7
LBJ: SMALL
GLIMPSES OF
A LARGE
MAN
The first time Lyndon B. Johnson ever spoke to me was, appropriately enough, from the heavens.
Not from very high in the heavens, it’s true. Even so, he sure got my attention.
The year was 1948, and the country was still sorting itself out after World War II. I was going to college under the GI Bill. Even though I had heard of this young Hill Country school teacher who had managed to get himself elected to Congress in 1937, Lyndon B. Johnson was still not a name that quickened the pulse of voters, even in Texas.
Nobody had any idea what tumultuous years lay ahead for Johnson, and how his fate would be bound tightly to that of the nation. And certainly I had no inkling that over the years to come, my own life would brush here and there along the fringes of the historic career of this man whose memory even today seems to inspire both love and hate in abundant measure.
Between 1961 and 1971, first as a newspaper reporter and later on the staff of Jim Wright, I was lucky enough to be in the right place on many occasions to catch a few first-hand glimpses and to form a few personal opinions about this endlessly fascinating fellow from the hardscrabble country northwest of San Antonio.
To me, Lyndon B. Johnson will always rank as the most incredibly complex man God ever made—a walking, talking bundle of contradictions. He could be as mean as a Texas rattlesnake and as kind as a Salvation Army captain on Thanksgiving. He could be as quick-tempered as a scalded Bengal tiger and as patient as your neighborhood undertaker. His ego was roughly the size of Jupiter and sometimes—just sometimes, I emphasize—you got a momentary feeling that his heart was about the same size.
My first exposure to this unusual man came one quiet afternoon as I sat at my typewriter in the tiny, cluttered office of The Bishop News, the weekly serving my home town in the blackland coastal plain of Texas. As a college student, I was working part-time as a reporter—unpaid, but that was OK. After all, there was seldom much excitement in Bishop—except occasionally in the News office itself.
From time to time while the paper was being printed, our cantankerous old flatbed press would run amuck. This ancient machine printed newspapers, one at a time, by means of huge platform which careened to and fro. Bolted onto this wildly oscillating platform were the massive steel forms filled with the slugs of molten lead belched out by the Linotype machine, which itself gave the appearance of a rather large octopus in the midst of a fit.
Occasionally while the press was running, the vibration would work loose the bolts holding the page forms on the moving platform. At that point the page forms would careen into the air like an F-15 being launched from the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk.
When that happened there were only three things to do—make sure nobody was hurt, clean up the mess, and begin to reset all the type. But on this particular day, our flatbed press was on good behavior.
I was sitting at my desk, talking with the editor, W.E. Newton, and a wonderful honest-to-goodness reporter, Edna May Tubbs, when a thunderous sound enveloped Bishop’s entire one-block business district.
“HELLO, THIS IS YOUR FRIEND, LYNDON JOHNSON!” an amplified voice boomed from the sky.
The entire editorial staff of our paper—all three of us—ran outside. There, hovering whup, whup, whup over Main Street, was the first helicopter I had ever seen in flight.
Bishop, Texas, population 997, was agog. Townspeople swarmed from the barber shop, from Moerbe’s Grocery, from both drug stores and even from the bench where Ben Drury and his pals used to sit in front of the pool hall. They ran into the middle of Main Street and gazed up in awe. In a minute or so, the helicopter wheeled on its course to the next little town in its statewide tour--but not before its ambitious passenger, Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson, made a feverish mid-air pitch for votes in the Democratic primary. He was running against former Governor Coke Stevenson for the U.S. Senate, a race he was destined to win—but only by a hotly-contested 87 votes in a runoff election.
In retrospect, I can see that day was marked by several momentous events. First, Bishop and a lot of other little towns across South Texas got a foretaste of what campaigning might be like in the new postwar world of American politics. Second, a reporter named Lynam got a pretty decent little story for The Bishop News. And third, people from the barber shop, the grocery store and the pool hall heard a name they would be hearing for a long time to come. Lyndon B. Johnson was on his way.
My next few meetings with Johnson didn’t come until 1961--the year he became Vice President. Again I was in the role of a reporter—this time for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. It was during this period that I noticed a characteristic common to all prominent politicians—an abiding (and usually justified) distrust of the press.
When Johnson came to Fort Worth to speak to a group of U.S. immigrants gathered proudly for their naturalization ceremony in the U.S. Courthouse, I asked for and was granted a private interview. I’ve forgotten what the story was, but I do remember that his press secretary, George Reedy, stood uncomfortably close to me and took far more notes of Johnson’s utterances than I did.
If I had asked, I’m sure George would have said he had
to stand next to me and take notes because Johnson might say something profound
on which he would get inquiries from other reporters. But his presence there sent me a far clearer message:
If you screw up the Vice
President’s comments, you SOB, I’ll have the notes to prove you’re a liar.
Later, while covering the Vice President on a trip to Wichita Falls, I witnessed one of his classic performances. At the airport, as Johnson walked from the plane, a local radio reporter intercepted him, thrust a microphone into his face, and asked some inane question. Johnson brushed aside the question, telling the radio reporter he had nothing to say on that subject. The reporter then asked the same question again, in slightly different words.
Johnson, who towered at six feet three, stopped, looked down at the fellow, and then abruptly reached out and entwined him octopus-style in his long arms. He pulled the astonished reporter so close their faces were only inches apart. I was standing close enough to hear.
“Son,” Johnson hissed, staring unblinkingly at his hapless prisoner, “did you hear what I said?”
The poor radio man fled in terror, thoroughly intimidated. And that brings me to Lynam’s Theory about Johnson’s vaunted skill in convincing the unconvincable. The question was, how was Lyndon Johnson, in one-on-one conversations, almost invariably able to bring around opponents, so quickly and deftly, to his own viewpoint? My personal, two-premise theory is this:
Premise 1: American politics, in Johnson’s time even more so than today, was predominately a man’s game.
Premise 2: Most American males are uncomfortable to the point of frantic embarrassment when they are physically embraced or touched in any way but a handshake by another man. My private belief is that Johnson recognized this early on and, whether consciously or not, perfected the technique. Most men in the United States, unlike those in Italy and elsewhere, had rather be beaten with a blacksnake whip than be embraced in public—or even in private—by another hairy-legged man. Even though homosexual male-to-male affection today gets a small measure of grudging acceptance from the public, this was not the case in Johnson’s day.
Conclusion: A
man who is ready to back up physically is also ready to back up psychologically.
In other words, if a towering, forceful Texan suddenly wraps his long
arms around you, hugs you as he would a woman and brings his face down close
enough to kiss you, you are so surprised and panic-stricken that you have only
one overriding thought: How do I get loose from
this son of a bitch? If
escaping requires telling him
“Yes” to whatever the hell he wants, tell him “Yes!”
While persuasiveness was his trademark, Johnson also could be downright cruel. One incident was described to me by a friend of 30 years--a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who flew as an escort officer on a Johnson trip to space installations around the United States. My friend swears he saw Johnson, then Vice President, throw a Cutty Sark and soda into the face of an Air Force steward. The reason? The sergeant had failed to use a freshly-opened bottle of soda in mixing the drink.
Yet this is the same Lyndon B. Johnson who personally saw to it that a full-dress military funeral in Arlington National Cemetery was given to a Texas soldier killed in action in World War II—after the soldier’s hometown cemetery refused him burial because he was of Mexican descent.
At least Johnson was even-handed with his anger. He would turn on friends as readily as enemies. One good friend in the press was the late Seth Kantor, a wonderful buddy of mine who worked as Washington correspondent in the 1960s for a number of Scripps-Howard papers, including The Fort Worth Press. After a briefing on plans for a controversial new fighter plane called the TFX, Johnson quietly drew Kantor aside and tipped him that the fantastically lucrative contract would go to General Dynamics in Fort Worth—a news beat of monumental proportions in Texas.
Yet from time to time, Johnson would get furious, even with him. Once Kantor wrote a Page One story reporting the incredible fact that Johnson, then Vice President of the United States, not only had his home telephone listed in the Washington directory, but that he often answered it himself. A few days later, probably after hundreds of strangers had swilled a few beers and then decided to give ol’ Lyndon a call, Johnson ran into Kantor at the weekly Texas Congressional delegation luncheon. Johnson’s eyes narrowed piercingly as he loomed over Kantor. “I sure want to thank you for putting my telephone number in the paper, Seth,” he hissed.
Not even Johnson’s good friend Jim Wright was immune. One evening in 1961 the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce was holding its elegant annual dinner in the Texas Hotel. A surprise guest was Vice President Johnson. As Fort Worth’s Congressman and Johnson’s good friend, Jim Wright went to the podium and gave him a lavish introduction.
Later that evening, in a private hotel suite upstairs, a handful of privileged local politicos were invited to gather with the Vice President to watch a video tape of his speech. On the tape, just as Johnson was warming to the subject of his speech, Jim Wright could be seen in the background, lighting a cigarette and glancing for a split second away from the podium. “Well, Jim,” Johnson growled, “I see that as soon as you finished introducing me, you quit listening.”
After succeeding to the Presidency, Johnson brought into the White House staff a delightful young woman named Delores Stacks. Attractive, articulate and politically savvy, Delores had worked in Johnson campaigns in Houston and had a wide acquaintance among Texas movers and shakers.
So valuable did she become in Texas political matters that she was usually among the staffers who accompanied the President when he went home to his ranch in the Texas Hill Country. As a good friend, Delores once told me a surprising thing. Despite Johnson’s unsurpassed skills of persuasion over the telephone, he never really took a minute to understand the mechanics of how the blamed thing worked. Especially troublesome to him were the sophisticated phones set aside for the President’s use, with their rows of blinking lights and assorted bells and whistles and doodads. Often Johnson punched the wrong button and cut himself off, she said, leading him to curse and pound the phone with his fist.
At the LBJ ranch in Texas, one of Delores’s jobs was to screen calls from Texans who described themselves as old school chums, long-lost cousins, good friends of good friends, and business moguls with urgent messages. They all had one thing in common—it was crucial that they talk to the President—right now.
Once Delores fielded a call from Austin, the state capital. On the line was a fat cat businessman who claimed to be a lifelong friend of the President. Delores recounted the story this way:
“Lemme talk to LBJ, honey,” the fellow blustered. “I’ve got somethin’ real important to tell him. Ol’ Lyndon and I go back a long way together, and he’ll be real interested in what I’ve got to say.”
Delores recognized his name as that of a man who had attended a barbecue at the LBJ Ranch, but she knew that the President didn’t want to take any calls. Just as she was about to say how sorry she was that the President wasn’t available, she was dumbfounded to hear the President’s voice on the line. Apparently he had picked up the phone, under the impression that he could talk to Delores without being heard by the guy calling from Austin.
Delores swallowed hard and said, “I’m awfully sorry you missed the President, sir, but he has gone to California.”
The fellow in Austin obviously recognized Johnson’s voice, but was intimidated enough not to say so. “Well, uh, honey...” he stammered. “It’s really important that I talk to him.”
“Tell him I won’t be back for a week and probably not then,” came the Johnson’s voice again.
“The President won’t be back for a week and probably not then,” Delores repeated dutifully.
“Well, uh...Well OK, then, honey,” said the Austin executive, accepting ignominious defeat.
Delores also told me the story of another Presidential phone call—a call that will always remain memorable to her. It came after one of the most shattering experiences of her life—learning that she had breast cancer.
Johnson was devastated at the news. To him, Delores was more than a trusted White House staffer, she was a dear friend. And, as President of the United States, he simply did not intend to put up with anything like this.
After the call went through, Delores remembers the President giving the head doctor at Mayo some very specific orders: “One of my most important staff members has the cancer. I’m going to send her up to you. You cure her—you understand?”
The boss at Mayo assured Johnson that he did indeed understand, and if Delores came there, Mayo’s doctors would do their best. But he reminded the President that perhaps the world’s foremost cancer treatment center was located in his own home state—the M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston.
The President nodded his acknowledgment into the telephone. “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll send her down there. I’ll make them cure her.”
He did, too. At least Delores was, in fact, completely cured. Moreover, she apparently liked Houston doctors pretty well. She married one.
In politics, Johnson was such a crafty manipulator of people that it’s sometimes easy to write him off as a person without feeling...to conclude that he was immune from the everyday emotions and human longings that the rest of us have. True, most of the time he kept any such feelings well concealed. But on rare occasions there was a chink in the armor and a tiny signal seeped out, as it did one day in October, 1971.
This was a year when Jim Wright, steadily advancing in stature and seniority in the House, had become chairman of an important subcommittee of the House Public Works Committee. Johnson, feeling his Presidential leadership fatally compromised by the national agony of Vietnam, had declined to seek re-election to the White House in 1968 and had gone home to Texas, devoting most of his time to the LBJ Library in Austin. He still loved the telephone, though.
One day in the summer of 1971 he telephoned Jim Wright. They had a long conversation touching on a multitude of subjects—how each other’s families were doing, how things were going on the Hill, and of course the performance of the Johnson’s successor, President Richard M. Nixon. Then, near the end of the conversation, Johnson said: “Jim, I’d like to have you come down here and see me.”
Jim Wright accepted this as the kind of perfunctory invitation that any two friends might routinely extend to each other in closing out a conversation. He gave Johnson the kind of answer he thought he expected—that he would sure try to come down, one of these days.
A month or so later, Johnson called again. Once more he and Jim Wright exchanged political tidbits and touched all the usual bases. Before hanging up, Johnson repeated his invitation to come down and see him, and Jim Wright repeated his perfunctory answer that he would really like to do that one day.
Then, as the leaves of the stately oak trees on the Capitol grounds began to take on a tinge of autumn, Johnson called again. This time he was more direct.
“Jim, I’ve asked you twice now to come down and see me,” Johnson said. “Is there some reason that you don’t want to come?”
Surprised, Jim Wright immediately offered amends. “To tell the truth, Mr. President, I thought you were just being courteous in inviting me down. If you really need to see me—of course, I’ll come down right away.”
After promising to call back soon to work out an agreeable date, Jim Wright hung up the phone, frankly puzzled. What on earth could Lyndon B. Johnson want to see him about? He turned the question over and over in his mind, but came to no conclusion.
Back when Johnson was President, Jim Wright asked for White House help on several occasions. Sometimes he got it, sometimes not. On one big-ticket item, he received virtually no help at all. This was the massive Trinity River project, which envisioned construction of a shipping canal from the Gulf of Mexico to Fort Worth and Dallas--at that time an area second only to Mexico City as the most populous place in the world without access to a navigable waterway.
While in the White House Johnson had been reluctant to support such a costly and controversial project for his home state. Could Johnson’s call now have any bearing on the Trinity? On the future of the sprawling General Dynamics aircraft plant in Fort Worth? On Jim Wright’s political future? If not any of these, what?
On October 25, 1971, Jim Wright flew to Austin. Because he still had no idea what Johnson wanted, he took along me and two Public Works Committee staffers, Jack O’Hara and Betty Hay.
Assuming that Johnson would want to talk privately over lunch with Jim Wright about whatever mysterious subject he had in mind, I suggested that Betty, Jack and I would grab a quick sandwich downtown and then stand by at the LBJ Library in case the Congressman wanted us.
But when our cab arrived at the library, Lady Bird intercepted us on the portico and insisted that all us—not just Jim Wright—come in for lunch. I glanced at the Congressman and he nodded his OK.
Gracious as always, Lady Bird gave us a brief tour of the library and then took us to their private apartment upstairs. The former President was there, relaxed in a sport shirt and khakis. We had a nice lunch, but I don’t remember what it was because I was searching so intently for a clue as to what this trip was all about.
The luncheon conversation yielded not the slightest hint. Lady Bird and the former President then escorted us into the living room. Johnson pulled out a copy of his recently-published book, The Vantage Point, and told how he arranged an assembly line of staffers to help him with the autographing of several thousand books—one staffer to open the book and put it in place for signing, another to take it away.
Then, relaxing on a couch, Johnson began reminiscing—about life in the Hill Country...how he fought to bring electricity and roads to those impoverished rural families...about his pride in having worked in Congress and in the Presidency for education and for civil rights and to help people climb out of poverty. It was an eloquent story, and as it went on and on, I began to get the first faint glimmer on why Jim Wright had been summoned here.
At one point Johnson turned to Lady Bird. In quiet, solemn tones he told us how proud he was of her, how grateful he was that she had shared his life, and how, because of her, his life was complete. I should have tried to write down exactly what he said, because his words came across with an eloquence and a sincerity I felt not many people had heard before.
For two and half hours, the former President talked. By the time he finished, and everybody stood to shake hands and express appreciation for a good lunch and a fine visit, even a cynical old newspaperman like me had gained a new appreciation of this unbelievably complicated man.
Fifteen months before his death on January 22, 1973, the 36th President of the United States had summoned his friend Jim Wright down from Washington—not because of an urgent political need, but because of a far more fundamental human need. Lyndon B. Johnson was lonesome.