Jackie liked LBJ -- she was apparently the only Kennedy who did -- and years later would praise his "incredible warmth" and "generosity of spirit." These aspects of Johnson's personality, the tapes make clear, were authentic -- but they were lost on many at the time he was in office. Those who were opposed to what first Barry Goldwater, then millions of others, called "Johnson's War," had a hard time then (and still do) seeing what a multidimensional character LBJ was. Even those who supported him politically, like the Kennedys, derided him for his folksiness, his unrelenting Southernness, his lack of polish. But he was the canniest of politicians, an extremely bright man (perhaps not truly brilliant like Nixon or Clinton, but plenty sharp) and gifted with a powerhouse intuition. Too bad he didn't pay more attention to it: Beschloss contends that it was Kennedy holdovers such as McNamara, Bundy and Rusk who convinced LBJ that JFK was intent on escalating the war, and that if he didn't follow through, the dead president's ambitious brother, Robert, would brand Johnson as soft on Communism. It's a contention that the tapes seem to confirm.
In a Sept. 18, 1964, conversation with McNamara, Johnson's instincts are spot on as he listens, and continually expresses skepticism, while his secretary of defense tells him that two American destroyers may be under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam. The month before, the Tonkin Gulf incident had occurred (on August 4), and as McNamara and LBJ talk about this new "attack," it becomes clear that the president already suspects that the August event was a false report (a suspicion that would later be confirmed). "Now, Bob," Johnson says, "I have found over the years that we see and we hear and we imagine a lot of things in the form of attacks and shots ... Take the best military man you have, though, and just tell him that I've been watching and listening to these stories for 30 years before the Armed Services Committee, and we are always sure we've been attacked. Then, in a day or two, we are not so damned sure. And then in a day or two more, we're sure it didn't happen at all!"
THIS ARTICLE
Reaching For Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965
By Michael Beschloss
Simon & Schuster449 pages
Nonfiction
"Yeah, yeah," McNamara responds, then continues to make his case:
McNamara: We've got a number of messages here now and considerable evidence that, as I say, there was either an intentional attack or a substantial engagement. I differentiate one from the other.
LBJ: Well, what is a substantial engagement? Mean that we could have started it and they just responded?
McNamara: But they stayed there for an hour or so. The first --
LBJ: They would have been justified in staying, though, if we started shooting at them.
As you listen to the "Reaching for Glory" CDs, a portrait emerges of Johnson as a man of a thousand faces and dozens of personalities, all of them real. It wasn't that he was duplicitous, he was kaleidoscopic. With women he's overtly flirtatious, he charms, he playfully admonishes, he compliments their appearance (to Jackie: "Your picture was gorgeous. Now you had that chin up and that chest out and you looked so pretty ..."). With men he cajoles, bluntly questions, he's crude, sophisticated, overbearing, a dick-swinger of the first order. (His March 1, 1965, upbraiding of New York Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. rivals performances by Pavarotti and Robert Plant.) He's also a mass of insecurities; Nixon would beat him in the paranoia sweepstakes, but only by a nose. And when Lady Bird misses seeing him on television he becomes a petulant little boy:
LBJ: Didn't see the television tonight, did you?
Lady Bird: No, darling, I didn't ...
LBJ: [irritated:] Well I was on, you know, nationwide. The first nationwide television at nine-thirty Washington time ... Didn't you know about it?
Lady Bird: Yes, I knew about it, but I didn't know the timing on it, darling.
LBJ: Why in the hell don't you find out?
That exchange took place a month before the 1964 election. Just a week later his problems became considerably more severe than whether the first lady caught him on TV. Walter Jenkins, special assistant to the president and a longtime Johnson friend, was arrested for performing oral sex on another man in the restroom of the Washington, D.C., YMCA. LBJ's personal attorney, Abe Fortas, called to give Johnson the news. After Fortas begins the conversation by going on vaguely, circuitously and at considerable length without ever managing to convey to the president exactly what he's talking about, he asks Johnson, "Have I gotten this across at all to you?"
LBJ: No.
Fortas: Well, is it all right to talk on this phone?
LBJ: Yes, I think so.
Fortas then proceeds to awkwardly meander around the subject for another long paragraph before LBJ responds: "I can't hear you. Talk a little louder!" The president finally gets the idea and twice says, "I just can't believe this." He's sure that Goldwater's behind it, that it's a setup, but Jenkins has confessed and he leaves the administration.
It was a sad episode, and it's a minor footnote at this point, but if any good came out of it it's the current entertainment value of the Halloween 1964 conversation between Johnson and J.Edgar Hoover. After the Jenkins calamity, LBJ calls Hoover to see if FBI investigations have turned up any other homosexuals in the Johnson administration. Hoover says the agency's investigating one Navy man in the Defense Dept. "In the course of the conversation," Beschloss writes in a short preamble, "despite longtime rumors that he is himself involved with his housemate, Deputy FBI Director Clyde Tolson, Hoover lectures on how to spot a secret homosexual."
LBJ: They raised the question of the way he combed his hair and the way he did something else, but they had no act of his ...
Hoover: It's just ... that his mannerisms ... were suspicious.
LBJ: Yeah, he worked for me for four or five years, but he wasn't even suspicious to me. I guess you are going to have to teach me something about this stuff. ... I swear I can't recognize them. I don't know anything about them.
Hoover: It's a thing that you just can't tell sometimes. Just like in the case of the poor fellow Jenkins ... There are some people who walk kind of funny. That you might think a little bit off or maybe queer.
You have to wonder if the president was just messing with the humorless Hoover or if he was actually as unworldly as he implies. (It's vaguely reminiscent of his exchange with Charles De Gaulle. On a presidential visit to France, so the story goes, De Gaulle met LBJ at the airport and in the motorcade on the way into Paris asked him haughtily, "So, Mr. President, what can we teach you?" To which the sly good ol' boy and commander in chief replied, "Why, just every little thing.")
But the light moments in "Reaching for Glory" are few. Overall it resembles one of those docudramas in which you know what the dreary dénouement is and you simply have to watch (or listen) as the players career toward it. It's like viewing slow-motion film of a train wreck -- though we won't see the full force of the collision until the third installment of Beschloss' trilogy, which will cover Johnson's final years in office.
As for Beschloss himself, he's accomplished a terrific job of historical scholarship while being the perfect host -- he gives enough context for each conversation to enable readers and listeners to keep their bearings, then he steps out of the way and lets the dialogue carry the scenes. The exchanges are by turns astonishing, confusing, clunky and contentious. They're rarely elegant and they're fraught with the varying agendas of the characters, some of whom are high-minded and with the country's best interests at heart and others who, well, you've got to wonder. What's abundantly clear is that running the USA is tough, exhausting, nearly impossible work that lacks both the precision and success rate of brain surgery.
This story has been corrected.
About the writer
Douglas Cruickshank is the editor of Salon People.
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