An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Author:Doris Kearns Goodwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

JUNE 14, 1965

Any confusion about whether Johnson had received and considered Dick’s letter of intended departure was dispelled at midnight on June 14 when an agitated Bill Moyers stepped into Dick’s West Wing office. Moyers had just left the Oval Office, where he had endured two hours of tense conversation with the president about Dick’s plans to resign as well as his own hopes to leave the White House later in the year and return to the Peace Corps.

In Johnson’s irritated mind, both Moyers (a fellow Texan for whom he often professed a fatherly affection) and Dick (a Harvard/Kennedy holdover for whom he harbored a stepfatherly distance, combined with admiration) were threatening to abandon him in his greatest time of need.

Dick’s diary recounts Moyers’s description of the heated exchange. At times, the fuming president seemed to fuse them together as if Moyers and Dick were planning to be roommates at Wesleyan.

I plucked both of you up from obscurity. I made you, he railed at Moyers, and now you want to leave me, to walk out in a crisis when I need you.

I like that boy [Dick] I’ve done a lot for him, and he’s done a lot for me. I’ve made him my alter ego, my voice, and my mind. And now he wants to leave me and suck around some Conn college.

[Said to Bill] You are my number one man but I have been dissatisfied with our relationship these past three months. It has been cold, distant, removed. You don’t answer my invitations—always seem to have baby sitter troubles. I expect my number one man to be outside the door when I come out. But you are never there. You act like maybe you’d prefer to be no 4 or even no man.

Then, switching back to Dick, he said: What will he do up there… you and Dick will write a book about me.

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