Lyndon Johnson, after 36 years of marriage to Lady
Bird, ask Doris Kearns;
In 1970, LBJ was age 62; Doris Kearns was age
27. LBJ married Lady Bird on November 17, 1934
Sycophantic LBJ biographer
Doris Kearns Goodwin denies having an affair with Lyndon Johnson. I believe her
but there is no doubt that LBJ regarded her as a girlfriend interest
LBJ pressured Kearns for sex, later asked her to MARRY him!
Was LBJ biographer Doris Kearns having an affair with Lyndon Johnson? I would say no, but there is
no doubt that LBJ considered Doris a romantic interest and he asked her to
marry him!! Here is the response of a very well known JFK researcher
when I posed that question to him: “No doubt about that one ….” Sally Quinn had
said some rather provocative things about Doris Kearns-Goodwin's relationship with
LBJ in those "final years." Here is a reference to that in a Wash
Post article (“A Tale of Hearts and Minds, 8/24/75) alluded to in the LA Times
in 2002:
Goodwin's first dip in the waters of infamy came in 1967, when,
having received a White House fellowship, she was photographed dancing with
Lyndon Johnson at a reception. The story turned on the fact that the president's
dance partner, then Doris Kearns, had just co-written a piece for the New Republic
under the headline: "How to Remove L.B.J. in 1968."
Later, in the early 1970s, Kearns and Richard
Goodwin, lovers but not yet married, set off a literary scandal that attracted
national media attention. It involved a
"psychobiography" that Kearns was writing about Johnson, based in
part on intimate conversations they'd had on his ranch in Texas, and a decision
to bring Goodwin aboard as a co-author.
Their plan was to expand what had begun as a
scholarly work--intended to help secure for her a tenured professorship at
Harvard University--break with a smaller publishing house and sell the book
elsewhere, for about five times the money. As the dispute grew, the story oozed
outward to include speculation in print about whether Kearns might have had an
affair with Johnson.
Sally Quinn, flying at her highest as a feature
writer in the Washington Post's Style section, wrote a lively, at times almost
embarrassingly explicit, account of the chaos that had come to Kearn's love and
literary life. The piece ran for what seemed like forever, and it included a
rather tart summation:
" Kearns has always
gotten what she wanted--and made it look as if she didn't even try. She got elected
student-body president at Colby College in Maine, got the best grades, got the
best beaux, got into Harvard, got a White House fellowship, got Lyndon Johnson,
got her Ph.D, got her professorship at Harvard, got her book, got author
Richard Goodwin and got Goodwin to collaborate with her on the book. Those are all
things she wanted, or thought she wanted when she got them."
At one point in the story, the
then-32-year-old Kearns is quoted as saying: " I really believe that Johnson
was picking a person he wanted to write about him. People say he was in love
with me and things like that. Partly that's true. But it was much more serious
than that."
Here is another excerpt from Sally Quinn’s 1974 article
"Johnson
was terribly possessive of her time, more and more as he came closer to death. She
was seeing many men at this point in her life but had no real attachments until
she met Richard Goodwin six months before Johnson's death."
One time Doris Kearns gave a lecture and said that Lyndon Johnson had compared her
to his mother. [LBJ's mother was quite the enabler of him; as was Lady Bird.] When
Kearns comments became public and appeared in print, LBJ said:
"So
I'll just take the knife out of my heart and close up the wound, and we'll have
you back here and we won't look back in pride or shame. We'll just start from here
and we'll go on with your book without Parade. We're both still alive and that's
what counts.”
Kearns has later admitted that Lyndon Johnson used to crawl into bed with her
and just talk, but with nothing else going on....
As for me, I am not buying that nothing else went on. The Doris Kearns case is
just another example of Lyndon Johnson's ability to manipulate people and even
turn them into sychophants protecting his legacy decades later. Jack Valenti would
be another good example.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: "I got to
know this crazy character [Lyndon B. Johnson] when I was only 23 years old....
He's still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual
I think I've ever known in my entire life.” [Academy
of Achievement June 1996 interview, p.1]
Doris Kearns also told authors Richard Harwood and Haynes
Johnson about her relationship with LBJ in an interview that Sally Quinn refers
to:
"They both took copious notes. In the interview Kearns told the reporters
that her relationship with President Johnson was extraordinarily complicated,
that she was still having trouble placing it in perspective, that she was troubled
about how to handle her personal relationship with Johnson when she published her
own book.
“She told them that the essence of their relationship was that LBJ was in love
with her, that he ‘pressed me very hard sexually the first year,’ that he courted
her aggressively, that he asked her to marry him, that he was jealous of other
men in her life."
[Sally Quinn, Washington Post, 8/24/75 "A Tale of Hearts and Minds"]
My comment: Really, this kind of behavior from Lyndon Johnson was typical. It
is how he behaved his whole life, and I don't just mean sexually. I am referring
to his narcissism, neediness, ability to manipulate people, ability to turn folks
into sycophants and slaves and have them do things they would not normally do.
I guess this just reproves the old saying that women love power; even if power is
a old bloated, craggy man and a paranoid, mendacious, delusional nut job.
Here is an email to me from a Harvard classmate of Doris Kearns:
“Robert,
I was a graduate student at Harvard in the Political Science Department when
Kearns was writing her LBJ book — the gossip at Harvard was always that she was
LBJ’s lover — Kearns was first and foremost an opportunist — if sleeping with
LBJ advanced her career, I doubt she hesitated.”
1.
Mark Groubert says:
Mr. Morrow is correct. Doris Kearns
Goodwin told a mutual friend of ours that she had sex with Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Her husband Richard Goodwin was in the throws of his own self-admitted alcoholism
at the time.
Two good books on LBJ’s dysfunction and his alcoholism: Power Beyond Reason:
The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson by D. Jablow Hershman and Lyndon B. Johnson:
A Memoir by George Reedy.
Doris Kearns supposedly told Legs McNeil that she had sex with Lyndon Johnson. Having said that I don’t believe that Doris Kearns was having sex with LBJ, although Johnson clearly looked upon her as a girlfriend interest and he pressured Doris Kearns for Sex
The Sexual Derangement of Lyndon Johnson – a YouTube interview with
journalist Mark Groubert
Doris Kearns Goodwin denies she has
ever had sex with Lyndon Johnson
No comments:
Post a Comment