LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  Reassessing Lyndon Johnson’s Reign

  Lyndon B. Johnson’s “accidental presidency” should be considered according to the charges contained in this book and regarded for what it was: a coup d’état; a deeply insidious subversion of the democratic process, the result of a criminal enterprise with other men who, deluded to think that their actions were patriotic, conspired to murder the thirty-fifth president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. The resulting impact on the United States was both immediate and long-term. Within a few years, it produced a tragically misbegotten war with a contrived enemy sold on the basis of pseudo patriotism to establish U.S. dominance throughout the world. Pundits still use the term “Vietnam quagmire” as the default benchmark for unfortunate comparisons to military conflicts in which a legitimate United States national interest actually exists. The U.S. “image” around the world, including the self-image by its own citizens, was greatly and permanently diminished by the illegitimate presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, and this lingering bruise is ample proof of the long-term effects of Johnson’s deceit.

  Lyndon B. Johnson was initially protected by the natural inclination of American citizens at the time to assume only the best about the new president; after all, he had advanced to the number two position over many years and had been presumed to have been “vetted” by his Texas constituents who kept elevating him to higher and higher positions (although it was accomplished through stolen elections and elaborate lawyering, this was not known outside of Texas). Then, according to his carefully drawn plan, the American people would follow his guidance following the traumatic event that thrust Johnson out of a downward spiral leading to prison and into the presidency of the United States; during the following year he would be assured of their support, just as he began reassuring them with his masterful performance as a new president thrown into office by the horrible act of “the lone nut.” In the meantime, the ruling class on Capitol Hill decided collectively to bury any suspicions they may have held as individuals about the moral turpitude of the new president for fear of pursuing any further investigations against him. If the evidence against him in the Bobby Baker or other scandals were to rise to an impeachable offense coming on the heels of the assassination, a constitutional crisis might have ensued, especially if all of his crimes had been revealed. And if he were to be found involved in the murder of JFK, the crisis might have been far worse than that; a collective decision was reached, probably silently and discreetly, that it might be best to “let sleeping dogs lie.”

  Lyndon Johnson had relied on what he felt was the inherent sophistry of his subjects—“pissants” he called them—to accept a story that he knew would be the one most comfortable to them: the sole assassin was a misguided communist, a screwball. He knew that the real story of his coup d’état would be so unbelievable and incomprehensible to most of them that the alternative would be an easy sell; it was the one which least terrified the entire nation.

  As he prepared for the 1964 election, competing with a man he portrayed as a “warmonger,” he had continued assuring the nation that he was capable of running the country maybe even better than his predecessor had. Suddenly, in July, 1964, the long-dormant and stalled civil rights legislation had finally gotten passed, and he was (at least he was portrayed to be) skillfully handling the terrible Vietnam “problem” as he valiantly tried to keep American youths from being called to war again while he carefully protected the national security interests of the United States. Only a man having mastered the art of duplicity could be portrayed as trying to keep the country out of the very war that he was simultaneously working to create, just as he began championing the long-suppressed civil rights legislation, which he had symied for decades. By the time of the landslide 1964 election, when “All the way with LBJ” became the ubiquitous battle cry heard throughout the country (comparatively few remember “In your heart you know he’s right,” advanced by his opponent), he was safely ensconced as the confident and magnanimous leader and president that he always knew, in his own mind, he would be; now he only needed to expand the “legend” from his own mind to those of everyone else.

  It wasn’t until he became president that he began to rally Congress to pass the very civil rights legislation he had personally stymied for three years, which was also a concept he had fought for twenty three years before that. He knew that he needed to have landmark legislative accomplishments during his first year as president to support his own run for the presidential election of 1964. There can be only one reason that Johnson continued, throughout his vice presidency, to block Kennedy’s attempts—no matter how tepid they might have been—toward the adoption of more aggressive civil rights reform: he wanted to save it as his own “place in history.” That was all he cared about, the only thing that kept him motivated to become president throughout his lifetime and, once there, it was not sufficient to be merely “one of many presidents”; he had to be considered the best one ever so that his place in history would be guaranteed. But to have a legacy at all necessarily meant that he had to become president in the first place, and in those nearly three years he spent holding an office he detested, his resolve to carry through with his planned takeover was steeled by polishing a meticulously crafted plan he had created to accomplish just that.

  Rather than being the primary catalyst of the new legislation, he was, ironically, thrust into a position as the beneficiary of the public’s remorse for JFK’s assassination and the collective guilt for the long-simmering civil rights battles that symbolized the last smoldering vestiges of the nation’s sorry history of slavery. At last, the nation in mourning could look at itself in the mirror of history and do what it needed to do to redress old wounds and make peace with itself. That Lyndon “Bull” Johnson could foresee all of this is debatable, but his ability to manipulate people—a single person or dozens, thousands, or millions at a time—has been proven; he benefited from the growing sense of outrage felt especially by younger people at the unfairness of the water hoses aimed at students simply attempting to register for college or black people denied service at lunch counters. The time for civil rights legislation had come, and the man responsible for it, more than any other, Martin Luther King Jr., would soon become the martyr for his cause. Lyndon B. Johnson had cleverly but merely been put into the position of taking much more credit for the passage of this legislation than should have been bestowed, given the extreme methods he used to accomplish his objectives. The New York Times went so far as to give the lion’s share of credit for its passage—not to Lyndon Johnson—to Everett Dirksen, the Republican senator and minority leader.

  The greater the number of threats, rumors, and innuendo from the “Bostons” in the White House, fed more and more ferociously by his own paranoia and sensitivity to criticism, the more he realized that he was out of options; he had to proceed with the plan in order to reach his destiny (and, of course, to stay out of prison). Another aspect he obviously factored in was that, in addition to securing his “legacy,” it would simultaneously divert attention away from any doubts harbored by people about his own complicity in the crime of the century, as the “mastermind” who put it all together. This was undoubtedly one of the first entries on his list of “Great Society” legislation begun well before November 22, 1963.

  The Final Demise of Lyndon Johnson

  In October 1972, Johnson invited his “son” Bobby Baker to visit him on his ranch. Baker later wrote, “I was so unprepared for LBJ’s appearance when we entered his bedroom, I’m afraid my face registered shock. Lyndon Johnson was very fat, most pale, and white-haired; he’d aged far more than his infrequent newspaper photos had led me to expect. There was an oxygen mask by his bed, which he frequently used to aid his breathing; he was removing it from his face as we walked into the room … [he thought] ‘Jesus, the poor man looks terrible. This isn’t the Lyndon Johnson I knew,’”6 Within a quarter of an hour, Johnson was dressed in his new “twenty buck” double-knit britches and a Western-style outfit
, driving Baker and his wife around the ranch, playing the part of a country squire, “tooting his automobile horn as he drove among grazing cows, pointing out his irrigation system, driving up a paved road to gesture toward his restored birthplace a mile or two from the LBJ ranch house. He constantly smoked and gulped Cutty Sark; throughout our visit he kept a portable bar handy.”7

  Barr McClellan described Johnson’s need for deep psychotherapy to find relief from his guilty conscience and how the psychiatrist had “gotten rid of the demons” he had long ago buried in the back of his mind. According to this rendition of the very real story also reported elsewhere, the closest he came to admitting an involvement in Kennedy’s assassination was to lay the blame mostly back on his chief attorney Ed Clark: “‘That dear old Ed-ward is a son of a bitch,’ he lisped, again mimicking Clark. ‘Just think. At one time, he was ready to ride “ol’ Sparky” for me.’ Johnson was referring to the electric chair at the state prison. ‘Hell of a man,’ he continued. ‘Willing to give all for me. You just gotta admire that … Yessir. That man’s got balls!’”8 According to McClellan, the attorney Don Thomas was given a number of million-dollar funds to be paid over time for certain witnesses who knew things that might compromise the closely guarded secrets. One was put up for a mistress and others set up for local officials including a judge. Controls were put into place to maintain secrecy and prevent anyone from being able to trace it in the future, and of course to ensure that all transactions were subject to the attorney-client privilege. The funds would continue flowing as long as the recipients kept their mouths shut and themselves out of the newspapers. The people managing all of this would also monitor their charges so that if anyone started talking “out of school,” then the money would stop and nothing could be done to prevent that.9 Indeed, this might explain why, according to Madeline Brown’s account in her book Texas in the Morning, her own monthly stipend stopped after several years without explanation and without recourse; she had by then begun talking to others about her days and nights with Lyndon.

  According to McClellan’s account, which he obtained directly from his former attorney colleague Don Thomas, Johnson also blamed the Pentagon for bad advice on Vietnam; never mind that others, as noted previously, had given both him and Kennedy clear warnings about the futility of getting involved in a land war in Asia or the fact that he would intimidate his own advisors from disagreeing with his preconceived opinions. One example of his condescending, belittling treatment of his military advisors was provided by Lt. General Charles Cooper (USMC, Ret.) who attended a meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff early in 1965 and described Johnson’s reaction to the advice he had just received:10

  “He screamed obscenities, he cursed them personally, he ridiculed them for coming to his office with their “military advice.” Noting that it was he who was carrying the weight of the free world on his shoulders, he called them filthy names-shitheads, dumb shits, pompous assholes-and used “the F-word” as an adjective more freely than a Marine in boot camp would use it. He then accused them of trying to pass the buck for World War III to him. It was unnerving, degrading.”

  The fact that he consistently refused to follow the military’s advice on what was actually necessary to win his war was also something he couldn’t acknowledge according to this account of his dying days.11 Johnson purportedly admitted to Thomas that he told the psychiatrist “‘about the killings’ … At first, Clark had done most of the dirty work on his own, keeping Thomas ‘out of the loop.’ When he had to act it was through trusted relatives or compromised public officials to protect Johnson from any involvement in the necessary crimes. In the 1948 election, Clark had to enlist Thomas. No one else could add the needed votes. Then, in the early fifties, Clark had drawn Thomas deeper into the web, making him the chief contact with John Cofer, the firm’s attorney for criminal matters … In his heart, he knew the most terrible of all crimes had likely been told. The assassination of a president simply could not be ‘contained.’ If the doctor knew, that was it. The word would be out. Thomas was sure the doctor knew because, being the outstanding psychiatrist he was, the patient was the only concern. He had to find out what troubled Johnson. The killing of John Kennedy was, he was sure, the primary cause of Johnson’s paranoia. That was followed by Vietnam and its paranoia with even more depression. Together, they led to the collapse of his presidency … ‘You know full well what was happening back then. They were closing in … Investigations everywhere. Hearings all over the damned hill.”12 This “factional” account described by McClellan, written as his honest interpretation of what he believes his fellow lawyer experienced with Johnson, is admittedly not conclusive as to what transpired, but it is the closest, most persuasive account of Johnson’s dying days that we have and will probably ever have.

  The general thrust of McClellan’s description of Johnson was affirmed by D. Jablow Hershman in her book Power Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson, who wrote that “the United States was being led by a man who already was or rapidly was becoming psychotic. LBJ’s grandiosity, megalomania and paranoia reached dimensions that could no longer pass for normalcy. Signs of grandiosity and paranoia were present before LBJ became President, but assuming responsibility for the war in Vietnam appears to have been more stress than he could bear as 1966 wore on.”13 Furthermore, Hershman concluded, “LBJ’s manic furies and incapacitating depressions, his pathological ego, megalomania and paranoia were products of his manic depression. Unfortunate though they were for him and the people with whom he came in contact, their effects became tragic when he took over the conduct of the Vietnam War … The effect on LBJ was catastrophic. His illness worsened past the point of psychotic collapse. The consequences were fatal, if not for him, certainly for those who died in Vietnam in his needless war—LBJ’s war—for he would not accept guidance from the advisors who might have imparted some degree of sanity to his decisions.”14 The chilling description presented by author Hershman of Lyndon B. Johnson’s real persona makes a compelling case for the need of a better vetting process for candidates for the presidency and vice presidency.

  Some of the visitors to his ranch after he retired independently described him with the following adjectives: “The most moody person I’ve ever known,” “odd,” “crazy,” and “psychopathic.” Author Hershman said that when Lady Bird was away, he vacillated between paranoia, depression, and rage as the torment of his long-repressed loneliness overwhelmed him.15

  According to author Dorothy Davis, “Many depressives frequently plan their deaths on the anniversary of a significant event.”16 It is interesting that Johnson died on the most significant anniversary of his life, at the ending of what would have been his second term, two days after Richard M. Nixon was sworn into office for the second time. But since he had to vacate the White House four years before his second term would have ended, he returned to his ranch where he pretended to find solace and comfort, but in reality, he was forced to encounter the loneliness and isolation and raging despair that would render him a four-year battle with a fate worse than death: his loss of presidential power, which he had worked all of his life to achieve. Doris Goodwin reportedly confirmed that Johnson tried to will his own death in his last few years at the LBJ Ranch,17 apparently so that he would die on the anniversary of his being sworn in as president after winning the 1964 election. It appears that he knew somehow that his death would be worth one last major “benefit of the doubt” because of the automatic deference that past presidents are due; it would finally give him the peace that had been so elusive, knowing that he would never have to respond to any inquiries about the crime and therefore would also ensure that he would never be tried and convicted of the murder of JFK. That knowledge was probably the only solace he could find, and it made him seek eternal peace for his troubled soul.

  Johnson’s disease was as responsible for his political success in the early years as it was responsible for his self-destruction as presid
ent. It accounted for his single-minded obsessiveness in wanting more and more power, money, and glory and his turn to the criminal activities necessary to attain those goals. It contributed to his crude, vulgar, and obnoxious behavior to others and his condescending, belittling, and arrogant treatment of his subordinates. The worst, of course, was that it fueled his compulsion to become president at all costs, including the murder of John F. Kennedy because he was the only person standing in the way. Almost as bad, however, was that his disease was the catalyst that caused Lyndon Johnson, who was determined not to become “the president who lost Asia to communism” or lose any war, to put himself into a position to do both.