Kati Marton (29 page)

In January 1968, during the Tet holiday period, the Vietcong launched a major offensive, mocking the “experts” who had predicted the end was near. No amount of number juggling or upbeat slogans about corners being turned could alter the basic fact: America’s South Vietnamese allies were tired, corrupt and indifferent about their own government. American troops could not win the war for them. When the generals asked for two hundred thousand more troops, Johnson understood his Vietnam policy had failed. His job ratings at this point were the lowest they had ever been.

Lady Bird could no longer keep her fears about her husband’s mental and physical state to herself. She poured her heart out to her husband’s confidant, Abe Fortas. Did he agree with her that her husband could be “a happy man retired”? Couldn’t he occupy himself as a rancher and maybe teach at the University of Texas? Fortas agreed the time had come.

Walking away from his life’s greatest love was not easy for Lyndon Johnson. He kept postponing his decision, waiting for some deus ex machina to extricate him. Johnson’s spirits rallied and he briefly reconsidered staying in the race after the Tet offensive. But it was a temporary lift. Sixty-three percent of his countrymen disapproved of his Vietnam policy. Bobby Kennedy announced he would run for president. Johnson’s nightmare, that the Kennedy who seemed most hostile to him would reclaim his brother’s throne, seemed to be coming true.

On March 31, 1968, the man who dreamed of greatness all his life faced the bright glare of television cameras in the Oval Office. “Remember,” Lady Bird whispered in his ear, “pacing and drama.” The president announced a partial bombing halt and called for Hanoi to join in peace talks to end the war. And then, looking momentarily off-camera at Lady Bird, said, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

The country and even many of his closest friends were stunned. Lady Bird, though, felt “immeasurably lighter.” Relief was also her husband’s immediate reaction. “The weight of the days and the weeks and the months had lifted. I had done what I knew ought to be done.” But the awful year was not yet over. Within a few days, the president was back in front of the television cameras. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., touched off a wave of arson, looting and terror in cities across the country. “I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck down Dr. King,” the president pleaded, while smoke rose a few blocks from the White House.

Mindless violence struck again just two months later. Robert Kennedy was thanking his campaign workers in a narrow Los Angeles hotel corridor when Sirhan Sirhan emptied all eight bullets of his revolver into him. The Johnsons were ending their presidency as they had begun it.

Reeling from double grief, the country seemed to have lost its bearings. Through the year’s convulsions, Lady Bird remained composed, even as her husband’s legacy seemed in peril. The Democratic convention in Chicago revealed a party at war with itself. Lady Bird’s gaze was fixed firmly on her beloved Texas hill country. She had no fears for her own future. That fall, another of her burdens was lifted when Jacqueline Kennedy married Onassis. “One of the oddest things is that as the result of the wedding which will happen tomorrow on a Greek island,” she wrote in her diary, “I feel strangely free. No shadow walks beside me down the halls of the White House …. I wonder what it would have been like if we had entered this life unaccompanied by that shadow?”

Lyndon Johnson lived only four years after he left the White House. The great volcanic source of energy stopped flowing once he left politics. Rejected by the people and the country he had worked to change, he started eating and drinking more than he should. Lady Bird thought she was saving his life by getting him out of the White House. Perhaps she did. But she underestimated his need to stay “in the arena,” as she put it. His old heart trouble flared up. In June 1972, he suffered a heart attack. His last speech, on December 11, 1972, was about civil rights, his proudest legacy. A humbler man than the one who left the White House, he claimed he was “sort of ashamed of myself, that I had six years and couldn’t do more than I did …. To be a black in a white society isn’t 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. Until we overcome unequal history we cannot overcome unequal opportunity.” His last speech was a reminder of LBJ at his best.

On January 22, 1973, Johnson suffered a fatal heart attack while he was taking an afternoon nap. A Secret Service agent who arrived within minutes with a small oxygen tank found Johnson unconscious on the floor. For once, the woman who had been by his side from the beginning was not there. Too late, Lady Bird rushed back from Austin. This man who hated being alone, died alone at his ranch. Afterward, Lady Bird said she was glad of one thing: her husband did not live to witness his successor’s attempt to subvert the Constitution a few months later. Watergate would have broken Lyndon’s heart, she said.

As for herself, she said she had no regrets about her life with him. He had delivered the adventure he had promised her on their first date in 1934. “Lyndon stretched me. He made us all perform,” she said, laughing at some private memory. While Johnson’s legacy is still wrapped in controversy, hers is beyond dispute. She made the Johnson presidency possible.

M
ISALLIANCE

THE TRANSITION FROM LYNDON JOHNSON TO RICHARD NIXON FOLLOWING
so much national turbulence—was miraculously smooth. The contrast between the couple heading home to Texas and the new arrivals from California, however, was nothing short of stunning. The new tone was set the first night Pat and Dick Nixon moved into the White House. The president and first lady did not share the usual celebratory first evening meal. Pat asked for cottage cheese to be sent up to her bedroom, while her husband ordered steaks he shared with their two daughters and their husbands. It was the beginning of a presidency where the chief executive
and his first lady lived virtually separate lives, carefully avoiding each other’s company. The most betrayed first lady in American history was married to a president who never strayed from his marriage vows. He did not know how to flirt; he rarely even noticed other women. He betrayed his wife with his only real passion, politics.

Richard Nixon cut off the most valuable source of honest counsel a politician can have, that of the partner in the enterprise. He turned the lively redhead with the high cheekbones who had first caught his eye into a nearly silent partner. Nixon could never bring himself to ask his wife or his fellow citizens for understanding or forgiveness. He came close to embodying the Horatio Alger-type story of the self-made man, but in the end, his personal weaknesses doomed both his marriage and his presidency.

THERE HAD BEEN WARNING SIGNS,
assassination threats. In Caracas, Venezuela, the final stop on Pat and Dick Nixon’s twelve-thousand-mile Latin American goodwill journey in 1958, they had been warned that there was going to be trouble. The local Communist party was expected to make maximum use of Vice President Nixon’s arrival. The military junta was new, its enforcers were inexperienced. But Nixon was never one to retreat from combat; he felt most fully alive engaged in a good fight. As the Nixons emerged from
Air Force One
they could sense that the crowd below was not friendly. Skip the welcome speeches, Nixon instructed his military aide. Pat instinctively bent down to hug the little girl holding a bouquet for her. A grim Nixon pressed his wife toward the terminal. Just then, the Venezuelan army band struck up the country’s national anthem. The Nixons froze where they stood. As if on cue, a shower of spit rained down on Pat and Dick from above. Saliva, brown from chewing tobacco, oozed down Pat’s face and tracked her new red suit. Nixon stood rigid. He did not reach out to his wife with an arm or a handkerchief. Nixon preferred spit, or any other indignity, to betraying human emotion. It was not the first time his wife was reminded that no personal cost was too high for her husband’s political ambition. In their marriage, the personal was always subordinated to the political.

By the time they reached the presidency, the Nixons were locked in a
lifeless union, sustained by habit, a sense of duty and, on his part, political necessity. Could any woman have mitigated the blend of suspicion, anger and insecurity that propelled Nixon to the White House—and then destroyed him? Pat had long since stopped trying.

And yet it started as a love match. The Nixons’ story began as a conventional pre–World War II romance. Twenty-four-year-old Dick knew the minute he saw Patricia Ryan that she was for him. He was proposing from the minute he met her, he said later. Like Lyndon Johnson, Nixon asked for his wife’s hand on their first date. Pat was appalled and firmly declined. She was far from smitten. Nor did she understand Nixon’s titanic willpower. But Dick knew that a small-town law practice would be the launching pad of his enormous ambitions. No matter how solitary a man he was, he would need a wife in that enterprise. Nixon was as determined in love as he would be in politics. For Nixon, life was combat.

Why a man with no natural charm, comfortable only in solitude and profoundly suspicious of everyone, would choose politics will forever remain a mystery. Pat surely sensed some hidden darkness and for a long time did not reciprocate his feelings. She had other beaus and a full life of her own as a Whittier, California, high school teacher. Her evasions only enhanced her appeal and his ardor. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for the girl he called his “wild Irish Gypsy.” Nixon even drove Pat on dates with other men. Nothing discouraged him. “Despite your refusal to let me be much more than an acquaintance,” he wrote her with typical bathos, “by all that I hold sacred, Patricia, I say that you are a great lady—and now I think you know what I mean by that.” His dogged pursuit—a carved pumpkin left on her doorstep at Halloween, a fully decorated tree at Christmas—finally wore her down. Together they would go places, he promised. Like Lady Bird, Pat longed for adventure and escape from small-town life. Like LBJ, Nixon delivered the adventure, but at an even higher price.

Pat and Dick were alike in some ways, dangerously different in others. Both were shaped by austere childhoods, marked by loss. Pat’s mother died when she was twelve, her father five years later. Two of Richard’s brothers died of tuberculosis. Neither Pat nor Dick had experienced much in the way of nurturing love. His dour, Quaker mother
refrained from any show of physical affection and abandoned Dick for years while she nursed his sick brother. Pat and Dick were both secretive and self-disciplined to the point of near total repression. Dick did not find out until years later about Pat’s mother’s painful death from cancer. Pat did not even tell him that she had worked briefly as a movie extra and spent a few years in New York City. She kept hidden her mother’s German birth and the fact that her father had died of the same disease that killed Dick’s brother. She did not even tell him her real name, Thelma, until they went for their marriage license. They never broke through each other’s defensive walls. This motherless daughter and this son of a hot-tempered Irishman survived by banking their emotions. Neither liked displays of feeling and would do almost anything to avoid confrontation. Dick was incapable of real sharing, of real love, perhaps because he had never really experienced it. He once revealed that his mother “never said ‘I love you’ because she considered that to be very private and very sacred. And I feel the same way …. I don’t say …‘I love you’ and the rest … that’s just the way I was raised …. In my family we considered affection and love to be very private …we didn’t think we had to prove it by saying publicly all the time ‘I love you.’”