Even then the job of persuading Johnson to obtain medical assistance had to proceed by slow degrees. For some time the candidate flatly rejected his visitors’ urgings that he see a doctor, insisting he didn’t need one. But the longer he sat talking, the harder it became for him to conceal his pain, and he began to shiver uncontrollably. Even then, he would not agree to be examined by a doctor, but only to talk to one over the telephone; he allowed General Smith to telephone a Dallas urologist with whom he was acquainted to discuss the situation and ask if something could be prescribed to make Johnson feel better. The urologist, R. E. Van Duzen, refused to prescribe without examining the patient, and Johnson, by now trembling and barely able to hold himself upright in his chair, finally agreed to an examination. Arriving at the suite, Dr. Van Duzen, Woodward says, “took one look at him, and said, This is a sick man, a very sick man, and he needs to be in the hospital.’ ”
Recalls Woodward: “The Congressman just said no, he wasn’t going to have anything to do with this at all and he wasn’t going to go. Finally, [Symington] talked him into doing this. Finally, he consented to going.…”
But only for tests, and only for a few hours. “He envisioned it—’Maybe I’ll get a shot and a couple of pills.’ He didn’t view it in the light [that he would have to stay in the hospital longer than a few hours]. That was the only reason he agreed to go.” And only under what Woodward describes as “great-secret conditions.” Johnson authorized Woodward to telephone Bolton and order the speechwriter to deliver the speech he had written himself—but not to hint at the real reason for Johnson’s absence; Bolton was to announce that the candidate had been flying to Wichita Falls but had been delayed by bad weather. No one but Bolton was to be told anything, Johnson told Woodward. No one! Not his wife, not his campaign headquarters, not Alvin Wirtz, not John Connally—no one was to know that he was in a hospital. As for the hospital staff, of course, they were not to be told the identity of their new patient.
By the time he arrived at the hospital, however, Johnson was doubled over in agony, gasping for breath, retching and gagging, unable to stand for more than a few moments at a time. His temperature was over 104 degrees. As attendants dressed him in a hospital gown and placed him in a wheelchair, he heard Dr. Van Duzen say he would have to remain in the hospital overnight, but he did not protest as he was wheeled down a corridor to a laboratory for tests. When the tests were completed, and he was being wheeled to his room, he vomited—over himself and an orderly and a nurse.
(A few minutes later, there was a poignant postscript. As Johnson had entered the hospital, he had said to Woodward, “Don’t leave me, Woody.” The faithful Woodward stayed at his side—except as Johnson was being wheeled to his room. A nurse had insisted that Woodward fill out the admittance forms, and Woodward had stopped—“maybe as long as five minutes”—to do so. But it was during those five minutes that Johnson vomited. When Woodward reached him, Johnson said, “Woody, don’t ever do that to me again!” The astonished Woodward didn’t know what he had done. “You left me,” Johnson said. When Woodward tried to explain that the nurse had insisted he fill out the forms, Johnson said, “I don’t care. You don’t work for her, you work for me. You stay with me. I called you and you weren’t there. I don’t want you to leave me. Don’t leave me when I need you.” Thirty-six years later, when Woodward was being interviewed, he was still laboriously trying to excuse his lapse: “He didn’t really need me. He had thrown up and soiled himself, and it was a sort of messy situation, but he had orderlies and nurses and ail sorts of people to handle it, and he was well cared for. I was maybe gone as long as five minutes. It was indicative of the fact that he didn’t like to be left alone.…”)
Woodward saw that keeping Johnson’s identity from the hospital staff was impossible. A small crowd of nurses, orderlies and doctors had been following his wheelchair down the hall “because they knew Congressman Johnson, knew who he was.…” Word was bound to leak to the outside world. Johnson was insisting he would be in the hospital only overnight. “I’ll pass it, I’ll pass it,” he kept saying. “I’ll be out of here in the morning.” But even if he was there only overnight, didn’t headquarters have to be told? Woodward asked Johnson if he could call Connally now, and Johnson said he could. But he told Woodward to tell Connally he was not to inform anyone else:
Tell him not to release it to the press, that I’m just going to be here overnight and they just want to run some tests. Just tell him not to say anything to the press about it. I’ll pass this stone during the night. I am reaching the point, sort of the crisis, and I’ll pass this stone and I’ll be out tomorrow. We’ll pick up the schedule. You tell John that.
FEARING THAT the conversation might be overheard by the hospital’s switchboard operator if Woodward were to make the call from his room, Johnson told him to make it from an outside phone. Woodward did—from a nearby drugstore. Connally said one thing that gave Woodward a sense of relief: Mrs. Johnson would be on the next plane to Dallas. The youthful aide realized that when she arrived the load of responsibility that he had been carrying alone would be shifted to Lady Bird’s shoulders. But when Connally heard of Johnson’s prohibition against telling the press his whereabouts, he said, “That’s just ridiculous.” Woodward returned to the hospital to tell Johnson that Connally said there was no choice but to tell the press, that “he thinks you can’t have a candidate for the United States Senate and a Congressman in a hospital in downtown Dallas,” canceling speeches and interrupting the campaign schedule, without reporters finding out about it.
By this time, Woodward was to recall, Johnson “really was not in complete control of his thinking.… There was an element of delirium from this high fever that he had.…”He told Woodward to tell Connally to do as he had been told: “You just tell him that I order!” But when Woodward made this call, Connally said, “Well, it’s too late; I’ve already done it.” Reporters had begun calling headquarters to ask why Johnson was canceling the Wichita Falls speech that evening, Connally said, and he felt he had no choice but to give the true reason, since they were sure to find it out anyway.
Woodward had expected Johnson to explode over this news, but when Johnson heard it, “a sort of calmness came over him and a sort of resignation.” He said, “Well, I guess I might as well withdraw. Get your notebook.” Dictating a statement irrevocably withdrawing from the campaign, he told Woodward to telephone Dallas newspapers immediately, and read it to them. “Do it right now,” he said. “I’m out of this.”
The young man didn’t know what to do. He felt his Chief was in no condition to make a decision which might well end his entire political career, but he knew he could not make Johnson change his mind. “I’d learned not to argue with him,” he says. And Johnson’s tone had been very firm. “He was out. He had made a decision.” When Woodward nonetheless screwed up his courage and tried to suggest that Johnson wait a bit, Johnson said angrily: “Do it right now.” Recalls Woodward: “He was very, very firm in telling me to do it right that moment.”
Years later, Woodward would say, “Can you imagine what would have happened if I had done that? The whole course of history—we might not even have had Vietnam or the Great Society.” But, he would say, “Every now and then the Lord takes care of you. God protects us kids.” As he was walking out of the hospital room to carry out Johnson’s orders, Woodward thought of something he could say to persuade Johnson to delay issuing the withdrawal statement—perhaps the only thing he could have said that would have persuaded Johnson to delay—and instead of leaving the room, he said it, and in so doing performed what was perhaps the greatest service that the devoted young man was ever to render to his leader, although he was to be associated with him for another twenty years. He said: “Why don’t you wait until Mrs. Johnson gets here.”
“THAT BOUGHT SOME TIME,” Woodward recalls. “I told him that she was in the air right that minute, flying up to Dallas, and that it was in fact time for me to go out to meet her. I said,
‘Let’s go ahead and make the announcement, but let’s do it after she gets here. She would want to be here when you do it.’ … That, in his fevered condition, seemed to ring a bell with him.” Johnson told Woodward to pick Lady Bird up; “then we’ll call the press in and we’ll announce this thing together.”
On his way to the airport, Woodward did something else of which he was to be proud. “Halfway out to the airport,” he recalls, “I suddenly said, ‘Oh, my God! If some reporter calls him, he’ll probably tell him he’s withdrawing, and everything will be all over.’ I stopped the car, and ran into some store and called back to the hospital and I got the [nurses’] supervisor and I told her, ‘Absolutely no calls! Absolutely no visitors!’ Under no circumstances was he to have any phone calls put through to his room or any visitors of any kind until Mrs. Johnson got there. I said he needed his rest. I said, ‘He is to be isolated. No one is to see him or talk to him.’ And, you know, I put the stopper in the basin just in time, because sure enough the phone calls began to come in while I was at the airport, but no one was put through to him.”
And when Lady Bird arrived, all at once many of the problems seemed to vanish. “I had not had any sleep, I was about at the end of my line, and I was never so glad in my life to see anyone as I was [to see] Mrs. Johnson,” Woodward says. On the way to the hospital, he explained the situation. She didn’t say much, but “she was calm and understanding and seemed to know exactly what to do.” As soon as they walked into her husband’s room, “she took over very completely.” When Woodward slipped out, she was talking to Johnson “soothingly and quietly.” Woodward could see that “he felt reassured having her there.” And when, some time later, Woodward re-entered the room, “somehow or other the notion of withdrawing from the race seemed to kind of fade into the background.…”
In fact, what was on the Congressman’s mind now was not withdrawal but food. The bed rest—and a massive shot of morphine—had made him feel better, and, with the hospital’s kitchens already closed, he told Woodward, “Get me something to eat.” When Woodward returned with a warm “Dutch oven” from the hotel, he found that the Congressman was in some respects very much back to normal. Woodward had brought a big helping of bacon and eggs, and, he recalls, “it looked like a feast to me; I couldn’t remember when I had eaten last.” But Johnson, sitting up with the tray on his lap, looked up at him and said, “Well, you’ve done it again.” Woodward couldn’t see anything wrong.
“Now, Woody,” his Chief said, “Why? WHY????? Is this the way you want to do things all your life?”
“What’s wrong?” Woodward said.
“There’s no salt and pepper.”
THE NEXT MORNING, the stone still had not passed. Johnson’s fever was up again. And reports of his hospitalization were in the Dallas newspapers, and Johnson had seen them, and, in Woodward’s careful phrase, “he was concerned about that.” Finding that there had been little if any change in the position of the stone during the night, Dr. Van Duzen was saying that an immediate operation—the operation that would mean the end of the campaign, and perhaps of his career—was imperative.
During the morning, however, Woodward took a call in Johnson’s hospital room from Jacqueline Cochran. The famous aviatrix had flown to Dallas in her twin-engined Lockheed Electra to hear Symington speak at a meeting of the Air Force Association, and she had learned from him of Johnson’s illness. In her brusque manner, she said that a friend, Dr. Gershom J. Thompson, was the chief urologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota; that Dr. Thompson was a world-renowned expert at removing kidney stones through cystoscopic manipulation rather than through operations; and that she was ready to fly Johnson to Rochester that afternoon.
An important consideration to Johnson was that there would be a familiar face at the Mayo Clinic: his personal physician, Dr. James Cain, Alvin Wirtz’s son-in-law, was on the clinic’s staff. But even that consideration faded before the political: he was afraid that a trip to Minnesota for medical treatment would be taken as a slur on Texas doctors. “I don’t want anyone to think that I can’t get all the medical attention I need right here in Texas,” he said, in Woodward’s recollection, and ordered Lady Bird to “call Jackie and tell her no.” But after a long conversation between Mrs. Johnson and Miss Cochran, “it was decided” that he would go; “Mrs. Johnson played a large part in that decision.” Taken to Love Field in an ambulance, Johnson was placed on a bed that had been made up in Miss Cochran’s Electra, and flown to Minnesota. (Although being moved had intensified his pain again, Johnson remained in command of his staff—even if it consisted of only a single aide. During the flight, Miss Cochran came back to check on the patient and told Woodward, who had been chatting with her about the thirty-five missions he had flown over Europe during the war, to sit in her pilot’s seat while the co-pilot flew the plane. Johnson, who had been dozing, awoke and saw Woodward sitting in the pilot’s seat. Rapping sharply on a table, he got Woodward’s attention, and when the young man hurried back, snapped, “Woody, don’t we have enough problems without you trying to fly this plane?” and told him to let Miss Cochran do all the flying.)
Hospitalization at Mayo’s didn’t solve the problem. Dr. Thompson was indeed expert at cystoscopic manipulation—inserting a cystoscope in the penis, running it up through the urethra and the bladder and then into the ureter, and then inserting a nylon loop in the cystoscope and using it to pull out the kidney stone—but only for a stone near the lower end of the ureter. It was general medical practice not to use a cystoscope on kidney stones high up in the ureter because of the danger that the cystoscope would puncture the ureter. And the physicians felt, moreover, there was little chance that the procedure would work in this case. When Johnson explained the necessity in political terms of avoiding surgery, the doctors were sympathetic, but said that in medical terms surgery would shortly be unavoidable. A stone as large as Johnson’s appeared to be was probably almost completely obstructing the kidney, and eventually such an obstruction can cause the kidney to stop functioning. In addition, the patient had been running an infection-indicating fever for more than a week, and an infection in the kidney can lead to an abscess and gangrene. The prognosis was rapidly becoming one in which there could be no more waiting; the situation was nearing a stage at which it might be life-threatening. A few more days was the outside limit of the time the doctors felt they could afford to delay. So, for three days, Johnson waited, while doing everything he himself could think of to jar the stone loose: going out in a car, he had Woodward drive him over bumpy roads; in the clinic he walked up and down the stairs; holding on to Woodward for support, he bounced up and down—even jumped up and down—as hard as he could bear to. These exercises produced no result except increased pain and weakness. Says Woodward: “There was no change in his thinking. He was going to pass the stone. He wasn’t going to let them take it [out] any other way. He was going to pass it, he was going back on the campaign trail.”
During the three days, he acted, in fact, as if he was still campaigning. He persuaded the doctors to have three telephones installed in his room, and with the help of Lady Bird and Woodward he worked them constantly, waving nurses impatiently out if he was talking—and, indeed, refusing to stop talking even while a nurse was actually giving him treatment, telephoning not only Wirtz and Clark but supporters all over Texas, trying to convince them that he felt fine, that his physical problems were minor, that they were all but resolved, that he would soon be back on the trail, that in the campaign itself things looked good, that he was pulling up on Ol’ Coke, that he was going to win; according to one report, in a single day he made sixty-four such calls.
But the reality was the stone—the stone that wouldn’t move. The reality was the pain that morphine only partly dulled, the pain that wouldn’t stop, the pain and the weakness. If the stone didn’t move, all the telephoning in the world wasn’t going to help him—and it wasn’t moving.
Finally, on Sunday, May 30, the doctors relu
ctantly agreed to attempt the cystoscopic manipulation as a last chance—the very last chance—to avoid surgery. Johnson was wheeled away and given a general anesthetic, and for forty-five minutes Mrs. Johnson and Woodward silently paced outside the operating room, lost in thought, she about her husband, Woodward, as he was later to relate, not only about Johnson but about politics, because “the realization was dawning on me by this time that if they were unable to remove the stone this way … they would have to operate surgically. And in fact the campaign would be over.” The doctors emerged and said that the procedure had been successful—just barely successful. (They said that “Had it been lodged any further up, they wouldn’t have been able to do it.”) According to one report, no kidney stone as high in the ureter as Johnson’s had previously been removed at the Mayo Clinic. With the stone gone, Johnson’s recovery should be rapid, they said, and Johnson could return to the campaign in a week.
HE WOULD RETURN to the campaign, of course, with almost two weeks lost. When he had begun the campaign, he had had nine weeks before the first primary, a terribly short time to make up ground on Coke Stevenson. Now he had only seven.
And he had made up little ground, if any. The news he was receiving in the hospital was not good. In the first place, there wasn’t very much of it. His staff at his campaign headquarters in the Hancock House in Austin was sending him all the newspaper clippings on the race, but on June 1st, campaign assistant Roy Wade was forced to report, “I have no clippings. There were none in the Texas press today,” and Wade’s June 2nd letter began: “Again, very little news.”
Even worse, there had been little shift during the week Johnson had campaigned before he entered the hospital. The last Belden Poll released—on May 16—before the campaign kick-off in Wooldridge Park had stated that Stevenson was the choice of 64 percent of the state’s voters; Johnson had 28 percent. Private polls taken now showed no significant change in those figures. The Wooldridge Park speech had made little impact, nor had the series of talks he had given in the Panhandle; all the pain he had endured on the Panhandle trip had resulted in virtually no narrowing of the margin there, Johnson’s polls showed. “Peace, Preparedness and Progress” wasn’t working.
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