Between You and Me (3 page)

W A L L A C E : You mean you would have gotten there and you would have taken the shot?

H I L L : The third shot, yes, sir.

W A L L A C E : And that would have been all right with you?

H I L L : That would have been fine with me.

W A L L A C E : But you couldn’t. You got there in less than two seconds, Clint. You couldn’t have gotten there. You don’t—

you surely don’t have any sense of guilt about that?

H I L L : Yes, I certainly do. I have a great deal of guilt about that.

Had I turned in a different direction, I’d have made it. It’s my fault.

W A L L A C E : Oh, no one has ever suggested that for an instant!

What you did was show great bravery and great presence of mind. What was on the citation that was given you for your work on November twenty-second, 1963?

H I L L : I don’t care about that, Mike.

W A L L A C E : “Extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger.”

H I L L : Mike, I don’t care about that. If I had reacted just a little bit quicker, and I could have, I guess. And I’ll live with that to my grave.

I’ve never interviewed a more tormented man. Hill’s agony was so deep, so poignant, that I couldn’t resist getting swept up by it, and there were times during our conversation when I could feel my own tears welling up. Many of our viewers were no less affected, as we learned from the letters that flooded into our office in the days following that broadcast.

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In our interview, Hill said that a “neurological problem caused by what happened in the past” had prompted his doctors to urge him to accept retirement from the Secret Service at the still-youthful age of forty-three. When the camera wasn’t rolling, he was even more candid. What our audience wasn’t told was that he was suffering from severe depression.

In the years since our 1975 interview, I’ve inquired about Hill from time to time to see how he was doing and to pass along my best wishes. But I didn’t have any direct contact with him again until the fall of 2003, when all the media were turning their attention to the fortieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. I wanted to know if Clint would be willing to revisit the subject in another interview with me. When I called him at his Virginia home just outside Washington, he greeted me warmly, and although he made it clear he did not want to talk any more about that day in Dallas, he assured me he was fine and that the misery he’d gone through was now behind him. He had finally managed to put his demons to rest, and he no longer blamed himself for the death of John F. Kennedy.

L y n d o n J o h n s o n

T H A T T R A G E D Y I N D A L L A S E L E V A T E D Lyndon Johnson to the presidency, and I had a memorable encounter with him two years after his stormy reign in the White House had come to an end. The occasion was a 60 Minutes piece on the opening of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in the spring of 1971. The event was considered so major that Don Hewitt, the executive producer of 60

Minutes, elected to fly to Texas with me and our production crew to take part in our coverage of the story.

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Johnson had been practically hounded from office by the groundswell of opposition to his war policies in Vietnam. By the time he left the White House, he had become an almost desolate figure, no longer welcome in the high councils of his own party. Since then, he’d been living as a virtual recluse on his ranch in the Texas Hill Country, where, according to some reports, he was so consumed by bitterness that he spent a lot of his time brooding over his fate and nursing his grievances.

Johnson’s resentment extended to the press, which he blamed for having fanned the flames of protest that undermined his presidency, and for the most part, he had turned a cold shoulder to reporters. But the opening of his presidential library put him in a more receptive mood. The library had been conceived as a lasting memorial to the great achievements of his domestic policy, and now that it was ready to be unveiled to the public, Johnson was not only willing but eager to cooperate with the media. So much so that when he learned we were planning to do a 60 Minutes story on the opening, he invited Hewitt and me to be his guests at the ranch. Nor was that all. When we arrived at the airport, Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, were on hand to greet us and take us under their wings. Even by the larger-than-life standards of Texas hospitality, it was an expansive, even effusive welcome, which we appreciated.

The next morning we were roused from our beds bright and early.

Johnson, reveling in his role as über-host, was eager to give us a tour of the ranch. Along with two other guests, we were herded into his white convertible, and with LBJ himself at the wheel, we took off on the sightseeing ride at an alarmingly high speed. At one point, as we ca-reened around the large spread, the former president swerved off the road and hit the brakes. He’d seen something that clearly distressed him. “Hewitt,” he barked, “you want to pick up that candy wrapper?”

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Hewitt, sitting next to me in the back, snapped to attention. “Mr.

President?” he exclaimed in a startled tone.

Johnson turned and glared at Don, then gestured toward the offensive object. “That candy wrapper,” he reiterated. “How about picking it up?”

It was obvious he had no intention of resuming our tour until his order had been carried out, and so, while the rest of us sat in the convertible and watched with amused approval, Hewitt sheepishly got out and did his part to combat the crime of littering at the LBJ ranch.

He stuffed the candy wrapper into his pocket and returned to the car.

But before he had a chance to get in, Johnson began to pull away, with Hewitt trotting along behind us in pursuit. This antic sideshow did not last long; once Johnson realized he had been a bit too hasty, he stopped the car again and let Don back in.

On reflection, the candy-wrapper incident shouldn’t have surprised us that much, for throughout his long career in Washington, Lyndon Johnson had a well-earned reputation for being almost compulsive in his need to exert authority and dominate all who came into his presence. While it was true that he was no longer the political force he’d been during his years in power, he continued to rule his own turf. At the LBJ ranch, he was still the commander in chief.

Back in 1964, when LBJ was in the exuberant early days of his presidency, reporters covering him wrote and broadcast vivid accounts about his harrowing high-speed rides around the ranch. On at least one of those occasions, Johnson drove with just one hand on the wheel, while in the other one, he clutched a beer can from which he heartily guzzled. Once a can was empty, he invariably flung it out the window. In writing about that, some reporters observed that the president’s behavior was hardly in keeping with the campaign the First Lady had recently adopted as her pet project: a major effort to

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clean up and beautify the nation’s parks and highways. In light of our experience with the candy wrapper, I can only conclude that by 1971, Lady Bird had brought her husband around to her way of thinking. As students of formal religion are well aware, there is no greater passion than the zeal of a convert.

Later that day we drove over to the new library, situated on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Hewitt and I had decided to structure our piece in the form of a tour, with President Johnson as our guide. We went through a couple of informal re-hearsals that afternoon to get the feel of things and set up camera angles. Even in those dry runs, the former president displayed understandable pride as he led us past exhibits honoring his achievements in civil rights, Medicare, and other landmark programs that fell under the heading of the Great Society. When we moved into a much smaller area in the library that dealt with foreign policy, he called our attention to an exhibit on the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East. But in glancing around, we couldn’t help noticing that the war in Vietnam was conspicuously absent. When I asked Johnson about that, he turned somber and spoke almost in a whisper. “We don’t have that one filled in yet,” he said. “Besides, I’ve already talked about Vietnam over and over again. So there’s no need to talk about it here.”

Hewitt and I looked at each other in disbelief. Don began to argue that we couldn’t ignore Vietnam, that it was an essential part of LBJ’s presidency. Johnson refused to budge. “I don’t want to talk about Vietnam,” he snarled. Turning to me, he said that if I brought up Vietnam while the cameras were rolling, he would cut off the tour on the spot and “send you boys packing.”

That was enough to alarm Hewitt, who promptly walked away, leaving me alone with Johnson. After a brief silence, I decided to try

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to persuade him from a different angle, one that would be both in-gratiating and combative, a dual tactic Johnson himself had often employed to great effect. I told him that I’d been a fervent admirer of his ever since the Eisenhower years, when he had demonstrated his political genius as majority leader in the U.S. Senate. I said that even back then I thought he was exactly the kind of president the country needed—a white southerner with progressive views on the race issue—and that when the forces of history and fate later conspired to put him in the White House, he had more than lived up to my high expectations. In particular, I said, he deserved the highest praise for the strong civil rights legislation he maneuvered through Congress during his first two years in office, since there was no question in my mind that he had done more to advance the cause than any president since Lincoln. “But then,” I said, “everything turned sour, Mr. President, and you know why?”

“Why?” he rasped.

“Because you let that war get out of hand.” I took a deep breath and then forged ahead, man-to-man. “Vietnam fucked you, Mr. President, and so, I’m afraid, you fucked the country. And you’ve got to talk about that!”

Johnson glared at me with startled fury and then stalked off. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I asked the question in that manner.

I suspect my thought process went something like this: Okay, if he refuses to talk about Vietnam, then I’ll remind him, using his own forceful and graphic language, about the terrible damage that war did to him and, through him, to the American people.

The reactionto my in

temperate remark was n

ot what I had

feared. Eventhough Johnsonwas steamed (to put it mildly), he did not go to Hewitt to complain that I had stepped out of line. Nor did he go through with his threat to send us packing. We proceeded to

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film our story, and whenthe time came for Johnsonto guide us past the exhibits, I honored his request and did not ask about Vietnam.

But to my astonishment, he brought it up himself. We’d just finished talking about the critical challenges that a commander in chief had to confront in the nuclear age when, out of the blue—without a hint or warning of any kind—the words came pouring out of him in a torrent:

“Throughout our history, our public has been prone to attach presidents’ names to the international difficulties. You will recall the War of 1812 was branded as Mr. Madison’s War, and the Mexican War was Mr. Polk’s War, and the Civil War or the War Between the States was Mr. Lincoln’s War, and World War One was Mr. Wilson’s War, and World War Two was Mr. Roosevelt’s War, and Korea was Mr. Truman’s War, and President Kennedy was spared that cruel action because his period was known as Mr. McNamara’s War. And then it became Mr. Johnson’s War, and now they refer to it as Mr.

Nixon’s War in talking about getting out. I think it is very cruel to have that burden placed upon a president, because he is trying to follow a course that he devotedly believes is in the best interest of his nation. And if those presidents hadn’t stood up for what was right during those periods, we wouldn’t have this country what it is today.”

A few minutes later, after we’d finished shooting and were preparing to leave, Johnson turned to me and said: “Well, god-dammit, Mike, I gave you what you wanted. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“Oh, I am, Mr. President, I am,” I assured him.

Johnson’s outburst provided the climax of our story, and when we aired it in a few days, I concluded the piece with the following comment on the man and his presidency:

“What he hopes most is that he will be remembered for his Great Society and not for Vietnam. But the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson is that, although he accomplished so much for so many while he was in

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office, historians are bound to write of him principally as the president who bogged his country down in Vietnam. It is some measure of the man, I think, that on that matter—Vietnam—he has not wavered.

He still believes that he was right, and that history will prove it.”

As we would later learn, it was not quite as simple as that.

Throughout the mid-1960s, as he ordered one escalation after another, Lyndon Johnson projected the image of a confident president who deeply believed he was pursuing a course that would ultimately lead to a U.S. victory. All his public statements echoed the smug optimism of his military commanders, who kept assuring us that we were winning the war in Vietnam. Although many of us eventually became disillusioned with Johnson and his war policies, we did not question his credentials. We assumed that his various decisions to expand the war were driven by sincere convictions.

Now, alas, we know how brazenly he lied to the American people. The stunning transcripts in a 2001 book called Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965, com-piled by the historian Michael Beschloss, reveal that as early as 1965—the year he ordered the huge buildup in Vietnam that, in effect, transformed the conflict into a full-scale American war—