One may speculate over what might have been if the country had remained at peace. Economic policy was working superbly in 1965 and it is likely that prosperity would have continued into 1968. In Chicago the Democrats would have renominated the Johnson-Humphrey ticket and it would have won easily. This might have launched a long period of Democratic control of the White House and the Congress. The Great Society would have survived and might have been expanded.
This leads to the guns or butter issue—the Great Society versus the Vietnam War. Johnson tried desperately to have both, but that was impossible. The war squeezed out reform. Arthur Schlesinger wrote in 1966, “The Great Society is now, except for token gestures, dead.” This is substantially correct in the sense of further efforts to help the underclass—programs to eliminate poverty, to improve the education of the poor, to raise standards of health care, and to replace the ghettoes with decent housing. The legislative monuments of the Kennedy-Johnson era that primarily benefited the middle class, however, remained in place—tax policy, aid to education, particularly higher education, Medicare, the national parks, wilderness, efforts to improve air and water quality, public broadcasting, and so on. Neither the war nor Nixon undermined these programs. But after 1966 Vietnam and growing Republican strength revived the GOP-southern Democratic coalition which blocked Johnson’s efforts to help the underclass, and Nixon later substantially disemboweled these programs. Thus, Lyndon Johnson’s great dream of lifting the poor, particularly black people, to a level playing field was destroyed by his own war.3
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was a metaphor for a manic-depressive personality: the stunning highs of the Great Society followed by the abysmal lows of the Vietnam War. No other American President has experienced so striking a swing from success to failure. Joe Califano, who certainly was a witness, called his book The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson. What manner of man was Johnson that he could spawn such a dramatic transformation?
He was a gigantic bundle of contradictions. Robert McNamara told Califano that he was the “most complicated man he’d ever met” and Califano agreed. The frequent shifts in mood and behavior make one wonder whether he ever established his own identity. What were the main contradictions in his personality?
Johnson possessed a first-class mind, perhaps at the genius level. This included a phenomenal memory and a large vocabulary. George Reedy, who understood him very well, wrote, “The Johnson IQ took a back seat to very few others—perhaps even to none. His mind was magnificent—fast, penetrating, resourceful.” Further, “he had the most superbly developed sense of timing in the whole history of American politics.” He had an uncanny ability to foresee future events and their impact on particular senators. “He could predict votes other senators did not even know they were going to cast.” White House aide Lee White stressed his “single-mindedness.” “He keeps his eye on that damned bull’s eye all the time.” In the debate over the 1957 Civil Rights Act a question of great intricacy under the common law arose—the distinction between civil and criminal contempt. Johnson took a few law books home one evening and the next day, according to Dean Acheson, one of the nation’s top lawyers who was helping Johnson with the amendments, was competent to argue the point before any court in the U.S. Intellectually, Acheson said, it was “awe-inspiring.” When he became President, Johnson had virtually no understanding of the federal budget. After evening and weekend meetings with Kermit Gordon, his budget director, he attained mastery of the subject.
But much of this intellectual power was piddled away. “He simply could not see a concept,” Reedy wrote, “without an immediate pragmatic objective.” Because of his marginal education and his refusal to read anything not directly related to his job, Johnson was unable to link his brilliance to a broad range of knowledge. Thus, he often perceived only half of a problem. Put another way, he was extremely bright but lacked wisdom.
He was obsessed with politics and cared about almost nothing else—literature, history, art, music, sports. When he was President and threw out the first ball at the Washington Senators opening game, he talked politics with the others in his party and paid no attention to what was taking place on the field.
Johnson cultivated the image of the proud Texan who was a tough, powerful leader. He wore expensive white beaver Stetsons, invoked Davy Crockett and the Alamo, and proudly showed off his handsome ranch on the Pedernales. In fact, he had lived most of his adult life in Washington, bought his clothes from expensive tailors, and moved in the highest social circles. His toughness was only skin deep. In his childhood he had been very insecure and dependent on his strong mother. He dreamed about flight from responsibilities and sometimes did run away. When his parents insisted that he go to college, he fled to California. On the day before the 1964 Atlantic City convention would nominate him for President he informed his wife and his closest aides, including Reedy, that he would not run. Both in 1960 and in 1968 he diddled with the decision to run and never became a serious candidate.
Johnson was extremely funny and was a brilliant mimic. He could split the sides of the people in his audience with his vast store of down-home stories delivered stone-faced in a rich Texas accent. Example: J. K. Galbraith wrote a speech for him. “Ken,” Johnson said, “this is a great speech. But I have to tell you that whenever a man makes any kind of economic speech … it’s like pissing down your leg; it makes you feel warm, but your audience is colder than a Texas norther.” Despite this wit, throughout his life Johnson fought spells of deep depression.
No other President except Nixon was so obsessed with secrecy. He did not want anyone to know what he was doing or intended to do until he alone made the announcement. He lectured, threatened, and berated his aides to protect his cocoon of secrecy. Yet he talked incessantly and was an incurable gossip. Smart reporters could sometimes figure out what he was going to do simply by studying what he said. This was eased by the fact that Johnson, though he officially “hated” the press, could not stay away from reporters. According to Charles Mohr of the New York Times, this was because he was lonely in the evening, particularly when his wife was away, as she was in early May 1965. Mohr wrote that one week Johnson “walked with the press” every day except Sunday. There were two-hour walks on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, on Saturday a walk followed by a long talk on the Truman balcony. On Monday Mohr was off, but there was a twilight walk on Tuesday.
Johnson, as noted above, had great trouble distinguishing between truth and falsehood. But, Reedy pointed out, he could always convince himself that whatever was coming out of his mouth was true. In time, of course, particularly over the war, the reporters and the public became aware of his massive lying and his credibility was destroyed. Some of the lies were whoppers. Example: During the 1964 campaign he repeatedly promised that he would not send American boys to fight and die in Vietnam. He was busy repudiating that pledge even before he was inaugurated on January 20, 1965.
Lyndon Johnson was indissolubly married and was at the same time a womanizer. When someone mentioned John Kennedy’s sexual escapades, Johnson would boast that he “had more women by accident than Kennedy had on purpose.” Reedy thought this “pure braggadocio. His physical desires were nowhere near those ascribed to JFK and to the extent that he indulged in extra-marital activity, it was usually with girls for whom he had ‘fallen.’ “ Lady Bird Johnson, Reedy wrote, “bore the whole thing with incredible fortitude. Always he came back to her because he needed her. She did have brains; she could be trusted; she would step into the breach at the psychological moment and patch up the gaping wounds he had inflicted.” Joe Califano on Mrs. Johnson: “She was a saint. … The most extraordinary woman I’ve ever met, including my own wife and mother.”
Johnson loved people in the abstract and treated many who depended upon him outrageously. He was a confirmed New Dealer who unhesitatingly invoked the power of the federal government to help the people at the bottom of the income scale. This, of course, led him to the Great Society. But a
streak of cruelty caused him to humiliate his subordinates. Knowing that Hubert Humphrey hated to kill, he demanded that the Vice President shoot a deer at his ranch. He insisted on doing business with his aides in the bathroom while he defecated. He told them that he wanted a “kiss-my-ass-at-high-noon-in-Macy’s-window loyalty.” An outraged Reedy as witness:
He was notorious for abusing his staff, for driving people to the verge of exhaustion—and sometimes over the verge; for paying the lowest salaries on Capitol Hill; for publicly humiliating his most loyal aides; for keeping his office in a constant state of turmoil by playing games with reigning male and female favorites. …
His manners were atrocious—not just slovenly but frequently calculated to give offense. … He was a bully who would exercise merciless sarcasm on people who could not fight back but could only take it. Most important, he had no sense of loyalty. … To Johnson, loyalty was a oneway street; all take on his part and all give on the part of everyone else—his family, his friends, his supporters. …
Occasionally he would demonstrate his gratitude for extraordinary services by a lavish gift—an expensive suit of clothes, an automobile, jewelry for the women on his staff. The gift was always followed by an outpouring of irrelevant abuse.
Califano’s ovservation on the effect of LBJ’s exploitation upon his aids: “There wasn’t a guy on the White House staff who didn’t have a hell of a problem with his wife, including me and everybody I knew on that staff. Everybody.”
Richard Goodwin and Bill Moyers, after each checked independently with a psychiatrist, became convinced that Johnson was paranoid and, in part for that reason, both left him. Doris Kearns, after interviewing him at length, reached the same conclusion. Douglass Cater said that he drafted many letters of resignation and never sent any of them. Reedy wrote of Johnson’s “tantrums” and “rampages,” often caused in part by heavy drinking, that were the prelude to “a flood of invective.” He speculated unsuccessfully about the causes, “but I cannot avoid the feeling that there were deeper causes which will probably never be known.”
Johnson did not vent his rage on Califano. Rather, he refused to talk to him and would give instructions through his secretary. Jack Valenti simply took the President’s outbursts. Moyers, according to Califano, “would go out for two hours and just drive around in a car.” Harry McPherson spoke of Johnson’s “moods.” “I suppose,” he said, “an analyst would say [he behaved] in some manic depressive way.” McPherson’s relationship with Johnson became “intense” and he saved his “sanity” by pulling away. He talked to a psychoanalyst friend who said that Johnson was a “clean-tube man.” Every once in a while his plumbing got plugged and “he blows everything out: good, bad, fears, rages, all of it. And he has got more to blow out than most people do.” McPherson learned to get out of the way when Johnson was about to blow out his tubes.
Thus, if all of Lyndon Johnson’s contradictions worked out on the downside, he would have had these characteristics: ignorance of many important matters, a warped over-emphasis on politics, a preoccupation with his own image, a tendency to run away from important decisions, an obsession with secrecy, an addiction to lying, a yen for sex, a cruel streak that caused him to humiliate people who were loyal to him, and a propensity for “moods” and “tantrums” that some called paranoid or manic depressive.
These contradictions, this yin and yang of personality, meant that Johnson was prone to making mistakes of judgment. Reedy devoted a chapter of his memoir to what he called “A Gap of Understanding,” that is, Johnson’s failure to grasp the role of the press in our society and his mule-like refusal to try to understand.
During his presidency Lyndon Johnson made two momentous decisions. The first was reached on Air Force One on November 22, 1963, immediately after he was sworn in as President: he would push at once for the enactment of Kennedy’s domestic program in 1964; he would win election as President in November of that year; and he would announce his own much broader domestic program in 1965. In his mind there was a sharp distinction between government officials who were elected and those who were not. He had become an unelected, accidental President. Kennedy had won the office by election and his agenda, therefore, was in Johnson’s mind sanctioned. Excepting poverty, all the programs had their legislative origins in the Congress of the late fifties when he had been majority leader in the Senate. He was thoroughly familiar with them and he strongly approved of the tax cut, civil rights, federal aid for education, and Medicare. Now a national figure, he was no longer constrained by Texas conservatism and could act out his own New Deal convictions on the Kennedy program.
The second momentous decision, of course, was to commit American military forces to the war in Vietnam. Here, too, he confronted legitimacy. As an accidental President he could not make that bold commitment. But his landslide victory over Goldwater in November 1964 was a transformation. Reedy, who was working for him at the White House, wrote, “His presidential style changed overnight and it was not a good change.” Reedy had been trying to get him to hold a long overdue press conference. Johnson said, “I’ve been kissing asses all my life and I don’t have to kiss them any more. Tell those press bastards of yours that I’ll see them when I want to and not before.” Reedy thought there would be trouble and that it would not be confined to the press.
Richard Goodwin, who was also in the White House, made an even graver observation. “During 1965, and especially in the period which enveloped the crucial midsummer decision that transformed Vietnam into an American war, I became convinced that the president’s always large eccentricities had taken a huge leap into unreason.”
These observations lead to the reason for Lyndon Johnson’s decision to go into Vietnam: hubris. He was convinced that he headed the world’s mightiest military power. With contempt he called North Vietnam a “pissant” sixth-rate or “raggety-ass” fourth-rate nation. With the legitimacy he had won in the election, he need not consult the Congress, or, for that matter, even let Congress or the American people in on his secret. In the Greek sense, this was the arrogance that aroused the anger of the gods and caused them to inflict disaster upon the one who went to war. As with Pericles and Athens, the preference for guns over butter would bring calamity to Lyndon Johnson and to the United States.4
Notes
The overwhelming majority of the documents cited in this book are housed in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, which is located on the University of Texas campus in Austin. The titles of frequently cited books have been shortened as follows: Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), cited as Bernstein, Promises Kept; Joseph A. Califano, Jr., The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), cited as Califano,Johnson; Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President (New York: Random House, 1991), cited as Clifford, Counsel; Congressional Quarterly Almanac, cited as CQ Almanac; Economic Report of the President Together with the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers (Washington: Government Printing Office), cited as Economic Report of the President; Lady Bird Johnson,A White House Diary (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), cited as Johnson,Diary; Lyndon Baines Johnson,The Vantage Point (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), cited as Johnson,Vantage Point; Doris Kearns,Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), cited as Kearns,Johnson; Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, cited as Public Papers, Johnson; and Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1964), cited as Warren Commission Report.
Prologue
1. Dictionary of American Biography, Supp. Eight, 205–7. Garner’s famous quip is usually bowderlized as “a pitcher of warm spit.” Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (rev. ed., New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966); Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., “Election of 1800,” in A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., F. L. Israel, and W. P. Hansen, eds., History of American Presidential Elections, 1
798–1968 (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), 1: 101–34; John D. Feerick, From Failing Hands (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1965), ch. 7, app. A; Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force, The Modern American Vice Presidency (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 7.
2. Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 576–78; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power (New York: New American Library, 1966), chs. 13, 14; George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir (New York: Andrews and McMeel, 1982), 54, 129; Lawrence F. O’Brien, Oral History Interview, 1–6, 11–12, Elizabeth (Liz) Carpenter, Oral History Interview, 1–10, Johnson Library; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 702–3; Leonard Baker, The Johnson Eclipse (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 10, 80.
3. The best treatments of Johnson’s vice presidency are Baker, Johnson Eclipse, and Evans and Novak, Exercise of Power, ch. XV, quote at p. 308. See also Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 703–4; Walter W. Heller, Oral History Interview, 2–5, Johnson Library; Kearns, Johnson, 167–68; Reedy, Johnson, 24–25, 126; Harry McPherson, A Political Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 191. The camel driver incident is described by two eyewitnesses: George Reedy, Oral History Interview, 11—15, Johnson Library, and Liz Carpenter, Ruffles and Flourishes (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), 41–46.
4. Johnson, Diary, 3–5.
Chapter 1. Fifteen Days
1. Warren Commission Report, chs. 1, 2; Johnson, Vantage Point, ch. 1, quotes at 8, 9, 11, 14; tape recording of the events of Nov. 22, 1963, by Elizabeth Carpenter, Dec. 1963, quotes at 17, 19, 26; Pool Report, Dallas to Washington, Nov. 22, 1963, Johnson to Caroline and John Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963, all Assassination of John F. Kennedy File, Johnson Library; Jack Valenti, A Very Human President (New York: Norton, 1975), ch. 1, quotes on 7, 9, 43; Michael Amrine, This Awesome Challenge (New York: Putnam, 1964), ch. 1.
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