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 a nitroglycerin tablet from pocket to mouth and slipped it under his tongue. This gave immediate relief from pain.
That heart disease eventually killed
Lyndon Johnson will seem, to many, less surprising than the fact that he survived with it so long. For after a severe heart attack at the age of 46, in mid-1955, Johnson subjected himself to 13 years of the most grueling, tension-ridden work. Yet during that period, his health seemed generally good. Cardiologists reviewing Johnson's medical history see evidence that for him, as for many another cardiac patient, frustration or the slower pace of retirement can be more lethal than the strain of a highly active life.
Change of Style. Before that first heart attack, Johnson abused his body. He smoked two to three packs of cigarettes a day, took little exercise and ate too much fat and sweets. At about 220 Ibs., he was roughly 30 Ibs. overweight. His initial seizure, said Johnson, was "about as bad as a man can have and still live."
The reason he did live, and so fully, was largely because he heeded his physicians. "I think the fact that he stopped smoking was a great thing," says Dr. Campbell Moses, medical director of the American Heart Association. "He changed his lifestyle, and that was a major factor."
Johnson rigidly rationed his alcohol, became a calorie counter and slimmed down to 180 Ibs. That, like giving up smoking, was torture for one raised in Texas ranch country on meals as "filling" (meaning fatty and rich) as Mother could provide, one who had developed a taste for thick, marbled steaks, preferably followed by peaches and cream. Often, when Lady Bird Johnson served dessert to others but none to him, Lyndon tinkled the service bell and demanded his banana pudding.
During the White House years, when Vice Admiral George G. Burkley was his physician, Johnson suffered no angina, the pain that results when the heart muscle protests that it is not getting enough blood. Indeed, Burkley recalls: "If you hadn't known of his previous attack, you would have had a hard time finding anything in his electrocardiogram to indicate it."
There was no excess of cholesterol or other fatty substances in the blood. "We tried to keep him on a low-intake diet," Burkley says, "but he wasn't starved on any strict regimen as a true cardiac patient would be, because he was a normal individual during those years." He got some exercise—swimming, walking, an occasional gym workout—and he usually took an afternoon nap. His blood pressure was normal.