The Failure of Lyndon Johnson

...Because of what he was and had become, President Johnson could bring together Middletown and "Metroamerica," thus enabling American liberalism to move ahead beyond civil rights bills and ad hoc antipoverty legislation to new, more comprehensive programs required to cope with the crisis of the cities and the demand of black people for jobs and justice...

...The mandate for Roche was different but also clear...

...Johnson served his country for many years, in Congress and as Chief Executive...

...He is right...

...What a word, "Metroamerica...

...Then, there are endless miniatures of the men and women in the President's entourage, capped by a full-scale, sympathetic profile of Mrs...

...Perhaps he will be vindicated on Vietnam by history—I doubt it...

...But nowhere is there "the downfall of a great man" nor "a sorrowful or disastrous conclusion that excites pity or teror...

...Johnson on the foul language with which he expressed his scorn for scholar, hippie, intellectual, congressman, or anybody else who got in his way...

...Put aside all this business of an asserted snobbism on the part of the New York intellectuals, the New York Review of Books and the Kennedy-Harvard establishment, and what is left...

...Etc., etc...

...The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, if scarcely a book for all seasons, does provide a useful account of who said and did what during the Johnson Administration...

...Asians are mostly good ("the people"), their leaders mostly bad ("the aggressors"), and if you draw the line on the aggressors why, then, you help the people...

...From the beginning, the mountain of memoranda he produced had no impact on anything...

...The President withdraws, foregoing renomination and possible defeat...

...A final note...

...They were concerned not with Johnson's person but with peace in Vietnam and change in the city ghettos...

...it simply means he didn't have the votes anymore...

...Slowly, the Great Society sinks into the quagmire of Vietnam...

...AN INTELLECTUAL'S LOT is not a happy one —at least if the setting is the White House, the President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the man of ideas Eric Goldman, on leave from Princeton to serve as Special Consultant to the President or, more broadly, "White House intellectual-in-residence...

...At the height of success at home, Lyndon Johnson applies the same formula abroad...

...In the first and third instances it worked out reasonably well because, to turn to the sociologists' distinction, the status and the role, the formal position, and the way it is in fact played by the person designated, were reasonably aligned...

...That is why the improbable team of President Richard Nixon and Urban Affairs Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan has at least some chance of accomplishing something...

...IF THERE IS LESS than meets the eye in all the rhetoric about Metroamerieans and other Americans, there is even less to the assertion that in LBJ's rise and fall we have a deep personal tragedy...

...You are compelled to think that Lyndon Johnson goes down not because of what he did but because of what he was, or rather, because of what his critics, the "Metroamericans," felt he was—Southerner, Texan, wheelerdealer, parochial old-fashioned liberal of rough humor and rougher tactics...

...As an account—the word "tragedy" is altogether misplaced but more about that later—of a turbulent period for LBJ and a frustrating experience for EFG, this book is only intermittently interesting...

...I would try to do it so...

...Such is Eric Goldman's version of the tragic play, the proud man who "got things done" now undone himself, yet large in defeat as in victory...

...This does not mean he was Lear...

...Although it adds virtually nothing of importance to the record, and its effect is to persuade this reader that court scribes should wait at least five years before writing up the events they have witnessed, there is something of value to be gleaned from the book...

...He acted according to his lights...

...Moynihan's status is clear...

...But it is interesting that in all these 531 pages there is not a single instance of anybody calling Mr...

...Lyndon Johnson went into another intense brain-picking effort, especially with lawyer-politico friend James H. Rowe, Jr., Montana-born and Harvard-educated, an alumnus of the New Deal, able, urbane, rocking back and forth in his chair, in his comfortable, middle years...

...Exit intellectual...

...Goldman was never sure why he had been chosen...

...The one-day Festival of the Arts at the White House was a fiasco...

...Put aside the knockabout caricature of LBJ in MacBird...

...Perhaps a greater emphasis will come to be placed on his domestic achievements—I am sure of it...

...The world can't be more unruly than the Congress...

...A considerable segment of this memoir is devoted to a detailed, mostly boring description of the President's impressive record on liberal domestic legislation...

...Johnson had chosen beautification of the landscape as her major work...

...he is being paid to think about the urban crisis and to prepare policy material for the President...

...The plain fact that millions of Americans who couldn't care less about four-letter words and the New Left, who worried not at all about LBJ's rough edges or Lady Bird Johnson's charm, never theless voted overwhelmingly for President Johnson in 1964 and overwhelmingly rejected him in the 1968 primaries...

...The informal "brain trust" he assembled soon faded away...

...We have had only three recent cases to form a basis for judgment— Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., under Kennedy, Eric Goldman and John Roche under Johnson...

...The Presidential scholars' program would have worked just as well if not associated with the White House...

...one should oppose the President without impugning his person...

...The rest we all know...

...shrug off the obscenities directed at LBJ by some of the young people on the New Left which, in any case, are more than matched by LBJ's delicate descriptions of both his thoughtful and his thoughtless critics—sons of bitches, bastards, knee-jerk liberals, and so on...

...Goldman's effort to portray the President as the tragic victim of a conflict between the cosmopolitans and the locals seems a bit fanciful...

...In the end he had to step down...

...For the most part, however, the life and times of Abe Fortas or Jack Valenti provide the same kind of pedestrian reading as his description of the tactics employed to get votes on Medicare...

...But let that pass...

...It is best, I think, to serve your country as a specialist doing the thing you know best how to do, on call to the White House or Congress for a specific assignment, and not as an intellectual utility infielder...

...On the periphery of the periphery of power Goldman has little to contribute here...

...There were achievements and frustrations...

...long passages read as if the New York Times had been cut to page size and pressed between hard covers...

...I cannot agree...

...Schlesinger would have no hand in policy, but he was a good writer who would write, a man knowledgeable about politics who would do some political liaison work...

...Lyndon Johnson wasn't big enough as man or mind to warrant such language...

...All the sketches are agreeably written but the result is no more useful: Time pressed between hard covers...

...Goldman defines his own modest role as "to help bring this enormously capable leader into rapport with Metroamerica...

...Johnson...

...But it leaves unasked the question of whether the post of White House "intellectual-in-residence" is worth filling, given the way in which the Presidency functions and power is stored in Washington...

...When Hubert Humphrey—not really a "Metroamerican" either—turned to these issues late in his campaign, they almost elected him President...

...the thesis is wrong...

...All that Goldman can do is to note, lamely, that Lyndon Johnson's "know-nothingism" was somehow less offensive than the intellectuals' "know-it-allism...

...President Kennedy made it clear...

...Aware of all this, Goldman has threaded into his narrative a recurrent theme, a thesis if you like: Fate handed to President Johnson a unique opportunity not only to complete the unfinished work of the New Deal-Fair DealNew Frontier but to preside over an emergent "consensus," a reconciliation of the people out there in Texas and the South with the new, politically strategic middle-class and professional people of the Northeast...

...Johnson himself moves restlessly across the scene, and Goldman does succeed in conveying the sense of a human being—generous and mean-spirited, boastful and "lashed by insecurity," a Populist and a Texas conservative...

...If it does not work, as seems likely, he will quit and we will know why...

...Nobody will blame the New York Review of Books...

...Once arrived, he had to shape his own (Continued on page 368) (continued from page 366) role himself at a time when the President was busy with legislative matters and Mrs...

...The thesis is wrong because it em BOOKS phasizes style and mood instead of substance...

...Professor Goldman is very hard on "rude" critics of the President like Dwight Macdonald and Edmund Wilson who did not respect the office and its occupant...

...In the in-between situation neither the status nor the role were ever clarified...

...he was an intellectual, he was tough (like the President), and he was needed because he spoke forcefully for the President's policy in Vietnam in the face of an army of professors and other critics...

...We are left with "the tragic figure of an extraordinarily gifted President who was the wrong man from the wrong place at the wrong time under the wrong circumstances...

...The "something" has to do with the imprint of a powerful personality on the political process, as well as with the role of an "idea man" who is charged with serving that powerful personality, but never really told to what end nor in what ways nor for how long...

...Even Goldman's resignation figured in a petty political intrigue...