Personal History (75 page)

This letter sounds toadying. It wasn’t meant to be. I greatly admired President Johnson, even though I eventually differed with him on Vietnam.
I had no problem if he was angry about our editorial policy on Vietnam, or even about our more objective news policy as opposed to Phil’s. What I minded then, and I mind now, is when misunderstandings get in the way of proper, professional relations. The very real problems between the
Post
and any president are complicated enough without fictitious and malicious stories making unneeded trouble. Johnson had been a friend, but I also knew he was paranoid enough to let something like this weird story anger him.

When LBJ responded the next week, it was with what I considered a slap in the face:

Clearly, Johnson found life with the post–Phil Graham newspaper difficult. Certainly, the president was growing more and more discomfited with our reporting, especially about Vietnam. To Johnson, loyalty was everything—loyalty as he defined it. The papers in Texas and their publishers were loyal. Phil Graham had been loyal. Why was I allowing my paper to report and say such things about his policies? From his point of view, according to those around him, Johnson saw me at times as masterminding the paper against his interests and at other times as being too permissive, and he used his aides, especially Jack Valenti and Joe Califano, to approach or reproach me. After one call, Jack went back to him and said, “Well, Mr. President, Kay says that she doesn’t write these stories and doesn’t command the stories to be written,” to which Johnson replied, “Well, by God, if I owned a goddamn newspaper, I ought to have some people around me who are going to do what I want. Hell, I’d just as soon have a pack of beagle dogs out there—at least I can train them.” When Jack reminded him that he didn’t tell his newspeople at the Austin station he owned what to report, the president replied, “I’m not down in Austin. By God, Kay Graham is sitting there in her office. She ought to know
what the hell those goddamn reporters are writing.” This is such a classic politician’s attitude about a publisher—every politician probably believes publishers sit in their offices doling out orders to reporters about what to write when.

LBJ particularly hated reading stories in the
Post
that predicted what he was going to do. One of the early ones on which he and I crossed swords was when we had heard that he was going to appoint Walter Washington as the “mayor” of Washington, D.C. The president called me himself to say I had to understand that, if we ran the story, Walter wasn’t going to be appointed. Califano called Ben several times during the day, pleading with him not to run the story and thereby ruin Washington’s chances. It was the good side of Ben—and the obdurate side as well—that there was no way he was not going to run the story. I didn’t try to stop him. When we did print it, the president, indeed, held up the nomination for a few weeks, and then announced the appointment as he had planned. According to Jack Valenti, “Those leaks were kind of like somebody dropping carbolic acid on him. He considered them a personal affront.”

What the president never accepted, or even clearly understood—as most people don’t understand—is the autonomy editors have, and must have, to produce a good newspaper. I used to describe it as liberty, not license. I felt then, as now, that I was never antagonistic to Lyndon Johnson; I was doing my job at the paper as I defined it, and he was doing his.

On a couple of occasions, President Johnson did send for me on matters of business. One of the first was about his wanting to send John Hayes to Switzerland as ambassador. Hayes had helped LBJ with broadcasting problems during the campaign, and this was his reward. Carroll Kilpatrick went in with Russ and me for what turned out to be a fairly leisurely and informal conversation, mostly on Vietnam.

Among other things, the president talked about the recent bombing pause, saying he felt it was a mistake, because Ho Chi Minh could view it as a sign of weakness and vacillation. He looked directly at me and asked how my son would feel if we were walking down a street and someone slapped me on one side of the face and then stepped back and slapped me on the other, and my son’s hands were tied behind his back. “Well,” the president said, “that’s the way our troops there felt during the bombing pause.” LBJ believed the net effect was bad: it had prolonged the war, demoralized our side, and got us in trouble on the resumption. He obviously was worried about the war and about our casualties, reporting sadly that we had already lost twenty-five hundred men and were now losing fifty a week, with the enemy losing many times more. When he asked us how we thought it would all end, Russ said he thought it most likely that there would be no formal conclusion to the war, but the president expressed confidence that it would end soon.

——

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1967, I went off on a trip to Europe that included a tour through the Greek islands and up the Dalmatian coast on a yacht chartered by Charles and Jayne Wrightsman. My mother, knowing that we would be going to Yugoslavia and having met Tito on a trip she had taken with Chief Justice Earl Warren and Drew Pearson, asked if I wouldn’t like to meet with him. She had already written to him that I was coming. Tito hadn’t given an interview in two years, and when he agreed to see me, I got off the yacht and went to Rome, where I spent two days preparing for the promised interview.

Because Bill Pepper was
Newsweek
’s bureau chief in Rome, he came along, and my son Bill, traveling in Europe at the time, came too. We flew to Belgrade and from there went north somewhere and were taken by motorboat to Tito’s summer-vacation island of Brioni. The moment we sat down in Tito’s office, he started speaking at a very rapid pace and obviously on the record. These were the days before tape recorders were routine. A quick glance at Bill Pepper made me realize that I’d better start taking notes, which I did for a solid two hours, while Tito talked over a range of subjects. Once we finished, we returned to Belgrade, where I slogged away, summarizing the interview as best I could, and sent the story off to the
Post
, where they ran it on the front page with my byline. (Unlike the case at many newspapers, the
Post’s
editors really were free to decide whether or not to use the publisher’s contributions, and they often downplayed stories I sent back from these trips.)

Having been away from home for several weeks, I returned to find that problems had piled up while I was gone. I set to work and also spent a week of many nights out, after which I went to Glen Welby with Billy, Steve, Lally, and Yann for what I hoped would be a restful family weekend; it turned out to unleash yet another crisis. We were in the middle of a tennis game and I was about to serve when I looked up into the sun and passed out cold with a convulsion. It was actually much more frightening for those who witnessed it than it was for me, who didn’t really understand what had happened. I came to with Billy and Yann reassuring me and saying that I had been unconscious, that they had sent for an ambulance, and that I would be taken to the George Washington University Hospital for tests. The doctors tested for everything, including a brain tumor, which was the most terrifying prospect, but after six days in the hospital, I was told simply that I had some sort of irregularity in my brain that could have come from anything, including an injury at birth or scars from the earlier TB. My doctor put me on an antiseizure drug, Dilantin—a strong drug, which no one explained to me. It took me almost a year to get even somewhat used to it, and my body never quite accommodated to it. I would often
have spells when I would suddenly feel faint or get palpitations, and was worried that I’d never be able to travel again or even feel completely comfortable about engaging in sports or other rigorous activities.

Later, hoping to get off the drug, since I had had no more seizures, I kept checking with the neurologists, who would do brain scans and tell me the problem still existed, and that I had to keep taking the pills. Finally, after about fifteen years, I found a brilliant neurologist who said, “I can’t promise you’ll never have another one if you stop taking it, but I’d rather see you have another one than stay on that drug.” So I stopped, felt much better right away, and have never had another attack.

Some weeks after the initial incident, I started to go out again. One of my first outings was to a small, informal party at Liz and George Stevens’s home, at which, after dinner, Bobby Kennedy started arguing with me about the
Post’s
position on Vietnam, keeping up a steady drumbeat about how hopeless the war was and why didn’t I do something about it. He was perfectly pleasant, but my head started pounding and I felt that I might faint. I knew I had to leave, so I quickly said to Bobby, “I’m terribly sorry. This has nothing to do with our conversation, but I have to go,” and got out in a hurry. I so much didn’t want him to think that I was avoiding conversation about the war that I wrote him a note, saying I hadn’t wanted to end the conversation but had been afraid I was going to have some physical problems if I didn’t leave. I got a charming letter back saying, “I hope you are feeling better. I often have that effect on people—but they recover rapidly.”

T
HE YEAR
1968 was a crucial one for the country and for me personally. Our involvement in the war was tearing at the society more fiercely than ever. On March 16, Bobby Kennedy announced that he would be a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. LBJ told Carroll Kilpatrick in an off-the-record interview that Kennedy’s announcement neither surprised nor upset him; in fact, he said that he had always believed Kennedy would run, because the senator found something to criticize or object to in every one of his legislative proposals. Johnson still felt he was right about Vietnam, and cited the fact that every Asian leader was telling him to hold on.

Only two weeks after he spoke to Kilpatrick, however, the president stunned the world by announcing—at the end of some televised remarks about Vietnam—that he would not run for re-election. Saying, “I have concluded that I should not permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year,” Lyndon Johnson, his famous energy flagging, took himself out of the race.

In many ways, Lyndon had been consumed by the war in Vietnam. He remained bitter about what people thought of him and the extent to which the war obscured many of his domestic accomplishments. Just over a month after he withdrew from the race, Carroll Kilpatrick spent several hours with him, on a flight from Independence, Missouri, where Johnson had visited the Trumans. At one point, as Carroll reported in a memo he wrote at the time, LBJ turned to Ray Scherer, a reporter for NBC, and “began berating NBC as scandalously prejudiced against him.… ‘The only difference between the Kennedy assassination and mine is that I am alive and it has been more torturous,’ he said.… ‘I think I understand the press a lot more than the press understands me.’ ”

Political discussions within my family began to heat up as the campaign year progressed. Don, viewing some of this from afar, was amused to talk both to Lally, from her hospital bed—she had just given birth to her second daughter—and to my mother, ill and also in the hospital. “And what did both want to talk about?” Don wrote me. “Bobby Kennedy, of course. Grandma evidently feeling anti, Lally pro. Family gatherings, I can see, will be more fun than ever. Perhaps I’ll extend over here until after the convention.”

My mother was having an operation for breast cancer. I was very concerned—after all, she was eighty-one and basically wheelchair-bound from arthritis—but she still had a lot of mental energy and her old emotional approach to issues. I sat with her the evening before the operation and tried to chat about things that would keep her mind off it. The question of Bobby Kennedy had become an emotional one for her—Mother disliked him with an intensity that only she could muster. Instead of staying calm, she kept reverting to Bobby, attacking him savagely. I liked him very much, and found it difficult to listen to her tirades against him. Finally, I said firmly that we had to change the subject, and the moment passed. The next morning, my brother was with her as she began to emerge from the anesthesia. Still groggy, she opened one eye and asked clearly, “Why does Kay like Bobby Kennedy so much?”