On November 22, 1963, President and Mrs. Kennedy were supposed to have spent the night at the LBJ Ranch in Stonewall, Texas. One year later, nearly to the day, that’s exactly where I was headed, now as an agent on President Johnson’s Secret Service detail.
It was hard to believe that a year had passed, and somehow the world had kept turning, life had gone on. It had been a rough year, to say the least. My entire focus had been on Mrs. Kennedy, Caroline, and John, making sure they had everything they needed. While I knew they were in capable hands with the new Agent in Charge, it was going to be strange not to be in daily contact.
With my new assignment, I received a pay grade promotion—from GS-12 at $10,605 to GS-13 at $12,075 annually—but the new job was actually a demotion in title and responsibility, as I went from being the Special Agent in Charge of the Kennedy Protective Detail, supervising my own small team of agents, to being a member of one of the three shifts on the President’s Detail. I knew that ultimately it was in my own best interest to leave New York City and return to the White House, but it wasn’t an easy transition.
I had been given a week off before starting my new assignment, which I spent at home with Gwen and the boys. Because I had been gone more than 90 percent of the time over the previous four years, it was always somewhat strained when I got to spend more than a day or two at home. My family had their own routine without me, and it was an adjustment for all of us. It wasn’t an ideal situation for a strong marriage, and sadly, I felt like I hardly knew my own sons. In many ways, I was a stranger to them. It was the same for all the agents on the White House Detail. When the president and first lady traveled, it was our job to be with them. There weren’t enough of us to be able to get time off for special occasions or family events. I had been gone for every holiday, birthday, and anniversary over the past four years. Now, President and Mrs. Johnson were going to be spending Thanksgiving at their ranch in Texas, so that’s where the agents would be too.
THE JOB OF the President of the United States is around-the-clock, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Even when they are on “vacation,” they are never away from the phone or the latest domestic or international crisis. But every president needs a place where they can try to find some relaxation, a retreat away from the White House. President Eisenhower had his estate in Gettysburg; President Kennedy had Hyannis Port and Palm Beach. For President Johnson, there was no better place on earth than his beloved ranch in the Texas Hill Country.
On November 19, 1964, I flew with my shift from Andrews Air Force Base to Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas. The agents had negotiated a good rate at the Commodore Perry Hotel, and from there it was an hour-and-a-half drive to the ranch, with not much in between. The drive back and forth added close to three hours to your eight-hour shift, making for long days, but at that time there was nowhere else to stay.
The landscape reminded me of the gently rolling hills around Washburn, North Dakota, where I spent my childhood—lots of wide-open spaces, dotted with pecan and oak trees instead of North Dakota cottonwood and elm, and every once in a while there’d be a white farmhouse set back a ways from the highway, with a few horses, cattle, or sheep in the yard.
The LBJ Ranch was an actual working cattle ranch. Johnson had about four hundred head of Hereford cattle, and the property was close to 2,700 acres. I would learn that there was nothing President Johnson loved more than driving around looking at his land and checking on his prized cows, and within a few short days I saw damn near every inch of the place.
The Texas White House was a large but unpretentious two-story white clapboard house with covered front porches on both the ground and second floors. The main floor consisted of several living and sitting rooms; an office, which had room for the president’s desk and three other desks for staff and secretaries; a big kitchen and dining room; several bathrooms; and two large bedrooms—one for President Johnson and one for Mrs. Johnson. Upstairs were six additional bedrooms and five bathrooms, accessible by the main staircase, as well as a steep, narrow back staircase off the dining room.
Inside, the house was relaxed and informal, filled with comfortable furnishings and family photos, nothing fancy or ostentatious. Outside, an expansive front lawn shaded by a beautiful live oak tree had a commanding view of the Pedernales River, which snaked through the property. Off to one side of the house was a large, kidney-shaped swimming pool, which was frequently used by the president, his family, and guests. Around the back of the house was a carport that held a variety of vehicles that the president had collected—and which he insisted on driving himself whenever he was on the ranch—then beyond the carport was an airport hangar adjacent to a runway that could accommodate small private aircraft, as well as serving as a helicopter landing pad.
I couldn’t help but think what Mrs. Kennedy would have thought of the ranch, had she and President Kennedy come here. It had been the one part of the Texas trip that she wasn’t really looking forward to, but I think she would have found it charming in its own way. Tolerable, at least, for one night.
As it turned out, I almost didn’t get to stay more than one night myself.
Shortly after arriving, I was standing post outside the main house when I heard President Johnson call out to Rufus Youngblood, the Agent in Charge. Rufus responded immediately, and while I couldn’t hear what was being said, I saw President Johnson pointing at me and talking sternly to Rufus. I couldn’t imagine what I might have done wrong, but obviously the president was not happy about something.
After our shift was over, Rufus pulled me aside and explained what had transpired. “Clint, listen, I know you may have overheard some things, and I wanted to set your mind at ease . . . You see, President Johnson saw you today for the first time, and he recognized you.”
“What do you mean he recognized me?”
“He knew that you were new on the shift, and that . . . uh . . . that you had been with the Kennedys.”
“So?” I asked. What did that have to do with anything? Lots of the guys had been with the Kennedys.
“Well,” Ruf began, “the one thing President Johnson demands from everybody around him is loyalty. He questioned your loyalty because you were so close to the Kennedy family.”
I shook my head in bewilderment. “Well, Ruf, you know me. I’m here to do the job.”
“I’m gonna talk to him,” Rufus said. “Look, Clint, I know—we all know—that you would do the same thing again . . .” His voice trailed off. He looked down. He didn’t want to mention it.
I looked directly into Rufus’s eyes and said, “If he doesn’t want me here, then I won’t be here.”
“Let me work this out, Clint. We all want you here.”
I knew the decision wasn’t up to me, or to Rufus Youngblood. It was President Johnson’s call, and I was convinced this would be my first and last day on the detail.
The next day, before I went on shift, Rufus called me into the command post. He and his assistant, Lem Johns, had gone to the president to plead my case.
“We told him you were not political, that you were the consummate professional. That you had no allegiance to the Kennedys, but only to the United States Secret Service and our mission.”
I turned my gaze away from Rufus and looked down at the ground. I was sure what the response would be. President Johnson did things on his terms. He wasn’t about to let the Secret Service tell him who was going to be on his detail.
“Clint, the president wants you to stay.”
I was surprised that President Johnson had agreed to allow me to stay on his detail, but I also knew that all it would take was one minor mistake and I’d be transferred to a field office far from Washington, D.C. I wasn’t about to let that happen.
THE TRANSITION FROM Jacqueline Kennedy to Lyndon Baines Johnson was like sailing on a magnificent yacht along the Amalfi Coast on a cloudless summer day, and suddenly being tossed overboard into an aluminum trough filled with ice-cold water. There were not two more opposite people on the planet. Mrs. Kennedy was soft-spoken, refined, and empathetic, while President Johnson could be crude, demanding, boisterous, and intolerant.
I quickly learned that when President Johnson was at the ranch, there was no set schedule: his activities were completely unpredictable and often spur-of-the-moment. He believed surprise was the best form of defense against anyone who might try to harm him, and that included not informing his Secret Service agents of impending activity. We had to continually be on our toes, ready for movement by foot or car. President Johnson would be in the house and suddenly decide to take a drive. He’d stride out the back door, dressed in his tan gabardine ranch trousers and matching pocketed jacket, a Western-style hat, and boots, headed for the carport, usually with several of his guests in tow. Rarely did he give advance warning to the agents, so as soon as one of us saw what was going on, we’d radio the command post and race for the Secret Service follow-up cars.
President Johnson refused to allow an agent to drive him around on his own ranch, and most times forbade any of us from being in the same car with him. He’d jump into the driver’s seat of his white Lincoln convertible, with the top down, barely waiting for his passengers to sit before he stepped on the gas, kicking up a plume of dust as he sped away. The agents on duty would scramble into a couple of other cars, fast on his trail.
It was often the same situation if he wanted to fly somewhere. Our first notification would be seeing him come out of the house and head straight for the helicopter pad or the JetStar parked at the end of the runway behind the residence. The word would go out on the radios, and simultaneously the aircraft crew would come running out of their standby trailer to try to beat him to the appropriate aircraft. Thinking back on it now, it makes me laugh, but at the time it was extremely stressful, and not conducive to our preferred security methods.
Lady Bird Johnson, on the other hand, was always thoughtful and considerate of those of us who worked in various capacities around the president. A petite woman, Mrs. Johnson was active and energetic, and she always seemed to have a smile on her face. Her given name was Claudia, but apparently when she was an infant a nurse commented that she was “as pretty as a ladybird,” and the nickname stuck. The president simply called her “Bird.”
Because President Johnson had such a domineering personality, Mrs. Johnson might have seemed demure to some, but in reality she was quietly forceful, and very intelligent. She had graduated with honors from the University of Texas with degrees in both journalism and history, and having been married to Lyndon Johnson for over thirty years, she understood his personality, and how hurtful he could be, better than anyone.
One day during that first trip to the ranch, I was on duty when President Johnson stalked over to one of the other agents and began berating him for something that hadn’t gone exactly as the president had wanted. Johnson towered over the other man, and as his voice got louder, he moved in closer until his face was scarcely an inch from the agent’s. For the next ten minutes, Johnson exploded with curse words and accusations, haranguing, scolding, and degrading the poor man until he nearly crumbled.
Finally, it stopped just as suddenly as it had begun, and as the president stormed off, the agent became physically ill, vomiting into the grass. Mrs. Johnson had witnessed the scene from a distance, and as soon as her husband was out of sight, she brought a towel to the agent, gave him a hug, and said, “Oh, Bobby, Lyndon didn’t mean it. He thinks so highly of you. Please forgive him—you do a wonderful job.”
I had just witnessed “the Johnson treatment.” Over the next four years, I would see the same situation played out with senators, congressmen, even the vice president, and nearly every agent on the detail, myself included. No one was immune.
THE JOHNSONS HAD two daughters, Lynda and Luci, and the minute their father became president, their lives changed dramatically. At the time, the children of vice presidents did not have Secret Service protection, but within hours of President Kennedy’s assassination, the girls each had agents assigned to them. Lynda was nineteen years old and a student at the University of Texas in Austin, while Luci was living at home with her parents in Washington attending the National Cathedral School for Girls. The Johnsons were a close family, and the girls often joined their parents at the White House and were always at the ranch for holidays.
As the first anniversary of the assassination approached, you couldn’t pick up a newspaper or turn on the radio or television that week without hearing endless recaps and analyses. President Johnson had called for Sunday, November 22, 1964, to be a day of “national rededication” to the ideals of President Kennedy, but a presidential declaration was hardly needed. All across the United States, and all over the world, people were paying tribute to President Kennedy at memorial Masses and somber ceremonies of remembrance. More than thirty thousand people entered the gates of Arlington National Cemetery to personally pay tribute at President Kennedy’s gravesite, among them Bobby Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Meanwhile, Mrs. Kennedy had taken John and Caroline to her leased home in Glen Cove, Long Island, to spend the day privately with her children and her sister, who had flown in from London.
President and Mrs. Johnson attended a memorial service in Austin, accompanied by Texas governor John Connally—who had fully recovered from his injuries—and his wife, Nellie. It was torture for me to be back in Texas on that day one year later. Everything was a reminder—the cloudless blue sky, the Texas twang of the locals, the sound of an airplane flying overhead—and in an instant the horrific images flashed into my mind, haunting me, taunting me, as they did almost every night in my sleep. A year had passed, but the nightmares endured, along with the emptiness and feelings of failure; my heart was as heavy as ever. The only way I knew how to deal with it was to focus on my job—checking and rechecking every detail so that nothing was ever left to chance, being the first one to volunteer for undesirable assignments, and all the while trying to prove to President Johnson that I was worthy of his trust and confidence.
THE LBJ RANCH was the place where President Johnson went to unwind, to relax from the stresses of the office, and he loved his ranch so much, and was so proud of it, that he wanted to share it with everyone. Visitors were constantly coming and going—friends, family, select members of the press, cabinet members, staff, and even heads of state from all over the world.
When the visitors arrived, which was usually by fixed wing aircraft or helicopter, they invariably were given a tour of the ranch with LBJ as the tour guide, driving his Lincoln convertible or an old fire truck he kept on the premises. It didn’t matter the status of the guest—everyone was treated pretty much the same and given the tour whether they wanted it or not. The agents had another convertible and a station wagon we used as follow-up cars on the ranch, which took a real beating driving at high rates of speed trying to keep up with the president on the rutted dirt roads. The president would take off, never in the same direction twice, suddenly careening across a pasture when he spotted one of his prize bulls.
“Just look at the size of the balls on that bull!” he’d exclaim with delight. It didn’t matter who was in the car—if there were women present or not—and I often wondered if he was truly reveling with pride, or if he merely loved to see the shocked look on his guests’ faces. While we were stopped, he’d pick up the radio and holler, “Need a little help up here, boys!”
That was the signal that it was refreshment time. In the morning it was Fresca; in the afternoon, Scotch. Cutty Sark and soda. There was more than one occasion when I mixed the president a drink myself—and learned the hard way that you always, always used a fresh bottle of soda, because he could tell the difference—but we tried as often as possible to have an Air Force steward with us for just that reason. Our job was to protect the man, not be his bartender, but if you refused, you were guaranteed a reassignment off the detail the very next day.
President Johnson had his own radio system and frequency, which he used to continuously stay in touch with the ranch foreman, other employees, and friends who owned nearby ranches. We monitored the frequency in an attempt to stay abreast of the situation, but you could never predict where he would go or what he’d do next. The Hill Country of Texas was his backyard playground, and while he knew every inch of it, along with everyone who lived there, we did not. There were a number of ranches the president visited frequently, and sometimes we would get to a neighboring ranch by car only to find out he had changed his mind and wanted to go to a different ranch in the opposite direction, by helicopter. We’d have to hightail it to the new destination to get there before the helicopter arrived. He was constantly changing his plans at the last minute, which resulted in enormous, and frustrating, logistics problems.
The various ranches were separated with barbed wire fencing and gates across the dirt roads to control the livestock, and whenever we’d come upon a closed gate, it was expected that one of the agents would jump out and open the gate to allow the cars to proceed, and then close it after all the vehicles had passed.
Along with the herds of cattle, the ranch was heavily populated with white-tailed deer, and one of the president’s favorite activities was to take his guests deer hunting. If the president were taking someone hunting, he wanted to make sure they were successful, so he’d have the ranch hands, specifically foreman Dale Malechek, keep him informed of where the deer were located. He also knew, having lived there for years, where the deer were likely to be at any time of the day. This was one activity that got him up and out early in the morning, and he got a real kick out of seeing his guests shoot their own deer.
I had grown up deer hunting as well, so this was nothing new to me, but in my home state of North Dakota we did things a little differently. We didn’t drive around in cars seeking the deer. We traipsed through woods or lay in a deer stand up in a tree waiting for the deer to come within range. LBJ’s method was a considerably different approach to the sport.
There were all kinds of creatures that roamed the ranch—armadillos, wild turkeys, skunks, foxes, raccoons—but by far the ones that were the biggest source of anxiety were the peacocks. The guys had warned me about the peacocks, but I really couldn’t believe that such beautiful birds could be as much of a nuisance as they said they were. I was wrong.
Someone had given President Johnson a few peacocks, and now there were at least a dozen of the large birds wandering freely around the ranch. They seemed to particularly like the area along the river near the main house, and I must say they were a magnificent sight when they spread their iridescent tail feathers into an enormous fan. Despite their size, they built nests high up in the trees, and at night, camouflaged by the leaves and branches of the lush live oaks, this created some terrifying moments for those of us on the midnight shift rotating posts around the house. If you happened to walk too close to one of the nesting trees, you’d suddenly see the giant bird flapping its wings as it wailed a blood-curdling screech that echoed across the lawn. And as if that wasn’t enough to scare the living daylights out of you, the next thing you’d hear was the booming voice of the president, yelling through his open bedroom window, irate as hell that he’d been woken up in the middle of the night.
“Will you shut those damn birds up!”
Much as we would have liked to shut them up for good with one clean shot, we resorted to tossing small rocks at them. The idea was to scare them, not necessarily injure, and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
The Johnsons also owned a home on Granite Shoals Lake, which was about an hour’s drive from the ranch, but just fifteen or twenty minutes by helicopter. It wasn’t unusual for the president to be entertaining guests and suddenly decide it was a great day to be out on the lake, and invariably he wanted to fly. There wasn’t much room in the U.S. Army Huey, so one agent would climb aboard with the president and his entourage, while the remainder of the shift would speed away in vehicles, attempting to get there in time to meet the chopper. Half the time, though, the president would change his mind midflight and decide to make a stop at a friend’s ranch in the opposite direction. We’d have to scramble to figure out how to get from where we were to the new destination and race to get there before the president landed.
The president had a motorboat he liked to drive around the lake, so the Navy bought some high-speed Donzis to keep up with President Johnson on the lake in Texas. The first time I went out there, I was surprised to see a familiar face handling the boats. My old friend Jim Bartlett—the U.S. Navy man who had taught me how to water-ski in Hyannis Port and had voluntarily moved my family to our new apartment the week after the assassination—was now in charge of the boats here in Texas. It was great to see him, and whenever we were out on the boats, it brought back memories of the good times we had had at the Cape.
ON THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, I left the Commodore Perry Hotel in Austin and drove with my shift out to the LBJ Ranch as usual, not even thinking about the fact that it was Thanksgiving Day. President and Mrs. Johnson spent the day visiting friends—flying by helicopter to the Moursund Ranch for a late lunch, and then on to the Wesley West Ranch, where they spent the afternoon hunting and riding—before returning to the LBJ Ranch to entertain a houseful of guests for a late Thanksgiving dinner. Usually we were able to get something to eat from a restaurant in Stonewall, near the LBJ Ranch, but on this day, no such luck. Everything was closed. It was a bleak and miserable day without food, but at least we learned a lesson that we had to be self-sustaining on holidays at the ranch.
On November 29, President Johnson returned to Washington, and my first trip to the LBJ Ranch was over. It had been an interesting and enlightening introduction to my new boss.
I WAS RELIEVED to be back in Washington, able to sleep in my own bed and to have a ten-minute commute, at least for the next three weeks. This was also my first opportunity to observe how President Johnson operated in the White House—which, not surprisingly, was vastly different from either Eisenhower or Kennedy.
President Johnson spent most mornings making and receiving telephone calls from the second-floor residence. Various staff members would arrive at the White House for a meeting, only to be summoned upstairs to the president’s bedroom, where he was likely still in his pajamas. Unless there was a morning function at which his presence was required, he usually didn’t go to the Oval Office until at least 11:00 a.m. Another major difference I noticed in this president’s routine was his eating habits. It was almost always breakfast in bed, or at least in the bedroom; lunch was a maybe because he sometimes just kept on going; and dinner was usually very late. Often he would work late into the evening and then eat. By late, I mean sometime around ten o’clock or later. Knowing this was not conducive to good health, Mrs. Johnson tried her best to get him on a regular schedule, to no avail.
Unlike his predecessors, LBJ did not have a regular exercise routine. No afternoon golf like President Eisenhower or daily swims like President Kennedy. When he was at the ranch, he did use the outdoor swimming pool rather frequently, but it was more to cool off and relax than to exercise. And while he might not have been particularly active physically, his mind was in constant motion—listening, absorbing, thinking, plotting, planning, directing—from the moment he awoke to the moment he fell asleep. His workdays were long, and it wasn’t unusual for him to call a senator or congressman at eleven o’clock in the evening—irrespective of any time zone difference, so that it might be two or three hours later on the recipient’s end—after which he’d be so wound up, he’d call for one of the Navy medical corpsmen to give him a “rub”—his term for a massage.
PRESIDENT AND MRS. Johnson planned to spend Christmas and New Year’s at the ranch, but with the end of the year fast approaching, there was still plenty of unfinished national business. No problem. LBJ simply moved his office from the banks of the Potomac to the banks of the Pedernales, bringing his cabinet along with him.
Three days before Christmas, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and all the members of the Joint Chiefs flew to the ranch to finalize the 1965 defense budget and to discuss urgent matters concerning the escalating war in Vietnam. President Johnson held court in his living room as his secretarial staff took notes and kept the coffee cups filled. It was a beautiful sunny day—warm for December—so after lunch, President Johnson suggested they continue their discussion outside. He called for someone to bring out some chairs, while the Joint Chiefs gathered up their briefcases and file folders.
LBJ, dressed in his ranch clothes, slumped down comfortably into one of the webbed folding chairs like this was a perfectly normal setting to decide critical issues affecting the American people and the world, while Chairman General Earle Wheeler; U.S. Army General Harold Johnson, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral David McDonald, and General Curtis LeMay—all in full military dress—looked decidedly out of place, huddled around the splintered picnic table in the flimsy chairs, holding down stacks of classified information so the pages didn’t scatter in the breeze.
By Christmas Eve, the official guests had come and gone, leaving just the family, a few staff members, and the Secret Service. Then on Christmas Day, the press descended on the ranch to photograph the first family and to follow them to church services in Fredericksburg. After the photos at the house were finished, President Johnson walked out the back door with Mrs. Johnson, Luci, and Lynda.
“Goin’ to church, boys!” he hollered as he plunked down into the driver’s seat of his white Lincoln convertible. Now, the road to Fredericksburg was a well-traveled highway, and our preference, and strong recommendation to the president, was for an agent to drive him and his family in one of our cars, with a Secret Service follow-up car trailing behind, but the president would have none of it.
“That is ridiculous,” he said. “I’m driving my own damn car to church, and you boys can follow me.”
During the course of the next four years, I would spend countless weeks at the LBJ Ranch, including every Thanksgiving and Christmas, and no matter how much turmoil the world might be in, President Johnson always insisted on driving himself to church.