I telephoned Lady Bird Johnson—Lyndon’s teeth had bared at even the suggestion that he use the telephone now—to reassure her and advise her to arrange travel to Dallas as quickly as possible. I called Hal Ball to facilitate quick transportation for Mrs. Johnson. I saw Lyndon trapped by the mob in the lobby’s corner, his slack cheeks flushed hot, his nose redly purple, his small person’s eyes dull with shock and a dawning realization. His little eyes sought mine above the roiling coil of press and lackeys, but he could not get through, even as I waved from the phone-bank.
‘You get that mike out my face or it’s gonna be calling your personal ass home,’ was edited from the special newscasts. Dan Rather had reeled away, pale, rubbing his crew cut.
The crowd slowly dissolved as news from doctors and Service upstairs failed to forthcome. We were able to huddle with Lyndon in a small waiting room off the lobby. The meeting was grimly efficient. An ad hoc transition team was assembled on the spot. Service had set up a line to Ball back at the office. Bunker and Califano and Salinger were filling note cards furiously. Cabinet appointments were hashed out with the kind of distanced heat reserved for arguments about golf. Lyndon said little.
I took Lyndon up to the First Lady’s room. Lyndon parted the crowd around her bed. He felt her tranquilized forehead with a hand that almost covered her face. Her color was good. A flashbulb popped. I saw the First Lady’s drugged eyes between Lyndon’s fingers.
No one had any news even about who in the hospital might have news. We all huddled, conferred, smoked, blew the smoke away from Lyndon, waited. Lyndon was so savage to those young Bostonians who came snuffling up both to commiserate and congratulate that our group was soon left to itself. Connally, his arm in a sling, hovered pacing at the perimeter of our circle, drinking at a bottled seltzer whose volume seemed to remain somehow constant.
I called Duverger, who had been home with bronchitis, watching the news on television and out of his mind with worry. I called Mrs. Teane at her home in Arlington. I tried to call Margaret at her treatment center in Maryland and was informed that she had checked out weeks ago. My mother’s line remained busy for hours.
Our huddle ended, too, long before the official word came. Everyone had a hundred things to do. The small room emptied little by little. Flanked by Pierre and me, Lyndon finally had a few minutes to slouch and reflect in his waiting-room chair. He applied the inhaler to his swollen passages. His spurs made lines on the floor as he stretched out long legs. He held his own forearm, opening and closing his fist. The skin below his eyes was faintly blue. I dispensed some digitalis and all but had to force him to swallow.
We sat. We stared for a time at the little room’s white walls. Connally studied the concession machines.
‘Everything,’ Lyndon was murmuring.
‘Excuse me sir?’
He looked out absently over his own legs. ‘Boy,’ he said, ‘I’d give every fucking thing I have not to have to stand up there and take a job ain’t mine by right or by the will of folks. Your thinking man, he avoids back doors to things. Charity. Humiliation. Distrust. Responsibility you didn’t never get to get ready to expect.’
‘Natural to feel that way, LB,’ Connally said, feeding a candy machine coins.
Lyndon stared hard at a point I could not see, shaking his great pill of a head.
‘I’d give every fucking thing I have, boy.’
Salinger shot me a look, but I had already clicked out my pen.
There was transition. Two hurried mass mailings. Boxes to be packed and taped. Burly movers to be supervised.
Duverger’s health declined. He seemed unable to shake the bronchitis and the coincident infections it opened him to. He lost the strength to climb stairs and had to give up his job at the boutique. He lay in bed, listening to scratched Belafonte records and raising in our linen a daily mountain of colorful used Kleenex. He lost weight and had fevers. I learned that malaria was endemic in Haiti, and obtained quinine from Bethesda. Whether from empathy or exposure, I felt my own health getting more delicate as the time with Duverger passed. I caught every sore throat that went around the White House. I got used to having a sore throat.
The White House systems for receiving and distributing and answering mail were huge, hugely staffed, time-tested, honed to a hard edge of efficiency. Lyndon’s Same Day Directive presented these quick furtive career mailboys small challenge. I became little more than a postal figurehead, responsible for drafting and updating the ten or so standardized reply letters that were printed and signature-stamped by the gross and flowed out in response to the growing number of letters and telegrams from people in every state. By 1965 the incoming mail was on the whole negative, and it was hard to prevent the formulated responses from sounding either artificial or defensive and shrill.
Duverger and I were formally married in a small civil ceremony outside a Mount Vernon suburb. The service was attended by a few close mutual friends. Peter came all the way from Charlotte. Duverger had to sit for the ceremony, dressed in mute silks that deemphasized, or maybe complemented, the sick weak gray of his complexion.
“I especially appreciate your coming here because I feel I have a rapport with you and they won’t let me out of the gate so I am glad they let you in.”
—To White House Tour Group
May 14, 1966
“This is not a change in purpose. It is a change in what we believe that purpose requires.”
—To Young Democrats’ Council
Columbia University, New York
May 21, 1966
“He seemed to get obsessed with his health. He began to seem robust in the way delicate people seem robust.”
“Boyd got delicate and obsessed, too. He wore his topcoat all the time. He perspired. As if he followed LBJ’s lead in everything.”
“Boyd barely even had a formal function. That army of career mail-boys of Kennedy’s was all over the SDD before we even got the transition over with.”
“He’d just sit there holding the radio while Lyndon worked. Who knows what he did in there.”
“They’d both wander around constantly. Walk around the grounds. Look out the fence.”
“Sometimes just the President alone, except there wandering a ways behind him’d be Boyd, with all those Secret Service folks.”
“But who knows what they walked over in that office, hour after hour.”
“The radio stopped, when they were in there.”
“Who knows how many decisions he was in on. Tonkin. Cambodia. The whole Great Big Society.”
“We’ll never know that about Lady Bird, either. She was one of those behind-the-scenes types of First Ladies. Influence impossible to gauge.”
“We know Boyd helped write some of the later speeches.”
“But no one even knows which ones were whose.”
“They were all thick as thieves over there.”
“Nobody who knows anything is even alive anymore.”
“That summary-boy with the ears had that gruesome office pool going about whether Dave would outlive Lyndon.”
—From Dissecting
“Now you folks come on and be happy, God damn it.”
—Televised address
Oval Office,
White House
November 1967
Most of the stories about those last months, about Lyndon refusing sometimes ever to leave the Oval Office, are the truth. I sat in the oversized corner chair, my lap full of tissues and lozenges, and watched him urinate into the iron office wastebasket Mrs. Teane would quietly empty in the morning. Sounds in the office were hushed by thick Truman carpet, lush furnishings. The office was dark except for passing headlights and the orange flicker of the protesters’ bonfire in the park across the street.
The office window facing Pennsylvania was dappled and smeared with the oil of Lyndon’s nose. He stood, face touching the window, an ellipse of his breath appearing and shrinking and appearing on the glass as he whispered along with the protest
ers’ crudely rhymed chants. Helicopters circled like gulls; fat fingers of spotlight played over the park and the White House grounds and the line of Kutner’s Servicemen ranged along the black iron fence. Things were occasionally thrown at the fence, and clattered.
Lyndon applied his nasal inhaler, inhaling fiercely.
‘How many kids did I kill today, boy?’ he asked, turning from the window.
I sniffed deeply, swallowing. ‘I think that’s neither a fair nor a healthy way to think about a question like that, sir.’
‘Goddamn your pale soul boy I asked you how many.’ He pointed at a window full of yam-colored bonfire light. ‘They’re sure the mother-fuck asking. I think Lyndon Johnson should be allowed to ask, as well.’
‘Probably between three and four hundred kids today, sir,’ I said. I sneezed wetly and miserably into a tissue. ‘Happy now?’
Lyndon turned back to the window. He had forgotten to rebutton his trousers.
‘Happy,’ he snorted. The best way to tell he’d heard you was to listen for repetition. ‘You think they’re happy?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
He twitched his big head at the bonfire, listening for the tiny loudness of the distant bullhorns and the plaintive hiss of crowds’ response. He slouched, his hands on the sill for support. ‘Those youths of America over across there,’ he said.
‘They seem pretty upset, sir.’
He hitched up his sagging pants thoughtfully. ‘Boy, I get a smell of happiness off their upset, however. I think they enjoy getting outraged and vilified and unjustly ignored. That’s what your leader of this here free world thinks, boy.’
‘Could you elaborate on that, sir?’
Lyndon horselaughed a big misted circle onto the window, and we looked together at the big hand-lettered sign on the Oval Office wall, beside the cattle horns, behind the Presidential desk. I’d made it. It read NEVER ELABORATE.
He was shaking his head. ‘I believe… I believe I am out of touch with the youth of America. I believe that they cannot be touched by me, or by what’s right, or by intellectual concepts on what’s right for a nation.’
I sneezed.
He touched, with big brown-freckled fingers, at the window, leaving more smears. ‘You’ll say this is easy for me to say, but I say they’ve had it too goddamned easy, son. These youths that are yippies and that are protesters and that use violence and public display. We gave it to them too easy, boy. I mean their Daddies. Men that I was youths with. And these youths today are pissed off. They ain’t never once had to worry or hurt or suffer in any real way whatsoever. They do not know Great Depression and they do not know desolation.’ He looked at me. ‘You think that’s good?’
I looked back at him.
‘I think I’m gettin’ to be a believer in folks’ maybe needing to suffer some. You see some implications in that belief? It implies our whole agenda of domestic programs is maybe possibly bad, boy. I’m headed for thinking it’s smelling bad right at the heart of the whole thing.’ He inhaled nasally, watching protesters dance around. ‘We’re taking away folks’ suffering here at home through these careful domestic programs, boy,’ he said, ‘without giving them nothing to replace it. Take a look at them dancing across over there, boy, shouting fuck you like they invented both fucking and me, their President, take a look over across, and you’ll see what I see. I see some animals that need to suffer, some folks that need some suffering to even be Americans inside, boy; and if we don’t give them some suffering, why, they’ll just go and hunt up some for themselves. They’ll take some suffering from some oriental youths who are caught in a great struggle between sides, they’ll go and take those other folks’ suffering and take it inside themselves. They’re getting stimulation from it, son. I’m believing in the youths of America’s need for some genuine stimulation. Those youths are out there making their own stimulation; they’re making it from scratch off oriental youths wouldn’t squat to help your Mama take a leak. We as leaders haven’t given them shit. They think prosperity and leadership is dull. God bless the general patheticness of their souls.’ He pressed his nose against the glass. I had a quick vision, as he stood there, of children and candy stores.
I squinted as a helicopter’s passing spot brightened the Oval Office to a brief blue noon. ‘So you think there’s something right about what they’re doing out there?’
‘ “Something right,” ’ Lyndon snorted, motionless at the blue window. ‘No, ’cause they got no notion of right and wrong. Listen. They got no notion whatsoever of right and wrong, boy. Listen.’
We listened to them. I sniffed quietly.
‘To them, right and wrong is words, boy.’ He came away and eased himself into his big desk chair, sitting straight, hands out before him on the unscarred presidential cherrywood. ‘Right and wrong ain’t words,’ he said. ‘They’re feelings. In your guts and intestines and such. Not words. Not songs with guitars. They’re what make you feel like you do. They’re inside you. Your heart and digestion. Like the folks you personally love.’ He felt at his forearm and clenched his fist. ‘Let them sad sorry boys out across there go be responsible for something for a second, boy. Let them go be responsible for some folks and then come back and tell their President, me, LBJ, about right and wrong and so forth.’
We took his pulse together. We measured his pressure. There were no pains in his shoulder or side, no blue about his mouth. We reclined him for blood flow, placed his boots on the window’s sill. My chest and back were soaked with perspiration. I made my way back to my chair in the corner, feeling terribly faint.
‘You all right, boy?’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’
He chuckled. ‘Some pair of federal functionaries right here, I got to say.’
I coughed.
We listened, quiet, unwell, to the songs and chants and slogans and to the chop of Service helicopters and the clang and clatter of beer cans. Minutes passed in the faint bonfire glow. I asked Lyndon whether he was asleep.
‘I ain’t sleeping,’ he said.
‘Could I ask you to tell me what it feels like, then, sir.’
A silence of distant chant. Lyndon picked at his nose deeply, his eyes closed, head thrown back.
‘Does what feel like?’
I cleared my throat. ‘Being responsible, as you were saying, I meant. Being responsible for people. What does it feel like, if you are?’
He either chuckled or wheezed, a deep sound, almost subsonic, from the recesses of his inclined executive chair. I stared at his profile, a caricaturist’s dream.
‘You and Bird,’ he said. ‘Damned if you and my Bird don’t always ask the same things of Lyndon Johnson, son. It’s queer to me.’ He brought himself upright to face my bit of the office’s darkness. ‘I done told Bird just last week how responsibility, why, it is not even like a feeling at all,’ he said quietly.
‘You can’t feel what responsibility feels like? It numbs you?’
He administered the inhaler, played with his fob against the bad light of the window.
‘I told Bird it’s like the sky, boy. Is what I told her. How about if I come and ask you what does the sky feel like to you? The sky ain’t a feeling, boy.’
We both coughed.
He pointed upward, vaguely up at the horns, nodding as if at something familiar. ‘But it’s there, friend. The sky is there. It’s there, over your ass, every fucking day. ’Matter where you go, boy, look on up, and on top of every goddamned thing else she’s there. And the day there ain’t no sky…’
He squeezed and worked the last bits of inhalant out of his nasal inhaler. It was a hideous sound. Before long I had to help Lyndon back over to the office wastebasket full of urine. We stood there, together, on the plain white marble Presidents’ floor.
“Mr. Lyndon ‘LBJ’ Johnson, like all men in public service, was driven both by a great and zealous personal ambition and by a great and zealous compassion for the well-being of his fellow man. He was, like all great men, hel
l, like all men, a paradox of mystery. He will not and cannot ever be completely or totally understood. But for those of us gathered today under these great lone-star skies to try and understand a man we must try to understand if we are to do him the honor he deserves, I say this. I say to go west. I say the further you go west, the nearer you get to Lyndon Baines Johnson.”
—Texas State Senator Jack Childs
Eulogy on the Passing of LBJ
Austin, Texas, 1968
When I received the pink, plainly inscribed invitation to take tea and refreshment with Claudia ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson, I was prostrate in our big bed, down with a violent flu.
Duverger had been gone almost a week. I had come home from some mass-mailing work in New Hampshire to find him gone. He had left no word and had packed none of his several pieces of luggage. His money and several of my small black office notebooks were gone.
I can offer no better testimony to my feelings for Lyndon’s career than my panic that René had either defected to or been shanghaied by some Other Side. Most of the entries in the notebooks were verbatim. One had recounted a Joint Chiefs briefing session held on sinks and hampers and the lip of a claw-footed tub while Lyndon had been moving his bowels on the commode. There was enough truth in those tiny records to embarrass Lyndon beyond repair; he had ordered that everything that was written be written. I admit, with pain, that my first day’s thoughts were of Lyndon and betrayal and the masklike Republican we’d all grown to fear.
Three days of frantic searching for Duverger had taken me as far north as the New Hampshire camps of Humphrey, McCarthy, Lindsay and Percy—and that man—and as far south as the dark lounges of Chevy Chase. It left me weak beyond description, and I came down with a violent flu. Lyndon, too, had been sick, out of the office and news for a week. He had not contacted me. No one from either office or White House had called for the three days I had been home ill. And I hadn’t the character to call anyone.
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