“We’re partners”—Johnson’s statement to the Chronicle’s publisher was borne out by the newspaper’s eagerness to comply with their agreement. Even he could find no fault with the paper’s efforts. Talking with Albert Thomas on January 20, he asked, “Is the Chronicle for us now?” and answered the question himself: “All out, all the time, aren’t they?” (“They’ve been that for about two or three [weeks],” Thomas replied. “Every other page” had a favorable story now, the congressman said.) When, on February 9, Johnson told Valenti to plant “a paragraph” in the Chronicle, Valenti said he was confident William P. Steven, the Chronicle’s editor, would comply. “Bill Stevens [sic], every time I send him, ask him anything, boy, he has it in the paper the next day.… Stevens has been real good about it.” The Chronicle was indeed to endorse Lyndon Johnson in 1964. It would not endorse another Democratic presidential candidate for forty-four years.2
THE POWER TO INVESTIGATE, the power to regulate, the power to license—those were not the only powers of government with which Lyndon Johnson, implacable, unyielding, refusing to accept anything less than exactly what he wanted, was, from behind closed doors at the LBJ Ranch, threatening the press during that Christmas vacation.
It wasn’t only congressmen or senators to whom the closing of a military installation represented a threat. The closing of a base meant the departure of its personnel, and their salaries, some of which would have been spent in local stores and restaurants. The resultant reduction in those businesses’ income would mean a reduction in their expenditures, including their expenditures on advertising—including newspaper advertising. And over Christmas, 1963, Johnson was contemplating the use of that threat against other newspapers, and against another reporter.
Shreveport, Louisiana, was the home of two daily newspapers, the Shreveport Times and the Shreveport Journal, and of Barksdale Air Force Base, home of the Strategic Air Command’s Second Bomb Wing and its fifteen thousand military and civilian personnel. The Times and Journal, both supporters of racial segregation, had turned against Johnson as his support for civil rights had become clear, and during one of his telephone calls to Albert Jackson, who in addition to being Margaret Mayer’s boss was president of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, Johnson asked, “What do we need to do about Shreveport? Do I need to really slug them, or just wait until they come around? … I can let them have it good with Barksdale Field and I’m tempted to, the editorials they’re writing.… I’m almost inclined to let them have both barrels.”
Jackson persuaded Johnson to wait “a little bit” on the Shreveport front.3 He suggested that he come to Washington to advise Johnson on how to handle various publishers, both unfavorable and favorable. Taking him up on the suggestion, Johnson invited him to visit the Oval Office, “and let me and you sit there and have a drink, and call some of these folks, and just say hello to them, without [them] even knowing you’re there.”
On another journalistic front, however, Johnson wasn’t willing to wait. Seventy-three-year-old Bascom Timmons, who had been reporting from Washington since 1912, had established his own news bureau, which represented more than a dozen newspapers in the capital. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram was the one to which he devoted most of his time, and the paper identified him as its chief Washington correspondent. A former president of the National Press Club, and a member of the Hall of Fame of Sigma Delta Chi, the national journalistic honor society, he was the dean of Texas newspapermen in Washington, and enjoyed, a colleague was to say, “the respect of all the newspaper people in town, and the love of many congressmen.” Those feelings were not shared by Johnson. Timmons’ articles and columns had been infuriating him for years, and during this Christmas vacation—on Christmas Day, in fact—he made a telephone call to the Star-Telegram’s owner, Amon Carter Jr. During the call, the recent decision to close the Fort Worth Army Depot (with its twenty-six hundred soldiers) was mentioned by the President, as was Fort Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base, home of six Strategic Air Command squadrons. And a non-military project, to link landlocked Fort Worth to the Gulf of Mexico, was mentioned also. The Trinity River Navigation Project, that would, through dredging and the construction of a series of dams, make the river navigable to barges all the way from the Fort Worth area to the Gulf 365 miles away, would cost an estimated billion dollars, but it had been a long-cherished dream of Amon Carter Sr., and after his death had been adopted by his son, and early in 1963, it had been approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, although the only funds thus far authorized had been for a minor first stage, a dam near Corsicana. And Bascom Timmons was mentioned, too, in a manner that made it seem that the President might be hinting at a connection between the journalist and the air force base, and between the journalist and the dream. After the exchange of Christmas good wishes, the President told Amon Jr., “Now, I want just to leave this one thought.… I’m going to get this budget down. And a lot of things are going by the wayside, and a lot of consolidation is going to take effect. And a lot of things are going to hurt people—like that Army depot the other day.
“We still got a lot of things there, like your Carswell, and your Trinity River, and things that you want. Now, you tell your crowd over at the Star-Telegram that you want to be damn sure that you’ve got as competent a man and as thorough a man and as attentive a man as the New York Times has got in those press conferences because you want the President’s home state to be represented by real intelligence.”
Carter understood what the President was getting at, because he knew how Johnson felt about Timmons; in fact, Johnson had complained to him already about the reporter. “We’re going to try retiring Bascom, which is going to be pretty hard,” the publisher said. “I know … you told me some things about him once before.”
Understanding, however, was not what Johnson had in mind, and he was no longer merely a senator or Vice President. He became more explicit about what a President might do with his power. “You all ought to just get the best damn fellow you can for the Star-Telegram,” he said. “And I’d have a man there, when he speaks up, he doesn’t say, ‘I’m Bascom Timmons’ …
“And that,” the President said, “will have its effect on other things. Because they’re going to put a lot of Strategic Air Command bases together. They’re going to phase out a lot of stuff.… It’s going to be a complete overhaul. And if I were you, I’d just get the best damn person I could get and have him representing me.… I’d get me a good man covering the White House.”
(Retiring Timmons was accomplished by the Star-Telegram sending, in 1964, one additional reporter, and, in 1965, another, to Washington to supplement Timmons’ coverage for the paper and gradually phasing Timmons out of the paper. Timmons himself appears to have been unaware of Johnson’s role in the phasing out. In an oral history interview he gave in 1969 he said only that “during his Administration, I didn’t see him so much because I wasn’t so active as I used to be.” He continued reporting from Washington for other newspapers until his retirement in 1974.
Carswell Air Force Base continued in service, its Seventh Heavy Bomb Wing flying more than thirteen hundred bombing missions over Vietnam. As for the Trinity River Navigation Project, in 1965 the Johnson Administration proposed, and Congress approved, authorization for the Trinity River Barge Canal to connect Fort Worth to the Gulf at a cost of just under a billion dollars. At the end of Johnson’s presidency, only a small portion of the project had been completed, and it was eventually abandoned.
THERE WERE OTHER TIMES also during that Christmas when he wasn’t on stage, and during these other private interludes it was apparent that other traits—like ruthlessness, traits of Lyndon Johnson ever since his youth in the Hill Country—had not, for all his showmanship, been eliminated but were only being concealed.
There was, for example, his penchant for deception and secrecy.
He wasn’t on stage in either his big white Lincoln Continental convertible or Judge Moursund’s big white Lincoln Continental c
onvertible. On seven of the vacation’s thirteen days the two men were driving around together, two big good ol’ boys with their hunting rifles and their Scotch and their tall stories and their Stetsons pushed back on their heads. Sometimes a secretary—either Vicky McCammon or Marie Fehmer—was with them, in the back seat, in case Johnson wanted to give instructions about what McCammon calls “White House business.” Moursund, questioned by journalists the next year, would insist that his job as the principal trustee of Johnson’s blind trust was “to see to it the Johnsons don’t know what is going on,” and, he would insist, that is what he did; “it’s not at all tough for me to do what I’m supposed to do.” Evidently, however, his job was tougher than he admitted. “With Moursund, he would talk about business, not White House business,” McCammon says. “A. W. was a trustee, so there was a whole lot of discussion on different money matters.” The two secretaries were not expected to deal with personal business matters. “Mr. Johnson and Judge Moursund would talk privately looking at things [those],” Fehmer says. She became so accustomed to such discussions that after a while “I didn’t even take notice of it.”
The President was also making arrangements so that the discussions could continue after his return to Washington. A new telephone was placed on a counter in the kitchen of Moursund’s home. It was “linked by a private telephone circuit to the LBJ Ranch and the White House” so that the judge “can pick up his phone and talk almost instantaneously with the President,” the Wall Street Journal was to report. (Although, Moursund insisted—in what the Journal described as a “heated” reply to its inquiries—that the Johnsons nonetheless “don’t know what is going on” in their business.)
Moursund was not the only business associate with whom Johnson took drives around his ranch. Jesse Kellam sometimes accompanied him, and with KTBC’s general manager, “the same thing,” McCammon says. And Johnson was to talk regularly with Kellam, too, after he was back in the White House—although in Kellam’s case the arrangements would be more complicated. Sometimes when Kellam was having dinner with friends in Austin the beeper he wore on his belt would buzz. He would excuse himself, saying he had to make a phone call, but he wouldn’t make it from a pay telephone in the restaurant; he would return to his office, and make it from there.
Ed Clark understood why. The beeper was summoning Kellam to talk to the President, and the talk was to be conducted in privacy.
Another locale being linked that Christmas to the White House was the Johnson City office of the law firm of Moursund & Ferguson. The telephones on the desks of the two partners were replaced by new ones—with an added button; it “wasn’t labeled anything, but when you pushed that, you got the White House’s board in Washington,” says Moursund’s partner, Thomas C. Ferguson, an influential Hill Country politician, former district judge and chairman of the Texas State Board of Insurance. And while Moursund would maintain, over and over, during the entire Johnson presidency, that no business was discussed over those office lines, that is not what Ferguson says. When the author asked him whether Johnson conducted personal business over those lines, Ferguson replied, “Oh, yeah. He and Moursund were talking every day.… You see, Moursund was trustee of all his property: one of these blind trusts—it wasn’t very blind.” The author asked Ferguson if he himself had conducted business for Johnson during his presidency. “Myself? Oh, yes,” Ferguson replied, and provided the details of several such transactions.
Other lines were installed—in the law firm of Clark, Thomas, Harris, Denius & Winters in Austin: one on Ed Clark’s desk, one on Donald Thomas’; in Earl Deathe’s office down the hall from Kellam’s at KTBC. Another was placed in Deathe’s home. By the conclusion of the Christmas trip, the phones were all in.
Calls were not restricted to office hours. Johnson wanted to be able to make calls to these men not only from the Oval Office but from his living quarters in the White House, and he didn’t want those calls to go through the White House switchboard. “I want an outside phone [line] installed in my bedroom … like that other one, where I don’t have to go through any operator,” he told Walter Jenkins not long after his return from Texas. “Can I do that? … I’d like to make a private call. When I talk to A. W. Moursund, when I talk to any of them, I don’t like the …” He could do that. Whatever it was he didn’t like—perhaps the fact that a log is kept of all calls to and from a President that go through the White House switchboard, perhaps the chance that an operator might listen in on the call (the recording becomes too garbled at this point to understand his next words)—was promptly changed. The outside line was installed, and after it was, Marie Fehmer says, “We could not know the calls he had placed from the bedroom.” White House phone logs and operators would have no record of them.
There would be a lot of such calls. “Every night he told Moursund what to do,” Ferguson told the author. “A lot of [it] was Johnson saying to Moursund, ‘Well, I want to do this,’ ‘I want to do that’—‘I want to get this piece of land,’ ‘I want to stock [with cattle] certain places.…’ And of course at that time anything Moursund said stood up throughout the Johnson properties … and he would carry out what the President would tell him he wanted done.… It was a very unblind trust as far as that trust was concerned.” Moursund would arrive at the law firm office the next morning with instructions that Johnson had given him in calls to his home the previous evening. Often, he would tell Ferguson, Johnson had been lying in bed in the White House when he called. Earl Deathe also speaks of late-night—and some early-morning—calls from the White House. “Sometimes he’d call you three or four o’clock in the morning,” he says. After these lines were installed, Clark says, Johnson wanted his dealings about his business interests conducted over these direct phone lines.
All during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, he, either himself or through a press secretary, would insist that he had divorced himself completely from his business interests. “As the American people know,” George Reedy said in one of many such statements—all approved word for word by the President—“the President has devoted all his time and energy to the public business and he is not engaged in any private enterprise, directly or indirectly.” And all during his presidency, the phones stayed in place, and the calls went on.
THERE WAS DECEPTION and secrecy during that Christmas trip in not only personal affairs but governmental.
If Vietnam initially seemed to him to be a part of the “breathing space” he had been provided on foreign affairs, the only immediate decisions necessary the ones he had made in his NSAM 273 of November 26, he had been quickly disabused of that impression. Within days, he was reading new reports: that the military situation, particularly in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, was “deteriorating,” and that the new junta was disorganized. One report, from Lodge, said that in a key province, “The past thirty days have produced … a day-by-day increase in Viet Cong influence, military operations, physical control of the countryside.”
The earlier reports, Johnson would say in his memoirs, using phrases that to him were particularly damning, were “wishful thinking”: “We had been misled into overoptimism.” He dispatched McNamara, along with McCone and Assistant Secretary of Defense William P. Bundy (McGeorge’s brother), to Vietnam, giving McNamara “quite a lecture” expressing “concern that we as a government were not doing everything we should,” and the Defense secretary’s report, delivered on his return to Washington, on December 21, said that “the situation is very disturbing. Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2–3 months, will lead to neutralization at best and most likely to a Communist-controlled state.… We should watch the situation very carefully, running scared, hoping for the best, but preparing for more forceful moves if the situation does not show early signs of improvement.”
McCone, in a brief report of his own, said he felt “a little less pessimistic [than McNamara],” but to Johnson the time for “less” pessimism, for “wishful thinking” in any form, was over. His views had been hardening�
�or perhaps only becoming more apparent. Strong as were the militant voices in Congress, there were voices on the other side, too—but the new President wasn’t listening to them. Ill equipped though Mike Mansfield was to be Majority Leader, he was well qualified indeed to give advice on Vietnam, having been not only a professor of East Asian history but one with a thoughtful overview of that part of the world, and on December 7 he had given Johnson a memo saying continuation of the war there would be costly to America and urging less reliance on a military solution in Vietnam and more on a political. Johnson’s response, in a conversation with Mansfield’s aide Francis R. Valeo, secretary of the Senate, on the evening of December 23, the day before he left for Texas, was to ask for another memo from Mansfield, and he made the request in words that made clear the advice he wanted. “What are we going to do about Vietnam?” he said. “We’re going to lose that war. Do you want that to be another China? … Get me a memo on it.… I don’t want these people around the world worrying about us, and they are.… They’re worried about whether you’ve got a weak President or a strong President.” And when Mansfield didn’t take the hint, saying in his second memo, “As you remarked to [Valeo] on the telephone, we do not want another China in Vietnam,” but “neither do we want another Korea.… A key factor in both situations was a tendency to bite off more than we were prepared in the end to chew.… We are close to the point of no return in Vietnam,” Johnson’s response would be to solicit memoranda from McNamara, Rusk and Bundy to counter Mansfield’s arguments. “The stakes in preserving an anti-Communist South Vietnam are so high that in our judgment, we must go on bending every effort to win,” McNamara’s said. Rusk arrived at the ranch with a memo that he handed to Johnson in which he wrote that there was need for a presidential statement emphasizing “the urgency of action to reverse the adverse trend in the war as well as reaffirming the United States policy of complete support for the Vietnamese government.” And included in the President’s response to McNamara’s “disturbing” report was approval of two of its recommendations: that more United States advisers be sent from Saigon to the Mekong Delta and other embattled provinces; and that an interdepartmental committee, chaired by Marine Lieutenant General Victor H. “Brute” Krulak, be created to study OPLAN 34-A, the proposal for covert military operations against North Vietnam, and to designate those operations with the “least risk” and the most “plausibility of denial.” The Krulak committee’s report, which called for “progressively escalating pressure … to inflict increasing punishment upon North Vietnam,” arrived at the Johnson Ranch on January 2. Among the operations it recommended, all to be carried out during the next twelve months, were guerrilla raids against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, “hit-and-run” commando raids along the North Vietnamese coasts—and shelling by American warships of North Vietnamese military installations on the coast of the Gulf of Tonkin. “There’s one of three things you can do” about Vietnam, the President would soon be saying in a telephone call from the ranch to John Knight of Knight Ridder newspapers, a supporter who nonetheless felt the United States might be “over-committed” in Vietnam. “One is run and let the dominoes start falling over. And God almighty, what they said about us leaving China would just be warming up compared to what they’d say now.… You can run, or you can fight, as we are doing, or you can sit down and agree to neutralize all of it. But nobody is going to neutralize North Vietnam, so that’s totally impractical. And so it really boils down to one of two decisions—getting out or getting in.… But we can’t abandon it to them, as I see it.”
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