July 13, 1960, Los Angeles, California - Biltmore Hotel - 506 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90071 - Seventh Floor hallway, in the Evening
Wednesday
night July 13 – a shirtless Lyndon Johnson with his pants’ fly open in the Biltmore
hotel hallway, having lost the Democratic presidential nomination, was drunk as
a skunk and cursing the Kennedys
QUOTE
Advance word of Kennedy’s upcoming invitation did not
sweeten Lyndon Johnson’s temperament as the convention proceeded. And late
Wednesday night, whether angry at Bobby and his family over slurs traded
between camps or suspicious that RFK opposed Jack’s decision, or perhaps simply
chagrined at his own second-place finish in the just-completed presidential
balloting – he’d gotten only half as many delegates at the victorious upstart
from Massachusetts – LBJ was in a foul mood. “As I went up to the seventh floor of the Biltmore
where Johnson was staying,” reported Gene Scherrer, then head of VIP security
for the Los Angeles Police Department. “Johnson was in the hallway, ranting and
raving about the Kennedys, saying things like, ‘Those motherfuckers’ and ‘I’d
like to piss on Bobby.’ He didn’t have his shirt on and his fly was open. He
was very drunk and very obscene. Of course, the next day, he
was named John Kennedy’s vice presidential candidate.”
UNQUOTE
[C. David Heymann, RFK,
pp. 167-168]
LA cop Gene Scherrer
also worked the 1985 “Ninja murder case:”
https://www.crimelibrary.org/notorious_murders/family/mbb207_faye_kellerman_woodman_murders/7.html
Dallas Times Herald reporter Margaret Mayer never saw a “more unhappy man” than Lyndon Johnson on the night that he was elected Vice President (11-8-60) with president-elect JFK. Lady Bird, however, was delighted that she was going to be Second Lady. Margaret Mayer was also a former aide to LBJ
Source: Margaret Mayer
who was a longtime reporter for the Dallas Times-Herald. Previously
Mayer had worked as an aide to LBJ so she knew him well.
QUOTE
Lady Bird was happy; she was going to enjoy being Second
Lady, she thought, and she did. Besides, she was always glad when a
campaign was over, victorious or not. Lyndon? Did he hoot and holler? Did he
even smile except for the photographers? He did not. He was demonstrably
morose.
Margaret Mayer: “The night he was elected vice-president – very late,
when it was quite apparent that he and Kennedy had been elected – I don’t think
I saw a more unhappy man. He had been at the Driskill Hotel with the
Homer Thornberrys, the Connallys, Jesse Kellam, and sometime after midnight,
maybe one in the morning, they all came downstairs and went across the street
to an all-night café on Seventh Street.
“There
was no jubilation. Lyndon looked like he had lost his last friend on earth, and
later he was rude to me, very rude, and I tried to remind myself he was
unhappy, but he did the same thing the next day in the TV station. He was rude
to just about everybody. Now I’ve known Lyndon a great many years, and I’ve
never known him to act like that.
“It was
clear to me and a lot of other people that even then he didn’t want to be
vice-president.”
UNQUOTE
[Merle Miller, Lyndon:
An Oral Biography, p. 273]
Picture of Dallas
Times-Herald reporter Margaret Mayer here:
Margaret Mayer - https://discoverlbj.org/item/mayerm
The First
time Margaret Mayer met LBJ in 1946 when he was laying on a couch wearing only
boxer shorts and he was “unfazed by my walking in”
[Margaret Mayer Ward oral
history, interviewed by Michael Gillette for the LBJ Library, March 10, 1977]
http://www.lbjf.org/txt/oh/oh-lbj/27500879-oh-wardm-19770310-1-80-6.pdf
Margaret Mayer Ward,
1977 on her first meeting with LBJ: “I mean the man’s lying there unclothed [in
boxer shorts] when I first met him. (Laughter) There was certainly no
discomfort on his part.”
A Good
example of LBJ’s casual cruelty: his remark to AP reporter Dave Cheavens in
1948:
Margaret Mayer Ward:
QUOTE
The one instance that
I remember that stuck in everybody's
mind--and this was the type of
thing that turned the press off on
him--Dave Cheavens was the corre-
spondent for AP, in charge of the AP
bureau in Austin. He's now dead.
Dave was a fat, chubby little fellow,
and as fine a reporter as ever
hit the Capitol Press Room in Austin. A
sweet man, son of a Baptist
preacher, just a great fellow, but
really fat and sensitive about it
to a degree. So one time when it came
Dave's turn to fly in the chopper,
for some reason--I guess they had the
chopper parked way away--anyway, they
were racing across a plowed field, and I
mean the furrows were against
them. They weren't going down the furrows but across them.
Johnson
turned
to Cheavens, who was trailing him, and shouted over his shoulder,
"Won't
those little fat legs carry you any faster?" It really offended
Dave
and someone else present. everybody was offended by it.
Maybe there were two reporters present; It
was the type of thing that Johnson
seemed to think he was
entitled to say, and he wasn't any more than the next man.
UNQUOTE
Margaret
Lucile Mayer Ward died on Sept. 27, 2007. Her obituary:
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/statesman/name/margaret-ward-obituary?id=26016558
A very drunk
President Lyndon Johnson, wearing only his underwear, would crawl down the aisle
of Air Force One telling everyone on board “Eff you, eff you” while he blasted
them with profanity. Source: 2013 interview of Sgt. Thomas Michl by Sean Fetter
QUOTE
With ludicrous piety, a key Johnson aide and sycophant Jack
Valenti – a USAAF veteran of World War II – tried to claim in a later book
(with a straight face) that LBJ ceased drinking Scotch during his presidency.
It simply wasn’t true.
Sergeant Michl share a disturbing incident related directly
to him by his appalled USAF friends on the Air Force One flight crew. “They
said one time going to Texas, [LBJ] had nothing but a pair of his undershorts
on and he was crawling down the [aisle of the] aircraft saying ‘Eff you
people! Eff you people!’ Every one of em. ‘I know you hate me; eff
you. Eff you!’ … Every other word, you know – using a four letter word.”
“He [LBJ was too drunk to walk,” said Michl acidly of that
episode. “And that was our president!”
UNQUOTE
[Sean Fetter, Under Cover
of Night, p. 144; Fetter interview with USAF veteran Thomas Michl in 2013]
Furthermore Sgt. Michl
said that the active duty Air Force people associated with Silver Dollar, who
worked at Andrews Air Force base, were absolutely convinced that LBJ was behind
the JFK assassination. Sgt. Michl said “We all thought that Lyndon Johnson did
it – had it done [murdering JFK].” That is on page 145 of Sean Fetter’s Under
Cover of Night.
