The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson

...This criticism takes on increasing force as we learn more about the reality of the Vietnam conflict and strip away the " p e o p l e s war" myth t h a t once dominated popular perceptions...

...Because the author's assignment was to do a comprehensive history of the Johnson presidency, he attempts to cover every significant aspect of LBJ's 1887 days in the White House...

...There is a story that Johnson, in conference with that formidable ~minence of the Democratic party, Dean Acheson, asked in frustration and self-pity, "Why d o n ' t the American people like me...

...All the same, he has pro4buced a work that no one with a serious interest in this critical administration can afford to ignore...

...The President was a victim to some extent of the Media Age but at least equally of demons he carried within himself...

...Name Street Address City State ZipCode II Or bill my MasterCard or VISA (circle one...

...Here was a great, roughhewn, larger-than-life personality who desperately wanted to win the trust and love of the American people, failed miserably, and found himself driven from the presidency in consequence...

...Or whether the antipoverty infrastructure was capable of absorbing a greater infusion of cash...

...no doubt he received the gratitude of some of the poor to whom he had given money or new opportunities...

...The result is a book that is frequently thought-provoking, if far from the last word and hardly for everyone...

...Johnson's motives in limiting the war, Bornet tells us, were good ones--he feared Chinese intervention and a wider conflict--but these were better reasons for avoiding a war in the first place than for waging one that the U.S was sure to lose...

...Moreover, it felt no great adversary duty when he took office...

...Bornet does not discuss another important error...

...Such an art would correspond to the spirit of our time...

...The Island of Crimea, a novel by the recent Russtun emlgre, Vassily Aksyonov, is very much a work of fantastic realism, but it differs from the others in one regard: It is as much about the democratic capitalist West as about the totalitarian Communist East...

...The merest glance at the historical record demonstrates otherwise...

...One wishes Bornet had done more to try to explain them to us...

...He managed to win the love of Jack Valenti and a few other loyalists...

...Those in his entourage whom he could not cow, primarily the reporters who covered him, he harassed in various petty ways...

...He never quite understood how one could get in the way of the other...

...President, you are not a very likeable man...

...The most recent fantastic realist to land in the West is the Russian writer, Georgi Vladimov, the author of Faithful Ruslan, a grotesque fable, brilliantly rendered, that looks at life in the Gulag from the point of view of a Soviet guard dog...

...Sinyavsky was not only rejecting the official aesthetic dogma of the Soviet Union (socialist realism) but also suggesting that traditional realism--the realism, say, of War and Peace--was inadequate to the job at hand...

...On both counts his analysis is damning, all the more so for its bland impersonality...

...Right now," he said, " I put my hope in a phantasmagoric art, with hypotheses instead of a Purpose, an art in which the grotesque will replace realistic descriptions of ordinary life...

...But the strategy could not override a growing perception that the President of the Republic and the titular leader of the free world was a peculiarly repellent individual...

...Fairly enough perhaps, the author does not address that question...

...Determined to display his power, he conducted himself with a vulgarity that could scarcel), be excused by his Texas origins...

...Dean Acheson's comment encompassed a huge mound of neuroses and personality difficulties that were responsible as much as anything else for the failure o f the Johnson presidency--in areas of substantive policy as well as in media imagery...

...4) Programs directed from Washington tended to be out of touch with local conditions...

...It appears certain that Johnson and those around him were guilty of a misperception about Asian politics that has bedeviled American diplomacy since World War II...

...The only way to bring the war to a successful conclusion was to destroy North Vietnam's ability to conduct it...

...Bornet leaves no doubt that he considers Vietnam a serious miscalculation...

...Bornet does not give us is a sure sense of whether the Great Society would have worked had it received sufficient funding...

...As John Paul said in his 1979 visit to Poland: "Is it not the intention of the Holy Spirit that this Polish Pope, this Slav, should at this moment of history manifest the spiritual unity of Christian Europe...

...Providence knows what it is doing...

...Johnson instead presided over an interminable "no-win war of attrition" fought by draftees in a far-away land for the benefit of an alien people...

...The pres~ actually kept most of Johnson's gaucheries off the record...

...2 Account Number Expires THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 41...

...They aren't a school of writers, a literary clique, but a disparate group all of whom have departed from traditional realism for a comic blend of the fantastic and the grotesque...

...The sort of person whom the lit trade calls The General Reader will find it rambling and pedantic...

...It has been amply demonstrated that reporters assigned to Vietnam generally failed to comprehend the nature of the war and of Asian society, but they also were put off by the transparent mendacity that ~ characterized one Saigon press briefing after another...

...The author believes that Johnson was hounded, even smeared, by the press, just as in his mind Herbert Hoover had been...

...pian overpromises of absolutely equal opportunity...

...Lyndon Johnson sought to fulfill his need for affection by distributing gifts to those in his personal orbit, entitlements to the American people, and TVAs on the Mekong to the Vietnamese...

...Yet apparently there really was a message from Rome to Moscow not unlike that which Kalb described...

...And a few stories--the frequent skinny-dipping in the White House pool, the 90-mile-anhour drives fueled by Pearl beer-inevitably got out...

...The humor in these novels is not Wodehousean, but dark, very dark...

...But no doubt so did the Soviets, and the odd thing is that our two authors, Sterling and Henze, for all the evidence, circumstantial and testimonial, they provide, refrain from asking the obvious: What do we do if we know for sure...

...Books may be returned within | , 10 days of receipt for a full refund...

...T h i s first full scholarly study of an administration that tried to outdeal the New Deal has been produced by a former biographer of Herbert Hoover and a certifiable political conservative...

...Johnson and company assumed that at bottom the Vietnamese subscribed to the precepts of Western liberal democracy, or could be made to do so by force...

...How then did one go about sorting out "the deserving poor," as the Victorians called them, from the non-motivated poor...

...U l t i m a t e l y , the most interesting questions about the Johnson Administration revolve around Johnson himself...

...He ordered the seats on the presidential plane reversed to face his compartment, refused to be photographed next to anyone taller, and thought nothing of having a valet kneel and wash his feet or a nurse administer an enema as he conducted business...

...He employed profanity freely, was addicted to scatological humor, and displayed a near-obsession with the sexual behavior of animals...

...2) Johnson engaged in utoAlonzo L. Hamby teaches American history at Ohio University...

...Personally offended by Johnson and increasingly disturbed by the Vietnam war, the press no doubt compounded his difficulties...

...The implications follow naturally: Repelled by LBJ's cowboy crudities, displaying the herd instinct that governs so much media behavior, the press became Johnson's adversary and contributed mightily to his downfall...

...Bornet's critique of the Great Society is at one with much of the conventional wisdom of the sane center these days: (1) Both the nature of poverty and the plan of attack on it were illdefined...

...Writing under the pseudonym of Abram Tertz, Sinyavsky in a 1959 essay described the kind of fiction he hoped for...

...Perhaps because he has already chronicled the trials of another embattled President, or simply because he takes the canons of objective scholarship seriously, Vaughn Davis Bornet has written the most comprehensive and evenhanded work on the LBJ presidency that we have...

...It was friendly to the Great Society...

...At one point the ailing Polish primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, referred explicitly to the "Holy Father's . . . letter to Brezhnev," having publicly stated in March 1981 that "Providence has placed in the Vatican a man who could be protector of Poland, and this he is...

...5) A fair amount of such money as was thrown at the poor had a way of being intercepted by opportunistic activists, local politicians, and various interest groups...

...LBJ's fall is fascinating soap opera, but it also tells us much about contemporary American politics and society...

...The best-known novels about totalitarianism are somber and earnest--Orwell's 1984, Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago--but there are some brilliant comic novels about Marxist-Leninist dystopias that deserve to be better known: Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Sinyavsky's The Makepiece Experiment, Nabokov's Pale Fire, and--more recently--Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting...

...Bornet makes a stab at explaining the first circumstance but rather inexplicably shies away from the second...

...Bornet is properly critical of the way in which Johnson, with the complicity of Barry Goldwater, made Vietnam an invisible issue during the 1964 campaign...

...It may be somewhat misleading to label all these writers fantastic realists...

...The Pope went even so far, during this visit, as to challenge the legitimacy of the Warsaw Pact...

...the result was to destabilize further an already shaky ally...

...He seemed to assume that naked emperors were always clothed...

...It was the President who let photographers snal~ him as he lifted his shirt to show his latest surgical scar to the world and as he pulled a pet beagle into the air by its ears...

...He is, however, overly partisan when he declares that Eisenhower had established no commitment to South Vietnam...

...On the one hand, a Vatican spokesman later denied that such a letter had then been sent...

...Sinyavsky and Kundera are in the West...

...Yet the North was ruled by a totalitarian dictatorship determined to prevail at any cost and all but impervious to the limited air war directed against it...

...Since fantastic realism doesn't gladden the hearts of cultural commissars, most Russian and East European writers who work in this vein have been expelled from their native lands--a better fate than that of their literary forebears who disappeared or were hauled off to the Gulag...

...To be a faithful chronicler of life under Communism, one had to employ the fantastic and the grotesque...

...He also noted that "no country should ever develop at the cost of enslavement, conquest, outrage, exploitation, and death...

...Peter and return to his homeland to stand shoulder to shoulder with his people...

...Appearing to confuse objectivity with balance, he resorts to an "on the one h a n d . . , on the other hand" treatment, more often than not making his points by indirection...

...The validity of alliances, he said, depended on "whether they led to more well-being and prosperity for member states...

...There always had been spats between Presidents and the reporters who covered them, but these tended to be unpleasant episodes in a normally friendly symbiotic relationship...

...Indeed, Bornet might have made more of the way in which the antipoverty programs served a welfare function for the various groups working in what Daniel Moynihan once characterized as "the resentment business"--welfare bureaucrats, planners, social scientists, and assorted do-gooders...

...He recites, with apparent approval, all of Johnson's complaints about the inbred hostility of a northeastern, highly educated press corps toward a Texas chief executive, but he barely touches on the underlying implications...

...In fact, as he gently puts it, "in twentiethcentury America, motivation was not a universal characteristic...

...But the American people as a whole had an op40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 portunity to evaluate Lyndon Johnson first hand through the relatively unfiltered medium of television...

...Perhaps it was thus in the days of McKinley, but no longer in the age of the Tube...

...Throughout his political career, Lyndon Johnson was torn between two conflicting impulsesqthe urge to dominate everything and everyone around him, and the need to be loved by all who surrounded him...

...Also at issue here were the Pope's intentions at the time when Soviet forces were mobilizing to deal with a possible collapse of their puppet regime in 1981...

...Once LBJ made his commitment, he handled it about as badly as possible...

...Johnson's failure was due in large measure, of course, to his ill-conceived policies, but Bornet senses that there was more to it...

...In large measure, he accepts Lyndon Johnson on his own terms, balances criticism with praise, and tends to treat the motivation of LBJ's critics as a problem of greater interest than the working of the presidential mind itself...

...Acheson's response was characteristically blunt: "Mr...

...but he tells us little of the first 55 years of Johnson's life and never undertakes a serious exploration of the President's personality and character...

...Beneath all the well-intentioned legislation, he comments, was the feeling that if the poor were given a bit more help and a chance at greater opportunity they would work hard to get ahead...

...No democracy could sustain such an effort over the long haul...

...They assumed that the North Vietnamese would rather build a nation than fight, that after a limited amount of American pressure Hanoi would come around to a compromise, enter into a coalition with the non=Communist Vietnamese, utilize American economic aid to construct a Mekong Valley Authority, and everyone would live happily ever after...

...Aksyonov, the son of Eugenia Ginzburg (the author of a compelling memoir about life in the Gulag, Journey into the Whirlwind), was a successful Soviet novelist and screenwriter who spent some time in the West, teaching at UCLA in 1975...

...As to Johnson's own reasons for escalation, Bornet persuasively demonstrates that the President should 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 have known better but fails to explain why he moved ahead anyway...

...Still, few will have doubts about Bornet's opinions on the two problems that loom largest in any evaluation of the Johnson Administration: Great Society social welfarism and the Vietnam war...

...Bornet writes little of Johnson's style and image, arguing that it is tasteless to reprint presidential profanity and that "official actions and consequences are what make a presidency meaningful...

...So is Jiri Grusa, the Czech author who wrote The Questionnaire, a work of fantastic realism about a young man's coming of age and a Czech town's difficulties with the savage god of modern history, who brought first the Nazis and then the Communists...

...He shows that time and again Johnson displayed a lack of candor with the American people...

...In calling for an art rooted in fantasy, Stephen Miller is executive assistant to the Board of Radio Free Europe and author of Special Interest Groups in American Politics (Transaction Books...

...These are not comedies of manners but what we might call works of "fantastic r e a l i s m " - - a phrase coined by Sinyavsky...

...A big, physically intimidating man, he was, to put it bluntly, a bully who cuffed around and humiliated those subject to his power...

...The press was with Lyndon Johnson through 1964...

...Or just how much additional funding would have been needed...

...What they saw damaged their President mor~ than what was written or said about him...

...His forthcoming book, Liberalism and Its Challengers: FDR to Reagan, includes an evaluation of Lyndon Johnson...

...He clearly has his doubts...

...Sterling, for instance, cites the assertion of NBC's Marvin Kalb that John Paul, in a handwritten letter to Brezhnev in August 1980, warned that if the Red Army moved against the Polish people he would "lay down the crown of St...

...I have enclosed my check in the amount of i :, , plus $1.50 postage and handling...

...But he is on firmer ground when he asserts what has become a standard conservative criticism: Kennedy was wrong to sanction the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem...

...Johnson was a victim less of media bias than of his own worst traits...

...There is some truth to the argument, but to assume that the media turned against Lyndon Johnson simply because he was from Texas or because he preferred barbeque to tournedos rossini is to seize upon a piece of the story so small that one is reminded of the fable of the blind man attempting to describe an elephant after feeling only the end of its tail...

...The result was a fatally flawed policy that not only destroyed Johnson but did irreparable harm to this nation's conception of itself as a world power...

...3) Funding was "utterly inadequate...

...In short, the United States had to be willing to deal with North Vietnam as it dealt with Nazi Germany or with Japan before Hiroshima, that is, level the country to the ground, if need be, using conventional ordnance...

...The bulk of the enemy in Vietnam, we now know, was the North Vietnamese army, not scattered groups of peasant guerrillas who swam like fish among the people...

...In 1980 he ran afoul of Soviet authorities for publishing a work abroad (The Burn, which will be published in English later this year), and was forced to emigrate...

...What Mr...

...The press corps that covered LynTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 39 don Johnson epitomized as much as any group in American life what neoconservative thinkers have called the New Class, a large portion of which pop sociologists recently have dubbed the Yumpies--younger upwardly mobile professionals, both selfobsessed and self-righteous, generally liberal and moralistic in their political preferences, cool and cosmopolitan in their self-images, geographically and culturally rootless, inclined to value style over substance whether in fashion or in politics, alienated from the traditional institutions of American life...

...The Island of Crimea is based on the following premise: What if Crimea Money-back guarantee 02-069 Harvard University Press | 79 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 ~ Please rush me copy(ies)ofTheSupply-SideRevolutionby ri Paul Craig Roberts at $18.50 each...