CHAPTER 10

LBJ Hosts a Wedding Reception

MY NEARLY SLEEPLESS election night followed a year of frantic activity. When I wrapped up my postelection coverage on Wednesday evening, November 9, 1960, I confronted five weeks of leisure—two weeks of vacation and three weeks of compensating time off in lieu of overtime. A colleague told me that in Puerto Rico, the San Juan Hotel near the airport offered bargain-basement rates for mainland reporters. I was off to San Juan Saturday morning.

Checking into the hotel, I paid my first visit to a casino. I hit an incredible streak of luck at the roulette table with a “system” I made up on the spot. I won over $1,200 at one point, and as my system began to fail, I walked away from the table with $980 ($6,700 in 2007 dollars). I quickly lost twenty dollars at the roulette wheel each of the next two nights, and stayed away from the gaming tables the rest of my vacation. I was flush for my long stay in Puerto Rico.

Democratic State Chairman John Bailey of Connecticut, a Kennedy insider resting in Puerto Rico, spotted me playing roulette that first lucky night. The next day at the swimming pool, Bailey called me over and whispered: “Bob, could you let me in on the system you use?” I said it was secret. When I encountered John Bailey in future years as he rose to become Democratic National Chairman, he seldom neglected to ask about my roulette system.

I got an invitation for a cocktail party on the roof of La Fortaleza—the 450-year-old governor’s palace. I collared Governor Luis Munoz Marin to discuss Puerto Rico’s status that he had designed to make the island a self-governing “commonwealth” of the United States. The result when I returned to Washington was a Wall Street Journal editpager (“Status Mania”) that enabled me to charge off as expenses to the newspaper my round-trip airfare plus a week’s lodging and meals. A poor reporter has to make the best of the cruel, hard world.

         

I FINALLY RETURNED to Washington the week before Christmas and immediately heard the unexpected. The president-elect had named his thirty-five-year-old brother Bobby attorney general of the United States. I asked Bureau Chief Henry Gemmill if I could send a “Brother Bobby” editpager up to New York.

A few hours later after I had submitted copy, a smiling Gemmill beckoned me into his office. “It is a little harsh, isn’t it, Bob?” asked Henry. “We need a rewrite to tone it down.” He had already used his copy pencil to add balancing phrases to my criticisms, and he wanted a lot more of that. I loudly declared that Henry was ruining my piece. I had become the king of editpagers and was accustomed to seeing them in print without modification.

However, I did not go so far as saying what I felt was Gemmill’s real motivation. Henry was shy on strongly held views on any serious subject. I was sure he envisioned getting the WSJ off on the right foot with the new administration and did not want the bureau’s number one troublemaker to create tension by attacking the new regime’s second most powerful figure.

A vexed but still smiling Gemmill suggested “we calm down” and compromise. I had no choice but to rewrite the piece with Gemmill’s modifications. It was filled with Henry’s balances that I detested. Bobby as AG could be “an unqualified disaster,” but he also could achieve “a mammoth record of accomplishment.” My documentation of his shortcomings as a lawyer was balanced by assertions of his administrative talents. While describing his ability to offend everybody in sight as his brother’s campaign manager, he “showed signs of maturing.” However, I insisted on keeping one largely unbalanced paragraph that summed up what worried me most.

The real basis for the liberals’ concern about Bobby stems from what they consider his contempt for civil liberties displayed as chief counsel for the rackets committee. He showed an impatience with the cumbersome apparatus of Anglo-Saxon justice in his zeal to put [Teamsters Union president James] Hoffa and associates behind bars. Liberals saw the specter of the hated Senator McCarthy in his badgering of witnesses, his use of hearsay testimony by police officers, his frequent practice of making a case against a witness without giving him a chance to reply the same day.

Gemmill insisted that I add to the end of the paragraph these words: “practices long fairly common in varying degrees among congressional investigators.” That and the other balancers did not mollify the Kennedys—especially father Joe. I was told that when Joseph P. Kennedy raved about “that bum Novak, whoever he is” after reading my modified piece, he was most upset by my saying Bobby’s outlook was closer to his father’s than his brother’s.

         

BACK IN WASHINGTON, I started my first working day with breakfast at the press table of the Senate restaurant in the Capitol. Seated there were Vice President–elect Johnson’s press aide, George Reedy, and Reedy’s lovely young secretary from Texas, Geraldine Williams. I did not know Geraldine very well and had not seen her since the plowing contest at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in September, but I was anxious to know her better. When I saw Geraldine next, early in the new year at the restaurant press table, I asked her to the Inaugural concert the evening of January 19 at Constitution Hall—the night before the Inauguration.

Our first date coincided with the great Inaugural blizzard of 1961. I changed into a tuxedo at the Wall Street Journal bureau and set off to find a taxi to pick up Geraldine where she lived on Capitol Hill. The historic twenty-four-hour snowstorm, leaving more than eight inches of snow in the capital, made it very difficult to get cabs in a city jammed with visitors.

I finally arrived at the house Geraldine shared with other government girls an hour later than I planned. The blizzard was worsening, and it seemed silly to try to inch ahead through heavy traffic to get to Constitution Hall to hear considerably less than half the concert.

Instead, we got out of the taxi on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked a couple of blocks through the snow to the National Press Building. It was too late for dinner, so we went up to the Press Club and into a small cocktail lounge where women were permitted. We both drank Scotch and smoked cigarettes until midnight when the club closed. We then walked several blocks to the Mayflower Hotel, where we got a snack and kept drinking and smoking until the bar closed down at two a.m.

Geraldine reminded me of a younger Lauren Bacall, only much prettier. Her elegance made her seem to have grown up in a garden. Unlike the chirpy twang of other Texas girls, her faint southern accent and perfect grammar seemed like products of a finishing school up North. None of that was true.

I learned from her that night that she grew up not in a garden but on a farm thirty miles from Waco, where she was picking cotton before she could read or write. She was born in Willie Nelson’s dilapidated hometown of Abbott and went to high school in the small, alcohol-free town of Hillsboro, which surely was no finishing school. Her Texas accent had been nearly totally extinguished by sheer willpower during one year in Washington. She had celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday one night before, and she indicated to me she wanted to get back to Texas soon to get the college education she thought she needed.

By the time I got Geraldine home to Capitol Hill and took a taxi cross town to my apartment in Georgetown, it was four a.m., and I had to sleep fast. Covering John F. Kennedy on Inauguration Day, I walked through the snow in Georgetown from one side of Wisconsin Avenue to the other to be at the president-elect’s home by eight a.m. The day’s activities began a few blocks away with mass at Holy Trinity Church. It was my first exposure to the Latin liturgy.

It was also my first presidential inauguration, and I was fortunate to spend the hours between mass and the end of the parade, nine hours later, as a pool reporter a few feet from the new president. The snow had stopped, but the winds howled and it was bitterly cold. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the youngest man (at age forty-three) and the first Roman Catholic elected president, delivered a magnificent inaugural address whose bold affirmation of American purpose in the cold war eased my nagging doubts about my vote against Nixon the previous November. No inaugural address I heard in the following four decades approached Kennedy’s. It was in a class with Lincoln’s second and FDR’s first.

At bleachers erected for parade watching in front of the White House, Bobby Kennedy gave me a gruff thank-you when I congratulated him. Stanley Tretick, a UPI photographer close to the Kennedys, said to him: “Bobby! What are we supposed to call you now? General? Mr. Kennedy? Your Excellency?” He replied: “Just me call son-of-a-bitch, like everybody else is going to.”

         

IN THE SPRING of 1961, I received a call from a young man with a peculiar accent. It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a thirty-four-year-old new assistant secretary of labor. He and his wife were living in the splendid caretaker’s quarters at Tregaron, the vast Joseph Davies estate in northwest Washington. Moynihan invited me to a stag cookout there.

About twenty men were there, and I recognized some from Capitol Hill. I had no idea why I was invited until, after dinner, Pat Moynihan rose to speak. He said all of us (Moynihan excepted) had Illinois connections. His boss, Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, was a native Chicagoan and had been a labor lawyer there. Now, Moynihan asked confidentially, what would we think of Arthur being the Democratic candidate for governor of Illinois in 1964?

As each gave his views, I heard nothing but praise for Goldberg’s erudition and character. By the time my turn came, I had drunk more than my share. I said I had shaken hands with Arthur Goldberg only once and never engaged him in conversation (the only man there to admit he did not know Arthur). But, I went on, I had heard him testify before Congress many times, and I thought he was pedantic and boring, his voice was too thin, and he was physically unattractive—a terrible candidate all around. My screed was followed by shocked silence. Then the laudatory comments of the others resumed, with mine ignored as though they never had been uttered.

(Arthur Goldberg never ran for governor of Illinois. After serving briefly on the Supreme Court and later as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, he stayed in New York City and ran for governor of New York in 1970. He was just as bad a candidate as I predicted, and he was crushed by Nelson Rockefeller.)

Pat Moynihan became a cherished friend and one of my favorite politicians. But after that spring evening in 1961, he never again asked my advice.

         

I WAS TAKING out three women early in 1961, but the one I liked best was Geraldine Williams. We especially enjoyed the Jockey Club, the fancy new Manhattan-style restaurant on Embassy Row. But sometimes we would have hamburgers and drinks at Harrigan’s, a saloon in old Southwest Washington (soon to be leveled by urban renewal). One night in March, I asked Geraldine to bring to Harrigan’s her Texas absentee ballot for an election created by the megalomania of her boss, Lyndon B. Johnson.

With Johnson up for the 1960 Senate reelection in Texas, the customary procedure would have been for him to drop out of the Senate race when he was nominated for vice president. Instead, LBJ ran for both vice president and senator in 1960 and won both contests. He then resigned from the Senate, forcing a special Senate election.

The ballot in the April 4 nonparty election was bedsheet-size, containing the names of seventy-two candidates. In Texas, you then voted by crossing out the names of the candidates for whom you were not voting—in this case, seventy-one of them. So while drinking and smoking at Harrigan’s, Geraldine and I had a little fun. She crossed out one rejected candidate after another, until she was left with one: Representative Jim Wright, the future speaker of the House and an LBJ protégé backed by Johnson’s political apparatus.

But Wright had to compete with three other moderate-to-liberal candidates. That left two other serious candidates, both conservatives. One was the sixty-three-year-old multimillionaire William Blakley, former owner of Braniff Airlines and an old-style Tory Democrat appointed to fill Johnson’s seat temporarily. The other was an unknown thirty-five-year-old college professor named John Tower, the only Republican in the field.

The outcome could not have been worse for LBJ. Blakley finished first with Tower second, forcing a runoff between two anti–New Frontier conservatives. The vice president did not care for Cowboy Bill Blakley, a Dallas business tycoon who affected Western garb. But as a Democrat, Blakley was infinitely preferable over Tower, a five-foot-five-and-a-half-inch right-wing Republican intellectual who proclaimed himself an acolyte of Barry Goldwater.

Johnson bestowed his political assets on Blakley in the runoff, but nobody thought they would be needed. Texas was still a one-party state with only one Republican in the congressional delegation and one Republican in the legislature.

I talked Henry Gemmill into sending me to Texas for a week, and I soon found this was no cut-and-dried election as was thought in Washington. Blakley was a terrible candidate, and Tower was not half bad. Lifelong Democrats were defecting—from the left because they hated Blakley, from the right because they liked Tower. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom drummed into me on this my first reporting trip to Texas was that a Republican could not win statewide. I was about to write a bet-hedging analysis. Geraldine Williams saved me.

Geraldine never leaked a word to me of what went on in Lyndon Johnson’s office and had no inside information for me about the 1961 special election. What she supplied was an invaluable introduction to her cousin Jody. He was Joe James, a forty-something lobbyist for West Texas Utilities. James and his girlfriend, Joyce, had befriended Geraldine during her one year in Austin (when she worked first for her state senator and then for LBJ). Both Jody and Joyce loved her, and made clear I was lucky if she deigned to have anything to do with me.

They hosted me for drinks and dinner in the private club at Austin’s Commodore Hotel, which was packed with legislators drinking and the lobbyists who paid for their drinks. James introduced me to everybody, and all gave me the conventional wisdom of Blakley winning. Then, near the end of a bibulous night, Jody set me straight: “Let me tell you something, Novak. John Tower is going to win this election. I guarantee it. Write it in your newspaper. The good ol’ boys around here don’t appreciate what’s happening. The Bill Blakleys are finished. They are going to be extinct.”

On the front page of the May 25 Wall Street Journal, I wrote: “Democratic Texas may be about to take a giant step toward establishment of a two-party system, giving the Republican Party an important foothold in the South.” Tentative though it was, my story was the only prediction anywhere of a Tower victory. When Tower won what was everywhere recorded as a stunning upset, my reputation as a political savant swelled.

My postelection editpager of May 31 is actually a more impressive analysis. I said flat out that two-party politics had arrived in Texas, and predicted that “what is happening in Texas today may well be repeated through the rest of the old Confederacy in the decades to come.”

         

TO BEGIN 1962, Les Tanzer, the White House correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, left the paper to join Kiplinger’s Changing Times magazine. It was a frequent case of a crack Journal reporter going lower down the journalistic food chain for a higher salary.

Al Otten moved over to the White House beat, and (after a little more than three years with the paper) I became its senior correspondent on what was now a Capitol Hill staff of five reporters. That meant me doing big congressional overviews, but my daily beat was the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees—covering taxes, international trade, and Social Security.

On this beat, I became acquainted with three memorable political personalities: Wilbur D. Mills, Harry F. Byrd Sr., and Robert S. Kerr. There has not been anybody like them in Congress for some time. Even then they seemed anachronistic, certainly out of tune with the New Frontier. These three personalities provided a congressional counterpoint to John F. Kennedy’s cultural transformation of Washington.

         

AL OTTEN SUGGESTED I kick off my new assignment with a leader on the Ways and Means Committee, the most important committee in Congress where all tax and trade legislation is constitutionally mandated to originate. In “Ways and Means Woe,” I described the committee’s “resistance to any kind of controversial action, whether desired by the Administration or business.” Its powerful chairman, Democratic representative Wilbur D. Mills of Arkansas, had “an apparent capacity for indecision and inaction that maddens” his critics on the committee.

Mills, a Harvard law graduate, had been elected to Congress in 1938 at age twenty-nine and now at fifty-three was at the peak of his prestige. He was considered the smartest man in Congress (as I noted in my leader), and to suggest that the chairman had no clothes was scandalous. A conservative Republican congressman approached Mills on the House floor the day my story ran to chide him. “Well, everybody knows that Novak is a notorious leftist,” Mills replied.

It was mutually disadvantageous for the Ways and Means chairman and the Wall Street Journal lead reporter to be at odds. I routinely asked to see him, and he accommodated me. He was a marvelous source, with encyclopedic knowledge of the bills he handled, and was willing to share much of his plans. After our rocky start, my relationship with the chairman became so close during the next dozen years that I was condemned for serving as Wilbur Mills’s mouthpiece in return for his news tips.

Mills wanted confiscatory tax rates lowered drastically as the incentive for getting rid of tax deductions, exclusions, and credits. This was essentially what President Kennedy proposed, but business interests decided tax reform was too high a price to pay for tax reduction. Kennedy became convinced that high tax rates so stifled the economy that they must be lowered—with or without tax reform. That was where Kennedy lost Mills, who dogmatically declared no reform, no tax cut. Simultaneously the chairman was blocking Medicare (medical care for the aged), which he correctly prophesied would impose an ever-heavier burden on the federal government. The smartest man in Congress meant mostly pain and suffering for the New Frontier.

Mills’s political career ended in 1974 with the exposure of a drunken affair with a striptease dancer. Nothing could have been a bigger shock to me or others who thought they knew him. Nobody on Capitol Hill had ever observed the sixty-five-year-old man who now declared himself an alcoholic even taking a drink. He once declined an invitation to dinner at my home on grounds he and his wife never went out at night.

         

WHEN I WENT on my new beat in 1962, I never thought about a similar exposé of the Senate Finance Committee, a leaderless backwater under the chairmanship of Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia. In 1962, he was seventy-five years old, and whatever fires burned within him long ago had been banked.

Harry Flood Byrd was Virginia’s dominant political figure for four decades. The Byrd Organization controlled the state’s public offices from top to bottom. Virginia was not only a one-party state but a state without competition in that one party. Byrd entered the U.S. Senate in 1933 at age forty-six after a term as governor, but did not become Finance Committee chairman for twenty-two years. Never deeply involved in the committee’s complicated issues, he was committed to legislation only when it touched on controlling the growth of government, protection of the textile industry, and states rights (headed by the preservation of racial segregation).

He was perhaps the most reactionary member of Congress. He had long since separated himself from national Democratic candidates, observing “golden silence” in endorsing nobody for president in 1952, 1956, and 1960 (as Republicans carried Virginia). But with his nominal Democratic affiliation making him part of the Democratic Senate majority, he never entertained becoming a Republican.

Reporters on the tax beat in Congress ignored Byrd. He did not know that much, and did not reveal much of what he did know. However, he was totally accessible to anybody from the Wall Street Journal. I never got much help from the senator in covering my beat, but I enjoyed our conversations. I remember especially two of them.

Byrd was opposing Senate ratification of a multinational treaty governing exploration of Antarctica. I asked him why he cared. “I’m worried about what Richard might think of this,” he replied. “Richard” was Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, the great American aviator and explorer of the Antarctic, who planted American flags in that vast frozen waste. He was the senator’s beloved, late younger brother. I told him, truthfully, that Admiral Byrd had been one of my boyhood heroes. The old man was touched, and it strengthened our relationship.

The second conversation took place after Byrd had publicly broken with Virginia’s Governor Albertis Harrison, a rare rupture inside the Byrd Organization. Harrison ended Virginia’s “massive resistance” to school desegregation by reopening Prince Edward County’s schools that had been closed to evade court-ordered racial integration. I had become close enough to Byrd to ask: “Senator, don’t you think that in the end you are bound to lose the fight over school segregation?” “Of course, Bob, of course,” he said softly. “That’s just the point. When that great son of Virginia, Robert E. Lee, was beaten at Gettysburg, the war was over. But the fact he kept fighting for the state’s freedom for another two years has made him the hero of Virginians for a hundred years. Albertis Harrison was duty bound to follow the course of Robert E. Lee, but he didn’t.” In Byrd’s view, massive resistance was the lineal successor to the South’s “Lost Cause” of secession.

Committed to a free American hand in Antarctica and adherence to dying white supremacy, Byrd was a reactionary romantic who dedicated his public career to a world that had disappeared long ago.

In poor health, Byrd resigned from the Senate in 1965, the year before his death. Harry Flood Byrd Jr. replaced him for the next seventeen years but never matched his father as a famous figure of the Right. Virginia was leading the South into a political realignment of majority conservative Republicans and minority liberal Democrats. Unable to win the Democratic nomination and unwilling to become a Republican, “Young Harry” became an Independent for his last thirteen years as a senator.

         

EARLY IN 1962, I was chatting with Senator Byrd in a hallway of the New (now the Dirksen) Senate Office Building outside the Finance Committee offices when a look of terror came over the chairman’s face. “Excuse me,” he mumbled as he ducked into the committee room. I turned around and saw an apparition. Lumbering down the hall was a sixty-six-year-old man, standing six-foot-three and weighing over 230 pounds. He wore a baggy, cheap-looking double-breasted suit, a “feedsack blue” shirt, and old-fashioned galluses. It was Senator Robert Samuel Kerr, Democrat of Oklahoma, the richest man in the Senate.

I was not sure whether Harry Byrd darted away from me because he did not want to talk to Bob Kerr, did not want Kerr to see him talking to me, or both. The word among Senate insiders was that Byrd was a little afraid of Kerr, who was the second-ranking Democrat below Byrd on Finance but was the committee’s dominant member.

Born in a log cabin in Indian Territory, Kerr got into oil production and untold riches as chairman of Kerr-McGee Oil Industries, Inc. While visiting in his office in 1962, I asked Kerr for his estimated net worth. He sighed heavily (as he often did) and then said he would give me one guess only and he would then tell me whether I was high or low. I figured to go high, and guessed sixty million (which was about four hundred million in 2007 dollars)—an unimaginable figure in my eyes. Kerr guffawed. “You’re low,” he said. “Way low.”

Mixing private and public business was habitual with Bob Kerr. He had brains, money, ambition, dynamism, courage, and determination—everything but moderation in advancing his personal fortune. Brazenly inserted in the lapel of his baggy suit jacket was a gold Kerr-McGee button, leading him to be called the senator from Kerr-McGee.

Kerr’s most spectacular abuse of power was confided by him to me during an off-the-record chat in 1962. I reminded him that when I arrived in Washington in 1957, he was conducting confrontational hearings on Eisenhower administration economic policy with Treasury Secretary George Humphrey in the dock as the defendant. Then the hearings recessed, never to be resumed. “What happened?” I asked. The senator sighed heavily, then replied slowly: “Well, my company had some problems with the IRS [Internal Revenue Service]. They went away—and so did my hearings.”

Kerr, unhappy with the Kennedy-Johnson ticket, sat on his hands for most of the 1960 general campaign as Nixon carried Oklahoma. With his ally Johnson kicked upstairs to the vice presidency, Kerr feared his own power in the Senate would be diminished. In fact, the opposite occurred. LBJ’s successor as majority leader, Montana’s Mike Mansfield, abhorred power and the resulting vacuum was filled by Big Bob Kerr. After two years, liberal Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, one of Kerr’s many enemies, was calling him “the uncrowned king of the Senate.”

Kerr was such a forbidding presence that few reporters sought him out. They missed a lot. Whereas I explored tax policy with Wilbur Mills and talked philosophy with Harry Byrd, I received a tutorial in deal making from Bob Kerr. He explained to me the deal he cut on December 26, 1960, with President-elect Kennedy at the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. Kerr would carry Kennedy’s tax and tariff bills. Kennedy, in response, would give Kerr pork barrel spending for Oklahoma, tax and trade concessions for oil and gas, and just about anything else the senator wanted. But Kerr, with Mills, opposed Medicare to the end.

I was looking forward to a day of football bowl watching on January 1, 1963, when I received an early telephone call. Robert Kerr had died of heart failure that morning at Doctors Hospital in Washington, where he was recuperating from a mild heart attack. Called in to do a leader for the Journal, I wrote:

Perhaps Mr. Kerr’s greatest asset as a Senate manipulator was his un-doctrinaire approach. As it suited his purpose, he was a budget balancer or a tax cutter, a free spender or an economy advocate, a neo-populist or a hard money man, a protectionist or a free trader.

AT TIMES, I felt as out of touch with the New Frontier as Bob Kerr, Wilbur Mills, or even Harry Byrd. The winter of my discontent began shortly after the high of the Kennedy inauguration. I had talked myself into believing I had to achieve something significant by the time I reached age thirty. I had a premonition I would die on the battlefields of Korea. When I wasn’t sent there, I still felt I would have a short life. I drank too much, I drove too fast, and often I combined them by driving under the influence. I was a four-pack-a-day cigarette smoker, which provoked recurrent asthma attacks that had periodically afflicted me since my second year in college. I often missed meals and was a little underweight. I fainted while drinking one night with Bob Jensen at the standup Members Bar at the National Press Club. Jensen insisted I see a doctor, who advised me to drink less, stop smoking, and start eating chocolate sundaes. I ignored the first two recommendations, and followed the third only for a short time.

With apparently little time left, I awaited my thirtieth birthday on February 26, 1961, with the grim recognition that I was only a hack journalist. Nobody planned a birthday party. I had taken out Geraldine Williams several times since our Inaugural eve date, and I asked her to dinner for my birthday. In a black mood, I told her I thought my career had been disappointing up to this point, and then I lapsed into silence. We spent the evening smoking and drinking Scotch without saying anything. Geraldine was the first girl I had ever dated who did not interrupt my dark reveries, and that was probably a mistake for her.

About two months later, Henry Gemmill took me to dinner at Rive Gauche, a fancy French restaurant in Georgetown. My boss said he realized things had gotten dull for me after the excitement of the 1960 campaign, that I was bogged down in what Henry called the “scut work” of covering legislation and that I felt a little left out of the New Frontier.

True, but what was Henry going to do about it? I hoped he would relieve me of some scut work. Instead, he told me that, effective immediately, my pay was going from $170 a week to $200. That meant for the first time I was a five-figure annual income earner ($10,400 or about $70,000 in 2007 dollars). I never dreamed I would make that much money in journalism. But as a bachelor I had bucks to burn and was going to pay cash in buying a new Corvette for $5,000. That my neurotic discontent had nothing to do with money was something Henry Gemmill did not understand.

About a year later, Vermont Royster called from New York and asked me to dinner the next night. “By the way, Bob,” he told me, “I’m not going to have time to stop by the bureau on this trip, so don’t say anything to Henry.” Although Royster had the title of editor, his responsibility was limited to the editorial page. He had no authority over Gemmill. So whatever he was up to, he was going behind my bureau chief’s back.

Royster picked Napoleon’s, a shabby little French restaurant on Connecticut Avenue that was a favorite of his dating back to pre–World War II days. He quickly came to the point, asking: “Are you a little bogged down with all the details of what you have to cover?” Yes, indeed, I said. I would like to get rid of covering in excruciating detail very complicated decisions made behind closed doors. “Then,” Roy said triumphantly, “come up to New York.”

He asked me to become an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. I would write unsigned editorials on any subject that a) interested me and b) fit the paper’s line. I could write as many signed editpagers as I wanted, with no requirement for compatibility with the Journal ’s opinion. To report and research for this, I would have an unlimited expense account to report anywhere in the world.

Then came his kicker. He would be retiring before too long. A transitional figure would replace him, but the paper had to develop a younger person for the long haul. Nothing was guaranteed, of course, but there was a real possibility for me. Robert D. Novak as editor of the Wall Street Journal! It teased the ego, even though that was nothing I had craved.

I cited two reasons to Royster for saying no. First, I thought I was not conservative enough to write Wall Street Journal editorials. Second, I did not want to leave Washington. An accomplished debater and logician, Royster demolished both arguments. What I did not say was that my experience being rejected as sports editor of the Daily Illini suggested I was no good at office politics. And the way Al Clark was purged as Washington Bureau Chief indicated it was risky mounting the Journal ’s slippery pole.

Two years later, Roy found his man in Robert Bartley, a young reporter in the Journal ’s Chicago bureau who later became the most influential editorial page editor in America. I know I could not have matched Bartley’s accomplishments, and I question seriously whether I ever really could have been named editor. I know I took the right path at Napoleon’s, even though sometimes I wonder what might have been.

         

BY THE SUMMER of 1962, Lyndon Johnson apparently had become resigned to my relationship with Geraldine, who had left George Reedy’s office to work directly for the vice president. We both were invited to dinner at The Elms, the mansion in far northwest Washington where Democratic socialite and, briefly, ambassador to Luxembourg Pearl Mesta once entertained lavishly (celebrated as “The Hostess with the Mostest” in the hit musical Call Me Madam). The place had just been purchased by LBJ in the absence then of an official vice presidential residence.

After a Texas-style cookout, LBJ reclined, nearly prone, by the swimming pool. It was just the two of us drinking Scotch, and he spoke with a candor he never bestowed on me before or after. He felt the Kennedy administration was in serious trouble, losing the cold war to the Soviet Union and losing the legislative war to conservatives in Congress. He said he had done everything the Kennedys wanted, including foreign missions that only guaranteed him bad publicity.

He was repaid with insults and humiliation, especially from the attorney general. Johnson was sure Bobby Kennedy was plotting to dump him in 1964. “But I’m going to fool them,” he said. “I’m going to pack it in after the term ends and go home to Texas.” That would have been a huge scoop, but I knew Johnson was just blowing off steam.

As for going back to Texas, the political environment there was hardly more congenial for LBJ than it was in Washington. Johnson’s protégé, John B. Connally, had just won the Democratic nomination for governor of Texas, which still all but guaranteed election in Texas. As secretary of the navy, Connally had been the highest Kennedy administration official bearing the LBJ brand.

But campaigning for governor, Connally removed the brand. With JFK and LBJ both unpopular in Texas, Connally ran against the administration he had just left, and won. Talking about Big John that summer evening in 1962 led Johnson into self-pity. “John has turned my picture to the wall,” LBJ told me. “You know I never would turn his picture to the wall.”

Later that summer, I made a decision I long had been pondering. I had known for months that I loved Geraldine, and I hoped she loved me. The question was whether it was wise for me to try marriage three and one-half years after failure on my first attempt. Geraldine and I were drinking Scotch at the cocktail hour on the roof of the Hotel Washington on 15th Street overlooking the Treasury when I proposed to her. She had no quick response, being a deliberate person under any condition and especially deliberate when faced with a dangerous proposition. Two weeks later, she said yes.

It was taken for granted in that era that she could not work for the vice president and be married to me at the same time. When she told Johnson, he immediately offered to host our wedding reception at The Elms. I thought that a bad idea, and Geraldine so informed her boss. He responded that he planned to hold the reception whether Geraldine and Robert came or not. It was classic LBJ, and it worked.

Johnson sent his private plane to Texas to pick up Geraldine’s family and bring them to Washington. At the small rehearsal dinner hosted by my parents at the Sheraton-Park Hotel the night before the wedding, the vice president stopped by and thrilled my mother by kissing her on the lips. The reception at The Elms the next night was a great success with Johnson presiding over the toasts.

When Johnson insisted on the wedding reception, I told Geraldine: “He must think a lot of you.” “No,” she replied. “It’s you he thinks a lot of.” What she implied was confirmed after we returned from our honeymoon by Frank Erwin, a very rich, very conservative lawyer from Texas who had been installed as state Democratic chairman by Governor Connally. Erwin was one of the Texas right-wingers who did not go over to the Republicans (and is immortalized by the Frank C. Erwin Jr. Special Events Center, home of the University of Texas basketball team). Erwin told Geraldine that he had heard about the wedding reception and now he expected “better” stories from Novak. I’m sure he got that straight from Johnson. That bothered me, but I figured it really didn’t matter. After all, how important is a vice president who stands no realistic chance of ever being president?

         

THE WEDDING WAS held the first Saturday after the 1962 mid-term elections, when Democrats captured big majorities in both houses of Congress for the third straight election.

A $13,000-a-year salary ($87,000 in 2007 dollars) went a long way in 1962. We purchased (with a big mortgage) a tiny $17,000 row house (“the doll house,” my mother called it) behind the U.S. Supreme Court on Capitol Hill. My election year-ending compensating time off from the Wall Street Journal gave us a five-week honeymoon—beginning with a week sailing first-class on the Constitution for a four-week tour of Spain. With liberal Americans and Europeans leery of visiting Franco’s dictatorship, it was the best bargain in Europe. We ended up in a suite at Madrid’s Fenix Hotel for $7.50 a night.

When I returned to the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, I found a dozen telephone messages on my typewriter from somebody I barely knew: Rowland Evans Jr. of the New York Herald-Tribune’s Washington bureau. Al Otten, whose desk faced mine, noted that “Rowly Evans sure is anxious to get hold of you. He’s been calling nearly every day.” Reporters by nature are curious, and Otten wanted to know the source of Evans’s sudden interest in me. So did I.