Skip to main content

Commiserator In Chief

March 2023
1min read

In 1965 I spent eight months at Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from shrapnel wounds and two broken legs received in Vietnam. One day that fall, our corpsmen announced that some of us were to be wheel-chaired to a meeting with the President of the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson was in Bethesda for a gallbladder operation, and we had seen the famous picture of him pointing at his scar, presumably to reassure the American people that he was healthy and fit to run the country.

The young lieutenants and enlisted men sat dressed in their blue hospital garb, awaiting a thank-you or even a pep talk. Many in that room had ghastly wounds or missing limbs from high explosives, bullets, or fire. The President drew himself up and announced, “I know just how you boys feel,” then went on to explain that he had just felt the surgeon’s knife. The room was absolutely quiet, no response except silent amazement being possible. Lady Bird Johnson broke the strange miasma hanging over the place. After a Secret Service agent briskly walked in and called her out, she returned, beaming like a possum up a persimmon tree, to announce that she had some good news. Her daughter Luci had just got her first B in college!

Did President Johnson’s eerie speech to his warriors represent some kind of inability to articulate his war, politically or strategically? As I think back, there was a kind of spiritual brokenness hanging over the man even at that early stage of the conflict.

The redeeming part of the day was furnished by my future wife, Pam, who arrived by Greyhound from West Virginia to visit me at the hospital. Without a pause she walked right through Johnson’s security and unhinged a. guard at an elevator with the simple question, “Does this thing go up?”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "September 1997"

Authored by: Frederic D. Schwarz

The Big Question

Authored by: Frederic D. Schwarz

New York Knickerbockers

Authored by: Bernard A. Weisberger

…and grow, and grow, from almost no employees to three million. Don’t blame the welfare state, or the military; the truth is much more interesting.

Authored by: Steven L. Kent

THE VIDEO GAME turns twenty-five this year, and it has packed a whole lot of history into a mere quarter-century

Authored by: The Editors

WHOEVER WANTS to know the heart and mind of America had better learn Space Invaders. A traveling exhibition makes it easy.

Authored by: David Lehman

At the height of the American avant-garde movement, Fairfield Porter’s realistic paintings defied the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism— and risked rejection by the art world. But today his true stature is becoming apparent: He may just be the best we have.

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.