Master of the Senate (126 page)

Baker, who had recently returned from a stint with the
Baltimore Sun’s
London bureau, was seated next to Johnson at dinner. “As food arrived, he stubbed out a cigarette, lit another, finished his Scotch, called for another, and asked how the House of Commons compared” with the Senate. When Baker replied that he had been “surprised” at the lack of “debates in the Senate,” Johnson, who “had taken only two or three mouthfuls of food…shoved his plate aside, stubbed out his cigarette in the food, lit another smoke, drained his whiskey, and called for another.” He gave Baker a lecture. “Speechmaking didn’t count for anything when it came to passing bills, he said. What mattered was who had the votes…. ‘You want to hear a speech? I can get somebody to make any kind of speech you want to hear. What kind of speech do you want?…You want to hear a great speech about suffering humanity? I’ve got Hubert Humphrey back in the cloakroom. I’ve got Herbert Lehman. I’ve got Paul Douglas…. You want to hear about government waste? I can give you Harry Byrd….’” And all the time Lyndon Johnson was talking, Baker was to say, he never stopped smoking and drinking, ignoring the rest of his dinner, waving away dessert, stubbing out cigarette after cigarette in his food, motioning for another drink again and again. “I had seen people smoke and drink dinner before,” Baker was to say, but Lyndon Johnson “did it like a man trying to kill himself.”

When he ate at home, Johnson’s dinners were usually the heavy southern staples he preferred, and he insisted that the portions be big—huge heaps of
black-eyed peas and tapioca pudding—and he shoveled the food into his mouth, head bent low over his plate, so greedily that even the adoring Bobby Baker said he ate “like a starving dog.” While he may have been “skinny” at White’s dinner party, during the 1955 session his weight rose with almost incredible rapidity—from the 185 pounds it had been when he returned from his annual checkup at the Mayo Clinic in February to 195, to 200, to 210, 220, 225.

E
VERY PREVIOUS CRISIS
in Lyndon Johnson’s career had been accompanied by a crisis in his health—and in every crisis he had refused to allow the illness to interfere, had refused so successfully that colleagues and friends and assistants had scarcely believed in the illnesses, had felt he must be exaggerating them, since if they were genuine, how could he possibly keep working so hard, keep driving himself so mercilessly: how could a man have such energy if there was something seriously wrong with him?

For weeks during his first, desperate campaign as an unknown candidate for Congress in 1937, he had complained of severe stomach cramps, often doubling over in pain. He couldn’t eat; every time he tried, he gagged or vomited. But he refused to cancel a single speech, drove every day for hours over bumpy Hill Country roads—had kept campaigning at the pace that made tough Ed Clark say, “I never thought it was
possible
for anyone to work that hard”—and his aides had stopped taking the complaints seriously. And then, during a speech two days before the election, he could no longer, even by holding on to a railing in front of him, stay on his feet, and he consented at last to be taken to a hospital, where doctors, rushing him to an operating table, found his appendix on the point of rupturing.

During his second desperate campaign—the “last chance,” “all or nothing” gamble he had taken against the seemingly invincible Coke Stevenson in 1948—the depth of Lyndon Johnson’s need to succeed, and of his determination to do so, had once again been illuminated by the way he dealt with illness. He began that campaign suffering from an infected kidney stone. Not only did it produce a 104-degree fever and make it impossible for him to eat, forcing him to vomit over and over until finally he could only retch because there was nothing left in his stomach, but it also caused pain—gripping, radiating cramps in the back, groin, and testicles—that physicians describe as “agonizing” and “unbearable,” classifying it as one of the most intense pains a human being can suffer. One of his doctors would say that he “didn’t know how in the world a man could keep functioning in the pain that he was in.” But Lyndon Johnson, bearing the unbearable, not only kept functioning, he kept campaigning, day after day driving hundreds of miles between Texas towns and cities, walking the streets for hours shaking hands, making speech after speech, and although, while lying on the back seat of his car, racked with fever and chills, he would
gasp in agony, and in bathrooms he would double over, clutching his groin and panting for breath, he never cut a line out of a speech or left a hall afterwards without shaking, with a smile, the hand of every person who wanted to shake his hand. And when, finally forced into a hospital, he was told by doctors that the danger of permanent damage to his kidneys was very real, that an immediate operation was imperative—that postponing the operation in the hope that the stone might pass naturally could prove fatal—Lyndon Johnson nonetheless insisted on postponing it because the operation, and the six-week recovery period, would have brought his campaign, and perhaps his career, to an end, costing him his last chance. He waited for three days, each day the doctors warning him he must wait no longer, and finally insisted, against their advice and against prevailing medical practice because of the great risks involved, that they attempt a still-experimental procedure to avoid the operation—insisted with an implacability that raises inescapably questions whose answers lie buried within Lyndon Johnson’s labyrinthine personality: whether, if he didn’t attain his goal, he didn’t care what happened to him; which choice he would make, if the choice lay between death and failure.

And now, in 1955, as the stakes grew higher, there were again warnings of illness—this time of illness even more serious than an infected kidney stone. And again Lyndon Johnson refused to let them interfere.

L
OOKING BACK LATER
, colleagues could see how clear the warnings had been. But at the time, the warnings were ignored, ignored not only by other men but by Lyndon Johnson himself—although fear of a heart attack had been one of the great constants in Lyndon Johnson’s life.

In May, while managing a foreign affairs bill on the Senate floor, he suddenly clutched his chest for a moment, but when he was asked if anything was wrong, he said impatiently that he merely had a touch of indigestion. Then on Saturday, June 18, he and George Smathers were scheduled to drive down to Brown & Root’s Virginia estate, Huntlands. They had lunch in the Senate Dining Room, where, Smathers was to recall, “he ate his usual double meal and gulped the food,” and got into the big limousine which Norman Edwards was driving. They had just crossed the Memorial Bridge into Virginia when Johnson clutched his chest, and “gasped out, ‘It’s killing me. I’ve got indigestion.’” He had Edwards pull over at a gas station and bring him a Coca-Cola, Smathers says, “but even after he drank it, he didn’t feel better,” and Smathers says, he was still complaining about the pain during a dominoes game at the Brown estate.

“Finally, he went to bed, and the next morning he said he was better,” Smathers recalls. “But he didn’t look better.” When Smathers asked him to see a doctor, however, “he kept saying, ‘No—no,’ as though I was looking for trouble.” He did, in fact, submit to a cursory examination by the Capitol physician,
Dr. George Calver, on Monday, but nothing wrong was found, and Johnson’s pace only intensified, although several times each day he would say he felt very tired, statements discounted by whoever heard them because the pace of his activities never slackened. Sometime in late June, telling two or three reporters about his fatigue, he said that he had had a bad pain and “a flutter” in his chest the last time he had had sexual intercourse with Lady Bird. “All I could think was, Who the hell would say something like that,” one of the reporters recalls. “Nobody took it [the symptoms] seriously.” On Friday, July i, the eve of the Fourth of July weekend, George Reedy told John Steele that he felt Johnson was “near the edge of sheer exhaustion,” and that evening, when Johnson went out to dinner with Sam Rayburn and Stuart Symington (Rayburn was trying to effect a rapprochement between the two men), Rayburn became worried. “He [Johnson] seemed very tense, seemed to want to talk politics all during dinner,” Symington was to say. “He was uptight.” Rayburn took the two senators home in his limousine, and after they dropped Johnson off, said to Symington, “He just can’t think, eat or drink anything except the problems he has as Majority Leader. He won’t relax.”

The next day, Saturday, July 2, Johnson was again to go to Huntlands for the weekend, and it had been arranged that Posh Oltorf would drive him down with George and Alice Brown on Saturday morning, but there turned out to be too many things to be done before he could leave, and he said Norman would drive him down later in the day.

A score of urgent senatorial matters that he had not been able to attend to during the week had to be resolved (one, involving Senator Francis Case, resulted in four separate visits from Case to G-14 that morning), and during the course of the morning Johnson made seven other telephone calls on Senate business—and there was also a trip to his tailor, Sam Scogna, that in its own way was urgent, too, since thanks to the thirty-five or forty pounds he had put on in the last five months, his suits no longer fit, and he was being measured for two new ones—one dark blue, one brown, both double-breasted and cut very full. He had told Reedy to have reporters from the three wire services in G-14 at three o’clock for a briefing, out of which Johnson was hoping for articles summing up the Senate’s accomplishments thus far in the session and making it clear that there would be more accomplishments, as major bills still before the various committees began to emerge onto the floor. The beat of one of the reporters, John Chadwick of the Associated Press, included the Judiciary Committee, however, and Chadwick brought up a bill Johnson had been hoping the press would ignore: proposed liberal legislation to alter the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Johnson replied curtly. “Still in committee.”

Chadwick, a soft-spoken, notably well-mannered journalist, waited until Johnson had finished discussing the status of other bills, and then returned
to the subject, saying, as he was to recall, “Can’t you tell us anything about the immigration bill?” and when Johnson replied, “I told you I don’t know anything about that—it’s still in committee,” said, “Well, what’s the difference between that bill and all these other bills you’ve been telling us about? They’re still in committee, too.” With a violence that another journalist present, William Theis of International News Service, was to say “shocked” the reporters—“I’d never seen him lose his cool in public in a way like that”—Johnson shouted: “Goddamn you, don’t you ever tell me how to answer questions! You can get the hell out of here!”

Theis, who felt Johnson was “obviously not well, out of control,” says he “just blew his stack completely.” The other reporters defended their colleague for a moment, saying there had been nothing improper about his question, and then, in Theis’ words, “broke the thing up right away,” and left Johnson’s office.

Stalking out a few minutes later, Johnson went down to the senators’ private dining room. Seeing Mike Monroney having lunch there alone, he joined him, bolted down a plate of frankfurters and beans, and half a cantaloupe, and got into his limousine. There was one more stop to be made: at the Mayflower, for a visit to Walter George, who had been confined to his apartment with a respiratory infection—and it was a quarter to five before Johnson came out, climbed into the back seat of the big limousine, and told Edwards to head for Huntlands. He was alone except for the chauffeur: Lady Bird was later to say that she had remained behind because Saturday was Lucy’s birthday and was planning to come down on Sunday.

“I remember it suddenly began to seem terribly close, and I told Norman to turn on the air conditioner,” Johnson was to say. “He said it was already on, and I said to turn it on full steam, and he said it was already on full steam, and was getting very cold.”

He was late, Johnson was to say, “and I was trying to make it up, and there was this sense of pressure. My chest hurt.” At first, he was to say, “I thought to myself, if only I hadn’t eaten that cantaloupe at lunch,” and “I belched a little and felt better.” But as the car headed deeper into the Virginia hunt country, “my chest really began to hurt.” It felt, he was to say, “as though there were two hundred pounds on it.”

By the time he arrived, George Brown was taking a nap, and Posh and Alice were leaving to take a swim in a neighbor’s pool. When they asked him to come with them, he said he didn’t feel well, that, Oltorf recalls, “he had terrible indigestion” and “heartburn.” They brought him some baking soda, and he said he felt better and would lie down on a couch in the living room and take a nap, too. As he was lying there, however, “I got this feeling that I couldn’t breathe,” he was to say. When Posh and Alice returned, George met them at the door. “Lyndon is sick,” he said. He had given him more baking soda, “but he says he’s got these pains, and I’m worried about him. It might be his heart.” At this time, Clinton Anderson, who was on his way to a friend’s house in Virginia,
dropped by. Lyndon tried to tell Anderson he had indigestion, but Anderson had had a heart attack, and when Johnson mentioned the pressure on his chest and said that his arms felt “heavy,” he said “Lyndon, I think you may be having a coronary.” He should see a doctor at once, he said.

Johnson’s reaction was rage. “He was furious about that,” Anderson was to say. “He didn’t want any doctor…. He knew there was a story coming out in the
Washington Post
about him as a possibility for the presidency. He didn’t want to knock it in the head, kill it right at the beginning.” When Anderson told Brown that a doctor should be called, Brown said, “Now, Clint, Lyndon doesn’t want us to do that.” As Anderson detailed the similarities between Johnson’s symptoms and those of a heart attack victim, Johnson became, in Oltorf’s words, “more and more frantic.” But Anderson insisted that a doctor be called, and Oltorf, who had of course spent a lot of time in the area, at Longlea, located one, James Gibson of Middleburg, and after Gibson had examined Johnson he told him that he had the symptoms of a heart attack, “and a bad one.” The doctor said that there were no local facilities to treat it properly. He knew Johnson was in a great deal of pain, he said, but he suggested that Johnson try to get back to Washington. “You’ll probably go into deep shock in about an hour and a half,” the doctor said, “which just gives us time to get you back into town.” That would be the best course, he said, “if you feel like you can do it.”