In this portrait of LBJ, Joseph Califano reveals the giant at close hand. Califano captures his mentor's lively, irascible spirit as he puts us in the White House alongside LBJ during the trauma of the Vietnam War and the creation of the Great Society.
The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson ONE
THE BEGINNING
THE FIRST CALL came on November 4, 1964. I was working as Special Assistant to Robert McNamara. My office at the Pentagon was directly across the hall from his. That morning The Washington Post and New York Times were on my desk, their headlines proclaiming Lyndon Johnson’s landslide over Barry Goldwater, 61 to 39 percent.
McGeorge Bundy, the President’s National Security Adviser, rasped cheerily over the phone: “Califano! Can you get over here and meet with Bill Moyers [a Special Assistant to the President] and me at eleven o’clock?”1
“Sure,” I said. “About what?”
“We want to talk to you about joining the White House staff.”
Moyers and Bundy were waiting in Moyers’s office. They said the President (whose only previous contact with me was a handshake in August 1964)2 wanted me to take on two tasks: administration headhunter and White House expert on Latin American affairs. Moyers said my experience with McNamara gave me good lines to top talent, and Bundy thought work I had done on Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican Republic gave me a grounding in Latin America. I told them I would have to talk to McNamara. They urged me to wait until the President had spoken to him. I said I couldn’t.
As soon as I returned to the Pentagon, I joined McNamara at lunch.3 His response was almost brusque. “Out of the question. First, they should never have talked to you without talking to me. Second, the work you’re doing here is far more important. There are only two jobs over there that would be more important: Bundy’s and Moyers’s. Moyers’s job only if the President made it a domestic adviser, in charge of the legislative program, coordinating economic policy and domestic matters generally. Forget about it. I’ll talk to the President.”
Less than a week later, returning from a meeting at the LBJ Ranch in Texas,4 McNamara told me I would not be going to the White House. “At least for now,” he added. “But I fear we’ve whetted the President’s appetite. So you may just have a six-month reprieve.”
The second call came eight months later, on July 8, 1965, from Jack Valenti, another of the President’s special assistants. “The President wants you on his staff,” he said. “George Reedy [the presidential press secretary] is resigning today. Moyers is replacing him. The President wants you to pick up his old job.”
“I’ll have to talk to McNamara,” I responded, excited but nervous and unsure about my boss’s reaction.
“The President already has,” Valenti chortled. “He doesn’t make the same mistake twice. Get on over here.”
At the White House Moyers and Valenti said that my new job would be to prepare legislative programs, manage domestic crises, and act as a general-utility infielder on the domestic scene.
When I got back to the Pentagon, McNamara told me to come right to his office.
“It’s also important that you work on matters relating to the economy,” he said. “The economic problems are bound to be severe as Great Society programs need more and more funds, since the cost of the war in Vietnam is likely to rise.”
An hour later, McNamara called me in to tell me that he had convinced the President he should let me coordinate economic policy.
“What a job!” I gasped.
“It’s not a job. With this President, it’s not even a job description. It’s an opportunity. You’ll have to prove yourself to him to turn it into a job,” McNamara said.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Take it. He needs someone to pull the domestic side together. It won’t be easy. I assure you of this: you will never work for a more complicated man as long as you live. But you’re also not likely to work for a more intelligent one. Anyway, you’ve been in the Defense Department four years. The change will be good for you. No one should stay in a job for more than four or five years.”
Late that afternoon, Moyers called to say the President wanted me at the White House mess for dinner. “He’s having a small dinner for the chairmen of the 1964 Great Society task forces and he wants you to have an opportunity to meet them.”
I said I was planning to have dinner with a friend from Panama who was already on his way to the restaurant. I thought I’d best skip the White House dinner. Moyers understood.
Five minutes later, he called again. “The President told me to send a car out for your friend and take him home and for you to come here, period.”
So went my first lesson: this President did not like people to say no to him.
At dinner,5 Johnson listened intently as each academic spent a few minutes outlining the most serious problems and opportunities facing America and the President. Remarkably, at least in retrospect, the Vietnam War was scarcely mentioned. Everyone was confident we could solve our domestic problems. In only nineteen months after assuming the presidency, Johnson had made enormous progress on the Democratic party’s progressive agenda.
The President, with whom I had not yet spoken, introduced me as a member of his staff. On my way out, he said he expected to see me at the LBJ Ranch for the weekend. As I drove home, I thought about my only direct experience of Lyndon Johnson in action.
On October 14, 1964, it was reported that Walter Jenkins, a long-time Johnson aide (as close to a White House chief-of-staff as the President ever tolerated), had been arrested a week earlier for making advances to a sixty-one-year-old man at the downtown Washington YMCA. The story broke less than three weeks before the presidential election and promised to fuel Goldwater’s charges of corruption and improprieties in Johnson’s past.
Around seven that evening, McNamara called me into his office. “Walter Jenkins was a member of an Air Force Reserve unit on Capitol Hill,” he said, speaking sharply. “The President wants a copy of his Reserve personnel file immediately. Get it. Make damn sure that everything is Xeroxed and nothing is removed. Have one of your guys do the Xeroxing himself or watch it being done.”
I called Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Lieutenant General William Stone. “The Secretary of Defense wants a complete copy of Walter Jenkins’s Air Force Reserve personnel record,” I explained. “This is so sensitive I’m asking you to Xerox it yourself. One of my staff will come down immediately to help you. After it’s copied, I suggest you keep the original in a safe in your own office.”
Two military officers on my staff were still around, Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Haig and an Air Force lieutenant colonel. Rather than put a young Air Force officer in the impossible position of standing over a general in his own service, I sent Al Haig to monitor the Xeroxing.
As soon as we had a copy, McNamara and I rushed to Moyers’s White House office. As Bundy, McNamara, and I gathered around a speaker phone, Moyers called Valenti at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, where the President was speaking to the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner. Lady Bird Johnson was preparing a sympathetic statement supporting Walter Jenkins and his family.6 When the President got on the phone, he expressed his suspicion that Jenkins had been framed or set up by the Republicans. He asked McNamara to read him texts of Jenkins’s Air Force Reserve fitness reports signed by the commanding officer of the Capitol Hill Air Force Reserve unit. One was more glowing than the next.
“Well,” said the President, “I’d better call Walter’s commanding officer. He’ll be shaken by what’s happened to Walter. And, in any case, I know he wouldn’t want to embarrass himself by making any damned-fool statements.”
Moyers and Bundy smiled. McNamara and I exchanged glances. The commanding officer who had signed Jenkins’s glowing reports was Air Force Reserve Major General Barry Goldwater.
· · ·
I got up at 3 A.M. on Saturday, July 10, 1965, to shower, pack, dress, and drive to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington to catch a presidential Lear Jet. Valenti, his wife Mary Margaret, and speechwriter Richard Goodwin were also on board. We arrived at the ranch just after 9 A.M. Johnson met us at the airplane and sent us off to our rooms. Then Mrs. Johnson offered us scrambled eggs and spicy deer sausage. When I demurred, she said, “I suggest you eat something now, young fellow. You never know with Lyndon what time the next meal will be.” After breakfast we changed into bathing suits and joined the President at the pool, where he was swimming. His secretary, Victoria (Vicky) McCammon, sat on the side with her feet in the water.
The pool, directly southeast of the ranch house, was surrounded by a red-brick border, a concrete sidewalk, and Bermuda grass. The President was still in the water when I dove in. He was talking about the Senate’s passage of the bill to create Medicare the day before. From the shallow end of the pool he shouted to me, “Are you ready to come help your President?”
“It would be an honor and a privilege,” I called back.
In the early afternoon, the President, with me next to him in the front seat, took his white Lincoln convertible, top down, for a drive around the ranch. Johnson had changed to dry trunks and a clean shirt, but I was still in my one pair of wet trunks and a knit shirt.
It was incredibly hot; the dust clouds made it hard to breathe. But there was relief. As we drove around, we were followed by a car and a station wagon with Secret Service agents. The President drank Cutty Sark scotch and soda out of a large white plastic foam cup; I had a Coca-Cola. Periodically, Johnson would slow down, sometimes stop for a moment, and hold his left arm outside the car, shaking the cup and ice. A Secret Service agent would run up to the car, take the cup and go back to the station wagon. There another agent would refill it with ice, scotch, and soda as the first agent trotted behind the wagon. Then the first agent would run the refilled cup up to LBJ’s outstretched arm and waiting hand, as the President’s car moved slowly along.
As he drove, the President would call his ranch foreman, Dale Malechek, on the car’s Motorola radiophone.
“Dale, the Hereford in East Barley Field, I think it’s number 481 [many Herefords were numbered on a horn], get on over and look at him. He doesn’t seem to be eating properly and looks a little underweight.”
“Dale, on the feeding tree in the Fish Tank, get some more salt for the deer.”
“Dale. This Goddamn fence at Dales Trap needs to be fixed. Get it done in the morning.”
As we passed from one section of the ranch to another, Secret Servicemen would jump out of the car in front and rush to open gates so we could drive through without stopping.
We stopped at LBJ’s birthplace, a small two-room building with a tiny barn behind, drove back for a fast ride on the airstrip and again around the ranch, ending at the ranch house around 2 P.M. Shortly afterward, we boarded a helicopter for the Haywood Ranch, another of Johnson’s properties, and Coca-Cola Cove at Lake LBJ, part of a chain of artificial lakes set in central Texas, thanks to the persistence of Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson. We lunched and spent the afternoon and early evening on a thirty-seven-foot yacht. From lake-front properties and in small motorboats, wire-service photographers constantly sought to take pictures. Secret Service agents in black speedboats tried to keep the photographers away. Johnson took care to drink out of an opaque plastic cup, usually below deck, whether it was filled with scotch or Fresca.
We went ashore briefly at a house on the lake that the President called “Jack and Mary Margaret’s,” after the Valentis. As we walked through the house, the President stopped in a bright shaft of sunlight in the living room. He unbuckled his belt and twisted toward his right side as he lowered his pants and pushed down his undershorts, trying to look at his increasingly bare right buttock.
“Something hurts back there,” he said, now exploring the surface with his right hand. “Is that a boil?” he asked me as I stood to his right. Astonished, I looked—“peeked” would be a better word—and gulped, “Yes.” “I’ll have to get Dr. [presidential physician George] Burkley to look at it,” the President said matter-of-factly as he tucked in his shirt, pulled up his pants, and buckled his belt.
In the late afternoon, the President took me waterskiing. He drove his twenty-foot gold-colored speedboat up and down the lake and under a bridge with concrete supports about every ten yards. He drove faster and faster, zigging and zagging around the lake and between the concrete pillars. The faster he drove and twisted, the more I was determined to stay up. He threw me once. He was going so fast that I thought I’d split apart when I flew off the skis and hit the water. Determined to prove myself, I got back up and managed not to fall off again.
We returned to shore around 8 P.M. The President, with Vicky McCammon in the seat alongside him and me in the back, was now driving around in a small blue car with the top down. We reached a steep incline at the edge of the lake and the car started rolling rapidly toward the water. The President shouted, “The brakes don’t work! The brakes won’t hold! We’re going in! We’re going under!”
The car splashed into the water. I started to get out. Just then the car leveled and I realized we were in an Amphicar. The President laughed. As we putted along the lake then (and throughout that evening), he teased me. “Vicky, did you see what Joe did? He didn’t give a damn about his President. He just wanted to save his own skin and get out of the car.” Then he’d roar.
Around 9 P.M. we went to the Haywood ranch house for dinner. I was still in my wet bathing suit. The others, more experienced in LBJ’s ways, had brought along a change of clothing. Near midnight we returned by chopper to the main ranch house, and the President asked me to come to his office. For half an hour, he handed me one paper after another, directing me to give them, along with his instructions, to various White House aides or cabinet members. When he finally retired, White House aide Jake Jacobsen gently took the papers from me and said he would carry out the President’s instructions. I went to bed, almost twenty-four hours after I’d gotten up in Washington.
Life at the ranch would always be unpredictable. We never knew when we would work or play. In the pool, on the boat, during a meal, the President might give us an order to do something or to get an agency or department head to take some action. Breakfast was always early and on our own, but lunch could be anywhere from one to four o’clock; it might be at the LBJ Ranch, on the boat, or at one of the Johnsons’ other ranches. The President usually took a nap, which could last anywhere from thirty minutes to a couple of hours. Dinner might be at eight or midnight and its location was just as uncertain. On Sundays we had no idea whether we would return that evening or Monday morning, afternoon, or evening, and we often departed on less than an hour’s notice. Mrs. Johnson displayed ceaseless patience in accommodating her husband’s spur-of-the-moment style.
That first Sunday, Johnson and I attended separate services, he at the First Christian Church in Johnson City and I at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Fredericksburg. Back at the ranch, Johnson held a press conference to name Major Hugh Robinson as his new Army aide. I had interviewed several black Army officers for the job only a month before and had recommended Robinson.7 He becam...
