CHAPTER 41

TOUCHING THE VOID

CHICAGO WAS INDEED A WAKE FOR THEDEMOCRATICparty, for the Great Society, and, for all practical purposes, for Lyndon Johnson. He would live for five more years, a tortured man, watching his legacy erode before his eyes.

Politically, the 1968 election was a turning point. The Nixon campaign had a number of things going for it, but the two most important were urban and student unrest—the so-called law-and-order issue—and Vietnam. Law and order was clear-cut. Nixon was for it and the administration, especially Ramsey Clark, was apparently against it. Initially it appeared that Nixon would have to share that issue with George Wallace, who told delighted crowds from Wisconsin to Georgia that if a demonstrator lay down in a street on which he was driving, he would run him over. But Wallace proceeded to outflank himself on the right by selecting Curtis LeMay as his running mate. LeMay announced that a Wallace-LeMay administration would not hesitate to employ nuclear weapons to defeat godless communism, thus ending whatever chance he and his running mate had of winning.

Vietnam was a much more difficult issue for Nixon. Since 1964 he had been “supporting” the administration’s policies in Southeast Asia, while at the same time criticizing LBJ for being too weak and timid in pursuing them. Characteristically, he had never missed an opportunity to play the anticommunist card, keeping the specter of McCarthyism and the soft-on-communism charge always in the back of LBJ’s mind. Following the March 31 speech, Nixon had announced that as far as he was concerned, Vietnam was off-limits politically. He would support his president. On September 15, after he received the nomination, Nixon sent word through the Reverend Billy Graham, who had now declared himself to be a Republican, that he would “never embarrass him [President Johnson] after the election. I respect him as a man and as the president.” And he promised that he would “do everything to make [Johnson] … a place in history because you deserve it.”¹But Nixon was ambivalent about a bombing halt. If the administration announced one and negotiations stalled, or the North Vietnamese Army stepped up the war and Johnson had to resume bombing, the Democratic administration would appear once again to have been duped. But if the bomb halt led to productive negotiations and those negotiations dovetailed with a Humphrey campaign that was moving toward de-escalation, withdrawal, and peace, he would be dead. To Richard Nixon’s great discomfort, the ball was in Lyndon Johnson’s court—and in Hanoi’s.

Even more than Nixon, Hubert Humphrey’s political fate was in Johnson’s hands. Opinion polls taken in early September showed the vice president running well behind Nixon nationwide and third in some southern and midwestern states behind both Nixon and Wallace. “On television tonight,” Orville Freeman noted on September 11, “both Wallace and Nixon got more play than Humphrey and the TV made a big point of the fact that he was being snubbed by Jess Unruh in California, Connally in Texas, and by McKeithen in Louisiana.”²Humphrey was a committed cold war liberal and had accepted the conflict in Southeast Asia for ideological, strategic, and political reasons.³But he was also deeply committed to the Great Society and civil rights in particular. Many of those like McGovern, McCarthy, and Michigan Senator Philip Hart who were opposing the war had long been his colleagues in the great liberal struggle. Emotionally, ideologically he was drawn to them. On how close or how far to position himself in regard to LBJ, Humphrey’s advisers were split. Orville Freeman and Jim Rowe believed it was suicide for him to part ways with the administration. Adlai Stevenson had virtually disowned Harry Truman and look what had happened to him. The best bet was to tout Medicare, voting rights, clean air and water, and to keep silent on Vietnam.⁴“Make Nixon seem irresponsible,” another adviser said, “a Wallace with shoes on.”⁵But others insisted that LBJ was probably the most unpopular man in the country in 1968. America wanted peace and would vote only for a candidate who promised not more of the same in Vietnam, but a resolution to that agonizing conflict.⁶Caught between the two camps, Humphrey’s anguish became palpable.⁷

Johnson recognized the value a bombing halt and substantive negotiations would have for the vice president’s campaign, but neither in fact nor appearance did he want politics to govern his last decision on Vietnam. By the end of September, just over twenty-nine thousand Americans had died in the war, 14,073 in 1968 alone.⁸The president wanted to stop the carnage. An end to the fighting would allow the nation to focus its attention on domestic problems. And Johnson was thinking about his own place in history.⁹But he also believed he had to tough it out a little bit longer. He called Mansfield and Dirksen to the White House and told them, “Now I want you all to know one thing. If I don’t have anybody here except me, I’m not going to give in … So there is no use of any pressure speeches or anything else that is going to do one damn bit of good … If the Congress does not agree to what I am doing, all you have to do is to repeal your Tonkin Gulf Resolution.”¹⁰“Johnson feels this very strongly,” Freeman noted in his diary, “and it isn’t a matter of his own personal position or personal pique, in my judgment, it’s more basic than that. I am convinced that the president believes that the only and best chance for peace during his Administration and to make any progress in Paris is now to be just as tough as can be and to make it clear that Hanoi will profit not at all by waiting … Charley [Murphy] said today that he was convinced that the President would rather see Nixon elected than to see any equivocation on this very key issue.”¹¹

Humphrey was whipsawed. “Now, the way I see the thing,” LBJ told Everett Dirksen, “there are 43 percent of the people for Nixon, 28 percent for Hubert, 21 percent for Wallace. So when you take 43 and 21 on Wallace and Nixon that’s 64 percent. Now these McCarthy people. That doesn’t do him any good. If he puts 8 percent with his 28, he’s just got 36. So he’s got to do something to get at some of the Nixon [supporters] back or some of the Wallace people back.”¹²In truth, on Vietnam, Humphrey could not resist the temptation to be all things to all people. He supported the president’s tough line, but shortly after the convention he told reporters that he believed the United States could begin bringing home some troops after the first of the year. Several days later, at the end of a long day, obviously exhausted, Humphrey let it slip that he could live with the minority plank on Vietnam if it came to that.

All of this, of course, sent Johnson up the wall. “I saw the president yesterday,” Freeman recorded, “he only had 10 minutes by the time I got in and he really went after Humphrey. He called him a coward … He’s trying to back off from his own family and unidentify himself with this program … He was furious that he is, as he put it, ogling McCarthy who is just treating him with contempt … On and on he went. A lot of the language was four letter words.” Then his face softened and he said, “Now don’t tell Humphrey anything about this … After all he’s the candidate, it’s hard going, I know he’s discouraged … so you don’t tell him that I’ve been so harsh with him and let’s see if we can’t help him.”¹³Later, Johnson put it to his vice president directly. McCarthy was not his friend and was not supporting him, LBJ said. “Hubert, somebody could knee you in the balls and you’d just come up giggling and saying ‘Knee me again.’ You’re going to have to hang tough. Don’t get off on a Vietnam issue. If you stay tough, Nixon has a way of blowing it. He’ll blow it. But you’ve got to stay tough and on a single path, not go jump[ing] all over the lot.”¹⁴

By mid-September, LBJ had decided on three preconditions for a bombing halt. The North Vietnamese would have to respect the DMZ, foreswear further rocket attacks on Saigon and other cities, and accept the government of South Vietnam as a negotiating partner in Paris.¹⁵Rumors of a peace deal swirled through Washington. On the 24th, Dirksen, who had become the go-between for LBJ and Nixon, paid a secret call at the White House. The GOP candidate, he said, had heard that the administration was leaning toward a settlement “that might be regarded as something of a sellout.” Not without reciprocity, LBJ replied. “I am getting criticism [from members of my own party] on not hitting Nixon,” he told the minority leader. “Now I don’t want to be a hypocrite at all. I want Humphrey to win just like you want Nixon to win. On the other hand, I want Communism defeated in Southeast Asia and this country more than I want anybody to win and that’s why I took myself out of it March 31st.”¹⁶Harriman and Vance subsequently broached the president’s terms to Xuan Thuy, but he refused to budge. “The North Vietnamese have come back with no counter proposals,” Rusk reported to the president and his other advisers. “They repeat merely that after we stop the bombing, they will discuss issues which either side wishes to raise. They refuse to agree to take any action which implies reciprocity for our present limitation on the bombing of North Vietnam.”¹⁷

By this point Harriman, Vance, Ball, and Clifford were well-nigh beside themselves. The North Vietnamese were clearly in a mood to talk, they believed. They had not rejected the president’s proposals out of hand but said that there would need to be a pause before they could discuss them. There had been signs from Oslo, where the Norwegians were in contact with representatives of the DRV, that Hanoi would accept a GVN presence in Paris.¹⁸The Soviets were reporting through several channels that their allies were ready to enter into meaningful talks. The election was just over a month away. On September 25 Ball, who had been appointed U.S. representative to the United Nations on May 14, resigned. “I cannot permit myself to remain quiet any longer about Nixon,” Clifford reported Ball as saying. “He is a liar, dishonest, and a crook. This is my country. We would get poor leadership.” He must be free to help Humphrey, he said.¹⁹

By the last week in September Humphrey was beginning to gain on Nixon in the polls but not quickly enough to catch up. At his public appearances, the vice president was being picketed and heckled both by followers of Wallace and by students who had supported McCarthy. In Salt Lake City on the evening of September 30, he delivered a major speech on Vietnam. It was taped, and excerpts were broadcast on all three networks. Humphrey declared that if he were elected president, he would immediately institute a total bombing halt. The only condition would be that the North Vietnamese respect the DMZ, that is, that the abatement would not further endanger U.S. soldiers in I Corps. He expected Hanoi to negotiate in “good faith”; if it did not, the bombing would resume.²⁰

The speech seemed to win the McCarthy-McGovern wing of the party over completely. A few days after the Salt Lake City speech, the vice president made an appearance in Boston. Humphrey recalled in his memoirs, “As I approached the hotel … I found myself surrounded by hundreds of students carrying signs that read, ‘We’re for you, Hubert,’ or simply, ‘Humphrey for President.’ This was the same Boston that only a few weeks earlier had been the scene of noisy demonstrators who heckled … me.”²¹Fifteen minutes before the speech, Humphrey called LBJ to tell him what he was going to say. Both men were cordial but frank. Johnson did not seem unduly upset. He had already seen a draft that had been released to the press earlier in the day. Quoting from it, he said, “You do require evidence of direct or indirect, or deed or word on the restoration of the DMZ?”

Humphrey replied, “Absolutely.”

Johnson: “I’ll turn it on.”

Humphrey: “God bless you. Thank you.”²²

Johnson understood intellectually that Humphrey had to try to carve out an independent position, and as he told George Ball, whom he phoned during Humphrey’s speech, there was little substantive difference between Humphrey’s position and his own. But the Salt Lake City speech was likely to have dangerous repercussions, Johnson believed, especially because Ball and other Humphrey advisers were telling reporters in background interviews that Humphrey was committed to a bombing halt no matter what.²³Nixon had called Johnson in a huff on the 27th, complaining that rumor had it that Humphrey was going to come out for an immediate unconditional bombing halt. Were the White House and the vice president planning to pull the rug out from under him? No, Johnson replied, and repeated his three conditions.

Then there were the South Vietnamese, specifically Thieu and Ky. The two were more suspicious than ever of the Americans. On September 10, Ky had paid a visit to Thieu and told him that rumors of a coup were in the air. Was it possible that the Americans were planning to oust them before the election so that Humphrey might win? Thieu replied that the same thought had occurred to him. It was quite possible that the Americans would either stage a coup or make a sudden decision to stop the bombing, accept a cease-fire, and press for a coalition government. Both men agreed that they, who had the most to lose if the Americans suddenly caved, should be on constant guard.²⁴Johnson recognized clearly that if the Thieu-Ky regime perceived that it was going to be cut out of the loop and sacrificed on the altar of American politics, they would do everything possible to stall any breakthrough in the peace talks and help Richard Nixon win in November.

As the election approached, the president alternately pulled Humphrey to him and pushed him away. In mid-October Humphrey went to the White House for an off-the-record visit with the president. But because a report of the meeting had leaked to the press, LBJ refused to see him. “It’s the same old business of the President’s petulance and pettiness,” Freeman observed. “This is what has made it difficult for him and why he has lost his personal popularity. How and why he could be this narrow and petty, even making allowances for the fact that he resents and dislikes what he calls Humphrey’s mouthiness … is just incredible.”²⁵A week or so later, the meeting took place. Jim Jones recalled the encounter: “Mr. Johnson would drink scotch and soda and he had a special jigger that just [held] almost a thimbleful of Scotch. He’d chug those down … and they would be equivalent to about four or five regular mixed drinks … Humphrey was trying to keep up with him, but the Filipino houseboy that was mixing the drinks didn’t have the same small jigger for Humphrey … At eleven or midnight or so when they finally wound up their conversation, Humphrey came bounding out of the President’s office into my office. He was about ten feet off the ground, just happy and smiling and running around, and he walked into two closet doors, thinking that was the door out into the hallway.”²⁶

 

IN THE MIDST OF THE MANEUVERINGsurrounding a possible bombing halt, the Johnsons accepted an invitation to dine with General and Mrs. Westmoreland on the evening of October 8. The president was temporarily detained, and Lady Bird and Luci went ahead. “We drove up to Quarters one at Fort Myer,” Lady Bird subsequently recorded in her diary, “and looked down below, through the trees in the valley to the lights of Washington—a glorious view, with the Washington Monument as its chief jewel. At first there were only the four of us, and then General and Mrs. Earle Wheeler joined us.” Lyndon came in very late, around nine. “Looking as tired as I have ever seen him, as worn—the fight temporarily gone out of him. He was warm to the company he was in, even sentimental.” The conversation ranged over the older people’s life-times: World War II, MacArthur, Vietnam. The three men discussed the Paris peace talks. LBJ slept all the way on the drive back to the White House. Lady Bird noticed that the little motorcade did not enter through the Southwest Gate as usual, but instead through a series of closed-off streets and through the front entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue. She asked the Secret Service why. “There has been a penetration,” he replied. Someone had gone over the fence. The individual was apprehended without incident, but Lady Bird later learned that during his presidency there had been more than six thousand threats on LBJ’s life.²⁷The next day, it was Vietnam again.

 

EVEN BEFORE THESALTLAKECITY SPEECH,LBJ had begun leaning toward a halt. He sent General Andrew Goodpaster out to Saigon to survey the situation directly. The general reported back on October 8: “We do not wish to say this in public, but things are going very, very well. All we need here is some time and it will come out fine.”²⁸A week later, Rostow told LBJ that both Creighton Abrams and Ellsworth Bunker “were comfortable about facing negotiations now in view of the improved military situation in Vietnam.” Westmoreland, who was in on the conversation, declared, “The enemy is militarily bankrupt.” The DMZ and the shelling of the cities were now off the table. In this same meeting, Rostow reported that in private talks with Harriman and Vance during the previous weekend in Paris, the North Vietnamese had indicated that the GVN could sit at the negotiating table.²⁹Peace was in the air. “We are going to be charged with moving now for political reasons,” the president observed. “We will be asked why we did not move earlier … However, it would be on my conscience if our negotiators were put in a position to say that the president had held them back and kept them from reaching agreement.”³⁰

But Johnson and his advisers had underestimated Richard Nixon, Thieu, and Ky. The administration had to have South Vietnam’s agreement to conclude a deal, and Saigon was determined to keep fighting, a fact the GOP candidate was determined to turn to his advantage. The president and his advisers settled on a bombing halt announcement at midnight on Wednesday, October 16. That afternoon, however, Thieu’s foreign minister had called in the ambassadors of Korea, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines (the troop-contributing countries) and told them that the United States was about to institute a bombing halt. “I just think we oughtn’t send Thieu anymore stuff,” LBJ exclaimed to Rusk. “To hell with him. I don’t care. I am just tired of the son-of-a-bitch making up that kind of stuff. It is just awful that his Foreign Minister and all that stuff just causes us all this damn trouble. I feel about the same way about these little jerks that have got one battalion over there.”³¹That same day, the North Vietnamese in Paris informed Harriman and Rusk that they would have to contact the NLF and arrange for it to send a delegation to Paris before substantive talks could begin. Johnson described the exchange to Mansfield. “We went all the way through it, and they said, ‘this is all fine, but … you say here that you’ll meet the next day with us with the Government of Vietnam. We have to have the NLF, and we don’t know how long it will take to get them.’ Now we said, ‘well, that’s all right. We’ll be glad if you’ll go get them.’ They said, ‘No, we think you better stop bombing and then we’ll go look for them.’ Now we said, ‘No, you said in your talks that if we would stop bombing that you’d be willing to start discussions the next day.’ ”³²Clifford reported to his staff: “I don’t know whether it’s a real hitch or not … LBJ was in good humor all yesterday, until last nite [sic], when he was in ‘slough of despair’ over the hitch … The man hangs over the ticker in his office until he’s hump-backed. I wish somebody would blow the damn thing up.”³³

On October 19, with the election two and a half weeks away, Thieu went on television and announced that the DRV had done nothing to earn a bombing halt and to declare that he and his government were adamantly opposed to the NLF being present at the Paris negotiations.³⁴Not a day passed that did not produce news stories from Saigon and Paris on the widening gap between the GVN and the Johnson administration and the impossibility of reaching terms suitable to both Saigon and Hanoi. All the while, Rusk was frantically negotiating through the Russians with Hanoi, trying to narrow the gap between the effective date of a bombing halt and the beginning of substantive negotiations. By October 22 it was two to three days versus ten days.

On October 24 Lynda and Chuck Robb’s first child was born at Bethesda Naval Hospital. That evening as Luci, Lynda, and Lady Bird were departing for the hospital, Johnson wrote his son-in-law: “Dear Chuck, This has been a week of waiting, of rumors, and of hopes for a turn toward peace, which have not been fulfilled … While we ache to see this turn in the road, I must be absolutely sure that every step we take is consistent with our national interests and honor and consistent with the sacrifices made by our men in the field and with their security … We all send our love.”³⁵

The day before, Johnson had summoned General William W. Momyer, former commander, 7th Air Force, Vietnam, to the White House. He did not want to jump the lines of command, he said, but he had to know: Would a bombing halt put American soldiers in Vietnam at greater risk? The monsoon season was just beginning, Momyer replied. Bombing from the eleventh to the nineteenth parallel for the three months following would have to be done by radar. That would mean bombing only fixed points and not trucks moving south. Normally, the air force would concentrate instead on bombing supply routes running through Laos. If that could be continued there would be minimal risk. “If you were president, would you do it?” LBJ asked. Momyer paused briefly and then said, “Yes, sir.”³⁶

The last week in October, the White House finally learned that the Nixon camp was secretly parleying with Thieu and Ky, promising them better treatment under a Republican administration and encouraging them to obstruct matters until after the election. The campaign’s go-between with the South Vietnamese government was Mrs. Anna Chan Chennault, the Chinese-born wife of General Claire Chennault. Mrs. Chennault was president of Flying Tiger Airlines, a frequent visitor to Asia, and a long-time intimate of Chinese Nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi and the members of the China lobby in the United States. In 1968 she was cochair of the Republican Women for Nixon. Once he became convinced in mid-October that LBJ was indeed working toward a bombing halt before the election, Nixon had his campaign manager, John Mitchell, telephone her. “Anna,” Mitchell said, “I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you have made that clear to them.” If she could persuade Thieu not to go to the negotiating table, it would offset the effect of any preelection bombing halt announcement. LBJ would appear to be a cynical politician who was willing to abandon a valiant, long-time ally.³⁷

When Johnson got wind of what was happening, he ordered the FBI to begin tailing Madame Chennault. He also instructed Deke DeLoach to send a team to install a listening device on the phone in her apartment in the Watergate building. Would it also be possible, he asked, to put a bug onboard Nixon’s campaign plane? After all, this was treason.³⁸DeLoach hedged. The Watergate was a huge building with a lot of traffic. The risk of discovery if his men tried to put a listening device there or on Nixon’s plane was too great. If the operation were revealed, both the agency and the president would be disgraced.³⁹“The thing that amazed me,” Jim Jones later observed, “was the total inability of the FBI to turn up any kind of hard evidence when they had been able to do it on so many other cases,”⁴⁰But Johnson had other instruments at his disposal: the CIA and the National Security Administration.⁴¹From intercepts collected by these agencies, he learned the full story.

LBJ called Jim Rowe, who was on the campaign trail with Humphrey. “He had the Vietnam embassy tapped, and he called me out in, I think, Peoria,” Rowe later recalled. “It was an open-air speech. I was in the crowd listening to Humphrey, and the Secret Service tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘the president wants to talk with you … Come over to the hotel.’ Johnson got on the phone. He told me about Anna … He said, ‘I just want Humphrey to know about it. Tell him about it, and tell him I don’t think he ought to do anything about it, but that’s his problem.’ I told Humphrey, and Humphrey didn’t ever say anything about it.”⁴²Rostow and Johnson had talked about how to proceed on the Chennault matter. “The materials are so explosive that they could gravely damage the country whether Mr. Nixon is elected or not,” Rostow observed. “If they get out in their present form, they could be the subject of one of the most acrimonious debates we have ever witnessed … For the larger good of the country, you may wish to consider finding an occasion to talk with Mr. Nixon.”⁴³LBJ agreed.

On October 29, top-secret orders went out to the U.S. military command in South Vietnam to “stop all air, naval, and artillery bombardment and all other acts involving the use of force against the territory of the DRV as of 0001 GMT Wednesday [the 30th].”⁴⁴Walt Rostow would later observe that October 29 through 31, 1968, would be the most hectic, intense, and dangerous days he had spent since the Cuban Missile Crisis.⁴⁵The key would be the posture the government of South Vietnam chose to take. On the 29th a member of the American mission paid a visit to Ky at the presidential palace. There could not be an unconditional suspension, Ky declared. “Although the U.S. wants a bombing halt in the interest of the number of votes for Vice President Humphrey, it is impossible without the concurrence of the Vietnamese Government, and there cannot be the ruination of [a nation] for the sake of one person.”⁴⁶LBJ met in almost continuous session with his advisers. Even Clark Clifford was alarmed at Saigon’s mood. It would be “extremely serious” if Thieu and Ky refused to go along. “Ky is a guy who is capable of committing suicide,” Rusk observed. “We’ve invested 29,000 killed and $70 billion … The whole thing could blow up.”⁴⁷

Later, LBJ described the situation as he saw it: “The Nixon forces have been working on South Vietnam … We can’t walk out, quit, split. We have got to hold together. We must tell them we won’t stand for their vetoing this … If he [Thieu] keeps us from moving, God help South Vietnam—because I can’t help him anymore, neither can anyone else who has my job.”⁴⁸On the morning of the 30th Washington instructed Bunker to see Ky and Thieu and make the administration’s position crystal clear. Thieu remained adamant, however: the United States must secure assurances from the DRV that it would negotiate directly with the GVN and that the NLF would not be treated as a separate entity at Paris. “Thieu kept circling around the problem,” Bunker reported. “I finally told him point blank that since we cannot get these assurances, if he insists on making his agreement conditional on such assurances, we shall have to go our separate ways. I warned him of the consequences if he forced us into this position.”⁴⁹Washington held its breath.

Meanwhile, the United States notified both the Russians and the North Vietnamese of the impending halt.⁵⁰Bunker met again with Thieu. “Thieu reacted emotionally and disjointedly,” he reported. “ ‘You are powerful, you can say to small nations what you want. We understand America’s sacrifice for Vietnam. All Vietnamese know our life depends on US support, but you cannot force us to do anything against our interest. This negotiation is not a life or death matter for the US but it is for Vietnam.’ I think they may take us right to the brink.”⁵¹Meanwhile, from Paris, Vance reported that the DRV had agreed that your-side, our-side negotiations could begin in Paris on November 6, the day after the election.⁵²

By noon on October 31 the announcement speech was ready. The president, who had a bad cold and spoke hoarsely, was scheduled to go on television at eight that evening. At 6:05 LBJ telephoned the three presidential candidates and told them what he was going to do. At seven he called Humphrey a second time. LBJ was frank about what he had made clear to both Hanoi and Saigon and what he expected to happen over the next few weeks. They talked about Nixon’s efforts through Madame Chennault and the South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, Bui Diem, to persuade Thieu to obstruct negotiations. He was all for him, the president told Humphrey, and went over plans he had to hit the campaign trail between then and November 5. “We’ve been talking about our programs, Mr. President,” Humphrey said. “I want you to know one thing: if I can do half as good a job as you’ve done, if I am elected, I will be happy.”

LBJ: “Well, you will do good.”

Humphrey: “I have been wanting to call you all the time.”

LBJ: “Don’t you do it. Don’t you do it. Don’t worry about me. You don’t have to … don’t mess with me.”⁵³

After he hung up, LBJ watched his taped speech with family members and staff in the Oval Office. One of his aides took notes: “He said it was the most important decision he had ever made. He further said he was not sure it was the right decision but was what he felt had to be done. Said he couldn’t guarantee Thieu, what Thieu wanted. ‘I could only tell him I was taking them on faith—that the times demanded this action. This is a step toward peace.”⁵⁴

In the wake of Johnson’s announcement, Humphrey drew virtually abreast of Nixon in the polls. Going on the attack, the Democratic nominee challenged his opponent to a debate. When the Republicans refused, Humphrey dubbed Nixon “Richard the Chickenhearted.” A week before the election, McCarthy endorsed his party’s selection in his typically cynical fashion: “I’m voting for Humphrey, and I think you should suffer with me.” The tantalizing question remained: Should Johnson go public with Nixon’s secret deal with Saigon? On the evening of November 2 LBJ called Dirksen. We know what you are doing, he said. Tell Nixon to cut it out. “We’re skirting on dangerous ground,” he warned. “Some of … your old China crowd, and here’s the latest information we got … she’s—they’ve just talked to the ‘boss’ in New Mexico [Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s running mate, was then campaigning in New Mexico], and he says that ‘you [Thieu] must hold out’—just hold on until after the election.” Then Johnson put his cards on the table: “Now I can identify them because I know who’s doing this. I don’t want to identify it. I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important … I know this—that they’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war … And it’s a damn bad mistake.” Dirksen said he would pass along the information—and the warning.⁵⁵

But Nixon refused to call off Madame Chennault. Instead, GOP spokesperson Robert Finch informed the press that LBJ had misled the presidential candidates into thinking that he would stand firm in Vietnam; the failure of the Thieu government to endorse the bombing halt showed how bankrupt and duplicitous the administration’s Vietnam policy was. In Saigon, Ky leaked various cables and transcripts of conversations in which Bunker had tried to persuade him and Thieu to agree to a bombing halt. Bunker was livid. “We obviously will never again be able to repose any confidence in Ky,” he told Rostow, “and indeed it is difficult to know how we can deal in future with this government, given this kind of irresponsibility at the top.”⁵⁶

On November 3, Nixon called LBJ to tell him that he had heard from Dirksen. Johnson repeated his accusations. Nixon just laughed. Everyone knew that Hanoi believed that it would get a better deal from a Democratic rather than a Republican administration. “That’s one of the reasons you had to go forward with the pause,” he said. “But … my God, I would never do anything to encourage Hanoi—I mean Saigon—not to come to the table.”⁵⁷But of course, he had, did, and would.⁵⁸

On November 4, the day before the election, LBJ and his advisers discussed once again the wisdom of leaking the Chennault affair. Rusk was against it: “I do not believe that any President can make any use of interceptions or telephone taps in any way that would involve politics. The moment we cross over that divide we are in a different kind of society.” Because of his desire to see Washington continue to take a strong line in Vietnam no matter who was in the White House, the secretary of state’s views were somewhat suspect. Clifford, for once, supported him. “I think that some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature,” he declared, “that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story, and then possibly to have a certain individual elected. It could cast his whole administration under such doubts that I would think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.” So be it, Johnson declared.⁵⁹

When the final tallies were counted on election Tuesday, Richard Nixon had won a narrow victory. The Republican ticket polled 31.7 million votes, 43.4 percent of the total, while Humphrey and Muskie rolled up 31.2 million, 42.7 percent of the whole. Wallace received 13.5 percent, which was strong for a third-party candidate, and had almost taken enough votes away from Nixon to have changed the outcome. Almost, but not quite. In a sense, the election was close, but in another sense, it amounted, as Theodore White observed, to a “negative landslide” of gigantic proportions. Since 1965 the Democrats had squandered a plurality of more than 16 million votes. The fragile consensus that Johnson had stitched together had been ripped apart by Vietnam, inflation, urban rioting, and the white backlash against the Second Reconstruction. More important, perhaps, the Great Society was proving an ironic success, elevating the poor into the working class and the working class into the middle class, accelerating the trend that had begun after World War II and pushing the country relentlessly to the right. Economically, the vast majority of Americans were no longer aggrieved. The Democrats saw defections from nearly every component of the New Deal coalition: labor, the South, urban ethnics, and farmers. Humphrey won a mere 38 percent of the white vote. Massive majorities among blacks and Jews helped, but even the reliable black vote fell 11 percent from 1964. Nixon had spoken of a “silent majority,” and he turned out to be right. “Nixon’s forgotten men should not be confused with Roosevelt’s,” observed columnist Kenneth Crawford. “Nixon’s are comfortable, housed, clad and fed, who constitute the middle stratum of society. But they aspire to more and feel menaced by those who have less.”⁶⁰

Johnson spent election day at the ranch. Arthur Krim recalled that he was relatively quiet as the returns came in showing Humphrey with an early lead but then shifting to Nixon. “When I got up around seven or eight o’clock, it was all over,” Krim later recalled. “I went downstairs and there was LBJ and so many thoughts swept through my mind about is he going to blame himself, how is he going to handle the Nixon thing? … He was, I would say, obviously deep into himself about the impact of it.”⁶¹

It would take Nixon five long years to reach a peace agreement in Vietnam, through alternate periods of brutal aggression, reluctant concession, and endless talks. Ultimately, nothing he and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, could do could stop the North from winning the war. Johnson’s legacy would suffer with each twist.

 

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE ELECTION,the Nixons paid a visit to the White House. The president and Lady Bird were waiting beneath a South Portico canopy when Pat and Dick arrived. The Johnsons greeted the first couple?elect warmly, LBJ even throwing his arm around the shoulders of the man who had driven his lover, Helen Gahagan Douglas, out of office some twenty years earlier in an acrimonious campaign. The two couples chatted for a bit. Nixon asked Johnson why he had not swept out the Kennedy people in December 1964, after his election. LBJ paused and answered thoughtfully: “Well, there are several reasons. One, respect for President Kennedy. He had trusted me and I tried to put myself in his shoes. How would I have felt if, as soon as I was gone, he had disposed of all my people? I wanted to be loyal to him. Two, I didn’t know for a good while whether I had an excellent man or an incompetent. And Three, I didn’t always have all the troops I needed … Maybe I made a mistake.”⁶²

After lunch, Lady Bird gave Pat a tour of the mansion while Lyndon and Dick went out into the Rose Garden to meet the press. President Johnson, Nixon announced, would speak “not just for this Administration, but for the nation and … for the next Administration as well,” until January 20.⁶³Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. In person, the president-elect would continue to be defferential. “Every time during that whole transition or the briefings prior to the election,” Jim Jones recalled, “Nixon was like a boy scout around Johnson. It was like Johnson was a big, hulking professional football player and Nixon was the autograph seeker.”⁶⁴But everyone knew who held real power, and it wasn’t Johnson.

The press tried to be kind. Stewart Alsop paid tribute in a column entitled “Well, Good-Bye, Lyndon.” In it, he praised the president for his selflessness in not running and his dogged pursuit of an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.⁶⁵TheWashington Post ran an editorial recalling the calm LBJ had brought to the nation in the wake of the assassination, the huge advances he had made in the area of civil rights and poverty alleviation, and his commitment to civil liberty. Johnson was pathetically grateful. “Kay dear,” he wrote Katharine Graham, the publisher of thePost , “I thank you and any others who contributed to the [editorial] … Through the years you and yours have given me courage and strength when I needed it most. Love, LBJ.”⁶⁶But for the most part, Johnson left office unreconciled to the media. “There are people who write with great authority about the president and the presidency who have never been in this room,” he complained in his taped interview with journalist Mel Stuart. “And a great deal of their stuff is imagination. There’s a great press credibility in this country. One man can write an article that someone has planted with him and they’re planted every day by certain people, serving their own ambition … So many people read what one man writes and then they clip it and then they re-write it and then the folks of the country start repeating it and repeating it and pretty soon it becomes an accepted fact and then they have two polls to come along and confirm it. And then you’ve had it.”⁶⁷

On January 14, LBJ delivered his last message to Congress. It turned out to be a warm, sentimental occasion. The president entered to a five-minute standing ovation. In a measured, almost understated voice, he reviewed the achievements of the past five years. They were monumental: voting rights, fair housing, Medicare, the poverty program, environmental protection, federal aid to education, the wilderness program. He expressed disappointment at not obtaining a gun control bill and voiced his hope for a just and speedy peace in Southeast Asia. He paid tribute to Congresses past and present, and singled out the Wizard of Winder, Richard Russell. His closing was eloquent and moving. “Now,” he said, “it is time to leave. I hope it may be said, a hundred years from now, that by working together we helped to make our country more just, more just for all of its people … That is what I hope. But I believe that at least it will be said that we tried.” He took his time leaving, shaking as many hands as he could reach as his colleagues sang “Auld Lang Syne.”⁶⁸

The day before the inauguration was a blur of friendly faces and fond farewells for the Johnsons. Humphrey called with a warm good-bye. The Marine Corps Band came by to serenade with the “Pedernales River March” as the president watched from the Truman balcony. Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman dropped in to pay their respects. Early in the evening, Lyndon and Lady Bird stopped by the staid, exclusive F Street Club to attend a party being thrown by the Henry Fords.⁶⁹From there, it was back to the White House to host a cocktail buffet for family and staff. Johnson mingled easily, telling stories and expressing a few regrets. “Perhaps it would have been different with Fulbright,” he told Joe Califano, “if we had only talked to him more, had him over here more, found some things to agree with him on.” Later, he warned Califano about Nixon. Recalling what he had done to Helen Douglas, he said, “It’s not enough for Nixon to win. He’s going to have to put some people in jail.”⁷⁰He warned his aide to pay $500 extra in federal taxes each year to keep the IRS off his back. The group sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” LBJ paid warm tribute to his staff, and Harry McPherson spoke eloquently about the privilege it had been to work for a man with such lofty goals. Lady Bird and Lyndon left the party and went to bed around eleven.

Shortly after the inauguration the next day, the four Johnsons flew back to Texas, landing at Bergstrom Air Force Base outside Austin. An enthusiastic crowd of some five hundred friends and well-wishers were on hand to greet them. The University of Texas Band played “The Eyes of Texas” and “Ruffles and Flourishes.” The former first couple arrived at the ranch around dusk. “The weather was mild and warm,” Lyndon later recalled. “After we changed into comfortable clothes, Lady Bird and I walked around the yard together.” In the carport behind the house the luggage was piled in a giant mound. For the first time in five years there were no aides to carry the bags inside. Lady Bird looked at the scene and began to laugh. “The coach had turned back into a pumpkin,” she said, “and the mice have all run away.”⁷¹

 

THE LIFE THATLYNDONJOHNSONenvisioned for himself after the presidency was that of rancher-businessman and teacher. In fact, it would be an abbreviated life of spiraling sickness and isolation from public affairs. His presidential library would be built in Austin. Longhorn football games would be attended. Annual wedding-anniversary parties would provide carefree relief. He would draw closer to his family. But overall, it was a time of reflection and decline.

LBJ was consumed by a fit of depression during his first few months back on the ranch. Visitors found him irritable, self-pitying, uncharacteristically withdrawn. He had begun smoking on the plane back to Texas on inauguration day and he never stopped again. His drinking and eating habits became completely undisciplined. In the spring, Elizabeth Goldschmidt received an emergency call from Lady Bird begging her and her husband, Arthur, to come down and spend Easter with them. “She was trying desperately to find a way to pull Johnson out of what was clearly a depression,” Goldschmidt recalled. “And he refused to discuss anything that was less than twenty-five years old.”⁷²

Then suddenly LBJ snapped out of it. “I was very, very worried,” Luci said. “I thought thirty-five years in public service and this is going to be like putting him in a tomb. But he discovered play … And he discovered his grandchildren and it was a delightful time.”⁷³His health improved somewhat and he began sleeping uninterruptedly from ten in the evening until six or seven in the morning. The house filled with people again as LBJ had Lady Bird and her staff on the phone constantly, inviting people to lunch and dinner. He began taking short trips, initially in state and then further afield.⁷⁴And his sense of malicious fun returned, at least for a time. In December 1969, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger began giving LBJ periodic foreign affairs briefings. After he returned from his first trip to the ranch, he told a Cambridge friend that the president was crazy. What do you mean? he asked. “When I first got down there, he called me ‘Dr. Kee-sing-er’ … Like I was the prime minister of Germany.” His colleague told Kissinger that LBJ was putting him on. No, said Kissinger; he is crazy. “And then he got me all mixed up and called me Dr. Schles-ing-er.”⁷⁵Johnson knew perfectly well who the new national security adviser was and that he had been up to his neck in the Chennault affair. This was his way of having some fun and keeping yet another “Harvard” off balance.

By the end of 1969 Lyndon and Lady Bird’s social life was booming and their horizons broadening. They began hosting each year on December 21 a rollicking party at the Argyle Hotel in San Antonio to celebrate their wedding anniversary.⁷⁶Lyndon and Lady Bird had become fast friends of former Mexican president Miguel Aleman. Every February, and spontaneously at other times of the year, the Johnsons would fly to Acapulco and stay in Aleman’s villa there. Typically, LBJ would invite guests at a moment’s notice; the former president’s plane would land and disgorge passengers—some dressed in business attire, others in tropical shirts—and mounds of baggage. LBJ always insisted on bringing his own food and water, a memorial to a bout with dysentery on an earlier trip. As was true at the ranch, LBJ played lord of the manor. If he wanted to golf, everyone golfed. If he wanted to go to the beach, everyone went to the beach. If he decided to watch the famous cliff divers, everyone went to view the cliff divers. Arthur Krim, who had bought a spread an hour’s drive from the LBJ Ranch, and his wife, Mathilde, usually came, bringing with them the latest movie releases.⁷⁷Sometimes Aleman would take the Johnsons to his ranch, Las Pampas, in the interior. The stark beauty and remoteness of the location made a lasting impression on LBJ. On these trips he would invariably bring containers of contraceptives, food, and over-the-counter medicines for distribution to the local peasantry.

When the Johnsons were in residence on the banks of the Pedernales, the business of the day was ranching. Yolanda Boozer, one of LBJ’s retirement secretaries, recalled, “Usually Mrs. Johnson was having coffee with him in the morning when I would arrive and he would be in his bed reading the newspapers. Then, in a matter of thirty minutes, he would be in the office ready to go on his rounds and see about his irrigation and his cattle. By then he would have talked to Dale [Malechek, his ranch manager] a number of times.”⁷⁸For the first year, “he became one of us,” Malechek said. He rode the fence line and helped haul irrigation pipes. If he saw a cow where it should not be or showing signs of illness, he was instantly on the walkie-talkie with Malechek.⁷⁹Initially, he brought the same intensity to his new role as rancher as he had to the presidency. A guest at the ranch recalled an early morning meeting with the hands. “Now, I want each of you to make a solemn pledge that you will not go to bed tonight until you’re sure that every steer has everything it needs,” LBJ said. “We’ve got a chance of producing some of the finest beef in this country if we work at it, if we dedicate ourselves to the job … But it’ll mean working every minute of every day.”⁸⁰

But the spring and summer of 1969 were particularly dry in Texas, and Johnson did not have a farmer-rancher’s patience or stoicism. After touring his sunblasted pasture, he summoned a guest to have a glass of iced tea. “It’s all been determined, you know,” he whined. “Once more I am going to fail. I know it. I simply know it. All my life I’ve wanted to enjoy this land. I bought it. I paid it off. I watched it improve. It’s all I have left now. And then this rotten spring comes along as dry as any we’ve had in fifty years.”⁸¹Johnson spent endless hours talking over every bull purchase and cow sale with Dale Malechek. “Gee, I hope he runs again for president,” the foreman remarked to Jim Jones.⁸²Malechek may have had more than one reason for wanting the boss out of his hair. The rumor among the Secret Service delegation was that the boss was sleeping with Jewell Malechek. John Richards, a member of the detail, recalled that LBJ and Dale each had their own bull and herd of cows. Johnson’s stud proved barren while Malechek’s produced prize calf after prize calf; the Secret Service boys observed that it was only fair.⁸³The affair was probably nothing more than a flirtation. Given the state of Johnson’s health, especially beginning in 1970, it could hardly have been otherwise. At the same time, observers noticed how comfortable Lyndon and Lady Bird seemed with each other after he got over his depression—the fond glances, the hand touches, the obvious pleasure when they were reunited after even the briefest separation.⁸⁴

Jewell Malecheck was not the only new woman in LBJ’s retirement life. During the last days of the presidency Arthur Krim had arranged a lucrative deal with Holt, Rinehart, and Winston for LBJ to publish his memoirs.⁸⁵Sitting in solitude for long hours struggling with memory and prose was not Johnson’s cup of tea. It was decided that he would dictate. Jim Jones, Walt Rostow, Harry Middleton, who would become the first director of the LBJ Library, and twenty-seven-year-old Tom Johnson, the White House aide who had agreed to become LBJ’s Texas secretary, would do the research. To help with the writing, LBJ summoned Doris Kearns, a Harvard doctoral student in political science who had once been a White House intern. They talked for hours, she sitting at the foot of his bed as he, reclining on his pillows, reminisced. There were boat rides on the lake, picnics, and horseback rides.

Kearns recalled that when confronted with microphone and tape recorder, LBJ became rigid, his prose stilted and colorless. He was obsessed with producing a memoir that looked like a presidential memoir, that portrayed him and his administration as he would want history textbooks to portray them. Off the record, he was animated, funny, coarse, and insightful. But he allowed none of this to go on the record. When Kearns showed him a draft chapter including some pithy comments on Wilbur Mills, LBJ exploded: “God damn it, I can’t say this—get it out right now, why he may be the speaker of the House someday. And for Christ’s sake, get that vulgar language of mine out of here. What do you think this is, the tale of an uneducated cowboy? It’s a presidential memoir, damn it, and I’ve got to come out looking like a statesman, not some backwoods politician.”⁸⁶The result,Vantage Point , contained information but no personality. Kearns made notes of their off-the-record conversations, however, and they became the basis for her influentialLBJ and the American Dream.

There were those who bade Johnson to speak out on public affairs, to use the considerable influence traditionally available to ex-presidents. Roger Wilkins, who had served for a time as a White House aide, remembered running into his former boss at a party in New York.

His back was to us, and he was standing there telling a story, and his hair had turned white, but he was still huge … All of a sudden his face goes into a kind of puzzle and he says, “I know, I know you … Little Roger!” I was smoking a cigarette, and at that point he gives me a bear hug … So then he and I moved to the side, and I found myself saying, “Mr. President, when you were president you said that you wanted to finish the job that Lincoln had begun, and I’m puzzled. Just because Richard Nixon is president doesn’t mean that you don’t have one of the two most powerful voices in this country. That’s a voice we desperately need now and I don’t see why you’re not speaking up … ” And he said, “Do you really think so?” I said, “Oh, yes sir, I surely do … ” So then I was off talking to another group later in the party and I looked across the room … and he was off by himself, leaning against the piano, just all by himself, looking at me, and I smiled at him and he smiled at me, a very gentle, sweet smile. He just waved at me and smiled.⁸⁷

LBJ really did not believe Wilkins, and he was right. Most people wanted to forget Lyndon Johnson. Columnist Charles Roberts described his exile best: “The most militant civil-rights advocate ever to occupy the White House, reviled by Negro militants; a Southerner scorned by Southerners as a turncoat; a liberal despised by liberals despite the fact he achieved most of what they had sought for thirty years; a friend of education, rejected by intellectuals; a compromiser who could not compromise a war ten thousand miles away.”⁸⁸Johnson now found nearly all public venues excruciating. He had attended the launching ofApollo 11 in July 1969. The moon shot should have been a crowning moment for him, but instead he found it deeply humiliating. Waiting for Vice President Agnew to arrive, he was forced to sit in the bleachers in the blistering sun with other VIPs, most of whom did not even acknowledge his existence. “I remember that moment,” Johnson later confided to an interviewer. “My trousers stuck like cement to the back of my legs, the sweat from my hair kept dripping down my neck, and my stomach was upset. I knew right then I shouldn’t have come.”⁸⁹

At the end of the first year of retirement, LBJ looked fairly well. “His craggy face was kind of mellow in those days,” Warren Woodward recalled. “His hair was long; it was swept back and curled on the ends like that of an elder statesman in the Andy Jackson vein. The lines in his face were deep, but … outside the gaze of the public eye, he aged gracefully.”⁹⁰Johnson’s heart condition would not leave him alone, however. Severe chest pains sent him to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio in March 1970.⁹¹In the middle of 1971 he was hospitalized again, this time for viral pneumonia. In the spring of 1972, he flew to Tennessee for Buford Ellington’s funeral and then on to Charlottesville, Virginia, to visit Lynda and Chuck Robb and their children. There he suffered another major heart attack, which put him into intensive care for three days. He survived the trip back to Texas but had to be hospitalized again for an extended period. From that day forward, Johnson could not go a day without a nitroglycerin tablet and oxygen; even then he was racked by severe angina.⁹²“The chest pains hit him nearly every afternoon,” a friend recalled, “a series of sharp, jolting pains that left him scared and breathless.”⁹³

Occasionally, LBJ did speak out on history and public affairs, but only in a very controlled environment. He agreed to a series of television interviews with Walter Cronkite that aired on CBS, but for the most part he kept his counsel. There were private attempts at reconciliation which seemed always to revolve around those associated with Vietnam. One such occasion was in New York at a dinner hosted by the Krims. Bob McNamara and Mac Bundy were among the guests. “After dinner he was in a very reflective mood,” Arthur Krim recalled, “and I remember him saying to those two something which I thought was over-generous. That was, he said, ‘You know, I want you fellows to know everything that went wrong in Vietnam that’s being criticized, it was my decision, not yours’ … He was more depressed later in the evening than I’ve ever seen him.”⁹⁴Johnson agreed to participate in a five-hour off-the record seminar with editors and columnists from theWashington Post on Vietnam. It came not long after his hospitalization in 1970. Dick Harwood, one of the participants, recalled the encounter: “His illness showed in his face, I thought, and from the side his skin had the yellowish-gray look you find on dead men.” At one point he was asked about the events leading up to the October 31, 1968, bombing halt. “As he talked,” Harwood recorded, “he seemed to take on another appearance; the pallor and signs of sickness went away and all of a sudden you were sitting with a vigorous, commanding, strong man whose mind was so clear, so well-organized, so quick that you suddenly became aware of the power of that personality … What came through above all was not his ‘complexity’ but the simplicity of his passions and loves and hates and the singleness of his mind and mental processes, a singleness that let him lay out so coherently and with calculated meanderings his case on the bombing halt.”⁹⁵Haynes Johnson, who was also present, remembered his saying in conclusion, “I want you to know, no matter how we differ about things, I feel I am at the table of friends, and I want to thank you for letting me come and visit with you.’ ” The journalists stood and applauded.⁹⁶

Johnson wanted to go to the 1972 Democratic Convention, but his health would not allow it. Instead, he agreed to receive George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, at the ranch. McGovern recalled that he arrived at midmorning and immediately sat down to visit with LBJ and Lady Bird on the front lawn under a big oak tree. LBJ assured McGovern that he had his support—active support, not passive. It would probably be best if they avoided discussing Vietnam. “Now on the war,” LBJ said, “I think you’re crazy as hell, and you think I’m crazy as hell; so let’s not talk about it.” They were both old populists. Johnson believed in tranquilizing big business and finance while he pushed his social programs. McGovern was more confrontational, but on the goals to be achieved, they were of a mind.⁹⁷“As we were finishing lunch,” McGovern later recalled, “I could tell he was in some physical pain. So I asked him how he was feeling and he said, ‘Well, every day I start out pretty well, but then by afternoon these damn pains start bothering me, and at four o’clock, I’m pretty well through. I go lay down.’ ”⁹⁸After the election, LBJ confided to Tommy Corcoran that McGovern was the worst presidential candidate in American history. How in that day and time against Richard Nixon could a Democratic candidate carry only one state?

By the time he met with McGovern, LBJ realized he was dying. “He struck me as a man who really knew he had something terribly wrong with him,” McGovern said, “although he didn’t seem to be distressed about it.”⁹⁹His doctors had ordered him not to make any more speeches, but he could not resist an invitation to deliver the keynote address at a civil rights symposium at the Library scheduled for December 11 and 12, 1972. The affair was to begin with a reception at the ranch, but the day before the festivities were scheduled to start, Texas was engulfed by one of the worst ice storms in living memory. Earl Warren, the Humphreys, and other guests had to be bused into Austin from San Antonio. Against the urging of his doctors and Lady Bird, LBJ traversed the fifty miles from the ranch to Austin by car.

All the major figures of the Second Reconstruction were there, conservatives, moderates, and radicals. LBJ’s opening remarks proved to be rather perfunctory, but he was to have another chance. On the last day of the conference a group of activists who wanted to attack the Nixon administration demanded to be heard. The organizers were reluctant, but Johnson insisted that the “redhots” be given their chance. When they finished their indictment, he mounted the steps to the podium, slowly, painfully. What followed was a recapitulation of his famous Howard speech that talked about a level playing field and the continuing need for affirmative action. “I’m kind of ashamed of myself that I had six years and couldn’t do more,” he declared. “So let no one delude himself that his work is done … To be black, I believe, to one who is black or brown, is to be proud, is to be worthy, is to be honorable. But to be black in a white society is not to stand on level and equal ground. While the races may stand side by side, whites stand on history’s mountain and blacks stand in history’s hollow. We must overcome unequal history before we overcome unequal opportunity.”¹⁰⁰He was forced to stop and pop a nitroglycerin pill in the middle of his speech, yet Johnson was his old animated, compelling self. The crowd rose to its feet, applauded, and then gathered around.¹⁰¹

 

LYNDONJOHNSON BREATHED HIS LASTat 3:50 in the afternoon on January 22, 1973. Fulfilling his worst nightmare, he was alone in his bedroom at the ranch. He called the switchboard and reported that he was in distress. Secret Service agents Ed Newland and Harry Harris rushed to his room with a portable oxygen unit. They found Johnson lying on the floor, not breathing. Newland attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it was too late. Lady Bird, who was contacted while driving in her car in Austin, rushed back. At 4:19 Johnson was flown to Brooke Army Medical Center, where shortly after he was pronounced dead.

For the next twenty-four hours, LBJ’s body lay in state at the Library, where some twenty thousand people filed by to pay their respects. During the first night of Lyndon’s death, while the body was at the Library waiting for the doors to open the next morning, a coterie of old friends watched over the casket. Lady Bird had organized them. “I do not want him to be alone,” she said. “Stand with him.”¹⁰²

From Austin the body was flown to Washington and transported by the traditional horse-drawn caisson to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Sixty percent of the crowd that lined the route was black. The next morning a memorial service was held at the National City Christian Church. Leontyne Price sang “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Marvin Watson, oddly enough, delivered the eulogy. He was ours, Watson said, “and we loved him beyond all telling.”¹⁰³

Burial day in Texas was bitterly cold but sunny. LBJ was entombed in the family plot on the banks of the Pedernales beneath a canopy of live oak trees. Lady Bird was dignified, composed, vulnerable. Father Schneider and John Connally spoke. “I remember a black man hobbled up,” Luci later said. “He was ninety-two years old. I tried to comfort him by telling him my father loved him and his people. ‘Ma’am, you don’t have to tell me he loved me; he showed he loved me.’ ”¹⁰⁴Ralph Ellison, the distinguished black intellectual, spoke for the inarticulate. Spurned by conservatives and cosmopolitan liberals, LBJ, he predicted, would “have to settle for being recognized as the greatest American President for the poor and for the Negroes, but that, as I see it, is a very great honor indeed.”¹⁰⁵