The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  At the end of the war and in the immediate postwar years Johnson made himself even more respectable with the Texas business community by becoming an activist for defense spending. He could be vigilant on the subject of defense spending against the Communist expansion, and simultaneously forge growing links to a massive new industry beginning to flex its muscle in American society. He was typical in that era of many in the Democratic party who were more than glad to change the political subject in the postwar years from the domestic reform of the New Deal to defense and foreign policy. In the House and later in the Senate, Johnson became both an advocate of greater defense spending, and at the same time, with that special duality of his (the kind of duality which allowed him to turn the lights off at the White House while sending the Pentagon budget skyrocketing), became known as a tough critic of potential waste in military spending. He became an advocate of greater air power, breaking with the Truman Administration on this issue, accusing the Administration in effect of not making our air wing adequate (in the postwar years the poor Army could never match the Air Force for congressional support. There was always much more political and business interest in a contract for a multibillion-dollar airplane than there was for an Army contract for new webbing on boots).

  His dissent with the Truman Administration never hurt his relationship with the President, who knew exactly the game Johnson was playing; he had played it himself. Yet Johnson’s belief in military preparedness and defense spending was a very real part of his outlook, an extension of the way he had felt in 1941 when he helped Roosevelt prepare this country for a war which seemed so distant to many Americans. To be for defense spending in those days seemed to be against isolationism, so in those years he was identified as a great friend of the military. Technically, he was; he helped them get the money they needed, though actually he did not like them or admire many of them. Johnson, who was always so well prepared himself, always better informed than his subordinates, thought they were sloppy in their work, that they left too much to subordinates, and he was uneasy with their parochial view and prejudices, and with their definition of loyalty, which was too limited by his standards. It was to service, not necessarily even to country, and certainly not to Lyndon Johnson. They had to be watched; it was all right when they were temporarily on your side, but they could not really be counted on.

  Added to his belief in defense spending and a need for preparedness came a very real belief in the Communist threat. (When he was President and as criticism on the war mounted, he convinced himself that there was a real Communist conspiracy at work in Washington; his feelings about it hardened and became stronger as sentiment against the war—and against him—also mounted during the sixties.) In Texas, as he made this transition, it allowed him to get along with the big boys and show them that that can-do ability didn’t just work for the poor and the underprivileged. But this also meant that as a senator committed to greater defense spending, to larger defense contracts, he was not disposed to challenge the prevalent anti-Communism of the day, nor the theories which required such great defense spending. To challenge them, to study them too intensely, might have meant to find them wanting and thus necessitate a cutback in defense spending. So the instinct for force, for greater military might, had been nurtured in and by Johnson; it was at once both very real and very convenient, which was a powerful combination for any politician, and he was a symbolic part of a particular phenomenon of the fifties and sixties which found the military budget dominating American life and the great advocates for even greater spending, the Democrats, ostensible members of the party which was soft on Communism.

  Very subtly, in the late forties, he had made the transition from New Deal congressman to sound and respectable senator who did not frighten the big interests of Texas. A change of emphasis really. In the early fifties he made his way up the Senate ladder, not through connections to the national Administration, but rather through connections to Richard Russell and Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, personification of the Southern big-interest wing, and in the late fifties he would undergo another transition. He had never been totally content to be just a senator. Now, as national ambitions stirred him, he became a man who spanned regions. He was not of the South but of the West, he could pilot civil rights legislation through the Congress, he could heal, he could understand the heartache of both sides, and also he had genuine ability. In discussing his own presidential race, Jack Kennedy had said that he had a right to run for it; no one else had more ability except Lyndon, and Lyndon could never make it because he was a Southerner. The prejudice against him never disappeared, and the sense of prejudice, the hurt always remained in Johnson, made him more interesting and, curiously, more sensitive. Even when he was placed on the ticket in 1960 he was put there to help Easterners, first Jack, who would hold office for eight years, and then perhaps Bobby. And he felt the pain of those three years of the Vice-Presidency; President Kennedy had been particularly aware of his sensibilities, but not everyone else was so sensitive (except for Rusk, who shared the same origins, humiliations and enemies). Johnson, who had always known about one thing, power, who held it and who did not, knew that as Vice-President he was a living lie, that his title was bigger than his role, that he did not have power, that younger, faster men with no titles held and exercised more power. And then suddenly, shockingly, he was President, the awkward easy-to-caricature Southerner replacing the beloved handsome slain Eastern President, shot down in Dallas, a hated city in Johnson’s own Texas. That did not ease his own sense of the prejudice against him as he acceded.

  So the perfectly prepared and trained and tuned parliamentary leader moved into the most public office in the world, an entirely different office for which all his previous training was in some ways meaningless, indeed the wrong training; he had learned many of the wrong things. The Presidency is a very different power center; it is not a particularly good place from which to perform private manipulation and to do good things for the folks in spite of themselves. It is at its best when a President identifies what he is and what he seeks as openly as possible, and then slowly bends public opinion toward it. If the President is found manipulating or pressuring a lower figure, putting too much pressure on a congressman, it can easily, and rather damagingly, backfire. Harry Truman was a success in the White House partly because he was openly, joyously and unabashedly Harry Truman; he was what he was, he gloried in attacks on his inadequacies, they being in general the inadequacies of most normal mortal men, and he made his limitations his assets; the American people had a sense of identification with him and what he was trying to do. Franklin Roosevelt was a fine back-room manipulator, but he always had a sense of the public part of his office, of it as a pulpit, and he used the rhythms of radio expertly in seeming to bring the public into his confidence. Lyndon Johnson never could. His office was above all public, but he could never communicate with the people, never be himself.

  Journalist after journalist, politician after politician, businessman after businessman exposed to the private Johnson treatment, the full force of the man, the persuasiveness, the earthiness, the intelligence, came away impressed. Many of Washington’s most sophisticated writers regarded Johnson as their favorite politician because of his earthiness, because he was so real that despite all his attempts to be clever and crafty and hide his style and his vanities and faults, he never could; and it was this earthiness, this particular quality to him, to his insecurities, which made him so interesting, so human. It was the lack of ability to control what he was and shield what he was which made him more likable than many politicians who were ideologically more sympathetic. But despite the great capacity to communicate from that office and despite his own enormous capacity to communicate, Johnson was curiously ineffective as a public communicator in the White House. He would not let the real Lyndon Johnson surface, the forceful, dynamic and very earthy one; not trusting himself, he did not trust the public. He did not feel he could be himself without hurting his Administration.
The real Johnson was saved for the private rooms, and the public Johnson was a new Johnson, modest, pious, almost unctuous, and it did not come over very well. The public, which, despite the fact that it did not know Johnson and had never met him, knew instinctively that whatever else, this was not the real man.

  This was part of it. The other part was related, the attempt to use the office, to manipulate, but to do so for the good of mankind, which is all right under ideal conditions (in that people do not particularly like being manipulated, even for their betterment, and if it doesn’t work out, then they become particularly ungrateful about it, as the Senate did after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. To a certain degree the Senate knew it was being manipulated, that the wording of the resolution was deliberately vague, that it was not a good idea to take your eyes off Lyndon Johnson; it knew it was not asking hard questions and playing the role it should have, but it was also willing at that point to acquiesce and be manipulated rather than ask the hard questions. But if the war did not work out, and it did not, then there would be a sense of bitterness and even betrayal over the manipulation). Even when Lyndon Johnson passed vast amounts of legislation through the Congress in 1964, there was some uneasiness about him. He was, in the public mind, too much a “politician,” he was a wheeler-dealer, you had to watch his hands. Even at his most successful moment there was not that much the public could identify with and say that it had participated in; it was his private act for them; nor could they identify with his personal qualities. So it was in no way inconsistent with his training that in 1964 the public Johnson seemed to campaign in one way while the private Johnson was being pulled in the direction of escalation. (In his memoirs he would clear up the discrepancy between his eventual acts and his campaign rhetoric against having American boys do what Asian boys should be doing. He had, he wrote, simply been implying that he did not intend to get into a ground war with China, which had nothing to do with Vietnam because we were already involved there.) If escalation finally was what the people needed and what was good for them, then Lyndon Johnson would make sure they would get it, but it would be better not to frighten them or confront them too openly with it. In 1964, as Lyndon Johnson learned to be President, and for a brief period enjoyed being President, the public man and the private man were doing very different things and going in very different directions.

  He might, thought his press secretary and admirer, George Reedy, have been a gigantic figure as prime minister, a man to stand along with Pitt and Disraeli and Churchill, if the parliamentary system had existed here. He was, thought Reedy, particularly well suited for its kind of leadership, a view strikingly similar to that of the man who had been for him in 1960 at Los Angeles and who in 1968 had helped drive him out of office, Eugene McCarthy. McCarthy, questioned in 1968 about his earlier support for Johnson, said he had been for him for prime minister, not for President, because given a particular course, he could get more out of it than almost any other man. But was he a man to chart a course himself? Under the British parliamentary system he would have faced the challenge of his peers, tough, sharp, examining, who feared neither him nor his office. But there was no comparable challenge at the White House, where no one really stands up to the President, where there is no equality, where no one tells the President he is wrong. For the Presidency is an awesome office, even with a mild inhabitant. It tends by its nature to inhibit dissent and opposition, and with a man like Johnson it was simply too much, too powerful an office occupied by too forceful a man (Johnson’s own style in the Senate of trying to take the mark of another man from the start to break him quickly was a quality which had served him, if not the others, well. But it did not work so well in the White House. Other men were already too inhibited, they did not need the extra force of the incumbent to put more fear, respect and awe into them). Now he was too powerful a man with no one to slow him down. He was in an office isolated from reality, with concentric circles of advisers who often isolated rather than informed, who tended to soften bad judgments and harsh analyses, knowing that the President was already bearing too many burdens, that he could not accept more weight, that it would upset him, and also knowing that if they became too identified with negative views, ideas and information, they too would suffer, their own access would diminish (a classic example of the former of the two problems would be Bob McNamara telling Arthur Goldberg midway through the escalation, when Goldberg raised a negative point to him, that it was certainly a good point but would he please not raise it with the President, it would only upset him).

  Now there was a giant of a man in the White House who made the imposing office even more imposing and who personalized the office. Doubts about a policy might seem like doubts about him: were you doubting him, were you disloyal? And Johnson, who in domestic matters reveled in his own expertise (calling in the staff working on a bill and questioning them, matching his own, often superior knowledge of it against theirs, ventilating the problems), was very different in foreign affairs. He was much more reserved in his participation and was prone to limit the discussion, as if somehow the discussion might show up his weaknesses. He had inherited the Kennedy people, who had always impressed him, but though they were the same men, they were used in a strikingly different way. Kennedy had been aware of the danger of isolation and the inhibitions the office placed on men, and he had deliberately confronted his senior people with young bright nonbureaucratic men from other parts of the bureaucracy, trying to challenge the existing assumptions; Kennedy did not view dissent as a personal challenge. Once Kennedy had played the diverse viewpoints against one another, once there had been an inner debate, he would use some of his own people to filter it down, to analyze it, and then finally make his decision. Even as a presidential candidate he had sat among his aides as they discussed issues, decisions, positions, all of them equals; as President they were no longer equals but he had encouraged the same diversity, realizing that it was healthy. As President he had been more of a judge than a participant, but he had held it together and set the tone. And it was Kennedy who knew the other players and their weaknesses, that McNamara was a man of great loyalty and force, and of a certain kind of intelligence, but of perhaps limited wisdom, brave in the bureaucratic sense, but that the imposing strength masked equally imposing weaknesses. He liked Bundy too. Bundy seemed so much like him, kept him out of trouble, sometimes he would know better what Kennedy wanted than Kennedy himself did. Only Rusk bothered him, with his reluctance to take strong and forceful positions. He respected Rusk’s proficiency, his loyalty, his control, the subtlety of his political instincts and his performance on the Hill, but he was bothered by his overdependence on the system. He never felt at ease with Rusk, and in the last part of the Kennedy Administration both John and Robert Kennedy were talking with intimates about the possibility of a new Secretary of State.

  The Johnson style was very different and it made different men of the chief presidential advisers. They would bear his stamp, and that made his Presidency different. From the start there was a different atmosphere, a more constrained one, less free, a little more fearful; whether this was deliberate or not, it was the result. (It showed in all sorts of ways, and made the isolated White House even more isolated. Kennedy, for instance, had liked newspapermen and had talked freely to them himself, so freely in fact that Richard Helms of the CIA once called Newsweek executives to suggest that perhaps Kennedy’s relationship with Ben Bradlee, their Washington bureau chief, was constituting a major security leak. But if Kennedy liked newspapermen and the press, and kept up with what different reporters were writing, then his staff had to do the same, and this in many ways opened up the executive branch. Reporters as such were not necessarily enemies. But Johnson viewed the press, with its different definition of loyalty, darkly; it was in essence a hotbed of enemies. If Johnson did not like reporters and did not see them, then his aides did not either, and they could explain away any critical reporting by the fact that the reporter was personally unfriendly to the Johnson A
dministration.)

  So there was a difference in the way the men were used. Johnson did not like the free flow, and did not reach down to younger men in the various offices. He believed that youth in itself was a sign of inexperience. (In 1968, during the great post-Tet events, the Wise Men had arrived to be briefed. What they heard jarred them, and it was reflected in their attitudes. Johnson wanted to know who had briefed them. He was given their names, young men in the various departments, and asked, Who the hell are they, who are these people? When he was told he said, How the hell can they know anything? They weren’t even around during World War II.) So the lower-level men did not appear and did not ask the questions which Johnson himself was unable to ask. His was a far more structured government; decisions were made at the very top, in part because of his almost neurotic desire for secrecy. The more men who participate, the more gossip there is going to be, the more rumor that maybe Lyndon Johnson himself didn’t make those decisions, that he needed people to make them for him, or worse, that there was disagreement at the top level of government, thus perhaps an inkling, an impression, that the decision was not perfect. So the way to control secrecy was to control the decision making, to keep it in as few hands as possible and make sure those hands were loyal, more committed to working with the President than to anything else. Besides, these were big men who had been given their jobs by Jack Kennedy.