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Perhaps the greatest measure of the President's faith in his judgment was the role he played when Lyndon Johnson underwent surgery. During the hours when Johnson's mind was dulled by anesthesia, somebody had to be empowered to decide whether to transfer the office of the presidency to Vice President Hubert Humphrey in case of a crisis. That somebody was Moyers.
Operating out of an office in the West Wing of the White House, Moyers has access to virtually every secret document in the national archives, is a regular at the exclusive Tuesday luncheons with Lyndon and his "Big Three" on foreign affairs—Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Special Assistant McGeorge Bundy. The President one day will call him "my vice president in charge of anything"; the next, he will say Bill is "in charge of everything." Some White House watchers go so far as to rate him the No. 2 man in the entire Administration—over such Cabinet members as McNamara—on the assumption that keeping L.B.J. running smoothly is every bit as vital a task as running the Pentagon.
Spectral Figures. Moyers is one of the men whom Political Scientist Louis W. Koenig describes in The Invisible Presidency as "the toilers in the shadows." "American History," contends Koenig, "is customarily written as a saga of great men, especially great Presidents. It needs also to be written—or rewritten—in terms of 'second men,' the spectral figures who toil influentially in the shadows around the presidential throne." Serving as "extensions of the President's personality, his eyes and ears," he adds, they cover a range "virtually as broad as the presidency itself."
The description is particularly relevant to Lyndon Johnson's staff. "With this President," says Moyers, "you've got to be ready to catch the ball and run with it any time it's tossed to you. You've got to be a darned good generalist." To Johnson, the ideal staff man is one who "can do anything for you and do it fast"—and keep the boss happy by doing it with as little publicity as possible. In the glare of the klieg lights that focus on the press secretary, Moyers is hardly in the shadows any more, but he understands and shares Johnson's disapproval of headline-happy hired hands. Nor is L.B.J. unique in that respect. "The best way to stay out of trouble," John F. Kennedy once told Special Counsel Ted Sorensen, "is to stay out of sight."
Because they fit into no neat bureaucratic pigeonhole and are constantly competing for the President's attention, Moyers and his White House confreres live in a state of perpetual uncertainty. "An adviser's status," says Koenig, "is not something that can be settled and defined by resonant titles, explicit conferrals of authority, or the organization chart. Status is the subtle, changeable, but unmistakable florescence of the President's mind."