David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

— 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.