Monday, August 5, 2024

Election Night 11/8/1960 - Lyndon Johnson was the most "unhappy" man that reporter and former LBJ aide Margaret Mayer had ever seen

 

          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:

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2013/10/25/jim-lehrer-news-changed-forever-on-nov-22-1963/

 

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 Air Force   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.

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