Lyndon Johnson fell into a depression. The doctors had told Walter Jenkins and George Reedy that depression was common among heart attack victims, but they also told the two aides that this one seemed unusually severe. Jenkins says he understood why: “He felt… if he had any chance to be President or Vice President or something, that this had ended it…. He became quite despondent at times.” Neither antidepressant medication nor the arrival of his mother (whose trip to Washington was her first airplane flight) seemed to help. For some days, he lay in his bed—“just wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t have anything to do with [anyone],” in Jenkins’ words—while his centrality in his assistants’ lives was dramatized. Bobby Baker got the news over the telephone at the New Jersey seashore, where he was vacationing with friends. Returning from the telephone, he was, recalls one friend, “white as a sheet. ‘The Leader’s had a heart attack,’” he said. Rushing to Bethesda, he was told that Johnson was allowed no visitors except Lady Bird. He went down to the lobby and waited—day after day. “For almost ten days I stayed at the hospital almost around the clock, leaving only to grab a few random hours of sleep and to take showers,” he was to recall. “Though there was little I could do, I felt it my duty to be there.” Once he went down to the Capitol to see Sam Rayburn, seeking solace, but didn’t get any: “Speaker Rayburn was disconsolate and near tears.” And when, finally, some days after Baker had returned to work at the Capitol, Lady Bird telephoned to say that Lyndon wanted to see him, Baker found “a quiet and sober man who talked of how close he’d come to death, of how he would be forced to curtail his activities, and of how he might no longer be able to act as Senate Majority Leader.” Saying he might resign from the Senate, he asked Baker if he would resign, too, and manage a radio station in Brownsville he was thinking of buying. “You’re my Leader, and I’ll follow where you lead,” Baker replied.
And then, one day, Reedy’s telephone rang and it was Jenkins. “For the love of God, do you know what’s happening?” Walter asked him, and told him to go to the hospital, and Reedy recalls, “When I got to the hospital, I couldn’t believe it!”
Letters—almost four thousand of them—had been pouring into Johnson’s office from friends and the public, and Lady Bird had been reading them to him. For days, Johnson had shown little response. And then one morning, immediately upon awakening, he had told Lady Bird that he wanted the letters answered—all of them, each answered not with a form letter but with a personalized note. Lady Bird should send handwritten notes to personal friends, he said, and as for the rest—he told her to have Booth Mooney come to the hospital, and when Mooney arrived, “he had a project for me,” a project Mooney was to call “Project Impossible.”
“We’re going to answer all of them,” Johnson said. “Every one has to have a personal reply.” And when Mooney, “aghast—four thousand letters”—tried to protest, saying that “all the newspaper people know you’re not up to dictating letters; it would look fake,” Johnson said he had figured out a way around that problem. The letters would be signed by Lady Bird, he said; Mooney would dictate them at the office, and after they had been typed, would bring them out to the hospital for her to sign. “Make ’em short, just a few lines, but tender and grateful,” Johnson said. And, Johnson said, he had a few letters he wanted to dictate himself; a stenographer should be sent out from his office. By the time Reedy arrived at the hospital, a desk had been set up in Lady Bird’s room next to Lyndon’s, and she was writing at it as fast as she could. “Two or three stenographers” were sitting at the physicians’ station in the corridor, and they were “out there with those typewriters going full blast. He took over the corridor, installed a couple of typewriters there, he was dictating letters, he was just going full speed.”
His physicians, J. C. Cain of the Mayo Clinic and cardiologist Willis Hurst, had prescribed complete rest, with absolutely no excitement, and had banned radio, television, and newspapers from his room. That morning Johnson had told Hurst that he missed country music, and had asked for a radio so he could listen to some. Hurst agreed, on condition that Johnson not listen to any news broadcasts. Once he had the radio, of course, Johnson listened only to the news, switching from station to station. One radio was not enough; he got a second, a small transistor with earphones, so that he could listen to two newscasts at once. And when a newscaster’s wording did not please him, he shouted back at the radio, and, as Reedy put it, “his nurses reported that they almost immediately acquired larger vocabularies.” A television set was installed in his room; a visitor found him “simultaneously watching TV, listening to the news through an earphone receiver on a tiny transistor radio, and carrying on a lively conversation with a nurse.” Visitors from the political world had also been banned, but Johnson insisted that Reedy and Jenkins be constantly on call, and then Rayburn was sent for, and Russell, and Earle Clements. The Senate wasn’t doing much in his absence, but, Jenkins says, “he really kept his oar in in the sense of being certain that he understood what was going on.” (Not that, as Reedy explains, Clements was trying to make the Senate do much; “By that time the Lyndon Johnson legend had become so overpowering that I pity anybody that had to step into his shoes.”) Baker was sent for again, and this time when he arrived his Leader was the Leader again, “demanding that I bring him all the news and gossip. Who was absent from roll calls? Who’d been drunk recently? Tell Senator Kerr this. Tell Speaker Rayburn that. Bring me a copy of this committee report or that Congressional Record. Johnson seemed pleased when I told him that not much was happening in the Senate, that it was conducting a mere holding action until he could return to work.” One day, Baker was rushing down the seventeenth-floor corridor toward Johnson’s room, his arms filled with papers he had demanded, when he encountered Rayburn, who had just been in to visit the patient. “His old face split into a rare grin,” Baker recalls. “I’m happy to see you taking him all that work,” the Speaker said. “It would kill him if he relaxed. I know he’s getting better because he fussed at me.” And “Project Impossible” had proved possible after all. On July 18, a Jenkins memo told Johnson: “We in the office know that having all your mail answered means more to you than any gift which we would give you. Therefore we have stayed here tonight to see that every letter is answered and filed. I am glad to report all of the letters about your illness—almost 4,000 to date—have now been answered.” Johnson had also decided to have letters written to the publishers of every newspaper that had carried a complimentary editorial about him during his illness, and to have those editorials inserted in the Congressional Record. That also had been done. More and more visitors came—including some from the GOP, like Knowland and Bridges. Dr. Hurst had tried to set a limit on the number of visitors per day, but when he told Johnson that the limit had been exceeded, Johnson replied, “Oh, now, look, Doctor, you’re not going to count Republicans, are you?” One day, the door opened, and the President was standing there, his great smile beaming into the room. “Why, Lyndon,” Ike said, “you look a lot better than I thought you would.” The Vice President came, for what had been intended as a brief visit but which lasted for more than an hour, as Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson fell into a serious conversation, one that was to mark the beginning of a close relationship between the two future presidents which is only now beginning to be glimpsed by historians. One rule on which Hurst had insisted was that no more than two visitors be in Johnson’s room at a time, and one day Harry Byrd sat patiently on a bench in the seventeenth-floor corridor for more than thirty minutes while Sid Richardson and Richardson’s lobbyist, Bill Kittrell, were talking inside.
Hurst and Cain did not object to Johnson’s activity because, alarmed by the depth of his depression, they had had a long discussion with Lady Bird, and as a result they had a better understanding of their patient, and of his inability to do anything in moderation. “If he was sitting on the porch at the LBJ Ranch whittling toothpicks, he’d have to whittle more than anybody else in the country,” Dr. Cain was to say. T
hey explained to Reedy that, in Reedy’s words, “to cut down his schedule would be worse than adding to it” because “his psychology was such” that the “frustrations” of idleness would be more likely than work to lead to “another heart attack.” And for a while, as he turned the seventeenth floor of the Bethesda Medical Center into an uproar, Lyndon Johnson was his old self. As Jenkins wrote to Mary Rather on July 23: “Mary, you would be real happy if you could see how well the Senator is getting along. He is just as cheerful and chipper as he can be.”
LYNDON JOHNSON’S OLD SELF had been characterized by violent mood swings, however, and they persisted in the hospital, so that from day to day Jenkins and others on his staff would not know whether they would find Johnson cheerful and chipper or lying flat on his back in his bed, speaking only in monosyllables and monotone, unwilling to take an interest in anything anyone told him. One antidote to his depression was the letters and editorials. Sitting next to his bed, Lady Bird read them to him. She put the best of them into acetate sheets in gold-tooled leather scrapbooks, and left them beside the bed. And Lyndon Johnson read them.
He spent hours reading them, reading them, in Reedy’s words, “over and over and over again,” putting his fingers on them as if he needed to touch them, becoming, in Reedy’s words, “absolutely obsessive about them.” In a way, Reedy and Jenkins and Mooney felt, his illness had deepened his lifelong need for reassurance that he was loved, and the letters and editorials seemed to assuage that longing. “There was sort of an unspoken yearning of his that could be felt all the way down to the Senate for that kind of reassurance, and he got it,” Reedy says. “Oh, he was just basking in those letters.”
The Senate had stood for a moment of silent prayer for him on the first day it met following his attack—Herbert Lehman had asked it to do so—and then there had been one laudatory speech about him after another. Lady Bird had told him about these eulogies at the time, but he hadn’t seemed interested. She had put the pages of the Congressional Record containing the speeches in a scrapbook, and now he read them, slowly, carefully, devouring every word. And there were letters from senators. “Give Lyndon my best,” Harry Byrd wrote to Lady Bird. “Tell him the Senate is not the same without him.” The longest letter was from Humphrey, of course; it said in part: “I miss having you get after me; I miss your good humor. Yes, we’re just lonesome for you.” One day, Johnson said with a grin, “Everybody loves Lyndon, I found out.” And then, in a lower, very serious, almost unbelieving tone: “Nobody run out and left me.”
THE OTHER ANTIDOTE was the woman who read him the letters and editorials.
When he had arrived at the hospital that first night, and the doctors were about to put him under, he had said to his wife, in a voice that Walter Jenkins says was the “pleading” voice of “a small boy”: “Stay with me, Bird.” When, the next day, he emerged for a moment from the sedation, he said it again: “Stay with me, Bird.”
She did. She was there, sitting by the bed, when he woke—every time he woke. “Lyndon wanted me around him twenty-four hours a day,” she was to recall, and that was how many hours she was there. “At first,” her friend Ruth Montgomery was to write, “Bird would not leave him even long enough to go out for a meal.” It was a week before her friends Eugene and Ann Worley persuaded her to go out to a restaurant; Ann Worley would never forget how, when Lady Bird first saw them, she said, “optimistically,” as if to convince herself, “Everything’s going to be fine”; she would never forget “how determinedly gay and cheerful Bird was” all that evening; she would never forget the smile that never left her face.
Her husband would remain at Bethesda for five weeks, periodically falling back into that terrible depression, a pit of despair so dark that at times Jenkins “did fear that he would kind of give up, maybe wouldn’t make the effort to [recover]. I thought maybe he would just say, ‘This is it. I’ve had it.’” For a few days, Jenkins says, Johnson would be “all right, but then he’d have these periods.” The doses of “despondency medicine” would resume, “and then he’d be all right for a while, and then he’d have another period of despondency.” During those five weeks, Lady Bird Johnson left the hospital to go to her home—where, of course, there were an eleven-year-old and an eight-year-old daughter living—exactly twice.
DURING THOSE FIVE WEEKS in the hospital, Lyndon Johnson was displaying other characteristics that had been prominent features of his old life.
One was that incredible will. Cigarettes—sixty cigarettes or more each day, lit one from the end of another—had been so desperately important to him for so long. Now Cain and Hurst confirmed what Dr. Gibson had told him in the ambulance: the smoking must stop immediately and completely. Lyndon Johnson tore the wrapper off a pack of cigarettes, opened the pack and pulled one cigarette halfway out of it. Then he put the pack on the night table next to his hospital bed, and the pack stayed there, open but untouched, the cigarette sticking out, for the rest of his hospital stay. When he got home, he put a pack on his night table there, and there would be another one next to his bed on the ranch, and they all remained untouched. Once, in 1958, one of his secretaries, Ashton Gonella, asked him if he didn’t miss smoking. “Every minute of every day,” he replied. But except for occasional lapses—all seem to have involved no more than a cigarette or two—Lyndon Johnson did not smoke another cigarette for fifteen years, not until, in 1970, he had retired from the presidency and was back permanently on his ranch, when he began smoking copiously again.
If there was another substance that had been as important to him as nicotine, it was caffeine. From breakfast, which had often consisted of several cigarettes and several cups of black coffee, through the rest of his day, “he had seemed,” in Jenkins’ words, “to live on cigarettes and coffee.” Now, since caffeine was dangerous for heart attack victims, he was told to cut out caffeinated coffee, too, and he did—completely, drinking only decaffeinated.
He had to cut out a lot more. Excess weight is a burden on the heart, and doctors told him he should weigh about 185, which would mean losing about forty pounds. So he went on a diet—with Johnsonian thoroughness, the thoroughness of a man who believed in doing “everything.” He announced he would lose even more weight than the doctors wanted, saying he would get down below 180, by reducing his daily intake of calories not to the 2,000 the doctors had recommended but to 1,500, and, Reedy says, “he became the god-damnedest diet fanatic that ever lived.” To make sure he kept the calories below that figure, he insisted that on every tray brought to him at the hospital there be a list of the calories in each dish on it. And since studies had begun showing that, as one article put it, “a fatty substance known as cholesterol is suspect in connection with heart disease,” the list must, he said, include a count not only of the calories but of the fat grams in each dish.
The responsibility for the list was assigned to Lady Bird (who for years thereafter would be referred to by some irreverent members of the Johnson staff as “the keeper of the weight”), and her husband tolerated no mistakes. Since he couldn’t seem to make himself eat small portions—although the portions were notably smaller than before—it was important that he eat foods very low in calories, and since a slice of cantaloupe contains only 45 calories, he became, Jenkins says, “a cantaloupe nut.” Once his tray arrived with a slice of watermelon instead, and he asked how many calories it contained, and, as Reedy recalls, “Bird incautiously said 65, and he insisted they look it up,” and when it turned out to contain 145, “you would have thought that the world had come to an end or he’d been betrayed.” Sometimes, determining the fat grams was difficult; “I’m either going to have to turn registered chemist or jump out the window,” Lady Bird said. But his methods worked. “I’ve given up eating and smoking at the same time,” he said, “and if any of you all have tried giving up just one of them, you’ll know how hard [giving up] both could be.” But by the time he left the hospital and returned to Thirtieth Place on August 7—to be greeted by a group of ne
ighbors standing on his front lawn, a “WELCOME HOME” telegram from J. Edgar Hoover, who was out of town, and an enthusiastic welcome from Little Beagle Johnson—he weighed 179.
FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE YEAR, as he rested at his Washington home until August 25, and then, two days before his forty-seventh birthday, went back to the ranch in Texas for a four-month stay, reporters were told that Lyndon Johnson was resting, concentrating on regaining his health, and that he had learned to relax—that he had changed his philosophy of life.
His illness was dramatized with the customary Johnson flair—reporters who interviewed him in Washington and then at the ranch found him talking in slow, calm phrases interrupted by frequent pauses and walking, as one article reported, with “agonizingly slow steps”—but so was the fact that, he said, doctors had assured him that if he took care of himself, he would recover from the illness and be able to return to his duties, to all his duties, “as good as new.” He wanted therefore to create the image of a prudent man taking care of himself, and he made sure reporters understood that he was doing so. He told them how much he had weighed when he had stepped on the scale that morning, emphasized that he was getting his weight down even lower than the doctors had ordered. The doctors had told him to take a nap every day; he took two naps, he said. The doctors had told him to get plenty of sleep at night; “even here,” as one article reported, “he tried to beat par. When the doctor told him to get eight hours sleep a night, Lyndon insisted on getting nine.” And he said he had resolved never to go back to his old driving ways; “I’ve thrown out the whip.” In fact, he said, he had developed a whole new philosophy of life, which was codified in an article, “My Heart Attack Taught Me How to Live” (written by Horace Busby), which appeared over his byline in The American magazine, and in dozens of interviews with reporters.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 100