Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent’s Adventures with the New York Times

21. The White House

CHAPTER 21 The White House Tom Wicker, the Washington bureau chief of the Times, arranged for me to transfer from Atlanta to Washington in early  to be the number-two reporter on the White House beat. Max Frankel was in charge. He had been a distinguished foreign correspondent, and I was pleased to work with him. Our daughter Cindy was also pleased. We lived in the same neighborhood in Chevy Chase with the Frankels,and she picked up some nice change babysitting the Frankel children. Our son John was less pleased to be in Washington. He was mugged for the first time in his life on a downtown street. We first lived in a rented house in Bethesda a few months before buying in Chevy Chase. An elderly neighbor made Norma feel at home. She invited Norma over several days a week for late-afternoon drinks. The neighbor made it clear that she was not a heavy drinker; she limited herself to one drink a day. Norma noticed that that was true. But she had a habit of “sweetening”her drink as it got low in the glass with a splash of gin, then another, then another. I moved onto the White House beat at the nadir of President Johnson’s popularity.He had enjoyed a series of triumphs immediately after succeeding the assassinated John F. Kennedy in , but he had escalated American involvement in the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. By , he was being denounced in the press and elsewhere every day. He had virtually stopped traveling outside Washington because everywhere he went he was greeted by hostile demonstrators. One chant in particular galled him:“Hey hey,LBJ,how many kids have you killed today?” Max and I took turns standing watch in Austin or San Antonio  while the worried, exhausted president tried to rest at his ranch near Johnson City. Only rarely did we see him on those trips. His press secretary or one of his aides briefed us every day, always insisting on the accepted fiction that the president was working at the ranch. Piddling news releases about small matters were provided to give us an excuse to file copy every day.Most of our time,however,was spent on the tennis courts in Austin or in the cafes and cantinas along the river walk in San Antonio. The reporters for the Associated Press and United Press International got special treatment because those wire services served thousands of newspaper and broadcast outlets around the world. Helen Thomas worked for Merriman Smith, the long-tenured White House correspondent for UPI,and did most of the agency’s out-of-town traveling . Her rival at the AP was Doug Cornell. They scrambled like Olympic sprinters to beat each other by seconds in filing stories. But we began to notice that at the end of the day in Austin and San Antonio, Helen and Doug could be found in out-of-the-way places having drinks and dinner. When Doug retired in , they got married . The marriage apparently thrived, even though Helen had made it clear that being a wife was not high on her list of priorities. Doug died in . Helen’s ancestors were Lebanese. Her feelings toward Israel were frosty. She passed me at a lope one day headed for the White House press room after one of Johnson’s news conferences. The president’s message on the Middle East that day had annoyed her. As she moved past me, I heard her mutter, “Goddamned Zionist White House!” Some similar comment about the Jewish state, this time in a very public place, ended her long career many years later. I was shocked when I started on the White House beat by another attitude that seemed to be widespread among the other reporters. Several of them were openly disdainful of the president. I suspect that at least a few of them let that disdain show in their copy, although I can’t prove it at this late date. I do know that more than a few of them disliked this Texan and made no attempt to hide their feelings in the press room chatter. There was a strong suspicion that he shaded the truth.That apparently annoyed those seasoned reporters. One would have thought  THE WHITE HOUSE that they had never encountered an elected official who committed that sin. I think they disliked Lyndon Johnson for another...