Making the Democrats Safe from Yahoos
JANEWAY, MICHAEL
Making the Democrats Safe from Yahoos THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT By Robert Sherrill Grossman Press. 282 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by MICHAEL JANEWAY Editor at "Atlantic Monthly" There are many...
...Lethargy, self-indulgence and greed such as led Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon to proclaim on the floor of the Senate in 1955: "When I speak of Lyndon Johnson's human qualities, I speak about a quality which all other Senators have observed time and time again —the unselfishness of the man...
...And that is what ruins Sherrill's book...
...Johnson's Presidency has gone beserk...
...But the worst indictment that could be made of Johnson is that he has brought so many Americans to such a state of concern and disgust for their government and its policy in Vietnam that this foolish, sophomoric book can be, and is being, taken seriously...
...Oh well...
...so has Sherrill's book...
...It is "the easiest way" for Johnson, corrupt tool-of-the-interests that he is, to "prime the pump . . . through defense spending...
...As king of the victorious anti-Goldwater consensus, by winning a limited little war in Vietnam against aggressive Communist forces he felt he could make the Democratic party safe from the yahoos...
...It was hubris in the truest sense: He set out to disarm critics, but his method was war...
...We are given the unofficial almanac of National Press Club bar gossip about Johnson's affronts to taste and sensitivity, plus any and all of his remarks or statements, hearsay or on record, in and out of context, which can conceivably show up LBJ as a hypocrite...
...To Johnson, Johnson is Roosevelt, Lincoln, Washington and Jackson, blended...
...To go down the list from the aid and troop commitments made under President Eisenhower and Kennedy to such intangibles as Johnson's own pride and cult of machismo would fill a book...
...That most difficult time of trial for the post-Roosevelt Democratic party was also a most difficult time of torn allegiances and political insecurity for one of its members, Lyndon Johnson...
...That time-bomb was the Republican charge that Democrats either "lose" real estate to the Communists, or "get us into wars," or refuse to "win" them, or all three at once...
...to disarm them after he has already beaten them is a more dangerous extension of that tendency...
...I merely want to suggest that one of the important, if subsurface, political factors was this need of Johnson's to exorcise the ghosts of 1950-53...
...but it is the contradicting qualities of the man, not the necessary balancing and telescoping of phrase, that is to blame...
...It was he who concluded in 1965—after burying Goldwater and, he thought, the Republican party—that a Johnsonian Democratic party could reign uninterruptedly if only the political time-bomb left over from the Truman era could be defused...
...Agit-prop is designed to send anyone who buys it out to the barricades...
...it appeals to one's feelings of discontent, of having been deceived...
...He is a good man in the true sense of the word 'good' "? It does not really matter now what kind of hyperbole Wayne Morse used to describe Lyndon Johnson 12 years ago, and no doubt these remarks like so many other public ones in politics had their origin in deals, favors, "self-indulgence" and "greed...
...In fact, it is not a book but a tract: agit-prop in the hoariest tradition...
...Thus Sherrill takes great glee in debunking the "myth" of Johnson's proclaimed and acclaimed attachment to the Populist tradition on the ground that the President did not grow up in poverty at all, but was the son of a "burgher" wheeler-dealer of some means...
...Sarcasm, arbitrary and undocumented allegation, and distortion are all pasted together with a silly, slangy breeziness which is supposed, I guess, to suggest authorita-tiveness and casual familiarity with the subject matter...
...it tells you authoritatively what is the "truth" behind the various "myths"—such as the "myth" of Johnson's liberalism...
...For this strategem of establishing the virile posture of the Democratic party while Goldwater-ism was down and out, of erasing forever the image of Democratic "appeasement" and "softness" has ended by bringing the house down on his 1964 consensus...
...Here again, Sherrill offers the best critique of himself: "The man doth make J. Evett Haleys of us all...
...I consider him not only a great statesman, but a good man...
...He was the slippery, secretive wheeler-dealer...
...For it is our righteous, jingoistic, imperialist President who has rearmed the irresponsible Left and rendered a Robert Sherrill plausible...
...role" in Asia, dredged up from the era of "white man's burden" and "naval power," put in mothballs...
...It is fanatical, narrow-minded, stupid because ill-informed, and ill-informed because its author loathes his subject with such irrational fury that his interest in accuracy or logic is minimal...
...To disarm his critics rather than fight on principle has always been Johnson's tendency...
...our President either returned to the task he understands (getting bills through Congress) or else defeated for re-election...
...and our latter-day imperial fantasies about the U.S...
...less flip than flap, flap than flip...
...He carried a lot of water and a lot of garbage on both shoulders through the early '50s (though I suspect with less commitment to the then-prevalent mood of reaction than was felt by his colleague, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts), and there is no particular reason why he should be forgiven on the grounds that he thus saved his Senate seat...
...His book sounds like the work of an obsessed Walter Winchell knocking out bitter political pamphlets in his basement...
...Yet even he has to admit that Johnson is contradictory...
...Sherrill's and Johnson's problems are somewhat related: To Sherrill, Johnson is a phoney liberal version of Harding and MacArthur, blended...
...it is highly selective...
...It is not designed to inform or to appeal to the intellect...
...Sherrill's distortions are cut from one cloth: Find anything in lohn-son's career that contradicts any liberal sentiment he has ever expressed or any liberal measure he has ever effected or aided, then use it to prove the man a total fraud, totally given over to self-interest and opportunism...
...For he is not interested in complexities of personality, and certainly not in facts, context, perspective, or history's other guidelines for accurate interpretation...
...I therefore regret having to report that The Accidental President reveals more of its author's flaws than Lyndon Johnson's...
...In contrast, Kennedy's idolators like to paint his reactionary period in the late '40s and early '50s as some sort of "time of testing," comparable to FDR's battle against infantile paralysis, out of which Kennedy emerged somehow purged...
...Here is his analysis of the manner in which Johnson ran the Senate in the 1950s: "Caucuses were not for him...
...A great deal of lethargy, self-indulgence and greed made up the majority spirit which was very easy for Johnson to manipulate...
...Reviewed by MICHAEL JANEWAY Editor at "Atlantic Monthly" There are many indictments to be made of Lyndon Johnson, and Robert Sherrill, Washington correspondent for the Nation, presses as many of them as he has facts, hearsay, conjecture or gossip to support...
...His proof...
...But they suggest a dimension, a part of Johnson which Sherrill blacks out as if it never existed?that part of him which was and is liberal and progressive, and which was allied with liberals and progressives...
...In his analysis of domestic political factors, Sherrill calls the war in Vietnam nothing but a device...
...Agit-prop appeals to the simpler emotions, and hate is least subtle of all...
...Easy: "We are told repeatedly by Johnson of how he and other members of his impoverished family were required to work dawn to dusk in the hardbitten soil of Central Texas (where peach orchards flourish), a story somewhat spoiled when we discover in the [published extract of] family archives the picture that shows they were one of the few rural families in the area that could afford an automobile before World War I." If Sherrill had done a little serious research instead of merely taking a sneering tour through Johnson's mother's rather inconsequential family history published in 1965 (A Family Album, by Re-bekah Baines Johnson, McGraw-Hill), he would have learned about Johnson's father's changing fortunes and how the post-1918 crash in the cotton market ruined him...
...As gop propaganda would have it: Truman "lost" China, "got us into" the Korean War, and prevented General MacArthur from "winning" it...
...However accurate that criticism, the Evans and Novak book is still a model of objective effort to find and mark contexts, origins, and the way it happened at the time...
...Johnson now has the responsibility for this war, and consequently, while it is hell for him as well as for others, it is also, for him, holy...
...Lyndon Johnson's tragic flaw is that he is too clever by half...
...Italics mine—M.J...
...The strength of his leadership had always depended on the support of Democrats like Richard Russell, who had billion-dollar pork-barrel cravings, and George Smathers of Florida, a member of the LBJ charm school who was better known as 'Gorgeous George' or 'Smooch,' and who really didn't care what went on from day to day...
...It is Leftist agit-prop, rather comparable to J. Evett Haley's Right-wing agit-prop, A Texan Looks at Lyndon...
...too much this, and this, and this—has a way of piling up in great spirals until it topples, and the reader comes away dizzy, and suspecting that accuracy was the victim of style...
...This is a search through Lyndon Johnson's career for closeted skeletons, for bodies that can be stripped down to skeletons, for any scarecrow that can be presented as a skeleton...
...It is a neatly manipulated way of "keeping the industrial-military pot boiling with profits...
...Now it is he who represents the yahoos, wraps himself in righteous patriotism, speaks sanctimoniously of the humanitarianism of the "other war" for "social revolution," and Red-baits his critics for refusing to stand up and fight to preserve "freedom everywhere...
...Authors of this kind generally hang themselves more effectively than any reviewer can, so let him speak for himself...
...Therefore, says Sherrill, Johnson likes the war, he loves the war, he wants the war, and so on...
...And of the journalists and essayists who have tried to assess the paradoxes and complexities in Johnson, Sherrill notes disparagingly: "The perpetually balanced phrase . . .—Johnson is this but not that, this but not that...
...In his preface Sherrill writes, "I think [The Accidental President] is a pretty fair review of those portions of LBJ's career that, added up, prompt many of us to look upon the ol' boy as a fascinatingly rousing bastard...
...There were, of course, any number of other elements in the decision to escalate in 1965...
...Worse than Sherrill's "research" is his style...
...Just so...
...You don't have to be Jewish to like Levy's, and you don't have to harbor a secret affection for big old Lyndon and his rough, tough, lying, cheating ways, or for his war, to dislike this book...
...SherruTs book, in contrast, is not a history of deals, but a history of squeals in the tone of gossiping school-girls ("And then do you know what he did...
...To Sherrill's agit-prop mind, the fact that the war is choking off domestic economic and social programs is simply proof of his theory: Johnson never wanted those programs in the first place, and in the war has found an effective tool for killing them while diverting budgetary resources to fat-cat defense contractors, who are in turn campaign contributors and backers...
...My own research while preparing a history thesis at Harvard on "Lyndon B. Johnson and the Rise of Texas Conservatism," for example, elicited the following intriguing allegation by a pillar of the Austin business community: The reason the Austin business crowd has always resented Johnson is not because he is an arriviste, or was a New Dealer, or a bully with his acquisitive television and land-buying ventures, but because he has never paid off a number of serious debts his father left when he died in 1937...
...Like Robert Sherrill, I would like to see the war in Vietnam abandoned...
...Alfred Kazin called the Rowland Evans-Robert Novak book, Lyndon B. Johnson—The Exercise of Power, "a history of deals" made by cardboard characters...
...Through sheer tour de force, Sherrill seems to be saying, he will get past the mealy-mouthed "balancers" and say what the man really is...
...In fact, he might have discovered some real dirt...
...But just as the tragedy of Johnson's Presidency is a great deal larger than this book, so, in an important way, is Johnson's responsibility for the book greater than Robert Sherrill's...
Vol. 50 • June 1967 • No. 12
