by Connie Bruck
“It was quite true, which points out the difficulty of being isolated. The final result was that Proposition 14 carried by two million, seven or eight hundred thousand, and the president carried by over a million.” It was counterintuitive—that a ballot initiative fueled by a backlash to civil rights legislation would win such enormous support, and that the president so largely responsible for that legislation would, too—but it did bear out Wasserman’s prediction. And he had understood the situation, he was saying, because he knew California politics, and was not part of a myopic political clique in Washington.
“There was just no way [Arizona Senator Barry] Goldwater could carry California,” Wasserman concluded. “I was concerned—the ‘big lie’ technique—if we kept talking about Proposition 14 identified with President Johnson, somebody would start to believe it, you know? I literally had never heard it until I arrived at that meeting, or heard it since.”
Washington was new terrain for Wasserman, but he approached it as he did his own—with confidence, authority, self-deprecation (“I’m a very simple man”) that was meant to convey the opposite, and, when necessary, a sure sense of drama (making a show of leaving a meeting was a Wasserman specialty). In this instance, his assessment turned out to be right. But he was not always so astute about what was—no matter his display of confidence—unfamiliar ground. Sometimes he seemed to be trying to focus on this new region with the lens he was accustomed to, which produced a decidedly off-kilter view. Since Wasserman was, as he put it, “in the image business,” Johnson asked his advice about what he and Wasserman, too, saw as Johnson’s “PR problems.” By 1967 Johnson was vilified by many in the college and black communities, both groups that Johnson felt should have been in his corner. Regarding their hostility, Wasserman commented, “I believe he understood that the reason was Vietnam. I also believe that he felt that if there was a way to communicate the real issues in Vietnam, that the reasons would be answered or understood. But there was just no way to communicate.”
Wasserman attributed that inability to communicate to “the fatigue factor,” which he said he had learned about in his business. “A given program can be on television very successfully up to a given point and then, for some inexplicable reason, it starts to disintegrate; and research has indicated that it’s called the fatigue factor. That, I believe, is the one thing that the administration failed to understand about the Vietnam War. We checked and, I believe, in the California area there was actually on television in every twenty-four-hour period over an hour of war film, seven days a week. . . . As ridiculous as it may sound, had it been possible to change the name of the war and the color of the uniforms of the enemy, it could have gone on longer. There was a total turnoff, as it were, with the mass population.”
Johnson treated Wasserman to some of the special attention that he doled out so masterfully, and to such great effect. Wasserman, of course, did this himself, on a much smaller scale, and he might therefore have been expected to be cynical about Johnson’s overtures; but, to the contrary, he seemed thrilled by them. Johnson, for example, had phoned Wasserman when a profile of him, entitled “Hollywood—A New Kind of King,” had appeared in Time magazine on January 1, 1965. The cover of the magazine featured Johnson, as Man of the Year. Wasserman recalled that he was driving home from the studio. “I happen to be a telephone nut, I have telephones everywhere, my car.” But he was preoccupied, and his car phone was off. “I drove in on my motor court, and my wife was standing there shouting at the top of her voice, waving her hands, saying, ‘Why don’t you have your car telephone on? The president’s calling.’ . . . And I said, ‘I’ve only been gone twenty minutes, you know.’ I went in and called the White House. . . . It was the president to tease me about the fact that there was a story on the inside of Time that was rather complimentary to me, about my capability and everything. He said I was stealing his thunder: here he was on the cover and there was a two-page story on the inside. And that was a call from a friend; that was not a call from the president of the United States.”
Unlike Jules Stein, Wasserman had made his climb without its going to his head, at least in terms of social pretense; he seemed to pride himself on that, and he saw the same down-to-earth quality in Johnson—which was part of the attraction. “I was always very impressed by the fact that, holding the highest office in the world, he was a real person, at least with people who he considered his friends,” Wasserman said. “He certainly did not put on airs or acts, or throw his clout or image about. I’m reminded of the time we were back in Washington at a private dinner about the time Luci [Johnson] and Pat [Nugent] were married, and there was an American Airlines strike. There were about ten of us at dinner, and my wife was seated on the president’s right. She was complaining to him about the difficulty we were having trying to get back to California because of the strike, and he picked up the phone which was on the dining room table to call Warren Woodward [chairman of American Airlines]. And she said to him, ‘Well, don’t bother with that. Lew’s already talked to Woody, and there’s nothing he can do.’ At which point, the president howled, because he was president of the United States, who certainly had more influence than her husband. He roared with it. . . . It never dawned on her, you know, that she was talking to the president of the United States. Which only proves his real quality as a friend; because she was totally at ease.”
Wasserman was a guest at a number of White House functions, including state dinners, and on several occasions he and his wife, Edie, spent the night. Wasserman loved to tell the story about how once he and Edie were in Washington to attend a dinner party, and staying at a hotel. While he was at the party, he received a call from the White House, saying that the president had learned he and Edie were in town, expected them at the White House that evening, and was having their bags moved from the hotel. Still, it was certainly a qualitatively different relationship from the one that Johnson had with Krim; when Wasserman went to the White House, it was an event, and Krim all but lived there. During his presidency, Johnson taped many of his phone conversations; a log, compiled from the time Johnson became president through December 1965, shows not a single one with Wasserman. And when the Wassermans were invited to the ranch on Memorial Day weekend in 1968, along with seven other couples, Lady Bird wrote in a note to Governor John Connally’s wife, Nellie, who was hosting these guests for lunch, that it was a group that “Lyndon and I think will be interested in the Library.” She was referring to the Johnson Library, then in the early planning stages.
There is no question that Wasserman was very fond of Johnson. After Johnson left the White House, it seemed that Wasserman could not do enough for him. He was one of the Library’s most substantial benefactors, as Lyndon and Lady Bird had anticipated; according to Jack Valenti, Wasserman donated MCA stock worth millions of dollars, which became worth hundreds of millions over the years. Wasserman contributed to Lady Bird’s wildflower foundation. Once he discovered that Johnson enjoyed listening to his cassette player in his car, Wasserman continually sent him large packages of tapes. But it is also true that he traded on the currency of this relationship when Johnson was president, and, in less meaningful ways, forever after. And if Wasserman was not an intimate of Johnson’s, Wasserman’s business associates certainly did not know it. During the Johnson presidency, NBC executive Don Durgin recalled, “Lew would hold forth in these lunches with his stories about Lyndon and all the inside. He sounded more knowledgeable than our news correspondents. He was so plugged in.” In later years, Wasserman would speak with great pride about his closeness to Johnson, but what seemed to be the highlight for him, as he often recounted it, was Johnson’s offering him the position of secretary of commerce shortly after the 1964 election. He had refused it, he would always say, “because my wife wouldn’t move to Washington.” On one occasion, he said having passed up that opportunity was the one thing in his life he regretted.
Some expressed doubt that Johnson ever made such an offer, however. Harry McPh
erson, an aide in the Johnson White House, was quoted in the Washington Post in 1995 saying that Johnson did not tap Wasserman and would not have—because of concern about what might be raised in nomination hearings regarding Wasserman’s connections to organized crime. Asked about his having been thus quoted, McPherson said, “Yes, I did say that, and I believe that was the case. But I was very angry with myself when I saw it in print—because I would imagine Lew would think, now why did McPherson go and say that?” Frank Stanton, the longtime president of CBS, had gotten to know Johnson in the early forties through Johnson’s interests in the television business. An Austin television station that Johnson owned became a CBS affiliate, and Johnson and Stanton were soon good friends. When Johnson was president, Stanton was a close adviser, in and out of the White House regularly. Stanton said that Johnson had offered him a couple different cabinet positions—secretary of defense and secretary of health, education, and welfare, as well as undersecretary of state. He had declined, he said, because “I knew that working for him, I would have no life of my own.” Stanton also said that he had never heard that Wasserman had been offered the post of secretary of commerce, and he was certain that if Johnson were seriously considering Wasserman, he would have asked Stanton what he thought. Like McPherson, he believed Johnson would have been leery of a Wasserman confirmation proceeding because of concern about his connections.
“You know, ties between the White House and Hollywood only started with JFK,” Stanton remarked, pointing out that such relationships had not existed for Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, or Dwight Eisenhower. “A lot of people aren’t sure about the greasepaint—it’s a tricky business.” And despite Wasserman’s fund-raising, he added, Johnson kept Hollywood at arm’s length until late in his presidency. “I was never at the ranch when anyone from Hollywood was there—and everyone was there,” Stanton commented. Of course Krim was, he acknowledged—“but I don’t think of Krim as Hollywood.”
One person who has repeatedly gone out of his way to assert that Johnson offered Wasserman the secretary of commerce post is Valenti. As Johnson’s close aide, Valenti had become very friendly with Wasserman; Valenti and his wife stayed in the Wassermans’ Palm Springs home for a long weekend following Johnson’s triumphant reelection in November 1964. About two weeks later, Valenti wrote Johnson a memo, recommending nine candidates for recruitment into Johnson’s administration. One was Wasserman, about whom Valenti wrote, “Ed Weisl called him ‘the best business brain I have ever known.’ Brilliant organizer and administrator. Tough, smart, full of common sense. Goes to the heart of problems—practitioner of the art of the possible.” Valenti says that Johnson, too, was high on Wasserman by that time. “He saw in Lew much of what he had himself—drive, instinct, judgment,” Valenti declared. “Johnson used to say, it’s not whether you scored 1600 in your SATs, or went to Harvard or San Marcos State Teachers College. It’s whether you have good judgment.” And, about a week after he sent Johnson his memo, Valenti says, Johnson asked him to sound out Wasserman for the Commerce position. “That’s when I talked to Lew. He was pleased but said he had just bought Universal Studios and could not depart MCA at this time.” Valenti’s account could not be definitively countered since, as he told it, only three people knew of the offer, and the two then-surviving ones—Wasserman and he—said it occurred. Moreover, it was only after Johnson’s death that Valenti, in the course of a speech he made honoring Wasserman in November 1974, “let the secret out” that Johnson had invited Wasserman to join his cabinet, as recounted in the Hollywood Reporter. This much is plain: whatever the truth about the offer of a cabinet post having been made, Wasserman would certainly have appreciated that Valenti put his name in the hopper.
A little more than a year after that occurred, Wasserman had a chance to reciprocate.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), begun in 1922 and originally known as the Motion Picture Producers Association, was shaped in its early years by men like Carl Laemmle, Samuel Goldwyn, L. B. Mayer, and Adolph Zukor. In its history of more than four decades, it had had only two presidents, both with Washington experience—Will Hayes, postmaster general in the Harding administration, and his successor, Eric Johnston, president of the Chamber of Commerce, and an emissary for President Roosevelt. After Johnston retired in 1961, the job had been vacant for several years, mainly because the rivalrous, combative studio heads could not agree on a successor. It was, in fact, a vacancy that had caught the eye of President Johnson, who wanted to place one of his people there. For from the very start of his presidency in 1963—even before Wasserman brought the President’s Club fund-raising to new heights—Johnson had considered Hollywood a rich money source, and the MPAA, Hollywood’s Washington embassy, located just down the street from the White House, a most desirable base. In December 1963, Theodore Sorensen, who had been a speechwriter for President Kennedy, told Johnson that he was quitting the White House staff; Johnson, loath to lose Sorensen, immediately proposed that he become president of the MPAA. His procuring the job for Sorensen, Johnson figured, would not only enhance his connection to the MPAA, but enable him to keep Sorensen on call as a speechwriter. Johnson had phoned Weisl, a Paramount board member, to ask him to arrange it, saying, “I’m going to lose him [Sorensen] either to this outfit or some other outfit that I control. I’m not going to just turn him out in the pasture.” In the negotiations with Sorensen that ensued, Weisl repeatedly made it plain to him that all the studio heads “expect you to serve the president first,” a condition to which Sorensen did not assent; and in the end he didn’t take the job. Other names were floated, from Adlai Stevenson to Pierre Salinger, but there was no accord among the movie executives, so the limbo continued.
In the spring of 1966, however, attorney Louis Nizer, a partner in the law firm Krim had founded, became the nominee—evidently with Krim’s support. The way Wasserman told the story to Steven Spielberg in an oral history interview, he was in MCA’s New York office when the receptionist announced that Nizer wanted to see him. “He said, ‘This is a courtesy call. I’ve just been hired to be head of the Association. . . . I said, ‘What! You’re sixty-six years old!’ Well, he knew he had made a mistake by coming in. I went down and saw [Milton] Rackmil [who was still serving as Universal’s representative, albeit at Wasserman’s sufferance] and said, ‘I want an emergency meeting of the Association by noon tomorrow.’ ” The president of the MPAA was Spyros Skouras, who was then board chairman of Twentieth Century-Fox; Skouras said it was too difficult to arrange a meeting, Wasserman continued. “I said, ‘Look, it’s very simple. I’m sending the resignation of Universal over by messenger. We’re out of the Association.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘We can’t get a meeting, we’re out of the Association.’ So we had the meeting and I screamed and Skouros said, ‘Okay, you go find someone.’ ”
Wasserman quickly fastened on Valenti. He was not an immediately obvious choice. He had no Hollywood experience, and had had no Washington experience either until that day in Dallas when Johnson’s life had been drastically reconfigured in an instant, and Valenti’s, too. In 1962, Valenti, a Houston advertising man, had married Johnson’s secretary, Mary Margaret Wiley, an attractive, svelte thirty-one-year-old blonde who had worked for Johnson since she’d graduated from college, and was a favorite of his. Mary Margaret then gave up her job with Johnson, but Johnson still tried to keep her in his ambit, persuading her to accompany him on a trip to the Far East, inviting her and her husband to the ranch—so Jack Valenti, too, became part of the Johnson circle. In November 1963, Valenti had organized a dinner in Houston for President Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, and Johnson and Lady Bird; it had gone very well, so Johnson asked Valenti to accompany him to Dallas the next day, and then continue together to Austin for another dinner Valenti had arranged. Valenti was in the motorcade in Dallas, and after he rushed to Parkland Hospital, where President Kennedy had been taken, he eventually learned that the president was dead and that Johnson
wanted him on Air Force One. He sped there, and for the next couple of months spent a great deal of time at Johnson’s side, living with him at first in the Elms, the vice president’s residence, and then in the White House. Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird’s staff director and press secretary, who was also on Air Force One that day, said, “He scooped Jack up—that’s so Johnsonian! Houston had been successful, so he scooped him up and took him along. Johnson was such an impromptu, impulsive, enthusiastic person—particularly when things had gone well. I don’t think he would have summoned Jack otherwise. It just happened that way. Destiny. He was there, he was capable, he was a ‘can-do man,’ as Johnson liked to say.” Valenti had a signal attribute, Carpenter added, that Johnson valued. “The Johnson expression, which came from the frontier days, was that he wanted somebody he could go to the well with. Well, Jack was certainly somebody he could go to the well with. Johnson was such a good analyst of men—that’s what made him such a good majority leader. He’d use [one assistant] for completely different things than he’d use Valenti for. He could use Valenti as his eyes and ears and legs.”
Valenti delivered his own self-assessment. In an undated note, apparently written after he had been with President Johnson for several weeks, Valenti wrote, “I have been pondering the question of how best I can serve you—how I can be most useful to you.
“I bring you one asset: Loyalty.”
Over time, it became clear that Valenti brought Johnson more than that. The same qualities that had made him effective in the advertising world served him well in the White House, as he watched Johnson’s calendar, coordinated speechwriting, and lobbied Capitol Hill. An engaging, likable individual, he prided himself on giving senators and congressmen “instant service,” trying his best to return their calls within an hour or two. He made the personal touch a kind of credo; in a note to the president in February 1965, Valenti wrote, “Thought you would like to know that so far I have written 110 letters, personal letters, to the Congressmen and Senators I have personally talked to at the Congressional receptions.” And while he was no original theorizer, he had a facility for translating abstractions into human terms. LBJ assistant Larry Levinson recalled, “The President would often say about some speech, ‘I want it Valenti-ized! I want it made human!’ ”
