The Unique Challenges of Writing for LBJ

Writing for LBJ

  In Fading Days

  My White House Year: Nine Months Long

  By Joseph H. Carter Sr.

  The letter was simply addressed: “Joe Carter, The White House, Washington, D.C.” The words were hand-printed like a second grader and by a second grade school teacher: Miss Henry, Park Elementary School, Red Fork, Oklahoma. The missive read:

  “Dear Joe: I saw your Mother at the Safeway. She told me that you had a job in the White House. I always knew that one of my boys would end up in the White House.

  “ Sincerely, Miss Henry.”

  Bemused, I ambled down a broad stairway then walked along a historic corridor of the regal Executive Office Building (EOB) adjacent the White House. With a grin, I handed Miss Henry’s letter to Will Sparks, a veteran, graying presidential speech writer. Respecting a noon-tide Will Sparks tradition, I turned to his mini-frig and fetched a large covert vodka bottle, poured a 35-cent shot into a glass of ice laced with Roses Lime Juice and sipped.

  Other writers strolled into Sparks’ office, paid the 35 cents, fixed themselves drinks, and commenced banter. Most were worn and weary veterans who had struggled with presidential worlds through another long morning. Some had endured such long mornings for six years or longer. Sparks hushed them. In serious tones and to my embarrassment, he read aloud Miss Henry’s letter. Then Sparks grinned and while faking a read added: “P. S. Damned if I thought it would be you.”

  Damned if I ever dreamed it would be me! A kid from Red Fork, Oklahoma! Me? I was one of six sons of a six-gun tottin’ western Kansas cowboy who was driven by bad times to become a six-day-a-week $1.10-an-hour railroad box car painter. Unbelievable but it was his son who had made Miss Henry proud and had triggered a chuckle among White House writers. I had fulfilled Miss Henry’s prophecy.

  Humor was a Will Sparks’s tool. He was the unlicensed guru of LBJ’s speech writers. Always full of advice, some of it sound. At his best, he defused and explained the foibles of government and the folly of drafting the thousands of words that presidents annually must dutifully speak, write, sign but often detested. Sparks was starkly aware that writing for a president lacked the glamour that Miss Henry envisioned. Nonetheless, writing had spawned my special journey even though my “year in the White House” lasted just nine months. I liked the perch. The year was 1968. I was 36 and accustomed to hard work.

  Fresh from a 17-year stint as a news reporter-writer, my trek to the White House, like that of most inhabitants, was happenchance. James R. Jones of Muskogee, Oklahoma had read my crusading support-the-war-in-Vietnam editorials and pro-LBJ columns in the later-defunct Oklahoma Journal newspaper. Jones earlier had been a campus sports reporter for United Press International where I once had been a correspondent. Jones wrote and I edited stories about the golden days of football at the University of Oklahoma. As happenchance gets started, Jones was beckoned to Washington by Congressman Ed Edmondson; Jones volunteered in 1964 and adroitly managed the Lady Bird Special train across the South and was rewarded by an invitation to join the White House staff as LBJ’s appointments secretary, a demanding job determining how the presidents spends his time—minute-by-minute—and with whom . Jones did it so well that soon he zoomed to chief of staff. LBJ seemed to love Jim Jones like a son and worked him like a dog. Jones’ success was no happenchance. Rather, it was a product of Jones’s hard work and skill that played into Joe Carter’s happenchance.

  A simple application for a federal writing post had led me to a job at the Veterans Administration (VA) in February, 1968, where I was given a desk across Lafayette Park from the White House. I signaled to Jones that I was settled into Washington and with the title of “confidential assistant” to the able Administrator Bill Driver whom I seldom saw.

  Jones was aware that most of the team of White House staff writers had grown weary under the under pressure of a soured war and from writing overwhelming numbers of words for a very pro-active president bent on creating a Great Society. Many writers hoped for better paying jobs and most seemed to dread the awesome pressures of the forthcoming November election campaign. One by one, they were seeking new jobs instead of remaining in the White House during President Johnson’s second full term.

  Unanswered letter stacks were growing. Demands for carefully written, prudent statements, proclamations, letters and other written materials were staggering. In that setting, Jones suggested my name to affable Arthur W. Shoemaker, an ex-Associated Press reporter turned LBJ aide, who handled a large part of the bulk of writing presidential letters and was vastly overworked.

  Known as “Whit,” from his middle name, Shoemaker deftly arranged that I would be “detailed” from the VA to his staff. I was seated in a regal office with a 16-foot ceiling, defunct fireplace, spartan furniture, a typewriter and an overload of mail located in a building across West Executive Avenue from the Oval Office. It was called simply “The Executive Office Building.” On the top floor was the ornate “Indian Treaty Room,” where many deals were cut to take-over land long occupied by so-called “native Americans.” Immediately, on the second floor, I was drafting letters that, in most cases, Shoemaker would sign as an “assistant to the president.”

  “On behalf of President Johnson I thank you for your letter…” most letters began followed by terse, imaginative but carefully written responses. The incoming mail had been written by either a happy, angry or simply inquiring citizen who wanted an answer. The most confounding letters during 1968 came from folks who were unhappy, puzzled or thankful because LBJ had dispatched a personally signed condolence letter praising their departed beloved son or husband who had died in the Vietnam War.

  Following a grueling six-hour morning of handling such tear-stained letters with an appropriate reply and passing off the works to the typing pool so letters would be dispatched before evening, I quickly learned the value of the protocol of joining other scribes in Will Sparks’ office for both liquid and social refreshment. Sparks always was jovial despite world affairs. Together with vodka, he eased the haunt of a grieving Mother’s loss or a distraught wife’s response to a tragic condolence letter from the president. The one-a-day vodka formula was sometimes violated with seconds. But Sparks’s humor never failed. He also had marked the shot glass with 35 and 50-cent levels so that contributed quarters and dimes would amply accrue to purchase replacement jugs. As junior-most writer, it immediately became my duty to execute the transaction. I would duck out into 17th Street rattling a pocketful of change, find a liquor store then flash my White House badge to return to the EOB where knowing, winking guards ignored the sacked booze in hand. I trembled like an Oklahoma bootlegger amid a police raid.

  Short time had passed when my telephone rang with a message that Marvin Watson, White House chief of staff, was summoning my presence. What have I done? Had they identified Will Sparks’ bootlegger? I asked myself a bevy of nervous questions then marched across West Executive Avenue to Watson’s quarters adjacent the all-powerful Oval Office.

  “We hear you’re good,” Watson said before I was even seated. “We need you in Omaha to be our man-on-the-ground for the Nebraska primary. Go to the Johnson-Humphrey headquarters at the Watergate Hotel and they’ll take care of details.”

  “Sure,” said I, relieved that I wasn’t branded as a bootlegger. Thinking of nothing smarter to say, I asked Watson, “but my wife is expectant in June, what about insurance?”

  “Don’t worry,” Watson said, “I’ll take care of that. Call Marty Hauan in Omaha. Right away.”

  Hauan, an O
klahoma advertising and public relation politico, had requested my help. A guy who well could have sprung from a lineage of bootleggers himself, Hauan had been a spokesman at the Democratic National Committee when he got the assignment to handle campaign advertising and strategy in Nebraska. On the phone, he explained the obvious. The Nebraska primary election was crucial with Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy making great gains in the immediate Wisconsin primary by preaching an anti-war challenge to the incumbents Johnson and Humphrey. While travelling to Omaha, Hauan asked me to stop in Oklahoma City and pick-up blank videotapes at his office. Wonderful! I could visit my family who had planned a move to Washington following a forthcoming birth. Even though I had escaped the bootlegger rap, I was homesick. A weekend with my beloved two sons and very pregnant wife hopefully would settle my nerves. Probably more confused than understanding, my family had nodded approval of my move into government service. From the White House perspective, the prospects for success were growing larger in my mind. So was my pregnant wife’s confusion.

  My new self image was dazzling: White House man-on-the-ground in a crucial primary election! Kick McCarthy’s butt and become a