Neither Sentimental Nor Bitter
JANEWAY, MICHAEL
tolerate, the ghastly anonymity we seek. Neither Sentimental Nor Bitter JFK AND LBJ By Tom Wicker Morrow. 286 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by MICHAEL JANEWAY Editor, the "Atlantic" There was the...
...A case in point is the repeated phrase, "garrulous John McCormack...
...Wicker writes: "Thus, as Congress saw things, Kennedy had not only failed in his first big tests...
...The argument is not about to be settled in our time, of course, even if it has already become tiresome, and with the advent of a Kennedy restoration movement and a whole new set of apologias, it now involves the credibility of the apologists together with that of their subjects...
...They helped make him, in Wicker's words, "master of nothing...
...The apologists are trying to talk about the spirit of the time, which always risks fuzziness (see Hegel), And as Marx took the fuzziness out of Hegel's theory of freedom, so there are many (I guess I am one) who feel that the apologists, speaking of Kennedy the liberator, need a similar shaking up...
...it was not necessary to fear him and it might be risky to follow him...
...The second apologia, a bit less soap-bubbly, acknowledges Kennedy's failures in the area of substantive achievements, and rests on the neo-Hegelian premise that no matter, Kennedy unleased the yeasty spirits of national self-liberation which had been moribund under Ike...
...Kennedy has not previously been written about very well in that manner...
...whatever its substantive validity, such a war would have had the virtues of simplicity and probably of honesty on Johnson's part...
...As I recall 1960, most people didn't take Kennedy's rhetoric much more seriously than Nixon's...
...He lost control of his escalation of an old war, trusting in "the excellent Rusk" and "the incomparable McNamara" to arm him with Kennedy's two greatest assets: plausibility and the appearance of expertise...
...There are faults in Wicker's style—he gets enthused with phrases that twit but don't define, a frequent failing in journalists...
...He stumbled into it blind.' " One eyed, not blind...
...For laymen, it has the virtue of describing sophisticatedly the cavernous understructure of political maneuver-ings without ever falling into conspiracy theory or mere inside dope-sterism.More successfully than in his earlier Kennedy Without Tears, Wicker combines the commanding overview of an historian with the earthy frankness of a working reporter...
...mit shall be unleashed on the sores of the nation, and the sores shall be healed...
...But as political books go, especially books by journalists, especially books by journalists of the press establishment, Wicker's JFK and LB] is tough, honest medicine against the half-truths popular among a people which hates its current President and loves its murdered one...
...The sentimentalists and hysterics are merely fashionable...
...Tom Wicker's new book will be important in the ultimate settlement of the argument, though, for he is telling it like it was and grinding nobody's axe...
...In both, he writes, decisions made in the opening days more or less determined all that was to follow...
...Those hysterics who see Johnson solely as a power-driven jingo fail to understand the subtlety of his calculations about the relation between war in Vietnam and Democratic politics at home...
...The minimum wage bill might have been passed at smaller political cost...
...Johnson governed in 1965 as in 1968 in part with memories of the 1940s and 1950s...
...More remarkable, at this moment when the country is so sick of Lyndon Johnson that even he yielded to the malaise and purged himself...
...Wicker quotes an unusually objective (and frank) Johnson aide of the 1965 period: " 'The President believed the American people wanted him to protect American boys...
...He wanted to let Hanoi know he could get tough and he wanted to give a boost to Saigon...
...He had neither the benefits of controlling absolutely a fully American war for what he saw as American interest, nor of fighting disinterestedly on behalf of an obviously admirable and worthy ally...
...he stumbled badly over the next two, appeased enemies, promised too much to his supporters, and the pattern was set...
...A man who fears spectres may hate to acknowledge his fear, however, as much as he hates to yield to it...
...why Johnson could not 'get it over with...
...We had no idea in those days about strategic bombing or stopping infiltration or bombing as a negotiation card...
...The intellectual playboy was not, after all, another FDR...
...Did it really make a difference after all...
...The President didn't choose this war, he didn't really want this war...
...Reviewed by MICHAEL JANEWAY Editor, the "Atlantic" There was the Kennedy Administration, and now there is the myth of the Kennedy Administration...
...But he needs to make that argument as part of his thesis that Kennedy was the victim of his own excessively pre-inaugural promise...
...One is that Kennedy's slim margin over Richard Nixon more or less crippled the victor...
...There are two important apologias in circulation to explain this...
...The chief spectre was being "soft on Communism...
...There is something to that, but only something: The civil rights and youth revolts would have come under a Nixon administration, too, and the question quickly becomes one of whether the President and his men shall acommodate themselves to the rebellious stirrings, or try and stifle them...
...the education bill might have been steered or slipped through if the President had not at first stood so firm, only to retreat so swiftly...
...This kept alive and virulent in his own country the questions of what the war was all about...
...but everything was going to turn out all right in the second Kennedy Administration...
...His shrewdness here and there seems merely facile: I don't believe, for example, that the electorate and the Congress were quite as captivated by Kennedy's 1960 campaign rhetoric as Wicker suggests...
...Congress refused to go along with him...
...They are too prone to weave in wishful illusions and hide from the proposition that what Kennedy was really adept at was entrancing these apologists and their followers...
...Captivation came later...
...Johnson is flawed because too adept at both...
...Wicker takes as his text the first three contests between the Administration and the Congressional establishment: the fights over reorganization of the House Rules Committee, and over Kennedy's education and minimum wage reforms...
...whether it was justified...
...Perhaps it is more accurate to say of the untelegenic manipulator that he feared spectres rather than traded in images...
...Kennedy won the first battle, but it was Pyrrhic...
...I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went...
...Historians will value it...
...Wicker's choice of words is judicious: "As President, up to the end of 1967, Johnson never found the political candor or the necessary facts to make the case for a war to contain Chinese Communism...
...I am not going to lose Vietnam," he told Henry Cabot Lodge days after he became President...
...what his real purposes were in Southeast Asia...
...he had botched the job...
...Wicker's book concerns the crucial outsets of the Kennedy and Johnson Administration...
...Looking backward to Kennedy, Truman and Roosevelt with a zeal to outdo all three at their best, "he found instead an ugly little war that consumed him...
...And once again a number of little foxes of the intelligentsia are explaining that Kennedys plus power equal problem-solving now...
...This is a good season for recalling just what happened during the real Kennedy Administration...
...Wicker has written an enormously detailed book based on day to day observations as a New York Times Capitol Hill and White House reporter...
...He is neither sentimental nor bitter...
...As Wicker shows, Johnson saw all the angles but the new one: that limited war is an illusion...
...But Wicker is as shrewd a critic of the one as the other...
...The late John F. Kennedy in fact failed to work such wonders as President...
...Wicker writes as dispassionately and intelligently about LBJ as about JFK...
...For once again, as the time of the singing of birds is come, the voice of another Kennedy is heard in our land...
...Kennedy, in Wicker's view, was flawed because too adept at image politics, and too inexperienced at legislative and bureaucratic politics...
...A Southern, liberal New York Timesman might be expected to have quite as many preconceptions as a Harvard academician about John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson...
...Since a leader requires, above all, the respect of his followers, in losing at the outset the essential respect of the Eighty-seventh Congress, John Kennedy had lost whatever chance he had to remake his country...
...History, and Tom Wicker, won't have it quite that way, and they are right...
...Kennedy showed himself amateurish and unsure about how to handle Congress, and Congress knew from then on that however the Administration might try to make things appear, reality—power to change or stand fast—would reNEWSWEEK main under Congressional control...
Vol. 51 • May 1968 • No. 11
