We'll Be Lucky Never to See His Likes Again

By Mark Falcoff

American Spectator Thursday, January 1, 1998

Review of Michael R. Beschloss's Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964.
Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 Edited by Michael R. Beschloss Simon & Schuster, 592 pages, $30 Some years ago I was sharing a cab in a major South American capital with one of the region's rising young conservative politicians. To pass the time in a monumental traffic jam, we started discussing recent American presidents. Which one, he asked me, did I think was the worst? Before I could answer, he suggested Jimmy Carter. "Close," I said, "but not quite. The worst--the absolute worst--from the point of view of long-term damage to the republic, was Lyndon Johnson." As I explained to him, at the time we were still digging our way out of the fiscal and moral mess created by Johnson nearly two decades before. Although LBJ will have been dead for a quarter-century this month, nothing I have learned since then has caused me to alter my opinion. Now historian Michael Beschloss has come forth with the perfect holiday gift for people like me--the Johnson-hater who has everything. This volume consists of selections from nearly a thousand hours of conversations--some 9,500 individual entries--covertly recorded in the Oval Office and elsewhere and preserved at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin. According to a fascinating historical note at the end of the book, in mid-January 1973, sensing that he had not long to live, Johnson summoned a long-time confidential secretary to his office at the Library and instructed her to ensure that these tapes remained sealed for fifty years after his death. Fortunately, Beschloss was able to convince the current curators of the collection to overrule this, one of Johnson's final wishes. The result is something that resembles nothing so much as a grisly traffic accident--not a pretty sight, but you can't take your eyes off of it. The relatively brief period covered is one of the richest in incident in our recent history--from the death of President John F. Kennedy through Johnson's election to a term in his own right in November 1964. During these months Johnson was busy juggling a number of complicated agendas: to appropriate for himself whatever remained of the Kennedy mystique (including the services of Kennedy's staff) without diminishing his own stature; push forward the legislative program that remained uncompleted at the time of Kennedy's death, particularly on civil rights; keep the Southern wing of the Democratic Party on the ranch while establishing a firm political beachhead in its dominant labor-civil rights wing; and keep the growing crisis in Vietnam off the front pages and out of the range of congressional debate until his re-election was assured. Beschloss has also chosen to include some important ephemera--the controversy over who should investigate the Kennedy assassination; the murder of three civil rights leaders in the South; Johnson's complicated relationship with Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders; riots in Panama and pressures to conclude a new treaty with that country; Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's decision to shut off fresh water to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo; the military coup in Brazil; and de Gaulle's decision to recognize Communist China. Inevitably, a great deal of attention is devoted to Johnson's complicated relations with the Kennedy family, and particularly with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. As is well known, the Kennedys viewed the Johnson presidency as a hateful regency, to be ended at the earliest possible date with the restoration of their dynasty. Here Beschloss has selected those conversations that illustrate, step by step, how Johnson outmaneuvered the Kennedys and forced the heir-apparent to leave the cabinet and seek political office in New York, rather than to stand as his vicepresidential candidate in 1964. Once the deed is done, McGeorge Bundy, a Kennedy holdover, underscores his capacity to quickly shift alliances: "Now that you've made this decision," he tells LBJ, "you don't have any problem with self-respect. You're in charge."

This book is not only about history, but about people--Johnson's allies and courtiers, rivals and adversaries, many of whom make repeated appearances. Like Bundy, most of those whose conversations are recorded in this book-Walter Lippmann, J. William Fulbright, Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, Abe Fortas, Joseph Alsop, Paul Douglas, Hale Boggs--should be glad to be dead; if this is how one sounds when talking alone with a president, I hope I never have the opportunity. The only people who come off as honest, forthright, attractive human beings--straight shooters who let the dice fall where they may--are Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lady Bird Johnson. (An unexpected runner-up is J. Edgar Hoover.) At the center is, of course, the Sun King himself, LBJ--vindictive, self-pitying, vulgar, cruel and ruthless, with an appetite for power that seemed like an addiction to drugs. His energy seems inexhaustible--not only for our domestic and foreign policies, but for every niggling detail of his life and the lives of those around him. Interspersed between meetings of the National Security Council or the Council of Economic Advisers are discussions--long ones--with a New York hairdresser on how much the latter proposes to charge for the privilege of preparing Lady Bird, the two presidential daughters, and select female members of the White House staff for a grand event; with Frank Stanton, president of CBS, on the expensive rebuilding of the White House desk to accommodate LBJ's unusual height; with the chairman of the board of a major clothing manufacturer on specific requirements for his casual pants; with another source on the outfitting of the entire White House staff with Western ranch outfits like his own, and so forth. Or on his requirements for secretarial staff: "I want the five smartest, best-educated, fastest, prettiest secretaries in Washington. I don't want any old, broken-down old maids. I want them from twenty-five to forty. I want them that can work Saturday and Sunday. I want them that can work at night and not be afraid to go home after the Secret Service takes them out of the gate." The portrait that emerges is of a man who repeatedly confuses the public interest with his own private good. Many of the conversations show Johnson's acute interest in covering up the source of his personal fortune (and that of his wife). One particularly pregnant dialogue deals with " envelopes" of cash to LBJ--and we aren't talking about contributions to charity. (In a footnote Beschloss emphasizes that all this was before post- Watergate rules on campaign fundraising.) Much attention is given to cajoling the press--with some success--to lay off what today we would call " investigative reporting." Indeed, the relationship between LBJ and the press, at least prior to his re-election, was remarkably tame by today's standards, although those who would not cooperate could expect serious trouble. (Secretary of State Dean Rusk even suggested to him that New York Times reporter Tad Szulc be put under surveillance.) As could be expected, plenty of attention is given over to Vietnam. What is remarkable here is the degree to which, long before committing American combat troops, Johnson and his associates had lost most of their illusions about the country and the possibility of winning the war. The seven-page conversation with Senator Richard Russell will surprise many who lived through those years, and were treated to nightly television disquisitions by LBJ on the rightness of his policy. "I'm confronted," Johnson confessed to Russell. "I don't believe the American people ever want me to run (abandon Vietnam). If I lose it, I think they'll say, I've lost. I've pulled out. At the same time, I don't want to commit us to war. And I'm in a hell of a shape." Russell's response was appropriately homey: "We're just like the damn cow over the fence there in Vietnam. It's one of those things where, 'Heads I win, tails you lose.'" This was in May of 1964!

These dialogues also cast interesting light on the state of the Republican Party a quarter-century ago. It is quite obvious now that the Eisenhower administration postponed serious thinking about Republican domestic policies for a decade, so that by the time Johnson got to the White House, the GOP was still trying to figure out an answer to the New Deal. The Republican leadership in Congress--Senator Everett Dirksen and Minority Leader Charles Halleck--are shown here to be in a purely defensive mode, nibbling at the margins of Johnson's legislative proposals, while their flacks spent most of their time on peripheral issues, like trying to dig up the dirt on Lady Bird's shoddy treatment of employees at her ranch. At one point Johnson even laments that the Republicans have no policy of their own--he would enjoy, he claimed, a spirited and principled opposition. (Of course, when Barry Goldwater emerges as the Republican nominee, Johnson refuses to take him seriously and even urges his campaign staff to ignore him.) Inevitably, one finds oneself comparing the Johnson of these tapes with the present incumbent. There are obvious similarities: the confusion of public and private interest; the collusive relationship with friendly forces in the media; the desire to buy the love of the American people with other people's tax dollars. But there are some differences as well.

For one thing, Clinton and his wife have a much better relationship with the glamorati of New York and Hollywood, and the elites of the publishing, artistic, and academic world, who recognize them as one of their own. Graduates of Yale Law, they have none of Johnson's hang-ups about the schools to which they went. ("I didn't go to Harvard; I went to San Marcos State.") For another, the current president's role model is not LBJ, who accomplished important things, many of them admittedly awful, but John F. Kennedy, whose presidency was largely fluff and "style." For yet another, the Great Society and the "civil rights" movement--the principal domestic policies of the Johnson administration--have all dropped off the tree as rotten fruits, leaving Clinton with the task of convincing Americans that policies that have been demonstrated not to work should nonetheless continue. Perhaps the most important difference of all is that, unlike Clinton, Johnson spent virtually his entire adult life in Washington, most of it in Congress, where he had the opportunity to take the full measure of the men with whom he would work as president. Anyone who wants an example of the Johnson treatment needs to read the long dialogue with Richard Russell, who after all had been something of a mentor to LBJ, wherein Johnson dragoons him into joining the Warren Commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination. Russell was old and tired and had no appetite for working with the chief justice, whom he rightly judged to be a publicity hound. It is painful to read Johnson overruling Russell's sensible objections, and makes one grateful for small mercies. Neither Clinton nor his putative successor Gore possesses anything like Johnson's skills at manipulation and persuasion, and for the sake of the Republic, a good thing too. Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI.