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There was an article from the The Atlantic website entitled “The Last Days of the President: LBJ in retirement” by Leo Janos from a July 1973 Issue and this is what was written:On the night before Christmas, 1971, Lyndon Baines Johnson played the most improbable role of his varied and controversial life. Protected from public view behind the gates of his Texas ranch, and no longer suffering the cloying presence of a battalion of White House reporters, Johnson donned a red suit and false beard, climbed aboard a small tractor, and drove to the hangar adjoining his airstrip. Assembled inside were the families of his ranch hands for what had become a traditional ceremony over the years: receiving greetings and gifts from LBJ. This time, they were so stunned at the sight of the former President ho-ho-hoing aboard a chugging tractor that they greeted his arrival with disbelieving silence. Undeterred, Johnson dismounted the tractor and unloaded a bag of toys for the children, sent to him for the occasion by an old friend, New York toy manufacturer Louis Marx, father of Patricia Marx Ellsberg."I'm going to enjoy the time I've got left," Johnson told friends when he left Washington in January, 1969, a worn old man at sixty, consumed by the bitter, often violent, five years of his presidency. He had never doubted that he could have won the 1968 election against Richard Nixon if he had chosen to run for another term. But in 1967 he launched a secret actuarial study on his life expectancy, supplying personal histories of all the males in the recent Johnson line, himself included. The men in the Johnson family have a history of dying young," he told me at his ranch in the summer of 1971, "My daddy was only sixty-two when he died, and I figured that with my history of heart trouble I'd never live through another four years. The American people had enough of Presidents dying in office." The prediction handed to Johnson was that he would die at the age of sixty-four. He did.He returned to the Texas hill country so exhausted by his presidency that it took him nearly a full year to shed the fatigue in his bones. From the outset he issued the sternest orders to his staff that the press was to be totally off limits. "I've served my time with that bunch," he said, "and I give up on them. There's no objectivity left anymore. The new style is advocacy reporting—send some snotty-nosed reporter down here to act like a district attorney and ask me where I was on the night of the twenty-third. I'm always guilty unless I can prove otherwise. So to hell with it." His press grievances were usually accompanied by favorite examples of anti-Johnson stacked decks—among these, the flurry of comment generated when he had lifted his shirt to expose ample belly and fresh surgical scar. He explained: "Rumors were flying that I really had cancer. I had to prove I really had my gall bladder taken out." By contrast Nixon, he thought, had intimidated the press into fair treatment. "The damn press always accused me of things I didn't do. They never once found out about the things I did do," he complained with a smile. One result of such self-righteous bitterness was that the man who had been the world's most powerful and publicized ruler was simply swept down a hole of obscurity, surfacing only occasionally at University of Texas football games or at the funerals of old friends such as Hale Boggs and Harry Truman. A logical surmise was that Johnson was brooding in silence on his ranch porch, pouting at the unfriendly, unloving world beyond his guarded gates. But LBJ's temperament was more complicated than that: relaxed, easy, and friendly for days, he would suddenly lapse into an aloof and brooding moodiness, only to give way to a period of driving restlessness. He was a seesawing personality for as long as anyone could remember.His first year in retirement was crowded with projects. He supervised nearly every construction detail of the massive LBJ Library complex on the University of Texas campus, which houses not only thirty-one million documents acquired over thirty-eight years in Washington, but also the LBJ School of Public Affairs. At one point, university regent Frank Erwin approached Johnson about an Indiana educator who was interested in running the LBJ School. Johnson frowned at the mention of the state which sent to the Senate one of Johnson's least favorite persons, and among the most vocal of his war critics, Vance Hartke. "Frank," Johnson responded, "I never met a man from Indiana who was worth a shit."There was fresh bitterness over a series of hour-long interviews, with Walter Cronkite for which Johnson had contracted with CBS before leaving the White House. The first show, on Vietnam, had been a fiasco. "I did lousy," Johnson admitted, and raised hell over what he claimed had been an unfair CBS editing practice—Cronkite refilming new questions to answers he had originally given during the interview at the ranch. "Cronkite came down here all sweetness and light, telling me how he'd love to teach journalism at Texas someday, then he does this to me," he fumed. The critical reaction to his television interview on Vietnam reinforced Johnson's conviction that his presidential memoirs should be divided into two separate books, one on domestic policies, the other on foreign affairs. In this way, he reasoned, the Great Society would be spared from the critical response he anticipated to his explanations of Vietnam policy. His publishers talked him out of separate books, and Johnson cautiously began unfolding his version of his presidential years. Assisted by two trusted staff writers, Robert Hardesty and William Jorden, he issued only one firm guideline, that not one word should appear in the book that could not be corroborated by documentation. To aid in this effort, Johnson threw open to his writers every file and document from his White House years, including telephone conversations he had held as President, which were recorded and transcribed for history. (Exposure to this material was largely for his writers' background information; few revelations or previously unpublished documents appeared in Johnson's book.) Jorden, a former New York Times reporter who had worked as an assistant to Walt Rostow, was particularly impressed with his research reading. "My God," he said, "I thought I knew just about everything involving Vietnam during my White House days. I discovered that I had missed a lot."William Jorden worked on the book's Vietnam chapters, which went to twenty drafts, and were read by McGeorge Bundy, Generals Earle Wheeler and William Westmoreland, and Abe Fortas, LBJ's pre-eminent confidant, among others, before receiving final approval. The result of all this effort was a fully researched but flat and predictable apologia of the Johnson years, most of its vital juices evaporated many drafts ago.Hurt and disappointed by the adverse critical reaction to his book, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969, Johnson found solace working the land of his 330-acre ranch, which he bought in 1951. Under a fiery Texas sun, the Pedernales River runs clear and full. Fat cattle graze languidly in the shade of live oaks. Johnson knew that he owned some of the loveliest property in Texas, and unleashed his energies as a working rancher like a restless child entering a playpen. LBJ installed a complex irrigation system (and was observed clad only in paper shorts helping to lay pipe in the middle of the shallow Pedernales), constructed a large hen house, planted acres of experimental grasses sufficiently hardy to withstand severe hill country weather, and built up his cattle herds through shrewd purchases at the weekly cattle auctions near Stonewall. On one occasion, ranch foreman Dale Milenchek talked Johnson into purchasing an $8000 breeding bull. The massive animal impregnated only a few cows before suffering a fatal leg infection. Johnson complained, "Dale bought me the most expensive sausage in the history of Texas."No ranch detail escaped his notice. Once, driving some friends around the spread, LBJ suddenly reached for his car radiophone, which crackled just as much in retirement as it had when he was President. "Harold, Harold, over," he barked. "Why is that sign about selling the Herefords still posted? You know we sold them last week. Get it down." At the LBJ State Park, across the road, Johnson enjoyed escorting his guests to a slide show and exhibit on the hill country. On another occasion, I observed Johnson watching a preview of a new slide show with increasing annoyance as the bearded face of a local Stonewall character appeared in various poses, slide after slide. Turning angrily to his park supervisor, Johnson exclaimed: "Will you please tell me why we need six slides of Hondo Crouch?" Another must on a Johnson-chauffeured tour was the family graveyard, a few hundred yards from his home. "Here's where my mother lies," he solemnly declared. "Here's where my daddy is buried. And here's where I'm gonna be too." Then, a sudden acceleration and the white Lincoln Continental would roar to the cow pastures.Old friends invited to dine with the squire of the Pedernales would be advised that dinner was at eight. But not until ten or eleven would Johnson appear, happily tired and dung-booted, to regale his guests about the new calf or progress with his egg production. "He's become a goddamn farmer," a friend complained. "I want to talk Democratic politics, he only talks hog prices." Often, Johnson took friends to a favorite hill on his spread to watch the sunset. His Secret Service bodyguard, Mike Howard, unpacked an ice chest and glasses, and the group would relax and drink to the setting sun. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, cook Mary Davis, a keenly intelligent black lady, would begin pressuring Lady Bird to get Johnson and his guests back before dinner was ruined. "Another half hour and I simply cannot be responsible for this roast," Mary would complain. With a sigh, Lady Bird would begin the artful manipulation of her husband. Contacting him on the car radio, she would suggest: "Honey, why don't you take everyone over to Third Fork and show them the deer?" (Third Fork was only a quarter of a mile away, in the direction of home.) Such ploys often failed, however. "Damn it," Johnson would reply, "I'm not going to be pressured into keeping to anyone's schedule but my own."He was still very much "Mr. President" to the retinue serving him in retirement, including three round-the-clock Secret Service protectors, a Chinese butler named Wong, brought to Texas from the White House, two secretaries, a dozen former White House staffers, who worked at the library but could be tapped for other duties when the occasion demanded, as well as a dozen or so ranch hands who were kept scrambling. A phone call would dispatch an Air Force helicopter to carry him forty miles from his ranch into Austin, where a landing pad had been built on the library roof. For longer trips he used his own twin-engine turboprop. A visitor expressed surprise that LBJ could still summon a helicopter to fly him around the Austin area. An aide responded, "He was living this way when he was in the Senate."He took up golf, puttering around courses in Fredericksburg, and on trips to Mexico. One day, playing with a few aides and friends, Johnson hit a drive into the rough, retrieved it, and threw the ball back on the fairway. "Are you allowed to do that?" one of the wives whispered to a Secret Service agent. "You are," he replied, "if you play by LBJ rules."Each December 21 he would host a rollicking party at the Argyle Club in San Antonio to celebrate his wedding anniversary. The guest list was limited to his closest friends, including a Texas businessman named Dan Quinn, who on the day of the wedding had had to run out and buy a ring for Lyndon to give to Lady Bird, since the groom had forgotten that particular detail. The hired band was instructed to play danceable music only, and Johnson, a classy ballroom dancer of the first rank, would dance with every lady present into the wee hours.Each February Johnson would take over a seaside villa in Acapulco for a mouth's siege. The exquisite estate is owned by former Mexican President Miguel Alemán, a business partner with LBJ on several Mexican ranchland deals. Johnson would fly in family, friends, and aides, as well as his own cook, food, bottled water, and even air-conditioning units. He brought his own food, water, and liquor to Acapulco to avoid the embarrassment of his 1970 trip when nearly all of his guests developed classic cases of "Mexicali revenge" after being fed local produce. At night, films would be shown, courtesy of LBJ friend Arthur Krim, who would have the newest releases flown down. Johnson also loved to visit Alemán's ranch, Las Pampas, deep in the Mexican interior, enjoying the total isolation and rugged beauty of the place. He was moved by the poverty of some of the ranch hands, who almost invariably had large families. Using an interpreter, Johnson would lecture the wives about birth control and the need to have small families if you are poor. Back in Texas, he began sending the families packages of birth control pills, vitamins, clothing, and blankets. "If I became dictator of the world," he said, "I'd give all the poor on earth a cottage, and birth control pills—and I'd make damn sure they didn't get one if they didn't take the other."Each Friday morning, a White House jet landed at the LBJ ranch, depositing foreign policy briefing papers prepared especially for Johnson by Henry Kissinger's staff. On two occasions Kissinger himself arrived at Johnson's door for personal briefings on the peace talks; twice he sent his deputy, General Alexander Haig. In all, LBJ's relations with the Nixon White House were cordial, although he sensed that the briefing papers told him only what Nixon wanted him to know. His death canceled plans he had negotiated with the White House to entertain Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in Texas, following her February meeting in Washington with Nixon. Johnson thought it would be a splendid idea to have Mrs. Meir participate in a question-and-answer session with the students of the LBJ School. Through an old supporter, New York industrialist Abe Feinberg, he queried Mrs. Meir on the matter and received word she would be delighted to visit with the students and attend a Johnson-hosted luncheon in Austin. The White House arranged to fly Mrs. Meir to Texas. A few weeks before Johnson's death, Richard Nixon called to tell him that a cease-fire was imminent. Johnson got in touch with his veteran speechwriter, Horace Busby, and asked him to prepare a statement on the cease-fire. "Get this thought in," Johnson instructed Busby. "No man worked harder or wanted peace more than I."Johnson had decidedly mixed emotions about his successor. He was puzzled by Nixon's cold style ("Imagine not inviting one member of Congress to Tricia's wedding. If you don't respect them, they won't respect you") and aghast at some of Nixon's domestic policies. Shortly after leaving the White House, he remarked to a Texas businessman: "When I took over the presidency, Jack Kennedy had left me a stock market of 711. When I left the White House, it was over 900. Now look at it. That's what happens when the Republicans take over—not only Nixon, but any of them. They simply don't know how to manage the economy. They're so busy operating the trickle-down theory, giving the richest corporations the biggest break, that the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket." Amused staffers recall that on the trip back to Texas aboard Air Force One, Johnson went up and down the aisles giving financial advice: "Keep all your money in cash," he urged. "Nixon will have us in an inflationary recession before his first year is over." (He had also, he told me, given his outgoing Cabinet members a different, if equally sobering, kind of advice: "Each of you had better leave this town clean as Eisenhower's hound's tooth. The first thing Democrats do when they take power is find where the control levers are. But the first thing Republicans do is investigate Democrats. I don't know why they do it but you can count on it.")Johnson gave Nixon "high grades" in foreign policy, but worried intermittently that the President was being pressured into removing U.S. forces too quickly, before the South Vietnamese were really able to defend themselves. "If the South falls to the Communists, we can have a serious backlash here at home," he warned. "When you think of what the South has been through, and what the government is up against, it is nothing short of a miracle that they have kept everything together for as long as they have. Thieu's no saint, but you have got to respect his ability to keep things together under the worst conditions imaginable." Over a lunch, at which I was a guest, a few days after the first installments of the Pentagon Papers appeared in the New York Times, Johnson ruminated about his own Vietnam policies. "We made a couple of key mistakes," he admitted. "To begin with, Kennedy should have had more than eighteen thousand military advisers there in the early 1960s. And then I made the situation worse by waiting eighteen months before putting more men in. By then, the war was almost lost. Another mistake was not instituting censorship—not to cover up mistakes, but to prevent the other side from knowing what we were going to do next. My God, you can't fight a war by watching it every, night on television."He then launched into a long defense of his policies against the allegations and implications contained in the Times's articles. "All the time, in 1964, I really hoped we could negotiate our way out of a major war in Vietnam," he said. "The Russians shared our hope." As the situation deteriorated in Vietnam, he said, he tried, by proceeding with U.S. troop buildups quietly and slowly, to avoid inflaming hawk sentiment at home and, perhaps more important, forcing Hanoi to call on the Chinese for help. "I told my advisers, 'By God, don't come to me with any plans to escalate this war unless you carry with you a joint congressional resolution.' I wasn't going to follow Truman's mistake in Korea when he went in without congressional approval. They claim I used Tonkin Gulf as an excuse. Hell, the Communists hit us there twice. The first time their torpedo boats hit the day before, I did nothing, hoping it was either a mistake or the action would not be repeated. But when they hit us again the very next day, I was forced to act. And just about every member of Congress was marching right along with me." He was particularly ruffled by the accusation that he had been secretly planning to bomb the North at the time of the 1964 campaign, when Barry Goldwater was calling for precisely such an act. "It is absolutely untrue," Johnson said. "On at least five occasions I personally vetoed military requests for retaliation bombing raids in the North. Only late in 1965 did I reluctantly agree to it. Not one of my principal advisers—Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and George Ball—opposed my decision not to rush into retaliation strikes. We had contingency plans to bomb in the North for retaliation for terrorist raids in the South. But I didn't want to do this. Finally, they attacked our base in Pleiku in February, 1965, destroying many planes and killing a lot of our men. I was forced to act. I felt I had no choice. All of my civilian advisers, every one of them, agreed with me. Dean Rusk told me, 'Mr. President, this is a momentous decision.' I suppose it was."We were in a private dining room on the third floor of the LBJ Library. Across the hall was a replica of Johnson's White House office. A three-foot electric pepper mill sat at the head of the table, and butler Wong scurried in with a plate of steak and sweet corn. Johnson seated himself ahead of his guests, a presidential practice carried into retirement, and began to eat. Aides arrived to whisper in his ear about incoming calls. He either shook his head or left the table for many minutes. Secret Service agents haunted the surrounding corridors, walkie-talkies in hand. Déjà vu was a decorative theme: on one wall of the dining room were the framed photographs of heads of state whom Johnson visited during his years in office. "Here's my favorite," said Lady Bird, pointing to a photo of South Korea's President, General Chung Hee Park. "He was a real no-nonsense fellow." (Lady Bird was more conservative than the public ever realized.) LBJ laughed. "I remember our trip to Seoul. My God, I've never seen so many people lining the streets. I asked Park, through an interpreter, what would he estimate the crowd to be? The interpreter jabbers a bit and tells me, 'President Park, he say population of Seoul is one million. People on the streets is one million. That's all the people we have. So solly.'"During coffee, the talk turned to President Kennedy, and Johnson expressed his belief that the assassination in Dallas had been part of a conspiracy. "I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger." Johnson said that when he had taken office he found that "we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean." A year or so before Kennedy's death a CIA-backed assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Johnson speculated that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt, although he couldn't prove it. "After the Warren Commission reported in, I asked Ramsey Clark [then Attorney General] to quietly look into the whole thing. Only two weeks later he reported back that he couldn't find anything new." Disgust tinged Johnson's voice as the conversation came to an end. "I thought I had appointed Tom Clark's son—I was wrong."Johnson rarely worked at the LBJ Library, preferring instead to do business at his comfortable ranch office, where on the wall opposite his large desk hung a painting of a Texas landscape by artist Peter Hurd. At Lady Bird's behest, Hurd had been commissioned to paint the official presidential portrait, resulting in what Johnson called "the ugliest picture I ever saw." Reminiscing, Johnson explained: "He didn't follow the strict rules about size and style laid down about those portraits. I like his scenes much better."In March, 1970, Johnson was hospitalized at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, after complaining of severe chest pains. Doctors reassured him that he had not suffered a heart attack; instead, the pains were caused by angina, a hardening of the arteries to the heart resulting in an insufficiency of blood to the body's most vital organ. Although there was little that could be done to cure the condition, Johnson was urged to lose considerable weight. He had grown dangerously heavier since leaving the White House, gaining more than twenty-five pounds and weighing around 235. The following summer, again gripped by chest pains, he embarked on a crash water diet, shedding about fifteen pounds in less than a month. But shortly before Christmas, 1971, he shocked his friends by suddenly resuming cigarette smoking, a habit he had discarded over fifteen years before, following his first, near fatal, heart attack. "I'm an old man, so what's the difference?" he explained. "I've been to the Mayo Clinic twice and the doctors tell me there is nothing they can do for me. My body is just aging in its own way. That's it. And I always loved cigarettes, missed them every day since I quit. Anyway, I don't want to linger the way Eisenhower did. When I go, I want to go fast." He quickly became a chain smoker.In April, 1972, Johnson experienced a massive heart attack while visiting his daughter, Lynda, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Convinced he was dying, he browbeat Lady Bird and his doctors into allowing him to fly home to Texas. So, late in the night of his third day in intensive care, a desperately sick LBJ was rushed to the airport and ferried back to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. The departure was so sudden that the Charlottesville hospital director, hearing a rumor that Johnson might try to leave, rushed to the hospital only to find LBJ's empty wheelchair in the parking lot.Miraculously he survived, but the remaining seven months of his life became a sad and pain-wracked ordeal. "I'm hurting real bad," he confided to friends. The chest pains hit him nearly every afternoon—a series of sharp, jolting pains that left him scared and breathless. A portable oxygen tank stood next to his bed, and Johnson periodically interrupted what he was doing to lie down and don the mask to gulp air. He continued to smoke heavily, and, although placed on a low-calorie, low-cholesterol diet, kept to it only in fits and starts.Meanwhile, he began experiencing severe stomach pains. Doctors diagnosed this problem as diverticulosis, pouches forming on the intestine. Also symptomatic of the aging process, the condition rapidly worsened and surgery was recommended. Johnson flew to Houston to consult with heart specialist Dr. Michael De Bakey, who decided that Johnson's heart condition presented too great a risk for any sort of surgery, including coronary bypass of two almost totally useless heart arteries."I once told Nixon," he said, "that the presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hailstorm. You've got to just stand there and take it. That's what I'm doing now." But he was also busy preparing his estate for his death. During the four years of his retirement he had managed nearly to double his considerable estate, which included stock in at least nine Texas banks, television interests in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, a real estate and photographic supply company in Austin, 3700 acres of land in Alabama, and extensive property holdings in Mexico, the Caribbean, and five Texas counties.The flagship of Johnson's business empire had been the Austin television station, KTBC, which Lady Bird had launched in 1952, nine years after she bought radio station KTBC. In September, 1972, LBJ engineered the station's sale to the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Corporation for nine million dollars, a premium price which impressed several of Texas' shrewdest horse traders. The sale provided Lady Bird with $4.7 million, and the two Johnson daughters with $1.3 million each. Working with his most trusted assistant, twenty-nine-year-old Tom Johnson, who had served as assistant White House press secretary (and is the newly appointed editor of the Dallas Times-Herald), LBJ negotiated with the National Park Service to take over his ranch home as a national museum after his death and when Lady Bird no longer desired to live there. Most poignant of all, he began a series of tough bargaining sessions with a Tulsa land company to sell the working portion of his beloved ranch. Surprisingly, these financial moves were made without the assistance of his lifelong business partner, Judge A. W. Moursund. "The judge and I have split the blanket," Johnson said. And that is all he would say.Apparently the two had argued about the purchase of a bank, but, whatever the reason, Johnson and Moursund, a Blanco County judge whom LBJ had known since boyhood and who during LBJ's' presidential years had a direct White House line plugged into his hill country ranch, remained totally estranged for the last year of Johnson's life. The split-up offered a rare peek inside Johnson's complicated business empire. Holdings and liabilities jointly filed included more than $700,000 in loans from federal land banks in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Dividing property, Johnson received a 4000-acre ranch and 214 subdivision lots along Lake LBJ in Austin; while the judge received 3200 acres in Oklahoma and more than 2000 acres in a nearby Texas county. All of the loans were listed in the names of Moursund and his wife.Sick and depressed, Johnson had hoped to attend the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, if only to stand up and take a bow. He needed some warmth and applause, but from Larry O'Brien and others the message filtered back that he had better stay home. The McGovern nomination disgusted him. Nixon could be defeated if only the Democrats don't go too far left," he had insisted. But to Johnson, party loyalty ranked with mother love, so he was far from pleased to find such old colleagues as George Christian, Leonard Marks, and former Commerce Secretary C. R. Smith working for Nixon against other old friends such as Liz Carpenter and Joe Califano, who campaigned for McGovern. Of John Connally, with whom his relationship had long been complicated, and who he thought would run on the GOP ticket as Nixon's running mate, Johnson remarked philosophically: "John sees a good opportunity." But when another close Texas confidant stretched his endorsement of Nixon to include active support for Texas Republican Senator John Tower, Johnson angrily called the offender and exploded: "You're a fat old whore."Johnson's choice to beat Nixon was Edmund Muskie. In his view, Senator Muskie was "crucified by the press. They zeroed in on him because he was the front-runner and pounded him out, just like they did to Romney in 1964." His disappointment was mollified slightly by his own estimations of the Maine senator, which he had discussed with friends a few years before. "Muskie," he had said, "will never be President because he doesn't have the instinct to go for his opponent's jugular." Prior to the convention, Johnson held long telephone conversations with both Muskie and Chicago's Mayor Daley on the strategy to stop McGovern. He advised Muskie to stand firm and hold out to see whether there would be a second ballot. But he refused to act on Daley's plea that he, Johnson, take an initiative and speak out against McGovern. "Johnson knows that if he takes such a stand it will be counterproductive," a friend said at the time. "If he goes against McGovern, it will only boost McGovern's stock. Lyndon just doesn't carry any weight in the party anymore, and he knows it. It's a miserable fact for a man who only four years ago was President of the United States. But it is a fact."So Johnson suffered the election in silence, swallowing his nitroglycerin tablets to thwart continual chest pains, endorsing McGovern through a hill country weekly newspaper, meeting cordially with the candidate at the ranch. The newspapers showed a startling picture of Johnson, his hair almost shoulder-length. Former aide Bob Hardesty takes credit for this development. "We were working together one day," Hardesty recalls, "and he said, in passing, 'Robert, you need a haircut.' I told him, 'Mr. President, I'm letting my hair grow so no one will be able to mistake me for those SOB's in the White House.' He looked startled, so I explained, 'You know, that bunch around Nixon—Haldeman, Ehrlichman—they all have very short hair.' He nodded. The next time I saw him his hair was growing over his collar."During the final months of his life he was suffering terrible pain. One of his last public appearances, his dramatic speech at the Civil Rights Symposium at the LBJ Library, proved to be so exhausting that he spent the next two days in bed. He filmed a final interview with Cronkite, taking long rests between camera loadings. Against the urgings of his wife and friends, he attended the mass funeral of fourteen Austin youngsters killed in a bus crash. "Those people supported me when I needed them over the years," he insisted, "and I'm going to support them now."Lady Bird noticed that he was unusually quiet on that cold January morning, but nothing seemed wrong, so she decided to drive into Austin for shopping. At mid-afternoon, on January 22, the Secret Service placed an urgent call to her via the car-telephone, and Lady Bird, in a shaking voice, called aide Tom Johnson at the television station. "Tom," she said, "this time we didn't make it. Lyndon is dead."FOOTNOTE:One of the more secretive Presidents, Johnson nevertheless was unexpectedly willing to open up portions of his archives to scholars as quickly as possible. At the time of his death, he had arranged for the LBJ Library curator to meet at the White House with Nixon's then chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to discuss declassification of Johnson's foreign policy papers. The basis of the meeting was Nixon's new executive order providing more flexible guidelines on declassifying documents. LBJ hoped his papers would meet these new guidelines.Copyright (c) 2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

As the babysitter’s daughter who became a millionaire by 30, the secret about wealth that I discovered along my journey to my first million is that it’s all centered around this one thing: Mindset.Here’s how mindset is actually the origination of how wealth is created:#1. The mindset for wealth creation starts from someone who usually didn’t have it.Excluding those who were born into wealth, hit the lottery, or married/procured wealth without earning it, those who earned it themselves had to want to achieve it in the first place. Not just theoretically would “like” to have some money, but rather “need it” badly. Most people who become wealthy start from this point.At some point in their lives, they decided that money was important and that they wanted some of it. Having grown up in a wealthy neighborhood as the daughter of the live-in help, literally in every single environment I grew up in, I was the poorest kid. While everyone had holidays to Disney, trips abroad, all the toys and luxuries in the world, my immigrant Chinese parents raised us extremely strict where we never had any access to money or material things besides what we needed.I wore yard-sale clothing and free donated items from churches and charities, while living in someone else’s house. As I entered highschool, while everyone was buying Abercrombie, American Eagle, Hollister, and clothes from all the hottest stores, my parents remained financially strict. Even though I worked as a waitress at my parents’ restaurant, they never let me keep the money nor use the money. The $20 that I was allowed to have here and there, I spent stretching each dollar to the max, shopping at stores like Rainbows and Tello’s buying just a few clearance items.Because I didn’t grow up with money, I always felt the lack of money, which was the origination of my desire for wealth. Almost every aspect of my life was impacted by my lack of money. I acutely felt the lack of wealth and how that limited the options available for my life and achieving my dreams.#2. You realize money is hard to earn; you embrace this trade-off, instead of feeling bitter about your lot in life.It’s hard to be passionate about wealth creation when you’ve never earned money in your life. But once you have something you didn’t have before, perhaps you’ll want more of it. By college, my family had opened up a bar and had me bartend and waitress. While the hours were grueling from 10am-2am every single day, I worked hard and happily. My job challenged me to deal with all types of people, mostly from more disadvantaged backgrounds, as our restaurant was in a very poor town in the South Shore of Massachusetts.I noticed everyone’s acceptance of their lot in life. They used their lack-there-ofs in life to excuse their current position in life. They had a lack of hope about their future and made no efforts to change their status quo, instead becoming disenchanted, bitter, and unpleasant to be around. I learned a lot that year about how peoples’ mindsets dictate their realities.Since I grew up in an entrepreneurial, hard-working, immigrant household, our attitude towards wealth and money was entirely different. We didn’t have the luxury to be bitter or not work hard. The consequences of a negative attitude would destroy our odds of obtaining a greencard and eventually citizenship rights. My mom had to work 3 jobs in order to graduate from her master’s program so that she could get a job and sponsor us for our permanent residency.If you’re unmoved by money or demotivated by how much backbreaking work goes into making money, then you may run out of juice or burn out, becoming complacent, giving up, and resigning yourself to Plan B. Instead of being deterred by how hard I had to work to make money, while my friends didn’t have to do anything and just received handouts, I embraced my lot in life. I made the best out of every job I was given, making friends, and learning how to work with people of all backgrounds, ages, races, and creeds with a positive customer-centric attitude.#3. The desire for wealth becomes addictive.In highschool, I worked at my family’s restaurant, and for 2 summers, interned at a bank in a white collar data analyst role. The money I earned was socked away to pay for college, so I never got to touch it. Finally, in college, I was able to utilize my own money because I had to pay for college expenses with the money I earned, i.e. buying books, food to eat, any movies/spring break activities. My mom couldn’t manage my new life in college, so I finally had the reigns to control every single cent I earned moving forward.Once I had access to the money I earned, I started really enjoying the benefits of being in control of my finances and the freedom money provides. Unlike my college classmates who had to rely on budgets dictated by their parents, I had an abundance of my own money to spend however I wanted! I could eat out in any restaurant, travel freely, and buy luxury goods for myself and my friends.Outside of my hospitality jobs, I also created my own side hustles to make even more money. I had already become addicted to money-making, not academic pursuit. I did the minimum required to get good grades, and spent most of my free time teaching my own brand of Chinese classes and becoming a powerseller of electronics and fashion items on eBay.When it came time to graduate, I had grown so accustomed of making money out of nothing that regular 9–5 jobs seemed very boring, low-paying, and un-appealing. Compensation was capped at a base salary with very little opportunity to bonus in all the jobs that would be interested in me, an unexceptional average student.Even though I was a lost unemployed graduate in 2009, at the height of the recession, I never gave up thinking bigger about my future. I didn’t know the answer yet, but I was determined to be rich or die trying, so to speak.#4. “Think and grow rich” really works.In my search for a prosperous future and wealth, I started reading books about money and success after I graduated. Unfortunately, schools don’t teach these subjects! Since nobody around me knew the answer or had done what I wanted to do, I had to seek answers from strangers, authors of books about success. I figured they would be my best bet and would have some answers for me.People like Zig Ziglar, Stephen Covey, Rhonda Byrne, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and many others wrote about how they, too, started from nothing and sought answers from others more successful, knowledgeable, and rich to spread the word about the secrets to wealth.It became simple to me: everyone said the same thing! If you could see an abundant future for yourself, truly believe in your capability to achieve it, AND execute through hard work to your plan, you, like many others who also achieved success, will truly create the life you want.The trick is first to believe. Despite my entire childhood’s programming of being raised by extremely penalizing, abusive, condescending, and blame-prone parenting methods that is common amongst Asian immigrants, I had to wash away the decades of self-hate and confidence issues stemming from how I let my parents make me feel. Instead, I had to love myself and believe that I was worthy, capable, and deserving of success.Once I let go of the bitterness I felt towards my parents and their aggressively negative parenting style, I started to see a path for my ticket out of being average: a career in sales.#5. Hard work and sacrifice is the price you pay for wealth.Unlike many of my peers who went into traditional career paths, I took a $35k base to move to New York City as a brand new headhunter, a salesperson of talent, with no idea what I was getting into other than the fact that, if I did well, theoretically, I would earn commissions that could double my base.Once I got to work, I implemented all of the positive energy, mindset, and key learns from the books I read about how to succeed in sales. Despite the odds against me and the tough road ahead, I didn’t see anything except opportunity and hope. I blindly believed that a. I could do it. b. I agreed to sacrifice everything for this job. and c. I would not stop until I made something of myself.I had to prove my parents wrong but more importantly, I had to the find the solution to my life’s biggest and persistent problem - not having enough money! I had to make something of myself asap because if I didn’t do it young, I’d be set back and forever be behind others. The fear of failure drove me to work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, until I finally made progress.By the end of year 1, I was already a top performer that broke company records, earning over $87k as a 23 year old. By age 25, in my third year of my recruitment job, I was pulling in over $215 in yearly income.#6. The journey NEVER stops, especially if you want serious wealth.Once people start making money, 2 things happen: you either get complacent or hungry for more. Despite having over 6-figures in assets by age 25, I knew this was nowhere near enough to live the type of life I wanted. Besides, with the astronomical costs of raising a family in this day and age (and the age-old threat of inflation), I would need a LOT more money than what I had to live comfortably for me and my future family, if I chose to have one.While many others were satisfied with their job and income, I was still in grind mode. I hustled outside of work to create investments that would take the money I earned and put it to use. I was unsatisfied at my employee status and I knew that I’d never get rich if I didn’t continue to deploy my capital smartly to eventually exit the rat race. Naturally, I got into real estate and stock investing through learning about the business models in my free time outside of work.Eventually, I had enough real estate assets to quit working at age 28. I also reached a mastery level of consistently being a top producer. I quit my job and took the leap to become an entrepreneur with no idea what the rest of my life would be like. All I knew was this: life would never be the same again and I was up for it.#7. Building for others can be great; building for yourself provides the highest returns at a high personal cost.I realized when I left recruitment as an employee that I could have just stayed in my role forever and continued to make $200k or more each year through my labor. However, I realized I was leaving a lot of money on the table and giving the revenue away to my employer.As a revenue generator, if I were to work for others and build their business, I may as well utilize my time to build my own business for an even higher return. To make real money, I would need to create a business (high future value and increasing returns) versus just working in one (immediate cash, but no residual or business income).Plus, I was already financially set with my investments and had no dependents or ailing family members to take care of. If I didn’t take advantage of this unique window in my life to go out on a limb, I would regret never trying. I resolved to take a big short-term loss by quitting my highly lucrative job with an eye to increase the wealth available to me in my long-term view.There’s a reason why the road to entrepreneurship is not for everyone. It’s a highly risky, uncomfortable, personally challenging, and dangerous road. Instead of just doing your singular job well, as an entrepreneur, you have to work double and triple duty to be everyone your business needs: the producer, the marketer, the CFO, the people manager, the tech guy/gal, the lawyer, and more.What’s even more terrifying is that the first few years you could do well, and later totally combust! The risks are always there. You have to be mentally ready to tackle wealth at the higher levels. There is certainly a lot more at stake to lose.#8. You need to become a different level player to progress. Rinse and repeat.At this stage of wealth, you’ll need to know how to curate extremely productive, loyal, self-motivated, and cohesive teams to grow your businesses and teams. Being who I was at the producer level, despite me being a top salesperson, I had to massively upgrade, learn, and adjust my style as a business-owner and manager of people.Instead of being solely responsible for the singular task of closing deals and generating revenue, I now added a BUNCH of new roles to my plate, while increasing my legal, regulatory, personal, and financial risks!To this day, I’m struggling to adapt, evolve, and mature into the leader my company and team needs me to be. In order to create successful businesses and increase my personal wealth exponentially, I have to invest so much time, effort, and energy into becoming a better person.This means I have to change a lot of my bad habits, limited thinking, and productivity systems to more efficiently handle my increased workload. It’s a soul-crushing process. Change is hard when you’re set in your ways and comfortable financially.In ConclusionFor better or for worse, in my life thus far, there has been no shortcut to wealth. I have to pivot, adjust, take risks, work hard, and persevere in every single thing I do in order to get what I want. The trade-off has been very high. While many of my friends don’t work 60–70 hour weeks, get to have the stability at their job and not worry about business risks, and also have a lot more free time than me to date, have kids, and raise families/pets, I have had to delay my gratification at every step of the way.While I would love to have it all, unfortunately I’m still figuring it all out. Wealth comes at a great cost. I don’t have as much free time to see my family and hang out with friends frequently. I have to be extremely strategic, purposeful, and intentional on how and whom I spend my time with.The pre-requisites to possessing various levels of wealth are different. Of course, the higher you go, you have to increase your tolerance and capability of self-discipline, personal development, delayed gratification, and self-deprivation of immediate wants. That’s why they often say, it’s lonely at the top!At the end of the day, we need to understand our personal drivers, purpose, and true rationale behind the desire for wealth. It can’t be purely material - there has to be a deeper motivation and commitment to what’s under the surface, pushing you to keep walking the path less traveled.Lastly, your mindset must align to your vision and goals, followed by actions you consistently take until you reach your destination. That’s the secret to achieving the level of wealth you want.

It might sound impertinent, perhaps irrelevant, to ask how much George Washington was worth. After all, his value is better measured by his service to his country than by his pocketbook. Nevertheless, when it comes to money, his countrymen can be a curious lot. Witness our interest in such things as the list of America’s richest annually published by Forbes and Dun & Bradstreet’s corporate ratings, as well as the readiness of newspapers to print salaries gleaned from government forms. There are Internet sites with all manner of personal and historical financial tables that stretch from ancient Rome to today, tables that compare the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Gateses of the world to William the Conqueror—estimated fortune $200 billion—or Marcus Licinius Crassus of Rome—about $20 billion.So where does the United States of America's first president fit into the grand scheme of wealth assessment, and how did he get there? Some purveyors of legend have it that he was the richest American ever. Others suggest that he was but the wealthiest American of his time. Certainly, in his later years Washington could claim to be a wealthy man, and when he died in 1799 his estate was pegged at about $780,000. But it is an estimate. In a schedule of property that accompanied his twenty-eight-page handwritten will, Washington lists the properties and holdings he wishes sold and what he thinks they are worth. There is real estate from Virginia to the Ohio Valley to New York to the District of Columbia, $35,000 worth of shares and bonds, as well as Mount Vernon livestock. The total is $530,000—an enormous sum for the time. But this figure is only part of the first president's financial snapshot. There is no valuation of his more than 7,000-acre Mount Vernon estate, which was divided among relatives, or the value of Washington's 123 slaves, freed in 1801. Since the estate was not in dispute and there were no taxes to be levied on it, his executors were not forced to assign market values. So, included in the figure of $780,000 is Washington's own appraisal of what his holdings would fetch—that $530,000, plus an additional, unverifiable figure of $250,000 that historians have computed for the rest.Most of this wealth can be traced to Washington’s success as a land speculator, an enterprise that grew out of his early career as land surveyor. Added to that was his firsthand experience of the frontier country beyond the Allegheny Mountains gained during the French and Indian War. The area’s potential, strategically and economically, made a lasting impression on the young officer and was the key that opened the door to financial opportunity.Washington's first land purchase was of almost 1,500 wilderness acres on Bullskin Creek in Frederick County, Virginia, in 1752, when he was just out of his teens. That year, after the death of his half-brother Lawrence, he inherited an interest in the Mount Vernon family domain. He built the estate to more than 7,000 acres with a workforce of 316 slaves—less than one-third of whom Washington owned, 153 belonged to the estate of Daniel Park Custis, and 40 he rented from a neighbor. For the rest of his life he added to his land holdings, particularly along the western frontier he knew from his soldiering days.To recruit Virginians for the army during the French and Indian War, Governor Robert Dinwiddie had in 1754 offered 200,000 acres of frontier land for those who joined. After the war was won, the governor reneged, but after years of lobbying Washington forced the authorities to honor their commitment, securing title to more than 23,000 acres in what would become West Virginia. By the time he died, Washington had more than 52,000 acres sprinkled from New York in the north, through Pennsylvania and Maryland, to Virginia in the south, and Kentucky and the Ohio Valley in the west, something above eighty-one square miles.According to Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther, authors of The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates, those acres translated into wealth that put Washington at number fifty-nine in the list of top 100 wealthy Americans through the ages. John D. Rockefeller Sr., the oil-refining magnate, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railway builder, head the list. John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin are the only other Revolutionary-era names among the top 100. Hancock is fifty-fourth, and just beats Washington to the post as richest colonial American. Benjamin Franklin’s publishing interests, as well as his Philadelphia land holdings, elevate him to eighty-six. These rankings reflect not just the dollar value of each man’s estate but also the ratio of each man’s wealth to the gross domestic product—in effect, how large their share of the national pot was at the time. The Wealthy 100, however, bases its calculations on the $530,000 figure in Washington’s will, and underestimates his financial clout.Today, two hundred years after Washington’s death, a $780,000 estate is an unremarkable legacy, but inflation has played havoc with our ability to compare values across the years. Thanks, however, to the work of a team of monetary and economic historians led by Professors Laurence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson of the University of Illinois at Chicago, there is a trove of data that goes a long way to helping convert old dollars to new. If we use their database, Washington’s $780,000 net worth can be reassessed to give us a better understanding of his relative standing in history’s unofficial Financial Hall of Fame. Translated to 2010 dollars using the consumer price index, the roughly three-quarters of a million dollar estate takes on a relative worth of $14.3 million, in itself not particularly large by today’s standards. That figure, however, amounts to one small part of the picture, according to the economists. Analysis of the “economic status” of Washington’s late eighteenth-century fortune aims to measure the relative “prestige value” of his wealth compared with the net worth of an average American citizen of the era. That figure amounts to $429 million in today’s money, and begins to reflect the serious wealth that the first president accumulated. It’s at this point that things get interesting.The third measure suggested by economic historians assesses what they call the economic power of Washington’s holdings, or roughly translated, “What was the president’s financial position relative to the size of the economy?” At the time of his death, Washington’s $780,000 estate was equivalent in value to almost one-fifth of 1 percent—0.19 percent—of the $411 million GDP. If Washington had lived two centuries later, and boasted a fortune worth 0.19 per cent of the nation’s approximately $15 trillion 2011 GDP, he would have been worth $25.9 billion, taking fourth place in the Forbes list of seriously wealthy Americans. Bill Gates is in first place at $59 billion, Warren Buffett in second at $39 billion, and Larry Ellison of Oracle fame gets the bronze medal with a $36 billion stash. Washington’s $25.9 billion sneaks him in just ahead of Christy Walton of the Wal-Mart chain. The first president is in rich company.So how did he get there? What led Washington on the path to wealth? “It is no secret that Washington was not born to the imperial purple,” biographer John Richard Alden wrote. “Nor was he by birth a member of the First Families of Virginia, the fabled Virginia aristocracy. He opened his eyes without fanfare of trumpets, with modest hereditary prestige.” What young Washington lacked in inherited wealth, position, or aristocratic polish, he made up for in family connections that set him on the road to fame and fortune.His elder half-brother, Lawrence, an army officer fourteen years George’s senior and more a father figure than a brother, married into the Fairfax clan—one of Virginia’s leading families. Always a mover and shaker, and a canny social climber, Lawrence Washington understood that the path to influence and riches lay in cultivating connections with Virginia’s colonial elite.George Washington joined the Masonic Lodge in Fredericksburg in 1752—in those days a way to meet the right folk. By 1759 he married Martha Custis, in a well-engineered, top-drawer financial coup. The widow of a well-heeled gentleman planter, she was one of the wealthiest women in Virginia. She brought to the marriage prime Virginia acres whose worth today would measure in the millions of dollars. This bounty passed into her new husband’s care, and Washington passed from being a comfortably well-off country gentleman-soldier to become one of Virginia’s wealthy landowners.Election to Virginia’s House of Burgesses was a natural progression, first from Frederick County and later as representative for Fairfax County. The burgesses met in Williamsburg, Virginia’s capital. Now Washington was at the center of Virginia’s elite.There had been a time, however, when, at age fifteen, his sights had wandered from the hills and dales of rural Virginia. A midshipman’s commission in Britain’s Royal Navy was on offer, perhaps again facilitated by his half-brother. But at the eleventh hour his mother defaulted on letting her son pursue a life on the briny. Her brother said that “he had better be put a prentice to a tinker, for a common sailor before the mast has by no means the common liberty of the subject.” Washington’s uncle, Joseph Ball, suggested his nephew would be better off as a landowner than a ship’s captain. Above all he advised, “He must not be too hasty to be rich, but go on gently and with patience, as things will naturally go. This method, without aiming at being a fine gentleman before his time, will carry a man more comfortably and surely through the world than going to sea.”Along with his ability to forge connections, Washington’s choice of career propelled him to financial greatness. Becoming a surveyor was almost certainly a result of Lawrence Washington’s guidance. Their father died when George was eleven, and in contrast to his elder brothers, who had been sent to school in England, the boy had to make do with a rudimentary schooling, perhaps with private tutors, that covered little more than the three Rs.The boy had an aptitude for matters mathematical and an interest in geography: a perfect combination for a strapping, young, would-be surveyor. One biographer points out such scribbled notebook puzzles the schoolboy tackled as “How to measure any piece of Ground be it never so Irregular and to Cast up the Content in Acres, Roodes and Perches” and “How to take an Inaccessible distance at two Stations.” It suggests Washington had a natural liking for working with compass, chain, and brain since “the examples are too many, too varied, and too carefully inscribed to have been done entirely as tasks.”In an unsettled continent, land surveyors were in demand. For Washington, a nod and a wink removed from Lord Fairfax, one of the richest and most influential men of the colony, employment was never an issue. His Lordship was blessed with an inherited land grant of five million Virginia acres between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers. To prepare it for tenants arriving from across the Atlantic required surveying.At sixteen, Washington, chain, compass, pen, and notebook at the ready, was soon on the payroll. A year later his connections helped him win appointment as a part-time government surveyor for Culpeper County at £50 sterling per annum. Four years of survey work later, Washington had tallied land surveys for more than 200 clients. The job paid well: good frontier surveyors could earn as much as the ablest trial lawyers. What’s more, with the inside scoop on land deals, surveyors were often in a position to make advantageous purchases of their own. But more important than the business and good name he was making for himself was the realization that the immensity of the frontier was there for the taking. He knew good land when he saw it, and his work gave him a down-to-earth insight into the mechanics, and the politics, useful to securing title to unsettled acres. There would always be hindrances like Indians or Scotch Irish squatters to overcome, as well as the need to influence the government, but with his connections Washington, still in his twenties, was on his gentle way to financial success.Yet there were setbacks. The expression “land rich, cash poor” applied to Washington at times in his mid-life career as tobacco farmer. Although his long-term goal of accumulating acres paid off after his death, there were periods when debts mounted and his financial outlook lost its rosy glow. As Washington prepared for his inauguration in New York City in 1789, he borrowed £100 at 6 percent interest from a friend to make the trip. The Mount Vernon agricultural enterprise was often mired in cash-flow problems.The difficulty stemmed from Washington’s pretentions to “keeping up with the Joneses” or, in his case, the Fairfaxes, Carters, and Robinsons of Virginia. He lived beyond his means, and he pushed the limits. Buying outlandish, expensive fripperies from London merchant Robert Cary led Washington into debt. Cary purchased Washington’s Mount Vernon tobacco crop and in return shipped exotic English goods, along with agricultural accessories like plows and grass seed to Virginia. On Washington’s want list was a chariot “made in the newest taste, handsome, genteel and light . . . on the harness let my crest be engraved,” along with ivory-handled sets, and a seven and a half foot tester bed with blue and white curtains to match the wallpaper. Busts of historical worthies, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and the King of Prussia, were to ornament the mantelpiece.The value of Washington’s tobacco crop, however, was falling, and the luxuries were getting more expensive. He ended up owing Cary £800 on the account, and the interest, at 5 percent, mounted.In 1766 Washington decided to opt out of tobacco production—the crop that was hard on the land and increasingly unprofitable—and diversify his production to wheat, corn, flax, and hemp, which were in local demand. He later pioneered a profitable distillery on the estate. It was, however, only when his stepdaughter, Patsy Custis, died in 1773 and Washington received money from her estate that he was able to settle his debt with Cary. Washington would not be the first, nor the last, Virginia landowner to discover that farming was not the easiest route to riches. Perhaps it explains why he was fond of saying, “Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.”