‘I guess I’ve blown it all,’ said L.B.J.

Press, 1 June 1976, Page 26

‘I guess I’ve blown it all,’ said L.B.J.

NZPA New York At the very end of his life, the former United States President, Lyndon B. Johnson, sadly summed up for his biographer, Doris Kearns, “The kids are right. I guess I’ve blown it all.”

Mr Johnson made the remark, Miss Kearns said, while regretting his inability to see his predecessors and speculating that future generations would not be able to see him. “He had a tremendous sense of the physical,” she said, over luncheon at Harper and Row, publishers of her book, “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream”. “He reduced everything to visual terms.” Miss Kearns told of the years she spent with L.8.J., first as a college intern at the White House and then at his Texas ranch. “This is everything I left out of the book,” she said. She denied that Ladybird Johnson had been jealous of her — a report widely heard since publicity about the book began. “I like to think she was glad he wasn’t yelling at her all the time, ‘Come here, I want you to ride round the ranch.’ Instead he screamed at me.”

Ladybird had such a secure feeling about her relationship with him over the

years that she did not get jealous about other people taking up his time, Miss Kearns said. The author said she went to the White House despising Mr Johnson and a lot of his policies — especially the war in Vietnam — but learned to respect him highly, although she still opposed the war. Mr Johnson had told her, “I hated that war more than anything I ever had to do, but if I hadn’t done what I did, I would have started World War III.” Miss Kearns said Mr Johnson was miserable most of the time after leaving the Presidency and tried to run the ranch like the White House. He tried to recreate the Oval Office at the ranch and even had morning staff meetings with the field hands. “He’d line them up at the fence, each with a pad — and some of them probably couldn’t write — and give them their orders. He’d end the thing with a patriotic speech . . . He’d get furious, for instance, when the hens laid

fewer eggs one week than the previous one. He’d practically accuse them of sabotage. “He even used to sneak over to the ‘birth house’ and, hidden, count the licence plates to see how many states visitors came from to see the place where he was born,” she said. Miss Kearns said that as his heart condition grew worse, he brooded about the fate of his Great Society under President Richard Nixon, and metaphorically compared it to a fat lady. “He used to say the Great Society was a beautiful fat lady — he had Rubenesque tastes — and that he kept adding new pounds to her and she got more and more beautiful,” Miss Kearns said. “ ‘Under Nixon she’s getting thinner and thinner, and uglier and uglier,’ ’’ she quoted L.B.J. as saying, “ ‘and soon they’ll have to put her away. When they put her in the closet, I won’t live any longer.’ ” Shortly after, she noted, he died, making the sad summation about having blown it at the very end of his life.