Hurting Good

Holding court on the hospital golf course at Bethesda, Md., Lyndon Johnson allowed that he was gaining "a little more strength" each day. "But," he added, "I don't want to leave the impression that I feel the way I did when I came in." Then, by way of illustration, the President pulled up his blue knit sports shirt and let the whole world inspect the ugly twelve-inch seam in the flesh under his right rib cage where doctors had removed his gall bladder and a kidney stone.

"We had two operations for the price of one," he explained to startled reporters. "Dr. [George] Hallenbeck went in and messed around for a couple of hours and then stood back and let the other fella go in. There are still footprints everywhere that hand went in, and I can still feel it."

Less dramatically, the President was also making tracks. At the end of his second postoperative week, his doctors pronounced: "The prognosis is excellent." He still looked somewhat drawn, and Press Secretary Bill Moyers had informed newsmen earlier that it would take more time than anyone had thought for the President to recover his full strength. Nonetheless, Johnson no longer winced with pain when he walked. The day after his first stiff quarter-mile outing in the hospital grounds, he ventured outside for a 1½-mile stroll and cheerfully shook hands with passersby. He stopped to chat with Mrs. Margaret Pisapia of Silver Spring, Md., who told him: "You look wonderful." "I'm doing O.K.," he replied, "for an old man." When he returned to his third-floor room, he had enough energy left to sign 21 minor bills, then visited a dentist in the hospital to have a tooth filled.

Visit to 4-C. Gradually, the patient—and the presidency—returned to normal. The doctors removed the third and last drainage tube from his abdomen. Lady Bird took a brief out-of-town trip for the first time since the operation. Johnson conferred increasingly with officials. Dressed in a business suit with vest, he held his first ceremonial bill-signing session in the hospital. After putting his signature on a law requiring automobile manufacturers to meet new exhaust-control standards beginning with 1968 models, he delivered a little homily on the perils of air pollution and duly handed out the pens, bestowing two on Michigan's Senator Pat McNamara. "You passed so damn much legislation," explained Lyndon. "Take an extra pen home with you."

Then Johnson visited the sailors and marines in Ward 4-C, who had hung a get-well sign from their window, took a two-mile walk, put in a few practice putts, held an impromptu press conference, and signed the $3.2 billion foreign aid bill, with a warning that "accomplishments, not apologies, are what the American people expect." Though the doctors announced that he could check out the next day, Johnson, sounding more and more like his old self, admonished reporters not to predict when he would leave the hospital or go to his Texas ranch.