Master of the Senate (127 page)

A
ND THEN
P
OSH
O
LTORF
, who had known Lyndon Johnson so long, saw, for the first time, the true strength of Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson’s usual reaction to physical danger, real or imagined, and to minor pain or illness, was dramatic; at San Marcos, he had had the reputation of being “an absolute physical coward,” and all during his life after college, whenever he had encountered minor physical problems—the only physical problems Oltorf had ever seen him encounter—he had become “frantic.”

But there had been other episodes in his life, episodes that Oltorf had not witnessed. To avoid service in a combat zone during the war, Lyndon Johnson, a reserve officer, had spent months traveling up and down the West Coast on an ostensibly Navy-ordered tour on which the Navy often could not even find out where he was. But when inquiries from constituents and reporters made it imperative that he at least give the appearance of entering a combat zone, he persuaded President Roosevelt—“for the sake of political future,” as one of Roosevelt’s aides wrote—to send him to Australia as an “observer.” And when, in Australia, he realized that he could not, “for the sake of political future,” return without at least saying that he had witnessed combat, he flew as an observer on a bombing mission on which his bomber was attacked by Japanese Zeroes. It was only a single bombing mission; the next day he left the war zone as quickly as possible. But on that mission, while he was watching Zeroes heading straight at his plane, Lyndon Johnson had not been frantic but “cool as
a cucumber.” Although he had avoided for as long as possible being at the scene of battle, once he was at it, his conduct had been calm and courageous, nonchalant in the face of danger. And, of course, when, during the 1937 and 1948 campaigns, there had been not minor sickness but grave illness, and great pain, Lyndon Johnson had not let it interfere with his work. All his life, whenever courage had been needed, it was there. This, now—the pain in his chest, the heaviness in his arms, the words “heart attack”—was what he had always dreaded. But what was required now was calm. And, instantly, there was calm. Oltorf, who had seen Lyndon Johnson “complain so often, and so loudly” about indigestion, now saw a doctor tell Lyndon Johnson that this time the “indigestion” was a heart attack—and Oltorf saw Lyndon Johnson’s demeanor change.

Yes, Johnson told Dr. Gibson, if it was best for him to get to Washington, he could do it. The place to take him, he said, was the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He wanted his people to be at the hospital to meet him, he said, and he told George Brown who they were, and to get them there: Lady Bird; Walter Jenkins; Earle Clements, so that he could give him instructions about the Senate’s upcoming work; George Reedy, to handle the press. He wanted someone he knew—someone responsible to
him
—with him at all times, and he asked Oltorf to accompany him in the ambulance. When it arrived—Middleburg’s “ambulance” was actually a hearse, with the undertaker driving—the doctor took a seat in front, Johnson lay on the floor in the rear, and Oltorf sat in the rear with him, on a sort of jump seat that pulled out from the wall, “so that I was sitting right over him.”

From that vantage point, Oltorf saw not only calmness but courage. The chest pain would “come and go,” Oltorf recalls, and about halfway to Washington, it got worse. “I can’t stand this pain,” Lyndon Johnson told the doctor. “You’ve got to give me something for it.” The doctor said, “I can give you a shot if you want, but we’ll have to stop, and it’s going to take some time, and time means a lot to you.”

“If time means a lot, don’t stop,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Keep going.”

“It was a very hectic ride,” Oltorf was to say. “It hurt him desperately.” But between bouts of pain, he and Oltorf talked. “It was an amazing conversation,” Oltorf felt. “He was extremely courageous and brave. I always thought, you know, that if he had a toe ache, he’d complain about it…and expect a great deal of sympathy. He was just the opposite with this serious thing.”

Oltorf watched him running over things in his mind. “I think he definitely felt there was a possibility that he’d die before he got there,” Oltorf says, and at one point, “he reached up to me,” and said, “Posh, if something happens, I want to tell you where I think my will is.” He said he thought it was in the bottom drawer of his desk at the radio station in Austin, that he had drawn it up when he went off to war and had not seen it in a long time, but thought that it was there. “If it’s not,” he said, “I just want to tell you what I want. I want Lady Bird to have everything I have…. She’s been a wonderful, wonderful wife, and
she’s done so much for me. She just deserves everything I have. That’s what was in my will.”

There was another matter Johnson mentioned, and Oltorf did not allude to it in the oral history he gave the Lyndon Johnson Library, although he included it—or at least part of it—in his interview with the author. “Then he asked me did I ever see Alice [Glass]. That was something he very seldom asked me. And I said [I saw her] off and on. He said, ‘How is she?’ and I said all right, and then he said something I didn’t tell you and I don’t think I’m going to.”

And there was another important matter. “Doctor,” he said, “let me ask you something. Will I be able to smoke again if this is a heart attack?” The doctor said, “Well, Senator, frankly, no,” and Johnson, with what Oltorf recalls as “a great sigh,” said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.”

At the emergency room entrance to Bethesda, attendants lifted Johnson onto a stretcher and carried him into an elevator, which took them up to the seventeenth-floor cardiac treatment section. Lady Bird, Walter Jenkins, and George Reedy were in a waiting room there (Clements had not been located), and they saw Johnson carried past its doorway into an examining room, and doctors took them to the private room he would have as a patient. After about a half hour he was brought in, and lifted onto the bed. “He looked very, very bad,” Walter Jenkins says. Johnson said the doctors had told him he had had a serious heart attack, and that they would be coming to “put him under” in a few minutes. Lady Bird was Lady Bird. “She didn’t break down or cry or carry on or anything of that nature, as some women do,” Jenkins says. “It’s not her nature to do that. She just said, ‘Honey, everything will be all right.’” Johnson told Reedy to notify the press about the attack, and not to minimize its seriousness, to tell them it was “a real bellybuster,” and that Clements would take over for him. He gave Reedy instructions for Clements. He told Jenkins “where his will was” and reminded him about the cash in the secret compartment in his desk, and told him to give it to Lady Bird. “I really felt that he did not think he would live through the night,” Jenkins would recall. “He was preparing himself for not being there anymore….”

He told Lady Bird to stay with him in the hospital, not to leave him. He handed her his wallet and keys. He mentioned the two suits he had ordered that morning. “Tell him to go ahead with the blue,” he said. “We can use that no matter what happens.” He asked for a cigarette, and when Lady Bird said he couldn’t smoke anymore, he said if he could have one last cigarette, he would never have another. Someone handed him one. “It was very sensuous,” Mrs. Johnson recalls. “He looked at it like, ‘This is the dearest thing.’” Then he went into shock. Mrs. Johnson saw him turn gray, “just about the color of pavement.” He was “motionless as stone and cold to touch.” After a while, the doctors came to see her. They said her husband had had a very serious heart attack, that his chances were fairly good, but that only time would tell. The first twenty-four hours, they said, would be critical.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON HAD SUFFERED
a myocardial infarction, the death or damage (infarction) of part of the muscular substance of the heart (myocardium) because the flow of blood to the heart had been interrupted by a blockage of an artery.

He was kept sedated for forty-eight hours, but there were intervals of consciousness, during one of which it became apparent that sedation had not dulled his ability to obtain information that someone did not want to give him. Lady Bird may have been determined not to let him know the doctors’ estimate of his chances of survival during this initial period following the attack, but he got the information from her anyway. She had been sitting almost constantly at his bedside, but she left the room for a few minutes, and when she returned, he spoke as if doctors had visited him during her absence.

“I’ve just heard the bad news,” he said.

“What news? What do you mean?” she said.

“I know the doctors feel I only have one chance in ten of pulling through.”

“Nonsense!” she blurted out. “They say it’s fifty-fifty.”

With this type of heart attack, however, the patient’s chance of survival increases dramatically with each day he survives without another attack and without increased damage to the heart from the first attack, and by the fourth day, although he was still permitted no visitors other than his wife, doctors told the press that while the Majority Leader had suffered “a myocardial infarction of a moderately severe character,” X-rays had shown no further damage to the heart, “his condition is stabilized,” and “he is resting comfortably.” “He was quite critically ill following the attack, but his recovery has been satisfactory,” they said. Any immediate return to work was out of the question, the statement said. “He cannot undertake any business whatsoever for a period of months. However, if there are no further attacks of a severe character and his recovery continues to be satisfactory, he should be able to return to the Senate in January.”

The damage to his chances of reaching his great goal appeared for some time, however, to be as severe as he had feared it would be when Clinton Anderson had first told him he was having a coronary.

“The immediate political casualty of the Majority Leader’s heart attack is the Johnson boom for President,” which previously “had been coming along on schedule,” Doris Fleeson wrote, and in the days following the Fourth of July weekend, the prevailing view in newspaper articles and columns was that the damage might well be permanent. A headline over an Associated Press analysis said “HEART ATTACK DROPS JOHNSON FROM WHITE HOUSE HOPEFULS,” and in an era before the later dramatic advances in the understanding and treatment of heart disease, that analysis did not apply merely to 1956. “Although when he recovers he may have a long and useful life as a senator, uncertainty is the greatest certainty about the life of a man who has had an attack,” the article declared. “Anyone who has had an attack and seeks the presidency starts under a political handicap: the voters are conscious of the risk in picking him over an opponent who has never had his first heart attack.” Johnson’s attack therefore “just about eliminates the 46-year-old Texan” permanently “from consideration as a presidential candidate.” Some journalists speculated that the attack might eliminate him from the leadership as well. While the doctors had said Johnson should be able to return to the Senate, they had declined to express such optimism about a return to the leadership; “It might be six months before it would be possible to say whether he could resume the leadership,” one of his physicians said. The AP said it is “questionable that when he returns his doctors will let him resume as Senate leader, preferring he go back to the less demanding role of senator.”

Lyndon Johnson fell into a depression. The doctors had told Walter Jenkins and George Reedy that depression was common among heart attack victims, but they also told the two aides that this one seemed unusually severe. Jenkins says he understood why: “He felt… if he had any chance to be President or Vice President or something, that this had ended it…. He became quite despondent at times.” Neither antidepressant medication nor the arrival of his mother (whose trip to Washington was her first airplane flight) seemed to help. For some days, he lay in his bed—“just wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t have anything to do with [anyone],” in Jenkins’ words—while his centrality in his assistants’ lives was dramatized. Bobby Baker got the news over the telephone at the New Jersey seashore, where he was vacationing with friends. Returning from the telephone, he was, recalls one friend, “white as a sheet. ‘The Leader’s had a heart attack,’” he said. Rushing to Bethesda, he was told that Johnson was allowed no visitors except Lady Bird. He went down to the lobby and waited—day after day. “For almost ten days I stayed at the hospital almost around the clock, leaving only to grab a few random hours of sleep and to take showers,” he was to recall. “Though there was little I could do, I felt it my duty to be there.” Once he went down to the Capitol to see Sam Rayburn, seeking solace,
but didn’t get any: “Speaker Rayburn was disconsolate and near tears.” And when, finally, some days after Baker had returned to work at the Capitol, Lady Bird telephoned to say that Lyndon wanted to see him, Baker found “a quiet and sober man who talked of how close he’d come to death, of how he would be forced to curtail his activities, and of how he might no longer be able to act as Senate Majority Leader.” Saying he might resign from the Senate, he asked Baker if he would resign, too, and manage a radio station in Brownsville he was thinking of buying. “You’re my Leader, and I’ll follow where you lead,” Baker replied.

And then, one day, Reedy’s telephone rang and it was Jenkins. “For the love of God, do you know what’s happening?” Walter asked him, and told him to go to the hospital, and Reedy recalls, “When I got to the hospital, I couldn’t believe it!”

Letters—almost four thousand of them—had been pouring into Johnson’s office from friends and the public, and Lady Bird had been reading them to him. For days, Johnson had shown little response. And then one morning, immediately upon awakening, he had told Lady Bird that he wanted the letters answered—all of them, each answered not with a form letter but with a personalized note. Lady Bird should send handwritten notes to personal friends, he said, and as for the rest—he told her to have Booth Mooney come to the hospital, and when Mooney arrived, “he had a project for me,” a project Mooney was to call “Project Impossible.”