Seeking Clues about the President
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Seeking Clues about the President LYNDON B. JOHNSON AND THE WORLD By Philip L. Geyelin Praeger. 309 pp. $5.95. LBJ: A FOREIGN OBSERVER'S VIEWPOINT By Michael Davie Duell, Sloan & Pearce. 84 pp....
...Leonard Baker's The Johnson Eclipse is a bland, slightly padded record of a pallid interval in its hero's active career, the three unhappy years in the Vice Presidency...
...Until we have something better, this volume is the most useful reference work available on Johnson's career...
...Since the President is the best known analyst of these exigencies, what he will do is likely to be the unexpected...
...Thus when attentive students of Lyndon Johnson, not all of them hostile, seek clues to Presidential intention their surest guide is the exigencies of American politics...
...If he is not prepared to climb over the bodies of enemies (and friends...
...Nevertheless, Geyelin convincingly argues that Johnson may be unique in considering only the internal impact of external policy...
...Johnson is a towering human being, the least likable politician of his age, and just possibly the most talented...
...Of course all Presidents, aware of Woodrow Wilson's fate, keep a cautious eye on domestic reactions to foreign initiatives...
...He was almost the parody of the perfect Presidential subordinate, just as he was to become almost the parody of the man in charge of the universe once fate gave him the Presidency...
...So much space has been wasted on such small warts not only because we love to gossip about our rulers, but also because we have had difficulty appreciating a truth about Lyndon Johnson: He is a dangerous President because the immediate exigencies of domestic politics are a frail guide to the prudent conduct of the affairs of a great nation...
...John Kennedy was no ideologue...
...By now the President's external qualities are common property...
...In his White House the ok...
...The President's foreign policy succeeds in the instances where the world really is rather like Texas...
...Is this to his discredit...
...not that he picks his nose, drives too fast, swills beer out of paper cups, bullies his subordinates, installs Muzak at the ranch, and revels in the language of the barnyard...
...Yet there is a genuine contrast of action as well as of personality between the two...
...It is Johnson as President that concerns Philip Geyelin in Lyndon B. Johnson and the World...
...His rage like his compassion, his naivete about ideas like his mastery of political maneuver, are outsize...
...For me, total immersion in the life and legend of Lyndon Johnson is not terribly illuminating...
...Although the two journalists recount dozens, if not hundreds of tales of Johnsonian ruth-lessness, deviousness and demonic energy, as well as Johnsonian courage, concern for poor people and belated but genuine attachment to racial equality, they do not disturb the general conception of their subject...
...it falters in the many instances where the world errantly wanders from Texas political folkways...
...It may be that Johnson's reputation for deviousness owes less to any special weakness of character than to an inability to cloak the usual activities of the politician in a convincing garment of rectitude...
...2.95...
...Three hundred pages are too many to devote to the description of very little power and less influence...
...Geyelin, the Wall Street Journal's foreign reporter, has written a judicious, chronological account of Johnson's external policies...
...The Rowland Evans and Robert Novak book...
...To Davie, Johnson is an infinitely more complex human type than John F. Kennedy...
...597 pp...
...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN These four books by five journalists are enough to gratify even a glutton's taste for explication of Lyndon B. Johnson and his activities...
...but Kennedy was capable of accepting intellectually defined policies and guiding his Administration by their light...
...The book does succeed in making, or in reinforcing, the point that in the Vice Presidency Johnson's excessive nature made him an unnecessarily retiring, ostenstatiously deferential, visibly uninvolved political figure...
...Where general ideas have no influence, our only guides to a President's actions are his needs and his personality...
...Here then is the legitimate occasion for concern about Johnson as President of the United States...
...He constructs his analysis around Johnson's insistence upon dealing with foreign policy as simply a continuation of domestic politics...
...This President is not only a man without an ideology...
...A cultivated Englishman, after all, recognizes in a Kennedy parallels to his own political leaders????a background of inherited wealth, a superior education, an ease in the presence of men of ideas...
...Their Johnson is no more appealing than anyone else's, even though the authors clearly admire him and, for the most part, endorse Johnson's uses of the power he has sought all his life to acquire...
...Equally in opposition within the President are an unusually passionate devotion to peace, and a strong American patriotism approaching chauvinism which inflames him at the sign of insult to American interests...
...280 pp...
...These are a prudence that causes him to hesitate, even dither before he embarks upon a policy in a world which he uneasily realizes is only incompletely within his control, and a passion for complete domination that pushes him to intervene massively when he acts at all...
...In many of his actions Johnson has simply extended his predecessor's programs and policies...
...Its author, Michael Davie, formerly a Washington correspondent for the London Observer, is, unlike his newspaper, something of an admirer of the President...
...THE JOHNSON ECLIPSE By Leonard Baker Macmillan...
...And the similarity of a Kennedy to the English governing class is no more a recommendation than the dissimilarity of a Johnson is a cause for derogation...
...Unfortunately, we cannot forego personality analysis and focus upon policies and programs...
...It was possible to understand these policies in intellectual as well as personal and political terms...
...lie about his intentions, and pursue his objectives disingenuously, he should select another career...
...Lyndon B. Johnson?The Exercise of Power, is a massive record of Johnson as a political animal, from his early days as a not really very poor Texas boy to the present...
...American politics are not a parlor game and a man who reaches the top is quite apt to have quelled the gentler side of his nature in the course of his ascent...
...But we should not expect Presidents to be pleasant people...
...He is a man equipped in domestic affairs with little more than old analogies to the New Deal, and in foreign policy with little more than a determination to do nothing unpopular...
...word was "pragmatic...
...LYNDON B. JOHNSON THE EXERCISE OF POWER By Rowland Evans and Robert Novak New American Library...
...7.95...
...Geyelin also makes plain the effect????in the Panama crisis which greeted Johnson in 1963, in the Dominican landings of American Marines, and in the Vietnam affray ????of two warring elements in the President's character...
...His reaction is similar to a familiar English reaction to the sheer size of the United States: Even Johnson's vulgarities are esteemed as expressions of the raw crudity and power of a frontier President????the first since Andrew Jackson...
...Apparently Johnson does not have it in him to be a Romney or an Eisenhower...
...Of the group, LBJ: A Foreign Observer's Viewpoint is the most elegant and the most concise...
Vol. 50 • January 1967 • No. 2
