Master of the Senate (129 page)

His illness was dramatized with the customary Johnson flair—reporters who interviewed him in Washington and then at the ranch found him talking in slow, calm phrases interrupted by frequent pauses and walking, as one article reported, with “agonizingly slow steps”—but so was the fact that, he said, doctors had assured him that if he took care of himself, he would recover from the illness and be able to return to his duties, to
all
his duties, “as good as new.” He wanted therefore to create the image of a prudent man taking care of himself, and he made sure reporters understood that he was doing so. He told them how much he had weighed when he had stepped on the scale that morning, emphasized that he was getting his weight down even lower than the doctors had ordered. The doctors had told him to take a nap every day; he took
two
naps, he said. The doctors had told him to get plenty of sleep at night; “even here,” as one article reported, “he tried to beat par. When the doctor told him to get eight hours sleep a night, Lyndon insisted on getting nine.” And he said he had resolved never to go back to his old driving ways; “I’ve thrown out the whip.” In fact, he said, he had developed a whole new philosophy of life, which was codified in an article, “My Heart Attack Taught Me How to Live” (written by Horace Busby), which appeared over his byline in
The American
magazine, and in dozens of interviews with reporters.

“During nearly 25 years of political life I drove myself and others at headlong pace,” the article said. “I never learned how to relax.” “Now,” he said, “I’ve got something I never had before in my life—something I always wanted, too—and that is time.” And, he said, he had learned to use that time. “It took a heart attack to make me cut my cloth to the pattern of contentment God has given me, but now I know the lesson well,” he said. “I began consciously looking for some of the good things I had been missing.”

One of those good things, he said, was
nature.
He loved to walk in plowed fields, “just to feel the dirt under my feet,” he said. He loved to “walk down the
road with a view of my fat cows grazing on the one side and my beautiful river flowing on the other.”

Another of the good things—“high on the list of those good things,” he said—“was getting acquainted with my two daughters. They had come to be 11 and 8 years of age, and I hardly knew them at all.” For example, “I had always been too busy to join with the girls in observing their birthdays.” Now, he said, there was time to get to know them, and “I found myself falling into a happy relationship with Lynda Bird and Lucy Baines.” They played dominoes together, “took turns reading aloud from their books,” and he found, he said, “Why, they liked me!” On Sunday mornings, he said, “after a leisurely, chatty breakfast, little Lucy suddenly threw her arms around my neck and hugged me hard. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘it sure is nice to have you around the house so much.’”

He portrayed his new life as one of reading and thoughtful contemplation. Although in truth his refusal to read books was as adamant as ever, plenty were scattered about, some of them open as if he had just put them down, when reporters arrived for interviews. Booth Mooney recalls that “stories began to appear which I scanned in utter disbelief. The Johnson who once had admitted or even boasted that he doubted if he had read as many as half a dozen books all the way through since leaving college was said now to be deep into Plato, not to mention innumerable volumes of American history.” After interviewing Johnson in his bedroom at Thirtieth Place, Mary McGrory reported that “There are books all over the room,” including Plato’s
Republic
and Machiavelli’s
The Prince
—“and the Senator is taking the unusual opportunity to do a little reading.” As the months passed, his thirst for the arts appeared to broaden. Arriving at the ranch for an interview in October,
Newsweek’s
Sam Shaffer found Johnson “sprawled in a hammock, a book on his lap. Strauss waltzes floated into the air from a record player.” As he talked to Shaffer, “He touched the book on his lap, and recalled that he’d always been too busy to read books before; he probably hadn’t read more than six all the way through from the day he left college until the day of the heart attack, and now he was reading that many a week. He listened to the music and said: ‘You know, until the attack, I just never listened to music. I don’t know why. I just didn’t.’” Lady Bird chimed in, telling another reporter that Lyndon was reading “innumerable history and biographies.” He certainly was, Lyndon said: at the moment, he was deep into Douglas Southall Freeman’s massive, three-volume
Lee’s Lieutenants
and “enjoying it immensely.” And it was wonderful, he said, with a deeply thoughtful expression, to “have time at last just to sit and think.”

The image he wanted was the image he got. Sarah McClendon wrote of his new, “easy-going, relaxed peace.” Mary McGrory, noting that “a man who has been ‘in a hurry all my life’ is learning to slow down,” and that he is “something of a model patient,” added: “It would perhaps be too much to say that the Senator is finding sweet the uses of adversity, but there have been advantages.”

But in reality he wasn’t resting, and he wasn’t relaxing, and he wasn’t at peace. He couldn’t be—particularly not back on the ranch.

He took off, on Wesley West’s private jet (“whose owner he declined to name”), from bustling National Airport outside Washington, but he landed at the tiny Fredericksburg airport, which consisted only of a landing strip, a wind sock, and a shed that was used as an office. There “representatives of both local newspapers and the United Press were on hand to chronicle in story and picture the return home of the famous native son,” and also present was a shocked Mary Rather, who was to recall that, as she watched him come off the plane, “He was the thinnest thing you have ever seen, and his clothes were just hanging on him. And of course Mrs. Johnson looked bad too.” Ranch hands had a station wagon there, and they drove him along the Pedernales Valley, with the houses further and further apart, to the ranch. And there, on the first morning, he was awakened at dawn by the mooing of a cow demanding to be milked, the same sound that had awakened him on the ranch as a boy—and instantly Lyndon Johnson was back in his first home, back ill on the ranch where his father had been ill, and where his father, who had had such great dreams, had failed; back on the ranch where his grandfather, whose saddlebags had once been filled with gold, had come to live out his life in poverty after his great dreams had been brought to nothing; back on the ranch where the heroine Eliza Bunton Johnson, who had dared to ride out ahead of the herd to scout, had come back to live when she was old—old and poor and paralyzed, with a stroke-twisted face that lived in Lyndon’s nightmares. Sometimes in the morning, he would walk along the river to the Johnson family graveyard, and there, under the spreading branches of a big live oak, inside a rickety little fence, were the tombstones: of Eliza Bunton Johnson, Sam Ealy Johnson Sr., and Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. He would stand there for long minutes, staring at the names. And one morning, thinking that no one was watching him, Lyndon Johnson drew with his shoe an
X
in the ground in that graveyard: the spot for his own grave.

His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, had come back from Washington to live at the ranch that summer, so Lyndon was back with that broken, wretched man. Josefa was living in Fredericksburg, so he was back with the sister who had brought the family into even deeper disgrace. He was back with his mother, who kept telling people how much like his father he was. If he walked past the graveyard, he soon came to the site of the house in which he had been born—on which another battered, ramshackle dog-run cabin now stood. Lyndon Johnson painted, and journalists repainted, a picture of a relaxed, almost idyllic existence on the tranquil banks of the Pedernales, but the reality was far different. “It was way out in the country and it was so quiet and still,” Mary Rather was to recall, and during the first few weeks, “it was a real quiet, long, lonesome, sad kind of a fall.” His nightmares came back, worse than ever.
*
And not
long after his arrival, he fell into a despair deeper even than his despair in the hospital.

F
OR A WEEK
, Lyndon Johnson sat in the big recliner in the ranch’s rock-walled living room, the chair tilted all the way back so that as he slouched down in it, he was lying almost flat, with his feet at the level of his head. He would sit there for hours, staring at nothing, and saying nothing. When someone—his wife or daughters—attempted to engage him in conversation, he would reply in monosyllables or not at all. Little Beagle Johnson would jump up, and lie in his lap. From time to time, he would lick Lyndon Johnson’s face, wagging his tail frenziedly and barking. There would be no response. As the dog licked his face, his master wouldn’t even move. Dr. Hurst, who had begun to understand his patient, had warned Mary Rather that, in her words, “some days he might want to see the mail that came in, and the next day I might have it all ready for him, and he wouldn’t look at it.” Ms. Rather, who knew the talismanic significance that the mail held for her boss, had not taken Hurst seriously, but the doctor’s prediction turned out to be correct. For a day or two, Johnson refused even to pick up the telephone when Walter Jenkins called to give him the news from Washington. She told Sam Houston, “He’s going into a very deep depression, and we don’t know what it is.”

Sam Houston, who knew his brother so well, knew what it was. “I said, ‘Well, if you had one office you aspired to all your life, and …’” And he knew what the cure was—the only cure. Telephoning the nationally syndicated political columnist Holmes Alexander, a close friend, he asked him to write a column saying that the heart attack would not prevent Lyndon Johnson from becoming President. When Alexander demurred, Sam Houston recalls, “I said, ‘Here I’ve been giving you scoops for years. If you can’t take a chance on helping me save my brother, then the hell with you.’”

Alexander agreed to write it, and on September I, there in the
Austin American-Statesman
were the magic words: “The Senator is now almost restored in health. He is a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination, either in 1956 or 1960, depending on which is more propitious. It’s hard to see how the party so united in praising him when he was ill, can divide against him now that he’s bushy-tailed and ambitious once more. This may be the first time in history that a man was virtually nominated by his press clippings.” Sam Houston gave the column to his brother as he lay on the recliner, and not long thereafter the beagle jumped up on Lyndon’s lap and went into one of his face-licking, tail-wagging, barking frenzies. And after a while, Lyndon Johnson laughed—the first laugh Mary Rather had heard him utter since he arrived at the ranch—and went for a walk.

And that same day brought another development. At Jim Rowe’s suggestion, Johnson had decided before the heart attack to put on his staff a new assistant,
one who would be a living reminder of his early link with Franklin Roosevelt, which Johnson considered essential to mending his fences with liberals. Now that assistant would be a reminder also that Roosevelt had suffered a serious illness but had become President nonetheless. And when Grace Tully arrived in Texas, she knew just what to say. “Many things about the senator reminded her of FDR,” one article reported; for example, Roosevelt had been deeply interested “in conservation and natural resources,” and Johnson’s improvements to his ranch show that he, too, “takes a great interest in the land.” “JOHNSON AIDE SAYS TEXAN is like FDR,” proclaimed a headline in the
San Antonio Express.

There would be other spells of depression while Johnson was in Texas, but none as serious as the first one.

D
URING
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S REMAINING MONTHS
on the ranch in 1955, there was no recurrence of the heart problem, no pain or any other symptom. The bottle of digitalis, a heart stimulant that doctors had given him in case of another attack, remained unopened next to the pack of cigarettes on his night table. For the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s life, however, he lived in terror of another heart attack. He never wanted to sleep alone, so that there would always be someone to help him if he suffered an attack during the night, and if Lady Bird was away, he would dragoon an aide or a friend into sleeping in the same room with him. Years later, in the White House, asking an assistant, Vicky McCammon, and her husband to stay overnight, he would insist that they sleep in Lady Bird’s dressing room next door to his bedroom; “The only deal is you’ve got to leave your door open a crack so that if I holler someone will hear me.” But that fear wasn’t as strong as the fears, born of his boyhood insecurities and humiliations, that haunted him throughout his life. Now he was back on the ranch that was a constant reminder of those boyhood fears, and he fled from them as desperately as ever—more desperately, in fact.

During the rest of his months on the ranch, the “sad, quiet” spells of depression alternated with periods of frantic activity. During these frenzied periods, he poured himself into recovering his health. Following doctors’ orders to get plenty of rest was easy on the isolated ranch. The Johnsons and their staff kept farm hours, going to sleep at nine and rising early, when the cows started to moo; the rural mail carrier left the mail and the morning newspapers in the box across the Pedernales around 6 a.m., and Mary Rather would walk across the concrete bridge to bring them back. Every afternoon there was the long nap, and Johnson spent a lot of additional time lying in the recliner.

The doctors had told him to relax. Massages relaxed him, so his favorite masseur from the Senate gymnasium, Olaf Anderson, was dispatched to Texas, and installed at the ranch for the duration. The sun relaxed him, so he would
spend hours lying in the sun with his shirt off, his pale skin gradually turning bronze. The doctors had told him to get plenty of exercise, and specifically to walk a mile each evening after dinner. Using a pedometer, he measured various walks he might take. The little home of his elderly spinster cousin, Oreole Bunton Bailey, he determined, was just over a half mile away, so if he visited her each evening, he would be doing more than the doctor ordered. Those walks became a legend among Johnson’s staff. “Oh, he loved to talk to Cousin Oreole about old times and kid her about her boyfriends, which she didn’t have, just tease her.” This pastime was less enjoyable to his staffers than to him, but he insisted that everyone accompany him on the walks, and stand around while he shouted at the elderly lady in the faded Mother Hubbard—she appeared to be, Jenkins recalls, “about as stone deaf as you could be”—and then walk back.