Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey With Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford

by Hill, Clint

  “I hate to ask you men to go,” he said. “I wish I did not have to send you into battle in a far-off country.” His brow furrowed, and I knew he was speaking sincerely from the heart.

  “Do your duty, as I know you will. I pray all of you will be back.”

  When he said that, my own emotions almost got the best of me. For I knew, as he did, that within hours of being on the ground in Vietnam, a significant number of these young men would suffer life-altering injuries or be killed in action.

  After stopping at a nearby hospital to visit a group of wounded soldiers, we got back on Air Force One for a five-hour-and-twenty-minute flight to El Toro Marine Air Station in Southern California. It was 8:41 in the evening when we touched down, and after a brief speech to the troops and civilian personnel who had gathered to greet him, President Johnson repeated the scene from earlier in the day, this time shaking the hands of the U.S. Marines boarding military transport planes headed straight to Vietnam. After watching the planes take off, we boarded helicopters and flew to the USS Constellation, an aircraft carrier stationed off the coast of California, where we would spend the night. The president held a press briefing aboard the aircraft carrier shortly before ten o’clock, and by the time he retired to his suite, it was well after eleven—2:00 a.m. by our East Coast body clocks. It was no wonder he looked fatigued.

  The following morning President Johnson was up early, and made the request to have breakfast with a representative group of sailors on the ship. He asked each of them to stand up and give their name, rank, and hometown, and then started asking questions. “How is the morale on the ship?” he asked. “Is it higher at some times than others?”

  The boys were hesitant at first, but then one piped up and said, “Yes, sir. It depends on the amount of mail we get from home, and what we read in the newspapers.”

  “What do you mean, what you read in the newspapers?” President Johnson asked.

  The young man said, “We read about the hippies and the flower children and all these people who are against the war. I don’t understand why we have to go to war and these peaceniks get away from the draft by rebelling and having demonstrations. It doesn’t seem right.”

  The president nodded in understanding. “Son, there are dissenters in every war. But I am so proud of you boys, and the entire nation is proud of you. Nobody wants to go to war, and nobody wants to die. But people must, and I’m proud of the way you boys have met your responsibility. You are fighting for the right to allow people to dissent.”

  He paused, and then looked around the table, taking a moment to look into each man’s eyes. “If you make it—and that’s what we want and pray for every day,” he said, “and if you don’t, then the good Lord knows that you went down swinging and fighting hard for your country. It’s boys like you that makes America a free country.”

  In the newspapers the next day, President Johnson’s visits to the troops made the front page, but the brief articles were overshadowed by the headlines: “U.S. Air Base Under Heavy Rocket Fire; Reds Shell 30 Cities in New Viet Offensive.”

  FEBRUARY 29, 1968, marked the last day of Robert McNamara’s tenure as secretary of defense. Having been appointed in 1961 by President Kennedy, McNamara had served seven years in the post, longer than any other defense secretary, and as he departed the office—to be replaced by Clark Clifford—President Johnson was to present him with the Distinguished Service Medal in a noontime ceremony at the Pentagon.

  February had been unseasonably dry, but that morning the rain started early, and was pummeling down as we departed the White House in a small motorcade and drove directly into the Pentagon garage. Secretary McNamara was there to greet the president, and he led us to a bank of elevators.

  Several members of the president’s staff had come along, so we all piled into one large elevator—thirteen of us, in elevator number 13—including one other agent and myself. An Army master sergeant assigned to operate the elevator pushed the button to take us to the appropriate floor, the doors closed, and the elevator began to ascend. The president was bantering with Secretary McNamara when all of a sudden the elevator stopped, but the doors didn’t open as they automatically would when we reached the intended floor.

  Looking perplexed, the sergeant pushed a couple of buttons, but the doors remained closed, and the elevator wasn’t budging. Secretary McNamara took over, pushing button after button on the control panel, but still, nothing. We were stuck.

  The sergeant got on the emergency phone and notified the operator of our problem, but there wasn’t much room to move, and with so many people in there it was quickly becoming hot and stuffy. We hadn’t built any extra time into the schedule, and as I looked at my watch I realized we were already late for the beginning of the ceremony.

  Drops of perspiration were forming on President Johnson’s forehead, and he was clearly becoming irritated.

  “What’s wrong with this thing?” he said with a scowl.

  “Don’t ask me,” McNamara quipped. “I don’t work here anymore.”

  The president was not amused, and as the air got stuffier, I too was becoming concerned. We attempted to pry the doors open from the inside, and got maybe an inch or so. One of the president’s assistants, Harry McPherson, was quite tall, and he managed to move a ceiling plate a few inches to create a small opening, but then the electricity cut off. Now we were in the dark.

  The elevator had a capacity of fifteen, and we had just thirteen people, so weight should not have been a problem, but as the minutes ticked by, the situation was getting more and more tense, and I knew President Johnson’s patience was nearing its breaking point.

  “Let me have your radio,” I said to the advance agent who was in the elevator with us. Other than the telephone inside the elevator, it was our only means of communication. I notified the agents posted outside the elevator of our predicament and requested they go to each floor and pry open the doors to try to locate us. It wasn’t long before they found us between floors. The distance from the elevator to the next floor of the building, however, was too high for anyone to climb, so a chair had to be lowered into the elevator. President Johnson stepped onto the seat of the chair, and with two people up above grabbing his arms and two in the elevator lifting from below, we finally got him out, and the rest of us followed. Needless to say, he was not in the best of moods as we walked to the ceremony site—fifteen minutes late—and the situation just seemed to go from bad to worse.

  The Air Force flyby had been canceled because of the weather. As President Johnson stepped up to the podium, a staff member juggled an umbrella over his head trying to keep him dry, but as the president began to speak, the sound system malfunctioned, making his voice inaudible to the two thousand attendees standing miserably in the rain. Everyone, including me, was soaked and chilled to the bone. It was a complete and utter disaster, and while I’m sure President Johnson found someone to blame, luckily this time it wasn’t me.

  Problems seemed to be mounting for President Johnson on all fronts. The war in Vietnam was going badly, there had been no resolution to the Pueblo seizure, a copper strike was looming, and the New Hampshire presidential primary was coming up on March 12. As sitting president, it was assumed Johnson would have no difficulty winning the Democratic primary, but with criticism of the war mounting and President Johnson’s popularity declining with each news broadcast, others in the Democratic Party saw a potential opening. Senator Eugene McCarthy, a Democrat from Wisconsin, decided to challenge President Johnson in the primaries with a fervent antiwar campaign.

  Johnson prevailed in the New Hampshire primary, but his percentage margin of victory was in the single digits. He appeared vulnerable. The president, his family, friends, and staff, were all very upset. Four days later, Senator Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for president—something he had repeatedly said he would not do—stating, “I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course.”

  On that same day, March 16, 1968, U.S. soldiers
claimed a big victory after an assault on the Vietcong in the seaside village of My Lai. In reality, the soldiers had killed an entire village of men, women, and children in what later became known as the My Lai Massacre. The horrific details of the incident did not become public knowledge, however, for over a year.

  On March 31, President Johnson scheduled a nationally televised address to the American people to announce an immediate de-escalation of attacks on North Vietnam as the first step in moving “toward peace through negotiations.”

  He had been working on the speech with his staff for days, and a final version had been distributed to the press shortly before he appeared on the air. I had gone home, and when the broadcast started I was sitting alone in my basement, where I had a small black-and-white television next to my desk. I was listening but not really watching the television screen as the president came to the end of his remarks. There was a pause, and then I heard President Johnson utter some words I never thought I would hear him say.

  “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

  I was absolutely stunned. Did I hear him correctly? There had not been any indication I was aware of that he was going to do this. No indication whatsoever. The newscasters, all of them as shocked as I was, confirmed it: Johnson had taken himself out of the 1968 presidential election. Then, I thought, Is this just a ploy on his part to gain sympathy and gather momentum for a presidential draft? Was it being done simply to encourage the North Vietnamese to come to the bargaining table? How would this affect his activity and exposure over the next few months? How would it affect our security for the president? These and a million other questions ran through my mind. I didn’t have time to dwell on it because we were flying to Chicago early the next morning, where President Johnson was scheduled to speak to the National Association of Broadcasters.

  The entire nation was shocked by President Johnson’s announcement, and that was all anyone was talking about. When I saw LBJ the next morning, however, he did not bring up the subject, and neither did I. It wasn’t my job to advise or offer my opinion on his political decisions—my only focus, as it always had been, was ensuring his personal safety.

  In his speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, President Johnson made some points that I thought were very significant, and still do.

  “Men and women of the airways fully—as much as men and women of public service—have a public trust, and if liberty is to survive and to succeed, that solemn trust must be faithfully kept. I do not want—and I don’t think you want—to wake up some morning and find America changed because we slept when we should have been awake, because we remained silent when we should have spoken up, because we went along with what was popular and fashionable and ‘in’ rather than what was necessary and what was right.

  “Certainly, it is more dramatic to show policemen and rioters locked in combat than to show men trying to cooperate with one another. The face of hatred and of bigotry comes through much more clearly—no matter what its color. The face of tolerance, I seem to find, is rarely newsworthy.”

  Indeed, President Johnson’s remarks are perhaps even more relevant in 2016 than they were in 1968, in this era of twenty-four-hour news cycles in which the news media’s repetitive broadcasting of “dramatic” incidents often provokes and incites violence. And yet at that time, President Johnson could have had no idea what was about to unfold.

  SENATOR ROBERT F. Kennedy had sent a wire requesting a meeting with President Johnson, and the meeting was set for ten o’clock Wednesday morning, April 3, at the White House. This would be the first meeting between the two since Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy, and Kennedy had asked to bring his brother’s former speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, along. They wanted to keep the meeting quiet—no press—so to facilitate their movements within the White House complex, I arranged for them to park on the South Grounds, and then I met them at the South Portico.

  “Hello, Clint,” Robert Kennedy said solemnly when he saw me.

  “Good morning, Senator,” I said. “I’ll escort you to the Cabinet Room. The president is expecting you.”

  The meeting lasted about an hour and a half, and while I didn’t know what was said, when they came out of the Cabinet Room, none of them appeared happy.

  Kennedy and Sorensen were silent as I escorted them out through the Rose Garden to the area near the South Portico. When we arrived at their car, Senator Kennedy simply said, “Thanks, Clint.”

  “My pleasure, Senator,” I replied. And with that, they exited the White House grounds.

  Now that President Johnson had taken himself out of contention for the presidency, I realized that Robert F. Kennedy had a very good chance of becoming the next President of the United States. The first thought that entered my mind was—all those kids! Bobby and his wife, Ethel, had ten children, and we’d be responsible for protecting all of them. The election was still a long way off, though, and I’d seen enough politics to know anything could happen.

  My immediate concern was preparing for a busy travel schedule beginning the next day with a trip to New York City for the ordination of Terence Cooke as archbishop of New York, followed by a Democratic congressional fund-raising dinner back in Washington that evening, an overnight flight to March Air Force Base, in California, so President Johnson could confer with General Eisenhower, and then on to Hawaii for meetings about Vietnam and the still unresolved USS Pueblo situation. There were still a great many details to iron out.

  Thursday, April 4, began quietly, with the president making phone calls from his bedroom all morning, which gave me time to work on the logistics for the complex travel schedule ahead. When we departed for New York City at noon, I at least felt like I had a handle on the itinerary.

  Everything went smoothly at the ordination at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and at 3:20 we were in the helicopter at Sheep Meadow in Central Park, ready to take off for Kennedy International Airport, where Air Force One was standing by to take us back to Washington, when the president decided that since he was in New York, he might like to have a meeting with Ambassador Arthur Goldberg at the United Nations. All plans were tossed out the window as we hastily arranged security for the spur-of-the-moment U.N. visit, which required an impromptu motorcade through the streets of one of the busiest cities in the world. It was 6:30 p.m. by the time we finally got back to the White House.

  I was standing by in W-16, the Secret Service ready room on the ground floor directly below the Oval Office, waiting for President Johnson to give word that he was ready to leave for the fund-raising dinner, when a call came in from the Intelligence Office. One floor above, all hell was breaking loose. The press office had direct wire tickers from the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) that ran twenty-four hours a day, and at 7:24 p.m., Tom Johnson, a young White House press aide who would go on to run the Los Angeles Times and CNN, happened to be standing near the tickers when the bells started ringing like crazy. It wasn’t unusual for bells to sound when there was a bulletin, but this type of nonstop ringing was reserved for news of the highest urgency—a FLASH. Tom Johnson read the FLASH, ripped the copy from the ticker, and raced down the hall to the small office where the president’s secretaries, Juanita Roberts and Marie Fehmer, the official gatekeepers to the Oval Office, were still typing memos and correspondence.

  “I have an urgent message for the president,” he said. The look on Tom’s face must have conveyed the seriousness of the situation, because, in a very unusual move, Marie waved him into the president’s office without question.

  Johnson burst into the Oval Office, interrupting a meeting between President Johnson, former governor of Georgia Carl Sanders, and Robert Woodruff, the chairman of Coca-Cola. Handing the strip of wire paper to the president, Tom Johnson said, “Mr. President, Dr. King has been shot.”

  President Johnson read the ticker tape, handed it to the other two men, and immediately got on the phone to FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover.

  Serious and methodical, President Johnson made one phone call after another, assembling those at the highest level of government in his office, asking questions and making decisions. Someone flipped on the televisions—the bank of TV sets along one wall of the Oval Office LBJ had had installed so he could watch all three networks simultaneously—as staff members scurried in and out, bringing new information and responding to the president’s requests.

  First it was decided to cancel the president’s participation at the dinner, then to postpone the trip to California and Hawaii. At 8:20 p.m. press secretary George Christian got word from Hoover’s office that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had died.

  There was concern that outrage over King’s death would trigger violence, and President Johnson realized, as the leader of the country, it was important for him to speak to the nation about the tragedy as soon as possible. People were already beginning to gather outside the Washington offices of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference on Fourteenth Street, and while they were solemn and peaceful, that could change in an instant.

  At nine o’clock, barely half an hour after Reverend King’s death, the press set up lights and cameras outside the West Wing, and President Johnson addressed the nation.

  “America is shocked and saddened by the brutal slaying tonight of Dr. Martin Luther King,” he began. “I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King, who lived by nonviolence. I pray that his family can find comfort in the memory of all he tried to do for the land he loved so well. I have just conveyed the sympathy of Mrs. Johnson and myself to his widow, Mrs. King. I know that every American of goodwill joins me in mourning the death of this outstanding leader and in praying for peace and understanding throughout this land. We can achieve nothing by lawlessness and divisiveness among the American people. It is only by joining together and only by working together that we can continue to move toward equality and fulfillment of all our people. I hope that all Americans tonight will search their hearts as they ponder this most tragic incident.”