Girl With Curious Hair

LYNDON

"MY name is Lyndon Baines Johnson. I own the fucking floor you stand on, boy.'

There was also an aide in the office, in one corner, a skinny man with big ears, working at a long pinewood table, doing something flurried between a teletype and a stack of clipped newspapers, but Lyndon was talking to me. It was the Fifties and I was young, burned-out cool, empty. I slouched emptily where I stood, before his desk, my hands in the pockets of my topcoat, flapping the coat a little. I stood hip-shot and looked at the scarlet floor tile under my shoes. Each red square tile was decorated with a lone gold star.

He leaned over his desk at me. He looked like a big predatory bird.

'My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson, son. I am the Senator to the United States Senate from the state of Texas, U.S.A. I am the twenty-seventh richest personal man in the nation. I got the biggest wazoo in Washington and the wife with the prettiest name. So I don't care who your wife's Daddy knows — don't you slouch at this Senator, boy.'

The way he looked, when I looked at him, was always the same.

He looked like eyes, the eyes of a small person, looking trapped from behind the lined hooked jutting face of a big bland bird of prey. His eyes are the same in pictures.

I apologized nervously. 'I'm sorry, sir. I think maybe I'm nervous. I was just sitting out there, filling out application forms, and all of a sudden here I am speaking to you, directly, sir.'

He produced a nasal inhaler and an index card. He put the inhaler to a nostril and squeezed, inhaling. He squinted at the card.

' "Every prospective part of the personnel in the office of the United States Senator from Texas shall be interviewed" — I'm reading this, boy, off this card here—"interviewed with the potential of being interviewed by any part of the personnel of the office he shall potentially work under." I wrote that. I don't care who your wife's Daddy's wife's internist knows — you're potentially under me, boy, and I'm interviewing you. What do you think of that?'

The big-eared aide sighted down his shears at a news clipping, making sure the cut lines were clean and square.

'A senator who interviews low-level office help?' I said. I listened to oak-muffled, far-away sounds of telephones and typewriters and teletypes. I was beginning to think I had filled out forms for an inappropriate job. I had no experience. I was young, burned out. My transcript was an amputee.

'This must be a very conscientious office,' I said.

'Goddamn right it's conscientious, boy. The president of this particular stretch of the Dirksen Building is me, Lyndon Johnson. And a president views, interviews, and reviews everything he presides over, if he's doing his job in the correct manner.' He paused. 'Say, write that down for me, boy.'

I looked to the jughead of an aide, but he was laying down long ribbons of Scotch tape along a straightedge. 'Plus "previews," ' Lyndon said. 'Stick in "previews" there at the start, son.'

Pores open, I patted at my jacket and topcoat tentatively, trying to look as if this might have been the one just-my-luck day I wasn't carrying anything connected to writing down aphorisms for inspired Senators.

But Lyndon didn't notice; he had turned his leather chair and was continuing, facing the office window, facing the regiments of autographed photos, civic awards, and the headless cattle horns, curved like pincers, those weird disconnected horns that projected from the wall behind his big desk. Lyndon probed at his teeth with a corner of the card he'd read from, his chair's square back to me. He said:

'If there's even a pissing chicken's chance that the ass of some sorry slouching boy who can't even button up his topcoat is going to cross my path in the office of this particular United States Senator, I'm interviewing that boy's ass.'

His scalp shone, even in the Fifties. The back of his head was rimmed with a sort of terrace of hair. His head was pill-shaped, tall, with the suggestion of a huge brain cavity. His hands, treed with veins, were giant. He pointed a limb-sized finger slowly at the thin aide:

'Piesker, you keep me waiting for a news summary again and I'll kick your ass all down the hall.'

The thin aide was clipping out a complicatedly shaped newspaper article with unbelievable speed.

I cleared my throat. 'May I ask what whatever job I seem to have applied for consists of, sir.'

Lyndon remained facing the decorated wall and big window. The window had limp United States and Texas flags flanking it. Out the window was a sidewalk, a policeman, a street, some trees, a black iron fence with sharp decorative points like inverted Valentines. Beyond that was the bright green and scrubbed white of Capitol Hill.

Lyndon inhaled again from his nasal inhaler. The bottle wheezed a bit. I waited, standing, on the starred tile, while he looked through the onion-skin forms I'd completed.

'This boy's name is David Boyd. Says here you're from Connecticut. Connecticut?'

'Yes sir.'

'But your wife's Daddy is Jack Childs?'

I nodded.

'Speak up Boyd goddamnit. Black Jack Childs, of the Houston Childses? And Mrs. Childs and my own lovely wife share a internist, at the doctor's, back home, in Texas?'

'So I'm told, sir.'

He rotated his chair toward me, noiseless, still fondling the policy card he'd written, tracing his lip's outline with it as he scanned forms.

'Says here you went and dropped out of Yale Business School, does it.'

'I did that, sir, yes. I left Yale.'

'Yale is in Connecticut, also,' he said thoughtfully.

I fluttered my coat pockets. 'It is.' I paused. 'In all honesty sir I was asked to leave,' I said.

'Met Jack Childs's little girl at Yale, then? Kicked in the butt by love? Dropped them books and picked up a loved one? Admirable. Similar.' He had his boots, two big boots with sharp shining toes, up on his desk. The eyes behind that big face were looking at something far away.

'Had to get married did you? Had to leave?'

'Sir, in all honesty, I was asked to leave.'

'Yale up there in Connecticut asked you to leave?'

'Yes sir.'

He had rolled the card into a tight cylinder and had it deep inside his ear, probing at something, looking past me.

"Tomorrow will be drastically different from today."

— Speech to National Press Club, Washington, D.C.,

April 17,1959

"The President is a restless man."

— Staff member, 1965

"The President is a wary man."

— Staff member, 1964

"I doubt if Lyndon Johnson ever did anything impulsive in his life, he was such a cautious, canny man."

— The Honorable Sam Rayburn, 1968

'I committed indiscretions,' I told Lyndon. 'Indiscretions were committed, and I was asked to leave.'

Lyndon was looking pointedly from Piesker to his wristwatch. Piesker, the aide, whimpered a little as he collated sheets at that very long knotty-pine table beneath a painting of scrub and dead-brown hills and a dry riverbed under a blue sky.

'I was asked by Yale to leave,' I said. 'That's why my postgraduate transcript appears as it does.'

He was always right there, but you had the sense that his side of a conversation meandered along its own course, now toward yours, now away.

'Me personally,' he said, 'I worked my ass all through college. I shined some shoes in a barber's. I sold pore-tightening cream door-to-door. I was a printer's devil at a newspaper. I even herded goats, for a fellow, one summer.' I saw him make that face for the first time. 'Jesus I hate the smell of a goat,' he said. 'Fucking Christ. Ever once smelled a goat, boy?'

I tried my best to shake my head regretfully. I so wish I could summon the face he made. I was laughing despite myself. The face had seemed to settle into itself like a kicked tent, his eyes rolling back. My laughter felt jagged and hysterical: I had no clue how it would be taken. But Lyndon grinned. I had not yet even been asked to sit. I stood on this great red echoing floor, separated from Lyndon and his boots by yards of spur-scuffed mahogany desktop.

'Probably heard rumors about what it smells like, though,' he mused.

'Some grapevine or other, having to do with animal smells, I'm sure I. .'

But he sat up suddenly straight, as if he'd remembered something key and undone. The suddenness of it made Piesker drop his shears. They clattered. Lyndon looked me up and down closely.

'Shit, son, you look about twenty.'

"Remember that one of the keys to Lyndon Johnson is that he is a perfectionist — a perfectionist in the most imperfect art in the world: politics. Just remember that."

— An old associate, 1960

I finally got to sit. My back had been starting to get that sort of museum stiffness. I sat in a corner of Lyndon's broad office for four hours that cool spring day. I watched him devour Piesker's collected, clipped, and collated packet of important articles from the nation's most influential newspapers. I watched aides and advisors, together and separate, come and go. Lyndon seemed to forget I was here, in an outsized chair, in the corner, my coat puddled around my lap as I sat, watching. I watched him read, dictate, sign and initial all at once. I watched him ignore a ringing phone. I noticed how rarely such a busy man's phone seemed to ring. I watched him speak to Roy Cohn for twenty solid minutes without once answering Cohn's question about whether Everett Dirksen could be shown to be soft on those who were soft on Communism. Lyndon looked over at my corner only once, when I lit a smoke, baring his teeth until I put the long cigarette out in a low ceramic receptacle I prayed was an ashtray. I watched the Senator receive an elegantly accented Italian dignitary who wanted to talk about sales of Texas cotton to the Common Market, the two men sitting opposite on slim chairs in the waxed red floor's center, drinking dark coffee out of delicate saucer-and-spoon complexes brought in by Lyndon's personal secretary, Dora Teane, a heavily rouged, eye-browless woman with a kind face and a girdle-roll. I watched Lyndon leave the slender spoon in his cup and reach casually down into his groin to ease his pants as he and the dignitary talked textiles, democracy, and the status of the lira.

The light in the office reddened.

I think I was drowsing. I heard a sudden: 'Yo there in my corner!

'Don't just sit there with your mind in neutral, boy,' Lyndon was saying, rolling down his shirtsleeves. We were alone. 'Go and talk to Mrs. Teane out front. Go get orientated. I once see a disorientated boy on Lyndon Baines Johnson's staff, that boy's ass gets introduced to a certain sidewalk.'

'I'm hired, then? The interview's over?' I asked, standing, stiff.

Lyndon seemed not to hear. 'The man that invented specially convened sessions of the United States Senate, that's the man ought to be made to herd goats,' drawing his jacket on carefully, easing into it with a real grace. He fastened his cuff studs as he crossed the floor, his walk vaguely balletic, his boots clicking and jingling. I followed.

He stopped before his door and looked at his topcoat, on its coat hook. He looked to me.

The coat hook was the same ornately carved wood as the office door. I held Lyndon's coat up as he slipped back into it, snapping the lapels straight with a pop.

'May I ask what exactly I'm to be hired to do?' I asked, stepping back to give him room to rotate in front of the mirror, checking his coat.

Lyndon looked at his watch. 'You're a mailboy.'

I didn't parse. 'Isn't that a little redundant?'

'You deliver mail, boy,' he said, bearing down on the door's handle. 'You think you can deliver some mail in this office do you?' I trailed him through the noise and fluorescence of the staff's office complex. There were cubicles and desks and Congressional Records and gray machines. The harsh doubled overhead lights threw the range of his shadow over every desk he passed.

'The Senator places great importance on communication with citizens and constituents at all times,' Dora Teane told me. I was handed an index card. Its heading, bold-face, read SAME DAY DIRECTIVE. "It is an office regulation for the staff that every piece of mail the Senator receives must be answered that same day it came in.' She put her hand on my arm. I got a faint odor of luncheon meat. The card was filled with numbered instructions, the handwriting spiky and almost childish. I was sure it was not the penmanship of a secretary.

'That'—Mrs. Teane indicated the index card—'is an unprecedented regulation for offices of Senators.'

She showed me the Dirksen Building's basement mailroom, the mail boxes, mail bags, mail carts. Lyndon Johnson received seas of mail every day.

"I'm a compromiser and a maneuverer. I try to get something. That's the way our system in the United States works."

— In The New York Times, December 8,1963

Margaret and I found a pleasant walk-up apartment on T Street NW. I was able to walk to the Dirksen Building. Margaret, who had gumption and drive, landed a part-time job teaching composition to remedials at Georgetown. I quickly became familiar with a good many of the huge number of young staffers who swarmed yearly from eastern colleges to the Hill. I established a regular relationship with a shy, smooth young press aide to another senior Southern Senator in the Building. Peter, who lasted four months, had a marvelous Carolinian manner and was as interested in discretion as I.

And I delivered mail. I emptied, thrice daily, gold-starred boxes, wire baskets, and dull-white sacks of mail into carts with canvas sides, trundled them over gray cellar stone into the freight elevator, and brought them up to Lyndon's maze of wooden offices and glass cubicles. I sorted mail in the sweet-smelling mimeo room. I got to know quickly what classes of mail there were and which went to whom for response. I got to know Lyndon's circle of assistants and researchers and aides and secretaries and public relations people, the whole upper-subordinate staff: Hal Ball, Dan Johnson, Walt Peltason, Jim Johnson, Coby Donagan, Lew N. Johnson, Dora Teane and her pool of typists — all pleasant, Southern, deeply tense, hardworking, dedicated to the constituency of Texas, the Democratic Party, and united in a complicated, simultaneous suspension of fear, hatred, contempt, awe, and fanatical loyalty to Lyndon Baines Johnson.

"Every night when I go to bed I ask myself: 'What did we do today that we can point to for generations to come, to say that we laid the foundations for a better and more peaceful and more prosperous and less-suffering world?'"

— Press Conference, Rose Garden

White House

April 21,1964

"Oh he could be a bastard. He had it in him to be a beast, and it was widely known. He'd hide paper-clips on the floor beneath his desk, to test the night custodian. He'd scream. One day he'd be as kind as you please and the next he'd be screaming and carrying on and cursing you and your whole family tree, in the most vile language, in front of your public co-workers. We became accustomed to this and all stopped, gradually we stopped being embarrassed by it, because it happened to all of us at one time or another. Except Mr. Boyd. We had a policy of trying to stay out of the Vice President's peripheral vision. He would go into rages for days at a time. But they were quiet rages. But oh that only made them more frightening. He prowled the offices the way a prowling storm will prowl. You never knew when it would hit, or where, or who. Rages, It was not a working environment I enjoyed, sir. We were all terrified much of the time. Except Mr. Boyd. Mr. Boyd, sir, never received an unkind public word from the Vice President from the first day he came to work when the Vice President was still a Senator. We believed that Mr. Boyd was a close relative at the time. But I wish to say Mr. Boyd never abused his position of immunity to the rages, however. Whether as a messenger all the way up to executive assistant, oh he worked as hard as we did, sir, and was as devoted to the Vice President as one man can be devoted to another. These are only the opinions of one typist, of course."

— Former typist in the office of LBJ

November, 1963

The truth made the truth's usual quick circuit around the offices, the Building, the Hill. I was a homosexual. I had been a homosexual at Yale. In my last year before matriculating to the Business College, I met and became intimate with a Yale undergraduate, Jeffrey, a wealthy boy from Houston, Texas, who was beautiful, often considerate, wistful, but passionate, possessive, and a sufferer from periodic bouts of clinical depression so severe he had to be medicated. It was the medication, I discovered, that made him wistful.

My lover Jeffrey ran with a group of synthetic but pleasant Texas socialites, one of whom was Margaret Childs, a tall, squarely built girl who eventually claimed, from unknown motive, to be in love with me. Margaret pursued me. I declined her in every sensitive way I knew. I simply had no interest. But Jeffrey grew inflamed. He revealed that his friends did not and must not know he was a homosexual. He pushed me to avoid Margaret altogether, which was hard: Margaret, gritty, bright enough to be chronically bored, had become puzzled, suspicious, of Jeffrey's (quite unsubtle) attempts to shield me from her. She smelled potential drama, and kept up the pursuit. Jeffrey became jealous as only the manic can. In my first year in Business, while I was shopping for my father's annual Christmas golf balls, Jeffrey and Margaret had it out, publicly, dramatically, in a Beat New Haven coffeehouse. Jeffrey put his foot through a doughnut counter. Certain information became public. Bits of this public information got back to my parents, who were close to the parents of two of my housemates. My parents came to me, personally, at Yale, on campus. It was snowing. At dinner with my parents and housemates, at Morty's, Jeffrey became so upset that he had to be taken to the men's room and calmed. My father swabbed Jeffrey's forehead with moist paper towels in a cold stall. Jeffrey kept telling my father what a kind man he was.

Before my parents left — their hands literally on the handles of the station wagon's doors — my father, in the snow, asked me whether my sexual preferences were outside my own control. He asked me whether, were I to meet the right woman, I might be capable of heterosexual love, of marriage and a family and a pillar-type position in the community of my choice. These, my father explained, were his and my mother's great and only wishes for me, their one child, whom they loved without judgment. My mother did not speak. I remember a distanced interest in the steam of my own breath as I explained why I thought I could not and so would not do as my father wished, invoking Fifties' wisdom about deviancy, invoking a sort of god of glands as a shaman might blame vegetable spirits for a lost harvest. My father nodded continually throughout this whole very serious and civil conversation while my mother checked maps in the glove compartment. When I failed to present for next week's holiday, my father sent me a card, my mother a check and leftovers in foil.

I saw them only once more before my father dropped dead of something unexpected. I had left Jeffrey's company, and had been befriended in my upset by a still grimly determined Margaret Childs. Jeffrey unfortunately saw, in all this, cause to take his own life, which he did in an especially nasty way; and he left, on the table beneath the heating pipes from which he was found suspended, a note — a document — neatly typed, full enough of absolute truth concatenated with utter fiction that I was asked by the administration of the Business College to leave Yale University. Weeks after my father's wake I married Margaret Childs, under a mesquite tree, the blue stares of my mother and a Houston sky, and a system of vows, promises of strength, denial, trial, and compassion far beyond the Childs' Baptist minister's ritual prescriptions.

The truth, to which there was really no more than that, and which made its way through the Senator's staff, the Dirksen and Owen Buildings, and the Little Congress of the Hill's three-piece-suited infantry remarkably focused and unexaggerated, concluded with the fact that Margaret's father, Mr. Childs, less wealthy than outright powerful by the standards of 1958's Texas, had lines of political influence that projected all the way into the U.S. Senate, and that he, Mr. Childs, in a gesture that was both carrot and stick, slung his son-in-law on one line of that influence and had me handover-hand it into the offices of a risen and rising, uncouth and ingenious senior Senator, a possible Democratic candidate in the next Presidential election. Lyndon.

I categorized and delivered mail. Business mail, official mail, important or letterheaded mail was all put into the hands of one or another of Lyndon's eight closest advisors and aides. Intra-Senate mail went to one of three administrative assistants.

All envelopes addressed by hand — automatically classified as letters from constituents — were doled out by Mrs. Teane and me among secretaries, interns, typists, low-level staffers. There was often far more of this constituents' mail, these Voices of the People, full of invective or adulation or petition for redress or advantage, far, far more than the low-level personnel could handle in a physical day. I developed and got approval for a few standardized replies, form letters made to look personal, responding to some one or another major and predictable theme in some of this mail, but we were still barely ahead of the Same Day Directive's demands. Backlogs threatened. I began staying at the offices late, telephoning Margaret or Peter to release me from the evening's plans, working to finish up assembling the Senator's replies to his people's every voice. I enjoyed the night's quiet in the staff room, one lamp burning, cicadas thrilling in rhythm out on the grounds. The staffers who handled mail began to appreciate me. A typist kept bringing me loaves of banana bread. Best, I now got access to Mrs. Teane's dark and deeply bitter East Texas coffee; she'd leave me a chuckling percolator of it as she made the closing rounds, plump and clucking, turning off lights and machines. I enjoyed the offices' night.

And, most nights, Lyndon's lights would glow from the seams in his heavy office door. I could sometimes hear the muffled tin-niness of the transistor radio he listened to when alone. He rarely left the building before ten, sometimes later, slinging his coat over a shoulder, sometimes speaking to someone absent, sometimes jogging toward an abrupt halt that let him slide the length of the slick staffers' floor, not a glance in my direction as I read crudely cursived letters, advancing a few to Mrs. Teane's attention, determining which of the pre-prepared responses were appropriate for which of the others, applying the Senator's signature stamp, moistening, fastening, metering, stacking, smoking.

And one night I looked up in a lean shadow to find him stopped, puzzled, before my desk in the big empty staff room, as if I were a person unknown to him. It's true we'd rarely spoken since that first interview four months ago. He stood there, cotton sportcoat over shoulder, impossibly tall, inclined slightly over me. 'What on God's green earth you doing, boy?' 'I'm finishing up on some of this mail, sir.' He checked his wrist. 'It's twelve midnight at night, son.' 'You work yourself pretty hard, Senator Johnson.' 'Call me Mr. Johnson, boy,' Lyndon said, twirling a watchless fob that hung from his vest. 'You can just go on ahead and call me mister.'

He hit another lamp and settled tiredly behind the desk of Nunn, a summer intern from Tufts.

'This isn't your job, boy.' He gestured at the white castle of stacks I'd made. 'Do we pay you to do this?'

'Someone needs to do it, sir. And I admire the Same Day Directive.'

He nodded, pleased. 'I wrote that.'

'I think your concern with the mail is admirable, sir.'

He made that thoughtful, clicking sound with his mouth. 'Maybe not if it keeps some sorry red-eyed boy up licking all night without renumeration it isn't.'

'Someone needs to do it,' I said. Which was true.

'Words to live my life by, son,' he said, throwing a boot up onto Nunn's blotter, opening an envelope or two, scanning. 'But damned if most wives who had minds in their head would let most husbands stay out this late, leave them lonesome till twelve midnight at night.'

I looked at my own watch, then at the heavy door to Lyndon's office.

Lyndon smiled at my point. He smiled gently. 'I carry my Miss Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson in here, boy,' he said, tapping at his chest, the spot over the scar from his recent bypass (he'd shown the whole office his scar). 'Just like my Bird carries me in her own personal heart. You give your life to other folks, you give your bodily health and your mind in your head and your intellectual concepts to serving the people, you and your wife got to carry each other inside, 'matter from how far away, or distant, or alone.' He smiled again, grimacing a little as he scratched under an arm.

I looked at him over a government postal meter.

'You and Mrs. Johnson sound like a very lucky couple, sir.'

He looked back. He put his glasses back on. His glasses had odd clear frames, water-colored, as if liquid-filled.

'My Lady Bird and me have been lucky, haven't we. We have.'

'I think you have, sir.'

'Damn right.' He looked back to the mail. 'Damn right.'

We stayed that night, answering mail, for hours, mostly silent. Though, before the air around the distant Monument got mauve and a foggy dawn lit the Hill, I found Lyndon looking at me, hunched in my loosened three-piece, staring at me, over me, somehow, nodding, saying something too low to hear.

'Excuse me, sir?'

1 was saying to keep it up, boy, is what. Keep it up. I kept it up. You keep it up.'

'Can you elaborate on that?'

'Lyndon Baines Johnson never elaborates. It's a personal rule I have found advantageous. I never elaborate. Folks distrust folks who elaborate. Write that down, boy: "Never elaborate." '

He rose slowly, using Nunn's little iron desk for support. I reached for my little notebook and pen as he shook the wrinkles out of his topcoat.

"I never saw a man with a deeper need to be loved than LBJ."

— Former aide, 1973

"He hated to be alone. I mean he really hated it. I'd come into his office when he was sitting alone at his desk and even though you could tell it wasn't me he wanted to see, his eyes would get this relieved light… He carried a little pocket radio, a little transistor radio, and sometime's we'd hear it playing in his office, while he worked in there alone. He wanted a little noise. Some voice, right there, talking to him, or singing. But he wasn't a sad man. I'm not trying to give you that impression of him. Kennedy was a sad man. Johnson was just a man who needed a lot. For all he gave out, he needed things back for himself. And he knew it."

— Former research aide Chip Piesker

April, 1978

I began doing much of my quieter busywork in Lyndon's inner office, on the red floor, among the stars. I sorted and categorized and answered mail on the floor in the corner, then on the long pine table when Piesker was remanded to my desk outside to put together Lyndon's daily news summary. I answered more and more of the personal mail. Lew N. Johnson said I lent a special, personal touch. Mrs. Teane began to forward things to my attention instead of vice versa.

Lyndon often asked me to jot things down for him — thoughts, turns of phrase, reminders. He showed, even then, a passion for rhetoric. He'd ask to see the little notebook I carried, and review it.

He did run in I960, or rather canter, in the primaries, while still a Senator. His determination not to shirk duties in the Senate meant that he couldn't really run more than halfway. But his Dirksen Building office still tripled its staff and came to resemble a kind of military headquarters. I took orders directly from Lyndon or from Dora. Mail became more and more a priority. I did some crude 1960-era mass mailings for the campaign, working with P.R. and the weird shiny-eyed men in Demographics.

Aides and advisors and friends and rivals and colleagues came and went and came and went. Lyndon hated the telephone. Dora Teane would put only the most urgent calls through. Those who knew Lyndon well always came by personally for 'chats' that sometimes made or ended careers. They all came. Humphrey looked like the empty shell of a molted locust. Kennedy looked like an advertisement for something you ought not to want, but do. Sam Rayburn reminded me of an untended shrub. Nixon looked like a Nixon mask. John Connally and John Foster Dulles didn't look like anything at all. Chet Huntley's hair looked painted on. DeGaulle was absurd. Jesse Helms was unfailingly polite. I often brought, to whoever had to wait a few minutes, some of Mrs. Teane's dark special blend. I sometimes chatted for a few moments with the visitor. I found my new French useful with the general.

Margaret Childs Boyd, my wife of almost two years, had found undershorts of mine, in the laundry, ominously stained, she said, from the very beginning of our time on T Street. She threatened to tell Mr. Jack Childs, now of Austin, that certain elaborate and philosophical pre-nuptial arrangements seemed to have fallen through. She had entered into an ill-disguised affair with a syndicated cartoonist who drew Lyndon as a sort of hunched question mark of a man with the face of a basset. She enjoyed, besides mechanical missionary congress, drinking imported beer. She had always enjoyed the beer — the first image her name summons to me involves her holding a misted mug of something Dutch up to the New Haven light — but now she got more and more enthusiastic about it. She drank with the cartoonist, with her remedial colleagues, with other election widows. Drunk, she accused me of being in love with Lyndon Johnson. She asked whether some of my stained shorts should be tucked away for posterity. I made her some good strong East Texas blend and went to my room, where by now I frequently worked into the morning on itineraries, mail, mailings, the organization and editing of some of Lyndon's more printable observations and remarks for possible inclusion in speeches. I became, simultaneously, a paid member of Lyndon's secretarial, research, and speech-writing staffs. I drew a generous enough salary to keep my new companion, M. Duverger, a young relation to the Haitian ambassador to the United States, in a pleasant, private brownstone unit that seemed ours alone. Duverger too admired the autographed portrait of Vice President and Mrs. Johnson I had hung, with his permission, in one of our rooms.

"So let's just don't talk, and let's just don't brag. Let's talk to our kinfolks and our uncles and our cousins and our aunts, and let's go do our duty November third and vote Democratic."

— Speech to Senior Class

Chesapeake High School,

Baltimore, Maryland

October 24,1960

"So you tell them what you do is just reach up there and get that lever and just say, "All the way with LBJ.' Your Mamas and your Papas and your Grandpas, some of them are going to forget this. But I am depending on you youths who are going to have to fight our wars, and who are going to have to defend this country, and who are going to get blown up if we have a nuclear holocaust — I am depending on you to have enough interest in your future which is ahead of you to get up and prod mama and papa and make them get up early and go vote."

— Speech to Fourth-grade Class

Mansfield Elementary School,

Mansfield, Ohio

October 31,1964

"Boyd and Johnson? There wasn't one of us could really say we understood Dave's relationship with LBJ. None of us knew what kind of hold the boy had on Johnson. But we knew he had one."

"That's for sure."

"But it worked the other way, too, didn't it? Boyd worshipped the hell out of LBJ."

"I would've said 'worshipped' wasn't the right word."

"Loved?"

"Now let's not get off on that again, boys. Those rumors, we knew those were just rumorous lies, even at the time. There wasn't a homosexual bone in Lyndon Johnson's body. And he loved Lady Bird like an animal."

"There was something animalistic about LBJ, wasn't there? He confirmed animalism for me, in a way. His time in the limelight, that time seemed to confirm for the whole country that a man was nothing more than a real sad and canny animal. He could hope to be no more. It was a dark time."

"That's what those radicals hated so much about him. They were scared that all they were was animals, and that LBJ was just a cannier and more powerful animal. That's all there was to it."

"God knows what that bodes for the political future of this nation right here."

"LBJ was a genius and a gorilla at the same time."

"And Boyd liked that."

"I think Dave was certainly drawn to it, don't you all? Dave was not one bit like an animal. No way."

"Too refined to ever be animalistic, maybe."

"You could say he was refined, I suppose. But I never trusted him. Not enough of his personality or his character was ever out there for me to see for me to really call him refined. A refined what?"

"A lot of times Dave could be in a room with you and you'd never even notice him in the room."

"Almost refined right out of existence, somehow."

"Whereas a whole giant ballroom or convention hall would know if Johnson was in it. He made the whole air in a room different."

"Johnson needed to have people know he was in their room."

"Was that it, then? Johnson needed an audience, and Boyd was an audience that Johnson knew was just barely there? That he didn't ever even have to acknowledge or feel any responsibility to?"

"I'm still not sold on it being impossible they were involved."

"I'm sure sold on it."

"I'm sold, also. Being homosexual would have been too delicate or human for LBJ to even dream of. I doubt if LBJ even had himself any ability to even try to imagine what being homosexual was like. Being homosexual is kind of abstract, to my way of thinking, and LBJ hated abstractions. They were outside his ken."

"He hated anything outside his ken. He'd totally ignore it, or else hate it."

"Boyd lived with that third-world French nigger that wore high heels. He lived with that nigger for years."

"Johnson had to have had some kind of hold over him,"

"Did LBJ ever even know, though? About Boyd and that Negro? Even as close as him and LBJ were?"

"I never knew of anybody who had any inklings as to that."

"No one knew if he knew,"

"How could he not know?"

— From Dr. C. T. Peete, ed.

Dissecting a President:

Conversations with LBJ's Inner Circle

1970

Lyndon as Vice President still kept his Dirksen Building office, the red tile with gold stars, the huge cubicled staff complex, the big window and the knotty-pine table where my new assistants sorted mail under my supervision.

'There was just one goddamned job I'd of picked up and moved that whole real carefully put-together system of offices and technology and personnel for. One goddamned job, boy,' he told me in the freezing open-air limousine on the way to his running mate's inauguration. 'And it seems like some good folks in their wisdom didn't want to give Lyndon Baines Johnson that job. So I say fuck off to all them, is what I say. Am I right Bird?' He knuckled at Claudia Johnson's ribs under her furs and taffeta.

'Now you just hush, now, Lyndon,' the lady said with a mock severity Lyndon clearly adored, a code between them. Lady Bird patted Lyndon's lined topcoat's thick arm and leaned across his red hooked profile, resting her other gloved hand on my knee.

'Now Mr. Boyd, I'm holding you responsible for making this rude and evil force of a man behave.'

'I'll try, Ma'am.'

'That's right boy, make me behave,' whooped the Vice President, waving to crowds he really looked at. 'I'll just tell you now, I have to blow my nose, or fart up there on that platform, I'm farting. I'm blowing my nose. Don't care how many ílectronic eyes are on that handsome little shit up there. Hope all this wind messes with his hair some.' He paused, looking around, surprised. 'Shoot, I do have to fart.'

He farted deeply into his coat and the limousine's cold hard leather seat.

'Whooff.'

'What is to be done with you, Lyndon?' Lady Bird laughed, cheerfully horrified, shaking her head at the crowd's waving line. I again remember white plumes of breath from everyone's mouth. It was freezing.

I first met Claudia Alta 'Lady Bird' Taylor Johnson at a summer barbecue on the banks of the Perdenales River that bordered Lyndon's ranch in Texas. Close friends and staff had been flown down to help Lyndon blow off steam and prepare for an upcoming Convention that already belonged, mathematically, to another man.

Lyndon had me shake hands with his dog.

'I'm telling Blanco to shake, not you, boy,' he reassured me. He turned to Lew N. Johnson. 'I know this boy will shake. Don't even have to say it to him.' Lew N. had pushed up his horn-rims and laughed.

'And this here is my unnatural wife, Mrs. Lyndon Baines Johnson,' he said, presenting to me a lovely, elegant woman with a round face and a sharp nose and a high hard hairdo. 'This is the Lady Bird, boy,' he said.

I'm very pleased to meet you, Ma'am.'

'This pleasure is mine, Mr. Boyd,' she murmured, a soft Texan.

I touched my lips to the small warm knuckles of the hand she proffered. Everyone around us could see the way Lyndon hung on the sound of his wife's voice, saw the tiny curtsies, her social motions, as though each movement of Lady Bird gently burst a layer of impediment between her and him.

'Lyndon has spoken to me of you with affection and gratitude,' she said, as Lyndon draped himself over her from behind and used his mouth to make a noise against the bare freckled shoulder just inside her gown's strap.

'Mr. Johnson is too kind,' I said, as Blanco slid against my shins and the hem of my Bermudas and then ran toward the smoking barbecue pit.

'That's it boy, I'm too kind!' Lyndon blared, knocking his head with his hand in revelation. 'Write that down for me, son: "Johnson too kind."' He turned, making a bullhorn of his hands. 'Say!' he shouted. 'Is that there band going to play some songs, or did you boys' asses get connected onto your chairs?' A cluster of men with instruments and checked shirts and cowboy hats began to fall all over themselves rushing toward the small bandstand.

We listened- ate from paper plates. Lyndon stomped his boot in time to the band.

I felt a hand's tininess on my wrist. 'Perhaps you would do me the honor of calling to take tea and refreshment at some time.' Mrs. Johnson smiled, holding my gaze only as long as was needed to communicate something. I shivered slightly, nodding. Mrs. Johnson excused herself and moved off, turning heads and parting crowds, radiating some kind of authority that had nothing to do with power or connection or the ability to harm.

I hitched up my shorts, which tended even then to sag.

'Quit mooning around and go get you some barbecue!' Lyndon shouted in my ear, tearing at an ear of corn, stomping.

Lyndon had his second serious and first secret coronary in 1962. I was driving him home from the office, late. We moved east through Washington and toward his private ocean-side home. He began gasping in the passenger seat. He couldn't breathe properly.

The nasal inhaler had no effect. His lips blued. Mr. Kutner of the Secret Service and I had a hard time of it even getting him into the house.

Lady Bird Johnson and I stripped Lyndon down and massaged his bypass-scarred chest with isopropyl alcohol. Lyndon had wheezed that this usually helped his breathing. We massaged him. He had the sort of tired, bulblike breasts old men have.

His lips continued to cyanidize. He was having his second serious coronary, he gasped. Lady Bird massaged him all over. He refused to let me ask Kutner to call an ambulance. He wanted no one to know. He said he was the Vice President. It took Lady Bird's veto finally to get him to Bethesda Naval in a black-windowed Service sedan. Kutner ignored traffic lights. It took both Lady Bird's hands to hold Lyndon's hand as he fought for breath and clutched his shoulder. He was plainly in great pain.

'Shit,' he kept saying, baring his teeth at me. 'Shit, boy. No.'

'Yes, no,' Mrs. Johnson said soothingly into his giant blue ear.

The Vice President of the United States was in Bethesda for eighteen days. For routine tests, we had Salinger tell the press. Somehow, toward the end of his stay, Lyndon persuaded a surgeon to remove his healthy appendix. Pierre talked to the media at length about the appendectomy. Lyndon showed people the appendectomy scar at every public opportunity.

'Damn appendix,' he would say.

He began to take prescribed digitalis. Lady Bird forced him to stop eating the fried pork rind he kept in his top right desk drawer alongside his silver-handled revolver. I tried hard to stop smoking in Lyndon's office.

I received a note on plain pink stationery. 'My husband and I wish to thank you for your kind and discreet attention to our needs during my husband's recent illness.' The note smelled wonderful; M. Duverger said he wanted to smell the way L'Oiseau's note smelled.

"I graduated from the Johnson City High School back in Texas in a class of six. For some time I had felt that my father was not really as smart as I thought he ought to be, and I thought that I could improve on a good many of my mother's approaches to life, as well. So when I got my high school diploma I decided to follow the old philosopher Horace Greeley's advice and 'Go West, Young Man,' and seek my fortune. With twenty-six dollars in my pocket and a T-Model Ford automobile, five of my schoolmates and I started out early one morning on our way to the Golden West, the great state of California. We got there in due time, minus most of my twenty-six dollars, and I got a very well-paying job of ninety dollars a month running an elevator up and down. But I found at the end of the month, after I paid for three meals and paid for my room and my laundry that I was probably better off back there eating Mama's food than I was in California. So I went back to Texas and I got a job with the Highway Department. We didn't have to get to work until sunup, and we got to quit every night at sundown. We did have to get to work on our own time. We had to be at work at sunup, and that was usually twenty or thirty miles down the Highway, and we had to ride home on our own time after sundown. I got paid the magnificent salary of a dollar a day. After a little over a year of that at the Highway Department, I began to think that my father's advice that I should go and take some more training and not be a school drop-out— maybe he was wiser than I had thought a year before. In other words, he became a lot smarter while I was gone in California and on the Highway. And with the help of the good Lord, and with a mother persistently urging to me to go back to school and get some training, I hitchhiked fifty miles to get back into the classroom, where I spent four long years. But I have been reasonably well-employed ever since. I now have a contract that runs until January 20,1965.

— Speech to Graduating Class

Amherst College,

Amherst, Massachusetts

May 25,1963

Mother came to Washington just once in those ten years to visit; she and Margaret kept in very good touch.

The day my mother visited, Duverger cooked all morning, a crown roast, yams in cream, and Les Jeux Dieux, a Haitian dessert, a specialty, airy and painfully sweet. He fussed nervously around the kitchen all morning in only an apron and heels while I vacuumed under furniture and worked surfaces over with oil soap.

Over drinks in the spotless room redolent of spiced pork, mother talked about Margaret Childs and how mother and Jack and Sue-Bea Childs so hoped that Margaret's hospitalization for alcohol dependency would mean a new lease on life for a dear girl who'd never once done anything to hurt anybody. Duverger kept fidgeting in the sportcoat I'd lent him.

It was the only completely silent dinner party I've ever experienced. We listened to the sounds of our knives against our plates. I could hear differences in our styles of mastication.

Our housewarming gift from her was a false cluster of grapes, the grapes purple marbles on a green glass stem.

My mother did not look old.

'Elle a tort,' Duverger kept repeating, later, as he applied the gel. He had little English he was proud of; we spoke a kind of pidgin when alone.

'Elle a tort, cette salope-là. She has wrong. She has wrong.'

I asked what he meant as he spread cold gel on himself and then me. He opened me roughly, rudely. I winced into the pattern of the bed's headboard.

'About what is Mother wrong?'

'She hates me because she believes you love me.'

He sodomized me violently, without one thought to my comfort or pleasure, finally shuddering and falling to weep against me. I had cried out several times in pain.

'Ce n'est pas moi qui tu aimes.'

'Of course I love you. We share a life, Rene.'

He was having difficulty breathing. 'Ce n'est not I.'

'Whom, then?' I asked, rolling him off. 'If you say I do not love you, whom do I love?'

'Tu m'en a besoin,' he cried, rending dark bedroom air with his nails. 'You need me. You feel the responsibility for me. But your love it is not for me.'

'My love is for you, Duverger. Need, responsibility: these are part of love, in this nation.'

'Elle a tort.' He turned himself away, curling fetal on his side of the bed. 'She believes we are not lonely.' I said nothing.

'Why must it be lonely?' he said. He said it as if it were a statement. He kept repeating it. I woke once, very late, to his broad brown back, moving, a rhythm, his open hand to his face, still repeating.

"He sees life as a jungle. No matter how long a rein you think you're on, he's always got the rein in his hands."

— Former associate, 1963

"Most of his worries are of his own making. He sees troubles where none exist. He's liable to wake up in the morning and think everything's got loose during the night,"

— Close friend, 1963

Lyndon spent the fourteen-minute ride to Parkland Hospital on the floor of the open-air limousine's back seat, his nose jammed against the sole of Senator Yarbrough's shoe. On top of them, covering them and holding them down as they struggled, was a Secret Serviceman whose cologne alone could have caused the confused panic I saw ripple through the Dallas streets' crowds as I lay on top of them all, riding their struggle, watching from my perch three Servicemen, in the convertible ahead, restraining the First Lady as she struggled and screamed, imploring them to let her go back to the site and retrieve something I could not quite hear.

We were jammed together in that back seat, a tumble of limbs, Yalies stuffing a phone booth. Lyndon's pantcuff and white hairless ankle and low-cut dress boot waved around in front of my face as we rode. I could hear him, beneath the overpoweringly scented Serviceman, cursing Yarbrough.

The hospital was choreographed madness. Lyndon, handkerchief to his bruised nose, was besieged by cameras, microphones, doctors, Servicemen, print media, and, worst, all those Presidentially appointed officials and staffers, eyes narrowed with self-interest, who knew enough to jump hosts before the political animal they had ridden had even cooled.

I telephoned Lady Bird Johnson — Lyndon's teeth had bared at even the suggestion that he use the telephone now — to reassure her and advise her to arrange travel to Dallas as quickly as possible. I called Hal Ball to facilitate quick transportation for Mrs. Johnson. I saw Lyndon trapped by the mob in the lobby's corner, his slack cheeks flushed hot, his nose redly purple, his small person's eyes dull with shock and a dawning realization. His little eyes sought mine above the roiling coil of press and lackeys, but he could not get through, even as I waved from the phone-bank.

'You get that mike out my face or it's gonna be calling your personal ass home,' was edited from the special newscasts. Dan Rather had reeled away, pale, rubbing his crew cut.

The crowd slowly dissolved as news from doctors and Service upstairs failed to forthcome. We were able to huddle with Lyndon in a small waiting room off the lobby. The meeting was grimly efficient. An ad hoc transition team was assembled on the spot. Service had set up a line to Ball back at the office. Bunker and Califano and Salinger were filling note cards furiously. Cabinet appointments were hashed out with the kind of distanced heat reserved for arguments about golf. Lyndon said little.

I took Lyndon up to the First Lady's room. Lyndon parted the crowd around her bed. He felt her tranquilized forehead with a hand that almost covered her face. Her color was good. A flashbulb popped. I saw the First Lady's drugged eyes between Lyndon's fingers.

No one had any news even about who in the hospital might have news. We all huddled, conferred, smoked, blew the smoke away from Lyndon, waited. Lyndon was so savage to those young Bos-tonians who came snuffling up both to commiserate and congratulate that our group was soon left to itself. Connally, his arm in a sling, hovered pacing at the perimeter of our circle, drinking at a bottled seltzer whose volume seemed to remain somehow constant.

I called Duverger, who had been home with bronchitis, watching the news on television and out of his mind with worry. I called Mrs. Teane at her home in Arlington. I tried to call Margaret at her treatment center in Maryland and was informed that she had checked out weeks ago. My mother's line remained busy for hours.

Our huddle ended, too, long before the official word came. Everyone had a hundred things to do. The small room emptied little by little. Flanked by Pierre and me, Lyndon finally had a few minutes to slouch and reflect in his waiting-room chair. He applied the inhaler to his swollen passages. His spurs made lines on the floor as he stretched out long legs. He held his own forearm, opening and closing his fist. The skin below his eyes was faintly blue. I dispensed some digitalis and all but had to force him to swallow.

We sat. We stared for a time at the little room's white walls. Connally studied the concession machines.

'Everything,' Lyndon was murmuring.

'Excuse me sir?'

He looked out absently over his own legs. 'Boy,' he said, 'I'd give every fucking thing I have not to have to stand up there and take a job ain't mine by right or by the will of folks. Your thinking man, he avoids back doors to things. Charity. Humiliation. Distrust. Responsibility you didn't never get to get ready to expect.'

'Natural to feel that way, LB,' Connally said, feeding a candy machine coins.

Lyndon stared hard at a point I could not see, shaking his great pill of a head.

'I'd give every fucking thing I have, boy.'

Salinger shot me a look, but I had already clicked out my pen.

There was transition. Two hurried mass mailings. Boxes to be packed and taped. Burly movers to be supervised.

Duverger's health declined. He seemed unable to shake the bronchitis and the coincident infections it opened him to. He lost the strength to climb stairs and had to give up his job at the boutique. He lay in bed, listening to scratched Belafonte records and raising in our linen a daily mountain of colorful used Kleenex. He lost weight and had fevers. I learned that malaria was endemic in Haiti, and obtained quinine from Bethesda. Whether from empathy or exposure, I felt my own health getting more delicate as the time with Duverger passed. I caught every sore throat that went around the White House. I got used to having a sore throat.

The White House systems for receiving and distributing and answering mail were huge, hugely staffed, time-tested, honed to a hard edge of efficiency. Lyndon's Same Day Directive presented these quick furtive career mailboys small challenge. I became little more than a postal figurehead, responsible for drafting and updating the ten or so standardized reply letters that were printed and signature-stamped by the gross and flowed out in response to the growing number of letters and telegrams from people in every state. By 1965 the incoming mail was on the whole negative, and it was hard to prevent the formulated responses from sounding either artificial or defensive and shrill.

Duverger and I were formally married in a small civil ceremony outside a Mount Vernon suburb. The service was attended by a few close mutual friends. Peter came all the way from Charlotte. Duverger had to sit for the ceremony, dressed in mute silks that deemphasized, or maybe complemented, the sick weak gray of his complexion.

"I especially appreciate your coming here because I feel I have a rapport with you and they won't let me out of the gate so I am glad they let you in."

— To White House Tour Group

May 14,1966

"This is not a change in purpose. It is a change in what we believe that purpose requires."

— To Young Democrats' Council

Columbia University, New York

May 21,1966

"He seemed to get obsessed with his health. He began to seem robust in the way delicate people seem robust."

"Boyd got delicate and obsessed, too. He wore his topcoat all the time. He perspired. As if he followed LBJ's lead in everything."

"Boyd barely even had a formal function. That army of career mail-boys of Kennedy's was all over the SDD before we even got the transition over with." "He'd just sit there holding the radio while Lyndon worked.

Who knows what he did in there." "They'd both wander around constantly. Walk around the grounds. Look out the fence." "Sometimes just the President alone, except there wandering a ways behind him'd be Boyd, with all those Secret Service folks." "But who knows what they walked over in that office, hour after hour."

"The radio stopped, when they were in there." "Who knows how many decisions he was in on. Tonkin.

Cambodia. The whole Great Big Society." "We'll never know that about Lady Bird, either. She was one of those behind-the-scenes types of First Ladies. Influence impossible to gauge."

"We know Boyd helped write some of the later speeches." "But no one even knows which ones were whose." "They were all thick as thieves over there." "Nobody who knows anything is even alive anymore." "That summary-boy with the ears had that gruesome office pool going about whether Dave would outlive Lyndon.

— From Dissecting

"Now you folks come on and be happy, God damn it."

— Televised address Oval Office,

White House

November 1967

Most of the stories about those last months, about Lyndon refusing sometimes ever to leave the Oval Office, are the truth. I sat in the oversized corner chair, my lap full of tissues and lozenges, and watched him urinate into the iron office wastebasket Mrs. Teane would quietly empty in the morning. Sounds in the office were hushed by thick Truman carpet, lush furnishings. The office was dark except for passing headlights and the orange flicker of the protesters' bonfire in the park across the street.

The office window facing Pennsylvania was dappled and smeared with the oil of Lyndon's nose. He stood, face touching the window, an ellipse of his breath appearing and shrinking and appearing on the glass as he whispered along with the protesters' crudely rhymed chants. Helicopters circled like gulls; fat fingers of spotlight played over the park and the White House grounds and the line of Kutner's Servicemen ranged along the black iron fence. Things were occasionally thrown at the fence, and clattered.

Lyndon applied his nasal inhaler, inhaling fiercely.

'How many kids did I kill today, boy?' he asked, turning from the window.

I sniffed deeply, swallowing. 'I think that's neither a fair nor a healthy way to think about a question like that, sir.'

'Goddamn your pale soul boy I asked you how many! He pointed at a window full of yam-colored bonfire light. 'They're sure the mother-fuck asking. I think Lyndon Johnson should be allowed to ask, as well.'

'Probably between three and four hundred kids today, sir,' I said. I sneezed wetly and miserably into a tissue. 'Happy now?'

Lyndon turned back to the window. He had forgotten to rebutton his trousers.

'Happy,' he snorted. The best way to tell he'd heard you was to listen for repetition. 'You think they're happy?' he asked.

'Who?'

He twitched his big head at the bonfire, listening for the tiny loudness of the distant bullhorns and the plaintive hiss of crowds' response. He slouched, his hands on the sill for support. 'Those youths of America over across there,' he said.

'They seem pretty upset, sir.'

He hitched up his sagging pants thoughtfully. 'Boy, I get a smell of happiness off their upset, however. I think they enjoy getting outraged and vilified and unjustly ignored. That's what your leader of this here free world thinks, boy.'

'Could you elaborate on that, sir?'

Lyndon horselaughed a big misted circle onto the window, and we looked together at the big hand-lettered sign on the Oval Office wall, beside the cattle horns, behind the Presidential desk. I'd made it. It read NEVER ELABORATE.

He was shaking his head. 'I believe… I believe I am out of touch with the youth of America. I believe that they cannot be touched by me, or by what's right, or by intellectual concepts on what's right for a nation.'

I sneezed.

He touched, with big brown-freckled fingers, at the window, leaving more smears. 'You'll say this is easy for me to say, but I say they've had it too goddamned easy, son. These youths that are yippies and that are protesters and that use violence and public display. We gave it to them too easy, boy. I mean their Daddies. Men that I was youths with. And these youths today are pissed off. They ain't never once had to worry or hurt or suffer in any real way whatsoever. They do not know Great Depression and they do not know desolation.' He looked at me. 'You think that's good?'

I looked back at him.

'I think I'm gettin' to be a believer in folks' maybe needing to suffer some. You see some implications in that belief? It implies our whole agenda of domestic programs is maybe possibly bad, boy. I'm headed for thinking it's smelling bad right at the heart of the whole thing.' He inhaled nasally, watching protesters dance around. 'We're taking away folks' suffering here at home through these careful domestic programs, boy,' he said, 'without giving them nothing to replace it. Take a look at them dancing across over there, boy, shouting fuck you like they invented both fucking and me, their President, take a look over across, and you'll see what I see. I see some animals that need to suffer, some folks that need some suffering to even be Americans inside, boy; and if we don't give them some suffering, why, they'll just go and hunt up some for themselves. They'll take some suffering from some oriental youths who are caught in a great struggle between sides, they'll go and take those other folks' suffering and take it inside themselves. They're getting stimulation from it, son. I'm believing in the youths of America's need for some genuine stimulation. Those youths are out there making their own stimulation; they're making it from scratch off oriental youths wouldn't squat to help your Mama take a leak. We as leaders haven't given them shit. They think prosperity and leadership is dull. God bless the general patheticness of their souls.' He pressed his nose against the glass. I had a quick vision, as he stood there, of children and candy stores.

I squinted as a helicopter's passing spot brightened the Oval Office to a brief blue noon. 'So you think there's something right about what they're doing out there?'

' "Something right,"' Lyndon snorted, motionless at the blue window. 'No, 'cause they got no notion of right and wrong. Listen. They got no notion whatsoever of right and wrong, boy. Listen.'

We listened to them. I sniffed quietly.

'To them, right and wrong is words, boy.' He came away and eased himself into his big desk chair, sitting straight, hands out before him on the unscarred presidential cherrywood. 'Right and wrong ain't words,' he said. 'They're feelings. In your guts and intestines and such. Not words. Not songs with guitars. They're what make you feel like you do. They're inside you. Your heart and digestion. Like the folks you personally love.' He felt at his forearm and clenched his fist. 'Let them sad sorry boys out across there go be responsible for something for a second, boy. Let them go be responsible for some folks and then come back and tell their President, me, LBJ, about right and wrong and so forth.'

We took his pulse together. We measured his pressure. There were no pains in his shoulder or side, no blue about his mouth. We reclined him for blood flow, placed his boots on the window's sill. My chest and back were soaked with perspiration. I made my way back to my chair in the corner, feeling terribly faint.

'You all right, boy?'

'Yes, sir. Thank you.'

He chuckled. 'Some pair of federal functionaries right here, I got to say.'

I coughed.

We listened, quiet, unwell, to the songs and chants and slogans and to the chop of Service helicopters and the clang and clatter of beer cans. Minutes passed in the faint bonfire glow. I asked Lyndon whether he was asleep.

'I ain't sleeping,' he said.

'Could I ask you to tell me what it feels like, then, sir.'

A silence of distant chant. Lyndon picked at his nose deeply, his eyes closed, head thrown back.

'Does what feel like?'

I cleared my throat. 'Being responsible, as you were saying, I meant. Being responsible for people. What does it feel like, if you are?'

He either chuckled or wheezed, a deep sound, almost subsonic, from the recesses of his inclined executive chair. I stared at his profile, a caricaturist's dream.

'You and Bird,' he said. 'Damned if you and my Bird don't always ask the same things of Lyndon Johnson, son. It's queer to me.' He brought himself upright to face my bit of the office's darkness. 'I done told Bird just last week how responsibility, why, it is not even like a feeling at all,' he said quietly.

'You can't feel what responsibility feels like? It numbs you?'

He administered the inhaler, played with his fob against the bad light of the window.

'I told Bird it's like the sky, boy. Is what I told her. How about if I come and ask you what does the sky feel like to you? The sky ain't a feeling, boy.'

"We both coughed.

He pointed upward, vaguely up at the horns, nodding as if at something familiar. 'But it's there, friend. The sky is there. It's there, over your ass, every fucking day. 'Matter where you go, boy, look on up, and on top of every goddamned thing else she's there. And the day there ain't no sky. .'

He squeezed and worked the last bits of inhalant out of his nasal inhaler. It was a hideous sound. Before long I had to help Lyndon back over to the office wastebasket full of urine. We stood there, together, on the plain white marble Presidents' floor.

"Mr. Lyndon 'LBJ' Johnson, like all men in public service, was driven both by a great and zealous personal ambition and by a great and zealous compassion for the well-being of his fellow man. He was, like all great men, hell, like all men, a paradox of mystery. He will not and cannot ever be completely or totally understood. But for those of us gathered today under these great lone-star skies to try and understand a man we must try to understand if we are to do him the honor he deserves, I say this. I say to go west. I say the further you go west, the nearer you get to Lyndon Baines Johnson."

— Texas State Senator Jack Childs

Eulogy on the Passing of LBJ

Austin, Texas, 1968

When I received the pink, plainly inscribed invitation to take tea and refreshment with Claudia 'Lady Bird' Johnson, I was prostrate in our big bed, down with a violent flu.

Duverger had been gone almost a week. I had come home from some mass-mailing work in New Hampshire to find him gone. He had left no word and had packed none of his several pieces of luggage. His money and several of my small black office notebooks were gone.

I can offer no better testimony to my feelings for Lyndon's career than my panic that René had either defected to or been shanghaied by some Other Side. Most of the entries in the notebooks were verbatim. One had recounted a Joint Chiefs briefing session held on sinks and hampers and the lip of a claw-footed tub while Lyndon had been moving his bowels on the commode. There was enough truth in those tiny records to embarrass Lyndon beyond repair; he had ordered that everything that was written be written. I admit, with pain, that my first day's thoughts were of Lyndon and betrayal and the masklike Republican we'd all grown to fear.

Three days of frantic searching for Duverger had taken me as far north as the New Hampshire camps of Humphrey, McCarthy, Lindsay and Percy — and that man — and as far south as the dark lounges of Chevy Chase. It left me weak beyond description, and I came down with a violent flu. Lyndon, too, had been sick, out of the office and news for a week. He had not contacted me. No one from either office or White House had called for the three days I had been home ill. And I hadn't the character to call anyone.

'Our husbands and I inquire as to whether you would do us the honor of taking tea and refreshment at our Shore home this evening,' read the note on colored stationery, without letterhead. I had become so trained to look for the letterhead first that the blankness of the First Lady's notes seemed almost high-handed.

And it was well-known scuttlebutt — scuttle, I suspected, from the butt of Margaret's old cartoonist, who had sketched me as a W.C.-Fields-nosed flower girl, holding the '68 train of Johnson as bride — that Mrs. Johnson wanted Lyndon out, and saw his office/ me as the rival she'd never had in life. 'Our husbands,' then, fit what I would hear.

Too, we could never name the heady perfume that had risen from Mrs. Johnson's notes and seduced Duverger from the first. He had shopped, sniffing, for days, and had fixed the central scent as essence of bluebonnet before he had become unable to leave our home altogether.

Duverger was dying of something that was not malaria. All four of my salaries went to Bethesda, where Duverger was not covered and where the staff, like Aquinas before God, could think of nothing to do but define his decline via what it was not. The doctors between whom I had shuttled my seated, coughing husband could isolate nothing but a pattern in his susceptibility to the uncountable diseases that came and thrived in the petri dish that was Washington.

For these last many months I had lain at nighttime holding a man dying of a pattern, encircling with my white arm gray ribs that became more and more defined, feeling pulses through a wrist too wasted narrow to support the length of its long-nailed hand, watching his stomach cave and his hips flare like a woman's and his knees bulge like balls from his legs' receding meat.

'Suis fatigue. M'aimes-tu?'

'Tais-toi. Bois celui-ci.'

'M'aimes-tu?'

An ever weaker me, blinking the cornered translucence of all my connections, I saw Lyndon himself fading before a carnivorous press corps; a war as nasty and real and greenly-broadcast as it was statistical and fuzzily bordered to those of us who read and acted on the actual reports; a reversal of his presidential resolve that the government's raison was before all to reduce sum totals of suffering; a growing intuition of his own frailty as two more well-concealed infarctions left him gaunt and yellow and blotched, his eyes seeming to grow to fit the face that settled into itself around them.

Duverger, who hadn't the strength to leave, was gone. He had taken my notes and left none of his own. Nothing in the vase below the mantel's autographed photo and little Klee. Amid tissues and the popped aluminum shells of antinauseants, I read the finely penned note from Mrs. Johnson, hand-delivered by one of my own distant subordinates in Mail. I breathed at what rose from the note.

'Wardine has prepared some praline mix which I find to complement camomile tea very nicely, Mr. Boyd.'

'Thank you, Ma'am.'

'Thank you that will be all Wardine.'

The black servant in black stockings and a doilied apron wiped away the last of the cold cream that had masked the First Lady's round sharp face. She adjusted the pillow under Mrs. Johnson's feet and withdrew, her back always to me.

I coughed faintly. I wiped my forehead.

'My own husband is near death, child.'

I had arrived late by taxi at the Johnsons' private home, retained from his days as a Senator, a turreted post-plantation thing on the very eastern shore of the Potomac delta that pouted lip-like out into the Atlantic. I could hear ocean and see lightning bubbling over a cloud roof far out to the east's sea. A horn in a channel moaned. I felt at the glands in my throat.

'You don't look well at all yourself, Mr. Boyd.'

I looked about. 'Will the President be able to join us, Ma'am?'

She looked at me over her cup of steam. 'Lyndon is dying, child. He has had great and additional. . trouble with the illness that has been troubling him all these years.'

'He infarcted again?'

'He has asked not to be alone on this night.'

'He's supposed to die tonight, you're saying?'

She readjusted the hem of her robe. 'It's a great trial for all of us who are close to the President.' She looked up. 'Don't you agree?'

I was wary. There were no doctors. I'd seen only the ordinary number of Kutner's men at the gate. I sniffed meatily. 'So then why aren't you with him, Ma'am, if he doesn't want to be alone?'

Lady Bird took a tiny bite of praline. She smiled the way elegant ladies smile when they chew. 'I am with Lyndon every moment of every day, dear child. As he told you. President Johnson and I are too close, we believe, to afford one another real company or comfort.' She took another little bite. 'Perhaps those come from others?'

I sipped at the sweet tea in the wafer-thin china cup. The cup was almost too delicate to hold. A wave of complete nausea went over me. I hunched and closed my eyes. My ears rang, from medicine. I wanted to tell Mrs. Johnson that I didn't believe what she, who had flown to Dallas in a fighter-jet, was sitting there calmly eating a cookie and telling me. I really wanted to tell her I had troubles of my own. I didn't want to tell her what they were. I wanted to talk to Lyndon.

'So I'm to go sit up with him, Ma'am?'

'Are you all right, Mr. Boyd?'

'Not exactly. But I'd be honored to sit with President Johnson.' I tried to swallow. 'But I very much doubt, with all due respect, that the President is actually dying, Ma'am. No two consecutive presidents have ever died in office, Mrs. Johnson.' I had researched this for a form letter reassuring citizens who'd written for reassurance in 1963.

Mrs. Johnson adjusted her robe under herself on the pink sofa. Everything about the room was as a First Lady's personal private parlor should be. From the mirrors with frames carved like tympana to the delicate oriental statuary to the crystal place settings spread out upright for display on white shelves to the spiraled rug whose pattern swirled into itself in a kind of arabesque between my couch and Mrs. Johnson's. I closed my eyes.

'You too, Mr. Boyd,' she said, snapping a cookie, 'seem marked for a… a kind of frailty by the evident love and responsibility you feel toward others.'

I heard an expensive clock tick. I decided what this was about and somehow just withdrew my thoughts from Duverger and the books. I swallowed against a hot flash. 'I'm not in love with the President,' I said.

She smiled wonderfully as what I'd said hung there. 'I beg your pardon, Mr. Boyd.'

'I'm sure it looks bad, my being sick just when he's sick,' I said. I held onto the arm of my sofa. 'I'm sure you've heard several stories about me and about how I'm supposedly in love with Mr. Johnson and follow him around like a love-starved animal and want to be intimate with him and enjoy such a close working relationship with him because I love him.' I'm afraid I retched the bit of the camomile and praline refreshment I'd taken. It hung in a dusky line of retch over my topcoat and slowly collected itself in my lap. 'Well I'm not,' I said, wiping my mouth. 'And please excuse me for retching just now.'

'Mr. Boyd,' she said. 'Dear Mr. Boyd, I have no reservations about your feelings for Lyndon. I appreciate beyond my poor power to express it your devotion to my husband, to the responsibility and tasks the Lord has seen fit to assign him. I appreciate your feelings toward my husband more than I can say. And I believe I understand what those feelings are.' She looked delicately away from my lap. 'I was speaking of your husband.'

I was dabbing at the puddle, swirled with praline. 'And this my-husband-your-husband business, Ma'am. I'd just ignore as much scuttlebutt as you can. Rumors are seldom all true,' I said. I stood, to facilitate my dabbing.

Mrs. Johnson's forehead furrowed and cleared. 'Your husband, Mr. Boyd.' She produced a sort of pink index card as I stood there. 'M. Duverger,' she read, 'a Caribbean Negro with diplomatic immunity, civilly married by you in 1965.' She looked up from the card. 'He has been kind enough to provide Lyndon the company and attention he has required during his illness.'

I tried to focus on the rug. 'Duverger is here?'

'As you were north, doing what Mr. Donagan described as integral postal work for our organization in New Hampshire,' she said, tidying the cookie tray. 'He arranged for Mr. Kutner of the Service to bring your husband to our home to be presented to the President. Who is dying.'

I sneezed. She sipped. I looked for something in her face. I had an unreasonable need to see whose script was on the index card she'd produced. These balanced off urges both to race to Duverger's side — though the Shore home was huge, and I'd never been past the rear hall — and to know how on earth Coby Donagan could have said the work I'd been north doing was important. I wanted so many different things all at once that I could not move. The First Lady sipped. 'So Mr. Johnson knows I have a husband?' I said.

'How, child, could he not know?' Lady Bird smiled kindly. 'How could he not know the heart of a young man who has emptied his life and his own heart into the life and work of Lyndon Baines Johnson?'

I began to feel for Mrs. Johnson a dislike beyond anything I'd ever felt for Margaret. She sat there, coiffed, in a robe, eating pralines. I felt simply awful. 'Is Duverger all right?' I said hoarsely. 'Where is he? Has he died? He's been dying, is the thing. Not Mr. Johnson. That's why I think I'm sick. Not Mr. Johnson.'

'They have been conversing together, Mr. Boyd.'

'René has hardly any English.'

She shrugged as at the irrelevant. 'They have had several conversations of great length, Lyndon has told me. And preserved them, as you two did.'

'How could Duverger not have said he was coming here? Is he dead?'

'M. Duverger has impressed Lyndon as a truly singular Negro, Mr. Boyd. They have discussed such issues close to Lyndon's heart as suffering, and struggles between sides, and Negroness. It was the best my husband has felt since you and Mrs. Teane finally removed him from his office, he told me.'

'Is he dead, I said,' I said.

She ate. 'Are you as privy as I to what my husband feels, David?' She looked for response. I wasn't giving any if she wasn't. 'My husband,' she continued, 'feels responsibility as you and I feel our own weight. The responsibility has eaten at him. You have watched him. You have been his sole comfort for almost a decade, child.' 'So you really are afraid he's in love with me.' Whether from resemblance or real grief, I noticed, she answered questions as Lyndon did; she answered them as tangents, on a kind of curve that brought her now in close, now out on her own course. Now she tittered Southernly, a white hand to her mouthful of refreshment. Her hair was confined in a kind of net.

'Lyndon cannot, he insists, for the life of him understand why new generations such as your own see everything of importance in terms of love, David. As if it explained feelings lasting years, that word.'

I could see Kutner's shadow, and another, move from foyer to kitchen. I rose.

She said 'Love is simply a word. It joins separate things. Lyndon and I, though you would disagree, agree that we do not properly love one another anymore. Because we ceased long ago to be enough apart for a 'love' to span any distance. Lyndon says he shall cherish the day when love and right and wrong and responsibility, when these words, he says, are understood by you youths of America to be nothing but arrangements of distance.'

'Is that Kutner and Coby Donagan I saw going into the kitchen?' 'Please sit.' I sat.

She leaned in. 'Lyndon is haunted by his own conception of distance, David. His hatred of being alone, physically alone, no matter atop what — the area of his hatred in which your own devoted services have been so invaluable to us — his hatred of being alone is a consequence of what his memoir will call his great intellectual concept: the distance at which we see each other, arrange each other, love. That love, he will say, is a federal highway, lines putting communities, that move and exist at great distance, in touch. My husband has stated publicly that America, too, his own America, that he loves enough to conceal deaths for, is to be understood in terms of distance.'

'So we don't even love each other, then?' I stared at her crystal place settings, arranged and never used, hot with nausea. 'Two close people can't love each other, even in a sort of Platonic way?'

'You stand in relations, my husband says. You contain one another. He says he owns the floor you stand on. He says you are the sky whose presence and meaning have become everyday.'

I coughed.

'Surely love means less?'

I realized, again, what Mrs. Johnson was talking about. I almost retched again.

'Mrs. Johnson,' I said, 'I was talking about Duverger and me.' I tried to lean as she had. 'Does Mr. Johnson know that Duverger and I love each other? That my first thoughts, when I found the notebooks and him gone, were for him? Does he know that I love?'

The shadow apart from Kutner's was Wardine, the First Lady's Negro servant, who was skilled with cold cream.

'And who wrote that card, about me, you read from?' I said.

'Someone in the room above us,' Mrs. Johnson said, not pointing, 'where the two husbands inside us have withdrawn,' not looking at me once, 'have removed themselves to positions of distance, must know that we love, child. He simply must. Don't you agree?' She inclined to the china pot, lifted its wafery lid to let Wardine check its contents. Upstairs. I was on my feet. She could tell me to sit as much as she liked.

'The President won't die, Ma'am.'

'Don't you agree?'

Wardine poured for her mistress, then came for my cup.

'Ma'am?'

She leaned, dispensing sugar, speaking to her own sharp bird's face as it trembled on the surface of her tea like the moon on water. 'I asked you, boy, whether or not you agreed.'

The smell of my soiled topcoat was the smell that came, faint, from under that door. The gently feminine clink of Lady Bird Johnson's willow-necked spoon was the masculine sound of my heavy old undergraduate ring rapping firmly against the carved panel of that great bedroom door. I rapped. A spasm passed through me, my gut, and I held until it passed. Something else moaned, businesslike, in the harbor.

The big door was silent, tonight, in November, 1968.

Forget the curved circle, for whom distance means the sheer size of what it holds inside. Build a road. Make a line. Go as far west as the limit of the country lets you — Bodega Bay, not Whittier, California — and make a line; and let the wake of the line's movement be the distance between where it starts and what it sees; and keep making that line, west, farther and farther; and the earth's circle will clutch at that line, keep it near to what it holds, like someone greedy with a praline; and the giant curve that informs straight lines will bring you around, in time, to the distant eastern point of the country behind you, that dim master bedroom on the dim far eastern shore of the Atlantic; and the circle you have made is quiet and huge, and everything the world holds is inside: the bedroom: a toppled trophy has punched a shivered star through the glass of its case, a swirling traffic-flickered carpet and massed wooden fixtures smelling of oil soap and the breath of the ill. I saw the big white Bufferin of the President's personal master bed, stripped to sheets, variously shadow-colored by the changing traffic light at the Washington and Kennedy Streets' intersection below and just outside. On the stripped bed — neatly littered with papers and cards, my notecards, a decade of stenography to Lyndon — lay my lover, curled stiff on his side, a frozen skeleton X ray, impossibly thin, fuzzily bearded, his hand outstretched with dulled nails to cover, partly, the white face beside him, the big white face attached to the long form below the tight clean sheets, motionless, the bed flanked by two Servicemen who slumped, tired, red, green. Du-verger's spread cold hand partly covered that Presidential face as in an interrupted caress; it lay like a spider on the big pill of the man's head, the bland, lined, carnivore's mouth, his glasses with clear frames, his nasal inhaler on the squat bedside table, the white Hot Line blinking, mutely active, yellow in a yellow light on Kennedy. Duverger's hand was spread open over the face of the President. I saw the broad white cotton sheet, Duverger above and Johnson below, the sharp points of Johnson's old man's breasts against the sheet, the points barely moving, the chest hardly rising, the sheet pulsing, ever so faintly, like water at great distance from its source.

I wiped mucus from my lip and saw, closer, the President's personal eyes, the eyes of not that small a person, eyes yolked with a high blue film of heartfelt pain, open and staring at the bedroom's skylight through Duverger's narrow fingers. I heard lips that kissed the palm of a black man as they moved together to form words, the eyes half-focused on the alien presence of me, leaning in beside the bed.

Duverger's hand, I knew, would move that way only if the President was smiling.

'Hello up there,' he whispered.

I leaned in closer.

'Lyndon?'