On the facing couch, poor Judy Agnew’s eyes had just glazed with fear. She’d glanced at her husband to recall whether he had a secret and she knew it.
Startled enough to put a hand to my high-collared blouse, I laughed nervously. “I’m sorry! I don’t have a clue.”
“’Course you do. What makes your Hopsie tick? You can trust me.”
“I’m afraid there’s no secret at all, Mr. President,” I floundered as best I could. “As the kids say these days, ‘What you see is—’”
I suspect mentioning the kids was what did it. When addressing the man for whose public pronouncements the term “credibility gap” was invented, quoting “What you see is what you get” might not’ve been stellar either.
“Balls. Harvard men,” LBJ roared, “always have secrets. They damn sure have ’em from me! And West Pointers, now,” he went on, making the Army bird colonel’s fidgety hands nearly do something West Pointers never do—hide the ring—“are just a bunch of smug Freemasons dressed up as soldiers, you know that, Mrs. Cadwaller? By God, if Congress would let me, I’d let ROTC take over the works and have you gold-ring nuggeted bastards put under arrest as an illegal cult. How’d it come ‘Country’ comes third in your book? I went to Southwest State Teachers’ College, San Marcos! Where in hell’d you say you went to school, son?”
The Pentagon civilian not only hadn’t but clearly didn’t want to: “Rensselaer.”
“Mm-hm. Another bright fellow who’s had all the answers since he was in didies. Sonny, do you know the one thing you have not said to your President since four goddam p.m.? ‘I don’t know, Mr. President.’ ‘I’m just not sure, Mr. President.’ Good goddam Christ. If McNamara just once, just once in his sanctified life, had said ‘I don’t know, Mr. President’—‘I’m not sure, Mr. President’—‘No goddam craphouse idea, Mr. President! We’re as slaphappy as poontang from Pyongyang and you’d do better not counting on us. This thing could go either way or somewhere else or nowhere or Jupiter or all up in smoke, but we can’t say which for pigeon shit in an envelope and the Lord sure does work in mysterious ways.’ Had you said that just once to me or to God knows Jack Kennedy, why then maybe! Just maybe. But no, damn it, you don’t—”
He’d heaved to his feet, one forefinger sweeping north. “You don’t, you won’t ever, sonny, even in your worst nightmares, won’t hear all of them in the park shouting, ‘Hey, hey—Rensselaer Institute! How many—how many—did you—did you’—fuck!”
Quaking, he dropped back in his chair. Passed a weary hand over his face before squeezing the bridge of his nose. “What about you, Carl?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t tick anymore, Mr. President,” said Carl [Last Name Redacted]. “I did once, but no more. Just not worth it.”
“Moot question, you mean?”
“Yes, sir. Moot question.”
“I stuck it out two years at Barnard before quitting,” I said brightly. “I just couldn’t see much point—not with that great big wonderful world waiting out there.”
Johnson’s big grateful paws clamped on Pam’s future Rheumas. “Then, little missy, you just may be the smartest woman—smartest person, hell—in this room. I remember that great big wonderful world awful well.”
Not as well as he thought he did, but it had been the quickest lay of the 20th century. “Well, I don’t have so much to show for it,” I apologized.
“Hell, look at me,” LBJ said. “Come on, let’s get something to eat.”
Posted by: Pam
We all rose as he did. Then the President led us out into the hall and through a portico into the family dining room, where places had been set for nine. Only Mrs. [Last Name Redacted] was either unavailable or nonexistent. “Felix! Where in hell is our food?”
“Coming right away, Mr. President.”
“Well, get us all another round while we’re waiting. Make mine double.”
The drinks beat the food by about thirty seconds. But the food took three mess stewards to bring. So far as I could tell, they’d emptied the larder: plates of steaks, ribs, and burgers with and sans cheese. No rump roast of Vice-President Humphrey, but I could see how you’d want to baste that a bit. We each had individual bottles of ketchup, mustard, Worcestershire, A-1 steak and hot pepper sauce at our place settings.
“Anybody here got a cigarette?” LBJ asked and the table froze.
With one possible exception—Judy Agnew, who’d started fumbling in her lap with a beatific peer into the good old vanity-mirror abyss before she recalled that she’d left her handbag back in the sitting room and didn’t smoke anyhow—everyone at that table must’ve known the man asking had quit a three-or-four-pack-a-day habit after a near fatal heart attack in summer ’55. Bull market in those too that year: President Eisenhower’s, which very nearly let us enjoy President Nixon much earlier in life, came along under three months after Senate Majority Leader Johnson’s.
Heart attacks were to the Fifties what shootings were to the Sixties. I’d even used to worry about Gerson, though not because of undue tobacco or boozing—just because he was under such pressure to be Gerson, Gerson, Gerson all the time. Try to remember the kind of Ike era.
“Oh, give me a break,” LBJ wearily told our still faces. “One to be sociable now and again ain’t going to kill me. And say it did? Say it did. Let’s all reason together over just how real a heartbreaker that’d be by now to my fellow Americans except Lady Bird and our girls. I can’t even be sure about my goddam sons-in-law. Now, Hopsie! Don’t you think those kids out in the park would finally learn just how good marijuana tastes with champagne?”
“Mr. President,” Cadwaller protested.
“Mmm. I’m not done yet. Let’s see. Now, Bobby Kennedy and old Gene McCarthy would be waltzing arm and arm around a maypole—trying to trip each other up the while, of course, but that’s politics and boys will be boys. Hubert’s whole fat Woody Woodpecker trip would go into overdrive as he leapt nimbly over my body to take the damn oath. A few of the servants down at the ranch might feel bad, but Hill Country people are no strangers to death and they’ll still be on the payroll. I don’t think I’ve left anyone out. Now will somebody please give me a cigarette?”
“Mr. President,” said Cadwaller again. LBJ held up a hand.
“No, no, no. As you can all hear from my tone of voice, I, Lyndon Johnson, am not being one bit sorry for myself. I’m only trying to analyze a situation cogently, just what the four of you bored me half stupid by not managing to do all afternoon after years of assessing this crap. Your C Street striped-pants crowd won’t be weeping much either, Hopsie, if one lonesome old cigarette does kill me bang, dead, just like that right in front of your eyes like you’re all worried it will. Well, then turn your backs on me, damn it! Let me have my one little smoke to be sociable. You know the funny thing, Hopsie, is I always say State’s the one that never let me down. That because I never gave ’em much say to begin with, but neither did Jack and you all loved his ass.”
“Mr. President, you know that’s not fair.”
“I agree, Hopsie. But you know what Jack said about fairness. That’s why I don’t let it get to me much. Now, would you happen to have a cigarette on you, Mrs. Cadwaller? Do you smoke at all?”
“Not in years.”
“Well, I am glad to hear that. My mother never touched one in her life. I wouldn’t want my death on her conscience anyhow. And Hopsie, I know you’re a pipe man, which of course is no help to me right now at all. Pipes are for serene Harvard men with a secret and white-haired old coots sitting out front of country gas stations and counting and naming each other’s nose hairs. Plus Jerry Ford, who can’t count and just calls his ‘My fellow guests here.’ But can you see me with one? No, I don’t think a pipe would suit me at all. I need a cigarette.”
“Mr. Presi
dent? I could run out to a People’s or Dart Drug,” volunteered Judy Agnew, faltering as the idea’s absurdity hit even her. There must be cigarettes everywhere in the Mansion, summonable by pressing a button to make Felix materialize. I do like to think the rest of us had a bit more notion something else was afoot.
“Why, Carl!” LBJ said with a snicker. “Mr. Central Intelligence. Thought you said you don’t tick anymore, but what makes you tick is right in your shirt pocket. Now, why wouldn’t you give your Commander in Chief just one cigarette?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Carl [Last Name Redacted], fumbling the pack out. “I didn’t think you liked menthol.”
“Never did in my prime. But if Salem’s what’s here, why, I’ve got no choice. So give over.”
Extracting one, he half palmed then half tossed it into his mouth with an addict’s finesse. An ex-smoker myself with occasional relapses, I knew it was like riding a bicycle.
“Carl,” said our President witheringly. “Now what am I supposed to do, breathe on it? I know the ‘Hey, hey’ kids in the park would believe that.”
“Sir, forgive me.” Carl patted for matches. But the Army bird colonel had just flicked open a Zippo.
“Well, well!” said LBJ shrewdly as he leaned in for the light. “Another county heard from. Colonel.”
“Sorry, Mr. President. It’s not for me. The General does like his cigar.”
“Yes, he does.” After one deeply satisfied inhale—the First Lady’s in Texas, of course—Johnson held up his Salem for our inspection.
“Well, now! I think we can agree that this is my cigarette. My saliva is on it and its smoke’s in my lungs. Doesn’t matter anymore who gave it to me. Doesn’t matter anymore who lit it. Doesn’t matter I never liked menthol much in my prime. Nobody else is going to smoke it. No one’ll take it away from me. If it does kill me bang, dead, right in front of your eyes, you all have my permission to tell them I asked for it.”
“Mr. President!” all the men said. Yes, even Cadwaller.
“Oh, don’t worry, Carl. Don’t worry, Colonel. Don’t worry, Rensselaer. Don’t worry, Hopsie. Felix Culpa has orders from me to swear an affidavit saying just that if he finds me dead from this cigarette I only lit to be sociable. Now, if you boys want to work out my next step in Vietnam”—he took a deep drag, then switched back from his aggressive thumb-and-forefinger pinch to two-fingered equanimity—“you go on ahead. Have something to eat while you’re at it. That is an order from your Commander in Chief. Dear Mrs. Cadwaller, come take a walk with me.”
Posted by: Dear Mrs. Cadwaller
His shirt baggy and yanked at the waistline, he’d stood. Indeed he’d stalked out, trailing twin contrails of smoke. Not feeling I had much say, I pushed my own chair back, blinking at the untasted plates of ribs, sirloin, and burgers before us. Then I found myself looking uncertainly at the most difficult moment of your great-grandfather’s professional life.
Sweat on his forehead and said forehead pale, as was his usually immaculate jaw with its faint grit of stubble—oh, Hopsie! How I loved you just then—he made himself honor the noblest traditions of the Department of State. He accepted the prospect of cuckoldry for our nation’s sake.
“Go, Pam,” he said. “Calm him down if you can. Dear God, I’ve got to see him tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is another day!” Judy Agnew reassured him inanely. Or maybe not so inanely, not that she knew it, since I couldn’t help hearing Nachum Unger’s voice call, “Margaret Mit-chell.” I felt no less inadequate this time.
“Not these days, it’s not,” said Carl [Last Name Redacted]. “Cadwaller, you in that briefing too? I thought it was only the toyshop.”
“Please excuse me,” I said. “The President’s waiting.”
In the hall, having just handed over his highball glass—“Right away, Mr. President,” said Felix Culpa as he melted away—he was grinding his cigarette out in a sand-filled metal ashtray stand. Yes, the White House still had them then. Even though few people smoked in the President’s presence, they all did the second his back was turned and nobody found that objectionable. If you’re incredulous, these were dinosaur days: before our homemade, as you might say, Vatican III.
By then it must’ve been well past eleven. The East Wing’s main hallway was still blazing with light, as were the empty rooms I could see. The President hadn’t retired yet. “Ever been up here before, ma’am?” LBJ asked.
“No.”
“I wouldn’t say so in front of Cadwaller, but I thought maybe you might’ve in Jack’s time. It was cooze Grand Central Station anytime Jackie hopped up to New York. Weren’t you some kind of stewardess before you got married?”
Since l’équipe has no time to ransack my reception-line prattle, let alone scroll back to our first encounter in 1942, I can’t guess from what mislaid Johnsonian dossier that illusory Pam—not the last, daisysdaughter.com readers—had popped up tonight. I suspect learning I’d been a stewardess was the germ of what I’ve come to call Clio Airways.
“Oh, hell, Mr. President, don’t you have eyes to see?” I said with a chuckle. “I was too old to be cooze in Jack’s time.”
“Sorry. When it’s this late at night, I sometimes think it was all twenty years ago. Don’t you too, Mrs. Cadwaller?”
“We all do, I think. Anyhow, Hopsie and I were in Africa.”
“Oh, whereabouts?”
“Nagon. Djedjia now,” I corrected myself.
“Hellhole?”
“Heaven back then if you were us.”
He pondered his bourbon. “Too bad Jack never sent me.”
“He sent Bobby,” I said.
“Yeah, he would,” LBJ grumbled. Once his next sip had cued us to start strolling, he stopped almost immediately to coach the man with the briefcase containing new-kew-lear, nucleah, and nuclear codes. “We ain’t going far, so sit tight, son. Hope you’ve got a copy of Playboy in there.”
“No, sir, Mr. President,” came the prim reply. As we walked on, LBJ sighed.
“I keep trying to get them to smile,” he confided. “Hell, in their shoes I’d be grinning like some damn Cheshire cat.” Then we passed into a large oval room done in yellow.
“This one’s still all Jackie,” LBJ said, meaning the décor. “Only room on this floor that still is, just in case she ever decides to come back and visit.”
“She hasn’t?”
“No, never. Of course Mrs. Johnson and I have invited her a number of times. Her refusals have been mighty gracious, and I can’t say as I blame her. I don’t think Mrs. Lincoln ever came back either. I doubt Lady Bird will,” which had me catching my breath as he shoved his glass in the far door’s direction. “This next one’s the Treaty Room. Jack named it, I didn’t.”
There are paintings you don’t really think of as having originals, since they aren’t reproduced in art tomes but history books. “My God! Forgive me, but I’m a historian,” I said. As LBJ flinched, I swiftly added, “Retired.”
We gazed at George P.A. Healy’s The Peacemakers, showing Lincoln conferring with Generals Sherman and Grant and Admiral Porter soon after Richmond had fell. Though it was far outside Glory Be’s time frame, I’d always quite liked it. Suiting how I imagine him, rough red-headed Sherman is doing the talking.
“Yeah,” said LBJ softly. Newly close, newly redolent, newly Lyndonian with his shirttail out next to me. “I used to come in and look at this one a lot. Don’t so much anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. And believe me, I was.
“Well, they sure as hell aren’t going to hang one of me chewing the fat with McNamara, Rusk, and Westmoreland. We’ve got plenty of photographs. A painting like this would be tits on a bull even if—fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck. Never mind.”
To have looked at him then would have invaded his privacy. M
iming the scamp I so definitely wasn’t by then and never really had been, I took a few steps and peered through the next door. “Lincoln Bedroom?” I guessed once he’d had a few seconds.
“Yep,” came his voice from behind me, now more under control. “Of course, it warn’t ever his bedroom.”
Posted by: Pam
That’s going to stay my one exception to a rule I’ve been quietly following here on daisysdaughter.com. Because laughter at this man’s expense still revolts me—I can understand loathing, but laughter?—I’ve made no attempt to facsimilize Lyndon’s cottonmouth accent. But that word could only be spelled the way Huck did.
“It was really the Cabinet room,” he explained, recovered enough to come up alongside me. “He signed the Emancipation Proclamation on a desk right about where that pillow is now. Valenti had the numbskull idea I should sign the ’65 Voting Rights Act in here, but I said piss on that noise. Hell, all I could picture was me on the bed in a stovepipe hat and fake whiskers.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t keep the original furnishings.” Recall that in Beverly Hills I’d put in some time as an amateur decorator.
“Hell,” Lyndon said. “Don’t you know this whole building is bullshit? All renovations. They gutted the place stem to stern back when old Harry Truman was inventing the cold war. The layout’s the same, but Abraham Lincoln never once put his hand to this wall.” His own was pressed to it.
“Mr. President, did you say inventing?”
“Come now, Mrs. Cadwaller. You never once heard that word pass your President’s lips. He had to scare hell out of the Congress to get done a few things that needed doing, was all. I’ve never asked him; we aren’t any too close. Harry doesn’t take kindly to anyone who sits at the desk where he used to, the more so when it’s a fellow Democrat. Anyhow, I guess he got away with it and I didn’t.”
