SINCE PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S DEATH, AND ESPECIALLY SINCE BOBBY’S departure from Justice for the Senate, I had gradually gotten to feel more comfortable with President Johnson. In many respects I was as different from LBJ in background as Bobby had been—thoroughly eastern, educated at elite institutions, with a mixture of idealism and pragmatism. LBJ was poorly educated in the formal sense; very Texan in his demeanor, his accent, his storytelling; and extremely intelligent. His almost rough exterior, tall with enormous hands and big facial features, made it difficult for people easily to see the first-rate mind he possessed. He understood government better than anyone else I have ever met. Part of this was his experience as a legislator and part of it was an extraordinary innate ability with people. He could persuade, flatter, cajole, intimidate—depending on the problem and the person—and he had a sixth sense of when to apply the pressure and when to turn it off. He loved the power of the presidency and the arsenal of political weapons that go with the office. And he knew how to use them. He could be kind. He could be mean. He knew what he wanted and was determined to get it.
Succeeding John Kennedy in the presidency probably made governing more difficult for Johnson. He had relatively little expertise in foreign affairs compared to Kennedy and lacked the good looks, the easy grace of the Harvard-educated son of a wealthy father, the quick wit, the carefully cultivated charm of the eastern elite. His skill was in the legislative process, the winning of support, the knowledge of a person’s strengths and weaknesses, the wheeling and dealing that put together legislative majorities. That contrast was rarely to his advantage. It made him easy to caricature, and it made it easy to see his faults and be blind to his considerable strengths. In retrospect, I think Bobby’s dislike was rooted in that contrast. It was difficult to see this man as the idealist I believe he was, in part because he never would have acknowledged those dreams to anyone, perhaps not even to himself. He loved politics because he was good at it. But he never lost sight of the fact that government had goals, and politics was a means, not an end.
During the several months I was acting attorney general and LBJ was trying to make up his mind as to whether he could trust someone close to Bobby as AG, he always treated me with respect. I had been concerned that he would turn to close colleagues to give him legal advice—to Abe Fortas, or Jim Rowe, or Clark Clifford, for example—but while he may have tested what I said with them, he always took my advice. Neither then nor after he named me attorney general can I recall any occasion when he wanted me to act in any way I thought improper or to do any favors for political reasons. I was repeatedly flattered that he sought my advice and, after some discussion, followed it. At all times I felt completely comfortable from an ethical viewpoint.
Despite the bias I began with, inherent in our different backgrounds and undoubtedly inflamed by Bobby’s dislike of him, I began to feel comfortable with this president. He called me with some frequency on the phone, usually about civil rights but occasionally about other stories in the news. I kept him informed of matters that I thought might get the attention of the press or someone in Congress, usually through his assistant for domestic affairs, Joe Califano. Joe was a great help in keeping me informed of what the president was thinking and accurately reporting my views to him. Joe was an excellent lawyer and an honest broker. If the president did not like my advice he would call me, but more often than not Joe explained it to him persuasively. I disliked calling the president directly unless it was really necessary, because I never knew what he was doing or who was with him, and I hesitated to disturb him if he was in the midst of something important.
Far more often he called me to inquire about some story he had read in the newspaper or heard on TV. Like all presidents, he was always concerned about leaks to the press, but there were few from the Justice Department, because lawyers are used to constraints of confidentiality about cases and the good ones hate press conferences. Nonetheless, leaks can happen, and I remember one vividly, though I have forgotten the subject matter. A reporter called me with a story that was both wrong and damaging about some proposed changes, I think, in legislation. When he insisted that my “no comment” would lead him to publish, I told him where the story was mistaken. The next morning I got a call from the president.
“Nick, did you see that front-page story in the Post? It had to come from Justice.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“I want you to find who leaked that story and fire him.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. President.”
“What the hell do you mean you can’t do that?” He was angry.
“Mr. President, you’re the only person who can do that. I leaked the story.”
Silence, then a chuckle. “By God, that’s the first leak in government I’ve ever uncovered!”
And that was that. But I heard him complain often about other leaks, sometimes bitterly. And he occasionally acted in an almost childish manner when news he had been planning to announce leaked out. I remember he intended to appoint Lloyd Cutler as undersecretary of commerce, but when that possibility appeared in the paper, he changed his mind. And I recall once he was chuckling when I entered his office shortly after another cabinet officer had departed.
“What’s the joke?” I asked.
“Tomorrow Drew Pearson will report that I’m going to name so-and-so to…” He named the person and the post.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because that’s what I just told your cabinet colleague, and I’ll bet he can’t wait to tell Drew.”
“So what’s so funny?”
“It isn’t true,” said the president, laughing even harder.
In actuality I think many of the leaks that bother presidents come from the Oval Office itself.
I had to put together my staff in Justice to replace the assistant attorneys general who had resigned after the election, and the president did not try to put in his own people or foist off some political obligations on me. He made one or two suggestions but left the decisions up to me. The recommendations he did make were fine. Indeed, on occasion they were almost amusing. I had found a very able tax lawyer who, after twenty-odd years in practice with a major firm, was teaching at a noted law school. When I sent his name and résumé to the president, LBJ called me.
“I don’t want another academic in the Justice Department heading the Tax Division. I want a skilled practitioner.”
I pointed out that my candidate fitted that requirement after years of practice.
“Yes,” said the president, changing ground. “But I don’t know him. I want someone I know. It’s a very sensitive position.”
“Mr. President, how many tax lawyers do you know?” I asked. “I doubt you know any except Carolyn Agger.”
Carolyn, Abe Fortas’s wife and law partner, prepared LBJ’s tax returns.
He laughed. “You’re wrong. I know Mitch Rogovin and Mort Caplin.” Mort was head of the Internal Revenue Service and Mitchell Rogovin was his general counsel.
“Well,” I said, “Carolyn won’t take the job, and neither will Mort. Can I have Mitch if I can persuade him to come?”
“Okay,” he said. And I did.
I had suggested Ramsey Clark as my deputy because I knew the president wanted him, and I was confident I could continue to work with him. I recommended another Texan, Barefoot Sanders, to head the Civil Division. I had worked with him at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination and come to have a very high opinion of him, as had Bobby. The Criminal Division was tough. Jim Vorenberg was running the Crime Commission, and my other choice had just been made dean of a prominent midwestern law school. The president suggested Fred Vinson (I suspect the name came from Fortas), son of the former chief justice. I checked Fred out, and he got, and deserved, high marks, so I accepted him. The closest LBJ came to seeking a political favor was his suggestion of Ed Weisl. Ed was young but had a good academic record, and his father, a close friend of the president’s, was a distinguished lawyer. I discussed the appointment with Ramsey, since I had in mind his old post as head of the Lands Division, and Ramsey thought he would be fine. As it turned out, he was. To head Antitrust I recommended Professor Donald Turner of Harvard, probably the country’s most highly regarded antitrust authority, and the president agreed. It was a good team in which I could have confidence as to both ability and integrity. Perhaps of equal importance, I did not feel I had to watch my back. They were people I felt I could count on.
President Johnson and I were too different in background and lifestyle to become close in any but a professional sense. The same could be said of Bobby and me, although Bobby was a far more open person. But I did feel with both that my relationship was friendly and relaxed, without any hidden agenda. I respected the president as a person as well as president, and as he grew to trust me, he was more relaxed and friendly with me. To some of his staff I remained an outsider, a Kennedy crony, but by others, such as Moyers and Valenti, I felt accepted.
I went quite faithfully to cabinet meetings, not because they were particularly interesting or important, but simply because (remembering Bobby) I did not want the president to feel I was not on his team. He quite regularly singled me out to say something on civil rights, because it was important to him. This was especially true when we had the Voting Rights Act before Congress. LBJ knew his legislative program and often knew it better than some of his cabinet officers knew their piece of it. Particularly after the 1964 election, he was constantly prodding all of us to get legislation passed while we had a large Democratic majority, because he did not think we would have it after the midterm elections.
In the public mind, cabinet meetings are important. In some respects they may be, but they are not meetings where policy is determined or decisions are made. It is useful for the president to gather his team together from time to time, particularly at the beginning of an administration, when cabinet members do not know each other well, or when, for the same get-acquainted reason, there are new cabinet appointments. Meetings can also be useful for the president to explain a policy that is getting public attention, particularly critical attention, so the members know the party line. In addition, President Johnson used them to push and explain his legislative program so all would understand what was going on and help each other where they could. Often meetings were held with no particular purpose that I could discern.
It was, of course, very exciting to spend so much time in the White House, talking with the president, something I had never imagined I would ever be doing. Add to that the magnificent White House state dinners at which Lydia and I were regular guests. LBJ liked Lydia because she was unlike many cabinet wives, having her own views, which were intelligent, often from a different perspective from most of Washington society’s, and anything but carefully politically honed. She also was particularly good at getting people to talk, usually about their favorite subject, which generally turned out to be themselves. It is a quality that makes her a superb psychoanalyst. President Johnson was an interested observer who instinctively saw exactly what she was doing even when he succumbed to it himself. She also has a maverick quality that he (like her husband) found appealing.
State dinners are full of pomp and ceremony and the kind of events you remember for a long time—if you do not go to too many. The food and wine are excellent, and the various service orchestras provide some beautiful background music. The company can be fascinating or boring—that’s luck of the draw. There is an inevitable sameness about them, but in fairness, it is a quite lovely sameness. Washington society thrives on them, as do business moguls and Hollywood stars.
Of more interest and intimacy were the invitations for a weekend at Camp David. Lydia and I would go to the White House on Saturday and fly to Camp David from the White House lawn with other guests on one of the presidential helicopters. It was a relatively short flight, thirty or forty minutes to the mountain retreat created by the WPA and run by the navy for FDR, who named it Shangri-La, after the place in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. It was renamed by President Eisenhower for his grandson, David. Isolated from the public and hidden in a part of the beautiful Catoctin Mountain Park near Hagerstown, Maryland, it consists of several log cabins for meetings, entertainment, sleeping accommodations, and recreation facilities. There are bowling alleys, tennis courts, a putting green, and a large swimming pool. Dress is informal, and there are several beautiful nature walks to be enjoyed.
Weekend guests can be as varied as the president wishes, and the weekend can be devoted to recreation or to business, or some of both. I am not sure LBJ ever really relaxed, except perhaps back home on his ranch in Texas. Our visits to Camp David usually included some members of his White House staff, another cabinet member, and an outside guest or two, all with spouses. There would be a business meeting in the afternoon, and then free time the rest of the weekend. Dinner was lavish but informal—sometimes a Texas barbecue, quite a contrast from the White House. After dinner there would be the latest first-run movie. I found it interesting that the president could never sit through more than a few minutes of a moving picture. He was far too keyed up and active to be a passive viewer.
I recall on one occasion the outside guest was Billy Graham, which meant a sermon on Sunday morning. Lydia was less than excited at the prospect. With an uncle as a former canon of the Washington Cathedral and a cousin as Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, she had had all the formal religion she felt she needed at a young age and doubted Billy Graham’s ability to rekindle piety. Nonetheless, we dutifully attended the sermon. Such is the power of the president!
That afternoon we were sitting by the swimming pool, and the president, in a deck chair a few yards from us, spent the whole time on the telephone instead of relaxing like the rest of us. I could not help wondering if some international crisis was brewing in some far corner of the world, or if Vietnam was exploding. Finally I asked Bill Moyers.
“No crisis,” he responded. “He’s talking to friends in Texas about what’s going on in local politics.”
On reflection, I think that is how LBJ relaxed.
While he used Camp David, as all presidents have, as a means of getting out of Washington and the White House to a more comfortable and private setting, it was his ranch in Texas that really invigorated LBJ. It is located in the hill country of south Texas, country he loved and felt thoroughly at home in. He took enormous pride in his land and its cultivation, his friends and neighbors, “real” people who shared his love of the land. By my eastern standards it was a huge piece of property—some 500 acres—but not by the standards of his native state. He knew every inch of the ground and loved it.
I did not visit the ranch often, perhaps only three or four times. It was usually on business, and a part of the time would be spent discussing whatever problem he had on his mind. After that he would get on an old fire engine that some admirers had presented to him and drive me around—me sitting beside him in my Brooks Brothers suit and tie, LBJ driving in his ten-gallon hat, flannel shirt, and blue jeans. He would point out sights of interest, and when he saw one of his black workers in a field he would stand up (the fire engine still moving), wave his hand, sound the siren, and shout, “Come over here, boy, and meet your attorney general.”
I would cringe beside him. It was almost as if he did not associate any of his workers with the civil rights leaders he regularly met with in Washington, although I am sure in fact he did. It was just a southern way of life that he was used to and felt comfortable with, just as he often did with the stories and jokes he told about blacks. They made me feel uncomfortable, but this president who did so much to secure equal rights saw no impropriety and no inconsistency between his stories, where blacks were the butt of a joke, and his convictions about racial equality.
There were deer on the ranch, and he enjoyed taking his visitors hunting. Frankly, it was not my idea of deer hunting, since it all took place seated in an old Cadillac convertible parked on a dirt road. One could shoot the deer from the seat without getting out. It did not seem to me very sporting.
On one occasion I recall, two or three Texas congressmen were in the party, one of whom was Congressman George Mahon, chair of the House Appropriations Committee. We shared the view that this was not the way of true sportsmen. At the same time the president was insistent that we hunt, and I did not wish to appear an eastern wimp in front of all these Texas he-men. At that moment, inspiration struck in the form of a brilliant legal analysis.
“Mr. President,” I said, “as much as I’d like to shoot a deer, I don’t think I should. I don’t have a Texas hunting license and I’m not even a citizen of Texas. There are reporters around, and I’m concerned, frankly, that one of them will report that your attorney general broke the law.”
LBJ looked at me. “By God, I never thought of that. You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry, but it’s better if you don’t shoot.”
Congressman Mahon winked at me.
I think it was on a visit to the ranch in December 1965, when we were discussing LBJ’s coming state-of-the-union speech, that he asked me to prepare a memorandum for him proposing a constitutional amendment creating a four-year term for congressmen. The more I thought about it, the worse the idea seemed to me. It meant that the House would always or never run with the president, and that either destroyed its independence or exaggerated it. But LBJ was insistent, so I devised a complicated scheme that combined staggered four-and two-year terms, which tried to preserve the merits of having half the House running in presidential elections and half in midterm elections and staggering the two halves. I was not enamored of it, but it was the best I could do, and I still thought the existing system better.
The president liked my proposal and a similar one, unknown to me, that he had persuaded Professor Richard Neustadt of Harvard to draft. He used the four-year term in the state-of-the-union and, predictably, got a standing ovation from members of the House. The idea of not having to run for reelection every two years had instant appeal. Then came their second thoughts, critical press commentary, and the realization that such a change had far-reaching and unpredictable consequences.
LBJ retreated in a very LBJ-like way. “I knew that four-year proposal was a mistake,” he would say, “but I let these two professors talk me into it. These academic types just don’t understand the real world.”
I ran into Dick Neustadt shortly after the president’s speech, and he told me that he had been as opposed as I had to the change.
The story illustrates a side of President Johnson that I never understood. After a while I became convinced that he had persuaded himself of the truth of his comment and thought that we, not he, really had originated the proposal. But how could this possibly be the case? Yet many times I saw similar instances of statements that were not true, statements one would normally call lies. When things did not work out as he had thought they would, he was able to conjure up an explanation that had little or nothing to do with fact and then become convinced that that was how it had happened. It was, I believe why Bobby thought of him as a consummate liar and one of the reasons he lost credibility with the press and the general public on Vietnam. Over time I became convinced that, for whatever reason, this was how he remembered it and he was not consciously lying. We all tend to see ourselves in a favorable light and to engage in wishful thinking. Lyndon Johnson, being bigger than life, tended to do so on a larger scale than most of us.
One day when I was in the White House well into the early evening and the dinner hour, he surprised me with a statement and then a question. “You know, this place is a lonely place when Lady Bird is off somewhere and I’m alone. You never get to meet real folks. It’s all ceremony. Why don’t you invite me to dinner some night with some of your friends so I can get to know you better?”
Nothing could have surprised me more. The idea of having the president of the United States to dinner had never occurred to me. It also made me nervous.
“Okay,” I stammered. “You name the date.”
He did.
I went home that night for a late supper and told Lydia that the president had invited himself to dinner. As with all things, she took it in stride.
“Who shall we invite?”
That was not easy. Many of our friends were newspaper people—Tony Lewis, Joe Kraft, Sandy Vanocur, and their wives—but that seemed out. Others were closely associated with Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, and that seemed out. Finally we settled on the Jim Vorenbergs, the Frank Thompsons (my favorite congressman), and the Jean Gordons. Dr. Gordon was a psychoanalyst I had known since high school, and his wife had been a classmate of mine at Yale Law School. All were old friends of ours, although none of them knew each other. We decided not to mention the president when inviting them.
Lydia made the arrangements—not so easy when your guest is the president. But we circumvented most of the Secret Service’s problems by using the Justice Department chef and hiring two waiters cleared for White House dinners. The menu was Lydia’s, and as always it was both good and imaginative. We invited our guests for thirty minutes ahead of the president.
After our guests had been seated and served drinks in the living room, there was a knock on the front door, and Lydia went out to greet LBJ. You could hear his booming voice in the living room, which was in the back of the house.
“Some Of It Was Fun!” said Jim. “Is that who I think it is?”
It was an interesting evening, and I think the president enjoyed himself. He did most of the talking. Some of it was stories, often with a racial joke; he was oblivious of the black waiters. When we went to the living room after dinner, Lydia said, “Mr. President, we don’t know much about your childhood. Why don’t you tell us something about it?”
LBJ then began some fascinating reminiscences of his parents and childhood in south Texas. I think Dr. Gordon and my wife particularly enjoyed his stories, and I could almost hear the psychoanalytic gears grinding when he described his mother dressing his brother in girls’ clothes.
There was not, to my recollection, any discussion of current politics, civil rights, or Vietnam. I doubt there was another dinner party in Washington that night about which the same could be said.