The Presidency: With a Good Cough

THE PRESIDENCY

Barely 30 minutes off the operating table, the nation's least patient patient signaled for a pen and scrawled a message to his doctors on the back of a medical form: "Tell me something." The surgeons obediently described the operations to remove a polyp from his throat and repair an abdominal hernia, but their fill-in was far too sketchy for Lyndon Johnson. "Tell me all that took place," he commanded in a second note. Thus began what will doubtless rate as the most exposed convalescence in presidential history.

As if determined to prove that it takes more than "a little stitchin' " to slow down a Johnson, the President maintained almost as arduous a schedule as if he were back in the White House. About the only difference was his sparing use of the telephone and—initially, at least—of his voice. "I don't have volume," he complained.

Lights Out. The President was supposed to get in shape for his surgery with a restful hunker-down on the L.B.J. Ranch. Instead, he punctuated his ten-day stay there with five press conferences and a ceaseless stream of announcements, the most notable being that he plans to visit Europe and Latin America early in 1967. Back in Washington, he whittled down a stack of paper work. "Look at that desk!" he told Lady Bird and White House Aide Bill Moyers on the eve of the operation. "That's cleaner than it's been in three years." He corrected himself. "No, that's the desk I had in the Senate. It's cleaner than it's been in 15 years."

At the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., outside Washington, Johnson's quarters were equally shipshape. On the walls of his three-bedroom suite, the same one he had occupied after his gall-bladder surgery 57 weeks earlier, hung paintings of his birthplace, boyhood home and ranch, along with framed quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Harold Macmillan and the Roman consul Paulus, all upholding the axiom—one that is not writ large in Lyndon Johnson's copybook—that a leader who wastes too much time on his critics has little time left for leadership. Across Wisconsin Avenue, the lights were out and the Venetian blinds lowered to a uniform level in the National Institutes of Health buildings; last year the wasting candlepower and higgledy-piggledy blinds had troubled Johnson when he looked out of his window at night.

After five hours' sleep, the President was wheeled into surgery. The operation proceeded smoothly (see following story) and at 7:20 a.m. Moyers was able to phone a reassuring report to Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the Harbour Square Apartments in southwest Washington. (By agreement with Johnson, Humphrey was authorized to exercise the full powers of the presidency if an emergency arose while Johnson was incapacitated.) Johnson began emerging from the anesthetic less than 15 minutes after surgery, and after a 40-minute nap the President was back in the cockpit.