At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch

oozed genuine sympathy in his habitual prelude to serious business. “Dick, I haven’t got anybody left like you,” said the President. “I’ve said more prayers about you than I have said since Lady Bird threatened to divorce me two years after we were married…and I’m so glad you’ve come through.” He offered to send an Air Force plane to move Russell during recuperation—“it’ll go above the clouds and everything”—then plunged into his quandary about combat troops in Vietnam. Having commenced regular bombing, and established airbases to support it, Johnson was withholding final authority to send Marines to protect the bases. “I guess we got no choice, but it scares the death out of me,” he said.
    Russell agreed on both counts. “These Marines, they’ll be killing a whole lot of friendly Vietnamese,” he told Johnson from his sickbed in a raspy drawl. “They’re gonna shoot everything that comes around those airplanes. They’ve been trained to do that. And that’s their business.”
    â€œAirplanes ain’t worth a damn, Dick,” said Johnson. He and Russell swapped stories on the futility of sending bombers over jungle targets. “Hell, I had a hundred and sixty of ’em over a barracks of twenty-seven buildings,” said Johnson, “and they set two on fire. It’s the damnedest thing I ever saw and the biggest fraud.” Bombing only “lets you get your hopes up,” he added, “that the Air Force is gonna defend us.”
    â€œNo, they’re not at all,” said Russell. “Not at all. I know they’re not.”
    Summarizing “the great trouble I’m under,” Johnson told Russell that “a man can fight if he’s got, if he can see daylight down the road somewhere, but there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam.”
    â€œThere’s no end to the road,” Russell concurred.
    â€œThe more bombs you drop, the more nations you scare,” said the President. “The more people you make mad, the more embassies you get mad—”
    â€œWe gon’,” Russell interrupted. “We gon’ wind up with the people mad as hell at us that we’re saving by being in there…. It’s the biggest and worst mess I ever saw in my life. You couldn’t have inherited a worse mess.”
    â€œWell, if they’d say I inherited it, I’d be lucky,” Johnson lamented. “But they all say I created it, and you know…”
    The President paused, then snapped back to pleasantries at manic full speed. “You go get well and come back and I got a big bed for you and I want to see you and I got three women want to see you,” he said, signing off with regards from his wife, Lady Bird, and their two daughters.
    Johnson alternated on Saturday between his morose stall on the Marine orders and hot pursuit of his legislative agenda. He called Vice President Hubert Humphrey to pepper him with lobbying instructions on the record number of 104 bills before Congress, stressing those that had languished in controversy for as long as forty years, such as landmark proposals to establish a medical care system (Medicare) for the elderly and provide the first federal assistance to public education. “If we don’t pass anything but education, and medical care, and Appalachia,” Johnson said, referring to his poverty bill, “we have had a record that the Congressmen can be reelected on.”
    The normally loquacious Humphrey struggled to squeeze in a word. “Well, Mr. President, I’ll go right up there and be right on ’em all afternoon,” he said.
    â€œYou just be on ’em the next four years,” Johnson prodded. Urgency was his theme. More than once he exhorted his assembled Cabinet not to waste his landslide popular margin of 16 million votes from the 1964 election, predicting that he would lose