The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV by Robert A. Caro

Author:Robert A. Caro
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307960467
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-30T14:00:00+00:00

IT WAS 9:24 P.M. Valenti, who had received an order to get on the plane, and then one to get on the helicopter, now received one to get in the car (“Drive home with me, Jack. You can stay at my house tonight and then we will have a chance to do some talking. Are you ready to leave now?”), still, he was to say, “not quite sure precisely why I was even here in the first place.” Gathering up Carter and Moyers as well, Johnson led them out to his car, two Secret Service agents in front of them, two behind, Youngblood at his shoulder. Two agents were already sitting in the front seat, a convertible full of agents behind; as Johnson got into the car, two of the agents stood up, automatic rifles in their hands; then as the White House gates swung open ahead of them and the two cars pulled out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, a half dozen waiting police motorcycle outriders swung out in front of them, their sirens wailing. At the other gates—at The Elms—men were holding shotguns as well as pistols; the street around them was filled with reporters, television mobile units, telephone trucks and telephone linemen hooking up the new, secure lines, and a cluster (surprisingly small, in reporters’ memories) of neighbors and onlookers.

Busby, arriving at The Elms a few minutes earlier, had seen at once that “the aura of the office preceded” the man he had worked for for so long. No one wanted to be in the foyer when the new President came in; it was “conspicuously empty; when people crossed through it, they hurried their steps.” Yet they wanted to see him coming in; “whenever the front door opened to admit a Secret Service agent or a telephone installer, faces appeared” at the five other doorways that opened off the foyer, “peeking around doorframes to see if the sound meant that he had come.” When he did indeed come, Busby counted sixteen faces (including “my own”) at the doorways.

Walking through the hallway to the sunroom at the back of the house, Johnson sprawled down in the big green chair. Framed in each of the French doors, there was, suddenly, a Secret Service man, his back to the windows. Asking for a glass of orange juice, Johnson raised it in a toast toward the grim photograph on the wall. “Hello, Mr. Sam. Sure wish you were here tonight,” he said.

Dr. J. Willis Hurst, Johnson’s cardiologist, was waiting in the sunroom; hearing the reports that Johnson had gone into Parkland Hospital rubbing his left arm, Dr. Travell had called him. Johnson told Hurst he had no pain in his arm, and observing him, Hurst was reassured about his health. Busby, observing him from a different perspective, was reassured in other ways; he saw in an instant that his calmness was only a façade: “he was more controlled than calm.” But he saw also that the control—the “composure and coolheadedness”—was complete.

After watching television

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.