“He’d get annoyed whenever someone criticized him or didn’t get the story right,” Califano told me of LBJ’s viewing habits. “If CBS didn’t use the lead he wanted, he’d say, ‘Call Cronkite.’”54 The president ended each long workday in his bedroom, surrounded by briefing papers but glued to any late-night current-events programming he could find in the era before twenty-four-hour cable news.55
