Medicine: The Heart of L.BJ.

While Lyndon Johnson was speaking at the L.B.J. Library of the University of Texas at Austin last December, his voice was noticeably weak. At one point he seemed to rub his lips. Then his tone improved, and he finished his speech. What the audience—and later, television viewers—witnessed was a public demonstration of Johnson's severe heart disease and his characteristic determination not to yield to it. "It was almost the greatest pain you ever saw," he said later about the crushing pressure on his chest (angina pectoris). By sleight of hand he had transferred...

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