Kati Marton (26 page)

Above all, he needed to prove he was the man in charge. “He derived a certain enjoyment from being in a superior position to the person with whom he was talking,” Clifford noted. “He was superior to his staff people, he was superior to his Cabinet people, he was superior to practically everybody, unless he wanted something from the Hill.” The Kennedys haunted him, tied him in a bizarre love-hate knot. “There was some defensiveness on his part with eastern intellectuals. He felt at a disadvantage with them—they had had the benefit of educations at Harvard or Columbia … and had connections and opportunities that he had never had,” Clifford said. He simply could not reconcile himself to anybody not loving him, and Bobby Kennedy could not love him. “I recognized it,” Lady Bird remembered, “knew it was something we had to be aware of and have sense enough to understand, that to Bobby his brother was a knight in shining armor and Lyndon was a ruffian intruder.”

Johnson relied on his wife to smooth his way in delicate human relationships. Unlike her husband, Lady Bird’s sense of self was not tied to the approval of others. She also had almost bottomless patience for human frailties. “I grieved for Bobby,” she said, her voice trailing off for a moment. “But I did not feel inferior to the Kennedys.” Johnson, though not a reflective man, innately understood her ability to calm not only his storms but those of others. He summoned her to say the soothing words he could not. In the middle of a conversation with Secretary of Defense, and Kennedy ally, Robert McNamara, Johnson put Lady Bird on the line. “Anybody like you who would take time to say a word to me, not to Lyndon …,” she cooed in her molasses-thick southern drawl. “You-all are the big staff we lean on.”

Lyndon and Lady Bird approached human relationships from opposite poles. Johnson sought to exploit the weaknesses of others. He bullied people and observed how they withstood the bullying. Lady Bird tried to disarm them with charm. She worked her magic on the influential
New York Times
columnist James Reston with an invitation. “Sometime, I would like to show you, quietly and serenely, if possible,” she purred in her most honeyed voice, “the wonderful country which has made our life, and which has made Lyndon whatever he is because it is the Lord’s blessedest piece of real estate ….”

In his first two months, the new president received almost seven hundred people in the Oval Office. Johnson was desperate to have Congress pass the Civil Rights Bill. In theory it was to honor his predecessor, but in fact the bill was about Johnson. He worked friends and enemies as only he could: cajoling, harassing, terrorizing and charming until they cried uncle. “He knew the men on the Hill quite well,” Clifford said, “and he knew how he could get them to support him in reaching whatever goal that he had. He was devious. He was complex. He could be duplicitous. He used all of his natural assets and almost every artifice to persuade persons on the Hill to agree with him.”

Johnson drew no boundaries between his public and personal lives. Unlike during the Kennedy stewardship, the White House under the Johnsons did not have an “Upstairs/Downstairs” divide. The president’s staff was part of his family. Johnson liked to bring aides upstairs for dinner, unannounced. Chief Usher Rex Scouten recalled that arguing with the Johnson family cook, Zephyr Wright, was one of the president’s great joys. “Zephyr was not a bit intimidated, gave as good as she got.” At first the staff were astounded at the president’s crudeness, but they soon got used to it. “He was one of those people that you just accepted as, This is Texas. This is the way he does business. Our biggest concern was Mrs. Johnson,” Scouten noted, “how he affected her.” But after a while Scouten said he realized that “He loved her. In his way he loved her. She was his. Lynda and Luci were his. He was not your average kind of guy.” Scouten, a former Secret Service agent, said, “At Secret Service conventions, even now, agents tell one hundred stories about Lyndon Johnson for one story of every other president.”

“He was the same with everybody,” Scouten asserted. “You knew
sooner or later your turn would come. Even if you were just standing there, you’d get bawled out or fired. Just standing around could get you in trouble. The clearest sign of how different he was from other presidents was that normally a half a dozen staffers and hangers-on would walk the president from the Oval Office to the residence. With President Johnson, only the Secret Service agents walked home with him.”

On most mornings, the couple would be woken by a soft rap on their door, and aides Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers would be beckoned to enter. “And there was Mrs. Johnson,” Valenti recalled, “in bed with her husband. She would perform the most extraordinary act of grace. She would remove herself from bed and instead of saying, ‘Oh, my hair!,’ she would say, ‘Jack, Bill, how are you?’ and then to her husband, ‘Now Lyndon, don’t work these young men too hard.’ And then, in her nightgown, with marvelous dignity, she moved into the other bedroom.” No matter how exhausting life with her human dynamo was, she always thought of him first. “Bone tired …,” she wrote in her diary on January 8, 1964, after her husband delivered his first State of the Union address. “If it is that way with me, what must it have been like with Lyndon?”

Valenti recalled many times when Lady Bird would step in to temper her husband’s outbursts. “One time he was beating up on me and she said, ‘Lyndon, no one serves you with more devotion than Jack. Do you think he deserves that?’ Johnson would not say ‘I am sorry’—he never said that—but he would move on. Only she could do that. Because when he crossed that line, she knew it, and she would put up a barrier there and he would stop.” Scouten recalled Lady Bird scurrying in her husband’s wake, dispensing soothing words. “He didn’t mean that,” she’d say to abused staff. “He has so much on his mind.” She tried to atone for his misdeeds, Scouten said, noting that Johnson knew just how far he could push people. “He knew people’s limits. He never abused Bill Moyers because he knew Moyers would walk out. With Valenti he’d call him every name in the book.” Nor did he abuse the aristocratic Clifford. “He had nothing that I wanted … I never asked him for anything—I had never suggested even obliquely that I was interested in coming into his administration, so that placed me in an unusual posture with him,” Clifford explained.

So hungry was Johnson for affection and affirmation that at times he
resented his wife for getting more of it than he himself got. Philanthropist Mary Lasker told the president she was thinking of giving Lady Bird a letter autographed by Thomas Jefferson, since members of Mrs. Johnson’s family had the middle name Jefferson. “I told [Lady Bird] about the letter,” Lasker remembered, “and she sounded delighted. And then I told the President when he got on the phone and he said, ‘Why are you giving anything to her? Do you like her better than you like me?’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s her family name. Besides the letter is from Jefferson explaining that since he’s out of office he no longer has any influence with the federal government.’ The President said, ‘Come to think of it, neither do I.’”

One evening in the upstairs residence, Clifford complimented Lady Bird, adding in a teasing manner, “I think we ought to arrange a ceremony and canonize Lady Bird …. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a St. Lady Bird?’ And I looked over at the president expecting to find the same kind of amusement on his part, and his face was just as glum as it could be. I got a little signal from that. I had seen on other occasions that when you were with Lyndon Johnson the main subject that you should devote yourself to was Lyndon Johnson.”

NO GOAL
seemed beyond Johnson’s powers of persuasion his first year as president. He cajoled big business, and he got the so-called Rockefeller Republicans and hard-right Democrats who hated him to respond to his pleas of “I need your help.” In the White House, he was everywhere, his voice echoing through the downstairs marble foyer, reverberating through every corner of the mansion. “Here, comb your hair,” he would order startled UPI White House correspondent Helen Thomas, offering a comb from his pocket. “Put on some lipstick,” he commanded his wife. No detail of the running of the ship of state or of his household was too trivial to merit his attention. He persuaded a pricey New York hairdresser to come and “do” all his “womenfolk”: his wife, daughters, secretaries—not for money, for the millionaire president pleaded poverty, but for the privilege. “If you don’t want me running around the White House naked,” he told Joe Haggar, the president of a clothing company, “you better get me some clothes.” The president then proceeded to
instruct Haggar on how to cut his pants. “Make the pockets at least an inch longer. My money and my knife and everything fall out …. The crotch, down where your nuts hang, is always a little too tight …. Give me an inch that I can let out there because they cut me. They’re just like riding a wire fence.”

Years later Lady Bird would admit grudgingly that she “did feel Lyndon should tone down his behavior at times. I did not manage to convey that to him very successfully, however. Generally, my advice was couched in very tempered terms.” Texas congressman Ralph Yarborough described Johnson as a “bank walker.” In his best east Texas twang, Yarborough would explain, “When I was a boy we’d all get in the swimming hole, go skinny dipping. There was always one boy who liked to walk the bank, cause he was pretty well hung. That was Johnson.”

When his wife was away, Johnson was often off balance. He would sometimes ask Homer Busby to sit in his bedroom and talk to him until he fell asleep. “Don’t just lope off,” he pleaded with Moyers. “I want to know where I can reach you on a minute’s notice.” At times he tried to fill the emptiness with alcohol. Lady Bird chided him about this recurring weakness for drink in lonely, stressful or idle moments. Johnson let fly that Jack Kennedy had been “shacked up” twice a day in the White House. His wife replied that if the Russians “press the button,” a president can always jump out of bed. It is harder to get out of a bottle. Johnson switched from scotch to Fresca.

Unlike most of his predecessors, Johnson would allow himself no relief from the annihilating pressures of the job. April 6, 1964 was a red-letter day, prompting Lady Bird to write in her diary, “Something happened that I have been wanting to happen for about nine years or more. Lyndon played golf! Maybe he’ll do it once a week and it would make a lot of difference for him … in health, in joy in life.” But it turned out to be a nearly unique event.

In the spring of 1964, LBJ announced his plans for a Great Society: “to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society but upward to the Great Society.” Fearing failure as much as he yearned for glory, he wavered about running for election in the fall. He felt he was “from the wrong part of the country,” too different from his predecessor.
The mounting uncertainty of the war in Southeast Asia added to his anxiety. In August, American destroyers were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnamese PT boats, or so he and McNamara claimed; it was a much disputed event. But with his genius for persuading Congress to do his bidding, Johnson rammed through the Tonkin Bay resolution, clearing the way for full-scale war in Vietnam.

Still, unlike JFK, foreign affairs had been neither his passion nor his strength. Lady Bird noted with foreboding, “That’s not Lyndon’s kind of presidency.” She wrote him a nine-page letter, outlining why she thought he should run: there was too much he still wanted to achieve, he had too much energy to retire. “And I dread seeing you semi-idle, frustrated, looking back at what you left. I dread seeing you look at Mr. X running the country and thinking you could have done it better. You may look around for a scapegoat. I do not want to be it. You may drink too much—for lack of a higher calling …. Stay in ….”

How many other presidents faced with equally hard choices might have been saved by letters this blunt, this knowing and this loving? Could anyone but a spouse write with such authority? It is not enough, however, to have a wife willing to confront her husband’s weaknesses head-on—as Lady Bird was. Her partner must also be open to her counsel. “Through our years together I have come to value Lady Bird’s opinion of me, my virtues and flaws,” Johnson wrote in his memoirs. But so tortured was Johnson that he could not come to a decision for months. All of his self-doubt, his bruised feelings from media depictions of him as the buffoon in Camelot, surfaced. “I was not thinking just of the derisive articles about my style, my clothes, my manner, my accent, and my family—although I admit I received enough of that kind of treatment in my first few months to last a lifetime. I was also thinking of a more deep-seated and far-reaching attitude—a disdain for the South that seems to be woven into the fabric of Northern experience.”

As usual, there was only one person with whom he could share his torment. “At 3:30 or 4
A.M.
Lyndon woke up,” Lady Bird wrote in her diary on July 15, “and I don’t think either of us went back to sleep the rest of the night. He described to me in detail the problems, the pros and cons, the good points and the bad, of every decision that faces him with
regard to this campaign—every sensitive job to be filled, every spot on the battlefield that needs to be manned. So it was a wakeful night, with about two hours’ sleep.”