The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

With others, of course, he went to great pains to show that he was deeply involved in the inner decisions of the Administration, that he was the real insider. One day in early 1961 Russell Baker, then a Hill reporter for the New York Times, who knew Johnson well, had been coming out of the Senate when he was literally grabbed by Johnson (“You, I’ve been looking for you”) and pulled into his office. Baker then listened to an hour-and-a-half harangue about Washington, about how busy Lyndon Johnson was, how well things were going. There were these rumors going around that he wasn’t on the inside; well, Jackie had said to him just the other night at dinner as she put her hand on his, “Lyndon, you won’t desert us, will you?” They wanted him. It was pure Johnson, rich and larger than life, made more wonderful by the fact that if Baker did not believe it all, at least for the moment Johnson did. And in the middle of it, after some forty minutes, Baker noticed Johnson scribble something on a piece of paper; then he pushed a buzzer. A secretary came in, took the paper, disappeared and returned a few minutes later, handing the paper back to Johnson. He looked at it and crumpled it. Then the harangue continued for another fifty minutes. Finally, exhausted by this performance, Baker left and on the way he passed a friend named David Barnett, also a journalist. They nodded and went their separate ways, and the next day when Barnett ran into Baker, he asked whether Baker knew what Johns...