“So let’s just don’t talk, and let’s just don’t brag. Let’s talk to our kinfolks and our uncles and our cousins and our aunts, and let’s go do our duty November third and vote Democratic.”
—Speech to Senior Class
Chesapeake High School,
Baltimore, Maryland
October 24, 1960
“So you tell them what you do is just reach up there and get that lever and just say, ‘All the way with LBJ.’ Your Mamas and your Papas and your Grandpas, some of them are going to forget this. But I am depending on you youths who are going to have to fight our wars, and who are going to have to defend this country, and who are going to get blown up if we have a nuclear holocaust—I am depending on you to have enough interest in your future which is ahead of you to get up and prod mama and papa and make them get up early and go vote.”
—Speech to Fourth-grade Class
Mansfield Elementary School,
Mansfield, Ohio
October 31, 1964
“Boyd and Johnson? There wasn’t one of us could really say we understood Dave’s relationship with LBJ. None of us knew what kind of hold the boy had on Johnson. But we knew he had one.”
“That’s for sure.”
“But it worked the other way, too, didn’t it? Boyd worshipped the hell out of LBJ.”
“I would’ve said ‘worshipped’ wasn’t the right word.”
“Loved?”
“Now let’s not get off on that again, boys. Those rumors, we knew those were just rumorous lies, even at the time. There wasn’t a homosexual bone in Lyndon Johnson’s body. And he loved Lady Bird like an animal.”
“There was something animalistic about LBJ, wasn’t there? He confirmed animalism for me, in a way. His time in the limelight, that time seemed to confirm for the whole country that a man was nothing more than a real sad and canny animal. He could hope to be no more. It was a dark time.”
“That’s what those radicals hated so much about him. They were scared that all they were was animals, and that LBJ was just a cannier and more powerful animal. That’s all there was to it.”
“God knows what that bodes for the political future of this nation right here.”
“LBJ was a genius and a gorilla at the same time.”
“And Boyd liked that.”
“I think Dave was certainly drawn to it, don’t you all? Dave was not one bit like an animal. No way.”
“Too refined to ever be animalistic, maybe.”
“You could say he was refined, I suppose. But I never trusted him. Not enough of his personality or his character was ever out there for me to see for me to really call him refined. A refined what?”
“A lot of times Dave could be in a room with you and you’d never even notice him in the room.”
“Almost refined right out of existence, somehow.”
“Whereas a whole giant ballroom or convention hall would know if Johnson was in it. He made the whole air in a room different.”
“Johnson needed to have people know he was in their room.”
“Was that it, then? Johnson needed an audience, and Boyd was an audience that Johnson knew was just barely there? That he didn’t ever even have to acknowledge or feel any responsibility to?”
“I’m still not sold on it being impossible they were involved.”
“I’m sure sold on it.”
“I’m sold, also. Being homosexual would have been too delicate or human for LBJ to even dream of. I doubt if LBJ even had himself any ability to even try to imagine what being homosexual was like. Being homosexual is kind of abstract, to my way of thinking, and LBJ hated abstractions. They were outside his ken.”
“He hated anything outside his ken. He’d totally ignore it, or else hate it.”
“Boyd lived with that third-world French nigger that wore high heels. He lived with that nigger for years.”
“Johnson had to have had some kind of hold over him.”
“Did LBJ ever even know, though? About Boyd and that Negro? Even as close as him and LBJ were?”
“I never knew of anybody who had any inklings as to that.”
“No one knew if he knew.”
“How could he not know?”
—From Dr. C. T. Peete, ed.
Dissecting a President:
Conversations with LBJ’s Inner Circle
1970
Lyndon as Vice President still kept his Dirksen Building office, the red tile with gold stars, the huge cubicled staff complex, the big window and the knotty-pine table where my new assistants sorted mail under my supervision.
‘There was just one goddamned job I’d of picked up and moved that whole real carefully put-together system of offices and technology and personnel for. One goddamned job, boy,’ he told me in the freezing open-air limousine on the way to his running mate’s inauguration. ‘And it seems like some good folks in their wisdom didn’t want to give Lyndon Baines Johnson that job. So I say fuck off to all them, is what I say. Am I right Bird?’ He knuckled at Claudia Johnson’s ribs under her furs and taffeta.
‘Now you just hush, now, Lyndon,’ the lady said with a mock severity Lyndon clearly adored, a code between them. Lady Bird patted Lyndon’s lined topcoat’s thick arm and leaned across his red hooked profile, resting her other gloved hand on my knee.
‘Now Mr. Boyd, I’m holding you responsible for making this rude and evil force of a man behave.’
‘I’ll try, Ma’am.’
‘That’s right boy, make me behave,’ whooped the Vice President, waving to crowds he really looked at. ‘I’ll just tell you now, I have to blow my nose, or fart up there on that platform, I’m farting. I’m blowing my nose. Don’t care how many electronic eyes are on that handsome little shit up there. Hope all this wind messes with his hair some.’ He paused, looking around, surprised. ‘Shoot, I do have to fart.’
He farted deeply into his coat and the limousine’s cold hard leather seat.
‘Whooee.’
‘What is to be done with you, Lyndon?’ Lady Bird laughed, cheerfully horrified, shaking her head at the crowd’s waving line. I again remember white plumes of breath from everyone’s mouth. It was freezing.
I first met Claudia Alta ‘Lady Bird’ Taylor Johnson at a summer barbecue on the banks of the Perdenales River that bordered Lyndon’s ranch in Texas. Close friends and staff had been flown down to help Lyndon blow off steam and prepare for an upcoming Convention that already belonged, mathematically, to another man.
Lyndon had me shake hands with his dog.
‘I’m telling Blanco to shake, not you, boy,’ he reassured me. He turned to Lew N. Johnson. ‘I know this boy will shake. Don’t even have to say it to him.’ Lew N. had pushed up his horn-rims and laughed.
‘And this here is my unnatural wife, Mrs. Lyndon Baines Johnson,’ he said, presenting to me a lovely, elegant woman with a round face and a sharp nose and a high hard hairdo. ‘This is the Lady Bird, boy,’ he said.
‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Ma’am.’
‘This pleasure is mine, Mr. Boyd,’ she murmured, a soft Texan. I touched my lips to the small warm knuckles of the hand she proffered. Everyone around us could see the way Lyndon hung on the sound of his wife’s voice, saw the tiny curtsies, her social motions, as though each movement of Lady Bird gently burst a layer of impediment between her and him.
‘Lyndon has spoken to me of you with affection and gratitude,’ she said, as Lyndon draped himself over her from behind and used his mouth to make a noise against the bare freckled shoulder just inside her gown’s strap.
‘Mr. Johnson is too kind,’ I said, as Blanco slid against my shins and the hem of my Bermudas and then ran toward the smoking barbecue pit.
‘That’s it boy, I’m too kind!’ Lyndon blared, knocking his head with his hand in revelation. ‘Write that down for me, son: “Johnson too kind.” ’ He turned, making a bullhorn of his hands. ‘Say!’ he shouted. ‘Is that there band going to play some songs, or did you boys
’ asses get connected onto your chairs?’ A cluster of men with instruments and checked shirts and cowboy hats began to fall all over themselves rushing toward the small bandstand.
We listened, ate from paper plates. Lyndon stomped his boot in time to the band.
I felt a hand’s tininess on my wrist. ‘Perhaps you would do me the honor of calling to take tea and refreshment at some time.’ Mrs. Johnson smiled, holding my gaze only as long as was needed to communicate something. I shivered slightly, nodding. Mrs. Johnson excused herself and moved off, turning heads and parting crowds, radiating some kind of authority that had nothing to do with power or connection or the ability to harm.
I hitched up my shorts, which tended even then to sag.
‘Quit mooning around and go get you some barbecue!’ Lyndon shouted in my ear, tearing at an ear of corn, stomping.
Lyndon had his second serious and first secret coronary in 1962. I was driving him home from the office, late. We moved east through Washington and toward his private ocean-side home. He began gasping in the passenger seat. He couldn’t breathe properly. The nasal inhaler had no effect. His lips blued. Mr. Kutner of the Secret Service and I had a hard time of it even getting him into the house.
Lady Bird Johnson and I stripped Lyndon down and massaged his bypass-scarred chest with isopropyl alcohol. Lyndon had wheezed that this usually helped his breathing. We massaged him. He had the sort of tired, bulblike breasts old men have.
His lips continued to cyanidize. He was having his second serious coronary, he gasped. Lady Bird massaged him all over. He refused to let me ask Kutner to call an ambulance. He wanted no one to know. He said he was the Vice President. It took Lady Bird’s veto finally to get him to Bethesda Naval in a black-windowed Service sedan. Kutner ignored traffic lights. It took both Lady Bird’s hands to hold Lyndon’s hand as he fought for breath and clutched his shoulder. He was plainly in great pain.
‘Shit,’ he kept saying, baring his teeth at me. ‘Shit, boy. No.’
‘Yes, no,’ Mrs. Johnson said soothingly into his giant blue ear.
The Vice President of the United States was in Bethesda for eighteen days. For routine tests, we had Salinger tell the press. Somehow, toward the end of his stay, Lyndon persuaded a surgeon to remove his healthy appendix. Pierre talked to the media at length about the appendectomy. Lyndon showed people the appendectomy scar at every public opportunity.
‘Damn appendix,’ he would say.
He began to take prescribed digitalis. Lady Bird forced him to stop eating the fried pork rind he kept in his top right desk drawer alongside his silver-handled revolver. I tried hard to stop smoking in Lyndon’s office.
I received a note on plain pink stationery. ‘My husband and I wish to thank you for your kind and discreet attention to our needs during my husband’s recent illness.’ The note smelled wonderful; M. Duverger said he wanted to smell the way L’Oiseau’s note smelled.
“I graduated from the Johnson City High School back in Texas in a class of six. For some time I had felt that my father was not really as smart as I thought he ought to be, and I thought that I could improve on a good many of my mother’s approaches to life, as well. So when I got my high school diploma I decided to follow the old philosopher Horace Greeley’s advice and ‘Go West, Young Man,’ and seek my fortune. With twenty-six dollars in my pocket and a T-Model Ford automobile, five of my schoolmates and I started out early one morning on our way to the Golden West, the great state of California. We got there in due time, minus most of my twenty-six dollars, and I got a very well-paying job of ninety dollars a month running an elevator up and down. But I found at the end of the month, after I paid for three meals and paid for my room and my laundry that I was probably better off back there eating Mama’s food than I was in California. So I went back to Texas and I got a job with the Highway Department. We didn’t have to get to work until sunup, and we got to quit every night at sundown. We did have to get to work on our own time. We had to be at work at sunup, and that was usually twenty or thirty miles down the Highway, and we had to ride home on our own time after sundown. I got paid the magnificent salary of a dollar a day. After a little over a year of that at the Highway Department, I began to think that my father’s advice that I should go and take some more training and not be a school drop-out—maybe he was wiser than I had thought a year before. In other words, he became a lot smarter while I was gone in California and on the Highway. And with the help of the good Lord, and with a mother persistently urging to me to go back to school and get some training, I hitchhiked fifty miles to get back into the classroom, where I spent four long years. But I have been reasonably well-employed ever since. I now have a contract that runs until January 20, 1965.”
—Speech to Graduating Class
Amherst College,
Amherst, Massachusetts
May 25, 1963
Mother came to Washington just once in those ten years to visit; she and Margaret kept in very good touch.
The day my mother visited, Duverger cooked all morning, a crown roast, yams in cream, and Les Jeux Dieux, a Haitian dessert, a specialty, airy and painfully sweet. He fussed nervously around the kitchen all morning in only an apron and heels while I vacuumed under furniture and worked surfaces over with oil soap.
Over drinks in the spotless room redolent of spiced pork, Mother talked about Margaret Childs and how Mother and Jack and Sue Bea Childs so hoped that Margaret’s hospitalization for alcohol dependency would mean a new lease on life for a dear girl who’d never once done anything to hurt anybody. Duverger kept fidgeting in the sportcoat I’d lent him.
It was the only completely silent dinner party I’ve ever experienced. We listened to the sounds of our knives against our plates. I could hear differences in our styles of mastication.
Our housewarming gift from her was a false cluster of grapes, the grapes purple marbles on a green glass stem.
My mother did not look old.
‘Elle a tort,’ Duverger kept repeating, later, as he applied the gel. He had little English he was proud of; we spoke a kind of pidgin when alone.
‘Elle a tort, cette salope-là. She has wrong. She has wrong.’
I asked what he meant as he spread cold gel on himself and then me. He opened me roughly, rudely. I winced into the pattern of the bed’s headboard.
‘About what is Mother wrong?’
‘She hates me because she believes you love me.’
He sodomized me violently, without one thought to my comfort or pleasure, finally shuddering and falling to weep against me. I had cried out several times in pain.
‘Ce n’est pas moi qui tu aimes.’
‘Of course I love you. We share a life, René.’
He was having difficulty breathing. ‘Ce n’est not I.’
‘Whom, then?’ I asked, rolling him off. ‘If you say I do not love you, whom do I love?’
‘Tu m’en a besoin,’ he cried, rending dark bedroom air with his nails. ‘You need me. You feel the responsibility for me. But your love it is not for me.’
‘My love is for you, Duverger. Need, responsibility: these are part of love, in this nation.’
‘Elle a tort.’ He turned himself away, curling fetal on his side of the bed. ‘She believes we are not lonely.’ I said nothing.
‘Why must it be lonely?’ he said. He said it as if it were a statement. He kept repeating it. I woke once, very late, to his broad brown back, moving, a rhythm, his open hand to his face, still repeating.
“He sees life as a jungle. No matter how long a rein you think you’re on, he’s always got the rein in his hands.”
—Former associate, 1963
“Most of his worries are of his own making. He sees troubles where none exist. He’s liable to wake up in the morning and think everything’s got loose during the night.”
—Close friend, 1963
Lyndon spent the fourteen-minute ride to Parkland Hospital on the floor of the open-air limousine’s back seat, his nos
e jammed against the sole of Senator Yarbrough’s shoe. On top of them, covering them and holding them down as they struggled, was a Secret Serviceman whose cologne alone could have caused the confused panic I saw ripple through the Dallas streets’ crowds as I lay on top of them all, riding their struggle, watching from my perch three Servicemen, in the convertible ahead, restraining the First Lady as she struggled and screamed, imploring them to let her go back to the site and retrieve something I could not quite hear.
We were jammed together in that back seat, a tumble of limbs, Yalies stuffing a phone booth. Lyndon’s pantcuff and white hairless ankle and low-cut dress boot waved around in front of my face as we rode. I could hear him, beneath the overpoweringly scented Serviceman, cursing Yarbrough.
The hospital was choreographed madness. Lyndon, handkerchief to his bruised nose, was besieged by cameras, microphones, doctors, Servicemen, print media, and, worst, all those Presidentially appointed officials and staffers, eyes narrowed with self-interest, who knew enough to jump hosts before the political animal they had ridden had even cooled.
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