David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

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?'