The first time I was in the LBJ Library and Museum was in 1977, shortly after I moved to Austin. I was 25, a full-time student at the University of Texas, and a part-time employee of a typing service. One day, the typing service got a contract to transcribe oral history tapes in the LBJ Library and I was one of the typists chosen to do the work.

So, every day after classes I would walk across campus to the tall white library. Upon entering, you would hear the voice of Lyndon B. Johnson himself. It emanated from two kiosks on the second level where videos of his speeches played continuously. If you were inside one of the kiosks, or nearby, you could understand what he was saying. But, if you were anywhere else in the building, you would hear the sounds from both kiosks at once, mixing together and echoingÑJohnson's voice and intonation familiar, but the words and phrases themselves only partially intelligible, as if you were trapped inside Johnson's brain, listening to his dream talk.

I worked on the top floor where this weird sonic jumble did not reach. But that did not mean it was safe from Johnson's voice. As soon as you stepped off the elevator, you would him again, this time coming from the Oval Office replica down the hall.

The replica had been built to serve as Johnson's library office. To make him feel more at home, all the furniture, paintings, and bric-a-brac from the original Oval Office in the White House had been installed. Johnson did not use the office long. Two years after the library's opening, he died, after which the office became an exhibit, open to the public. Visitors could push a button by the door that would start an audio tape of Johnson describing everything in the room and its meaning to him-the portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt, for instance-and pontificating on the majesty of the office, the loneliness of the office, and so forth.

It was a long tape that tested the attention span of most visitors, with the result that they would usually walk away before the tape had ended, leaving Johnson to drone on and on for long periods of time without an audience to benefit from his words of wisdom.

One night, after I had been working at the library for some months, I had one of those dreams you have when you first fall asleep-short, but vividly realistic. In the dream, I was walking down the hall towards the Oval Office replica. As usual, I could hear Johnson's voice. Also, as usual, no one else was around.

I entered the office and there, seated at the desk, was the rotting corpse of Lyndon Johnson, startling me into wakefulness ...

After that, whenever I passed the office, I would avert my eyes and quicken my step.

I worked at the LBJ Library for a year. It was easy work, and interesting. I would cue up the tapes on a reel-to-reel player, put on a pair of headphones, and, working a foot pedal to rewind, pause, and fast-forward, transcribe interviews that had been conducted with people who had known Johnson at different times of his life.

Most of the interviewees spoke glowingly of Johnson; even those who were critical of him--Kennedy staffers, for instance--went to some pains to soften their criticism and try to find something nice to say about him. And yet, despite everyone's best efforts, what emerged from this Citizen Kane-composite of interviews was not pretty. It was left unsaid, but nothing could hide it: Lyndon Johnson was an overbearing, coarse, ruthless, sociopathic, low-life, power-mad monster. He was a good enough politician that he could charm when he had to, but the mask could easily slip, and often did. Nowhere is this more vividly documented than in a photo taken during the 1960 Kennedy-Johnson campaign. Here we see an out-of-control Johnson angrily reacting to a heckler while Kennedy tries to restrain him.


Johnson lacked the very rudiments of couth. Time and again, in those interviews, people would describe him as a "fast eater." If you were unfortunate enough to be seated next to him at dinner, no matter how dignified and official the occasion, he would finish his plate before you had so much as lifted your fork and began working on yours. Actually, you did not have to be right next to him. His arms were long, therefore many a person left the table hungry.

Another bad habit of his was to dictate letters and conduct meetings while sitting on the toilet. Also, if he happened to be near the White House swimming pool, he would suddenly strip naked, no matter who might be present, and jump in. His apologists defended these behaviors as harmless eccentricities, even as signs of a charming earthiness. And yet there were times when this earthiness was not so charming, as when he would, without the least shame, fondle women in front of other people, including his wife, Lady Bird.

And these weren't even his worst traits. He was also a bully. In a moment of candor, one long-time associate in his oral history interview stated that the only people Johnson respected were those, like himself, who had a "power base." Everyone else existed for his use-or abuse, if he saw fit.

In another interview, a reporter described a drunken Vice President Johnson following him around at a Washington party all evening, haranguing him over something he had written. The harangue did not end until the man fled the party. And everyone had stories to tell about Johnson's famous techniques of persuasion: his big face only a few inches from his victim's face, talking, imploring, threatening, while his hands worked constantly, grabbing an arm, grabbing a lapel, jabbing the chest with a forefinger, grabbing and jabbing and moving ever closer with no regard for social distance, until the victim agreed to do whatever Johnson wanted.

These are animal behaviors. Animals defecate in public, for instance, and mate in public, without the least concern for who might see. Also, alpha males of many species engage in various behaviors to assert their dominance. The ape showing its genitals, for instance, has its human counterpart in Johnson stripping in front of everyone for an impromptu skinny-dip. His haranguing the reporter or shouting and gesturing at the heckler also correspond to primate aggression displays. Apes also assert their dominance by mounting their fellow apes, a behavior different only by degree from Johnson's violation of social distance and touching in order to intimidate.

Once, during one of his early congressional campaigns, Johnson and three aides drove through a blinding Texas blizzard to the home of a wealthy rancher they hoped would contribute to the campaign. They spent the night with the rancher, who like many old-time Texas country folk kept his house unheated on winter nights.

Early the next morning, Johnson's aides were awake, dressed, and ready for another long drive to the next appointment. But they could not get Johnson out of bed.

"It's too cold," he said. "I cain't get up."

This was unlike Johnson, who usually was up before anyone else, as he did not like to sleep and lived only to work.

As it important that they get on the road as soon as possible to keep the next appointment, his aides began trying to persuade Johnson to get up. But he would not.

Finally, he said, "I need body warmth."

What he meant by this was that one of his aides should climb under the covers with him to provide the body warmth. This was immediately done. The chosen aide sheepishly shucked off his shoes and got into bed, whereupon Johnson wrapped himself around the aide and rubbed against him until he felt ready to get up.

It is possible, of course, that Johnson really did need body warmth and might have died for lack of it, but, given Johnson's animalistic urge to dominate, he was not literally engaging in the mounting behavior of an ape or dog.


These are not the only bad habits of Lyndon Johnson. There is another, and it is the ugliest of all. As a young man, he is known to have tortured and killed a dog, on another occasion a mule. These incidents are described in Blood, Power, and Money, the book written by Johnson's lawyer, Barr McClellan, who points out that, though the information is readily available to researchers in the LBJ Library, it has for some reason been ignored-even by Johnson biographer Robert Caro, whose critically acclaimed, multi-volume work lists so many other horrible Johnson habits. This omission is unfortunate, as it obscures the one most essential thing to know about Johnson-that he was a killer. It is a fact of criminal psychology that persons who torture and kill animals for entertainment do not respect life in general. Very often, they go on to kill human beings. This was Johnson's destiny. However, as an adult, Johnson did not have to dirty his own hands with these killings; he could order them, sending his personal hit man Mac Wallace to do the job.

One of Johnson's earliest victims was Department of Agriculture inspector Henry Marshall, whose investigation of Billy Sol Estes' cotton allotment schemes was leading straight to Estes' partner in crime, then-Vice President Johnson. In 1984, in grand jury testimony for which he had been granted immunity, Estes described a 1961 meeting between himself, Johnson, Cliff Carter, and Mac Wallace, during which the Marshall problem was discussed. Johnson concluded the meeting by telling Wallace, "Get rid of him."

Marshall was found dead shortly afterwards. Officially, it was a suicide, it having been determined from the evidence that he first beat himself unconscious, then attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his pickup, stuck the other end in his mouth, then after asphyxiating himself picked up his rifle and fired several shots into his own unconscious body.

Not surprisingly, there were many persons, including Texas Ranger Clint Peoples, who questioned this version of events. Yet it remained the official version until Estes' 1984 testimony, after which Marshall's death certificate was changed to read, "Cause of death--murder by gunshot."

Estes detailed other Johnson murders carried out by Wallace. One of the victims was Johnson's sister, Josefa, whose involvement in late-night sex orgies in Austin's Zilker Park had long worried Johnson. It was just a matter of time, he feared, before the vice squad raided the park and a scandal erupted that would destroy his career. Johnson solved the problem by sending Wallace to murder the hosts of these sex parties, then years later sending him to murder the ever-troublesome Josefa.

Another Johnson victim, according to Estes, was President John F. Kennedy.

In Blood, Power, and Money, McClellan presents evidence linking Johnson to the Kennedy assassination. Mac Wallace's fingerprints, for instance, were found on a box on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. McClellan also traces the money trail from Texas oil barons Clint Murchison and H. L. Hunt, who financed the assassination, to Johnson lawyer Ed Clark, who organized it. The assassination was necessary, it seems, to save Johnson's political career. The federal investigations of his the criminal activities of Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker were leading straight to Johnson, with growing speculation that Johnson would be dropped from the 1964 presidential ticket, and even worser, face indictment and prison. His only hope of escaping this disaster was to kill Kennedy and assume the office of the presidency. As president, he would have the power to stop these investigations, and in fact that is what happened.

On the day of the assassination, Don Reynolds, a Bobby Baker associate, gave sworn testimony to the Senate Rules Committee describing a $100,000 payoff to Johnson for his role in securing a $7 billion defense contract for General Dynamics to develop the TFX fighter plane. When news of the shooting of Kennedy was received, his testimony was terminated. It was not resumed. Also, one of Johnson's first acts as president was to halt further investigations into the Billie Sol Estates matter. Attorney General Robert Kennedy's investigation of Mob figures such as Carlos Marcello, another Johnson crony, came to an end as well.

It would, however, be an over-simplification to say that the killing of Kennedy was solely Johnson's idea, or that its sole purpose was to save his political career. Other men besides Johnson had much to lose by the continuation of Kennedy's presidency, and much to gain by his death.

Kennedy had eliminated the oil depletion allowance, signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, begun withdrawing troops from Vietnam, refused to go along with Pentagon projects such as Operation Northwoods, made known his intention to destroy the CIA, and signed Executive Order 11110, ending the power of the Federal Reserve to loan money to the government at interest. With each new transgression, Kennedy was costing too many men too much money, and greatly curtailing their power. As a result, there had for some time been talk within the military-industrial complex, and among international bankers, that Kennedy should be eliminated and replaced by their man, Johnson. Johnson owed his entire career to his biggest supporter, the construction company Brown and Root. In turn, he had looked out for the company's interests, securing it lucrative federal contracts over the years. On the horizon was the Vietnam War, which promised to be tremendous boon for Brown and Root and other military-industrial contractors. With the Kennedys behind the scenes pushing the investigations of Johnson and preparing to dump him in '64, it was clear what the future held for these companies if they did not act in Johnson's interests. His interests were theirs.

So Kennedy was killed, Johnson became president, the war in Vietnam went on as planned, and today the LBJ Library looms over the University of Texas campus. The library would, of course, not exist had Kennedy lived. In a very real sense, then, it is a monument to the assassination.

In the 25 years that have passed since I worked at the library, I have often walked or driven past it, but rarely gone inside. Once, about 14 years ago, I took my daughter there; she was in middle school and had a class assignment to visit the library. That was the last time I entered the building, until a few months ago. I went with my daughter, now grown, to see the Lewis and Clark exhibit.

Before seeing the the exhibit, we went into the main hall to look at the Johnson exhibits. There we found Johnson's daughter Luci Baines conducting a guided tour for some church ladies. They had just reached the display dealing with the Kennedy years. We attached ourselves to the group and listened. Luci Baines described her father's relationship with President Kennedy. "It's true they had their disagreements," she said, "but my father always had the highest respect for John F. Kennedy. Theirs was a great friendship, and a great working relationship."

"Except for the time he had Kennedy killed," I whispered to my daughter.

We left Luci Baines' tour group and walked upstairs to the second level to find the Lewis and Clark exhibit. On the way we passed the kiosk labeled "The Humor of LBJ."

"Let's have a look at that," said my daughter.

We stepped inside the kiosk. To my surprise, the video screens had been removed and replaced with a life-size mannequin of Lyndon Johnson, dressed in a cowboy outfit and posed, like Will Rogers, leaning on a wooden fence and holding a lasso.

"This is new," I said. Wondering if it might be an audio-animatronic, I looked around for a button to make it work, but did not see one. So, as an experiment, I sat down in one of two empty chairs facing the mannequin. "Maybe you turn it on by-" I was right. As soon as my buttocks hit the chair, a spotlight lit up LBJ and he came alive. My daughter quickly sat down beside me.

The LBJ robot began lip-syncing to audio tapes of the real LBJ telling funny stories, the kind of anecdotes that are told at the beginning of a speech. The mouth movements were accompanied by robotic hand gestures. Sometimes the head would turn, too, causing the LBJ robot to look you right in the eye, with creepy effect. The intent, no doubt, was to simulate life-like movement, but the stiffness and unnaturalness of these movements instead only made it seem more robotic. It also had a dead look, reminding me of my dream from decades earlier-the one in which I saw Johnson's corpse in the Oval Office replica.

The Humor of LBJ went on. And on. And on and on. The robot seemed to have an endless supply of anecdotes. He might have gone on telling them for hours, but we decided to give him a rest. I stood up. The spotlight went off. The robot froze and fell silent in mid-sentence.

"If only it had been that easy to shut him up in the Sixties," I said.

HOME