On a spring morning in 1958, Mimi answered the phone and said it was Senator Johnson’s office asking for me. It was Saturday. We were eating a late breakfast, and Senator Johnson didn’t know me from Herb, Uncle Gene, or the Jolly Green Giant.
Saturday was a lazy day in Washington. The president golfed at Burning Tree, Congress shut down for the weekend, and children nagged fathers to take them to Glen Echo and ride the Ferris wheel. There was an unwritten agreement that government and press would not annoy each other unless there was a genuine crisis.
“Lyndon Johnson?”
Probably a joke. At the office last night, Wally Carroll had told me I’d be the Times Senate correspondent starting next week. Wally ran the Washington desk and was Scotty’s right-hand man. He had a pixie sense of humor. In honor of my new job, he might have got somebody with a cornpone accent to call up and pose as the Senate majority leader.
A woman with a lovely, soft southern accent said good morning, Mr. Baker, Senator Johnson wants to speak to you, please, and gave way to a big male voice that said, “Russ, this is Lyndon Johnson.”
It was, indeed. Lyndon Johnson, the genuine article, Democratic leader of the Senate, nobody could doubt that. He had one of the most distinctive voices in town.
“Russ, I hear you’re going to be working up here on the Hill, covering the Senate…”
I was saying something, but didn’t know what. By now I had covered a lot of famous people and was used to talking easily with them, but this strange Saturday-morning call from Lyndon Johnson had me too flustered to keep command of the conversation.
Maybe it was the unabashed heartiness with which Johnson kept calling me “Russ,” as though we had been pals ever since boyhood down on the “Purd’nallis” River, and never mind that he wouldn’t recognize me if I tapped him on the shoulder at this very moment.
He said they’d been telling him I was taking over Bill White’s job covering the Senate for the Times. Bill White was a wonderful man as well as a wonderful reporter and he’d done a wonderful job for the Times, and he’d been able to do it so well because he understood the Senate, knew how it worked…
In fact, Johnson really had known Bill White almost forever. Their friendship went back a quarter century, to early New Deal days when both were new boys in Washington. Bill, however, had now arrived at Reporter’s Nirvana, a syndicated column of his own, for which he was quitting as the Times’s main man on the Senate.
So the politics of this Saturday-morning call was amply clear. I’d been around Washington long enough now to understand that politics was fundamental to the human condition everywhere, only more so in Washington.
Johnson was saying, Russ, the two of us are going to get along just fine.
I sure hope so, Senator, I was saying, while thinking this man is really a piece of work. Just last night I hear I’m going to be the new Bill White, he probably knows it before I get to bed, probably has to be restrained from telephoning me in the middle of the night to say, “Russ, we’re going to get along just fine, you and me…”
It was no secret around town that Lyndon Johnson wanted to be president. Big-time television was still in the wings waiting for the 1960s, so it was no secret among men who wanted to be president that being written about with awe and wonder in The New York Times was one of the most wonderful things that could happen to you.
“When there’s something in the Senate you want to know about, I want you to feel you can come ask me, and I’ll be glad…”
This kind of talk made me edgy. You didn’t have to be terribly Washington-wise to know that Lyndon Johnson, if not actually offering a deal, was probing to find out if I was willing to trade favors. He was saying he could make me look good at the Times. He didn’t have to tell me what my end of the deal would be: to make Lyndon Johnson look good in the Times.
The offer put me off for several reasons. For one, Johnson was too big a story, so it was dangerous to give him most-favored-senator treatment. Everybody watched him constantly, and everybody read the Times; a sweetheart contract would be recognized at once. That couldn’t do me anything but harm.
Another reason: I had never been much interested in getting “inside” information and scoops. Such stuff was important to a newspaper, but it wasn’t what I did well. On the Senate beat I hoped to give the reader accurate and absorbing pictures of the fascinations that occurred there daily. I wanted to let readers know that senators billed as titans of statesmanship were also human. That the Foreign Relations Committee’s stately Walter George of Georgia was also the senator from Coca-Cola, that Senator Fulbright also worried about keeping the board of Arkansas Power and Light pacified, that the oil industry often called tunes for senators like, well… Lyndon Johnson.
If I had to cut, doctor, fake, and censor constantly to promote Johnson’s ambition, my theory of coverage just couldn’t work.
During this eerie Saturday morning phone conversation, I didn’t think things out so carefully as I now suggest, but I was instinctively trying to keep distance between us. This was never an easy thing to do with Lyndon Johnson, even on the telephone. One of his favorite postures for conversation was leaning down over you and pressing his nose down toward yours until your spine was bent so far back that you couldn’t think of anything but your aching vertebrae.
So while he went on calling me “Russ,” I kept saying “Senator,” determined not to get palsy by saying “Lyndon.” Toward the end, I suddenly became aware that this was not a phone conversation. It was a broadcast.
The phone company sold a device that sat on your desk and worked as both mouthpiece and earpiece. You could lean back and talk from a distance and still be clearly heard, and the reply from the person you were talking to came through it so loud and clear it was heard all over the room. The defect was that it sometimes transmitted an echo. Johnson, who loved all gadgets, had one, of course, but I didn’t suspect it until I heard my own voice echoing in my earpiece a millisecond after I’d spoken.
This prompted me to listen more closely, and—what do you know!—I could hear the shuffling of bodies moving around in chairs, and even a faint laugh from somebody not Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s phone call was a performance being given for an audience. I was not having a phone conversation; I was playing to a crowd.
This left me feeling clammy. That faint laugh had been especially unnerving. Was Johnson making a fool of me to amuse his audience? Who was in that audience? Any reporters who covered the Senate for other papers?
Johnson returned to his major theme: his eagerness to do me immense kindnesses, to dole out the most secret information. All I had to do was come to him, tell him what I needed, it would be mine for the asking, that was how kindly disposed he felt toward me. Then he concluded with a line I hear clearly in my head to this day because it made me laugh so many times in the years that followed:
“For you, Russ, I’d leak like a sieve.”
In my four years covering the Senate, he never “leaked” me a single piece of information that had the slightest news value.
Maybe he wrote me off as useless after that first phone talk. More likely, I suspect, he never “leaked” anything to any journalist unless it was something self-serving. The most useful information for a Senate reporter in those years was what Lyndon Johnson was up to, and I soon learned that Johnson was the last person to ask.
The best person to ask was Styles Bridges, the Senate Republicans’ slippery gray eminence, whose mind, like Johnson’s, had a Florentine subtlety when it came to politics. Bridges instinctively understood Johnson. Though of opposing parties, they had a fellowship of mind. This enabled Bridges to make an accurate guess about what Johnson was up to, even when he didn’t know for sure. Often, of course, Bridges did know. Among Senate Republicans, he was the power behind the power, and since Democrats rarely had more than a one-vote majority in the Senate, Johnson had to deal with Bridges.
If I could find Bridges I could get an authoritative reading on Johnson’s latest maneuver. The problem was to find him. Bridges had more hideouts than a movie gangster. Since he rarely appeared on the Senate floor I spent many a futile afternoon wandering half-secret corridors of the Capitol maze, knocking on unmarked doors, asking strangers, “You know where I can find Styles?”
On rare occasions they did, and he was worth the search. In Senate press gallery lore, he was said to be the slickest of scoundrels, but like so many politicians famous as rogues, his word could be trusted—at least when he talked about his colleagues. When he said, “I don’t know,” it meant he either didn’t know or was bound to silence on the subject. When he said, “I don’t know, but maybe…” he meant he didn’t know for sure but had this pretty good guess. When he answered a question with a piece of information, you could safely assume it was not a lie. Bridges was a classic illustration of why reporters so often give their hearts to rascals.
It was Johnson who fascinated me, though, because he was a writer’s delight, a human puzzle so complicated nobody could ever understand it, but what a glorious time a writer could have making the effort. The Senate of the 1950s swarmed with men who had run for president, intended to run for president, or were destined to run for president though they didn’t yet know it.
Most were remarkable men. John and Robert Kennedy were both there, John as a junior senator in the back row, Robert as chief counsel of an important committee. Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater were there; so were Hubert Humphrey, Stuart Symington, Estes Kefauver, and Richard Russell. Down the corridor in the House of Representatives were Gerald Ford and Eugene McCarthy, soon to move over to the Senate. Almost everybody who was to afflict the country for the next generation was there. Remarkable men, all of them, but from a writer’s point of view, they were long magazine pieces who might at best, with plenty of coffee and cigarettes, be stretched into thin campaign biographies.
Johnson was the exception. Johnson was a flesh-and-blood, three-volume biography, and if you ever got it written you’d discover after publication that you’d missed the key point or got the interpretation completely wrong and needed a fourth volume to set things right. He was a character out of a Russian novel, one of those human complications that filled the imagination of Dostoyevsky, a storm of warring human instincts: sinner and saint, buffoon and statesman, cynic and sentimentalist, a man torn between hungers for immortality and self-destruction.
Fascinated by him, I passed endless hours leaning over the press gallery watching him on the floor below and wasted too many hours sitting in offices listening to him talk, talk, talk. To a writer, he was irresistible, and monstrous, and delightful, and, if you were trying to convey a sense of him for a mass-circulation journal, terrifying.
A year before I took up the Senate beat, Bill White wrote a long portrait of him for the Times Sunday Magazine. To call it flattering would have been understatement. Bill believed Johnson could be one of the nation’s great presidents, though at that time, the mid-1950s, there seemed little chance that an oil Texan with a southern accent could ever get to the White House. Bill’s Magazine piece emphasized Johnson’s statesmanlike qualities so fully that it never got around to suggesting Johnson might have a defect or two of the most trivial sort.
Normally Bill talked to Johnson at least once a day, but for three days after publication of the famously flattering Magazine piece, Johnson refused to see him. On the fourth day, Johnson relented, Bill went to his office, they discussed business, and, since Johnson obviously didn’t intend to raise the subject, Bill asked if he had seen the Times magazine article.
Yes, Johnson had seen it. He spoke now in his tragic voice, a tone he often fell into when reflecting on the persecutions to which he was subjected. He had seen the piece, all right. To his sorrow, he had seen the piece.
Was something wrong with it?
Johnson’s reply was so outrageous that Bill, one of Johnson’s oldest friends, couldn’t resist telling us about it back in the office. Johnson said:
“If I thought I was the kind of man you wrote about in that piece, I wouldn’t like myself very much.”
Old friendship got Bill off easy compared to the punishment visited on Sam Shaffer, who did the reporting on an unabashedly flattering Newsweek cover story on Johnson. Johnson did not leave Sam dangling, but called him into his office the day the magazine appeared, abused him extensively, and declared, “Anybody who’d write something like that about me would rape my wife.”
Sam sat in Coventry for three weeks before Johnson would speak to him again. Then they resumed relations as though nothing had happened.
Knowing Johnson was capable of these tantrums, I was always uneasy writing about him, yet covering the Senate meant writing about him almost constantly. People who keep a tiger for a pet must feel the same uneasiness; it’s a fascinating creature to be associated with, but you have to be careful about taking liberties. As a result, sometimes when he did things that made him look bad, I leaned backward to give him the best of it in the paper. There are a hundred ways a reporter can handle an unpleasant story about a politician without putting the boot into him very hard, and I sometimes took it easier on Johnson than an upright, conscientious reporter should have. I rationalized my shame by telling myself I had to keep up good relations with Johnson to do a good job covering the Senate for the Times.
I was lying to myself, of course. Johnson provided me with little of news value except colorful copy, which anybody could get without keeping on his good side. Truth was, I let him keep me mentally a little bullied because I enjoyed the personal contact with him which the job made possible.
He had a gift for finessing the awkward question with a comic vulgarity.
“Don’t you think the Senate ought to be discussing this situation in Laos?” I asked him one day when that mysterious little Southeast Asian country was in the news.
This was in the 1950s when most senators, including Lyndon Johnson, I suspect, couldn’t have found Laos on a map. Instead of admitting he didn’t have a single idea about Laos in his head, Johnson went on the attack, came out of his chair, leaned into my face, and whacking his hands on his buttocks in rhythm with his words, shouted:
“Low Ass! Low Ass! Low Ass! All the things I’ve got on my mind and you come in here wanting to talk about Low Ass!”
His sense of humor sometimes extended even to himself. In a mellow chatty mood in his office one day, he told me a story about Little Juan, a Mexican-American boy in Duval County, Texas. Duval County was a sensitive subject with Johnson because of the 1948 Democratic primary that sent him to the Senate for the first time. In that election, 988,296 votes were cast, and Johnson won by the amazing majority of 87 votes. Naturally, everybody said his people had stolen those votes, and Duval County was supposed to be where the critical stealing was done.
Because of his eighty-seven-vote majority, Johnson acquired the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.” If you wanted to stay on his good side, you didn’t call him “Landslide Lyndon” or otherwise joke about that election. This day, however, he had to tell me this joke, “one they tell about me in Texas,” he said.
About Little Juan sitting on the curb crying. Along came a friend. “Juan, Juan, why are you crying so?” asks the friend.
“Because my father is dead,” says Little Juan.
“But Juan,” says the friend, “your father died three years ago.”
“But yesterday,” says Little Juan, “he came back to vote for Lyndon Johnson and he did not come to see me.”
Though I dealt with Lyndon Johnson off and on for seven years, sometimes in close personal contact, sitting around his office chewing the fat, joking, telling stories, he never knew who I was. He knew I was The New York Times, of course, but I don’t think he ever for more than a second or two thought of me as anything but an important newspaper that he didn’t want to antagonize.
This was dramatized in unflattering fashion on a day in 1962 after I spent nearly an hour alone with him in his Capitol office listening to one of his marathon monologues. I had known him seven years by then. He had become vice-president, knew he was the butt of cruel humor among many of President Kennedy’s people, and was trying to pretend it wasn’t so, that he still counted as he had counted back in the Fifties when he was Johnson the Genius Who Ran the Senate.
He spotted me outside the Senate this day, clapped my back, mauled my hand, massaged my ribs, just as he’d always done in the glory days of old, all the time hailing me as though I were a long lost friend and simultaneously hauling me into a big office he kept across the corridor from the Senate chamber. He sat me down and launched his monologue. The part he obviously wanted me to note, in case I published some of this in the Times, dealt with a private dinner for three at the White House at which he had supped alone with the president and Mrs. Kennedy.
He had been profoundly moved when Mrs. Kennedy had reached across the table, touched his hand, and said, “We need you, Lyndon.”
I strongly suspected this story was about eighty percent fiction, but his eyes glittered so happily that he seemed to have persuaded himself every word was God’s truth, and I wasn’t disposed to ask skeptical questions. For one thing, he’d told me I couldn’t quote him directly on anything he said, and I had no intention of reporting this touching story of Jackie Kennedy’s dinner-table endorsement on my own say-so.
For another thing, I felt sorry for him. If you had once been the great Lyndon Johnson, master of the Senate, it was hard being the nonentity called vice-president, it was painful to be laughed at and called “Cornpone” by people you thought of as arrogant, smart-ass Ivy League pipsqueaks.
Looking for something that could be printed, I shifted ground slightly toward the famous frustrations other powerful men had experienced in the vice-presidency. His fellow Texan, “Cactus Jack” Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president, had said, “The vice-presidency isn’t worth a jar of warm piss.” It was the only memorable line Garner had ever uttered.
No such thing, said Johnson. John Garner had never said any such thing. He had known John Garner very well, had often talked to the old gentleman back in the early New Deal days. Garner had always known the job was vitally important. Nothing as silly as that statement about a jar of warm piss could ever have been spoken by John Garner.
And so it went, on and on. During our chat Johnson scrawled a few words on a piece of memo paper and sent it to his outer office. A few minutes later his secretary brought him back a message on a small piece of paper. Johnson looked at it, crumpled it, and threw it in a wastebasket. A reporter who knew me happened to be idling in Johnson’s outer office during this exchange of messages, so knew what it was about and told me as we walked away from the office together.
“Do you know what was in that message Johnson sent out while you were in there?”
“No. What did it say?”
“It said, ‘Who is this I’m talking to?’”
My vanity needed that blow. Like so many Washington newspaper people, I had begun to kid myself that these terribly important people talked so readily to me because of my charm. I needed to be reminded that they were not talking to me at all; they were talking to The New York Times.
I first met Johnson in 1955. It was at a dinner party in the garden at Bill White’s house on one of those early-summer Washington nights still soft enough to dine out of doors. I had been with the Times only a few months, and Bill had taken an interest in me. This was flattering because he was one of the bright stars of American journalism.
Before the Times he had worked his way in the A.P. from small-bore stuff in the Houston office, to Washington in 1933 covering Texas regional news, to war correspondent, then to top-drawer writer during World War Two. He had been in the armada that landed in Normandy on D Day. He was a professional, a generation older than I was, and with his rugged profile and graying black hair combed straight back, he looked more like a senator than most senators. In fact, Bill was probably more powerful in some ways than many senators. Part of the Texas old-boy network that pretty much ran Washington in the 1950s, he knew most of the people who counted.
After I switched to the Times, Bill noticed me hanging around on the fringes of the Senate looking for feature stories and took me to lunch at the Mayflower one day. There he tried to instruct me in a thousand subtle things about power in the Senate and how it worked. This was the highest flattery. I felt like a rookie baseball player at spring training camp who had attracted the attention of Ted Williams.
Arriving at his place for dinner that night, Mimi and I were dismayed to find we were the only people there that nobody had ever heard of. We knew it was going to be a heavy evening when we stepped through the gate and saw Dean Acheson, former secretary of state and architect of the Western world’s cold-war policy. It was that kind of crowd: famous congressmen, a famous judge, a famous newspaperwoman. Except for Mimi and me, the least famous guests were a couple of lawyers named Abe Fortas and Edward Bennett Williams, and I knew they were big-time, too, because I’d seen their names in newspaper stories about big-timers.
Lyndon Johnson was only moderately famous. He must have felt almost as out of place as I did. Why else could he be chain-smoking one cigarette on top of another and pouring down Scotch whisky like a man who had a date with a firing squad? During the drinking hour before dinner, I watched him taking in rivers of smoke and whisky and waving his hands and weaving his long, skinny torso this way and that, all the while talking nonstop to a group of four or five who seemed enthralled by the performance. It was just Lyndon Johnson being himself, of course. He always operated like a runaway motor, but I didn’t know that at the time.
There were four or five tables for dinner, and when we finally sat down to eat I discovered Bill White had done me another favor by seating me next to Johnson. Bill’s wife, June, introduced us and told him I’d been working in London. 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 what little I had seen of the Senate.
I’d been surprised at the lack of debate in the Senate, and said so. In the House of Commons, debate seemed to be far more important than in the Senate, where, I said, most talk seemed commonplace, inaudible, and inconsequential, as though it didn’t really matter.
Johnson had taken only two or three mouthfuls of food, and now he shoved his plate aside, stubbed out his cigarette in the food, lit another smoke, drained his whisky, and called for another.
Speechmaking didn’t count for anything when it came to passing bills, he said. What mattered was who had the votes.
He was being the forthright schoolteacher, trying to instruct an innocent pupil about life’s realities.
But what about the history books with their stories of the great debaters? What about Webster and Clay? What about…?
Johnson had a child on his hands.
“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?”
Another cigarette was being stubbed out in the food, another cigarette was being lit, the Scotch was getting low in his glass again.
“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…”
This man obviously absolutely hated oratory. As he talked on, another butt fizzled out in the green beans, another match flared, the empty glass was replaced with a filled glass…
“You want to hear about government waste? I can give you Harry Byrd. States’ rights? I’ve got Jim Eastland, I’ve got Olin Johnston, I’ve got…”
Another cigarette was squashed, another lit.
Dessert was brought. He waved it away and called for a drink. I had seen people smoke and drink dinner before, I had done it myself once or twice. In those days when health was not yet an obsessive social passion, drinking and smoking too much were not the revolting things they later became. Still, until now, I had never seen it done by anybody really famous. Famous people didn’t have to carry on like that, did they? This Johnson did, though. He did it like a man trying to kill himself.
A few weeks later, at a Sunday afternoon party with a similar group in Middleburg, Virginia, he had a severe heart attack. In the ambulance, he later told me, he reached for a cigarette, and Senator Clinton Anderson, himself a heart patient, took the pack out of his hand, saying, “You won’t need those anymore.”
Even before I inherited Bill White’s job, I had seen enough of Johnson to marvel at the theater he provided. Often it could not be reported in a family paper. Phil Potter, the Sun’s Senate man, and I went to his office to tease him the day he joined a big political crowd to welcome Vice-President Nixon home from a disastrous trip to South America. Nixon had been mobbed on the trip, and might have been killed, so the airport welcome-home was a patriotic display of affection for a brave, death-defying vice-president.
The irony was that the Democrats almost universally despised Nixon. If you were a Democrat in the 1950s, you were expected to despise Nixon, whether you despised him or not, so press cynics like Potter and me were amused to learn that the great Senate Democratic leader had led the handshaking as Nixon descended from his plane.
Late that afternoon we found Johnson in a small office off the Senate floor and, straight-faced, asked him if he now intended to concede that Nixon might indeed be a great American. Aware that we were tormenting him, Johnson replied with a comment calculated to keep him out of the paper:
“I can tell chicken shit from chicken salad.”
By the time he telephoned, calling me “Russ” and promising to leak like a sieve, his great concern with the New York papers was his stand on civil rights. He wanted to be president, and Democrats who wanted to be president needed all the help they could get from the New York papers. In New York they liked civil rights. In New York they didn’t understand the hellishness of the trial facing a man from Texas who championed civil rights. In New York they looked down on Texans, and needed to be shown that a man from Texas could be just as liberal as a man from New York, though it was ten times harder for a man from Texas.
So periodically, wandering into his office, I would be brow-beaten by Johnson reading an endless list of liberal legislation he had got through the Senate or intended to get through the Senate. After a while I began to know the list by heart. One of my favorite items was the vote by which he had got the Senate to defeat something called “the Bricker amendment,” a right-wing attempt to cripple the Supreme Court.
At this point on the list, Johnson usually recalled that Anthony Lewis, our Supreme Court reporter, had been especially concerned about the Bricker amendment. Defeating the thing was a great deed done for liberalism, Johnson always said. Or, as he once put it while running down the list:
“Bricker amendment defeated—I saved Tony Lewis’s little Supreme Court for him.”
To get right on the civil rights issue, he finally cut free of his old ties to the southern race baiters, brought a bill to the Senate floor, and endured a filibuster to get it passed. After I hadn’t called on him for a couple of days, he must have feared that the Times was losing interest in the filibuster, because his secretary got me out of bed early one morning—Saturday again—with a request to hurry immediately to the Capitol because Senator Johnson wanted to see me.
I got to Johnson’s office, still sleepy-eyed, to find Don Irwin waiting outside. Don was the New York Herald Tribune’s Senate man. Whatever this was, it must be very big because Johnson wasn’t risking the charge that he had favored one New York paper over another.
Don and I were admitted to the sanctum together. There we found the great man clad in silk pajamas lying partially covered on an army cot. We were to take it that, like all the other senators tied to the Capitol by the filibuster, Johnson had spent the night on this Spartan rack. He gave us his most worried, most thoughtful, most solemn expression.
“I’ve called you all down here this morning,” he said, “because I need your help.”
Don looked as uneasy as I felt. With Johnson, who could tell? Maybe he really was going to ask us for help.
He rose from the cot and stood in full pajama magnificence in the center of the office. He was no longer the skinny beanpole I’d first seen at Bill White’s dinner party. He looked big, heavy, almost ponderous.
“Tell me how to end this filibuster,” he said, speaking directly to Don.
That was why he’d got us out of bed and brought us down here without breakfast? To play games, asking reporters what he ought to do next so he could impress them with how dumb and incompetent they were?
That was the reason, all right.
Don was so flabbergasted he could hardly do more than stammer. Johnson turned the question on me.
“I need advice,” he said. “I’m asking you to help me. How do I end this filibuster?”
It was the only time I ever came close to sassing him. I said something like, “For God’s sake, Lyndon, I’m an irresponsible young newspaper reporter with no constituency to worry about. How can you expect somebody like that to tell you how to deal with ninety old men who are responsible to hundreds of different pressures?”
With that, the conference petered out quickly. Johnson’s older daughter, Linda Bird, burst in with coffee and after a little socializing, Don and I were dismissed. Johnson, I always assumed, felt reassured that he had done what he had to do to keep New York from forgetting that Lyndon Johnson was fighting it out for civil rights on the cot front.
He did for an instant know me by name one afternoon several years later. It was during the 1964 presidential campaign. He knew he was going to win big, big, big, and he was euphoric about it. One of the few things troubling him was a scandal involving Bobby Baker, a young man, said some, whom he had once loved like a son. Bobby was now out of his life, except as a political embarrassment, and Johnson was enjoying probably the supreme moment of his life. He was running for president, and everybody, absolutely everybody, was going to vote for him.
Flying across the country on Air Force One, he often sat up far into the night drinking Scotch and savoring the miracle of it all. You didn’t sleep through a time of glory and happiness as wonderful as this. You stayed up, enjoying it, talking about it. He talked about it one night with the handful of pool reporters assigned to his plane, telling them that all the great leaders of the world were dead now, replaced by minor figures. He, Lyndon Johnson, was the last of the big men left on the international scene. One reporter said what about President de Gaulle of France, who had just completed an unexciting visit to several South American capitals.
“Aren’t you forgetting General de Gaulle?” he asked Johnson.
Johnson snorted in contempt.
“De Gaulle! He’s just an old man who went to South America and fell on his ass.”
Flying the country in this extraordinary state of elation, he landed at Los Angeles a few minutes behind the chartered jetliner the rest of the press was flying. As Air Force One rolled to a stop, I stood back from the photographers to get a long view of the scene and saw him come down the ramp laughing and talking and waving for the cameras.
As his feet touched the tarmac, he glanced into the distance and saw my face. Some extraordinary chemistry, produced no doubt by the joy of the season, helped him match my name to my face at that instant. Waving happily at me, he shouted, “Baker for president! Baker for president!”
Then, an instant of dreadful recognition! This film, shown on television, could be a disaster. Everybody would think he was shouting about the scandalous Bobby Baker. So he waved again, and again shouted, in an even louder voice:
“RUSSELL Baker for president! RUSSELL Baker for president!”
A year and a half later, mired fatally in Vietnam, his presidency was already headed for ruin, though he didn’t know it. Except for that brief campaign moment, I hadn’t covered him as president. I had been writing a newspaper column, which was often critical of his Vietnam policy. On a May day, eleven years after I had first met him, he recognized my name on a list of guests invited to a large, not very special White House reception.
The document is in his presidential library in Austin. It is a memorandum from the office of Eric Goldman, who was Johnson’s house intellectual:
“Jim Jones phoned to say that the President has okayed everyone on the guest list for the Presidential Scholars ceremony except in category 17, newspapermen.
“On that list the President wants removed the following:
“Russell Baker, Art Buchwald, Robert Donovan, Walter Lippman, Peter Lisagor, James Reston.”
It was a pretty distinguished company to find myself in. The chief qualification for membership, I suspected, was having got under Johnson’s skin by criticizing his Vietnam policy. I didn’t learn about it, however, until some fifteen years later when a friend doing research in the Johnson library found it in the files.
Funny thing, though: I remembered going to that reception. It was the only time I’d gone to the White House socially since Eisenhower had left. Somebody had slipped up, and I had got an invitation in spite of Johnson’s veto. It must often be like that, even after you are president.
Unaware that we were supposed to be scratched, Mimi and I went. I followed Mimi through the reception line, coming up toward Mrs. Johnson and Lyndon in the Blue Room, wondering if, when my name was announced, he might stop me for a word of reminiscence about the old days.
He didn’t. He just looked at me with his official, brief reception-line expression as we shook hands. It was the look you get from people who look you right in the eye and haven’t the faintest idea who you are. After all those years, he still didn’t know me from Herb, Uncle Gene, or the Jolly Green Giant.