Means of Ascent (41 page)

The next morning at nine, when the train arrived in Dallas’ Union Terminal, Woodward, absolutely alone now with a desperately ill candidate (and alone also, since Bolton was back in Wichita Falls, with the knowledge of the severity of the illness), managed to get Johnson dressed and over to their suite at the Baker Hotel, where the Congressman went to bed. He asked Johnson if he could summon a doctor, or at least telephone headquarters back in Austin and tell
them what was happening. “He said no, that he was still determined that the stone was going to pass.” For some hours, Johnson lay in bed, “literally just racked with fever and chills.” Although he had not eaten for almost three days, he had no appetite; Woodward tried to get him to eat, but Johnson couldn’t; when he tried, he would have vomited, Woodward explains, “but there was no food in him, so he only gagged.” Occasionally, he
would groan. By this time, Woodward was convinced that Johnson could not possibly get back on a train, return to Wichita Falls and make the scheduled speech. He asked whether he could at least telephone Bolton in Wichita Falls and tell him to cancel the speech, but Johnson, he recalls, “continued to believe” he would be able to make the speech, and refused to listen to any suggestion that he wouldn’t. “He was going to Wichita Falls with an important
message. The Air Force base was going to be kept open. There just wasn’t any way he was going to miss this opportunity.” Johnson was, in Woodward’s careful words, “getting a little more irritable about this time.” Woodward did not telephone anyone. But by the afternoon, Woodward could not bear it any longer. He felt that if Symington knew the situation, he could persuade Johnson at least to get some medical assistance. “You have to remember I
was a First Lieutenant, and this was the Secretary of the Air Force, but I screwed up my courage.”

When the front desk telephoned to say that Symington was on his way up, Woodward gave Johnson a new shirt, and met Symington and
General
Robert J. Smith at the door, and, in the few moments before Johnson dressed and appeared, “poured out my problems to them. I told them, ‘I’m not able to convince him that we should get a doctor. He is a very sick man, and he’ll probably fire me for telling you this,
but I’m here by myself, and I’ve just got to turn to someone, because I know when I see a sick man, and this is a very sick man. Yet he’s determined to go to Wichita Falls. He’s determined to have this conference with you, Secretary Symington. And I don’t know what to do.’ ”

Had Woodward not told the two visitors that Johnson was sick, they would never have known. When the young aide finished whispering to them, he called, “Congressman, they’re here now.” The door to the bedroom opened, and there was Lyndon Johnson, beaming at his visitors. “He pulled the door open and sprang out with all the
energy and vitality just as if nothing was wrong,” Woodward recalls. “Full of energy!
Ready to go! My God!
Will!”
Sitting down with Symington and Smith, Johnson “conducted the conference and they worked out all the arrangements.” And, Woodward is convinced, Johnson would not have said a word to the two men about his physical condition had not Symington, in a diplomatic way, “after the business was over, got the conversation around to his health obliquely: ‘How are you feeling, Lyndon?’ ” Gradually, some
of the truth emerged.

Even then the job of persuading Johnson to obtain medical assistance had to proceed by slow degrees. For some time the candidate flatly rejected his visitors’ urgings that he see a doctor, insisting he didn’t need one. But the longer he sat talking, the harder it became for him to conceal his pain, and he began to shiver uncontrollably. Even then, he would not agree to be examined by a doctor, but only to talk to one over the telephone; he allowed General
Smith to telephone a Dallas urologist with whom he was acquainted to discuss the situation and ask if something could be prescribed to make Johnson feel better. The urologist, R. E. Van Duzen, refused to prescribe without examining the patient, and Johnson, by now trembling and barely able to hold himself upright in his chair, finally agreed to an examination. Arriving at the suite, Dr. Van Duzen, Woodward says, “took one look at him, and said, This is a sick man, a very sick
man, and he needs to be in the hospital.’ ”

Recalls Woodward: “The Congressman just said no, he wasn’t going to have anything to do with this at all and he wasn’t going to go. Finally, [Symington] talked him into doing this. Finally, he consented to going.…”

But only for tests, and only for a few hours. “He envisioned it—’Maybe I’ll get a shot and a couple of pills.’ He didn’t view it in the light [that he would have to stay in the hospital longer than a few hours]. That was the only reason he agreed to go.” And only under what Woodward
describes as “great-secret conditions.” Johnson authorized Woodward to telephone Bolton and order the
speechwriter to deliver the speech he had written himself—but not to hint at the real reason for Johnson’s absence; Bolton was to announce that the candidate had been flying to Wichita Falls but had been delayed by bad weather. No one but Bolton was to be told
anything
, Johnson told Woodward.
No one!
Not his wife, not his campaign headquarters, not Alvin Wirtz, not John Connally—no one was to know that he was in a hospital. As for the hospital
staff, of course, they were not to be told the identity of their new patient.

By the time he arrived at the hospital, however, Johnson was doubled over in agony, gasping for breath, retching and gagging, unable to stand for more than a few moments at a time. His temperature was over 104 degrees. As attendants dressed him in a hospital gown and placed him in a wheelchair, he heard Dr. Van Duzen say he would have to remain in the hospital overnight, but he did not protest as he was wheeled down a corridor to a laboratory for tests. When the tests
were completed, and he was being wheeled to his room, he vomited—over himself and an orderly and a nurse.

(A few minutes later, there was a poignant postscript. As Johnson had entered the hospital, he had said to Woodward, “Don’t leave me, Woody.” The faithful Woodward stayed at his side—except as Johnson was being wheeled to his room. A nurse had insisted that Woodward fill out the admittance forms, and Woodward had stopped—“maybe as long as five minutes”—to do so. But it was during those five minutes that Johnson
vomited. When Woodward reached him, Johnson said, “Woody, don’t
ever
do that to me again!” The astonished Woodward didn’t know what he had done. “You left me,” Johnson said. When Woodward tried to explain that the nurse had insisted he fill out the forms, Johnson said, “I don’t care. You don’t work for her, you work for me. You stay with me. I called you and you weren’t there. I don’t want you to
leave me. Don’t leave me when I need you.” Thirty-six years later, when Woodward was being interviewed, he was still laboriously trying to excuse his lapse: “He didn’t really need me. He had thrown up and soiled himself, and it was a sort of messy situation, but he had orderlies and nurses and ail sorts of people to handle it, and he was well cared for. I was maybe gone as long as five minutes. It was indicative of the fact that he didn’t like to be
left alone.…”)

Woodward saw that keeping Johnson’s identity from the hospital staff was impossible. A small crowd of nurses, orderlies and doctors had been following his wheelchair down the hall “because they knew Congressman Johnson, knew who he was.…” Word was bound to leak to the outside world. Johnson was insisting he would be in the hospital only overnight. “I’ll pass it, I’ll pass it,” he kept saying. “I’ll be
out of here in the
morning.” But even if he was there only overnight, didn’t headquarters have to be told? Woodward asked Johnson if he could call Connally now, and Johnson said he could. But he told Woodward to tell Connally he was not to inform anyone else:

F
EARING THAT
the conversation might be overheard by the hospital’s switchboard operator if Woodward were to make the call from his room, Johnson told him to make it from an outside phone. Woodward did—from a nearby drugstore. Connally said one thing that gave Woodward a sense of relief: Mrs. Johnson would be on the next plane to Dallas. The youthful aide realized that when she arrived the load of responsibility that he had
been carrying alone would be shifted to Lady Bird’s shoulders. But when Connally heard of Johnson’s prohibition against telling the press his whereabouts, he said, “That’s just ridiculous.” Woodward returned to the hospital to tell Johnson that Connally said there was no choice but to tell the press, that “he thinks you can’t have a candidate for the United States Senate and a Congressman in a hospital in downtown Dallas,”
canceling speeches and interrupting the campaign schedule, without reporters finding out about it.

By this time, Woodward was to recall, Johnson “really was not in complete control of his thinking.… There was an element of delirium from this high fever that he had.…”He told Woodward to tell Connally to do as he had been told: “You just tell him that I
order!”
But when Woodward made this call, Connally said, “Well, it’s too late; I’ve already done it.” Reporters had begun calling
headquarters to ask why Johnson was canceling the Wichita Falls speech that evening, Connally said, and he felt he had no choice but to give the true reason, since they were sure to find it out anyway.

Woodward had expected Johnson to explode over this news, but when Johnson heard it, “a sort of calmness came over him and a sort of resignation.” He said, “Well, I guess I might as well withdraw. Get your notebook.” Dictating a statement irrevocably withdrawing from the campaign, he told Woodward to telephone Dallas newspapers immediately, and read it to them. “Do it right now,” he said. “I’m out of
this.”

The young man didn’t know what to do. He felt his Chief was in no
condition to make a decision which might well end his entire political career, but he knew he could not make Johnson change his mind. “I’d learned not to argue with him,” he says. And Johnson’s tone had been very firm. “He was out. He had made a decision.” When Woodward nonetheless screwed up his courage and tried to suggest that Johnson
wait a bit, Johnson said angrily: “Do it right now.” Recalls Woodward: “He was very, very firm in telling me to do it right that moment.”

Years later, Woodward would say, “Can you imagine what would have happened if I had done that? The whole course of history—we might not even have had Vietnam or the Great Society.” But, he would say, “Every now and then the Lord takes care of you. God protects us kids.” As he was walking out of the hospital room to carry out Johnson’s orders, Woodward thought of something he could say to persuade Johnson to delay issuing the
withdrawal statement—perhaps the only thing he could have said that would have persuaded Johnson to delay—and instead of leaving the room, he said it, and in so doing performed what was perhaps the greatest service that the devoted young man was ever to render to his leader, although he was to be associated with him for another twenty years. He said: “Why don’t you wait until Mrs. Johnson gets here.”

“T
HAT BOUGHT SOME TIME
,” Woodward recalls. “I told him that she was in the air right that minute, flying up to Dallas, and that it was in fact time for me to go out to meet her. I said, ‘Let’s go ahead and make the announcement, but let’s do it after she gets here. She would want to be here when you do it.’ … That, in his fevered condition, seemed to ring a bell with
him.” Johnson told Woodward to pick Lady Bird up; “then we’ll call the press in and we’ll announce this thing together.”

On his way to the airport, Woodward did something else of which he was to be proud. “Halfway out to the airport,” he recalls, “I suddenly said, ‘Oh, my God! If some reporter calls him, he’ll probably tell him he’s withdrawing, and everything will be all over.’ I stopped the car, and ran into some store and called back to the hospital and I got the [nurses’] supervisor and I told her, ‘Absolutely no calls!
Absolutely no visitors!’ Under no circumstances was he to have any phone calls put through to his room or any visitors of any kind until Mrs. Johnson got there. I said he needed his rest. I said, ‘He is to be isolated. No one is to see him or talk to him.’ And, you know, I put the stopper in the basin just in time, because sure enough the phone calls began to come in while I was at the airport, but no one was put through to him.”

And when Lady Bird arrived, all at once many of the problems seemed to vanish. “I had not had any sleep, I was about at the end of my line, and I was never so glad in my life to see anyone as I was [to see]
Mrs. Johnson,” Woodward says. On the way to the hospital, he explained the situation. She didn’t say much, but “she was calm and understanding and seemed to know exactly what to do.” As soon as they walked into
her husband’s room, “she took over very completely.” When Woodward slipped out, she was talking to Johnson “soothingly and quietly.” Woodward could see that “he felt reassured having her there.” And when, some time later, Woodward re-entered the room, “somehow or other the notion of withdrawing from the race seemed to kind of fade into the background.…”

In fact, what was on the Congressman’s mind now was not withdrawal but food. The bed rest—and a massive shot of morphine—had made him feel better, and, with the hospital’s kitchens already closed, he told Woodward, “Get me something to eat.” When Woodward returned with a warm “Dutch oven” from the hotel, he found that the Congressman was in some respects very much back to normal. Woodward had brought a big helping
of bacon and eggs, and, he recalls, “it looked like a feast to me; I couldn’t remember when I had eaten last.” But Johnson, sitting up with the tray on his lap, looked up at him and said, “Well, you’ve done it again.” Woodward couldn’t see anything wrong.