Master of the Senate (130 page)

For additional exercise, a kidney-shaped swimming pool was built in the front yard of the ranch house. It was a Johnsonian pool—large, nine feet deep at the deep end, expensive, personally supervised (“Every shovelful,” George Reedy says. “That swimming pool became one of the great construction projects of history”), equipped with every technological innovation, including a huge, elaborate heater, kept constantly at full blast, that kept the pool as warm as a bathtub because he did not like cold water (“I myself hated that pool,” Reedy says. “I didn’t go into it unless he absolutely forced me into it, because I want water to be cold”), and surrounded by a lawn of grass as smooth and lush as a carpet. “Telephone outlets make it possible for Johnson … to conduct business neck-deep in the warm water, while piped-in music [from speakers placed in the live oaks] soothes his nerves and those of his guests; and while secretaries and assistants scurry about the pool, obeying an endless stream of instructions,” one visiting journalist reported. Strauss waltzes were played only when journalists were present; at other times the repertoire was strictly “elevator music.” How much exercise the pool gave him is doubtful (aside from a few sidestroke laps every day, he spent most of his time in it in a floating reclining chair, a drink in his hand), but it did give him a new means of control: Reedy at least was tall, other assistants were shorter, and when Johnson was swimming with a shorter assistant, he would wait until the assistant was at the deep end of the pool, and then stop and stand still while he was between the assistant and the shallower water. Years later, five-foot ten-inch Joseph Califano, newly attached to the White House staff, would describe how President Johnson outlined a multi-part domestic program in the pool with “his finger poking my shoulder as though it were punctuating a series of exclamation points.” (“I nodded, treading. He was so close to me, almost nose to nose, that I couldn’t move around him so I could stand on the bottom of the pool. [I was] breathless from treading water as his finger against my shoulder kept pushing me down. Not until months later, as I got to know him, did I realize that for this early exchange Lyndon Johnson had instinctively and intentionally picked a depth of the pool where he could stand and I had to tread water.”) Johnson spent hours
lying on an immense chaise lounge that had been placed beside the pool, sipping lemonade made with sugarless sweeteners, and yelling “Bird! Bird!” into an intercom, in a voice that one visitor likened to a “hog call,” whenever he wanted something.

Then there was the diet, and as time passed, it grew increasingly difficult to keep Johnson on it. A dietitian, Juanita Roberts, was brought to the ranch, and installed there, and she devised dishes—a low-fat tapioca pudding made with Sucaryl, for example—with which Johnson could cram himself without ingesting many calories; his weight stayed between 175 and 180. Lady Bird had to supervise this area of his activity, too. “When this is over,” she told a friend, “I want to go off by myself and cry for about two hours.” Lyndon might “get along all right,” she wrote another friend. “I don’t know whether I’ll make it or not.”

And he poured himself into the recovery of his career. Part of the day was rest, but the remainder was politics as usual—the Lyndon Johnson brand of politics. Wanting, in Reedy’s words, to “generate attention—keep people aware of his presence,” he began dictating letters to Lady Bird and Mary Rather, dictating so many that they couldn’t keep up with him, and they were joined by a recent addition to the staff, Mary Margaret Wiley, a twenty-six-year-old University of Texas graduate, dictating so many that the three women, working at card tables set up in the rock-walled living room, couldn’t type them up in the perfect style he wanted fast enough, or to cross-index them for the files, and the letters were sent off for typing (“On new stationery with pretty typewriter—
Hurry Please!”)
in big packages to the larger staff in the Washington office, which also couldn’t keep up. (The letters were to foes as well as allies, and all were written with the Johnson touch: “Dear John: I have been sitting here on my Ranch looking over the Country in which I was born and just relaxing and enjoying myself thoroughly. Every prospect pleases except one—the distance from my close personal friends in the Senate. One of the reasons that I am so very anxious to recover completely is so I can return to Washington in January as good as new and thank all of my friends on both sides of the aisle. One of the first hands I want to shake is that of John W. Bricker.”) He began telephoning, and was soon demanding that the calls be stacked up waiting for him; so many new telephone lines had to be installed that the long cords grew tangled on the living room floor. To the clatter of typewriters, a clatter which, a visitor says, “never seemed to stop,” that drifted out of the open windows of the living room and down across the lawn and the meadow to the placid Pedernales was added the ringing of telephones, a ringing that also “never seemed to stop.” The stacks of letters and telegrams on the card tables grew higher. A former secretary, Dorothy Palmie of Austin, who had been reading in the newspapers about the calm, restful atmosphere at the ranch, drove out for a visit and found him “going full-blast. Mary Rather and Lady Bird were beating their brains out with all these little details and tasks and chores.” A team headed by Reedy set
up an office in the United States Courthouse in Austin, Jenkins remained in Washington with the rest of the staff, and the three offices were in constant communication. By mid-September, the reports from the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee began to flow again, as did the glowing promises of future reports (“Watch for the SPSC to try to make headlines this fall with a searching probe of undue cuts in the Defense Department’s aircraft and missile programs,”
Newsweek’s
“Periscope” declared. “Senator Lyndon Johnson is personally laying out the agenda for this while recuperating in Texas”) and the leaks (Reedy, in Austin, to Siegel, in Washington: “I had another talk with the Senator about [reporter] Jack Anderson and I think we should do something for him as soon as possible. Can you find anything in the Preparedness Committee files that I could slip to Jack in a hurry and that would make him a pretty good story? … I think that we could make some real ‘hay’ with Jack”), and other means of influencing the press, including the orchestration of a “spontaneous” letter-writing campaign to try (unsuccessfully) to persuade
Time
magazine that Lyndon Johnson should be its “Man of the Year.” The planted stories began again (“Dear Senator, All right! I have followed your instructions. I have just finished and mailed to Texas a five-page story on Grace Tully—Affectionately, Liz”), as did the pressures on government officials for favors for Johnson’s friends.

With the loneliness becoming unbearable to him, Johnson began to invite visitors to the ranch—senators and journalists, and others important to him; the first visitors would be Adlai Stevenson, still the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, who was going to speak at the University of Texas on September 29, and Sam Rayburn, who would introduce him—the two men had agreed to drive out to the Johnson Ranch after the speech and spend the night. So many people were invited that the five upstairs bedrooms, several of which were already occupied by staff members, would not be sufficient; while the pool was still being built, another construction project was begun: a four-room guest house.

Johnson had, furthermore, resumed, as avidly as ever, his quest for money. He did it with his customary circumspection. When E. L. Kurth gave him a prize Brahma bull, named “Johnson’s Manso,” the papers were sent not to him but to A. W. Moursund, and Moursund was at the ranch almost every day. And he did it with his customary energy. During this period, while he was publicly proclaiming—over and over—his devotion to rest and relaxation, he was working at a headlong pace to add new advertising revenues for his radio and television stations, calling Edwin Weisl Sr., Hearst Newspapers counsel, in New York to bring pressure on some advertisers, using Jenkins to bring pressure on others (“I don’t want to leave the impression that we muscled people to come [as advertisers], but we did try to call it to their attention that we had the space available or the time available and could use the programming,” Jenkins would say). And he was adding new stations. “That summer he had a little time on his
hands, of course, and we decided that we wanted to go and buy another station or perhaps two stations,” Jenkins recalls. The station Johnson decided to buy was KANG in Waco, and he conducted the negotiations for that property with the old Johnson touch, bargaining with the owners for a favorable price while gently obtaining from compliant FCC Chairman Bartley advance knowledge of upcoming FCC decisions that would make KANG much more profitable for him than it would ever have been for them, and keeping that knowledge secret so that they would sell to him at a lower price. “Lyndon made a lot of money that summer,” Arthur Stehling says. And he was entering new fields as well, buying up stock in the Johnson City Bank and other little Hill Country banks. He took his naps religiously, but woke up from them running—as fast as before. His pace, in fact, seemed to be even faster now. Asked years later, “Did the heart attack slow down Johnson?” George Reedy replied: “It speeded him up if anything.”

T
HEN, IN
S
EPTEMBER
, the political landscape changed—dramatically. Dwight Eisenhower was at the very peak of his enormous popularity. In July, at a top-level conference in Geneva with British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, French Premier Edgar Faure, and the two Russian leaders, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin (Winston Churchill had coined a word for such a meeting; he called it a “summit”), Ike’s broad, open grin and his apparent candor and earnest desire for peace had won the hearts of Europeans, and his proposal for an “Open Skies” aerial inspection treaty to reduce the threat of nuclear war had captured the world’s imagination. As he was flying home in triumph aboard the
Columbine
, Gallup pollsters were finding that no less than four out of five Americans approved of his performance as President. And then, on September 24, he suffered a heart attack while on a golfing vacation in Denver.

Ike’s attack, a coronary thrombosis, was more serious than Johnson’s, and Eisenhower, just three weeks short of his sixty-fifth birthday, was almost eighteen years older. The Democratic National Convention was less than a year away, and the general assumption in Washington, an assumption that endured for months, was that the President would not run for another term. Lyndon Johnson, who during the next three days would telephone Eisenhower’s press secretary, Jim Hagerty, two or three times a day to express concern and ask how the President was doing (thereafter, he would be given daily reports by Jerry Persons), was almost instantly running for the prize he had always sought.

The strategy he evolved—in talks with no one, lying deep in thought on the recliner or walking deep in thought along the path next to the Pedernales—was the strategy Richard Russell had used in 1952, but with a crucial difference. With Russell having removed himself from the picture, Johnson believed he would be the candidate of a solid South, with its 262 votes in the 1,200-vote convention. And he believed that because of the firm ties he had forged with
western and border-state senators, he could do what Russell had not been able to do—collect enough votes from these states to give him a substantial bloc at the convention.

At the moment, Stevenson had most of the southern votes, as the least of three evils, the others being Kefauver and the New York liberal Harriman. If none of these three men could get a majority of the convention, it would be stalemated, and the nomination could well go to a fourth, “compromise,” candidate, if this candidate had a substantial, solid bloc of votes behind him.

The first requirement was that southern support be stripped away from Stevenson. That would be accomplished by Johnson’s entry into the race. The second was that both Stevenson and Kefauver be stopped—preferably that they kill each other off. The third was that Johnson position himself to be a candidate. And there was an additional, urgent, requirement: that Johnson do so without becoming a candidate openly. An announcement that he was running would rouse northeastern Democrats and liberals across the country, distrustful of him because of his past pro-southern positions, to organize a “Stop Johnson” movement and effectively destroy his candidacy before the convention so that he would not be able to become a compromise choice there. His effectiveness as the Democratic Senate Leader would be undermined as well; as Tommy Corcoran was to explain, “If his colleagues thought he was pushing all those programs to get a track record for a presidential race, they’d scatter every time he called a caucus.” He should go to the convention, he decided, as Texas’ favorite-son candidate. That way, his name would be placed before the convention—but in such a fashion that he could claim he was not a serious candidate but was only trying to hold his state’s vote until its delegation determined which of the other candidates to support. And to make sure he held the delegation’s vote, he decided, he should also be its chairman.

B
Y COINCIDENCE
, the perfect opportunity to implement this strategy was immediately to hand: that already scheduled visit, just five days after Eisenhower’s heart attack, by Adlai Stevenson and Sam Rayburn.

The visit had originally been thought of—by both Johnson and Stevenson—as little more than a courtesy call. Now, however, there were consequential matters to discuss. Johnson wanted them discussed in secret, but someone in Austin learned that Stevenson and Rayburn would be going out to the Johnson Ranch after the speech, and George Reedy had to telephone Johnson from Austin to inform him that a large contingent of reporters could be expected the following morning.

Johnson’s reaction was rage: an old-time explosion that “could be felt all the way to Austin,” that was so violent that Reedy “started being afraid that he was going to bring on another heart attack and die,” and that didn’t subside for hours; at midnight, Reedy got another call—from Lady Bird, “just begging me
to keep the press from going out to [the ranch].” “She was just crying, just crying. Apparently the people out at the ranch were like a family would be during the Black Death in Europe.” Explaining that while reporters could be barred from the ranch itself—“That’s private property”—nobody could keep them from standing on the public highway right outside the gates “and talking to people going in and out,” he advised her to allow them on the ranch instead of letting them “use their imaginations as to what happened.”