Taking Charge

...Now historian Michael Beschloss has come forth with the perfect holiday gift for people like me—the Johnson-hater who has everything...

...Patrick Knowlton, a harassed witness in the Vince Foster Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 Edited by Michael R Beschloss Simon & Schuster /592 pages / $30 REVIEWED BY Mark Falcoff S ome years ago I was sharing a cab in a major South American capital with one of the region's rising young conservative politicians...

...Inevitably, a great deal of attention is devoted to Johnson's complicated relations with the Kennedy family, and particularly with Attorney General Robert Kennedy...

...During these months Johnson was busy juggling a number of complicated agendas: to appropriate for himself whatever remained of the Kennedy mystique (including the services of Kennedy's staff) without diminishing his own stature...

...I want them from twenty-five to forty...

...Once the deed is done, McGeorge Bundy, a Kennedy holdover, underscores his capacity to quickly shift alliances: "Now that you've made this decision," he tells LBJ, "you don't have any problem with self-respect You're in charge...

...But there are some differences as well...

...It is quite obvious now that the Eisenhower administration postponed serious thinking about Republican domestic policies for a decade, so that by the time Johnson got to the White House, the GOP was still trying to figure out an answer to the New Deal...

...This book is not only about history, but about people — Johnson's allies and courtiers, rivals and adversaries, many of whom make repeated appearances...

...It is painful to read Johnson overruling Russell's sensible objections, and makes one grateful for small mercies...

...Indeed, when it comes right down to it, Singer seems to believe that infants of all sorts, not being "persons," are candidates for early retirement...

...Johnson's complicated relationship with Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders...

...Much attention is given to cajoling the press —with some success—to lay off what today we would call "investigative reporting...

...Which one, he asked me, did I think was the worst...

...But since I believe that Teichman's essays are models of philosophical sophistication and moral intelligence, I am going to recommend them to you anyway...

...she writes about the limits of academic freedom, about philosophers who think that abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia are morally permissible (she does not), as well as philosophers, like Jacques Derrida, who think that it is okay to murder language by pretending that the meaning of words is hopelessly compromised by ambiguity, metaphor, and so on...

...what endows human life with value, he says, is being aware of oneself as a person...

...Teichman reserves some of her harshest criticism for Peter Singer, a professor at Monash University in Australia and author of a book called Practical Ethics...

...44 ferocity is never defeated by her encounters with stupidity, moral barbarousness, or intellectual chicanery...

...The only people who come off as honest, forthright, attractive human beings—straight shooters who let the dice fall where they may—are Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lady Bird Johnson...

...Fetuses, of course, are for Singer eminently dispensable, but so are severely disabled newborns...

...riots in Panama and pressures to conclude a new treaty with that country...

...Yet Evans-Pritchard holds out hope for "the ordinary citizens" who will "cleanse the institutions of this country before they become irretrievably corrupt...

...with the chairman of the board of a major clothing manufacturer on spe44 If this is how one sounds when talking alone with a president, I hope I never have the opportunity...

...At one point Johnson even laments that the Republicans have no policy of their own—he would enjoy, he claimed, a spirited and principled opposition...

...What is remarkable here is the degree to which, long before committing American combattroops, Johnson and his associates had lost most of their illusions about the country and the possibility of winning the war...

...In Oklahoma City, a federal tort claim has been filed by 170 families of victims killed in the bombing—a lawsuit that this book says "may ultimately sweep away much of the political landscape of fin-de-siecle America...

...The worst—the absolute worst—from the point of view of long-term damage to the republic, was Lyndon Johnson...

...the military coup in Brazil...

...I want them that can work Saturday and Sunday...

...I'm confronted," Johnson confessed to Russell...

...keep the Southern wing of the Democratic Party on the ranch while establishing a firm political beachhead in its dominant labor-civil rights wing...

...167 pages / $59.95 REVIEWED BY Roger Kimball I have to begin this review by acknowledging an interest...

...These dialogues also cast interesting light on the state of the Republican Party a quarter-century ago...

...Many of the conversations show Johnson's acute interest in covering up the source of his personal fortune (and that of his wife...

...Or on his requirements for secretarial staff: "I want the five smartest, best-educated, fastest, prettiest secretaries in Washington...

...Anyone who wants an example of the Johnson treatment needs to read the long dialogue with Richard Russell, who after all had been something of a mentor to LBJ, wherein Johnson dragoons him into joining the Warren Commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination...

...I don't believe the American people ever want me to run [abandon Vietnam...

...It's one of those things where, 'Heads I win, tails you lose.'" This was in May of 1964...

...If I lose it, I think they'll say, I've lost...

...Neither Clinton nor his putative successor Gore possesses anything like Johnson's skills at manipulation and persuasion, and for the sake of the Republic, a good thing too...

...The only difference between killing a normal infant and a defective one," he writes, "is the attitude of the parents...

...The Republican leadership in Congress—Senator Everett Dirksen and Minority Leader Charles Halleck— are shown here to be in a purely defensive mode, nibbling at the margins of Johnson's legislative proposals, while their flacks spent most of their time on peripheral issues, like trying to dig up the dirt on Lady Bird's shoddy treatment of employees at her ranch...

...Secretary of State Dean Rusk even suggested to him that New York Times reporter Tad Szulc be put under surveillance...

...push forward the legislative program that remained uncompleted at the time of Kennedy's death, particularly on civil rights...

...I've pulled out...

...And I'm in a hell of a shape...

...The seven-page conversation with Senator Richard Russell will surprise many who lived through those years, and were treated to nightly television disquisitions by LBJ on the rightness of his policy...

...case, last year filed a federal tort claim naming FBI agents as defendants...

...And those bits of it that are clear often seem irrelevant to the pressing concerns of life...

...An unexpected runner-up is J. Edgar Hoover...

...Some of the essays that appear in Jenny Teichman's Polemical Papers were first published in the New Criterion, which I help to edit...

...There are obvious similarities: the confusion of public and private interest...

...MARK FALCOFF is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...It follows that, on Singerean principles, we should not be too hard on that young couple who asphyxiated their newborn and consigned it to a dumpster...

...This volume consists of selections from nearly a thousand hours of conversations—some 9,500 individual entries—covertly recorded in the Oval Office and elsewhere and preserved at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin...

...the desire to buy the love of the American people with other people's tax dollars...

...The portrait that emerges is of a man who repeatedly confuses the public interest with his own private good...

...It follows that, in the world according to Singer, many classes of human beings have only the most tenuous right to exist...

...Of course, when Barry Goldwater emerges as the Republican nominee, Johnson refuses to take him seriously and even urges his campaign staff to ignore him...

...Close," I said, "but not quite...

...His energy seems inexhaustible—not only for our domestic and foreign policies, but for every niggling detail of his life and the lives of those around him...

...To pass the time in a monumental traffic jam, we started discussing recent American presidents...

...For one thing, Clinton and his wife have a much better relationship with the glamThe American Spectator • January 1998 67 orati of New York and Hollywood, and the elites of the publishing, artistic, and academic world, who recognize them as one of their own...

...It is one of Teichman's great gifts as a philosopher to be able to write clearly not only about technical philosophical matters but also about things that people actually care about...

...Although she tells us that she is not herself a religious believer, she finds good philosophical grounds for arguing that "human life is sacred" and that "it makes sense to suppose that human life could have a transcendent purpose," even if we have difficulty in specifying exactly what that purpose is...

...The result is something that resembles nothing so much as a grisly traffic accident—not a pretty sight, but you can't take your eyes off of it...

...I went to San Marcos State...

...Although LBJ will have been dead for a quarter-century this month, nothing I have learned since then has caused me to alter my opinion...

...As is well known, the Kennedys viewed the Johnson presWe'll Be Lucky Never to See His Likes Again 66 January 1998 • The American Spectator idency as a hateful regency, to be ended at the earliest possible date with the restoration of their dynasty...

...One particularly pregnant dialogue deals with "envelopes" of cash to LBJ—and we aren't talking about contributions to charity...

...For Singer, human life itself has no intrinsic value...

...Russell was old and tired and had no appetite for working with the chief justice, whom he rightly judged to be a publicity hound...

...if this is how one sounds when talking alone with a president, I hope I never have the opportunity...

...The relatively brief period covered is one of the richest in incident in our recent history—from the death of President John F. Kennedy through Johnson's election to a term in his own right in November 1964...

...As could be expected, plenty of attention is given over to Vietnam...

...It is in the nature of things that anyone who pokes around in the world of contemporary academic writing is going to have many such encounters, so it is a testimony to Teich-man's intellectual robustness that she has managed to preserve her savagery intact at least from 1979, when the first of the essays in this volume appeared, to the present moment...

...naval base at Guantanamo...

...At the center is, of course, the Sun King himself, LBJ — vindictive, self-pitying, vulgar, cruel and ruthless, with an appetite for power that seemed like an addiction to drugs...

...Beschloss has also chosen to include some important ephemera —the controversy over who should investigate the Kennedy assassination...

...Like Bundy, most of those whose conversations are recorded in this book—Walter Lippmann, J. William Fulbright, Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, Abe Fortas, Joseph Alsop, Paul Douglas, Hale Boggs—should be glad to be dead...

...Perhaps the most important difference of all is that, unlike Clinton, Johnson Polemical Papers Jenny Teichman Ashgate Publishing...

...with another source on the outfitting of the entire White House staff with Western ranch outfits like his own, and so forth...

...I suspect that an unfailing sense of humor has been a great aid and comfort...

...In Polemical Papers, as she explains in the introduction, she rangeswidely, touching on "human problems which are of interest not only to academic philosophers but to everyone else as well: problems relating to war and peace, to love and sex, and to life and death...

...Fortunately, Beschloss was able to convince the current curators of the collection to overrule this, one of Johnson's final wishes...

...He is also a utilitarian, which means that when it comes to morality he is utterly at a loss...

...cific requirements for his casual pants...

...After all, Singer tells us that parents, biological or adoptive, A Model of Intelligence and Sophistication 68 January 1998 • The American Spectator...

...Before I could answer, he suggested Jimmy Carter...

...and de Gaulle's decision to recognize Communist China...

...At the same time, I don't want to commit us to war...

...Russell's response was appropriately homey: "We're just like the damn cow over the fence there in Vietnam...

...I want them that can work at night and not be afraid to go home after the Secret Service takes them out of the gate...

...spent virtually his entire adult life in Washington, most of it in Congress, where he had the opportunity to take the full measure of the men with whom he would work as president...

...Accordingly, Teichman writes about terrorism, about pacifism and violence, and about the Roman Catholic teaching on contraception (as formulated by Teich-man's teacher, the English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe...

...the murder of three civil rights leaders in the South...

...Singer is a big deal in the field of bioethics...

...Indeed, the relationship between LBJ and the press, at least prior to his re-election, was remarkably tame by today's standards, although those who would not cooperate could expect serious trouble...

...Inevitably, one finds oneself comparing the Johnson of these tapes with the present incumbent...

...The author suggests that Clinton may escape "retribution" for all but the Paula Jones affair, which he describes as "one of the most picayune" of all the president's "sins...

...The conclusions reached by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard may be subject to derision and mockery, but only because it is so hard for all of us to accept what they say about our country...

...As I explained to him, at the time we were still digging our way out of the fiscal and moral mess created by Johnson nearly two decades before...

...Interspersed between meetings of the National Security Council or the Council of Economic Advisers are discussions—long ones—with a New York hairdresser on how much the latter proposes to charge for the privilege of preparing Lady Bird, the two presidential daughters, and select female members of the White House staff for a grand event...

...Philosophy has a bad rep among sensible people, and not without reason...

...According to a fascinating historical note at the end of the book, in mid-January 1973, sensing that he had not long to live, Johnson summoned a long-time confidential secretary to his office at the Library and instructed her to ensure that these tapes remained sealed for fifty years after his death...

...Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's decision to shut off fresh water to the U.S...

...and keep the growing crisis in Vietnam offthe front pages and out of the range of congressional debate until his re-election was assured...

...Here Beschloss has selected those conversations that illustrate, step by step, how Johnson outmaneuvered the Kennedys and forced the heir-apparent to leave the cabinet and seek political office in New York, rather than to stand as his vice-presidential candidate in 1964...

...I didn't go to Harvard...

...Graduates of Yale Law, they have none of Johnson's hangups about the schools to which they went...

...In a footnote Beschloss emphasizes that all this was before post-Watergate rules on campaign fundraising...

...A lot of it is silly, obscurantist, muddle-headed, pretentious, or all of the above...

...with Frank Stanton, president of CBS, on the expensive rebuilding of the White House desk to accommodate LBJ's unusual height...

...the collusive relationship with friendly forces in the media...

...Jenny Teichman, who recently retired from teaching philosophy at New Hall, Cambridge, is one of those analytically trained philosophers whose intellectual ROGER KIMBALL is managing editor of the New Criterion and, most recently, co-editor of The Future of the European Past (Ivan R. Dee...

...For yet another, the Great Society and the "civil rights" movement—the principal domestic policies of the Johnson administration—have all dropped off the tree as rotten fruits, leaving Clinton with the task of convincing Americans that policies that have been demonstrated not to work should nonetheless continue...

...I don't want any old, broken-down old maids...

...For another, the current president's role model is not LBJ, who accomplished important things, many of them admittedly awful, but John F. Kennedy, whose presidency was largely fluff and "style...