Lyndon:An OralBiography
Miller, Merle
LYNDON: AN ORAL BIOGRAPHY Merle Miller / Putnam / $17.95 Alonzo L. Hamby Some years ago, I spent a few particularly beautiful autumn days in Asheville, North Carolina, attending the annual meeting...
...Harry Truman was mentioned in passing...
...As Miller describes it, the result was reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe: "a huge suitcase full of most of an early draft" requiring four month's of editorial ministrations by a female Maxwell Perkins at Miller's "glass house...
...LYNDON: AN ORAL BIOGRAPHY Merle Miller / Putnam / $17.95 Alonzo L. Hamby Some years ago, I spent a few particularly beautiful autumn days in Asheville, North Carolina, attending the annual meeting of the Oral History Association...
...Those who approach it with a serious purpose are bound to be disappointed...
...Enter Merle Miller...
...The oral history movement, however confused it may be about its own standards, deserves better...
...The outcome of all this work is both disappointing and irritating...
...Who was even earthier than Harry Truman...
...When I was a graduate student in the early 1960s, my dissertation supervisor all but required a trip to the Columbia Oral History Collection...
...Either Allegheny or Piedmont, or possibly both in collusion, had managed to lose his suitcase...
...Even more infuriating is Miller's inability to bring anything fresh and new to Lyndon...
...I also learned that oral history was no substitute for history...
...Miller's use of source material is characterized throughout by the same infantile level of credulity...
...It was only natural to try again...
...Lyndon has done well at the bookstores, largely because it exemplifies the People magazine school of gossip so influential in American popular culture...
...Miller's solution was to draw upon over 300 of the Johnson presidential library's taped interviews with the late president's associates, and to supplement these with 180 interviews of his own...
...Actually, a genuine oral biography of LBJ has already been published: Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by Doris Kearns...
...Yet it took Plain Speaking to bring him a mass audience...
...It would involve instead the interviewing of important figures by credentialed scholars, the production of formal, carefully edited transcripts, and the deposit of the finished product in a library, where it would remain available to all qualified researchers on equal terms...
...The many first-rate interviews I located compensated for the thinner stuff, the off-the-top-of-the-head gossip...
...Anyone familiar with Johnson has heard it all before...
...Lyndon Johnson, of course...
...Miller got the story, he tells us, from "people who know, who were, presumably, there...
...Providing no discernible beginning, nor any perceptible ending, our speaker rambled on about his own life, examining in some hilarious detail the difficulties of existence as an avowed homosexual, among them his relationship with his mother...
...Admittedly, these would be pedantic quibbles had Miller not left the impression that he now considers himself a master oral historian...
...Although not a perfect book, at least it is based on direct, frank, and intimate contact with its, subject, whom it quotes extensively and with a rihg of authenticity...
...When Miller had concluded, the mistress of ceremonies thanked him for what she described, apparently in all sincerity, as an extraordinarily thoughtful address...
...On one or two occasions, he indicated the height of his own spirits by alluding fondly to the martinis he had earlier consumed with his hosts...
...The tapes themselves remain unavailable...
...It was not a good night for the distinguished guest...
...After all, no credentialing process formally conferred the title "oral historian," and it was assumed that the whole business involved little more than thrusting a microphone at the mouth of a talkative historical figure...
...Oral history emerged as a technique of professional scholarship in the years after World War II...
...But so far as I know, the author has displayed no interest in establishing herself as a Leading Oral Historian...
...Promoted by the renowned historian Allan Nevins, the idea achieved its first and fullest realization at Columbia University in the 1950s...
...But what is more-and here oral history cannot help us-we need a biographer capable of explaining how a president, given an overwhelming vote of confidence by the American people, could persist in decisions that extended social welfare liberalism to the breaking point, nearly wrecked a flourishing economy, and destroyed the nation's sense of purpose in world affairs...
...Unfortunately, it also demonstrates what is wrong with the book...
...By the standards of good oral history, the book left much to be desired...
...His talk had little to do with matters-such as interviewing techniques and experiences-that one might presume to be of interest to oral historians...
...and it grew out of a widespread and relatively new conviction that it was possible to write scholarly history about the very recent past...
...One of Nevins' young students, Dean Albertson, created exemplary standards for oral historians with a series of lengthy interviews with officials from the New Deal agricultural program, among them Henry A. Wallace...
...Johnson deserves the attention of someone like the late T. Harry Williams, who at the time of his death was in the process of creating a genuine oral biography of LBJ which would have described him in all his enormousness-his vulgarity, his vanity, his insecurity, his insatiable appetites...
...And even if Miller did talk to her, she must have been ample indeed if she can be described as "people...
...The young lady, we are led to believe, was an anonymous groupie, hardly the sort to have been available for an interview 15 years or so later...
...it was simply another tool for the working historian, useful especially for color, anecdotes, and impressions of personalities...
...To be sure, the interviewing was amateurish, the presentation uncritical, and the facts at times questionable...
...The definitive work on Lyndon Johnson remains to be written...
...in Brewster, New York...
...When he published Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman in 1973, Miller already was a figure of some note, the author of eleven books, fiction and non-fiction, and countless short pieces...
...It was greatly facilitated by, although not really dependent on, the development of the high-fidelity tape recorder...
...it was "biography" only in that the subject had chatted about himself...
...As I visited other institutions, I discovered that the national norm was closer to the thin stuff than to Columbia's best...
...he was tieless, disheveled, and hardly in a mood to deliver inspiration to an after-dinner audience...
...In one sense, oral history represented the professoriat's formal adoption of the ancient journalistic technique of the interview...
...After some experience of my own both as an interviewer and a participant at oral history meetings, I found myself mistaken for an expert in the field, particularly by colleagues wanting to set up projects of their own...
...But there was an obvious problem...
...But who were they and how could they have been there...
...One wonders also about the seriousness of Miller's efforts when he mentions that one of his interviews with Lady Bird Johnson occurred "in a car driving around the Ranch, Stonewall, Texas," another with Lynda Johnson Robb transpired "at a party at her home in McLean, Virginia," and two with LuciJohnson Nugent were taped "at two parties at her home...
...All that mattered little: Miller had captured Truman's vivid personality, Plain Speaking was a great success, and an accomplished journalist had suddenly become an oral historian...
...A few stories were new to me-I'll confess to particularly liking the one about the attractive one-night stand to whom vice-presidential aspirant LBJ declared in gratitude, "Ah want to thank you for yore help to mah campaign...
...Culled from taped background interviews Miller had conducted a dozen years earlier while working as a television production assistant, the book appealed to a Watergate-weary audience yearning for a leader with Truman's down-toearth virtues...
...We all deserve better...
...But it was not to be mere journalism, which most academics assumed to be shallow and ephemeral...
...Using the results of her interviews, Miss Kearns takes some pretty good stabs at explaining what sort of a person Johnson was, how he got that way, and why in the end his administration failed...
...By the time Miller began work on his second "oral biography," LBJ had departed to a land far beyond the range of any tape recorder...
...It is impossible to tell how much of the final product is derived from the Johnson library interviews and how much from Miller's own-a major annoyance to those who believe that a historian should cite sources for his quotations...
...Scholars and graduate students, working at times on their own research, at times on specially funded projects, conducted detailed interviews with subjects who had systematically refreshed their memories and who from time to time read excerpts from diaries or other personal papers into the record...
...I recount this episode for what it can tell us about the limitations of both Merle Miller and the oral history movement...
...It makes use of the interview as a scholarly work should-not as end product, or even sole source, but as one of many methods for obtaining information about the subject...
...The keynote speaker was Merle Miller, still enjoying the good fortune and recognition that had come from the publication of his taped interviews with Harry S Truman...
Vol. 14 • February 1981 • No. 2
