How long, however, could the reality of the situation be concealed? Even O. J. Weber was forced to give his boss a warning. In a letter on March 16, Weber wrote: “The matter of your being out of Washington is coming to a showdown and you’re going to get caught no matter which way you jump.… Even if the President calls you back there will be that element which will say, I told you he wouldn’t get in any trenches with the boys. Since the movement to recall members on duty with the armed forces is gathering momentum every day don’t you think it is doubly important that you get on a boat and get to Pearl Harbor or some other place like that NOW and as quick as you can?” In another letter, Weber wrote: “We’re going to have to have an answer [to voters’ inquiries]. Any way you take it the situation will be embarrassing.” Other aides, back in the district, were similarly warning Johnson that his constituents’ curiosity about his precise whereabouts and duties was rising, and Johnson’s reply to one of these aides, James Blundell, contained a note of defensiveness: “I am under orders from the Secretary of the Navy, and the Commander-in-Chief. I don’t give the orders but I do take them. Today I am here, tomorrow I don’t know where I will be, but it will be where they think I can do the most.…”
Even more ominously, inquiries were becoming increasingly insistent from reporters on newspapers all over Texas, not out of suspicion but simply out of eagerness to do articles about him. Newspapers had reprinted a cryptic message that Warren Magnuson had scribbled from “somewhere in the Pacific”: “Getting it, but am afloat.” The Congressman’s carrier, part of a task force that had raided Wake Island and the Solomons, had just finished dodging torpedoes from a Japanese plane while Japanese bombs rained down. Other congressmen were now in service. (Twenty-seven would eventually serve.) A third member of the Naval Affairs Committee, Representative Melvin Maas of Minnesota, was with the Marines in the South Pacific, where he would win, among other medals, the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. Another Texan, Representative Eugene Worley, had become a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, and was in the South Pacific. Representative James Van Zandt of Pennsylvania, also a Lieutenant Commander, was in the North Atlantic, on a destroyer escorting convoys through U-boat-infested seas. Having made during his last campaign a promise similar to Johnson’s—to enlist in the event of war and serve in the front lines—Representative Frank C. Osmers of New Jersey had redeemed that pledge on the day after Congress had declared war: he had enlisted as a buck private and requested assignment to a combat unit, with which he would later participate in the Okinawa and Philippine invasions. Articles were appearing about these congressmen. Still unwilling to abandon his political ambitions, Johnson, as the months passed, had been unable to decide whether to file for the Senate seat or for re-election to the House; the filing deadline for both races was May 31, and no matter which election he selected, the announcement of his filing would focus attention on his war service, attention which, under the present circumstances, might prove disastrous for either candidacy. If he wasn’t going to get “something big” in Washington, he needed to be in a combat zone when he announced. And there might not be much time left, for Wirtz had let him know that the order recalling all congressmen to the House, an order whose issuance would require him either to resign from Congress or to return without ever having seen combat, was under active consideration at the White House. In desperation, he headed back to Washington with Connally on April 13. In Washington, he made no secret of the pragmatism with which he viewed the war, as is revealed by a diary entry made by a new White House aide, Jonathan Daniels, after meeting Johnson for the first time. Johnson, Daniels wrote, “wants for the sake of political future to get into danger zone though realizes talents best suited for handling speakers and public relations.” After telling presidential secretary Marvin McIntyre he would wait around Washington as long as necessary to meet with Roosevelt, Johnson was finally given an appointment on Sunday, April 26. Judging from later communications, during this meeting he again sounded out Roosevelt about the Senate race—and the President again declined, this time firmly, to assist him. After a nudge from Forrestal, however, Roosevelt did assist him with his other problem. The President had decided to send a three-man survey team to report on the war effort in the Southwest Pacific. Two Lieutenant Colonels, one representing air forces, the other ground forces, from the War Department General Staff had already been selected. When Forrestal suggested Johnson as the Navy’s representative on the survey team, Roosevelt agreed. On April 29 he was ordered to Australia.
On May 1, still unwilling to foreclose a senatorial race, Lyndon Johnson signed two applications, one filing him for that race, the other for reelection to his congressional seat, and told Connally, who would be remaining in Washington, to consult with Wirtz and make a final decision on which seat to file him for. Then, with Mary Rather and O. J. Weber acting as witnesses, he wrote out a will in longhand, leaving all his possessions to his wife, sealed the will in an envelope, and left for San Francisco. (Another envelope was sealed at this time; it was a large manila envelope, on which had been written, “To be opened only by JBC or LBJ.” Inside is a leather carrying case containing four photographs, four of the pictures taken by Arnold Genthe of “the most beautiful woman” he had ever seen. Where Johnson placed the envelope at this time is unknown; it would later be kept in one of the locked filing cabinets in the office of his assistant Walter Jenkins, in which Johnson’s most secret papers were stored.) On May 7, 1942, five months after Pearl Harbor, Lyndon Johnson boarded a huge PB2Y Coronado Flying Boat for the long flight to Honolulu—on his way across the Pacific to Palmyra, the Fiji Islands, New Caledonia, Australia and the war. He had brought with him at least one political accoutrement—scores of copies of his formal portrait—and waiting for him in Nouméa, capital of New Caledonia, was a brief reminder of politics: a telegram from the White House. Roosevelt apparently was concerned that Johnson might try to circumvent his strictures against a Senate race, and the telegram warned him off. It was signed by presidential secretary McIntyre, who officially spoke only in the names of Rayburn and himself—but Johnson knew whom McIntyre was actually speaking for. MUCH TALK DRAFTING YOU SENATE RACE, SAM AND I THINK YOU SHOULD WIRE SOMEONE TEXAS YOU WOULD NOT CONSIDER. And when Johnson arrived in Melbourne, Australia, there was another reminder. Charles Marsh had been urging him to run for the Senate, but, Johnson knew, it was not Charles who had the brilliant political mind at Longlea. He had asked Alice for her advice, and for a report on the reaction to the suggestion that he be drafted for the race, and on May 31 he received it on the other side of the world: CHARLES BELIEVES YOU SHOULD FILE FOR SENATE. POLLS SHOW YOU LEADING. NO ONE ELSE SHARES HIS OPINION ENTHUSIASTICALLY. IF POSSIBLE, TELEPHONE. LOVE, ALICE MARSH. Whether Lyndon telephoned Alice is not known, but he got through on the telephone to John Connally. Calls from the South Pacific were limited in duration. “It had to be very short,” Connally recalls. “He just asked, ‘What did you file me for?’ ‘I filed you for reelection.’ ‘That’s fine.’ ”
Those were the last reminders of politics. Then Lyndon Johnson headed into a war zone.
3
In the Pacific
IN MELBOURNE, Lieutenant Commander Johnson and his fellow “observers,” Lieutenant Colonels Samuel Anderson and Francis R. Stevens, met General Douglas MacArthur, who paced back and forth in front of the maps on his wall as he gave the survey team from Washington an overview of the war in one of his famous tours d’horizon. The General’s staff had arranged an itinerary for them: first they would inspect major industrial and training sites in the southeastern Australian countryside near Melbourne and then they would head more than a thousand miles north to the bases from which air raids were being flown against Japanese installations in the conquered portion of New Guinea. Recognizing the importance of a Congressman close to the President, the politically astute MacArthur had detailed a blue-ribbon escort team, headed by a Brigadier General, William F. Marquat, to accompany the observers.
The to
ur was conducted in the shadow of a war that was going badly. While the big Coronado had been crossing the Pacific, the Japanese had been capturing island after island. It was during Johnson’s stopover in Hawaii that the first rumors of a great naval battle in the Coral Sea had begun trickling in; by the time he landed in Nouméa the rumors had become reports: of defeat, and of the loss of yet another aircraft carrier, the Lexington. With the Japanese now not only on New Guinea but on New Britain and Portuguese Timor, Australia itself was filled with fears of impending invasion—and of impending abandonment by its battered American ally. The lack of equipment was borne home to the three observers when they learned that the plane assigned by MacArthur as their transportation, an early-model B-17 Flying Fortress named The Swoose, had been grounded by lack of spare parts; after several days touring the Melbourne area, they were flown north on an ancient Australian airliner, first to Sydney, then to Brisbane, and finally to Townsville, in northern Queensland, for a visit to Garbutt Field, headquarters of the 22nd Bomb Group. At a final briefing just before they left for Garbutt, they were told that a battle was shaping up at that moment, at a place called “Midway.”
WHEN LYNDON JOHNSON arrived at Garbutt Field, on June 6, he found himself in a landscape almost as flat and barren as a desert; the trees were small and stunted, the undergrowth sparse. Amid the trees stood tents—old and frayed—and planes, twelve Martin B-26 Marauders of the 22nd Bomb Group, twin-engined medium bombers much smaller than the four-engine Flying Fortresses he had seen near Melbourne. Not one of the Marauders was unscarred. The three observers walked among them, looking at the blackened marks left by fires, at the small, neat bullet holes, at the gaping punctures caused by shell fire from Japanese guns, at the jagged, gleaming shards of metal that protruded from them. One Marauder, which had evidently been forced to come in with its landing gear retracted, lay tilted on its side, the tip of one wing on the ground, the propeller on that wing bent and blackened by fire. The other wing pointed to the sky; the engine on that wing, jolted loose by the crash, hung down. Around the planes scurried mechanics, frantically trying, with almost no spare parts available, to get them ready again for combat, hammering, welding, threading belts of fresh ammunition into machine guns. Other members of the ground crews were hoisting bombs, slim 100-pounders, big 500-pounders, into open bomb-bay doors. Watching them were crew members. Exhaustion and tension showed on their faces. Their uniforms were ripped and tattered. Some, because their uniforms had worn out and there were no new ones available, had donned Australian shorts, bush hats and cowboy boots. Some wore fresh bandages, stained with blood. Lyndon Johnson may have tried—and, for six months, had succeeded—to avoid being in a combat zone. He may have arrived in one finally only for what Jonathan Daniels had called “the sake of political future.” But whatever the reason, Lyndon Johnson was in a combat zone now.
IF ONE CHARACTERISTIC of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.
As an NYA director to whom “hours made no difference, days made no difference, nights made no difference”; as an unknown twenty-eight-year-old running his first, seemingly hopeless campaign for Congress against seven older, better-known opponents, a race in which he drove himself so ruthlessly that a fellow politician, a man who worked terribly hard himself, said, “I never knew a man could work that hard”; at every stage in his adult life—as Congressman’s secretary, Congressman, senatorial candidate—he had displayed a willingness to push to their very edge, and beyond the edge, the limits not only of politics but of himself. In every crisis in his life, he had worked until the weight dropped off his body and his eyes sunk into his head and his face grew gaunt and cavernous and he trembled with fatigue and the rashes on his hands grew raw and angry, and whenever, at the end of one more in a very long line of very long days, he realized that there was still one more task that should be done, he would turn without a word hinting at fatigue to do it, to do it perfectly. His career had been a story of manipulation, deceit, and ruthlessness, but it had also been a story of an intense physical and spiritual striving that was utterly unsparing; he would sacrifice himself to his ambition as ruthlessly as he sacrificed others. If you did “everything, you’ll win.” To Lyndon Johnson, “everything” meant literally that: absolutely anything that was necessary. If some particular effort might help, that effort would be made, no matter how difficult making it might be.
It would be made even if the effort required was the one that was, of all efforts, perhaps the most difficult for him to make.
One prominent aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s makeup, particularly notable because of the rough-and-tumble world in which he had been raised, was his attitude toward physical danger, real or imagined. To Johnson City boys, wrestling and fistfights were normal parts of growing up. Lyndon Johnson had displayed a conspicuous hesitancy and timidity at participating in these activities, or at riding an unruly horse or diving from a not very high bank into the Pedernales River—at any of the routine rough-housing of youth. And at college, if a fellow student, antagonized by him, approached him to fight, Johnson would immediately, without a single gesture of resistance, fall back on a bed and kick his feet in the air with a frantic windmilling motion to keep his foe away, while yelling, “If you hit me, I’ll kick you! If you hit me, I’ll kick you!”—a scene which astonished other students, one of whom says: “Every kid in the State of Texas had fights then, but he wouldn’t fight. He was an absolute physical coward.”
Whether or not this view, widespread among his fellow students, is correct, certainly Lyndon Johnson had never been casual about his physical well-being; on the contrary, he had always been unusually anxious to avoid even the slightest exposure to violence, danger or risk. Never, in any physical encounter, had he conspicuously displayed courage.
But if courage was needed now, it would be there.
Lyndon Johnson was in a combat zone now, but he was in it only as an observer, not as a combatant. Yet recall by the President was imminent; he was never going to be “in the trenches” or “on a battleship”; this trip as an observer was to be his only direct participation in the war. And if he was never going to be a combatant, if the closest he could get to fulfilling his campaign promise, the only means now left to him of protecting his “political future,” was to see combat—then he was going to see it.
On the night of his arrival at Garbutt Field, and on the next day, he, Anderson and Stevens talked to the airmen of the 22nd Bomb Group, hearing about the missions they had been flying.
The missions were mostly against the Japanese air base at Lae, on the northeast coast of New Guinea, and Lae was a tough mission. As Martin Caidin and Edward Hymoff report in their 1964 book, The Mission, the best available account of Johnson’s experiences in the Pacific, just getting to the target was tough. Since, at nine hundred miles from Garbutt Field, Lae was outside the range of a B-26, the Marauders flew first to “Seven-Mile Strip,” a primitive little American base hacked out of the New Guinea jungle on the south side of the Owen Stanley Range that towered up to ten thousand feet between it and Lae. The flight from Garbutt Field to “Seven-Mile,” as it was called, was over the ocean. The men knew what was in that ocean: as one said, “so many sharks that we could fly low and actually see their fins and bodies cutting through the water.” Occasionally, for sport, the machine gunners fired at the fins: then the water would turn red as other sharks tore apart those that had been killed or wounded. Just a week before, a badly hit B-26, returning from Lae, had fallen into the ocean; a Japanese pilot was later to write that he had seen “thirty or forty” sharks swarming around the crew members as they scrambled frantically to get into a life raft. “Suddenly one of them thrust his hand high above his head and disappeared. The others were beating frantically at the water. Then the second man disappeared. I circled lower, and nearly gagged as I saw the flash of teeth which closed on the arm of the third man. The lone survivor, a big b
ald-headed man, was clinging to the raft with one hand and swinging wildly with a knife in the other. Then he, too, was gone.…” After refueling at Seven-Mile, the Marauders took off for Lae—from a runway, surrounded by mountains and jungle, that was too short, that ran up and down a hill, and that was pocked with bomb craters so hastily filled with dirt and stones that sometimes the wheels of the heavily loaded planes would sink into one; just taking off from Seven-Mile, the pilots told the three observers, could be “pretty hairy.” And almost as soon as they had taken off, they were over the Owen Stanley. Since a B-26 carried no oxygen equipment, the pilots sometimes attempted to fly through the passes in the rugged range, often during turbulent tropical storms (there were no facilities for forecasting weather), before swinging out over the ocean again—the Solomon Sea, it was called off New Guinea—for the best bombing approach to Lae. Antiaircraft fire over the target was heavy. The young men standing talking with Lyndon Johnson had flown through it so many times that they had given nicknames to various gunners; the most dangerous, they told him, was the one whose bursts followed so hard on one another that they had named him “Rapid Robert.” And then there were the Zeroes, which would roar up to meet them, or swoop down on them, out of the sun. Johnson had heard reports that the Japanese fighter planes were less maneuverable than American planes; the American pilots corrected him: the Japanese planes were more maneuverable, they said. And, they told Johnson, the Japanese pilots were good. The three observers—the two Lieutenant Colonels and the Congressman in khakis—stood listening as they were told about the bombers that had been shot down, and about the planes that, battered, with one engine gone, had struggled home—over the ocean, and the sharks. The young airmen standing there at Garbutt Field that day, in their bush hats and shorts, had, Anderson was to recall, a “jaunty air,” but as Lyndon Johnson talked to them, he was talking with men who were so familiar with death that they had evaluated its relative forms. One pilot described a recent crash in which a B-26, failing to clear the trees, had plowed into them and exploded in a great fireball. When the three observers expressed horror, the pilots told them that they didn’t understand: after a crash, an explosion was a blessing, since the men in it died instantly; the alternative was burning to death in the wreckage. But the airmen’s matter-of-factness could not conceal the odds against them: two weeks before, six B-25S from another squadron had raided Lae; five of the six had been shot down. Although the exact percentage of American bombers lost on raids against Lae in 1942 is unknown, one estimate is that on a typical raid, between fifteen and twenty-five percent of the planes did not return. The men with whom Lyndon Johnson stood talking among the battered planes of the 22nd Bomb Group were men who were face to face with death every time they took off on a mission. The following morning, their escort, Brigadier General Marquat, told the three observers that the 22nd Bomb Group’s next mission against Lae would take place in two days, on June 9. Arrangements had of course been made for Anderson, as the Air Force observer, to fly on the mission, Marquat said, and now Stevens, Anderson’s associate in Washington, said he was going also. There was no reason, Marquat made clear, for Commander Johnson to go: he was an observer for the Navy, and the Navy had no connection with this mission. Commander Johnson said he was going too.
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