David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

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.