Scroll to the very bottom and see McGeorge Bundy compare the Lyndon
Johnson of 1967 to Joseph Stalin.
Longtime LBJ
aide George Reedy on what a “Narcissist, Bully, Sadist & Lout” Lyndon
Johnson was.
From Reedy’s
1982 book:
Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir
George Reedy
worked for LBJ from 1951-1965
"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 for the longest hours of work 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."
"There was no sense in which he could be described as a
pleasant man. His manners
were atrocious- not just slovenly but frequently calculated to give offense.
Relaxation was something he did not understand and would not accord to others. 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- at least, not the
kind of loyalty I learned on the Irish Near North Side of Chicago, where life
was bearable only because people who had very little in the way of worldly
goods had very much in the way of mutual trust. To Johnson, loyalty was a
one-way street: all take on his part and all give on the part of everyone else-
his family, his friends, his supporters."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. x]
"He was cruel, even to
people who had virtually walked the last mile for him.
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 irreverent abuse
(I believe he thought his impulse was an example of weakness for which he had
to atone) and a few members of his entourage noted that gift was invariably tax
deductible on his part. Furthermore, some of the most lavish presents
frequently went to members who had performed no services other than adulation.
And when his personal desires were at stake, he had absolutely no consideration
for the situation in which other people found themselves. They were required to
drop everything to wait upon him and were expected to forget their private
lives in his interests. He
even begrudged one of his top assistants a telephone call to his wife on their
wedding anniversary, which the assistant was spending on the LBJ ranch and his
wife at their home in Washington, D.C."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. xiv]
"He had a habit of adopting all useful thoughts as his own,
and often the originator of highly important ideas would forget his or her own
authorship in a matter of hours and be ready to swear that the whole thing
originated in the brain of "the Leader." [George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, xvi]
"He had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he
held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something
charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone
who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not
an act. His whole life was
lived in the present and he was tenacious in his conviction that history always
conformed to current necessities."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 2]
"To complicate the picture, his own view of what had
happened frequently shifted. To the outside world, this appeared as a form of
mendacity. It is my firm belief, from close association over a number of years,
that the man never told a deliberate lie. But he had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that
the "truth" which was convenient for the present was the truth
and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He
literally willed what was in his mind to be reality and, as he was a master at
imposing his will upon the people, the society, and the world around
him, he saw no reason for history to be exempt from the process."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 3]
"That other man had to
be Robert Kennedy, whom he regarded as the focal point for all the forces who
sought the downfall of Lyndon Johnson."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 6]
"As a rule, his language colorful, pointed, and what can most
charitably be described as "earthy." His "humor" was based
chiefly on the contents of toilet bowls and he was addicted to
"pie-in-the-face" practical jokes. His favorite spectator sport was watching bovine
copulation and he gloried in summoning fastidious males to his bathroom, where
conference and excretion could be intermingled. His consumption of beverage
alcohol was for purposes other than sacramental and in quantities that did not
accord St. Paul's "a little wine for thy stomach's sake."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, pp. 34-35]
"They had to be young, they had to be cheerful, they had to
be malleable, and it helped if they were slightly antagonistic to him at the
outset. He dearly loved to convert an anti-Johnson liberal with a slightly
plump figure and a dowdy wardrobe into a lean, impeccably clad female whose
face was masked in cosmetics and who adored the ground he walked on (or, at
least, told him she adored the ground he walked on). To her, he would pour out
all his dreams and aspirations in what (as it was described to me later by one
woman with a sense of humor) was an incredibly potent monologue. The motif was
that he trusted her loyalty and needed her wisdom and she had to come with him
to occupy the top spot in his organization. It was an offer rarely refused.
The reality was somewhat different. The best the woman could hope
for was a position as his private secretary. She learned very quickly that it
was not the post of a top "advisor." He had no respect for the
political intelligence of any woman except his wife- and, unfortunately, he
usually listened to her only when he had done something stupid and had to find
a bail-out maneuver.
There were many
compensations for the reigning favorite. She could look forward to travel under
plush conditions, attendance at glamourous social functions with the Johnsons
(he would always find a "safe" male for an escort), expensive
clothes, and frequent trips to New York, where a glamorous make-up artist
would initiate her into the mysteries of advanced facial make-up, resulting in
cosmetics so lavishly applied that they became a mask."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 36]
"Very few reigning favorites were allowed to run the office
for any great length of time. One of them, who held his attention longer than
the rest and for whom he exhibited some really deep feelings, was married off,
probably because a continued relationship was incompatible with the vice
presidency.
[Interjection from Robert
Morrow. This was Mary Margaret Wiley Valenti who was LBJ’s top mistress and who
he got to marry Jack Valenti as a cover on June 1, 1962. Jack Valenti let Mary
Margaret continue to have sex with LBJ and Courtenay “Lynda” Valenti is the
biological daughter of Lyndon Johnson & Mary Margaret Wiley Valenti. Courtenay
Lynda was born 3 weeks before the JFK assassination. LBJ's daughter Courtenay Lynda Valenti now sits on the Board of Trustees of the LBJ Foundation (2020).]
The others dropped back into the pool known to the male staff
members (speaking under their breaths) as "the harem." His greatest joy was
traveling with a large number of women over whom he could fuss- buying their
clothes, supervising their diets, and admonishing them at every public stop to
"put on some fresh lipstick." It was quite a show. He may have been "just a
country boy from the central hills of Texas" but he had many of the instincts
of a Turkish sultan of Istanbul."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 37]
"The result of all of this was an office in a constant state of turmoil. A
new reigning favorite meant a period of several weeks in which workable
routines would be upset; morale would fall to all-time lows; efficiency would
go out the window."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 37]
"He was rarely candid,
and when he spoke of personal matters his words were such a mixture of fantasy,
euphemism, and half-truth that it was impossible to separate out the nuggets of
revelation. In this case, however, the facts are compelling. As it became
clearer that inexorable forces were pushing him into the small circle of men
from whom the nation picks its chief executives, he developed a pattern of
conduct that indicated beyond a doubt a desire to revert to childhood. He
intermingled, almost daily, childish tantrums; threats of resignation (which I
realize in retrospect were the equivalent of the small boy who says he will
take his baseball and go home); wild drinking bouts; a remarkable nonpaternal yen for young girls;
an almost frantic desire to be in the company of young people."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 56]
"A few weeks after his heart attack in 1955, he summed up the
whole problem when he told a conference of doctors, gathered to evaluate his
condition, that he enjoyed
nothing but whiskey, sunshine, and sex. Without realizing what he was
doing, he had outlined succinctly the tragedy of his life."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 56]
"The drinking bouts
became increasingly heavy and increasingly frequent. When he
was with staff members, there would usually be a point at which he would launch
a tirade reviling an assistant for a long series of fancied wrongs and assumed
inadequacies. ...
They were invariably
preceded by a wild drinking bout. He was not an alcoholic or a heavy drinker in
the commonly accepted sense of those words. But there were occasions when he
would pour down Scotch and soda in a virtually mechanical motion in rhythm with the
terrible tension building visibly within him and communicating itself to his
listeners. The warning signs were unmistakable and those with past experience
tried to get away before the inevitable flood of invective. As they found out,
it was rarely possible.
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, pp. 56-57]
"As the 1960 campaign
drew closer, the drinking bouts surpassed all previous records.... The 1960
campaign was a nightmare for the staff- a weird collage of beratings,
occasional drunken prowls up and down hotel corridors, and
frantic efforts to sober him up in the mornings so he could make the speaking
engagements. Here again he came close to disaster. He spent a whole night in a
hotel room in El Paso pouring invective upon the head of a bewildered advance
man...On the stump he had very few peers. But in his rooms at night, the drinking patterns
continued as did the threats of leaving the campaign."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, pp. 58-59]
"Someone had told him about the theories of subliminal
conditioning then making the rounds and his methodology was to mutter
"sincere" over and over in the presence of journalists. When he could
insert the word into a sentence, he would do so even when it had to be dragged
in by the heels, kicking and screaming. When he could find no sentence that was
suitable, he would repeat "sincere" under his breath, over and over
to the absolute bewilderment of his audience. Fortunately, he dropped the
effort before articles could appear questioning his sanity."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 68]
"This occurred when he
was vice president and obsessed with the idea that Bobby Kennedy was directing
an anti-LBJ campaign. His elevation to the presidency made absolutely no
difference. Brush after brush took place with the journalists who, in the
early days of his administration, accepted him as a miracle worker to be
treated with downright reverence. Eventually, however, his conviction that they
were opposed to him created an opposition- always the outcome of paranoia. He did not attribute this to his
own shortcomings but to the machinations of the man he regarded as his arch
foe. At this stage of the game, Bobby was helpless to do him much mischief but
LBJ still believed that there was a plot for which the press was the principal
instrument."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 70]
"In a very important sense, LBJ was a man who had been
deprived of the normal joys of life. He knew how to struggle; he knew how to
outfox political opponents; he knew how to make money; he knew how to swagger.
But he did not know how to live. He had been programmed for business and for business only and outside
of his programming he was lost."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 81]
"I never fully understood this or other similar episodes. In the back of his mind, it is
possible that he believed these visits were inspired by Bobby Kennedy as part
of a "plot" to delete the name LBJ from the ticket in 1964. This had
become an obsession with him- a conviction that peopled the world with agents
of the president's brother all seeking to do him in. Someone- I never found out
who- very actively fed this belief and kept him in a perpetual state of
anxiety. This reached major proportions with the outbreak of the Billy Sol
Estes and Bobby Baker scandals....
There was absolutely nothing to keep Johnson's name in the Billy
Sol Estes story except the LBJ refusal to deal with the press. He covered up
when there was nothing to cover and thereby created the suspicion that he was
involved somehow. His
reasoning was simple: The whole thing existed as a Bobby Kennedy plot and to
talk about it to the press was to help Bobby Kennedy.
About the same thing
happened in the Bobby Baker scandal except that in this instance he was really
close to the central figure in the expose. He had considered Bobby as virtually
a son and succeeded in promoting him to be secretary of the Senate
Majority at an age when Bobby should have been in knee britches."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, pp. 134-135]
"But Johnson refused to accept the obvious explanation. He insisted that it stayed in
the press because of conscious pressure from Bobby Kennedy, who, he claimed,
was holding daily briefings with the sole purpose of knifing LBJ in the back.
He was so convinced of the existence of these meetings that I made a personal
effort to check on them myself. There was not the least bit of evidence that
they were taking place or had taken place. I am not a master spy but it is
hardly likely that during that period the attorney general of the United States
could have engaged in such an organized effort without one of my newspaper
friends tipping me off.
This viewpoint did not
impress Johnson in the slightest. He merely said I was "naive" and
that he would demonstrate the truth to me. The next time the two of us were
together with a correspondent, he lectured the man on how wrong it was to ask
stooge questions and then said: "I know all about those briefings
downtown." It became apparent at once the correspondent did not know not
know about them but that did not stop LBJ. He continued his lectures to other
correspondents- a practice
that led to some speculation as to his mental stability. Fortunately,
the speculation did not appear in print.
These episodes were merely ludicrous. Much more serious was his
interpretation of all his relations with the administration as involved
with "plots." He resisted- to the point of hysteria- the
round-the-world trip which later became famous for his discovery of Bashir, the
camel driver, in Karachi.... He
raved, at least to me, that Bobby Kennedy was trying to set him up.
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, pp. 136-137]
"Those of us who had to deal with what few substantive
matters characterized the vice presidency found it increasingly difficult to
secure decisions from him. The
consumption of booze increased as did the number of hours he would spend in bed
at home just staring at the ceiling and growling at anyone who came into the
room... There was some demon within the man himself that would have
operated in any position short of the presidency."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, pp. 139-140]
"Why Jack Kennedy offered Lyndon Johnson the vice presidency
and why Lyndon Johnson accepted it, I will never know. Frankly, I doubt whether
anyone will ever know now that the principal protagonists are dead. My
guess is that it represented a shrewd political judgement on Kennedy's
part."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 141]
"Behind the scenes, however, the campaign was grinding agony
for a staff which felt a duty to the campaign to keep the seamy side from
showing. There were some
terrible moments- drunken, aimless wanderings through a hotel corridor in
Chicago (fortunately blocked off by police) in which he tried to crawl into the
bed of the female correspondent (I got the impression as we led him away that
he was seeking comfort, not sex); a wild drinking bout in El Paso in which he
spent the night cursing and raving at a good friend; continuous torrents of
abuse directed at his staff. It was amazing to watch him go out in
public and make truly compelling speeches off-the-cuff after such
episodes."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 142]
"Whatever the reality, however, the LBJ paranoia continued to mount. He was convinced
that Bobby Kennedy had virtual control over the nation's press and that this
control was being used to pave the way for a "dump LBJ" campaign in
1964. This was a period in which he proceeded to "hang around" the
outer offices of the White House- something like a precinct captain sitting in
the anteroom of a ward leader hoping to be recognized. It was not a very
prepossessing sight and certainly not worthy of a man of his stature."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 147]
"He was not a man of thought and, instead, it became for him
the period of intense misery. He obviously had not found what he had expected
to find in the vice presidency, and while his intellect was keen, it was not of
the variety that could grant him inner serenity. What could have been to a
philosopher an era of growth was, in his eyes, a time of shame and failure.
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 147]
"Johnson campaigned as though there were a real contest with
the outcome in doubt. In time I came to understand that the act of
campaigning had importance to him that was totally unrelated to the goals.
There was some form of vitalizing force in frenzied crowds that drove him into
a state of ecstasy...
"What was even more interesting was the scene that invariably
followed a session with a crowd. Despite his tapping technique, some people
would always be able to grasp his palm for a fleeting moment. In such
instances, it would be necessary for him to tear loose- leaving long scratches
on the back of his hand. He loved those scratches. A medical attendant aboard
Air Force One was ready with some soothing ointment for a gentle massage. LBJ would insist that everyone
on the plane cluster around during the massage period and he would point
lovingly to each scratch, describing in detail the person responsible for it.
The first time I witnessed the performance, it seemed to me that he was
thinking in terms of the Stigmata from the Cross. But the performance
was much too sensual for such an interpretation. There was something
post-orgasmic about the scene. A psychiatrist could have had a field day."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 152]
"The trouble was that Johnson himself became a victim of the
Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It froze him into a totally uncompromising position
where he had no alternatives- or thought he had no alternative- to feeding more
and more draftees into the meat grinder. He had never, in his entire life, learned to confess
error, and this quality- merely amusing or exasperating in a private person-
resulted in cosmic tragedy for a president. He had to prove that he had
been right all along. And this meant that he had to do more of what he had been
doing despite the demonstrable failure of his Vietnam policies."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 165]
"There were a few key traits to his personality and it is
unlikely that he shed them. As
a human being he was a miserable person- a bully, sadist, lout and egoist. He
had no sense of loyalty (despite his protestations that it was a quality
that he valued above all others) and he enjoyed tormenting those who had done the most for him. He
seemed to take a special delight in humiliating those who had cast their lot in
with him. It may well be that this was the result of a form of self-loathing in which he concluded
that there had to be something wrong with anyone who would associate with
him."
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, p. 171]
"His
lapses from civilized conduct were deliberate and usually intended to
subordinate someone else to his will. He did disgusting things because he
realized other people had to pretend that they did not mind. It was his method
of bending them to his designs.
[George Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir, pp. 171-172]
President Lyndon Johnson: The War Within
By Richard N. Goodwin; Richard N. Goodwin was assistant special counsel to
President John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1962, and special assistant to President
Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and 1965. This article is adapted from his latest
book, ''Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties,'' to be published by Little,
Brown next month
Published: August 21, 1988
Correction Appended
IN ONLY TWO BRIEF YEARS
-1964 and 1965 - Lyndon B. Johnson did more to advance the cause of black
Americans than any American President since Abraham Lincoln, and initiated a
program for the enrichment of American life as revolutionary and far-reaching
as the New Deal. ''We are entering a new era of good feeling,'' pontificated
The Washington Post in 1964, ''and Lyndon Johnson is the gargantuan figure
making it all possible.'' Yet little more than a year later, Johnson's own
immense powers became an accomplice of his own destruction - propelling him
into a war that would dissolve his vision and end his hopes. The story of that
transformation, the beginnings of which I witnessed as one of the President's assistants, makes
it clear that the war in Vietnam was not only a national tragedy but a personal
tragedy for one of the most formidable men ever to occupy the White House.
Around midsummer 1965, about
the time the decision was made to increase by more than 100,000 the number of
American troops in Vietnam - a decision that transformed Vietnam into an
American war - I became
convinced that President Johnson's always large eccentricities had taken a huge
leap into unreason. Not on every subject, and certainly not all the
time: it was during this same period that Johnson was skillfully crafting some
of the greatest triumphs of his Great Society.
But there is no question that the President's conduct during 1965 was, on
occasion, markedly, almost frighteningly different from anything I had observed
previously. My conclusion is that President Johnson experienced certain
episodes of what I believe to have been paranoid behavior. I do not use this term to describe a medical diagnosis.
I am not L.B.J.'s psychiatrist, nor am I qualified to be. I base my judgment
purely on my observation of his conduct during the little more than two years I
worked for him. And this was not my conclusion alone. It was shared by others
who also had close and frequent contact with President Johnson.
Perhaps my first sign of
this came in April, when the President of Pakistan, Mohammed Ayub Khan, and the
Prime Minister of India, Lal Bahadur Shastri, were scheduled to visit the White
House. Both men had
expressed opposition to our policies in Vietnam. Both visits were abruptly
canceled. ''We didn't cancel the visits,'' Johnson falsely stated at a press
conference, we just told them that because the President was ''very busy,''
this was not the most propitious time for a visit. And, Johnson
patiently explained, ''When you put things that way, most people want to come
at the time that would be most convenient to us, to the host . . . and the
answer came back that they would accept our decision.''
But the foreign-policy
pundits did not swallow Johnson's explanation. We had, they wrote, deliberately offended two of
Asia's most important leaders because they did not approve our bombing
of North Vietnam. A week later I sat beside Johnson as Air Force One carried us
from the Texas ranch to the White House. Suddenly, Johnson leaned over to me,
looked around, and, speaking in tense, almost whispered tones, as if he were
confiding the highest secrets of state, said, ''Listen, Dick, do you know why
there was so much trouble about Ayub and Shastri?'' ''No, Mr. President,'' I
replied. ''Well, you ought to know about it, so you can keep on the alert. I
had it investigated. Do
you know there are some disloyal Kennedy people over at the State Department
who are trying to get me; that's why they stirred things up?'' ''I
didn't know that,'' I answered. ''Well, there are, and we can expect to hear
from them again. They
didn't get me this time, but they'll keep trying.'' In my diary entry of that
date I noted that ''the President spoke in an intense low-keyed manner,
characteristic of his most irrational moments.''
The following day, I noted
in my diary: ''Hugh Sidey
came to see me. He said there was an increasing worry about the President
around town. A fear that his personal eccentricities were now affecting policy.
For example, he told me that in responding to criticism over the Ayub and
Shastri affair, Johnson
had said to reporters, 'After all, what would Jim Eastland [ the conservative
Senator from Mississippi ] say if I brought those two niggers over here.' ''We
agreed that it was such a stupid remark for L.B.J. to say - knowing that if it
ever made its way into public print, he would be severely damaged - that he had
to be a little out of control to say it at all.'' A few days later,
Johnson received telegrams from our Embassies in Saigon and in New Delhi
suggesting a visit from Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey as a demonstration
that our goodwill toward the nations of Asia remained unimpaired. I was sitting
with Bill Moyers, then special assistant to the President, in the Oval Office
when the telegrams arrived. Johnson read them; then, his face contorted in
fury, he rose and slammed them onto his desk.
''I don't want telegrams
like that,'' he said, almost shouting, then he picked up the phone. ''Get me
Rusk. . . . Listen, Mr. Secretary,'' he began, softly sardonic, ''you know
those telegrams about Humphrey?'' We couldn't hear Secretary of State Dean
Rusk's reply, but listened as the President suddenly raised his voice: ''If
they send me any more telegrams like that, I want you to call them back. Fire
the bunch of them. I don't want any more telegrams like that.''
The President replaced the
handset and turned toward Moyers. ''You know what it is, Bill, don't you, it's those damn Kennedy
ambassadors trying to get me and discredit me.''
IT WAS NOT SURPRISING THAT
THE ''Kennedy crowd'' should be the prelude to that swarming mob of ''enemies
and conspirators'' that began to infect Johnson's mind. Not only had he felt humiliated - and with some
cause -during Kennedy's Presidency, but the enduring shadow of Camelot
-glamorous, popular, intellectual Camelot, enshrined in steadily growing myth -
seemed to him to obscure the achievements of his own Presidency, preventing
others from seeing how much more he was accomplishing than his predecessor.
Johnson once explained why
Fulbright and ''all those liberals on the Hill'' were squawking at him about
Vietnam. ''Why? I'll tell you why. Because I never went to Harvard. That's why.
Because I wasn't John F. Kennedy. Because the Great Society was accomplishing
more than the New Frontier. You see, they had to find some issue on which to
turn against me, and they found it in Vietnam.''
For Johnson, the omnipresent ghost of that past was reincarnated in the
person of Robert F. Kennedy and his followers. But understandable hostility
would soon be displaced by the more ominous conviction that Robert Kennedy was
not just an enemy, but the leader of all Johnson's enemies, the guiding spirit
of some immense conspiracy designed to discredit and, ultimately, to overthrow
the Johnson Presidency.
''Why does he keep worrying
about me?'' Robert Kennedy once asked me. ''I don't like him, but there's
nothing I can do to him. Hell, he's the President, and I'm only a junior
Senator.''
''That's right, that's the reality,'' I replied. ''But we're not talking
about reality. In Johnson's mind you're the threat. If he had to choose between
you and Ho Chi Minh'' (to be his successor in office), ''he'd pick Ho in a
minute.''
In May 1965, I drafted a speech
that Johnson was scheduled to deliver in San Francisco on the anniversary of
the United Nations Charter. Not limited to the standard plea for increased
peace and understanding among the nations, it contained several tangible and
far-reaching proposals for the control of nuclear arms. Johnson was delighted
with the draft, approved it, and ordered that it be prepared for delivery.
Then, shortly before the President was scheduled to go to San Francisco, Robert
Kennedy addressed the Senate, calling for progress toward nuclear disarmament.
The Kennedy speech received little public attention. But it infuriated Johnson.
''I want you to take out anything about the atom in that speech,'' he said.
''I don't want one word in there that looks like I'm copying Bobby Kennedy.''
''But, Mr. President,'' I
protested, ''the Kennedy speech is very different from yours, and it's only his
opinion. These are formal proposals from the President of the United States.
The entire world will be listening.''
It was as if I hadn't spoken.
Johnson picked up a newspaper. ''Here's Reston's column on Kennedy's speech. You make sure we don't
say anything that he says Bobby said. I'm not going to do it.'' Thus all
the arms-control proposals were excised, the American initiatives were canceled
simply because Bobby Kennedy had made a speech.
Late that spring, alarmed at what I perceived to be the President's
increasingly irrational behavior, I began to study medical textbooks. I learned that the paranoid personality may pass
relatively undisturbed through a long and productive lifetime, manifesting
itself only in subtle traits of behavior: a somewhat excessive secrecy and
suspicion, a need for control over the external world. Because particular displays of these traits nearly
all have some basis in reality - there are real adversaries, real reasons
for an ambitious man to seek control over people and events - they are
ordinarily perceived more as personal eccentricity than as a failure of reason
or a distortion of reality. To the gifted few they may even be a source of
strength, increasing their ability to achieve mastery over that always
treacherous world they inhabit.
Yet if control is threatened, mastery undermined, enemies increasing in
number and moving beyond reach, the mental apparatus so carefully constructed
to transform potential weakness into external strength can begin to falter. The
latent paranoia, liberated by the erosive pressures of misfortune and sensed
helplessness, can take occasional control of the conscious mind, thereby transforming
the most highly developed faculties into instruments of willed belief, even
delusion.
Something like this began to happen to Lyndon
Johnson during 1965, when he found himself - for almost the first time -
surrounded by men and events he could not control: Vietnam and the Kennedys, and, later, the press,
Congress, and even the public, whose approval was essential to his own esteem.
As his defenses weakened, long-suppressed instincts broke through to assault
the carefully developed skills and judgment of a lifetime.
It was during this period, in the spring of 1965, that I
first noticed Johnson's public mask begin to stiffen. In his public
appearances, the face seemed frozen, the once-gesturing arms held tightly to
the side or fixed to a podium. Protective devices proliferated - Teleprompters,
a special Presidential rostrum that traveled with him, even the careful
excision of colorful or original language -all, I now believe, designed
at least in part to guard him from spontaneously voicing inner convictions that he knew, in that part of his mind still
firmly in touch with reality, would, if voiced, discredit him. ''You know,
Dick,'' Johnson once told me. ''I never really dare let myself go because I
don't know where I'll stop.''
In mid-June, Moyers entered
the Oval Office to find Johnson holding a wire-service report torn from the
teletype machine that stood close to the desk. The President said: ''Did you
see this? Bundy'' - McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser - ''is going
on television -on national television - with five professors. I never gave him
permission. That's an act of disloyalty. He didn't tell me because he knew I
didn't want him to do it. Bill, I want you to go to Bundy and tell him the
President would be pleased, mighty pleased, to accept his resignation.''
Johnson paused. ''On second thought, maybe I should talk to him myself. . . .
No, you go do it.'' Then,
as if responding to some sensed hesitation on Moyers's part: ''That's the
trouble with all you fellows. You're in bed with the Kennedys.''
Moyers wisely ignored the
President's order, and left the White House to go home. ''At midnight,'' I noted in my diary, ''Moyers
called me to talk about Johnson. He said he was extremely worried, that as he
listened to Johnson he felt weird, almost felt as if he wasn't really talking
to a human being at all.''
The next morning when Moyers
entered the Oval Office, Johnson looked up at him. ''Did you speak to Bundy?''
''No, I didn't, Mr. President,'' Bill replied. Johnson grunted, and returned to
the memorandum he had begun reading. Bundy was to last another year.
A week later, Moyers and I
were talking with Johnson in the Oval Office when, provoked by nothing more
than my comment that his education bill had virtually complete support from liberal
organizations, Johnson proclaimed: ''I am not going to have anything more to do
with the liberals. They
won't have anything to do with me. They all just follow the Communist line -
liberals, intellectuals, Communists. They're all the same. I detest the United
Nations. They've tried to make a fool out of me. They oppose me.
''And I won't make any
overtures to the Russians. They'll have to come to me. In Paris, Gagarin'' -
Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut - ''refused to shake hands with the astronauts.
I sent those astronauts myself, and what he did was a personal insult to me.''
(In fact, Gagarin did shake hands, but later declined to meet with American
officials, which Johnson persisted in inflating into a personal affront.) ''I can't trust anybody anymore.
I tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to get rid of everybody who doesn't
agree with my policies. I'll take a tough line - put Abe Fortas or Clark
Clifford in the Bundy job. I'm not going in the liberal direction.
There's no future with them. They're just out to get me, always have been.''
I accompanied Moyers back to his office. ''We were both shaken, alarmed,''
I noted in my diary, ''not so
much at the content of Johnson's statements - surely he didn't mean to halt all
discussions with the Soviet Union or pull out of the United Nations - but at the disjointed, erratic
flow of thought, unrelated events strung together, yet seemingly linked by some
incomprehensible web of connections within Johnson's mind. He won't act on his
words, but he believes they're true.''
On June 28, I recorded in my
diary that Johnson had ''asked
me and Bill if we thought Tom Wicker [ of The New York Times ] was out to
destroy him, if Wicker was caught up in some sort of conspiracy against him.
We said no, that he writes some favorable and some unfavorable stories, but we
couldn't convince him. . . .''
GRADUALLY, AS Johnson moved
closer and closer to the crucial
decision of July 28 -when he would raise the number of American troops in
Vietnam by more than 100,000 - circumstances began to overwhelm him,
elude his grasp. The decision to transform the war, which he knew was
potentially fatal to his public ambitions, could no longer be evaded or
postponed. Increasing opposition from the press and critics on the Hill could no
longer be controlled by his hitherto almost irresistible power of persuasion. The somewhat frightening, always
puzzling outbursts became more frequent.
No longer satisfied with
impugning the motives of his critics (''That Fulbright,'' he told me after Senator
J. William Fulbright had joined the ranks of dissent, ''he never was satisfied
with any President that wouldn't make him Secretary of State''), or attributing
his difficulties to ''those
Kennedys'' or ''those Harvards,'' Johnson began to hint privately that he was
the target of a gigantic Communist conspiracy in which his domestic adversaries
were only players - not conscious participants, perhaps, but unwitting dupes.
Sitting in the Oval Office
on July 5, Johnson interrupted our conversation on domestic matters: ''You
know, Dick, the Communists are taking over the country. Look here,'' and he
lifted a manila folder from his desk. ''It's Teddy White's F.B.I. file. He's a Communist sympathizer.''
A few days before, I had been sitting in Bill Moyers's office, when Bill
walked in, visibly shaken, his face pale. ''I just came from a conversation
with the President,'' he said. ''He told me he was going to fire everybody who
didn't agree with him, that Hubert [ Humphrey ] could not be trusted and we
weren't to tell him anything; then he began to explain that the Communist way
of thinking had infected everyone around him, that his enemies were deceiving
the people and, if they succeeded, there was no way he could stop World War
III.''
''Suppose he really does go crazy,'' I said. And then, answering my own
question: ''I tell you what would happen if we went public with our doubts.
They could assemble a panel of psychiatrists to examine the President, and he
would tell them how sad it made him that two boys he loved so much could have
thought such a thing, and then explain his behavior so calmly and reasonably
that when he was finished, we would be the ones committed.''
Shortly thereafter, I talked with a psychiatrist who was also a close
personal friend. After he agreed to treat
our conversation as privileged, I described the President's behavior in detail
as I had observed it. At
the time, I did not even inform Moyers of this step; nor did he tell me, until
years later, that he had independently followed the same course, speaking with
two different psychiatrists.
All three doctors offered essentially the same opinion: that Johnson's behavior - if the layman's descriptions
we provided were accurate -seemed to correspond to a textbook case of paranoid disintegration, the eruption
of long-suppressed irrationalities. The disintegration could continue, remain
constant, or recede, depending on the strength of Johnson's resistance,
and, more significantly, on the direction of those external events - the war,
the crumbling public support -the pressures from which were dissolving
Johnson's confidence in his ability to control events.
On July 14, Johnson walked
into a staff meeting, took a seat, listened a while, then said: ''Don't let me
interrupt. But there's one thing you ought to know. Vietnam is like being in a plane without a
parachute when all the engines go out. If you jump, you'll probably be killed,
and if you stay in you'll crash and probably burn. That's what it is.''
Then, without waiting fora response, the tall, slumped figure rose and left the
room.
If that's how he feels, I
thought as I watched the door close behind him, then why are we escalating the
war? What's the point if he thinks it's hopeless?
Admittedly, there was, by
now, no easy way out. We had raised the stakes and increased our commitment:
American boys were dead and American resources wasted. But still there were
choices - to continue the unwinnable war, to withdraw, or to seek some kind of
jerry-built compromise. These choices were all unpleasant, but they were not,
equally, disasters. Yet Johnson's assertion that there was no escape from the doomed plane may well have
been true -for him, for that part of him already encircled by enemies.
Weeks later, sitting around
the pool at his Texas ranch with some members of the staff, Lady Bird Johnson
at his side, the President gloomily proclaimed: ''I'm going to be known as the President who lost
Southeast Asia. I'm going to be the one who lost this form of government. The
Communists already control the three major networks and the 40 major outlets of
communication. Walter Lippmann is a Communist and so is Teddy White. And
they're not the only ones. You'd all be shocked at the kind of things revealed
by the F.B.I. reports.''
As the President spoke, his
manner became more intense, his body stiffened. Mrs. Johnson leaned over,
tenderly patted his hand, and at her touch tension seemed to seep from his
body.
''Now, Lyndon,'' she said,
''you shouldn't read them so much.'' ''Why not?'' he asked. ''Because,'' she
replied, ''they have a lot of unevaluated information in them, accusations and
gossip which haven't been proven.''
''Never mind that, you'd be
surprised at how much they know about people,'' Johnson told his wife. ''Why,
that draft protest last week that got everyone so excited. According to the
F.B.I. report, out of the 256 who were supposed to have burned their draft
cards, a substantial number were crazy people who had a previous history in
mental institutions. . . . One of our informants in the Communist Party . . .
reported that the Communists decided to do all they could to encourage
demonstrations against the draft.''
Johnson removed his hand
from his wife's grasp, leaned forward, the intensity returning: ''Now I don't want to be like a
McCarthyite. But this country is in a little more danger than we think.
And someone has to uncover this information.''
DURING THAT SUM-mer, Bill Moyers and I - often
accompanied by one of Bill's assistants -met every few days to discuss the
President's increasingly vehement and less rational outbursts. We agreed that
Johnson was changing, that some invasive force was distorting his perceptions,
infecting the entire process of Presidential decision. Although we were
reluctant to acknowledge it, the signs of aberration were too obvious to be
ignored or rationalized as typical Johnsonian exaggerations.
''It's all a few intellectuals and columnists,'' Johnson confided to a few members of the White House
staff sitting with him in the Oval Office. ''The people loved me, and they believed
in me. You just go down to the White House basement. You'll see them. Boxes
full of letters, all praising me for doing the right thing. They spread the
doubt - every morning I wake up and see another column attacking me, or some
professor on television. Naturally, people get confused with all these voices
shouting and hollering about how awful I am.
''Bobby saw his chance. He saw I was in trouble, so he put [ Martin Luther
] King on the Kennedy payroll to roil up the Negroes. That's why we had the riots.
After all I've done for the Negroes, they never would have attacked me if they
hadn't been put up to it.
''Bobby gave the Communists the idea. Now I'm not saying he's a Communist,
mind you. But they saw they might be able to divide the country against me. They
already control the three major networks. So they began to complain that we were killing civilians, that we ought to
stop the bombing. That got back here, and my critics took it up.
''Not just in the press. I
was always getting advice from my top advisers after they had been in contact
with someone in the Communist world. Hell, you can always find Dobrynin's car''
-Anatoly F. Dobrynin, then Soviet Ambassador - ''in front of a columnist's
house the night before he blasts me on Vietnam.''
AT THE BEGINNING of June, I
had told Moyers in confidence that I intended to leave the White House later
that year. ''He won't let you,'' Bill responded involuntarily. ''Why not?'' I
answered.
Then we both began to laugh,
recognizing the absurd outburst of some hidden perception that Johnson's will
could not be denied.
On July 5, I made a diary note: ''It has been a wild and unbelievable week
- dinner with Bill and his assistant and another long discussion of Johnson in
which we agreed on his paranoid condition. I asked Bill if he thought I should
talk to anyone before I left, perhaps to Bob McNamara,'' - the Secretary of
Defense - ''whose position might let him keep things from getting out of hand.
Bill seemed to think that it might be a good idea . . . But I don't know if we
can trust McNamara. He is
intelligent and skilled, could understand our fears, but is also very
ambitious. . . .''
If the world was beginning
to slip from his control, Johnson
would construct a tiny inner world that he could control, barricade himself not
only from disagreement, but from the need to acknowledge the very existence of
disagreement except among the uninformed and the hostile.
In those days, Johnson's
conversations with his Cabinet would often begin with: ''What are you doing
here? Why aren't you out there fighting against my enemies? Don't you realize
that if they destroy me, they'll destroy you as well?'' The meetings
themselves, no longer a forum for debate, were largely confined to reports by
each secretary on the affairs of his department. Questions about Vietnam were discouraged, and, if asked,
went unanswered.
Nor could the National
Security Council be trusted. ''Those National Security meetings were like a
sieve,'' Johnson remarked. ''There's
that Arthur Goldberg'' (then representative to the United Nations) ''with a
direct pipeline to The New York Times. . . . And those fellows from
Defense were the worst of all. . . . Every time I saw some Department of
Defense official's picture in the paper with a nice story about him, I'd know
it was the paper's bribe for the leaked story.''
Those who attended security
council meetings were sometimes told they should not use the occasion to voice
doubt or disagreement. The President didn't want to hear it. ''I know how you
feel, Arthur,'' the faithful Robert S. McNamara told Ambassador Goldberg before
one meeting, ''but it would be better if you didn't say anything. The President
has already made up his mind, and you would only embarrass him.''
Gradually, all meaningful discussion and decision were confined to the
small, carefully chosen inner circle: Secretary of State Dean Rusk; Robert
McNamara; the Director of Central Intelligence, William F. Raborn Jr.; the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, and, occasionally,
others who could be trusted to maintain complete secrecy.
Meanwhile, dissent from the
outside - press or Congress or public - was discounted, rejected as the
malignant tissue of ignorance, political ambition, disloyalty, or even a
multiplying conspiracy. The only effective restraints were Johnson's judgment
of the limits of public and Congressional tolerance, and his fears that certain
uses of American military force might precipitate Soviet and Chinese
intervention.
Later, after he had left the
White House, Johnson spoke of ''secret treaties,'' formal documents committing
the Soviet Union and China to go to the aid of North Vietnam should the United
States transgress defined limits. ''I never knew when I sat there approving
targets one, two, three, whether one of those three might just be the one to
set off the provisions of those secret treaties. I kept asking myself, what if
one of those targets you picked today triggers off Russia or China?'' There
was, of course, no evidence that any such treaties existed. But Johnson needed
them to justify his acts, and so he believed in their reality.
The incursions of paranoia -
a kind of guerrilla warfare of the mind - are subtle, carefully establishing
their chimerical, delusive outposts on still-firm remnants of reality. There was
aggression in Southeast Asia, and opposition at home. These things were true. But the transformation of
disagreement into disloyalty, political opponents into personal enemies,
spreading dissent into a gigantic conspiracy, the rebels of Vietnam into
the advance guard of world conquest, were the work of mental processes that
bent and twisted the clay of reality into menacing fantastical shapes.
For much of the time,
certainly during 1965, Johnson retained a large measure of control over his
immense political skills. Congress,
despite increasing dissent, did not cast a single vote against the war or the
money to fight it. Johnson not only defeated efforts to roll back the
Great Society, but succeeded in enacting a dwindling flow of legislation.
In Vietnam he could, at
first, truthfully assert his consistency with the commitments of Kennedy and
Eisenhower. In Vietnam he
had, at first, the support - more than support, the persuasive advocacy - of
that foreign-policy establishment he secretly despised - thinking that
they regarded him with contempt as the ignorant boy from a small Texas town
accidentally come to power -but on whom he relied, believing their approval was
a warranty that he was doing the right thing. And even as those who had guided
and urged him on from the beginning reconsidered and fled, Johnson, finally
almost alone among the powerful, never departed from the conviction that he was
acting in fulfillment of his obligations to the country and the future of its
freedom.
Johnson hoped, at first, to
retain public support for his cherished Great Society by concealing the
necessities of war, flourishing false estimates of rapid ''progress'' soon to
be followed by ''victory.'' In the side pocket of his jacket he carried cards
on which were inscribed the latest ''intelligence'' - statistics demonstrating
our accelerating control over the population, shrinkage of the Vietcong forces
through death and rising desertions. It was, you see - couldn't you see? - only
a question of time. He
grotesquely understated troop commitments already made in secret, and had his
Secretary of Defense underestimate the cost of the war by a factor of at least
50 percent. This was not simply lying - although there were many lies; it was
as if Johnson thought that by saying these things, then urging them upon others
with his immense persuasive power, he could somehow transform his misstatements
into truth.
And, for a long time,
Johnson succeeded: not in changing reality, but in deceiving much of the
country and, perhaps, himself. Because of the office he held, his access to
media, his control over information streaming into Washington from Vietnam,
Johnson was able to transmit his own confused - but never purposeless -
distortions to the public. His optimistic public reports, the accounts of
Hanoi's intransigent refusal to negotiate, were instantly and without
qualification published and broadcast throughout the land. Many of the
reporters, even some chieftains of the press, knew better, realized they were carriers of
deception, but felt compelled to print and broadcast official public reports
simply because they were official and public.
As he felt himself compelled
to plunge even farther into the insatiable jungles of Vietnam, Johnson began to
magnify the stakes of the war. ''Why, Ho Chi Minh and the Communists in Southeast Asia,'' the
President told a small group of staff members, ''are as much a threat to our
national security as Hitler.''
Later, after he had left the
White House, Johnson expanded on this theme, telling his biographer, Doris Kearns, ''I honestly and
truly believe that if we don't assert ourselves and if Chinese Communists and
the Soviet Union take Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, it seriously endangers India,
Pakistan, and the whole Pacific world. . . . We'll lose all of Asia and then
Europe and then we'll be a rich little island all by ourselves. That means
World War III. And when that comes to pass I'd sure hate to depend on
the Galbraiths and that Harvard crowd to protect my property or lead me to
shelter in the Burnet caves'' (a local tourist attraction near Johnson City,
Tex.).
YET IT WOULD BE A mistake to
attribute Johnson's poignant disintegration wholly to the inward disruptions of
his mind. He also had the misfortune to be trapped between two Americas - the
one in which he had grown up and the one he came to lead.
He was fond of quoting Sam
Rayburn as saying that ''A man who can't size up another person when he walks
in the room had better be in another profession.'' No one could do that better
than Johnson. His greatest gifts of leadership - the ability to understand,
persuade and subdue - depended on connections and relationships that existed on
a human scale.
''I always believed,'' he
once said, ''that as long as I could take someone into a room with me I could
make him my friend. And that included anybody, even Nikita Khrushchev. From the
start of my Presidency, I believed that if I handled him right he would go
along with me. Deep down, hidden way below, he too wanted what was good, but
every now and then this terrible urge for world domination would get into him
and take control and then he'd go off on some crazy jag, like putting those
missiles in Cuba. I saw all that in him and knew I could cope with it so long
as he and I were in the same room.''
Later, as the enigmatic Ho
Chi Minh loosed forces that threatened to destroy him, he would remark: ''If
only I could get Ho in a room with me, I'm sure we could work things out.''
It was true that there were few who could totally resist the influence of
Lyndon Johnson's personal presence. ''I can't stand the bastard,'' Robert
Kennedy once told me after a private meeting with the President, ''but he's the
most formidable human being I've ever met.''
Yet now this man of such
intensely personal gifts was set at the head of a gargantuan bureaucracy,
managed by people he could not know or observe; compelled to reach for his
constituency while sitting in an empty office staring at the curved, blank lens
of a television camera.
Often he would awaken in the
middle of the night and -clad in pajamas, feet encased in thickly padded
slippers -go down to the Situation Room of the White House, where he would sit
for hours receiving the latest reports of bombing raids and missing planes,
captured villages and fresh casualties, as if, somehow, in this way he could
establish contact with the struggles, the secret desires, of living flesh.
But it could not be done. A
master of men, the invulnerable genius of the small town had become the servant
of technology. His perceptions confused, judgment distorted, no less shackled
because he believed in the power of that technology, the mathematical accuracy
of transistor computation, he even liked the machines with their illusion of
control, but liked them as a small boy likes a mechanical toy - never fully
trusting, but with no other choice. His increasingly angry, increasingly
baffling frustrations were a manifestation of America's own transformation.
During the next few years,
as I campaigned with Eugene McCarthy and then Robert Kennedy, I never disclosed -even to my
closest friends and colleagues - the wild surmise that had preoccupied my final
days in the White House.
Later, I was to question my failure to disclose what I knew of Johnson's
mental condition: was I, through misplaced
loyalty or personal cowardice, betraying my obligation to the country? Yet such
disclosures would undoubtedly not have been believed. After all, what
credentials did I have? I could not have proved my judgment then. Indeed, I
cannot prove it now, although the subsequent escalation of an unwinnable war in
Vietnam - an escalation fueled by self-deception throughout - added testimony
far more persuasive than my own observations.
Still, to this day, I have never overcome the suspicion that my secrecy may
have been a very large mistake of judgment or of timidity.
Correction: September 11, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final
Edition Editors' Note The credits accompanying Richard N. Goodwin's article on
Lyndon B. Johnson on the Aug. 21 issue mistakenly omitted the name of the publisher
of Mr. Goodwin's latest book, ''Remembering America: A Voice From the
Sixties,'' from which the article. The publisher is Little, Brown.
Arthur Schlesinger from his book Journals
1952-2000, which was published just after he died in 2007
January
6 1963
The
New Year opened quietly, with the President [JFK] still in Florida. On Friday,
January 4, I went to the National Archives for the opening of an exhibition
celebrating the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Bobby gave the speech -
it was derived from a speech I had written for the President for use on January
1 by television from Palm Beach, but which the President had decided not to use
on the grounds that a segregated city was hardly the best place from which to
make an emancipation speech. It
was a good speech; and, at the end, Joe Rauh passed me a note saying,
"Poor Lyndon." I asked Joe what he meant. He said, "Lyndon must
know he is through. Bobby is going to be the next President."
[Arthur
Schlesinger, Journals 1952-2000, p. 185]
October
13 1963
Frank
Wisner and Mac Herter went into a long bit about how terrible it was for Jackie
Kennedy to go off on the Onassis yacht. Wisner said that "everyone" in Europe knew that
Lee Radziwill was having an affair with Onassis, and that Jackie was
along as cover. The gossip of the idle rich is exceedingly boring.
[Arthur
Schlesinger, Journals 1952-2000, p. 201]
March
25 1964
"There is nothing more dangerous,
so far as I can see, than being accepted by Johnson as one of his own. I think he
has been meticulously polite to those in the White House whom he regards as
Kennedy men. But, when he starts regarding them as Johnson men, their day is
over. He begins to treat
them as Johnson men, which means like servants. This is what is
happening to Pierre Salinger. Of all the Kennedy people, he seemed to make the
transition most easily - which meant that LBJ began shouting at him, ordering him around and
humiliating him just as if he were Jenkins or Valenti. Teddy White told me a
terrible story in which Johnson made Salinger eat a plate of bean soup at a
White House luncheon out of pure delight in the exercise of authority.
As soon as people become Johnson men, he seems to stop listening to them and to
use them only as instruments of his own desires."
[Arthur
Schlesinger, Journals 1952-2000, p. 225]
June
16 1964
I
went to New York on Tuesday night for a dinner in honor of Jackie to thank
contributors to the Library. Afterward we went to the Smiths'. I had a long
talk with JBK. She started
to tell me about the trip back from Dallas and the effort made to get her to
change her dress when Jim Fosburgh came up and we had a change of
subject. A few nights ago (June 5) at the French Embassy, Godfrey McHugh gave
me a long account of that ghastly afternoon. Godfrey told me that they did not
know the Johnsons were on Air Force One. He and Kenny kept asking the pilot to
take off, and were told that the plane had to wait for Mrs. Johnson's luggage -
a mysterious excuse, since
none of them knew that the Johnson's were already occupying the presidential
apartments in the back of the plane. Godfrey also said that LBJ was in a panic
at the hospital, convinced that there was a conspiracy and that he would be the
next to go. Godfrey also gave me a horrendous account of his visit to the LBJ
Ranch before the [Ludwig] Erhand visit in December - Johnson's crudeness,
discourtesy, drunkenness, etc."
[Arthur
Schlesinger, Journals 1952-2000, pp. 227-228]
July
23 1964
Bobby
seemed philosophical about the vice presidency. His thoughts are still turning
to the idea of spending a year at Oxford reading and writing.
We talked a good deal about his
relationship to LBJ. Obviously Johnson's actions in the first 24 hours after JFK's
death left wounds which will take a long time to heal. Bobby
commented that Sarge Shriver had taken it on himself to harmonize the situation
then and had only made it worse. Bobby said, "I told Sarge that if I
wanted him to intervene I was capable of asking him to do so." His
references to Sarge were fairly cool, and he seemed scornful of the notion that
Sarge might be a serious possibility for the vice presidency.
After a silence Bobby said, "You
know the worst thing Johnson has said? ... Once he told Pierre Salinger, 'When
I was young in Texas, I used to know a cross-eyed boy. His eyes were crossed,
and so was his character. Sometimes I think that, when you remember the
assassination of Trujillo and the assassination of Diem, what happened to Kennedy
may have been divine retribution.'"
[Arthur
Schlesinger, Journals 1952-2000, pp. 227-228
[Robert Morrow’s note: John Kennedy had a
lazy eye and was a bit cross eyed.]
October
30 1966
"[RFK]
talked a bit about campaigning with Johnson. He said that, after a day together
in New York, he said to Johnson back at the hotel, "Did you enjoy the
day?" Johnson looked at him earnestly and said "Of all the things in life, this is what I
most enjoy doing." Bobby said it to us incredulously"
"Imagine saying that, of all the things in life, this is what you like the
most."
At
Clark's we talked about the [William] Manchester book [The Death of a
President], and this led on to a discussion of the autopsy photographs and
then of the Warren Report. RFK wondered how long he could continue to avoid
comment on the report. It
is evident that he believes it was a poor job and will not endorse it, but that
he is unwilling to criticize it and thereby reopen the whole tragic
business."
[Arthur
Schlesinger, Journals 1952-2000, p. 254]
December
10 1967
Dick [Goodwin] suggested that LBJ, if
reelected, would use all his wiles and powers to prevent RFK's nomination.
(Bobby interjected, "He would die and make Hubert President rather than
let me get it.") Ted felt that he would try this, but his capacity to do damage
would be limited."
[Arthur
Schlesinger, Journals 1952-2000, p. 268]
March
13 1968
"I
went to dinner [Tuesday] at Ham Armstrong's - the Anthony Edens, Jack McCloys,
Bill and Judith Moyers, Nin Ryan. I had a fascinating talk with Bill. He thinks that LBJ is now well
sealed off from reality; the White House atmosphere, he said, is
"impenetrable." He also feels that LBJ explains away all criticism as
based on personal or political antagonism; Bill used the word
"paranoid." He said that he had himself such a personal debt
to Johnson that it had taken him a long time to reach these conclusions, and
even longer to say them; but
he felt that four more years of Johnson would be ruinous for the country."
[Arthur
Schlesinger, Journals 1952-2000, p. 280]
April
4 1968
David Karr called today. He had spent
an hour yesterday with LBJ and says that it was "terrifying." Johnson
was, first of all, filled with self-pity. He seemed very hurt over the Kennedy
attitude toward him and kept talking about his "partnership" with
JFK. "Then my partner died, and I took over the partnership. I kept on the
eleven cowhands [the cabinet]. Some of the tenderfeet [Arthur Schlesinger, Jr?] left me. But I kept
on. If he is up there in heaven looking down, I know that he knows what I have
done."
He was bitter about RFK. He said
for example, "On civil rights I was stronger than he was," instancing
some issue about the guarantee of home mortgage loans, which, he said, Bobby
would not put into the civil rights bill; ... He also talked about Bobby in
connection with the Bay of Pigs (with which Bobby had no connection) and said
that the credibility gap began then in the Kennedy administration and not in
the Johnson administration. And
he kept talking about an alleged affair RFK had with Candy Bergen in Paris.
[Arthur
Schlesinger, Journals 1952-2000, p. 286-287]
January
14 1969
I
took part with Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, Eric Goldman and Ted Sorensen (in
Kansas City) in a National Education Television commentary. Afterward Bill and
I went over to the Algonquin for a drink. We
talked a bit about the problem of writing about Johnson. Bill said, as he has
said to me before (and Dick Goodwin has said even more often), that one great
trouble was that no one would believe it. He said that he could not see how one
could write about Johnson the private monster and Johnson the public statesman
and construct a credible narrative. "He is a sick man," Bill said. At
one point he and Dick Goodwin became so concerned that they decided to read up
on mental illness - Dick read up on paranoia and Bill on the manic-depressive
cycle."
[Arthur
Schlesinger, Journals 1952-2000, p. 306]
January 15 1971
Last night I spoke at the annual dinner of the Century. I
sat next to Mac Bundy and we discussed, among other things, the Khrushchev
memoirs. I remarked on the curious resemblance between Khrushchev's account of
the life around Stalin - the domineering and obsessive dictator, the total
boredom of the social occasions revolving around him, the horror when invited
to attend and the even greater horror when not invited - and Albert Speer's
account of the life around Hitler. Mac said, "When I read Khrushchev, I
was reminded of something else in addition - my last days in the White House
with LBJ."
[Arthur Schlesinger, Journals
1952-2000, p. 333]
McGeorge Bundy in 1971 compared the Lyndon Johnson of 1967 to
Joseph Stalin and former
top aide Bill Moyers said he was a “paranoid” in 1968 and a “sick man” in 1969.
McGeorge Bundy’s last days in the Johnson White House were in June, 1967 when
he come back in to manage the USA response to the Six Day War (a period when the USA almost had nuclear war with the USSR)
