"Just about everybody knows the story by now," WFB begins: "the pretty little

girl, selected as a White House Fellow, goes to the party in the East Room and finds herself dancing with the President of the United States only a few days before her article appears in The New Republic calling for the removal of that President. Thus the meeting between Doris Kearns and Lyndon Johnson" and the beginning of a "long and curious and, by the way, platonic relationship [during which] ... he would talk nonstop about his hopes, dream, fears, and superstitions." One sample from this somewhat surreal but fascinating conversation. WFB: "You had a sense that when he talked to you sometimes those soliloquies were dangerous to interrupt, right?" DK: "Oh yes. I mean, it wasn't that. I mean, if I could recreate his physical presence as it was. He wouldn't be sitting back in a chair like you now, which is not very threatening to me. He would be leaning over, breathing down my neck as he was giving me that soliloquy, which makes you much more terrified to say, 'But sir!' And so you listen and you hope at the end of it you can interrupt or you can give a comment, which you can. And I suspect I was like many others; a captive of that kind of formidable presence."