How could the Secret Service, I wondered for a moment, let the neck of the president of the United States be exposed to a barber's shears? But I only blurted something obvious, like ''Thanks for seeing me.'' Johnson didn't reply. He just stared at me from under heavy, lowered brows, across the sheet littered with his hair clippings. I shuffled from one foot to another; still he said nothing, nor did he even move, as the seconds came to seem minutes, then hours.
I had thought I was on easy terms with the senator, then the vice president. But was this the same garrulous man I had known -- this silent, staring president? Whoever it was, I was quickly intimidated, unnerved, reduced to a sort of nothingness by those unblinking eyes, that jowly familiar face turned implacable, that motionless form under the barber sheet, the brooding silence in which I was being regarded, or perhaps measured.
I shuffled and writhed. He still said nothing. Finally I knew I was beaten, and to my shame I mumbled some banality about the nation's good fortune in having such a man to take over. Only then, as if just noticing my presence, he whipped off the barber sheet, stood up and spoke, as if those interminable moments had never happened.
Forty years later, whenever I remember that first interview with a new president, I still feel diminished by my small experience of the Johnson Treatment.