Lunching with the Democratic Policy Committee
Questioning a witness at a subcommittee hearing
Conferring with Bobby Baker
The Southern Caucus meets in Richard Russell’s office to discuss strategy for the civil rights bill, July 26, 1957. From left foreground: James Eastland, Strom Thurmond, John Sparkman, Sam Ervin, Kerr Scott, Allen Ellender, Russell, Herman Talmadge, John Stennis, Olin Johnston, Spessard Holland, Russell Long, Lister Hill, Harry Byrd, and Willis Robertson (back to camera).
Frank Church, Joseph O’Mahoney, Johnson, Estes Kefauver, and Richard Russell, after the passage of the jury trial amendment, August I, 1957
Happiness: on August 27, 1957, Johnson’s forty-ninth birthday and the day the House passed the Senate’s civil rights bill, Johnson hugs Angel Macias, whose Monterrey, Mexico, team had won the Little League Baseball world championship.
On August 29, 1957, still Majority Leader because of William Proxmire’s election, Johnson emphasizes a point after Proxmire was sworn in. Left to right: John Kennedy, George Smathers, Hubert Humphrey, Proxmire, and Johnson.
Dedication of Henry Clay’s portrait in the Senate Reception Room: Senators Hayden, Kennedy, and Johnson, March, 1959
President-elect John Kennedy bids good-bye to his dinner guests, Vice President-elect Johnson and family, November 27, 1960.
As the Senate prepared to recess for the long Fourth of July weekend, moreover, the lionization by the press was about to take a new turn—the turn Lyndon Johnson had been waiting for.
The South had begun to throw out its skirmishers for a Johnson presidential candidacy in 1956. The lack of enthusiasm south of the Mason-Dixon Line for a second campaign by Adlai Stevenson was more than equaled by the South’s distaste for the men northern liberals were mentioning if Stevenson were not to be the candidate: the New Yorker Harriman or the apostate Kefauver. The man the South wanted was the man the South always wanted, of course, but now Richard Russell withdrew from consideration in terms so unequivocal that they would have been called “Shermanesque” had not that adjective been particularly inappropriate, and the conservative columnist Bas-com Timmons wrote that “Johnson will inherit much of the support which was given Senator Russell last time.” Immediately after Russell’s withdrawal, a chorus of such support began to issue from the southern citadel on Capitol Hill. Taking the Senate floor on June 30 with the Newsweek article in his hand, Harry Byrd himself read into the record the magazine’s prediction that Lyndon Johnson would be President one day.
And over the Fourth of July weekend, the press was going to join in the chorus, as Johnson knew. George Smathers had given him an advance copy of a front-page editorial scheduled to appear in Florida’s Orlando Sentinel on Saturday, July 2, an editorial that would say that “only the nomination of Lyndon Johnson” could “put solidarity back in the once solid South” and save the Democratic Party from another defeat, that only his nomination “can extirpate and expiate the shameful and disgraceful insults heaped upon the South at the last convention…. He is the one man who…can win back such states as Florida, Tennessee and Texas…. The Stevenson-Kefauver-Harriman liberals are through. They bear the stamp and stigma of the leftwingers and big city political machines.” Johnson had also seen the advance text of a Liz Carpenter article that was going to appear on July 3. “This super-sensitive political town began speculating this week” about “the first rumblings of a Johnson presidential bandwagon,” the article said. The New Republic’s July 4 issue would carry what would be described as an “exuberant panegyric” of Johnson by Senator Richard Neuberger. And, most significantly, Robert Albright’s “Gallery Glimpses” column, scheduled to appear in Sunday’s Washington Post (which would, as Evans and Novak put it, “be on every Sunday breakfast table in the capital”), contained the words that Johnson so much wanted to read: “Lyndon Johnson last week emerged as something more than a highly skilled legislative technician. Unless bystanders missed their guess, he was riding a presidential boom.” Having obtained an advance look at the Albright column, Johnson was telling colleagues to be sure to read it Sunday.
• • •
BUT LYNDON JOHNSON HIMSELF was not to read those articles on Sunday. On Sunday, July 3, 1955, he lay, as his father had once lain, under an oxygen tent in a hospital, having heard a doctor say to him what a doctor had said to his father: the words he had always dreaded hearing.
27
“Go Ahead
with the Blue”
AS THE PACE OF THE 1955 session had accelerated and, with the increased press and public focus on Lyndon Johnson’s role as Leader, the stakes had grown larger (and, with each success, the expectations for further successes—and the danger of resultant disappointment and criticism—had become greater), the frantic quality to Johnson’s efforts had intensified. His days grew longer. His alarm was set for 7:30 a.m., but he was almost always awake when it went off; it wasn’t an alarm that was jerking Lyndon Johnson out of sleep. Often the long black limousine would be pulling away from Thirtieth Place by eight o’clock, with Johnson in the back seat dictating to Mary Rather and leafing through the morning newspapers at the same time. And no matter how early he arrived in 231, the morning was never long enough for all the private meetings that senators had requested, for all the telephone calls that had to be made or answered. Every time Walter Jenkins appeared in the doorway of the inner office, more pages of the yellow legal pad he held in his hand would be filled with urgent requests for a moment of the Leader’s time. There were committee meetings at which he had to put in appearances. Afternoons were spent in the unremitting tension of the Chamber and the cloakroom, every minute seemingly filled with a task that couldn’t be postponed. Lunch would often be a hamburger, placed on his office desk by Mary or Ashton as he was talking to someone in person or on the telephone. He would gobble a bite or two, put it down, resume talking—sometime later, cold now, the rest of the hamburger might be eaten, or it might not. Or Jenkins would bring a hamburger to the cloakroom and hand it to him, and as he talked Johnson would absentmindedly put it down on the little desk along the wall. An hour or two later, the Leader’s hamburger would still be sitting there. One day, Johnson ordered his staff to set aside an hour for a late lunch at the conference table in his private office with Arthur Krock. The Times columnist was very important to him, but as he was leaving the Senate floor, a matter unexpectedly arose that required him to stay to resolve it, and he arrived a half hour late. He had instructed Jenkins that he was not to be interrupted except for calls that simply could not wait. During the lunch, there were eight such calls, three of them on matters sufficiently complicated so that, as Krock put it, “it was essential to talk at length.” Johnson would return to the table, resume talking to Krock. Suddenly, he would remember something he had forgotten to say—some instruction he had forgotten to give, some instruction he had given that might be misunderstood without further explanation. In the middle of a sentence, or a bite, he would jump up, grab the phone, make sure everything was clear, every base covered. And then Jenkins was buzzing in to say that the important delegation he had agreed to see had already been waiting in the outer office for some time, and the lunch had to be ended, half the meal uneaten.
Trying to cram everything in, he would run from place to place. “More than once I saw him literally run the few steps from a doorway in the Senate Office Building to his car waiting at the curb,” Ashton Gonella would recall. As he was managing a Senate debate, the car would be waiting outside in the portico beneath the Senate steps, and his driver, Norman Edwards, would often have the motor running, for there was no time: “for a 3:30 plane, he left at 3:30,” with Ashton or Mary Margaret Wiley or Jenkins on the phone to the airport to ask them to hold the flight until he got there—“Senator Johnson is on his way.”
When the Senate recessed, at 6 p.m. or later, it was across the Capitol—often at a dogtrot—to the Board of Education, and then back to G-14, to put on the day’s events the spin he w
anted for the voracious journalists waiting there. And before he went home, there would be the next day’s session to arrange. “It has become almost a commonplace for friends to receive telephone calls from him as late as ten o’clock at night and to find that he was still at his Capitol Office,” Robert Albright was to write. One evening in June, he didn’t arrive home until after midnight. So ashen was he with fatigue that Lady Bird took one look at him, told him to get into bed, and brought dinner to him on a tray. And the nights were not for sleeping; in Walter Jenkins’ recollection, there was hardly one now during which his telephone did not ring at least once. And in other houses in quiet Washington neighborhoods, too, in the homes of senators as well as staffers, a phone would ring in the early-morning darkness and a man, jolted out of sleep, would reach groggily for the phone, to hear the Leader’s voice on the line.
The antidotes with which he tried to relieve the tension he took with a frenzied compulsiveness. His secretaries were still mixing his drinks weak, but, coming back to G-14 after the Senate recessed for the day, sinking into the big chair and having a glass placed in his hand, he would throw back his head, empty the glass in a single gulp, immediately hold it out and rattle the ice cubes for another Cutty Sark and soda, and another and another. More and more, the man who wanted never to be “out of control” because of drinking was out of control. Nicotine was, as always, the antidote he relied on most. His fingers were stained yellow with it; no matter how often Ashton and Mary Margaret emptied the ashtrays in his office, they were soon filled again; there was a feverish impatience in the way in which, in the middle of a tense conversation, he would reach for the open pack on his desk, pull out a cigarette, and fumble to light it; sometimes, sitting in one of the soft armchairs in the cloakroom, he would light a fresh cigarette and bend low over it, inhaling deeply as he took the first, long drag. Smoking was not allowed in the Senate Chamber: if Johnson had to be present, but didn’t have to be at his desk, he would stand in the rear of the Chamber, just in front of the cloakroom doors, with his hand cupped around a hidden cigarette.
He was too wound up to stop talking, and, at dinner parties at which the drinks were not mixed weak, all inhibition was gone. Russell Baker was to describe him at one party—four or five tables, guests of the Dean Acheson and Abe Fortas caliber—in the garden of William White’s home, “chain-smoking one cigarette on top of another and pouring down Scotch whiskey like a man who had a date with a firing squad. During the drinking hour before dinner, I watched him taking in rivers of smoke and whiskey and waving his hands and weaving his long, skinny torso this way and that, all the while talking nonstop to a group of four or five who seemed enthralled by the performance.”
Baker, who had recently returned from a stint with the Baltimore Sun’s London bureau, was seated next to Johnson at dinner. “As food arrived, he stubbed out a cigarette, lit another, finished his Scotch, called for another, and asked how the House of Commons compared” with the Senate. When Baker replied that he had been “surprised” at the lack of “debates in the Senate,” Johnson, who “had taken only two or three mouthfuls of food…shoved his plate aside, stubbed out his cigarette in the food, lit another smoke, drained his whiskey, and called for another.” He gave Baker a lecture. “Speechmaking didn’t count for anything when it came to passing bills, he said. What mattered was who had the votes…. ‘You want to hear a speech? I can get somebody to make any kind of speech you want to hear. What kind of speech do you want?…You want to hear a great speech about suffering humanity? I’ve got Hubert Humphrey back in the cloakroom. I’ve got Herbert Lehman. I’ve got Paul Douglas…. You want to hear about government waste? I can give you Harry Byrd….’” And all the time Lyndon Johnson was talking, Baker was to say, he never stopped smoking and drinking, ignoring the rest of his dinner, waving away dessert, stubbing out cigarette after cigarette in his food, motioning for another drink again and again. “I had seen people smoke and drink dinner before,” Baker was to say, but Lyndon Johnson “did it like a man trying to kill himself.”
When he ate at home, Johnson’s dinners were usually the heavy southern staples he preferred, and he insisted that the portions be big—huge heaps of black-eyed peas and tapioca pudding—and he shoveled the food into his mouth, head bent low over his plate, so greedily that even the adoring Bobby Baker said he ate “like a starving dog.” While he may have been “skinny” at White’s dinner party, during the 1955 session his weight rose with almost incredible rapidity—from the 185 pounds it had been when he returned from his annual checkup at the Mayo Clinic in February to 195, to 200, to 210, 220, 225.
EVERY PREVIOUS CRISIS in Lyndon Johnson’s career had been accompanied by a crisis in his health—and in every crisis he had refused to allow the illness to interfere, had refused so successfully that colleagues and friends and assistants had scarcely believed in the illnesses, had felt he must be exaggerating them, since if they were genuine, how could he possibly keep working so hard, keep driving himself so mercilessly: how could a man have such energy if there was something seriously wrong with him?
For weeks during his first, desperate campaign as an unknown candidate for Congress in 1937, he had complained of severe stomach cramps, often doubling over in pain. He couldn’t eat; every time he tried, he gagged or vomited. But he refused to cancel a single speech, drove every day for hours over bumpy Hill Country roads—had kept campaigning at the pace that made tough Ed Clark say, “I never thought it was possible for anyone to work that hard”—and his aides had stopped taking the complaints seriously. And then, during a speech two days before the election, he could no longer, even by holding on to a railing in front of him, stay on his feet, and he consented at last to be taken to a hospital, where doctors, rushing him to an operating table, found his appendix on the point of rupturing.
During his second desperate campaign—the “last chance,” “all or nothing” gamble he had taken against the seemingly invincible Coke Stevenson in 1948—the depth of Lyndon Johnson’s need to succeed, and of his determination to do so, had once again been illuminated by the way he dealt with illness. He began that campaign suffering from an infected kidney stone. Not only did it produce a 104-degree fever and make it impossible for him to eat, forcing him to vomit over and over until finally he could only retch because there was nothing left in his stomach, but it also caused pain—gripping, radiating cramps in the back, groin, and testicles—that physicians describe as “agonizing” and “unbearable,” classifying it as one of the most intense pains a human being can suffer. One of his doctors would say that he “didn’t know how in the world a man could keep functioning in the pain that he was in.” But Lyndon Johnson, bearing the unbearable, not only kept functioning, he kept campaigning, day after day driving hundreds of miles between Texas towns and cities, walking the streets for hours shaking hands, making speech after speech, and although, while lying on the back seat of his car, racked with fever and chills, he would gasp in agony, and in bathrooms he would double over, clutching his groin and panting for breath, he never cut a line out of a speech or left a hall afterwards without shaking, with a smile, the hand of every person who wanted to shake his hand. And when, finally forced into a hospital, he was told by doctors that the danger of permanent damage to his kidneys was very real, that an immediate operation was imperative—that postponing the operation in the hope that the stone might pass naturally could prove fatal—Lyndon Johnson nonetheless insisted on postponing it because the operation, and the six-week recovery period, would have brought his campaign, and perhaps his career, to an end, costing him his last chance. He waited for three days, each day the doctors warning him he must wait no longer, and finally insisted, against their advice and against prevailing medical practice because of the great risks involved, that they attempt a still-experimental procedure to avoid the operation—insisted with an implacability that raises inescapably questions whose answers lie buried within Lyndon Johnson’s labyrinthine personality: whether, if he didn’t att
ain his goal, he didn’t care what happened to him; which choice he would make, if the choice lay between death and failure.
And now, in 1955, as the stakes grew higher, there were again warnings of illness—this time of illness even more serious than an infected kidney stone. And again Lyndon Johnson refused to let them interfere.
LOOKING BACK LATER, colleagues could see how clear the warnings had been. But at the time, the warnings were ignored, ignored not only by other men but by Lyndon Johnson himself—although fear of a heart attack had been one of the great constants in Lyndon Johnson’s life.
In May, while managing a foreign affairs bill on the Senate floor, he suddenly clutched his chest for a moment, but when he was asked if anything was wrong, he said impatiently that he merely had a touch of indigestion. Then on Saturday, June 18, he and George Smathers were scheduled to drive down to Brown & Root’s Virginia estate, Huntlands. They had lunch in the Senate Dining Room, where, Smathers was to recall, “he ate his usual double meal and gulped the food,” and got into the big limousine which Norman Edwards was driving. They had just crossed the Memorial Bridge into Virginia when Johnson clutched his chest, and “gasped out, ‘It’s killing me. I’ve got indigestion.’” He had Edwards pull over at a gas station and bring him a Coca-Cola, Smathers says, “but even after he drank it, he didn’t feel better,” and Smathers says, he was still complaining about the pain during a dominoes game at the Brown estate.
“Finally, he went to bed, and the next morning he said he was better,” Smathers recalls. “But he didn’t look better.” When Smathers asked him to see a doctor, however, “he kept saying, ‘No—no,’ as though I was looking for trouble.” He did, in fact, submit to a cursory examination by the Capitol physician, Dr. George Calver, on Monday, but nothing wrong was found, and Johnson’s pace only intensified, although several times each day he would say he felt very tired, statements discounted by whoever heard them because the pace of his activities never slackened. Sometime in late June, telling two or three reporters about his fatigue, he said that he had had a bad pain and “a flutter” in his chest the last time he had had sexual intercourse with Lady Bird. “All I could think was, Who the hell would say something like that,” one of the reporters recalls. “Nobody took it [the symptoms] seriously.” On Friday, July i, the eve of the Fourth of July weekend, George Reedy told John Steele that he felt Johnson was “near the edge of sheer exhaustion,” and that evening, when Johnson went out to dinner with Sam Rayburn and Stuart Symington (Rayburn was trying to effect a rapprochement between the two men), Rayburn became worried. “He [Johnson] seemed very tense, seemed to want to talk politics all during dinner,” Symington was to say. “He was uptight.” Rayburn took the two senators home in his limousine, and after they dropped Johnson off, said to Symington, “He just can’t think, eat or drink anything except the problems he has as Majority Leader. He won’t relax.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 98