The city that had progressively bulldozed itself, then replaced its heritage with statues of eels and iron ore.
The city whose most famous novels were about sand, and which had retained the death penalty for projectionists who screened The Exorcist on Good Friday.
The city that dreamt recurringly of secession.
The city that killed Father.
But I’m ashamed to say that I felt no indignity, only sadness and contrition. Instead of standing righteously before the city, I anxiously knelt. I would take my lumps for the party. The next day, I tearfully offered Belinda my resignation.
‘Too late, mate,’ she said, and waved me out.
They were the party that fucked animals. We were the party that killed idols.
And we lost.
Land of the free, home of the knave
I knew that I’d never work in politics in this town again, but I also knew that no other town would care about my past. I was still going to change the world by filling powerful mouths. Of course I would. I had to. What mattered more than facilitating democracy? Than social reform? Than history? I applied for a speechwriting role in Canberra, for the Department of Arts, Innovation, and Robots.
Then, rich with time and motivated to leave the city, I flew to Washington DC for Obama’s first inauguration. A pilgrimage for the baptism of the great orator. I was in love with America’s political letters: Lincoln’s speeches. Grant’s memoirs. Emerson’s journals.
A week before, in Texas, I’d met with one of Lyndon Johnson’s speechwriters in the lobby of the dead president’s library. Henry was frail but still thrumming with recalled glories, and he was pissed that Obama hadn’t mentioned his guy on the campaign trail. After all, he told me, LBJ had helped pave the road for the first African-American president — and not once had Obama referenced the father of the Civil Rights Act in his numerous tributes to dead presidents.
I nodded, then asked Henry if he had ever seen Johnson’s penis. I’d read enough history to know that: 1. LBJ had christened it Jumbo; 2. He had once, from the Oval Office, irritably explained to tailors the inability of his trousers to accommodate it; and 3. He would casually display old mate while intimidating congressmen in his favourite site of negotiation: the urinal. This seemed to me, a lazy and amateur historian, not an act of simple vulgarity but inspired self-possession. LBJ understood the great, disorienting power of transgression. A shameless man is a powerful one. So as it was, I thought the odds were pretty good that Henry had glimpsed Jumbo, possibly even been threatened by him.
But Henry pretended not to hear me. ‘Obama has erased Johnson’s legacy,’ he told me. ‘But I guess Johnson did a good job of that himself.’
‘How so?’
‘I moved to Texas after he left the White House,’ he told me, shifting slowly in his chair. ‘Now, I’m from the Midwest. I wasn’t familiar with Lyndon’s South. But the President had asked me here to help him write his memoirs. So, dutifully, I came.’ He was looking at me intensely now.
‘We’d talk on his ranch for hours. There was Scotch. Cigars. A sinking sun. “Are you getting this down, boy?” he’d ask. And Lady Bird would come out occasionally to monitor his drinks and smokes. He’d promised her far fewer than he’d had. And she’d see the ash and empty bottles and she’d shake her head, just slightly, not wanting to embarrass him in front of me, but she knew he was killing himself. Then she’d return inside. Lyndon would wait for that back door to shut. Then he’d wait a second more. Then he’d lift his cigar from the table, wink at me, and resume his story.
‘These conversations were unvarnished.’ Henry was leaning into me now, our noses almost touching. ‘Lyndon had a way of speaking. He was direct. You can say he was crude, unsophisticated, but that doesn’t matter. This was the ex-President speaking. Honestly. These porch chats were historically golden. His career was over, and he was relaxed and holding court on his legacy. It was real. Cuban cigars, Cutty Sark, long hair, and loose belt. But a week later, when I showed him the transcripts, he said they were too informal, too strange, that if published they would undermine the dignity of the office. So those porch sessions vanished. And Lyndon himself vanished behind the false language of his memoirs.’ He wasn’t looking at me anymore, but off into the past.*
[* I see now that Henry had a disturbingly sentimental faith in his country’s virtue, and, long after Johnson’s death, still believed that his old boss was a brilliantly potent expression of it. But despite this very American sentimentality, Henry had retained an historian’s interest in recording the ragged idiosyncrasies of his power. And the truth was that his old boss was a prodigiously conniving shit whose power was not exercised in the morally decorous bubble suggested by his official memoirs.
Even Henry got that. Even Henry wanted some of Lyndon’s funk to rub off on the public record. And I’ve never forgotten it. In my determination to allow some of my funk to rub off on these pages, Henry — more than Father, Garry, or Bessie — is the greatest influence on this memoir.]
I left Henry and took the lift upstairs to LBJ’s archives. I requested boxes relating to his March 31 speech — his announcement in 1968 that he, the sitting President, would not contest a second term. Less than four years earlier, 12 months after JFK’s murder, Johnson received more than 60 per cent of the popular vote, the most in a century. But now his popularity had curdled and his arteries were jammed; the Vietnam War continued and assassins stalked the land. ‘I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.’
I read many handwritten drafts of that speech, scribbled on blue and yellow legal pads. I studied marginalia and the speech’s advancements. And while
