Ronald Kessler: The First Family Detail

The agent adds, “Agents don’t deserve that. They’re there to do a job, they’re there to protect her, they’ll lay their life down for hers, and there’s absolutely no respect for that. And that’s why agents do not want to go to her detail.”

When it comes to outrageous behavior, few presidents have matched Lyndon Johnson. Yet, true to its name, the Secret Service kept it all secret.

Even when his wife, Lady Bird, was at home in the White House, Johnson had what Secret Service agents called “clandestine movements” in the middle of the night to see a secretary at her home.

“Johnson would slip out of the White House for a night liaison at 11 P.M. with one agent driving,” former agent Ramon Dunlap says. “He thought he was being discreet and getting away with having no protection beyond the driver, but he never got away with it.” An agent would drive while Johnson’s detail, unknown to LBJ, would discreetly follow.

Johnson had a sex life equal to John F. Kennedy’s. In addition to one-night stands, Kennedy had several consorts within the White House. Two of them, Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowen, were secretaries who were known as Fiddle and Faddle, respectively. They would have threesomes with Kennedy.

Wearing only T-shirts that revealed their nipples, Fiddle and Faddle were cavorting with the president one afternoon in the White House pool when Jackie decided unexpectedly to return to the White House. Her Secret Service detail warned JFK’s detail, and Kennedy exited the pool, giving his Bloody Mary to Secret Service agent Anthony Sherman.

“Enjoy it, it’s quite good,” the president said with aplomb.

Like Johnson, JFK had long-standing affairs with his fetching secretaries. But Kennedy, unlike Johnson, won his Secret Service agents’ admiration. He treated them with respect, asked about their wives or kids when they were sick, and gave them plenty of notice if he was planning a trip.

“Kennedy was genuinely concerned about people and tried to learn from them,” says former agent Charles “Chuck” Taylor, who was on his detail.

Unlike Johnson, Kennedy was at least discreet about his affairs. At one point, Lady Bird caught her husband having sex with one of his secretaries on a sofa in the Oval Office. Johnson blew up at the Secret Service for not having warned him that his wife was approaching.

According to Bill Gulley, who was then director of the White House Military Office, Johnson would spot pretty secretaries in the White House, make a play for them, and if they went to bed with him, he would transfer them to his personal staff. Of the eight secretaries around him, only three were not having sex with the president, Gulley says.

Joseph Laitin, Johnson’s deputy press secretary, recalls that Johnson made a play for Laitin’s secretary.

“All I know is, the next day, she was his secretary,” Laitin recalls, adding that she became a member of the president’s harem. “One day she said, ‘Mr. President, I won’t be here after next week,’” the press officer says.

“Why not?” Johnson asked.

“I’m getting married,” she replied.

Winking, LBJ said, “Well, if it doesn’t work out, come back.”

A White House photographer claimed he always knew when another Johnson secretary had had sex with the president in the Oval Office, Laitin says.

“[The secretary] would go in to take dictation, and when she came out, the seams in her stockings were not straight the way they were when she went in,” Laitin says. “The door was always closed.”

On a regular basis, Johnson would sit nude in the White House pool as he dictated letters to his attractive secretaries, Dunlap remembers.

Johnson did not limit himself to women on his personal staff. He had “a stable” of women with whom he had sex, including some who stayed at the ranch when Lady Bird was there, a former agent says.

“He and Lady Bird would be in their bedroom, and he’d get up in the middle of the night and go to the other room,” the former agent says. “Lady Bird knew what he was doing. One woman was a well-endowed blonde. Another was the wife of a friend of his. He had permission from her husband to have sex with her. It was amazing.”

Johnson routinely closed the door to his stateroom on Air Force One and spent hours locked up with one of his pretty secretaries, even when his wife was on board, according to Air Force One steward Robert M. MacMillan and other crew members.

“Sometimes a message came in, and the radio operator could not deliver it to the old man in his room because he was fooling around,” D. Patrick O’Donnell, an Air Force One flight engineer, remembers. “He could lock it. He would be in the partitioned area with some broad. Lady Bird would get up and try and get in.”

Laitin recalls seeing Johnson engaged in intense conversation on Air Force One with one of the curvaceous secretaries he was known to be having sex with.

“Across the aisle was Lady Bird reading a book,” Laitin says. “She was a very tolerant woman.”

If Johnson had no regard for his wife’s sensitivities, he had even less for his agents’ feelings. On a regular basis, Johnson would tell Secret Service agents they were fired.

“Johnson told a Secret Service agent driving the limousine that he was fired because the air-conditioning in the limo quit,” former agent Dunlap says.

When Johnson—code-named Volunteer—was vice president, he was late for an appointment with President Kennedy and ordered a Secret Service agent to drive up on the sidewalk to bypass traffic on the street.

“Johnson said to jump the curb and drive on the sidewalk,” former agent Chuck Taylor says. “There were people on the sidewalk getting out of work. I told him, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I told you to jump the curb.’ He took a newspaper and hit the agent who was driving on the head. He said, ‘You’re both fired.’”

In this instance, Johnson did not make good his threat. But Dunlap says the president’s penchant for firing agents was a way of belittling them and was typical of his crude behavior and the way he treated everyone around him.

“If he had a bunch of congressmen and their wives on the Sequoia , and he wanted to take a leak off the bow of the boat, he wasn’t above doing it,” Dunlap says, referring to what was then the presidential yacht. “He was proud of his organ. If he had to take a leak in the Rose Garden, he did that, too, in front of reporters. They would not print anything like that or he would have their ass. He could pull their press credentials. He would sit on the toilet and talk to aides. He had no qualms about doing that. It was embarrassing to say the least.”

“The first time I met him, he pissed in front of me,” Johnson’s deputy press secretary Laitin says. “I was a bit shocked.”

Dunlap says Johnson treated Lady Bird and his daughters, Lynda Bird Johnson Robb and Luci Baines Johnson Nugent, like everyone else.

“He talked crudely to his daughters and to Lady Bird,” Dunlap says. “When he started giving Lady Bird hell, she would start humming and walk away.”

“Johnson would come on the plane [Air Force One], and the minute he got out of sight of the crowds, he would stand in the doorway and grin from ear to ear, and say, ‘You dumb sons of bitches. I piss on all of you,’” recalls Air Force One steward MacMillan. “Then he stepped out of sight and began taking off his clothes. By the time he was in the stateroom, he was down to his shorts and socks. It was not uncommon for him to peel off his shorts, regardless of who was in the stateroom.”