Personal History (45 page)

I had doubted, perhaps wrongly, that Lyndon Johnson really wanted the bill, and had told Phil so. My feeling was that Johnson wanted to cultivate his relationship with Phil and chose this route to do it. But Phil’s enthusiasm for both the bill and the senator kept growing, and despite the failure of the bill, they undoubtedly became even closer after working together on it.

Unlike Phil, I was still drawn to Adlai Stevenson, though my mother met him before I did. She was undergoing a political transformation, which, like everything she did, was carried to extremes. Her doubts about Eisenhower were confirmed when she had tried—and failed—to interest him and his administration in the social issues that mattered so much to her. She was extremely disappointed in his lack of response. “There’s no getting away from it, Phil. He’s dumb,” she wrote in a letter.

Her acquaintance with Adlai blossomed into one of her highly emotional relationships with prominent men. There were heavy exchanges of letters between them over the next several years. Hers to him were full of advice of both a personal and a political nature. But Adlai really did become her friend, writing equally personal and somewhat emotional letters in response.

In June of 1955, my mother had an operation for cancer of the uterus. Even though the doctors had told her the cancer was localized, she, like anyone confronted with such an operation, had some last wishes in case something went wrong, and decided to issue certain instructions. When I was visiting her the evening before the operation, she asked me to send for Phil. Her instructions to him involved three things: her jewelry was to go to specific granddaughters and to be used by their mothers until the girls
grew up; a small amount of money was to go to her friend Ruth Taylor; and—most urgent—she wanted to make an immediate gift of $25,000 to Adlai Stevenson. She had learned from newspaper reports that he had no money for preparatory political expenses for the next campaign, and she thought he ought to be freed of that worry. She told Phil that nothing would give her as much happiness as knowing that this had been done. Phil agreed to arrange it and promptly did.

That fall, Phil was going to be making a speech in Chicago, and wrote to Adlai suggesting that we three get together, which we did. Adlai himself drove us to the suburbs of Chicago, where he had a beautiful farm with a pretty, informal, rambling house in which his family of three sons had grown up and in which he now lived alone. For me this was the beginning of a pleasant but complicated relationship. Phil and Adlai had a less rewarding time together. Phil had known Adlai for quite a while and thought him an obviously able and talented man, but he worried that Adlai couldn’t compare as a politician to Lyndon Johnson, and he later came to share the view, held by many, that Stevenson was too indecisive and not tough-minded enough. Nevertheless, Phil took the paper back to a policy of nonendorsement.

As expected, President Eisenhower was re-elected by a wide margin. Stevenson’s concession was notable for its high spirits and heartening words. When asked on the night of the election whether he would ever try for the presidency again, he responded: “I’m a candidate for bed.”

I
N ONE OF
his letters to Phil that summer before the election, LBJ had casually invited Phil and me to visit him and Lady Bird at their ranch, to “enjoy a little bit of Texas hospitality.” Throughout the fall, he went on urging us to come, and an opportunity arose at the end of the year, when Phil was asked to speak at Texas A. & M. University. Phil accepted, in part so we could head over to the Johnsons’ ranch.

The college owned a small plane that flew us, after the speech, to Fredericksburg, the town nearest to the ranch. LBJ was at the end of the landing strip to pick us up, and we were immediately put through the procedures he loved, driving over the fields and through the gates to his land for an extended tour of that lovely West Texas country. We even stopped to see his family cemetery, a ritual for guests.

The next day we set off hunting, in pursuit of deer, which LBJ was most eager for Phil to shoot. Phil—who loved hunting birds, in part because they are hard to shoot, which meant he mostly missed them—couldn’t stand the idea of killing a deer. Our host, however, considered it a matter of successful hospitality to have his guests return home with one. When we came across a little group of deer on a hill just ahead of us, Phil
took aim, on LBJ’s orders. “Shoot, Phil,” the senator barked. With his gun on his shoulder, pointed and ready, Phil responded, “I can’t shoot him in the ass, Lyndon.” When one of the deer turned toward us, Johnson urged him again to shoot. This time Phil responded: “I can’t, Lyndon, he looks like Little Beagle Johnson.” The Johnsons had several beagles, all with names with the initials LBJ, and Little Beagle was one of Lyndon’s favorites. The deer ran off, leaving the senator really cross with his reluctant guest. The next time a deer appeared, Phil realized he had no choice but to comply, and he shot his deer.

The visit was an odd one for me—Phil and Lyndon were completely comfortable with each other, but Lyndon regarded me quite differently. He would look straight at me, separating me from him and Phil, and begin whatever he was about to say with, “You Northern liberals …” He hammered points home with me, as though trying to explain to me how the world really worked. On one occasion, he spent a long time telling me the story of how civil rights came to Johnson City, relating:

In truth, I regarded LBJ with mixed feelings at that time. I still believed that to some extent he was using Phil, and I certainly wasn’t ready to embrace him entirely, as Phil seemed to have done. One night he and Phil put away a good deal of whiskey, both during and after dinner. In our late-night talk, Johnson started complaining about the press—as will politicians of any persuasion. In the middle of his diatribe, he said, “You can buy any one of them with a bottle of whiskey.”

I was much too reticent to enter into the conversation or to object, but when Phil and I went upstairs I denounced Lyndon for saying what he had said, and Phil for letting it go unchallenged. Apparently, Lady Bird had similar words for Lyndon, because he was very different the next morning, urging us to stay over another day, which we did. At lunch before we left, he gave us both presents—a large ten-gallon Western hat for Phil and a
charm bracelet for me with a little Texas map, a microphone, and other symbols of the Johnsons’ world hanging from it. When it hit my hand, it was so heavy I realized it was gold. The press is not supposed to accept presents, and these gifts troubled me deeply, especially in the context of that conversation, which still rankled. Phil told me to accept the bracelet, he would keep the hat, and we would return a gift of equal value, which we did—a water purifier Johnson had mentioned needing.

As we left the ranch, we were handed a large cardboard box containing Phil’s frozen deer and sausage already made from it. The mounted deer head was to follow. As it happened, the whole East Coast was socked in by fog and rain, so our plane circled endlessly above the bad weather and finally landed in Pittsburgh, from where we caught a train to Washington in the middle of the night. Unable to cope with the huge box of deer meat, we simply left it on the station platform. The head, sent later, still decorates the library at Glen Welby.

A few days after we returned from the ranch visit, Phil handwrote Johnson a rough but lengthy memo as the basis for some important general ideas for further discussion. What he was doing was giving LBJ advice on how to improve his image nationally, arguing that the senator needed to counteract the reputation he had as a conservative, sectional, and (oil and gas) interest-motivated politician. Phil believed that this was a false stereotype that had weakened Johnson’s national effectiveness, but that it had to some extent been accepted by LBJ and his staff, who seemed only to be concentrating on re-election in Texas in 1960. Phil argued that Lyndon had a role to play in truly national politics, and if he was to do so he had to “remember that the best defense is a good offense” and to begin erasing the inaccurate stereotype by paving the way for a legislative “session marked by a higher order of accomplishment.” Phil also contended that Lyndon should announce a legislative program for 1957 in a press conference timed so as not to be quashed by the Republican president’s State of the Union address. He then suggested that Lyndon follow up with a major address before “the best possible audience,” which would have several principle themes, of which perhaps the most important was to “create and articulate a realistic philosophy on civil rights,” which were to be strengthened. As he elaborated it, that philosophy needed to be “not one based solely on Texas acceptability. Rather one which goes a bit beyond Russell and yet far short of Humphrey, and which at the same time is realistically suited to the times and to the possibilities of Congressional action.”

In the Johnson Presidential Library there is a memo to Senator Johnson from George Reedy, who was then one of LBJ’s staff assistants. Reedy’s memo was attached to Phil’s and commented on it. He thought Phil’s idea was “sound, but I do not agree with his timing.” In addition,
Reedy said, “Phil lives in the
Washington Post
atmosphere and that atmosphere has great influence in Washington. I have an idea that out in the country you are much more popular than would be apparent from the Drew Pearson columns and the Herblock cartoons. The
Washington Post
atmosphere is highly specialized and is not reflected in very many other communities.” I believe that in this case Phil was closer to the truth than Reedy was.

T
HROUGHOUT
the early months of 1957, Phil was still active on all fronts. One of his significant achievements at this time was exchanging
Post
stock held by the Meyer Foundation, which placed the ownership of the business completely in our hands. He was also constantly involved in labor negotiations, particularly with The Newspaper Guild. A contract that was signed in the spring of 1956 came after eight and a half long months of negotiation but brought with it an unprecedented five-year agreement.

Another important thing he did around this time was to make an extraordinarily blunt speech about the Teamsters’ efforts to organize our circulation department as they had that of the
Star
. It was reported to us that Jack Kauffmann, then publisher of the
Star
, had agreed to negotiate with the Teamsters if they came over and got us to do the same. Phil’s speech, handwritten on a legal pad, said that if the
Star
is contracted with the Teamsters Union, “You can be sure somebody is going to ask you to join the Teamsters. They will probably tell you that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. The situation is just the reverse,” Phil warned. “You will have everything to lose and nothing to gain.” He also told them in no uncertain terms:

And he went on to spell out the crookedness of the Teamsters, concluding by saying that we had the best circulation organization in the country and that we were going to keep improving it and expanding opportunities for the dealers. He said, “We are not going to let you down by
having any dealings with that crowd. And I am counting on each one of you not to let us down.” And they didn’t.

Knowing how things work, I assume people around Phil may have tried to tell him all the reasons why he couldn’t make such a speech. It might not be legal today, and I’m not sure it was then, but it is a significant example of his ability to know when to run a risk to make a vital point.

The
Star’s
going with the Teamsters proved to be a crucial mistake. To the independent
Post
distributor, selling one more newspaper meant more money in his (or, later, her) pocket. To the
Star
’s Teamster driver, selling one more paper just meant more work to be done. Preserving our own delivery system turned out to be an important move for the future health of the paper, and as later amended, it became a system widely copied by other papers.

By the summer of 1957, Phil was clearly exhausted and in need of rest. Together, we made the decision to retreat to Glen Welby. It was an idyllic summer, spent playing with the children and just doing nothing. As Phil described himself in a letter to his father in late August, he had become “practically a total refugee from work.” He added: “I think I am quite a burden to Kay, but I suppose that is the normal role of a husband.” Only later did it become clear that by then something serious was the matter with him; it certainly wasn’t apparent to me then. What was obvious was that he was high-strung and had overextended himself. Looking back, I see that he was like a rocket fizzling out—still giving off sparks and even occasional bursts of flame, but steadily burning down.

The biggest interruption to the pastoral life on the farm that summer came at the beginning of August, when Lyndon Johnson asked Phil to come back to Washington to help him win passage of what became the Civil Rights Act of 1957.