Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  10

  “Will!”

  IN THIS CAMPAIGN—his last chance—personal as well as political patterns that had marked Lyndon Johnson’s entire career emerged stark and unadorned.

  Almost every great crisis of his career had been accompanied by a crisis in his health, for example, but he had done his best not to let it interfere, complaining endlessly, loudly, violently about the illness, but, even while complaining, refusing as long as possible to give in to it, fighting against pain and weakness with an endurance that was more than physical, spending his energy with a prodigality that would have exhausted the energy of a well man—and then finding more energy. In his first, desperate campaign as an unknown candidate for Congress eleven years before, he had kept going for days while complaining of stomach cramps, unable to eat, gagging and vomiting when he tried to choke food down, doubling over in pain yet refusing to cancel a single speech or a single long day’s campaigning over bumpy Hill Country roads. He had kept going for so many days while making these complaints that his aides no longer took them seriously—until, two days before the election, during a speech in a County Courthouse, he could not, even by grasping the railing in front of him, hold himself erect any longer and consented at last to be taken to the hospital, where doctors found his appendix on the point of rupturing and operated immediately. Now, in this, the greatest crisis of his career, illness flared up again—and again Lyndon Johnson fought the weakness with his will.

  For several days before he formally entered the campaign on May 12, he had been feeling the familiar dull abdominal ache, accompanied by nausea, that by now he knew signaled the formation of another kidney stone, and the pain grew steadily worse. Doctors advised a few days of bed rest in the hope that the stone would pass, but Johnson said there was no time for that. Then, a day or two before the Saturday night rally in Austin’s Wooldridge Park that would open his campaign on May 22, the ache changed into the sharp, gripping, radiating cramps in the back and side of “kidney colic,” a pain that comes and goes in waves so intense that medical textbooks describe it as “agonizing” and “unbearable”; “few bodily complaints … demand immediate relief so urgently,” one says; doctors class kidney colic as one of the three or four most intense pains that a human being can suffer. The nausea grew worse; he began gagging on food when he tried to eat; sometimes he vomited. More significantly, he was running a fever, a sign that infection was beginning. The doctors increased the doses of painkiller—probably morphine and Demerol—which gave him temporary relief, told him that this stone did not appear to be passing, and reminded him that so long as the stone passed within a few days, probably no permanent damage to the kidneys would result, but that if it did not pass, the danger of irreparable loss of kidney function was real. It was time, they said, to consider an operation to remove the stone. The operation was a relatively simple one, but, Johnson was told, the recovery period would be a minimum of six weeks. Election Day was nine weeks away. If he had any possibility of catching Coke Stevenson, an operation would end it. The campaign would, in effect, be over. His political career would be over.

  Johnson refused even to discuss the possibility of an operation. He had had stones before, and he had always passed them, he said. He would pass this one, too, and as soon as it passed everything would be okay. “I’ll pass it, I’ll pass it,” he said. “I’ve had this before. Just leave me alone.” Early on the morning of the Wooldridge Park campaign kickoff, however, both the pain and the fever became more acute, and every time he attempted to eat, he gagged. The pain, and the worry about its effect on his campaign—on his last chance—combined with the fever and the tension that always preceded crucial public appearances to produce a frenzy that came close to hysteria. One of his speechwriters, Paul Bolton, arriving that late afternoon at Johnson’s Austin apartment to give him the final draft of the evening’s speech, encountered Dr. William Morgan, Johnson’s physician, on the stairs. When he asked Dr. Morgan how Johnson was feeling, Bolton recalls, the doctor “just shook his head. He wouldn’t say a word. My heart sank.” And when Bolton entered the apartment, the Congressman was standing in the middle of the living room, “mother naked—obviously sick, and obviously he had been shot full of painkillers.” He began to rant, his arms flailing. Lady Bird was attempting to soothe him, and to get him dressed for the speech, but with little result. “I was aghast,” Bolton recalls. “I was scared half silly.” During the few minutes before Lady Bird shooed the speechwriter out, Johnson kept saying he was determined to give the speech, but Bolton remembers that he did not believe that was possible. The speechwriter drove to Wooldridge Park “very much in a turmoil.” But then, right on schedule, Lyndon Johnson’s car pulled up to the park and the Congressman got out. As he waved to supporters and told Lady Bird to go up on the stage ahead of him, he was poised, smiling, “all dressed up,” Bolton recalls, “in his well-tailored clothes, looked like he was feeling beautiful.” He didn’t merely walk onto the stage, which had been cleared of everybody except his wife and his mother (both dressed completely in white); he ran out onto it, “head thrown back,” Bolton recalls, “hands in the air,” flung his Stetson into the crowd with a carefree, sweeping gesture; “he was a great figure of a triumphant warrior going to war.”

  The speech itself, broadcast over a twenty-station network, repeated themes (“Peace, Preparedness and Progress”) familiar to Johnson’s supporters. Its tone was militaristic. “Preparedness” is the only weapon with which to halt the “surging blood-red tide of Communism,” he said. “Only the narrow straits of the Bering Sea separate Alaska from the menace of Eurasia, and in frozen winters a man can walk those straits. Moscow is only eighteen hours in the air from Detroit.…” America “must not surrender to the barbaric hordes of godless men in Eurasia.… We must stand up to the war-makers and say, this far and no farther.” On civil rights, he attacked President Truman’s attempts to create an FEPC (“because if a man can tell you whom you must hire, he can tell you whom you cannot employ”), and to end the poll tax (because “it is the province of the state to run its own elections”). He was against proposed laws against lynching “because the federal government has no more business enacting a law against one form of murder than against another.” As in 1941, he was trying to act statesmanlike and senatorial, which meant that he bellowed the speech. But after he finished, he shook hands with the audience—and didn’t leave until he had shaken every hand offered.

  Bolton’s astonishment at Johnson’s performance was no greater than that of Dr. Morgan, who was to say later that he had given Johnson “several shots of pain killer [probably morphine] that day and that he didn’t know how in the world a man could keep functioning in the pain that he was in from a kidney stone.” During the night following the speech, Johnson’s condition did not improve. But he was scheduled to leave his house at seven a.m. for a four-day campaign swing through the Panhandle. It was a vital trip; the Panhandle was the first area targeted in the campaign because he was so little known there, and no time could be lost in trying to make a dent in Stevenson’s support there. And tied into the tour was an event—still secret—which Johnson believed would dramatize what he could do for Texas as a Senator. Midway in his tour of the Panhandle, he was to break off for a trip to Dallas. There he would meet Air Force Secretary Symington, and following the meeting he would return to Wichita Falls to make a dramatic announcement: that city’s Morris Sheppard Air Force Base, whose closing had been scheduled, would remain open. Symington was flying to Dallas just to meet personally with Johnson, so that the Congressman could say that he had, in the meeting, persuaded the Secretary to reverse the previous decision and keep the base open. If Johnson couldn’t be there, the announcement would lose much of its drama. At seven a.m. Sunday, Johnson was at the front door of his house, waiting to go.

  Sunday was a long day. From Austin the candidate, accompanied by speechwriter Bolton and twenty-five-year-old war veteran Warren Woodward, Johnson’s adoring congressional aid
e, flew north to San Angelo and then on to Abilene and Lubbock, rushing to the telephone in each airport to call the local newspaper publisher and influential supporters; arriving that evening in Amarillo, he first gave a speech over the local radio station and then held a series of meetings with his press supporters and the key oilmen there.

  Because Woodward was going to be Johnson’s personal attendant, John Connally had been unable to avoid giving him some details of the candidate’s physical condition, although, following Johnson’s injunction to secrecy, he had told him as little as possible, and had certainly given the young ex-pilot no inkling of the possible seriousness of Johnson’s illness.

  Prepared or not, however, Woodward soon knew that something was very wrong—and rapidly getting worse. By the time they arrived in Amarillo that first evening, he recalls, “I noticed him beginning to perspire and look feverish. It was obvious that he was getting progressively more uncomfortable.” He gave him the pills Dr. Morgan had sent along, and aspirin, and “he just kept going.”

  Monday and Tuesday were worse. The periodic waves of agonizing pain, which might last an hour or more, had begun radiating now from the back around into the groin, and then, finally, down into the testicles, a signal that a stone has passed from the kidney into the ureter, the narrow tube that connects the kidney to the bladder. Johnson’s fever, moreover, was obviously climbing; by noon on Monday, Woodward was worried “about having enough shirts”; Johnson’s face seemed constantly covered “with beads of perspiration.” Although he always perspired profusely, this was especially dramatic; Woodward gave the candidate a new shirt at every opportunity—six or seven a day—but they seemed to be soaked through almost as soon as Johnson put them on. Choking down even a few mouthfuls of food grew harder and harder, and finally he gave up trying to eat.

  But he didn’t give up campaigning. He could get relief from the pain by lying down; the moment he stood up, it got worse. On Monday and Tuesday, however, not only did Lyndon Johnson drive hundreds of miles between the small cities in the Panhandle—Borger and Pampa and Moheetie and Floydada—in which campaign appearances had been scheduled, he walked the streets for hours shaking hands, and made speech after speech to Chambers of Commerce and service clubs. On Tuesday, the candidate’s fever was clearly higher. The terrible cramps grew so bad that sometimes in the privacy of a car or in a bathroom, he would double over, clutching his groin and gasping for breath. But that was only in private. In public, on speakers’ platforms or on the streets of a town shaking hands, voters might have noticed that the candidate was sweating a lot, but the only expression they saw on his face was a smile, and his handshake was as firm and friendly as ever. Tuesday was a very long day. Johnson’s first appearance was at six a.m., and at eleven o’clock that night he was still shaking hands. And from the beginning of that day to the end, Lyndon Johnson never left a room until the last hand in it had been shaken. He cut not a single line out of a speech. The “unbearable” pain was being borne. Somehow, Warren Woodward says, “he got through those days.”

  All this time, of course, the young aide was first suggesting and then begging his Chief to see a doctor. “It was perfectly obvious that he was getting more sick as those days went on, and as I look back on it now, it was because this stone was not passing and it was throwing more poison into his system,” he says. Each suggestion was rejected. “It never entered his mind that he wasn’t going to pass this stone,” Woodward says. “Therefore he felt it was a personal trial of his; he just had to tough it out until that stone passed. So all we could do for him was try to keep his fever down by aspirin and maybe some medicine for pain. That was it, and the rest was up to him. And that was his mood.…” Johnson ordered Woodward not to tell anyone at campaign headquarters back in Austin that he was sick, just to say he was fine.

  Tuesday night, however, was, in Woodward’s phrase, “a wild night.” At about eleven o’clock, Johnson, together with his two aides, boarded a Pullman for the three-hundred-mile trip to Dallas and his meeting the next afternoon with Symington. Bolton disembarked midway on the trip, in Wichita Falls, to prepare for Johnson’s return there the next night, when he was to give the speech announcing that the Sheppard Air Force Base would remain open. Woodward’s lower berth was directly across from Johnson’s, and Woody didn’t get much sleep. By this time, his temperature soaring, Johnson was suffering alternately from what Bolton says were “the most severe fever and chills I had ever seen,” and throughout the night Johnson would shout across the aisle: “Woody!” Jumping up, in his pajamas, Woodward would cross the aisle, and open the drapes curtaining off Johnson’s berth. “Get this window open!” Johnson would say, and Woodward would see that sweat was pouring off him from his fever. “Finally,” Woodward recalls, “the fever would pass and he’d maybe doze off for a little bit.” Woodward would close the window. Then a chill would come. The chills were very bad. “He was just shaking uncontrollably.” Woodward got the porter to collect all his spare blankets and pile them on Johnson, but they didn’t help. “I’m freezing, Woody! I’m freezing!” Johnson would cry. He asked Woodward to get into bed with him, and Woodward did, and wrapped his arms around him “to try to give some heat from my body over to his and try to keep him warm.” Then “when he would start the perspiring period,” Johnson would order Woody, “Get this window open!” and then, after a while, shaking and shivering with cold again, he would order Woody to get back into his berth and hug him again. Sometimes Johnson would doze, and Woodward would return to his own berth, but he never got more than a few minutes’ rest before Johnson’s voice would be shouting “Woody!” across the aisle.

  The next morning at nine, when the train arrived in Dallas’ Union Terminal, Woodward, absolutely alone now with a desperately ill candidate (and alone also, since Bolton was back in Wichita Falls, with the knowledge of the severity of the illness), managed to get Johnson dressed and over to their suite at the Baker Hotel, where the Congressman went to bed. He asked Johnson if he could summon a doctor, or at least telephone headquarters back in Austin and tell them what was happening. “He said no, that he was still determined that the stone was going to pass.” For some hours, Johnson lay in bed, “literally just racked with fever and chills.” Although he had not eaten for almost three days, he had no appetite; Woodward tried to get him to eat, but Johnson couldn’t; when he tried, he would have vomited, Woodward explains, “but there was no food in him, so he only gagged.” Occasionally, he would groan. By this time, Woodward was convinced that Johnson could not possibly get back on a train, return to Wichita Falls and make the scheduled speech. He asked whether he could at least telephone Bolton in Wichita Falls and tell him to cancel the speech, but Johnson, he recalls, “continued to believe” he would be able to make the speech, and refused to listen to any suggestion that he wouldn’t. “He was going to Wichita Falls with an important message. The Air Force base was going to be kept open. There just wasn’t any way he was going to miss this opportunity.” Johnson was, in Woodward’s careful words, “getting a little more irritable about this time.” Woodward did not telephone anyone. But by the afternoon, Woodward could not bear it any longer. He felt that if Symington knew the situation, he could persuade Johnson at least to get some medical assistance. “You have to remember I was a First Lieutenant, and this was the Secretary of the Air Force, but I screwed up my courage.”

  When the front desk telephoned to say that Symington was on his way up, Woodward gave Johnson a new shirt, and met Symington and General Robert J. Smith at the door, and, in the few moments before Johnson dressed and appeared, “poured out my problems to them. I told them, ‘I’m not able to convince him that we should get a doctor. He is a very sick man, and he’ll probably fire me for telling you this, but I’m here by myself, and I’ve just got to turn to someone, because I know when I see a sick man, and this is a very sick man. Yet he’s determined to go to Wichita Falls. He’s determined to have this conference with you, Secretary Symington. And I don’t know w
hat to do.’ ”

  Had Woodward not told the two visitors that Johnson was sick, they would never have known. When the young aide finished whispering to them, he called, “Congressman, they’re here now.” The door to the bedroom opened, and there was Lyndon Johnson, beaming at his visitors. “He pulled the door open and sprang out with all the energy and vitality just as if nothing was wrong,” Woodward recalls. “Full of energy! Ready to go! My God! Will!” Sitting down with Symington and Smith, Johnson “conducted the conference and they worked out all the arrangements.” And, Woodward is convinced, Johnson would not have said a word to the two men about his physical condition had not Symington, in a diplomatic way, “after the business was over, got the conversation around to his health obliquely: ‘How are you feeling, Lyndon?’ ” Gradually, some of the truth emerged.