Nothing New on LBJ
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Nothing New on LBJ Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream By Doris Kearns Harper & Row. 576 pp. $12.50. Reviewed by John P. Roche Professor of Civilization and Foreign Affairs, Fletcher School...
...If he took issue, he would call, tell me so and invite me to his basement dungeon to talk about the matter under review...
...if he jumped into the pool naked, you were supposed to strip and do the same...
...Still, it was disagreement in an atmosphere of civility...
...Well, if she wanted dreams to play with, no one in the world could come close to matching Lyndon's productions...
...Since he was often manifestly unfair, however, I see no point in recapitulating his observations now...
...it is based on first-hand experience...
...That is not sheer speculation...
...He couldn't wait to meet the author, and later reported to me that he liked her and thought he could "cure her of Harvard and that Bobby crowd...
...When the White House phone exploded into action with its three blasts around 9 a.m., my wife went into the study to answer it...
...Doris Kearns, associate professor of government, has achieved the impossible: She has converted that elemental rascal, with whom I had a warm personal and working relationship, into a dullard...
...In her book she tells of going to the ceremony for new Fellows, who are assigned to various government agencies, and dancing with the President a week before the piece was scheduled to appear...
...One could go on puncturing the myths in this book with reality...
...But on the dreams Kearns is home safe: Like most of the resources of "psy-chohistorians," their existence and significance can be neither verified nor disproved...
...In fact, he had two regular White House squads on what I called "therapy duty...
...Johnson just wanted to blow his stacks (he had about four) in a secure environment...
...Whenever I sent the President a memo on foreign policy, I automatically sent Walt a carbon...
...even Abe Lincoln was known to feel sorry for himself...
...I don't doubt that from time to time he went on a machismo trip, but I think he picked his fellow-travelers pretty carefully...
...He said he just wanted to chat, had already been to mass with Luci and was going to the Protestant service with Linda, hoped we would have a nice Easter, and so on...
...Reviewed by John P. Roche Professor of Civilization and Foreign Affairs, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy...
...It is interesting, in this context, that Kearns quotes no memos from any of us in her indictment of "courtiers...
...I may have lived in a dream world, but compared to university faculties I found the White House to be remarkable for the absence of petty infighting...
...They were beauts...
...there were only two—AP and UPI) and commenting on them, on the state of the world, and on any other topic that caught his fancy...
...Connie explained about the asthma and offered to wake me if it was important...
...The point, rather, is to demonstrate that with the exception of the glorious dreams (did that foxy character dip into Freud for ammunition...
...He was an overworked man with terrible frustrations (notably Vietnam) who simply needed to get off some steam...
...The night before I had an asthma attack and, with the aid of steroids and an inhalor, first got to sleep after 3 a.m...
...Unfortunately, she seems to have been reading up on psychoanalytic theory and, in some of the most tendentious sections of the book, applies her dubious talents as a lay analyst to the material thus gathered...
...They talked for half an hour...
...Why is that...
...It occurred on Easter Sunday, 1968...
...The President was, to engage in some bushleague psychoanalysis of my own, the paradigmatic oral type...
...Then, around 6 or 7 p.m., after one of those exhausting days, he would want to relax and talk to late-sleeping staffers he knew were not stringers for the Washington Post or New York Times, namely Harry McPherson, Joe Califano and myself...
...At no point in my White House stay did Johnson bully me...
...After 400 pages not only was I relaxed—I was sound asleep...
...the President had read it and chuckled at its naivete several days before he met her...
...As far as that bristling ego is concerned, I recall an evening in 1970 when LBJ and Lady Bird were driving Douglas and Libby Cater and me back from a dinner party...
...Doris Kearns first hit the papers in May 1967, shortly after she was named a White House Fellow, when an article coauthored by her ran in the New Republic: "How to Remove LBJ in 1968...
...Doug and I replied that we were in the minor leagues...
...The purpose of this autobiographical excursion is not to shine up my own ego...
...Lord knows, enough of Lyndon Johnson's eccentricities were documented in his lifetime...
...I never heard any more on either subject...
...The rule was that if the President called in a fury about some column or article and said "Get ahold of Elfin [Newsweek] and Potter [Baltimore Sun] and fill them in," Califano, McPherson, Christian and I would immediately get together for a caucus...
...I said, "I suppose because you're older than we are...
...all of the other staff members with whom I had constant contact were equally their own men...
...Kearns, possibly the victim of LBJ's last con job, fell for every word...
...A friend at the New Republic had dropped a proof of the article over my transom...
...Johnson announced he was being offered $3,000 a lecture and inquired about our rates...
...The early-morning group usually consisted of Bill Moy-ers (replaced by George Christian) and Jack Valenti (replaced by Marvin Watson), plus a few keepers of the bedchamber who regularly hung around hoping lightning would strike and they would be named to the FCC or the Alaskan Boundary Commission...
...Following some silence at the other end, the President came on...
...We didn't all love each other...
...Larry Temple, an LBJ aide, was calling from the Texas ranch and said the President wanted to talk to me...
...In her view, he atomized it to guarantee that there would be no solidarity, that each of us would rely on him alone for guidance and absolution...
...Johnson, having found a willing listener, had been delighted to feed her...
...I never took his explosions seriously, though...
...He was not allowed to smoke (he once accused me of trying to poison him with my pipe), and he obviously had to keep a close guard on his drinking, so all he had left was the chance to discharge his id in safety...
...One illustration should suffice...
...Where we agreed his decision was unwise and precipitous, we would do nothing for a couple of hours...
...He promised in a loud whisper to pick her for a job in the White House itself, she says, but then came the article and exile to the Labor Department...
...Figuring that was covered by the First Amendment, I listened, argued and on occasion flatly disagreed (particularly with his theory that not a sparrow fell without the intervention of Bobby Kennedy...
...Johnson was to become genuinely fond of Kearns and eventually persuaded her to return with him to Texas to help prepare his memoirs...
...For whatever it's worth, he once invited me for a skinny-dip and I thanked him and declined...
...Probably because she spent so little time in the White House before it became a graveyard, she accepts a lot of nonsense about Johnson's relations with his staff, too...
...Similarly, he asked me once at the ranch to go on a deer shoot, and I backed out on the ground that I had only been trained to shoot people...
...What she doesn't know is that Lyndon was setting her up for a fall...
...Now, with LBJ in no position to defend himself, what new sins could be attributed to him...
...Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream is Harvard's ultimate revenge on LBJ...
...Actually, during my tenure (1966-69) we were constantly conspiring to keep him out of trouble...
...I thought he was going to wreck the Continental laughing...
...As she herself notes, perhaps he decided she was big on dreams...
...If he called back—well, he was the only President in town...
...Doris Kearns' book tells us nothing we haven't already been told elsewhere more accurately...
...syndicated columnist The advance publicity—including a proprietary brawl between Basic Books and Harper & Row, and a number of teasing tidbits released early to stimulate the appetite—made me open this book with considerable apprehension...
...If at the ranch he handed you a rifle, you were supposed to go out and shoot a deer...
...he innocently asked...
...Afterward, Larry later told me, the President turned to him and said, "There's a lucky man—he's got a wife like Bird who protects him...
...He used to break me up with his mimicry of and reactions to leading political personalities...
...On occasion, such incidents could infuriate him, but this one tickled his funnybone...
...Indeed, compared with studies by Harry McPherson, George Christian, Richard Harwood and Haynes Johnson, Jack Valenti, and even Eric Goldman, it is very watery gruel...
...About 80 per cent of the time he didn't, and we heaved a collective sigh of relief...
...Evening duty consisted of listening to the President spill his guts...
...We all have a bit of Walter Mitty in us...
...He would prowl around the Oval Office, pulling items off the news tickers (Kearns speaks of three...
...Maybe, as Kearns suggests, he had an acute Oedipus complex, but where I come from they say "Oedipus, shmedipus —as long as he loves his mother...
...Kearns says, for instance, that Johnson "forced people around him to submit to his tests of manhood...
...Another standard line echoed by Kearns and contradicted by my own experience is that Johnson was an intolerable bully...
...Harry and I, for example, often disagreed with Walt Rostow's rosy view of Vietnam...
...Because Luci and Linda were both married and had developed a certain immunity over the years to their father's therapy sessions, Kearns also became a surrogate daughter, an "ear...
Vol. 59 • May 1976 • No. 11
