Even a cursory inspection, however, suggested anything but a conventional middle-class existence. A massive communications network enabled Johnson instantaneously to receive and transmit information to the world at large. In that era before cell phones, telephones floated on a special raft in the swimming pool. Phones were handy when sitting on the toilet, riding in any of his cars, or cruising on his motorboat. A three-screen television console allowing him to watch all three networks at the same time was built into a cabinet in his bedroom. If necessary, Johnson’s voice could be broadcast on thirteen loudspeakers installed at strategic points on the ranch.
I would sometimes accompany Johnson on his early-morning drives to inspect his fields and give instructions to the workers. The grand disparity of power between the White House and the ranch lent an inherent pathos, even comedy, to the urgency with which Johnson conducted briefings with his ranch hands. “Now,” he would begin, “I want each of you to make a solemn pledge that you will not go to bed tonight until you are sure that every steer has everything he needs. We’ve got a chance of producing some of the finest beef in the country if we work at it, if we dedicate ourselves to the job.”
No detail was too small to warrant the label “HP,” high priority. “Get some itch medicine for the sore eye of that big brown cow in Pasture One. Start the sprinklers in Pasture Three. Fix the right wheel in the green tractor.” Status reports on legislation that had been staples of Johnson’s night reading in the White House were replaced by reports of how many eggs had been laid that day. “Monday (162) Tuesday (144) . . . Thursday (158) . . . Saturday (104).” He initialed these daily memos and made further inquiries. “Only 104 on Saturday? Out of 200 hens? What do you reckon is the matter with those hens?”
When I think back over these years, my most vivid memories were the walks we took in the late afternoons after the day’s work on the memoirs was done. Those walks, setting out from the ranch, traversed the actual way stations of Johnson’s childhood. Less than a mile down the road was the house where he was born, painstakingly restored as a public museum. He liked to check the variety of license plates in the parking lot and track the attendance sheets to see how many people had visited that week, a gauge of how the winds of historical judgment might blow. Across the field, hardly a throw from his birth house, was the cottage site where his grandfather had once lived. There, Lyndon could find refuge; there, he would revel in his grandfather’s vast world of cowboy tales and ancestral lore. On a rise further down the road stood the Junction School, where his formal learning had commenced.
Clustered along this road was the nucleus of his life: ranch, birth house, grandfather’s cottage, school—and finally, across the road, beneath enormous pin oaks overlooking the meandering Pedernales River, the Johnson family cemetery. “Here’s where my mother lies,” he would say, pointing to her grave in the small burial plot. “And here’s where my daddy is buried. And here is where I’m gonna be too.”
Rarely was there a moment of silence on our walks, a moment not filled with the sound of Johnson’s voice. He found comfort and relief in moving backward in time from his tumultuous presidency to the early years of his upward climb. He spoke with pride of his teaching days in the impoverished town of Cotulla, of the work he had done to introduce all manner of activities to his Mexican American students. He relished memories of working under Franklin Roosevelt, putting thousands of needy young people to work in the National Youth Administration, building roadside parks, school gyms, and swimming pools. He returned again and again to the story of how he had brought electric power to the Hill Country, and how electricity had changed the daily lives of thousands of farm families, letting them enjoy such modern conveniences as electric lights, refrigerators, and washing machines for the first time. He spoke of the joy he took in the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which, despite the weakness of its enforcement procedures, had opened the door to the far larger achievements of the 89th Congress during his first eighteen months as president.
“Those were the days when we really got something done,” he said, “the days when my dream of making life better for more people than even FDR truly seemed possible. Think of how far we might have reached if things had gone differently.” He sucked in a deep breath, shook his head, and exhaled, his expression revealing a deep and unsettling well of sadness.
Returning that night to my room at the ranch, making notes on what he had said, I asked myself a question I would ask many times in the years to follow: Why was he telling me all these things? Why was he allowing me to see his vulnerability and sorrow? Perhaps it was because I was a young woman and aspired to become a historian, two constituencies he badly wanted to reach, to persuade, to shape, and to inspire. Perhaps, to a lesser extent, it was because I possessed an Ivy League pedigree, which he both held in contempt and coveted. Or maybe it was simply that I listened with sleepless intensity as he strove to come to terms with the meaning of his life.
For the more we talked, the more it seemed to me that he believed his life was drawing to a close. Indeed, I later found out that he had commissioned an actuarial table while still in the presidency which statistically predicted, based on his family history of heart failure, that he would likely die at sixty-four. Only a little more than a year into his retirement, in the spring of 1970, severe chest pains sent him to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where he was diagnosed with angina. He embarked on a strict regime of diet and exercise, but it was not long before he resumed eating rich foods, drinking Cutty Sark scotch, and chain-smoking. “I’m an old man so what’s the difference?” he said. “I don’t want to linger the way Eisenhower did. When I go, I want to go fast.”
In April 1972, Johnson suffered a massive heart attack while staying at the Virginia home of his daughter Lynda. Against doctor’s orders, he insisted on returning to Texas to recuperate. Reprising his father’s dying wish, he wanted to return to a place where “people know when you’re sick and care when you die.” Though he managed to survive his second heart attack, his remaining time was filled with pain. “I’m hurting real bad,” he told friends. Mornings would begin fairly well, but by afternoon, he often experienced “a series of sharp, jolting pains in the chest that left him scared and breathless.” A portable oxygen tank beside his bed provided only temporary relief.
Nine months later, on December 11, 1972, Johnson was scheduled to speak at a civil rights symposium at the LBJ Library. All the leaders of the civil rights community would be present: Roy Wilkins, Clarence Mitchell, Hubert Humphrey, Julian Bond, Barbara Jordan, Vernon Jordan, former chief justice Earl Warren, among many others. On the Sunday night before the symposium’s opening, however, a treacherous ice storm had descended on Austin. It was unclear if the event would even proceed. “So cold and icy was it,” library director Harry Middleton recalled, “that we got word that the plane carrying many of the participants from Washington couldn’t land at the Austin airport, and they would have to come here by bus.”
“Lyndon had been quite sick the night before and up most of the night,” Lady Bird remembered. “The doctor insisted that he absolutely, positively could not go.” Nevertheless, wearing “a dark-blue presidential suit” and “flawlessly polished oxfords,” he headed out over the icy roads on the seventy-mile trek to Austin. Though he had given up driving in recent months, he became so agitated by the driver’s slow pace that he took the wheel himself.
Those who watched the ailing former president ascend the steps to the stage knew that determination alone drove him. He struggled noticeably to reach the lectern. The pains in his chest were such that he paused to place a nitroglycerin tablet in his mouth. If this effort was to cost him his life, so be it. He spoke haltingly, acknowledging that he no longer spoke in public “very often” or for “very long,” but, he emphasized, there were now things that he wanted to say.
“Of all the records that are housed in this library, 31 million papers over a 40-year period of public life,” he began, the record
relating to civil rights “holds the most of myself within it, and holds for me the most intimate meanings.” While admitting that civil rights had not always been his priority, he had come to believe that “the essence of government” lay in ensuring “the dignity and innate integrity of life for every individual”—“regardless of color, creed, ancestry, sex, or age.”
Continuing, Johnson insisted, “I don’t want this symposium to come here and spend two days talking about what we have done, the progress has been much too small. We haven’t done nearly enough. I’m kind of ashamed of myself that I had six years and couldn’t do more than I did.”
The plight of being “Black in a White society,” he argued, remained the chief unaddressed problem of our nation. “Until we address unequal history, we cannot overcome unequal opportunity.” Until blacks “stand on level and equal ground,” we cannot rest. It must be our goal “to assure that all Americans play by the same rules and all Americans play against the same odds.”
“And if our efforts continue,” he concluded, “and if our will is strong, and if our hearts are right, and if courage remains our constant companion, then, my fellow Americans, I am confident we shall overcome.”
This would be Lyndon Johnson’s last public statement. By going to this symposium, Lady Bird later said, “he knew what he was spending, and had a right to decide how to spend it.” The choice he made that day represented his hope that history would recall the time when he had been willing to risk everything for civil rights, to push in all the chips, the entire capital of his presidency. “If I am ever to be remembered,” Johnson wistfully told me, “it will be for civil rights.”
Five weeks after this keynote address on civil rights, he suffered a fatal heart attack. The man who needed to be surrounded by people all his life was alone. At 3:50 p.m., he called the ranch switchboard for the Secret Service. By the time they reached his bedroom, Lyndon Johnson was dead. As he had long foretold, he was sixty-four years old. Three days later, he was buried in the family cemetery, in the sheltering shade of the massive oak trees.
* * *
Whenever Theodore Roosevelt held forth upon leadership, death, and remembrance (which was often), he sprayed sparks in every direction, like a man sharpening his blade on a grindstone. At times, he seemed to scorn the vainglory of posthumous fame. “As the ages roll by,” he suggested, it was only a matter of time “before the memory of the mighty fades.” It might take a hundred, a thousand years, or even ten thousand years, but eventually “the inevitable oblivion, steadily flooding the sands of time, effaces the scratches on the sand we call history.” Yet, on other occasions, Roosevelt replaced this dismissive perspective toward personal remembrance with the romantic heroism of dying “in the harness at the zenith of one’s fame” with the consciousness of having “work worth doing” and doing it well. “In the days and hours before dying,” he speculated, “it must be pleasant to feel that you have done your part as a man and have not yet been thrown aside as useless.”
For such an aggressive, self-propelled spirit, a tranquil retirement was out of the question. A restless and frantic search for meaning, service, duty, and adventure would haunt Theodore Roosevelt for the remainder of his days. The youngest man to ascend to the presidency, he was only fifty years old when his seven-and-a-half-year tenure was done. He was the youngest former president in our history. Anathema was a life without a definitive and challenging task to perform and a spotlight in which to perform it. His daughter Alice quipped that he so fiercely craved being at the center of action that he wanted to be the baby at the baptism, the bride at the wedding, and the corpse at the funeral.
He had savored “every hour” of being president, “the greatest office in the world.” He had been fortunate, he realized, having chanced to lead the nation at a time when his dragon-slaying, trust-busting, crisis-management leadership style found an answering chord in the public. He frequently spoke of the zeitgeist, and how it shifted like a kaleidoscope to attract or discard particular capacities at particular times. The harmonic congruence between the times and Theodore Roosevelt reached a pinnacle in 1904, when, after serving out three and a half years of President William McKinley’s term, he had won election in his own right by what was then “the greatest popular majority and the greatest electoral majority ever given to a candidate for President.”
Nonetheless, at the moment of this great victory, he had stunningly announced that he would not run for the presidency again, citing “the wise custom which limits the President to two terms,” a duration which he would have essentially completed by 1908. He feared that even his most fervent supporters would be disappointed by the unseemly ambition to hold office “longer than it was deemed wise for Washington to hold it.” With unusual care for a sitting leader, he picked and groomed a successor, his friend and cabinet member William Howard Taft. Furthermore, he worked assiduously to engineer Taft’s nomination at the head of the Republican ticket. No sooner had the Republican convention opened, however, than remorse settled upon him. “I would cut my hand off right there,” he told a friend, pointing to his wrist, “if I could recall that written statement.” Had Roosevelt given the slightest indication to the delegates that he had changed his mind, the nomination would have been his. He felt, however, that he must honor the pledge he had made. “The people think that my word is good,” he explained to his friend Bill Sewall, “and I should be mighty sorry to have them think anything else.” Reiterating his unconditional support for Taft, he insisted that there was no man in the country “so well fitted to be president.”
Immediately after Taft’s inauguration, Roosevelt set sail for a year-long safari in Africa. “It will let me down to private life without that dull thud of which we hear so much,” he reasoned; it would “break his fall” into life as a citizen. No sooner had he come home, however, than his characteristic restlessness returned. His agitation and fidgetiness flared when one progressive delegation after another journeyed to Sagamore Hill, urging him to run for president in 1912. Under Taft, they argued, old-line conservatives were once more in the ascendant, threatening the advances of past years. “Like a war horse scenting the sniff of distant battles,” Roosevelt eventually threw his hat in the ring, challenging the incumbent he had once nurtured for the Republican nomination. Then, when Taft defeated him at the convention, he consented to lead the progressive forces on a third party ticket.
With the Republican Party split in two, “the only question now,” Senator Chauncey Depew aptly remarked, “is which corpse would get the most flowers.” From the start, Democrat Woodrow Wilson was the prohibitive favorite. In mid-October, however, a chance event threatened to upend the race. While Roosevelt stood in an open car in front of a Milwaukee hotel waiting to depart for a speech venue, an assassin raised a pistol and fired at “point blank range” at Roosevelt’s chest. Had the bullet not been deflected by the metal eyeglass case in Roosevelt’s pocket, it would have gone “straight into his heart.” Defying the doctor’s order that he be taken straight to the hospital emergency room, Roosevelt proceeded to the venue. Somewhat unsteadily, color drained from his face, Roosevelt delivered his entire speech before consenting to hospitalization. His stalwart response to the attempt upon his life brought a surge of support for his candidacy. “The bullet that rests in Roosevelt’s chest has killed Wilson for the Presidency,” one Democratic speaker suspected.
A week before the election Roosevelt had sufficiently recovered to deliver his final speech of the campaign at Carnegie Hall. In contrast to the caustic tone toward opponents that had marked his campaign, he now focused solely on the principles for which the Progressive Party stood. He believed, he told his spellbound audience, that “perhaps once in a generation” the time comes for the people to enter the battle for social justice. If the continuing problems created by the Industrial Age were not addressed, he warned, the country would eventually be “sundered by those dreadful lines of division” that set “the haves” and the “have-nots” again
st one another. “Win or lose I am glad beyond measure that I am one of the many who in this fight have stood ready to spend and be spent.”
Though Roosevelt garnered far and away the largest percentage of votes any third party candidate had ever received, Woodrow Wilson carried the election. More damaging still, the split party had hurt the very progressive cause Roosevelt championed. In one state after another, Republican progressives, victorious two years earlier, were now defeated.
As had been true throughout his life when beset by political loss, personal grief, or depression, Roosevelt sought relief from pain in physical challenge, motion, and adventure. Just as his African hunting trip had cushioned his fall after leaving the presidency, so now, the fifty-five-year-old defeated candidate sailed to South America for an expedition to the unmapped River of Doubt in the heart of the inaccessible Brazilian rain forest—“his last chance to be a boy.” This time he nearly died from a life-threatening infection, combined with a severe bout of malaria, which left him debilitated for the rest of his life. “The Brazilian wilderness,” Roosevelt told a friend, “stole away ten years of his life.”
Still, Roosevelt’s impassioned supporters refused to believe that his political star had set, pressing him to run for president in 1916. Roosevelt rebuffed their entreaties, casting a realistic eye on the temper of the times. “For a dozen years I held a great place in the confidence and good will of the American people and I was able to do many things which I fervently believed ought to be done.” His great “usefulness,” he felt, had come particularly in the settlement of the coal strike, in the national parks and wilderness reserves that he had set apart for future generations, and in the busting of trusts and the regulatory legislation that had created a fairer economic playing field. “While I have in no manner changed,” he believed, “there have been such changes in the currents of thought” that it would be senseless to imagine that the Republicans, who “seem to be sinking back into a kind of inert and dangerous conservatism,” would even consider nominating him. Indeed, “it would be an entirely unwise thing to nominate me, unless this country is in something of the heroic mood that it was in the time of the Revolution and again in the time of the Civil War.”
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